OpenAI–AMD Deal, DevDay Reactions, xAI’s Memphis Datacenter | Doug O'Laughlin, Celine Halioua

27:32And so they wound up being valued like medium-sized SaaS companies as opposed to social networks. And they've never really compounded, compounded, and compounded. So I agree that it's a little odd to not force everything that's generated in Sora to just automatically be shared on Sora on the app. Because it feels like if you can just continually have every Sora generation in the feed, you can rank those, like you can have a very powerful. Have a catalog of content that people like, and it also feeds your, it feeds, it's going to continuously help you make the model better. Yeah. I also wonder if they'd open it up to human generated content.

28:17Like, why not? I don't think that OpenAI needs another front in the war, right? It's hard enough competing. It's hard enough competing with Google, right? You clearly to compete with Google, you have to do a number of just absolutely heinous deals, right? You got to be doing deals with Broadcom. You got to be doing deals with Oracle. You got to be doing deals with AMD. You got to just be doing these deals that are pretty unprecedented, at least for the, for the, in the, in the modern era. So they don't need to open a new front in my view. I do feel like the, it's just a new angle on the creativity.

28:54If you could have Sora, but with like a cap cut style or edit style video editing that goes into it. So you could have, like, if you just want to maximize for like the maximum amount of creativity, being able to inject an actual screen recording of a movie clip and then a Sora clip and then, and then your actual video that you recorded and then bring in some more Sora, like editing all that together. It's just going to be better content. We need to talk about how T dating advice is still top five. No way. Free app on the app store. Even after the hack, it's still ripping. It's above Tik TOK. It's above Google.

29:34It's above X. It's above WhatsApp. I thought Sora. It's above Instagram. And obviously, again, it only counts first-time downloads. But yeah, Sora is number one. But I'm just saying if you look at the top five, it's Sora, ChatGPT, Gemini, Threads. And then T. Shout out to Connor Hayes for getting Threads back in the top five. We love it. We love it. Also, shout out to Dylan Field over at Figma doing a deal with OpenAI. Getting the shout out in DevDay. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free. Um, uh, Tyler, do you understand this, this, this post from Leo who says new image model is just GPT image one mini LMAO.

30:17It's so over on the API docs. What is going on? So I think it was like one of those cases where someone just found like the link to the PNG that's like hosted on the site and like it's not released yet. Okay. So there's like no information about this at all. They didn't talk about it at dev day. Okay. So yeah, yeah, this is kind of, I don't really know that people are being comped to this? Like, it feels like most of the excitement about the agent mode or agent builder is like images would be like a small piece of that. Because yes, every once in a while in an agentic workflow, you'd want to generate an image.

30:49But I do wonder how open it will be. Like, would it be possible within the agent builder to vend in a different LLM? Like, are they going to be model agnostic at some point? Like, from a true model builder, you might want to be able to, like, call Claude Code over here and then use some other image generator. You want to get a mid-journey image over here. You want to go over there, pull different things together. Yeah, I mean, I feel like you kind of have to because otherwise it's like then as a consumer, I'm just going to go use N8N or... Something that's on top of all of them. Yeah, because if I'm just being limited, then why would I use it?

31:26Yeah. Well, High Yield Harry is not happy with all the deals that are happening. he posted on September 22nd explaining the NVIDIA and OpenAI deal to our analysts and it's the screen cap from what is that? Detective movie? Detective HBO? True Detective. True Detective. And he's getting hammered. And now he says I'm entering my Michael Burry era. These deal structures are dot com bubble things. Keep dancing now but come on guys. Be real about what's going to happen here. There's a lot of people that are not happy with how crazy these deals are. Sven Henrik says. Since nobody is saying it, Sven will.

32:11He says, we're witnessing the largest and most concentrated instant market cap expansions in history with no proven future revenue cost earnings model to back up the investments or the valuations. The market is running on an incredible amount of blind faith. Let's give it up for blind faith. There's not enough of that. When and how it ends, TBD. One certainty, though, when it eventually does blow up, everyone will be asking the Fed to come to the rescue again. The only thing I would push back on is a lot of people, it's contrarian. Nobody is saying it. Everyone's saying it. It's contrarian, actually, at this point, to say, no, this is good and healthy and natural.

32:53No, no, no. The people that are still super AGI-pilled, just super beating the drum of the value is there, look at the revenue growth, all this stuff is real. It merits the build-out because we're going to see 10x gains again and again and again. Yeah, let's pull up this video of, let's pull up at the X game, Stephen Hawking at the X game. Should we pull that up? Stephen Hawking at the X game. Oh, you guys haven't pulled up already. If you watch this video and then say to me, I don't think Sam Trillion. Sam Trillions. I don't think Sam Altman should get another trillion. I don't know what to tell you.

33:33This is so sick. Wow. That's perfect. No. Oh, no. The physics. Tyler over there, this is going to be critical to building humanoid robotics. This is a physics simulator. This is a world model. The crowd is losing. It's like, physics don't make sense there. Like, that's not how that would happen. The next iteration, I swear, Sora 3, just scale up a little bit more, bro, please. Oh yeah. On Friday, we posted, yeah, we posted another five trillion, please. Yeah. Yeah. We posted an example of a video that we shot versus, and then I had Tyler try and recreate it with Sora and the other video models.

34:10And, and Tyler kept texting me like, dude, just one more prompt. Like, I, I'm so close. I can get it there. And it was, not very close. The hands were very creepy. Your naked foot snuck in somehow. Yeah, I don't know what the training game was. It was odd. Yeah, lots of weird stuff. It seems like it's very good for, like, again, we're in that like style transfer. It works well when it's like, there's a ton of footage of police body cams, and then there's a ton of footage of SpongeBob, and you put SpongeBob in the police body cam, and it knows how to mash those two up. But if you come to it with just some completely new idea that it doesn't have a lot of training data on, you're going to be fighting the prompt for a long, long time.

34:55Now, those mashups are valuable. They get views. People find them enjoyable. And there are some that are very funny. But it is a challenge to create anything that's kind of novel or new. But there's still a lot of room. Sachi Michal says, this OpenAI AMD deal feels like a jump the shark moment. The deal structure is just so stupidly unbelievable. Well, I'll tell you something believable. If I was walking around a farmer's market, John, and I walk by a stand and I think, I don't really like what this guy's got. I don't really want it. But then I think to myself, what could I do in this moment to make purchasing some of these vegetables interesting to me.

35:39And so I go to the farmer and I say, how about you give me 30 % of your business and I'll buy some of your vegetables. And I actually should get more equity value in your business than I need to pay for the vegetables. What did I actually say? That seems like a deal that might get done. and to me that feels a little bit like what we're seeing here today with uh open ai and amd yeah what did what did i actually say oh i here you you were saying like like did i call the did i call these like circular deals um efficient more efficient or something like that i said uh i said lots of people are throwing up red flags about these this was on uh september 29th uh or 23rd.

36:27High growth companies have been paying for things with equity, in this case chips, forever, most commonly with talent, but occasionally with other counterparties. The open question is that couldn't this deal be more arm's length pretty easily? NVIDIA's biggest shareholders are Vanguard, BlackRock, Fidelity, and State Street. There's a world where NVIDIA takes the cash it has on hand, pays a dividend, and then those investors take their money and invest in open AI. That would be the natural flow of capital in normal times. But NVIDIA thinks there are benefits to inking a longer term partnership.

37:03Open AI looks highly likely to join the ranks of the hyperscalers in Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are all working on AI chips that could cut NVIDIA out of the equation long term. So NVIDIA gets a fantastic long term partner with open AI who will be committed to buying an accelerated schedule of AI accelerator creator purchases, and OpenAI gets a deep partnership with arguably the best CPU, GPU design team in history. And so it's interesting that like, and the NVIDIA deal, the read on the NVIDIA deal was like, oh, this is NVIDIA finding like its true long-term dance partner, where in a world where Google is going TPU, Microsoft is going to do their own thing, Amazon's doing their own thing in chips, cutting out NVIDIA, there's like some real risks to NVIDIA long-term potentially.

37:44And so NVIDIA is locking up a partnership with OpenAI, but then OpenAI is going around and being like, but we're also going to do custom. I think one thing that everyone's learning about Sam is you never really lock down Sam, right? Yeah. You had, obviously, Satya and Sam were dancing. They're still dancing through the existing partnership that they have, but certainly Sam is willing to go find the incremental partner. And it's interesting that the AMD and NVIDIA deals just happen so closely together. Yeah. And NVIDIA felt crazy. AMD feels crazier just because, again, it's not like these are Sam's first picks for GPUs, right?

38:31Yep. Well, you can't lock down Sam, but you can lock down your compliance. With Vanta, automate compliance, manage risk, and free trust continuously. Vantage Trust Management Platform takes the manual work of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. Let's go. We should read through the actual deal of the OpenAI AMD reporting in the world. Are you saying we should get into the facts? We should get into the facts. It's a five-year agreement. It will challenge NVIDIA's market dominance as OpenAI plans deployment of AMD's new MI450 chips. and the announcement from Sam mentioned NVIDIA more than AMD, which some people are reading into, like maybe you want to keep NVIDIA happy.

39:11The big question for me is, is there an OpenAI Intel deal coming at some point? Because Intel has been looking for a buyer, been looking for a reason to spin up the new fab in America. Sam needs to figure out some way. You know, the deal that I could imagine is Trump makes an investment in OpenAI. OpenAI then has to spend off of Uncle Sam's balance sheet. OpenAI then has to spend some amount of that with Intel. Yeah. I wouldn't be surprised to be so excited. And Sam figures out a way to get some warrants in Intel too. I mean, there's certainly a lot of energy around like the United States government is pushing Intel.

39:55There's a desire to reshore manufacturing, reshore chip manufacturing. And if you can be part of that story, you should be a beneficiary. You should win points, score points in Washington. And so doing something there, I wouldn't be surprised if we see it in the next couple weeks. It just feels like Sam is really knocking down partnerships with every major counterparty. And so why not Intel as well? Well, the Wall Street Journal has the story. OpenAI and chip designer advanced micro devices. They don't name companies like that anymore. I don't know how. AMD announced a multi-billion dollar partnership to collaborate on AI data centers that will run on AMD processors.

40:31One of the most direct challenges yet to industry leader NVIDIA. Under the terms of the deal, OpenAI committed to purchasing six gigawatts worth of AMD chips. It is cool that we're now just referring to GPU orders based on their energy demands. It's pretty sick. starting with the MI450 chip next year. The chat GPT maker will buy the chips either directly or through its cloud computing partners. So it could go through Oracle. That's not that crazy. Well, it is if it's not actually OpenAI putting up. Does this mean that OpenAI doesn't have to, if one of their, they can be like, look, we - Yeah, the CapEx might not live on their balance sheet.

41:11Exactly. Because they might go to a NeoCloud or they might go to Oracle and they might say, you own the data center and we will set up a contract to lease against that because we want to model this business as OPEX because we are a software company on top of the hardware. It's not the craziest thing. There's plenty of big tech companies, I believe, Netflix, Snapchat, there's a whole bunch that are built on top of other cloud platforms, but they have such large contracts that Google can say, oh, well, you're going to be with us for a decade. You're going to be spending hundreds of millions of dollars.

41:42We're going to go build a new data center for you And we're going to own that CapEx because we're super huge and liquid. We can afford this. So AMD chief Lisa Su said in an interview on Sunday that the deal will result in tens of billions of dollars in new revenue for the chip company over the next half decade. The two companies didn't disclose the plan's overall expected cost, but AMD said it costs tens of billions of dollars per gigawatt of computing capacity. So we're looking at almost$100 billion deal, which is probably why the market cap popped by a commensurate amount. OpenAI will receive warrants for up to 160 million AMD shares, roughly 10 % of the chip company, at one cent per share awarded in phases if OpenAI hits certain milestones for deployment.

42:27AMD's stock price also has to increase for the warrants to be exercised. The shares opened 33 % higher Monday morning. The deal is AMD's biggest win in its quest to disrupt NVIDIA's dominance among AI semiconductor companies. AMD processors are widely used for gaming in personal computers and in traditional data center servers, but it hasn't made much of a dent in the fast-growing market for the pricier supercomputing chips needed by advanced AI systems. Quickly, let me tell you about Graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams like GitHub ship higher-quality software faster. Their billboard's going viral again today.

43:04It is? No way. Just the exact same post again. I think this time it was like, I'm in San Francisco. I hate it here. Oh, really? It's like negative, but it's still going viral? We love it there. Well, if you want to run a billboard campaign, get on adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising, 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 efficiency in this ad buying across the globe. Well, AMD plans to use the chips for, or OpenAI plans to use the AMD chips for inference functions or the computations that allow AI applications such as chatbots to respond to user queries.

43:36Maybe that's easier for them to deal with. They train on NVIDIA, but then inference on AMD. Maybe there's something there. I mean, the models are so stable. There was a new indication or kind of leak that GPT-5 is still running on the 4 pre-train. So there will at some point be a new like huge pre-train uh 4.5 was supposed to be that they haven't really done that yet but uh there's there's a world where like gpt4 that pre-trained model i mean i'm sure they've done other things to it but like generally that is like mature enough that if you can just go and optimize it and ship it off to different chips maybe it runs fast maybe it's a huge lift to to get it out of the cuda ecosystem and over to amd but uh certainly amd wants to make it happen and OpenAI wants to make it happen.

44:27Maybe Codex can do it. Maybe Codex can do it. We don't know. I think that it could be like a$100 million project to like replatform it, but it's totally worth it when you're running inference for 800 million weekly active users. So I don't know. It's hard to overstate how difficult it's become to get enough computing power, Altman said. We want it super fast, but it takes some time. The two CEOs of the deal will tie their companies together and give them incentives to commit to the AI infrastructure. Boom, it's a win for both of our companies. And I'm glad that OpenAI's incentives are tied to AMD's success and vice versa.

45:07He's such a good investment banker. Get him in, get him on Wall Street. NVIDIA remains the preferred chip supplier among AI companies, but it's also facing competition from almost every corner of the market. Cloud giants such as Google and Amazon design and sell their own chips. OpenAI recently signed a$100 billion deal with Broadcom to build its own in-house chip. No,$10 billion. $10 billion. Yeah,$10 billion deal. Easy to add an extra zero these days, but we got to. Well, if you want to manage your zeros properly, get on Julius.ai. What analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert-level insights.

45:44It's the AI data analyst that works for you, and it's more reliable than me when it comes to getting the numbers right. And apparently Copilot in Excel. We saw that. We saw that post earlier today. Oh, yeah. Somebody using Copilot in Excel to add a handful of numbers. One, two, and three specifically. And what did it? Tyler, what's one plus two plus three? Sum those numbers. Let me think.

46:12well co-pilot said 15 yeah close so just try to get that close if you can as long as you're with as long as with numbers you just got to get close what do you think it is i'm going with six let's go nailed it human intelligence undefeated underrated underrated good morning matt how you doing in the chat good to see you good day great to see you um open ai is going to begin with one gigawatt worth of MI450 chips starting in the second half of next year to run its AI models. That's a lot. Just put the chips in the bag. We are just throwing around gigawatts now. I do, I really want to know how deep this goes.

46:50We got to ask Doug, he's joining 10 minutes, what kind of deals Sam is going to start doing on the energy side. I was asking him about that. Because he has his nuclear company, Oclo. He also has a fission company, Oklo, and then he has a fusion company. What's that one called? Oklo's only up like 590 % in the past six months. Just wait until they ink a$100 billion deal with OpenAI. It could happen. I mean, it's one of those things where it's like if they build that energy, OpenAI would buy it. So it makes sense. These are all just like sort of like mutual agreements to jump across the threshold together.

47:34Mutual agreement to jump sharks. Yeah, to jump sharks. I don't know. I don't know. It's dangerous to be bearish prematurely. Like you never know how big these things can get. It could continue to run. We could be stuck in January of 1999 for the next five years for all we know. Yeah, you never know. In late September, NVIDIA announced that it would invest$100 billion in OpenAI over the next decade. Under the terms of the circular arrangement, OpenAI plans to use the cash from NVIDIA to buy NVIDIA chips and deploy up to 10 gigawatts of computing power in AI data centers. The deal highlighted how the market's seemingly endless enthusiasm for NVIDIA stock is providing a financial backstop for the entire AI market.

48:17The NVIDIA deal isn't completed. The two companies have signed a letter of intent and have yet to disclose specific terms in a regulatory filing. Wow, what a time to be alive. OpenAI and AMD described Monday's announcement as definitive and planned to immediately file details with security regulators. Sue told investors in a call Monday morning that the deal was a clear validation of our technology roadmap that would give AMD tens of billions of dollars of revenue by 2027. When asked about the unique warrant structure, Sue called it pretty innovative. We're going to get a lot of revenue. I wouldn't say it came lightly.

48:52We just have to give a huge amount of the company away in order to capture that revenue. Yeah. What's the headline number here? It's$10 billion to Broadcom,$100 billion to NVIDIA, and$300 billion to Oracle. $20 billion-ish to CoreWeave as well. Wait. So, Tyler, they're saying 6 gigawatts of AMD chips. Can you estimate the dollar value of that if it's mi 40 uh 450 equivalents i think um i think on on uh the invest like the best with don't tell he said it's like around 50 billion per gigawatt 50 billion per gigawatt yeah wait so this is like a 400 billion dollar deal i think wait that's totally wrong okay okay yeah i i i want to know like like what is the energy use of a single mi 450 and then divide that by six gigawatts to get me like how many chips are they going to buy and then what's the price of the chip.

49:52So multiply that. That's what I want to know. In the meantime, let me tell you about Fall, the generative media platform for developers. The world's best generative image, video, and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine tune with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. Let's go. There's so much in this article. Should we get into this XAI coverage? Yes, sure. Elon Musk gambles billions in Memphis to catch up on AI. I don't know why this is a story. It's mere billions. If we're not in the hundreds of billions, like what are we doing? This is pennies. The journal has reporting, XAI aims to win tech arms race with Colossus data centers thrown up at lightning speed.

50:32City is divided over massive power and water demands. For Elon Musk, ground zero of the AI arms race is 114 acre tract of grass and swamp on the state line of Tennessee and Mississippi. This once sleepy plot of land filled with groves of water-rooted Tupelo trees at its western edge is now part of a growing empire Musk is accumulating in the deep south, just a few miles from Elvis Presley's homestead at Graceland. Labor crews hired by Musk's ex-AI were excavating power equipment on the site, a defunct energy plant just over the state line in Mississippi, and preparing to build a new plant capable of generating over a gigawatt of electricity, enough to power around 800 ,000 homes.

51:14Engineering permits show that Musk plans to route transmission lines that will connect the new power plant to a million square foot data center that is also under development just north of the border in Tennessee. Memphis is the front line of Musk's costly foray into the AI wars. His AI company, XAI, has already built one massive data center here in the Bluff City that it calls the world's largest supercomputer. That facility, called Colossus, houses over 200 ,000 NVIDIA chips and powers the technology behind the AI chatbot, Grok. Now Musk is close to finishing the second facility, which will be even bigger.

51:48He calls it Colossus 2. The AI arms race is shaping up as the most expensive corporate battle of the 21st century. Let's give it up for expensive corporate battles. Can I get the horn, Nick, please? With the belief that the first to the finish line will dominate the market, making speed crucial. Money also makes a difference. The more cutting-edge chips companies have, the smarter their models are. But at this stage, it's unclear if or when the enormous investments will pay off. Technology companies that are splashing out to higher AI talent are writing even bigger checks to build the infrastructure needed to power cutting-edge AI models.

52:19Morgan Stanley estimates companies will spend over$3 trillion on AI infrastructure through 2028. What do you got, John? I have a more recent benchmark for all of the different AI models to let you know where Grok sits relative to the other Frontier models. ChatGPT5 Pro. Is this your comedy bench? Viral bench? Yeah, viral bench. Claude Sonnet 4.5, the latest and greatest. Gemini 2.5 Pro. And of course, Grok Expert Mode. so I will read you. My prompt for all four of these models was, write an X post that gets me over 1 ,000 likes. My account is at John Coogan. And ChatGPT5 Pro said, NVIDIA isn't a chip company.

53:00It's supply chain choreography. The scarce assets now, HBM, advanced packaging, power, and high bandwidth networking. If your AI thesis ignores those, you're playing checkers on a Go board. Not bad. I think you'd get like 40 lives on that. Claude Sonnet 4.5 says, everyone's focused on which AI lab will win AGI. The real question, who wins the infrastructure layer? NVIDIA is printing money now, but the company that figures out inference at scale will be worth more than all the model companies combined, which is hilarious. It's just like a hot take. It's kind of a hot take because anti-anthropic, I suppose.

53:43Who knows? Maybe they're working on this. Gemini 2.5 Pro says, the biggest hurdle to starting isn't the idea. It's not the capital. It's not the competition. It's the unshakable fear of looking stupid for the first six months. So that's what Gemini 2.5 Pro thinks is a banger. And then we have Grok Expert. And remember, this model was trained on X data. It should know what works. It knows it has the entire corpus of every tweet, every post on X. And here's what it said would go viral and get over a thousand likes. It says, this is from my account at John Coogan. October hits and suddenly I'm craving pumpkin everything.

54:28Binge watching horror movies and planning the ultimate costume. Who's with me on turning this month into pure spooky magic? Drop your fave Halloween ideas below. Hashtag spooky season. hashtag Halloween 2025 hashtag October vibes with three emojis and I think we know who wins like Grok is clearly genuinely hilarious I think it knows it's self aware it's totally self aware it knows that this is it knows that it might not be able to create the perfect zinger but it knows it can do such a throwback that we will find it absolutely hilarious that feels like something like like John Cena would post in like 2011.

55:14Totally, totally. And so if I had to post one of those, I would definitely go with the Grok post because it's hilarious. Post it, post it. And people would be laughing. You never posted the - I didn't post the other one about Lewis Hamilton. You should just post all four and then see which, like actually do the benchmark. I should, I should. I will. Maybe I'll prompt it again and then do it again. But the pure spooky magic goes pretty hard. I like it. I think it's worth 10 trillion in CapEx to get these bangers. All right, well, I want to ask Doug about what XAI has to do to actually get back in the game.

55:48I want to ask him what AI is. What is this AI stuff? Well, this Colossus and Colossus 2 are incredible feats of engineering. Yeah. Yet the... And what's the asset value? I do wonder, like, it seems like if they don't get product market fit on the consumer layer, is there a world where Colossus 2 is just an incredibly valuable asset that can be sold to a different firm or something. Anyway, we have our next guest, our first guest, Doug O 'Loughlin in the Restream Waiting Room. Let's bring him into the TBPN Ultra Dome. Doug, how are you doing? Good to see you. Good to see you too, guys. How are y 'all doing?

56:22Doing fantastic. Great to see you. What a day. What have your immediate reactions been to the AMD news? Was this on your bingo card for this year? Yeah. Did you see the person that bought like 6 million of AMD calls like on Friday? Uh-oh. Was that you? Hopefully not. I wish. Hopefully not. I wish. That's not me. I would be in super big trouble. So that's definitely not. So I'm actually going to talk more than just AMD specifically. The thing I think is really funny is that like, look at all the announcements, man. I have a very pet theory. It's kind of a lame theory if you think about it. But I think OpenAI is just trying to have everyone involved, like NVIDIA, AMD, SK Hynix, the entire memory chain, all the hyperscalers.

57:05and effectively like you know it's everyone's problem now everyone is all vested interest in uh in essentially opening yeah he's making himself too big to fail exactly that's right there's there's a world in the future where open ai needs effectively a bridge round and he can go to a bunch of different people with big balance sheets and say like if you guys don't pony up like we're all going down exactly that's the plan man essentially have you ever heard this phrase like, uh, it's like, if you owe the bank a hundred bucks, that's your problem. But if you owe the bank a billion bucks, it's the bank's problem.

57:40That's, that's essentially what's going down, I think. Um, so we're seeing like partnerships everywhere. It's kind of, it's kind of a crazy, um, it's kind of crazy time. Yeah. Uh, what, what's your take on people, uh, like overfitting to, uh, the.com boom and the world com story. Do you think that's like overwrought at this point, or are there actually good analogies now that we're in like an infrastructure boom? It's not just valuations. Because we've had bubbles in like software, private markets, venture capital before, and those seem to have worked their way through so easily because it's just, oh, some fund that needs to like wind this investment down over a 10-year life cycle.

58:25And it's such a small part of the economy, even though the numbers feel big. Retail never touched it. There wasn't a lot of debt. Yeah, like Clubhouse was like$600 million, which is just like nothing compared to the global. Who cares? Yeah, and there was a post that went super viral. It was a screenshot that was tracking the NASDAQ in the dot-com era to the NASDAQ today. And it lined up absolutely perfectly. And then it turns out it was just completely fake news. We tried to recreate it a bunch of different ways. there's some somebody like basically committed a chart crime yeah and it went super viral and everybody's like wow it looks exactly it tracks exactly you can't do that man it never works let's put it this way it never works um i have a post i just uh okay one i wrote about the 2000 silicon bubble sure and two i just wrote something that was mostly behind a paywall but like you could just look at the cover image and it's just like you are here it's like the first interest rate cut was in 1998 in september and i think that's that's probably our best analog like i think that that's probably the best one-to-one analog, which means it gets a lot crazier from here.

59:31That's my belief, at least. So if we look back to 2000, all the analogies and eras back then, I think the one that is kind of scaring and worrying is like the vendor financing. Like that's a lot of capital for your vendor to be putting up. And that kind of, that's a little scary. Like I think it's getting a little circular, but like it's not, it's definitely not tech bubble crazy because the valuation would have to be a 2X from here. That's kind of the thing that's like a little different. And I think the other thing that's also kind of interesting is like, last time you could argue the entire tech bubble was kind of very focused and concentrated on the like a very small amount of unprofitable companies that really didn't impact the economy when they all went bankrupt.

1:00:10The difference is today, who's the primary participants, it's the seven largest companies in the entire world. So that's kind of the thing, the push and take here that I think is really interesting. And now given what we publicly heard with the graphics announcements, it's going to be a lot of capital to get from here to there. And I think, I think it's going to be interesting, man. But honestly, if you look at everyone's balance sheet, no one's levered. That's the thing that I think is really interesting. No one is levered at all. And like, that's the, that's the next leg. Yep. That's the next leg.

1:00:39I was giving a sort of hypothetical example around the AMD deal to John. And tell me if this is just stupid or too simple, but I'm walking around a farmer's market. I see a stand, a farmer's selling some vegetables. I'm not that interested in the vegetables, but then I think, what would make me interested in this situation? Well, and then I say to the farmer, how about you give me 30 % of your company and then I'll buy some vegetables. Is that at all track with this deal? Yeah, I think it's - Suddenly I'm interested. If I can get 10 % of your company, I'm interested in being a customer. Yeah, I think it's also, I want to highlight something that's really interesting is look at the different deals between AMD and NVIDIA.

1:01:29NVIDIA, you essentially have to, they're like, okay, well, please do an investment in us so we can keep buying your chips. And then the vice versa, AMD is like, no, no, no, you must invest in us. So please buy our chips. That's the discount and the premium if you think about it. Like NVIDIA, you get the premium because it's a better chip, higher gross margin. And they're like, you're getting so much of our money, you might as well just be an investor. And then on AMD's side, it's like, dude, we don't want this. So give us something in return. Can you take me through the view on AMD generally over the past year?

1:02:05I know that semi-analysis was pretty crucial. George Hots was talking about some bugs that were in the actual, just trying to run large models on AMD chips was not going well. Your team was pretty integral in that. It seems like they're moving pretty aggressively to try and catch up. Is that gated by money? What's the recent history of AMD in terms of getting back in the game materially? So I do think they're much more competitive than they have been a long time. Our team's definitely been working. Watch for some stuff from SemiAnalysis soon, TM. I can't say anything more. Go subscribe. Yeah, but we're definitely continuing to do some work in this space.

1:02:51I think, look, on the smaller models, on the inference side, it seems like there's not a lot of differentiation. But on the bigger, extremely large world size, there is. So GB200 is still law of the land. But the Helios 450 rack, which is going to be this next generation, we're a lot more excited about. Mostly because they get the ginormous discount of the equity. It's just kind of an insane thing what they've done, man. Like, it's such a big amount of the equity possibly on those penny warrants. Like, I mean, it's kind of crazy. It's like, hey, you know, you buy$40 billion a product, you get$20 billion investment for free.

1:03:26Like, it's kind of this crazy, like, buy one, get one deal. So, I mean, I think that that's, I think they have a chance. They have a fighting chance. The other thing that was interesting is it feels like OpenAI can have various partners buy AMD chips, but then OpenAI gets to count that towards purchases themselves. In the Wall Street Journal article, they made it look like if Oracle buys a bunch of AMD chips for a data center that OpenAI gets to exercise its warrants. OpenAI gets to exercise the warrants, and those count towards AMD purchases, basically, even if it's not on OpenAI's balance sheet.

1:04:06Yeah, pretty much I think the way to think about it is it's an open AI infrastructure bet. Everyone who is in the open AI sphere, it sure counts. And they're just trying to get the most money, the most power, the most pull into it so that essentially, you know, they're kind of creating gravity. Everything comes to them. Honestly, this is a really good analogy. In 2020, NVIDIA bought like 5x more capacity than everyone else at TSMC. And so there was no room for anyone to compete. Kind of the same thing. They're taking all the oxygen out of the room for anyone else that isn't named open AI. What do you think about this?

1:04:38I feel like I heard this on Transistor Radio recently that GPT-5 is still potentially running kind of like GPT-4 class model under the hood, doing a bunch of test time inference on top of it to get you a better reasoning model. But like the core architecture actually hasn't shifted that much. So does that make it easier to port that model to AMD? Like what is the actual barrier? We've heard about the CUDA moat, but is it something where like you can underwrite a hundred million dollars of new kernel writing to run on AMD, even though it's a huge hassle, but it's because you're still amortizing that original training run that you did on NVIDIA to inference it on AMD going forward with this new deal?

1:05:27Is there something where the pre-train is stabilizing to the point where porting to a new architecture is more justifiable? I think that that feels like a stretch, honestly. I wouldn't know one-to-one on this one. If this was a world with no reasoning, then I would say yes, definitely yes. But I think reasoning really does change the game and how you orchestrate these larger and larger context-sized windows and then multi-nodes, because that's a really hard game too. It's like multi-node reasoning or multi-node inference is very, very challenging. And so that's, I don't think you get a perfect one-to-one, but like, let's also be clear.

1:06:03AMD has caught up quite a bit in the last year. Like it's a big difference. And like, that's, I think it's enough to maybe take a bet. And like, you got to also think about the bigger context here. You know, we're talking like what,$20 billion of revenue, mostly 2027 story. It's kind of peanuts compared to the numbers that we're actually talking about from everyone else. They're still fourth place. Let's be clear. Like this is, this is commitment. And I think you can see maybe a little bit momentum and inertia, but they're still in fourth place. For fourth place with NVIDIA TPU and Tranium above them?

1:06:37Yeah, even Tranium. Even Tranium is above them. Interesting. How are people thinking about actually valuing OpenAI at this point? It feels like you have all these like circular, if you're, if I was trying to build a DCF for OpenAI to underwrite, you know, investment at 500 billion. in. It's like, okay, well now I own parts of AMD, so I need to build a full DCF of that. But AMD is linked to OpenAI and I have all these like circular transactions. Are investors like grappling with this or is it all just like vibe-based investing, what you've seen? I think it's a little bit of vibe-based investing.

1:07:08I think the real play here is TAM is big. It's really, really big and it's going to be a lot bigger. I think the other thing that's really interesting is some of the agentic purchasing can really unlock very, very, very large parts of the economy that previously you could argue they had nothing in. If you're talking about the partners they had available today, for example, Booking.com, TripAdvisor, we can be talking about, and this is like some 2021 math, but like 1 % of all travel, 1 % of all groceries, 1 % of everything. And you're like, that's a big number. That's a really big number. And so, and you know, that's, that's going to be rev.

1:07:50So, so I think that that's the, that's literally the plan. I mean, they're trying to become the super app and that means that they're going to be integrated with everything. And you saw on the partnerships they had, they try to integrate as much as, as possible with every, every player of the stack. And so I think this agentic purchase push is going to, you know, if we start to see revenue from it soon, which I think they're, they're definitely shooting for, we'll kind of open up the TAM story and start to monetize the free users. Cause there's really only like a hundred million paid users. It's not that much, but there's hundreds of millions of free users.

1:08:21And we're talking about a personalized assistant who could plan for you. Um, you can do something crazy as like, Hey, I need a, you know, I thought I lost my travel bag or something. So I was like, Hey, I need a small dot kit for on the go for everything. Could you just like, you know, make a travel size and order it and get it to my house tomorrow. That seems very like, It feels like science fiction, but that is very much in the next 12 months. And so, hey, 1 % to 3 % on that transaction, that's a lot of money. And I think that's the real way for it. It's becoming so integral into everything that everyone has invested in you.

1:08:55So the AMD order and the fullness of time is around 6 gigawatts. Where do you expect that energy to come from? Do you expect Sam to start doing crazy deals like this on the energy side? He's already has Oklo, which is just, you know, up. He's not chairman anymore. He had to step down. Yeah. Did you notice that? But I knew he wasn't direct. I mean, I'm assuming he's a major shareholder still. But so that's kind of one angle. But where else, where's the power going to come from? Dude, that's a trillion dollar question, I feel like. Definitely there's a lot of ways to. But it's an important one, right?

1:09:36If you're trying to underwrite and say, this is real, at least for AMD, it's like, okay, well, how real can it be if we can't plug them in? There's a lot of ways. There's a lot of ways. Okay, so let's first talk about the grid is actually not built for 100 % production. So there's a lot of slack in the grid itself because it's actually built for the highest day and the lowest day. It's built to have a 99 % margin rate confidence interval on the absolute high and the absolute low, so the peak of the power. And so generation throughout an average day is at a much lower utilization than 100%. So I think the real reason and something you're going to start to see is that people are going to, like, essentially the grid is going to kind of start to become a lot more fragmented.

1:10:27And there's going to be a lot of behind the meter power generation that happens at the data center. And so in that case, what you do is you'd sip from the grid, meaning that you can use the grid when the grid is not totally utilized when it isn't you're doing gas channel on site. That's probably the thing that is most I mean, it's gonna be huge. It's gonna be huge, like natural gas, you know, energy consumption is just going to go through the roof. So that's going to be like the big driver, I think, to get these data centers online. I think it's going to take a lot of time. And also we're seeing like grids breaking right now, like grids are just like grids are not keeping up.

1:10:59And that's kind of been, I think it's going to be a big story in 2026. But I also think that that's where we're going to see international purchases too, just because like we're running out of power in the United States. I mean, I think what's also interesting is like, even though we say we're running out of power, when you have this big demand response, supply comes out of the woodwork. So we're starting to see stuff like gas gen, gas turbines, like all these different like little clever pockets of energy are coming up to then fulfill the need. I expect that to continue. Effectively, if you have enough demand, supply will find a way.

1:11:32Yeah, people remember. That definitely feels like the next wave here is we're going to see$100 billion deal for a new Hoover Dam and more nuclear actual build out. There was some news about this with some of the hyperscalers trying to recommission nuclear power plants, but it just feels like it's so slow. It's not on the order of what TSMC is fabbing next quarter. So we kind of lost track of it, but it does feel like that's going to be the next chapter. And maybe it'll be a little bit longer lead time, but you've got to start thinking about it now. Where do you expect the leverage to come from if that's the next leg of the journey?

1:12:12Is it net new private credit fund formation? Is it just banks getting more and more active? Like where is the capital going to come from? Okay. So one, let's not forget, there's positive free cash flow from all the big guys. That annually is something like, you know, I have a spreadsheet, maybe even open right now, talking about the total firepower. We're talking quite a bit of capital is available to do this, like a surprising amount. I want to say on an annual basis, it's something like$250 billion, maybe even$200 billion. But the thing that's also really interesting is none of the hyperscalers are levered at all.

1:12:51There's a really good paper from DoubleLine talking about, would you rather loan to the United States government or would you rather loan to Microsoft? So the real crazy town is if you start loaning to Microsoft instead of the United States government because Microsoft has net cash. Microsoft also has become more credit worthy over time versus I would argue the US government has become less credit worthy. And also what's really crazy is that Microsoft has a five bips premium to the United States treasury. So you're effectively, their rates are risk-free. And so what's possible, I think in terms of like, now I think the real issue is like how much liquidity could the actual credit market handle?

1:13:30I don't know if they can handle like$300 billion, like that's a shit ton of money but like we're talking you know there there's things that can definitely come out of those works like private credit is going to be part of it just because they're sitting on on like an ungodly amount of capital and they have to deploy it um i definitely think the hyperscalers for me are the one that are most interesting like we're talking about i mean dude that's crazy just like it's funny you say five years yeah it's funny you say 300 billion because i'm thinking i was just doing the math on 250 billion in free cash flow if if that's used to service 5 % coupon payments, that's$5 trillion in notional debt value.

1:14:08If you're just saying, we want to know where the systemic risk is going to come from. I don't know. When we all run out together, that's the problem. What happens is just think of it as one long debt-fueled binge. But the thing is, you're looking at the debt-fueled binge, and I can tell you confidently today, there's not really much debt to go around at the big guys. So, you know, I think, I think we could right now today, it would get, and also I don't think everyone's going to get to like three times leverage. That's just insane. I don't think anyone wants to do that, but I definitely think there's a play, there's a way to get to eight, uh,$800 billion of credit.

1:14:47Like that, I mean, it would be insane, but that's one and a half turns from Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Google. And the two that I think are most interesting is the founder-led ones like Zuck and Sergey. They control the companies. They have voting shares. They can do whatever the fuck they want. So if they woke up tomorrow and said, get me a turn of EBITDA on this bad boy, they could get it. Now, that'd be really crazy because they make a crap ton of money. I actually have the number right now. So right now, I think, yeah. Meta's cash on hand at the end of last year was around$77 billion. As of the end of June, it was down to$47 billion and just will continue to drop throughout the year.

1:15:33So they already did that. I think it was like a$30 billion. They're not even close. They're not even close, man. I mean, so, okay, I have the numbers right now. Net debt is$17 billion. Net debt for Google is negative 56. That means they have more cash than debt. Oracle is$94 billion, which is a crap ton. They're pretty much, they're not tapped out, but they really, pretty much, even though it has to go up for them to raise more. Meta's at$2.4 billion in debt. And then Amazon's$58 billion in debt. So Meta and Google specifically, which are ironically the ones who are founder led, they have so much free cash, or they have so much cash they could raise if they want to they're both have they both have like big gush cash and they're both founder-led like that to me is you know that's that's the next leg man and and also yeah but like sorry who doesn't want to lose yeah well why are you not putting nvidia in that camp founder led they have 50 billion in cash they you know are not levered yet like they could also lever up and start investing more aggressively right well they're doing they're they're enjoying some customer, you know, demand guarantees, which are, which are, yeah.

1:16:43What's the story around, around NVIDIA? I think, I think NVIDIA is focused on a different level of the stack, right? Because NVIDIA is like, Hey, we are an infrastructure provider and you know, we're having like all these long lead time things need so much capital and time to get there. The thing that NVIDIA wants to backstop, in my opinion, is the Neo clouds. And so you're already starting to see that with like some of the, the Neo cloud purchases that are happening or like the neocloud backstopping that happens at like um lambda or even core wave to a certain extent what happens is they buy essentially flex capacity for research gpus for nvidia so they can get better at programming like gem essentially but i think the thing um yeah i think nvidia is much more focused on their part of the infrastructure ecosystem to be a backstop instead of purchasing gpu hours right they're not they're not in the market to you know they're a seller and so so So, you know, if they woke up one day and said, hey, we're going to just start buying this stuff in mass to make a model, you'd be like, what the fuck's going on?

1:17:41I just wonder if the NVIDIA story, like if they get in on this like debt boom, it instantiates itself as like they lever up and then they basically have instead of$50 billion to throw around, they have like$200 billion to throw around. And then that goes into equity purchases of companies that are doing, that are purchasing GPUs. And it sounds really circular, but like they are just another vehicle for credit to absorb like credit interest because they're such a big company. Yeah, I do think that's possible. But I think I just don't think I mean, you see that in some of the smaller investments, but I think they're really focused on the neocons and the data center side, like the infrastructure around their ecosystem.

1:18:23Do you think do you think Satya might be feeling like he went a little risk off too early? yeah i think so and and and this guy over here is listening to transistor radio so uh microsoft's back like i think they're i think they're going to step back into the market in a big way like uh especially on the mou after open ai and also mai they're starting to be very focused on like i expect them to be back in the marketplace now effectively but i still don't you know so i think what happened is this giant build out in 23 where they said yes to every single leasing opportunity possible and then they like there was a top-down pause and now they're starting to pick up the pieces be like no no actually now by pausing we have to pick back up so i think um satya definitely feels like i don't know he was definitely in first place for a long time and would have if he just kept pushing i think he would have kept in first place and now you have like you know oracle popping in and being like yeah like i'll essentially steal all your business if you let me we'll come in at a lower lower price like i'm just gonna lever my entire balance sheet for it but we're talking about like the four-year guide is a hundred billion dollars man like that's insane so that hundred billion dollars arguably should have been all microsoft's and that's you know that's that's up to them and they will tell you um in public meetings that like you know it's lower roi for them and sure that's that's the case but i think microsoft is definitely being conservative and they have the biggest balance sheet so they're i kind of don't expect them to be the first player i think of it as like kind of like um what is it called like opec you need a slippery person to essentially defect and the slippery defectors is meta and google in my opinion those are the two biggest and so when they start to really get into the game all of a sudden they're gonna be like whoa this is attacking my business model and i'm losing market share and that's when um that's when the other guys come back in in a big way yeah uh do you think soar is gonna move uh any of these like gpu build-up plans like sam was getting kind of mocked for saying like oh we're gonna have to pick between i was to be clear yeah i was the one saying i said uh i just thought it was i mean i thought the lot the timing of going out and saying yeah there's a very real possibility in the future that we'll have to choose between curing cancer and free education for everyone and then a week later we launch you know the most it feels like intensive product intensive slop yeah um yeah but i mean we got some we got some news on api pricing it sounds like it's 32 cents a generation like it feels like it might not be moving the needle as much on the on the inference side or actually like like is Sora going to make them GPU poor I don't know if you have a view on that it's 30 sorry it's 32 cents per inference what's the time frame on that uh I think that's an eight well it's per second per second okay so it's almost three bucks for a for a 10 for a 10 second clip okay so that's actually like on par with VO3 that's pretty it's pretty it's pretty intense That's pretty expensive.

1:21:16And they give you, what, 10 credits a day or something? So if there's hardcore users out there, they're generating$30 a day. What is that? $1 ,000 a month. Like it adds up if you get a million DAUs on there. Like that's a lot. Yeah, I think they probably have more. They have the potential to do much more than a million DAUs. I mean they're definitely compute rich, man. The Pulse thing, have you guys been doing Pulse at all? Yeah, I have. They generate those images for you. and you're like, oh, a little personalized slot feed for me. Like, that feels great. I know. On launch day, we were reacting to it, and John was very impressed.

1:21:53For me, it was like three out of the five images that I looked at were, like, great, and then, like, two out of the five, I'm like, you could have just not generated this one. This is just absolutely garbage, you know? Yeah. What do you think about... It's going to get better. What do you think? We had a question in the chat from Bobby. he says, asking about, like, what do you think about public sentiment risk? It feels like I've never seen more hatred of AI from non-tech folks than in the last week or so. And you're seeing data centers just getting kind of, like, blocked. That feels like a potentially, you know, it's certainly going to be a roadblock at a bunch of different stages of this build-out.

1:22:40Yeah, I think that that definitely is a newer roadblock that is getting more real, because let's be real, up until now, no one cared. It's like such a small part of the big picture. But I still think the reason why I think we're going to go bravely into the future is everyone else seems to be pretty on board. And I think the one that really helps is the Trump administration is like super duper on board. They're like, hey, whatever, we're going to tear off the shit out of everyone. But we're going to we're going to completely make up for the weakness in personal consumption by massively investing.

1:23:10And, you know, it's like, we're going to get the biggest check from every company in the world, every nation in the world. And the only thing anyone wants to spend anything on right now is GPUs. And so they're like, F it, we're building more GPUs. And so you're, you're seeing all these huge announcements. And I think that that's the, you know, that's, that's kind of the thing that will kind of push it back. I mean, if Trump is being like, dude, from the government itself, I'm blessing you to buy more GPUs. That's kind of, I think, the thing that really holds it together and makes it possibly much crazier from here.

1:23:40The public backlash thing, I think that it really comes back to you have to have that feedback loop work all the way to the right decision maker, not just some random person. Like, yeah, I'm seeing that read it on the news, too. But like Mark Zuckerberg or Satya has to wake up and be like, what am I doing? Right. Right now, everyone in their camp, all the closest advisors and trusted people are being like, spend more, spend more. the government uh you know trump is yeah i mean the dinner the dinner everybody wanted to say the biggest number right it was even even zuck threw out a probably a bigger number than he meant to because he heard someone it seemed like he just heard someone else say a big number and he didn't want to say a smaller number oh how much am i good for how much he's like he's like on his phone right now i was like yeah okay yeah i have a one one one more question uh how long do you think xai can maintain this level of invest you know basically like this level of investment without being able to back it up with real revenue growth

1:24:48because it seems like this last financing they were having to tell like the journal or some other publication like we're not having any trouble fundraising which usually means like you're having not the easiest time if people are kind of poking around i i mean okay so the same way i'm not going to bet against sam altman's ability to raise i'm definitely not going to bet against uh elon musk's ability to raise like sam altman is like the newest kid on the block but if there's someone that like you should never essentially short ever in the history time it's elon musk and the other thing i think that's like much more important with that is elon's back in the seat he's the ceo of tesla and he like actually has the compensation so he's like fuck it all right i'm actually i'm very locked in yeah um and you know if we're talking about mag 7 you know there's a lot of market cap um tesla tesla oh yeah so yeah but but that's that's what i'm saying that the yeah it just feels like i wouldn't be shocked if a year from now xai was a part of was merged in with tesla 100 100 and then that you know and that would actually be a creed tesla stock would pump on that even though because people would do it yeah and so that's gonna but i'd say i would would crush because then they're then they they're all of a sudden attached to one of the largest financial entities in the entire world totally like that's that's you know we're talking trillion trillion dollar market cap right like that's yeah real fucking like you can take that and turn it around you can loan it out and you can you can move big checks yeah it's very very non-trivial for them to raise 10 20 billion dollars off yeah yeah what i was getting at was basically this last financing where they're going and raising capital at 200 billion.

1:26:27And those investors have just been getting pitched anthropic at like 170 with crazy, with a crazy revenue ramp and a bunch of, you know, real, real, you know, traction and code gen. The investors are looking around being like, okay, like I'll, I'm going to, I'll give you the cash, but like, I don't know the next time around, if there's going to be the same level of appetite. There are some really big pockets that back Elon. I wouldn't bet against the Elon sphere, because you have to remember, he made a lot of billionaires out of it. For example, Larry Allison is always on the phone. I don't know if you knew that.

1:27:03He was good for a lot of X when they took down Twitter. You can see a lot of big people come out of the woodworks. Larry's flush now. He's got a lot of equity to spend. These people can come out of the woodworks. I had a theory that we were kicking around earlier that I could see it because Larry was a big investor in the original X takeover, right? There's this iconic text exchange where Elon and Larry are talking and he's like, I'm good for a billion. And he's like, Elon's like, okay, you might want to do two or something. Yeah, whatever you recommend. And so I could see a world where X, the social platform, does not go to Tesla and get spun into the basically paramount, this whole like media conglomerate.

1:27:53Right. Because I just don't, you know, especially with XAI, a part of Tesla, it's not like Tesla sitting there and being like, we need to be able to pump timeline posts instantly into every Tesla in America. It just stops being quite as strategic, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't disagree with that take. That's a pretty good take. But I just think that like, you know, Elon will find a way. Whatever way that needs to happen, if that's with Oracle, if that's with Tesla, like Elon will find a way, I believe. Is there significant asset value in just Colossus 2? Like it is the biggest supercomputer.

1:28:30It's this massive data center. It seems like it was very hard to build. It seems like all the hyperscalers would love to have it. Sam would love to have it. If you just ran an auction for it, do you have an idea of what the value of Colossus 2 would be if there was breakup value there? You know, at today's value, I mean, I would say it's probably like tens of billions. Tens of billions. Maybe not tens. I would say tens, actually. Tens. tense. Are we including Colossus too? Yes. Okay, then yes, tense. Yeah, yeah. I'm just thinking like the XAI assets like sure the business isn't necessarily like printing profit with some massive consumer or product market fit.

1:29:20Someone would be really stoked. But someone would be stoked and there's some value. It's interesting. If you think about whatever MBS is, just that deal with Microsoft, literally scale that up and that's probably what you would buy on a TCO basis for Colossus. Like there's demand. So, okay. One last question. You got to go?

1:29:42Hairbrained theory. I want your feedback on this hot take. There's a lot of discussion over the value of TSMC and Taiwan risk, but we now have the golden visa,$2 million to bring someone to America. For a hundred billion dollars, you could bring 50 ,000 people. is there is there some world where we get into like ai talent wars but for process knowledge around semiconductor manufacturing and and we see some american entity start poaching tsmc employees in mass to get them to america um that's definitely possible i just don't feel like it's probable people have been saying there's a supply shortage yet like tsmc has a lot of like has almost a captive audience dude like if you think about it tsmc is like you know i mean it'd be like working for the government almost but like even more prestigious and killing the shit out of everything like tsmc is like the company of taiwan sure dude honestly tsmc engineers are like really underpaid as is like don't tell don't tell them right but like um on a on a dollar basis compared to even american peers and a lot of people like like china for example uh poaches very heavily so I think there's definitely a chance but I feel like you have to take the entire know all it's not just the tool, it's the tool, the process, everyone, you'd have to take the whole fab, but yeah I think that would be I think it would be sick dude, I think if Intel could do it, right?

1:31:07Intel should do it, Intel should do it because they have the golden visa, they have the backstop from Trump, they have all the investors coming in, they'll probably have an open AI deal soon who knows, and then they have all the money and they can just bring people over, anyway we won't take any more of your time, thank you so much for hopping on the show Super fun, Doug. Always a good time. Nice to see you. We'll talk to you soon. Nice to see you guys, yeah. Talk soon. Bye. Let me tell you about Turbo Puffer. Search every byte. Serverless vector and full-time search. From first principles on object storage.

1:31:32Fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. You also heard Doug talking about agentic commerce. It's more important than ever to get your brand mentioned on ChatGPT. Go to Profound. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Our horse post popped off. We took our first day off on Friday. But we did give you some facts about our horse in the studio, which you can see behind Jordy Hayes over there. And we got a wonderful reply from Eric, who's working on Soil Tech. He says, the horse as a symbol is deep lindy, power, camaraderie, and frontiering forward motion.

1:32:05As a Kentuckian, I can only agree. More horse content. And shares three beautiful images of horse statues throughout the ages. Incredibly underrated animal. The most underrated. Dan McCormick, Paki McCormick's brother, has launched his creatine gummy brand in Target. That's Create. A wild step in this journey that in many ways started with him posting on X. Three years ago, he was embarrassed to be starting a creatine company. He'd shy away, hedge, and downplay when asked about it in real life on X. Surrounded by a bunch of like-minded freaks, I could post openly about my excitement and the business's progress.

1:32:39I've shared a lot less over the last two years, but my bullishness... Actually, the timing on Create, Dan's perfect timing. is kind of insane. It felt like a supplement that already had almost perfect saturation. Totally. Right? I think anybody that I knew that was working out multiple days a week was already using creatine. But never doubt American demand for supplements in gummy format. Never doubt it again. Never doubt Elon. Never doubt an Irishman. Never doubt demand for gummies. Oh, this is fun. Rampman acquisition today. They bought Jolt AI. to help their engineers build faster. Jolt is a world-class team of engineers who have spent years solving some of the hardest problems in developer productivity.

1:33:23Today, Ramp is welcoming them to the team. They're scaling the AI platform and reimagining how software and finance get built. Said, from a talent perspective, says Kareem Atiyah from Ramp. Ramp's engineering team is made up of founders, math olympiads, and AI researchers. Kareem's goal is to hire elite technical talent and then get out of their way. for his part, Joltz Spectre, the founder, admitted in an interview that he didn't expect to get acquired by a company like Ramp, but that he's extremely happy. It's where his team landed. The trio will be working on a number of things, including Ramp's internal engineering platform.

1:33:57So congrats. Fantastic. Hit that gong, John.

1:34:05First hit of the week. It's good to be back. Technium says you can now invest in NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, ARM, OpenAI, Mistral, CoreWeave, Nebius, and more with just one ticker. NVIDIA. Of course. We also had a fun... So, Amparic says word. Is he continuing? He's posting again. Is he continuing to run? We also got some gong analysis. This is from Ethan Frost on September 30th. He said, I analyzed every gong hit on TBPN. Here's what I found. And Tyler, can you take us through this post of what the breakdown was? And do you think this was manually tagged or was there AI involved? It's a pretty remarkable breakdown of all the different gong hits, how much they raised, and then how loud the gong hit was.

1:35:00But explain this post to us. Yes. I think the main thesis was like, are gong hits on 2PN, are they louder as funding increases? Yes. You can see the correlation is like slightly there. I think it's a bit hard because of like sometimes the microphone is just a little bit further away. Sure. So it wasn't like, you know, a crazy kind of correlation. But yeah, he basically just indexed all of the gong hits that we've basically ever done. Yes. And then done a ton of data. So like series A, series B, he breaks it all down. He also breaks down between you guys. Okay. So there's some good facts here. Who's louder on the gong, me or Jordy?

1:35:37Let's look. Definitely Jordy. Definitely. Jordy? For sure. Okay. Definitely me. Yeah, John is standing more often than Jordy when he's hitting the gong. But Jordy throws. How do I hit the gongs? But I throw the mallets. Yeah, Jordy throws the mallets a lot more often. Now I've got a clean shot. I've got to really rip it. these are so funny total gongs I heard by day of the week why are there so many on Saturday and Sunday we don't record on Saturday or Sunday I was very confused by this maybe the weekly recap we post sometimes anyways fantastic analysis the toss let's see the toss hit that's a funny one underutilized Anyway, thank you for your service, Ethan Frost.

1:36:32Legend. Buko Capital says, I put 10 % of my portfolio into reshoring semis, and it just wasn't even close to enough. Easiest money of our lifetime. Listen to the president. Should have brought a shovel, not a teaspoon. That's true. Yeah, very interesting to see where the Intel story goes. I wonder if there will be an open AI deal for CPUs or something. Justine Moore was sharing that Taylor Swift is using AI-generated videos to promote her new album. Yeah. I was surprised to see that. Biggest artist in the world. Usually there's like a ton of pushback when big artists use AI. Yeah, it feels like she would get.

1:37:08She's a prime cancellation target. It might be happening. I haven't followed it too closely. Patrick McKenzie says, I think the economic logic of this is inevitable and that you'll need video to get your N plus one marketing post through the noise on social media, even as Taylor Swift. And your choices are either 100K shoot per post or a relatively junior employee with some taste. Yeah. And yeah, it's a good take. Yeah. There is this development of like, will everything be instantiated in every possible format? So if you have a startup launch video or announcement, you'll write a pithy tweet and then you'll write a blog post and you'll also drop a podcast and then you'll also drop a vibe reel and a video and a two hour documentary and they will all be instantiated from just a short fact sheet that then goes out.

1:37:57And it begs the question of like, where will the instantiation live? Will I, as the consumer of content, say, I want to consume these sources in video format? That's kind of the notebook LM model is like, I am saying I want to consume the internet in a podcast format. With ChatGPT, you're kind of like, no matter what question you ask, no matter what the sources are, it comes to you as a neatly organized research report that's a couple thousand words with bullet points. And it's not this, it's that every time. But then there's the other side, which lives on the creator side, which says I should instantiate my idea, my concept, my take as a TikTok reel, as a YouTube video, as a podcast, as a video.

1:38:48And I do that on my side. And I'm wondering where it lives long-term. like it because there is a world where you can go to where taylor swift doesn't need to generate the ai generated video because i as the taylor swift can't span can go to sora and it knows that i'm a fan of taylor swift and it automatically generates it for me based on just her text post or yeah or she could just share she could just share the prompt in text in the notes app and then you could just imagine imagine it exactly maybe i don't know it'll be somewhere in between Ethan Frost is in the chat saying, let's go. Let's go.

1:39:22Hey, what's up, Ethan? Thanks so much. Great to see you. Thank you for analyzing the gunk. Yes. What else? 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. I would go out on a limb and say everything that OpenAI launched today was almost certainly planned and linear. For sure. For sure. Oh, this is a fun one. And so Kareem Jetta says, introducing Gaslight Garage, a box where I put my phones and feed them AI-generated audio nonsense to make them think I want to buy stuff.

1:39:56Practical AI for the people, Gaslight Garage. And Snowy, or S-N-W-Y, says, I tried this once after getting into an argument with my parents about whether your phone listens or not. Where do you stand on this, Jordy? Do you think your phone is listening to you? and such a tough one because everybody has like an example or two yep but if you think about we talked about how many ads you get and then i saw how many different things you you see how many ads you get over a multi-year period yep how many products you talk about over a multi-year period yep and then at some point or another they're gonna like perfect alignment between the two.

1:40:38And then also you have to factor in people that search for something once and then, you know, on a certain network and then forgot about it or someone else in a household search for something and then somebody else in the household gets served, right? There's a lot of different ways to explain away the listening aspect. But I, yeah, I noticed that Some of the spookiest ads that I would ever see would be, it would come from a conversation that I had with a person in real life where like, yeah, the phones could have been listening, but more likely, and then I saw an ad. So they tell me, oh, you got to test out these headphones.

1:41:16And I see an ad for those exact headphones the next day. And I'm like, that's weird that I just heard about that. And now I'm seeing an ad. How did that happen? I know I didn't search for it. I know I didn't send any data signal to my phone or my apps. but then I realized that it's like well if they just ordered those headphones and that data of them shopping and them going through that checkout flow is encoded in their Instagram profile and then it knows that we hung out because we're friends on the network and we like each other's posts and we were texting with each other on the app and stuff and then it can say well Jordi just like these headphones John and Jordi were just hanging out showed John the the like they might be similar consumers.

1:41:58I feel like that can be like kind of spooky, but not, but very like, um, a clear flow that would come from the data. Um, but anyway, uh, Snowy said, got two iPhone sixes, both wiped and connected to two different wifi networks with independent VPNs said keywords to one and different ones to another, never an earshot of, of each other with multiple apps, Insta, Facebook, Twitter open with their accounts and basic usage. And the ads were never what I said they were basically always location-based slash pretty basic things. My running theory is that whoever thinks their phone is listening is just predictable enough that it knows not because it heard them.

1:42:34I think that's probably right. Plus, there's this massive incentive that if the phones were listening and targeting, there would be a huge incentive to become a whistleblower. Like there's been a whole tour of folks who have like left meta, become influencers. You can go get a book deal. You can get a book deal. Exactly. And you can become famous. You can get a speaking tour. You can get a TED talk. Exactly, exactly. You can get a government job. Probably. I don't know how much somebody at Meta wants the government. Do you get paid to testify? Maybe they should do that. Appearance fee for testimony on Capitol Hill.

1:43:03Let's make it happen. Anyway, Numeral, sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Someone in the chat is like, I was just thinking about Numeral. How did they know? He's speaking to me directly. Well, you and Tyler should debate this one. Mr. B said, when AI videos are just as good as normal videos, I wonder what that will do to YouTube and how it will impact millions of creators making content for a living. Scary times. And Justine Moorhead. It's kind of crazy that biggest YouTuber comes out and just scares everybody. because I think if you dig into this at all, it's pretty easy to show how AI presents an incredible opportunity for existing creators.

1:43:54Like, yes, some amount of attention will go to content, will go to net new content creators that are just using the tools better or more focused, but nowhere in here does it say that if you're making a living from content today, you can't use AI to make significantly more content, significantly better content. It's much more of an opportunity than a threat in its current form. Yeah, I also think it's funny coming from Mr. Beast because this is like slop on slop hate. Mr. Beast is like, I would not want my kids to be watching Mr. Beast videos. If you watch them, it's just like the cuts are like every one and a half seconds.

1:44:37It's like pretty insane already. so I like I think um Mr. Beast I will also if you remember if you remember he wasn't uh he tried to create a tool that used AI to make thumbnails and he eventually rolled that feature back because it was taking away uh revenue potential revenue from thumbnail artists yeah yeah so I mean I would say that his style of content is much more susceptible, I guess, to being taken over by the app. See, I totally disagree because I think part of the reason, like I can see what you're saying in the sense that you can argue like this is slop, I don't want people to, I wouldn't want my kids to watch it.

1:45:22At the same time, it's very clearly the opposite. It's the opposite of slop in that it's like massive, massive productions, real humans, real money on the line. Don't worry, Jimmy. People want to know that you made 100 people stay in that circle for a month. Exactly. It's so much more entertaining. If you just took Mr. Beast-style content and made it using AI, it would not be nearly as entertaining, right? Yeah, people want the suffering. Or you could just watch two robots play chess, right? Yeah. Okay, you can say that it has this big budget, but I don't think you can't say that Mr. Beast is like, oh, it's like this auteur cinematic content.

1:46:05Like it's still like, there's like, okay, it's like, they have real people, but above that, it's just like, this is like very stimulating, like fast paced content. Yeah, but a big part of it is the human suffering element. AI, you know, wait until AI can actually suffer like a human. Yeah, I mean, you could, I'm trying to think of the most recent example, but there is something about just like the fact-checking chain of like, if you're watching someone do like, I bet when the X Games happens or when Red Bull does their next stunt, like that will get more viral views than the Stephen Hawking novelty X Games video, just because there's something that we know that the fact that the X Games is a real organization that they own, that they're not posting AI generated content.

1:46:55And they've made that commitment to only show videos or Red Bulls only showing videos of humans doing wingsuiting through a helicopter off of a cliff or whatever. And so there's something that just hits like more emotionally, like it's more emotionally resonant. And then there's also all of these like downstream, like behind the scenes, like the Mr. Beast, like are the videos fake has been a long time debated. He's kind of one beat those allegations every time. But like the incentive to like kind of see like a whistleblower on someone who's like faking their content will be like at an all time high.

1:47:33But I would imagine that the institutions that still make people suffer will do quite well. But I don't know. I mean, I think it will definitely like widen the gap. Like if you're making content that is at all substitutable with slop, like you're done. but if you're making content that cannot be challenged whatsoever and is so like uniquely human uh but yeah where does mr yeah a good example a good example is like our is is andrew huberman threatened by someone else coming out and creating an ai based persona yeah that tries to do the same thing that he does right in terms of like creating long form content around various health protocols and health topics.

1:48:20And I think that even if you could put the level of craft in that the Huberman lab team does, do you want to be getting health advice from an imaginary robot? Or do you want health advice from Andrew Huberman because he's 50 and he's absolutely jacked? He's living his best life, right? It's like where the content is coming from matters a lot. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, the provenance matters. People care about other humans. They're anti-clanker at their core in many ways. Well, let me tell you about Fin.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.

1:49:05In other reshoring, we're not just reshoring chips, we're also reshoring Sharpies. Apparently, Sharpie found a way to make pens more cheaply by manufacturing them in the United States It's Newell Brand's Move production. I need one of these. They need to make the red, white, and blue Sharpie pack immediately. I need these. This is actually mentioned in the Wall Street Journal article. Apparently, where is it? Donald Trump uses a Sharpie all the time or something like that. For signatures, right? Yeah. Where is it? Pen barrels whirl along automated assembly lines that rapidly fill them with ink.

1:49:42At least half a billion Sharpie markers are churned out here every year. each one made of six parts. Only the felt tip is imported from Japan. It didn't used to be this way back in 2018. Many Sharpies were made abroad. That's when Chris Peterson, who was the CFO of Sharpie Maker, Newell Brands, challenged his team to answer the question, how could they keep Newell from becoming obsolete compared with factories in Asia? I felt like we had an opportunity to dramatically improve our U.S. manufacturing. He's now the CEO. And he makes all 93 colors of Sharpie at a 37-year-old factory. And they did it without reducing employee count and without raising prices.

1:50:19But to get to this place, it took close to$2 billion in investments across the company. And of course, this is a$2 billion market cap company. Okay. Book value to market cap is one-to-one, apparently, if they did all those cap-its. This company has... I want to get the CEO on the show at some point. President Trump uses a custom Sharpie. He's slapped high tariffs on many imports with the goal of prompting more companies to do what Newell has done and bring manufacturing back to the U.S. But Filippo Falorni, an analyst at Citi, said few companies in the sector have the resources to replicate Newell's move.

1:50:58Well, I think we're ready for our next guest. Ready? Let's bring in Celine from Loyal. But first, let me tell you about Adio. Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. And gets started for free. Let me also tell you about public. Investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing. Industry-leading yields. There you are. And they're trusted by millions. Yeah, we're hoping to get a real horse in the studio at some point. I can help with that. Yes? I have like three. No way. Wait, you actually have horses?

1:51:32Yeah, yeah. I'm a crazy horse girl. Where? Yes. Petaluma. Petaluma? Yeah. Do you live there? No. No, it's SF. Cool. But I do the anti-commute. Okay. Yeah. What is that? Like you drive up against the traffic to North Bay to go ride your horses. Okay, okay. I've taken investor calls while on a horse. Okay. No way. Almost fell off on an investor call while on a horse. Wait, walk me through. Like, are they the same breed? Like, what's the story with the three horses? Why three? Horses are potentially the worst investment you could ever make. I do not recommend them. They are worse. I feel like there's some, like, seed valuation joke you could make here about horses.

1:52:07anyhow they tend to break themselves they're like self-destructive we were thinking about getting a horse at one point we wanted to race in the kentucky derby and give it like some funny name we were we were gonna call it the ramp yeah and we were and we were running the numbers and it wasn't that crazy as a marketing well yeah you get into it and you're like okay maybe it's like 100k for the horse and then naming rights a month so like but it's such a funny stuff someone's gonna do it now that we somebody's gonna do it dude that color would look sick on a horse though Like imagine the racing stripes.

1:52:35I love it. Anyway, sorry. Kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company. Hi. Yeah. I'm Celine Hollywood. I'm the founder and CEO of Loyal, and we're developing drugs to extend dog lifespan. Amazing. Horses next? Horses next. Venture capitalists next. Humans eventually. Eventually. What was the inspiration for the company? Did you know that you wanted to start with animals, or was that purely like the FDA? No. So I actually was working in human longevity. So I worked with a previous guest of y 'all's, Laura Deming, at her venture fund for a few years. And we were just frustrated because nobody was trying to develop a drug explicitly for lifespan extension.

1:53:13Right. And we're like, this is obviously like obviously that was a promise. Yeah, that was everybody was promising it, but nobody was working on it specifically. Not directly. No, they're all kind of going these indirect paths. And so we became obsessed with how to do this. Realize to do it in humans, it would take a lot of time, a lot of money, but you could do it in dogs. It's a super crazy market. I hear one of you is a dog person. I am. I am. My dog was supposed to attend, but I have to leave right after. And so he's busy chasing squirrels. He's a 10-year-old Newfoundland. So he needs. Oh, wait.

1:53:40So you understand this? No, yeah. Because we're starting with a big dog's short lifespan. Yeah, on your homepage. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For a while, at least. Yeah, no. Newfies are the shit. Yeah, no. It was like the dog was pitched to me as like, look, every day after year five is like a miracle because they're known to have extremely short lifespans. And so I kind of set myself up for like, look, like I'm not coming in. You get a golden retriever. You're not thinking like, yeah, it's going to live for 40 years. So I just went into it thinking, okay, I'm getting a Newfoundland. It's six to eight years or something.

1:54:10And he's done very well. He's 10 years old. Good job. We need to sequence your dog. I'll send you a saliva kit. We actually have an investor that has two giant new feeds that they bring around everywhere. Like on his plane. I should do that. It's hilarious. Well, that's why he's living so long. That helps. Flying private helps. Do not take your dog's commercial. Yeah. But I actually got convinced to take their term sheet because they sent me their Pinterest board, which was just new fees all the way down. I love new fees. They're the best. Fully committed. They're so good. So, yeah, on the like the fact that there's never been a drug explicitly for longevity.

1:54:46Is that just because like in order to have a drug, you need a like a problem or some sort of like it needs to be a treatment for a specific condition and just death is not a condition. And so is that the right narrative? Yeah, like the way to think about it is to be able to have a drug to approve to do something, you have to prove that the drug is doing that thing. Sure. And so if I gave you guys a longevity drug and I was like, oh, let's see if it extends your lifespan. This weighs 50 years. Yeah, be following you for decades and the company's going to be long dead and all of that. It's also hard to prove that the drug was the catalyst for longer life, right?

1:55:19It could have been, oh, they just got a lot of sun or they walked a lot. There's a lot of variability, right? The decisions you make, the yerba mate being pro or anti-longevity, whatever it is, all of these things vary aging. It's one of the most complex phenotypes, but we all go through it. And it's the same thing is true in dogs, but the good thing about dogs, at least when you're developing a longevity drug, is they age much faster. So you can see if something is working in a period of time, that's much more reasonable. And you can theoretically have a much more isolated study. Is that right?

1:55:53What do you mean isolated? Well, I just imagine like it's easier to control factors in a dog's life versus like a bunch of humans. Like a dog is not going on a bender in Las Vegas. That is, yes, yeah. So you can just be like, yeah, we know exactly what the dog's diet was pretty much every single day. Maybe it got a new cheeseburger once. But a human is like using Diet Coke one day and then some alcohol and then this and then bender and then Burning Man. Who knows? There's so many confounding factors. Dogs didn't have a cheeky cigarette habit earlier in their life that they don't talk about. No, it's true.

1:56:26Yeah, dogs just, it's a lot, it's still complicated, but it's much more simple. And then you also have these individual breed variances, which teach you a lot about humans too, right? Like why does a newfie have such a short lifespan versus a golden versus a chihuahua? You can study these things in a much more quickly way. Yeah, why not mice though? I feel like there's a lot of mice studies. It works in mice. You know, I love mice. I don't think mice are a multi-billion dollar market. Yeah, that's the thing. The commercial opportunity with dogs, if you ask a dog owner, how much would you pay to have an extra year of healthy lifespan for your dog?

1:57:01And I'm sure there's a wide range between like$1 ,000 and some people that are like, I would pay any price. I will, you know, liquidate my 401k for another two years. It's actually really interesting. like people, it's not actually really at all correlated to socioeconomic status or how much, you know, people, cash people have in the bank. They will just spend anything. A certain subset of the population will spend anything on their dog. I've had people offer me$50 ,000 for the drug before. And I would like to note to the FDA that I said no. But I've actually gotten a lot of offers like this. The willingness to pay is insane.

1:57:37The market is huge. And so we could hopefully make a multi-billion dollar company around this and then use that revenue to fund more research. Yeah. Maybe into horses. Love it. Yeah. What was the initial - Yes, please. What was the initial target, kind of the biotech side of the business? Like, how do you know what to target? Like, how do you narrow it down? Like, there's a lot of different life extensions, NAD and telomere extension and just, you know, cardiac stuff. There's like a million different sub-indications that people think about when they're thinking about their own longevity. Yeah.

1:58:08How do you narrow it down? What do you focus on? So the way we thought about it is we wanted something that was as broad as possible. So as, you know, efficacious and relevant to the chihuahua as it is to another dog. Right. And even if they have different food or different behaviors or, you know, more inbred or less inbred, that it still may work. So that was one. And two, you want something that's relatively simple. Right. Aging is so unbelievably complicated that when you add any additional variables, like things just become exponential really quickly. And so where we actually started is what you were talking about early with newfies, with a short lifespan of big dogs.

1:58:43Because it turns out the genetic driver of dog size, the thing that makes a newfie grow really, really big in puberty or makes a chihuahua not grow big in puberty, also genetically controls the rate of aging of that dog. So your newfie, well, maybe not your newfie, but the average newfie is actually aging at a much faster rate. And so that was a really nice place to start because, A, it's something that everyone understands, especially big dog lovers. They're like, I know the heartbreak of losing a Great Dane or losing a large Labrador. And it was like simple mechanistically. And it was applicable to a wide swath of the canine population.

1:59:18Basically, any dog over a certain weight would be eligible and has this problem, right? Because they're not living as long as a chihuahua that lives for 16 years. Every other bigger dog has a somewhat shorter lifespan than that theoretical maxima. So, I mean, how do you explain what the drugs are actually doing? so basically that's a black box unfortunately yeah basically the way to think about it is you know all puppies are born approximately the same size but a great dane puppy has super high levels of these proteins called growth hormone and igf1 and these are circulating at really high levels and basically binding to their cells they're saying grow divide grow divide and that's why your burner puppy or newfie puppy is getting so big yep that's normal it happens in humans too but it shuns down significantly once you're fully grown sure in a big dog it doesn't yeah so big dogs still have these super high levels of these growth hormones circulating around that are basically making the dog turn over at a faster rate.

2:00:11So what the drug does is it inhibits those levels, it brings them down to a level that's seen naturally in dogs. So think bringing a new level down to an Aussie shepherd or something similar. And this is like this idea that if you reduce growth hormone, if you reduce IGF-1, it extends lifespan. It's actually been shown all the way from worms to mice to a multitude of organisms. And there's even humans, centenarians, that have the same genetic things that chihuahuas do. And are biophilies? They're spiritually chihuahuas. So is the, like... I think that's an insult. Is the scientific, like, phrase, like, IGF-1 inhibitors, essentially?

2:00:48Yeah. And are biohackers using that, like, wild, like, against the FDA? Yeah, how much can you learn from these sort of fringe biohackers? Oh, God. These NF1 studies. Is there anything to learn or just... Well, yes, there's always things to learn. You know, it's funny. People actually often will supplement growth hormone in IGF-1 because it makes your muscles really big. Oh, sure. And it's very aesthetic. It's kind of like human growth hormone. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It does not increase function, but it does increase, like, muscle size. So a lot of people might not be happy when they hear about this.

2:01:21Interesting. It doesn't correlate with strength at all. It's just like, oh. Gives you the pump. Yeah, you guys can't tell. I'm on it. That's even awkward. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, plenty. I think the people that are taking HGH are doing that specifically entirely for aesthetic reasons and they're post-strength. Yes. Yes, they are post-strength. But are there people in the biohacking community that swear by it or are they optimistic that it will have an effect on longevity for them? Yeah. I mean, this mechanism is pretty consensus as a longevity mechanism. it's not going to be as like this specific one, the big dog short lifespan, isn't going to be as relevant to humans because like I'm not living twice as long as you guys, right?

2:02:04Me being so short that I'm having to like sit on my feet. Sure. But a new fee does live twice as, lives half as long as a chihuahua. Exactly. Exactly. So think of it as kind of like a biological hack to have a foot into a very, very, very complicated biological problem. Yep. What's the current understanding of why women live longer than men? I mean... We just do less crazy shit. It's just risk-taking? Yeah, it's risk-taking. I think it was like heart attacks or something. No, I actually don't know. There's like a real reason, but I don't know. Yeah, I like the idea that dudes are just wing-seating.

2:02:37Dudes are just fucking insane. So walk me through the actual process to commercialize and grow the business. I imagine the FDA has a number of different subgroups, veterinary medicines. One of them, is that a more receptive, faster pathway than just the traditional drugs for humans pathway? Are you accelerated there? Yeah. So the FDA on the veterinary side is super stringent, right? It matters a lot in some ways, you know, almost more because a dog can't talk. So you're really trusting the FDA and you're trusting your veterinarian that this like pill you're giving isn't going to like cause some disaster.

2:03:16Sure. But the nice thing with canines is that the incentives are really, really aligned. right like everybody wants dogs to live a longer healthier life and preventative medicine is really where it is with dogs because you know there's no insurance nobody's getting half a million dollar cancer car t therapies or whatever right it's it's always a dog owner having to pay out of pocket so most of the really successful dog drugs today are already preventative medicines think like heartworm prevention right it's reducing the risk of your dog getting a disease that if you give the drug you'll never see them get that disease yeah right flea and ticks same thing there's a lot of categories of medicines like this.

2:03:53So yeah, it's actually been really fun to work with them. And then the new administration is like, well, it's a little complicated, like super pro longevity. Right. And so it'll be interesting to see how that maybe impacts the human side where things are very regulated, but also just a bit more complicated. But it seems absolutely critical, even just from a fiscal standpoint, that we figure out how to get people to live longer and healthier. Yes. It's, you know, people, when you talk about longevity, they tend to be like, oh but like you're just gonna make the rich live longer and like the fact of matter is the rich already live longer because they can also access better cancer meds better you know doctors I do like preventative screens all the time the vast majority of Americans could never afford that right versus like a daily cheap pill that broadly extends your quality of life and broadly extends your lifespan it not only helps that individual to potentially prevent them or delay them developing cancer it also helps their children who aren't going to have to become caretakers before their own careers have taken off.

2:04:52It means that they can have more flexibility in pursuing doing the next great thing. I think actually like, you know, better health of the population is one of the best great equalizers we could bring. Yeah. How closely does your business track to what I'm loosely familiar with in the biotech world where it's like you're in the lab, you develop the drug, then you test it on like dog, monkey, mice, something like that. You take that data through phase one, phase two. It's a multi-year process. The company might IPO and then get bought by Merck or Pfizer at some point. That's what I think of when I think of biotech.

2:05:28Yes, we've created a new drug for this very specific cancer, but it's still a$10 million or$100 billion outcome because it fixed this one thing and it became very profitable. Is that the typical path or is it wildly different in veterinary? Dude, your biotech context is on point. I'm actually super impressed. We had a bunch of biotech investors and founders on one day when Trump was doing the most favored nation thing. He tried to get a speed on it. I don't really know where that went, but anyway. It's okay. There was almost 100 % tariff on us. Oh, really? Yeah. No way. But that got taken away.

2:06:02It's been really interesting. It's been exciting. It's all a roller coaster this year. My cortisol is just like... Perfect. That's good for longevity. My personal longevity is not benefiting from the bill. um so the way to think about it is if you're comparing to human is you do um maybe backing up a little bit the overarching themes of developing a dog drugs it takes like four to seven years basically by a combination of how effective and how lucky you are to get a dog drug approved takes about 20 to 50 million dollars um for context in humans it takes a decade to develop a human drug takes about a billion dollars to develop a human drug so you're like orders of magnitude faster orders of magnitude faster and cheaper and then actually the coolest thing and You guys have been pretty lucky, right?

2:06:42We've also been lucky, right? And like totally. Where did you catch lucky breaks? Oh my God. Well, I just feel like, I feel like the average, whenever you guys announce it, like any type of milestone, the average investor is basically sharing something to the effect of you guys don't realize like how rare this is. Like the speed at which you guys have been able to kind of just like knock down these different milestones. I mean, we've gotten the first ever efficacy approval for a longevity drug. We've created the first regulatory pathway for a drug that makes for longevity. For any species, right?

2:07:15Obviously, it's in dogs, but it's any species. And dogs actually are regulated by the same federal regs as human drugs. So it was still a really huge lift. We're running the first ever Lifespan Pivotal FDA-enabling clinical trial. All of these things are super, super hard. Obviously, we have a smart team. But, yeah, you have to get really lucky, too. We got lucky that the drugs... When you pick a drug and you're like, this is going to be our lifespan extension drug. It either is or isn't. Right. And there's nothing I can do as CEO to make this drug work if it doesn't work. Well, you can try and take 10 drugs through the pathway at the same time, potentially.

2:07:50That's kind of what we're doing. Yeah. We have like four in development. But that's really expensive. Of course. Right. So you have to pick a couple of candidates that have the most promise. And luck comes in and that like you hope one of those is the one that you picked. And you hope there isn't some like random toxicity that you find out at the 11th hour. and that like totally nukes and especially as a longevity drug there's zero tolerance for adverse events there's zero tolerance for me turning your dog because it's not like you have a bad condition that you're trying to treat exactly some side effects or or the average patient would be okay with some side effects yep it's like you're that you're going from net neutral to it has to be exactly exactly reduce quality of life yeah i mean that much i mean there's people like um what are some of the human uh the the drugs that human patients are taking i feel like peter atia and people are taking certain drugs that like rap my son yeah they like they metformin like reduces your like athletic performance they all have some like like metformin is like works by improving your metabolic fitness um which um we actually have drugs that are actually our lead drug now is developed is uh improving metabolic fitness and senior dogs is a very like robust way Like if you've ever intermittent fast or calorically restricted, that's a way to improve your metabolic fitness.

2:09:06Metformin just does that as a drug. It's an old diabetes drug. But yeah, it has a bunch of like stomach side effects. And also just when you give any drug for a long time, bad things can happen. Yeah, there's also, it can't, if somebody were to reclassify it as a, there's no incentive to reclassify metformin as a longevity drug because it's off patent. Exactly. So you would spend all this money. I didn't know that. Because there's a lot of, it's debated, right? But there's a lot of evidence that aspirin could be potentially beneficial for lifespan, but nobody would do the work to reclassify it because it's off patent.

2:09:41And you could spend a billion dollars proving that it works, and then everybody could just make it. Yep. Yep. And this is like a niche thing that actually... And so you can't even market aspirin as... No, no. It's not a viable label claim. No, no. And this is a niche reason why Loyal made a lot of sense and why I was like, okay, I guess I'm going to go and do this. You have this catch-22 when you're trying to develop a human longevity drug, which is you need something that has a ton of safety, both acutely. So you took like five of them, nothing bad is going to happen, but also over a period of time.

2:10:15If I give it to you for a decade, is it going to increase your risk of colon cancer? The only way you know that is by giving it to that person for a decade. By the time you have done that, the drug is generic. One of the really cool things about animal health is that the FDA tries to incentivize people to develop and prove that new drugs work for animal medicine. So you actually can get 10 years of exclusivity from the FDA if you develop a generic drug for a novel use case in dogs. So we have actually both. We have licensed human drugs. We have generic drugs. But it means that you are able to go in and say, look, this might not work, but it's not going to do any harm.

2:10:51And that's so important when you're trying to create regulatory pathways, when you're trying to convince veterinarians to prescribe something that's never existed before, to convince dog owners to do something they've never done before, to be able to say wholeheartedly, there's decades of data and we don't think this drug's going to do any harm. That helps. Are you guys feeling any acceleration from various AI models? It seems like we have people on the show every week that are building AI for science, AI for drug development, and foundation models dedicated to it, and yet you're here. You haven't said AI once.

2:11:26I have not said AI once. This was so funny. It was a meta point. We were working on loyal narrative stuff, and I was like, should I just let go of my ego and have an AI story? And I was like, anyhow, there's no AI in the loyal story. But I really debated it because I was like, man, I wonder if this would increase my valuation by a factor of two. What about ELNs? And that would be good for dogs, and it would be good for horses, and it would be good for humans. No, but that's saying something that you're actively doing all of this drug development. And meanwhile, there's companies coming out, and they're making the claim, at least to investors, that they're going to be able to speed up drug development, do it more efficiently, et cetera.

2:12:07So, I mean, so here's the problem. Because I'm sure you've tried to figure out how do we unlock value here. Yeah, so here's the problem with AI for drug development is I'm like, I'm not an AI person, but like I am like in terms of like technically trained, but I am, you know, sure the models are good enough that we gave them biological data. They could infer things that human scientists couldn't. The problem is we don't have those data sets. Like they don't exist for a human. I can't like say, okay, here's like your model. And if I give you the drug, how is it going to react in this part of your body, that part of your body?

2:12:39How is it going to like get reduced over time? How is it going to interact with this other drug you're on? We just don't have those data sets. Yeah, we saw this with AlphaFold. Like AlphaFold came out, protein folding solved. It turned, the biotech markets didn't really move because it turns out that actually solving protein folding problems is like 0.1 % of the job to do to get a new drug to market. You got to recruit patients and then monitor them and then talk to the FDA. design the clinical trials yeah there's so much more to do you know like our client our big longevity study that we're running in dogs right now um i think the biggest risk to is actually operational it's data quality it's dogs not dropping out it's veterinarians complying right like the biggest reason the study would fail is that if we have to throw out a bunch of data in five years because it doesn't adhere to the standards that are necessary right um so there's some interesting ai companies for like the beginnings of drug development like chai discovery is one that's trying to do basically better antibody binding design.

2:13:34That's smart. I think that makes a lot of sense. But, I mean, I'd love to be proven wrong, but I think there hasn't been, like, a moonshot for the bio data gathering on the clinical side that would be necessary to, like, model you and see what works and doesn't. Well, it's not a good – yeah. It's not a business. Yeah, it's not a business. You're taking a – even if somebody was able to raise a billion dollars with the idea it's like would they would they'd come to you and be like what do you need and then they'd be like a services provider yeah and that's the hard thing like so we're building all these biobanks out um and so we're gonna have you know potentially that one of the best data sets of translational aging um in a species that's the best model of humans that isn't humans and so maybe we'll be able to do it from then but like i would i would feel disingenuous for me to say like yeah that's a strategy because just like no one knows like biology is like the ultimate black box and it's the ultimate humbler honestly what about peptides are dogs yet are dogs on ozempic um actually so this is my favorite fun fact everyone is like oh are you just developing like ozempic for dogs and the answer is no because people don't want their dog to not be hungry think about it right you go home your dog's super excited to see you jumps on you you're like oh my dog loves me so much i'm the alpha male your dog's probably hungry yeah right and so when people give their dog Ozempic or Ozempic like drugs.

2:14:55It just takes all the joy. It takes all the joy away. The dog becomes a cat. Oh no. No this actually existed before. Yeah I think about like my most cherished memories with my dogs growing up it was like my dad my brother and I making scrambled eggs for the dogs. Yeah. It's like that was peak peak uh peak experience as like a you know 10 year old. No totally um it's a it's not a not a good market so like our other drug that's working on metabolic fitness to extend lifespan, which is very similar to how a ZenPIC works. It is targeting, you know, improving metabolic fitness, but it's a, we make sure explicitly that the mechanism that we're hitting doesn't impact appetites and doesn't impact like weight in general.

2:15:39Any book recommendations for us? That's cute that you think I have time to read as a... Any movie recommendations? Must love dogs. What you got for us? You know, I watched Love is Blind France last night. Okay. Love is Blind. Really trying to turn off. I'm sorry. I, you know, I, you know, I want to be one of those like CEOs. I'm like, these are the esoteric, hyper-intellectual books I'm reading that show that I'm smarter than you. What? No, there's no shame. I was reading a book that there's only one copy. It's thousands of years old. It's a rare PDF. You don't have access to it. It's English, but you wouldn't, you wouldn't understand.

2:16:16Yeah. But like, honestly, like loyal is my all day, every day. I don't have cognition afterwards. What's the general routine like at Loyal for you? So we're actually fully remote, which I know. Contrarian, but it actually works well because we have to hire people. We have to hire the best possible person for each skill set we need. And often those people are not – actually, they're almost never in the Bay Area. I'm going to St. Louis after this. That's where we have a lot of team members. We have a lot of team members in Kansas. We have them in Florida, right? And so you get so much more benefit from hiring the right person for the right role than you do saying, I'm going to hire the second or third best person, but they're willing to move to SF.

2:16:55Right? Yeah. So for me, I actually just like live at coffee shops. I sit out of some of our investors' offices, bring my dog. Maybe one day whenever I'm able to fly private, I'll bring my dog. Isn't Antonio Grasios the one with the two newfies? No. Okay. No, he does have a cute dog, though, or his partner does. Because it says you raised from valor. I did raise from valor. We've got to hit the gong for you. Thank you so much. We're hitting the gong for me. Of course. And all the dogs. And all the dogs. Currently getting studied. Just congratulations. What's the next big milestone that people should be looking out for?

2:17:32The next big milestone? I mean, we're just trying to bring this damn drug to market, honestly. That's a big one, hopefully in the next year or so. I mean, pray for us. It's like the hard stuff's behind us. but there's a lot of hard stuff in front of us too. Well, good luck. Cop between hard stuff, as every entrepreneur is. It's a worthwhile goal. Anyways, well, I think we can close out the show with you because we actually have to hit the road. Well, first we've got to tell you about 8sleep.com. Get a pod five. We've got to put the animals on the 8sleep. You do have an 8sleep. That's great. We've also got to tell you about Bezel.

2:18:08If you want a watch for your dog, go to getbezel.com. get him a Submariner. And if you want to take your dog on a vacation, head over to Wander. Find your happy place. Book of Wander with inspiring views. Thank you for, the chat says, when can we buy loyal stock? I'm assuming you can't answer that. We got an SEC something, something. Okay. Sorry, guys. Sorry, guys. Private company. Become a venture capitalist. Someday in a very bright future, I'm sure. But thank you for tuning in with us today. Thank you for tuning in. We will be back tomorrow morning. I can't wait. See you tomorrow. Have a great afternoon.

2:18:46Goodbye. Love you. Bye.