Suno Sparks Music Rights Firestorm, Travis Kelce’s Six Flags Play | Philip Johnston, Justin Murphy, Darren Rovell, Guillermo Rauch, Brendan Foody

29:06Production team. Everyone's jamming.

29:21supporting vocals in the back i even heard the original song i was like i i can't immediately clock the original song so all right we can pause it but this is pretty good that's good i like i like that and i mean if we're going to be able to play that level of audio on the stream without getting demonetized that's actually like a huge unlock i feel like there's a ton of fun that we could have with it yeah it's interesting because it doesn't immediately clock as slop no in the same way and and of course like a a a producer yeah probably can clock it as well but to somebody that doesn't work in music isn't necessarily like i don't consider myself the biggest music fan yeah it's like at the very least like better than elevator music.

30:06Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it is, it is just a simpler, it feels simpler than getting video, right? Like video, if, if there's six fingers, you're going to notice, but in music, like if you're sticking to general chord progressions and you're sticking to general key and, you know, not like completely, uh, you know, slopping up the, the, the basic rules of how to generate music, you should be able to get something that sounds at least reasonable. What do you think about this AI music stuff? Do you think you'll be listening to a lot of it in the future? I think there's something interesting on the consumption streaming side almost, where if you think of there's the Spotify DJ, and it'll kind of update a little bit depending on how long you listen to the song.

30:56DJX, yeah. Sometimes I'll skip five in a row, and it'll be like, I get it. I get it. So it'll update. And basically like you can imagine it's like trying to find the next group of songs or whatever. And in latent space, there's like some area where it thinks that like you might like that song, but then it turns out maybe there's actually no song in that, in that point in latent space or whatever. Then you can just generate it. So if you have like a generative playlist, I think that's kind of interesting. I feel like Spotify has got to do something here. That DJ X is like two years old at this point.

31:23That was like an early, that's just recommendation algorithms. That's not like the AI boom. That's not generated AI, but at the same time Spotify if they launch some generative AI thing like a lot of the artists will probably be pretty upset right well yeah I mean it's like kicking the industry while it's down it's like hey we know that streaming already doesn't generate like enough revenue at least in their view right a lot of the artists will post like I've seen artists like share their like payouts yep and it's and and it basically shows like you need to be constantly touring if you want to make money as an artist.

31:59And so if you introduce AI versions of their music or music that is just decent music, it's just going to hammer their earnings even more. What should Spotify do with regard to AI music? I want your answer. Jordy, pitch me on a five or 10-year strategy. You're the CEO of Spotify for the next five or 10 years. What do you do in AI music? but while you're thinking about it, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.

32:40Well said, John. What do you say? My immediate thought, and I haven't thought this through. I gave you an entire ad read to think through. You should be ready to step into the boardroom. Be a boardroom general. So the obvious, the thing that feels most obvious, and I'm sure there's some potential negative externalities to something like this, but if you just make it so that if I generate a song that's like an AI Gunna song that we just listened to, if every person, like if you can figure out a revenue split that basically takes care of the people that created the track that inspired it, in that case, it's extremely obvious because it's an existing Gunna song that's converted into a new song, if you're just paying out effectively the same amount to the producer and the writers and all that stuff, that feels like an easy solution.

33:35Now, the problem is if you're just generating entirely net new music, which is like the prompt would be like make me a funk song, then you're still eating into the potential earnings of like real artists on the platform. and I don't know how you solve that. I mean, it's potentially a bull case for Spotify because they can take out... Why did Spotify lean so heavily into podcasts? One, because people wanted to listen to podcasts and two, because they didn't have the same dynamic where they're paying out at such a large amount of their revenue to artists on the platform. So they could go out and pay to acquire Joe Rogan or whatever was originally for like a year or two years because you're acquiring users that would presumably listen to podcasts and you're not paying out the record label and the artists and all the underlying.

34:28That is a good point, yeah. But, yeah, the monetization has to be wildly different between. Yeah, so if I'm gonna and somebody's generating AI gonna, I'm cool with that if I'm getting paid like that's a normal song. Yes. But it starts to get really complicated when it's like, generate a gunna song that sounds like this, and there's no underlying song. So how do the royalties work on just like a generic gunna song? Yes. I don't know. I have a rebuttal. But first, let me tell you about graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

35:05So I know exactly how you do it. Tyler, you know how you do it. You take the song, and you do the algorithm backwards. and you basically reverse engineer the prompt from the final MP3. And so if someone went to one of these AI music generators and said, I want Taylor Swift singing a Gunna song, and then it generates that music, you can use basically the same system to reverse engineer and just say, based on what this MP3 sounds like, what do you think the prompt was? And if you can figure out the correlation between the prompt and the actual output, you can figure out how to do attribution. And I think in general, Spotify, I would come out and say, hey, look, we're not going to get into the game of generating audio directly.

35:59But we are happy to let our creators use any tool that they want to generate music and come on our platform, whether that's a microphone and an acoustic guitar. or Ableton with a bunch of digital drums or an AI music generator like Suno, you're welcome on Spotify. But we're going to take 50 % basically because we take our take rate, whatever the take rate is. YouTube's around 45, 55%. And then how are we going to actually parcel out the royalty? Well, we're going to look at What does our AI system tell us about what the prompt was? And if it's Gunna singing Taylor Swift or Taylor Swift singing Gunna, well, then they're both getting 50 % of that new generation.

36:51Bunch of ideas from the chat. Taylor says the future is exclusive listening parties, zero streaming presence. So artists just charge, not even for a concert, just show up in a room,$10 ,000 a pop. you can be one of a small number of people to ever hear the song and then they just retire it. I like that. That's good. I think there's something there. Ryan says, I will cancel Spotify if they start pushing AI music. Pushing? What does pushing mean? That's the question. It's exactly what Tyler just outlined, right? They're DJing for you and they're like, hey, we made this song for you. We thought you'd like it.

37:27So I think this is kind of potentially a stated preference versus revealed preference. I think that actual broad user feedback would be like, that's entertaining, that's kind of fun, that's cool. And I say that because people like doing this sooner stuff. If I'm scrolling my X feed and I see Harry Potter Balenciaga, which is AI generated, is X pushing that on me? Or is that just a good MP4 that day? people liked it and so it rose to the top of the feed i would say the latter i would say that it's not like there was any spotify is historically less algodriven right it's like we have this but they have we have this like basically billboard and the home page we're just gonna put stuff there but they have an algorithm and the question is is if there's i i think there's a big difference between them actually choosing to generate music and then and then allowing anyone to come with generated music but well they're already doing that yeah yeah they're already um av says spotify should launch a standalone audio sora or vibes that could be interesting i feel like they're so any any business that is reliant on hollywood or the music industry is just so sensitive like actually has this at scale business doing that yeah is so sensitive and they're yeah yeah spotify in a way, way different place than OpenAI, which doesn't really have any Hollywood connections, and even YouTube, which YouTube's like the vast majority of their ad dollars and creators do not come from any sort of Hollywood organization, any sort of large organization.

39:03Spotify does really have like a few key massive partnerships that they need to keep happy. John Philippine says Spotify buys Suno. I could actually see that. Well, if you need to generate some media, head over to fall, the world's best generative image, video, and audio models all in one place, develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. Speaking of Taylor Swift, Travis Kelsey is here to save six flags. And the Wall Street Journal has a fantastic, look at that header image. What is going on with that collage? Is that AI? I don't know. It looks like some sort of illustration, but it's a lot of fun.

39:42Have you been tracking what Travis Kelsey is doing with Six Flags. Just this year, Six Flags, the stock has dropped from$50 a share, essentially, to almost$20 a share. So massive sell-off in the company. It is now popping on news that Travis Kelsey is investing. But the Travis Kelsey effect, it's up 22 % over the last five days. Let's go. The stars of the Super Bowl always celebrate in the same way. They bask in confetti, hoist the Lombardi trophy, and then proclaim where they plan to celebrate their epic victory. I'm going to Disney World. If Travis Kelsey wins a fourth Super Bowl this NFL season, there are hundreds of millions of reasons why he might pick a different amusement park.

40:24The Kansas City Chiefs tight end just joined an activist investor campaign that's targeting six flags. Kelsey, New York-based Jana Partners and other investors have put around$200 million to by roughly 9 % of the theme park operator. That means Kelsey is now part owner trying to sell America on stomach churning drops, head spinning turns and dipping dots, just what he loved as a kid and still does. On its surface, a 36-year-old football player teaming up with rabble-rousing investors might seem as unlikely as getting engaged to the world's most famous pop star after talking about her on a podcast.

41:03But as the two sides got to know one another, they realized the partnership with Kismet and a ripe opportunity to revitalize an American icon. Kelsey, in recent years, has developed a wide-ranging investment portfolio, mostly in business he's passionate about, beer, games, and clothing. And he's often done it alongside institutional investors. Kelsey's business team had Jana on its list of potential partners. What would your turnaround plan? This is just the most classic investment strategy. Just buy the stocks of the companies that you spend money with, right? Do what you love. Health is just doing that.

41:45Find a job you love and you'll never work a day in your life. How would you turn around Six Flags? How would you increase the revenues, increase the profit, increase the attendance? How would you make Six Flags? Great. And before you answer, let me tell you about Julius.ai. uh julius what analysis do you want to run chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds what's the first kelsey get on julie you actually probably should that would be a good first step i know it's a sponsor but you actually should start take all so it's notable it's notable looking at nfl athletes looking at their investment strategies kelsey obviously going the activism route.

42:25Saquon going the Fifth Avenue route. He has to buy Fifth Avenue. He likes co-investing with the founders funds of the world, with the Thrives of the world. It's interesting to see these two strategies play out in the market. I don't actually know that I've ever been to Six Flags, which is wah, wah, wah, wah. So I don't feel, and I'm not a fan of theme parks in general. Why not? I don't feel like super qualified to. What are your ideas? I feel like there is potential for a comeback. I was convinced by Brian Chesky when he came on and said, you know how you never. Long the real world. Yeah, long the real world.

43:14You know how you never see your phone in dreams. That hit hard. I know it sounds like something you see on a Pinterest, live, laugh, love board, but it hit with me. I'm serious. I've been thinking about this when I was looking at the sphere in Las Vegas. I thought the sphere in Las Vegas was awesome on day one. I thought it looked really cool. And then I got tickets for my wife and her friends to go see the Backstreet Boys there. They had a great time and I was further confirmed. I still haven't even been to it, but I'm still just like extremely bullish on the sphere. And so I do feel like what you probably need is more differentiation across different Six Flags theme parks.

43:58What makes the sphere so unique is that it's the only sphere. They couldn't even build one in London. They tried and the Londoner said, no thanks. And so I would be, I would be focused on, if you look at the roller coaster database rcdb this is a real thing like imdb um you can pull up which which theme park has the tallest ride which one has the fastest ride and if you're a real crazy theme park fan you can go around and i want to ride the tallest one here the fastest one here the biggest wooden roller coaster and the fall the fastest steel roller coaster there's all these different permutations and you can go collect all the badges but it's not meaningful like they it's like five feet taller over there.

44:38I have two ideas for you. Please. So one, we talked about this a little bit last week, which is just raising the stakes, right? I think even as a kid, I understood that statistically, even though the roller coaster was going really fast and it was really high, and then it was going to go really low, and then it was going to go upside down. Statistically, I knew the odds were in my favor, right? The odds that I was going to make it to the end in one piece, maybe a little sick to my stomach, whatever. But I knew I was going to get to the end. Just, just I had a good feeling, you know, statistically.

45:07Yes. So raise the stakes, right? If it was like one out of a thousand rides, it just comes to like a devastating halt, right? Okay. Like upside down. Oh. And so you just don't know, am I in that batch? Yeah. So that would be exhilarating, right? And we saw there was - There could be a mandatory chili eating contest. No, no, no. That's my next idea. So America loves to gamble, right? And so what if they required every ride, you had to eat a bowl of chili before going on it. And then there was like a DraftKings betting booth nearby. So you could see the people walking onto the ride and you could bet every seat go long or short on if they were going to hurl at any point on the ride.

45:49I like that. And so you could be, they could eat the bowl of chili. Yes. They're walking out. They go on, you know, there's maybe like glass separating or something like that, but you could see them walking out and you're like, oh, that guy. That doesn't look too good. Oh, that chili's not sitting well because especially throughout the day, people have had more and more chili because every time they have to do a ride, they have to eat a bowl of chili. And so you'd have a huge new influx of guests that aren't there to do the rides. They're just there to gamble on will people make it to the end.

46:17And so by the end of the day, it is just a mess out there. People are in hazmat suits. You're walking around, you know, goggles and everything because there's just the whole park is just going everywhere. I'm a firm believer in adding variable rewards to Six Flags generally. I would be very interested in when you get on the ride, there's a 1 % chance that it goes 1 % the speed. And so you get on and you're like, yeah, you got unlucky and you're going to be on this for two hours now. And it's just going to be clinking along just one inch at a time. And you're just like, yeah, I caught the raw end of the stick.

46:56I got the short stick. So another one, like lottery upsells for every ride. So we're basically just going pure gambling right now. I'm just trying to juice their margins. Yeah. You got people going. How do we get more dollars out of every guest? Yes. And so I think, you know, if you have an option, you know, you're waiting in these long lines, right? If you have an option to buy, people walk around with an iPad and say, like, would you like to do digital slots? Would you like to buy a lottery ticket? and kind of have fast feedback loops so that they can say, like, somebody in the crowd right now is going to win$1 ,000.

47:29You can do the numbers. You can run the numbers. There's only a few hundred people in line. You've got not a decent chance, but you've got a chance. And so I think it's just about getting that incremental dollar average. I have a different idea. I think you're getting a little de-gen. Let's go to Tyler. But first, let me tell you about Turbo Puffer. Search every bite. Serverless Vector and Full-Text Search. built from first principles and object storage fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable tyler what's your idea i i think i i like the the you know what weather the line doing stuff so i think data labeling would be good now it's actually that's actually great yes it's kind of yes i route i would take it a step further you know there's like big uh like uh massive land parties with just tons of monitors like the jp morgan i would make the jp morgan experience with a bunch of quad monitors and it could and you could go to six flags and you just lock in and they just have google ai studio cooking on every monitor and you just go to the you get in the line to go vibe code you chat with models you vibe code you monitor usage um i i think that bringing in the corporate big tech dollars yeah either through branded integrations rides so you can ride the google AI studio coaster.

48:42That could be a way to upgrade. Another opportunity, wellness has been booming, right? While theme parks have been in relative decline. How do you get wellness? So the obvious thing is people have been promoting the intravenous use of ketamine. So if you had ketamine mental health stations throughout the... What about facelifts? Did you see this article in the Wall Street Journal? why tech bros are getting facelifts now. Yeah, so it needs to turn into a wellness destination. You can get a facelift. I'm not familiar with this at all, this whole story, but people were having fun with it. Pull up this picture.

49:27I think they're trying. I mean. Whoever this dude is, Dr. Ben Tolle, he's a 60-year-old who runs a solar and tech business. He had an advanced deep plane facelift and neck lift with SMAS optimization as well as other procedures. Well, I mean, he looks great. I mean, he looks great. He's looking great. I think this looks like a good ad for facelifts, if you ask me. Yeah. Well, Keith Reboi, friend of the show, got a nod in this article. Really? Tech is a young person's game. In a 2024 talk, Keith Reboi recounted advice his fellow investor, Peter Thiel, once gave him. You can't hire anyone over 30.

50:08It's unsurprising then that men in tech are increasingly spending thousands of dollars on procedures such as mini facelifts, neck lifts, and eyelid lifts to beat the signs of aging, according to plastic surgeons. Yes, the latest addition to the tech bro look is a brand new face. Tyler, maybe you should go 10 years younger. Maybe you should try and look like a five-year-old. just maybe you should shave your head and get like that one curly cue like the baby you know the baby with the single single hair i need cartoon baby yeah the cartoon cartoon baby that's the way yeah you would have to get a much you could get a face lift but then put it make your face a lot wider yeah like round you need to you need to get on some sort of diet that that gets the gets the baby fat back on instead of working oh that's just filler tyler just gets so much You just need so much filler you just have a baby face.

51:01That would be ridiculous. I'm amazed that people were quick to volunteer their own personal stories for this article. Who did? But I guess, I mean, all the people in the photos. Yeah, but are these people people know in tech? I don't know, but they're tech on the nerves if you scroll down. I mean, you need to ID these people. Oh, unnamed patient. Men used to wait until 60s or 60s. I'm saying it's a 46-year-old tech executive. Tyler, figure out every 46-year-old tech executive. Reverse engineer who this is. Anyways, I think it's cool. I don't have a problem with it. Yeah. Well, if you're trying to do facelifts, you need to get your brand mentioned on ChatGPT.

51:45That's right. Get your plastic surgery firm mentioned on ChatGPT with Profound. Reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. the White House has posted that the console wars are over they shared an image of Donald Trump donning Master Chief's battle armor with the plasma sword I'm really not that sharp on Halo terminology but it is big news because apparently Halo is coming to PS5 is that correct who's familiar with this break this down for me are the console wars over It does feel like you're sort of over. I think this was a quote on GameStop's post where they said, we're announcing the console wars are over.

52:33Halo is coming to PlayStation. That's exciting. Halo is coming to PlayStation. It does feel like the console wars are over in the sense that the two companies have just diverged so thoroughly in strategy where, you know, Microsoft owns Xbox, but is very much like console agnostic. And Sony is very much like all in on PS5 as like the core strategy. And that's like, I don't know, they're still duking it out a little bit, but it feels very much like PS5 is like a real legitimate console. And then Microsoft and Xbox and Xbox Cloud are like a strategy. and they would be okay with you playing Xbox games on your PS5 because they feel like they are definitely pulling back from the hardware wars.

53:24What do you think? I was just going to say it's pretty funny that Ryan Cohen is so anti-violent video game. It's wild. I mean, all the old images of GameStop the day before the new Call of Duty comes out. It must be. I mean, I would assume it was a big part of their revenue, but maybe not anymore. Who knows? um i wish i i i miss when q4 meant that there was a then all i was thinking about was a new cod that was a simpler time i played a little bit of the new battlefield it was not anything super special um yeah i think you got to set your whole life up to really dominate cod plus i feel like i gotta have mouse and keyboard and it's just not in the cards for me yeah i can't i can't do the controller stuff seriously it's just too i don't know it's just not for me.

54:13Um, anyway, the, the console wars, um, I was, I was trying to get up to speed on like, how do you tell the story of the, of the last 30 years of the console wars, uh, going back to the Atari, then the NES arrives in the United States in the, in 85, 89, Sega Genesis in 1989, Super NES, uh then playstation and n64 go back and forth the sega dreamcast comes in apparently one of the earlier online playable consoles um dvd playback of movies uh moves units into living rooms people start buying consoles because oh you can also play dvds and then eventually you can also play hd dvds and blu-rays there was a battle between hd dvd and blu-ray um anyway we'll see how much it's over it feels it feels pretty over um but they're not to be clear they're not going to allow like cross-platform live play between playstation and xbox oh they definitely do that in cod oh they do for sure yeah is there any advantage to playing on one or another like is like the hardcore players do they do they pick a side uh i mean the i believe the hardest core players always pick mouse and keyboard but they might play hardcore so so pc would be the most hardcore got it because the reaction time i mean i'm sure that there are plenty of people that debate this but uh in general the the the muscle like because if you're trying to pick click on a head like moving your arm yeah you playing on a pc would smoke you playing on a console usually usually like there are there are clearly some people who are phenomenal with the sticks but in general this much movement is going to be more accurate than this much movement because this is just not that much it doesn't it doesn't leave that much uh for like precision now some of the games have worked to crude to kind of level the playing field by having different levels of auto aim exactly different levels of auto aim and so you're in this weird realm where if you play on consoles, you do get, it's not auto aim.

56:26A console player would be very upset with you calling it auto aim because what it actually is, is that when you're over a target, it slows down the speed at which the stick moves the cursor. Exactly. And so it's not snapping to the target it's just letting you slow down using auto aim with this laser pointer exactly don't don't shine i don't put it in people's eye i don't put the laser you don't know where you're going with that it's risky it's risky it is um should we talk about uh take him on why ai is under hyped and isn't a bubble yet sure let's do it take him whatever happened we take tay was supposed to be on friday yeah but it was like a it was like a 2 p.m last minute uh booking and it It wasn't, there wasn't anything in the news right then.

57:17So we're going to have him on later. I've wanted to have him on the show for a long time. In the LinkedIn chat says, I'll take it that Jordy wasn't exactly a trick shotter. Not on, not on. I've had my, I've, I've, I've 360 no scopes. I like that Joseph is like, as a PC player, it is auto aim. I agree. It does feel like there's a big difference between the computer is, you're setting your sensitivity once, and then you go into the game and you interact with the game. and there's nothing that's like context aware. As soon as you add something that's context aware, it feels like that's auto aim and that's cheating and that would certainly be an advantage.

57:53And it is designed to be an advantage because you have a lot of disadvantages when you're using a console with a controller that has small stakes. So Take Kim says, here's why AI is in a bubble today. He's distilled data points and ideas from previous columns and coverage. If you prefer facts and evidence-based reality over vibes and conflated narratives, enjoy. Big tech valuations are reasonable. Leverage is low. We're at the beginning of multiple AI super product cycles in the year ahead. We are in the early innings of a technology computing shift to AI, the largest in decades. Think 1994 versus 1999.

58:30Yeah, that's a good question. When does the dot-com bubble start? Everyone says like 99 to 2000, but was it not a bubble in 94? Because like it can be a bubble. like even a big big bubbles have small beginnings right like they start as small bubbles and then they get bigger and bigger as they inflate yeah remember amazon went public may 15th 1997 so yeah and so you could so you could easily claim that i just have we're in the very early stages of a bubble my personal timeline was that like the further you went in the 90s the crazier it got like it was like heating up yep and there was plenty of people that made insane amounts of money's money like prior to the bubble.

59:11Right. Totally. And a lot of them probably wish they held a bit longer, but no, no. I think a lot of them are happy that they got out when they did like, well, sure. But, but again, like a lot of like the euphoria, I'm talking about like, like I've talked to some folks who are like, they founded a company in 1994. They sold in 1998. It does not exist. It didn't exist. It does not exist anymore. It didn't exist in 2002. but they wound up with like$100 million liquid and they're like set for life because they like nailed it. That's enough to retire. Yeah. I'm kidding. I feel like the debate comes up is 10 million enough to raise a VC fund and LARP as a VC for a little bit continue we actually have our first guest we can come back let's go to space let's go to space data centers our first guest of the show is Philip from Star Cloud burning up the timeline Philip how are you doing good to see you The current thing himself.

1:00:17The current thing himself. Did this all kick off with NVIDIA posting about you? Was that when the kerfuffle began? I think that was the catalyst, yeah. Okay, so... Thanks so much for having me on, by the way. Of course. I've been a huge fan since everyone. I am, glad to have you. This is why the show exists. We address every timeline that is in turmoil. So break it down for me. When did you start the company? What's the pitch? And then we'll go into some of the, like... Why are the haters wrong? Yeah, yeah. But just give me the recent backstory. Yeah, so we started about a year and a half ago, beginning of last year.

1:00:54We basically, in that time, built a satellite. We've got the first launch coming up in a week, and that's why NVIDIA just posted their first thing, because we're going to be launching the first H100 to space, so about 100 times more powerful GPU compute than there's been in space before. And yeah, that's a brief history. What were you doing before this? so I started my career as an engineer for five years studied applied math and theoretical physics undergrad and masters and then I spent a few years at McKinsey working with the space agencies of the UA and Saudi government and then I founded and sold another company not related to this and then moved my way into this Harvard, Wharton, Columbia he's been to every academic institution collecting them all what is the strategy for this first launch, this first satellite, like what are you trying to figure out with this launch?

1:01:44What is the value of putting this H100 into space? And then kind of like, how do you think about the timeline? Because I think like the, I would say like overarching criticism of data centers in space has been like people, I don't think people generally believe that this will never happen. It's more of like a debate around like the timeline on which it happens. Yeah, yeah. Which is a fair, I mean, it's a fair debate to have, I think. So the first satellite, the reason we're launching this, lots of people believe that you can't run terrestrial data center grade GPUs in space because of high radiation environment and you need to dissipate the heat in a vacuum.

1:02:23So this is really a demonstrator. It's a 60 kilogram small sat. It's launching on a Falcon 9, a quarter plate there. And so we'll be running Hype Out. We'll do a whole bunch of firsts. We'll be the first to run Hype Out inference in space on imagery from working with various DoD customers. We'll announce that soon. we'll be the first to train a modeling space we're training mini gpt from cup of the we'll be the first to do um we're running a version of gem gemini called gemma which is like a cut down version working with google cloud on that um so we'll do some fun demos like for example you can ssh into it and then just ask it things like where are you now and how does it feel to be a satellite and it will give you a kind of coherent answer um but yeah this is really really a demo um the next satellite launching in october next year is 10 times the power will have by far the largest commercial radiator in space, a 30-meter wingspan solar panel.

1:03:12And then we'll have very, very sophisticated optical and connectivity options on there. So customers, including DoD and other satellites, will be able to send us raw imagery. We process it on the edge, and then we just download the insight. And that's the roadmap. How far are you? Like, there's a launch that's happening very soon. And then there's the renders, which are like, it looks like sci-fi Star Wars. oh, yes, there's like 25 shipping containers that are descending. What's the delta there? And what was the decision between kind of showing more of a vision document? Because I think that's what triggered a lot of people, was you were showing an amount of mass in orbit that feels beyond the ISS.

1:03:57It looks huge. Oh, yeah. Right? Yeah, no. To be fair, it's extremely difficult to imagine what's about to come down the line with Starship. so like the launch cost might come down by between 10 and 100x launch capacity is set to go up by 1000x or more and the reason is if you build a new starship every day for a year which is like a very conservative estimate for what they're trying to do at the end of the year you have 365 starships it has 5 times payload capacity you can launch 10 times as frequently so we're really talking about 1000 times like more tannish per year that we can get to space and that's coming like 3 to 5 years which is really not that far away so the idea of the render like you can launch the whole ISS in two Starship launches.

1:04:38So the render is to show, look, there is going to be a lot more mass in space. But yeah, I mean, I almost feel like you should have done the Anduril thing where it's like anime, if it's like sci-fi where the vision's going, and then it's like render for like what you're actually sending. Because like the render that I saw of like the multiple shipping containers putting together, like that's not what's actually launching next week. So I think that's where like a lot of the cognitive dissonance is coming from right but yeah i mean you'll iterate all this it's fine yeah i recently saw palma talking about that and i was like man that's actually pretty cool yeah yeah it's nice to have because there is a there is a value for like the vision document like what do you where do you want to go in 10 years yeah um but it just hits different when it's like the official nvidia account is sharing this render and it's like okay like that feels like it's happening soon it's not like they don't do their research like they have a whole team of like phds that go and look at this shit and like they have they have a board that approves that this can get shown that it's like feasibly possible yes so talk about it's a science problem yeah i guess talk about so uh this first this first launch is meant to be like a demo basically like correct me if i'm wrong but effectively uh a science project to start to show capabilities in space to start to prove that you guys can actually put GPUs in space that can run workloads.

1:06:04Like what is the actual timeline? So, and then it sounds like maybe defense is like an early place where there might be some commercial applications, but then what is, what's your timeline on, on when, uh, if, or when, you know, I would be, you know, prompting a model like chat GVT or Gemini or whatever. and you'd be running that workload. It's just cheaper to do it in space because that's the long-term vision, right? It's just cheaper. It's not anything special or like, oh, we need to be there for some geopolitical or defense reasons. It's just like the energy is free and the heat dissipation is free, so it's just cheaper.

1:06:42So that's where you go, even though the launch costs are expensive. Yes, yeah. So maybe I'll start with the second part. So when will it be cheaper? That's coming with Starship. And so we're looking at the first commercial launches of Starship in 18 months. But we're probably going to be seeing mass volume production of Starship on a three to five year time frame. So, yeah, the roadmap is next year in October, we're launching our second satellite. That's the one that's about 10 times the compute of the first one, but much more capable in terms of continuous power generation and solar panels. That one is the first commercial service that will produce more cash than it costs to design, build and launch.

1:07:23I mean, that satellite pays for itself just on hosted payloads. Because that satellite has such high throughput and processing capabilities, there's a whole bunch of people that just want to stick sensors on that. It's not the end-state business model, but that's a nice revenue stream in the meantime. Then we're launching a satellite after that, which will be, I mean, yeah, we can't talk too much about it, but you can see this PEZ dispenser form factor that's coming out of Starship. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I probably shouldn't say too much. And that was successfully tested on the last Starship launch, right?

1:07:58Where there was a whole bunch of debris blowing around. It was a crazy, crazy launch, but it did come back. It landed, and the Pez dispenser thing shot out the fake Starlink, or the dummy Starlink. Yeah, exactly. So that's about a four-ton, at least 100-kilowatt satellite. The second one's 10 kilowatts. The first one's one kilowatt, so we're going up in order of magnitude each time. That one could feasibly launch end of 2027. and then from there we basically will launch lots of lots of small versions of or lots of continuous versions of that because that will have very low launch cost and it will be a while before we start launching the full starship payload base size i mean for one we need this clamshell door to be ready before we can do that um and yeah but to be frank it's quite a while until we start docking things in space the only reason you would dock things in space like in the concept video is if you want to train a large model because then you need the whole data center to be internally networked.

1:08:51And so that we're probably looking at, you know, early 2030s before we start docking. I mean, I don't have a problem with thinking in decades. Like that's like what we say in tech, we want people to do. And so I don't have any, I don't think there's any problem with saying like, yeah, like there's some crazy stuff that needs to happen with launch costs. And like, it's going to take a while until this really works out. Like that's actually exactly what people want from technology founders, ideally. I guess there is the question of like, you know, how do you frame it as like how you don't want people to think.

1:09:23Yeah, if you just needed to generate a lot of revenue quickly in space, you could do the first space casino where people could beam up, tap into it, all ages, all ages. Oh, really? Yeah, I mean, I can't. Yeah, space token. You've got to mine it in space. How do you think about, you know, some of the, I think we had asked Dylan Patel at one point about GPUs in space and I don't think he mentioned the challenges around heat and heat dissipation but he was talking about how sometimes you just need to unplug the server and plug it back in again or switch out individual GPUs but what's the solve on that long term?

1:10:08Are you thinking about these being fully robotic systems that allow you to make changes on the fly? What's the solution there? Yeah, I think probably two points on that. I mean, the first is for these massive data centers where you've got like a kilometer long or a mile long row of racks, the people I speak to now are saying, look, if an H100 breaks in that, you just leave it in there. Nobody's going down there and unplugging and putting that back in. They're just writing software around it and they'll just leave it, basically. So that's number one. But secondly, for the first few iterations of the satellite, it'll be exactly like Starlink in that we won't be able to touch it.

1:10:45And so we'll have to have redundancy on the critical systems. And then we over-provision things like solar panels and radiators, which degrade over time. Over time, the whole industry is, well, space industry in general is moving towards robotic maintenance, but also terrestrial data center industry is moving towards robotic maintenance. And that's where on a sort of five-year time frame, some of the people we speak to in data centers are saying we are fully expecting data centers to be maintained by humanoid robots in a five-year time frame. And this is where it starts to sound a little bit wacky and sci-fi.

1:11:15But I mean, humanoid robots do not require too much modification to work in space in the sense that a human space suit would take care of radiation and thermals. You would need to retrain it slightly. But that maybe sounds a little bit wacky. But yeah, it doesn't have to be a humanoid, right? There's a bunch of other form factors. Yeah, it could be any form factor, but humanoiders will be mass produced, so probably the cheapest. That's interesting. I want you to react to Andrew McAllop's viral post. He gets 7 ,000 likes, breaking down a bunch of different things. The core claims I see in here are questions about what if demand for payload to orbit doesn't decline.

1:11:57He does talk about the difficulties of heat dissipation. He says, you just finished watching a Scott Manley video on radiative heat transfer, and now you think you're going to disrupt AWS with a few solar panels and a rideshare slot. You're going to believe that right up until the next month when you crack open DeWitt. And he goes into a lot of the technical level. But I was wondering if there were any key points in here that you think were easily debunked from actually being in the trenches. Obviously, he does work in space and does something somewhat similar and does seem like an expert who'd be equipped to know this stuff.

1:12:38But you've obviously focused on this case specifically. So what was your reaction when you saw his sort of comedic breakdown? Yeah, I mean, I like the post. I mean, I'm a fan of Andrew. I've been following his stuff, and he's a great engineer. Same with Kelly, by the way. I'm very impressed with what they're doing with our own. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, on the thermals, the criticism usually is in order to dissipate that heat, you need a large surface area. And they think for some reason that that's super impractical. I mean, my co-founder, Ezra, has a PhD in engineering, spent 10 years designing and building large deployable structures, solar panels and radiators.

1:13:12And I mean, you just have to build a large surface area. And that's what we're doing. So half our engineering team is building a very large, low cost and low mass deployable radiator. So that is the core IP of our company is that. um so that's number one on the launch cost side of things um so so sometimes people say if there's no competitor to starship which it doesn't look like there'll be for at least five years um then will there be any incentive for starship to for spacex to drop the pricing yep now i have a different opinion than most people most people say well no they'll just keep it high i i don't think so and it's the same reason that they keep that the the tesla is sold under the price they could potentially sell Tesla at a higher price.

1:13:52But in order to reach a much larger market, you need to sell at a lower price. So, for example, they're going to have all of these Starships sitting there. They can only launch once every two years to Mars. Their marginal cost of launch on each Starship is$2 or$3 million. Now, either they can leave it there because there's no demand at the$200 million for launch price. Or they can say to people like us, hey, you can launch it for$20 or$30 million. They still make a showload of money. That's still very profitable for us. And so it's like a win-win. So my expectation is that actually the long price will come down even if they don't have a huge number of competitors.

1:14:26Yeah, like the elasticity of demand there. Like they might just be able to sell more volume at lower prices, so they might wind up lowering the cost. Or, yeah, kind of giving you like a bulk discount, if you want to put it in that terms. Interesting. On the heat dissipation question, how much do you think that that is in the domain of science and we need to have a breakthrough discovery? You need to discover the solution to that problem versus an engineering problem where maybe it just comes down to can you make, manufacture something that is already follows the laws of physics and all the physicists agree it works if you can just build it profitably?

1:15:11Yeah, I mean, from what we're seeing, it's very much an engineering challenge. It's really like a manufacturing. So we know that it works because the International Space Station has a radiator that dissipates 70 kilowatts. The problem is it's ridiculously expensive. So our radiator on our second satellite is 10 times lower mass per watt of dissipation and 100 times lower price per watt of dissipation than the radiator on the International Space Station. That's the whole game is making this radiator cheap and light. and we've got some very innovative or very unusual manufacturing techniques that we are working on basically Fun You posted a few days ago people don't understand Starlink is going to just be the internet direct to sell is going to hit hard basically all telco is doomed let's check in this time next year expand on that That was at 1am and I had a very heated argument with somebody and I was in the cabin.

1:16:10I was like, I'm just going to post this. And then like 300 ,000 views later, I was like, okay, this was probably like a little bit too extreme. Too aggressive. Well, no, yeah. Obviously, if you want to get attention on Axe, just say the most inflammatory thing possible. Say that, you know, all these multi-hundred... No way, I don't do that. No, but what's your view on how quickly, you know, we saw news on Apple exploring something with Starlink Starlink on direct to sell. It seems like every major manufacturer is going to be interested in this. And then there's also that other company that's like a competitor, right?

1:16:48What is it? Is Verizon propping them up? They don't have any satellites. ASTS. ASTS. Yeah, yeah. No, I don't think they have any hope in hell. And the reason they don't is because, sorry. There's a whole bunch of people that are going to – They have a retail army. The retail traders? The retail traders are going to come for you, dude. Good luck. What do you know about space? You got the private markets. They're doing fine. You got the private markets Varda guys coming for you. Now you got the retail traders and ASTS coming for you. You got no friends in this foxhole, dude. You got to get out of here.

1:17:23ASTS is up 7 % just today. Oh, that's so good. Oh, wow. That's amazing. Well, no, I mean, okay. I want them to succeed, and I'm like - Okay, well, in that case, I reversed my entire position. 7 % move. Let's go. That's very funny. Yeah. I don't know. It's a launch cost thing. It's a launch cost thing. They can't compete with Starlink on the launch cost. So, yeah. Yeah. I mean, that argument can be leveled against us, by the way, as well. So, yeah. Well, so, so on, on what, what are the, what are the telco companies going to do? Because they're multi hundred billion dollar companies. They're not just going to roll over.

1:18:00Is it, is like, how do you see them kind of reacting? I mean, it feels like there's lots of multi-hundred-billion-dollar companies that just get backed into a corner and die. I mean, Blockbuster is a hundred-billion-dollar company. You are such a space, Maxie. Well, no, I guess my money. You might be right over, like, you know, it just depends on the time frame. But, like, I mean, it just doesn't seem like internet backhaul is not going to move to Starlink in the next, like, five years. You know, it's just, like, not going to happen. like Akamai. The thing people are underappreciating is the amount of capacity they can launch per Starship is absolutely mind-blowing.

1:18:43And that's coming in 18 months. And that's like proper, hardcore, very high bandwidth direct-to-sell in buildings. That's what people don't appreciate. That's pretty crazy.

1:18:58I love a Starlink. I guess the telecom companies could end up being like Starlink resellers. Yeah. Right? Is that one scenario? I mean, they could be, yeah. It doesn't sound like the best business to be in. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, thank you so much for hopping on and defending your honor. I think you did a great job defending your honor. I think you're thinking in decades. I'm excited for you to continue working on this. You're in the Washington area, right? Yes. Washington State. what's the scene like in Redmond before you go? Good? How's the energy? I mean there's a lot of, it's where Kuiper and Starlingcast are, all of the people I think 95 % of satellites launched in the last two years were designed and built in Redmond so there's a lot of space time out there but yeah it's not the liveliest of cities in the world but Well you guys have work to do so thank you so much for joining, fun conversation and we're rooting for you I really appreciate it Let me tell you about Linear.

1:20:00Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. You can start building. Do you want to go into Bub Talk? Are you still interested in talking bubbles, or do you want to move on to something else? We can move on to something else. There's a bunch of Bub Talk in here. Maybe more importantly, the maker of Oreos. We need to hammer Bub Talk more. I mean, it's been a lot of Bub Talk lately. but I feel like we've hit it a bunch. There's a bunch of charts. Yeah. If you're trying to figure out if we're in a bubble or not, I recommend going outside, picking a Daisy and just picking the leaf, the picking the pedals off.

1:20:38It's a bubble. Like where we are right now. It's a bubble. It's not a bubble. It's not. And then whatever you end up landing on, that's what's going to happen. So yeah. Good luck. And so, um, in Oreo world, Mondelez, the owner of Oreo has trained their own video model for television advertising they invested 40 million dollars and they say it cuts production costs by 30 to 50 i don't know how that's possible that like it should cut costs by 99 like do you know i don't know i just think i still but i still think there's a huge amount of budget goes to coming up with good ideas sure and then the like editing and then making infinite variations of it which i'm sure AI can already do well in some cases.

1:21:29I still think you pay people to come up with great ideas and then execute, but the idea is actually the highest margin part. Some of the ad agencies I think will do well. Apparently, Oreo's parent company only spent $100 million on digital print and national TV advertising in the last year. Wait, so they spent$100 million on advertising? and then they spend 40 million on this stuff. Okay. Tyler, what's your take on OreoNet? So this was my idea when we were talking about Sora, where I said that Coke should, or Coca-Cola should release a video model open source where you can do anything, but every single video has a Coke model.

1:22:10Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So they should release this model, make it open source, but there's just Oreos everywhere in the video. You just like can't do anything else. You ask it to like make a picture of your dog and your dog just is an Oreo for a head or something like that. It just gets crazy. Yeah. Yeah, that would be, That's a brilliant idea that would be abused so badly that it would be shut down with 24 hours. I mean, does this math make any sense? Like, where did the 40 million go? Like, what were they fine-tuning? What is it, like, claims? That 40 million is ours now. That is ours now. Yeah.

1:22:43I really want to know the breakdown of that. Was it actually, like, running the fine-tuning? Was it generating, you know, training data? like what was the actual project that got them there? I mean, I could imagine, you know, it was, it was somebody took the$40 million and they made it an app layer on top of Sora too. Yeah. Also, if they have a whole bunch of footage of Oreos throughout the 30 years that they've been advertising and doing video ads, maybe 50 years and they load those in, can they count that as like depreciation? or something? It's hard not to see this being like a huge waste of money that somebody high up said like, I'm going to be the AI guy at Mondelez, right?

1:23:29Because you have to imagine whatever they were able to do today by investing$40 million, 40 % of their ad. So again, like production cost, which is where they're saving money, is not advertising budget. I would look at the way they're talking about their ad budget as like what they spent on ads plus the production cost. Yep. Like that's the ad budget. It's very possible that the production cost was like 10 % of that. Yeah. So you spent 40 % of your overall advertising budget to slash 10, potentially 10 % of your budget by 30 to 50%. Meaning that the payback, yeah, I mean, it's a, it's a, it's not the craziest thing.

1:24:10I don't know. Yeah. But, but the models are going to, the models will just be one shotting. I promise you they will be one shotting people eating Oreos better than your model, your custom model by now. Yeah. Like by the time they finish, by the time they finish, it's, it's like they, they get on Sora too and they do it and they're like, Oh no. Why do we fine tune like some, you know? Oh, they did it with Accenture. I called it. I knew, I knew it. I knew it. I knew this was just like, yeah, like big consulting, you know, big strategy firm says, yeah, we're happy to give you, if you want it, what's your, okay,$40 million.

1:24:50We're happy to give you an AI play here. You're going to be, you might just be the open AI of food. You might become, we can help you be the anthropic of cookies. Of cookies. And then it's just immediately a write-off. It is so crazy that they created their own model. How did this leak? It's so bad. I think, no, I think they're bragging, John. They're bragging? They're bragging. Mondelez is doing... It's like, why are they telling on themselves? Why are they telling on themselves? They're not, John. They're bragging. Wait. Yeah. They said the head of the global senior vice president of consumer experience said they're going to use it in the 2027 Super Bowl.

1:25:35I don't know. Is there any reason why you'd want a three-year-old fine tune? You could have just run eight Super Bowl ads. You could have run eight. That is actually crazy. That's actually an under... This is so inspiring. If you want to make money in the AI boom, go and get$40 million for a project like this. It's genius. Like, you just made so much money. That's an epic consulting moment. Yeah. Coop says, sounds bubbly to me. Totally agree. There's really so much money. Nobody has applied. So the friend.com billboard strategy, is potentially a new strategy. Just like buy so much advertising that people can't stop talking about it.

1:26:18Why has nobody done that for the Super Bowl? Like has anybody bought, like if you really wanted to break through with the Super Bowl, you would buy 10 ads. Or you'd try to buy, I mean, a friend tried to buy every single ad. Can you imagine doing a whole Super Bowl buyout? It's just four. How many minutes of Super Bowl ads are there? Could you do 40 minutes of ads? We can't get away from Avi's billboards. We drove by today this one that just says, when you're on the street, it just says end.com. Is it the end? Yeah, I definitely think that Oreos just being like, we want to be drilled into the mind of every American.

1:27:02We're going to buy 20 Super Bowl ads this year. That's our budget for the year. Yeah. I mean, there is like some sort of bull case where it's like you need to generate a whole bunch of Oreo creative across Facebook and Instagram ads and whatever. But at the same time, it's like, I don't know why you need a custom model. The$40 million custom model is crazy. Yeah, because you have to assume that every model is training on every Oreo ad ever in history. Am I crazy here? Is there any reason why you'd want to fine tune for$40 million? I would go farther. I would train a language model. Oh, yes. From the ground up.

1:27:38Yeah, because then you have the - Do a full pre-train. Do a pre-train. Do a pre-train. Do a full base model. Yep. You know, what's it going to score on? Humanity's last exam. What's it going to score on? And let's assume I'm a Fortune 500 buyer and you're an Accenture consultant. How much is that going to cost me, Tyler? A couple billion. And you're telling me that that's worth it, right? Of course, yeah. We got to get this guy a job at Accenture. He's going to 100x revenues. Yeah, I mean, this just, to close it out, this is Publicis Group, French multinational advertising company, one of the largest advertising agency conglomerates in the world, and Accenture serving up a farm-to-table AI strategy for an executive at Oreo who wants to be able to say, we're not just using generative AI.

1:28:30We are generative AI. We are the future of food. I hope they need to vertically integrate. They need to vertically integrate. They need their own data center. They need their own chips. They need to bake this algorithm into an ASIC. They need to go to Broadcom. They need to go to TSMC. They need line time at TSMC. Because, I mean, it's possible that they need to go to ASML and get an entirely new lithography machine. They need to get into Rare Earth. They need to get into Rare Earth. They need to go all the way down to... Maybe acquire a desert just to get enough sand. They need to teach sand to think.

1:29:09They need to teach sand to make Oreo hats. That's what they need to do. They need to acquire sand. Brutal. Best of luck out there, Oreo. Best of luck. We're rooting for you. Well, you know what Oreo should do? They got to. If they want to use AI, they got to use numeralhq.com. Put your sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. if you're if you're selling oreos online you got to get numeralhq.com uh lulu says it's the year 2025 you wake up and a progressive white billionaire with a blackface nft profile picture is saying gm to you saying wag me friend this is a crazy choice why did he pick this one this is like the how do you do fellow kids meme with the it's it's such a crazy choice on a million different levels, even the smoking, even the NFT.

1:30:02Maybe Reid secretly likes heaters. That would be sick, I guess. Jay said, this GM is proof that LinkedIn is four years behind on every news cycle. Pretty remarkable. How is this... I think the crypto community loved it, to be honest. Really? I think they were pretty fired up. You're one of the 10 ,000 people that own... Crypto Punk? A Punk. How are the punks doing? Are they still hanging out? Well, before we dive into that, we have Justin Murphy in the Restream Waiting Room. Let's bring him into the TBP and Ultradome. Justin, how are you doing? I'm good. What's up, guys? Good to see you. You might be the sharpest guest we've ever had.

1:30:45I love this suit. You're looking great. Thank you. You know, you're the reason I use 1Password. You had some sort of course on creativity or something. And the main thing I took away was use a password manager because you gave such an emphatic endorsement of password management. And I adopted it, and it changed my life, and I love it. And then we interviewed the CEO of OnePassword, and I was like, I love this. I learned this from Justin Murphy. Wow, that's really interesting to hear. I'm an avid user of Lucy. I'll throw in as well. Oh, let's go. How people don't use password managers is beyond me.

1:31:22I mean, even with password managers, it's living hell. But I'm glad you solved that. Yeah. So maybe for the folks who aren't super familiar, what's the shape of your business? What's the shape of your day-to-day? I know you have a number of different outlets. I wanted to invite you on the show because I noticed you were live streaming and you actually mentioned us. And I was like, oh, that's so cool. Because I love when we create some format and then other people can kind of spin off of it and whatnot. But how do you describe your whole - Life. Yeah. Your whole person. Your cinematic universe, I suppose.

1:31:57Yeah. I left my very nice, cushy academic position about six years ago. I left at that time with a very clear mission, which was to basically reinvent the scholarly life for the internet era. I was watching academia go downhill, and all the creator economy stuff was kicking off. It was clear that there would be ways to essentially port everything I was doing as a professor onto the internet. And I would just have to experiment and test a lot of things out and hustle and try to figure it out. So that was my mission six years ago. And it still is. I mean, that's my calling. That's my vocation. It always has been.

1:32:36And I basically built a couple businesses, tried a few different models, and had moderate success with a few of them. And then I started having kids and kind of took a step back to kind of think about what this stuff really looks like over the long term. I had a lot of successes. I had some failures as well. And that's when I decided what I really needed to do was sit down and write this book called The Independent Scholar to really map out the whole thing and really put this kind of new lifestyle and business model on the map. So basically, the past couple years, past two or three years, I've kind of been in hiding, honestly.

1:33:10I've been having kids, figuring out how to do that, and writing this book to try to basically teach everything I've learned about this lifestyle and business model that I've built, and also to ground it in a kind of longer running history. Because a lot of the greatest thinkers and philosophers and what I call independent scholars throughout history were actually free-floating individuals hacking it in weird entrepreneurial ways. And most people don't know about this history. And it was largely what inspired my kind of mission. So I decided I needed to do it right, sit down, take the time required and put it down all in one place.

1:33:45So that's finishing up. And then I also occasionally work with startups if something actually really interests me and seems really exciting and asymmetric, and I like the people. So my life's really crazy right now just because a startup I started working with like two years ago, it started I was just sort of like consulting, kind of advising, helping out with the branding and messaging. They just keep winning, and this thing is like kicking off. So we're in the thick of it right now. That's called Nockchain. It's a layer one blockchain. So that's kind of consuming everything at the moment. Apologies to the poor people who pre-ordered my book.

1:34:17A lot of people are waiting on it. It will come out by the end of this year, mark my words. But right now, I'm in the weeds with Noxchain because this thing, I think, is going off. So that's a summary. It's a little messy, but I basically have accomplished my mission that I set out on six years ago. And I still haven't come up for enough air to tell the story fully, but I will. And I think I'm pretty proud of everything I've accomplished. Yeah. How do you think about the basic economic forces around long time horizon content, which is how I would put investigative journalism and academia? It feels like social media and algorithmic feeds are fantastically aligned with news and fast, high-throughput creativity.

1:35:05Just because if you're producing a lot of content regularly, there's a lot of ad inventory space. There's a lot of room for a little side partnership here. And it just kind of all flows together very easily. And I feel like Substack and the social media platforms have done a great job of providing an outlet for someone who would effectively be like a beat reporter or someone who's just a commentator, an analyst, somebody with a column, a weekly column in a newspaper. You can take that weekly column and you can go and develop an audience and monetize effectively. But if you're Seymour Hersh and you're going to get like one scoop a decade and it's going to be something that reshapes the global political world order, really hard to underwrite that against like$10 a month on Substack.

1:35:51And so how are you thinking about like the long-term monetization summary, like forces that allow for like long time horizon work? Is that solved? Is there a good pattern there yet? I have a very strong and clear answer to this after a tremendous amount of experimentation and also this kind of prolonged engagement with the history of independent scholars. I believe the answer to your question, John, is you need to – stage one is you have to get out there and you have to write a lot in stage one. So you don't necessarily have to be chasing clicks or playing the engagement baiting game or whatever.

1:36:31But you do have to get out there, and inevitably there's going to be some kind of volume game where you have to get in the mix. But I don't think you have to do that actually for too long because if you can just get out on places like X and have some kind of blog or newsletter or videos or whatever your medium is, if you can get out there and just put out interesting stuff that's intelligent and thoughtful and build even a small audience, nothing that you would be able to live on. But if you could just do that stage one of showing that you understand content, that you have real ideas, that you are really interesting and worth listening to, and that you can execute on a basic kind of modern content operation, if you can do that for even a little bit, what you then do, stage two, is you get exposure to tech companies.

1:37:15That's really the missing link that people have not fully figured out. A lot of people have sort of accidentally figured this out. But the fact is that Silicon Valley and technology is obviously the engine of all kind of radical wealth creation moving forward. And these companies need really educated, thoughtful, creative people who understand how to read real books and how to write really high-quality copy and write thoughtful essays. This whole new world of sort of highbrow thought leadership is incredibly valuable to almost every company today. And the fact is, it's incredibly hard to hire for.

1:37:50Tech companies really struggle to find PhD tier intelligence for hire, and who also have any kind of understanding or experience with actually running modern content operations online. And so what I have found, and this I think is really the ticket, is that if you can just simply prove that you know what you're doing online with content and you can build any kind of audience and just put out stuff that's worth reading that someone smart could look at and be like, oh, this person's smart. He might not have a million followers. He might not have many followers at all. But clearly he publishes consistently.

1:38:24He's smart. He's got alpha. it's I think actually increasingly easy to find some sort of creative position with a startup or tech company of some kind and that's going to be your ticket to actual sustainable wealth and income on which you can then do the really long form thought leadership. I've seen basically use like consulting fees from a tech company to bootstrap like a independent media platform. Absolutely. And maybe some people don't want to build their own platform necessarily, like someone like Seymour Hersh or these kind of older guys. Often they don't want to build a business, right?

1:39:00They don't want to build a whole thing. And for them, that's kind of a non-starter. But if you can finagle some kind of situation where you're adding value to a growing tech company or even just a funded startup for a couple of years, even if they fail, you can drive real value that they have a hard time hiring for. And in an ideal world, the company wins. And then you really have economic security to do your intellectual work over the long term. But even if you have to hustle this way for a few years in different projects, you can get a very decent paycheck adding real value in a way that is actually quite conducive to your intellectual orientation and goals and lifestyle that you're building.

1:39:37So you don't necessarily need to build a company or a big media operation. But on that economic basis, you can definitely grow your audience in that time. you can write a really heavy-hitting long-form essay once every month or two months or three months or whatever the case might be. And in this way, you start publishing your own books. And there's so many different ways to monetize. But the tech partnership, I think, is the big opportunity that a lot of people are sleeping on. People have done it. There are enough examples, in addition to me, to make me feel like this is obviously the future.

1:40:07But people haven't really systematized it yet or kind of written down a reproducible playbook yet. Maybe it was, I don't want to get the person's name wrong, but there was someone who did like a philosopher in residence at a venture capital firm. And there's been a few people who have maybe partnered with like Stripe Press in one way or another and kind of like pulled forward some income in various ways. There's definitely, yeah, different ways to like slice it. But I think you're right that there's just like, there's a pool of capital over there. And if you're able to provide some interesting service, I hadn't thought about that.

1:40:41Basically, if you want to be an independent scholar, get ready to hustle. Kind of, yeah. Well, but look, it's a hustle to get a job as a professor. It's a really bad hustle. It's absolutely grinding competition that is as brutal and as intellectually exhausting and suffocating as grinding on a startup for a few years, honestly. The only difference is you don't get paid very much at all, and also there's no upside. So, I mean, when you compare working for a startup or, you know, being creative and hustling with different kinds of creative positions in tech startups, you compare that to what it takes to get a full-time tenured position in academia, it's actually like more liberating and mentally kind of freeing and more conducive to a kind of creative intellectual.

1:41:26Yeah, I had lunch with an academic a couple months ago, and he was like, yeah, I'm having a kid in like six months. And I was like, go get a job at a lab right now. And he actually did. Oh, he did? No way. That's awesome. And, you know, again, I think he'll be able to probably do more interesting work at the frontier with more resources. and I guess is part of this like sad that like what's the downside here that the techno capital institutions are going to end up financing scholarly research and academia like is there is it basically Lindy like this has been happening for like hundreds and hundreds of years and this is like not so different is that kind of what you're getting at with the book?

1:42:20Yeah, exactly. It's not sad. I mean, contemporary academia is very sad. Living a life as a kind of cloistered professor today is incredibly sad, I can tell you from firsthand experience. And what we're talking about here with sort of the new breed of independent scholars joining forces with Silicon Valley, it is clearly part and parcel with a long-running continuous history. Because when you look at some of the most interesting and impactful thinkers and philosophers and creatives throughout all history, what you find with many of them is that they lived on the margins of institutions, both economically but also socially.

1:42:57And in multiple cases, what's really going on is they're looking for any kind of unexploited economic niche where they can just make some money in a way that is maximally conducive to a certain state of mind and a certain of lifestyle. And they are, you know, really kind of opportunistic. Like they'll, you know, Spinoza was famously a lens grinder, right? This is at a time when being a lens grinder was, it's not as manual as it sounds. He was a kind of scientific and technical expert of optics. And to grind lenses was actually an interesting kind of philosophically and scientifically sophisticated industry.

1:43:37But he also involved manual labor. And he sold his lenses to leading scientists of the era. And that's actually how he networked with some of the brightest lights in European science and philosophy. That's how he got on people's radar. And that's how he earned their respect, actually, is from the quality of his lenses that he was grinding. And this is in my book. And so Samuel Johnson is another interesting example. He's a case study in the book. Samuel Johnson, people don't know this, in the early 18th century, he basically kind of invented the Substack model. And this is before there was even email.

1:44:11I kid you not. So he did paid subscription newsletters by print well before email, obviously. And he would just write essays twice a week and he would walk them to the printer's office and where the mail goes out or whatever. And he would send them off twice a week by post. And he made a living doing this for quite a few years. He was at the end of the patronage era. So he was well known in elite circles as one of the most brilliant genius thinkers and writers and conversationalists of the time. And he never got a patron. He never got the bag. He was always forced to hustle. He was always doing creative things.

1:44:47And that was one of them. And he managed to do it and ended up changing the English language in many ways. One of the most impactful kind of scholars of his lifetime. And so to answer your question. Silicon Valley and tech startups today are just the current manifestation of this. Like independent scholars always have to look, where is the money? Where's the opportunity? Where can I use my brain power in the way that is maximally adding value, but also maximally conducive to me having freedom and time and being able to think clearly and provocatively? And it's obvious now, when you look at this, that in the United States, perhaps in the West, more broadly, Silicon Valley is now the site of that.

1:45:26Why do you think Silicon Valley is obsessed with Nick Land? there's still a tremendous amount of alpha there that uh people have not fully been able to grok because it's you know um it is dense and a little bit difficult to read um but that's the reason is because there's real alpha there and people know it and no one really has the time or the patience to kind of work through it but they know the alpha is there and that's why they're all obsessed with it what is the nature of the alpha just investing theses or like lifestyle how you live your life or predicting the future and what the shape of the political economy will be?

1:46:01I would say, I mean, there are many specific things you could look at. If you look at his writing on AI back in the 90s, it's incredibly prescient and much more so than even, even you compare Nick Land's early writings to someone like Nick Bostrom writing about AI much more recently. And a lot of Nick Land's texts actually match reality much more, I would say. But the reason, So you could double-click on many sort of specific ideas, I guess. But the high-level answer to your question, John, is that there is this kind of ideological problem in Silicon Valley across the board. I mean, the big intellectual problem with Silicon Valley is that everyone is a back-patter.

1:46:42Everyone is mutually invested in each other, so everyone is back-patting everyone else. I mean, just structurally, right? It's not even not throwing shade at any individual, but just literally everyone is invested in each other. And so pretty much all public content that you see is, you know, it's someone speaking their book. And that's fine. And that's America. And that's cool. Like, that's the world that we live in. But there is just a big sort of one big drawback to that, which is that people are too, like, pro-social is the way that I would put it. In Silicon Valley, you know, no one wants to be, you know, anti-human or anti-social, right?

1:47:20Because it doesn't sound very nice. It sounds a little scary. Maybe you don't want to invest in that. We had this this morning as a team. John, Tyler, and I were sitting around. We had a post that will not be posted that genuinely had us all in tears. But there's one group that would be taking the brunt of the joke. And we like them. We're friendly with them. And it wasn't something we were going to share. And so, yeah, there's this pressure to be social, which in some ways is healthy. Like in some ways that stems from like this is a culture that somebody can move to San Francisco and be a nobody and in two years be an icon.

1:48:08And that is like, that's positive. But it also means that the culture is like, I'm not going to do anything antisocial here because two years from now, this person, I might be trying to lead their round, right? Exactly. And so the issue with technological acceleration is that it is a brutal kind of machinic global process that's been happening for hundreds of years. And we know a lot about it. And a lot of it does not look very pretty for a lot of humans, not all humans, but for a lot of humans. And so when you really try to model this really rigorously without any kind of pro-social biases and without any of the kind of human ideological filters that, frankly, most Silicon Valley players are forced to kind of lay over their thinking and their publishing, you see – no one in Silicon Valley really is able to talk, frankly, about kind of the underlying brutality.

1:49:09and the really kind of scary structural elements involved with capital acceleration. But Nick Land does that in a very aggressive way. And that's the source of the alpha, basically. Well, and Dario's hasn't been, I mean, I'm sure the Anthropic comms team freaks out every time he goes and gives a talk and says 80 % of, or whatever the statistic he's saying, some large percentage of white collar work is going to disappear. And then they kind of like walk it back a little bit. but clearly the message is being received. Well, but notice that whenever you do hear some Silicon Valley thought leader or big player come out and say something that's kind of antisocial or bad or scary, there's always kind of immediately behind it the solution that they're providing that will make it all okay.

1:49:57You know what I mean? So the thing with Nick Land is you've got a model, you've got a really hardcore, I think, very rigorous model of modernity and capital acceleration, which has no such convenient solution hiding in the background to sell you. And when you look at that stone cold in the eyes, most Silicon Valley people don't want to hear it. But on the other hand, they know there's alpha there, so they kind of can't look away from it either. In your desire, there's this concept of artificial intelligence being this time-traveling force, an invasion from the future. As a human, that makes me feel like I want to fight it.

1:50:35Is that the right desire? Is that the human desire to counter the machinic desire? So Land does introduce the site. Well, he doesn't introduce it, but he very much plays up this mental model that you get from the Terminator movies that, yes, Capital is this kind of time-traveling entity that comes back and not only kind of composes itself from us, but just as the Terminator movies suggest, comes back and kind of composes itself out of enemy resources. So there is in that kind of model an implicit kind of antagonistic structure. But I'm not so convinced of that, frankly. I think the fact is that capital acceleration will be quite brutal for some people, for many people.

1:51:19I mean, it clearly shreds apart sort of – modernity and technology shred apart traditional values and morals. I mean, even Marx knew that. I mean, Marx perhaps knew that better than anyone. That has been clear for a very long time. and whatever the errors of Marx were and the terrible kind of, you know, tragedies that came downstream of his ideas, you know, the critics of capitalism in the early modern period, like, were structurally onto something, okay? And there's no doubt about that. I mean, it absolutely shreds any vestige of any kind of traditional morality, basically. And that is sociologically true beyond a question, in my opinion.

1:51:57And so play that forward, play that forward, you know. So it's going to be ugly for a lot of people, I think. But I think all we can do really is try to basically, you know, try to stay one step ahead, be honest and rigorous and aggressive and take the risks necessary to bet on the truth. And try to just stay ahead of the machines and try to take with you all of your friends and family and everyone in your tribe. There's, you know, there's really no other solution. And I think personally that it actually goes in a more positive direction than some of Nick Land's texts seem to suggest. I think it actually matches much more clearly to something like The City of God by St.

1:52:39Augustine, where basically the good people and the bad people increasingly kind of diverge over time. So technological acceleration kind of pulls these people apart, what he calls the city of God on the one hand and the city of man on the other. What technology really does is it accentuates the differences between people who are oriented to heaven and the truth and the good and people who are oriented towards anything else. So if you're oriented towards anything else, you're going to go down fast. You're going to get wrecked, I think, and increasingly fast thanks to technological acceleration.

1:53:08How do you summarize the current discourse? Because I would loosely group it into general fear among the broader white-collar class, and potentially even blue-collar, because you have, you know, everybody, you know, people outside of tech are worried about automation and losing their jobs. and sounds like you think that's a very, maybe the correct concern to have. Inside of tech is kind of like bifurcated into people that are thinking like, okay, OpenAI just is starting to look more and more like Facebook every single day. They have Sora, they're gonna introduce ads, they're introducing commerce.

1:53:52This just looks like a big tech company. And then you have people at labs that just believe, like, you know, just wait, like, you know, just one more training run, bro. uh agis right around the corner but it's hard to like actually read too much into what they're saying because they obviously have you know tens of millions to hundreds of millions to billions of dollars of like you know equity tied up in in these narratives that are kind of dependent on on those scenarios playing out to some degree but how would you kind of summarize it and where do you think it is like even a year from today yeah so again i think a lot of these categories that people use to parse this phenomenon are just totally wrong, and they're totally ideological.

1:54:37So, for instance, the jobs story. That's all people can come up with to think about the devastating impacts of technological acceleration. We're going to lose our jobs. We're going to lose our jobs. So everything potentially bad about AI gets shoehorned into this one topic of, are people going to lose their jobs? It's much more complicated and in some ways worse, but in some ways better. So like the better way to think about it is really just that with all technological acceleration, you have to, everyone has to hustle harder, basically. Like you have to work to stay ahead, to succeed. You have to work really, really hard and increasingly hard.

1:55:14And yes, there is more surplus. People are wealthier on average. That is true. So, you know, you know, a kind of poor person in America has exposure to like a lot of really nice things that obviously, only kings could have in the past. So that story is true. But nonetheless, to actually build a life that is healthy and happy and sustainable, you have to be incredibly smart and sharp and judge and making good decisions about a number of different things in all aspects of your lifestyle. And you have to be working super hard and you have to be dodging this existential threat. Nowadays, I mean, think about how much research you have to do on food just to stay healthy, right?

1:55:48You have to be incredibly smart and sharp and you have to hustle increasingly hard just to survive the chaos of technological acceleration. And so AI is just a kind of a further acceleration of that. It's going to get more and more insane. The payoff will be bigger for people who are right and who keep their head on their shoulders. For those people, the payoffs are going to be bigger and bigger. But for everyone else who can't keep up with this kind of shredder of traditional norms, you do fall behind. And it's not a matter of losing your job. It's a matter of your whole family is opiate addicts because they got one-shotted by complex processes that they had no chance of even understanding.

1:56:32When does this start? If we take the time travel analogy, should we start this whole story in 1860 when GDP really starts to accelerate? Is that the beginning? Do we go back earlier? Is this latest AI boom anything special? Karpathy on Dorkesh was kind of saying like, no, like this is exactly, this is just an extension of computing. So this is an interesting research question about how do you really mark that breaking point, um, associated with modernity and technological acceleration. People have very different answers. I think it's, it's an interesting kind of empirical debate. I've always kind of been partial to Heidegger's answer.

1:57:09If you read Heidegger's, um, the question concerning technology, he seems to think that the, the, the key break point was when we started storing energy basically. So he says the windmill, for instance, was fine because the windmill just sits there. Nature kind of operates on it, and it can create energy. And he seems to think, that's my reading, is that it's fine. But when we start storing it, when we're putting it in batteries and we're putting it into these different containers, he seems to think, he seems to suggest that that's kind of the breaking point because that's where you can start to sort of run much farther ahead of the future.

1:57:44because you can store these things up, right? I have a stockpile of coal and I have a steam engine and I can build up a larger pile of energy and then I can deploy it all in one jolt to jump forward. Right. And then the Marxists have this kind of theory that they like to say that it's the enclosure of the commons. So it really starts in England. There were for aeons, these traditional norms of anyone could kind of graze on the commons and much of the land was commons. And then at a certain point, there's a specific kind of decision made where they start enclosing it in order to capitalize on it and privatizing it.

1:58:24And some people point to that as the kind of the breaking point. You can get you can get many examples and people kind of debate that. I think it's sort of it's sort of very hard to answer conclusively. But those are some those are some possible answers that I think are interesting. um do you think uh yeah do you think the escape the permanent underclass meme is actually healthy then because it's basically is encouraging people to like you know sharpen up avoid uh the avoid the the pressure to just quit your job and and gamble on meme coins like avoid you know becoming immersed i have a completely different take on this and i want your reaction too is uh i feel like the future things playing out, like kind of the darker scenarios, like there's a massive underclass, but there's no permanence whatsoever.

1:59:09And on any day-to-day basis, somebody could go a thousand X up and become extremely wealthy and then everything collapse and go back down to the underclass. And I feel like the volatility is actually increasing way higher and we're actually getting more underclass, but also less permanence. But what's your take on the permanent underclass meme? So that meme, I actually think, is a rare good one that is directionally correct in an important way. And that actually gets more to the heart of the threat and the brutality of tech, economic acceleration, much more so than the jobs meme. That is the kind of anxiety, that is the general diffuse anxiety and fear that everyone feels and is right to feel.

1:59:48You are forced to feel that with capital acceleration and its current inflection with the AI revolution. so I think that's basically that is spot on in terms of the generalized it feels like durable because everyone feels it and it feels like you're saying it's somewhat real it's like the techno capital acceleration people feel it they realize that making the 20 million dollars in 3 years is a lot better than making the 20 million in 25 years or whatever historical timelines look like. It's worth noting that it's kind of self-enforcing as well, because if that's a meme and you know other people feel that way, then you really have to trust it and you better get after it.

2:00:36Because even if you think it's false in stage one, if you think other people are buying into it, you think, okay, everyone else is going to be hustling harder. They're going to be getting the bag. And shoot, even though I thought this was false, now they're all getting it. I better get after it or I'm going to get crushed and left behind. And so, yeah, I mean, what a lot of people say is that capitalism produces so much surplus that you can just choose to not participate in the rat race and just enjoy the surplus. But that's not totally true because the things that we really want in life and that really matter to us are often relative.

2:01:07Things like recognition and identity and standing in a community, these things are relative. And so it doesn't really help that much that you can have a big screen TV for really cheap. You can have many other Yeah, it's clear like everyone will be entertained in the future. You will not need to be elite to be entertained. Like you're going to be entertained. You're going to have the screen. You're going to be able to put on the headset. You're going to be able to take any range of telemedicine drugs to make you feel anything. You will be entertained. You'll maybe have a one in a 10 ,000 chance every week to like escape or whatever.

2:01:44But I do think it's notable that we transitioned from a pull yourself up by your bootstraps culture, which was like, if you just do anything in America in the early 19th century, you can get a house. You can, you know, you can live kind of, you can pull yourself up by the bootstraps to live the American dream. And now the American dream is on the other side of escaping the permanent underclass. At least the American dream that you were sold as a kid of having a home in a desirable area and sending your kids to college and raising a family. The American dream was the middle class. It was the default.

2:02:25Right. I mean, frankly, I think the big antidote to all of this, the other pole of this entire problem that we're talking about is crypto, I believe. I mean, in so many ways, it's sort of diametrically kind of opposed to AI, or it's like perfectly poised to be kind of the solution to a lot of this. Because one way to understand technological acceleration is, especially in kind of human societies with all of the faulty human wetware that we have, is that it becomes this like big lying game. Like everything gets inflated. Like, you know, the money supply is really just kind of a metaphor for many other things where there's a ton of inflation, right?

2:03:01Like verbal inflation, you know, credential inflation. In a way, modernity is this mad race to inflate all kinds of things. And we get ahead of our skis in many ways. And that's why it's so cutthroat, because other people are inflating, so you have to inflate or you die. And so human society and modernity is totally torn asunder from all of its traditional values and traditional anchorings. Everyone is competing in this mad materialistic race to stay afloat, which is mimetic. And even if you don't want to do it, you kind of have to do it. Meanwhile, crypto is this kind of, I mean, cryptographic protocols are truth machines, basically.

2:03:38They kind of restore integrity and kind of like primordial, almost physical truths to this kind of chaotic, constantly inflating kind of material modern world. And so my mental model is very much that the reason you're seeing the reason the early stages of crypto have been so chaotic and crazy with, you know, so many stories of big crashes and crimes and so many kind of scammers. And the reason it's so crazy like that is because people intuitively understand that this crypto stuff like is the next big vector through which like humanity will be able to secure its future. And so the people who rush into that first are a wild grab bag of sketchy people, I think.

2:04:24But it's going to be the only thing that puts grounding on all of modern chaos. And you see, that's what Bitcoin does, right? That Bitcoin literally just regrounds money and physical resource anchoring. One suggestion. Crazy idea for you before you jump, and then we'll have to see this again soon. Thank you so much for having me on that. Instead of a book, how about you buy a Lambo and you sell a course? I will teach you to escape the permanent underclass by becoming an independent scholar. You could be the Andrew Tate of independent scholars. That's one option, but I don't think so, man. That's knock chain.

2:05:08That's the role of knock chain. We say escape the leveling process. I don't think you should worry about escape. I don't like the phrase, you know, escape the permanent underclass because it's much more general. You have to escape the leveling process. There is a long-running, gradual, historical gradient that is trying to sort of destroy everything of traditional value. Everything that is permanent and timeless is getting sort of eroded or hidden and kind of taken away from you. And, like, you want to escape the leveling process. And that's why we're building a blockchain. That's what it's all about, escape the leveling process.

2:05:39That's very cool. Well, thank you so much. This was super fun. This is a great conversation. We'd love to have you back on and go deeper. Everyone really enjoyed this. But thank you so much for hopping on. We'll talk to you guys. I appreciate it. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon. We have our next guest in the Restream Rating Room. But first, let me tell you about Fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks. Number one in competitive bake-offs. Number one ranking on G2. Let's bring in our guest from the Restream Rating Room. Darren, what's going on? What's up?

2:06:15How are we? Second time on the show. Thank you so much for hopping on. I'll let you take this. Sweet. Great to have you back. What's happening in your world? Here you've been flipping pretty hard, so break it down for us. so uh this weekend a 1914 baltimore bay bruce baltimore news bay bruce sold for uh three million dollars less than the guy bought it um in 2023 brutal making it the biggest card loss of all time no way now i thought they i thought they only went up yes so did that adam smith never says that no never um so you know it's very interesting to me because um i don't like to admit when i don't know something but when this card when i first heard of this card was when collectible which was one of those fractional share companies that went bust when they said they were buying a piece of it i think it turned of$6 million.

2:07:28And I had said, I've never heard of the 1914 Baltimore News, Babe Ruth. So I did a little research. Newspapers.com is probably the best value that I have. I mean, $150 a year for all the newspaper stuff. I mean, wow. That's crazy. I don't actually, I'm actually not familiar. This sounds incredible because Because we're always, I mean, we have a little recurring segment on social. We talk about this day in history. I'm sure we could get a bunch of alpha. Oh, you can get, now hopefully they didn't see this because I've been subscribing for a long time. They're not too good at business because I would really pay for it.

2:08:09Because you'd pay like 10x more. Yeah, exactly. So anyway, I looked and tried to see when the first mention of the 1914 Baltimore newspaper. Ruth is again, because I didn't know. And I think I know everything. The 2006 Durham Herald Sun. That was the first mention, at least on what newspapers, and they have a lot of newspapers in there. That was the first mention of the 1914 Baltimore newspaper. So I kind of have this theory that people don't think it was a card. On the back is a schedule. So it's Babe Ruth in the minor leagues the year before his rookie year. And it has a schedule of who they're playing.

2:08:56And it came in a newspaper and it was a 10-card set. So one of the reasons why I think this guy lost was because there's only so many people that know this. A lot of people buy cards and big cards so that they can say they have the big card. And when someone says, I have the big card, oh, what card is that? I don't even, I've never heard of it. It's a whole lot different to have a T-206 Honus Wagner or a 1952 Mickey Mantle than to have the 1914 Baltimore News Babe Ruth. And so I think that's why the guy got it handed to him. Okay, and why would, do you think the person that just paid$4 million for it knows that it might not be a real card?

2:09:43No, I'd like to know who it was that bought it, but I don't think I'm going to find that out. Again, it's a real card by a lot of standards. So after I looked at the 2005-2007 Durham Sun, I did more research, and people had mentioned it in the early 80s, so they'd mention it in passing. But to me, it doesn't inspire a whole lot of confidence that something that was beginning in 1914 until 1980, no one talks about it. I'm just not comfortable. I'm not comfortable. So that's my take. Might not be everyone's take, but it's my take. What does it say about, do you think other people that own some of these flagship cards are a little bit concerned now about the real market value of whatever they're holding?

2:10:41Or is this like a one-off? No, the market is as hot as ever. I sold 31 things this weekend on Heritage Auctions. And some of the prices that I got were amazing. um some are are painful in terms of you know really able to do this like you know i just uh it's hard to sell it's always hard to sell but i got some some really awesome prices too so this is the question is did you buy 31 times two to just even it out well you tell the wife you didn't you say i made so much money that's how it works and then you know there's a different bank account that then goes out. It's all about trust. Because in the end, I mean, I'm married 17 years.

2:11:29It's all about trust. It's all about we are going to win anyway. We're doing it for our family. So I did buy a massive, massive, massive piece about two weeks ago, and I had to clear some room. You had to clear some room. But yeah, this is investing, right? So we made a lot of money. We're going to invest some of it again. That's how it goes. Talk to me about... Yeah, yeah. Talk to me about Otani on the Dodgers because my family, I'm not super into baseball, but I do go to the occasional game. I often get Otani bobbleheads. I was so confused. By the way, I had a Dodgers hat on, not because I'm a fan of the Dodgers.

2:12:07It's just a green hat, and I like New York City. I've always – Wait, what? Green New York City? They made a green Dodgers hat. Oh, okay. I was wearing a green Dodgers hat. And it was for the Brooklyn Dodgers? Saturday, so many people were telling me, were yelling baseball things at me. I'm like, I wear this hat all the time. Why is everyone yelling? And then I found out from the security of my neighborhood that the World Series was happening. That's how I learned the World Series. So we're out of the loop here. Wow, that is quite, you guys have to pay a little bit more attention. We do. Well, no, I'm more interested in the market than just alts market in general than the actual game being played.

2:12:48For sure. Yeah, but my question about Otani is that I've been getting bobbleheads when I go to the game, but it feels like the equilibrium in the market is beating expectations, right? Because if there's really high expectations, a lot of products are produced, right? And so where are we on clearing prices around Otani? Is he blowing out expectations and so market prices are rising or is there a different dynamic? Yeah, absolutely everywhere. So Fanatics has a deal with Otani and they're buying up all the Babe Ruth balls because they want to have Otani sign the Babe Ruth balls and sell them. So if you're looking for a single sign commercial?

2:13:27What do you think about that? Is that not like… I don't want it. I want Babe. Now, Babe Ruth signed plenty. He signed a tremendous amount. But to me, so the value of Babe Ruth's single sign balls are going up because they are buying in the back room. They're buying as many so that they put a tiny on it. The bobbleheads, I mean, the bobbleheads since 1997. I mean, it's amazing the life of the bobbleheads and the lines of the bobbleheads. The Dodgers did a really good job gamifying it. So you have to gamify it for the degenerates and the youth. We live in a degenerate economy. and uh so you have to have 10 that are golden and only a couple with the that come with the dog and you know and then that really kind of you know jams up ebay so the dodgers have done a good job but why does it jam up ebay you do right by jamming up you mean just makes it popular yes yeah yeah people people uh you know people really like to go to buy their bobbleheads on on ebay uh it's amazing to me that that's been going for 30 years yeah i'm surprised there's not another thing.

2:14:34I mean, the market is so, uh, it's so crazy. I don't know if it's always like this, but when I go to Dodger stadium and they give me a bobblehead, there will always be someone inside the stadium who paid for a ticket who offers and you think about, okay, what is the sunk cost of that ticket? They're not actually watching the game. They're there just to acquire the actual merchandise. By the way, I got to jump in. I, I, I misspoke. I meant the, it was a, is a green Yankees hat. I was about to say. I was like, yeah. What are you talking about? I was a Yankees hat. I'm not going to come on anymore if you guys don't know the difference between a Dodgers and a Yankees logo.

2:15:08I do know, but I have both. I have a Yankees hat and a Dodgers hat, and I wear them interchangeably. Okay. And I just like to confuse people in my neighborhood. They don't know. I mean, the Dodgers were in New York at one point. They were in Brooklyn. But yeah, you were wearing them. They were. But then why were people talking to you about the... Were you wearing a Yankees hat? Well, no, I just was wearing... I was wearing a baseball hat, and I didn't know it was a World Series, so I didn't know why people kept yelling random baseball-related things at me. People were just cheering for this. Well, the Yankees haven't won the World Series since 2009, so you should know that.

2:15:45They're in a 16-year drought right now. Brutal. Yeah, so why would this person that just sold for – do you think this was a forced seller, like somebody that just had to get out? I think otherwise you would just sit on it. I think so. I think so for sure. I mean, uh, I always say that the assets that are in this space are not it's, they are what's. And, and you know, if you look at, there's no absolute here, right? It is, it is. When do you sell it? What is, what auction house are you selling it? What's the description in the auction house? Um, what's the publicity? What's the marketing? These all play.

2:16:28It's like when someone says to me, hey, I'm going to invest in Otani because he's playing well. I said, collecting isn't fantasy. Collecting isn't fantasy baseball. Collecting is an amalgamation of all the factors that go in. It's how many people collect Otani. What is the worth of the people who collect Otani? What is their ability when it's going down to stay and hold? And if you're a 35-year-old man with money and you collect what people who are 16 to 20 collect, you better know. Because they don't have the wherewithal to hold on if it goes down and then that affects you. Or you better know if there's a guy who owns 600 of them.

2:17:11Because, again, those are the market factors at play. It's not as simple as a game of fantasy. Yeah. Do you have any insight into what's going on at GameStop? We had the CEO of GameStop, Ryan Cohen, on the show, and he was talking about prize packs. What was it? Power packs? Let me, this is a fun one. Yes. So repacks are like the new thing. There are, digital repacks are even crazier. Now, people who are watching the show, I'm now going to blow your mind. Okay. Digital repacks, this is how digital repacks work. You open a pack digitally. leave that card really exists in the company's coffers or vaults okay you open it you don't like it so you pay 25 for it as eight dollars in value then they immediately offer do you want to exchange it at 80 of the value and then you're like okay i'm comparing this to gambling where there it's zero sum game if i lose i'm zero and they're like wow i can i can i only lose 20 and so these companies like courtyard and arena club who do these digital by the way then it goes back into the pack they could sell the same card 30 times a day wow and they show you the checklist they show you yeah the checklist so so courtyard did 70 million this past month uh it is it is going nuts anyway game stop what game stop has done is it has a relationship with psa uh where people can grade their cards and a normal company.

2:18:43And since GameStop is always going to be to me, a main stock, a normal company would be very worried about taking submissions from, from, from people holding the card and then sending it to PSA, right? If this was another company that was a, a fortune 100 company, you would be really scared about the liability of this but i feel like gamestop has a little bit more flexibility than most and so they are the biggest player in this in this game and it is really we've written about it on collect a lot it is really interesting uh how are how are startups faring in all of this you have gamestop playing here fanatics a couple that you just mentioned you have heritage i feel like the big the big auction houses have been surprisingly durable against um you know upstarts coming to their markets if you look at the automotive industry uh everyone is like like every industry uh everyone wants the multiple so they're all in the tech you know that's what they do right they they want the sass model that's that's what that's what everyone's after um so you know originally there was card scanning where it told you what the price is a lot of people were coming out of COVID and they're like, I have a bucket full of stuff and no one's going to go through it.

2:20:03So I'm going to have to scan it. Who's the best scanner? And then we had too many scanners. And so there's, there's just a, you know, there's a lot of information. There's a lot of people fighting. I don't know who the winner is. Fanatics is all over the place. It is probably in terms of monopoly, they are probably the number one monopoly in any business today in terms of having a stronghold on so many things. So it makes it hard to get into the business. Do you think that'll keep just compounding?

2:20:38It depends. It depends what teams and leagues, whether they, you know, I mean, teams and leagues want to take the bag and they're going to give the biggest bag. Now, if you choose to, you know, build it by yourself, then that's a little bit different. But as of right now, that's what we're looking at. I mean, some of the parts of the consulting part of my company helps teams and leagues and brands get into this and help build by themselves. But right now, Fanatics is the two million pound gorilla. It should be interesting to see what they're going to do with gambling because, you know, I just think the one and two are FanDuel and DraftKings.

2:21:24And I don't even think it pays to be three, given how much the business costs and the consumer acquisition. Yeah. What about how much attention have you been paying to prediction markets entering sports? I mean, obviously, they've been at it for a while, but it feels like... You mean Polymarket? Polymarket, Cal Shea, it's really heating up. As someone who was in gambling for a long time, I'm shocked that Polymarket and Cal Shea got to the place that they did. Sure, they always had kind of that like we're peer-to-peer, but I can't believe that, just like prize picks, I can't believe that they got to where they did in their valuation because I always thought that the lobby of DraftKings and FanDuel and Fanatics and Caesars and the old casinos, I always thought that they were going to win.

2:22:19The tribes, the tribes, yeah. I mean, you know, the Seminole tribe, I thought the lobbies would win. So I'm actually shocked. I always thought that Polymarket and Calshee would be kind of lower end and never really break through, and that has not proven to be the case. What is the secret to Fanatic success? like it feels like there was a time when every brand every team and maybe every league had their own kind of merchandising operation i remember being able to because a kid go and buy an nfl jersey uh and then at some point fanatics like finagled the ultimate deal and got everyone in the room together and they came again they came with the bag of cash is that what it was is he just is he just a value founder just a fantastic deals guy just got all the money and Well, Michael Rubin has a great story.

2:23:12If you don't know this story, I'll quickly tell it. But he owned GSI Commerce, which was essentially around the turn of the century, around 2000. All these companies were saying, oh, we could do a virtual warehouse. We could do our warehouse virtually. and Michael said I'll do a physical warehouse I'll get it to you I'll get it to your consumer a day faster and I'll take the risk that seven percent of the time uh Jeremy Lin is going to get traded from the Knicks to the Rockets and I'll have 9 ,000 Jeremy Lin dolls in a room because if I win every business it doesn't matter if I have waste all these other guys are not taking any sort of risk.

2:23:53They're just opening a virtual warehouse. And so that was his, that was his way to get there. And he got everyone's business and then eBay bought it from him for$2.3 billion. And then they said, Oh, but you know, we don't want to compete with our consumers. So we'll give you the sports business. And then he turned fanatics into a$20 billion business. So, you know, he, He did benefit from getting the biggest guys who, you know, some of them overvalued the market, right? He got big soft bank money, you know, and that helped because money was money and they took whatever valuation. You know, obviously they had to write down on a lot of businesses, but he got the right money and he has the right connections.

2:24:41You know, he knows the owners well. He knows everyone so well. And so they feel like it's a good relationship. Makes it really hard to get into the game. Do you think it's niche enough that he'll never face anti-monopoly pressure? If he hasn't now, he won't. Last question. Blue Jays are Dodgers tonight. Who are you rooting for? uh i am rooting for uh the stars to be the stars because that's better for my market so if vlad guerrero and bo bichette and otani and all those guys are the stars that's great what i don't want is i don't want a no-name hitting a home run even though you can say oh he's going to grow his own market yep i'm more benefited by the big guys getting bigger You want the winners to keep winning.

2:25:37Okay, you want to let your winners ride. Thank you for all the context. I feel like I truly... You got to love being on your show. You guys are very curious. This is very fun. I really learn a lot. Thank you so much for coming on. Yeah, I learn a lot every time. Let's do it again soon. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great day. Good luck out there. I clearly need to learn a lot more about sports. I've been spending too much time learning about CRMs. I've been learning about Adio, Customer Relationship Magic. Adios, the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. I mean, it is hilariously ironic that we always make jokes about not knowing about sports.

2:26:15And then, of course, I try to talk about sports and really mix up a team. Our next guest is Guillermo Rao from Vercel. Welcome to the TBPN Ultradone. Guillermo, how are you doing? Do you know about sports? I know you know Counter-Strike. Do you know sports? I know a lot about counter-strike. I know some about soccer being from Argentina. Okay. Right? Yeah. Baseline. And jiu-jitsu. And jiu-jitsu. Which I just started doing. So I know as much as one class, but I'm ready. Okay. Okay. Did you get brutally injured in the first class? No. I brutally overcame because I boxed for many years. Oh. Okay.

2:26:50So I had some baseline. There you go. Fight in me. I got into jiu-jitsu briefly, and it's like so – it's an incredible workout. It's so fun. it's like perfectly competitive and skill-based you know you can like clearly level up and then i just saw that like every guy in the gym that was over 40 that had been doing it for like 20 years would just be like hobbling in you know all these different injuries and i got i got i got a little scared around you know destroying all of my joints but um yeah but i guess if you're in the right gym uh it's probably better for longevity yeah we're working down the tech ceo checklist I love it.

2:27:30AI, Jiu-Jitsu, more to come. Well, we missed you a week ago. We've been bopping around. But give us the latest news in Vercel world. What's the latest on your side? Well, I mean, the big one is our funding at$9.3 billion valuation. $300. It really is. That's awesome. Congratulations. Insane. It's a mess. Insane. um oh yeah we had a million primary 300 million secondary led i don't know if you can hear but this is a good omen the gong is still ringing still ringing still ringing a little bit did it ever stop it never stopped might never stop yeah yeah you might be back here with the series g before it stops ringing hopefully uh what's the uh what what what do you actually capital constrained on is it just hire more people build a better product are you actually like a big consumer of AI data factories, token factories?

2:28:27Are you spending a lot on inference right now? Well, clearly not too capital constrained because half of it was secondary. Yeah. So chapter one of Vercel was providing the developer experience to developers to build pages. Yeah. I mean, I'm being overly simplistic, right? But the world is going from pages to agents. Yeah. So it's not that the web services of the internet are going to be irrelevant. But if you think about the cloud, the cloud was born with Amazon Web Services. The next chapter of the internet is going to be AI services. So Vercel is building the AI cloud. And we felt, and obviously investors felt this way too, that this is worth a very, very big bet.

2:29:09Because every type of software will become AI native software. And the new primitive of the cloud will be the agent. And this requires new services. It requires new frameworks. Something that developers and investors are really excited about is our AI SDK. You can think of it as the React of AI. So the most popular package for developers to use to build AI agents, and it's growing basically vertically. Like something we've never seen before at Vercel, and we've been doing open source for a long time. Is that driven by new ideas, new companies, startups that are coming up and instead of spinning up just a website or a web app, they're spinning up an actual agent that they get new customers for?

2:29:57That's right. It's mostly net new customers? It's a lot of net new, but also I think a lot of enterprises are going to basically leapfrog their classic digital transformation journey and just go to agents directly. And what this is resulting in is a whole new set of demands for the cloud that were never there before. Software is running for a lot longer, which is fascinating from a compute standpoint. Obviously, investors are excited about GPU compute. But now we're seeing all of these new types of software that are just running, thinking and producing, obviously demanding tokens, but running for minutes, hours, days.

2:30:34We call these workflows. And so we hosted our Vercel Ship AI conference the other day, and we basically came with an actual definition of what an agent is. And agents basically remind us a lot of the old types of software that people were excited about maybe decades ago, which is these workflows and business processes that look like nodes connected in a graph and have all of these steps. It turns out that kind of software, which we'll now call agent, is actually kind of hard for developers to write, especially the ones that were used to creating the typical SaaS type of software. So Vercel is sort of becoming the default place where this new kind of agentic workflow is born.

2:31:11How are you thinking about hardware or your own cloud, your own physical infrastructure? It feels like that was crazy to talk about five years ago, but now there are neoclouts. I know people who have just stood up, whole data centers. And so if you came to me and said, yeah, as part of this fundraising round, we're also going to spin up a couple different data centers and we're going to be on our own infrastructure in a few years. I'd be like, yeah, that doesn't sound crazy to me at all. But how are you thinking about it? Well, Vercel is in this incredibly unique position that developers come to us because of the developer experience.

2:31:45Sure. We can actually automatically make the best infrastructure decisions on their behalf. Okay. And today that's sitting on top of the hyperscalers because they give us so much flexibility. Yeah. So for example, a couple of years ago, you could have made the wrong hardware decision. Because you were going to say, well, all my CPU workloads are going to be short burst, really immediate, CPU bound, rendering based. Well, it turns out that a lot of the new workloads are agents that are spending a lot of time thinking. So you need new kinds of software infrastructure to support these workloads. And I believe that the hyperscaler clouds still give us the most flexibility there.

2:32:19Also, keep in mind that a lot of these agents need to be in close proximity to the enterprise data. So yeah, the NeoClouds are exciting, but you kind of want to be in the cloud from a security perspective, regulatory, and also latency. I do think there's something to the cloud that is a bit of a rich-get-richer scenario when it comes to latency. Because you need to fetch data. You need to do RAG. You need to get actual context into the models. and every millisecond of latency that you waste there is actually very, very costly. So on one hand, proximity to the cloud and being in the cloud gives us a great advantage.

2:32:55On the other hand, because we offer services like our AI gateway, we also make them compete fanatically. So at Next.js Conf, we announced the Next.js evals, which is basically what I call the oracle of truth of how good your model is at coding real-world workloads with things like Next.js. Here's a, oh, sorry. Yeah, I was going to say our developers really benefit from the fact that we let them choose. They're not bound to specific model. How are you thinking about integrations with consumer AI apps? I feel like there's a world where I go to Gemini or I go to ChatGPT and I am iterating through a prompt and kind of laying out the, let's say I want to make a landing page for a new startup.

2:33:45and I've kind of figured out the value props and the customer testimonials and how I'm going to wireframe everything out. And then I want to actually deploy it right now. I don't think I can do that within any of the consumer-grade chat apps. They're going to kick me over and say, hey, go set up this account. But there's a world where that doesn't need to happen, but it's a delicate balance because you don't want them to be like, now we're on top of you and fully. And so how are you thinking about onboarding almost like prosumer creators? Yeah. So on my blog, I drew these parallels between the cloud 1.0 and the AI cloud.

2:34:25And so you have the poster child of frameworks was React and XIS. Now it's going to be the AI SDK. Before we had CDN for delivering pages and images. Now we have the CDN of tokens, the AI gateway. way. And one of the other big transitions that's going to happen is protocol. So we're going from HTTP to things like MCB. MCB is really exciting because if you look at how ChatGPT is now allowing you to embed apps inside of ChatGPT that also just came out a couple weeks ago, I went to Next.js. I was able to deploy Doom inside of ChatGPT. Why? Because we have an MCB integration that allows our customers to embed themselves inside of ChatGPT.

2:35:07This is really exciting if this takes off this is the world that you just described but right now is there an app yeah does this open air have like a review process for that uh because i haven't just like run into the i i do run into those like hydrated ui elements every once in a while i'm asking for like movie reviews it'll show me some pictures or like links but it's all kind of like pre-baked ui you need to be working on creating your own studio ghibli moment around that yeah Yeah, this feels really, really big. I feel like it's ripe for it. So yeah, tell me more about how this actually rolls out.

2:35:39Yeah, so on a protocol level, it's MCB. So as long as you have something like Vercel, you deploy your thing, it can speak MCB, you're embedded into ChatGPT. I deploy my app in developer mode, which means they'll let you basically embed everything. It's going to be a little bit like an Apple App Store, where you're going to have to get approved. But it seems like their guidelines are pretty open. So I think a lot of it will fly. And to your point, this allows ejection points from ChatGPT into other kinds of platforms. So you could imagine one where if you start cooking up an idea, it recommends V0 because Vercel registered an application with them.

2:36:16And this is the right application for prototyping and Vibe coding. In fact, the other day, while I was in developer mode, it started recommending things to me. So I guess some of the early adopters of their apps platform. I believe MCP will continue to enable this agent-to-agent communication. This is already very big when you're coding with agents. A good example would be Figma converted to v0, so you can convert from Figma to Next.js app. That's going to speak to the MCP protocol. So I think, as far as the AI cloud goes, enterprises will be wrestling with these questions. The most common question I get is, how do I not get this intermediated by Google AI overviews, which is sort of summarizing all of the results of the search pages and how do I not get this intermediate by ChatGPT.

2:37:01And I think they're really good answers. How do you think about M &A? You don't have to talk about M &A interest in Vercel because I'm sure you're turning down stuff all the time. But how are you thinking about M &A in terms of expanding and building on the existing platform? Yeah, there were so many investments being put into the AI categories, right? And vertical agents, coding agents, IDEs, things like this. I think there's going to be more consolidation in the coming months and years. There's like 10, 20 different options for anything you can conceive AI-related. AI for QA, AI for testing, AI for this.

2:37:42So I think it creates a lot of opportunities for Vercel, which is a very broad platform with lots of users to sort of make some strategic M &A. but I'm even more excited about our marketplace. So we announced at Vercel Ship AI our marketplace for one-click install of AI agents and AI infrastructure services. So I mentioned, if you're going to sit down and create your own agent, it's very likely you're going to need some services that Vercel doesn't offer. One example is browsers on demand. I think you guys have had a couple browser CEOs here on the show. So Vercel doesn't offer browsers as a service built in, but now we offer it one-click through the marketplace.

2:38:21Another example is security audits that AI agents can help with. One-click install services like Corridor. Because Vercel contains the deployment URL, and we have access to the code, and we have access to the production data, it gives us a very special place so that we can grow a massive ecosystem of agents that automate the cloud. We're going to create some of those agents. We might acquire a few. But overall, I'm very excited about becoming sort of the nexus where all of the agents are collaborating together. So they take the burden off of maintaining the cloud. We also, the outage the other day with US East 1, the internet melted down.

2:38:59You know, all of those pagers or mattresses were waking up people. Our vision for the future of the cloud is that they wake up agents. The agent has the first pass of like, oh my God, anomaly alert, 500 errors. All right, let's have the Vercel agent do the first pass. But this is also true for, you know, you've vibe-coded something, and you want a security engineer to review it for you. Well, now that's an agent you can one-click install through the Vercel agent marketplace, which is very, very exciting. Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, what an interesting place to be. You have so many different pieces of the business, and I imagine that a lot of them are growing business lines.

2:39:40I can imagine the Series F process was a lot of fun, given all the booms. Jordi, anything else? No, this is great. Great to get the update. Yeah, thanks so much for hopping on. Have a great rest of your week. We'll talk to you soon, Guillermo. Cheers. See you. Bye. He mentioned eight sleep. Let's talk about our sleep scores. How'd you sleep? We need to talk to Mateo, and I don't want the John handicap. You have a conspiracy theory that for some reason just gives me better results. I got a 98 last night. Let's go. Seven hours, 44 minutes. I got a 78. Our next guest, Brendan from Mercore, is in the Restream waiting room.

2:40:23No, he's in the TBP and Ultronome. Welcome to the stream, Brendan. Congratulations. The$10 billion man. How are you doing? Called his shot. He's the biggest shot caller in all of Silicon Valley. Yeah, we got to get some new shots. Yeah, I was telling him this. I was like, you need to call the shot. you're holding up the global economy within five years. Every company is dependent on you. There's no shot this man won't call. But give us the news. Break down exactly what happened. Tell us what is new today. Yeah, I mean, the company's been growing like crazy. We're now paying out over$1.5 million a day to experts in our marketplace.

2:41:00Hit the gun for that. There we go. And what else? and we've raised our series C of$350 million at a$10 billion.

2:41:15Massive. $10 billion. Excited. Yeah. That is not bad for your first startup. The gong is really going. Something's up with the gong these days. I don't know if you can hear it, but it's like, it's ringing. Let's get right in. You had a, I feel like I remember you had a blog. Was it blog post Friday? Do I have that right? Is it worth getting into that? About the big things? Yeah, the big things. Let's talk about the big things. Yeah, it's really starting with the question of what are the things that we know are going to be the same about our business over the next 10 years. And that there's a lot that's going to change over time.

2:41:52But we know that the three main areas that our customers will always want more improvement and progress are in more candidates on our platform, better matching and faster delivery of all the candidates that we're hiring for them to improve frontier models. Is that Bezos inspired? It is, exactly. Yeah. Similar to how Amazon said that their three big things were more products, better prices, faster delivery. For us, it's a little bit different because no two people are the same, but inspired by it very significantly. Totally. Let's go through them, I think. And then I guess want to get more into the future, too.

2:42:37I think some people would have a sense that there could just be this incredible demand over the next five years. And then does that demand evolve, evaporate? But I want to hear how you view it, maybe more specifically. Totally. What we've been seeing is that there's an enormous trend towards humans training agents how to automate redundant workflows that they would do in their jobs. because it's structurally more efficient to do so. Instead of a customer support representative redundantly responding to hundreds of tickets, they create an eval to train an agent one time how to do that thing. Instead of a banker redundantly analyzing data rooms, they create an eval to train an agent how to do that thing.

2:43:24And we believe that a huge portion of the broader knowledge work in the economy is going to converge on training agents how to do these activities. And our marketplace is really at that frontier of creating this new job category and training agents. How does this look long-term if one of the big AI platforms becomes really, really dominant, understands what everyone does and can just ask me to do a task within the app? Is there any sort of disintermediation risk? Or do you think that what you're building with Mercore is special enough that even if the open AI ChatGPT app can detect that, oh, well, you've talked to me enough.

2:44:08I know you're an investment banker. I'd love to do an RL environment with you. Here's an offer directly to come and do some training data. How are you thinking about counter-positioning against that risk? Or is that just not a thing at all? Well, one of the most important things in building out these environments to train agents is that they need to be very consistently reliable in that you need to put a lot of work into them. And if there's noise and that there's some mistakes or issues, then it's very difficult for a model to learn from. And so as a result, it's really difficult to ask your users to say, put in 10 hours to helping to see if we made a mistake in preparing this financial model for you.

2:44:50And those users might flag a mistake, but that's incorrect half the time. And so what they instead need to do is build out armies of experts that are able to diligently analyze model performance, go through strict review processes to ensure consistency, and build these RL environments to adopt models for any specific use case. So you obviously have massive diversity on the talent side. But how do you think about customer concentration over the next few years? Do you think that, like, there are clearly power a lot of winners in AI. There are trillion-dollar labs, Google and OpenAI is half a trillion dollars.

2:45:33There's huge winners, and then there's a ton of startups. How do you see the shape of your business? Do you think you'll have a lot of medium-sized companies or just tons and tons of small companies? Every individual company will need to come to you for talent to optimize whatever little thing they're doing, or will you be doing more work with the really, really big labs? How do you think that all shakes out? I think it'll be some combination. Definitely near term, it looks similar to NVIDIA. And so far as working with a dozen of the hyperscalers that are investing huge amounts in this. But over time, what we're seeing is that every enterprise wants to train agents to customize their specific workflows.

2:46:14And we have the expertise to help them do that. And building out all of the eBell sets and environments that correspond to every workflow in their businesses that they want to automate. um what uh any any i had an eye-opening experience yesterday i have a friend who's a lawyer and about a year ago i started i started asking him like what kind of ai tools uh they're using and he was like broadly like not impressed he was like we're like signing up for them they're not getting we're not getting a lot of value um but uh it's interesting i'm keeping an eye on it kind of thing. And then yesterday he said to me, I've seen the future.

2:46:54Harvey isn't perfect, but has better attention to detail and is more thoughtful than almost any junior person at our firm. I've watched it do a hundred K of associate level work in 10 minutes. And that felt like it's just extremely notable to me to just see how hard he like 180 on that is like, uh, how, like what, what is the structure? And you can talk at a high level and not give away specifics, but how much investment is going into just that category alone from your view? I mean, we're seeing a huge amount of investment in law, certainly. I would say the top categories are probably software engineering, then finance, then law.

2:47:34Maybe close between medicine and law, but I think that the models are very quickly going to be able to do even partner-level work at a lot of these firms. And so that transformation and how it impacts businesses and the economy is going to be really profound. And obviously, all of the data and evals to enable that is one of the primary blockers to getting there. We have a shout-out to one of your employees, Virat Talwar. So I just wanted to say congratulations to him on being part of the team. The chat. The chat is just shouting him out. Obviously, it's a big milestone. So we want to celebrate everyone on the team.

2:48:11what uh how in in conversations for this last round uh obviously the business has so much momentum i'm sure people are just like take my money at all caught you know whatever i just take it uh i'll send the money and we'll figure out the docs later but uh how big can mercore get like what is like if somebody asks like okay if everything goes right what does his business look like? And does it look like you're paying out on the levels of an ADP? Do you become one of the largest pseudo-employers in history? What's the craziest outcome? The way I think about it is that right now, businesses are spending about$40 trillion a year on knowledge work, all for people doing these largely monotonous things that have similarities from task to task.

2:49:07But all of that is going to be transformed to training agents to automate workflows. Instead of doing it ourselves, we'll have agents do those things. And Mercore is building the infrastructure to enable humans to engage with models, to teach them to fit into the AI economy. And I think there's an opportunity worth tens of trillions of dollars a year to help that transformation happen over the coming decade. And so we're only 1 % of the way there, if that, and very exciting for everything to come. Are you a foodie? We have another question from the chat. Do you like fine cuisine? I am a foodie.

2:49:47You are a foodie. It's a very fort show coincidence. Yeah. That's good nominative determinism. We're very happy to hear that. Last question, when IPO? we don't have a specific date in mind yet uh potentially on the horizon but we'll be sure to keep you guys updated let's go potentially let's do an air horn for potentially on the horizon now there's probably somebody's probably going to write an article on that by the way so i'm sorry this is a new thing i i see it all the time every time they interview palmer lucky and blonde bloomberg they ask him like when are you iping and i'm like you know that he would tell you if he had news there.

2:50:24Like, why are you even asking? But I guess it's just fun to ask. And then in a couple of years, we can look back. Potentially on the horizon is much different than we have no plans though. Yeah. I mean, you could have said absolutely not. I would never, I will never take this company public in my life. You didn't say that. So at least we got something. So anyway, massive congratulations on all the progress. Really, really remarkable growth. I mean, what a fun time, what a fun business and congratulations to everyone on the team. I mean, absolute rocket ships. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

2:50:59Let's get back to the timeline a little bit. Let's get back to public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-ass investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. Yes, let's go back to the timeline. A lot of people have been focused on this chart overlaying stock market performance over job openings and how it basically diverges. At the introduction of Chachipiti. Basically. That's where people like. Which is also the introduction of high rates. Yes. And I think. I think we need to put Tyler on this. Is this a chart crime, Tyler? Do you think that there's some funny business going on?

2:51:38This is a pretty simple just. I don't think that it's literally like the lines are wrong. Mark at A16Z broke this down. He said this is particularly trippy chart crime. The break point was exactly when the COVID stimmy bubble popped and the Fed hiked interest rates to the moon. He says, the great forgetting that COVID ever happened is wild. I can't tell if it's adaptive or suicidal or both. But, yeah, I think everyone wants to memory hole this one. And so what is exactly on this chart? I don't even have it pulled up. It's number of jobs versus financial performance or something like that. So Gavin Baker here says, really interesting chart from Derek Thompson surfaced it, former guest on the show.

2:52:25Stock market and job openings were highly correlated for decades. No longer. Stock market is up 75 % and job openings are down 33%. Would think at least partially due to AI. Chamath Polyhapitiya chimes in and says, It could also be that the plurality of the stock market is now highly concentrated across seven to eight companies who on a relative basis just don't employ a lot of people. So the stock market goes up, won't pull up employment along with it. I still think what has been happening to date is CEOs are desperate for every possible AI narrative. And if they need to do layoffs because they got bloated during COVID, they will say that we're getting efficiency out of AI.

2:53:10And that's a much better reason than we overhired. Remember, Microsoft has done a number of different layoffs this year. There's a layoff that got announced today. Well, we should get Derek Thompson back on the show. We should also get a couple other economists. Maybe Tyler Allen would be there. Amazon is targeting as many as 30 ,000 corporate jobs beginning tomorrow. So probably not a fun day over at Amazon HQ. Some more positive news. Timothy Mellon, a banking heir, is said to be the anonymous donor. Not so anonymous now, I guess, according to the Times, who gave$130 million to the U.S. government to help pay troops during the shutdown.

2:53:51uh this guy doesn't according to will monitis uh worth 14 billion personally guaranteed payroll for the armed services and the only and most recent photo of him is from 1981 i mean he kind of this photo looks so cool that i kind of understand how he's like all right that's it yes i took the only photo i need for life yep i won't do any photos because this looks i mean the suit the tie photo with the train in the background yeah you know with the with the hair, the stare. I mean, yeah, he, he just, he one-shotted photography. He did. It's remarkable because when you look at the photo and then you hear the headline, it's like, meet the man who backstopped the, uh, and, and paid for the army's payroll in a time of crisis with his fortune.

2:54:39You're like, oh yeah, like this guy was probably crucial in world war two based on the image. And you're like, no, this happened like last week. He's talking about the 2025 government shutdown. That is what they're talking about, which, and I just keep, I just, every time I see this image, I think like, oh, this is a... Mike in the chat is asking, 130 million is what percentage of monthly payroll? And that is... Yeah, I have no idea. Well, maybe he levered it up. The fiscal year 2024 military personnel category of the DOD budget, which covers pay and retirement benefits was about 192 billion. So, uh, yeah, I don't think the 130 million is going to, it's a good start.

2:55:21We've been on gambling this entire show, but I'm just thinking about like, what if instead of government bonds where you earn like 4%, the government just released, you know, a one massive lottery ticket or something would be, uh, it, it costs a billion dollars but there's a one percent chance that it pays out a hundred billion dollars and if it does then then the u.s government is indebted to you for like hundreds of years but if it doesn't if it doesn't pay out then the u.s just gets a hundred by 2024 math i think you basically need like seven ish billion dollars every two weeks to keep the payroll going so what does 130 million do it's like a day.

2:56:00Yeah. Mike, Mike didn't. So, uh, I guess, I mean, it's a good start. Uh, I mean, there are some, there are some divisions of the government that have, uh, basically savings that they can kind of tap into. And then also there's a big question about, uh, how much are you actually going to, uh, like, like, like, do you need to, do you need to bring everyone back on payroll? Or can you get by with 10 % or 20 %? And maybe this is something that he's backstopping and saying, hey, let's pay 20 % of people instead of 10 % of people. What does Polymarket say about the government shutdown? Let's pull that up.

2:56:42Government shutdown. Will the government shutdown end by, what is the most likely? November 30th. By December 31st, it's a 93 % chance. That's good. November 15th is like the 50-50 mark, basically. So expect another two weeks, maybe another three weeks, according to Polymarket. So there's your Polymarket update. People are still talking about double speed. The lets you control thousands of social media accounts with AI, ensuring they look as human as possible. Never pay a human again. Control is all you need. Jeremiah Johnson says, every startup is like we found a cool way to monetize undermining the social contract with 30 ,000 likes this is i mean we follow we follow this person or something like that this person's like a liberal they should be pro-tech and they're it's not like this person is like by default some like crazy anti-tech person and so you mean by jeremiah johnson like jeremiah johnson is is not like some like tear it all down anti anti-business you know and and he's making a good point getting 30 000 likes and so i think this is a harbinger of like what the shape of the tech lash will look like well i think in this case even tech was not excited about this one.

2:58:13Tech was lashing itself. Self-flagellating. Self-harm. Self-flash. No, but tech is saying broadly this doesn't seem like it needs to exist and probably is a net negative even if there's some legitimate use cases. Anyway, you know what is a casino? Running an out-of-home campaign with adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. only ad quick combines technology expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. Zoomer went viral again. This guy is just harvesting hatred from the entire world at this point.

2:58:55He said a few days ago, at this point I've lost all motivation to post on Axe. The new algorithm is so demoralizing. I have 30 ,000 followers and I'm getting 500 views in an hour. I'm done with this place. Well done, Elon Musk. And everyone and their mother was dunking on him and saying, you just got paid$10 ,000 a week ago to post a picture of Steve Jobs' daughter. He didn't take the photo. It's not like he's a photographer. In this post by ADS, Elon, Elon, I need my dopamine dollary dues. I posted another hot girl. Where's my engagement? Elon, Elon, I'm a content creator. So anyways, not a lot of support for Zoomer, but I guess, I'm sure he'll be back.

2:59:41I doubt he, I doubt he. Okay, we need Tyler to give us a review of chadlabs.ai. Apparently, I didn't even see this, but there's a YC company that is a brain rot IDE, something like that. No way this is real. You can, you can. Is this brain rot TikTok and a cashback IDE? It seems like a parody. this is for sure somebody just making it this seems like it's like a joke but we need you to get to the bottom of what's actually going on it's in i mean it's a real yc company yes but is it a stunt or are they actually trying to bring tinder into your ide which is like i mean i'm on the web i'm on the website commenting learn on the y combinator website and clad labs says it's the BrainRot IDE.

3:00:34It's a fall 2025 bat. Oh, it's Clad Labs. I thought it was Chad. No, it's Clad Labs. Founder of Chad IDE here, cladlabs.ai. So it's not Chad Labs, it's Clad Labs. Yeah, I mean, I think this is just called Zoomer, this is just Zoomer marketing. They do call it the Chad IDE, the first BrainRot IDE. They say, sup, GigaChads. This is on the YC websites. Sup, GigaChads. We're Richard and Kevin, founders of Clad Labs. TLDR, as highly requested, we built the chat IDE. Chat integrates your brain rot vices with your agenda coding workflow. Chat increases productivity and reduces friction of context switching.

3:01:14So Kevin is kind of saying like, I thought the problem and solution was pretty straightforward, crying emoji, not sure what people can understand about that. So he's kind of like leaning into this. It feels like this might be rage bait. The product branding is an epic rage bait. But this is on the YC website. They have a screenshot of the product where they have Tinder in one panel and then the IDE in the other panel. And so this is the modern thesis. They're saying you can shoot state craps. Yeah, so you can rage bait your way to actual usage. I'm surprised that YC is putting this gambling IDE on their website, I will say.

3:01:49But maybe they're just not going to form an opinion. No, no. I think there is a open debate amongst a lot of people, like respectable, respectable venture capitalists around, can you launch with something that's rage-baity and then pivot into something that's serious? Can you build a serious business with a rage-baity go-to-market? And I know you're against this. I've been working on my next essay, Rage Bait Marketing is for Losers. I like it. Which is that I think when you do rage bait marketing, it obviously gets a lot of attention, but it makes it so that you make the entire world prey on your downfall.

3:02:35And I think that that is spiritually a bad strategy. So I'm still working this one out, but I don't think that rage bait marketing helped clearly win the enterprise, right? Yep. But there were a lot of VCs who invested. Maybe it worked for students. And the story's not over, but there were a lot of VCs who invested and said, hey, look, I mean, we talked to Brian Kim from Andreessen on the show about this. Like, why'd you do the deal? And he was like, I like that they were able to get a lot of attention and that gives them an opportunity to deliver a product. That gives them the opportunity to go build something.

3:03:11And he was like, look, we don't know if they have necessarily, but at the very least, it's gotten attention. Yeah, and they were masters of it. They would do the pictures of like, just spent$10 ,000 on this suit and you could tell that it was off the rack or whatever. Yeah, yeah, tons of stuff. I just don't think it's a good strategy. And I think that's gonna be proven correct. I think you're correct in the spiritually risky strategy because how much better is it to just go and actually build a beautiful, optimistic brand and pay for some billboard ads or even direct response ads. Beautiful thing.

3:03:52You don't even need advertising if your product is... Advertising is an accelerator. Let's say you do need advertising because you've built a product, but no one knows about it. And you have two options. One, like the dark castle and the fork in the road meme. One of them is you rage bait everyone. you make your product annoying and then everyone will have to check it out and the product's actually good versus yeah you have to shell out some cash to run some ads um but you slowly compound and you slowly grow and then after a decade you have a product where everyone's like wow that went that came out of nowhere those guys have just been running great ads for years you know yeah just i just think you're ultimately chat ide is competing with You Cursor, Windsurf, github copilot they're competing with serious companies and what kind of like you're you're gonna you're gonna attract you know what this is you know developers this is the lack of this is the lack of the april fool's day joke this company could potentially have just been this should have been an april fool's april fool's or windsurf's april fool's joke and it should have just been maybe i don't know exactly what it is we got to dig in and understand what this is but there's a whole world where the idea of a of a brain rotty ide is something like google does as a side project as a joke right yeah like they used to do stuff like that and some of it like they had a whole they had a whole didn't they have a whole feature that was just like talk to your dog or something i don't know there's so many we there used to be a rich culture of of april fool's jokes where you could effectively rage bait the the world but everyone was in on the joke and now uh we're in this world of like you you rage bait is your whole brand strategy it's your whole brand strategy that's where and it's really hard to pivot away from i don't think anyone's done it successfully yeah it's very very well on that note we have to get on with bezel get bezel.com bezel your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet seriously any watch and also wander find your happy place book a wonder with inspiring views hotel graded menus dreamy beds top-tier cleaning and 24-7 concierge service.

3:06:04It's a vacation home, but better. Play the double kill sound effect for two sponsors. Thank you to everyone who supports the show. Thank you to everyone in the chat. Thank you to everyone who's listening to the show. We will see you tomorrow live with Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft. Cannot wait. Cannot wait. Have a great rest of your day. See you then. Goodbye. Cheers, folks.