NVIDIA Chip Export Debate with Aaron Ginn, Apple Building a Robotic Siri | Delian Asparouhov, Jen Bucci, Ben Kennedy, Jessica Wu, Parag Agrawal, Eric Simons, Matt George

27:36why should I not be worried about that? I think it's one that the fact of going back to what Jensen said which is accurate that over half of the super-dilligence team is actually Chinese nationals and then add in the people who are Chinese descent it's like 75%. So we can't really control that. Math is universal. Engineering is universal. So saying that it's like saying we're going to really control the way French make croissants and we're going to really get after them and say you cannot use that much butter. Let me steel man this more. Let me steel man this more because, yeah, math is universal.

28:11E equals MC squared is universal. Or basic physics is, rocket science is universal. And yet we might not want to export rocket motors because then you can just build up extra capability. There is a difference between having the weights of a model and being able to influence it a trillion times a day across your entire population. That might be a strategic advantage. Yeah. Again, I go back to the fact of that China is going to China. And they're very limited things we actually can do. And the things we can do, going back to this idea of, like, we can make them more dependent. Sure, sure. Right?

28:42Because one of the things I believe about trade, one of the things I believe about free markets, is, like, as a universal, I'm against war. I think conflict is bad. I agree. And at times it's just war theory. But when you kind of just hyper-focus on this, you overextend what we think we actually can do. And this is where America, as the— Yeah, but the China Hawks are going to say, you know, have a potential conflict with Taiwan. They're going to be leveraging drones. But this decreases that. This increases it. So that's the funny thing about all these China Hawks things is, like, they're creating the scenario for war.

29:13Like, all of these things, many of them we can't control, many of them we can't, and then we over-reserve ourselves. But let's say they are gearing up to try to take Taiwan. Don't we want them to have less compute? No, this basically, increasing the dependency on us decreases the life of us. But do we have any leverage after they get the historians? They're already focused on decreasing their dependency on American companies, Taiwan itself. It's already happening. No, I think, one, you're overestimating, one, the power the Central Committee actually has. And two, many of these things you have to delineate between what is bloviating and propaganda and actual reality.

29:52The Chinese companies operate very differently than what actually happens in the committee. So, yes, the committee has a lot of power. but it's more of like structured socialism than it is communism. That all of the ingenuity around DeepSeek came from just Chinese engineers trying something. It was not the committee was like, go be better at this. And I think there's many things in this zone where they think that we can impact it because we view it as a state-by-state actor action when in reality it's almost like China's coming to y 'all and saying, hey, you got to do the less gong stuff. And he goes to the president, he goes, hey, Jordy and John, they hit the gong too much.

30:31And Joe Trump's going to be like, they've already tried. It's like, what am I going to do about that? Right? It's like, John, Jordy, they're great. They're beautiful. Beautiful human beings, right? Yeah. I mean, there's a little bit of a dynamic in China that I think is maybe underrated, which is that even though Beijing is pressing Alibaba and ByteDance to not buy H20s, Alibaba and ByteDance are independent companies. They don't want to be GPU poor. They want NVIDIA chips, correct? Like they'll, you know, placate. Of course. They'll be compliant. But if it was up to them, they would buy the best and they would buy the most.

31:04And this is why leaning into our strings, which is like we are the best at making chips. Let's draw them, create maybe a division in the ranks, right? Rather than just being here, being like, ooh, China, right? It's like many of these are, one, are failed neocons, right? Who make up these kind of reasons and excuses and got us into all these wars that didn't go anywhere. But then you actually read into, okay, so let's say we did all this stuff. It actually creates a scenario for war. This actually creates a scenario for less war. This creates a scenario of maybe division in the ranks because we increase the dependency, we increase trade, and therefore lower is the threshold.

31:39But this creates isolation, which therefore increases the likelihood of innovation of Taiwan. What about the risk of short-term leverage over China dependency, over long-term independence? I'm thinking of that IP leakage point, the idea that maybe cloning the CUDA ecosystem. Hate to break it to you, brother. The IP's leaking. It is true that obviously they can get their hands on one H20, tear it down, reverse engineer it. But there might be gains to be had from running a true H20 cluster, the lessons that you learn from that, and then porting that back to Huawei Ascend clusters. And so is there any risk of setting up a series of large H20 clusters that actually accelerates Huawei?

32:27So this is what's different about one of the differences between Trump administration and Biden administration. Biden administration was actually not that focused on this because they basically targeted the ability to buy chips, but they didn't really have as much restrictions on the ability to make chips. Trump is targeting the ability to make chips and having less restrictions on the ability to buy because if you can't have the ability to make it's like... But NVIDIA has an R &D center in Shanghai. Yeah, but they don't make anything. That's different than ASML and TSMC. And so what we're not hearing I think it's important from an IP leakage standpoint.

32:58I'm just saying it's not it doesn't get solved by the ban, but it's happening regardless. The software isn't made in America, but one, most of that stuff is open source because again, it's a combination of hardware and software. But the IP leakage you should be concerned about relates to founder equipment. It does not relate to NVIDIA. That is a very, very low threshold of concern. Like Zeiss and Trump, those companies that make the mirrors that go inside the phones. The EDA software stuff that just basically came out about that stuff relates to the ability. That's the IP leakage you should be worried about.

33:30And we're not seeing anything in the news about Trump moving on allowing ASML to send the photography machines. No, he went the opposite direction. to buy the administration. He went the opposite. Yeah. Because if you control the ability to produce, then all this good stuff starts happening. Sure, sure, sure. But if you're like, which is what happened in the previous administration was they inverted it. They thought that because, as I said last time on your show, that they associate GPUs with AI tumorism. Yep. And if you remove the AI is a god and we don't want a Chinese god, Yep. then all this stuff kind of just doesn't make any sense.

33:58Okay, let's get into the meme ones. The meme ones. One of the reasons to ban exports at age 20s to China is that it will result in higher employment for Chinese thumbnail artists. So Chinese thumbnail artists are obviously going to be put out of business by generative AI models. If your job is creating a ton of slop content on listicle websites, you're having a rough time with the rollout of GPT-5, of course, in large language models. And so if we hobble the ability for China to run LLMs, that will result in higher employment for thumbnail artists. What about that? I mean, China is not the lowest cost manufacturer or producer of content or any type of it.

34:46No, that's a good point. It's the Philippines, Malaysia, Mexico. That's true. They actually do a lot of work in the factory that's less displaceable. They should be worried about robotics, potentially. Yes. Humanoid robotics. Yes. But maybe that does what, where was that thing? Yeah. Right there? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. what about incentivizing AI researchers to leave so they can be GPU rich you're a top AI researcher in China and and you can't get any H20s and you're sick and tired of working at a GPU poor company like Alibaba sure or ByteDance and you say you know what I'm going to MSL I'm going to Meta I'm going to OpenAI I'm going to Anthropic I'm hopping a flight to San Francisco is that a pasta yes so that's why we should ban it because if they're GPU rich over there they'll stay Oh, I see what you're saying.

35:32But if they're GPU poor, they will say, Zuck is setting up 100 ,000 H100s in tents. I want to train on that. I got to get to Palo Alto. Yeah, but as well as like Alibaba isn't going to pay them$100 million. Exactly. Yeah. No, it's like if it's independent. Yeah, but they both have factors, right? And so if you keep the Chinese AI companies GPU poor, it will be an incentive for AI researchers to come to America. I mean, it's a good argument, right? I mean, on the edges, maybe. Marginal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It requires lots of confounding factors that make it an unpredictable sort of thing. But again, I think the desire to be on the super intelligence team, would you want to go be on it for a billion?

36:18That sounds pretty nice, right? A billion dollar cash out. I'm happy right here. You're happy right here? I mean, look at the car outside. I don't know. A billion dollars. But that is completely independent of GPU capacity. Yeah. So that's where this is much more of a, and actually let me maybe inverse this argument. Because I think a lot of the constraints as we've seen on the recent frontier models are heavily driven by talent. So if we keep the talent over there and they basically provide artificial constraints because we give them these things, then actually they're going to make more progress on making it more efficient and become more skilled at things that we're not skilled at.

36:57Is there a risk that they go close source and we're not actually able to port back the inference savings that we're seeing from DeepSea? No, because I think they're really, I mean, they don't care about open source. They're very clearly. They care about soft power. Yes. Yeah. And so that's why they're doing everything they're doing, which is kind of counter us. I'd say that China generally behaves as a very ingenious population. But in terms of being, they're much more reactive to us than we presuppose. but there is an innate desire in the population to have soft power. That's why they did the Belt and Road Initiative.

37:33This is basically a renewed effort. So I'd rather basically starve them of any capability to actually project power externally by creating an export nation and that we can basically become the dominant export nation. And that something like this is that in reality is that they just have millions and millions more engineers than we do. and so we want those people to come to America if they want to betray the regime and we want to make sure they advance that IP but if we continue to isolate them they're just going to make advancements even though they are GPU poor because that goes to an over protectionism on our side where we create a more GPU slop because we have way more high performance computing and we just don't care to make it efficient.

38:17So I'd rather have that be to where all that stuff is just happening on our stuff. So in some respects, by giving them more, we actually decrease the incentive for them to make innovations because they actually will have more GPUs. So this is the solution to negative gross margins. This is what will save venture capital. It all comes back. Anyway, I want to go to a post that you put up. We can wrap up with the board. If you want to take that board and design it into a beautiful graphic, do it on figma.com. Think bigger. Build faster. Figma Health Design and Development teams build great products together and you can get started for free.

38:54You posted, this is really a race between America and the world. And you have the generative AI startups ranking. OpenAI, DeepSeek, Anthropic, XAI. What was your takeaway from this chart of gen AI startups? Oh, that one. Yeah, I think it's a, yeah, China is obviously listed the most out of America. up. But I think one is that it's our ability as a nation to invest in stuff that we think is revolutionary and become, again, the default nation. We want to be the standard. We want to be the exporter. But in reality is that seeing, when have we ever seen a great wave of new infrastructure development that has occurred this fast that's international?

39:37So that goes back to whatever China shocking person that you're talking about. That's where he does it. I make a little bit of a jest of a joke of has he talked to anyone who doesn't live in america yeah because we haven't ever seen that in silicon valley to where there's a big motion in silicon valley to do this investment you know social media mobile web 3 and what we see now is the fact of like all these countries are doing sovereign ai projects that's where the roll-up effect the ability for us to control this is it's way more like bitcoin where it's something accessible to everybody and and that's what leaning in on that side is kind of accepting the escape velocity that we're in versus the other side wants to live i think in a little bit of a fairy tale being like oh wouldn't it be nice if you control those things if it's it's like if you have children you're like well wouldn't it be nice if you stop hitting your sister and you're the kids going to be like right and yeah it's like you can only you can really only extend yourself so far when you are world occupied by multiple free agents multiple sovereign nations and and so i'd rather lean into our strengths where we can actually execute control yeah the more that we are a platform the more soft power we have therefore i believe more peace and more prosperity less starvation good or greater things for humanity and we can still control things but if we're in this other side where we think that we can just hit people with sticks like they're just going to be like all right i don't want to play this game anymore would you go further would you allow the export of the b200 the the i i think some version of blackwell should be in there i don't have much of opinion on how much nerf it should or anything like that.

41:08Gavin Baker had a good post that you reposted. He said, any journalist describing NVIDIA H20 as an advanced chip is not a serious person. They're either ignorant or ideological. The H20 is circa four years behind the actually advanced B200 that NVIDIA sells to America and our allies. The B200 has 30x more compute, 2x the memory bandwidth, 2x the memory of the H20 sold in China, arguably 100x more usable compute. selling H20s to China is good policy as they are slightly 1.5x better than domestic Chinese accelerators. Selling the H20 thus effectively slows down the development of a robust domestic Chinese AI accelerator ecosystem, which would be good for China long-term.

41:50In the event of conflict, we would simply stop selling H20s to China and they would be left with inferior domestic alternatives and America would have a five to six year technology advantage over those domestic alternatives. Conversely, if we do not sell the H20 to China during peacetime, they would absolutely build effective domestic alternatives over time. These alternatives would almost certainly be less power efficient than NVIDIA. See the Huawei Cloud Matrix 384 with its super fast but power hungry optical scale up fabric. But China has way more power available for AI than the United States due to their embrace of solar.

42:29selling H20s to China during peacetime is also good for the world and America because it means their AI ecosystem is comparable to the American AI ecosystem and we can easily adopt the impressive algorithmic innovation seen in their open source models like Deepsea. And the world benefits from a robust Chinese open source ecosystem that remains well behind American closed source frontier models. The fact that the Chinese government is discouraging the use of H20s in favor of domestic alternatives should tell a rational, dispassionate observer that all they need to know about which country benefits from the sale of H20s in China.

43:06Soft power. Yeah. My question is, is there something structural going on where China has to remain open source because of their position in the market? Yeah. I think what Gavin is reflecting, which is more of my disposition, is if we're going to make a strategic decision around because we still want to be the dominant superpower in the world, we have to be realistic and pragmatic about where we are. Like the fact is that we have, I don't know how high is the debt, 30 trillion, right? And 38 I think. I mean, it's negligible in the age of AGI. But once we get a fast takeoff, it solves it. Fast takeoff fixes this.

43:42Yeah, yeah. If we just grow GDP at 5 ,000 % a year, we're fine. Yeah, yeah, fine, yeah. So the, or just like fudge the numbers, right? That works too. So the, if we're gonna make a decision about any sort of policy trajectory, we have to understand like what we actually are. Like we generally have a quite hostile politics. We have many states that are essentially bankrupt. And we have a military that is still the strongest, but is kind of lacking on the asymmetric capabilities, which is why we have Androil being created. So if we're going to say, hey, we're going to go to basically to a soft war with somebody, we should really understand what's going on.

44:17And I think there's many people who occupy the China Hawk policy who, like as Gavin said, who don't even understand this technology. or they commingle TSMC with NVIDIA. And so if they're constructing an argument based on bad priors, then it's really hard to take anything else they say seriously. Because that's why I go back to the AI. If you remove the AI doomerism, many of the people who are China hawks are just actually AI doomers. They think that Terminator is coming. It's going to kill us all. We're just robots. A very old is proven. Do you think that's the flow? I thought it might be the opposite.

44:54It's like you're a China Hawk and you need to justify your policy. And so you wrap it in paper clipping. I mean, I can go like either way. Yeah, I can see it going either way. But I just don't believe that. And if you have any, for example, the number of genes you have is like basically hundreds of thousands. The number of cells you have is in the billions. the number of neuron synapses you have is about 500 trillion. The number of basically spaces in the model that like open AI uses is 500 times less. Yeah. Right. And even in the fact, even the fact of like the way that we construct LLM today, if you did that in human brain, that's called a seizure.

45:38Right. So like we have to, we have to realize that, that again, it doesn't mean. Don't make mistakes and don't have a seizure. Yeah. It doesn't mean AI can be amazing. It doesn't mean any of these things, but it's very different than from intelligence. There's enough in... Back on the Kurzweil timelines. It's back on... Ray Kurzweil makes this argument that the singularity will occur when the total amount of flops in computing is greater than the total amount of flops equivalent in the human brain. And we're orders of magnitude away from that. So you really have to... Within one human being, it will encompass all the competing power in that lifetime of 80-ish years a person lived than anything we have on planet Earth.

46:20So, like, just sit down and be humble. Because when you're humble, you can basically appreciate. Because even the fact of, like, the way elements work are very directive. But that's not even the way attention works and perception works. Like, do you recognize you're sitting in a chair? Like, do you feel that? But your body does, but your brain doesn't acknowledge it. Right? So even that differentiation between that there is so much computing happening in your body that you're not even aware of, which makes this such an effective species. And LLMs, again, they're great. But you're overextending yourself to thinking that because you have all of this power and all this energy being able to generate TFLOPs, that you're going to say, oh, you're a person now or you have sentience.

47:03And that's just not the way the brain works. And that's not even the way intelligence works. I like that. There's some I think it's a woman I just post where he's saying like when they invented the steam engine There were people that are saying like like the brain is just like a steam engine and then when they invented the Gasoline powered engine. It's just like the human brain. It's just like a gas powered engine And then when they invent the CPU they're like the brain is just like a CPU and GPU The brain is just like a GPU and I want to like bring their their their current technology understanding into like the human And and my way is good cars 10 horsepower.

47:38Yeah It's the same thing. There's 10 horses in there, isn't there? And one of the things I love about the brain so much is, for example, its ability to be plastic, right? Being able to mold itself, which LLMs can't do yet because they see novel information and they basically just like, whoa, right? They kind of like freak out. But even how we understand neuromodulators like acetylcholine, dopamine, like noreferrin, And even the way you understand that, whenever you see something, you know, y 'all have kids, when you see your kids, your body releases these normodulars that creates basically attachments to synapses and forms memories.

48:15And the way that we even understand that cocktail, we just know it just gets released. We don't know the percentages, we have no fricking clue. And as well as like, if I take your brain and then release it the same amount, right? Just like take electrons there and just boom, right? That you don't have the same effects, right? that how does directive and focus impact cells? We have no idea. Like you can, for example, like hold this gong or hold that, right? You're like Diet Coke. Yeah, like even these two things, right? We don't even know what's happening when you have a fridge cigarette. How does like information affect this Diet Coke and this like translate from cell information to the fact of meaning in caffeine?

48:55And science has no clue like how that works, but we know it works. and so I expect podcasters to figure it out I mean the the do watch Tim Dillon of course he has a reason watch anything yeah he has a great thing on like pockets like he's a black little rossi yes every show every show I have a three-hour context window anyway Aaron getting thank you so much for stopping by yeah great to see you thanks for coming in person fantastic let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.

49:42Let's take it over to Mark Gurman himself. He has some new reporting. Apple plots expansion into AI robots, home security, and smart displays. Apple Inc. is plotting its artificial intelligence comeback. Don't call it a comeback. Actually, you can call it a comeback. It makes sense. They've gotten a lot of hate over the last few years for the role, just particularly the rollout of Apple intelligence. Very hyped. A lot of features on display at WWDC that didn't ship when the new iPhone launched. They sold the new iPhone. Yeah, exactly. And so I think that there were high expectations because of Apple's position with on-device inference being very cool.

50:27Tim Cook, I gave you Genmoji. Are you not entertained? They shipped a few things. I think that I would love to see the Genmoji actual usage data because I feel like even though it's not popular in Teapot and OnX and in the Technorati, it might actually be seeing decent adoption and joy. I mean, I've seen people share generative imagery from Microsoft Copilot, which I had no idea was a popular image generation platform whatsoever. Facebook crowd. Exactly, exactly. So I wouldn't be so sure that Genmoji is producing zero value. But at the same time, it's clearly been a tumultuous time for the company.

51:07They've been kind of on defense in terms of public relations. But Mark Gurman is still scooping every single day. So Apple is plotting its AI comeback with an ambitious slate of new devices, including robots, a lifelike version of Siri, a smart speaker with a display and home security cameras. A tabletop robot that serves as a virtual companion targeted for 2027 is the centerpiece of the AI strategy, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The smart speaker with a display, meanwhile, is slated to arrive next year, part of a push into entry-level smart home products. Tabletop robot that's a virtual companion.

51:42Yep. That's big. A lot of software they got to write to make that work. They got to get on graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Tim Cook, if you're listening, get on Graphite. So this is big too. Home security is seen as another big growth opportunity. New cameras will anchor an Apple security system that can automate household functions. The approach should help make Apple's product ecosystem stickier with consumers to the people who ask not to be identified because the initiatives haven't been announced. I mean, this seems like something that they could knock out of the park.

52:12Like just the smart thermostat, like these patterns have been defined for a decade. And that's like the sweet spot for Apple to come in and like the Sonos home speaker, where we were saying like they're just like the speaker. Everyone knows what they want out of a connected speaker system. They just want it at the level of Apple execution. It doesn't require going zero to one in some new territory. And so I feel like they could be very successful in the home video monitoring, home thermostat, home speaker. So I think I like this overall. The robot is where it gets funny because this feels crazy.

52:51But I'll let you keep going. Going into companionship feels interesting. I don't think it's companionship. I don't think of it like that at all. A tabletop robot that serves as a virtual companion is the centerpiece of the AI strategy. I mean, so let's read what the actual report is on this robot. The tabletop robot resembles an iPad mounted on a movable limb that can swivel and reposition itself to follow users in a room like a human head. It can turn toward a person who is speaking or summoning it and even seek to draw the attention of someone not facing it. The hope is to bring AI into life.

53:27I don't think of this as like companion necessarily. This could just be - Jarvis. Yeah, Jarvis. Exactly. Jarvis isn't a companion, but companion has a bad flavor to it right now, a bad vibe because people are saying, like, I married my companion, and that feels very Black Mirror. I do think that there's a serious Black Mirror risk, but I'll go into that in a second. But what were you about to say? Yeah, I'm not going out and saying this feels like a competitor to friend.com or any other players that are actually focused on companionship, but this does feel like giving Siri a presence in the home.

54:04Like an always-on presence in the home. It will be interesting to see how they solve it. A partnership with OpenAI or Anthropic seems logical, but Apple's Siri partnership with OpenAI or Anthropic before September on PolyMarkets is a 6 % chance. By December, it's at a 44 % chance, though. So this is a very low-volume market, but still, it feels like we haven't seen a lot of messaging from Tim Cook that they're going to be building a huge data center, going to be training a foundation model, it feels like they're going to need to partner on some of the underlying infrastructure for that because I would not want Siri hanging out in my kitchen talking to me.

54:45Like Siri is just not reliable enough, but I would welcome Claude or ChatGPT into my house. But I would treat it specifically as a, like an Alexa, what's the weather like? What's on my calendar? look up the history of the Roman Empire. I would ask it questions like that and I would use it as a knowledge retrieval tool. I might start to trust it in some agentic contexts. And the question is, do we want a robot iPad with an arm swinging around your kitchen and hopefully when you want to know the weather. It's you're within earshot. I think this could be really cool. I think it could be really cool.

55:29I mean, they say FaceTime is going to be... And it's just funny because they're still competing with their own... Yeah, but if you're ever in the kitchen, this is an example. So FaceTime calls will be a key function of the device. During video conferencing, the display will be able to shift to lock onto people around a room. And so as you're walking around, the FaceTime is just following you. That actually feels more social. I remember during COVID I bought Facebook's camera. They had some sort of device that you would mount on your TV and it would act as a video conferencing system. And I used it a few times.

56:04I ultimately churned, but it had a really wide angle lens and it would like zoom in on the people. It had really good face detection. And so it would center you no matter where you were in the room. But as soon as you walked to the other side of the room, it wouldn't be able to follow you because it didn't have any motors in it. and I feel like this could be interesting link in the chat this all reminds me of the Meta Portal yeah that's the one I'm talking about the Portal yeah basically I didn't market it as a robot but it would sit on a table and it would sort of follow you around the room and Meta is no longer selling Meta Portal wow I guess they wound it down so anyways Tim Cook told employees I gifted some of these and they were pretty well received uh most of them wound up being used as uh like uh digital digital photo frames though yeah and they weren't actually used that often for calls i don't know if putting it on a robotic arm is enough to make it useful i think you do have to nail the underlying uh speech recognition and and the in the in the conversational nature like it has to be powered by a frontier llm you know what's funny what is i feel like the product i i could imagine them having a mood board internally with the pixar lamp hopping around that's literally listed here as like one of their inspirations apparently so tim cook told employees in all hands meeting this month that apple must win in ai and hinted at the upcoming devices the quote the product pipeline which i can't talk about thankfully mark german has his moles and apple are talking tim cook says it's amazing guys It's amazing.

57:41Some of it you'll see soon, some of it will come later, but there's a lot to see. So Apple obviously always is cooking on moonshots. Very little of it services to Mark Gurman, and even less actually services publicly via Apple's own channels. Mark Gurman, if you have a little extra time, you should leak Julius's user numbers, because Julius has over two million users now. They're trusted by folks at Princeton, BCG, Zapier. What analysis do you want to run? It's the AI data analyst that works for you. Connect your data, ask questions in plain English, and get insights in seconds. No crowding required.

58:19We need to get our logo up there. Yeah. The fourth logo. For sure. There's a lot more. So Apple is planning to put Siri at the center of the device operating system and give it a visual personality to make it feel lifelike. The approach, dubbed Bubbles, is vaguely reminiscent of Clippy, which we are super bullish on. And we think Microsoft should totally bring back Clippy. an animated paperclip from the 90s that served as a virtual assistant in Microsoft Office. Apple has tested making Siri look like an animated version of the Finder logo, the iconic smiley face representing the Mac's file management system.

58:50The final decision on its appearance hasn't been made, with designers considering ideas that veer closer to Memoji, the playful characters that represent Apple user accounts. Device prototypes use a roughly seven-inch horizontal display approaching the size of an iPad mini. the motorized arm can extend the display away from the base roughly half a foot in any direction. So that's not going to snap out. I was really hoping at least five. Yeah, seven feet across the room. It reaches across and pins you against the fridge. Yeah, I think Apple should be able to nail delivering this in a way that doesn't feel black mirror and dystopian.

59:26Oh, that's funny. Sorry, I actually didn't see this, but there's a quote in here. Some people familiar with the product call it the Pixar lamp. Yep, exactly. I think it could work really, really well. Now, they have to be cognizant of the Black Mirror vibes. Hopefully, it can hop around, though. That would be very cool. If it could hop off my kitchen table. It can definitely hop around. That's Nat Friedman core. This is doable with modern technology. But the risk is that they botch it because Apple's had a rough go with the recent marketing, and they've had a couple real backlashes. They had that one where they smashed all the pianos in the press.

1:00:01Do you remember this? so they had a huge hydraulic press and they and they pressed like an easel with paints and a bunch of paint buckets and pianos and violins and all this stuff they got a ton of blowback from this we can we can try and pull it up uh do you remember this you remember that uh people were saying that they're like destroying these timeless pieces yeah and it's just like the things that i instruments and stuff like that yeah the thing that i love you're literally you're destroying it for this particular um uh oh shots fired bill bishop from the substack stream you need better guests to talk about china and chips not just nvidia partners who are regurgitating nvidia's talking points bill bishop get on the stream call in we'd love to have you bill bill you're welcome hop on of course aaron is riding with jensen yeah he is the jensen surrogate he's he's a surrogate for jensen the juggler he has to juggle both united states and nvidia and China's interest and Taiwan's interest and all of them.

1:00:58Come on the show, Bill. Miles Fisher wants to see the production team. He says, show the off-camera voices. Let's get the production team up on the screen. Bill, call into the show right now. We'll send you the Zoom link. Yep. Call in. You're welcome. Can we pull up the Apple ad of them crushing the videos? Is that even available anymore? They might have just taken it off the internet. But there was... I think I found it. But there was... This is it, right? Yeah, I think... Yeah, yeah. This is a record player. like literally all these things that bring people joy and it's just crushing a trumpet it's like all your dreams like all the things that you want to spend oh an arcade machine all the things that are nostalgia nostalgia plays so well and this is just anti-nostalgia in a million ways destroying i mean it is a beautiful shot like this is a crazy company that built itself empowering i know creative talent i know yeah they crushed the pixar lamp and the angry bird oh it's brutal the TV blows up.

1:01:56This is such an incredible production though, the fact that they actually shot this. It is a remarkable ad. Oh, and then the poor emoji. The poor emoji gets crushed. And then, of course, it is revealed after everything blows up that all of that fits in your iPad, which is super thin. A reasonable message. You get all of that in the context of an iPad. You get games. You get an arcade machine. You get an easel. You get a piano. You get all of those things. At the time, Tor Myron said, our goal is always to celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad.

1:02:32We missed the mark with this video, and we're sorry. Absolutely brutal. Well, really quickly, let me tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned on ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover your new products and brands. Check out Profound. So the other ad that didn't go as viral and result in major backlash, was the launch of the Apple Vision Pro. So when the Apple Vision Pro launched, one of the videos that they showed was of a middle-aged man looking at VR video of his kids, but he was alone in a dark room. And Ben Thompson was like, it feels like he's divorced or something, or maybe like the kids died.

1:03:12Bachelor mode. It felt like Minority Report, which is a movie I know you haven't seen. But in Minority Report, Tom Cruise's son goes missing from the pool one day and he has a virtual 3D video that he plays back and gets very emotional about. And the imagery was very similar in the Apple Vision Pro, but it wasn't an optimistic scenario. It was like, yeah, I guess if my son passed away or got kidnapped, I would want to relive that, but that's not gonna inspire me to buy an Apple Vision Pro. And so with this Pixar lamp, this robot in your kitchen or in your house, like they really, I think they have to lean into to light mode, not dark mode.

1:03:58They have to really be aware and reality check themselves on the black mirror effect because the idea of someone hanging out in their kitchen, being lonely, and having this be the only companion that they ever talk to, that's a lot less fun than, hey, we're all cooking together in the kitchen and this is helping us keep track of the ingredients. Or my idea was teach it to pour some beers and get it at the fraternity. This thing needs to be tending bar at a frat house and inspiring dancing silhouettes like the original iPod commercial in order to be successful. Get the iRobot a stack of red solo cups ASAP.

1:04:39Apple's canceled for fraternity-coded marketing. I think that would be amazing. If this thing could pour a beer without foam, I think they got a winner. Because it needs to inject itself into social. Even the iPod. Like, yes, you could put in the headphones and you could tune out the world and be that dancing silhouette during the iPod commercial. But also, you could say, pass me the aux cord. I want to play a song for my iPod that everyone can enjoy. And it's a social experience. And so it's important to show both of those sides now more than ever. and in ChatGPT demos and any AI product demo, there's always going to be the user who uses the product to be more isolating, but the marketing should always be aspirational and pro-social, just like social media.

1:05:26Social media, it's at its best when we're highlighting the fact that, like, I have so many friends that just send me a random Instagram reel every single day. And, like, that's our interaction. And for me, it's a way to, like, check in with a friend. Share a laugh. Share a laugh. and it's a heart and it's a laughing. I can imagine the ad creative for the Apple Pixar lamp. You know, it's sitting on the center of a kitchen island and the family's hanging out and they're FaceTiming somebody. Exactly, yeah. One of the family members is out of town. I can actually imagine us having a Pixar lamp here on the table.

1:05:59Really, really, it's like, yeah, it's like you want to be connecting two families or two sides of the family. The East Coast side of the family, the West Coast side of the family, they're both having Thanksgiving and they're able to connect, but everyone's being extremely social. Do not film this thing with the lonely person having the Pixar lamp be the only thing to keep it company. Anyway, that's my advice for Adam. What else is there in here? The projects coded Linwood and Glenwood. Core to the new home devices and current products like iPhones and iPads is an overhaul to the underpinnings of Siri.

1:06:35Engineers are working on a version code named Linwood with an entirely new brain built around LLMs, the foundation of Gen.AI. The goal is to tap into personal data to fulfill queries, an ability that was delayed due to hiccups with the current version. It should be able to do it. Hopefully, this team, they should have a moonshot division just trying to solve iMessage search. They could probably start there. Every tech company needs that. Amazon search is rough. Google Gmail search is rough. there search has gotten so like dominated billion dollar business in figuring out so i mean that would be the killer that might be a killer app for comet and some of the browsers is just like actually being able to search my gmail inbox better that would be pretty fantastic i feel like it should be at the app layer anyway whatever they're building they're building products they got to get on 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.

1:07:36Open AI is on linear. Let's get Apple on linear. Let's get the Siri team on linear. They very well might be already. So somebody, Craig Federighi, who you all know, says the work we've done on this end-to-end revamp of Siri has given us the result we needed. He added that this has put us in a position to not just deliver what we announced, but to deliver a much bigger upgrade than we envisioned. He said there's no project people are taking more seriously. So that is very positive. A final decision hasn't been made on which models will be used, but Apple has been testing Anthropic PBC's Claude for this purpose.

1:08:14Mike Rockwell, the former Vision Pro chief who was put in charge of Siri earlier this year, is overseeing both the Linwood and Glenwood efforts. Apparently, so during the development of the tabletop robot, Apple engineers have made heavy use of chat GPT and Google Gemini to build and test features within Apple AI and Siri teams as a whole software developers are increasingly using third-party systems as part of their development process. Getting into a ring competitor here, Apple is working on a camera codename J450. It's designed for home security, detecting people, and automating tasks. The device will be battery-powered and could last for several months to a year on a single charge.

1:08:54That's interesting if they can do this for they can they can do this for a random home security camera they can't do it for you but they have you're telling me they have the capability to have an always on camera we need a tinfoil hat uh the device has facial recognition and infrared sensors to determine who is in a room apple believes users will replace will place cameras throughout their home to help with automation that can be turning lights off when someone leaves a room or automatically playing music so Apple you're telling me that you can make a home security camera of which I will purchase multiple and put them around my house and it will be able to have a single battery that could last for several months to a year on a single charge and you can't make an iPhone it's a little bit well as the screens pretty bright the screen's right yeah but I'm Always on camera?

1:09:51How long do you think your phone battery would last if you just constantly had the camera? I actually think running the camera sensor is a lot less power intensive than running a screen, for sure. And obviously a bunch of different applications. But still, pretty powerful, pretty exciting. I don't think people want an always-on iPhone. They want the thrill of charging the iPhone every night. If you're an adrenaline junkie, there's nothing like being on 1 % trying to fire off that last iMessage, trying to search iMessage. I actually had a moment yesterday. my one year old is starting to walk. And I had this moment yesterday where I was, I'd filmed a video of her walking for about 10 seconds.

1:10:31Everyone's in the house is like laughing, enjoying the moment. And then my battery died and completely lost the video because I didn't hit like end the video. So the battery died right in the middle of this, memory gone forever. There is actually, that has something to do with the encoder. There is a certain file type that you can use when you're filming on one of these cameras that if the battery dies, it will actually save the last of the file. But there's certain codecs where if you don't hit finish recording, the whole thing will be corrupted. It's very annoying. Anyway, get on your Merle HQ, sales tax on autopilot.

1:11:08Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Tyler, what do you think about the Apple robot? Would you buy this thing? Would you do a challenge for it and then churn in two weeks? That's probably, that's most likely. Probably, yes. Depends on how much it is. I'm like, you know. What have you adopted this summer that you still daily drive? You've churned from the vision, you've churned from the VR headset, you've churned from Cluelay. My new phone. Your phone, you have not gone back to the old phone. It's, yeah. Extremely bullish for Apple. Let's hear it. Let's hear it for new phones.

1:11:45You know, you talk a lot of trash, Jordy. Oh, the latest iPhone doesn't have an all-day battery. Tyler's still using the latest and greatest phone. Still a good business. iPhone sales are ripping. Well, in other news, Emily Choi has announced, we just closed the biggest deal in crypto history. Deribit is the number one crypto options exchange by volume and open interest. And now it's officially part of Coinbase. So, of course, Coinbase just completed their$2.9 billion cash and stock acquisition of Deribit. This had been announced previously. Darabit launched in 2016 and reportedly notched over$1 trillion in annual trading volume in 2024.

1:12:24So let's give it up for a big number. In other crypto news, bullish. This is one of the greatest headlines I've ever seen in the Wall Street Journal. The nominative determinism of bullish. I don't know if you can see. Maybe I should just put it here. We need the printer cam back. But the business and finance section of the Wall Street Journal says, Bullish's IPO lives up to name. Price of crypto exchanges shares jump 84 % on their first day of trading. Shares of Bullish soared in the IPO, highlighting the challenge of pricing an IPO in today's exuberant market. Just last month, shares of software company Figma jumped 250 % in their debut.

1:13:08That prompted whispers about the risks of a company underpricing an IPO and potentially leaving billions of dollars on the table. The ideal first day gains are typically around 20 to 30 percent, many bankers who work on deals say. Bullish had a market capitalization of more than$13 billion as of Wednesday afternoon. Its stock, which trades under the symbol BLSH, was temporarily paused after it began trading. All eyes were on Bullish's debut, largely because the company is led by Tom Farley, the former president of the New York Stock Exchange. Farley, in the role, guided some of the biggest IPOs, including those of Alibaba and Snap.

1:13:50Bullish's debut was a chance for him to show his own ability to nail an IPO's pricing to both maximize for company proceeds, because when you're going public, you are selling stock. You want to sell it at the fair. It's a fundraising event. You want to sell it at the fairest price. If the stock pops, you could have sold a lot more, potentially, and gotten with the same amount of dilution. essentially. So they could have, so they raised 1.1 billion. Um, but because it jumped 84%, they could have raised$2 billion for the same dilution. And so that's in theory, the, in theory, the problem here. Um, and so, uh, you know, people, people kind of go back and forth, but it, but it gets to this point.

1:14:28I mean, you're making a gamble, right? Yep. Even the Facebook, the Facebook IPO didn't, didn't it decline? Tanked. Yeah. It was like one of the worst IPOs in tech history. It was very, very rough and it took over a year, I think, for them to build back up. But that was due to a few things. There was a technical error. There was a mispricing. There was a lot of, I think the numbers or something, there was the mobile risk. There were a few different factors where people were like, oh, maybe this isn't the best, a true compounder. I don't know. It was very odd in hindsight. But yes, this all goes to the point of how will individual investors react to public debuts?

1:15:05Because if they go out and it's a hot company, becomes a meme stock or there's just too much latent demand, the stock will pop insanely. And so that's what a lot of companies that are going public are dealing with these days. But it's sort of a champagne problem because it's good to have a high-valued stock that you can go out and acquire stuff. $11 billion public company now. Yeah, it's great. Bin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks. Number one in competitive bake-offs. Number one ranking on G2. You can get started for free. brad pitt says his ford versus ferrari movie with tom cruise never happened because cruise found out he would not be driving much in the movie we both wanted to drive tom realized that shelby would not be driving much so it didn't come through some lore who wound up starring in ford versus ferrari who plays shelby i forget um it's uh it's someone else right ford versus ferrari oh it's uh Christian Bale, that's right.

1:16:02Christian Bale and Matt Damon. Although Matt Damon does not play, who does he play? Matt Damon, Ken Miles, Donald Frey. Anyway, Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free at Adio. Well, in other news, OpenAI and Sam Altman are investing a quarter of a billion dollars and merge labs at an$850 million valuation. That's a big stake. The Financial Times is reporting. So Sam Altman wants to put a chip in your brain. That's kind of the point. I think everyone wants to put a chip in your brain.

1:16:42Everyone, even Roy Lee wants to put a chip in your brain. Roy Lee wants to. And Mark Zuckerberg said that if you're not wearing meta Ray-Bans, you'll be at a cognitive disability or something like that, didn't he say? Or cognitive disadvantage because having AI on top. hopes revenge said good I'm used to it it's great so the Financial Times Altman's co-founding or a company Wow yeah open AI and its co-founder Sam Altman are preparing to back a company that will compete with Elon Musk Neuralink by connecting human brains with computers heightening the rivalry between one over this the two billionaire entrepreneurs the new venture called merge labs is raising funds at 850 million with much of the new capital expected to come from opening eyes ventures team according to three people with direct knowledge of the plans.

1:17:26Altman has encouraged the investment and will help launch the project alongside Alex Blania, who runs World, an eyeball-scanning digital ID project, also backed by Sam Altman. Altman will co-found the company but not have a day-to-day role in the new project they added. Merge is one of a slate of young companies looking to take advantage of recent advances in artificial intelligence to build more useful BCIs. Its name comes from what many in Silicon Valley describe as the merge, a moment when humans and machines come together. Yeah, it's good. The Doomers are going to love this one. I'm sure. Altman wrote a lengthy blog post on the topic in 2017, speculating the moment would come as soon as 2025.

1:18:08This year, he suggested in another blog post that he could soon have high bandwidth brain computer interfaces as a result of recent technological advances. I'm going to reference back to this blog post from Sam Altman called The Merge. He posted this eight years ago on December 7th, 2017. A popular topic in Silicon Valley is talking about what year humans and machines will merge, or if not, what year humans will get surpassed by rapidly improving AI or genetically enhanced species. Most guesses seem to be between 2025 and 2075. People used to call this the singularity. Now it feels uncomfortable.

1:18:48and real enough that many seem to avoid naming it at all. Perhaps another reason people stopped using the word singularity is that it implies a single moment in time, and it now looks like the merge is going to be a gradual process, and gradual processes are hard to notice. I believe the merge has already started, and we are a few years in. Our phones control us and tell us what to do. Social media feeds determine how we feel. Search engines decide what we think. The algorithms that make all this happen are no longer understood by any one person. They optimize for what their creators tell them to optimize for, but in ways that no human could figure out.

1:19:23They are what today seems like sophisticated AI and tomorrow will seem like child's play. And they're extremely effective, at least speaking for myself. I have a very hard time resisting what the algorithms want me to do. Until I made a real effort to combat it, I found myself getting extremely addicted to the Internet. We are already in the phase of co-evolution. The AIs affect, effect, and infect us, and then we improve the AI. We build more computing power to run the AI on it, and it figures out how to build even better chips. This probably cannot be stopped. As we have learned, scientific advancement eventually happens if the laws of physics do not prevent it.

1:20:02More important than that, unless we destroy ourselves first, superhuman AI is going to happen. Genetic enhancement is going to happen, and brain-machine interfaces are going to happen. It is a failure of human imagination and human arrogance to assume that we will never build things smarter than ourselves. Our self-worth is so based on our intelligence that we believe it must be singular and not slightly higher than all the other animals on a continuum. Perhaps the AI will feel the same way and note that differences between us and bonobos are barely worth discussing. The merge can take a lot of forms.

1:20:35We could plug electrodes into our brains or we could all just become really close friends with a chat bot. Wow. Oh, eight years ago he said that? Eight years ago. That's crazy. ChadGBT, of course, wouldn't exist for years, but I think a merge is probably our best case scenario. If two different species both want the same thing and only one can have it, in this case, to be the dominant species on the planet and beyond, they're going to have a conflict. We should all want one team where all members care about the well-being of everyone else. Although the merge has already begun, it's going to get a lot weirder.

1:21:07We will be the first species ever to design our own descendants. My guess is that we can either be a biological bootloader for digital intelligence and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like. It's probably going to happen sooner than most people think. Hardware is improving at an exponential rate. The most surprising thing I've learned working on open AI is just how correlated increasing computing power and AI breakthroughs are, and the number of smart people working on AI is increasing exponentially as well. Double exponential functions get away from you fast.

1:21:42It would be good for the entire world to start taking this a lot more seriously now. Worldwide coordination doesn't happen quickly, and we need it for this. That's a wild post. Is that still up, or did you have to go to the archive? Still up. Still up. Interesting. That's a hot take. Tyler, would you put a chip in your brain? Yeah, I want 4-0 piped straight in. Yeah, you're down? I'd do it, yeah. Yeah, sycophancy maxing. Chat is not super into it. Gabe says he just wants salt and vinegar chips, not brain chips. John Exley says he's got to be honest. I don't think it's for me ever. I can already picture the contagion of peer pressure.

1:22:21Yeah, reading that blog post made me want to touch some grass. We should actually get some grass here in the studio. We should get some grass in the studio. Or even on the table so we could just have one hand on the grass. It relates a lot to this cold healing post. 2040 population distribution predictions, 90 % brainless content zombies who are functionally illiterate cannot write a paragraph, 5 % neo-Amish flip phone users, 5 % elites and super elites at algorithmic war with each other to steer the 90 % to their whims. And then Crabb says, always has been.

1:22:59I think the case of the Neo-Amish is fascinating because the non-Amish are doing fantastically. They have adopted flip phones, I believe, and they've adopted some technology. But in general, they've accumulated a lot of real estate. And they're, by all accounts, they are flourishing. and so what's interesting is that the the the the coastal elites have not gone to war with the amish they've not said like what they are doing is unacceptable and we must like eradicate them i don't know if they'll ever be threatened by it i think they might be fine with it forever i think everyone might be fine with it forever and so i think they can build they can build barns like they're they're in the game oh you're threatened threatened by that i mean if they can build a barn what else could they build i think i i think that like you even though there will be you've seen the videos, right?

1:23:51Of them assembling a barn in 12 hours. It truly is some of the greatest grass touching we can do. The Amish population doubles every 20 years. Amazing. Bullish. Chart that out, Tyler. Chart that out. Yeah, oh, that's a fast takeoff there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Project the next 10 ,000 years. What will the Amish population be? Amish general intelligence. How many Amish people will there be in 10 ,000 years if they keep doubling every 20 years? That's what I want to know. I bet it's a big number. Mark has a good one. He says, AI equals Amish intelligence, how to build a barn in 20 hours. I love it. Thank you, Mark.

1:24:34This is so funny. But I think my takeaway is like, so Sam is painting this picture of like, you get left in the evolution tree and you get like dropped off and it's a dead end i don't know that it's necessarily a dead end like you could like monkeys are still around you could you could still just be a monkey and you could be an amish and like the super intelligence brain computer merged people could go off and do their own thing and you could just be vibing as an amish for thousands and thousands of years like there's not necessarily an incentive to eradicate until the super intelligence comes and says hey i'm gonna need you guys to come and ride soul cycle bikes to power my data center i i think that i think that people are just are just people like people like animals people people are nice by default like the default state of of most living things is not this like vicious battle to dominate everything constantly like yes like the animal kingdom is extremely metal and there are insane battles constantly but it doesn't it doesn't need to necessarily be that way yeah i don't think it necessarily needs to be that way.

1:25:40I think the Amish can coexist. Tyler, do you have the final number? How many Amish people will there be in the year? 12 ,025. 12 ,025. Yes, I think it'd be 1.3 times 10 to the 156. Can you turn that into like words? Is it quintillion, octillion, septillion? I want to know. Convert it into... 10 to the 156 is like... Is that passed to Google? I guess$10.100. So there will be more than a Google Amish. Yeah. That's fantastic. I'm rooting for the Amish. That's great. Let's go for the Amish. I think you got to go long Amish. How do we make money on this? Someone asked, what about the absent-minded destruction of parking lots?

1:26:25I don't get that. I'm confused. I don't know about the absent market. Amish reference. Are the Amish destroying parking lots? I think they're building parking lots for all those barns they're putting up. Anyway, the Amish are missing out on eight sleep. or maybe that's a loophole that they can do. We should definitely get the Amish on Eight Sleep. Get a pod five if you're Amish and you're listening to the stream and you're in the chat right now. They got a five-year warranty, a 30-night risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping. That would be, imagine the... First thing you put in the barn, pod five.

1:26:54They could imagine if we find out that the Amish can build barns so quickly because they've all been secretly sleeping on Eight Sleeps. Maybe that's the secret. Maybe that's the secret. They got an Amish version from Mateo that's like cooled by the earth. Ooh, the farm to table eight sleep. That's nice. Taylor says, I for one welcome our Amish Borg overlords. And Gabe says, Long Home Depot. Yeah, Long Home Depot. Going Long Home Depot to, did the Amish shop at Home Depot or did they chop their own trees down? I don't know. I'm gonna do a deep dive on the Amish. Anyway, should we debate whether or not TV is dead?

1:27:31Are magazines dead? one of our strongest stans, Adam Faze, I believe he's a part of Faze Clan. Adam Faze said, Emily Sundberg asked me for my anonymous hot take, which I guess he immediately de-anonymized. On the state of media right now, I'll out myself because I don't think mine's that anonymous. Magazines are dead, TV is dead, Hollywood is dead, TBPN is more important than CNBC, Emily Sundberg is more important than Vanity Fair, Nick Fuentes is more important than Fox News, and X is unfortunately the center of the universe. Interesting take, very spicy. Alex Heath from The Bird says, half is true, half is not, we'll never know which half.

1:28:13And Max Taney says, I think you could make the argument that none of this is true. Yeah, who knows? What is relevancy? What is importance? Who knows? All I know is we're having fun on this stream. We're having fun with you in the chat. I just want to say you're keeping magazines in business, John. I am. I mean, yeah. Oh, the newspaper's dead. Why do I read it every single day then? Well, he didn't say the newspaper was dead. No, the newspaper is Lindy. I think... I actually think true journalism is more important than ever. As long as TBPN is alive, Hollywood cannot be dead because we are alive from Hollywood and we are joined by someone who is not far from Hollywood.

1:28:51Delian Asperuha, partner at Founders Fund, co-founder of Varda Space. What can we do to second office for Varda? Let's move it to Hollywood. Hollywood is the new Silicon Valley. Well, if they get tasked, not a lot of warehouse space. Wait, think about this. So if you guys get tasked with a moon landing and we need to... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We got you covered. If you're going out for series J and you need to make a moon landing up here like it happened, we got the cameras for you. We're good. My somewhat controversial take is the moon landing did happen. Yeah. The footage wasn't looking that good.

1:29:30They did live stream from Hollywood for the footage that they had some great takes. So both are true. That's great. They had to reshoot it. They had to reshoot it. Yeah, reshoots happen all the time. I don't have a problem with it. I say let it happen. Fair play. Yeah. Anyway, what is new in your world? There's a bunch of stuff going on in DC. We can talk about chips in China. We can talk about, I want to talk about negative gross margins in AI companies. What's going on in venture. There's a bunch of stuff. But what's top of my view? Why don't we start there? Let's start there. Because this is a fun one.

1:30:01Okay. So. Because Delian has been getting, you know, chirped at for years. For years about this. About margin profiles. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Back to Everett, baby. Yeah. Let's make it just an Everett. Somebody tell Everett to come on right now. Yeah, yeah. Let's have the gross margins debate. So here was my take to kick it off. Here's an example of how the AI startup economy works. I've anonymized the companies, but this was relayed to me in a group chat and I believe it to be roughly true. You, the user, gives an application layer company$1. They turn around and give$5 to a foundation model company that gives$7 to a hyperscaler who in turn gives$13 to a GPU maker and it's giving house of cards.

1:30:46And so the question is, how fast can inference costs fall? Are we so over? Will we solve this? Is Moore's law enough to save us? What else needs to change? What's your take on negative gross margins in now software businesses and the end of zero fixed costs? I saw this graph that was NVIDIA's free cash flow by quarter and they're like capex by quarter The first was like today spent I think I forget it was quarter yearly Maybe it was yearly but they're you know spending something on the order of like, you know 4.5 you know sort of billion in you know sort of capex on you know sort of scale up of you know production lines and Their free cash flow is something on the order of like 35 40 years of billion dollars And so there's just something like funnily ironic where like you take the whole like 2010s mantra of like, you know, software is eating the world.

1:31:32Marginal cost of distribution is zero. So your margins are phenomenal. And then it's just like it's all just completely wrong, right? Like, you know, SaaS companies end up having like crazy high sales and marketing spend in order to actually like grow the revenues at all. So the margins don't look anywhere near what they look like. Alex Clayton from Meritech had this tweet where now the publicly reported revenues of AI labs now surpass the entire publicly traded SaaS industry. So it's just like you have this entire decade of companies, things that people sort of worked on, revenues, et cetera, and then it turns out it was all just completely wrong, both on like those companies actually having durability, margins, et cetera, and they're replaced by something that is somehow bigger and potentially also has all those, you know, sort of same like risks and concerns of durability, margin center, and who's the winner, it still ends up being the people that have the fundamental like hardware, you know, sort of infrastructure.

1:32:31Like if you look at like where all their like free cashflow is ending up, it's somehow ending up in like Oracle running data centers, Microsoft running data centers, and, you know, NVIDIA basically building the chips that, you know, sort of goes into those and like the energy companies that are providing the energy for it. But like the end, like application layer and like software companies end up capturing like none of the sort of margins or cash flows from all of this. And so, I don't know, he's the guy that's always loved bits and atoms rather than pure bits alone. I continue to feel very validated.

1:32:56And I admit that I enjoy studying, you know, some of these AI companies, gross margin profiles, and then realizing that like the fucking space factory company has better gross margins than they do. That's wild. Do you think that there's any hope for inference costs to fall off a cliff and gross margins to kind of get right side up very quickly. Because that is the bull case. Like we saw this with DeepSeq, like the inference cost, even for reasoning models, dropped like 20x very quickly. And you just don't see that in, I'm a homemaker and all of a sudden, like the price of lumber just dropped 10x.

1:33:34Like that just doesn't happen. It only happens in software and algorithms where a more elegant implementation of the algorithm them can actually drive same results, 10x savings and cost. And that feels like everything's like, everyone's kind of hoping for a bailout maybe, and I'm like cautiously optimistic that it could happen. We're going to get a government bailout of the artificial intelligence industry within the next 365 days. We need a federal backstop. Universal tokens, everyone gets$1 ,000 in Nvidia credits or something. The other like interesting, you know, sort of macro lens on this is if you look at the amount of CapEx that is going into setting up, you know, basically, you know, buying chips, setting up user data centers, basically all things that the like, you know, sort of hyperscalers and foundation labs are contributing towards.

1:34:29It's actually the highest single, you know, sort of industry investment line item as a percentage of GDP. since basically the fiber rollout in sort of the late 90s. And then before that, the last time that we had an equivalent was basically the railroad boom in the late 1890s, right? I want to say. And the railroad boom was significantly higher. I think it was like almost 9 % of GDP. I know the chart you're thinking of. And I think fiber and like the internet rollout was like 1.2 and we're at like 1.3 % of GDP, something like that. So we're not like insane 10 % of GDP, which is kind of what like the fast takeoff folks, the, you know, the Dwarkesh Patel crowd talking with Satya Nadella talking about like this could be 50 % of GDP if scaling really, really works like we think it will.

1:35:20The thing that's unique though to those, you know, relative to those prior booms is fiber companies were dependent on their fiber revenue in order to keep justifying rolling out fiber, right? And they obviously ended up being wrong. You thought that fiber was going to be everywhere. There was going to be infinite internet. And then it turns out you set up like a basic backbone for the internet and then after that you actually didn't need fiber everywhere and so there was projected to be semi-infinite demand for fiber and now the biggest company that was rolling that out in the late 90s, Corning, literally only finally last year reached their original peak 2001 market cap.

1:35:49It took four years and most of that now has nothing to do with fiber. It's like the Gorilla Glass that they make for iPhone, all these other special glass applications, but it shows how long it can take to get back to your prior peak. The railroad companies obviously were highly dependent on their rail revenue in order to be able to continue to invest into railroads. What's crazy about the CapEx that's going into these data centers is a significant chunk of it is funded from companies that have free cash flow and revenues from completely unrelated to the AI business. Meta is funding all this stuff from their social media and targeted ads.

1:36:20Microsoft is feeding all this off of their SaaS revenues. Amazon, obviously, from their marketplace, etc. It's like the only companies that are actually dependent on the AI revenues to fund this CapEx are basically the foundation model companies. and then Google from their monopoly, basically on search. And so when you think about how long they could potentially sustain that 1.3 or you get up to 2 % of GDP, it could potentially take a significantly longer time if there is any type of bubble here for there to be eventual decrease on the percent of GDP because they're not actually that reliant on that CapEx rollout actually immediately contributing to revenues.

1:36:57And then the crazy part is you still have Apple mostly sitting on a huge chunk of cash and hasn't really participated in all this other than the fact that actually they're like you know revenues have now been flat for like five and a half years straight and then they're like you know bounce sheet has basically only decreased linearly you know quarter over quarter for the last five years straight so it's like man if you were like a more brilliant version of tim cook five years ago should have just bought like 90 billion dollars of gpus and like started building you know some data centers and instead he like i don't know rolled out the like iphone like you know 400 I found 400, it would actually go pretty hard.

1:37:30Which, to be fair, has good margins and low churn. We gave our intern a new iPhone and he is still using it. And we can't say that about some of the SaaS that we've had him try. There is a wrinkle with the Apple thing. A lot of the balance sheet decline is because of dividends. They're paying shareholders out. But I agree with you. The other thing that I want to - It's also because they don't know what to do with the cash. You know what I mean? I completely agree. They're creating the Pixar land. Yeah, they're going to create a Pixar lamp now. They're literally creating a Pixar lamp that will sit on your kitchen.

1:37:58It's going to be an iPad on a robotic arm, and it will be able to move around and follow you around the room. So if you're FaceTiming with someone in the kitchen and you walk over to the stove or the refrigerator, it'll follow you around. And they're going to compete with Ring. You're saying they don't know what to do with their cap. I think they've got plenty of world-changing ideas. Yeah, they're going to go steamroll a$2 billion company. It sounds like a shitty 2013 YC startup pitch on the order of Jucero, basically. Yeah, who knows? I want to talk about, yeah, the fractures in the financial world around AI do feel like the foundation is a little more solid because it's coming off of cash flow from these hyperscaler balance sheets.

1:38:36There's also the... Yeah, and that's the bowl case for the hyperscalers in AI and just being competitive, even if they're behind the ball on co-gen and personal assistance and things like that, is that they're just going to be able to sustain this pace and investment level for... The other kind of source of capital that people are discussing now is private credit. And people are wondering if there's this private credit bubble, but then also private credit isn't mark to market as much. And can you give me kind of like the venture capitalist 101 on how venture capitalists are interfacing with private credit these days?

1:39:17Because it feels like there was usually like a handoff where you invest in a company and And then at a certain point it goes public and then, you know, or goes into private equity and then you're kind of out of the game. But it feels like there's a little bit more interface between the VC world and the private credit world now. Like, do you have any insight into what's going on there? Have you followed that at all? A bit, you know, the place deal by deal, right? Study this stuff is like the upstream, which is like the, you know, sort of equity side of things. I'm forgetting the, you know, sort of exact stat that I'm thinking of.

1:39:52But there was basically this crossover point in the last year, which I want to say was it wasn't IPO equity raised, but it was something like capital deployed into sub -$200 billion market cap companies. And basically for the first time ever, the private capital market was actually as large and had crossed over to the public capital markets in terms of fundraising, in terms of issuing a primary and fundraising. thing. And so the strategies that some of these like major asset managers on the equity user side of things, these are obviously like the Fidelities, the Black Rocks, et cetera, the ones that are like, you know, the, you know, Vanguard, all of those groups at this point have clearly, you know, sort of admitted to themselves that the sort of prototypical, you know, IPO, when you're between five and$25 billion market cap, is just a world that is not coming back anytime soon.

1:40:47It's not to say there won't be some companies that do that. Obviously, Figma has done, you know, sort of phenomenally well. And so that may tempt some companies to go back to it. But all these asset managers have realized that, you know, so much of the returns are now being, you know, sort of held up in the private markets that they need to, you know, sort of go enter those. And so you're seeing the equivalent on the, you know, sort of private credit side of things. I don't think I can, you know, sort of share the logo of the company, but there was a company in our portfolio that recently, you know, raised hundreds of millions of dollars in private, you know, sort of credit from tier one, basically sort of bank, top sort of foreign in the United States.

1:41:21The cost of credit that they had on it was effectively like LIBOR plus 25 bips, which is just like the equivalent of cost of capital for a$50 billion publicly traded company. And notably, very different than like venture debt, which is like something people like, oh yeah, I raised$10 million, I got a$1 million credit line or something like that. This is a completely different goal. If you have a bad quarter, we're going to take over the asset. Yeah, exactly. These are totally different. This is like, you know,

1:41:50backing physical assets that these companies are going and buying and sort of rolling out. And so I remember watching that deal happen and being like, wow. I mean, first as the equity investor, I'm like, oh my God, this cost of capital, super easy for this company to cover the CapEx sort of rollout based off their margins, et cetera. And so the return on equity now that you can see as the private investor is insane, where it's like, why go public where this company doesn't even need to raise that much equity? And they like, one of the, like there's a lot of value proposition for being public, but one of them is that your like general cost of capital on the debt side just goes down significantly, typically when you're sort of a public company.

1:42:27And that was what people thought of on the cost of equity side for a long time. That was the whole purpose of going public was like, you know, in 2013, you couldn't raise$5 billion in the private markets. And so if you wanted to scale to that level, you had to basically go public. Private credit was much more laggard to catch up, but it's now actually starting to catch up where it's like, well, man, you're like, cost of equity is basically the equivalent, if not cheaper than what it is when you're public. Now the cost of credit is starting to basically become the equivalent. At some point, it's like, why are you even sort of bothering to go public?

1:42:55So that was the first set of thoughts that I had. But then the second was, okay, I was trying to think about it from the lender perspective. I was like, in what world are they giving this private company the equivalent cost of capital of publicly traded? It couldn't be that they just raised so much money and they need to deploy it at all. cost right couldn't be that i yeah yeah i mean maybe there's a part of it that couldn't be it right like why would we yeah but it's a lot of money we have a lot of aum we got to take some huge risk right here we got to deploy we can't we can't generate fees unless we're you know slugging around maybe huge check but what we have what's the other reason i think the other reason is like um there's these certain like um super cycle macro trends that sort of feel unstoppable And if your company is related to that, the banks are willing to underwrite it because they believe that, like, look, this piece of infrastructure that you're building, if you don't utilize it, there will be a fast follower that quickly sort of jams it up.

1:43:51So you build out XYZ data center with all these GPUs. For some reason, if your model, your particular consumer application doesn't work, somebody else is basically going to go snap that up. And so they clearly are treating like a part of underwriting, you know, you know, CapEx as a, you know, infrastructure like debt provider is thinking about like if the like equity holder of this, you know, basically goes belly up. Is this does this asset actually have secondary liquidity? Right. That's why, you know, you know, companies that have super esoteric pieces of equipment or technology a little harder to have debt.

1:44:18If you're buying something, say, like, you know, you know, even like that warehouse. I mean, the warehouse space, like if you were to I don't know, you're probably leasing it. But like if you were to say, I want a mortgage and I want to buy a warehouse, like that's hyper liquid and you can sell that to somebody else who needs a warehouse very easily. You're in El Segundo. It's pretty simple. But yeah, like if it's R &D and if the R &D doesn't produce fruits like that needs to be equity backed. That needs to be paid for with equity. And so, yeah, it is interesting that, yeah, there's this like super cycle and there's certain technology, certain pieces of equipment, certain pieces of hardware that you can just underwrite way, way differently because somebody is going to pick them up.

1:44:53There's three hyper - Water cooling towers at GPU centers Transmission lines People building transformers The gas turbines that people are using For basically backup power to smooth out the grid Battery systems And so it's interesting where you almost have the And I always talk about this You want to transform the world You can do all the government policy you want But ultimately it's the invisible hand that is going to make this happen When we think about electrification and build out of grid When we think about reshoring of manufacturing in the United States And having not just 10 CNC machines in a facility like this, but like hundreds, thousands, et cetera.

1:45:26The easiest signal to see whether or not that stuff is going to happen is like, what is the cost of capital to go do that? And the banks are clearly signaling like, we believe that this is such a macro trend. There's such strong support from the market, such strong support from government policy that like we're going to be giving these like subscale companies, but that are focused in these particular areas, cost of capital low enough that this, you know, and we believe that the risk is low enough because of the secondary liquidity and because of all these macro trends that it sort of becomes a self-fulfilling loop where now all of a sudden you do get, all those trends built out on crazy amounts of energy built out, restoring production in the United States, huge data centers.

1:45:59Now, this stuff can also go in the reverse direction, but I think it's just one of these highlights of capital markets are just so reflexive. When people believe in a trend more, then the cost of capital becomes less, then the rollout basically happens faster, and then it loops on itself, and the cost of capital becomes less, et cetera, as you're seeing this in these categories. But there's more sustainability, again, to this, especially in the data center world, where it's not dependent on the data centers producing cash for a lot of these businesses. Obviously, on all things reshoring production, they're obviously more dependent on actual revenues there.

1:46:27The only other topic that I was going to flag, by the way, is I don't know if you guys saw, but the White House actually put out an executive order yesterday that was one of their first broader orders on basically maintaining commercial space leadership in the United States that I kind of wanted to briefly talk about. Yeah, please break it down. A little bit of Delta V space topic. Break it down, spaceman. Break it down, spaceman. Break it down. It was something I hope I don't butcher. you know apologies michael kratzios if i butchered the name of the order but it was something like you know uh you know america maintaining uh making space great again you know maintaining american leadership in space um there were a couple different aspects of it you know that i enjoyed you know reading through um i think the first primary like um lens that i put on it is it was just the clearest language that i've ever seen from a government official talking about just making so much of space activity far more regular um it was everything from just like you know sort of rethinking the regulations around both launch and reentry to think of these things as like much more, you know, sort of regular activities.

1:47:25You know, the example that I always like to provide in relation to, you know, sort of VARTA was, you know, if you've studied the airspace around Cape Canaveral over the past decade, it's had a sort of significant, you know, sort of shift in that there used to just be the occasional rocket launch that would do a basically like temporary, basically shutdown of airspace. You know, flights would get, you know, sort of rerouted, you know, across Florida in order to, you know, sort of accommodate that. And it was always sort of like a one-off special operation. At this point, if you actually look at like the commercial, you know, plane traffic patterns around Florida, most of it has basically largely shifted.

1:47:57Like they used to typically actually like fly along the coast. If you think about that in New York to, you know, Miami flight, it would actually sort of cut along the, you know, sort of coast to basically, you know, sort of reduce a little bit the distance. Now, because there's just such consistent operations, the airspace is basically, you know, predicted to be effectively closed off at basically all times. And so all of the commercial airline traffic basically just goes along the central line of Florida. And it sounds like a simple thing, but it's interesting to think about how day-to-day activities and commercial activities are shaped when something is seen as a regular activity rather than a special occasion.

1:48:31And so you've seen that built out around Cape Canaveral where you now do have this rocket flight corridor that is basically just permanently sort of cordoned off. It's really the only place that we have that in the United States at that regular event activity where like it's thought of as something that needs to be cordoned off. You obviously have Vandenberg, you know, sort of space for space, but still their things are still occasional enough that you don't have the equivalent. There's also a little bit less like, you know, sort of commercial flight traffic that, you know, sort of goes around there.

1:48:54It's just a little bit, you know, less than like a, you know, sort of dense urban population. But a part of the, you know, sort of executive order from the president was both, you know, sort of rethinking and reshaping, you know, basically launch and reentry regulation, but also clearly pushing for, you know, an establishing of a bunch of spaceports around America that are meant to have basically, you know, sort of regular both reentry and, you know, and launch activity. And then thinking through how much burden should there be put on reentry vehicles that are coming back from space if those reentry vehicles have a basically what's known as a flight termination system on board.

1:49:28Basically, it's like, hey, if something's going wrong, just explode the damn thing so we don't accidentally like land in the wrong place. And so should you allow for basically like looser regulations when you know that there is that type of termination system on board that can basically self-terminate if you're in an off nominal scenario? And so it was just great to see leadership from the administration and the president in such a like pointed direction of, hey, this type of activity needs to be thought of as like day to day and as common as like commercial sort of light. The example that I like to give is, you know, we are now approaching the point of the amount of orbital rocket launches from the United States per year is about the same number of commercial airliners landing and taking off in LAX every day.

1:50:07Wow. It's becoming, you know, regular. I mean, it's still 365, you know, off of, you know, truly, you know, the daily equivalent of LAX. But it's like, you know, it's in the orders of magnitude now of like, you know, some of our busiest airports. And so we need to think of these things not as like rocket launch pads, but like spaceports. And I like that the executive order had the word spaceport in it like 15 times, not like esoteric, crazy rocket launch pad thing. It's like, no, airports and spaceports. Yeah, we kind of do that with the commercial flights. I think when commercial airliners are flying east to west, they fly at like 35 ,000 feet.

1:50:39And when you're flying west to east, you fly at 32 ,000 feet. So there's just always a gap. And you don't even have to think about, like, am I going to run into someone? Because everyone's just codified. And default pattern of operation. You don't have to think about that. And so we need the equivalent for spaceports where it's like, yeah, there's this corridor that allows, you know, for reentry, you know, so regularly. And just like, it's not like it's the one off rerouting of planes, but the planes just don't go there because they know that that's where things reenter. Yeah. Anything. What's the update on Firefly Aerospace?

1:51:08They went out. They went public on August 7th at 60, down 18 ish percent since then. But this is the company that had the rover. Moon landing. What's the general update on the company? And yeah, yeah. Like how do they fit in the ecosystem? Yeah, I've been spending a bunch of time with some of the investment bankers that sort of led that deal and then some of the like long hedge funds that did it. It was exciting to see that of the call it like top eight, you know, mega IPO allocators that are like the long only, you know, sort of public equity types. I think something like seven out of the eight did like meaningful, you know, sort of positions in that Firefly IPO round.

1:51:53And so I think this kind of goes back to like the super cycle stuff that we were talking about, where I do think that this stuff starts to become a little bit of like a self-fulfilling prophecy, where like you have the president and the administration really leaning in and leaning forward. Obviously, there's like Jared Isaacman, no longer administrator, Secretary Duffy stepping in, they're trying to find, you know, interim. So, you know, there's obviously things that they're still sorting out on like our space leadership, but clearly, you know, sort of leaning forward in a way that is sort of marching towards, wanting more launch providers, more activity, both military and civil in space, and then obviously towards the moon and Mars.

1:52:26Firefly has had a somewhat complicated history. It's no longer the original founding CEO. They've had a swap out CEO a few times. But I do think in this category of aerospace company, it's really important to focus on just ultimate flights and success in those. And for what it's worth, Firefly has accomplished two things that I think are quite phenomenal. They are the only rocket launch company that basically had this contract with the DoD where the DoD basically had them on guard. And then they were only given 24 hours notice and they had to launch a satellite. And so it wasn't like a, oh, pre-planned, et cetera.

1:52:54It was like basically like responsive, you know, sort of launches. I think that, you know, sort of term that the Air Force gave it. I think it was Air Force. And so very impressive to have done that. And then obviously, you know, they've managed to actually, you know, sort of land on the moon and not tip over. Intuitive Machines is still working on that, you know, sort of second part. so they've clearly accomplished some things financial profile of the business I admit is like you know it's a lot of capex a lot of burn it's not super repeatable you know sort of yet but the fact that like you know these public you know long you know equity folks are you know buying in at such scale again improves their balance sheet reduces their cost of capital clearly shows some signaling from the equity markets at least that they really do believe that this type of like lunar infrastructure launch infrastructure is something that has such macro tailwinds behind it that you know even though they're still you know choppy in terms of operations, et cetera, that there's sort of clear potential there.

1:53:39And you're seeing that with Rocket Lab. I mean, look at the company. It was, I think, a year ago, probably trading at like$3.5, sort of$4 billion in market cap. It's something like a$22 billion market cap company today, as like amongst the sort of higher, sort of, you know, rev multiple, you know, sort of ratios in all things, you know, A &D. Let's give it up for high revenue multiples. We love them here. We love them. Love them. Give them to the rocket companies, baby. We don't have enough of them. Yeah. Not saying Vardik's going public anytime soon, but it is encouraging to see, you know, all the interest in activity.

1:54:08Well, you're the one who said you were talking with investment bankers. Yeah. Oh, you know, the job of a capital allocator, you know. Right, right, right. So I posted earlier somewhat of a joke, somewhat real breaking group chat sentiment flips bearish. Investor confidence confidence dips to the lowest level since late 2023. source my phone. How are you feeling about general sentiment right now in private markets? There's been a lot of exuberance. Should we be fearful? Yeah, a lot of people being greedy. Should we be, is there any alpha in being fearful? Yeah, we always try to zig when others are zagging at FF, obviously.

1:54:48So when we see this level of exuberance, I think that always makes is a little more hesitant. But yeah, it's been wild to see just the, you know, sort of depth of interest, but in this like sort of K-shaped, you know, sort of dynamic, right? Where, you know, the equivalent of like, I forget who tweeted this today, some relative prominent venture capitalists, but, or maybe a reporter that was basically saying that like private capital markets are basically replicating the like MAG-7 strategy, but, you know, in the private markets where it's like, you know, basically if you look at the like MAG-7 versus the like S &P 493, S &P 493 is basically flat, MAG-7 are up.

1:55:18You kind of have the equivalent dynamic in private capital markets, both literally with like the individual logos of like SpaceX, OpenAI, Andurl, et cetera, where it's like, you know, representing the biggest chunk of, you know, capital allocated, you know, ever in the history of private capital markets. But I think it's also generally true in like the categories where it's like if you're not A &D and if you're not AI, oh, my God, like there's like, you know, basically no interest and nobody wants to talk to you. And then if you're in those categories, the rounds get done in like a week and are done at like the craziest prices.

1:55:45yeah I think we always stick to our general strategy of like you know ignore the noise focus on the things that we think are in the long term and so you know well it's just it's it's worth it's worth remembering because we just had you know we you know Figma IPO was you know this amazing moment but if you look back it's like Andrew Reed did the sea at 400 million posts and you look at the the you look at the companies that are doing rounds at 400 posts right now and they were not anywhere near that kind of profile. In those categories, this is where, again, obviously there's lots of benefits to doing the hot category where your downstream financings typically are much less risky, but there's also the return compression there.

1:56:28So my sort of pithy joke on it is, while everybody else is focused on A &D and AI, I'm just doing the Series A's of fish-killing robot companies where nobody's really thinking of this. We tasted Shinkei on the stream. It was a lot of fun. What does A &D stand for? Oh, Aerospace and Defense. Aerospace and Defense. I'm sorry. I'm spending too much time with capital allocators. Lots of jargon. Lots of jargon. What else needs to be clarified in space? Obviously, the spaceport, the actual path the rockets travel along is important. but is there, you know, appetite for more clear regulation around LEO, Middle Earth orbit, geo orbit?

1:57:11Are there even just like re-entry of the pods that Vardis ends up? Like, what else, what's the next thing that we need to kind of standardize around? I like that in my head now I have Middle Earth orbit going. Yeah, Middle Earth orbit. What's it actually called? Medium Earth orbit. Medium Earth orbit. I like Middle Earth orbit better. Let's take it back. Let's coin it. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, I mean, there has been, you know, I've heard some like, you know, sort of light rumblings, you know, sort of around this. Right now, when you look at your sort of general space policy, it is kind of split up in a bunch of different areas.

1:57:43You basically have FAA responsible for all launch and reentry licensing. So basically like when you're in the air, then once you're in orbit, you have everything from if you want to take photos of other things in orbit, that's all regulated by NOAA. Kind of crazy because it's like, you know, NOAA stands for like Ocean whatever administration, et cetera. So it's like, why are they regulating pictures? But it's because they're responsible for all things OSINT, you know, in, you know, photography land. And then if you want to communicate with your satellite, you know, it's the radio spectrum from the FCC.

1:58:10And they even govern like, so, for example, you know, one of the recent back and forth, you know, more in the prior administration around VARDA was they were trying to debate whether or not ISAM, so in space assembly and manufacturing needed to live in its own specific spectrum. And everybody had to communicate in there rather than getting to be in like the general, you know, sort of space, you know, sort of spectrum. And so you have all these sort of split regulators. And as a space company, it's very burdensome relative to like, okay, if you're like a pharmaceutical company, you kind of know that your only regulator is the FDA.

1:58:40And that's all that you're sort of working with. And so, yeah, I think probably when I think about what needs to happen next beyond just the spaceports, it's just like make it so that there's sort of more of a single point of contact if you're a space company rather than having to establish like four different regulatory relationships. Which, by the way, none of them talk to one another, right? Yeah, yeah. Um, so that, and then probably like a space traffic coordinator, like there isn't the equivalent of like, we have air traffic control here. There's regulations on like how you need to report your position, how you communicate, et cetera.

1:59:05Space traffic control. They like kind of started something actually in the first Trump administration. It worked through Biden administration. And then oddly enough, the Trump administration actually shut down their own project. And so now we're kind of back to like wild, wild west again on all things space traffic. So it's mostly just like literal, like the companies like individually email each other. And there's like this one, like nonprofit foundation that like collects everybody's space traffic data. And then it's like, and by the way, there's no rules. I'm like, by the way, if like you're going to be intersecting with a Chinese satellite and then like the nonprofit introduces you and the Chinese company over email, it's not obviously like who's going to maneuver.

1:59:36There's no rule. It's a game of chicken. It's still just catholic. It helps that it's mostly just pretty empty up there. So there's not that many, you know, incursions. We're going to need regulation around drunk space. We're going to need pilots who live their life one mile at a time. I have a sort of odd. It's pretty short if you're going 14 ,000 miles an hour. That's maybe 14 ,000 miles at a time. What's your read on the future of the sort of pilot career path? It seems like obviously many different types of planes have great autonomous systems, yet we obviously still want pilots in the cabin.

2:00:18How do you how do you when you kind of look at the progress happening on the on the autonomous side? Where do you think human pilots will fit in? Man, there's clearly some things that are moving forward, like, you know, Secretary Duffy, you know, Secretary of Transportation, you know, has really pushed forward more aggressively than I would have expected on all things like eVTOL, you know, beyond visual line of sight, you know, sort of drones, you know, on like the small scale, you know, sort of vehicle. autonomy side of things. When you think about like a Boeing 747, you know, sort of getting actually fully automated, man, the commercial airline or, you know, commercial passenger stuff is just, it feels so hard.

2:00:58And a part of it is other than obviously a recent whole set of events, you know, DCA crash obviously included generally the United States has such a flawless safety profile. I think we've talked about this in like, you know, other, you know, like get things changed because you have, you know, so much, you know, such a, you know, a great safety record. So yeah, I think, you know, jobs as pilots - Yeah, I mean, when you think about if you have, you know, hundreds of people in a single metal tube flying through the air, is it worth having a couple more people to be in there? It's also, there's also an economic dynamic where I believe the cost of labor for an Uber is about 70 % borne by human labor, whereas the cost of a 747 flight is like 7 % pilot fees, even though the pilot, no, no, no, it's like 50 % fuel, 70 % fuel.

2:01:50Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Whereas the gas and the Uber is like 10 % of the cost of the ride, 70 % is the actual human. And so there's a lot, there's a very different economic dynamic there. But we're actually going to talk to Merlin Labs today that are, and Merlin is going public. Like they work on autonomous flights for planes, autonomous pilots for planes. So we'll dig in with Matthew George. My last comment for the session is this is my favorite one where I didn't realize I was going to be on TBPN until the TBPN account tweeted. And it was like, Dell's on today. And I was like, I didn't know that.

2:02:22Well, lo and behold, look at it. I am. That's amazing. We should just communicate purely over X.com. It is the everything app after all. Anyway, this is always a great time. Thanks so much for hopping on. Later, boys. We'll talk to you later. Great to see you. Bye. And whether we talk to Delian about the markets, whether you're long, whether you're short, whether you think it's top or local bottom, head over to public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions, folks. We are joined next by some folks at Anderil.

2:02:52Today, Anderil posted. They are waiting in the Restream waiting room, I believe. We will bring them in in just a second. Anduril Industries said, introducing the Anduril 250, the first ever NASCAR race on an active military base. So welcome to the stream. I believe we have Jeff and Jen joining. So welcome to the stream from the WeStream waiting room. Whoa. Okay. Hey. Can we flip them? Can they flip their camera? We're seeing you horizontal or flipped somehow. But good to meet you. Good to see you. Actually, I met both of you online. And Jen's been on the show before. Let's try and rotate the camera 90 degrees if possible.

2:03:31There we go. There we go. Looking good. And I see some vehicle in the middle. That thing looks stunning. Both of them. Fantastic. How are you doing today? Hi, everyone. My name's Jeff Miller. I'm great. It's good to see you, John. Good to see you, Jordy. We're here in the hangar in Mooresville, North Carolina. Incredible. So we wanted to give you guys a little bit of a window into our big announcement around on the Anduril 250. Why North Carolina? Isn't this happening in San Diego? Well, NASCAR headquarters. Makes sense. Daytona and in Charlotte. So we've been here this week, not only working with the NASCAR team to make sure we show up into the sport in an authentic way, but we've also been meeting with several of the teams themselves because you might be seeing a Anduril stock car with the paint scheme come June 21st, 2026.

2:04:27Getting to learn the sport as we make the announcement. Yeah, what is the Andrel colorway? When I think of Andrel, I think of the slate gray, but then I also think of all the anime colors. And so there's a little bit of both. Is yellow and gray going to be a brand pattern going forward? Well, black is surprising color, but not color. We are not getting a lot of audio from you. I don't know if there's, is there one microphone? What's going on here? Can we hear you, Jen? We can hear Jeff. What Jeff was saying is that, okay, great. So, what Jeff was saying is that black is not only one of our core colors, or not a color, as you like to say, but our accent tone there is safety yellow.

2:05:14So anything that you see, whether it's an incredible products that Jen and team are designing the finish, you're going to see that safety yellow. So in the paint scheme here, we like to call it using the language that they use here in NASCAR versus what you'll hear more in F1 called a livery, what we call livery on our aircraft. For our paint scheme here, we really lead into that black and that safety yellow. The car looks incredible. Looks amazing. You guys cooked as usual. Can you give us a tour of the livery? I want to see a close-up. Yeah, can the camera move around? Can you show us the car up close?

2:05:50Can you hear me at all? A little bit. I can hear you loosely on his microphone, I think. But if it's a shared pair of AirPods, it's probably switching back and forth. Let's see if we can get a tour of the car. Okay. I'm going to take you around the car. Okay. Very cool. All right. That's insane. That's a huge annual logo on the front. You really dominated this. Yeah. Safety yellow. Mary color is black, right? The safety yellow comes from our livery scheme on our actual products where we're calling out high viz, critical warnings and markings. And, you know, as we think about bringing these two worlds together, I really thought there was a lot of symmetry, a lot of kinship between our two identities, right?

2:06:34I think I love also spending time here, getting to know the NASCAR brand, like bringing, they're leaning really hard into their legacy and their heritage, but then they pair that with such contemporary, you know, bold graphics and high visibility colors, which is, you know, there's a lot of synergy between our identity and their identity. We got to get some Mustang GTDs in the Androil parking lot after the next tender. Have you seen the Mustang GTD? It's beautiful. It's like a$500 ,000 Mustang. It's beautiful. Oh, wow. Is that a fury in the background too? Yeah. That's right. It's hard to see.

2:07:09That's amazing. Jeff can walk you around the fury. That's awesome. Talk to me about the actual race. Would this race have existed without Andurl stepping in? It's not just the logo on a car. It's not just the logo on the entire car. It's the logo and the name Andurl on the actual race. And a whole new race. And a whole new race. Yeah, what I'd like to say is that this race, first and foremost, is the branch of the National Leadership and the U.S. Navy. So it's our privilege to be a part of it. Ben Kennedy, we're going to have the opportunity to speak with. We've got such incredible vision, along with Amy, the race director.

2:07:52And so we came on in April. Jen and I had a chance to go on the Navy base. And the second we stepped up on a naval base, Coronado. This is where the film's Top Gun and Top Gun Maverick had seen film. That famous sidebar is there. You stepped on a U.S. aircraft carrier, and you feel the power. You feel like you are there. And with people who are doing work that really matters. So, yes, this race would have absolutely worked without us. But I think what NASCAR saw in Anderle was a company that was so deeply committed to our American values and our warfighter and wanted to celebrate that story, that it was a perfect fit.

2:08:31Very cool. Well, we're going to hop on with Ben Kennedy from NASCAR. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us. When is the actual race? Can people buy tickets now? Is it on sale? What's the next step? And how do we get some merch? People are usually asking us that, but now we're asking you that. We can talk offline, but yeah, when is the race? The race is June 21st, 2026. You can go ahead and place your deposits now. We'll definitely be having merch. I'm expecting a live broadcast from TVPN. We will be there. 100%. I can't wait. So yeah, can't wait to run this back with you guys in about 11 months.

2:09:13Fantastic. incredible uh thank you so much and congratulations on the partnership we're very excited beautifully executed tracking and can't wait for the race we'll talk to you soon cheers thank you all thanks for coming on and we're also notorious for running uh snarky billboard ads on 101 if you want to run an ad go to adquick.com out of home advertising made easy and measurable say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising only adquick combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe did you see the the the billboard that they actually dropped on the 101.

2:09:44Yeah, we talked about this, where Jeff Miller, who we just talked to, put up a billboard of the fury saying like, no more enterprise SaaS because every single, I think Trey Stevens got sick of seeing another enterprise SaaS billboard. And he said, I need an andrew billboard up there. And so they did it. They did it. And so we will be hopping on with Ben Kennedy from NASCAR in just a few minutes. But in the meantime, let's tell you about Bezel. Get bezel.com. Your bezel constantly errors is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Jordy, where would you like to go in the post?

2:10:18We got about five minutes. I have a post here from Ian Roundtree, friend of the show. He says, a friend hadn't heard of TBPN and another described it as follows. TBPN is a very popular ramp infomercial in the style of ESPN. Instead of rankings tied to sport leagues, they are tied to how early and how much you invested in ramp or how close you are to someone who did. I said, fact check, true. We love it. We love it. Daniel Tenrero says, happy CoreWeave lockup. Expire day. Expire day. Basically the Super Bowl for guys like us. CoreWeave down 10 % today. As some folks sell. I'm not sure how the actual lockup plays out.

2:10:58Actually now down 15%. 15%. Still a$48 billion company. Not a bad run. Shout out Nick Carter. They also... Angel investor in the... Oh yeah, that's right. Or was it seed round? Yeah. Yeah. You can run the numbers. Corrieve most recently beat on top line, missed on bottom line. They are burning something around 300 something million dollars a quarter, but making a lot of revenue. And so. Who hasn't burned? They're investing. 300 million. Investing. 300 million a quarter. Yeah. It happens. Parag Agrawal says he's just setting up his Twitter again. Coming on the show today. Heads down building parallel with some of the best people he's ever worked with.

2:11:38creating infrastructure for AI to search and use the web. He will be on the show in not too long. Very excited for that. Buck says Stas, S-T-A-A-S, subsidized tokens as a service, i.e. most of the VC-backed AI app layer. And on that note, a Chris Pike post has hit the timeline. Oh, yeah? A Google Doc has hit the timeline. I repeat, a Google Doc has hit the timeline. It's called Cursor's Problem. Product market fit is the story founders love to tell business model product market fit is a part they often skip Product market fit is users repeatedly choose your product business model product fit The extraction of value is sustainably in excess and proportional to the cost of delivering value Cursor has relied on a subscription model that historically allowed for quote-unquote unlimited use That's a fixed revenue variable cost setup But insurance companies are the canonical example, and they employ actuaries to accurately price risk and segment users.

2:12:39Hypergrowth startups rarely have that muscle. When variable costs scale with intensity of usage, but revenue doesn't, you're not selling software, you're underwriting risk. Without actuarial discipline, pricing, segmentation, caps, exclusions, these models drift into the same ditch that killed MoviePass, Oyster, and forced ClassPass to retire, quote unquote, unlimited. COHORTS INVERT YOUR MOST PROFITAL USERS CHURN BECAUSE THEY USE THE PRODUCT THE LEAST AND GET THE LEAST VALUE. OFTENTIMES THEY CAN GET BETTER VALUE FROM A COMPETITOR WHO PRICES THEM MORE ACCURATELY OR WITH LESS BREAKAGE. THE REMAINING USERS ARE THOSE WHO EXTRACT MORE VALUE THAN THEY PAY.

2:13:14OVER TIME, OLDER COHORTS MORPH INTO DEEPLY NEGATIVE GROSS MARGIN. TOP LINE MASS ROT, NEW LARGER COHORTS CAN BRIEFLY OFFSET THE DRAG, HIDING THE DETERIORATION IN EARLIER COHORTS. REVENUE grows margin quality quietly decays a large cause of this problem in fast growing companies is the conflation of subsidies and marketing they're both expensive growth strategies but they do very different things marketing buys attention it changes who hears about you not what the product is worth in equilibrium subsidies by behavior they put economic value on the product scale distorting the read on willingness to pay the 15-minute delivery boom made this vivid.

2:13:56PMF seemed strong when prices were artificially low. When prices rose to true cost, demand snapped back. The quote-unquote fit was with the discount, not the service. Venture lore points to Uber and DoorDash as counterexamples. The lesson isn't negative gross margins are fine. The lesson is if there's an operational path to positive margins, i.e. density, batching, or utilization, and future pricing power, quote, moats, the temporary subsidies can be a bridge. Indeed, venture capital is precisely the right instrument to facilitate these kinds of companies, but most businesses don't have such a bridge.

2:14:32Does this bridge exist for cursor? Cursor's users expect the best coding performance, which is currently delivered by the frontier models. That pins cursor's cogs to open AI and thropic price cards. Cursor doesn't control two critical dials. One, model performance frontier, which is what users demand, and model input output pricing, what cursor pays. If cursor steps down to cheaper, weaker models, the users who care about performance will notice and churn. Those who can tolerate weaker models can get them cheaper elsewhere. If it stays at the frontier while keeping prices flat, the variable real cost to service their heaviest users will explode.

2:15:07In an effort to combat this cursor has been forced to raise prices and institute usage caps leading to user outrage and churn. Any time unlimited shows up in variable cost businesses, PMF becomes a permanently open question. Are users here for for the product or for the subsidy? Would they still use it as much or at all at true marginal cost? Until cursor prices consumption in proportion to cost, it cannot know. Last couple paragraphs. So interesting that we're going into, we're leaving the world of zero marginal costs. Like this is the Ben Thompson intellectual, like aggregation theory regime of the past two decades.

2:15:46Like since, you know, if you're trying to understand Google, you had to understand what it meant to serve an incremental user at zero marginal cost. And it was something that Wall Street and retail and lots of folks, even a lot of VCs, could not wrap their minds around for a long, long time. And there was huge alpha in that. And now it's become consensus right when the economic equation is now flipping. I just wonder how long we'll be in this regime, if it's here to stay, if we plateau in reasoning models are always expensive. And then I wonder, I do wonder how bad the gross margins are at various companies, how bad this subsidization, subsidized tokens problem is.

2:16:34And I also wonder if there are any companies, like there have been plenty previously, like previous era SaaS companies that have said, have gone out and said, hey, we're an AI company now. And I wonder if that's hurt their gross margins. I've been picking at that with a few founders that have come on. I've said like, so like, is your inference bill growing or is it material at all? And basically what I'm getting at is like, is it affecting your gross margins? We were asking Rahul from Julius about this and he said that it's a thing, but it's not incredibly material. There's going to need, you just have to find a way with the application layer company that you build to deliver enough value that the actual inference is under the hood very efficient and then i do wonder if cursor is in a unique unique position because it's such a raw interface to to to the frontier coding model and the quality really matters uh but yeah could they could they swap out deep seek r2 save 10 times as much money and then you know and then all of a sudden finish off chris's post he says cursor will have to choose what it wants to know if it keeps subsidizing the heaviest usage.

2:17:41It can keep growing, but it cannot claim unambiguous PMF. If it starts charging in proportion to cost, some usage will fall and what remains will be the market. The burning question that should nag founders, do I have demand for my product or for my subsidies? So Cursor is without a doubt a beloved product. Yeah. And it seems very reasonable to subsidize for a while and really get people installed and and hooked on the product, and then raise prices to the point where you are delivering value. Like when you think about what the value of an AI software engineer, that could be justified in the$50 ,000 a year,$100 ,000 a year territory.

2:18:20That doesn't seem that crazy to me if you're actually getting that leverage out of the system. But the idea of saying, oh yeah, my IDE bill is 10K a month is crazy. But it could be, I don't know. But anyway, before we get into our next guest, Ben, we have some news breaking. Cohere just raised$500 million at$6.8 billion. On the Transformer paper, one of the greatest to ever do it. Nick on X says, we are so back. We are so back. Congratulations to the folks on Cohere. I'm feeling it. Well, let's bring in Ben from the Restream waiting room. Ben Kennedy from NASCAR. How are you doing? Ben, good to meet you.

2:18:57What's happening? Good. How are you guys doing? Thanks for having me on today. Of course. Of course. Ben, why don't you kick me off with an introduction on yourself and how you fit in the NASCAR organization? Yeah, so my name is Ben Kennedy. I am EVP here at NASCAR, but we get the opportunity to wear a bunch of different hats. So we're responsible for the NASCAR own track properties, NASCAR regional team, admissions team, people making improvements to our racetracks. And then importantly, what we're talking about today is schedule. So dreaming up the next year's schedule and we're getting ready to announce our 2026 schedule here pretty soon.

2:19:33But, you know, one of our big projects, which I know we're talking about today, is the race on the base next year. We're bringing our NASCAR Cup Series, our Xfinity Series and our Craftsman Truck Series to San Diego for the first time and for the first time ever on a military base. So really excited about it. Take me through the shape of like all of the different NASCAR events, because there's like, you know, the there's the tentpole events that people kind of know and love. And then there's a whole bunch of other different properties, activations, events, races. Kind of give me the shape of what NASCAR is today.

2:20:07Yeah. So we compete across 38 race weekends throughout the year. Thirty six of those are points races. And then we have two exhibition races. and our season it starts in february with the biggest race of the year the daytona 500 so we're a little bit different in the sense that we start with our super bowl and then we will go pretty much straight through the entire year we'll have one or two weeks off to the first week in november where we'll have our championship race which will be in in phoenix this year so we uh we're competing every single season we have um three different national series so you can almost think of it like high school or college that kind of leads to the pros.

2:20:45But we have our Cup Series, our Xfinity Series, which is our last step for a lot of drivers before they go up to the Premier Series. And then our Craftsman Truck Series, which are a little bit different style of vehicle. It's more of a pickup truck style. And that's where a lot of drivers will start their National Series career as they begin touring with us. And then how does the race on the base fit into that structure? Yeah. So the race on the base will be, it'll be in the middle of our season. So Amazon Prime will cover it for the Cup Series. A lot of the Xfinity Series and Truck Series, which will be on Saturday and Friday that weekend, but it's June 19th to 21st.

2:21:25And essentially what we're going to do at Naval Base Coronado is we're going to build a temporary three mile circuit that will go around the base. So anyone that comes out, we're going to create kind of these different neighborhoods of experiences that fans can go and see. So the start-finish line where you'll have a lot of the hospitality, the garage area, people will be able to get down and see and hear the cars. They'll go out towards the bay side of San Diego or they'll go past an aircraft carrier or two. And then eventually we'll come out onto the tarmac where they'll be weaving their way through F-18s and Ospreys and all sorts of fun stuff.

2:22:01So don't have the course design finalized yet, but around a three mile course we're going to build temporary on the base yeah talk about you think the uh expected lap time will be for for a course of that size it's a good question i would say you know we've run a couple models on it we do a lot of our sim work virtual before we we commit to anything it's around a minute and a half a minute 40 seconds or so it's it's a pretty high speed track 120 miles an hour on average something like that i imagine that's that's wild that'll be a lot of fun to watch. Talk about partnering with Anduril, who they are trying to reach.

2:22:40They have customers, they have employees, they have fans of the merch. Why was it a good partnership? What are you excited to deliver to them on the marketing side? And what did they bring to the table other than just money? Yeah, we couldn't ask for a better partner than Anduril. And if we approached them or they approached us, I think we reached out to them through the grapevine. And we had some conversations earlier this year, probably five or six months ago with them, and they had a ton of energy around the event. And for us, we want to find partners and companies that we can do business with that are both strategic in the sense that we're going to add value to them and hopefully they'll add value to the weekend, which I know they're going to do, but partners that are organic as well.

2:23:26And you couldn't think of a more natural fit than a partner like Anduril. You know, you look at all the different types of technology that they're creating, both on the software side and the hardware side, it's incredible. And you think about precision, speed, and innovations in technology, that's what our sport is all about. So couldn't ask for a better partner than Anduril. Really fired up about the announcement today. This has been a long one coming. We had a couple of Easter eggs that snuck out about a month ago when we had the announcement, but glad to be able to be talking publicly. today about it and excited to see there's a lot of elements that they're going to be bringing to the table over the next 11 months.

2:24:05And then especially on that weekend that fans will get to go out and experience as a part of it. What's the path? A lot of our audience are founders and executives at various technology companies. What's the path into partnering with NASCAR itself or various teams and events? Yeah, I would say if anyone's interested, reach out to us. I'm sure we can find a way to provide contact info and whatnot. But typically, we'll have conversations with whoever might be interested. I think the good news is there's a lot of interest around this event. And whether it's NASCAR as a sanctioning body or a team or a driver, we have connections to everyone in the industry.

2:24:52So happy to put them in touch along the way. that's amazing thank you so much for hopping on the stream congratulations on the partnership on the announcement we'll see you there I'm looking forward to it we'll see you there yeah I look forward to seeing you guys out there it'll be a blast this is gonna be great talk to you soon cheers Ben bye if you're looking to go to San Diego you gotta book a wander find your happy place find your happy place book a wander with inspiring views hotel great amenities dreamy beds top tier cleaning 24-7 concierge service it's a vacation home but better folks Jordy warm up Can we, I just want to say, I want to be live streaming from an aircraft carrier for the race.

2:25:33We can do it. For sure. For sure. Well, let's bring Jessica in from Sola. From the Restream waiting room and from Sola. How are you doing? Good to meet you. Welcome to the show. It's good. Would you mind kicking us off with an introduction on yourself and the company? Absolutely. I'm Jess. I'm co-founder and CEO of Sola. We're an agentic process automation platform that helps businesses automate their most operational workflows using AI by doing workflows the way that humans do. Name one process you've automated with an agentic workflow. Yeah, absolutely. As an example, we work with companies across a whole bunch of different verticals.

2:26:12But for example, for some of the logistics companies we work with, you can imagine they operate on internal portals, external systems, spreadsheets, everything in between. And to actually get a shipment out end to end, it requires a lot of manual work. And so Sola will type data in. It will take down data. It will, you know, do all the coordination that gets the shipment end to end and work in that fashion. Give us the news today. Anything to share? Very exciting day. We just raised a$17 million Series A led by A16Z. Congratulations. Don't leave out conviction. I was just about to get there. We continued support from our lead conviction as well as Y Combinator.

2:26:56There we go. Amazing. That's a great lineup. Talk to me about what the state of the art is in actually building an agentic workflow on top of kind of an internal dashboard. We've been hearing a lot about the big labs setting up reinforcement learning environments with verifiable rewards. They're cloning DoorDash. They're creating copies of Amazon.com. So the future version of ChatGPT will let me order headphones or gongs or whatever I need for the show just within that chat interface. I imagine that if you're talking about some custom piece of logistics software, some internal portal, there's probably some things that you can get out of the box just by using Frontier reasoning models and web browsers and agentic browsers, but what extra steps do you have to take to actually deliver a ton of value?

2:27:47Absolutely. Let me give a little context. 100%, everyone's talking about enterprise AI agents and computer use and VLMs, but there's a gap between where those are at today and how that gets into productionized workflows for enterprise companies at scale. You can imagine that for the first time, we have these models that can reason and they can act like humans. They can understand how these platforms are working and we don't need to build an integration or like an API connection into platforms in order to be able to do work on them. But instead we can just mimic the way humans do. Now that said, if you've tried operator or computer use agents or any of these models, they're pretty unreliable for individual tasks.

2:28:32And then you can imagine if you're scaling this up to hundreds of thousands of hours of real world work, it's going to be really tough to do so. And so what Sola does is we take an approach where we use a combination of deterministic as well as more deterministic, non-deterministic automation and sort of change the abstractions on which things are built so that, you know, you are able to, for example, send a shipment across five different platforms reliably and at scale. And so we use these models, but also a whole lot of different architectures on top of that to make things very accurate and be able to plan and build guardrails around the processes that people have.

2:29:11Did you start with a focus on logistics, or is that somewhere you ended up after talking with a bunch of different companies in various industries? After I demanded a single example to dig into. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, today we have workflows across a lot of different verticals. So Sola does finance workflows and KYC. Sola does healthcare workflows and enters data into EMRs. Logistics is a big part of that. I would say that the two biggest verticals that Sola has done a ton of work in today is logistics and healthcare. It's by no means where we started, actually. Our early customers were in legal and in healthcare, I would say, mostly, and some insurance as well.

2:29:54But I think logistics just turned out to be an industry that we discovered a few months ago. Turns out there's a million perfect automations for Sola there. And today we work with a whole bunch of really large companies in the industry who are using it for all kinds of different applications. What's been the employee reaction at the companies that you guys work with? I imagine a lot of these employees are stressed out, overworked, kind of, you know, exhausted from managing all these different service areas. So my sense would be that they welcome a tool like this. But what's your read? Yeah, for sure.

2:30:28I think that it really meaningfully changes the the way people work. Like, for example, some of the companies that we operate at, you know, we're saving people from doing the very boring copy pasting, very manual, repetitive work so that they can focus on sales and customer relationships and everything else that goes into their business. One of the customers that we work with, they do a few hundred million in revenue. We started working with them about half a year ago, and their kind of famous data point is that they haven't had to hire a single person at their company since bringing on Sola because they've just been able to do more with the same amount of people that they have on hand, and they can kind of scale the revenue of their business without having to scale headcount.

2:31:07Yeah, I've heard that from a founder building in the AI roll-up space. And he's buying companies and he's telling the management team, we're not like a traditional private equity that's just going to like gut the company. We're focused on growth. We're going to focus on growth, but we don't need to add a bunch of incremental headcount. We're just going to make you more effective. Interesting. It's a great value prop. There's a big kind of discussion online today about gross margins at startups. Can you walk me through the economic thinking of your buyer, your customer? How are they thinking about the value that you deliver and then your costs?

2:31:46Because obviously, I imagine that these workflows use reasoning models. The token bills are probably significant, but you're delivering, hopefully, a lot more value than that. So how are people responding to the idea that, okay, there's a company that has real variable costs with the amount that I demand or the amount that I'm using this tool? Are they receptive to a consumption model? Are they receptive to price increases? What's the vibe been like from the AI buyer world? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the most direct way to justify value is just how many hours are you saving, right? That's the most straightforward way.

2:32:27in the traditional way automation is justified. On top of that, for a lot of businesses, you actually see top line revenue lift. Like if you start powering their core operations and they can just do more business, so it becomes a very different equation. And I think that's a lot of the ways customers see Sola on top of just time savings. In terms of model costs, it really doesn't make sense to paying a computer use agent at every single step that you're doing. You can imagine that will get super costly, it will be slow, it will be unreliable. And so we have a lot of infrastructure built on top of that so that the things that you don't necessarily need models for that are very straightforward, we can just apply more traditional automation.

2:33:04And then areas where you need reasoning, you need flexibility, you need workflows to adapt, then obviously we use more models there. And so costs aren't crazy. And I imagine those will keep going down over time. Fantastic. Well, congrats on the round and congrats on all the progress. Yes, hiring. Hiring lots of engineers. We're based in New York. if you're interested, please reach out. We are growing very quickly. Fantastic. Amazing. Congratulations on the milestone and we'll see you back here soon, I'm sure. Yeah. Have a great rest of your day. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon. And we have Parag Agarwal, the former CEO of Twitter.

2:33:38The man, the myth, the legend. In the Restream waiting room. He is launching a new company today and we are pleased to have him join the show. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Hey, John. Great to be here. Great to have you. to talk about. Let's start with the new company. I mean, I'd love your thoughts on live streaming on Twitter and X and all the things that we're doing. But let's stay focused on your company. What did you announce today? Should we bring this gong for you? Let's do it. Give us a breakdown. How are you describing the new company? We're building parallels to build infrastructure for AI's using the web.

2:34:20It's part of this observation that the web was built for humans we built twitter you're thinking about people in browsers and apps and you're designing stuff for humans and two years ago as i was thinking around like the eyes are going to use the web and that's going to be the primary user of the web and it's going to be a massive scale like thousand x a million x of what we've ever done on the web that needs new infrastructure new business models and that's what this company is about Today, the product we shipped is our deep research product. I want to tell you more about it. Yeah. How long, when did you actually start the company?

2:34:57It sounds like you've been in stealth for a while. Yeah, a year and a half ago. We've been building a lot of infrastructure in that time, a lot of infrastructure. So talk about the first product, break it down. We shipped a deep research API today. So you're users of chat GPT and I'm assuming several deep research tools. We have an API product that any enterprise developer can integrate into their applications, into their workflows. Since we have reimagined the search stack as well as the technology for the web from the ground up, we can outperform OpenAI's deep research. We can outperform every leading model's deep research quality in terms of their benchmarks, others' benchmarks, and the real customers.

2:35:46and I think that's the product we've announced today. So break down some initial use cases for the product. Let's say I have a SaaS company, like a vertical SaaS company. Is this, and I'm building, or something, you know, I can imagine somebody's building SaaS for sales reps or, you know, a CRM provider. Is this something they would be running, you know, deep research style queries within the product? Yeah, people do all kinds of things. So in the sales CRM context, right, there's a lot of people who have this massive current customer list, prospect list. They want to go, I wish I knew this about this customer.

2:36:25I wish I knew this about this customer. So they just like add a bunch of data to have the CRM now have a lot of information that wasn't in there, but was on the web. And now it's in their systems, in their CRM. They're ranking based on that. They're prioritizing based on that. They're able to go do meeting assist. right before you meet someone pull everything from my internal information that i have about the customer and our interactions with them but also pull everything that's happening with their business what they're talking about what they're doing what they're shipping how do you think about the parade of frontier i mean google's i mean i believe they have gemini apis and they have and and they focused on kind of this this idea of the trade-off between cost and quality of result and intelligence is a function of cost ultimately?

2:37:13Where do you see pockets of value? Do you just want to go way further? It doesn't matter how much it costs companies are willing to pay, or is there a different kind of angle on the Pareto frontier that you think is unexplored? Glad you mentioned the Pareto frontier. I think we obsess about the Pareto frontier, but I think both are important. One, at every price point, you've got to be the best. And then for someone who has no price sensitivity, you got to be the absolute best. Right. And I don't think you get to do the one without the other. Yeah. The way we push is we first push quality and accuracy for use cases as high as possible.

2:37:56And once you can do that, it actually, you can do a lot of work to make it cheaper by trading off a little bit of quality. out that's the motion you take on but you gotta be on the Pareto frontier for every use case to be operating at the scale that we want to operate at which is like every application every workflow anytime everything should use ai yeah and it's kind of silly so who are you so do you do you uh how do you think about competition in the category are you competing with open ai's api uh is that the wrong way to think about it yeah i'm interested in in where do you see pockets of unexplored territory?

2:38:37Like one of Google's advantages is that they have the TPU, but there are lots of new chip companies that offer different trade-offs for inference. And what are you excited about in terms of like differentiation? So one, we use models from OpenAI Google and we use several open source models in different places. We also, in our own models, we build our own index, crawl, ranker, listener. and so what we are is a little bit of a complement to the best models if you're building ai applications now of course open ai does bundle a search tool with their api and that we compete with and beat on quality so we beat not just that tool in fact like the benchmarks for the products we ship today, we beat humans doing hours of work through our deep research product, not just because we're cheaper or can do it faster, but we're more accurate for a bunch of workflows than hiring a bunch of people to do it.

2:39:40Right. And that I think is really exciting. As we work with more and more customers, we're able to replicate that. And that's an amazing moment that we've found this year. Do you think there's room for differentiation by finding a beachhead market that is a subcategory? I just imagine like we've seen this with Harvey and legal and there are obviously, you know, HIPAA compliance and medical. And we just talked to Jessica and she was saying that like they were a YC company. They tried a bunch of different things, did some health care, some legal, wound up in logistics and had a bunch of luck there.

2:40:16Are there any glimmers of beachhead markets on the horizon for you? um almost too many so we're seeing like a bunch as you mentioned like crm sales sales intelligence marketing there's a bunch happening there there's a lot of people innovating and there are customers so if you think about our customers our customers are often vertical people who are in various markets we have people doing uh science research on like papers published or on sort of clinical trials that are happening or the data coming out of those with people with like investors like hedge funds to p funds to venture funds using us because like information on the web is what gives people alpha and people can be so creative and now can create like scaled programs for figuring out where to spend their time instead of doing one query at a time and chat GPT, you write a script, you do a thousand queries on our deep research system, you get better quality and you figure out where you want to spend your time.

2:41:19And we even have coding agents that use our search when they get stuck. So if you're an agent, like it's just like, so in some beachhead markets, I think it all converges in the way I say, right? It's all agents out there. You can have an agent for sales. You can have an agent for investing. You can have an agent for choose your favorite industry. And every agent needs - I'm back writing. How has it been building quietly out of the public eye? Have you enjoyed it? A lot. Also, respect for founders. Like, I don't know, this is, I ran a large company, right? I was at Twitter 11 years. Yeah. Being a founder, taking something from like nothing to having like a bunch of customers.

2:42:06Is this your first startup? It's my first startup. Wow. Wow. Figuring it out, like I'm massively unqualified for the jobs, but those are the only jobs you really want, right? Yeah, of course. You want a job that you're qualified for. Just got to figure it out. I want to dig into a little bit more granularity. Obviously, it's launch week, but chat is asking us, what did you get done this week? Break it down for us. This week, I got back on Twitter. Wow. That's great. Ring the gong. Ring the gong, Jeremy. We're hitting the gong. It's great to see you back on the timeline.

2:42:44Congratulations on the launch. I think that's huge. And I don't know if you caught this. I think I almost broke Twitter. Oh, really? As I was tweeting like this morning at like 8 a.m., I was like trying to get my tweets out for the first time like in years. Right? And Twitter is glitching. Then I go on the detector. Okay. You might have brought it down. And I was like, what timing, man? like yeah yeah yeah time we launch on the timeline is is like one of the hardest dances you have to do uh you can get steamrolled by a viral current thing there's a good day but it was a good day launch yeah and we're glad you were able to make the show like a surprise deep seek launch yeah yeah exactly but i think you broke through and uh we're very excited for you so congratulations on the launch thank you so much for stopping by and have a great rest of your week we'll talk to Yeah, great to catch up.

2:43:35Have a good one. Bye. Up next, we have Eric from Bolt.new in the Restream Rating Room. Let's bring in Eric. I'm very excited to talk to him because Bolt is launching a new business model. The margins on prompting will go to zero and the company will make money from hosting websites and apps instead. I want to talk about it. How are you doing, Eric? Good to have you on the stream. What's happening? Hey, good to be here, guys. Yeah, long time watch. You're good to be on the show. Fantastic. It's good to have you. Introduce yourself, give us a little background of the company, and then I want to go into the business model questions because this has been top of mind for us.

2:44:08I'll show. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, so a company's called Bolt.new, formerly known as StackBlitz. We're in the process of swapping the logo. Got to get new merch printed. We've been around for eight years now. We actually just hit the eight-year mark two weeks ago. We were actually about to go out of business like a year ago. And what ended up happening was we pivoted and launched Bolt. And in the first two months, we went zero to 20 million of ARR. And it was really one of the first text app tools that came out. Okay. Are you beating the allegations? Zero to 20 million. Very impressive. What were the gross margins?

2:44:44Can you give us any insight here? Because everyone on the timeline saying anyone with a big revenue ramp, it's all suspicious. But give us a white pill. Yeah. So our margins have actually been really good. So like typically it's been around 40%. And a big part of that is that, you know, for the text to app stuff, part of it is the inference where you're having the code gen, you know, AI model spit out code, but then you actually have to run it somewhere. And so that's like the technology we've been making for the past eight years, basically allows you to run full development environments in a browser using the end user CPU.

2:45:16So it doesn't cost us anything. Right? Got it. That's a big part of why our cogs are a lot better. Sure. But for us, I think what seems to be inevitable is that margins are just going to go to zero on this stuff. And so we're kind of skating to where the puck is going. Unpack that because a lot of people are saying margins are going to go to 100%. Margins are going to go very high because inference is going to get very cheap. You're saying margins are going to go to zero. Break that down. Why would it go to zero? Is that just competitive dynamics from the competitors and the legacy companies and just all sorts of different competitive pressure?

2:45:52I think it's a good question. So, I mean, it's really like we could go and use the previous generation of models and charge users, you know, what we're charging for frontier stuff. But the problem is, like, you're not going to be able to build, you know, quality apps. Right. Because the frontier models and agents are incredible and they just keep getting better. And so if you're expecting to, as a company reselling inference, unless you're a model provider, your choice is you can either take a margin and give worse models than what are in the frontier, or you're saying, hey, we want to always have the best, most capable stuff and not take a margin.

2:46:33And instead, and then, but what that means for your business though, is that you have to be going and making money in other ways than just reselling inference. Right. And so if you kind of look at the previous generation of site builders and hosters as an analogy, you know, if you go to like Wix and Squarespace, they don't charge you to like build a website. It's free. Of course, you don't have to pay for AI or whatever, but like you drag and drop. What they bill you for is to host the thing. Right. Right. And that's how they have a very healthy LTV and average customer contract length, etc., is that you have your website host.

2:47:03And that's the primary ongoing value that's being. Yeah. And I people people that have been kind of trying to track this market of prompt to site or prompt to app have have that, you know, the critics critics have talked about churn. But my read on it has always been that it seems like there's been a fairly healthy market of just website builders for a long time. It hasn't been monopolistic. You've got the Wix's, the Squarespace's, the Webflow's, the framers. And, you know, all those companies have been able to carve out solid businesses. And so, yeah, this launch makes a lot of sense, which is, hey, come on the platform, generate whatever you want.

2:47:46But then if you're generating a site, a marketing site for your business, you know, we'll host it for you indefinitely. Yeah, exactly. And so it kind of moved, like for us as a business, it moves the focus for us to having the best services and like workflows for the customers we're serving. So like that's for people building hosting website, that's hosting services. We partner with like Netlify and Superbase for powering the stuff that we've got today. and they've scaled this for some of the heaviest products like Uber and Twilio in the past. So you can build to millions of people now with Bolt.

2:48:21And on the B2B side, we're selling to folks that are basically replacing Figma with Bolt for doing prototyping and rapid product development. And that's just very sticky because you're working on a team and it's for the same reason that Figma is a collaborative product is sticky. And so that's really where we're focusing in because that's like, you know, the retention is incredible on those use cases from our numbers. Right. Are you feeling acceleration, deceleration from the frontier labs on coding products? Lots of people were kind of on the timeline, at least disappointed in GPT-5. It feels like it's more of a consumer product now.

2:48:57But in general, you know, it used to be, you know, every six months we got something that was completely breakthrough and now the releases feel a little bit more incremental. But what are you feeling just from the foundation model lab side? Because we are seeing a lot of progress there. The benchmarks are improving. The context windows are getting bigger. Are we accelerating, decelerating, kind of in a rebuild mode, kind of rethink? You need to go back to the drawing board and do some AI research. Yeah, I think for all the frontier labs, they need to keep hitting more and more breakthroughs. Right.

2:49:32But from an on-the-ground perspective of a company like us looking at these models and running evals and measuring them, the models themselves may be seeing maybe more incremental improvements. But what's really, I think, the big unlock is that not only are they getting better at just coding, but they're getting better at being designed to be used as part of agent systems. And that's a huge thing. Because I mean, if you think about how humans think, like if I asked you to like, you know, rattle off like, you know, the latest financial numbers or something, it's like you might be able to like pull that up.

2:50:06But realistically, you need to like think on it. You get some things wrong on zero shot and you need to like kind of go do some research, bounce around. And so like that's what really agents are kind of replicating in my view is like how we as humans actually think and work. And so how do you really tune the models to be good at going and going down different thought paths killing ones that don't actually look promising etc etc you look at cloud code is probably the best example of this in the code generation world um and so there's remarkable uh you know progress being made in that realm of things right yeah so there's a lot seems to me there's a lot of room to run just on you know incremental improvements on the zero shot aspect of models but then also how these things are going in reasoning and working totally yeah the yeah the unhobblings, I think about like, I'm sure that you don't vibe code a database every time someone builds a website, you pull a database off the shelf.

2:51:00And I've seen the stats of all the databases that you guys are pumping customers into. And so yeah, as more of those tools roll out, and you get more of that functionality off the shelf, and you can pull this from over there, pull that open source project, pull this data like that feels like that unlocks a lot of a lot of growth. Last question from my side for now. Gabe in the chat asks, what are those champagne bottles in the background? What's going on there? First time someone's asked about this. Yeah, actually. So these are the first enterprise deals when we closed the first, because we had never done enterprise sales motions before, period.

2:51:37I've never been a salesperson. So my chief of staff and I, my CTO, when we closed our first three major customers, this is probably four or five years ago. So we started with the$15 bottle of Cook's for the 20K deal we did. Yep, that's good. And then worked their way up. There we go. So those are the things I keep on the shelf. What's the top tier bottle in the back? I think the top one, I think it's a bottle of Dom. There you go. That's probably$2.50. Yeah, I think someone got it for us as a gift or something. I can't remember what that was about. But that's like the, I never drink alcohol. But it's like, that's, you know.

2:52:13Let's hear it for some tea towel. Totally. Enterprise deals. We love it. We love it. Good experience. Well, thanks so much for coming out on the show. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest. Likewise. Thank you. See ya. Up next, we have Matthew from Merlin Labs waiting in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring in Matthew. He has some really big news. We're going to need a bigger gong, Jordy Hayes. How you doing? Hey, guys. How are you? We're great. How are you? Give us the news. Give us the update. Give us the introduction on you, the company, and the news today. Hey, guys. I'm Matt. I run Merlin.

2:52:46We are, yeah, we're going to need a bigger gong. We're going to need a bigger gong. No, like I'm seeing you already with a mallet. Like I'm here for it, like especially at the end of the show. Yeah. So I run a, I don't know, buy a really cool company called Merlin where we're developing essentially a pilot, just not a human one. We are deploying that predominantly with the U.S. Air Force and a bunch of other partners and customers around the world. And we announced this morning that we're taking the company public, which is going to be the first time one of these big defense startups go public.

2:53:21Congratulations. There we go. I was waiting for that.

2:53:29Let's stay on the anatomy of the deal. What's actually happening from a mechanics perspective? What does it mean to take this company public? Where will you be listed? Do you have a ticker? Like break down the like what's going on with the deal, what it means. And then I have a ton of questions about autonomous flight. Yeah, 100%. So we were looking at a couple different options. And particularly for us, going public sort of efficiently allows us to do a bunch of things. It allows us to go build a lot more capital to go sort of execute on a couple big contracts that we're working on. But it also allows us some currency to do M &A, which is important for us, especially as we sort of build up.

2:54:08So we talked to a lot of folks and we're combining with Inflection Point. Inflection Point has done two other really high profile deals, USA Rare Earth and then Intuitive Machines, both of which are trading at multi-billion dollar valuations with hundreds of millions of dollars in cash in the balance sheet. And then another big part of the announcement today is we announced like$120 plus million of committed capital before we even announced the deal. Yeah, so it's effectively like an investment in the company, although it'll happen after the merger. 100%. So most companies, when they're going public, they raise their pipe between when they announce and when they go public.

2:54:45Based off the strength of the deal, we were able to pretty quickly raise about$120 million before the announcement. TBD, how much more money will take to pre-announce. But super exciting and I think a really important moment for Defense Tech. Got it. Talk to me about the value of autonomy in flight. We were talking to Delian earlier about this. There's like the model for self-driving cars is very logical. Something like 70 % of the cost of an Uber is the human driving the car. In the plane context, it's usually something like 7%. It's much lower because the fuel is very expensive. You only have a couple of pilots.

2:55:25You have a lot of people in the vehicle. so how are you thinking about focusing on like fully autonomous versus uh you know pilot assistance technology kind of what's the equivalent of a level five self-driving level two self-driving how do you think about the progression to self-flying planes yeah i mean well delian delian is captaining his cessna yeah extreme extremely well but he might be joined by a by a copilot yeah no i yeah he's gotten himself in some situations where he probably would have been better to let the co-pilot take over. But he's always made it through. So we're grateful for that.

2:56:00All right. So everybody thinks of an airplane with two pilots, right? But if you're like FedEx or big airplanes, I don't know what Dellian's talking about, but big airplanes, there's anywhere between 13 and 20 FTE pilots per airplane, making all in anywhere between half a million and a million dollars a year. So if you're able to, in the future, augment that and go from two crew down to one, that's you know, billions of dollars of savings for, you know, the airline industry, which is super important. But for our military customers, getting that out there enables those pilots to go act a little bit more like mission managers, which is super important, particularly given that the Air Force is short pilots, which enabled our big contract that we announced last year, sort of a big nine-figure contract to go spearhead fixed-wing autonomy for certain parts of the Air Force.

2:56:49What about the role of not necessarily autopilot, but just enhancing the safety of airplanes? I feel like that's just something that everyone should be excited about. Everyone's seen the different flight disasters. Everyone wants more airplane safety. They're definitely willing to pay for it. It seems like there's an opportunity to plug in. And I'd love to know about the different FAA pathways for what it means to actually pilot the plane via a non-deterministic machine learning based AI based system versus having an iPad next to you that's more just offering advice and diagnostics and acting as kind of just bring it like a centaur model, bringing super intelligence alongside a human in loop.

2:57:44Yeah. So for our customers, particularly our DoD customers, like bottom line, most people living today have lived in a world where America has been able to go project air power and like prevent World War Three from happening for the vast majority of their adult lives. We are in a world for the first time ever where America does not, in the West, does not have the unilateral ability to go project air power and prevent World War III. So like what we're doing and what we're building here of like getting autonomy out actually in an operational service going from two crew down to one. And then we're doing some uncrewed stuff as well with a few customers.

2:58:25Like gets us to that point of like getting out of this like kind of toy iPad pilot assist kind of like, I don't know, kind of like a BS solution. And actually going out and really operationalizing autonomy and like getting like millions of hours of operating history so that we can start to go claw back that lead against some of our peer adversaries. Yep. Makes sense. Super important stuff. come back on as this cycle progresses. yeah we're very excited for you congratulations on the news cool we're gonna need a bigger gun guys yeah we'll get it ready we're working on it it's actually it's actually in the works hopefully wherever it's manufactured we'll fly it's really it's a race against against you guys uh getting out yeah okay we'll do our absolute best i'll be back and we'll expect a bigger gun fantastic we'll talk to you soon matt have a good one bye breaking news The Trump administration has said to discuss U.S.

2:59:21taking a stake in Intel. Someone predicted this on the show. Maybe it was Aaron. The Trump administration is in talks with Intel to have the U.S. government potentially take a stake in the beleaguered chip maker, helping support the company's effort to expand domestic manufacturing. The deal would help shore up Intel's planned factory in Ohio, said the people who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private, of course. The company had once promised to turn that site into the world's largest chip making facility, though it's been repeatedly delayed. The plan stems from a meeting this week between President Trump and Intel CEO Lip Bhutan.

2:59:59The people said the idea is for the U.S. government to pay for the stake and the details are being sorted out. One of the people said another caution that the plans remain fluid. So we'll be interesting to see here if this is taxpayer dollars or this like sovereign slush fund that we're getting from Japan. Make NVIDIA pay for it. 15 % of H20s put that money to work by Intel. I don't know if I like that. I don't know if I like buying Intel. It feels like we also, I don't know. I mean, the U.S. government does own some companies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were recently. They're the lenders for student loans or all sorts of lending that goes on.

3:00:39Those are nationalized. And so Trump was talking about IPO-ing those or spinning those out. What do we got, Tyler? Do you think this is bullish for Leopold? The tuition awareness is big. Weren't they big Intel? Oh, yeah. That's huge, actually. I mean, Intel's up 20 % in the last five days. Exercise those calls, Leopold. Let's go, Leopold. Let's go. Bucco Capital has a – I got a post here. We'll use this to close out the show. So pull this up. Team, please. You just drop it in the chat. It's in the chat. Leopold Ochenbrenner today after being clowned on literally. Regal says nationalizing Intel is a horrible idea.

3:01:13This is. We're going to get demonetized. Turn this off before we get demonetized. No, we just got to talk over as it's playing so that the AI gets confused and thinks, oh, that's not a real song. Anyways. Anyway, fun hanging out with everyone in the chat. Thanks for watching. Gabe Technochief, John Exley, Deepak, Raghav. So many good usernames. Thanks for watching. We will see you tomorrow. I can't wait. It's going to be a blast. The mansion section. Incoming. It's already Friday? Wow. Hard to believe. Anyway, thank you so much for watching. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and we will see you tomorrow.

3:01:54Goodbye. Bye. We love you.