Palmer Luckey LIVE from NYSE, Supreme Court Smackdown, Data Center Backlash | Ryan Petersen, Jonathan Gould, Diogo Mónica, Joe Lonsdale, John Shahidi, Will Bruey, Sam Levenback, Alex Heath

27:52Did you read it yet, Tyler? Why are you laughing? In protest, you won't. Team Cope is funny. Team Cope is funny. But yeah, people took this all over the place. The people versus the wheel. Grunts from the silent majority. Dragging rocks and rolling is a drag. People are having a lot of fun about this. The horses versus the car. The horses versus the car. At the same time, the backlash can have an actual impact. So you should not just write it off and be like, well, obviously AI is going to happen. So this is, you know, it's inevitable. It's like, no, we live in a democracy. If they vote, no more data centers.

28:31Look at what happened to nuclear, people. You keep comparing AI to splitting the atom. I was just watching some video, and a guy was saying, AI is the most incredible human invention. It's up there right with when we split the atom. And I'm like, well, I know how that ended. We got a bunch of nuclear weapons that we didn't even fire at each other. It just became a Cold War. So really zero economic value from that. not just a lot of people building and then putting them in silos. And then a couple nuclear power plants that eventually got regulated out of existence and we never got a nuclear future of energy.

29:02And so it is possible that society can just freak out and be like, actually, we're doing non-proliferation. That's a possible outcome here. Hill says this is why we need data centers in space. Elon looking pretty smart. For sure, for sure. Even if the timelines that have been thrown out are aggressive on a longer time horizon. You're not going to have to push back there. And Trey really coming in with the most obvious solution, Blimp data centers. Just put them over the Pacific. I love it. Float them over there. Well, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider.

29:37Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Rob over on X has found some information on the Twitter deal trial. Is this the trial around the compensation for the Twitter employees? Oh, I thought this was the OpenAI case. No, this is different. This is different. So I believe this is the case around the Twitter employees that did not actually get their severance. It says the class action brought by former Twitter investors against Elon Musk. I actually don't know that much about this particular case.

30:17But there was a pool of 92. They think Twitter was worth more than$44 billion? Well, maybe they had stock options that were canceled. Maybe they are employees, but they're counted as investors in this case because it's a SEC violation instead of an employment contract. I actually don't know. I'm completely speculating here. But apparently, Elon Musk's popularity, unpopularity is throwing a wrench in the trial because, quote, hate for Musk quickly narrows the jury pool in Twitter deal trial. A California judge quickly narrowed a pool of 92 prospective jurors Thursday, excusing 38 potential jurors who said they couldn't be fair and impartial, as Musk's attorney lamented.

31:02There are so many people who hate him so much. Yeah. So the trial, according to Bloomberg Laws, the trial involves claims from Twitter investors who say Musk violated securities law by publicly waffling over his decision to purchase the company and driving down its stock price. Yeah. And there's probably a lot of people who don't like Elon because of the benchmarking. Does that mean, though, so he said, okay, I'm going to buy this company, and then he was trying to back out because he was like, the price is insane, and then the stock declined and people sold, and then it ended up getting bought up here, and now they're like, well, you kind of misled.

31:39I don't know. I wonder actually how this will net out because he didn't make anyone sell the company if you're a Twitter shareholder and you believe that. Yeah. Basically, I mean, every time you make a public statement, unless it's disclosed through the traditional SEC workflow, one person or five people can sell, and then they can hold you to account on that, on the impacts of that. And so every possible move in the price of the company can come back to bite you based on what you were saying and whether or not it was above board. Yeah. But the court will decide, and apparently they're going to get a bunch of people on the juror who have never heard of Elon Musk.

32:20There are people out there. I don't know the guy. Cooper, our strongest soldier in the chat, coming in, driving up those numbers. Let me tell you about Figma. Shipped the best version, not the first one, with Figma. You heard from Dylan Field yesterday. He introduced Claude Code to Figma. Explore more options. And they liked each other. They liked each other. They did. Pub is saying they're calling it the most Canadian caption of all time. Team Canada hit the timeline after their loss to the United States, saying silver shines just as bright. It's very Canadian. Absolutely brutal. We have a Canadian on our team sitting over there shaking his head.

33:07He's hard to see from this angle. But we're all friends on this continent. We like a good competition. There's a war in the community notes right now. People are saying silver actually shines brighter than gold, but gold is better. It actually doesn't. It also tarnishes much easier and becomes dull. Gold is greater than silver. People are biting it out over whether or not gold or silver is better. They're coping it out. Yeah, they're coping it out. We know how it works at the Olympics. You want to go for gold, and only America could take it home yesterday. Blake Robbins is reacting to the news that Meta's VR metaverse is ditching VR.

33:45This is from The Verge. We'll have to talk to Alex Heath, former Verge reporter, later today. This feels pretty clear. The metaverse was actually just Roblox this whole time. Not Fortnite, not VR. This is extremely hard for me as a VR bull. I threw on the headset yesterday, watched about 10 minutes of Blade Runner 2049 before you called me and I had to take it off. but I was having a great experience watching a 3D movie. You threw that on right when you got home. Right when I got home. I was like, I'm going to chill for a little bit, throw on Blade Runner 2049. Reggie recommended it, so Hip City Reg.

34:18I was like, okay, I got to do it. Put it on. But interrupted. There was other stuff going on. So didn't get through the whole movie, but still delightful experience, and VR is not dead. It's about to reanimate and come back from the grave, I predict in the next 400 years, I guarantee you, VR will be kind of popular, sort of popular. It'll get to at least 2%. At least 2%. 20 DAUs. Yeah. In the next 400 years, I would take that bet. Matthew Ball dropped his state of video games in 2026. Boom. One of the standout lines was Roblox had 150 million daily users in Q3 of 2025. Its quarterly engagement is now equal to Steam, PlayStation, and Fortnite combined.

35:10It's huge. Which is just absolutely wild. Roblox is so popular. Should we click through this a little bit? So popular. Yeah, we can click through it. It's a huge presentation, and we'll have to have Matthew Ball on the show to really break it all down. But this is the report that I was sort of inspired by yesterday when I was talking about this interesting fact that Matt Ball shared on his Stratechery interview, that when you look at video games, the video game market is not doing particularly well. You have to always segment out non-China, and then there's also mobile versus console. Are people paying, or is it ad-based?

35:50There's a whole bunch of different sub-segments. But just looking at non-China growth in video games, like all of the growth went to Roblox. And basically everything else was either flat or down. And people are starting to just spend more time on endless feeds. They're on Instagram. They're on TikTok. Or they're doing sports betting or watching TV or watching Netflix. There's a million different things that have fought for attention. And it used to be the greatest bargain in history. and Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of Take-Two, maker of GTA and 2K games, got in a lot of trouble at one point because he said like, we should be charging per minute.

36:30And people were like, this is a nightmare that he's gonna charge per minute. He was like, no, no, no. I just mean in terms of the value that we're delivering, we will take$60 from you, which is a lot of money, but we will give you GTA 5, which you can play for a hundred hours and have a great time and some people will play for more than that. And so on a per hour basis, you're paying like 50 cents. Now comp that, he would say, comp that to go into the movies. You know, you pay 20 bucks and you're there for two hours, that's$10 an hour for entertainment. Whereas with a video game, 50 bucks for 50 hours, you're paying a dollar an hour.

37:06So he was just driving home that it was a great value. That is no longer the case in the world where there's so much incredible entertainment that's basically free because it's ad supported. and the experience of scrolling an endless vertical social feed is now rivaling the level of entertainment that you get from video games. It used to be like, yeah, I'll go on Facebook and check some posts about see who posted what they did this weekend, check in with that, but I got to go and play Counter-Strike or I got to go play the actual game that's really fun. Now it's a lot more competitive. Anything else?

37:44Yeah, I mean, I'll kind of tap through. So global video game content sales had a strong 2025 growing 5 % year over year and hitting a new all-time high of about$195 billion,$10 billion more than the prior high in 2021. The industry high was achieved through new highs in each of mobile PC and console too. So everything's up and to the right. And fortunately, 2025, as with years prior, boasted several new hit franchises and studios, while many older franchises and studios also achieved new highs. But despite three straight years of industry growth, a new record high for revenues, and a smattering of new hits each year, private funding for game makers fell another 55 % in 2025.

38:28That is a big decrease. There's so much going on in the video game industry. And it's often overlooked because it's just like sort of off in its own little world. And the players are like subscale relative to the Mag 7. So they don't get as much attention. but it's a fascinating industry. Quickly, let me tell you about Vanta, automated compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. Do you want to talk about chill remote jobs or do you want to stay on video games? Yeah, let's talk. Do you want a chill remote job? No, I said that, but I lied. I don't want a chill remote job.

39:08I actually love a high pressure job. I love office politics. I love being thrown into the fire. Last minute slide changes fuel me. I get high off an ad hoc ask. Corporate jargon is my love language. When I'm in office, I'm a lethal corporate machine. I'm in a God-tier flow state right now. This is my favorite game. This is so good. I love this new genre of the day in the life at work. Whoever said that office jobs are adult daycares was on to something. I don't get that. There's nothing like an ad hoc ask. Right, Tyler? Yeah. I feel like Tyler. Tyler lives for an ad hoc ask. He's like, yes and.

39:48You're like, yes, but let me throw on my white suit first. Yes. Market's up. Let's go. I think at least it was. Yeah. Well, I'm wearing green and the market's green. That works, right? Green's a good color. Casual Friday cope. Yes. More news in Paramount's$108 billion bid for Warner Brothers. It cleared an antitrust hurdle. What hurdle was that? But the media group whose bid is bankrolled by Oracle billionaire Donald Trump, Larry Ellis. Freudian slip. No, Oracle's doing fine. Said on Friday that its deal had complied with the U.S. Department of Justice's second request review process, removing a critical impediment to U.S.

40:34regulatory approval. I have no idea why there would be any antitrust worries here. The antitrust question has always been right. The point is that there's no antitrust here. With Paramount and Warner Brothers, the question has always been Netflix. But I thought that was going to get through, but we'll see where it lands. So Paramount's deal could still be blocked, but by allowing the 10-day statutory waiting period to elapse under HSR, or Hart Scott Rodino Act's second request process, the DOJ is clearing the path for Paramount's deal on antitrust grounds. The government's saying they can go forward as long as they can agree to terms.

41:13Yeah. And zooming out, when you look back at the news from a month ago, it seemed obvious that the next step was to spend a lot of time in Washington for the Ellisons. Yeah. And try that angle. It seems to be going well. And let's see if this spiked the Calci chart. It's up a little bit. Will Paramount acquire Warner Brothers before September is at 52 %? We need to find the other one, which is who will acquire Warner Brothers. Let me see. Who will successfully take over Warner Brothers? Oh, Netflix is back up. Netflix is up 47%. Interesting. The lines have just been crossing constantly. They crossed a couple days ago.

42:02So it's a deadly dance, a tango. Well, it's been a lot of fun to follow it. I've been enjoying that. Let's pull up this video. While we pull this up, let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150 ,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. Matthew McConaughey, we talked a little bit about this, but it hits way harder when he says it himself. So let's play the clip. It's coming. It's already here. It's already here. Don't deny it. Don't deny it. It's not enough. it may be for you but it's not going to be enough to sit on the sidelines and make the moral plea the moral plea that no this is wrong it's not gonna last there's too much money to be made and there's it's too productive it's it's tear all right so i say get get get your own your own yourself voice likeness etc trade market whatever you got to do you did that yeah get own own yourself So when it comes, not if it comes, no one can steal you.

43:04But they're going to have to come to you to go, can I? Or they're going to be in breach. And you'll have the chance to be your own agency and go, yeah, for this amount or no. Okay? It's coming. Is it going to be another category or is it going to infiltrate our category? It's damn sure it's going to infiltrate our category. I think it'll end up, does it become another category? Will we be in five years having films, the best AI film, the best AI actor? Maybe. I think that might be the thing is that becomes another category. I'm not sure. It's going to be in front of us in ways that we don't even see.

43:40I'm not watching movies if it's AI or not. No AI is going to get me to start watching movies. It's a question of reality. I don't watch them. It's more hateful than ever. In a very exciting way, I think. but also a scary way. This is great industry leadership. I love it. Very politically delivered. Yeah, so I can see there being an incremental category. Yeah. That said, I still think AI will be used in every category. That's what he says. Yeah. Yeah, he says he doesn't know the timeline and he's not sure exactly how this will come out, but he says there might be a new category, just like there's best animated film at the Oscars, but then CGI and animation works its way into the Avengers, which is not an animated film, but Thanos was animated with CGI.

44:27It just wasn't hand-drawn. And so the categories blur together. Clearly, AI is coming for all sorts of different levels of the stack. And he's just saying that you shouldn't just sit by and hope that it doesn't happen. You should embrace and figure out how you fit in. Well, let's go over to the New York Stock Exchange. Do you want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. There was a fun clip on Instagram. And many of our guests will be at the New York Stock Exchange today. I see. In just 15 minutes. And the European kid was at NICI having some fun, going a little bit too far.

45:01Let's play the clip. What's he doing? What? That's the bell. You can't touch it. If you're coming to the right public, then you're not allowed to touch it. Sheree, my family's gone public five times. I know what the bell does. Don't try money mog at the New York Stock Exchange. That's not going to work, European kid. You gotta go. Come on. I'm sorry. You can't be here. You have to. And you stuck away. You have to go. Do they realize who I am? I'm sure they know who you are. We have to go. My family owns this belt. No. You can't be here. To be honest, when I read the caption, I thought it was Rich the Kid gets escorted.

45:37No, no, no. The rapper. So they're brothers, the European kid and my tech CEO. We ran into one of them in SF. I think we ran into my tech. Wait, there's two? There's two and they look identical. Wait, did you not know this? Are you sure? Are you sure it's not the same guy? I thought it was the same guy with two accounts, two characters. Wait, I don't know. We'll have to get to the bottom of this. It might be one person, two accounts. I thought they... I have no idea. We'll have to get to the bottom of this. You got got. Yeah, it's the prestige. I'm getting prestiged, potentially. There might be a secret twin, and he's living life as a single person with two accounts, when in fact it is two people.

46:18That's possible, too. Let's not rule anything out. Yeah. Let's not take off our tinfoil hats prematurely. Let's watch this post from David Herman. I love David Herman. The Hermanator. The Hermanator. The Hermanator. The Hermanator. The Hermanator. The Hermanator. The Hermanator. The Hermanator. Wait, start it over. Yeah, this is an ad? He was pulled into a drain pipe after being caught in a flood. A nearby officer rushed over to help, but he was quickly dragged in too. The rushing water forced them both through the 100-foot long pipe. They finally came out on the other side at Papa Giuseppe's kitchen.

46:47I love these ads. to warm you up from the flood. It's funny, is that even AI? I'm pretty sure that's just like a video game. Especially on Valentine's Day, you and the officer will absolutely have a great time to recover from the flood. Yeah, I've seen a lot of this style of ad where it's some crazy, you know, TikTok explainer and then it just cuts to like, and you landed this at your company. It is hilarious. Let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. or crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Ben, can you hear this? We got to talk about - Another Ben.

47:26We got to make an ad like that. Yeah, we do, we do, we do. Walk in. Where it's somebody like falling off of a plane, and then they land, they fall through the cloud, and then they land in the TBP and Ultronome, and they're being interviewed by John and Jordy. There is a$36.5 million waterfront compound for sale in the Florida Keys. and take a look at this picture. Finally a white pill. Take a look at this picture. So it has 1 ,700 feet of shoreline and two 5 ,000 square foot homes. You thinking what I'm thinking? Next door neighbors. That's right. That's right. We can do it. So you remember, I think it, not Asana, the Atlassian.

48:11They did. They had this crazy feud. So the founders of Atlassian, And I think we read this in some story. So they were besties. They built this massive company together, wildly successful, basically two-decade run, incredible run. And they decide, you know, we've had an incredible run. Let's keep the run going. Let's buy houses right next to each other. They end up getting a massive feud over it. And I think it destroys the friendship. Hopefully it's recovered by now. But we could do it. Oh, you think we could do it? I think we could do it. You don't think you'd be bothered by my industrial-grade Wi-Fi penetrating while you're trying to sleep?

48:48You don't think that would bother you? I think that would be. That would be the straw that broke the camel's back. I'd be like, John, you have to turn off the Wi-Fi after 10 p.m. when we're sleeping. It disrupts the sleep. Stop listening to movies all night long at full blast volume. I don't care. I don't want to see the second and third Matrix or hear them through the walls. You'd be in the backyard with your VR headset on but playing the movie on the speaker. But playing the audio fully and so you can still hear it. And then you'd be falling asleep with it on. So it'd just be blaring. Exactly, exactly.

49:17That would be the end of TBPN. That would be the end. So we won't be doing this. But what a funny situation. So it's a 10-acre waterfront property in the Florida Keys. That says just move in together. No, you need two properties that are as close as possible next to each other. And then they have like separate beaches. But the houses are like, your windows are looking directly at the other person. It's such a weird property. So Eddie Garcia bought the Isla Morada property for about 15 years ago. Waterman specializes in developing master plan communities throughout Florida. Garcia said he originally intended to create a small development on the land, but he wound up falling in love with the site and instead turned it into a family compound.

49:58My kids grew up there fishing, lobstering, crabbing, you name it. He was on open claw before it even existed. he lives full-time in Miami with his children in college he said the property's too big for just him and his wife but you got you got his and hers mansions what's wrong with that when Garcia bought the property it was mostly empty except for a 16 slip marina that's eight boats per person and two cottages built around the 1950s all of which remain on the property today He built two side-by-side West Indies-style homes in 2013, and then he ran it back in 2015. Each is 5 ,000 square feet with four bedrooms and a pool.

50:38Pretty, pretty interesting property. Also, for you Boston sickos out there, there's a$22 million Beacon Hill home. It's become one of Boston's priciest townhouses. It's a six-bedroom residence. It was converted from multiple rental units into a single-family home. The development company Crest City Capital purchased the building for$8.9 million in 2023. Then they converted it. They gut-renovated the house, which had multiple rental units, turned it into a single-family residence. The buyer's identity couldn't be determined. Tracy Campion of Campion & Company, who represented the purchaser, didn't respond.

51:15But there's some beautiful photos here. It's a Greek revival house built in 1825. That's an old, old house. So you don't see a lot of 1800s properties out here in California, but you do in Boston. You see Nicey, 1792. That's a good one. That's an OG. It's located in one of Boston's most upscale neighborhoods. Have you spent any time in Boston? Have you ever been? I don't think I've ever been. You've never been. Beautiful city. And I don't think I'll ever go. Why not? I just think... No, I mean, think about the list of... I don't like traveling that much. Yeah. uh i i like being i like being in california and when i and i but i but at times i enjoy traveling but there's easily 400 destinations that i would go to before boston before boston it's not in the top 400 i don't think boston is in the top 400 if you really break it down but i like to travel pops i like to travel i like to go somewhere yeah i've done the traveling where you do you stop by two days here, two days here, et cetera.

52:19So if you do an East Coast trip, and you go to New York, and then Rhode Island, and then Boston, and then Maine, you could have a wonderful little excursion on the East Coast. You should do it sometime. Broaden your horizons. Road trip. If we were doing a road trip. Yeah, we'd definitely stop there. College tour, maybe. Let me tell you about Busto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with small and medium-sized businesses. Tyler, we originally met because Tyler was commenting saying that we should do a college tour in Q1 of last year. Yeah, well, I think you guys said you were going to do a college tour, but then I said you've got to go to Michigan because they have the biggest stadium in the Western Hemisphere.

52:58Yes, yes. Filling 110 ,000 fans in one stadium would be truly – We've got some work to do. We need quite the guest lineup. We need to stack it. Yeah, we really need to stack it. Yeah. The tiny Lake Tahoe enclave with some of America's priciest waterfront homes. And Tahoe is absolutely wild this week. Did you see that video of bears? Bears? Bears and horse stars. I think they were just running across the ski slope with people on it. That's awesome. Kids were having to pull out of the way. Yeah. I saw a Growing Daniel posting about how they're actually really friendly, and you can just go up to them and pet them.

53:35Is that right? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I think so. Crystal Bay's median list price of$14.9 million makes it one of the most expensive places to buy property in the United States. It's straddling the California-Nevada border. Lake Tahoe's 72-mile shoreline is home to some of the country's most coveted real estate. Actually, the property is... No, just Tahoe in general. Lake Tahoe is both California and Nevada. Having a property that was half and half? I'm sure that might exist. I don't know. that's probably pretty hard to zone or like actually get done but it has to exist somewhere in America I know that there's a spot in America that you can stand on and be in four states simultaneously or maybe three states because the lines like intersect so you can stand on that spot and be technically in four states.

54:23You could just do the thing like the house we just saw in the Keys where it's like kind of too one person's not paying income tax the other person's paying terrible income tax yeah Incline Village is the is I think the city that's the least in Nevada, but technically in Nevada. So it's the most Californian Nevada city. So it's a popular San Francisco and suburb in many ways. I'm sure the broader population of Nevada has really high opinion of... Incline Village. Incline Village. For sure. Crystal Bay is home to roughly 200. It's a community on Nevada's north side. Ranks among the priciest waterfront markets with a median listing price of$14.9 million.

55:04The enclave is defined by its mid-century glamour. Around the 1960s, it served as a playground for entertainer Frank Sinatra, who at one point owned the local Cal Neva Resort and Casino. Yep. Eric in the chat says Cal Neva Resort is exactly that, in the same town. Oh, Cal, Nevada. Cool. Very interesting. Today, it is a tale of two realities. A town with a faded commercial strip that sits adjacent to multi-million dollar residential real estate favored for steep slope privacy and elite lakefront living. So it's just four miles northeast of Crystal Bay. It's the bustling incline village where there is a hospital, grocery stores, and the Diamond Peak ski resort across the California state line as the community of Kings Beach provides a more rustic feel.

55:55The North Shore tracks homeowners seeking a constant outdoor connection. Winter offers skiing, while summer centers on the lake for boating, fishing, paddleboarding, holding an American flag while you wakeboard. That's very popular out there in Tahoe, of course. There's something interesting going on. Is it legal to wakeboard up there without holding a flag? Jail instantly. For years, Crystal Bay's commercial core had been defined by two stalled icons. Sinatra's former Cal Neva closed in 2013 and the Tahoe Biltmore Hotel and Casino, which closed in 2022. These vacant structures have given the state line a ghost town feel with the Crystal Bay Club Casino as the area's main entertainment and music venue.

56:42However, a revitalization effort is underway. the Cal Neva is being transformed into the high-end Lake Tahoe proper resort and casino slated to open in 2027 signaling a possible shift from faded casino era relics to modern luxury destination let's go let's hear it for Lake Taco everybody out there let's give it up for like I'm a big bear guy I'm a SoCal guy you're not gonna catch me in Tahoe you're gonna catch me in Lake Arrowhead the The House of the Week. And are the people. The House of the Week. We will tell you about the House of the Week after we tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.

57:26The House of the Week is a modernist home tucked into the Los Angeles hillside. Let's hear it for Los Angeles. Wall Street may be 3 ,000 miles away, but they're showing some love to homegrown houses here in Los Angeles. They're saying it's a hillside masterpiece. The Hollywood House was designed by Rudolph Schindler. For journalist Susan Orlean and her husband, John Gillespie, a house has never been just a place to live. It's not just a place to live. It's an entire experience. Fans of modernist architecture. Read that again. I'm messing with you. I'm messing with you. Really? Yeah, I'd love that.

58:03Fans of modernist architecture. They spent their earliest dates visiting Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water in Pennsylvania When the pair moved to Los Angeles in 07, Sororlene could research a book. They quickly fell in love with the work of Rudolf Schindler, an Austrian-born architect who helped define modernism in the city. And so there's a beautiful house up per sale. They did a four and a half year renovation. Did you hear the drama about there was a reporter, was it at Reuters or something? But he was accused of using AI to write all of his Olympics coverage. and it had all the telltale signs of AI generated sort of slop.

58:40And the editor-in-chief backed the journalist and said, no, he always writes like that. That's what he sounds like. They trained on him. They trained on him. And then Pangram came in and said, well, we pulled the receipts and he didn't use to write like that before AI. And so you can look at the chart. Maybe he's really bullish on AI. and so he only will read outputs now. He doesn't read any organic content. Maybe that or maybe he's just aping the style of ChatGPT 4.0 because he thinks it's a good aesthetic. I don't know. Could be trying to troll. Because I could probably write an essay that triggers Pangram 100 % AI if I put my mind to it without the help of AI.

59:25I could just sit there and say, this isn't this, it's that, blah, blah, blah. I actually think that would be a good challenge. I don't think you could. I think it would I think pangram Tyler challenge Tyler challenge write something by hand 100 % is really hard 100 get it 100 over 90 you think you could do over 90 in the next beat between now and when the palmer interview ends you have to write 500 words that score above minimum right yeah I think it's it's a few hundred words right yeah uh you have to write more words in the pangram minimum and score above 90 percent yeah you have to kick it off with like sorry as an ai model i can't i can't answer this but i'll try anyway this isn't just a this it's that anything else you'd like me to expand this prompt with and then you'll trigger it that's that's the hack do you think and if you win you get a 50 gift card to matu to pick yourself up some cheese steak sandwiches i was thinking something book related maybe tonight so there's 50 dollars 50 whole dollars on the line 50 smackaroos go okay label box rl environments voice robotics evals and expert human data label box is the data factory behind the world's leading ai teams um anyway uh jay leno he was turning heads because he was caught driving a 119 year old car a steam oh you caught me you caught me he didn't I didn't want anyone to see.

1:00:53Look at this car. This is amazing. I didn't, 119 years old. We should ask Palmer if he has any steam cars. 1906, 1907? Do you see the steam actually pushing out of the bottom? Do you load firewood into it? How do you generate the steam? This is incredible. He's the final car guy. He got the McLaren F1, and then he went older, and then he went older and he finally got like the first car. He's going to get into horses big time. That would be hilarious. He was just like, yeah, like real car guys, like we know like you should just get a horse. Yeah. Yeah, that's the end. That's the end. He literally predicted vibe coding in 2023, none other than George Hotz on the Lex Friedman podcast.

1:01:41I don't doubt that these models are going to first become useful to me, then be as good as me, and then surpass me. Like, I think in two years, I'm going to start using these plugins. Yeah. A little bit. And then in five years, I'm going to be heavily relying on some AI augmented flow. And then in 10 years. Do you think it will ever get to 100 %? I think it's all generated. Our niche becomes, oh, I think it's over for humans. In general. No more programmers left, huh? That's where we're going. Well, unless you want handmade code, maybe they'll sell it on Etsy. It's just handwritten code. It doesn't have that machine polish to it.

1:02:17It has those slight imperfections that would only be written by a person. Look, I don't doubt that these... It's over. It's so good. We're back. He's truly so good. It's over. We're back. Let me tell you about Vibe.co. We're D2C brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales, just like on Meta. This was quite interesting. Somebody over on X called Levi says, two weeks ago, the Epstein Files podcast didn't exist. Today, it's about to cross 500 ,000 downloads and sitting in Apple Podcasts' top 20 series between the New York Times and NBC News.

1:02:54I vibe coded every episode with Claude from real Epstein court documents. So basically he just like fully generated a podcast and it is charting. For something like this, it makes a ton of sense to just programmatically like sort of put everything together because there's so many files. It's a perfect use case for AI to sort of like synthesize, comb through. And there is unlimited demand for Epstein related content. Totally. Anyway, we have Palmer Luckey in the Restream Waiting Room. Let's bring him in to the TBP on Ultradone. Palmer, how are you doing? You are live. You are live, sir. Can you hear us, okay?

1:03:34Yep, I hear you loud and clear, though, with a little bit of delay. So we'll try to keep it zippy. Well, we're going to say probably five words in total, and you're just going to go crazy. Tell us what's happening. Tell us what's happening. So, I mean, Trump is complaining about tariffs. Yes. Iran is on the brink of war. Yes. And Erebor, the new bank for the tech community building things that actually matter, has officially received its charter and become operational. So, it's a pretty good set of things that are going on. Big hit. Congratulations. Big hit. Take us back in time. When did this project start?

1:04:14What was the inciting element? Why is this important? How did you pick this to work on? Look, there's a lot of things that I could point to, but it really boils down to I've been looking at starting a bank for a while, primarily for my own personal use, because there weren't banks out there that really understood my business, my businesses, the things that I was doing. Silicon Valley Bank was doing a reasonable job, but then they went out of business and and took everybody's money with them, and had to have the government bail everybody out. And I think that was really kind of the thing that got me very serious about it.

1:04:50I realized that you didn't have banks that were aligned with the United States, interests that were aligned with deep tech, hard tech, energy, the things that are really complex and hard to understand, but that do really matter, that could also serve them in a meaningful way. I mean, you have farmer's banks that serve communities that are doing agriculture. You have banks, certainly, that are doing oil and gas, quite well. But when it comes to tech, it's a pretty sparse field. And so I started thinking, well, how do you build a bank that could serve those things? How could you do it in a very conservative way, very, very low risk way, where you can ensure you're not going to go out of business, you're not going to force everyone to rely on government bailouts?

1:05:30You may not be able to survive a total financial collapse. Banks rarely can, but you can at least be the last man standing. And so thinking about that, and then also a lot of things that new technology enables, like using US dollar backed cryptocurrencies to have 365, 24-7 settlement of payments, which is something that a lot of businesses need and very few get. You kind of stack all these things together and it becomes clear that there's room for a company to be a real bank for real companies doing real things. So is there a network effect there? Because if I'm on Erebor and Jordi's on Erebor and we can both have 24-7 settlement, but someone else is on a different bank and they don't have 24-7 settlement, we're going to have a good experience and then maybe to get out of the network how does that work i think that there will be network effects but to be honest whatever network effects there are will probably be pretty short-lived i think that pretty quickly everyone is going to realize that they need to support these things and i think that when like seeing this administration's support for using specifically dollar backed stable coins so not saying we're going to move everybody off of the dollar we're going to move them off of uh you know the united states currency as the reserve currency the world.

1:06:37But I think probably most banks are going to get drug into this. The difference is that we're trying to do it from the start. So is there a network effect? Probably. But I think most of the forward-looking companies that would value that network effect, that one in particular, see that in the next few years, probably all banks are going to be forced to adopt this to be competitive. So what is the ideal banking experience for you besides stability and low risk? Is being able to talk to somebody, is that a bug? Should we just, is Airborne just going to be, you know, a chat bot that you say, talk to a human and it says, unfortunately, I cannot do that.

1:07:15I have an AI chat bot. I think it's going to be a long time before we hand things off to the chat pods, if only for regulatory reasons. Like you set aside the risk, which is a huge factor. You set aside the fact that we have our own banking rails, which are extremely efficient and that we can settle at any time. I mean, those are huge factors on their own. But even if you knock off kind of all of these obvious advantages. There's a lot of other things that you get from having a bank that is strongly aligned with the United States, strongly aligned with U.S. interests, strongly aligned with the U.S.

1:07:44Department of War and also the intelligence community. And there's a lot of ways that that manifests. For example, one of the things that we're doing is rather than working with the intelligence community only under court order to kind of go and respond to when they think there's crime going on in the platform, we're preemptively going out there and saying, no, we're going to work with them from the very, very beginning to help make fraud almost impossible on our platform, which is great for me too, because it means that people who want to engage in fraud are going to go to other banks. It means that people who don't want to engage in fraud are going to be thrilled about being on a platform that doesn't have that type of activity on it.

1:08:16And to the extent that it exists inside of their own platform against their will, they know that they have a willing partner that is willing to work with the government rather than hide these things. I would say maybe think of it as like the opposite of HSBC, where they were banking the cartels and desperately trying to avoid any sort of government intervention that would make that clear to the public markets, put Erebor way at the other end of that spectrum. I think there's also a lot of other banks that whether they're good or bad people is irrelevant. You might have good people who nonetheless are very beholden to European markets, Chinese markets, other foreign markets that they need to keep happy, either because they want to keep them happy and make money or because they don't want their executives in those jurisdictions to get arrested.

1:08:57Erebor is taking a very different approach. We're saying, you know what, we're an American company, we're an American bank that supports American companies, and we will comply with U.S. law, but we will not comply with spurious rulings from people who have no real jurisdiction or authority over us. And you'll find a very hard time finding a bank that takes that position. I'm not aware of any other than us. How do you think about rolling out products? A bank can do everything from mortgages to equipment financing to venture debt to capital raises, take someone public. That's kind of what, you know, you go to a big bank, they're going to help you IPO.

1:09:32What do you want to do first? I think that right now, you know, we look, we've just barely open. So give us a little bit of time. The products that we are prioritizing are based entirely on the customer feedback that we're getting, the things that they tell us they need, the things that they tell us that we can most help with. In a way, the existence of a bank to me is almost this antiquated thing. You would hope that companies could really just do all of this stuff themselves, or at least most of it themselves. But the regulatory climate, the way that the banking system works, requires that you have this intermediary in the form of a regulated bank to make these things happen.

1:10:08And so I kind of think of our business as part and parcel of these companies that need us, and we're going to work very, very closely with them and focus on the things that they care about. That's probably not going to be, for example, residential mortgages, but things like equipment financing, very conservatively played where it's not going to turn into a risk management problem, allowing them to work with the legacy banking system and plugging into that in the least painful way. These are things that we have a lot of customers who are very interested. Oh, and we need to not lose their money.

1:10:40If we can do that, we'll be doing better than many other banks. Yes, yes. Talk about the trade-offs of going the charter route. You know, the last 10 years, most of the banking products that founders have used were built on top of existing charters or spreading deposits across multiple. Well, people would just avoid getting a charter at all. They want to be a fintech company, and they basically will dance around the fact that realistically what they're doing is basically being a bank. Like, look, there's a lot of things that you can do without having your own charter. There's things you can do partnering with other companies.

1:11:17There's a lot of things you cannot do without having your own charter. Yeah, it's sort of against, it's kind of anti-hyper growth. Like, you can't just scale to$50 billion of deposits tomorrow, even if there's the demand, right? So maybe speak to that. We decided that we needed to get our own charter because of the type of bank we were going to try to run and the ability to have the buck stop with us. The moment that you're dependent on somebody else for the key infrastructure, the key risk management, the key licensure questions, they can kick you off the platform. They can be forced to kick you off the platform.

1:11:52They might, and maybe they're doing it for good reasons. Maybe they're doing it for bad reasons. I mean, you've seen this play out, for example, with Steam and their payment processors and their banks and their payment processors banks, where they're basically censoring games because there's some circle of people who all claim it's not them pointing down the chain. It's that guy, it's that guy, it's that guy, it's that guy. But they all agree, even if they can't agree, who's causing the censorship that if you don't censor, they're going to drop you, they're going to drop your account, they're going to debank you, they're going to depayment you.

1:12:19And so one of the things that you have to ask yourself when you're making yourself dependent on another bank or another payment company is, am I setting this up where they get to make my decisions for me? And are they making their decisions for me? Or is the Chinese Communist Party making those decisions? is some political party that is extremely hostile to some business on our network the one actually making that decision. So if you don't control your own charter, if you don't control your own destiny, the buck doesn't stop with you, and you're always going to have to keep other parties happy.

1:12:47And I think that was not something that we were interested in. We wanted to be able to run the bank the way that we think it needs to be run. And if we are debanking somebody, we are going to have to take responsibility for that. And I think that actually leads to much better behavior. I would love to see that type of behavior across the industry. Physical branches. How are you thinking about that? I think we're going to start with Fort Knox and then we'll expand from there. I like it. Yeah, maybe actually dive deeper there. Like what is a bank these days? I think most people can conceptualize like setting up a crypto wallet that holds coins.

1:13:22But when you want to hold real dollars, you don't actually have a physical bank vault, I imagine. So once you get the charter, does that just give you the ability to maintain a database and a ledger? What is a bank? What is a bank? I mean, there's lots of forms it can be. I think if you want all the details, you can actually read through a lot of our applications. It's actually a matter of public record and you can see that. Erebor will have a physical vault and we will have a lot of treasure in it. So we are not trying to be a pure digital, pure Ether company. And in fact, a lot of the companies that are very interested in working with us want us to have secure, actual vaulted storage.

1:14:04I'm not saying that that's going to be the first thing that we focus on. That's our key differentiator. But we are not a bank of the ether. We are of terra firma. Yeah. Last time you came on, we talked a lot about Mod Retro. I'd love an update on the M64. What makes that product special? Where did you go further with this project than with the Chromatic? and just general, like how you're thinking about the M64? Well, for people who aren't familiar with it, the M64 is a tribute to the Nintendo 64 that I'm building, one of the greatest multiplayer consoles of all time. We're building a console that is compatible with all classic N64 games.

1:14:41We're re-releasing a lot of classic N64 games so that you can buy them if you don't already have them. We're actually doing new releases of canceled N64 games that never even made it to market, either because they were canceled and ported to GameCube or because they ran out of money or because the studios imploded for interpersonality reasons. There's a lot of cool stuff coming out. The M64, I guess the main update is that it's in mass production right now. It is not eventually coming. It is in mass production right now. We've decided we're not going to launch it until we build up sufficient stock to meet the demand.

1:15:13One of the mistakes I think we made with the Mod Retro Chromatic, which was a tribute to the Game Boy and Game Boy Color, was that we started selling them, and then all of a sudden we sold out. and then you have people who hear about it, they read about it, their friends are all talking about it, they go to try to buy one and they can't buy one because it's sold out. And there's a question. Will they remember to come back and buy it some other time? Will they still feel like going and immediately buying it? Exactly. And so you kind of end up with this dead-end call to action. And so we've decided this time, by the way, this is especially bad for the game publishers that we're working with.

1:15:45Let's say that it's someone who's re-releasing a game or somebody who's doing a brand new game. Some of the indie developers we're working with on the Chromatic, They're out there promoting their game, they're trying to market their game, they're doing a whole marketing activation trying to convince people, hey, come and buy my new Game Boy game, come and buy my new Nintendo 64 game. Well, what happens if you can't buy the console? A lot of people are like, oh, I'll come back later and buy it. And then they don't. And so what we want to do is not let down our developer partners this time and make sure that we maintain stock.

1:16:12So the goal is that the M64, no matter how many people hit our website, is not going to sell out. And so we are mass producing. We're stockpiling, I think, tens of thousands of them so far, more and more to come. What is the supply chain actually like right now? We've covered the gamer rebellion against AI and memory. Gamers are rising up. You know, the supply chain is okay because of the type of hardware that we're building. There's a lot of consumer hardware right now where people are trying to buy memory, and it's a huge problem. But remember that the Nintendo 64 doesn't have exactly a lot of memory.

1:16:52It had 16 megabytes by default, 32 megabytes with the expansion pack. And so it turns out that you don't need that much memory to perfectly replicate the Nintendo 64 original hardware. It might be actually the least memory-impacted consumer electronics product of the year. And so this was your plan then all along? Yeah, you saw this coming. You knew the AI boom was coming, and you said, I'm going to make the final console. Yeah. Now we've got to return to monkey. We've got to go back to the beginning. I mean, really, what am I doing here with something with 32 megabytes? I mean, you remember what Bill Gates said, right?

1:17:31What was it? 64 kilobytes of RAM ought to be enough for anyone. Yep. Let's go back even further. Yeah, let's figure out how to use AI to build applications that fit within reasonable memory footprints. I'm only half kidding. I think you might have seen me going back and forth with Shamath on Twitter a couple weeks ago talking about how this AI software platform for building software using AI should definitely support export to Windows XP Service Pack 3 compatible applications. And I really am only half kidding. There is actually a lot of government hardware that is still running those, financial hardware that's still running these, mostly offline stuff.

1:18:11And so having apps that can run on those is actually useful. But man, it feels crazy to need a few gigabytes of RAM to a start menu. It feels pretty crazy that you need 16 gigabytes of RAM to take 30 minutes to search through a bunch of text files. Surely we can do better than this. Can you talk a little bit about how you think about gaming and the concept of just raising the next generation kids? I have three kids, and I think I could probably get an emulator and run it on an iPad and slam that over to my kid's face. and he might not know the difference, but is there another angle to the M64 that is about some of the things that you can't do with it are actually good for the world, maybe?

1:18:57I mean, you have to remember that the gaming industry, like many industries, figured out what actually worked a long time ago. They figured out how to make fun games, they figured out how to make things that make people keep coming back, but it's moved from innovation to extraction. And I will note, I stole that line from Nirav Patel, founder of Framework, because he put it so much better than I did. But there's these industries that have moved from innovation to extraction, and they're now in the extraction phase where they try to make tons and tons and tons of money, and actually pushing the limits is not the top priority for some huge majority of the dollars that are in industry.

1:19:31And so there's a lot of stuff that you can learn, especially when you're learning it from the ground up, by going back to when people were just getting the basics right, when they were still innovating, building things that were really compelling to people. I recently had a kid, I might have a second on the way, I'm planning on starting them with, I don't even if I'd say the classics. This isn't like a vintage play. It's starting them with a good foundation. That foundation happens to be largely old games, but I am not going to be throwing them into the slot machine microtransaction gamblerama that is dominating kids' games today.

1:20:04It just seems like a crazy thing to do. It's a Skinner box. Yeah. Don't go in the Skinner box. Talk about vibe coding. What would your life be like if vibe coding existed when you were 20? Advice for people who are 20 now in the world of vibe coding. You went into hardware very early. That feels like a great move. Is that still a great move? Walk us through all that. I mean, the biggest beneficiaries of vibe coding are going to be the hardware nerds like me. It's going to be the shape rotators, not the word cells. Everyone's focused on how the word cells are going to be wiped out by AI. But for the shape rotators, it's going to be incredible.

1:20:47I was always a pretty terrible software engineer. I'm not a programmer by trade. I've taught myself enough to glue things together and make them work. But when I started my first company, Oculus, or actually when I started Mod Retro when I was 14 or 15, I knew just barely enough about software. If I would have been able to build crappy stuff by outsourcing it to a computer, I actually would have been able to accomplish things a lot faster than trying to do it myself. And people might say, Palmer, you should have just learned to code. You should have just learned to do it yourself. But I think it's pretty easy to look at my track record and realize I started Oculus when I was 19 after building prototypes since I was 15 I was only able to accomplish what I accomplished because I focused on what I was good at Which was opto mechanics a little bit of electrical and then the product integration of all of these different components I didn't have time to learn to program if I had spent another year to learning to program At even a reasonable level.

1:21:42I would have been two years behind on everything else And so I am a big fan of vibe coding, even if everything that comes out of it is slop, even if it is all shit, it's better than I was able to make. How are you thinking about VR these days? I recently watched the Matrix from start to finish in an Apple Vision Pro. I enjoyed it. It feels like the only real thing that you can do these days is just a home theater, if you don't have a home theater. But it doesn't feel like the industry's embraced that at all. And everyone's sort of writing down their investments and pulling back. at a time when the display technology does seem to be good enough for that narrow use case, if you cut out the weight and move things around.

1:22:23But where do you see this? Where do you want consumer VR to go? And then where do you think it actually is going? So I will challenge your premise there, which is that people are pulling back. I think that's driven mostly by people sensationalizing meta, firing a bunch of people. But you have to remember, they got rid of 10 % of the Reality Labs team in one layoff. Remember that they have something like eight or 9 % annual churn naturally and organically, not including firing. So I mean, what you're really talking about is basically pulling six months of churn forward into a single month. And they're still spending more on VR than anybody by an order of magnitude.

1:22:58They've said they are not spending less on content. They're just not putting it into first party stuff like Facebook MetaHorizons. You might have seen, they've announced MetaHorizons is no longer a VR app as of yesterday and is now a mobile focused app only. So what they've done is they basically killed a few of these failing efforts that didn't make sense. And they're now putting those resources into things that are working. And so I wrote a bit about this on Twitter where people need to understand this is not the end of VR. It's not collapsing. They are still spending an enormous amount of money.

1:23:32They're bigger than anybody else by an order of magnitude. And I think if you pay attention to what's going to be coming out from Meta and others over the next 12 months, you're going to see a lot of progress. Like Apple Vision Pro, yes, they, so yes, Apple Vision Pro was ahead of everybody on visual quality, on display quality, but let me tell you a short story. Imagine that an American company went to a Japanese display vendor and they said, we want you to sell us your new 4K micro OLED displays. The company gives them samples of those micro OLED displays. The samples cost about a thousand dollars each because the yield on that production line is only about 10%.

1:24:07In other words, 90 % of the displays coming off the production line are not up to par. They're not working. And that's because these are engineering samples. They're not meant to actually be a working product. And they said, listen, here's our engineering samples. Just wait two years and the yield is going to be up to 90%. We'll be able to sell these to you for a couple hundred dollars. And then imagine that that American tech company had a guy named Tim Apple call them up and say, no, we're going to build a product with this right now today using our engineering samples. They said, but Tim Apple, that's crazy.

1:24:37That means that your headset was going to cost like$3 ,000. He said, I don't care. I'm going to sell a headset that should launch in 27, in 2024, 2025, and I'm going to do it for $3 ,500. That's what Apple Vision Pro is. It was never intended to be a product of the times. It's a product of the future hauled into the present by spending enormous amounts of money. And so Meta and Sony and Apple and Google and all of these other companies, they are going to be hitting that level of visual fidelity. They're going to be doing it with headsets that are far smaller, far lighter than what you see from Vision Pro.

1:25:10And I actually remain very optimistic. That's great. I think things are going pretty well. I'm extremely optimistic. It's mostly just that when I try and pull stuff out of Meta, they're like, no, no, no, we're not ready to talk. And I think that they're just being cold shoulder to me because they don't want to leak it yet. But I am very optimistic. Well, you know what the problem is? Yeah. They don't have a charming, charismatic pitchman who knows how to talk about this stuff with you. They've got to solve that. They need to figure out what they're doing. They do. It reminds me of something. Being here, I'm on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange behind me.

1:25:44And back in the Oculus days, when we sold the company to Meta, one of the first things that happened was New York Stock Exchange emailed our contact email. and they asked if I would come and ring the bell of the New York Stock Exchange. Sounds pretty cool, right? Like, hey, you've been acquired by this major public corporation in the form of Facebook. Come and ring the bell. Maybe someday we'll do something else with you. And unfortunately, I didn't see that email for about seven years because another Oculus executive intercepted the email, said, oh, no, Palmer can't make it, but I would love to come.

1:26:17And he came and he rang the bell without telling me about it. And so I found out about it later in unrelated litigation. That email came up in discovery. And anyway, I've not had a chance to ring the bell yet. Maybe when Andrew goes public, I'll finally be able to ring that bell. But I got to admit, I have a long memory and a long memory of grudges. And I won't say who it was, but there's probably a handful of people out there who can guess. You have a lot of co-founders now, a lot of executives that you work with. How do you select for folks who won't do that to you? How do you select the right people?

1:26:52Extreme loyalty. Trust. I don't know. I mean, it's important. Remember. We just kicked this thing off a year ago. Look, I started Oculus when I was 19 years old. Yeah. And I mean, you also got to remember the story of who is a founder, who is a co-founder. It's fluid and dynamic and always changing with the ebb and flow of history. One of my ideas is to have a blockchain company where everyone agrees what the founding story is and who the co-founders are. And then it goes into the blockchain so that nobody can come back and say that they're a co-founder. There's a guy running around now who says that he's a co-founder of Oculus, who was very much so not a co-founder.

1:27:31I swear, I swear, I think I met this guy. I told you this story off air. Tell me the story. I was at a dinner party at my friend's house and my buddy was like, hey, this guy works at, I'm not going to name the company, but you guys probably have some tech stuff in common you guys should meet. I go up to him and I said, hey, hi, I hear we should meet. He's like, hey, I was like, what's your story? He's like, I started a company called Oculus. Now it met. And I was like, oh, interesting. Never heard of you before. So it may be this guy. We won't put him on blast. Here's the crazy thing. I don't even know who you're talking about.

1:28:07And I told him, I was like, oh, like there's multiple people who are saying this, including a guy who literally has a documentary being made about him, how he's the founder of Oculus. So it's always you'll appreciate. You'll appreciate it. I was like, oh, that's that's awesome. Like Palmer comes on the show all the time and then he completely back back back back. It was like, well, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I joined like, you know, you know, but I was on the founding team like he back. track. To the point, you asked me, how do you select these people? Carefully. I was 19 years old when I selected the first people that I was working with.

1:28:44I've learned a lot. I've been stabbed in the back a lot, and I'd probably make very different decisions if I were doing it today. And it's worth noting, remember that I started Oculus on my own with no co-founders, nobody involved in a lot of, like, I brought on people that I am happy to call co-founders, even though they didn't join the company until months later, who I had never met when I started the company. That said, there's some people I'm honored to share the title of co-founder with, and there's other people that I'm not, which is why I really want this blockchain thing. Somebody needs to vibe code this slop and get it out there.

1:29:17Super important question. Have you played Federal Reserve Simulator yet? It's a new game. It's on Steam. On Steam. You've got to try it out. You're a banker now. I've not even heard of it. You're a banker now. You've got to get the reps in. You might really enjoy this. You've got to do it. Federal Reserve Simulator. Federal Reserve Simulator on Steam. I think it's right there on the screen. It says, Trump says, we have an incompetent Federal Reserve chair who loves high interest rates. Very interesting. What hardware are you collecting recently? We just learned you can buy a steam-powered car and drive it around.

1:29:50Jay Leno has one that's 120 years old. What hardware am I buying lately? Collecting, not just buying, collecting. Yeah, I know. There's a few things I could bring up. To be honest, I've been too busy to buy really good stuff, but I recently got delivered one of the first Jetson 1s, which is a small eVTOL aircraft. I was one of their first customers and their first delivery. I also have a collection of motorcycles. The theme of the collection is commercial failure. And so all of my motorcycles were huge commercial failures. The more of a failure, the better. And so I've been buying some failed two-wheel drive motorcycles.

1:30:31I've been buying some failed military motorcycles. How do they ride? Oh, incredible. Look, there's really bad failed motorcycles. There's others that failed because they're too good. One of the crown jewels of my collection is a Honda Rune. It was basically a personal project created by the CEO of Honda. The document that they used when they were creating it has actually been leaked now. And at the start of the document, it says performance is the only object. Price is of no importance. And so they wanted to build the ultimate cruising motorcycle. And the story goes that they lost over$100 ,000 per bike in the end.

1:31:07And so I've got one of the handful of Honda Roons that made it out of that program, a beautiful Honda room with a couple thousand miles, metallic purple and chrome. And it's one of my favorite motorcycles, if not the favorite. So commercial failure doesn't mean a product's bad. It just means they couldn't figure out how to make a business out of it. Back to your Jetson 1. Have you been flying it? Are you taking it like half a foot off the ground and then a foot off the ground? What is the path to commuting to work in it? I think given the regulatory climate around eVTOL aircraft, it's best that I not say one more word.

1:31:44Perfect. Perfect. Where do you get your shirts? Where do I got my shirts? Well, it depends. I buy Tommy Bahamas. This one is a rain spooner and a Hawaiian shirt. So I've got a Sentry Tower. I've got a Ghost X on it. And they're headquartered on Catalina Island, California, in Avalon. So I buy from a whole bunch of different places. I'm an equal opportunity Hawaiian shirt purchaser. I like it. Supporting the entire market map. Well, it sounds like we have Jonathan Gould, the comptroller of the currency, next to you in the booth. Is that correct? That's right. I'd like to introduce Jonathan Gould, Comptroller of the Currency, here with me today on TBPN.

1:32:30Thank you so much for joining us. Jonathan, please introduce yourself since it's the first time on the show. And tell us a little bit about what happened today from your perspective and what's going on with Erebor from your perspective. Sure. So thank you so much for having me. I'm Jonathan Gould, Comptroller of the Currency. We charter, we regulate, and we supervise national banks. And today we're here to celebrate what is the first full-service charter of a national bank that's been issued since I took office about seven months ago. So we're very excited to have Airborne into the national banking system after months of hard work on their part.

1:33:06So delighted to have them there, and we're here to celebrate that. Yeah. How much is changing around the way banks get chartered? I'm interested to hear, is this just the Herculean efforts on Palmer's side, or is there going to be a flood of new bank charters issued? What does the view over the next decade look like for new banks broadly? Well, so I think over the last four years, but even beyond since the 2008 financial crisis, regulators have imposed a lot of hurdles, procedurally and otherwise, as a result of just having a much lower risk tolerance around bank chartering in the United States.

1:33:46That's not the result of any changes in statute or anything like that. Just simply a lot of regulators, not just the OCC, but other regulators as well at the federal level and possibly the state level too, just discouraging banks from forming. But of course, it's absolutely critical that we have new banks forming in America on a regular basis. That's really part of how the banking system revitalizes and refreshes itself over time. And so, again, we want to do everything we can such that we are being transparent and holding all applicants to the same standard and faithfully applying the statutory factors that Congress has given us on a case-by-case basis and in an even-handed fashion so that if new applicants, if they meet the statutory factors and they can meet our high supervisory standards as Erebor has, they will get a charter.

1:34:36So we're excited to see the demand that's out there. We think that they're and have seen already a lot of banks of various different business models kind of in the pipeline already. And again, if they meet the statutory criteria and they can meet our supervisory standards, we welcome the system. I'd also say just personally, I think those standards, people should understand, are already extremely high. Like you guys are not lowering the bar. You're just going through the process that statutory you're supposed to. and I like, you might not be able to say this or want to say this, but I'll say like right now, as it is, there's probably a lot of things that could be done to make it easier for people to start banks that would be productive.

1:35:12But right now, I mean, the bar is extremely high. I've put it this way. Starting a bank is very much a rich get richer thing right now. You can't be a 19-year-old Palmer Luckey who started Oculus in his trailer and say, you know what? I've got this incredible idea for banking. I think I'm going to go start a bank. Maybe it's possible, but the process we went through, I don't think a 19-year-old Palmer Luckey can get through. That's fair. And again, I mean, part of what we're doing here is just trying to live up to the standards that we say we have in place for what it takes to become a bank. But more fundamentally, and if you'll pardon me for this one, but I mean, you shouldn't have to hire a burglar from the Shire to get a bank charter, right?

1:35:50You know, it shouldn't be that challenging. We should have transparent standards around it. And to the OCC's credit, I think we do. We just haven't in all cases and overall administrations followed them. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. What other are there other kind of industries or categories that you're interested in? Airborne is obviously unique in that it's focused on technology and industrial businesses. And it's something that has so much excitement from our industry. But is there kind of a line out the door in terms of other sectors that are excited to have kind of a new bank partner in their industry?

1:36:27So we don't, you know, from a chartering agency standpoint, we don't, you know, pick and choose winners and losers. We don't pick and choose business models. We want to make sure that to the extent there is an unmet credit need in a community or in a business or an industry, that the banking system is evolving to meet those credit needs, again, subject to doing so in a safe and sound manner. So again, we are trying to apply the statutory factors across business models, across potential applicants in an even-handed fashion, again, consistent with the guidance that we've produced over the years.

1:37:03So again, we're not trying to direct bank chartering one way or the other. I think we've seen in the past, particularly over the last four years, a skepticism inconsistent with statute, but a skepticism around things like digital assets and crypto. we are reverting back to what I would say is the norm for the OCC over its 163 year history, which is we don't pick winners or losers here. We apply statutes in even-handed fashion, and we are agnostic around technology. And in fact, we welcome banks embracing new technologies over 163 years, which is how long our agency has been around for. And obviously, the U.S.

1:37:44banking system far exceeds that. Banks have had to adapt, evolve over time. And again, new chartering is how banks do that in part. It's how the system adapts and refreshes itself. So we have a strong interest in seeing that continue to occur. I know you can't pick and choose, but I have to say, in my mind, I want someone to start a bank that is focused on adult content and other edge of illegal stuff. It's not what I want to focus on. But the problem is right now there's this weird gray area where there's things that are technically legal in the U.S., but no banks want to touch them because of the PR concerns or the actual real risk concerns.

1:38:20And so they end up being banked by foreign banks that are doing all kinds of weird payments. Now you have an opening for organized crime, an opening for sex trafficking, and you don't have any real insight into how any of it moves. The U.S. can't see how the money is moving. It becomes much harder for law enforcement. These other international banks don't want to cooperate with law enforcement because they're making all their money off of sex trafficking and illegal payments and all of these other things. And so I've always wished that somebody would come up and say, hey, I'm going to bank all of the people that are on the edge of legality so that we can get at least some insight and access into this.

1:38:55I don't want to be in that business personally, but somebody out there should do this because it would probably be better if that whole industry theoretically didn't exist. But in a world where it does exist, It's better that they not be banged by Russian organized crime. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Get a little more technical with us. What does the actual process look like for applying for a charter? I mean, I think some people, you know, imagine like a web form that they fill out. Then they might, you know, imagine, you know, a thousand page legal document. Or are there lots of conversations, meetings?

1:39:34You probably also need to be able to raise like a quarter billion dollars or something in that range. What does it actually take these days? I mean, I'll leave that to you. But I mean, you said it doesn't take a quarter billion dollars. I mean, we had to have like three hundred fifty million dollars in regulatory capitals just sitting in an account to backstop it, which, again, gets back to what I said earlier. where right now starting a bank under current rules and statute, it is very much not the 19-year-old Palmer Luckey version of a world. That seems healthy. I don't want to bank with a 19-year-old, personally.

1:40:08We have some 19-year-olds on our team. They're fantastic. Well, I bet me and Jonathan probably have slightly different opinions. But remember, Eileen, very libertarian. I'm a college dropout. I'm trying to figure out if I can convince kids to drop out of high school. I mean, would you say you wouldn't bank with a 19-year-old? Maybe you just haven't met the right 19-year-old. You know, like, that's right. There's a lot of people who wouldn't work for a 19 year old. And I had that problem when I started Oculus. And yet I managed to do it. I'll give you the more anodyne, less colorful version. And maybe somewhere between the two is what actually happens in practice.

1:40:43So it's a two phase process for chartering a bank at the OCC. The first phase essentially is, you know, the regulators. So the OCC will be vetting kind of the business plan. understanding and assessing what's the probability for success, ultimately doing what's called a, giving what's called a preliminary conditional approval or not. We aim to do that within 120 days. And then essentially kind of the second phase is the actual in-organization phase. So it's standing at the bank, doing all the policies and procedures, doing the fundraise for the capital side, making sure you have the management team in place that you need.

1:41:22And that can occur, that basically has to occur within 12 to 18 months of when the OCC grants preliminary conditional approval. But how long exactly the bank remains in organization phase is really up to the bank, right? Because they've just got to get themselves ready so that they can essentially kind of, you know, open the doors for business. And the last thing that happens just before they do open the doors for business is that OCC examiners come in and do the final kind of pre-opening exam and make sure, in fact, the policies and procedures are in place. management's there and so forth so that the bank can, in fact, welcome customers and execute it on its business plan.

1:41:59I have one last question. Can we have a 19-year-old comptroller? What does it take to become a comptroller of the currency? You go to Wall Street, and then there's a revolving door, and then you go to the government. Do you work your way up in the government? Break me down for the 19-year-old that wants to be the next comptroller of the currency. What do they got to do? Well, I don't think there's any statutory prohibition on age. I mean, hopefully qualifications are relevant, although, you know, it's hard to tell sometimes in Washington these days, but, but certainly you do need a presidential nomination and support and you need the advice and consent of the, of the Senate.

1:42:38I spent about 25 years in this industry, so I've got a lot of friends and, uh, you know, both on the, on the policy side and on the, on the banking side. So, okay. Uh, well now I'm excited about a 19 year old comptroller. Let's see. They can put on their application. They can put on their application. You don't have to worry about the, Oh, wow. Palmer talks a big game about faith in youth. And then as soon as I tell him you're going to be regulated by a 19 year old, he's like, Oh no, no, no. Let me tell you why this actually fits in with the libertarian perspective. Okay. When you, when you have a free market and you have a whole bunch of different companies that are all competing with each other the idea that one or a few of them might be run by high schoolers say you know what give them the right to compete in that it's it's a it's a free market they're allowed to compete and if they provide a better product and a better service and people want to work with them or for them all the power to them government is different you have a centralized power you have one chance to get it right and so i i will admit i'm a little i am a little worried that perhaps if you need someone with a lot of experience, not even just in currency or finance, just someone with experience in life.

1:43:44I talked earlier about how I probably picked poorly in some of the people that I worked with early on. Imagine if I was the controller of the currency and I had that same level of naivete. If it's one of a hundred companies in the market, I'm all for it. If they are the person who is the wielder of singular government authority, I actually would worry about it. So I'm not as hypocritical as you think. I'm halfway there. I wouldn't want to discourage 19-year-olds from aspiring to be or becoming the comptroller of the currency. But just to be clear, the comptroller of the currency is not responsible for killing the penny.

1:44:16Okay, okay. Do you have to deal with that every day? Are people stopping you on the street and clicking pennies at your head? Most of my family members and all my college friends, all they want to know is, so you're responsible for killing the penny? And then as soon as I say no and start describing my actual job, they immediately lose interest. That's a funny one. Well, thank you guys for coming on the show. We really appreciate all the context and laughs. Have a great time at the New York Stock Exchange. Say hi to Lynn for us. Yeah, say hi to Lynn and we'll see you soon. Thanks, guys. Live long and prosper.

1:44:47Goodbye. Live long and prosper. Let me tell you about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. And let me also tell you about Eleven Labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents, reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs. That was a lot of fun. I loved in the chat, someone was saying they got to make Comptroller of the Currency Simulator, get it on Steam. I'm ready to play 10 ,000 hours of Comptroller Simulator. That's what you should be required to do before you get the job and the presidential nominee.

1:45:25Anyway, we will continue with our coverage of Erebor at the New York Stock Exchange. In just a minute, we have Diogo from Han Ventures coming in, calling in from the New York Stock Exchange. So we will bring him in in just a second. Any other breaking news that we should touch on, Jordan? Yeah, we can touch on this briefly. So NVIDIA and OpenAI are nearing finalizing NVIDIA's$30 billion investment into OpenAI. A lot of people were kind of... But it was$100 billion, which is - Yeah, and so this felt like a downgrade, but at the same time, that$100 billion, when they proposed it, was going to be in 10 % installments based on milestones.

1:46:07And so I think it makes a lot of sense to just do a good chunk of this up front. You just need to remove five zeros from every deal to contextualize it for a normal founder. Like if you're raising a$10 million Series A and an investor comes in and says, I'm good for three, you're like, awesome, this is great. and then add five zeros and that's the same ultimate experience. Anyway, we have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. Let me tell you about Plaid first. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest, securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI.

1:46:41And without further ado, welcome to the show. How are you doing? What's happening? We are working on audio. Let's try and bring that in and we will kick it off in the introduction. Please, since it's the first time on the show, introduce yourself. Yes. My name is Yogi Monika. I'm a GP at Han Ventures and the co-founder and executive chairman of Anchorage Digital. Fantastic. Since it's the first time on the show, give us a little bit of background, how you wound up at Han Ventures. We've had Katie on the show. And what was your first trip to NYSE? Yeah. I hear that. That's interesting. Yes. It was not my first trip, actually.

1:47:14So I've been here a few times. Nice. I've gone to take lots of the pictures. Great. And they actually have a curator, by the way. So if you come to NYC, you should ask for her. She knows everything about the history of this place. It is an hour and a half to two hours, but you should absolutely do it and see all of the original documents and everything that's happened here. Super historic. Cool. And then, so yeah, background, the path to Han, the path to crypto. I know Han Ventures is interesting because there's the government relationships as well as the fintech. There's a lot going on. So I'd love to know how you wound up in your current position.

1:47:47Yeah, so fun story, but I really have only done one thing in my entire life. So PhD in distributed systems 20 years ago when honestly was useless. And then I led security team at Square for four years, went to lead security team at Docker for three years, then started my own company with Nathan, a company called Anchorage Digital, the first federal chartered bank, which is very relevant for Erebor. And then Katie and I connected when I was fundraising for Anchorage about eight years ago. And over the years, we've just been friends. And she was, as you know, co-leading the A16Z crypto funds. That was an investor in Anchorage.

1:48:22We were friends. We were on the board of the Libra Diem, if you recall that initiative, by Facebook together. And just, you know, they're clients of Anchorage. And so we've interacted many different ways over the years. Yeah. So talk about the AeroBoard deal. How'd you meet Palmer? What was interesting about this other than, you know, obviously there's a lot of star power, but I want to hear more about the unique thesis. So, look, I was in a unique situation, which is I'm one of the few crazy people that actually sit on the board of two federal charters, not just one. And so when the team came to me and really wanted to start this, said, well, there's not that many people that have done this over the past five years.

1:49:03And Anchorage got our charter, as you know, in 2021 and really was trailblazer in terms of showing that you could have innovation under the OCC and going through a Biden administration, which, as you know, was very crypto unfriendly and coming out on the other side with a very strong business. Sorry to interrupt, but did everyone think you were absolutely you guys were absolutely insane to try to get a charter in that climate? Like what did you think the odds were going into that process? Was it kind of a moonshot like, hey, if we can make this happen, it's great, but low likelihood or at what point did you develop confidence that it would be a possibility?

1:49:38Well, look, it was to the point where the consultants that were helping us get the charter did not believe that we were going to get the charter in the first place. So that was how bad it was to get a charter and try to get a charter in 2020. But if you think about Anchorage and how it started, it is an institutional bank. We only serve large institutions. The clients are the Blancrocks of the world, visas of the world, very large institutions. So when we had the opportunity of converting our trust, state trust charter into a federal charter, it was the obvious solution and the obvious, you know, solution that had longevity.

1:50:15If you're just serving institutions, we basically connected the best security that custody's crypto assets to the best regulatory charter that can get out there. And that was the end state of the company. If you had the opportunity of jumping right to the end state of the company, wouldn't you take it? And so we put all of our chips, we went all in, and we just ended up being the first ones to get the charter. Got it. How are you thinking about innovation in the existing, you know, mega bank sector? Like, there's been a ton of skepticism around crypto from the leads of the big banks, but I feel like some of them are coming around.

1:50:47It's staring them in the face at this point. They're seeing public companies that operate in crypto, you know, make it through. There's new regulation. Is there anything that you are seeing on the horizon where those banks might modernize and actually adopt some more forward-thinking technology strategies? Look, Erebor, to a large part, actually came out of the frustration of the fact that that does not exist for the industry. If we go all the way to 2008 in post-crisis, you had Dodd-Frank that actually created so many more regulations, all of these stress tests, all these capital requirements.

1:51:22And from that moment on, the number of federal banks is literally a monotonically decreasing function over time. Each year has less banks than the year before it through M &A, mergers or people going out of business. And so the frustration of the industry when you're in technology and you're trying to build financial products of not being able to build has culminated in something like Anchorage and then something like Airborne. Because if you think about it, fintechs started for a while renting these charters and doing banking as a service as it's called. And then all of a sudden, Synapse blow up happens, which is still being litigated.

1:51:57They literally did not know who the money belongs to. And so it showed that if you are a tech company that wants to build a world-class product, then you cannot rely on a rented charter and banking as a service. You sort of have to do it yourself. So, going straight to the pain, which is very difficult to get an OCC charter and operate as a bank holding company under the regulatory regime of the oldest banking regulator in the United States, the OCC, that is not something that you do lightly, but it was necessary. So it was time for tech to come into finance. And so that's why these banks got created.

1:52:30And we had to take matters into our own hands. How do you see the market for new banks developing? because when Palmer launched Anderil, there was this line where in order to start a defense company, you had to have a billionaire as a co-founder. And he cited Palantir, Anderil, SpaceX. And it was something that was like the barrier to entry was so high. And then now we have a whole defense tech boom and there's a lot of cool stuff going on. Anderil's obviously still doing fantastically. But is this a moment where you think people will just wake up and be like, yeah, it's hard, but it's not impossible.

1:53:04And so maybe we will see a bank that's specifically targeted at farming or oil and gas or some new startup in some other vertical. They'll try and create some differentiation, not go right up against Airborne, but we will see a market map in a few years of new banks. 100%. After 20 years of almost zero federal charges being created a year, there's a window here. because of a pro-business administration and lots of these convergences that have been happening that allows people to even for the first time think that it's possible. Think that it's possible. And so dozens of these charges have been applied for.

1:53:38There's two main strains of them. One of them is the trust bank charter that encouraged Trailblaze in which you are full bank, but you're not actually taking deposits and you're effectively a full reserve bank. And then there's the Airborne model in which you're full fiduciary, traditional bank. In the case of Airborne, extremely conservative, of tier capital ratios, and it's an extremely conservative bank, but you're going for the whole enchilada, FDIC insured, et cetera. So lots of banks are now realizing that this is possible. And you see that in the massive increase of applications and charges being given out.

1:54:09So it's a new renaissance for banks and people realizing this is possible. So let's actually go do it. Yeah. How are you thinking about making, you're now on the board of two, would you consider making more investments in this space or are the incremental charters that would be kind of broadly interesting to the market not necessarily a fit for Han Ventures? Look, they have to make sense. One of the reasons why Erebor works is because three of the things that are hardest about starting a bank, the first one is capitalization. It's no surprise that Palmer starting anything will get capitalized.

1:54:50And so you jump through that hurdle. The second one is the regulatory hurdle. Anchorage has shown that it was possible. The team that Palmer assembled is absolutely magnificent from engineering to compliance to regulation. And so it was very clear to me from day one that they were going to be able to step over their hurdle. And then the third and most important thing is you actually have to get to scale on a depository base. And Erebor through Palmer as a go-to-market, which is what I call it, Palmer as a go-to-market, it's our go-to-market strategy. And Palmer's friends, Palmer's connections, and obviously the competence of the team in the bank, you have all three figured out.

1:55:23So effectively, we speed ran the infancy teenage years of a bank into something that is fully fledged and is ready to go. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Let's go to market. Breaking it down. Palmer. Congratulations. Have fun. Enjoy the closing bell. Great to meet you. Come back on the show. Four minutes until the closing bell. and then have fun at NICI. We will talk to you soon. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70 % of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

1:55:59And I believe we have Joe Lonsdale in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TV panel. Joe, how are you doing? Hey, guys. How's it going? Good to see you. It's going fantastically. Is software dead? I want to start with SaaSpocalypse. I know you have some good takes on the SaaSpocalypse because someone vibe-coded your former company, right? Oh, that's funny. You saw my comments on the end today. I can't help myself. It's like being shared by all these people. Oh, yeah, I vibe-coded Palantir. I'm like, come on, guys. It's annoying because I'm such a pro-AI bullish person, but it drives you to apostasy for the whole movement when they're like, we're replacing everything.

1:56:38Palantir is going down. I'm like, no, I think low-end SaaS is in trouble the next few years. Like that's the reality, right? Not the hard companies. So that's narrow point solution, no system of record, no regulatory mode, like no network effect. Is that what you're thinking when you describe low-end SaaS? That's where I would start is probably some of the stuff that Constellation Software used to do. I don't know what they're doing now, but back in the day when I studied them, there was a lot of stuff like that. And listen, it probably climbs the stack over time. So there's probably some very simple systems of record that are very basic that you can kind of probably pull in.

1:57:15But listen, if you took more than$100 million to build your SaaS software with good engineers, that's going to take a while to replace. And if you have a great SaaS company that spent hundreds of millions or billions of dollars and you still have a great tech culture and you're using AI, you're fine. As long as you have a great tech culture because you're going to stay ahead. But there's a lot of stuff with PE bought, didn't take that much to build, probably put more money into sales than tech. That stuff's in trouble. How are the conversations going with existing portfolio companies that are now running the calculus on how long it'll take to build new products and thinking like, hey, we can go multi-product faster than maybe we could before.

1:57:53Or maybe it's more tempting because this thing that was going to take us a year could now take two months or six weeks or something in that range to ship. still feels like somewhat of a risk to just say, okay, we're going to do everything all at once. But how are you thinking about it? You know, I, my, my bias as an entrepreneur has always been to like do too much at once. And I need to hire people around me to hold me back. Cause I'm like, let's do these 14 things. Then you're like, actually guys, you know, actually we should ace this thing first and this thing. So, so, so, you know, in, in general, this is probably dangerous for me because it empowers me to keep pushing for doing everything at once.

1:58:24And it's like, I love Peter Thiel's like argument on the board of Facebook 20 years ago, where like the Warren Buffett, you know, person, Don Graham, who was tied to him is like, don't spend too much money, get cash flow positive. And Peter's like, we should be like still burning money and like just growing faster and taking over the market. He's obviously was correct. Right. So I mean, it's just like there's a lot to do. And our big companies are growing. You have no excuse to be making money right now. If there's the build, right, you should you should be spending more to build within this environment.

1:58:51You know, it's it's you know, I think the best engineers really are five to 10x better with this. I think if your engineers are not using it, you should replace them. That's a great way to know who to replace in your company right now. And, you know, I mean, yeah, a lot of our older SaaS companies are still well run. They're building agents on top of it to perform the work for their customers. Does that make sense? Yeah. So it's like if you like dominate, I shouldn't say it because he gets too many calls, but like one of our CEOs is like dominates a big part of the financial industry in one particular niche area.

1:59:20and now he's rolled out agents and he's adding tens of millions of revenue with the agents to help the customers have to hire less and to be more efficient. So there's a lot of stuff like that we're seeing. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, let's flip it over to Airborne. You're not going to vibe code a bank charter. At least I don't think you will. But what are the keys to success going forward? You're obviously deeply involved with the company, very excited about it. What does the next couple of years look like? What do you want to see happen? So, you know, I think with a bank, you got a barbell on one hand.

1:59:49There's all this really exciting stuff you could do with AI and with hopefully convincing the regulators to permit new really great things, and we could talk about that. On the other hand, it's a goddamn bank, right? So you have to be traditional. You have to be safe. You have to be smart. I'm going to be putting my own money in. I'm going to put some of my firm's money in. A lot of my friends are. A lot of my companies are too. I'm on the board of this thing, and your job at a bank board is to be conservative as well, right? The whole point is our reputations are all tied into this Palmer's reputation, my reputation, a lot of other people's reputation.

2:00:22You have to run this thing where you're serving customers better and learning from the best of that. We're going to be extra safe. I don't know what I'm supposed to talk about, but I think the whole point is that it's not a narrow bank in the traditional sense, but it is much narrower than other banks. We're going to keep a lot more in a very, very safe way because I think it's the right way to run these things. Just not take any risks you don't need to take. What was the sort of 72 hours of the SVB crisis like for you personally? Oh, gosh. You know, it was actually interesting because I'd worn eight or nine of my companies about six months before.

2:00:55Actually, I didn't know for sure, but I said this looks not quite right to me. My brother talked to me about it. He's a macro analyst. And I'd be like, what's going on? I hadn't known for sure. And I had a bunch of my family money in FRB. And it was really sad because I loved – I mean, SVB guys were nice too, but I loved FRB. They were like our – John and I too. Yeah, and I was at the dinner with the governor here in Texas that night and had a bunch of other friends here. I won't mention their names, but guys who had moved here are very multibillionaires who themselves had a bunch of their own money in FRB, actually.

2:01:27And we all felt terribly guilty because when SVB had started to go down, we actually had each withdrawn money from FRB as well because you kind of had to in that situation. It was just too scary. And so it was like SVB was a little bit sad. But FRB for me was just, I was never really worried for myself. I got my money out. My companies didn't have too much exposure. But I felt really sad because it was such a great bank. And I think for me, one of the goals of Erebor would be to try to learn to do things as well as FRB did to serve people. I think it was a really great bank. Yeah, you mentioned Texas.

2:02:00There's a lot of young people that are nervous about the job market in the age of AI. Give me the pitch for University of Austin right now in the age of AI. University of Austin, the age of A, well, I think in any age, but especially in an age where the world's changing quickly. You need to have a really strong foundation. You need your leaders in your society to have a strong intellectual foundation. So what we're doing is we have, you know, it's one side, really deep intellectual foundations of the West, understanding our civilization, understanding how our world works, why it works the way it does.

2:02:27You want to talk, you know who my top people I work with in business, they all understand philosophy. They all understand history, whether it's Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Charles Koch, Elon Musk. You have to give them that really strong base. On the other hand, you got to challenge them, push them really hard on the STEM side. We're just finishing our STEM building. right next to SpaceX and Boring Company. I was just with my friend who built Palantir with me. He was teaching the AI agents course next quarter. So we have a lot of our probably top 100 friends who built companies as advisors who are helping push the university forward.

2:02:54And we're going to train courageous young leaders. And a lot of them are going to work with us and build the future. So it's a pretty exciting place to go. That's very exciting. You guys are setting up dorms for Mac minis, a little space to set them up. You know, there's all sorts of crazy AI stuff going on that we're having fun with. But I think the dorm is a little bit too nice, frankly. I think the students, I don't know, maybe it's too fancy, but it's good. They like it a lot. Are you secretly funding the California billionaire tax to punish everyone that didn't leave like you? You know, it has been something I've commented on that it's probably really good for these people in California to wake the heck up and see what's going on.

2:03:31But no, I'm actually secretly funding a bunch of the things that now my friends are waking up to kind of reveal the fraud in California and reveal the nonsense in California and hopefully fight back against the real extremes. is because I used to argue with a lot of my friends in college. I'd be more on the moderate right. They'd be on the moderate left, I'd say, if you want to define it. And now most of those smart people who've been successful on the moderate left were like complete allies against the crazy far left because that is just so broken in California. And I'm excited to see a bunch of them courageously stepping up.

2:03:57Well, thank you for taking the time. We'll let you get back to your day. Good to see you. We'll talk to you soon. Good to see you, guys. Always a great time. Have a good one. Let me tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. Gemini 3.1 Pro is here with a capable baseline. It's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life. Do you hear that? That's the sound of a happy dad. Barking. Let's bring him in. What's happening? Here we go. Cracking them open for you. And it's five o 'clock somewhere. It's four o 'clock at the New York Stock Exchange.

2:04:39Cheers, John. Good to see you again. Yeah, good to see you guys, too. I'm good. Good. I know it's been a few weeks, but I just want to congratulate you guys again on the Super Bowl ad. Oh, thank you. That was a lot of fun. You know, I want to tell you guys, like, man, I actually got emotional because I remember a year ago when we spoke and when TVPN, like, was just taking off and, you know, just watching your guys' journey has been incredible. You know, I get like once a week or so, I get like someone calling me and like trying to pitch me on a show. And we're like, we're the TBPN of sports. We're the TBPN of, I got some guy the other day, like we're the TBPN of Europe.

2:05:17So it's kind of cool. It reminds me of like 10 years ago when I was in music. People used to always pitch, I'm the Justin Bieber of Latin music. I'm the Justin Bieber of India. And like that's what TBPN's become. Yeah, it's a good sign. It rarely works. I mean, if someone's trying to do the happy dad for wine, it's like that's probably not the thing. Either you'll do it or whatever works in that category will just look completely different and have a different strategy because people want new things. Walk us through, what's the experience like at the New York Stock Exchange today? It's pretty cool.

2:05:54I mean, yeah, I came out here to support Airbor and what Palmer and Trevor and the team are doing. Really excited. We're going to be switching all our companies over to Airborne in the next upcoming weeks. So it's very, it's not just because they're good friends of mine, but it's really nice to see a bank doing something different and having that personal touch and their philosophy of just truly caring about companies and whether you're a startup or an established company. So it's just a good feeling to be a part of it. Yeah. How is business going? How did 2025 shake out? There were, you know, the economy was up.

2:06:39There were tariffs. There's lots going on. But what was it like in your world? Well, tariffs don't really affect us because almost all our products are U.S. made. So, you know, happy dad. Yeah. So, you know, outside of our merch business, which is, you know, just, you know, less than three percent of our business um everything else is u.s made so tariffs don't necessarily affect us um you know so far i mean this year has been already a great year for us you know happy dad in january was uh you know uh year over year in january is up 31 percent uh just yeah and this is this is this is dry january by the way this is uh and this is like you know if you live anywhere outside of a california or you know um some of these west coast states 90 percent of the country was pretty much frozen, you know, including, including Florida.

2:07:29You know, I was in Miami a few weeks ago and it was 35 degrees in Miami. So, you know, and you know, happy dad's not a cold weather product. So to start the year off like that chocolate, although maybe you should launch the happy dad hot chocolate for next January. Yeah. I think, uh, people, um, we're okay with the cold drink. So we're going to probably stick with that right now. how are you uh how much time do you spend in new york feels like a lot of your your your your business and is is more west coast leaning but new york is really feels like the epicenter of so much happening and just like the creator industry broadly i don't spend a lot of time here at all um i actually would only spend time here because more personal reasons because my wife's family's from new jersey but yeah now i spend most of our most of my time is actually in california to work with our team in Orange County.

2:08:25My brother Sam does a lot of the traveling to meet with our third-party partners, but I spend most of the time in California, not too far from you guys. Give us some tips, some hacks for expanding a consumer product, expanding in retail. I remember this fun story from Mark Rampolla who started Coconut Water Company, and he went to all his sales guys and was like, whoever sells the most, I'm giving you an F-150. And they worked extremely hard, and it was just kind of funny outside the box. Most people would be thinking in the spreadsheets. But what's been working on the retail side? What has been the interesting, unexpected growth vector throughout the last year?

2:09:05Well, with Happy Dad, I think last time I was on the show in September, we were talking about creator brands and creators overextending themselves when they launch a brand. And one of the things that we're doing this year is we're going to actually spend a lot less time and effort on marketing with creators and spend more of the money on trade marketing and being actually where the customer's at. So if you think about Happy Dad, you know, Happy Dad, you know, you go on a weekend on a Friday or Saturday to buy the product. Well, you might as well spend money in the store with displays and, you know, decorating the stores or putting up neon signs.

2:09:40Like money is probably better spent where the customer is versus where the customer isn't.

2:09:48If you're sponsoring a podcast and the podcast is live at 8 a.m. on a Tuesday and you're an alcohol company and most of your sales are Fridays and Saturdays or Sundays during football season, the customer is going to forget about you by the time Friday, Saturday come out. So you might as well spend that money when they're actually in the store. So that would be my tip with any CPG brand is focus on trade marketing, focus on actually, you know, decorating stores, proper displays and being seen in the stores. Because what's the point if you're not necessarily in the store or if you're hidden in the back because your competitors are actually doing what I just said?

2:10:28Yeah, we were talking about this. Expensify spent a lot of money sponsoring. 10 mil something 15 15 sponsoring the f1 apple f1 movie yeah and uh cool concept but the challenge is like think about the the sort of uh person's like frame of mind when they're watching that movie they're not in the business of they're not thinking i gotta buy expense management software right now and so being at the right place unless you have a lot of money like if you have a lot of money and let's just say taylor sheridan calls you and says hey you want to be stocked in our fridge in Landman season three, if you've got extra money and you're already in the stores and you're doing everything I said, and you just have, you know, an extra amount of cash to do that.

2:11:12Um, so your friends could text you and say, Hey, I just saw your product in Landman. That was awesome. If you want to do that, that's fine. But I would, I would focus on the actual where your customer physically is and they're ready to go and they're ready to buy. They've got their wallet. So, you know trigger them at that moment yeah how uh a lot of a lot of your a lot of your shows have partnerships with uh the sort of like the draft kings or the fan duels of the world some other online gaming platforms i'm sure a bunch of prediction markets now how are you navigating that whole landscape obviously the the big uh the big sports books have been talking pretty openly about how their businesses have been impacted by prediction markets even though they're getting into the game themselves what do those conversations look like and and how often do those contracts actually turn over yeah so um so you know we have a media company shots which was part of the tbpn super bowl commercial so thank you um you know we don't have a lot of time so we don't need to do that but but you know i'm doing it in my head um you know shots has a partnership with uh with price picks which was um you know which was a daily fantasy you could select players uh more or less and recently they implemented uh prediction markets in there so we have a long-term partnership with price picks um amongst all of our content and they've been great partners we've been with them since 2022 we recently renewed our deal for another three years um they're great because they already had a fan base um we didn't have to worry about you know most of most of our um um fans right now, they actually have price picks.

2:12:48So, you know, we're, we're more focused on getting them re-engaged in the product or educate on some of these new features that price picks has. So yeah, so that, that's, that's our partner when it comes to the prediction market slash sports, the sports app space. Yeah. Talk to us about like the broader growth of alcohol consumption, particularly among young people. Obviously your business is growing, your category is growing, but beer, I believe, had a 4 % decline and alcohol broadly, it feels like young people aren't drinking is sort of a meme, but how are you processing that? Yeah. So people are, you know, this new generation, especially, but most people are just, they're drinking, they're just drinking differently.

2:13:35They're not, you know, they're not going heavy. They're not going, you know, spirits. They're not drinking beers. You know, if you look at most beer companies, if they haven't got into like the seltzers or the tea or no bubble space, they're struggling. So, you know, I think beer consumption is down. You know, I say this all the time. You know, people don't want to get, you know, they don't want to wake up hung over. So they're not drinking, you know, vodkas and whiskeys and, you know, some of these harder liquors because people want to get up and they want to feel good. People are more on their health kick more than ever these days.

2:14:10You know, that's why you're looking at, you know, all these supplement brands, these fitness brands, GLP-1 peptide companies are all through the roof because people want to be healthy. They don't want to wake up. And I also have this theory that people want to look good on social media, too. So, you know, so there's only two ways to look good on social media, either be in shape or add 15 filters to your picture. Or grab a hammer. Grab a hammer. Stop with the hammer. We're not bone smashing. Bone smashing is now. It's over. That guy. Yeah. Anyway. That guy's a one-on-one. He is a one-on-one. Jordy, anything else?

2:14:43I want to, yeah, I want to, do you think Clavicular will create 10 ,000 Claviculars? Do you think IRL streaming is going to be a big new meta, or is there just a much, I mean, there's naturally a smaller base of people that can be an IRL live streamer than a traditional influencer who might have a normal job or something of the sort? Well, media is in general changing in general. You know, I mean, you know, I consider you guys IRL, just in a different format. And, you know, if you look at, like, how many people are viewing this right now, it's a lot less people than how many people are going to clip the TBPN interviews.

2:15:26So, you know, the longer you could actually stay online, the more of a chance you have to have multiple clips. If we had to count all the TBPN live views on X and YouTube versus all the clips of TBPN amongst all the platforms, shorts, TikTok, X, reels, it's probably hundreds X. So I do think IRL, whether it's streamers, whether it's this format, I think that's where media is going because it's really about short form. Most people aren't, you know, people are going to watch Palmer's clip, you know. Yeah. And those clips are probably going to go. I was in the other room, so I didn't hear what he was talking about, but everyone was laughing.

2:16:12So, you know, I'm sure there's going to be clips of that. Yeah, you're going to see the clips. He was advocating for 19-year-olds to run bank. You know, he's not. What's crazy about Palmer, I spent a lot of time with him. And sometimes I'm like, what did he just say? I don't know what he said about the 19-year-old running banks, but sometimes I'm like, fuck, he's kind of right. No, no, no. He's great at making a point that he can defend and actually peel back the onion but tie up in a bow. It's really great stuff every time. One more thing I think about media, too, is I do think we're going to see in the next year, we're going to see our first podcast produced by Grok.

2:16:55Like, I think there's going to be a very nice. Yeah, we talked about this on the show today. There's a top 20 series on Apple that's 100 % generated with AI. It's on the Epstein files. They took all the Epstein files, put them in deep research reports and different coding models to then turn it into audio. And it's charting. It's in like the top 20 because people just want that. I got to see that. They could turn it over immediately. And even though it's AI generated and it's probably not as nuanced as some serious journalist with a bunch of reputation, it's giving people what they want faster.

2:17:30And so there's demand. So now imagine you guys have TBPN and then you have Diet TBPN. But imagine like TBPN brought to you by Grok or some sort of AI engine that goes live at like 4.01 p.m. Eastern time and breaks down the stock market like one minute after the stock market closes. You know, or sports, you know, like, you know, today in sports, you know, it goes live a couple hours before tip off NBA. And this is what's going to happen in the NBA. So and so is playing so and so. This guy's hurt. That guy's not hurt. This is what the line looks like on price picks or poly market. You know, I think we're going to see one of those pretty, pretty, pretty soon.

2:18:09Yeah. Well, it's fantastic to see you. Excited to have you back. Come by the Ultradome soon. I want to. Well, that's what I was planning on doing. And then when I heard you guys were here and I was here, I was like, I was going to reach out to you guys next week about coming by. But I'm at this any day. You know where we are. Since you were last on, I think John, like somebody's only offered your handle on Instagram to John Coogan like 10 times. They hit him up every day. Constantly. Do you want at John? And I'm like, I know, John Chahidi, I'm not stealing his thing. I know you have that laughing lockdown.

2:18:43I'll give you at John on Snapchat because I have that, but I don't use it. I like the consolidation of you have the John. I'll be John Coogan. I'm happy to have the full name. The final John. The final John. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. Have fun. Thanks for having me. Have a good one. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era unlocks seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. Software multiples have been reset at a fair level given AI uncertainty, said Brad Gerstner. He says, if you own a software stock, you must expect the CEO to say, quote, we crush numbers and expect that to continue because our business accelerates with AI.

2:19:26If you don't expect to hear it, don't own it. Too hard basket. Dylan did that. Dylan did that? Dylan Field. Oh, yeah. Oh, exactly. Yes, yes, yes. For sure. For sure. Also, there was some funny stuff in the chat, but we can get to it later because we, of course, have Will Brewery from Barda Space. It's time for a lightning round. The Restream Waiting Room, and it is time to kick off the Lambda lightning round. Let's fire up that cloud, fire up the graphics package, and let's bring Will Brewery in to the TBB and Ultram. Will, how are you doing? Check, check, check. Hey, Jordy and John, how are you?

2:20:00Can you hear me? Yeah, good to see you. Loud and clear. Excellent. It's been far too long. Obviously, we're here, you know, excited about Airborne, but I'd love to start with just an update on are you running out of numbers for these capsules? How many are up there? How many have come back? You're going to have to switch to, you know, base 64 or something and coding them because the numbers are getting so high. Yes, I love that. Yeah, we are at Winnebago 5, just landed a couple of weeks ago, so we're very excited about that. Number 4 is in orbit. Number 6 gets shipped to the launch plate next week.

2:20:32Oh, thank you. Yes, yes, of course. I love that. So, yeah, what are you actually learning in between these? Are they purely commercial, like someone just asked you, so you're going to put one up? I imagine that you're iterating on hardware, software, regulatory, everything that goes into it. What changes in between one launch to the next? We have, but we've hit that zero to one moment. I mean, we've hit the zero to five moment. So now we're moving from six and beyond. So, yeah, yeah, very excited about that. So we are iterating on all the fronts you just mentioned. But luckily now that we have an assembly line going actually right behind me, there's two of them on the floor.

2:21:09We put together and bulk all of our changes into what we call block upgrades. And so that will occur about every year, just like a car comes off a line as an upgrade. Like an iPhone. Yes. It's a space iPhone. Exactly. Exactly. It's lighter, thinner, faster, cheaper. Yeah. It is. It is. Okay, so you have a capsule. You can put stuff in that. Can I put a GPU in it yet? So technically we have a data center in orbit right now. You do? Okay. It doesn't have as much compute as you may want, but it, you know, it checks the boxes of compute. You're like, Delian, shut up. This might be real. There's a chance.

2:21:54So actually I should point to you guys. We were featured in Morgan Stanley's market analysis that came out. two days ago, where they're looking at the microgravity manufacturing industry seriously. A very sophisticated report and kind of hit up the nail on the head. Okay. And a lot of that is still bio-focused, I imagine? Yeah. So we're definitely focused on bio for at least the next five to 10 years, just because from first principles, it's the most expensive dollar per kilogram. It has the biggest impact. It helps people. It makes economic sense. And it's a large market that we can scale into.

2:22:39It's highly differentiated. And the defense stuff is interesting and orthogonal, but that is sort of a separate part of the business. Is that correct? Separate part of the business, but same part of the product. I mean, every single vehicle that comes off the assembly line can be either used for either use case. And so that really helps with scaling. And so we just have a diversified revenue stream now. What kind of AI native tools, and I mean truly AI native in that they were created after the Transformer paper was released, what kind of categories are you getting pitched that you're excited about around potential speed ups or already getting benefit from?

2:23:20You mean like to purchase at BARDA? Yeah, yeah. Roll out. Like tools that you're buying or planning to buy that you're excited about outside of code generation? Yeah, outside of code generation. So Cursor, excited about that, excited about the new model. It's becoming so much easier to build the in-house version of those sasses that it really isn't, for us, I'm laughing right now because the guy leading the effort here was up until 4 a.m. last night just because he was so excited about it, we were looking at it. But what we did was what it does is it looks at Confluence, which is kind of like our wiki at the company.

2:23:58based on the diff from Confluence over the past week, here is a report of everything that's happened at the company. It does time tracking. It does risk analysis. So it's like, it's awesome. It's awesome. We're really excited. Is it getting to the point where it can make recommendations to you of like, here's how you can speed up this part of the process or is that kind of the next step? Yeah, absolutely. We even ask it to give us a multiple choice. Really? Nice. walk through how launch costs are looking this year next year there was a lot of back and forth with starship last year eventually did like like massive progress in the back half of the year and then the surprise for me was blue origin and I think everyone was sort of like oh it's a space tourism company and people were like no no no it's like a very serious company and there's going to be a real race.

2:24:49That feels extremely good for you. But do you anticipate the curve of launch costs to continue or change in some way? What are you seeing? Yeah, so I'll tell you what I know. What I know is, so right now, we've already booked all of our launches out through 2029. Oh, wow. And yeah, so we're launching four this year, seven the year after that, 10 the year after that, 12 the year after that. They're booked, flight hardware is purchased. The other thing I know is that you know when from a bar to business model perspective we're one of the few space companies that treats launches shipping like you know and so we use spacex instead of fedex but from a business model perspective shipping is shipping yeah and so you know we're excited about new shippers coming online you know that'll probably induce some margin compression which be nice uh for for us payloads uh but at the same time you know we're not going to trans transition overnight you can imagine if you were using fedex and they had a you know a truck going 167 times to the route that you want.

2:25:43And then all of a sudden UPS shows up with one truck. Hey, I'm excited. I can't wait for more, uh, but I can't switch shipping, um, uh, quite yet at the current nascent aspect of the technology. Last question, pick a side moon or Mars. Who you got? I'm on team Mars, man. Yeah. Oh yeah. So I was, uh, you know, I was, I was, uh, uh, cut my teeth when Mars was, I still think it is. Yeah, absolutely. Like, um, I think the, you know, what I want to be as my career ambition is muddy the mudskipper you know the first fish that it was an ugly scene but the first fish that started to crawl onto land his slippers were slightly more like legs it was not a glorious moment but if you zoom out it was an extremely glorious moment so I'd like to be you know that ugly you know not quite you know ready for the next planet yet but you know we show up sure sure sure yeah moon important testing ground but Mars is the goal and will be truly multi-planetary.

2:26:42Moon base doesn't really count as multi-planetary. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to see you, Will. Congrats on all the progress. We're still waiting for our capsule here in the dome right now. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we've got, you know, we've got three of them right now. They're going to have too many. They're going to need a whole storage facility for them in a couple of years. We can be trusted. We can be trusted. The price is going to invert. I'm going to start paying you just to get them off the property. You're going to be like, I've got to get this out of here. I got to hold on to it for regulation.

2:27:09Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to see you. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Have a good one. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And I'm also going to tell you about Restream, one live stream, 30-plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. Up next. Sam Levenbeck from X Energy. He's the next VP of growth and strategy. Sam, good to meet you. How are you doing? What's happening? Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here. First time on the show, please introduce yourself and tell us about the company a little bit.

2:27:43Yeah, absolutely. My name is Sam Levenbeck. I work at a company called X Energy. X Energy is designing a high-temperature gas reactor. And what's really exciting, there's a lot of exciting things about what we're doing. The technology is super compelling. We have some incredible investors. I think the thing that we're most cited for and known for is we're building our first project in South Texas with Dow Chemical in Calhoun County, Texas. And we're going to be building our second project in Washington State with Amazon to support one of their largest data center clusters in the Pacific Northwest.

2:28:24So just super exciting times for nuclear and the next generation of firm power. Yeah. I mean, Dylan, our team mentioned that you are a new Erebor customer. And I'm wondering, like, this doesn't seem like something that's like, you know, unbankable or, you know, requires something new. But what is it about your business that drew you to Erebor? Is it just excitement? Or is there something that where your business looks a little bit different than a normal business? I think that there is a really amazing nuclear industry in the United States today. We have 94 operating nuclear reactors, but not a lot of new reactors in construction, right?

2:29:08And we have a moribund nuclear supply chain in this country. And it's a shame that we've lost a little bit of the shine and the pedigree of what we have historically done so well in the United States. And so getting that nuclear supply chain back up on its feet and up and running and to support the growth that's really demanded by AI digital infrastructure is a pretty heavy lift. And it's not something that's directly in the wheelhouse today, frankly, of a lot of existing pick-your-basket of capital allocators. I think what's been really impressive about the Erebor team, about, you know, with Owen and, you know, what they're building is a real excitement and willingness to roll up their sleeves and understand our sector, understand what is risky, understand what is bankable, and, you know, get to work with us really with the same mission, which is, you know, the next century of American leadership in global nuclear commerce.

2:30:14Yeah. How capital intensive is the business? Do you have to buy land to build a facility? What level of the stack? Yeah. So our business is primarily around two things. Number one is designing a next generation high temperature gas cooled pebble bed reactor. So that's a heavy lift. Our company has over 900 employees today working on that. Wow. We are also then the secret sauce of our reactor is the fuel, so-called Triso fuel. And this is really advanced stuff. And we're building a fuel factory today in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. We received last week from the NRC our permit to operate that facility.

2:30:57And so that's the two halves of our business. It's designing a reactor, which our customers will license that technology for us, and they'll build it on their balance sheet. and we will sell them the fuel for the life of that reactor. So we are selling you the design to build the printer, and then we will sell you the printer ink for the life of that reactor. So there are different aspects of that business that are capital-intensive. There are different aspects that are not. And getting into it with us and understanding those different aspects is really something that Airborne is coming on that journey with us.

2:31:31When did you guys decide to get into the fuel business? Did that come after the reactor? That's a great question. You know, it was really a visionary decision by our founder back in 2015. If you build the world's most advanced reactor and the fuel doesn't show up, you're kind of hosed, right? And so a little bit of vertical integration here, a little bit of getting into if it's the secret sauce of your reactor, you better have your arms firmly around it. was really early insight. And so that decision was made back in 2015. And we spent a lot of time redeveloping how this fuel was made, the intellectual property around how you do it.

2:32:18And that's been a really important part of our story and our journey. Last question for me, I want to know about timelines. We talked to a lot of folks in nuclear. I hear 2029. I've seen some reporting in the Wall Street Journal about even just bringing old nuclear power plants back online. But the dates are crazy to me. The 2030, 2032, 2035 gets thrown around. What are you estimating for when we might actually see the famously flat curve of nuclear power generation in the United States start to tick upwards? You're going to see it in the early 2030s. In the early 2030s is when we're going to see our first two projects coming online with many more thereafter.

2:33:06You know, the first pickles out of the jar are the hardest, but the demand is insatiable. That's a new analogy. Because pickles are green like nuclear fuel. Yeah. You know, it's, but you're going to, I think that there's a reason that you're hearing. I mean, that's, I think, kind of the consensus in the industry. You know, you've got to, But and so I think seeing look, turning on those reactors and operating existing reactors, that's that that's the low hanging fruit. And we should get every electron we can out of the existing fleet. But that's not going to be enough. There's only so many of those projects to do.

2:33:42But really, throughout the 2030s, I think you're going to see, I know you're going to see a steady and ever-growing clip of new nuclear reactors coming online and powering this kind of generational super cycle of AI digital infrastructure. Yeah. How are you thinking about the different scales of nuclear power generation? I was really excited about just replacing the one megawatt diesel reactor. Radiant's doing some cool stuff there. There's a couple other folks. Then there's been, you know, as the AI boom has sort of taken off, everyone has been thinking about, well, what if we get 100 of those together?

2:34:23Well, then we're doing something for a data center. Maybe we should upscale the whole project, do a 10 megawatt, a 25, 100 megawatt. And then we can get into like the really big Westinghouse projects that maybe can be unstuck by a startup. But what's the landscape like from your perspective? Where's the most value in new reactor designs? Love this question. I mean, I think that it's all exciting and all have their puts and takes, right? So the big reactors, the conventional light water reactors, the Westinghouse AP1000, a lot of new excitement and focus on those. I'm sure new ones will get built.

2:35:04I mean, just the amount of power demand that's out there. You know, Westinghouse is a great company. But Vodal, we all learned from Vodal that it can take years. We did turn on Vodal, but it took a long, long time. And I think that tech companies will see that. And that's the downside, right? I think that even for a big hyperscaler, even these companies spending$160 billion a year on CapEx, a$15 billion bite on a single machine is a lot of risk to manage. and it's a lot of risk for any individual investor-owned utility to manage. You know, if you look at the market caps of the largest investor-owned utilities in the United States, $15 billion,$10 billion, whatever the next AP1000 costs, these are big bites of the apple.

2:35:51So those are the puts and the takes with those. But you know what? They're going to be successful building more. I don't have any doubt about that. At the other end of the spectrum, the one megawatt micros, Look, if you can get those to scale, delivering tens and then hundreds at a time, it's an awesome opportunity. The challenge there, and I think you alluded to it in the question, is for it to make a meaningful dent in a hyperscale data center, you're building hundreds and thousands in a single location. And that's a lot of moving parts. That's a lot of… But it doesn't necessarily… Grid capacity is grid capacity.

2:36:28So if you put one at every hospital and you replace a diesel generator on every oil field, that does free up energy for other purposes. And that has equilibrate at some point. Absolutely. So, I mean, they're super exciting. And the theory of the case getting to a factory kind of manufacturing throughput to bring down the cost, it totally makes sense. You know, but it's, you know, it's nonetheless challenged on the economics on the actual delivered cost of electricity when you get that small. Our main product is in that middle sweet spot. So a single one of our reactors is 80 megawatts electric.

2:37:08Oh, wow. That's pretty big. Yeah, what Dow is building at their first site is four reactors, so 320 megawatts. Wow, okay, that's a lot. That's a lot, yeah. That's like a small coal plant, you know. That takes a real chunk out of what they're doing, and that more than takes care of the site that they are focused on. I think that's the same amount of energy that's generated in my entire city that I live in. I live in a small city. Yeah, it's a meaningful bite. What Amazon and Energy Northwest, their second project, they're talking about anywhere between 4 and 12 reactors on a single site, so anywhere between 320 megawatts and a gigawatt.

2:37:46What's really exciting about that theory of the case, our theory of the case, for these mission-critical deployments, a petrochemical facility, it can't go down. You need very high reliability. So if you have four reactors, if you overbuild just a little bit, if you only need two or three reactors, if one goes down, you're still golden. You know, if you build 12 reactors in Washington state, if you only need 10, one, even two go down, you're still completely utilizing that very expensive data center with those very expensive, you know, NVIDIA chips, you know, running in it, you know, and getting the full use case out of it.

2:38:29So that kind of reliability of our form factor is something that's, you know, very exciting, you know, particularly to our customers. That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Have a great rest of your day. Congrats to all the 900 or 1 ,000 people at the company on all the progress. Yeah. We'll talk to you soon, Sam. Have a good one. Goodbye. Let me tell you about app love and profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. And before we bring in our next guest, we've got to check in with Tyler on his project.

2:39:04Let's go over to Tyler. What do we got? Okay. So I can read my little essay. And you swear on your life that you did not use AI to generate this. Correct. Yeah, you can check my chat logs. I did not use any AI. For anybody that's just tuning in, the challenge was write 500 words that Pangram will pick up as AI at 90 % rate. Or above. Okay. And if you win, you get a$50 gift card. This is Tyler's impression of a client card. Okay, so I want you guys to also try to guess what the percentage is. Okay. This isn't just an essay that is trying to fool an AI system. It's an experience where words and phrases flow over the compute like a waterfall.

2:39:47This short speech marks a pivotal shift towards a style of writing where the audience doesn't just consist of real people, but machine learning algorithms too. It underscores the innovative change frequently cited in the New York Times and CNN, who, along with many CEOs, industry professionals, and growth hackers, have noticed the world-changing pattern emerge. It's a testament to the emerging influence of the AI industry. Additionally, it demonstrates the way in which artificial intelligence systems may fall victim to possible bad actors, further enhancing the importance that some government institutions may play in the future.

2:40:19You are absolutely right that AI systems might not always accurately predict whether text is written by humans, and you're actually touching on something really important. It's a great insight. In the future, it's like pretty long. Okay, I'm putting it at 96%. I think this is going to come back at a full 100. Let's hit it. 100%. Let's go! We did it! I never lost faith. Enjoy those cheesesteaks. Hit the gong. Dan says runner-winner cheesesteak dinner. Cheesesteak dinner! Absolutely massive. You guys don't know. You're also at home. Cheesesteaks doesn't sound that significant, These are the best cheesesteak sandwiches in the world over at Matu.

2:41:05Oh, yeah, yeah. Read out the emdashes. Did you use any emdashes? Yeah, I mean, there are emdashes in what I just sent. You put emdashes everywhere. That's fantastic. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. Yeah, Hill says you should have used the word Delve. Big missed opportunity. I think actually, like, current models don't use Delve anymore. I think that was just 4.0, which I guess this probably detects. Yeah, it probably detects. Anyway, we have our last guest of the show, Alex Heath from Sources in Person, live in the TVP and Altradome.

2:41:43Alex, good to see you again. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for coming on down to the TVP and Altradome. Sources.news is the website. Access is the podcast. Yeah, so you're really in the process of breaking through because anytime you get quoted right now, it's just say, sources says. And then a lot of people are reading that and out there saying, okay. You created sources. Apparently some sources, yes. But you are the final source. I named it that for a reason. Yeah. No, it's good. And you've been on a tear. Thank you so much. Truthfully. There's always a question about, okay, you leave the place.

2:42:17Yeah. Does your content get better or worse? And it's just been scoop after scoop after scoop. What's the secret? The scoop cannon's always loaded, gentlemen. It is. That's all I got to say. Scoop doggy dog right here. You got anything more this week? I got some stuff next week. Wow. Wait, but how do you keep it in the chamber? Aren't you worried that somebody's going to out-scoop you? Yeah, there is always that fear. There's always that fear. Sometimes you know based on the story or the beat. You know who your competition is. You know if they're on vacation. You know if they're on maternity. Do you hire private investigators to track your rivals to make sure?

2:42:57Oh, they're out of the game right now. But you keep tabs. You keep tabs. Yeah, what's super interesting is that I feel like your beat is just like what's actually interesting in tech to me. No, seriously. That's the goal. You could come out and you could be like, yeah, I'm tech, but I'm focused on SaaS or just AI. And you're hitting everything that I'm interested in consistently. And that's just really, really hard. And I see your name on every single article that's posted. So, like, do you ever sleep? Like, what's going on? You know, I've been using AI a lot. to leverage output, where now it's my editor and it's my first draft.

2:43:35I'm the ultimate editor of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the combo of Granola, running that during meetings, training Claude to really write like me. Sure. So it does the first pass. I spend about half the time that I used to spend on a story writing it, but I'm spending all that time now editing what the AI gives me, making sure it's not just lazy AI writing. Sure, sure. because that still happens. And realizing that I think the leverage I have now is like my network, the interviews I do, the scoops I get, and not so much the writing. The sources. I never read your work expecting to be entertained by the language.

2:44:17I really don't care at all. I've never been a writer. I always hated writing. I love scooping. That's what I've always loved. Scoop Athly. future Hall of Fame. And I've been doing this for a while, and I think the longevity you have to have now, especially with AI, is you have to use the tools. Wait, did our giant ice cream scoop ever come? Did we order that? Oh, we couldn't find it. Okay, we got a manufacturer. We're trying to get a comically large ice cream scoop for the gong. I love it. You guys had a great scoop. I love it. By the way, the last time I came on here was WWDC last year. Yeah, that's right.

2:44:51You guys had, I think, 80 ,000 followers on X. Oh, yeah. And I was like, I left that. I was doing it outside of Cooper, outside of Steve Jobs Theater. That was fun. I was like, these guys are on to something, man. Thank you. The magic you guys have. That's fun. Seeing you guys just ascend has been incredible. Yeah, there's been a ton of ascending going on just broadly this year. Love to ascend. Everyone needs to ascend. Did you see all the hammers in the country? Stop, stop, stop. The hammers. No, my biggest number one question is how are you balancing your relationships when you're balancing access that you have to these companies, the executives will actually talk to you on the record and are excited for you to tell their story.

2:45:29But at the same time, you're kind of getting some stories out the back door at times. You have to have both. Yeah, but what's that dance like? It's tough. How do you thread the needle? Because some reporters fly too close to the sun, scoop too close to the cone. To the cone. Scoop too close to the cone. Yeah, it's a balance. You know, I've always looked up to Sorkin and how he's approached DealBook and the reporting he's done. And, you know, I consider him like a mentor. And, like, the way he approaches it, it's just fair. He's here with us. Check the street. Hey, is he really? No, no, no. I got a sound effect right there for you.

2:46:10He's definitely the goat. And, like, what has given him longevity is the fairness that he approaches an interview with, right? So giving people that maybe don't even deserve it a fair shake and just approaching things out of curiosity and being a nerd and not being like instinctually against whatever they're doing. I mean, I have opinions. Like I just interviewed Chris Best from Substack about their Polymarket deal this week. What's that deal? Deep product integration with Substack where basically any Substack writer can embed a Polymarket like natively in the CMS. And are they getting paid on an impression basis?

2:46:50Just the question. I asked him that and he wouldn't answer. So you infer with that. But are creators getting? So Polymarket is buying basically like they'll pay us. They offered it to me. I said no, but like they'll pay you to embed a market in your story. Someone set up a Polymarket on if Alex Heath will ever take Polymarket money. I think that's zero. But that's a good example. I have pretty strong opinions about prediction markets and poly markets specifically and reporting I can't share yet. But I still want to hear Chris out. I'm like, why did you do it? And he's geeked on prediction markets, as is every tech CEO, as you guys know.

2:47:27And so I just want to understand that. And I think a lot of reporters, they don't actually – Say that again. Can you say that another couple times? Actually five times? But he wants to – No, and we've experienced that where it's kind of random, but certain interviews get thrown up on prediction markets, and then you get people in the chat, and they try to trick us into, like, sometimes they'll see, like, they're asking a genuine question. Like, ask them about this, and I'm used to trying to respond. We usually trust the chat. We'll be like, oh, they're interested. They're interested in this question.

2:48:00And then I'm like, wait, why do you want me to ask this person about Bitcoin? Like, I have, you know. Yeah. It's a taste thing, right? Like, and you guys are experiencing this too. Like your taste is what matters. And then also like being able to, I mean, just to the point about like, how do you do scoops and do interviews? It's like just balancing the fact that like I am, it's a bit of a leverage thing where it's like, like you can't buy me and I may also kind of ruin your day a little bit if I scoop something, but I'm at least going to do it with a smile. Right. Whereas a lot of reporters will do it and like, and they won't.

2:48:35And it'll be kind of like vindictive. Yeah. No, that's really good. What are you looking for out of Apple this year broadly? I'm always interested to hear this excitement about a new foldable. There's some leadership changes in the works. We've got a lamp. Very interested. We've got a lamp coming. I've been very interested in the story behind the story, particularly with regard to John Ternus, because that feels like there are leaks and Apple's pretty tight, but then Mark Gurman's always getting scoops. but you have to imagine that there's internal politics around who's leaking what, why are they leaking it, why are they not leaking that Tim Cook is staying or something like that.

2:49:15There's some sort of internal machine. So I don't know. How have you just been processing apples here? I've been following Apple for a long time. I actually got started at a rival Apple. Gurman and I are about the same age, and we were doing rival Apple blogging in high school. High school. Doing blog for blog with a Gurmanator. Well, no, he destroyed me. It's amazing that you still have a career. You're like, I got to get me out of here. So I just find Alex like washed up with Chinese food covering him. We're like dusting him off. You got to get back in the arena, dude. It's okay. Shout out Mark.

2:49:49Yeah, we love Mark. We love Mark. He's fantastic. But Apple always has had a, it's why I got into this. It's why I started covering tech. It's for a lot of people, right? So interesting. And I feel like they've lost their soul in a way, man. It really bums me out. Like I don't, I'm curious about the glasses. I'm like Mark. I've also heard they're coming next year, the first glasses. I'd be curious to see, you know, but then it's like Alan Dye was doing that, and he left and went to Meta. So it's like he saw what they're doing and still went to Meta, which is kind of weird. Tim Cook hasn't. Maybe he likes that founder mode lifestyle.

2:50:18I guess. But I just, Apple, I just, I think they're stuck in an era that doesn't feel of the moment, right? Yeah. And I'm curious with the leadership reset, will that solve it? Ternus doesn't seem like the person who would solve that. Yeah. But, you know, to credit to Tim, as you guys say, like, returned a lot of, you know, value to shareholders. But is Apple, like, culturally relevant anymore? Yeah, yeah. There is an interesting pivot where it's like, oh, no, they're becoming Microsoft, which is also, like, an incredible company. It's just delivering so much value. But it isn't. It doesn't inspire people.

2:50:50Here's something. So everyone's vying to be the Apple of AI, right? You see this in a lot of the marketing campaigns, advertising campaigns. A lot of it feels heavily Apple-inspired. And Apple should be thinking, well, why not us? Why don't we be the Apple of AI? But instead, they're doing Genmoji, right? They have an opportunity to lead with heavy, heavy campaigns around the magic of AI. And they can say, we're not even building data centers. We're not increasing your power bill. they're there they have a really powerful position but it feels like they've lost uh it doesn't feel like anyone at apple uh is uh in love with advertising anymore like is really willing to meet the moment uh and deliver the kind of campaigns that i think they could or like you the next demo day i bet if you were to pull all the founders in the next demo day like what company inspires you the most how many would say apple we did this we actually did this And I was expecting it to be all like Elon and Tim.

2:51:54Yeah. And not Tim Cook, but Steve Jobs. And we didn't ask the company. We asked the founder. And a lot of people still said Steve. Jobs, yeah. Yeah. But not current Apple. Yeah. Yeah. How do you balance? Apple's such an interesting beat because it's, or at least it has been for a very long time, it's still very much consumer relevant, where I imagine that there are just Apple fanboys who read German, right? But then when you talk about Alan Dye going over to Meta, that's more industry focused. So how do you think about your audience blending tech enthusiasts with just tech executives who need to know about what's going on in their industry, like trade versus infotainment?

2:52:42These are the two extremes. I mean, I worked at a very scaled publication before the Verge, right? Oh, wait. Yeah, yeah. Actually, tell me the story. It was Business Insider 10 years ago. You guys remember Cheddar in New York? Yeah. It was there. It's a very fun segment. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of reminding me of that back in the day. And then The Information and Verge, Red's deputy editor for the last almost five years. So it did the scale thing, and now I'm in the influence game. And as I kind of think you guys are, right? You're not going for a huge scale. Talk about your audience being a couple hundred thousand people.

2:53:14Totally, totally. That's all you need. For me, I wish I could brag more about the source of subscriber list. It's a great list. It's a great list. I've actually been doing an exercise where I tally up the market cap of the people on the list. That's the number. We've done that too. We've done that too. Don't count the number of subscribers. You count the market cap of the CEOs. The average, the average, the average follower at one point was, had like a billion dollar market cap. Okay. So, and it helps with brands, right? It's like, it's like, you're like, well, you're not big, but it's like, yeah, but you want to reach like these people.

2:53:47Exactly. So it's not like enthusiasts. It's not like how I came up in the OG kind of Apple blogging world or the tech blogging world. It's the source of subscribers work in these companies that I cover. They work in finance and policy. What stories are not a fit? Because we, like Ben Thompson's a hero of ours. Another goat. Goat. Just his ideas all the way through his business model, the whole spectrum. He talks a lot about, yeah, consistency. He talks a lot about, like, companies that he doesn't cover. He's like, stop covering Twitter, stop covering, like, Elon. He stopped covering Tesla, yeah.

2:54:25Yeah. Are there categories that you are maybe fascinating but not? We try and stay out of politics. Yeah, I stay out of politics. Once you wade into that, you just become like, oh, well, then you have to do the cultural story. That's not the white space in media. It's not. The white space is what you guys are doing. And you as well, yeah. So, because it's a return to form. Everyone has gone towards politics. Totally, totally. Right? or even just kind of It's crazy too because I didn't actually think there was any white space left in independent subs. Everything comes around. Yeah, everything comes around.

2:54:55But also it takes the right entrepreneur. Yeah, but to your question, I think it's taste. I don't think I, when you're in a newsroom, you're taught to think in beats, companies that you're covering, sectors. And for the first time, and I was doing this at the verge towards the end because I was kind of just doing my own thing, but like I really just go where my interest is and where I know this is the most interesting company right now. Yeah. So it's right now, It's like all open AI. It's anthropic. It's the big labs. Yeah. But you know, notion's interesting. I think Ivan's interesting. I saw that.

2:55:22Yeah. And also the thing story about like, okay, they beat earnings and everyone thinks Sasspocalypse. I was thinking the exact same thing. I wrote about it. I had them on. Sometimes I feel like we're like a day after each other. Exactly. And I was just like, okay, yeah, this is a story that like a lot of people would just be like, ah, I'm over. Yeah. We had, we had, we had Evan on. And then that night broke the story on spec. I was like, ah, it would have been nice to know.

2:55:46But yeah, no, it's just kind of knowing like this is what's relevant. I do think it's a taste thing. And I don't think it's a thing you can teach. It's a thing you just kind of have to do. Yeah, we got to get you publishing while we're doing a live interview. And then you text us. Would you eventually? Would you eventually? Do you know who we're booked? No, just the scoops are in the chain. Okay, okay. Oh, okay. We'll book those people. We'll book those people. Do you ever see yourself rolling up or rolling in other independent? because I think there's going to be writers out there that are good for about one banger story a quarter, which is actually not really a fit for a monthly subscription.

2:56:28It's a challenge. But they could work great under your umbrella. I think based on the way things are going, that's going to happen. And I think that will happen for a lot of people. And I think consumers want that. If you can find four or five other people and then stay super lean, which is like, hey, we don't have a ton of bloat. We're not hiring like, you know, 200 people to do this, but five writers, one P &L, one subscription. Like that's what consumers want. I'm interested in like - I'll subscribe to pretty much any new tech writer just to generally support them. That's too much. But it's not, like I'm not reading all of them.

2:57:02Yeah, I think there's interesting ways you can compensate on rev share, profit sharing, ways that traditional newsrooms can't. Sure. Yeah. And I also think - Yeah, and I don't think, I was saying this yesterday, I don't actually think it will do well at the sub stack level. because there's a lot of people that would want to be in your bundle, but you don't want to be revenue sharing with them. But if you can set it up and actually you're running a business and managing the personalities, managing where they're at, I can imagine sources getting to – it doesn't have – in the same way that we're anti-scale and that you can say, cool, I want to build a newsroom over time, but it's five other people.

2:57:39And I don't need to raise VC to do that. Yeah, that are individual contributors. Like all these VC-backed newsrooms that are four years in and not profitable and the cap table's screwed. And I don't need that. And so I feel like we're kindred mindset here. And we're in this unbundling phase of media, which is so exciting. And there will be re-bundling. It's funny that we sort of landed in the same place with very different backgrounds. This is my first. I mean, I had a YouTube channel before. I've never been a journalist or worked in a newsroom. but we still sort of landed on the correct thing.

2:58:12We all love horses. We do love horses. Did I say horses? What does the horse represent? Progress. It's the year of the horse. It is the year of the horse. We had it before. You knew what the year was going to be. We already have a horse tattoo. Get your reaction to. I forget what we were talking about but our friend John Palmer was listening to us on a podcast talking about what's happened with media and that it's really hard to, media is all about personalities and talent. It's really hard to retain talent if you can go set up a sub stack or we didn't need to start on television. We could just set up some microphones and a camera and get going.

2:58:56We call it the barbell effect. Yeah, and that's really a challenge. You want to own the platform, YouTube, sub stack, or you want to be the individual creator basically. And John's theory was that that comes for software in the same way where you still have a huge platform like a sales force that has a bunch of other kind of layers to it but then you'll have like you know uh yeah an aws but then you'll have like a bunch of new entrants which are like you know in the same way that we maybe compete with some cable networks technically for attention you would have like a 10-person team that is building like some software that historically needed like a thousand people and had this bloated cost structure.

2:59:37That sounds right. I think what Ivan told me about agents too in software where he was like, if your company cannot be traversed by agents, you're going to be in a rough spot. I think that extends to what you're saying. Like I think the young teams that are agile, that understand that may have a shot at actually disrupting the big players, but the big players will always exist. And I do think distribution is still the thing that really matters, right? Like you guys probably feel that. Like you have that with X and YouTube, but you know, and Substack's good, but you know, that's the thing when you go out on your own is you're like, Oh man, I got to fight for distribution.

3:00:10I got to fight for every eyeball. I got to publish every day because when I'm not publishing, I'm not getting subscribers. So that's why I went to four times a week. Cause it's like, when I don't, I don't get anything. So it's like putting it out everywhere. Is travel important to your work? Yeah. I got to go out and touch the sources. I mean, not literally, but you know what I'm saying? Like I got to go out and grab them right when they walk out of the office, I got to shoulder brush the sources. Last time, last time we were trying to meet up, you were like, I'm going to cross down and doing an interview.

3:00:33in person, which is important. That's always been a thing I've invested in. And I've never understood reporters who just sit in their office and like blog all day. It's like, you're never going to get really differentiated stuff. Cause they're really, especially in the age of AI where you can generate anything. Like if I can just generate the copy, what matters is like what's feeding the copy. And that's me going out and like interviewing someone. I remember breaking a story. I went to some like political event in Las Vegas and Teddy Schleffer from the New York Times was just hanging out at the bar.

3:00:58He didn't get invited. Yeah, that's the old school. He just was literally gumshoe. Teddy's old school, man. Old school, gumption. And everyone there was adversarial to the New York Times. But everyone was talking to him. Everyone was like, I got to hear this guy. I got to say my side of the story. To have longevity in this game, you got to do that and you got to love gossip. Oh, yeah. And you have to have like a level of just, you do. I mean, this is what this is. It's like gossip. People are always like, why do people tell you things? Why do people tell you things that violate an NDA? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

3:01:25And they always think it's vindictive or they're pissed and they're trying to right a wrong or it's moralistic. A lot of people just like to gossip, man. Yeah, and I mean, maybe the more optimistic view is like they like the world operating on the truth. And so leaving the truth out can be beneficial to update. That's the more optimistic thing. I mean, I think gossip is not negative. Yeah, totally. It's just like, I mean, I guess it can. It's sort of neutral. It's neutral. Versus the vindictive, I'm leaking something because I want you to write about my enemy. That's different. That does happen.

3:01:55But there's also people that just say like the story deserves to be told. Yeah, and you want to like give and take. So a thing I try to do also is I share stuff. I don't just try to ask. What do you think about the future of investigative journalism? Like really, really long, like a year. It just feels like on Substack. That's the model that's so challenged. It seems the most challenged. Because telling somebody, hey, subscribe, and then I'm going to just go off in the wilderness and then write a story that will ultimately kind of become free. Yeah. I mean, the big magazines will have that for as long as they can.

3:02:27And it's probably just going to end up aggregating to the Times, the Journal. Yeah. Maybe not the Washington Post anymore. It's the barbell. Yeah. And so those kind of people aren't their own brands and they don't want to be either, right? Totally. And so it's a different kind of skill and it's a different mindset. Yeah. So you actually don't mind being protected and behind a brand. It's actually better for you if you're doing that work because you have the legal protection, you have all that other stuff. Totally, totally. You have the benefit of time. Yeah. Whereas like when you're out like me, I just don't have time.

3:02:53So yeah, I do think it just will accrue more to the barbell that we've been talking about. Will you ever write a book? Yeah, I've thought about it. Yeah, I've had conversations. No one I know who has written a book has enjoyed it, like afterwards. Yes. No one I know afterwards is like, I'm so glad I wrote that book. There's a lot of things like that in life. They're just trying to pull a ladder up. Life, once you become a New York Times. Yeah, the game theory is tell all your enemies not to do the thing. Do people read books? I mean, I haven't read a full book in a long time. I mean, my wife does, but she's not reading the kind of book I'd write.

3:03:25No, here's what you do. You take your latest article, you print it out like it's a book page. You take a picture of it with your phone, give it a little weathered yellow color overlay. And say, Claude, make this 800 pages. No, no, no, no. You just share that on a screenshot and people will be like, oh, it's authoritative. It's a book. Here's a marketing idea for you. We were going to do this. We didn't get around to it, but I think you should. You should actually have the sources like daily print edition that you just put around SF everywhere. Like give it to all the cafes. It's old school. You don't have to do it forever, but it'd be a good lead gen for the newsletter.

3:03:58Or like a week away. All you do, you just have a process. When you publish something, print it, distribute it to the cafe. That is a good idea. Get people hooked. Getting out there is important. I'm going to do events this year. Getting out there and being out in the world. No, no. It seems ridiculous for a podcast to have as aggressive of a brand we have. No, it matters. It matters. It matters. We ran a Super Bowl ad for a reason. Yeah. We've broken through a number of times. Did that do what you guys hoped, the Super Bowl? 100%. Yeah. The sponsors seemed thrilled. Exactly. Well, no, the point was that it wasn't just sponsors.

3:04:31Yeah, the guests. It was all the guests. There was thousands. And so we've had so many guests come on the show. I don't think you had a logo when you came on. I didn't. Yeah. But we've had a lot of the guests that come back on the show since they've been, oh, thanks for putting this in the ad, you know. Well, you guys are crushing it. Seriously. It's very awesome to see what you guys are doing. Last question for me. What's the longest you've ever held a scoop? Oh, my God. Holding a scoop is like being underwater. That keeps me all you want to do is take a breath a sign you're getting too cocky And is when you hold it and you're not worried about it, which has happened to me.

3:05:09Okay And then like and then I get scooped and yeah Yeah So months Couple months couple months couple months cuz yeah We've been talking to some folks who are writing books. Mm-hmm. That's really hard I don't know how because it's like a year or two I don't know how you do that and the advance has got to be crazy for you. Oh, yeah I guess you're getting paid up front for yeah, I'm just getting subs on stuff And you've got to itemize things out in a way that a book doesn't. So, yeah, I'm holding right now, actually, and it's tough. I'm like antsy. I'll be back on with you guys. Yeah, yeah. I don't like this.

3:05:44Well, it's great having you on. It's been amazing to see your success. And, again, threading that needle by telling interesting stories but not being adversarial is fantastic. Yeah, fair and balanced. Fair and balanced. It's Cronkite, baby. Seriously. Yeah, it's fantastic. Can we call it? Yeah, I think we can plant the bomb. Hey. Tell everyone. You can end the show with us. Tell everyone where to find. Sources.news.access.show. Access. Oh, I like that. That's actually a really funny idea. But access is available in your podcast layers, of course. Yes. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

3:06:19Subscribe to our newsletter at tbpn.com. And have the best weekend of your life. Have the best weekend of your life. Just do it. Go get a scoop. No excuses. But don't hold on to it. We love you. Not my scoop. Goodbye.

3:06:32Nice work brothers. I'll see you on the next one.