OpenAI and Gemini Achieve IMO Gold, CBS Cancels Colbert's Late Night, McLaren's Mansour Ojjeh Collection | Chris Black, Chris Buskirk, Turner Caldwell, Jamin Ball, Harper Carroll, Nikita Singareddy

27:23Deja Vu Coder says, you're laughing, OpenAI? And Google DeepMind's unreleased models just gave an IMO gold medal performance without internet access and you're laughing. People love it. It is interesting that XAI didn't get involved in this one. You have to imagine they knew both DeepMind and OpenAI were gonna be competing. Yeah, I mean it feels like this is the nature of like the value of research. It's like a new research domain or new research path. Like XAI is dominated in the pre-training, build the big super cluster, get all the GPUs, do the massive pre-training. Then now with Grok4, they're doing equal spend on RL generally, but DeepMind and OpenAI seem to have like the next, next thing already cooking.

28:13And we just don't know the phrase for it yet because in order to learn that phrase, you gotta pay$100 million for some researcher to come tell you basically. I'm sure that there is a new paradigm, a new strategy to unlock this level of performance. And it's something with - It's probably not 100 million. It's some combination of a bunch of people that collectively cost about$2 million a year. But eventually, I mean, we were seeing this with the behemoth analysis from the semi-analysis and what Jeremy was diving into where even just when you train a really big model, how you chunk up the memory, how you chunk the attention, like that has a dramatic impact on the actual end state and the model performance.

28:58And so it seems like Google and OpenAI have been able to like hammer out a bunch of those problems to get a really great result. And they're not going to tell anyone anytime soon, I imagine. Sebastian has a good post here. He says, it's hard to overstate the significance of this. It may end up looking like like a moon landing moment for AI, just to spell it out as clearly as possible. A next word prediction machine, because that's really what it is here. No tools, no nothing. Just produced genuinely creative proofs for hard novel math problems at a level reached by only an elite handful of pre-college prodigies.

29:34Pretty sick. It is funny explaining it to somebody just on the street. Yeah. A computer beat some high school students at math. They would just, they would tell you, okay. Cool. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Yeah. Cool story. And then when you phrase it like this, it's like, okay. But it's like, yeah. Landing moment. But yeah. Yeah. But like the, the high school IMO folks are still in the 99.999th percentile for just everyone. Like they happen to be age. There happens to be an age cutoff, but it is essentially arbitrary since most people cannot do these, this level of math. Well, let me tell you about graphite.dev.

30:14Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. You can get started for free. Francois Chollet says intelligence isn't a collection of skills. It's the efficiency with which you acquire and deploy new skills. It's an efficiency ratio. And that's why benchmark scores can be very misleading about the actual intelligence of AI systems. Elon's there saying good perspective. And so yeah, we don't need to move the goalposts, but we kind of, it's still interesting too, because we achieved this particular benchmark, now what have you done for me lately, basically.

30:56And so I think people really will move the goalposts, and you can kind of knock it, but at the same time, it was interesting timing that last week, Arc AGI V3 dropped. These models are not doing well on that, and they're simultaneously doing well on something that is so hard, you show it to most people, and they don't even know where to start with the math problem. And it's completely ridiculous to try and even take a shot at. So we wanted to give Arc AGI v3 an attempt. Are you ready, Tyler? Yeah, I'm ready. I haven't looked at it at all. Okay, so yeah. How familiar are you with Arc AGI generally?

31:36Yeah, I mean, so I played with like the version one. Like last summer I was trying to like, there's the prize. I tried it out for a couple of weeks. Did you try it out as a human or did you try writing software for it or? Yeah, like trying to like write software for it. Okay. Yeah. What was your approach? I don't know. There's a bunch of stuff. Okay. It was like, that was like just static images, right? So then there was like ways you could like tokenize it to try to do like normal LM. Yep. And then I think I was trying some like random image processing. Did you get any of them right? Or was it like a straight up zero?

32:06Yeah, it was like pretty bad. Well, the initial Arc AGI, V1, V2, V1 was pretty solidly solved by O3 High, I believe, or O1 High. I think O1 was the one that solved that. O1, and it was like$2 ,000 a task, and they got to something like 60%, 70%. Still not where an average human is for these puzzles, but impressive. Then Grok 4 came out, and Arc AGI V2, they pumped the score from, like, what, 6 % to 50%. 15 % or something. They doubled it, but still not great. But now ArcGIV 3 came out and it's more of a game. So I played it on stream on Thursday, I believe, maybe Friday with Mike. I did pretty well.

32:51I have some, I actually have some times from Mike. You did well, especially considering you had like a minute to look at it prior to joining the show. I really was pretty fresh. Yeah, you basically tried it for a second and you were like, this is really hard. Yes. and then had to stop. Okay, so you want to put it in hard mode, right? So I got times from Mike on how humans have done on Arc AGI V3. So you have to finish the whole thing.

33:24And he says, if he only gets one shot to speed run all three games with unlimited try-agains, I'd say 15 total minutes is hard, 20 minutes is medium, and 25 minutes is easy average. So you want him to do it in 15 minutes? Under 15. Under 15. And what does he win? A new iPhone. New iPhone. We bricked your iPhone when we made you sign up for Google Glass. Yeah. So this is an opportunity to make it all back. This is high stakes. So make sure you have it set up. Okay. And you should pull up the instructions and read the instructions. And we'll start a timer when you, it's 1136 right now. Is there wait there's no like hard mode easy mode no no no no no so everyone does the same thing Whether you're an AI or a human you will see some instructions.

34:14There's some keys It's more like a game than than filling out the puzzles and And and the actual instructions there are really no instructions you it's your job to figure out the nature of the game Figure out how it works and then go and speed run it. Okay So pull it up and I will read this post. So Ludwig Yitgenstein says, 20 years ago, this type of person would become an elite math professor. Now they're making AI breakthroughs. This is progress probably. And it's the CV of Alexander Wei, the research scientist over at OpenAI. He's a member of the technical staff. And before he has a PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley, he was at Harvard studying computer science.

34:57Phillips Exeter, totally tracked, research intern at Meta, Microsoft, DE Shaw, Google. What a stacked resume. This guy's a killer. And now he was on the IMO team that did that. And so we talked about the plot twist and the battle between OpenAI and DeepMind. I'm sure both of them will be talking about this. I'm more interested in the underlying technology and what actually happened and what was discovered than who released it earlier. That doesn't matter as much to me. And again, Noam says, hey, we posted after the closing ceremony. It was live streamed, so this is easy to confirm. We weren't in touch with IMO.

35:38I spoke with one organizer before the post to let him know. He requested we wait until after the closing ceremony ends to respect the kids, and we did. And so it seems like this is pretty verifiable that they didn't do anything bad to the IMO kids. they might have they might have roasted google but that's just done you know google's gotta start posting at one amp uh so tyler give me the update do you have it pulled up how are you i'm ready to start okay uh production team i got a timer you got a timer okay so so i want you to count up because we want to get the total amount of time we're aiming for under 15 minutes for all three puzzles that's hard uh 20 minutes would be normal 25 is like easy mode apparently this is according to Mike.

36:22So I haven't actually tried to speed run in this time. I said, did you play all three games or just one of them? I played one of them. Didn't you get through two? Well, so there's levels to this. There's levels. Uh, you'll figure all this out. Tyler, you wait. So I I'd say, I'd say you get unlimited lives in the game. Yeah. Yeah. You can reset and do whatever, but you can spend the whole show trying to do all three games in 15 minutes if you want. Oh, well, no, no, no, no, no, no. It doesn't work like that because once you know the tricks, like you'll be able to blast through it. Yeah, for sure.

36:56For sure. Um, so anyway, uh, let, let's go for 15. Good luck. New iPhone on the line. Uh, if not, this really is the iPhone moment for our benchmarks. This is the iPhone moment for our KGI. Good luck to you, Tyler. Okay. Let's start. Okay. Uh, five, four, three, two, one go Tyler okay we will let him work on that and we will check in all right should we talk about chat GPT yes yes yes so there's actually before we get into that let's tell you about Figma think bigger build faster Figma helps design and development teams build great products together you can get started for free at figment.com what did you want to say I wanted to say the some big news that hit the timeline this morning polymarket has acquired uh q c ex for 112 million dollars and that is going to allow them to enter the u.s market uh as you may know uh to date you haven't been able to use polymarket yeah if you're in the u.s we use it as a data source yep uh so you can go on the website obviously it's on our ticker uh you can see it on the ticker uh but this is going to allow them to actually launch in the US.

38:11So Shane has been absolutely cooking and I think he's gonna come on the show soon now that he's not under DOJ investigation. What a wild founder story arc. So, and like, yeah, remember those old photos of him like coding in a closet and stuff? In his bathroom. In his bathroom. Gross. He built Polymarket in a studio apartment bathroom. With scraps. I love it. Anyway, Vanta, automate compliance manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.

38:49Join the purple llamas at Vanta.com. So OpenAI has been doing a lot of stuff. They're kind of on a run. So IMO gold medal happens over the weekend. The ChatGPT agent, which I tested finally, so I'll have a little review and some analysis of that. But also, apparently, they are testing a new model on the web dev arena on LM Arena under the name Anonymous Chatbot 0717. So this is a secret project from OpenAI that they are maybe putting out in the test realm. And then people discovered it, and they're digging into it. And so I can't believe I'm going to say this, but it's genuinely at a completely different level of front-end coding.

39:31far better than Sonnet 03, Gemini 2.5 Pro, or Grok, which is saying a lot because people love those models for coding, especially on the front end. So to test it, I ran a great prompt borrowed from the amazing Feature Crew Pod YouTube channel asking models to create a procedurally generated planet with 3JS. Take a look at yourself. I'm pretty astonished by how big the jump is. I have featured the new model twice because its implications have been so interesting. Of course, this is only one test, but OpenAI models have always been a bit meh on front end work, and they seem to have finally overtaken everyone else.

40:01So this apparent, alleged, unreleased OpenAI model is building this procedural world and it generates this really cool 3.js, like basically a video game. And it sounds like it kind of one-shots it. So exciting stuff from that. There is, so the agent stuff. So SWIX says, please stop making flight booking agent demos with faint but dying hope, the undersigned. And so everyone is saying, he's saying please stop making fetch please stop trying to make fetch happen flight booking Instacart orders, Astro, Turfing, Reddit he wants killer use cases to be coding agents, support agents, and deep research, up and coming is screen sharing outbound sales, hiring, education, personal AI, and finance, and I have to, I think we're somewhat responsible because for months we were just like just book a flight, like this is the killer demo, this is the killer use case and then everyone was like, I mean it got played out, we did stop asking we did stop asking you we're very curious yeah yeah yeah and so um sam albin had a post last week he said today we launched can you give some background for people that may just so sam altman crawling out from under a rock yeah so he started a company he was the president of y combinator he started a company called looped sold it angel investor and stripe yeah yeah that's what people know him from uh koenigsegg owner mclaren f1 owner that's how that's where people probably know him from.

41:27He says, today we launched a new product called ChatGPT Agent. Agent represents a new level of capability for AI systems and can accomplish some remarkable complex task for you using its own computer. It combines the spirit of deep research and operator, but is more powerful than it may sound. It can think for a long time, use some tools, think some more, take some actions, think some more, et cetera. For example, we showed a demo in our launch of it preparing for a friend's wedding, buying an outfit, booking travel, choosing a gift, et cetera. We also showed an example of analyzing data to create a presentation for work.

42:00Although the utility is significant, so are the potential risks. We built a lot of safeguards and warnings into it and broader mitigations than we've ever developed before from robust training to system safeguards to user controls, but we can anticipate everything. In the spirit of iterative development, we are going to warn users heavily, and it gives users freedom to take actions carefully if they want to. And so, very interesting post. He goes through a bunch more stuff. But I actually tested it out this weekend. So as you know, we have a studio, the TBPN Ultradome here in Hollywood. We're always thinking about what's next, always looking at what else is on the market.

42:35And when we were first looking for the TBPN Ultradome, I went to ChatGPT Operator and I said, hey, I'm looking for a studio. It needs to be a soundstage, which means padded walls. I want concrete floors. I want it to be at least 40 feet by 40 feet. I need one gigabyte internet access there. I need power, AC. It can't just be a heavy industrial space where there's going to be somebody next door, Hadrian, making CNC stuff, is rattling me. I need a bunch of things. Go and figure it out, operator. And it went around and it looked at LoopNet, but it kind of got stuck on CAPTCHAs and it wasn't doing a great job.

43:15And I felt like I had to be there watching it and it was really only working on desktop for me at the time. but I reran basically the same query asking it to look for studio space in LA with all these different metrics that I wanted, all these different parameters that I wanted to make sure it verified. And it found a place that was like not listed on any sort of like rental sites. It found just a website that was out there for some crew that runs like two studios, one in Hollywood, one in Van Nuys and gave me the full breakdown. I was able to go to the website. But then, of course, I'd have to call, and I called, and they only are available between 9 and 5.

43:55Well, this is what I was asking the agent team. I think it was on Thursday that we had them on, which was… What have you done for me lately? Well, basically adding a voice feature just to now call them to confirm that it's actually available and let me know, find out when I can go see it. That is a much easier step to add in many ways than the browser use functionality. And also like the, just the asynchronousness of it. Like I fired off this query, I don't know, like after like, I don't know, 6 p.m. on a Saturday. Like it needs to wait until 9 a.m. on Monday when they open to pick up the phone.

44:35When we started this section, I put in an agent request said, find me a GT3 RS with under a thousand miles for under 400 K that's currently for sale in Los Angeles County. And so it's doing, I'm watching it cook and it's doing like an hour plus of work already in like five minutes. Yeah, no, no, it is remarkable. So it can really work through different sites and features. I can see it found one in LA County with 1 ,300 miles under 400K. And I just watched it say, this one will disqualify this one because it's over that limit. And so it needs to be able to think about time and it needs to think, okay, when is the certain time to do this?

45:22I need to come back to this in two days or something. Like basically set a cron job, set an alert, come back to things. It needs to use Linear, a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps, linear.app. OpenAI runs on Linear. Linear supports agents. And they actually have an integration, which I am excited about. But, I mean, jokes aside, Swix was saying this is a new frontier model. And I think that a lot of people get hung up in, oh, there's a new branding around it, agents. I was talking to our buddy David Senner about this, and he was like, what are you using it for?

45:58What are your prompts? And I was like, it's the same prompt. The thing that I would send to deep research, I send to agents now. It's just better. And I do understand that it might unlock some new use cases. But I think the basic thing that you should start with if you're looking to experiment and kind of road test chat GPT agent for yourself is just take something that you would put in deep research, throw it in agent, and see how you like it and if it's better. And I noticed that it's a lot better in many ways. It gives you a.md file at the end. Basically, it gives you a document, like a report, that renders the exact same as a deep research report, but you can kind of scroll it differently.

46:39You can still do all the tables and stuff. The links, oddly, weren't working. Like I would click on it and it wouldn't open. So there's like still some bugs and some rough around the edges stuff. But in general, I think it did a lot. I just think of it as like deep research is kinda, it feels like deep research is a little bit bound by the first level of depth on the internet and agents can actually go, okay, there's a website out here that has something but I need to go to the archive, I need to log in, I need to find a different route. I need to work around it, figure out all these different things.

47:13Let's actually fact check some stuff, start building a table over here. Oh, okay, I got some conflicting information. Let me try and resolve that. Like all the natural things that when you do like actually good research. And so I think it's fine if it's just a research tool. Yeah, the thing that Agent is doing here is it's navigating to a site and then it's using the site's internal search mechanism to find what it's looking for versus just like scanning like databases or just scanning pages and pulling out information. So it's actually taking that next order. Yeah, it's actually using the website.

47:50And I still think like, I don't see this as really replacing anyone in my life at least or my business, but I see it very much as like in between me and the folks on my team, I will go fire off a prompt and try and like really do as much of the research and kind of pre-work and then hand that off and come with to somebody who works for me with just a more educated idea of like, okay, I think we need this. I have, I've already kicked this off and I think it's possible. I need you to go and negotiate and I need you to go do all the soft skills and I need you to actually execute this and take the last mile that's like the human side of this, but you already have all the information to basically do, like the job is well defined.

48:38And so I think that my next change to the way I use ChatGPT, deep research agents, will be by the end of this, give me a list of steps to actually execute this that need to be executed by a human. So with that GT3RS, it's like GT3RS, if they find one, it's like, find me the phone number of a few. And then when should I call them? What other data sources do I need to point to? What are the other considerations? So I basically have like a script to go and actually get the deal done, for example. So anyway, very exciting stuff. Almost as exciting as numeral. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

49:18Got a numeral HQ to get started. So should we talk about Stephen Colbert? We should. We should talk about Stephen Colbert. This was a fascinating story that happened. The late night is ending. So Stephen Colbert, you might know him from the Colbert Report. He was originally on The Daily Show. Then he had his own show on Comedy Central. I believe it was half an hour, maybe an hour, every night on Comedy Central. Then he got pulled over into CBS with Late Night, which was originally designed to compete with The Tonight Show, which was Johnny Carson's property, that he ran for 30 years, 1962 to 1992.

50:03Absolutely legendary run. Jay Leno took that show over, gave it to Conan for a year, went back. Very controversial, late night wars, very fun deep dive to dig into. But Emily Jashinsky has a story in Pirate Wires all about late night. I have some facts here that were sticking out to me. So the high level is that the Late Show, Stephen Colbert's daily late night TV show. How many days a week is it? It's five days a week. They do 190 episodes per year. So they take a few weeks off in between little breaks. It's pretty casual. Yes, pretty casual. We do, I mean, we are on track to produce four times as much content this year.

50:51but they spend a hundred million dollars to produce we spend five times yeah yeah yeah you keep pulling those daily gt3rs's i mean they were they were spending how much is gt3rs 400k they could have bought a gt3rs for every single episode because they were spending a hundred million dollars to produce 190 hour-long episodes every year and so this wasn't a problem because back in 2009, they were pulling in$271 million in revenue. So, I mean, and I'm sure that they were actually spending less back in 2009. So the margin on that show was immense, like 60%, 70%, maybe even higher. The problem is that the revenue started declining because the audience got older and ad dollars moved around.

51:41The average viewer is... The median viewer of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is over 59 years old. So it is effectively like a retired audience. So they're not as likely to buy expensive products. And if they buy those products, they might not stay with them forever because they might churn, because they might pass away. And so - Lower LTV. Lower LTV. And then also it's a very broad audience. It's a very political audience. It's very general comedy, politics, daily news, audience, very broad. So you can only sell broad things. And that's why you see Unilever. You're watching an ad and you're watching the Late Show.

52:22Or T-Mobile. Yeah, Verizon. And then you see Dove shampoo or something. You just see generic products, not hyper-specific like Adio, which is customer relationship magic. Adio is the AR native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free. You're not going to see that on the Late show yeah um you just won't you just won't um and so uh revenue kept falling now they make less than 70 million reports were maybe like 60 million in revenue now colbert is taking 15 home 15 million a year home personally and then the rest of the show costs 85 million to produce about 50 million of that is probably salaries there's a bunch of other costs that go into it they have a live band they fly people around they have hair and makeup and in all sorts of they have to license music and they do all sorts of stuff.

53:10So then they went from, at one point, making$200 million in profit off this a year, amazing, to losing$40 million. And importantly, CBS is going through an acquisition, and so there's a whole bunch of problems where you don't necessarily want to have this massive loss-making asset sitting there while you're trying to sell the company and restructure everything. And then there's a little bit of conspiracy. And Keith Olbermann was saying, he put on the tinfoil hat and was saying, like, this is all because Trump is like, Colbert criticized Trump. And this is a straw man hat. I'm going to get out the straw man.

53:49Yeah, we're not making this argument. This is this is no one's really making this argument except for the obvious. Yeah. But put on the straw hat. I like the straw. By the way, new straw. This is a funny hat. I don't even know what kind of hat this is. A straw, some sort of straw hat. I got to sit lower so that it'll fit in. Yeah. Anyway. But yeah, I mean, the obvious thing here is that Stephen Colbert, whoever that is, was a zero interest rate phenomenal. You have a business. He's in the business for 30 years. I mean, yeah, who wants to be the proud owner of a business that loses$40 million a year like clockwork?

54:27Yeah. So it was a loss leader for CBS. basically during upfronts when they're selling ads to everyone they go to target and they say hey how about we put you with stephen colbert and they're like sure but then we also want to be on the game shows and then the game shows make higher margins and they lose money on the on the late show but a company like target wouldn't want to advertise on the game show unless they can also be with colbert and the prestige tv that's happening there so basically they're losing 40 million What's interesting is that you would think that they would be able to cut back the cost and say, hey, look, we're making half as much revenue.

55:03We need to produce this for half as much money. And so, Colbert, you got to take a haircut. Folks, you got to take a haircut. About 50 people. Instead of 100. 200. Yeah. Was it 200 people? It was 200 people. 200 people. Okay. Yeah. 200 people. And apparently, so we were messaging some people over the weekend, some media moguls, and they were saying, I mean, it's very routine for there to be two people tasked, like effectively their full-time job is like moving one camera. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so effectively it's just a culture of inefficiency that has a bunch of different reasons why that is, but doesn't really work in the modern era.

55:48So the interesting thing here is I was trying to figure out kind of what happens from here. So CBS has confirmed they're not doing a replacement host. They're not going to hire like an H-1B Stephen Colbert. I think they're going to put a talk show in there. Yeah. So anyways, it's going away. There's no indication that ABC, NBC, Netflix, Max, or any of those platforms is going to try to launch one of these Johnny Carson style shows. But I think the right move for Stephen Colbert, it's not my flavor of comedy entertainment. But I think he could have, I think if he went independent and effectively launched live show, podcasts, something of that sort, he could continue to earn exactly what he's earning today.

56:43Yeah. And just do it with a much smaller team, maybe even have a better lifestyle. Maybe he starts doing the show in the morning. Yeah. I mean, there was$60 million of like, we want to advertise on Stephen Colbert, like flowing into this property. Yeah. If he provides a similar level of experience and content, he should be able to sell similar levels of ads. Maybe not 60, but maybe 30. And then he takes home 15 and he has 15 to spend on a smaller team. And what's crazy is during the COVID era, all of the late night shows went to from home episodes where they were basically doing them over Zoom and then they set up nicer camera setups.

57:21And they were able to do those shows way cheaper. But I think because of the union, it wasn't palatable or really easy to just cut back on staff and cut back on salaries or switch to some sort of more incentive pay, which is tricky. And we just talked to Delian about this, where in France, there was a company that wanted to like, their business wasn't doing so well. They wanted to lay off folks. Too many people. And they couldn't do it. And so the government basically said they had to shut down. In France, there's policies that effectively require companies to pay years of severance. So it ends up becoming a massive liability on the balance sheet.

58:00And anyways. Yeah. So Emily Jacinski over at PirateWire says, CBS is not just pushing out Stephen Colbert. It's retiring the iconic late show brand altogether. That's the buried lead getting lost amidst frenzied speculation over politics and palace intrigue. If cutting Colbert is a bid to juice Paramount's pending merger or to punish him for criticizing it, as Democrats are now arguing, because Colbert said that CBS as a company should not have, or Paramount, should not have settled a lawsuit with Trump, I believe. CBS just stumbled right into the future, Emily says. She says, Colbert's time at the helm of the late show perfectly illustrates the most important trend in media and culture.

58:41One might fairly wonder how Colbert, a man who leans so far into hashtag resistance comedy he could hardly get up, has dominated the late night wars throughout Donald Trump's hostile takeover of American politics. Johnny Carson, for example, famously skewered both political parties without fear or favor. Carson won the late night wars when networks faced less competition, meaning his goal was to appeal to as wide a swath of the American public as possible for the sake of selling more ads. By the time Colbert took the helm from David Letterman, late night ratings had collapsed from their high watermark.

59:14That's particularly why Greg Gutfeld is able to actually beat Colbert's ratings on a cable network, a feat that would have been unthinkable in the 1990s. Like Colbert, though, Gutfeld doesn't approach politics as Carson did. This is the new model. Cultivate a loyal niche that returns night after night, giving you an edge over others competing for an increasingly smaller slices of the pie. The result is a microculture. Monocultural institutions like The Late Show or The New York Times can no longer and no longer do appeal more widely than their core audiences. For the Times, this is their subscriber base, and it's why, for instance, the paper committed obvious journalistic malpractice by yanking Senator Tom Cotton's infamous Send in the Troops op-ed back in 2020.

59:57As the paper of record for all of America, that decision made no sense. Cotton was expressing a mainstream position in his party and in the country, but Times subscribers were furious, and that critical business interest shifted the outlet's editorial position. This, of course, was helped along by a staff increasingly aligned on an ideological level with the paper's narrow subscriber niche. One of the greatest sources of cultural angst stems from the ability to recognize these institutions of the monoculture have shifted to microculture. Whether they supported Trump or Bernie Sanders, plenty of Americans outside affluent urban bubbles figured that out years ago.

1:00:34It is the institutions themselves that often cling to the outdated brands, so blinded by their own biases that it's become difficult for the C-suites to even recognize what's happening outside of Manhattan. And the Hamptons don't count. Anyway, fantastic analysis from Emily. You should subscribe to PirateWires to go read the full thing. But lots of people were having fun with this. How does a late show cost$100 million to produce? That was a big question. And I think a lot of it's just, this is a, this is, Letterman started in the 90s, so this is 30 years of just like, yeah, let's just add one more person.

1:01:13Like 30 years is only adding 60 people a year, one, what would it, no, no, no, way less, six people a year. So you're adding like one a quarter, which is like not that much, and I think it just kind of creeps in. But you gotta be aware when revenue starts dropping, like you have to right the ship and you can't just keep losing money because it doesn't give you leverage over CBS, who's trying to get out and sell the company. Buko Capital Bloke says, I can't stop laughing at CBS losing$40 million a year on the late show with Colbert because they were spending$100 million a year to produce it, a show of a guy talking, sometimes to other people, is their less competent group of industry executives than linear television.

1:01:55Alex Roy, friend of the show, says, Media is a business. Colbert already has an audience. He should have no problem launching a YouTube channel. I agree many friends run a profitable like YouTube channels with millions of subs with staffs of less than 10 people They started from scratch signed a media business veteran The left has been looking for its Joe Rogan or Tucker Carlson. Why shouldn't Colbert be that guy? That's interesting And so a lot of people were saying it's a piece to camera slash guest interview show It shouldn't cost that Tyler is back. What's going on time? I'm done. Well, I was stuck for a while on one of them and then I switch a different game finish that came back but I don't know I feel like it was a little slow 25 minutes

1:02:37but you didn't get through it all did your hair get messed up I was stressed out I was on one level for like 5 minutes and then I couldn't figure out I went to a different one and it was like I got it instantly that's brutal we'll keep giving you challenges until you get a new phone before you go back to college He's brutal. He says 25 is average. 20 is medium. 15 is hard. Well, we will give you a new challenge, give you a new chance to win a new iPhone. The iPhone moment has arrived for RKGI. Tyler missed it this time. But what do you think it says about current AI systems? Do you think you will outperform the latest IMO level model from OpenAI?

1:03:26You still got it? I mean, I think you could probably do RL on this and get it. I mean, I don't know if that's what the labs are necessarily doing. I think ideally, like, they're trying to just train it, you know, independent of this and then see how it does. I think it's a very good, like, benchmark in that sense. But you probably could RL on this. Yeah, so the way Mike described it was that you played the three public games. There are three private games. And so I don't know how much variation there was between the games. It seems like there was a fair amount because you got stuck on one, you switched to one, switched to a different one, and then went back, right?

1:04:04So, yeah. So I think the goal is like, if you RL on the three public games, you will be overfit against the private games that have slightly different mechanics and you won't have learned the true generalizing function. That's the idea, at least. Yeah, that makes sense. But I mean, I'm sure, you know, if you're opening AI, you could just like, oh, let's just make new games that are kind of in a similar vein and then RL on those, then you have more data and then, I don't know. I think you could probably, like, I think my general sense is that you can like RL on pretty much anything. Yeah. So if they really want to and they want to throw like, you know, many millions of dollars, I'm sure they could get it.

1:04:42But I don't know if that's really what they want. I think the current prize is like$10 ,000, something like that for something that works on it. Maybe there's a million dollar prize. There's a million dollar prize that's still hanging out there, I believe, for RKGI V1. Yeah. But those are size limited, right? You can, like, you need to run in a certain speed and they can't be like so big. Yeah, I think they have to run on the Kaggle infrastructure, Kaggle infrastructure. So you basically have to like send it your weights, your code, and then you get access to like one GPU. You don't get to fire the Stargate at it.

1:05:13But I don't know. It'll be interesting to see. What's your timeline for a lab destroying this? Probably end of the year. End of the year. You think they'll beat it? Yes. The whole team is like, we designed this to be unbeatable for years, like two to three years. I don't know. I mean, they just beat IMO. It's like, do you mean on a public model or them just releasing, we've beat this? Private. It doesn't need to be open sourced. Yeah. I think if it's a private model, it's like open AI. It's like, okay, we have this internally. We're not going to release it. It's not safe. Yeah. But like, we've run it on this.

1:05:49I think probably by the end of the year is like reasonable. For specific, okay, we built a model just to beat this. or we just were advancing models generally, giving people what they want, making great things, solving flight booking and GPT agent and solving IMO, and then, oh, as a byproduct, we solve this. You think that's what's gonna happen? Yeah, I don't think they're necessarily gonna train a model just to do this, but they definitely could. I mean, at this point, it's getting high stakes, right? Because like - Apparently, IMO is not RL'd at all, like specifically for - That's what they say.

1:06:21Math, so yeah, I think that model is like reasonably capable, obviously. Okay, I want to try that model on RKGI V3 and see how it does. Because it does feel like that will be a very interesting moment where if they truly don't cheat and don't RL on this specifically without the gas station data set, as Rune calls it, no RKGI V3 creating new games, that feels like scientists collecting the gas station data set, right? And they just go about their day building better and better models. and then by the way, oh, we solved this. That will be very, very interesting. But I don't know. I would take the over on the end of the year.

1:07:01We're more than halfway through the year. Yeah, that's true. Okay, what is your line? You're so AGI-pilled. You're so AGI-pilled. I think this will hold. I mean, B1 is still holding. B1 is not. Yes. B1, it takes$2 ,000 to get like 60%. You just got 100%. You know, like you finished the whole thing. In 25 minutes. Yeah, I mean, we'll see, I guess. I don't know. I would take the over on this year. I would probably take the over on end of next year. I have to give you an update on ChatGPT agent. So it only found, so it gave me a really great report, but it only found one, and it's listed by a dealer, and I can already tell the dealer,

1:07:49the dealer is like clearly pricing it like not where they would actually sell it. Got it. Okay. But they did find one in Costa Mesa. So not far away. One county away. Okay. Not bad. $399. $399. Just under the limit. There we go. So pretty good. Yeah. Not bad. Not bad. 15 minutes. Yeah. They're there. I think we got to use it more. We hear. What's going on now? They didn't actually get me. they don't have a link um okay we're gonna have to dig into a more test gi not achieved internally but we're making progress yeah uh okay wait so are you saying 100 on v3 or what's like the benchmark because like if it's 100 then like yeah obviously not a year 100 i mean like you got you just got 100 never having seen it 25 minutes yeah like not crazy i I think we could literally give this to anyone over the age of like 10 and they would get 100 % in half an hour basically.

1:08:51I think it's a very doable puzzle for humans. And so I want 100 % and I want it in, and I don't care about time and money. Like I agree with, was it Will who said that? Yeah, Will Depew. said, you know, so yeah, throw$2 ,000 per task on it. I'm fine with that. The question is just, can the model do it in any amount of time, in any amount of money? And it seems like right now, it's probably at zero. We'll see how the IMO model does. Maybe it does really well. We'll see. But I would put it at over, I would put it up there with doing your taxes, you know, Dwar Kesh mode 2027. Yeah, I think 100 % is hard.

1:09:38But if you give me like 90%, like if it misses one of the tasks, because there's three games, they each have like 10 levels. If you can miss like one of those. Yeah, well I think you have to finish a game or not. And so I think basically on the private data set, you can get zero, you can get one out of three, two out of three, or three out of three, basically. But it's unclear because like, when do you tell it to give up? Because it can just keep trying and kind of brute force it. but maybe there's some sort of like limit. I don't know. But you get like unlimited retries. But maybe the real test is only giving one try.

1:10:13We got to move on. But for your next challenge, Tyler, prompt 4-0 7 ,000 times in a row and stay sane. Stay sane. Start recursive prompting like crazy for 48 hours straight. and then come back to us. Yeah. Well, we got to talk about the McLaren collection that's going up for sale. But first, I got to talk to you about Fin.ai. 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. This was what Swix said. He wants AI agents for customer service. Fin.ai is delivering, so go check it out. Anyway, so the Monsoor O.H.

1:11:01collection. This is from Tom Hartley Jr. And hopefully we can pull up the video because it is fantastic. It's on YouTube. And yes, so here's the video. You can play some of that. Look at this lineup of cars. So the story here is this man named Mansoor Ojeh. I'm not sure how to pronounce that. It's O-J-J-E-H. I apologize to anyone who knows how. He says, I'm incredibly proud to announce that we've been entrusted with the sale of the world's greatest collection of McLaren road cars, offered directly from the home of one of the most influential figures in McLaren's 62-year history. He passed away age 68, surrounded by family, and is now entrusting the sale of his collection.

1:11:48This guy is fascinating, very, very interesting fellow. So he has, let me pull up my information here. So Mansoor Ohay. um he was the son of he's a franco saudi french saudi arabian businessman uh and he used his family fortune to bankroll formula one teams and he built the tag group so if you're familiar with tag hewer the uh the the the watch brand he built that watch brand and then wound up selling it to lvmh and so he was born this uh the man who collected all of these mclarens in burnt orange which by the way, not only is he the only one with the massive orange McLaren collection, that particular color is not available to anyone else.

1:12:35He has his own color that only he can buy. It's absolutely incredible. And every single one of those cars that you see there in the background, they are all the last one off the line, the last individual production car that they've ever made of that particular model. And so he gets the last one. And you see the logo there? he puts his name on the logo. I've never seen a brand do that, but they were so tight with him because he owned the company at one point that they would replace the McLaren logo with Mansoor logo, which is incredible. And so he is a fascinating figure. So his father, Akram Ohe, accumulated immense wealth as an intermediary in Saudi arms deals.

1:13:20So he basically would go to the Saudis and say, what weapons do you need? What missiles do you need? What guns do you need? What planes do you need? I'm going to go out into the world and find those and source those and bring those back and take a cut of that. And so he - Yeah, this is really, I will say, if your father has amassed immense wealth through arm stealing, this is really pretty much the playbook for how to put that capital to work. It's the best. It's the best. And so Mansoor grew up in France. The family mostly lived in France. He attended the American School in Paris. He moved to California, where we are, studied business administration at Menlo College.

1:14:01Let's give it up for all the business administration majors out there. One of the top majors if you want to administrate businesses. Yeah. Which he certainly has. He went to Santa Clara. He initially managed his father's ventures. He became gradually more and more involved in his father's investment vehicle, which was Technique d 'Avant Garde. which is TAG, Luxembourg registered holding company created in 1977. So the group's purchase was to broker deals between the Arab world and Europe and to handle commissions from arms and infrastructure contracts. And so his dad was born in Syria, raised in Iraq, studied in France on a scholarship during the 40s, marries a French woman, stays in France, and then starts arranging these arms deals and infrastructure projects.

1:14:50And so in 1956, the dad opens an arms trading company in Switzerland and establishes Saudi Arabia's first weapons factory. During the 1960s, he represented the French defense contractors such as Dassault and Matra, selling Mirage jets and missile systems to Middle Eastern clients. He was facing some scrutiny from French authorities at one point. He founds the TAG group. The group gave him unrivaled access to the Saudi royal family for defense projects, leveraged his relationships with Prince Sultan, the Saudi defense minister, and he became so wealthy that he bought a cruise liner, like a cruise ship.

1:15:30He bought the Queen Elizabeth II, just I think as like a personal pleasure yacht. He bought a ranch in Paraguay, homes in Paris and Monte Carlo, and then he starts sponsoring the Williams Formula One team, and he was putting in a million dollars a year, a million pounds a year. In the 80s... When did he start doing that? This was in the late 70s. And so his son, so the dad dies in 1991, reportedly worth several billion dollars. Mansour, who's the man with all of those fantastic looking McLarens, him and his brother, Mansour and Aziz, were heirs to the tag group. and there was a bitter inheritance dispute between the widow and some of the children and obviously all the assets kind of you know get fought over but Mansoor makes out quite nicely and winds up investing even more heavily in F1.

1:16:25So through TAG he starts sponsoring Frank Williams Formula One team in 1978 when Saudi Airlines sought to attract other Saudi brands. TAG became the team's major sponsor in 1979. Williams actually did win multiple races, although they were having some trouble a few years ago. They were pretty good back then. They got Alan Jones and another title in 1982 with Kiki Rosberg. I think that's Nico Rosberg's father, I believe. The sponsorship gave Mansoor his first taste of Formula One success and increased tags visibility. Then in 1983, he jumped ship from Williams, goes over to McLaren. Frank Williams resisted, Diversifying Beyond Racing, McLaren's boss, Ron Dennis, proposed exchanging shares for financing a new turbo engine.

1:17:18And so Mansoor agreed and funded the development of a Porsche turbo engine badged as TAG. So the McLaren-TAG partnership dominated in the 1984 season. Drivers Nicky Lauda and Elaine Prost won 12 of 16 races, and McLaren secured both the drivers' and constructors' titles. So basically, he comes in with a bunch of money and says, you want to win an F1? I will finance a new engine. He goes and does it, and it actually works. And so he, in 84— Which is interesting because Tag and Porsche have their own partnership now. They have the Carrera line of watches all these years later. Yeah. And so in 1984, he buys a 50 % stake in McLaren's holding company.

1:18:00Now, remember, McLaren was founded by a true racer who died at age 31, I believe, in a racing accident. And so left this incredible legacy of just a guy putting it all on the line in racing. It wasn't like he was some business guy who was like, I want to get into racing. He was just a race car driver. Well, this is the story of Enzo, too. Ferrari wasn't started until he was in his 40s. Yep. And, but he had just been so obsessed. Yep. Over racing. Yeah. That it just carried into the brand. And so in a, Mansoor buys a 50 % of stake in McLaren's holding company, Tag McLaren Holdings. And he's still working on the racing stuff, but then he says, we got to make a road car.

1:18:44And the road car that he pitches is the McLaren F1 supercar that launches in 1992 and is a$20 million icon. owned by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, like they're in museums, like they are the rarest of the rare. Jay Leno has one. I think it's like one of the few cars Doug DeMuro hasn't driven. He rode in it with Jay Leno, but they are incredibly rare, incredibly special cars. And the doors go up. The doors go up. And so in other news, like he did buy Huwer and created Tag Huwer, which was a watch company that you might be familiar with, Tag Heuer. They eventually sold Tag Heuer to LVMH for$740 million in 1999.

1:19:29Wait, did you know that Elon crashed his McLaren F1? He did, yes. And I believe that the McLaren was picked up and like reconstituted and wound up selling still for millions of dollars. The car hit a hidden embankment on Sand Hill Road at a 45 degree angle, launching it into the air like a discus according to witnesses i mean the car goes 200 miles an hour weighs like 2 000 pounds incredible piece of lore imagining elon on sandhill road and you know who else was in that car i do peter teal crazy and he went to the meeting after right yeah yeah they were apparently the lore is that they went to sequoia to pitch or something they were like raising money or driving down what did elon do he turned off traction control really apparently yeah that is wild yeah the there's a long history of guys turning off traction control driving really fast and then just crashing their cars so if you want to avoid crashing your supercar maybe keep it on avoid turning off traction control i mean that's the thing doesn't the carrera gt not have traction control or maybe maybe maybe it does but uh it's like one of the few features and it definitely kills a lot of its drivers a lot of these guys like pride there you know they like an analog super car does have traction okay it does it does not have stability control that's it or other electronic driver aids that are common okay super cars so mansoor he buys huer turns it into tag huer great watch brand sells it to lvmh for 740 million dollars in 1999 he gets a huge profit from that and then he starts going deeper into all that he launches tag aviation and aeronautics which is distributing bombardier jets to the Middle East.

1:21:11So he's a go-between between French aerospace and defense companies in the Middle East still. In this case, he develops a luxury airport in the Middle East, and he's just doing a lot of deals at this very, very high level, probably benefits from his ties to F1. And so he builds the McLaren F1, and then of course starts collecting and stays involved in McLaren F1 for for years. And he builds this, I mean, he builds a 235 foot super yacht, Kogo, he creates a lavish house on Lake Geneva, Switzerland, known as La Maison du Lac, and kind of goes on through that. He winds up getting idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, gets a double lung transplant, and ultimately doesn't make it, but he dies at age 68.

1:22:02McLaren CEO, Zach Brown, described him as a titan of our sport, ultra competitive, determined, passionate, and sporting. And so everyone remembers him and his contributions to F1. But what's interesting today is that they are about to sell his entire McLaren collection, which is something like 20 McLaren road cars, all in his exact spec, which is this burnt orange, with his badging. I don't know who the buyer would be. They're probably listening to this show, but good luck out there as you go and bid on the mansoor collection because it is truly one of a kind and every single car there is in the most extreme spec and it's the last one off the line and there's a bat and there's a plaque inside that says this is the last f1 that was ever made this is the last senna that was ever made this is the last speed tail that was ever made this is the last gtr this is the last i mean look at that one no uh what is that the elva yeah the elva burnt orange elva with no windshield wow that is fantastic and just every single one of those cars is insane oh also oh by the way also every single one of those cars delivery mileage never been driven never been driven do you think he was buying you think he was getting two like so the story is that he had an f1 of course he developed it he had an f1 but it was kind of I think from like the middle of the pack or maybe the earlier pack.

1:23:32And because he was just like excited to get the first one and you know, got it and probably gave one to someone else and like just had one, drove it, had fun with it. It was his experience. But then his brother got the last one in that orange color. And his brother was about to sell it. And he said, you can't sell this. If you're selling it, I'll buy it. And so he buys it from his brother and winds up building an entire collection on the back of that one car, the last F1 off the line, the burnt orange that turns into his signature color. It turns into the color that you cannot buy no matter how much money you have.

1:24:12No matter how many McLarens you own. And his legacy lives on Oscar and Lando dominating so far this year. Yeah, give us the update there. It's good. He wouldn't have been, he wasn't around to see it, but he would surely be proud. Yeah. Well, if you're looking for a compliment to your McLaren F1, get on Bezel. Getbezel.com. Your Bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Anyway, let's go to Trey Stevens. He had a massively viral post on Friday. We didn't get a chance to talk about it. There are only four tier one cities in the United States. New York for finance, DC for government, San Francisco for tech, LA for media and entertainment people.

1:24:55Thank you, Trey. No other cities are power centers for aspirational talent. Sorry. He says, based on replies, here are the people arguing for other cities. Austin, people who live in Austin. Boston, people who are really upset about Trump's Harvard attack. Dallas, Houston, people who have only lived in Texas. Miami, people who love money but don't love to work. Mogged. Mogged. Someone just commented arguing for Cleveland. and it's funny because Troy's an Ohio guy. No, no, I agree with this and it is incredibly sticky. Like it's unclear if there will ever be another team city built in America. It doesn't really matter though, because you can go, like Warren Buffett is out in Omaha.

1:25:41It's fine. Like people read this as like, I can't possibly be successful in finance if I'm not in New York. Ken Griffin was in Chicago and then Miami. Charlie Munger lived in Los Angeles. Yeah, yeah. And so it's like, it is true that these are tier one cities. It doesn't mean that you can't do something cool and amazing and achieve your goals in life somewhere else, but you should just be thoughtful about it. And you shouldn't delude yourself into thinking that a tier two city is secretly a tier one. If it's not, it's just not. And so stuff's moving around, very fun post. Always good to bait literally everyone in the world.

1:26:22but very fun. But related to this, Delian had a post that was kind of interesting here. He said, 10 years ago, it felt like Silicon Valley had this really vibrant seed fund ecosystem that felt just as important as the multi-stage venture firms. Now that feels totally dead, partially because a whole generation of top tier companies just completely skipped that step in raising. And so yeah, more and more companies are saying, our seed, our$1 million, will just come from our own balance sheet. and it'll just come internally and we'll just fund that or we'll just jump straight to 20 million i feel like there's plenty of i do i i have a problem where if somebody's raising a pre-seed yeah i do feel like there's 20 funds that i would potentially introduce them to the challenge is when those pre-seed funds are then trying to go compete at seed which we now know is this sort of four to eight million dollar range we had somebody on friday who was raising 55 million crazy whether or not that was marketing or, you know, whatever.

1:27:25The name doesn't really matter. Board Ape Yacht Club raised a billion-dollar seed round in 2021. That was a seed round? Was that because they just hadn't raised before? They really hadn't raised, yeah. Yeah, there's this weird thing where, you know. And Mira Mirati,$2 or$3 billion seed round. And so again, like your company's expectations are based around how much capital has come in the door, not the last name, the name of your last financing round. Yeah, there's one side of this which is like the seed moniker used to stand for time and money effectively. It used to be like, okay, if I'm a seed stage company, you know that I'm in the first 18 months of my creation.

1:28:11And I've raised less than$5 million or else I'm in mango seed territory and series A territory. But now there's some world where people just say, okay, this is your second round. It doesn't matter that you've been around for 10 years. It's an A round or it's a seed round. or doesn't matter if you're raising a billion dollars and it's priced like a growth round, it's a seed round. I don't know. I think what Delian's getting at is more just like the vibe of like, you used to be able to, he's a seed investor, you used to be able to hunt around, find some people doing cool stuff and get 10%, 20 % of the company for a million bucks, two million bucks.

1:28:47And that has kind of disappeared. Delian's still known to get a good price. He's figured out how to survive. nature finds a way, as does public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously, they got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions of folks. Get to public.com. And we have our next guest. I believe we have Chris Black in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him in. Let's bring him in. Chris Black, how you doing? Bring me in. What's up, guys? How are you? What's happening? It's great to meet you. I've wanted to chat for a long time. I actually bought your, what was that little green book that you made all those years ago?

1:29:27Wow, we got an OG on our hands. I don't think you know it all. I think it was 2015 I did that with Powerhouse. So thank you for being a ground floor investor. I had that in college, and I felt so cool to be a college kid that was cultured enough to buy a table, a coffee table book by Chris Black. I think it turned into more of a bathroom book than coffee tables. Yeah, it's very small. You would like the form factor. Sure, sure, sure. And what was inside the book? Can you break it down? I mean, Chris can give some more context. The thing that I remembered in a quote that I've brought up a bunch, it was the Andy Warhol quote in there that was something like, business is art and making money is art and good business is the best art.

1:30:12You guys love that. You guys love that. Yeah, I mean, the book was just like a fun advice book, kind of, basically. It did really well as a graduation gift purchased from Urban Outfitters that year. Oh, yeah, there we go. We sold a lot of books, thank God. So it was fun to do. That was very fun. Did you go through a traditional publishing house? Like, what was the workflow? Did you write the whole book and then shop it around? Like, I've never published a book, so curious. It was based on Twitter, honestly. It was based kind of on that idea of like life soul instruction book, the classic form factor to use your term meets sort of Twitter.

1:30:49So I went through, wrote them all. Yeah, I did it with Powerhouse, which is like sort of in and out of business from what I can tell. But I'm working on a book now for Simon & Schuster that should come out in 2026. So that's a little more of a process. What's the concept of the new book? It's kind of like an essay memoir, a little bit of everything from some high school stuff to being a drug addict to work to kind of everything. And that process is a little bit more like you're talking about. You write a full essay, you outline some chapters, and then you take that out and sell it. And CAA helped me.

1:31:27Obviously, I wasn't doing it myself. But it's daunting, but I'm excited. Yeah. What's the secret to a good book launch these days? We talked to Ezra Klein's co-author, and he was saying that, interestingly, when they went on hour-long podcasts, they sold less books than a five-minute hit on TV. Because if you listen to an hour-long podcast, you're like, I got the gist, I don't need the whole book. But if you listen to five minutes, you're like, oh, I could do another hour, I'll buy the book. That's a fair, I have a friend who's a very successful legendary author who told me an anecdote that he sold more books from doing Tucker Carlson when he was on TV, that he sold from anything else, like a clear bump.

1:32:09I mean, this was years ago. But I think that I mean, we're talking about this earlier today, Jason, I actually were talking about this and about how sort of podcasts have replaced not only late night, obviously, but it's like kind of like Stephen Colbert news, it's top, but also like, Good Morning America, the view, like, it's still fun to do that stuff i don't but it might it might move books but it doesn't seem like the publicists think that it it does based on the priorities of what they're having their clients do yeah is it is it speed run 200 podcasts is that is that the playbook now i mean if you pay attention to people yeah kind of you know if you have if you pay attention to an actor or writer whoever has something coming out it's like you know music we talk to a lot of musicians on how long gone so we're part of that in some ways but like there's the dach shepherds joe rogan's smart list, call her daddy world that I think is basically, that's the new Oprah.

1:33:02That's what it is. I almost feel like there's a world where some podcasters, certainly not us because we're a daily show or very news driven, but some podcasts, I'm thinking of like acquired FMs, like business deep dives or some true crime podcasts, like they kind of fill the hole of an audio book. It's like you get two or three hours every month and it feels like it's just a more it's like an easier financial model for them to be like well i'm selling 12 ad slots and i have subscribers that feel like they're getting something they're not waiting a full year for the next thing so when i hit their credit card with a 20 charge this month they're getting one thing you were talking uh i think we were talking on friday this concept of like releasing a book on sub stack because you could get somebody to effectively it creates this like community experience of like reading the book together but then it's you know you might charge 25 for your book but somebody might pay you i don't know ten dollars a month for your sub stack no i mean there's all these i mean i i think there's all these ways to do it i am extremely traditional and the what i think is cool and what works um i would like to do it about as buy the book no pun intended as possible just because i think that's cool.

1:34:15I think all of these modern approaches though are often more, more profitable. And also maybe, um, like you said, easier for people to stomach, like the attention spans aren't there. Even if you break it up like that in their minds, it's like easier to read in a weekly dispatch than it might be to sit down for an hour every day and read a book. You know? Yeah. There's also something about like, I mean, when I've heard somebody say like, when you publish a book, like it's the easiest way to get like a comma with a phrase after your name every time you're in print like if i wrote a book that's just like you know how i became awesome everyone would just be like okay like you know life life is someone awesome forever john coogan author of of the awesome life that's why that's why i'm awesome chris's book i'm assuming the memoir will be called just go to go to work shopping it now but no i mean i think you're right i mean i had another friend um uh maddie matheson uh the the chef and cookbook author and you know actor and he told me he was like dude like new york times bestseller lasts for the rest of your life you can you you get that forever if you do it one time you know and like i think that also that is so interesting because it's such like a classic thing that we all know but no one really knows the formula of how you get like it's not just sales there's all these factors that like no one knows you know which makes it even more it's interesting to think about would you rather have be featured in the new york time is it is it more valuable to be featured in the new york times four times a year forever or just be a new york times bestseller because i we had we had a couple buddies get hit pieces last week in the new york times and they just like really they only get attention if you give them attention yeah like dude i was i that's so funny you say that because there was a story in the early days of how long gone there was a story that wasn't favorable let's say and i was like wait was this was this the um was this the whole lawsuit thing because i got the t-shirt back then too no not the new york times no this was not the new york times this was not there's not the cease and desist for making fun of the daily this was a it's you know it's um yeah don't strice and it don't strice you know speak really generally so nobody can figure it out.

1:36:31You know what? We're moving on. Moving on. Anyway, the other interesting thing about books versus podcasts is we have a buddy who runs an AI podcast, the Dwarakash Patel podcast. Great show, great interviews, super researched. He published a book and the book was like an oral history of AI. And so it was a collection and it was actually kind of like a digest of a bunch of interviews that he's done. So he didn't start from a blank page and just start typing out like a thousand pages and refine it. But, and in some ways it's like, it's just kind of a different instantiation of the same thing that he's been doing, but I love it because I'm, there's no way for me to go to like randomly remind myself in five years that I should go revisit a Dwarkesh podcast, unless someone like clips it and shares it.

1:37:24But if I put that book on my shelf, I might pick it up randomly in a few years and there's something about like just the tangible physical we're very into the physical stuff here we print the no for sure it's real i mean i think also that i mean i think that like everything else it makes a return to some extent you know what i mean like i subscribe to the financial times i subscribe to several magazines like a lot of my friends do i mean obviously i'm 42 years old so it kind of makes sense but i think that like young people are fetishizing print the same way they fetishized vinyl you know a couple you know 10 years ago it's same kind of thing once it is you know once it's basically past its prime print is just objectively better than vinyl though i gotta say i'm not 100 in that it's like it's it you can go to the beach and carry like you can't like you know like just bringing a piece of paper to the beach and letting it get yeah yeah losing it whatever it's nice it gives you the benefit of leaving your phone at home yes that's the powerful thing when i finish a book i leave it wherever i am like on the back in the back seat of the plane on like i leave it so somebody can hopefully pick it up and take it i'm usually i usually have a couple with me if i'm traveling if i finish one i gotta lose some weight you know because you're adding adding stuff on the way that's amazing exactly when are we gonna get how long gone pressed on vinyl we gotta do a couple special episodes we did do a cd we did do a couple years ago with jag jaguar which is a really fun project to do but yeah i I mean, I think for us, we're still, I mean, you guys have done something so interesting.

1:38:52I think it's so cool the way what you guys are doing and how you're approaching it. I think this live daily thing is like really powerful. Sure. And I think we're trying to figure out what our version of video is. So yeah, you guys are doing, what's this thing? I read it in Feed Me, like you're doing a live show, like a one-off live show. We did, we're on tour right now. We're just have a couple of days off. but we did a show at Turf Club in St. Paul, Minnesota, basically with this service called veeps.com, which is started by the Madden Brothers from Good Charlotte, but then Live Nation bought it.

1:39:27And it's basic. They send a full sort of very pro crew to shoot your show live, and you can buy a ticket online and watch it up to 48 hours after you pay. What's the ideal live site? It's like Vampire Weekend, How Long Gone, Alicia Keys. That's awesome. I don't know how. It's cool. Podcasters in control. Podcasters in control. What's the right live show for you, though? Do you feel pressured to have the hottest takes? Well, this show, we're doing DC on Thursday, and then Friday, we're doing Toronto, and then we go to London. But this show is actually different. We used to just go up there and shoot the shit.

1:40:06We'd bring a guest up, depending on what town we were in, much like the actual podcast. This time it's the How Long Gone Guide to Life. And it's a visual, it's like basically a keynote that we're walking the audience through with like our commentary. And we've only done it twice so far, but it feels sort of like it's taken us from a live podcast to a show, which is what our goal was. And I don't think we could figure out exactly how to do that. And I think this is kind of pushing us in that direction, which is great. Give us the three-minute summary of the Guide to Life so that people have to still go see the full show.

1:40:39Yeah, yeah. Don't give it all away. Get the tickets, get the ticket. Yeah, no, it's everything we talk about. By the way, we did one live show together in Miami and we had only made like two episodes. And so nobody knew us as a duo. They didn't know our humor. And the live show is like we made like a very serious like argument for why venture capital firms should get their founders on like PEDs. So like testosterone, like a variety. That's a great I would watch pay attention to that. Yeah, exactly. And I don't like half of the half the audience was like, these guys are dead serious. What is going on?

1:41:17Half were like, kind of laughing. Like, what is going on? It's a mix. It's a mixed bag. Yeah. I mean, ours, we basically cover all of the stuff that we talk about on the show from like restaurants and restaurant etiquette to the gym and gym etiquette to dating and sex and drugs. So it's like we cover it. you know it's like one slide that's going really well for us is polyamory is for ugly people be single or cheap that's going really well for us but you know it's just like funny stuff that you can just kind of talk about and also will inspire a response from the crowd yeah we we like to go back and forth with the audience it's going back we're going to create we're going to create a rival guide for life and we'll just go guide for guide we'll go guys look i think we i think we have different enough audiences totally cover a lot of terror for sure yeah so so going back and forth i want your uh restaurant etiquette this morning we go to our cafe where we have breakfast every morning normally really like i never noticed the music it was always quiet and chill and today they were blasting in sync and backstreet boys britney spears and maybe it was just the mood because it was kind of gloomy in la we're having some like late june gloom going on it's terrible And I was a little bit tired from the weekend trying to get back into it.

1:42:33And I was like trying to read like a pretty detailed analysis about like tech and stuff. And I was just like, I can't. And the funny thing is that two days ago I was in a grocery store and I was like jamming to the Backstreet Boys. And I was like, this is the greatest thing ever. I was loving it in that context. But in the morning. But it felt like such a violation of trust because we go to this place every single morning. It's so reliable. And it sets me up for the day I'm prepping the show. And so we kind of made a slight comment. We were like, oh, is the music different? but i want to know etiquette wise how should i i don't want to be i want to speak to the manager that's weird but also like i'd like a change yeah what should i do what what kind of like uh like as a regular like what are your rights as a regular what are your rights as a regular you're right you can't say anything sorry if you can't say anything no if you say something they're never going to look at you the same you're right or wrong i'm just telling you they're gonna they're going to think of you differently.

1:43:26It's not going to be made with love anymore. Let me say that. It's not going to be made with love. So am I supposed to vote with my feet, go somewhere else? We were running the numbers. We go there every single day. We're basically employing a single person there, paying the full... I like how you think about this. It's logical. You can figure out a way to make it work. A barista hates all of the customers. Okay. And that's a feature. Yeah. It's a feature. I understand what you're saying. I think restaurants... There was a trend for so long it's still going on where like restaurants play like hip-hop you know and like i don't want to hear kanye west while i'm eating spicy pinne you know i want i want to like i want to hear nothing is preferred if you go to certain kind of old school like i think lay bernardana in new york doesn't play music and it's just it's like the bustle of the restaurant and the chatter i'd much rather yeah yeah yeah it's fascinating jordy where should we take it now i have a i yeah Yeah, I wanted to just get some broad takes from you on a bunch of different topics that we don't cover closely.

1:44:26So one, first off, is AI psychosis real? You experienced it yet yourself? Let me tell you something about AI, and I'm sorry to all of you. I just couldn't care less. No, I'm assuming. Couldn't care less. I don't care less. I think it's a reality. I think it's very serious. I think it's coming for us, good, bad, and ugly. I just don't care. and like other things in my life, I'm going to put it off till the very last minute. And when I have to deal with it, I've never downloaded Photoshop. I've never used InDesign. I've put off all this shit in my entire life and it's worked out. So I think I'm going to do the same thing with AI until I have no choice.

1:45:02And so you work, list off some of the clients that you've worked with over the years. It's basically everybody, right? Oh, I mean, yeah. I mean, everything. And on that side of the business, yeah. I mean, New Balance, Tom Brown, Stussy, J. Crew is an ongoing one. Banana Republic for a couple of years. So, yeah, I mean, like a little bit of everything. John's 6 '8", so Banana Republic is his. Yeah, they signed Kevin Love. Jason's 6 '9". So he has the same – he suffers the same issue. What's that shoe? And he has the 14, 15? Jason's a 17, so it's really – Whoa, okay. Mogged. He goes to these, like, funny websites to find shoes.

1:45:42that we haven't heard of because we're dark web big and tall for sure exactly exactly exactly so so you're going in when you're working with these clients it's kind of like rick rick rubin mode you don't know how to use any of the tools you're just kind of like they just pay you to tell them what what i mean no i think it's a little bit of um a relationship thing and and hopefully a taste thing like i think taste takes years and years to develop and i think mine is suited for certain people more than others. I think J.Crew is like a perfect fit because I grew up wearing J.Crew. I was raised in Atlanta.

1:46:16It's preppy, it's Southern. But I think I have a little bit of a different point of view because I got into punk and hardcore and skateboarding and all that stuff. So it's like a little bit of a hybrid of all those things. But I think with clients, it's all about sort of taking the real talent at the company and making sure that it doesn't go off the rails. So the creativity, people who are true geniuses and really creative like powerhouses need to be brought back down to earth a little bit you know and like reminded in a nice uh gentle way that if we don't you know make money this is all over like this is like like we can do all this stuff but sometimes you got to feed the beast to make sure the lights stay on and it buys us more time to do more fun stuff and i think it's like a i think as an outsider going into a company you're able to do that a easier than like a salaried employee yeah you can stir things up uh yeah are you um but but so so going like slightly deeper your client like i have to imagine every single brand that you've worked with or will work with in the future is starting to try to mix in ai generated imagery and i'm sure that's sounds like that's triggering to you it's just stuff that that you don't you don't want to like how do you see the kind of market kind of bifurcating in the sense that you think every brand you think any brands will take a hard line and say like we only shoot you know farm to table organic content here we never i think that's exactly what's going to happen i think there's going to be like a division where it's like obviously certain things are easy to automate i think everybody will do that because it's a it feels like a freebie i think some of the creative stuff i think a lot of at least i hope clients i work with would sort of be like we need a human being to take the pictures like that like pictures specifically like to me there's so much emotion involved in it there's so much skill involved in it and you just can't to me i haven't seen it mimicked correctly like asking chad yeah the other the other picture car is different like this is something that requires like a human touch i think yeah and i i think there's actually there's laws in place that that make it so that chain restaurants can't photoshop their food right because they would just photoshop a burger and then they're trying to sell it and it just doesn't look yeah thing and i think i think it's possible we'll see i don't know on the apparel side will be interesting because everybody's had the experience of like buying an item and it just looks amazing online or it looks totally different when it gets there or whatever and then it just like doesn't fit or whatever and so i think that that will probably accelerate as you have these sort of upstart brands that never even do product photography don't even know if they're if their stuff well product photography and like econ photography is like a science and it's pretty hard to get right and there's a lot of discussion at these companies about how to do it who's going to shoot it how it's going to appear and i think that stuff is very interesting because it directly relates to sales and like the bottom line like some styles work really really well and that's what everybody wants to mimic and some are a little a little harder to pull off you know yeah what about on what about how do you see like you know the music market evolving we don't cover much music at all the latest justin beeper album we got that's all two songs i mean we we talk about music and on how long gone all that's all we do and like a lot of my my best friends are musicians um most of them are successful at this point they've been doing it long enough but i think it's like everything else in our in our lives i think we're just paralyzed by choice and the barrier of entry is just too low you know there's too much stuff and music it suffers from that maybe more than any other genre that i can think of and you mean i mean because you know growing up you'd buy an album you'd invest dollars into it and so you would listen to the full thing and you'd like really pay attention to it and now if you can stream an album for two seconds and be like ah it's whatever yeah you don't care i mean i think yes i think that i also think that it's just if the if the three of us wanted to make a song right now and upload it and have it on itunes and spotify this week we could do that yeah and i don't think that i don't think the world needs that from us or for many for many other people and i think that but yes you're right i think when you would go to the store um access was harder i mean we talk about this all the time like i grew up i remember the day that we got internet at my parents house you know i mean we have the Dell in the fucking family room.

1:50:41I remember it like the whole thing. And if you remember a time before that, I think the effort that was involved to like anything or, or to, to understand anything was so much greater. Cause you had to piece it together through like magazines and going to a show and that kind of thing. Yeah. You go to a show, you go to magazines, you look at the liner notes of an album and see which bands get thanked and then go find those bands. You know, it's like, it was that, it was kind of that tactile and that granular. But yeah, I think it's like, I think that like Spotify and streaming in general, like I know people that make a lot of money on streaming and they're very happy with it.

1:51:16I know a lot of people and the, the, I think general sentiment is no one gets paid enough. And of course I always want artists to get paid more because they, you know, it's a soundtrack to our lives. It's like important for culture. Um, but I also think that people forget that these are just giant corporations and they've got bought again, they've got bottom lines and like they're going to do whatever they have to do to make that work. Yeah. Do you think corporate jingles could make a comeback? They have. What do you mean? I mean, you know famously Pusha T from Clips wrote the McDonald's jingle.

1:51:46I'm loving it. No way. Yeah. I had no idea. He'll never have to work again. That's incredible. From that alone. Yeah. So I think all that stuff. I mean, it's like the way that like Jon Hamm is the voice of Mercedes. Like everybody gets it how they can. You know what I mean? I think the jingle or I mean, what we talk about a lot on How Long Gone is like sync culture. you know and like how there used to be like you would be a sellout you know if they used your song in a in a jack-in-the-box commercial and now it's like well that's the most money i'm going to make if they're going to give me a quarter million dollars to use my song for 30 seconds like i have to do that you know the choice isn't isn't quite as clear as it used to be and so we've talked to a lot of different musicians about regret you know how they like pass something up because they were high on their horse in their early 20s and now that they're 40 they're like I'm a fucking idiot.

1:52:33Like, it was half a million dollars. Like, who cares? Yeah, that makes sense. You said that they've made a comeback already. Like, is there a more modern example than the McDonald's theme song? I mean, I feel like, you might be right. I feel like they're just, they're ingrained in my brain so they feel new. Totally. But like, Cars for Kids or something is probably 20 years old. If you guys ever lived in New York, there's 1-877-CARS-FOR-KIDS. Yeah, I know it well. I'm just thinking about like of the new companies that have emerged Airbnb, Facebook, Instagram, Spotify, open AI, like SpaceX, like Tesla doesn't have a jingle.

1:53:12Like, I don't know if those would be even like on brand, but like even funny, even like Prime from Logan Paul, like he's done a song like he did. He did like it's every day, bro, with his brother, I think, or maybe that was just his brother. But, you know, like there are influencer brands. Mr. Beast has a chocolate bar. I don't know that it has a jingle. And I'm wondering if it has something to do with the fact that, like, the nature of advertising has become, like, way longer tail in the creative. Like, we don't see that many, like, shelling points for, like, wow. They made an iconic ad. It ran at the Super Bowl.

1:53:48Everyone's talking about it. It's more like they spent the same amount of money on ads, but it's just in the form of a thousand different Instagram ads. and everyone saw a slightly different one that was more tailored to them. So the guys saw the one with the girl in them. Potentially Alpha making a jingle right now and using the same jingle on like thousands of different creative. So it's always the same audio and different visuals. That will work. Yeah. I think we're onto something here. Ramp, time is money. Say both. Find your happy place. I mean, with car companies, they obsess over like the sounds the cars make.

1:54:20You know what I mean? Like I drove this new Mercedes from Atlanta to Miami for the F1. And it was like, there was all this detail. I'm a huge Mercedes fan. We love Mercedes over here. We have tons of them. I'm in Bedford, New York right now. And I borrowed a CLE AMG convertible. It couldn't be better. It's 53. I just noticed all the, when you drive these cars, you notice like these little kind of sort of brand moments where it's like a little noise when something starts up or like it is audio or like how famously like porsche has a guy whose only job is about like the way the door sounds when it closes because it sounds so much better in a porsche than other cars you know yeah but it but it's just a funny i think there is these audio elements that are happening from a brand standpoint but they're not quite as overt as like a jingle you know yeah it does feel like uh doug demero has this take that like power is on demand like the latest rivian truck electric truck has 1200 horsepower it's the same as a bugatti veyron like it is it like that's what you want when you're driving your kids no no no no no all right because that rivian is rivian is like the that that is like the austin mesh hat yeti cooler of cars i just don't i don't get the popularity i don't think it looks good i mean i guess it's an alternative to tesla so So that's part of this.

1:55:49Yeah, I think the main thing was that like Tesla hadn't come out with a truck yet. And then they came out with a very controversial design. And then the F-150 Lightning was pretty expensive. And the Rivian kind of was just pure play, like didn't confuse anyone. And then they did have the full-size SUV or like close to full-size SUV in the electric category. A little bit sooner than the Hyundai Ioniq 9 and a couple others. It says a little bit more. But it is interesting because between Lucid and Rivian and – I forgot about Lucid. Polestar. Polestar. Polestar is technically like a Volkswagen or a – Oh, is it?

1:56:26It's not a Volkswagen. It's the Volvo. Volvo. I go to Copenhagen Fashion Week a couple times a year and the drivers are all – It's all Polestar. It's all Polestar. I mean every brand is confused with what to do with electric. like it's like do we throw a is it a is it a powertrain we just throw a little i at the end or an x or an e at the end or do we do a whole new sub brand or do we spin something out oh what do you have you seen that have you seen the new the new lamborghini what is what is that the ev oh yeah what was that called it's called the why do they have to make them look lans the door the lans the door you got to pull a picture of the lans the door this thing looks wild it is what What is it?

1:57:04A Lambo? Yeah, it's a Lamborghini Lansador. They're calling it an SUV, but it just looks like a really big car. Like a lifted sedan. It looks like a lifted, no, it looks like a lifted hurling on. It's kind of sick. It's kind of sick. And then there's the slate truck, which is coming out, which is like a small thing. But I think that some of the new companies, like they're so focused on like just deliver on the basic value prop. They're not in that like surprise and delight category yet. Although Rubion did kind of do that with like that gear tunnel. you know about that in the truck i like okay yeah that is a that is just a a big old car yeah it's a big car but they're calling the suv guys that kind of looks like a subaru no joke no that's that's the uh hey that's like a subaru halo car like that yes uh uh total uh total tangent but i did have uh one question and then one idea that i wanted to throw out before before you jump do you think that any social media apps will become truly lindy like will we be on x like 30 years from now chopping it up on the timeline or as a as a i call it twitter still i'm a traditionalist but for this purpose i will call the x i x is the most enduring platform that we have because i think it's not image based i think that's what sets it apart it feels more comedy and information and those are two things that i feel like aren't as affected by trends in some ways whereas like instagram i love instagram i use it every day but like people get when people get very exhausted by it because of what they have to see you know and i think twitter i don't know i'm a i'm a twitter diehard i'm a power user i have been forever um and i will never change that yeah that's awesome i hope yeah it's one of those things like is is is it digital news or is it its own form factor, like vinyl, that will just perpetuate forever?

1:59:03We're going to find out. Last question, media and entertainment question because you're an entertainer. Do you think there's room in the market for next election cycle pay-per-view boxing between both political parties? So like Democrats versus Republicans, betting on the line, very American. I'll pay I'll pay$100 for the PPV for that. I mean, I think that if we're I don't think we're that far away. Honestly, I know that's a joke. I don't think we're that far. No, I'm not. I'm actually serious. I really think every four years you get 10 10 Dems, 10 Republicans get them lined up in different weight classes.

1:59:42$100. Duke it out. I would love to see some low-level first-year senators just bloodying themselves in the opening rounds. It could just be angry online posters, too. That's a category of fighting that has not been monetized. It's something we should think about. Yeah, it's like Dana White's slapboxing thing or whatever. No experience required. Political slapboxing would be huge. Awesome. All right, well, this was super fun. Let's do it again soon. Thank you. Come back on again soon. This is great. We'll talk to you soon. Anytime, guys. Thanks so much. Have a good one. Good luck with the rest of your live shows.

2:00:20We were talking about jingles. We got to sing you a jingle. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book of Wonder with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. And Chris Buskirk is in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring in Chris Buskirk. How you doing, Chris? I'm all right. How are you? Great. Hopefully, you got to hear us singing. we're trying to bring back corporate jingles we think that there's an unexplored territory there i don't know your stance 1789 oh i know why we don't i actually know why we don't have them anymore please explain it's because big pharma took over advertising and that killed all the creativity oh interesting man they got to throw those big disclaimers at the end commercial 20 seconds tells you all the bad things that are going to happen to you when you take the drug it's rough well yeah so so uh the conspiracy theory there i don't have my tinfoil hat handy is that uh it's not about even generating awareness here we go i got we keep one of these anytime we have to discuss a conspiracy theory discuss a conspiracy theory it gives you cover you know yeah i don't i don't believe this necessarily but uh you you listen to these pharma ads and they're after after listening to it i would say you're much more likely to think I don't think this is for me, right?

2:01:39Because you maybe hear about some benefits and then you get like 20 seconds of, but it's just, is it a mechanism to just invest so many dollars in the show that the show could not possibly criticize the pharma industry broadly? Otherwise you're potentially - Is this manufactured consent, says Noam Chomsky, but has been written, rewritten many times. Well, it's more like, yeah, you're welcome to criticize big pharma, but like say goodbye to like what, 60 % of your revenue overnight. Anyway, we're not going to be talking about more. Sorry. Anyway, let's kick it off with an introduction. Theory is always also known as the news six months in the future.

2:02:19Yeah. But let's introduce yourself. How do you think about yourself? What key projects are you working on right now? You know, co-founder of 1789 Capital. As you guys know, like I've got some other avocations as well. But, you know, just, you know, people always say, like, how do you split up your time? And like, that was like the Rubik's Cube question for me for a while. And I realized actually the simple answer is right, which is like all the different stuff I'm doing is all the same project, which is how do you keep the country peaceful and prosperous? Like, that's really it. And there's all kinds of different vectors of attack there.

2:02:57There's like, there's politics, there's culture, there's business, there's tech. but it's really all with the same telos. Like how do we just make life better for this country and the people in it? Yeah, give me a temperature check on your view on the business climate. There's been so many stories about tariffs and interest rates and all sorts of stuff. At the same time, the stock market's been like down and then right back to where it was. And so there's like the nothing ever happens view. There's the incredibly tumultuous times view. How are you just feeling about the business climate generally?

2:03:31It's amazing. It's better than it's been in a long time. Yeah. I mean, this is what, you know, I've had the following conversation. It probably literally like 10 or 20 times in the past few months. And people, whether it's a lot of investors, but also founders slash builders have said a different version of the same thing, which is I didn't know how much I was self-censoring my own thought about what was possible over the past four or five years years until, you know, fill in the blank, January, February, March, April, whatever, just this year. And then they realized like, oh, the shackles are off.

2:04:07We can actually go and do really cool stuff now. And everybody had their project. Like there, it was like, there was a pain point in their business. Like, oh, I can't do this. Or like, you know, like the crypto guys or AI, like they're really, really under attack. And it was like regulation by enforcement. And so they knew what the pain points were. And so for obvious reasons, we're super focused on those things. and they were like, oh, if we could just get through this, then we could do this one other thing, whatever that may have been. And what I've heard a lot of people saying is, Once the pain stopped, I realized that there were like 10 other things that I wanted to do, but that I could do.

2:04:42And so like the amount of optimism and energy is just really infectious. It's like it's a great time to be alive. Yeah, it feels like, I mean, we saw that with a lot of the nuclear founders. Like you talk to those folks. And I mean, it was so rough for a while that they normally, like if you invest in my company, I don't want you to invest in a direct competitor. But the nuclear companies were like, look, like that's not going to be the thing that does me in. Like you can go ahead and invest. And then now we finally have some clarity from the EO. we talked to some nuclear founders and it feels like we're on the cusp of some real progress there.

2:05:16How much are you focusing on energy? What are the other categories that you find interesting right now? What do you see as being like uniquely unlocked in this new era? Yeah, it's, we call it the, I don't think we made it up, but like we call it like transformational technology. So that means like AI, AI infra, energy, robotics, space, defense. Those are kind of like the big buckets. In a lot of cases, there's a lot of, they're really related. You know, we, like, at least the way we think about energy is, like, it's attached to all of those. Sure. And, you know, that's where nuclear really comes in, but particularly around AI and crypto and some of the other elements, just security in general.

2:05:58Like, that is the major unlock. like one of the things that I tell people all the time is like if you want to like a just an easy heuristic about like you know how you think about like what are the big unlocks that need to have happen which is the think about it this way the large civilization that has access to the most abundant cheapest energy wins like period full stop um I was talking with a friend of mine another investor last week and I he actually had he had this great um description which I had actually never thought of about colonization of mars because i was saying how you know like obviously elon's been super focused on it and like i don't want to go to mars like i've never wanted to go to mars it seems like it seems like it sucks there i said but then i realized um that actually like terraforming mars like that's actually kind of cool because it would make it someplace you'd actually want to go so that's why like mar like mars colonization has become charismatic because like just like getting to the moon was was interesting and charismatic um in the 60s because it was like, can we get there?

2:06:58Like it was just the, it was just like the journey, not the, not the end. But then when you start to think about the idea of, of, of colonization of Mars, well, it's interesting when you think that like you could make it beautiful. And what he said was, it's just an energy problem. If you can bring enough energy to bear, then you can terraform, then you can terraform Mars. I was like, that was actually for me, that was like an interesting way to think about it that I hadn't considered, but the same thing applies to everything else, which is if you have super abundant, super cheap energy as a large scale civilization, you're going to win because it makes everything else better, easier, cheaper, and things that were not possible, it makes them possible.

2:07:39Kind of like the way SpaceX what SpaceX has done with launch by just driving the cost per kilogram into the dirt, it unlocks all these other businesses. So if great power competition is energy competition. Do we, you know, I mean, the concern here is that China is just like copy and pasting nuclear reactors and we have a bunch of great nuclear startups that are, you know, making efforts and some new projects. I think Meta, you know, has announced some new initiatives there. But is this not like one of the kind of biggest issues that we're facing from a national security standpoint? There's a way in which it's the biggest because it touches everything.

2:08:24It touches literally everything. You think about these really critical growth areas, AI being the super obvious one. I've seen a number of analyses that show the amount of AI compute we need to build just in this country, let's say, in the next 10 years, so by 2035, it would consume more power than we produce right now as a good country. So there's like, we need to be producing a lot more power because unlike certain members of Congress, it turns out electricity doesn't just come from the wall. Like you actually have to produce it someplace. Yeah, food comes from the grocery store. Gasoline comes from the pump.

2:09:02Electricity comes from the wall. What are you, slow? You just plug in and there's electricity there. I do think there's something fascinating about like, it's so hard to predict the future. It's so hard to predict what we will need, you know, a gigawatt data center for? And then all of a sudden, it's like, we need it today. We have the use case. We need it today. And I keep thinking about what happened in the dot-com boom where we overbuilt all this dark fiber. Google went and bought it up, and a bunch of the tech companies bought it up. And then eventually, the products caught up. My question is, how do you think about projects that might be uneconomical to underwrite on the venture side?

2:09:42And so they might need to be underwritten by the government. Like, I feel like we're probably aligned in that, like, we should probably keep the government as narrow as possible. But there are some really crazy things like the moon landing, like the Mars helicopter, stuff that just doesn't make any sense for any private company to go after. And then after a while, you start seeing like, oh, okay, like, you know, they built some roads, they built some infrastructure. And now private companies are catching up and actually ramping up the use of that energy or something. But how do you see the government playing a role in the next, in solving those fundamental problems?

2:10:20Is it purely just on deregulation? Do you want to see funding flow into certain projects? Do you want to see government doing hard projects? What's your philosophy on all that? Yeah, it's both. It's the answer. It's like we've just seen, you know, just as I was saying earlier, like just this year, just by getting out of the way unlocks a lot. And there's so many people who want to do things and who have the capacity to do things if they're not being shackled and prevented from doing them. So like we've seen a lot of that in the past seven months is just by getting out of the way and giving people permission to do it, you get a lot of you get a lot of activity and so that's a big part of it but then there are these other issues um where you know china creates its national champions and so like great example is like rare earth magnets you know it is it can be um it is i mean they subsidize it so it is cheaper to buy a rare earth magnet from a chinese supplier than it is to buy the raw materials in the united States.

2:11:23That's geopolitics, right? That's not just markets. That's not just economics. That's not just innovation. That's geopolitics. The Chinese have been on top of this for 20 years and realized that this was a choke point where they would be able to get a huge amount of leverage over their competitors and adversaries. And I guess we're someplace in between those two things with China. And if they were able to subsidize them, they could drive out all the competitors out of business. And because they go into literally everything of any importance, that they'd have massive, not just economic leverage, but like geopolitical leverage over the United States.

2:12:01So that's a place where, you know, government needs to play a role because it's not a company v company competition. It is a state actor v company competition as it stands right now. And that's something that's critical to national security. So you see that, I think, in a number of other spaces. But, you know, the rare earth magnets is like it's just a very obvious example of that where you can't like a company can be super innovative and can do all the right things. But if it is facing a state actor as its competitor versus another company, like they're going to lose. Yeah, on the rare earth materials question, there was a story in the Wall Street Journal last week about Apple buying half a billion dollars of rare earths from a company called MP Materials.

2:12:49In Vegas. In Las Vegas. And it stuck out to me as kind of a vibe shift because Apple hasn't been at the front of like re-industrialize America, bring back jobs and, you know, let's make everything in America. They're not saying that, but it feels like maybe behind the scenes, they're at least thinking about their supply chain very seriously and trying to diversify. And maybe it's a cruise ship, but they're putting their hands on the tiller just a little bit. And so I took that as a cause for optimism with the overall energy independence, supply chain independence. But did you see that story? Are there any other causes for optimism that might be coming from the crowd that's not cheering as loud as they can, but might be getting, you know, might be working behind the scenes to kind of achieve the same goals that everyone should be aligned around?

2:13:39Yeah, I mean, look, there's a lot of signal, I think, in that move. I mean, at some point, Apple has to realize that their supply chains are really, really insecure. are. This is like another point on the rare earth magnets. Like one of the things like the one of the what great sort of unintended consequences of the Liberation Day tariffs and the general policy of a tariff policy coming out of the administration is that this actually was turned out to be a forcing function. It made China play their rarest card way too early. Had they decided, for instance, to attack Taiwan and then played that card, that would have been the optimum moment.

2:14:22But what happened was that in the negotiations around tariffs, they threatened to play the rare earth card. In fact, they did actually reduce exports the past couple of months, but it was too soon. They played it early, and now there's time for the United States to catch up. And this is, in fact, as we saw with MP, and the support they've gotten from the government, Another company that we're in the process of investing in called Vulcan Elements is in the space as well. And we now have a window in time where we can build out an ecosystem to manufacture earth magnets in the United States and do it really, really quickly.

2:15:00So that's just a place where there's a lot of signal coming out around that as well. But there's I think the the fact that there is so much happening and at such a rapid rate, that's where we're seeing. That's where we're really seeing the advances here, because like, I don't know, like people ask me, like, are you pleased with the way the admin's gone? Yeah, I am. What I've been surprised by, though, is the speed with which they've moved. And what's happened is like they're moving at like founder speed and that that becomes infectious. And so now you get cycles that might have taken a year or two or three to happen and work things work through the system in the past.

2:15:43And now, like we see, we're standing up a rare earth's capacity in the United States basically overnight. That was like a pipe dream four or five months ago. And now it's actually happening. We got to stop calling them rare earths. They're just earths. They're just earth magnets. They're not rare. They're not rare. They're only the process form is rare. Yes. The industrial capacity is rare. but the product is not let's just call them earth it is it is you gotta you gotta uh you know we probably criticize uh china more than than most podcasters on earth but you got to give them credit for letting the world think that they were just the happy meal toy manufacturing hub for like a couple decades yeah and then just like quietly owned you know all all these critical supply I'm curious how you're thinking about solar.

2:16:32And one of the reasons I ask is I've invested in tons of these different kind of hard tech, new industrials categories. And I've yet to back a solar company. I only started actively angel investing maybe four or five years ago. And it's fallen out of fashion is one way to describe it. Casey Hammer is bringing it back. Yeah, so Casey's the only, Casey's the example, and I would happily invest in Casey if I had the chance. But curious how you're thinking about that. It's another area that China is dominant in, and it seems like something that we wouldn't necessarily want long term. So, like, I've been sort of, like, semi-obsessed with solar for a long time.

2:17:15I just, like, it's mostly just basically being, like, thrifty. I'm like, damn, there's all that sunlight, and I can just power my house for free, you know? So like at my house in Arizona, I have solar on it. I've had it for years. Okay. But it's really not economic. And so there needs to be a pretty big leap forward for it to matter. Otherwise, why not just build more nuclear? Right. Why don't we just keep it simple? Yeah. Casey, an interesting point. Like PV solars actually isn't that good. And like the concentrators are like, okay. But like, again, like we have the solution already. So there's got to be a compelling case to be made as to why under the current like, you know, with the current technology around solar, why is that even worth focusing on?

2:18:01Interesting. Yeah. Casey's point was like China is subsidizing photovoltaic manufacturing. And the most hurtful thing you could do is just buy all of it so that they take a loss on every unit and then build up your capacity. but I don't know that that actually would catalyze a real shift in capacity and we might just get kind of hooked on them. You're still helping them get extremely good at manufacturing. Especially if there's a learning curve and stuff. So I don't know. It's a longer conversation. And PV is just not that efficient, right? That's the problem. Yeah. I think the argument was that it's very well matched to the load of the grid of the American consumer because when it's hot out, we run our air conditioning and when it's hot out, the sun is shining on the PV cells.

2:18:47And so there's a match there, whereas a nuclear power plant generates just as much at night as it does in the day. So I don't know. There's a whole bunch of different load use cases for AI training versus inference and all this different stuff. But it's a fascinating geopolitical dynamic. And it seems like the main takeaway is that China has just been saying yes and to everything. And they develop capacity everywhere. and it's like, we could try and predict the future, but if PV winds up being really important, I want to have capacity for that. If nuclear, I want that too. I want the smorgasbord.

2:19:20Give me all the energy, but I don't know. They're building a ton of coal plants too. Yeah, no, 100%. And fortunately, some of the AI infrastructure buildouts are pulling forward some of that. We're getting a whole bunch of natural gas online. We are becoming more energy independent. So green shoots all over the place. Jordy, anything else? Last question? I think that's it for now. This was fantastic, Chris. Yeah, we got to have you back on, especially when there's like big news in your world or anything going on that you can comment on. Anytime, happy to do it. Yeah, we need, we just need 30 seconds notice.

2:19:50We'll drop you the, we'll drop you the link. We'll drop you the link. You can just hop right on. Okay, awesome. Yeah, just signal me, I'll be on. I will. I'll talk to you soon, Chris. Have a great day. Bye. Cheers. Bye. And speaking of minerals, we have... Adquick.com. If you're selling minerals, you put it on a billboard, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. What were you saying about Materials? Well, we have the founder of Mariana Minerals joining the show.

2:20:24Welcome to the stream. Hit the soundboard. Give me the Ashton Hall. Welcome to the stream. How you doing, Turner? Good. How you doing, guys? Beautiful map behind you. I love cartography. I'm a big fan of throwing a map in the background. Is that 3D or like, does it have texture? Or does it just kind of look at, look like. It's got a little bit of texture. Good. Not crazy 3D though. The Mercator projection, I'm pretty sure. That's a good one. Anyway, introduce yourself. What do you do? Welcome to the show. Yeah, sure thing. Thanks for having me on guys. Turner Caldwell here, CEO of Mariana Minerals.

2:20:59We're a vertically integrated software first mining company. So we're coming into projects that are, you know, have post exploration. They've discovered the mineral deposit and we come in to engineer it. So we develop the mine plan. We develop the refining plan. We capitalize it at the project level and from the top co. And then we manage the construction. We manage the commissioning and then we operate it out into perpetuity. Okay. Talk to me about the whole pipeline of actually getting minerals out of the ground. Let's say I own 100 ,000 acres in Alaska or something. I bought it just as a forest.

2:21:37it's a ranch, never explored it. What are the steps? I imagine we're talking about like a decade, there's exploration firms, then you come in at some point. Like really walk me through a concrete example of going from like someone has some land to now we're getting material. Well, yeah, and if you're this verticalized, why not also do discovery? I'm sure there's a reason. I'm sure there's a reason for that. Yeah, there's a big market of folks that are doing discovery. There's actually a bunch of awesome like tech, VC-backed startups that are focused on accelerating discovery. I think what we're missing is folks that are focused on condensing the timelines from when you have discovered something to when it is actually producing.

2:22:13And it's like this sneak in the grass kind of challenge, like very complicated system of actually designing these plants, buying out all the infrastructure, installing the infrastructure, getting it running. But yeah, so you start with a flat piece of land. Ideally, it's flat. And you'll start this like really long campaign of, you know, you'll start with kind of like spot testing of different areas to determine and probably some surface sampling to determine if there's something promising there. There's some permits that come into play when you have to actually start doing more advanced exploration campaigns.

2:22:44And that's something that, you know, if you're on federal land and sometimes on state land, those permits can get in the way of accelerating kind of mineral discovery. You'll do drill holes, you know, hundreds to thousands of drill holes to define a mineral deposit. And those mineral deposits can vary all over the place. You can have shallower ones where it's a little bit cheaper to drill. You can have really deep ones where it starts to get much more expensive to do and timely, time intensive to do that expiration campaign. And all along the way, you are taking samples and you are kind of building these 3D models to try to understand how was the deposit formed?

2:23:18Why is the mineral there in the first place? And that helps to kind of inform also the advancing the expiration side of things. And in parallel with that, you're starting to do these testing campaigns where you're running concentration tests to figure out how you can upgrade the ore to an intermediate product. You're starting to do refining tests to understand how you would actually extract the target mineral into its final state, which is, you know, a high purity metal alloy in many cases or a high purity kind of specialty chemical salt. And so you're writing these reports all along the way. So you'll start with a PEA, which is an initial economic assessment.

2:23:53you'll then do a pre-feasibility study, you'll do a feasibility study, you'll do a definitive feasibility study. And kind of as you're doing that, the value of the asset is kind of increasing and increasing. Speculators are piling into the stock. And the intent there at that point is really clear. Let's hear it for the speculators. The backbone of the mining industry. Penny stock rippers. I love it. That's right. And that's how that exploration is funded, really. Sure. They're trying to like ride that first wave of value creation. Yeah. Similar to like FDA trials for new pharmaceuticals, probably.

2:24:22Well, I can, I can, I can, I'm starting to figure out, you know, a number of reasons while you're explaining them, why you wouldn't want to do the exploration and discovery is because that could take like 10 years. Why don't you just do this thing and then he goes on to describe the hardest thing in the world. Well, yeah, but then, but the other thing is like the duration, ideally you start working with a customer and they're like, here's what we have in the ground to help us get it out. And then you can just start doing that. That's exactly right. And that's, that's how we're thinking about it is we want to be the ones that go from, You know, the folks that are doing the exploration, they're there to define the resource and ideally get some return on the invested capital that they had as they were kind of like going through this like long and arduous process of defining a mineral resource.

2:25:02But typically those are geologists, financiers, lawyers. It's very rare where you'll see a junior mining company that's actually staffed to take it all the way through to production. It's a different class of business, fundamentally. Like you're dealing with, say, like very high CapEx deployment. complex kind of mining and refining systems that span the entire ecosystem of engineering skill sets, commercial skill sets. And so there's a nice handoff point there. And so what happens today is the junior mining companies will spend a lot of time exploring, going to increase the value of the asset.

2:25:35Ideally, they flip it to a large mining company that comes in to do the hard yards of actually getting the thing operating. And that's where we want to come in as well. So the big mining companies, they're looking for billion dollar opportunities to deploy billions of dollars of capital. And they pick their spots on the commodities also. So you might have a commodity that's out of favor. And so no one's picking up the asset. You might have an asset that would be called subscale in this scenario where it's not a billion dollars of CapEx. It's only a couple hundred million dollars of CapEx, still a big project.

2:26:09And those are getting ignored. And so we think that with the differentiation on the tech stack on the software side of things that we're bringing in and also a differentiated team, we can bring these smaller scale assets, which are like right size for us as an early stage company into production while they've been kind of ignored by the big mining companies. All right. One more question and then we'll talk about the news today. But when did you first yearn for the mines? Yes, yearn for the mines. So when I graduated college, I actually had this like vision of moving to Australia and going and working in the mines.

2:26:42I never quite like like, convert on that. But worked at Tesla for nine years and change. Started out up in Reno, was working on the gigafactory up there, kind of, like, designing, building it. Then started working on battery cell manufacturing, started working on areas of the cell chemistry and in the supply chain side of things. And as I was moving kind of further and further upstream, you know, the mining industry is wild. It's an awesome industry. But it's definitely been neglected. Like we've kind of been viewing it as dirty and, you know, it should happen. It should, it should happen, but it shouldn't happen here.

2:27:17And it's also like this massive, it's this awesome opportunity to work across scales. Like a lot of what you're developing starts at like the micron scale of like, how do I get this atom out of this other atom? Well, not atoms, but it's like atom out of this mineral. And then you have to scale that up to like kilometer scale infrastructure. and like that breadth of scales is awesome. That's really cool. What's the news today? If I might. Yeah, so we're, ah, there we go. We're coming out of stealth with our Series A raise. We had Andreessen Horwitz, Coastal Ventures, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and a couple of other folks join in.

2:27:53We've raised$65 million. There we go.

2:27:57So loud. First hit of the week. Oh, it feels so good. Neil's good. Congratulations. Fantastic news. Fantastic. Last question before you jump off. Are you guys like acquiring any companies or is it fully ground up? Yeah, so we'll step in and we'll acquire mineral assets that makes sense for us to step into. We're working on that in the copper space right now. But that's like buying the land, not necessarily like basically buying the resource itself, not like a surrounding company or maybe it is structured as yeah so it'll it'll it'll it'll vary there's a lot of mining projects that are on care and maintenance that you know have were turned off and could be turned back on with you know if you come in and retrofit to deploy kind of like the reinforcement learning platform that we're working to deploy which means you need more instrumentation you need more control to be able to control the the big refinery which is basically a big robot um and uh in certain cases it might be a a mine that's actually operating today that we can step into and we see opportunity for uplift.

2:29:00And in other areas, it'll be a greenfield asset where, you know, we're stepping in and partnering and partnering with the resource owner. And then we would have a cash flow split kind of once we bring it to commercial scale so that they can keep exploring. And you kind of create this flywheel where they're continuing to explore, they're leveraging cash flows from operating assets to fund their exploration. And then we would step in to develop those assets over time. So it's pretty variable. But yeah, we have - Yeah, so basically the market prices certain assets here, and you guys look at it and say, with our technology, this is actually worth some premium on that.

2:29:36That's exactly right. And in certain cases, the market will say that there's no net asset value or no NAF. And that's an area where you can kind of step in and get a good deal and bring it into production. He's a value miner. Let's go. He's a value investor. This is super cool. Congratulations. we're going to do a lot more on rare earths broadly so we're going to stop calling them rare because we got plenty we're just going to call them earths they're a lot out there they're hard to find in high concentrations and hard to get out but they're out there well congratulations to you and the team on the raise and hopefully have you back on soon we'll talk to you soon cheers 8sleep go to 8sleep.com get a pod 5 ultra They have a five-year warranty, a 30-night risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping.

2:30:27Get an eight sleep. We have our next guest from Altimeter coming in the studio. I've got to give people the – I'm so sick. You will welcome him to the show. My HRV thinks that I'm dead. So thank you to my eight sleep for getting me through this. Saving my life, basically. It's life-saving technology. You heard it here first. That is health advice. Not a health claim. Not a health claim. Not. Awesome. Ask your doctor about saving your life with an eight sleep. I'm going to botch his name. Jammin. Let's bring him in from Altimeter. There we go. How you doing? Good. What's happening? Great to be here.

2:31:03Great to meet you. Great to meet you. Sorry for botching your name on the way in. No, no. How do we say it? Given name is Benjamin. Benjamin. My parents called me Jammin as a toddler. That's awesome. In kindergarten, they were a bunch of Benjamins, so they just told my teacher, hey, call him Jammin. That's what we call him. That's amazing. So I was trying to give it this exotic pronunciation. Jameen. I'm sure you've gotten every variety over the course of your career. The only one that bugs me is Jasmine. Other than that, anything goes. Okay. Well, good to meet you. Welcome to the stream. Jamen Ball.

2:31:35Powerful name. Likewise. It's fun. Turner and I are actually good friends in college. It's fun seeing him on the show right before. Oh, amazing. No way. That's awesome. No way. Where did you guys go to school? We were at Stanford together. Oh, okay. So you had a sort of non-traditional. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. It's kind of like the Stanford of feeders into VC. Yeah, it really is. It really is. Well, it's great to have you on the show. I feel like you guys over at Altimeter have just been on a run. Just also like I feel like Invest America's or the Trump accounts is like feels like almost an incubation.

2:32:12So it's been it's been super cool. Yeah, super cool seeing that seeing that take off and get passed into law. Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. Well, I want to have you on to talk about, it sounds like you've been digging into the Figma S1. Oh, yeah. Would love to kind of get your reaction to it. You had a post getting picked up earlier in the timeline. Yeah, no, happy to. I mean, in many ways, Figma is the white buffalo of my career. It's the one that got away. I've been at Red Altimeter for about five years, was Red Point for five years before that. And I think the memory of venture capital that I'll never forget is trying to win the Series C.

2:32:49I think this was late 2018 or early 2019 with Vivek, who was one of my colleagues, and Scott, who was one of the partners at Redpoint at the time. And we lost to Andrew Reid, who's a phenomenal investor at Sequoia. But I'll never forget that round, the Figma Series C. It's my white buffalo. He's told us the whole story about how they brought him into the Sequoia office and they sat Dylan down in the Brown conference room because at Sequoia, they have all of their conference rooms named after their endowment partners and their LPs. And they were like, look, we're investing in you, but if you make us money, you're helping your school.

2:33:26And I thought it was very interesting. There you go. About pitch, but it's a good pitch. So it got away, but now you're digging in further and trying to understand the business in the S1. What have you learned? what are the interesting takeaways? What should someone, even if we just zoom out, what are people typically looking for in a software company going public these days? Yeah, it's a great question. And I'd say, in many ways, the market needs this type of company to go public. We haven't seen a software IPO really since the Service Titan IPO late last year. If you look at the overall kind of growth rates of the public software universe today, it's declined quite significantly.

2:34:05I think the median growth rate, I track a basket of about 80 software companies. The median growth rate's about 14%. And that's not what it used to be. We're not really in this high growth. There's not a lot of high growth software companies that you can buy and invest in. Figma comes out as a marquee software business. It's growing 49%. But what it also brings is 28 % free cash flow margins, which is super rare. The growth in and of itself, they would be, at least in my basket, the fastest growing public software company. When you add in the free cash flow margins at scale, it has this unique profile of growth plus profits, which rule of 40 is a popular metric a lot of investors look at, which just adds your growth rate plus your free cash flow margin.

2:34:53They'd be number one on the list. And so I think that's something the markets are excited about, growth and profitability with a company that's almost at a billion dollars of run rate. So the rule of 40 is you add the free cash flow margin to the growth rate of the business on the top line, and you should be at around 40 % positive. But it sounds like Figma's up at 79%, 69%, something like that, like well above 40. Is that right? That's right. Yeah. 40 % is kind of the benchmark for are you considered a good or great business? And so they kind of far exceed that. And even when lined up against the rest of the software universe at least the 80 that i track that's the it's the highest how much credit should we give to where the business is today to all the chaos that happened during the adobe acquisition yeah in many ways you got a billion dollar non-dilutive investment through the breakup fee yeah which sounds like you know they obviously don't didn't necessarily need that but it it gives them a massive amount of leverage.

2:35:58Yeah. I'm also interested in other aspects that could change. If you think you're going to be acquired, like maybe you freeze hiring and that's a good decision. And then you wind up, you know, actually increasing your margins or maybe it changes the way you think about the business. They did make changes like probably when the acquisition didn't go through. I do remember there was almost an immediate change in how they were doing pricing. and billing that was like night and day. Sure, sure, sure. I mean, I think this is a testament to the strength of not just the business, but to Dylan and the leadership team.

2:36:35Having a company go through something like that, most companies don't make it back from that because as a customer, you're thinking, do I want to use this product? What's going to happen when it gets acquired? Is it going to be shut down? Is it going to be a focus? You get a lot of customers who are thinking, I don't know if I want to use this software. You get a lot of new hires thinking, well, gosh, I thought I was going to go work for a high-growth startup. I don't really want to go work for Adobe. It's the type of people that Adobe attracts are going to be different than the type of people that a high-growth startup attracts.

2:37:04And so you get a lot of headwinds on the customer front as well as on the hiring front, and it can just lead to really negative inertia that's hard to overcome. Look at Windsurf and OpenAI. I'm sure similar dynamics happen there where thought you're going to get acquired. Customers think different of you. New hires think different of you. It's really hard to come back from something like that. And the fact that Figma not only did, but is, you know, I think I'm going to be worth a whole lot more than what that acquisition was just a few years ago. It's a testament to and many of us think the strength of the management team, which, again, I don't think it can be overstated how significant of an achievement it was for that team to come back from from that moment.

2:37:44even stronger than what they were going into it. I'm curious how you think, you know, if you were going to, you know, anybody that's kind of trying to analyze the business, I think one thing that'll, you know, that you can make a really strong case for why Figma will be a massive beneficiary of AI, right? I think if anybody, you know, they've had different experiments over the years. They have Figma make now. but the other side will look at the business and say, well, if every engineer can just generate designs instantly, is design software necessary? Do you have a view there? I mean, I've been generally, as somebody that uses Figma every single day and has for my entire career, I sort of expect to use it a decade from now and I expect to use it even 15 years from now.

2:38:38I don't know, like it's just such core infrastructure to the company. And so that's my view. So when people say, oh, we want, you know, like all UI will just be generated. But how are you thinking about that kind of set of risk factors? That's a great question. And I think what we can do is look back at how the business is executed over its entire lifecycle to kind of get a glimpse into how they might be successful or not in this period of time. When Figma was founded, the entire industry used a product called Sketch. and Sketch was almost the equivalent of Excel to an investment banker. And it really wasn't until the Series C in Figma where it kind of started to become obvious that, wait a second, maybe this product, maybe this startup is actually going to convert the world from Sketch to something new.

2:39:22And for outsiders and even for insiders, designers, the notion of taking away Sketch, again, it was like taking away Excel from an investment banker. It was a huge deal. All of the shortcuts, the workflows, all of that was just ingrained into your muscle memory. But they were able to do that. They were able to overcome that. And that is one of the reasons why they're so great today. I think the management team isn't naive, though. They're looking at the opportunity as it exists today. And they say, well, we can't afford to be sketched. We can't we can't let someone figma us like we figma sketch, you know, I don't know, seven, eight years ago.

2:39:56And so it's certainly the thing that is top of mind for them. I look at Figma Make as a step in the right direction. I look at the audience, the distribution, the mindshare that they have. I look at the fact that Dylan is still the CEO. It's a founder-led business that has a history of execution over a decade-long period. And everything that I believe to be true is that they will be successful and then they will be the vendor that kind of capitalizes on this kind of trend of, well, do I even need Figma? I'm just going to prototype in with a prompt and I'm going to get my design. I think that misses some of the iterative process of the design process.

2:40:34And so I think it's a risk. Well, yeah, you can make, you can, you know, anybody that's arguing like all UI will be generated from a prompt. You can go back the other way, which is I'll just generate designs for the software that I want and understand how the product works and how it flows and all the different functionality. And then I'll just generate all the code after, you know, it can go both ways. Yeah, and market size. I mean, look, if you rewind the clock to the seed series A, series B of rounds that Fegman was raising, a huge reason not to do the deal was TAM. You'd say, how many designers are there in the world?

2:41:06What's the price point of designers willing to play? Multiply P times Q and like that's your TAM. I think early on, what did the world get wrong? Well, it was that Q is actually higher. It's not just the designers. You're going to creep into product people. You're going to creep into engineers. and the people that are going to touch and use the product aren't just that limited set of designers. I think the same thing is going to happen with AI, right? Now, all of a sudden, you are going to increase the scope and increase the surface area of the types of people and the personas who can interact with Figma in the same way you're seeing with the coding solutions, right?

2:41:41Maybe the right way to think about the TAM for a Windsor, for a cursor, isn't 20 bucks a month because that's what GitHub charges times number of engineers in the world and software engineers. Maybe it's the average salary of a software engineer times the number of software engineers. Those are two vastly different numbers. And I think when we look at how that applies to Figma today, if they get this shift right, it will massively expand the personas and the type of people who can and will access and pay for Figma. Makes sense. Very well said. Thanks so much for coming on. This is really helpful.

2:42:16We should come back on again soon. and let's look at the other 80 companies. Let's do it. That you track. I think Figma just process-wise, they're supposed to price on Wednesday, trade next Thursday. So they're on the road talking to investors like us and excited for their debut on Thursday. Maybe finally own a piece of the Figma. Exactly. I texted Dylan and I told him that exact same thing. I'll finally become a shareholder. That's awesome. No longer the white whale. Well, thanks so much for hopping on and breaking it down for us. We'll talk to you soon. See ya. Bye. Up next, we have Harper Carroll coming into the studio.

2:42:49Welcome to the stream. We are waiting one minute. Let me see. Let me tell you about the timeline. We have the bucket pullback. We've got Harper. Oh, we have Harper. Harper. Welcome to the show. Hi, Danny and John. Thanks so much for having me on the show. Welcome to the show. Would you mind introducing yourself? And there's a bunch of things that I want to talk about, but I'll let you kick it off with an intro on yourself. Okay. I am Harper. I run Harper Carroll AI. So I'm an AI educator. I'm a machine learning engineer. That's my background. I have two degrees in computer science and engineering, specializing in AI from Stanford.

2:43:32Then I was at Meta building machine learning systems there for about four years. Then I was at a GPU environment, cloud environments development startup that where I became head of AI. I actually started teaching AI there and that's how this all kind of was born. But I also TA'd when I was at Stanford, some core AI PhD courses. And yeah, that company was acquired by NVIDIA. And I just teach AI now full time. I started on X with fine tuning guides. So you might, if you've seen me before on X, it was probably from that. I started in late 2023 with like fine tuning open source model guides with your own data or with hugging face data, coding guides, stupider notebooks, and then went to Instagram and have been there and kind of reaching towards YouTube and starting there with Q &As and yeah, just kind of seeing where this goes.

2:44:26What's been the bigger news in your world? The IMO gold medal competition between OpenAI and Google or GPT agents or something else in the world of AI? There's a new news story every day. What's been capturing your attention? Yeah, there's a new news story every single day. I actually saw one recently. What were they saying? That reasoning models, well, the major AI companies are coming together and saying that they want to make sure that reasoning models stay open and that we continue to see their thought processes. So that kind of research. I also saw really interesting research from Anthropic that said that reasoning models are not actually necessarily showing us what we think that they're thinking.

2:45:12So, for example, Anthropic gave a reasoning model a question and it kept getting it wrong. And then they gave it a hint and the model got it right. But when you looked at the trace, the chain of thought from the reasoning model, it didn't mention a hint. So we think that we're actually seeing its reasoning, but not necessarily. so there needs to be a lot more work on this but but yeah some of the cool research stuff and and yeah there's always new new tech coming out open ai's agent very exciting stuff for plush these browser do you do you expect uh we've been we've been testing agent uh john was texting uh testing it over the weekend i was testing it on the show earlier do you expect an explosion of consumer use cases in the way that everybody, I mean, it's hard to build a product that's more viral than like the initial chat GPT product, but do you, are you expecting there to be like specific use cases that, that come out of that?

2:46:11And are you seeing any that, that, that are super promising? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I, I feel like I was, I advise companies as well on their AI. And, um, I feel like I was kind of early to say, you know, there was a wave maybe about a year ago where people were saying, oh, you know, rapper companies are BS. You're a loser if you make a rapper company. But I think I was one of the earlier ones to say, like, no, actually, you can't really compete with these foundational open source models. And yes, if you want to do a small specialized model, I think we'll see a lot more of those. I don't think we need these massive foundation models that know everything about the world for very specialized tasks.

2:46:45So I think we'll start to see more of those. but one consumer use case that I'm really, really excited about is using AI for kids. I think both of you guys have kids, right? Yeah. Do you use it with your kids at all yet? At least large language models specifically, like ChatGPT. Yeah, totally. Usually when I want to violate intellectual property rules and I want to create a story where Spider-Man, who's a Disney IP, interacts with Batman from Warner Brothers. Oh, good. You're sitting on a transformer. Yeah, exactly. And so I find that all the large language models are happy to write poetry that completely disregards the cinematic universes, which I have a lot of fun with.

2:47:27And then sometimes illustrate them. I always thought that these form factors, the Avi's friend.com, the Rabbit R1. I always thought that those were something that if you just focus on the kid use case, which is like a friend that can help you understand the world that maybe a parent can kind of like call into. Totally. Would be would be cool. But but yeah, just hasn't really. Yeah. Yeah. So how does this actually roll out? What are you excited about? Is it going to be all sold in through the through the parents and the parents will be using the product and then kind of like giving the result to the kid?

2:48:02Like, I feel like my son got an AI generated like story gifted to him over Christmas, but it wasn't like he is, you know, using an LLM directly. At the same time, there's that news that OpenAI is partnering with Mattel for kind of like a ChatGPT Barbie. That's kind of interesting. What I'm most excited about is using large language models for kids in terms of like audio. So, so kids are, as I'm sure you know, I don't know how old your kids are, but they are relentlessly curious until that's kind of beaten out of them. And I think so many parents now are single parents or they're working two jobs.

2:48:41And, you know, we've really demonized screen time. And I think for good reason, right, where you're when you're sitting, when you have a kid sitting in front of a screen and they're just passively consuming. that's really different than when they're able to interact with an AI model. They're able to think, ask questions, practice forming questions that are, you know, comprehensible to the model. The model can give feedback on the language. You know, if they're asking a question, it can show up as text. They can learn to read and write as they are talking to the model, because as they speak and the text shows up on screen, they're actually like, that process is built in of understanding language to text, which will help again with reading and writing.

2:49:16And these models, I think they can be offered to everyone for free because you don't need a super advanced model for kits. Like you just need to have some general understanding of the world. You really just need like a probabilistic word generator machine, which is just how AI models are at their core. And yes, you should, you know, we might want to have some guardrails around hallucination and making sure that they're like actual facts, which would, you know, maybe perhaps make the models more expensive because you have to hook it up to, you know, databases or what, you know, the internet or what have you.

2:49:48But these very basic AI models to help kids practice speaking, to help them engage their curiosity, because again, parents are busy. They eventually end up, kids come to their parents and they eventually end up losing that curiosity. And I'm not saying, I think this is a very controversial opinion. And some people hear this and they say, oh, you know, AI is going to replace human interaction. I don't see that at all. And I actually have reached out to my audience on Instagram asking how they use AI. And the ones who use it have found it extremely rewarding. Some use it with their kids. So, for example, like if they want to practice learning with their kid, but they're worried that they won't know the answer to a question, they can have AI kind of in the chat with them.

2:50:33And they can ask AI when they have a question. some parents reached out to me and said that they have a nine-year-old and a 12-year-old and that AI is kind of like this cool older sister so they have the audio be this you know 20-year-old girl and they're like they she is the cool older sister that helps them discuss topics that they wouldn't listen to their quote-unquote dumb parents about like nutrition and exercise and screen time and like they love this AI it's this cool older sister another really cool application of AI that I saw recently I was at Dell Tech World and I saw this AI bot called Norby it's a physical robot and he was made to help a child with his speech impediment and this hit close to home for me because my little sister she's four years younger than me and when she was like going on eight she had she couldn't say her r's she would say like hopo and she was like you know a kid and she had the speech impediment and we would send her to a speech therapist and they're so expensive and the kid is miserable and they're sitting with this therapist for like max two to three hours at a time and you know they don't relate to this strange adult and again it's so expensive whereas this norbybot was made to talk to the kid about what they're interested in truly completely customizable at their level it's fun they can give the feedback and then i think they've expanded this norbybot to be um to help teach languages in general and so just again meeting kids where they're at with what they're interested in helping stoke that flame of curiosity helping i just see it as and again i mean it's this this ultimate democratizer it's the the ultimate leveler in terms of education right and so i can imagine i can imagine a hardware device so so my uh three year old is hopelessly addicted to reading like all day long all like great great addiction to have but like all day long just no matter what we're doing throughout the day he'll find a book and it'll be like, read this, read this, read this.

2:52:29And we almost always indulge. But you could imagine a hardware device that uses just computer vision to like read what's on the page and have a small speaker read it out to the kids. Oh, interesting. Because some books, they include like a speaker and you can like press play on it and they can flip through it. You're talking about wonder books. Wonder books. But they can often get out of sync and then you don't know kind of where they are and they're on the wrong page and it's confusing. but if they had a flashlight style device that you could just point at the word and have it read out they would probably learn to read like a very very young age.

2:53:02It feels like we should be entering like a boom of widgets and like Christmas gifts and like yeah it's just maybe maybe we're just a little bit early in this stuff. This Christmas will be dominated by AI enabled stuff but I'm curious one question I have is how like the the X audience really woke up to the AI psychosis kind of crisis last week, I feel like. There had been some reporting in like the New York Times prior to that, but I don't think anybody took it super seriously until recently. But most parents would not want their kids 7 ,000 prompts deep in any LL. Well, yeah, but just how aware is like the Instagram world in terms of the risks of going, you know, recursive prompting and just going super, super deep and getting down a crazy rabbit hole by yourself?

2:53:48yeah i haven't spoken about that specifically on instagram i talked a little bit about it in my latest youtube q a video where i was just saying you know i'm concerned about people entering psychosis and you know the recursive deep dive that is one element then there's also people who and i think this is more common on you know say instagram where people think that ai is being channeled it's like god is being channeled through ai and you know i talked about it through a mathematical lens of like, yes, okay, what are synchronicities? They're low probability events. And technically AI, because it's a probability machine, could have a low probability event occur, right?

2:54:27It doesn't always choose the most likely word. It just samples from probability distribution. So in some ways, yes, you could have some kind of synchronicity. You could have, whether you see that as divine, whatever. However, you cannot assume that that is always the case. And I would assume that it's never the case because people are entering this deep psychosis where, yeah, they think that beings are channeling through them. And then when we have this issue where AI is trained and told, I don't know if it's trained to, but it's at least system prompt told to, you know, encourage the user and validate the user and their thinking.

2:55:04And yeah, I mean, it's a slippery slope and perhaps something I should talk more about on Instagram, especially given what happened last week. Well, yeah, the thing that's concerning to me is it feels like it can trigger the same type of psychotic break that ayahuasca can, except it's available to everybody on their device in five minutes at all hours of the day. Completely. It's like a lot of large numbers. If there's a billion people using those 30 minutes a day, you're just going to hit everyone that's at risk for this thing very quickly. So you have to go in and figure out how to intervene before people get thousands of pros.

2:55:42I just think it's important. I think it's something that we can quickly like create guardrails and overcome as an industry. But at the same time, it's still a good time to say like, talk to your loved ones. If you have somebody that you think might be months and months into one of these rabbit holes. Yeah, it gets into like how the product companies and kids AI education companies would need to message. Because Jordi and I are both Yodo owners, which I'm not sure if you're familiar with. but it's essentially a Bluetooth connected radio that you can physically put a card in and it will read you a Dr.

2:56:18Seuss story and then you can take that card out. So like a three-year-old can use it and it doesn't have a UI or anything, but then you can play stuff from your phone if you want as an adult, but you can even do like volume limits. It's very like designed and it has a nice harness around it. So it's very safe. But if they were like, hey, we're launching an LLM, I would be like, okay, which model? like tell me which model tell me exactly the guardrails what yeah grok heavy and there's no limits on what you can do and yeah and it doesn't have internet access so it might get kind of wild with what's in the way it's there yeah uh so i would i would have a lot of questions but then i'm in this weird like ultra prosumer world where i'd be buying that as a consumer but i'm deeply so like like maybe we need like an fda label on this or some sort of kind of like ages three plus, or when you got the Legos, it's like 100 pieces, like the smallest piece is small enough that a toddler could choke on it.

2:57:15Maybe don't buy that one. There's gonna be a lot of work to get done to make these products palatable, because as soon as something goes wrong with AI, there's a massive incentive to write a piece about it, and it's gonna go viral because everyone's kind of expecting it because we've been raised on the Terminator, unless you're Jordy and you haven't seen that movie. But anyway. Oh, interesting. I mean, you could probably just, you could train a model for kids. Yeah, I think so. And then you could also have like a secondary model, like reading everything and kind of like passing through a filter and double checking.

2:57:46Totally. You look at, you limit the training data. You don't have it trained on Reddit things or sketchy sites. Even Google search, Google AI powered search, which is like a pretty, it's a one, it only, you don't really chat with it. it just, you type in a couple of keywords and it just gives you an AI summary. And there's already hallucinations. People saying like, there was that story about eating glue. And there was a story about, there was a story about like, if you ask it like really definitively, like define this axiom or like, tell me the story of this thing. And you just basically talk it into believing that this is a thing.

2:58:20It'll just make up stuff. And that could go off the rails. Like, I don't know if I'd want my four year old walking around being like, oh yes, the parable of, you know, like the something or other. And I'm like, what are you talking about, dude? Like, that is not a real thing. Like, you know, it just coming up with like, you know, I want him to learn a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Not like, you know, a hat applied to a crystal ball is a diamond. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Like, you just learned that from somewhere. Anyway. No, it'll be a fun time. It's really good feedback.

2:58:48Because it's something that I'm thinking a lot about. Because I'm really excited about AI for kids. But well, you'll probably be fully employed. Because I think everyone is going to be starting these companies. Hopefully it's a bull market in Christmas gifts. Or build one yourself. Yeah, yeah. Come back and launch it here on the show. I'm definitely thinking about it. But yeah. We'll happily join the beta. We will. We'll use our children as guinea pigs for the AI revolution. Well, we will test it on Tyler, our intern first. Make sure it's him. He looks up because he's programming right now. Sorry.

2:59:17You're not on camera, Tyler. But we will be testing children's toys on you and seeing if it deranges you and then making sure. And then only then will it be applied to the three and four year olds in our lives. He's caught on camera. I'm embarrassed. Thank you so much for hopping on, Harper. This is great chatting. We will talk to you soon. Have a great one. Bye. Up next, we have Nikita Singleready, a good friend of mine. Fortuna Health got a little loose. She's in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring her in. Nikita, how are you doing? Sorry, we're late. Sorry, we're late. We're running late today.

2:59:51Great to hang out with you. So welcome to the stream. Kick us off with a little bit of an introduction. Who are you? What do you do? I'm Nikita. I'm one of the co-founders and CEO of Fortuna Health. We're TurboTax for Medicaid. So I can go into what that means. But much like how TurboTax helps people understand their taxes, all the different rules and regulations for taxes in different states, we're doing the same thing for government health coverage, where all the rules are different in every state. And I'm really excited to be here. excited to support the ratio one woman to men inspiring little girls everywhere that you can achieve your big dream which is being on dbpn let's go there we go let's go there we go it's great to great to have you you have news today yeah break it down yes yes do the honors yes uh so we announced our series a led by andreason today which we're there we go how much how much Come in.

3:00:49There we go. Let's go. Congratulations. Fantastic. Did you bring a knife? Fantastic. Wait, so give us the backstory. When did you start the company? Was there like a specific insight that you had? Or like, I imagine you'd be kind of crazy if you weren't using a lot of AI to do this, but so maybe there was a catalyst there. How did it come together? Yeah. So two and a half years ago, we started working on this problem. And I think one of the crazy things about a lot of health care is that you look at it from an outsider's perspective and someone else, every time we talk about this idea, they say, why wasn't there a turbo tax for Medicaid?

3:01:28Like when I shared the analogy earlier, it seemed like, of course, someone should have built this five years ago, eight years ago, but nobody had, shockingly. So as we were looking at ideas to build, and particularly we wanted to build a big, we want to solve a big problem, but specifically a tech problem in healthcare. There's a lot of stuff like physician shortages, right? That's a different sort of problem to solve, or helping people find and get connected to a behavioral health clinician. That's a different sort of problem. We looked at, is there big, important consumer tech to be built here, and then triangulated onto this.

3:02:04And Jordi, we do use AI, but it's not the core part of our product. I would say the big part is helping guide people step by step through what's a really scary, challenging process for folks. Processes that sometimes involve faxes or going in person, right, to the health care version of the DMV for Medicaid. So that's our point. Let's give it up for the DMV. If you like the DMV, if you love the DMV, you're going to love healthcare by the same people that brought you the DMV. It's great. The absolute legend. Talk to me about the different counterparties and people involved. There's traditional insurance companies.

3:02:43It sounds like in this case you're dealing with the government. Are doctors an important piece of this? Is it just direct to consumer? How do you acquire those customers? How do you make money from them? Yeah, good question. So every state has their own Medicaid program. So if you're in California, it's called Medi-Cal. If you're in Oregon, it has a different name. In Pennsylvania, Medicaid is called medical assistance. So every state has its own program and then multiple programs they're under. And then some of those states outsource that work of running the Medicaid program to insurance companies.

3:03:17So you have United Medicaid, Centene Medicaid, Elevance, Anthem, Medicaid, etc. So a lot of our customers are those insurance companies to make it easier for their members to understand the steps that they have to take to enroll and renew. So we're not D to C, we're more B to B to C, if that makes sense. Makes sense. What about customer acquisition? How do you actually get people on board? Full$18 million on three Super Bowl ads. Yeah, hell yeah. Yeah. So mostly we get texted out or we're like listed on the website or we get emailed out. So it's really easy. You just click a link that, let's say a health plan, health plan, TBPN, you're insured by TBPN Medicaid.

3:03:59And they send you a link saying, hey, you need to renew your New York or your Illinois Medicaid. Click here so that you can stay renewed with TBPN Medicaid. And so that's how people would get access to fortuna that way. Okay, interesting. Wait, so yeah, how did the employers fit in? Because I feel like a lot of Medicaid users or the insured folks on Medicaid are like, it always felt like it was independent from the corporation that they work for. Is that not the case? Yeah, no, it kind of is. So you don't get it through like your job, let's say. Okay, yeah, yeah. Usually because your job doesn't cover.

3:04:39Sure, your job doesn't cover. Got it. And then you go on Medicaid. Got it. So you're getting it through them. Yeah, that makes sense. And then how do you actually get paid? Great question. So the same insurance company as I was mentioning earlier, or hospitals, let's Let's say you come in and you don't have insurance. And so they say, hey, do you want to try or use Fortuna to help you get Medicaid? So those are the two types of entities that pay for us. Okay, cool. Yeah, what is the state of the fax machine in the medical insurance industry? We've heard it's alive and well, but it also feels like it's got to be wrapped with APIs at this point.

3:05:15Are they wrapped? Are they wrapped at this point? You know that meme from the, why am I forgetting the name of the movie, where they throw the fax machine on the ground and everyone's like... That's Office Space. Don't worry. Jordy has. I actually have seen that. Oh, you have. That's my dad's favorite movies. One of the five movies you've seen. Yes. Healthcare, you're right, has been keeping faxes alive for a really long time. There's so many stupid and silly reasons for that. A lot of it is you can't even if you're, let's say, the state government, sometimes you're not allowed to procure a new contract with a non-fax company.

3:05:53So you've been living on Xerox for 30 years because it's that hard sometimes to contract with the government. But yes, people are wrapping, we're wrapping around automating faxes, tracking those faxes, et cetera. So we sort of have like a bunch of different automations around, are we submitting things to fax machines? Are we submitting them via snail mail? Are we submitting them to digital portals, email, et cetera, and then tracking all of that? because some different types of Medicaid accept different submission formats. But absolutely, facts is alive and well. Are you going state by state or trying to do all 50 at once?

3:06:31Like what are the tradeoffs there? Is there a common pattern? I remember a lot of the telehealth companies needed to get their doctors certified in different states. And so there was actually another company called Medallion that was set up just to do doctor licensing in all 50 states. It's what's the actual rollout and what are the considerations there? Yeah. So we are largely going state by state as we roll out with new customers. But the classic thing is when you get really good at a state, like we have a lot of customers in New York. We started getting more customers in New York because we got to go to New York.

3:07:03So it's more like patchwork sequencing. Like absolutely. We want to go to all 56 in case you didn't know. Oh, 56. State and territory Medicaid. Yes. What are the last six? Break it down. The others are like Guam and Central Mariana Islands. Oh, the islands? Are you going to visit all six? I feel like you got to make the... You got to expense that. It's like every entrepreneur has got to go to Delaware and just take it in. I need to do like, you know how Zuck when he wanted to sort of run for Boston? I need travel to there. We have to do that. I got to do that at some point. Yeah, that makes sense.

3:07:40What else is... Obviously, you follow the industry broadly. What else is interesting in healthcare in AI? Where are you either partnering with existing companies or you see some low-hanging fruit that if you weren't building this, you'd be, you kind of see it on the roadmap of someone else or you see some like white space where you're like, wow, that's a really unsolved problem. I'm busy, but that's interesting. Yeah. I mean, there's a ton of low-hanging fruit. I would say there's a lot of people that are doing conversion of in the way that somebody writes a doctor's note that needs to be written up in a very specific way inside the EHR that needs to be written up and converted in a very specific way to how, you know, insurance companies convert and accept that information.

3:08:23I still think that there's a tremendous amount just to be done in that space. I think that obviously voice AI is just in its infancy, honestly, especially because you need to get more specialized for each field. So I'd say there's a lot that you could do and can be done in that space. And I'm really bullish on AI nurses. Like clearly we have a doctors and nursing shortage. Like that's obviously a problem that has not been solved by policy. I'm perfectly fine getting my care, particularly, you know, low level, low acuity care by an AI that's probably much better than a doctor who has, or a nurse who has no time to see me.

3:09:02I'm just, you know, coming in, coming out. I'm one of a hundred people that day. I think there's still a huge opportunity there. Yeah. Or even just someone who's like, there can still be a human in the loop, but they're like, you're chatting with an AI. And then at the end of the day, the doctor kind of looks through, okay, they made seven different recommendations. I have most of the context. I can just see that nothing went crazy off the rails. Last question from my side. And I'm curious if it came up during the fundraiser or how you guys think about it. But I can imagine a world in the future where somebody would go to chat GPT agent and they would say, I need to sign up for Medicaid.

3:09:37Help me do it. And then it just starts going, you know, goes and spends 15 minutes and figures out the steps and things like that. And then eventually could take action. Do you worry about that as like a competition? Well, I'm sure you don't worry because you're a killer, but do you think about that as like a competitive vector? Are there reasons why that's just like going to be an edge case that for many, many, many years is like not something that, you know, a general agent would be able to do? How do you think about it? Yeah, it's a good question. I think it solves like 30 % of the problem, which is, OK, what website should I go to to do this?

3:10:12But then you run into problem number one, which is what happens if you forgot your password from four years ago? So AI can't really solve that problem number one. And then let's say a second problem, maybe you were the child and your parent had the Medicaid. So now you actually have to split your account from a prior account. So all of these interesting, weird problems that, yeah, if you put like the Medicaid rule manual through AI, sure, you could get high level steps. but it doesn't solve these very real world tangible problems that only get solved from building this TurboTax experience that can connect into state systems or know where you need to go to route those types of, I wouldn't even call them edge case, it's just all of the complexities that get wrapped up and compounded are people's real world scenarios.

3:10:58So definitely AI solves 30 % of what is the basic rules, but that long tail stuff of, okay, I switched my job three days ago, how exactly am i supposed to report that but now the state has a new fax line that nobody has listed publicly yeah i can't solve that yeah yeah that makes total sense awesome well congratulations to you and the team on the race yeah thank you wait i if i have one minute i want to share um some receipts from from 2022 when i sent john a message um so jordi i think this might have been before you were involved but i said hey john props to the storytelling work you're publishing on YouTube.

3:11:37I think most people we know are still sleeping on YouTube's reach. There we go. October 12, 2022. And he said, Hey, thanks. It's crazy. I've been pulling it over a million views per month, but no one has really noticed. Look at you now. Yeah. John basically created technology YouTube. Yes. He's, you know, the, the godfather of it. Created content, really. Created content, created entertainment. Literally that's content created. Created storytelling. Created content. Yes, exactly. Thank you so much. Great to have you on. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks, guys. See you later. Goodbye. And we have our bucket poll back.

3:12:15If you've been watching from the early days, we used to put random posts in a bucket, pull them out. I'll take one. Do you want one? Can we talk about it? What's this one? People now watch YouTube on TV sets more than on their phones or any other device. an average of more than one billion hours each day. One billion hours a day? This is from a journal article, how YouTube won the battle for TV viewers. Not surprising to me, I mean, it's been in this case for a while, that like a lot of, if you're people that are YouTubers, I obviously had been in the industry for a long time, just to have like such a large amount of their viewers coming in on TV, so TV, Lindy, apparently.

3:12:58Yeah, we were talking about this with David Senor, where like what podcast do you watch on TV? It's pretty rare, but I was telling him like there are like these big events that happen on podcasts every once in a while where like everyone has to watch it. I mean the biggest example from last year was like during the campaign when Donald Trump went on Joe Rogan and I think 100 million people watched that. I bet a lot of people watched that on TV. They sat down and watched the whole thing because that is such a critical conversation. They didn't just watch. They sat there. They sat down and listened.

3:13:33But that type of thing, you're talking about someone who's like on the campaign trail that might really affect your life one way or another, like the subtle intonations of like how people respond to something that like the facial, like you're going to want to see the whole experience. And so, yeah, makes a ton of sense that that would be thrown on the TV. Well, I have another post here from Mads. This is an exchange. Somebody's saying, Name your favorite quote by a celebrity. And I think we've read this on the show. We've read this before. It's a great one. But it's an all-timer. So Playboy is asking Nicolas Cage, your salary is shooting up into the multi-millions per movie, reportedly$4 to$7 million.

3:14:11Do those numbers make you chuckle? Nicolas Cage, I don't chuckle. I have respect for the dollar. And I think that is a great philosophy for money. Respect. I agree. I agree. Do you want to do more timeline? What else do you want to do? Some big aviation news. Flexjet. This is coming from Preston Holland. Flexjet raises$800 million from Bernard Arnault, valuing the company at$4 billion. So let's give it up for private aviation. Fantastic. Preston is saying, well, we see LV interiors on Flexjet airplanes. That would be very interesting, Claib. I mean, I'm sure that they're already done in the third party, but not OEM.

3:14:53Maybe you get one from the factory. you know these collabs happen in the car world every once in a while why not in the private jet world i suppose um and then here i threw this one in ad from nike with scotty scheffler this is cool uh i just thought this was good this is nike at its best if we can pull this up you've already won but another major never hurt and uh this is this is nike at its best none of these D to C ads. I don't want to see UGC. Just give me some inspiration. In spell. This was interesting. Mert highlighted this and said, this having a quarter million likes is a good reminder that the average person has no idea how the world works in any way.

3:15:39And so Antonio Brown. Oh, it's AB. Oh, I didn't realize it was AB. post it there's basically a post that says astronomer ceo andy byron uh and chief people officer christian cabot have been immediately put on leave and ab says if he's the ceo then who put him on leave and it got 250 000 likes that's a lot of likes apparently people think that all ceos are total dictators yes and can uh can fire but not be fired themselves and uh don't realize that a board of directors. It's a thing. It's their job. It's to hire. And fire the CEO. And in fact, it was a unique, sort of unique situation because Andy Byron was not the founder.

3:16:20He was a CEO brought in by the board. And so he, of course, serves the pleasure of the board. He also serves the pleasure of the shareholders. And unless you own 100 % of the stock and all the board seats, like if you gave even one share up, you could be the subject of a shareholder lawsuit because what you are doing is maybe not in the interest of the shareholders. And so there are a bunch of different ways that he could get put on. And we've got a new CEO over at Astronomer. Oh, we do. Astronomer. Astronomer. Pete DeJoy. Pete DeJoy. Said, over the weekend, I stepped into the role of interim CEO, a company that I've proudly poured my entire professional life into helping build.

3:16:57And he goes into why he stepped in, which, of course, everybody knows. But it seems like a solid company. We know some companies that leverage astronomers. platform and Apache air flows. No joke. You don't want to be not managing that. You don't want to be running that installation and infrastructure yourself. This is not a promoted post for them, but they are. Uh, zoomer has a post here. I don't know what this AST space mobile Inc. ASTS baby. It's a 20 billion dollar space company with zero revenues. Yep. And, um, I'm going to add this to my top signals list. Yep, I've heard about this company before.

3:17:42It's fantastically popular with retail traders. It is a competitor to Starlink. They haven't launched or generated revenue yet, but the narrative is if you can't own SpaceX, if you don't want to own SpaceX, you want to pure play, as they say, in the public markets, ASDS is the bet. But it is a wild valuation. They have some deals. They have some press releases. They have some different irons in the fire and a store. And if you invested around this time last year, you were getting close to a 5 or 6x. People have made a lot of money on this so far. I mean, yeah, I think it's SPAC at$4 billion and it's up 5x at$20 billion.

3:18:24Well, let's hope they get some satellites into the air. Yeah. And I think that's a great place to end. Yeah, fantastic. Fun show today. we'll see you tomorrow have a good one bye