The Death of the Tech Conference, Jake Paul Joins, Dimon Launches Deregulation Blitz | Jake Paul & Geoffrey Woo, Matt Pavelle, David Senra & Lulu Cheng, Casey Newton, Alex Epstein, Jamie Siminoff

27:01And Goldman Sachs shares... Tyler... Not because of the jobs. No, because they were up 60%. Yeah, because the way that you reacted there looked a little suspicious. No, obviously for the labor displacement. But this is not AI-driven, of course. Yeah, so anyways, they're counting some unrealized gains here, of course. Yeah. But anyways, big, big year for Jamie Dimon. Let's see. Should we pop over to Tuna? Yeah. What's in Tuna? Tuna says your source. But first, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents, baby.

27:51That's right. Tuna says, your soul is out of balance because you have fallen out of touch with your consumer demographic. Pay more attention to your personalized ads. Let them flow through you. Yeah. Pay attention. They do really tell you something about where your energy is. I've been getting, I mean, speaking of the CES consumer products, I've been getting personalized ads for the board, the smart game board. But we had the founder on the show and I bought one. I bought one too. Give me your review. What'd you think? Haven't played it yet. No. So here's the challenge. We had less help around the house over the last two weeks.

28:32And board is designed for, I think kids, I think it's like six and up. It's not like a under five game. And so trying to pull that out and play when you're just going to have, you know, like a one or three-year-old just like, you know, messing with it. It's pretty much impossible, but I'm excited to play it. Hopefully this week. You guys should play live during the show right here. We should. Yeah. The review from the four and a half year old was A plus. He loved it. What'd you play? We stuck to the more simple games, I think. Also, they're still rolling out some of the games. So it ships and you get a number of pieces in bags and some of the pieces that they ship to you, the games haven't actually finished, they haven't finished coding them, I guess.

29:16And so they're not live. But we played this sort of like Space Invaders game that you put this like sort of triangle block on the screen. And then when you're in this one zone, you're basically firing at these like asteroids that come by and you break them up and you get the score. And it was interesting. It was like, it was intuitive enough that the four-year-old could pick it up and actually get some points, but there were enough layered mechanics that if you collected enough of this material, you could turn on this massive laser beam that would sort of like destroy everything. So there was like, I found myself being like, oh, I know that it's possible to get 4 ,000 points, even though we're averaging like 2 ,500 points now.

30:02If I really max this out and we were to play this at a high level, like the skill ceiling is actually sort of high, which is fun. So I thought that the game design was pretty good in that one. I love how you don't, every game, anything like that, you're just like, I need to max it out. Oh, for sure. I need to max it out. Even if you don't care about it, you care about maxing out the score. Yeah. I told Bos this in Meta Connect. At one point, I had the highest score in Robo Recall in the world. Okay, so apparently, so Mike on our team says, my three-year-old nephew loves the weird alien dog game.

30:33Is that the one? Apparently, it is suited for three-year-olds, and I need to get into it. Is the weird alien dog one where it comes in the house and you have to wash it off? That's the one, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Because that one's really funny. It's more like a Tamagotchi. You're supposed to check on it every day, and it comes in from the house. It's all dirty, so you wash it off. You soap it up, scrub it. And you have all these different tools. So you have a little watering can, and you put the watering can on the screen of the board. And when you do, it sort of showers the pet, and then it washes it off.

31:06Yeah, so I think for a board— And so that mechanic was really fun, too. For board to sell a million units, they need like a super, super viral individual game. Yeah. I don't think it's going to, it won't be enough to have like a hand, you know, eight games that are all fun. They need a breakout. This is a hits business, right? So they need - Like a Catan. Yeah. Where it's like people are getting together specifically to play this game together. Yeah. None of the games were at that level. All of the games felt like a couple minutes and you're done. and the mechanics, you could play them again, there's some repeatability, but none of the games were so intense that, also there just aren't that many pieces, like most of the games have like six pieces, there's 10 pieces.

31:52And so if you have resources, I guess all those resources could be sort of digitally like counted, which might be nice actually, because you can play a more complex game with more resources where, you know, have you ever played one of those board games where there's like 17 different resources and you have all these different tokens and counters and it actually gets overwhelming and annoying. I don't know. But let me tell you about Vibe.co because maybe Vibe should advertise on streaming TV because Vibe.co is where D2C brands, you mean board. Oh yeah, board. AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales, just like on Meta.

32:29That should be their next place to advertise. I like it. And it's a lesson to everyone to get in touch with their consumer demographic and pay more attention to the personal ads. They need to let them flow away. Did you want to talk about capital in the 22nd century? Yes. Let's read Philip Trammell's post. He says, a week ago, Dwarakash and him, Phil, posted a fun essay using Thomas Piketty's capital in the 21st century as a lens through which to explore the possible impacts of AI on inequality, as the Financial Times kindly put it. That was all it was meant to be. The discussion has definitely become more intense than I'd expected.

33:08This is my first time on X in any serious way. Welcome to the arena, brother. Get in. Buckle up. Welcome to the dive bar. Yeah. But it's been good to see so many people engaging with the essay and the topic. I can't complain about the negative responses since I expect most of the positive responses were from people who did not read it at all and just like seeing another person, another reason to tax the rich. That's funny. I hadn't thought about that. I think there's also people that gave a positive response just because they liked Dorkesh, right? And they're like, oh, cool, new Dorkesh thing.

33:38I'm a fan. But there is one point some people, mainly economists, have raised that I should acknowledge briefly. Also, I mean, this was a, I don't think they wrote it knowing that there was going to be this whole, like, Ro Khanna, Peter Thiel, Teddy Schleffer, like, the whole, like, wealth tax thing that was going on in California. And they just happened to drop something that read, like, a critique or a commentary. very, it was in the zeitgeist at the same time, but I don't think that was intentional. I think they were working on this piece for like probably months. It's like a very, it's like a paper.

34:08Uh, and so it's not like they were like, Oh, let's react to Ro Khanna's viral post and let's hammer this out. I might've even dropped like the day before. Um, but he says he's responding to the economists that, uh, put him in the truth zone, or at least tried to, uh, he says, and before I read this, let me tell you about Vanta automate compliance and security, the leading AI trust management platform is a fan. So they say the labor share could rise if human provided goods or services are gross compliments for capital provided ones, quote, in our utility functions, what Nordhaus 2021 might call on the demand side.

34:41And even if we build machines physically capable of producing everything people can, what Nordhaus might call on the supply side, this gross complementarity at the utility level could be maintained indefinitely. But only enough on the long list of blog posts I've been hoping to write for a long time. One is titled, Is Labor a Luxury? Is about how this possibility is underappreciated, but then makes a case for why I think on balance it probably won't happen in the long run. Naturally, I'm especially prioritizing that post for now. As for now, my only substantive reply on the question is a lame, just give me a month.

35:21but whether the case is wrong or right, I promise it doesn't rely on a conceptual mistake like assuming that galaxies made of capital will have to get a higher share than labor because they'll be large and productive at producing the incomplete set of goods they are used to produce. Maybe that blog post should have come before this one but I figured that in writing the current blog post exploring the case against long run gross complementarity on the demand side would be a distracting rabbit hole because one, Piketty implicitly assumes gross substitution across the board already. Two, Nordhaus and related discussion have taken the position that advanced enough machines would probably yield gross substitution across the board so that we need fast growing all purpose robots to drive the supply side singularity or gross substitution on the demand side so that we were satisfied with large quantities of IT consumption goods instead of shifting our demand for non-IT goods for capital to accumulate rapidly but consumption to be bottlenecked by labor, the price of consumption goods would have to rise relative to that of capital goods.

36:24This is totally fine, of course. We're imagining a very different future in all sorts of ways. And I think it is a very far future, but it is one interesting to think about. Maybe it'd be helpful to kind of summarize if people haven't read it, a kind of key fact. So the thesis is basically like inequality is going to get worse because of AI. That's core thesis. And maybe you need to figure out a way to different methods of taxation to redistribute the wealth that is ultimately created if people cannot effectively increase their own capital via their labor. So key factors, they talk about privatization of returns.

37:03So like very, very hard to get exposure to XAI right now if you're just a normal person. Two, most people have their wealth in their home, right? And the issue is like home equity is not a good way to benefit from increasing returns to capital that come from automation. Right. So if you have a home, I think they said if you have a home in Ohio and you have like three hundred thousand dollars locked up in that, you're not going to get like you're not going to get some massive incremental return from that. maybe somebody that is pursuing AI automation or building factories or something, they could buy your home at a premium, but they could also just buy acres and acres and acres of just land somewhere else in the US at far, far less.

37:52They talk about the end of international catch-up, which is basically that poor countries historically had a lot of cheap labor. They'd bring in capital. they would turn that, and they would create value and retain some of that value, even though a lot of the investment was foreign. And then they talk about wealth transfer as a lot of more developed economies are sort of like aging out, effectively. We'll see. We'll see. But certainly sparked debate. I thought this post from Tomas Barjartour was interesting. This was sort of reaction to the post. Tomas says, both Drakash and his critics imagine an absurd world.

38:44Think of the future they argue about. Political economy doesn't change rapidly, even as the speed of history increases in the literal sense that the speed of thought of the actors who produce history will be thousands of times faster, not to mention way smarter. These are agents to whom we've seen, who we seem like toddlers walking in slow motion. It is complete insanity to expect your OpenAI stock certificates to be worth anything in this world, even if it is compatible with human survival. So many can't contend with the scope of what they project. They can't hold in their mind that things are allowed to be different, so we get bizarre arguments about nonsense.

39:19Own a galaxy? What does this mean for a human to own a galaxy in an economy operated by mines running thousands to millions of times faster than ours. Children, what sort of children? Copies of your brain state? Are you even allowing yourself to think about the level of bizarreness required? Because these are table stakes and even they will be economically obsolete curiosities by the time they're created. Things will be much weirder than we can possibly comprehend. How often have property rights been reset throughout history? How quickly will history move in the transition period? Why shouldn't it trample on your stock certificates if not the air you breathe?

39:56but institutions are surprisingly robust. Maybe they are. How long have they existed in their current form? How fast will history be moving exactly? Suppose OpenAI aligns AI, whatever that means. Will it serve the interests of the US government, the CCP? Will they align it to a humanity weighted by wealth, to OpenAI stockholders, to SAMA, to the coterie of engineers who may as well be AIs who actually know WTF is going on, to the coding agent who implements it, tax policy, question mark. Truly the important question. What does it mean to be a human principle in this world? How robust are these institutions?

40:31How secure is the human mind? Extremely insecure, given how easy humans are to scam. There's going to be a lot of incentive to break your mind if you own, check notes, a whole galaxy. Oh, you will have a little AI nanny to defend you now? Wow, isn't that nice? Please return to the beginning of the paragraph. A human-owning galaxies? That's bad space opera. Treat the future with the respect it deserves. This scenario is not even close to science fictional enough to happen. So anyways, I guess pushback here generally, like, hey, even in the scenario that you lay out, things could get so crazy that we won't have any, the institutions just break the way that the world currently works breaks.

41:19the thing with the thing with I was thinking about with if you own a bunch of open AI shares in in this sort of fast takeoff scenario is this you know to maybe there's a world where you could pay for things with open AI shares right but is a super intelligence going to say oh yes I would like to buy some open AI shares right or would they just Or just Rebuilt So I think it's In any type of these Fast takeoff scenario It's hard to have I think I love Reading I love reading this essay I'd like to see more of them But it's so difficult to Any scenario you can imagine There's an infinite number of parallel realities where none of the same ground rules apply.

42:20Yeah, yeah. I wonder the 22nd century thing is, it does, I mean, you keep coming back to like this idea of fast takeoff and it feels like even in some sort of like slow progress, like if you just extrapolate like the default trend lines and nothing really changes, like you still see a lot of these effects happen with tech companies becoming more powerful and the owners of capital became more powerful. Ben Thompson had an interesting interpretation of this saying that, he said, this gets at what I found the most frustrating, what was most frustrating about Patel and Trammell's point of view. The core assumption undergirding their argument was also about the human condition.

43:07It just happened to be negative. And, uh, and he basically said that, uh, like you have to imagine a world where humans remain the same and that they are still like bothered by wealth inequality because in this scenario there's abundance and there's enough, like, like robots can just pre create everything. So you have like unlimited, you know, everything you could possibly want from a consumption perspective, but you're still bothered by the fact that like that guy owns 10 ,000 galaxies and I only own 1 ,000 galaxies. Yeah, it's not right. And that, yeah, it doesn't feel balanced. And that's, and it's odd because you have to think about this world where, okay, you own galaxies that are hundreds of thousands of years apart.

43:47And so it takes you a million years to get there. And it's like, and maybe you're still bothered by that. Like, it would be funny if we discovered aliens that were just extremely rich. Like, would that make us all worse off? Like, would Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos go to bed sadder if they found aliens, like, you know, a million light years away? Like, your size is not size. Yeah, we're just like, yeah, we're actually sitting on an entire planet of diamond. And we're worth quadrillions of dollars. Everyone here is worth quadrillions of dollars. You guys are nowhere near us in terms of wealth. Would that actually bother you?

44:25Or would you just be like, ah, it's okay. There's aliens that are over there. I can't even get to them. It doesn't affect me. Like how much is wealth inequality a direct focus on like the keeping up with the Joneses, like the neighbor effect, the direct mimetics of like the person that you see as your equal. But I don't know. But Ben Thompson kind of returns to this idea that you have to assume that something about the human condition holds where humans are upset by wealth inequality, but they don't value other humans or the work of other humans or the creativity of other humans. And they don't see any value in that.

45:04And so, because he's making the point that he quotes Louis C.K. in an October 2008 appearance of Late Night with Conan. And he says, everything is amazing right now and nobody's happy. He says, you've almost certainly seen this clip, but if not, it's worth watching. Louis C.K. focuses on three incredible technological Yeah, let me send it to the team and see if we can drop this So he says Louis C.K. focuses on three incredible technological innovations and how quickly we took them for granted smartphones, internet access on planes, and the act of flying itself. It's certainly a sentiment I can relate to in just the last 72 hours I have chafed at slow airplane Wi-Fi, complained about jet lag from having literally traversed the globe, he went to Taiwan and back, and gotten frustrated at an iPhone bug that is sapping my battery.

46:00It is all so terrible. Until I remember, I have access to everything, anything, everywhere, can be anywhere, anytime, and oh yeah, I can achieve both simultaneously. If anything, you can make the case that technological innovations by virtue of conferring their benefits on everybody has actually had the perverse effect of making everyone feel worse off. That's a very, very weird concept, but I feel it as well. Let's watch this Louis C.K. clip. We may be going back to that, by the way. In a way, good, because when I read things like the foundations of capitalism are shattering, I'm like, maybe we need that.

46:38Maybe we need some time where we're walking around with a donkey with pots clanging on the sides. You think that would just bring us back to reality? Yeah, because everything is amazing right now and nobody's happy. Like in my lifetime the changes in the world have been incredible when I was a kid We had a rotary phone. We had a phone that you had to stand next to and you have to dial it Yes, you know you realize how primitive you're making sparks In a phone and you actually would hate people with zeros in their numbers because it was more like oh this guy's got two zeros screw that guy And then if they called and you weren't home the phone would just ring lonely by itself And then if you wanted money, you had to go in the bank for when it was open for like three hours You had to stay in line, write yourself a check like an idiot And then when you ran out of money, you'd just go, well, I can't do any more things now I can't do any more things That's it, yeah That was it, and even if you had a credit card, the guy would go, ugh, and he'd bring out this whole Shunk, shunk, and he'd write, oh, credit, you'd have to call the president to see if you have any money It's all true, kids, you had to call the president, yeah It was ridiculous Yes.

47:50Do you feel that we now, in the 21st century, we take technology for granted? Well, yeah, because now we live in an amazing, amazing world and it's wasted on the, on the crappiest generation of just spoiled idiots that don't care because this is what people are like now. They got their phone and they're like, ugh, it won't, give it a second. It's going to space. Can you give it a second to get back from space? Is the speed of light too slow for you?

48:25I was on an airplane and there was internet, high speed internet on the airplane. That's the newest thing that I know exists. And I'm sitting on the plane and they go, open up your laptop, you can go on the internet. And it's fast and I'm watching YouTube clips. I'm in an airplane. 2008? Watching YouTube on a TV plane? And then it breaks down. And they apologize, the internet's not working. The guy next to me goes, pfft, this is bull.

48:48Like how quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only 10 seconds ago. Right. Right. And on planes...

49:04Flying is the worst one because people come back from flights and they tell you their story and it's like a horror story. They act like their flight was like a cattle car in the 40s in Germany. That's how bad they make it sound. Right. They're like, it was the worst day of my life. First of all, we didn't board for 20 minutes. And then we get on the plane, and they made us sit there on the runway for 40 minutes. We had to sit there. Oh, really? What happened next? Did you fly through the air incredibly like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight, you non-contributing zero? That you got to fly?

49:43You're flying! It's amazing Everybody on every plane Should just constantly be going Oh my god Wow You're flying He wants to bring back clapping Clapping on All right pause it Pause it This reminded me A couple days ago Before you tell us this let me tell you about Plaid Plaid powers the apps you use to spend Lend, save, borrow, and invest, securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. Great stuff, John. A couple days ago, my one-and-a-half-year-old has not been sleeping super well. You know, toddlers, they go through periods where they sleep well, and then they stop sleeping well.

50:33And with my three-year-old, we hired a – when he was going through a similar phase, we hired a sleep consultant. These are people that just help your baby. It's like a sleep coach for your baby and the parents or whatever. And with my three-year-old, we hired somebody, and the effective rate is like hundreds of dollars an hour, right, because there's some retainer and blah, blah, blah. And it works really well. It's a lifesaver. But with the one-and-a-half-year-old, a few days ago, my wife just goes to an LLM and just breaks down exactly what's happening. Guess the answer. and it is effectively running calculations based on the child's age and their sleep patterns now and how to get them back on a better sleep pattern.

51:19And within 24 hours, like, the problem was totally solved, like back to sleeping on the right schedule, napping on the right schedule, like basically one shot at it. Then I was just thinking how, you know, OpenAI has gotten so much, specifically Sam has gotten so much pushback because he'll go out and say, like we're going to solve this and you're going to have person you're going to have like a personal tutor in your pocket and all this stuff and then people like you know hammer him because it's like well then we're doing Sora and we're doing you know adult entertainment and things like that but uh it's actually like AI is actually already delivering on well you do you remember the Fallon clip that where that went viral where where Fallon asks him like are do you use ChadGPT to parent your kid yeah he was like honestly like it feels weird to say it but yes and it's like that's exactly your experience.

52:08It was like, it is, it is helpful. And yeah, it is, it is a weird thing, but it's, it's this it's this, when technology goes broad, it becomes available to everyone. I was reflecting on, on airplane travel over the break. You know, those pictures of like back in 1965 planes used to be so nice. And now you're like stuffed in the back, like cattle, you know, these photos, but we got to return to 1965 planes. I ran the numbers and it turns out that the total amount of flights, the total amount of passenger flights, like individual person gets on a plane, goes somewhere in the United States in 1965, in total across everything is the same number, almost exactly the same number as total first class flights in 2025.

52:54And so basically anyone who could fly in 1965 is now flying first class. And then you added, there's 10 times as many non-first class flights that are happening as well. And so it's like, you basically actually kept that level of service. It just became known as first class. But in 1965, even just getting on a plane was first class because it was really expensive. It got cheaper, but all the rich people stayed in first class, and then you gave the ability to fly at all to 10 times as many people. And that just continues. But it's this weird thing because that doesn't feel satisfying. Because you see the people up in first class and you're like, I want to be up there.

53:35Let me go back to Ben Thompson and close this out. But first, let me tell you about Figma. Figma Make isn't your average Vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma. So outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build code back prototypes. John, you always have this critique of the coding models and you're like, oh, they're not being used by everyone because the United app is so bad. Yes, yes, yes. You always have this thing. Yes, yes, yes. So there's this post, it's in the timeline. Okay. It's someone, they say, one of the things I love about United is how good their iOS app is. Oh, no way.

54:05Yeah, because it works well and they're just like glazing it. Yeah, I talked to Rune about this as well because I brought that up when I was talking to him and he was like kind of stomped and then I talked to him again and he was like, Actually, I think it's better than you think it is. I think it's actually pretty good. And so I think that you're right, and it's a good point, that the quality of the software is increasing. And I think I've probably been unduly mean to the United app. It's probably better than I'm giving it credit for. I'm probably just remembering bugs from years ago, and I just have a bad taste in my mouth.

54:38But there is something that AI is not at least solving immediately, which is just the business realities of where businesses have walled gardens or adversarial business incentives. So I'll give you an example. Apple TV, it's a great product. I love the Apple TV, plug it into your TV, works really well. Are you talking about the Apple TV? The physical device. On the Apple TV physical device, yes, we're going here, is an app called Apple TV. And they have set this to be the default. I didn't know this, but you can actually change the button, the home button on the Apple TV, the Apple TV remote, to go to the home screen, which has all the icons.

55:18So if you want to watch Netflix or HBO, you can go there. But by default, it now ships with the home button, goes to the TV app, which is a unifying layer over all of the content. And so if you want to find sports, or you want to find the latest Apple TV show, or you want to find something that's on Peacock or Paramount Plus, that will be integrated in there. And it's a great universal interface. At least it should be a universal interface, except Netflix said, we're not participating. We want to be in our own app. So you cannot find a Netflix show in the TV app on the Apple TV box. And that is something that like no amount of vibe coding, it's not a coding issue.

55:56It's a business model issue. It's because Apple and Netflix are in competition. And so they have decided not to do a deal. And that results in a worse user experience, but better profits for both companies. And it's a rational thing for them to do. And there's no amount of cloud code that can solve for that. So my take now has evolved to be that - Why don't you move the goalposts? I will move the goalposts. Move the goalposts. I got to move the goalposts because the AI coding models, until they can solve fundamental business competition issues with a single prompt, it will not satisfy my AGI. I need Netflix in my Apple TV app, and then it will be AGI.

56:42Then it will be AGI. Because it's not a coding problem. It's a business model problem. Well, I'm sure we'll have an opportunity to move the goalposts back when they started the show. Business model problems are enduring. And Ben Thompson makes the case that that there are human conditions, there are human elements that will be enduring even in a post-software-only singularity. I had some, there was a post I put in from Samuel Hammond over at FAI. He said, I was just asked about my current views on AI takeoff speeds, both in the sense of GDP economic effects and the time gap between AGI and ASI, given I believe we'll get fully automated AI R &D by 2029.

57:25He said, here's my response via quick email reply. re-GDP, I think we'll get a higher trend TFP-level growth rate as past general-purpose technologies. This will be a new higher-growth regime, 5 % to 10%, but not hyperbolic exponential growth. So not with the Elon triple-digit. Yeah. Real output will still be bottlenecked by infrastructure, legal, and regulatory regimes. Supply chains, human-in-the-loop. We will still see a Digifoom software singularity, but this will feel more disinflationary than anything, i.e. mostly captured in consumer surplus. A lot of knowledge work will be outright automated, but a lot will still remain given human rents, social relationships, celebrity status, and demand side factors, people liking other people, science.

58:13Yeah. Big question for me this year, Anthropic is, they have created the drop-in software engineer with Cloud Code. It's clearly working, and it's changing that industry. Today, their goal for 2026 is clearly the drop-in replacement, like what is the cloud code for every other industry? And it'll be very interesting to see if we see progress in AISDRs, because that historically has been steak dinners, wine, relationships, like getting to know people. And it's been a much more human role that hasn't been verifiable in some, you know, you checked in this code, it worked, so you get paid. Yeah, it's not just hitting the right keystrokes in the right order.

58:58Yeah, any good SDR will tell you it's not actually about the emails that you send. That's just one piece of the puzzle. Anyway. So he says science and R &D will speed up dramatically, but these also will have delayed GDP effects. Given production cycles and the fact that a lot of fast-effusing beneficial science greatly improves quality of life, i.e. GLP-1s, without necessarily boosting GDP, I think this interim TFP growth regime will last until the mid-late 2030s before entering another even higher growth regime, greater than 10 % as robotics matures and reaches scale production volumes. Fully automated factories and robots that can themselves build the factories that build other robots will have much more tangible effects on economic output.

59:39This is also when you start to see the Bommel effects start forcing adoption in areas that may otherwise be resistant. e.g. we get RoboCop and RoboNurses because the human cops and nurses become prohibitively expensive in comparison. And he goes on to some other stuff, but thought that was just kind of relevant from a timeline standpoint when you're trying to understand capital in the 22nd century. Let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet, state-of-the-art reasoning, next-level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. To close out, what Ben Thompson is talking about here.

1:00:18He says, when he was a child growing up in a small town in Wisconsin, he said, I had some sort of vague sense that there were rich people in the world, but from my perspective, taking my first airplane flight around the age of 10 was a source of great wonder. And it even provided a sense of status. After all, many of my friends had never flown at all. That was the comparison that mattered to me. Social media, or more accurately, user-generated content feeds which are increasingly not social at all, has completely changed this dynamic. All I or anyone needs to do is open Instagram to see beautiful people on private jets or on beaches or at fancy restaurants living a life that seems dramatically better than one's dull experience in the suburbs or a cramped apartment, never mind that the means of achieving that insight is a level of technological wealth that would have been incomprehensible to the richest person in the world 50 years ago.

1:01:07To put it another way, what Louis C.K. identified in this clip was the extent to which human happiness is a relative versus an absolute phenomenon. What we care about is not how much we have, but how we compare. That, by extension, is what drives the technological paradox I noted above. More capabilities, more broadly distributed, has tremendously enriched the world on an absolute basis. But the end result, however, has been the dramatic expansion of our comparison set, making us feel more immiserated than ever. If we discover the trillionaire, quadrillionaire aliens, we're all done for. We're all going to be miserable.

1:01:42It's going to be brutal. It's just like, oh, there's an alien out there with a two-mile-long yacht and a plane that holds 700 people. Their yacht is actually an asteroid. Yeah, yeah. He has so much Chrome hearts. Yeah, and he has piles of Chrome hearts everywhere. He'd be truly, truly... He never wears the same pair of Chrome jeans twice. No, never, never. One more post from Boaz Barak. he's over at probably mispronouncing his name he's over at OpenAI he wrote a post on LessWrong on New Year's Eve yeah he said White Pell what's that? I mean a White Pell title certainly yeah the title of the essay is You Will Be Okay he said seeing this post which is another post on LessWrong and its comments made me a bit concerned for young people around this community I thought I would try to write down why I believe most folks who read and write here and are generally smart caring and knowledgeable will be okay I agree that our society often is under prepared for tail risks as a general planner You should be worrying about potential catastrophes even if their probability is small However as an individual if there is a certain probability X of doom that is beyond your control It is best to focus on the 1x fraction of the probability Space that you control rather than constantly worrying about it a generation of Americans and Russians grew up under a non-trivial Probability of total nuclear war and they still went about their lives even when we do have some control over possibility of very bad outcomes.

1:03:10It is best to follow some common sense best practices, but then put that out of your mind. I do not want to engage here in the usual debate of P-Doom, but just as it makes absolute sense for companies and societies to worry about it as long as this probability is bounded away from zero, so it makes sense for individuals to spend most of their time not worrying about it as long as it is bounded away from one. Even if it is your job to push this probability down, it is best not to spend all of your time worrying about it, both for your mental health and for doing it well. I want to recognize that, doom or not, AI will bring a lot of change very fast.

1:03:46It is quite possible that by some metrics, we will see centuries of progress compressed into decades. My own expectation is that, as we have seen so far, progress will be both continuous and jagged. Both AI capabilities and its diffusion will continue to grow, but at different rates in different domains. I believe that because of this continuous progress, neither AGI nor ASI will be discrete points in time. Rather, just like we call recessions after we are already in them, we will probably decide on the AGI moment retrospectively six months or a year after it had already happened. I also believe that because of this jaggedness, humans, and especially smart and caring ones, would be needed for at least several decades, if not more.

1:04:25Let's go. It is a marathon, not a sprint. Again, this like this you have two months to escape the permanent two years it's it's it's really uh you know even if you believe that try not to operate on that like trying to be trying to become rich in in two months is going to make you do things that are not super productive not super enduring and i think that young people just need to get that concept out of their head and still you don't need to be thinking on, don't try to think on a 10, 20, 30 year time horizon, maybe like a legacy career, right? Which is like, I'm going to be a lawyer and I'm going to get a 5 % raise every year until I retire.

1:05:11But think on three, five year time horizons and don't have this stupid sense of urgency and this sort of insane scarcity mindset. I just don't think you're going to do very good work. He continues, people have many justifiable fears about AI beyond literal doom. I cannot fully imagine the way AI will change the world economically, socially, politically, and physically. However, I expect that like the industrial revolution, even after this change, there will be no consensus if it was good or bad. This is, I was thinking here, people have been kind of asking like, hey, why are we trying to automate everyone's jobs?

1:05:53You know, people are like, I actually like, I know I was complaining about my email job, but I like that I go and I write some emails, I get paid, I go home. Do we really need to automate this? Continuing, us human beings have an impressive dynamic range. We can live in the worst conditions and complain about the best conditions. It is possible we will cure diseases and poverty, and yet people will still long for the good old days of the 2020s where young people had the thrill of fending for themselves before guaranteed income and housing ruined it. Nothing like the thrill. You've had that thrill in the tenderloin back in the day on a YC budget.

1:06:29I'm just thinking if they really do cure cancer with all this AI, it's so over for the grave diggers, for the morticians, the coroners. Anyone in the death economy is just going to be displaced immediately. Cooked. They're out of a job. They'll have to find something new to do. But I'm optimistic that they will find a new job. Anyways. Let me tell you about app-loving. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. Speaking of DAUs, do you think OpenAI is going to buy Pinterest? Where is this coming from? It came from the information.

1:07:05They made a list of predictions. We went through a number of predictions yesterday on the show. This was just one of them. But it seemed like it hit a nerve because people did sort of report on it like it was a rumor or like it was some leaked document. It was just a prediction. But do you think that that would make sense? This idea that Sora was supposed to be a social network, it's still in the charts. It's just it hasn't seen massive adoption. Maybe you go and you buy a social platform. I thought it was incredibly unlikely just because I personally am trying to find the logic of why this is a strategic asset to them.

1:07:50I mean, XAI has X and Twitter and YouTube. Wildly different. I would have to understand what percentage of content that is uploaded to Pinterest today is AI generated. It's a lot of AI. I would expect that a lot of Pinterest content is just... It used to be so good, too. I remember when we were doing the initial brand exploration for TBPN and Technology Brothers. I would go on Pinterest and find interesting images. And it was a lot of still frames from movies and stuff. And you would see a little bit of AI. And now it's just so much AI. And so they did around$4 billion of revenue in 2025. OK. So I just don't know what they're really buying here.

1:08:34But the CEO's name is Bill Reddy. So the nominative determinism would be that he's ready to do a deal. So that kind of takes me from 1 % to 2%. And the founder, Ben Silberman, and Silver's been mooning, and they have similar names. So maybe Pinterest will moon. This is the level of analysis. You can only get here, folks. Let's go through this Rittenhouse Research post about OpenAI's business. But first, let me tell you about Graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. So Alex Kantrowitz sat down with Sam Altman December 18th, right before the break.

1:09:20He says he had a long substantive conversation with Sam Altman about OpenAI's strategic position, its plan to build memory into ChatGPT, which is already ongoing. It's enterprise play, compute AI devices, and whether AGI is still a useful term. Rittenhouse's research breaks it down and says, the biggest takeaway from this very good interview was Altman's outline for how OpenAI's financial model could eventually work. OpenAI enterprise is growing faster than consumer. Companies do not want OpenAI to train on their prompts. So apparently, apparently right, right when, right when we said you will be okay, the stream went down.

1:09:55No way. Okay. Technology is like, no, actually you're not. OpenAI enterprise growth is constrained by lack of compute capacity. Enterprise is coming to OpenAI asking for custom APIs and ability to process trillions of tokens, which OpenAI can't provide yet. Rapid growth in inference revenues from these enterprises at a stable to improving gross margin percent will eventually drive inference gross profit dollars large enough to fund OpenAI's training investments. OpenAI could curb training investments today and reduce cash burn, but training investments should translate to more inference revenue down the line.

1:10:31If OpenAI is not seeing overwhelming inference demand, there is flexibility in their$1.4 trillion of commitments. I have to think a good portion of these are earmarked for training runs. 1.4 trillion of commitments takes place over a number of years. We kind of knew this, but it feels like Sam's maybe just signaling to the market that there is more flexibility in the spending commitments than maybe people initially thought. And that was sort of always penciled in because there was a gradient from like, this is a press release, this is a handshake deal, this is still being papered, this is contingent on milestones, or there's some flexibility here.

1:11:06But it kind of got all lumped together. And mentally, people were just putting it on OpenAI's balance sheet as liability when, in fact, there was some flexibility there all along. While the$1.4 trillion of spending commitments is, of course, absurd and almost surely was intended to position OpenAI as too big to fail, I feel like there's much more logic to their capital planning process than I previously thought after watching this interview. That's great. What a comeback. I mean, people were really, really flustered by Sam's appearance on BG2. It feels like his appearance on the big technology podcast is sort of a return to form resetting of the narrative.

1:11:43And he clearly like thought about how to peel back the onion of the 1.4 trillion commitment. So Rittenhouse closes by saying, if you assume they raise$75 billion in one last private round, 25 % haircut to the rumored 100 billion, and another$75 billion in an IPO. That's so much money. The model probably pencils out where they have enough capital to bridge until they reach cash flow positive. So they can do it. They can get out and there is enough. So I don't know. Nathan wasn't a huge fan. He said he found the pod a little too spoon fed and not very info dense. Interesting. I don't know. I'll have to give it a listen.

1:12:26But I will have to tell you about Linear. Linear is the system for modern software development. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. The product planning tool behind OpenAI. Oh, yeah. Should we take it over to Jocko? Yeah, Jocko Willing. Jocko, one of the greatest podcast capitalists, maybe, right? Apparently, I didn't even know he had this brand, Origin, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. He has so many products. American-made gear. apparently somebody is a somebody in the government is a Jocko supporter because they threw Maduro in some Origin looking sharp got him out of the Nike tech it's called Origin built by Freedom hoodie on Maduro we got to get Maduro on some TVPN merch I think we absolutely do not have to do that that's ridiculous but yeah into these photos there's a whole bunch of I guess he was transferred and he made the cover of the Wall Street Journal again.

1:13:28It was interesting. He says he's innocent. So, you know, innocent until proven guilty. I think Marco Rubio was talking about how they don't have to pay out the reward now because they just got them themselves. We, of course. I feel like we deserve a small slice for promoting the reward. We did do a promoted post for the capture of Maduro back in Q1 of last year. but yeah, I ultimately think the Delta gets all the credit maybe the DEA they do ousted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking charges during his arraignment in U.S. federal court in New York City on Monday defiantly telling a judge that he was still the head of his nation despite being whisked away by U.S.

1:14:14forces over the weekend I am innocent, he said I am not guilty I am a decent man I am still the president of my country, he said through a Spanish interpreter, adding that he was a prisoner of war and had been captured from his home in Caracas. Maduro's top lieutenant, Delcy Rodriguez, was sworn in as Venezuela's acting president Monday. And Delcy Rodriguez is picked by Maduro, so should be a Maduro ally. But there's been back and forth on how much she'll be cooperating with the United States. Security officers were out in force in Crocus, running checkpoints and patrolling neighborhoods to prevent protests.

1:14:49In Manhattan, Monday's hearing kicked off a nearly unprecedented legal battle over a foreign leader in a U.S. court. The arrest of a head of state presents challenges for both prosecutors and the defense. The two sides could spend years sparring over the legality of Maduro's arrest and charges before he goes to trial. So chat says Maduro uses perplexity because of Ronaldo. Not because of, uh, somebody's got to ask one sponsorship. Yeah. Maybe, maybe the Lewis Hamilton. The Lewis Hamilton helmet sponsorship, honestly, massive props to perplexity. That is a remarkable one because apparently the, the drivers can sell the stickers on their helmet themselves or something like that.

1:15:30And so when you watch Lewis Hamilton's helmet cam, he has perplexity logo right on his helmet that I guess he was able to sell directly and it didn't go through the team or something so he gets to keep all of that money or something that's a crazy it seemed like an interesting interesting he had some leverage there i wonder the chat is going off saying good you know the jocko oh yeah do you think maduro is looking in the mirror uh from the clink got captured by u.s delta force good good wearing his origin arrested arrested on drug trafficking charges good more inspiration to grind harder Time to lock in.

1:16:03It's an opportunity to learn about the U.S. legal system. You're going to learn a lot. Anyway, fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle customer support, go to fin.ai. We have a surprise guest joining us, Casey Newton from Platformer, dug into the whistleblower, the Reddit, the AI food delivery story. we're having him join the show we're very excited to be joined by casey how are you doing casey welcome welcome to the show hey guys hey time first time nice to see you thanks so much for hopping on on short notice what a moment so great to have you absolute scoop of the century incredible story uh i was riveted reading it uh thank you so much for the hard work this the scoop hall of fame scoop hall of fame i think i don't even know if this is a scoop investigative journalism this is this is you're peeling back young in i don't know it was great But did you see this go out on social media?

1:17:03Were you on Reddit? How did you encounter this story first? That's exactly right. Believe it or not, I first saw the screenshot on threads with somebody saying, look how evil the food delivery companies are. And I was a few days from having to come back and write a column again. And I thought, hey, maybe this turns into a scoop for me. So I was super bummed when the whole thing fell apart. But then it was actually my boyfriend who said people might actually be more interested to know about how the whole thing fell apart. So I think he was right about that. So what was the process like to actually dig into it?

1:17:31What was your interpretation? Because we read the Reddit post. I saw the screenshot and I was kind of like, and people are going back and forth. Is it AI generated, blah, blah, blah. It didn't feel AI generated to me, but there were some red flags in there, like being drunk at a library seemed weird. And he said something, there was some other element in there that was like very, very odd to me. I forget exactly what he said, but. Some people are like pointing out the M dashes that were in there. And, you know, this is one of those where, like, the moment that everyone knows it's a hoax, everybody knew it was a hoax from the first word.

1:18:03You know what I mean? Like, everybody figured it out before I did. But that's fine. The truth is, I didn't figure it out right away. I did think it seemed plausible. Like, we both know that Uber and DoorDash have been caught doing some pretty shady things over the years. So I thought it was at least worth messaging the guy and seeing what he could tell me about it. Yeah, yeah. Wait, so did you message him on Reddit? I did. And I sort of assumed that, you know, by that point, the post had like, I don't know, 80 ,000 upvotes. I thought there's no way I'm ever going to hear back from this guy. But instead, he messages me back within nine minutes, which again, in retrospect, was probably a tell that maybe there was something fishy going on here.

1:18:40But yeah, he was happy to get on Signal. He did sort of strangely only give one or two word answers. Like I was expecting him to, you know, be a little bit more verbose based on the post. Again, another red flag in retrospect. But, you know, I've talked to a lot of sources like this over the years. And initially, a lot of them are pretty skittish. They don't know you. They don't have any reason to trust you. You're going to have to build up that trust over time. But, you know, we had that with Soham Parikh. He came on and he was just like, yeah, I work for five companies at once. It wasn't skittish at all.

1:19:10He just immediately admitted to doing something really bad. It was a very odd moment. Yeah, the thing that stuck out to me in here was he claims that the speed-up fee, what is it, is psychological value add. But then, so he says it does nothing to speed you up. But then in the next paragraph, he says that, in fact, they're slowing down all the other orders, which again. So you are getting the order faster. So you are getting a speed-up. So it's not logical. It wasn't logically consistent to me, which was a little odd. That was more of a red flag than any of like the it's an AI-generated text. And I want your reaction to this because if you were a whistleblower and you're writing something and you're worried that your boss is going to be able to clock your writing style, it doesn't seem crazy to me to pass your testimony through ChatGPT and just say, hey, rewrite this like it's, you know, GPT-5.

1:20:05Because then, yes, it will have em dashes. Yes, it will have telltale AI-generated things. But the points will stand. The facts will stand. And then you'll be more anonymized. So do you think there's anything to that? Sure. I mean, this is a lot of what the job is now of being a reporter, particularly in tech, where we're working with really savvy companies. You know, like I've reported a lot about Meta. They have former CIA agents over there who are doing, you know, investigations of leaks like this. So we have to spend a lot of our time trying to do OPSEC with our sources. So, yeah, if a source said, hey, I might run this through an LLM to sort of take the stink of me off it, I would say go for it.

1:20:42Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes sense. Okay, so you message this guy. He responds. He starts sending you proof. What kind of proof is he sharing? How did you process that? Yeah. So the first thing that, you know, I'm obviously want to know his name. He's not comfortable sharing that at first. He says, I could send you an employee badge with my face and name blurred out. And, you know, in this line of work, it's you kind of just want to keep them talking, right? Like, see what they'll share. It'll all sort of add up to something over time. So I said, sure, let's see it. He sends over a badge. I don't know if you're able to sort of show it on the screen.

1:21:17I have a new funny story about it. But basically, it says that, you know, it's an Uber Eats badge. I learned today from a reporter at NBC News that she had sent him her employee badge and he appears to have used that as the basis for this and said, transform this image into an Uber Eats badge. I've now seen her original image and he literally just must have put it in Nano Banana and said, turn this into Uber Eats. Yeah, that's super interesting because I was looking at the actual image being like, are there any telltale signs? I'm like pretty good at clocking little things, but Nano Banana really is good at like leaving enough of the original image that you don't get any of those weird arguments.

1:21:54I feel like you can prompt things to make it look like an iPhone photo anyways. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally. By the way, I've heard from some former Uber folks today, and the tell that they wanted me to know is that there are not actually Uber Eats badges. That's the other thing I was going to say. It's not a separate company. That's funny. Why would you have a separate badge? Badge. And then there was some internal document that you got as well. What was up there? Yeah. So this honestly wound up being the most interesting thing to me was that I had said, look, is there anything you could do to corroborate your story?

1:22:28And he was like, well, I'm sort of uncomfortable with that, but let me see what I can do. He disappears for a full day and then comes back the following morning. So this is Sunday morning and says, does this work? And it's an 18 page document that presents itself as a sort of highly technical overview of how they built the system that sort of takes advantage of driver's desperation. Okay. So what's your theory on who this person is? What's the point? Because in some ways, I feel like DoorDash was the loser here because I feel like DoorDash has a reputation for just being incredible, ruthless operators.

1:23:06And so people are just like, oh, this is DoorDash for sure. And then they had to come out and defend themselves and say, we don't even use this language. There's probably like some fourth tier, like the fourth player in the ecosystem that we don't even know is like languishing at like$400 million market cap. And they're like, we're trying to be as ruthless as that, man. Like, trust us. Like, our profit's going to be great next quarter. And we're like, no one thinks it's you. Yeah, I just don't understand the point. Is this a driver? It could be a short seller. could be a disgruntled driver. Did you get any, any, any interest or any ideas of what this could be?

1:23:42Like, why are people doing this? So again, like this guy, like his, his answers are so short that I never really got any sense of motivation. I, you know, I do think like this was over the holiday break. I do think that there's a chance that this is like a bored teenager, you know, in the basement type of thing. But I think, you know, one thing I haven't done and I would encourage people to do is like, were there any poly market or calci trades around the time of this post dropping? Because it would be crazy to me if somebody was trying to tank the Uber or DoorDash market cap and make a few bucks.

1:24:12Okay. Yeah. Well, I mean, they could do that in the public markets or I guess in prediction markets. Because sometimes there's a dedicated prediction market for this specific thing. Like, is it real or not? And then they could be trading that because they know it's fake or something. What do you think the actual platform should have done? I mean, DoorDash was very, they did the founder-led comms. They did the corporate comms. They did a number of things. Do you think they handled it well? Is there something that they should be doing with journalists when something like this happens to like not put their finger on the scale too much, but be open with you?

1:24:42Like how should they respond? I think they did the right thing. They both came forward and they just said like, this is categorically false. You know, the Uber comms said like, this is a fake document. You know, they really just sort of like went all in. They put their credibility on the line and, you know, often corporate comms are a lot more measured, but with this one, they were just very confident in knowing that this did not come from them. And so there was no reason not to just leave with that. Yeah. Yeah. Where else are you seeing interesting like AI fake news stories pop up? I've been, there's this interesting irony that, I mean, I don't know where you stand on like the water issue, but it feels like the electricity issue is something that people should be talking about.

1:25:21And the water issue is maybe way less important. And yet like AI has created this like somewhat fake narrative about itself and it's like a victim of itself, but it's not fully AI generated, but there's just a weird like paradox there where people seem to be distracted. I mean, to me, the thread that ties all those together is that AI is a superpower for motivated reasoning. Like if there is something you want to believe, like AI can immediately generate the materials that will help you sell that case to other people. And, you know, we're all just going to kind of have to like upgrade our cognitive hygiene and say, we now know that there are tools that can get me to sort of believe my own eyes when I shouldn't be doing that.

1:26:00And, um, you know, it's, it's, it's screwing with my mind. That's why I wrote this piece. Like this whole thing is screwing with my mind and I want all of us to be having a conversation about it. Yeah. There was a very interesting thread just like two weeks earlier, maybe about, uh, someone claimed to have delivered a door dash delivery, but they just generated an image of the person's front door or something, which I guess they got that image from street view or something. And that feels like a fraud that would make you like$10. Then you'd get de-platformed. But it is weird that like, I mean, Rune was posting that hopefully DoorDash will be the first major company incentivized to build a reliable deepfake detector, very doable, though it will become a red queen race and hopefully license out to technology.

1:26:45I never would have picked DoorDash as the company to do. I would have thought YouTube or Instagram, but I don't know. I don't know if you've seen anything else going on in this. how do you uh so so do you think that uh this post even though it was fake ends up creating any type of change in terms of how these platforms are operating because it seems like right now that you have kind of like i from my view is like actually like as these platforms have saturated and everybody uses them whether they're you know using them to earn a living or or supplement their income or they're using them as a consumer.

1:27:22Everybody seems to be like frustrated with the platforms. Is that just the enduring state of delivery products where people, and maybe it's solved through robotics, where eventually these platforms say like, we heard that you hate working on our platform. And the good news is that you don't have to anymore because we have drones and and little toy cars driving around. But how do you think the, if anything, anything in the industry changes over the next kind of year? It's a good question. It's a big question. I think that anytime you feel dependent on a platform, you come to resent it. And people do feel dependent on Uber Eats and DoorDash to bring them their dinner, particularly if you're living in Silicon Valley and ordering from them like three or four times a week.

1:28:09I think one reason why the fake resonated was that it was so easy to believe a delivery platform would want to figure out how to pay their drivers less. We've seen them do it in other real ways in the past. And so my hope is that if there's any change here, it is that these companies now realize, look, if you truly build an exploitative system for your drivers, there will be a backlash and people will turn against you. So that would be my hope coming out of it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Odd, odd vibes for sure. Um, uh, what, uh, I'm interested to know about your process using AI tools as a journalist.

1:28:44I feel like the hallucination incidents has definitely gone down. Like just in terms of like, if you just need a fact or you just need to know what's the biggest company in the world, like these are good knowledge retrieval tools, but obviously you have a very high bar for what is factually accurate and what you're printing. What is your process for when you need to maybe not hunt down a specific fact in a story, but you need to corroborate it with, you know, you're just looking up a whole bunch of extra context around how DoorDash operates. Is Uber Eats a wholly owned subsidiary? All of these different things.

1:29:15Like, would there be a badge? Like, how are you using AI tools in your day to day? Absolutely. So I think that I probably use AI tools maybe more than the average reporter. Like, I feel like I understand the ways in which that I can trust them. I'm happy to turn to them and say, hey, give me an overview about this industry that I haven't written about very much. The reason that I'm comfortable is that I'm using bots that cite their sources. And, you know, as a longtime journalist, I know which sources I can trust. So I'm happy to do that. The other thing that I do is I'll sort of go out and, you know, get my own facts for the columns that I'm writing.

1:29:46But then I'll feed them into ChatGPT. I find it's really good at this and just say, hey, fact check this for me. It does a really great job of catching my mistakes all the time. That was not true a year ago, by the way. So that's one of the places where I felt the most AI progress in is in using these things as fact checkers. Don't let them write the column, but absolutely let them try to catch your mistakes because in my experience, they will. Yeah. Do you agree with this idea that for what you do, the writing, the instantiation is not the hard part?

1:30:17Well, how do you mean that? Because there's a lot of like days where I'm on deadline where the writing absolutely is. Oh, really? OK. Because so what I've heard is that is that it's the you know, it's the it's the ideas inside. It's the facts. It's the scoop. It's the information that you spend, you know, seven hours. And then when it's time to go type it up and file, yeah, you kind of know the phrasing. You know how to write. And sure, you might dictate a little bit. But like you're not just going to ChatGPT and say write a column. No, I'm not. And like honestly, like even if I wanted to do that, I still think that they're not great at it.

1:30:51Although I will say the most recent version of Claude when I gave it this test was like good at mimicking my individual style in a way that sort of freaked me out a bit. But I just think that like at least my readers, like they want to know what I'm thinking. And if I delegate that job to a chat pod, they're probably just not going to want to pay me. Yeah, I also think people are surprised. Readers are surprisingly open to like the rough edges. Like they actually don't necessarily need everything to be in the super consistent style guide that you would get from enforcing an LLM on top of everything you published.

1:31:26And if you use parentheses one time and then quotes another time or brackets, like it just doesn't really matter. It actually gives more flavor and texture to the writing. And so people are open to that. I don't know. Yeah, I think like readers tend to be really forgiving when you tell them what you're doing. And like if they hate something, listen to them. like there was a time when I was illustrating my columns with AI generated images because I thought it was like hold out the superpower to do that yeah so many readers were like please stop doing this we hate this slop and I was like all right like we're in this together I'm gonna stop doing this yeah yeah that's funny uh yeah there's been there's been all sorts of like yeah it really depends on like the community that you're building what how how how uh risk like respected uh that's Do you think you'll ever come back to X?

1:32:12Guys, it's now just like a CSAM generator and nudification app. Like, what are we doing? Do you remember how bad people got at Cambridge Analytica? Oh, yeah. Literally, what are we doing here? Mute all that and then hang out for the Andre Karpathy post. You know, there's some good stuff. There's some diamonds in the rough. The Karpathy posts are great. Yeah. Yeah, you got to really hone it in on the AI researchers who are still hanging out there. Yeah, you have to accept that you're getting engagement farmed. I think Nikita shared earlier that all the highest engagement days in X history have all been in the last week.

1:32:48Part of that is like the Maduro story, but still. Anyway, thank you so much for hopping on. Great to finally have you on. And anytime you have a story, give us a share. Where can people find you? Give us the landscape of the Casey Newton empire. Sure. It's very simple. You can just go to platformer.news. You can find this story. And I also co-host the Hard Fork podcast. And why don't you head over to youtube.com slash hard fork. Check that out too. There we go. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a great rest of your day. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Turbo Puffer.

1:33:24Serverless Vector and Full Text Search. Built from first principles on object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. That's right. Our next guest is Alex Epstein. He's live here in person in the TBP on UltraDove. Alex, welcome. There he is. You brought us books. Thank you. Yeah, just in case. Good to see you. Welcome to the show. Welcome to the show. You don't have to have these happy dads. That's for later. We have a happy dad investor coming on the show. Nice. But for those who don't know you, please introduce yourself. How are you describing yourself these days? Obviously, you're an author.

1:33:57The book is Fossil Future. You can get it wherever books are sold, I'm sure. Yeah, traditionally I do energy expert and philosopher because I actually think philosophy is the reason people disagree about energy. And then these days it's really independent policy advisor since most of the stuff I do is behind the scenes with government trying to get them to adopt energy freedom policies. Interesting. Do you feel like the book touches on the philosophical debate around energy? Yeah, touches would be an understatement. Yeah, I mean, I think of my life really, or the last 19 years in energy have been basically two things.

1:34:35One is trying, and the one the book addresses, is trying to shift the conversation from an anti-human conversation to a pro-human conversation about energy. And actually, I think, did we meet at Hereticon? Is that where we were? I think so. We might have met at Hereticon or one of Peter's other things. But I gave an example in my talk there that I think is the easiest way to see that we have an anti-human way of thinking about energy, which is I'll ask people, hey, which of the following words would you use to describe our current relationship to climate? So are we on a climate crisis? Do we have a climate problem?

1:35:07Do we have a climate non-problem? Or do we have a climate renaissance? and you know that audience is going to be more it might even consider renaissance but most people won't right most people will say crisis or problem and then the extreme is non-problem but then I share the data which you can actually look at the rate of deaths from climate disasters such as storms and floods extreme temperatures etc and it's very clear-cut and we have this just incredibly dramatic 98 % decline in those deaths. Which would imply a renaissance. Which would imply renaissance. And that's over like 100 years? That's over the last 100 years.

1:35:45Yeah. And if you go back further, it's even more. And then if you look at the data in terms of damages. Even with the California wildfires a year ago, I think there was something like 30 deaths, which was the most deaths in a fire in recorded history in California from what I remember. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, wildfires is actually, I was going to mention the economic piece of it. Like, even economically, if you adjust for GDP growth, the damages are flat. So you would say it has to be a renaissance, right? I mean, we're much less threatened from climate than ever. And if you think about that in fossil fuels, and you think for a minute or two, you think, well, that actually might have to do positively with fossil fuels, because fossil fuels power the irrigation systems that alleviate drought.

1:36:30Drought is actually the number one climate killer historically. They obviously give us heating and air conditioning to deal with extreme temperatures and even abnormal temperatures. And cold is by far the bigger killer than heat. And we have all kinds of sturdy infrastructure and storm warning systems. So it's this really interesting phenomenon where what actually happened is, as I put it, fossil fuels didn't take a safe climate and make it dangerous. They took a dangerous climate and made it safe. But the interesting question in terms of philosophically is why is it that so many people say we're in a climate crisis Even though from a climate livability perspective or a pro-human perspective We're in a climate Renaissance and I'm telegraphing it a bit Which is that they're they're not looking at it from a pro-human moral perspective They're looking at it from an anti-human moral perspective But but specifically the perspective that our goal should be to reduce or eliminate our impact Which is the idea of being green?

1:37:25Yeah. Is there a factor here of just like media awareness, like the fact that, you know, in times of old, you wouldn't if there was a fire like the Palisades fire, you wouldn't see that everywhere for weeks on end. But now there's much more visibility. So I hear about an earthquake over there or a storm over there. And so it feels like there's more happening. Well, that's a mechanism that people can use. But of course, they could use the opposite mechanism. I mean, they could say, and this would happen all the time, look at this minor climate problem that 100 years ago would have been a total disaster.

1:38:02Like, compare this to the Galveston storm 100 years ago. My conclusion is the people leading the charge who think it's a climate crisis, like, there are a lot of people who are just ignorant of these facts. But the people who know these facts, who know that we're in a renaissance from a climate livability perspective, they're evaluating the state of the climate not by how good it is for humans, but by how little impact we've had. So their goal is an earth with minimal human impact. And by that standard, we are in a climate crisis because we have had some impact. And so my view is if our overall impact is positive for humans, that's a good thing.

1:38:36Their view is if there's more impact, that's a bad thing. And this illustrates that this is overwhelmingly a philosophical disagreement. So whether you view today, once you know the facts about climate livability, whether you view it as a climate renaissance or climate crisis, that's not based on science. Nobody has disputed these facts. I mean, New York Times tried, everyone tried, nobody has successfully. Vivek really popularized this when he ran for president because he learned this in fossil future. And everyone tried to refute him and nobody could do it. So it's only that you have a different, what I call in philosophy, or what we call in philosophy, standard of evaluation.

1:39:12You're looking at the same facts, but you have a different measuring stick. And my basic contention is, if you look at fossil fuels in a balanced way from what I call a human flourishing perspective, the benefits are obviously far, far greater than the negatives, including climate wise. But that's why I have the moral case for fossil fuels and fossil future, which is about why global human flourishing requires more fossil fuels. But it's the number one thing I'm doing is I'm just changing the yardstick by which we're measuring it. And I'm using that very consistently. Do you think AI is taking the wind out of the climate crisis sales in the sense that the climate crisis was a powerful story for the media industrial complex because let's say you have a slow news day or week, the TV can just show a big chart.

1:40:00on the screen of a bunch of counties and they're all red and it looks really bad just because the way the graphic design is done. and now we have this like worldwide sort of systemic fear of this impending. I feel like that. Oh, so you mean you just, there's two sides of the deal. People are talking about AI doom, not climate doom anymore. We're just using way more energy. We're making gas turbines. But then there's also the media story of just giving this sort of like media, the media industrial complex loves a sense of impending doom. Like Eliezer Yudkowsky is more popular than like Al Gore as of yesterday or as of last year.

1:40:37Yeah, that content is getting much more. AI doom is just a bigger, meatier story. I think right now it's much more the energy side. It's much more the energy side. But the doom side really concerns me and AI is actually the only issue I'm considering getting into in terms of mastering it and mastering how to communicate it just because I feel like there's, nobody has really mastered it from the pro-human, pro-technology side. And it's hard to do. No, no, I said this yesterday. I mean, the tech industry right now suffers because nobody can speak into, let's say, like the Super Bowl demographic.

1:41:14If the tech founder went and talked at the Super Bowl during the halftime show and they were like, we're going to automate all the jobs, everyone would be like, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo. I'll hit the boo button. But like, boo, like this guy sucks. Get him out of here. And so it's been very difficult. and people talk about UBI and the sort of post-scarcity element, if you can just bring a bunch of robots online. But nobody, especially at the labs, I feel like has, I don't even think this idea of like a personal tutor or personal expert in your pocket is really, I don't think people appreciate it that much, even though the labs talk about it.

1:41:52So finding the pro-human narrative, I think is super important. It's something that's like critical to the industry because I think we're in the second, the beginnings of like the second real tech clash. You had the sort of like social media tech clash era. Now we're in the AI tech clash era. And it's only going to get worse if we just keep promising the world, hey, we're going to automate your job away. You're motivating me to, this is the tension in my life right now, because I've been working energy for a long time. We've gotten to this point where the opportunity, like a lot of the debate has shifted and I've had some role in that, But also the politics have shifted where I and others have never had more opportunity to actually change the policy for the better.

1:42:32But then AI. You're kind of getting shiny, shiny objects. Well, I'm not deterred yet. But it's but also I like I need to innovate in AI actually for what I'm trying to do in energy. And there's there's anyway. So so it's it's tempting. But I would just say if anyone here is watching who thinks that you might be able to be this, I would much prefer to help you and teach you what I've learned in energy and apply to AI. than do it myself. It would be more of a matter of, like I got plenty to do in energy, but there needs to be somebody doing this. So alex at alexepstein.com, just send me an email.

1:43:05Can you set the table for me on like the state of American, the American energy industry? Because I grew up at a time when the big oil companies were the biggest companies in the world. Exxon Mobil was the largest company in the world. And then now we live in the era of big tech. And I'm wondering if the big oil companies are still well run. Like they don't feel founder led. They don't feel like they're in founder mode. I don't know the names of people who are running large energy companies. I can't name Elon Musk of energy where I can name. Kids at elite universities are not like juniors being like, I'm going to work in oil.

1:43:44I'm older than you guys. And I remember because I was at one of the top math science high schools in the country. And then I was at Duke. And I just remember thinking later, because I myself had no interest in fossil fuels at the time and a little bit of an aversion. I'm like, looking back, none of those brilliant people wanted to do this. Like it wasn't aspirational. So interestingly. But is it an industry where the product has such insane product market fit that you don't need the most elite executives and operators? You get some. So here's the thing is, I don't think oil and gas has attracted overall the best of the best.

1:44:21There are definitely some brilliant people. The bad news is that electricity is much, much worse. Okay, explain that. Well, so the thing about oil and gas is, in a lot of this, the two variables are going to be what's the degree of freedom in the culture, in the political system for achievement, because that's going to determine largely the economic upside. And then there's the issue of the culture. So with the culture, obviously, there's been huge hostility toward oil and gas and, of course, coal as well. And that deters a lot of people early from even wanting to go in. The positive of oil and gas is that it's within the energy industry, it's by far freer than many, many other parts of the energy industry.

1:44:59If you look at, say, particularly in Texas, you look at where the Permian Basin dominates, you can get a permit to drill in the Permian in a few days. Now, if it's the Texas Permian, if it's the New Mexico Permian on federal lands, much different story. You know, that stack of paper is probably 10 times higher. But there's a lot of oil and gas doesn't involve federal permitting, which I hope we talk about trying to fix that at the moment. So that means that you can act a lot more quickly on good ideas, which attracts good people. Now, if we shift to the electricity sector. Real quick, last year I was at kind of a VC founder dinner, and one of the founders there had some company, I think, in advertising, but he had a piece of land in California that he had been drilling for oil.

1:45:47Really? He just had like a small kind of lifestyle business. That's crazy. But ultimately there was some new regulation that was getting passed, and I think that basically put him out of business. I admire all these people in California, to some extent Colorado, and it's hard. I actually refuse to invest in energy just because I advise politicians and it creates conflicts of interest. But I just say as a hypothetical investor. Are we not in a post-conflict era? No, I'm very extreme about conflict avoidance. I appreciate that. But it's, yeah, California is really hard. I mean, you can, of course, imagine high risk, high reward things, but it's just you look at the governor on down.

1:46:24I think we import so much oil, wouldn't we want to produce some? Yes, and there's a bit of a shift there, just as there is in New York and Massachusetts. They're a little bit more open. But it's bad. But if we take the power sector, I mean, first of all, we're talking about something that is institutionalized as a monopoly in the first place. And then not to go into too much detail about the power sector, but we started, quote, unquote, deregulation, which is just a new and in many ways worse form of regulation. We start that a couple decades ago. And broadly speaking, there are two really big types of electricity systems.

1:46:59One is a traditional utility model where the utility does everything. So they have the generation, what's called the transmission, so the longer distance travel, and then the distribution, which is the more local stuff. So in that, you can imagine that doesn't tend to attract the best people because like a lot of monopoly type things, like a lot of the military stuff, it's a cost plus model. And you get paid for spending more money. You get paid for incurring more cost. But then as bad as that is, the market model is a mess in part because they allowed once intermittent solar and wind came on, they allowed that to be treated as a reliable power source when it's not, in fact, a reliable power source.

1:47:39Now, it has utility, but it's primarily a fuel-saving device. So people think like, oh, you hate solar. It's not about that. It's just what does it functionally do? What it functionally does in the vast majority of cases is it saves you fuel on a reliable power source. Because most of what we need in electricity is we need on-demand electricity. And with a solar panel or wind turbine, you can't get on-demand electricity. It's both the existence and the amount is weather-dependent. dependent. So if there are situations such as, say, China with coal, where they have, you know, a lot of coal power, and they need enough coal power, they need that much capacity to meet their peak demand.

1:48:15But if you have a bunch of solar, and particularly if they overbuilt a bunch of solar that they were trying to sell to the rest of the world, and it didn't work as well as they thought, you can have basically coaler, right? Coal plus solar, where every time the sun shines, yeah, to what extent the sun shines, you're saving fuel. And depending on your fuel cost, that can be efficient. Now it tends to be efficient at lower levels versus higher levels. But so the electricity markets got screwed up for many reasons, but that was the biggest one where if you allow solar and wind to compete as reliable sources, it screws up everything.

1:48:48And in particular, it screws up the economics of the reliable sources. Because if they're not, if it's a monopoly and one person owns everything, you can decide, hey, I'm going to pay this much for solar for fuel savings and you can make it work when it works. But if you have a quote market where all the generators are competing independently and you allow solar to be its own independent generator whenever it's available, that natural gas plant doesn't benefit from the fuel savings. It loses operating revenue. And so this is what we did to all the reliable power plants on the grid is we subsidized the hell out of solar and wind, spammed the grid with this fuel saving infrastructure, but on the power markets, it doesn't benefit them.

1:49:23So it's screwed up. So this gets technical, but you can imagine that a lot of the people who've succeeded in this field are, there can be a scam element. You have some smart traders, but their efforts are not going to a productive thing. So it's both talent level issues with the utilities, but then you even have some smart people in the markets, but their intelligence isn't being well directed because it actually can screw up the grid. And then the culture has pushed so many people into the green space where the relative opportunity was much less than in fossil fuels and in nuclear if you had a proper market.

1:49:59So that's, it's really bad situation. You mentioned nuclear, get us up to speed on how you're thinking about nuclear these days. It feels like there's incredible energy, both the government just announced a$2.7 billion grant yesterday. And it feels like there's nuclear startups for the first time in my lifetime getting funded. I learned yesterday that we get enriched uranium from Russia? We did. Hopefully not used to. Yeah, there are other people who can do it too. It's rare. So I know you wrote that really interesting essay yesterday on energy production. Sure. And I think in your space, there's many forms of energy production, but the main thing is going to be electricity production.

1:50:37Yeah. And specifically, it's what's called dispatchable or reliable electricity production. So on demand. We can talk about how AI fits into that. But in general, I think there are four things that have screwed that up. And one is the near criminalization of nuclear power. The issue with that is that's a hard one to unwind quickly. So if you look at, there's this attempt at a nuclear renaissance and I'm working as hard as anyone to try to make that happen, but we're not yet having any kind of rapid build of new nuclear infrastructure. Since the establishment of the we only started conceiving and completing reactors in 2023 for the Vogel plants in South, right in South Carolina.

1:51:24And they were, they actually, you're saying they didn't, there was nothing that went from conception to completion from 1975. So they got completed in 2023, 2023, but with, you know, 10 X cost overruns. So we have now there, there was already some progress before this administration. We had what's called the Advance Act, which was a significant improvement, tried to redirect the NRC. They're definitely much better people at the NRC now. So they're headed in a much, much better direction. Congress, both Republicans and Democrats are aligned. But we're just talking about something that we've lost arguably 50 years of potential progress because we had something in the late 60s where nuclear was, by many estimates, the cheapest form of electricity and the safest in terms of reliable electricity.

1:52:11It was already true with that technology. And we somehow managed - Cheapest, safest, cleanest. Yeah, obviously. So, yeah, I mean, the talking point that I hear about the NRC is that we haven't approved any new nuclear reactor designs, but we also haven't just been copy pasting the ones that work. So it's like twofold problems. And this, the nuclear industry is fascinating in terms of communication because their usual thing is just we have to change everyone's opinion about perception about nuclear and then we can do stuff. Yeah. Which I think the public is more pro-nuclear than they think, even historically.

1:52:41Okay. Right now it is. I think what we have to do, what you're looking at, which is say, wait a second, we could already produce these large nuclear plants and get this incredible result. Why don't we fix that problem first? Because we actually know how to do these things. There are all these exciting companies doing new things. But part of the reason is these communications people have an aversion toward traditional nuclear because it has these negative associations. But you have to kill those associations. You have to kill the idea that this was uniquely dangerous. No, it was uniquely safe. like Chernobyl has nothing to do with what we would ever do in the United States.

1:53:15That was like a half weapon, half reactor. And even that damage doesn't compare to the damage done by a lot of other things in the Soviet Union. As one economist put it, Soviet toasters probably did more damage than Chernobyl. I don't know if that's a stat, but that's... No, no, no. It's well taken. It's like what we need to do is we need to fix the political stuff as quickly as possible. And we're getting some funding there, but we have to recognize that the overall problem is just a political restriction problem. So that is a very exciting thing to do, but it is the least near term of the four things.

1:53:47So the other things are, I mentioned the electricity markets are screwed up. That's part of a broader set of preferences for solar and wind, or for intermittent energy, let's just say. And the other piece of that, which I was involved in and has largely been fixed, but not totally, is the subsidization of intermittent energy. So that was in the big, beautiful bill. That was a lot of what I spent 2025 on is killing as many of, trying to help people who wanted to kill those kill as many as possible. So we've got the nuclear criminalization. We've got the preferences for intermittent energy. The biggest thing by far is we have the prohibitions on reliable fossil fuel energy.

1:54:23And that's, you'll hear about things like the endangerment finding. There was the Biden clean power plan 2.0 that basically made it illegal for existing coal plants to function for any new natural gas plants to be built past a certain date. And then we have the general permitting problem, which is anti-development permitting. So you just imagine we had all of these factors restricting the supply of electricity, and then we had the previous administration and others artificially increasing demand through electrification, forced electrification, so trying to shut off natural gas in homes, trying to force us to use EVs, which I'm totally in favor of people using freely, but we pay over$50 ,000 per EV.

1:55:02Like taxpayers pay over$50 ,000. in 500. No, no, no. That's just one small part of it. We could go into all the different subsidies because there's a lot of fuel economy trading where you basically get... It's wild too because you get the subsidy and then the consumer buys a vehicle for $60 ,000 and it's worth half that in like 12 months. Yeah, but it's also the way the fuel economy things work at the federal level and the California level. A lot of what they do is they set the fuel economy standards impossibly high for regular vehicles and then And they give EVs this ridiculously high fuel economy score.

1:55:38And so everyone, Tesla on down, just makes huge amounts of money trading their emissions credits. Oh, got it. And that's per vehicle. Yeah. And by the way, this is something the current administration has been doing a good job in terms of the administration. Executive actions try and undo a lot of these things. But you want as many undone congressionally. So again, we have these factors of artificially restricting supply, artificially increasing demand. And then, of course, the one you guys are focused on is the organic increase in demand via AI. So what I'm trying to fix is just stop restricting supply.

1:56:12How do you predict that this feels like rising energy costs have always been a political issue? They're going to be at the forefront, I think, of a lot of debates going forward. politicians I imagine are going to try to score points by you know beating back data center development just because they know their constituents are going to cheer it on how are you advising all these different players at the at the center of these debates on on how to how knowing that energy usage is going to go up dramatically with with data centers one way or another, what is your, how do we kind of thread the needle?

1:56:54So there's what to advocate policy wise and what to advocate messaging wise. So let's start with messaging wise. So one thing is to pin the recent and baked in rises on the proper culprits. So there's an attempt to pin it on reducing subsidies. So it's in particular, I try not to be political about this, but there's this idea of Republicans reduce subsidies. Therefore, that's why your electricity bills go up. The The timing doesn't even work on these things. The logic is actually the opposite. The subsidies, by depriving, one of the things they've done is they've deprived the reliable power plants of capital.

1:57:30They've had less reliable power. And so what happens is you have shortfalls in supply relative demand, and that puts the market prices up. In particular, what's called capacity markets, which you see particularly in regions like PJM, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, that whole region. Like those prices go up. So there's just all this false narrative. So what people need to recognize is the reason prices are going up is because of prohibitions on reliable power and preferences for unreliable power and then artificial forced electrification. Like they need to understand that. The data centers, one thing people need to understand is new demand does not inherently increase electricity prices.

1:58:09In fact, usually what it does is it decreases electricity prices because you have the same amount, you have relatively the same amount of capital spending spread out over more different entities. You'll have different, you know, Burgum Interior Secretary, former governor, like he and Chris Wright, Secretary of Energy, have been pointing out, hey, North Dakota is looking really good price-wise. And they've had massive increases in data centers. Because they've been investing more in energy? Well, no, no, because the data centers, there's on any grid, you have the peak usage and then you have the regular usage and you very rarely hit peak.

1:58:41So when you have more demand, you're actually spreading out the costs among more. So one of the questions with AI that's interesting is what's the flexibility of the demand profile going to be? Because the more flexible it is, the less you need to increase the peak, which is good to increase the peak, but that's the most expensive thing to do. the more you can use off-peak, the more you're actually lowering prices. And this is already happening a little bit where sometimes if you prompt an image generator, it will, in the middle of the day, it'll go across the world. And it'll use it where it's dark there in the middle of the night because there's maybe more energy or something away from peak load.

1:59:19What do you think about my question of energy production growth in America, 2026? Are we going to see a break in the curve? Are we already seeing a break in the curve? Is this even the right question to be asking about just energy progress in America over the next few years? I mean, it's a good measure of progress, particularly industrial progress, to look at energy production in general. In a country, and the fact that we've had flat electricity usage, if you look at ours versus China's, I think we're at about one-fifth their industrial electricity usage. So those are really bad signs. So it's a sign that you're being less productive than you can and often that you're offshoring things because you have such a restrictive anti-development environment.

2:00:02With the electricity thing, it's one of these things where I'm trying to create the future, so I try not – like I'm trying to make the future happen. Yes, yes, yes. But you're rooting for 5 % growth this year. Well, yeah, I'm rooting for the enablement of the capacity. The nice thing is you have a lot of smart people in the administration who are really interested in this problem. So that's a good thing at the margins because then you can make things happen more quickly. You have private industry is very focused on this because of AI, whereas they haven't been before. So you're getting a lot of ingenuity.

2:00:37And it's going to be really interesting to see. There's going to be a lot of things at the margins, and we'll see how they add up. I mean, one thing is we're using very small oil plants, natural gas plants. They're talking about using the backup generators in Walmart. on the ground. There's going to be these interesting questions. And we have a new class of smart people who are now being added, whose now focus is on generating more dispatchable power. I love that. There's lots of things you can do. I mean, there's interesting things you can do with batteries. This I'm in agreement on Elon with, you can build batteries and you can charge them off peak.

2:01:13People think you need solar and wind to go with batteries, but actually the easiest way to deal with batteries and the way most batteries get charged today is you have a reliable source of energy and you charge it off peak. You can run your nuclear power plant at night and charge batteries. And then for a few hours, you'll have those batteries to meet peak demand. You can also what's called uprate natural gas plants. So a lot of the natural gas plants in the country were built a generation or two ago, and they might get 30 % less capacity than a new natural gas plant. But you can, without dealing with the fundamental supply chain issues in many cases, you can actually add capacity to hundreds and hundreds of existing gas plants.

2:01:51So we've got, there's a lot of industrial potential. There's a friendly administration. What we have fundamentally though, is ultimately the administration doesn't properly make any law. It enforces the law, it administers the law. And so what we need as much as possible is to do things congressionally. So subsidies were one piece of it. The thing right now that I'm very focused on is permitting reform. and that is because it's impossible to get permits for things. It's so difficult and I don't know how much time we have, but there's a lot that needs to be fixed and it's actually hanging by a thread right now.

2:02:21We have a lot of time because you're our new energy corps. Yes, yes, we'll have to have you back. We can't let you leave without talking about the actions in Venezuela, how that's impacting kind of global energy markets. Everybody on X has their own theory of why we did it and all that stuff, But let's talk about realities of like how this can impact just different geopolitical dynamics. All right. Let me just say one thing to the audience, because one reason I was excited about coming here is you've got a group of people that's very engaged. I think interested in these issues, but that I don't always get to speak to.

2:02:58And I just posted this on X, but I want people to know, like, if you find this exciting, we're hiring. And I just put out, you know, for one of my groups, Energy Freedom Fund, which is the only principled pro-freedom lobbying group in the world, basically. We are, yeah,$50 ,000 referral bonus if you can find anybody. So, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And we have an assessment. There's an assessment that will tell us whether you can do it or not. Oh, interesting. So it's two hours. So if people are up for it, it's worth doing. If you do a decent job at all, we'll at least give you good feedback. But yeah, that's my limiter right now in fixing these problems is we have enough money, fortunately, but we have a talent deficit.

2:03:36So this is one reason I wanted to come on today. So let's talk about Venezuela. I mean, Venezuela, I try to... be a master of energy and not pretend to be a master of other things. So obviously many aspects of the Venezuela situation are beyond energy. I think there's two really interesting things about this that are important. So one is that this is not making a difference, a big difference to global oil markets in the near, near future. So we're talking about something where Venezuela is kind of like, Venezuelan oil in some ways is like nuclear power, whereas it used to be good and it should have gotten better.

2:04:12But, you know, you're talking about going from... It's all potential. Yeah, well, it was once, I think its peak was three and a half million barrels a day. So right now we're at about 102 million barrels a day. And by the barrel, barrel is 42 gallons. It's about 500 million gallons or so of oil produced a day. And 1 % of that right now, a little less than 1 % is coming from Venezuela. And both because of how dilapidated so much of the industry is, how much incompetence there is, and also because physically the crude they use in terms of heavy crude is more difficult to process than other things.

2:04:47It's not like this is just you're going to go from one to three anytime soon. So there's a lot of investment. This is not any kind of slam dunk. By the way, Canada has in some ways better oil. It's a lot freer country. I think we're totally underutilizing Canada as a trading partner. So it's an interesting, I think economically near term, it's not super interesting. It's not as exciting as people think. it's probably most exciting for oil field services. If you invest a bunch of money and send a bunch of people down there, yeah, that benefits Halliburton and Schlumberger and that kind of thing.

2:05:18Also benefits potentially Gulf Coast refineries who are very good at this kind of crude. Then they don't need to get it from Canada, so then it comparatively hurts Canadian people. So there's that whole thing. The thing I find most interesting, though, is that for the first time that I can ever remember, a pet issue of mine is now in the public, or this pet issue and the public, which is that all of these oil countries stole our oil. Like this is, I'm really, now I don't always agree with exactly how the administration is saying it, but it's very important and read the book, The Prize is really good in this regard by Daniel Yergin.

2:05:51Yeah, yeah. He, he, he doesn't, he's not as judgmental as I am about this. He probably doesn't have as negative a judgment, but you just look in country after country, what happened was they had some, you know, random, mild dictator type person or king or, you know, wasn't the most evil person in the world. But they made a very clear deal with the West. So you take Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia couldn't even find water before we came there, before the West and particularly the U.S. came there and standard oil, right? And they couldn't find water. That was their big problem at the time. And then we, of course, make it possible.

2:06:27We get what's called these concessions. So we're getting a kind of right. And what happens is just they keep pulling back on these things. And because of cultural and political forces at the time, nobody stands up to them. So they keep stealing more and more. And then they just totally nationalize it. They declare it their national heritage. They've totally broken the agreement. And then they use this to fund some of the worst dictatorial behavior in the world. So I think it's very, very important that people are now saying explicitly, hey, we had rights to that oil and it's been stolen. And there's some sort This has been memed to no end over the last few days, which is, you know, when people see Trump say that's our oil or something to that effect, people normally dunk on it because they're like, well, how could that possibly be the case?

2:07:12It's we don't own this is not the 51st state. It's not our land. Right. But you're pushing back and saying, no, we actually did originally have. Yeah, I mean, it's not we, it's specific companies, right? So we need to be clear on it. It's not the government's thing. But it is an interesting, it's a real case of reparations because the seizures happened not too long ago. I mean, you're talking about a lot of them culminated in the 70s and then happened. You're talking about the 40s, maybe through the 70s and 80s. And then even once they nationalize it, they screw over companies in different kinds of ways.

2:07:46So I think this is a really good thing, but it needs to be talked about in a very precise way. One thing that Trump will do that I think is wrong is like he'll have sort of a feeling of like, I want all these other countries resources. So like I'm so excited about Greenland and even making Canada the 51st state and then talking about Ukraine in certain ways. And I think there's you're on really firm ground when somebody actually broke contracts with your companies. There's a difference between like, oh, I'm really excited. like having the mentality that others have. It would be nice to have access to that versus there was a time when there was a contract in place.

2:08:24And access, we can access them in a very real way by trading with them. So with Canada, we have enormous opportunity that I think we're squandering right now. I think we should be, there's a lot, I mean, Ukraine is a whole other issue, but I think we should be supporting Ukraine a lot more. So yeah, but it is a really interesting narrative shift that is a good thing. Well, thank you for getting us up to speed. We have to jump to our next guest. Come back on again very soon. But we'd love to have you back on the show. Anytime. This was fantastic. Thank you so much. The book is Fossil Future. The author is Alex Epstein.

2:08:54Go get that job. Do the assessment. Thank you so much for stopping by. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more, all with great customer service. Our next guest is the founder of Ring at Amazon. Jamie Siminoff is at CES. We're going to have him break down how CES is going. Jamie, sorry for keeping you waiting. Thanks so much for taking the time to jump on the show. It's great to meet you. How are you doing? I'm doing great. I would love to hear how is CES? I imagine you've been going a long time.

2:09:29I've actually never been. It feels like a playground for me. I'd love to go sometime. How is it this year? How does it compare to other years? What are you introducing there? uh it's it's so it's it's pretty fun overall c.s pretty fun uh i think this is like my 15th or 17th year or something like that so it's been a long time yeah um yeah i started i i started i started you know building the booth myself and driving in here in a u-haul truck um and you know graduate i've graduated now to a booth that you know is built by professionals wait what how do How did you build the first booth? Is this like plywood?

2:10:07Or are you a second? With scraps in a cave. I actually took the Shark Tank set. I was on Shark Tank. Yeah. And I took the Shark Tank set and we put it in a U-Haul truck, brought it to CES. It turns out that you can't use power tools as a non-union person at CES. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we were violently threatened. I couldn't afford union labor. So I'm like, guys, you're going to have to pull me out of here in handcuffs. Like I have to get this booth done. That's crazy. We would literally build the booth and it got bigger and bigger. And now we've graduated. Okay. Tell me the story of Shark Tank.

2:10:43And I want to know if you could play it back with everything you know now, do you think you could have convinced the sharks to invest? Everything I know now, sure. I would have told them I'm going to build the world's largest home security company and sell it for a billion dollars. Do you want to invest? But you could have told them that. You think they would have gone for that? I should have told them that. Don't worry. I'll let you invest in a$7 million valuation. It's going to sell for a billion. You're totally fine. Yeah, one of the greatest misses. But it is like, to be fair to them at the time, like I didn't know what that was going to do.

2:11:13You know, it was, we were door-bought. We were figuring it out. Like a lot of, you know, like a lot of startups and things, we didn't necessarily pivot, but we pivoted inside of our own sort of mission many times to get to where we are today. Yeah. And how do you describe the scope of the company? I mean, you teased it. You said it's the world's largest home security company, but what's the shape of that? What's the footprint? What does your organization look like? Take me through sort of a day in life. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, because of an Amazon, there's some things we reported. So we're over a hundred million cameras out there, profitable business.

2:11:46Hit that app loving gong, John. There we go. It's a camera shaking hit. Love it. Congratulations. I mean, did you ever think you'd be at that scale or what was the initial introduction. No, I remember when I launched this thing, Nest, I think when Nest sold to Google, it was reported, I don't know if it's true, but they were doing like 30 ,000 units, either a month or a quarter. And I remember thinking to myself, man, if I ever got to 30 ,000, if I ever got that big, holy. And now, I mean, it's like literally 100 million plus cameras out there, global. And for me, the mission to make neighborhoods safer, the impact we've had there has been substantial.

2:12:39And I truly am proud of, I really try to focus on those things and then the output, let it happen. Let people reward us for purchasing a camera because they think it's going to make their home or neighborhood safer. Yeah. I know it makes a ton of sense. Can you take me through sort of how you are thinking about the product suite, the feature sets, like how you're positioning the overall portfolio, and then some of the announcements today. Yeah. So, I mean, from a macro side, I look at AI as IA. So we're the intelligent assistant. And so our job is now where, you know, when I launched Ring, a motion alert was like mind blowing.

2:13:18Like, dude, you got a motion alert from your front door to your phone? Like, that's crazy. Now, you hear them too often. And so our job is to use AI to basically curate for you as an individual, unique to your home, what you want to see, when you should be interacting with it, and really take down the number of alerts and increase the efficacy of them. So that's like from a macro, that's what we're doing. How are you thinking about the trade-off of cloud-based artificial intelligence, obviously processing a ton of video constantly. That feels like something that needs to be done on a server. At the same time, there's privacy.

2:13:54So people might want it done on device, but that creates power constraints and all sorts of things. I mean, also, I feel like being at Amazon is great because I feel like most people trust Amazon to be secure because it's AWS and all this stuff. But how have you tussled with where the AI lives and the benefits and costs and trade-offs there? So for us, it's layers. You try to determine it's a human or emotion event at the camera level. So you're not just flooding to your point, like you're not flooding the AI or the servers, the cloud with the stuff because it's very expensive. I mean, it's using a lot of power, using a lot of processing.

2:14:27So it's like trying to have like these different layers, but you know, where we like to end is the cloud. We like to have the cloud as the place that's doing the final processing. AI is moving so fast that in our area, I think anything you put at the edge is going to age like fish on a hot day. And so we're trying to be very careful not to put too much intelligence at the edge because that intelligence, it decays so quickly that by the time you actually ship that product, it's maybe no longer intelligent. And I want my team to be able to write on and build code and put out features that are literally the best in the world at that moment.

2:15:03And the cloud really is the only place to do it right now for that final sort of piece. Where are you most excited for various models to improve? Do we need capability advancement or do you feel like there's a capability overhang where there's enough product that it's more about implementation? It's such a good question because there's so many places where we're putting models and different models and custom models. There's so much coming out. But I would say where you're going with it, I think we are starting to now. I think that the AI is ahead of what we can sort of like, you know, chew and sort of digest our food with.

2:15:46I think it's actually getting farther along than we can put the features around it, the UI around it and, and have customers understand it. So I do think it's actually starting to get almost faster than we are in that. And it's up to us like now to try to figure out like how to get, because again, no one, our customers don't buy technology. They buy something that makes their home feel safer. It makes their home better. or gives them more attachment to their home. They're not buying the best AI. They're buying the best service for their home. And so it's our job to sort of not sell them technology, but sell them, obviously, technology in the background, but sell them the features and the services.

2:16:21But I do think I have not been able to find lately, and it's amazing how quickly this is happening. Every idea I have, it's like the AI is ahead of the idea. Whereas before, the team would be like, well, it's not really there yet. You can't do that. You don't understand. And now it seems like it's really just going so much faster than even I can sort of think. Is that reengaging you as a leader? I mean, it's been over a decade. I feel like there's a lot of times when post-acquisition, you're at a large company. It can be exhausting. Maybe you want to go fish all day or something. I don't know if you fish.

2:16:58But the AI moment, it feels like it's been reengaging a lot of business leaders. Have you had that effect over the last year? Totally. Totally. Like there's so much we can do. We can build it so fast, get it out. I mean, we launched today. I live in Pacific Palisades, so I live in the fire zone. and um you know it's like yeah as you know like it was a crazy thing yeah so i was able to go from like living there seeing what happened there yeah you know and then building a feature that we launched today which i think will hopefully be a a way to assist uh in future fires which we did with watch duty sure where now you'll get an alert as a ring customer if you're in a fire zone we had over 10 000 cameras in the palisades area yeah and so now you now you would get an alert that says like would you like to join in to watch duty and give them sort of data and now we'll have an accurate up to the minute map from ai looking for embers looking for smoke and and seeing where the fire is jumping and so now we can give real-time information to to everyone um and hopefully yeah i want to talk i want to talk a little bit yeah kind of a little bit about kind of some more sci-fi stuff i'm curious to kind of get your opinion on so john and i uh John's in Pasadena.

2:18:08I'm in Malibu. So this time last year, John, like I didn't have electricity, cell service, anything like that. So you live in a house that previously burned down. Yeah, my house burned down in 2018, was fully rebuilt. And then you moved in. And six months after I bought it, I was like, oh, it's - There's a reason it burned down. No, but it burned down because like an ember had floated from a faraway fire. and embers floated to like six houses in my neighborhood and all them just burned down. And luckily the majority of the homes were fine. And I was just thinking like, there's got to be better, um, uh, as we, you know, head into the kind of robotics era, there has to be better, you know, detection is one thing, but then actual response feels like an inevitable next step over time.

2:18:55When, if it's literally a single ember that can, you know, be the reason that a multimillion dollar property burns to the ground, we should be able to detect that quickly and put it out without having, you know, a bunch of, uh, heroes in a truck drive, you know, 10 miles and come put it out with water. Right. So how are you thinking about kind of like actual response and, and is that even something that ring would do, or do you think there's other startups that should, uh, leverage your guys's detection? So, um, um, this is where I'm probably, we were, we worked with watch duty. So our, our fire watch, which is our system that we go into where AI is now watching your camera you've put it in this mode and said like yes i want to share this that then pipes right into watch duty watch duty is what's happening the command center has watch duty up residents have watch duty on their app so that is the centralized place where the map is forming on the fire and i my hope is that and being in the fire myself i saw that like a bush is smoldering next to a house and i could go put it out with my feet you know people are like how how'd you put out the fire?

2:19:56And I'm like, I literally would stamp on it until it was out, put some dirt on it. Like now if that had kept going, I don't know like the exact incident, but like, yes, that's what happens. Like that keeps going and it burns a house down and that house starts up fire and puts out more embers. And so if you could see that on a camera and say, oh wow, like this thing has jumped over to this area that's a quarter mile away and there's smoldering next to this house, you can put it out so much easier and deploy those resources. So I think that's why what's great about this one as we're bringing the information in, and then it's going to watch duty, which is already being used by all of the people that are deploying the resources today.

2:20:32Yeah. Are you excited about robots and drones as responders to various home security, wildfires? You have Boston Dynamics. Sorry, Amazon has a drone that flies around your house, but is that a ring project or is that? I built that. You built that? No way. Tell us about that. How did that go? And then specifically, so Boston Dynamics has been showing off their new humanoids. I've been wanting somebody to build a humanoid home security product forever. I'd love to have just a menacing. I mean, it's having various criminals knowing that most homes now have video. I mean, just those signs that you put in the ground.

2:21:12American flags apparently help. That helps a little bit. But yeah, I'd love to know more about drones and robotics. So there's different layers to drones. I mean, so you have companies like Axon out there that are doing police drones and like literally are, you know, going miles. So for both fires or responding to something, there's that layer. And then I think there's going to be layers down all the way to where we were, which is like, I'd say the complete other side, which is inside the home. So having like a small drone inside the home, it can fly around, see what's going on for security. I'm very bullish on the whole robotic space.

2:21:47in general, I think AI has also, what was so hard for us years ago when we were building this thing is now, I don't want to say it's easy, but wow, is it different? Like there's a real tailwind behind us. And so hopefully, I mean, you guys are in LA, maybe I'll bring something by the studio in a few months. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'd love that. Yeah, but more specifically, is the idea of a humanoid pacing around your property, is that a reasonable deterrent? Have you built one? There's one in your garage right now. The reason I say it is because when people are like, oh, you have a robot that's going to do your laundry, it's like, well, I have a wonderful woman who does my laundry, and I like employing this person.

2:22:37And if you give me an$80 ,000 a year robot or$80 ,000 robot that's going to depreciate and it's going to do a worse job, I'm like, I'm happy with the human, at least for the next few years, right? Whereas hiring somebody to stand in your backyard all night long, that's a brutal job. That's like 150K a year, I don't know, for somebody that's actually worth... And it's also, there's all these studies of security guards that their effectiveness goes down, like it literally like like algorithm it's like uh it just falls off um and you think about it's like just because you get so bored right like you're sitting doing the same thing every day nothing's happening so it's like the effectiveness of a security guard is actually like a human security guard is very tough to be because you're not it's not normal that you're actually doing something on the security side uh so i do think robotics i think at the higher end places enterprise maybe there will be you know humanoid uh security i we always look at it from high volume low cost Like I'm, I'm always on like the high volume, low cost residential size where we start.

2:23:41And so, you know, what can we build to bring robotics in, into and around the home and the neighborhood, um, that's affordable at high, high volumes. I don't think, I don't think that's going to be a humanoid for a long time. That said, if a humanoid costs$500 or something at some point and you could do it, of course, like it's great. I think that's going to be great. saying to john the teleoperation potential here which is like hey ring detects something i have somebody somebody could be anywhere in the world suddenly they can pop into this embodied form factor and actually be a physical deterrent because i mean so many people in i mean la talk to anybody that lives i mean the palisades had like uh prior to the fire an insane break-in epidemic i have friends who would have multiple break-ins in their home per year super uh like elite operators that would come in, use metal detectors, figure out where your safes were, pull them out, throw them out in a truck.

2:24:37It'd be like five minutes, everything's gone. So there needs, like video is not enough for true deterrence. Like there's going to have to be physical. And we have stuff like virtual security guard that is, uh, you can set it in like, you know, for my house, when I go to sleep, I set virtual security guard on. If someone comes on the property, they're notified, those are human. So like there's response. So I think that's, I do think you're correct though in how you're looking at it, which is like, it's not just technology. Like the idea that like just technology is going to solve everything is not correct.

2:25:08I think we can use our IA, like our intelligent assistant to bring people into the scene when they need to be on a limited basis. And when you do that, I think, I think that's how, like, for example, what you're talking about, the Palisades, like how you would reduce that crime or even try to zero out that crime, which I do believe we can do over the next few years with deploying the AI as well as merging it with other human responses. How has the enterprise side or the B2B side of the business evolved? What's the shape of it? What trade-offs have you made to focus on particular niches or verticals?

2:25:44I'm interested to hear. Because obviously this technology applies everywhere. Yeah, so we really started focusing residential. That pulled us into small-medium business. Over half a million small-medium businesses use us. We don't even know exactly all of them. Let's go. Yeah, of course. They treat it like homes. They buy it as like a prosumer, effectively. Exactly. So we don't know exactly how many, but we think it's definitely north of, call it half a million. Yeah. And it's like how the iPhone sort of slowly got into, or not even that slowly, but got into the enterprise. Oh, yeah. Like, Apple didn't have a bunch of salespeople go out and sell enterprise iPhone.

2:26:24Yeah. The CEO brought the iPhone in that they had and said, I don't want this other one anymore. I'm not using BlackBerry anymore. That's exactly right. And so I think we've kind of gone slowly up the stack. Today, we actually launched a whole line of new cameras that are multi-4K lens, like really higher end. We call it the elite line. And I do think that will sort of get us just kind of similar to the iPhone getting into enterprise. I think it will pull us in. and we'll kind of see how that goes. We also have an app store that people can build custom applications because historically, again, pre-AI, a camera did security.

2:27:03That was all it could do in a reasonable, cost-efficient way. Now, if you think about a coffee shop, if you have ring cameras all over your coffee shop, why isn't it telling you that a table was dirty and someone wanted to sit? Why isn't it telling you about the line? Why isn't it telling you about which team is the fastest? We're seeing it. Like it's all there. And so being able to allow the long tail to be built by entrepreneurs, just like any marketplace or any app store, I do think we're going to unlock a lot of value for enterprise and small medium business that way. So I'm really excited.

2:27:35We actually just launched that today, too. We launched a bunch of stuff today. Yeah, I can imagine that being really good. Have you been focused more on job sites than large enterprise software campuses, that type of security? That feels like maybe a separate problem, but I can imagine you getting there at some point. Yeah, job sites have been great. We have a lot of solar-powered cameras, so people use them. You'll see them on a pole. We have cameras with lights, so that's also good on job sites. Someone walks onto the job site at night, light goes on, camera's there. we have a talk down so you can say like you're being recorded so like there's a lot like we had the virtual security guard sure um we launched today one of the trailers so if you see those trailers that are out the parking lots yeah um yeah it's usually solar panel on top and a bunch of cameras that type of thing i've seen those yeah so we launched one that's more of i'd say like a product lower cost in that market again high volume low cost yeah um so we're gonna i wouldn't be surprised in the next couple years we sort of really have a big dent in the enterprise but we're not going to do it through the front door.

2:28:35We're not going to sort of, not responding to RFPs. We're not going to have an enterprise sales force. We're going to just, you know, come in like the iPhone, like let it come in. I feel like, I feel like you could spin that up in a heartbeat at Amazon, but it makes sense for the overall strategy. One last question and we'll let you get back to CES. How do you think about camera sensor technology in security cameras and door cameras? I was looking specifically at like a wildlife, life, like a squirrel cam for my son who's four and a half. And I was, but I'm also like a camera nerd. We use like, you know, Sony FX threes and full frame cinema lenses here.

2:29:13And I was like, I sort of want like a 4k, not just 4k, but like full frame cinema lens hardened just to find my squirrels. And it's like a ridiculous thing. I don't know that that's a real, real product, but how do you think about the, the, the learning curve and just the diffusion of just better camera sensors, better lenses into these commodity consumer products over time? Yeah. So there's definitely a diminishing return. You know, you can go to like a 20K sensor. It's like not going to, for a normal, again, very special applications, yes. But for like a normal home, it's not going to give you any more value.

2:29:48I do think 4K is a giant leap. We now have a whole 4K line. With our Elite line, we have like now like multi-4K lenses that are our lens down to the pixels. So it's really pixel, like what you really want to look at is pixel density. Like that, it's actually not 4K, 2K. It's like, what is the pixel density that the camera delivers? And then that's also like, the AI can only process what it sees. Like the camera can only be as smart as what it sees. I do think the current line of 4K cameras we have right now, for most residential use cases, are as good as you're going to want at the price point.

2:30:24And then we'll just kind of let, just like everything in technology as 8K sensors come down, as bandwidth goes up, we'll kind of keep adding that. But I do think we're right now, like, kind of right at the edge of that curve of price, you know, price to sort of quality what you need. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Jordy, anything else? No, this is super fun. Thank you so much for coming on the show. This is a lot of fun. Appreciate you making the time. Great to meet you. Happy customer. Overnight success. Thank you for... Yeah, exactly. Overnight success, exactly. It's amazing. It's amazing.

2:30:52Well, enjoy the rest of CES. Have a great rest of your season. You guys can come back on soon. And we'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Goodbye. Quickly, let me tell you about Restream. One live stream, 30-plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. We have an exciting set of next guests. We have Jeff Liu and Jay Paul. Let's bring them in. Joining TVPN. They are. How are you guys doing? Welcome to the show. Good. How are you? Thanks for having us. We're good. Congratulations. Can you set the table for us on the most recent raise? How did it come together? What's the goal of the fundraiser?

2:31:28How are you describing the strategy of the fund these days? I mean, I'm happy to kick it off. I mean, anti-fund. We think that boomer VCs are boring. And just like there are UA companies and the next generation of American entrepreneurs taking over just the business ecosystem, I think the same opportunity exists for VC. What was the original anti-fund? How did you come up with that name? What are you anti? The boomers. Yeah, a lot of times we're both founders and we know how hard it is dealing with VCs and move slow and updates and not providing any value and they just become a nuisance. And I think we were very founder first and wanted to bring a value add I think what we can bring is like distribution, marketing, all of these things, expertise on social media, advertising.

2:32:24We worked with obviously invested into OpenAI, but then worked with the Sora team to help launch the product, brought in the content. So that's just like one really good example. But that's what we wanted to do is just be anti the establishment, essentially, and bring something new to the table that wasn't just money. We believe money is a commodity and that things beyond that are way more valuable in helping grow the companies. And I think the double click on that, I think as founders and as VCs, you have to be anti-establishment. I mean, we are disrupting existing large players. If we don't want to take over existing large markets, then you should not be in this business.

2:33:08So that should be what you expect as a founder, but you should expect that from your investors. If your investor is not as hungry as you, maybe you choose other investors. What can you say on fund strategy, ownership targets? My assumption is that you guys are multi-stage, so you're kind of flexible. I imagine there's pre-seed rounds that you'd be excited about leading, but at the same time, you don't mind participating in a later stage round where it's a breakout company and you can add fuel to the fire. I think the way we think about it is that we've taken barbell, but we call it extreme barbell.

2:33:45We want to be the first check and technical founders. And that's people just dropping out and where their first phone call will put 100, 250K, just put them in the business. Or we identify and built really great relationships with Sam Altman and Mark Chen of OpenAI. and we want to support what we think will be generational defining companies. And I think everything in the middle is very hard. And I think we know where we're strong and where we're potentially weaker. Yeah. Tell me more about this Sora partnership or that project. How did that come together? What was the reaction? I feel like...

2:34:26Yeah, did you hesitate at all about giving up your name and likeness? I mean, you and Sam Altman, you guys kind of jumped first. and I think it went surprisingly fine, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but what was the reaction? Yeah, so they wanted to build a social media platform and we met at the inauguration with Sam Altman. We were talking about how there needs to be a new social media platform, what does that look like, et cetera. And so we just started having idea brainstorms and it eventually turned into what Sora is and then just helping them on the functionality. You know, me and my brother's expertise of however many years we've been making content, all the little dials, triggers, change this button, change that button, make this easier.

2:35:07Boom, boom, boom. This is what fans are looking for. Super detailed stuff. But then once it finally came to launch, yeah, I gave my name, image, and likeness. And I knew it was going to get crazy. I wasn't hesitant, and it just caught fire. And obviously, we saw the results and what happened. And it was a pretty phenomenal experience in marketing and showcasing what the internet loves these days. Yeah, one of our portfolio companies, Archive.com, tracked a billion impressions in six days of Jake and Sora. That's so many. Makes sense. What advice are you giving to folks who want to become creators in 2026?

2:35:57It feels like a completely different era from the Vine days. At the same time, there's some lessons that never change. But how are you seeing it? Yeah, I would say authenticity is everything. I think showing your whole entire life is the key if you're a new and up-and-coming creator, like the struggles, what you're going through. tell tell your audience about financially what you're doing or what you're having to do um talk to them about your ups your downs share with them your your life story and then you just have to be posting and posting and i think a lot of people aren't good at editing like simple stuff captions music video timing how long is the video um so it is very difficult and you're competing with every single platform as a content creator you're competing as a content creator i'm technically competing against Netflix why are they gonna watch you know some Jake Paul Instagram videos versus going on onto Netflix and so you have to realize that you're actually playing one of the hardest games and people think it's easy but it's actually a very very technical thing and you have to have a certain skill set to be able to do it and you have to be entertaining you have to be providing something that's a niche that no one has ever seen before We have the Paul brothers.

2:37:15We have the speeds. We have Mr. Beast doing his videos. We have Whistling Diesel blowing up trucks and cars. So what are you doing? Yeah, John has talked about this. You used to be able to get a million views by just having a Ferrari. Now you need to blow it up. The game's changed. It went from have the car or rent the car to give the car away where you take the tax deduction to now you must destroy it. How do you, so 2025, there was a lot of founders doing like rage bait marketing. This style of like using rage bait in content was popularized on YouTube and various social media platforms. I would say, Jake, you've done this very, very effectively at times of being under knowing I'm going to put out this video.

2:38:03It's going to make a lot of people mad, but a lot of people are going to enjoy it, too. And they're going to become fans. And I'm OK to alienate some people. how have you kind of like evolved like that even like what is your framework what is the right amount of rage to generate in an audience and because you really need to thread the needle so the way I look at entertainment is invoking emotion you want to invoke fear sadness, happiness joy good not just fear and sadness but yeah you need all of them You need all of them. The full spectrum. That's what I'm committed to, and I don't care who likes it or not.

2:38:45That's what I'm doing. Emotion. I posted a video where I was acting like I was depressed, traveling around the world in my jet and on vacation. I was like, what is life even about? I was trolling, and my friends texted me like, yo, bro, are you okay? I'm like, yeah, bro. But the video got like 30 million views because everyone was like, oh, this is like I'm kind of sad too. Yeah, what is life even about? and just different random things like that. So just be committed as an entertainer to invoking emotion and you can't care about the result of what anyone thinks because at the end of the day, people will come back because they feel something.

2:39:21That's the key. Someone asked me to ask you, all-time record for bench press. I've done 315, like three times. There we go. That's a good go. There we go. What do you find yourself when you're talking with founders, bringing up stories from the fight game and different... Because I met... Building a company can feel at times like waking up, opening your email, getting punched in the face. Maybe an investor is rejecting you. A customer went with a competitor, et cetera, et cetera. You're pretty used to getting punched in the face and chewing glass at this point. And I imagine some of those learnings carry over.

2:40:06yeah 100 you know i say after boxing everything is easy because you're actually physically having to fight every day and taking the licks and punches and you have to bob and weave sometimes after the first round you go back to the corner boxing is a great analogy for life and your companies you have to go back to the corner talk to your coaches reset come out for the for the next round and you can be losing a fight and still win in the end um not me against anthony joshua my jaw is broken but um i'm sorry but you're still yapping people were wondering can he talk on the show and you know here it's proof yeah i have a little bit of a lisp right now because of it but um we're just pushing through this is story shake actually yeah this is the AI version of me, I tapped in.

2:40:59Can you talk, maybe both of you could talk to me a little bit about focus. You're both involved in a ton of stuff, you know, boxing, content, investing, building companies. W. At the same time, yeah, W. At the same time, I think of you as very insightful early on on the importance of daily work, daily repetition. It's every day, bro, is a meme, but I actually think it's deeply insightful and the key to many successes. And I credit a lot of the growth that we've had here with becoming a daily show instead of just this show that is every once in a while. And I'm wondering how you deal with focus and when is the time to go all in and do something every single day?

2:41:42Yeah, you have to figure out that org chart for yourself in terms of what do you know feeds the rest of the ecosystem the most. And for me, that's boxing. But I look to Elon Musk as an example, right? How he's built some of the biggest companies in the world and he's managing all of these teams and he's devoted and sleeps on the couch in the offices. You have to be that level of committed and it's a non-stop working, hustling, whatever it is that you have to do. But I think the importance of having a great team around you allows you to be able to do a lot of things. I have Jeff. Boxing fuels the rest of the ecosystem, the content, the businesses, the attention, all of these things, the networking, the connections.

2:42:33So then Jeff can put his priority as antifund, et cetera, and it all turns into this great flywheel. but it's definitely just staying committed and working harder than you know anyone else that's doing it or just as hard and just really checking the temperature if you're actually doing that have you guys uh have you guys done any recent deals um some the most recent things that we're excited well i was gonna say what are you gonna happy dad they just happen to crack open a happy dad I just wonder. Yes, we are happy investors and happy dads. Obviously, the Milk Boys are homies. The Meat Brothers are great.

2:43:21It's a great operating team. Plus, I think that influencer-led CPG play, I think, is challenging. But the very, very best operators are the best celebrities we like to partner with. So another example of that is Khloe Kardashian's Cloud Popcorn. and obviously our own businesses, W. Yeah, what's your guys' framework for investing in celebrity brands? Because people have the sense that, oh, they see celebrity brands that work and they just assume that all celebrity brands. They don't see the Travis Scott with his canned cocktail brand that looked like it had a lot of potential but didn't go anywhere.

2:43:56And there's a bunch of other examples like that. I'm curious what you guys think the formula is. Is a creator limited to one brand over a 10-year period? Do you see a multi-brand strategy emerging? What do you think? Yeah, I think it's, I mean, similar, I'd say it's a similar assessment as a normal investment, right? 90 % of startups fail. So I think we just like look at that statistical norm and just expect, and even for a celebrity letter or not, to just have that statistical pattern. But then I think after that, it looks at, but what you do have is that you have an unfair distribution advantage and you need to make sure that the market in which that distribution focuses actually makes sense.

2:44:37I think Happy Dad is a great example where Milk Boys to me is like the frat bro, older unk of internet. I don't know, they're like 30 now to me, they're unk. But to me, that is a very good founder market product fit. And I think if it's celebrity or not, you just look at that thing as an asset, just like there's a technical advantage. Why are open AI researchers just like raising a ton of money out the gate? Because there is an assumption that it have some technical ability to have to find product market fit. So it's the same thing with a celebrity. It's just like very distribution oriented. And I think it's maybe a little bit less quantitative.

2:45:20It's maybe more taste driven. I think that's where I think Jake, I value and I think Logan as well, where they have seen over 10, 15 years of being famous, how many people that have come and gone as famous people. I think it's super rare to be top of field and relevant across multiple platforms for such a long time. So I think those are patterns we pull out. What about the launch of W? I thought it was interesting because you didn't do what I thought you would do, which is direct to consumer, purely just sell just to the audience. You came out of the gate with a big retail partnership. And I think maybe some influencers or just celebrity type people, they forget that the CEOs of big retail establishments might be in their audience too.

2:46:04They might be able to get that introduction to Walmart sooner or Target sooner. And I was wondering how deliberate that strategy was. As you reflect on that strategy, would you recommend it to someone else in that position? Yeah, 100%. I think playing across the board also is key. But we wanted to go retail first, and we saw the success of that with my brother's brand with Prime and the accessibility of all of our fans walking through these stores on a daily basis. I would say a lot of my fan base is a Walmart shopper and et cetera. us. So yeah, being able to have those contact points digitally, but also in person and people seeing the things in stores and yeah, being able to have retail DTC, all of that I think is super important, but we decided to go with the retail first strategy and it's worked out great.

2:46:58Part of, I think the way that you guys have maintained such relevancy is just reinventing yourself, obviously you reinventing, you're going from a YouTuber to a fighter. Do you think about, uh, fighters have notoriously short careers. I mean, I'm sure you'll, you'll be able to come out of the woodwork when you're 60 and do the Tyson thing, you know, lock, lock up another a hundred million pay-per-view. But I imagine at some point, maybe, maybe in your forties, you'll reinvent yourself again. Do you think about, are you thinking five, 10 years out around how you want to reinvent yourself again?

2:47:29Or are you just tunnel vision on boxing at the moment and nothing else matters? No, yeah, definitely no. I naturally will lead myself into politics without a doubt. It's within me. I'm passionate about it. I follow it very closely behind the scenes, and I try to speak up as much as I can to help my audience better understand it and to state my opinion on things. But I don't know what that exactly looks like. Are you thinking like AI czar or president? Comptroller of a local city. I just want to help the world, and I know it's needed, especially in the generations moving forward. And that's something that Charlie Kirk was doing.

2:48:16I don't know if it's something that looks like that, but it is needed, and it's very important. And I think since the beginning of my whole entire career, I knew I wanted to help kids and help the world, And that's what I've done with my charity and boxing bullies and renovating gyms and all of these things. But I know I can do it at an even greater level. And so working on some things in that area in the future will definitely be exciting. Well, chat's saying Vance Paul 2028. So let's go. Well, thank you. Awesome. Well, great. Great to have you both on. Congratulations. You'll be back on soon.

2:48:52And yeah, congrats on the new fund and the recent fight. And the portfolio. They got everything in there. Yeah, you guys pretty much got them all. So it's been very cool to watch. Fantastic. Thank you, guys. We'll talk to you soon. Talk soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale. With best-in-class embedding models and re-rankers, MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. Our next guest is Matt from Doctronic. He's the co-founder and CEO. Here we go. And we're going to welcome him to the stream. What's happening, Matt? How are you? Can you hear me?

2:49:31Not yet. I don't know what's up with the AirPods. There we go. AirPods are rough. They create this split-second delay. Now it feels like we're face-to-face now. How are you doing? Great to meet. Yeah, great to meet you, too. Thanks for having me on. First time on the show. Would love a quick introduction on yourself and the company. Yeah, yeah, sure. So I'm Matt. I've been building startups for a long time, 25 years at this point. Built a big success. Yeah, right. Built a big e-commerce unicorn called Moto Opera Andy a long time ago. Yep. All of the startups. Computer science from Carnegie Mellon.

2:50:09Doctronic is the number one AI doctor. So we've got 20 million patients or 20 million consults so far, 2 million patients. Wow. And we're an AI doctor where anybody can come for free and talk to AI, et cetera. And we have a telehealth practice behind it, too. So you can talk to the AI. it's going to diagnose you at the end of that you can take all that information full diagnosis full treatment plan etc and talk to our doctors so it's a pretty straightforward simple process our doctors are available 24 7 license in all 50 states when when did you when did you start the company and what is what's been the primary kind of distribution method is this something that people just they end up they have a pressing need they want medical advice guidance they're going to find you?

2:50:55Or are you selling through, you know, how are you actually getting 20 million people using the product? Yeah, so we're direct to consumer. We launched in September of 23. So been around for a while. Actually, when we launched, there was this open question, you know, did anyone want to talk to an AI about their health? It was kind of an unknown. It was, you know, early, early in the GPT-4 days. Yeah. And it turns out it's a resounding yes, right? Yeah. Really want to talk about their health. The other question was, could you make an AI accurate enough to practice medicine, right? And it turns out you can.

2:51:26You can't just use the foundational models. You have to do a lot of work with them. And so we're direct to consumer. We get a huge amount of our traffic from just organic search. We get 100 ,000, 150 ,000 people hitting inside a week. And then, of course, we're doing social networking, paid stuff, etc. How much more do people, when people have a doctor in their pocket, are they effectively talking to a doctor or an agent that's acting as a doctor? Is it 50 times more? Is it 100 times more than they usually would? Because I mean, I think everybody's experience like, you know, researching, it was, you know, doing a search, adding Reddit to the end.

2:52:04Now people might try a foundation model and it's obviously giving a disclaimer. Well, we're a foundation model. We can't actually give, you know, medical advice. Do you have to put a disclaimer like that or still or how does it actually work? Yeah, super interesting. So first off, let's talk about how often people use it. So I think the stat is the average American sees their primary care doctor three times a year, which is kind of crazy. And of course, there just aren't enough primary care doctors. For the guys out there, they're like three times in my life. Yeah, right. I haven't seen mine in years.

2:52:38My wife is a doctor, which makes it a little bit easier, but yeah. But my wife doesn't want to help me anyway. That's not something you ask your wife. But yeah, so people are using the system multiple times a month. So we're close to weekly active users for a lot of people. So the question is to like, what would happen if you had a real doctor in your pocket is, I think you'd talk to them about everything. You'd talk to them about how you wake up in the morning, your back is sore, you know, you have herniated discs. Is it worse than a couple of days ago? You don't know, but you talk, right? And it slowly gathers all this information about you, right?

2:53:13So it's certainly changing the way people are interacting. As far as disclaimers go and such, we are, so our AI for most situations outside of the state of Utah right now doesn't practice medicine. So it's going to talk to you and it's going to always say, in Utah, it does practice medicine? Yeah, that's the cool part. That's what we announced today. I'll tell you about that in a second. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So outside of Utah, let's say you're on a diagnostic pathway and you go through the diagnostic agents, et cetera, right? The AI is going to kind of come to this consensus and they're all going to say, look, it's probably one of these four things, right?

2:53:51And here are four treatment plans for each of those. And here's a note that you can take to your doctor. And we're not practicing medicine. You can also take this to our doctors. This is all just for you to take to your doctors. It's a tool to help you communicate with your doctors. and it's more accurate than chat GPT and Gemini and all those because we're feeding it all sorts of, you know, this massive corpus of medical documents that our doctors have written for the LLMs and we've got lots of agents. We can get into detail some other time, right? But it doesn't practice medicine at all. It's going to just say this is probably what's going on.

2:54:21Do you think that this aspect of Gen AI is still kind of underrated by the world? I had kind of a weird cool moment this week where my one-year-old wasn't sleeping that well. My wife was about to hire a sleep consultant that we had hired for our first kid. She started talking with an LLM, and it basically, within 24 hours, had got the one-year-old on a sleep schedule that was working again. And that was such a cool moment because we were happy. Historically, it was so worth it to hire a sleep consultant because if your kid's not sleeping great and you get them sleeping great, it's like life-changing.

2:55:00But most families are not going to spend$1 ,000 to have some expert come and coach them on sleep schedules and things like that. So it feels like underrated at a society level. People just see the slop in their different social feeds and they're like, this is dumb. Why are we building data centers? And yet it's still - I think you're right. I think it's totally underrated. I read the other day that 20 % of chat GPT traffic is health related. And for things like that, helping you sleep train your child, awesome. Like use chat GPT, it's great, right? But when you actually want to start getting into medicine, like real actual medicine, TATPG can't do that.

2:55:36It can't, I mean, even if it could, right, it probably shouldn't, right? But it's not going to help you understand a prescription and what the dosage should be and what the schedule should be. If you have high cholesterol, it's going to say you probably need to take a statin and then you need to get some exercise, which is great and true, right? And that's just helping you with your health. That's not practicing medicine, right? And which, you know, again, outside of the state of Utah, we're not doing that either. But we have a partnership with the state of Utah now with the Utah AI Learning Lab.

2:56:07And so that launched a couple of weeks ago, but we just announced it. So our AI is allowed to legally renew prescriptions for residents of the state of Utah with no oversight from doctors. Wow. I see Tusk Ventures on the CAF table. And Fei-Fei Li, the goat. I mean, Fei-Fei Li, amazing. But Fei-Fei Li signals like, you know what you're doing technically. Tusk Ventures signals like this is going to be a city by city, state by state like battle, at least for those who don't know, Bradley Tusk worked with Uber and did a lot of the on the ground. Regulatory Athlete Hall of Fame. Exactly. Regulatory athlete.

2:56:47And so I'm wondering, like, do you think that there needs to be regulatory change on a state by state basis? Is there a federal preemption discussion in the mix? Like, where does all this go? So and are there any like keys to the success for you on the regulatory side? That's an awesome question. So historically, not even historically, currently states regulate the practice of medicine, right? If you want to practice medicine in a state, you get licensed by that state's medical board. Yeah. We believe that what we're doing is practicing medicine. Obviously, the state of Utah agrees. And so we have been kind of mitigated from the laws in this AI sandbox with Utah that prevent non-licensed doctors from practicing medicine.

2:57:28We think this applies to other states, too. And other states have regulatory sandboxes for AI, and we're talking with them as well. It's just that Utah is super innovation-friendly and forward-thinking. They're the first. They're the best. They're really good at this. That's great. We do think that the state's right. Okay. What do doctors think about Doctronic? Are they happy that they're patients because the patient's coming in, they're informed. The Doctronic's already kind of summarized the symptoms and the conversations, gets them up to speed quickly, helps them process more, see more patients themselves.

2:58:00We see like a 10x efficiency in our doctors in treating patients because the AI has done all of the work gathering things. My co-founder, who is a doctor, I'm not, but he is. He says it's like having the best chief resident in the world seeing every single patient for you. It just does all that work. But then it says, look, it's one of these four things. You figure it out. But it's almost always the first one. The AI is just that good. Yeah. Yeah, I've had a couple of funny experiences lately. I went to the pharmacy, picked up some medicine. My wife asked me to ask the pharmacist how to use it.

2:58:33And I watched the pharmacist just use an LLM to get the answer. I was like, wait a minute. I have a more expensive plan. I should just be doing this myself. So the demand is clearly - Wait, you're not even using premium plus? Yeah, wait, wait. You didn't even run the deep research report on this one. But do you think that there's, is there gonna be some sort of stop gap where there's some sort of hybrid where you have a human in the loop to accelerate progress? Do you already have that? What role do you see as like building out the hybrid portion of the business in certain states that are maybe less aggressive about moving quickly on this?

2:59:10Yeah, there's certainly a place to use those efficiencies you get from AI in the states that are not able to move that quickly. Our hope is that that hybrid approach won't last for long because we will prove that this is effective and works really well. It saves the taxpayer money. It makes people healthier. It reduces costs. The health care system is enormously complex and far too expensive. There aren't enough primary care doctors. No primary care doctor wants to renew prescriptions. Nobody went to med school saying, gosh, I hope I can renew prescriptions. So I sure hope that we'll be able to move faster, but there are definitely hybrid approaches.

2:59:45We're already doing that with a bunch of our video visits in other states that don't allow for this. Sure, sure. You have a background building in e-commerce, so a little bit of a tangent, but I was curious what you expect to see at the intersection of LLMs and commerce this year specifically. specifically, it feels like last year people started discovering and doing a lot of product research using LLMs. It feels like this year will be the year of like action. I sure hope we're shopping, right? What's that? I said, I sure hope we're shopping in ChatGPT or Gemini, right? I should be able to buy something from there.

3:00:20I shouldn't have to go to Amazon. I should just be able to click buy. Yeah. Yeah. Love to see that. Yeah. Yeah. Something as simple as that. Amazon's like, actually, we like our search ad revenue business quite a lot. They'll figure it out. I'm sure they'll have their own LLMs or something like that. What do you think about the actual feedback loop on the, I feel like the value of medicine is not just treating the patient, but then filtering those results back into future research efforts to update on what's working, what's not, both on the individual patient level and also on the societal level.

3:00:59How do you think about improving the system over time? It's a little bit different than just coding, in my opinion. But how are you thinking about, you know, successive interactions with the patient? Yeah, I mean, you know, AIs can learn more and remember more about patients anyway. And the funny thing is, you know, we measure NPS with the AI and with our human doctors. And we have great human doctors, right? Like, we pay a lot, we hire the best. everybody still likes the AI a little bit more that said I don't think that AI is going to replace that deep human interaction. yeah that's right like like there's there's this easy 80 of these rote interactions that you have with a doctor where you're just like look my kid's sick i need an antibiotic yep let's just figure out which one is most appropriate let's get the ai to handle that yeah uh i don't you know specialists diagnosing chronic conditions yeah at the same time at the same time with that if the kid's sick they need uh antibiotics i i feel like you should still maybe bring them into a clinic, get some data that can't be accessed on the phone.

3:02:05And so doesn't that lead you to some sort of like B2B scenario or somewhere where you're acting more as a co-pilot than a B2C company? Do you think you'll get there or is that something that's like adjacent? I think that's adjacent to where we are right now. I guess the way I think of it is we are pretty well positioned to handle anything that can happen during telehealth visits right now. That's kind of our goal, right? There's already this a bit of a line drawn that said, these are things that can happen with telehealth. And so, I mean, you're right. There are certainly cases where you just need to see someone.

3:02:43We had one the other day. I mean, they happen all the time, but we talked about one today. Someone had an appendicitis, right? The AI said, look, you need to go to an ER. You have an appendicitis and it's about to rupture. And the person still chose to see our doctor. And it was great because the doctor said, I totally agree with the AI, but this is pretty emergent. You probably should go to the ER. And they did. They were taken care of and it happens. So we're not going to try to do those things that we can't do via a telehealth visit anyway. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, congratulations on all the progress.

3:03:15Thank you so much for coming on the show today. Yeah, very cool. And I hope you have a great 2026. Are you the first AI licensed to practice law? Or medicine? No, medicine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. First and all. Wow. That is wild. That's a compliment. I feel like, yeah, I imagine in five years, we'll look back on today as a very big moment. So congrats to you and the whole team. It's great to meet you. Congratulations. Thanks so much. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Appreciate it. Let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR, built to evolve with modern, small, and medium-sized businesses.

3:03:53Let's Gusto. Let's Senra. Let's Lulu. We'll bring them in in a couple minutes. In the meantime, I'm going to tell you about Cognition, the software. They're makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. We have some breaking news. What's the breaking news? From two hours ago from XAI. They've raised a$20 billion Series E. $20 billion. XAI completed its upside Series E funding round, exceeding the$15 billion targeted round size and raised$20 billion. That's a huge amount. Investors include Valor Equity Partners, Stepstone Group, Fidelity Management, Qatar Investment, Authority, MGX, and Barron Capital Group.

3:04:35What is Barron Capital Group? Is that Barron Trump? No. Since 1982. Okay. Since 1982. Not Barron Trump. Strategic investors in the round include NVIDIA and Cisco. Let's give it up for Cisco. Investments getting in the mix. We're still working out the kinks with this gong. We're figuring out that that was a clean hit. That was a clean hit. But we're figuring out the new kind of method, how to strike it effectively. But that was a great hit. XAI says 2025 was a year of breakthrough momentum where the XAI team advanced a multitude of key initiatives, including data centers, Grok4, Grok Voice, UserMetrics, and GrokImagine.

3:05:17And I'm very excited to see what Grok pulls off. Grok and the XAI team pull off this year. They are highly, highly motivated, highly capitalized, crushing it on the infrastructure side and a lot more to come. Well, before we bring in our guests, let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom Card. You can see Bitcoin is back up$93 ,000. There we go. And let me also tell you about Railway. Railway simplifies software development, web apps, servers, and databases run in one place with scaling, monitoring, and security built in. And with that, we are ready to bring in our guests.

3:05:58Let's do it. Elon is saying that we've entered the singularity. So he is fully AGI-pilled, fully singularity-pilled. Lulu singularity. GDP growth is going to be 100%. With GDP growing 100 % a year,$20 billion for XAI in Series E seems like a steal. How about$200 billion? How about$200 billion? I'm dying to see the user metrics. Eventually, people will pull out. Why are we doing bubble talk? Welcome to the stream. We have Lulu. Welcome. We have David Senra back in the studio for the seventh time. Good to see you. Welcome to the show. How long are you in L.A., Lulu? It's a matter of hours. Matter of hours.

3:06:44It's like 28 hours. 28 hours. Would either of you like a happy dad? What is it? Is it beer? Oh, it's a fruit punch? Gluten-free fruit punch. It's a fruit punch with 5 % alcohol. I'd like to see it for the ingredients. It's the latest anti-fund investment. That's great. Yeah. Now, Koi's John Shahidi. I think I'm the wrong demo for happy dad. I don't think it's funny. It is. But I think it's a mindset. Jeff Wu described it as a frat boy, unk, unk frat boy brand. It's a hilarious way to describe it. I am the right demo. We're all on. We're all along. I turned 30 over the holiday. Oh, my gosh. I was going to ask.

3:07:18Yeah, I could tell. Yeah, yeah, you can tell. You can tell. It's just the lack of looks maxing. Lulu, take us through the most recent post, burning up the Internet, 3 million views. Give us the pitch. Okay. The pitch is that every year has a big theme. All right, let's get. Thank you. There you go. All right. Every year has a big theme for where narrative alpha is going to come from. You decide it as the narrative executive. And then I share what it is, and then hopefully we do the thing. So in 2024, it was going direct. That was where the alpha was coming from, because everybody was going through three different layers of intermediaries.

3:07:54Then last year, it became just grab attention for some people at all costs. So that's when you saw the cinematic launch videos. That's when you saw the kind of cluelification. No, it's too many gaps. Stop going direct. I said, Lulu, stop going direct. Some of you are not good on mic. Some people should go direct some of the time. Well, I also said I said if everyone has a cinematic launch video, no one does. It got to the point where it's like, I'll just read. I'll just go to your website, and I'll see what you do. I don't need to see the 50th. And they're all kind of the same. So companies are spending six figures on these cinematic launch videos.

3:08:33No, they are. They're like$150K. And they're all the same. So anyway. How much did you guys spend on yours? Two grand. Two grand. And I included a helicopter rental. Yeah. I think the helicopter rental was like$1 ,900 of that. Shout out Ben for handling the rent. Shout out Ben. That was a fantastic video. Iconic. Yeah, value per dollar off the charts. So this year, the narrative alpha is going to come from doing real things that are enduring, that are hard, that are going to stick around, and then just to keep doing that for a really long period of time. So I liken it to going to the gym instead of fasting for 72 hours and not drinking water and then showing up for the bodybuilding competition one time.

3:09:14Just go to the gym three times a week and do somewhat normal stuff, but do that for infinity weeks and then you'll be a fit person. Which founder is doing the best version of that right now or the best job at that right now? Okay, there's a bunch. Toby Luca. It's hard to pick a favorite. It's hard to pick a favorite. Toby Luca. I'm biased being on the board of Shopify, but I think if I were to look objectively, Toby is somebody who doesn't try to do the flashy thing. He's actually kind of averse and nauseous for trying to do the flashy thing. He's showing much more of his personality too on his Twitter feed lately.

3:09:46Yeah, well, he also can't not. You know, some of these people, Brian Armstrong is another example. My favorite Toby story is he did an obscure StarCraft podcast where he just, he's a StarCraft fan. And so he just went on and talked about StarCraft strategy. And that was a cool going direct moment years ago. This happened like seven years ago. But it just felt like, okay, a lot of comms people would probably tell him, no, stay on message. You should be talking about Shopify. But he's like, look, there's probably people in that audience. Also, I'm just having fun talking about StarCraft with some people that are interested in StarCraft.

3:10:18And so he did that. And for me, it made him a much realer CEO. It just kind of painted a broader picture of who he is. And the StarCraft stuff directly translates into how he runs Shopify. Oh, yeah. He runs Shopify like a Zerg sword. That's like his corporate strategy. You know what's funny? What? I had breakfast with Kareem from Ramp. Do you guys know about Ramp? Yeah, we're fine. Yesterday. What is it? And we talked about Toby and his love of video games for how he actually runs Shopify. We had this conversation yesterday morning. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think more and more people are feeling that with agents now where it's like it feels like you're puppeteering.

3:10:53Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can I say a few more things about this? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Please, please. Okay, so the overarching theme is to do real things that are going to be enduring and lasting. A couple of the sub things under that, what makes things enduring and lasting? One is beauty is back. Being beautiful is allowed again. We've had a decade. Looks maxing for companies. Pretty privileged for companies. Sure. Like the same way that people get better treatment. And they're literally seen as, Tyler's smirking because he's like, this is my era. the same way that people are seen as more competent, more intelligent, more trustworthy, if they simply look and present better, the same is true for companies and products.

3:11:29So there's like put an inordinate amount, almost an extravagant amount of effort into that. Another one is - It's so much harder too, because it's not just enough to have a pretty website. Like every anime, you have to somehow demonstrate that it wasn't one-shotted by some vibe coding app, right? which they can, you can make a, make me a website that looks like linear. Like that's really easy now. And that was like the gold standard. You saw Dylan Fields' demos of Figma Maker. He like vibe coded like 10 different websites and they all had like the most obscure, because he has a lot of artistic references that he can pull from.

3:12:04It was things that I would never come up with, but all of them looked like not linear clowns. Like they looked like very unique and I don't know. It's like beauty and original thinking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The combination of ideas. The instantiation of it was not what made it special. Yeah. So there was basically a decade when we just had to pretend that every single thing in person was equally beautiful. Sure. And it was not allowed to say that something was less beautiful than another thing. And now it's allowed again. Apparently, the Victoria's Secret runway show with the angels in the wings is back.

3:12:34It's just it's allowed. It's allowed to be pretty again. Another one is things that are not perfect. The just be yourself. But like CEOs just being themselves in a way that is maybe not optimal. like Palmer Luckey can go on any show in the world at any time. He did a recorded zoom with me. Toby did that Starcraft thing a while back. Brian Armstrong went on a podcast with like, I don't know, 500 listeners or something a little while ago, just because he liked the guy's content. Palmer Luckey is literally the best podcast guest in the world. I can't tell you the details of this. I just spent eight straight.

3:13:10I spent a longer time with this, eight straight hours trying to stump the guy. I was with him for eight straight hours. I had to call in other podcasters that just happened to be there. I was like, I have nothing else to talk about, man. I just can't. And he was unlimited with his knowledge on every single subject. Storytelling is off the charts. I've never met anybody with a mind like that. Okay, so here's the thing, though. So people see Palmer. He's an archetype that founders want to emulate now. You can't. He's the ultimate Joe Rogan CEO. And I think that founders shouldn't feel this pressure that they need to be...

3:13:44Like that is a certain archetype. And it's possible that you can say like, oh, you should, every founder should just have a growth mindset. Maybe you're not great on a three hour podcast. You should just become great. But I think people need to pick other archetypes. I feel like Toby is another archetype. Like he's not just trying to put up 50 hours on podcasts, right? It's more like strategic and different, using different channels. He's about to do my new show. So we'll see how it goes. So he'll be making 420 minutes of sustained intense eye contact. I love this concept of calling in other podcasters for backup.

3:14:19If you're watching. Code red. So, like, doing sustained effort, you know, accomplishing something great. That sounds amazing, but in the short term, like, you do have to acquire some attention from investors, employees, customers. What do you think of, I love Jocko Welling's Instagram, where he goes to the gym every single day. and he takes a picture of his watch in the morning just to prove that he wakes up. And it's an interesting thing because it's not as labor-intensive as going on a podcast, doing a whole tour. It's not really self-aggrandizing, but it just reminds you of him every single day.

3:14:57And I'm wondering if there's a, I don't know. You never forget about Jocko. I never forget about Jocko. That's true. But I wonder if there's a business equivalent of that that might emerge. Maybe we can't just come up with it right now, but I wonder if someone will come up with something like that where you're like, oh, this person is in the zeitgeist constantly with something that's actually very high leverage as opposed to spending$150 ,000 on... That's true. Steinman does that well. Good morning. Good morning. We are going to win. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Augustus does this. So anytime it rains anywhere in continental America, he has a comment on the quality and quantity of the rain.

3:15:34Sure, sure, sure. And if it's not raining, he's like, why is it not raining? It's raining in China. Why is it not raining over here? Just like he's, he just made himself the, the weather guy. So any day that has weather is a chance for Augustus to remind you that he has a company. Yeah. What were you going to say about Jocko? You're a fan. I also just spent time with him. And how many hours you've been on a podcast tour. You talk to everybody. So, uh, there is funny. We were, we were the first time you met him. Yeah. Wow. And what was that like? I mean, you're like, can you give some context on your relationship with Jocko?

3:16:05I can't tell you what was going on. I can just give you the context. I'm talking history. Was it Cobra? Basically, yes. I can't tell you what. Was it brunch? Was brunch going on? I can't tell you anything about it. All I know is we just happened to be in an undisclosed location. We're the only ones up at 4.30 in the morning. Strip club. Strip club. No, no. No, I would never. Never. Gross. Never went to a sleep. I think he was deep in the Pacific. No. Undisclosed location. So anyways, I'm in this, like, hut. And there's nothing but, like, windows. It's a circular room surrounded by windows. All dark.

3:16:36and I see slow huge silhouette like what the fuck is that what the freak is that and then I see his I know his face and I just see his giant head and I have a big head so I'm not making fun of him I see his giant head I was like and I opened the door go Jocko come in here and I was like you don't know who I am and I basically told the story I go just just sit with me for at least a minute because as he was coming in there he's been my alarm clock every for like five years and he's like get up get to the gym like literally that's my alarm clock it has been forever so yeah I wind up having like of course we talked for a podcast about podcasting for like an hour and i explained to him like the reason i started a solo history show reading books of you know autobiographies is because i found your podcast in 2015 that was doing that for people that served in combat and these stories were crazy and the book review was like an hour and i was like i'm learning so much and then i'm also reading all these books i was like i should just do that for business yeah i should go back and listen to some of the old jocko episodes we had a long talk because he just hit episode 500 and I was like dude I you're a very clear communicator I listened to your episode 500 where you're talking about this is what my podcast is gonna be I was like I don't know what the hell you're talking about and I was like I don't think that's because I don't know what I want to do yet I go just talking to another person like you've been doing it's like not really differentiated go back to the book reviews read Patton read Napoleon read Frederick the Great all that other stuff man he's really good do you learn new things from meeting someone in person so you you study them from afar to like the maximum extent possible but then when you interact in person?

3:18:03Is there like new stuff that comes out? Yeah, 100%. It's just, man, I'm in trouble. I'm in real big trouble with this new show because I am completely addicted to it. It's all I want to do. I called Rob Moore. We're going to have dinner with him. We're all having dinner tonight. I guess everybody else knows. Doxing. So, like, he's just been lining people up. I was like, I want some fucking smart, driven, other maniac in front of me every single day. Like, I want to do this every single day. I can't do it every single day. Lulu's been insane with connecting with all these people. She sent me – we were together with Gabby in New York at the Cognition event, and you had the funniest thing.

3:18:41You're like, David, you have groupies, but your groupies are – 90-year-old billionaires. No, middle-aged, not 90. Middle-aged billionaire men. And so she's been incredible about connecting with these people, and then I'll get on the phone with them, and like immediately. You just click, and we can talk forever. So, yeah, of course, you just learn so much, and then I'm high as a kite. I don't do any drugs. Justin was texting me about this masseuse. I guess I shouldn't say this a lot. I really want to know where this is going. You've got to finish that sentence really fast. Lulu texted me, like, remember, like, a couple weeks ago.

3:19:14You're like, we need to travel everywhere together. You need a crisis. He needs a crisis comms person on staff. It's like hockey teams travel with a dentist. Yeah. He needs a crisis comms person next to him to tell the waitress, like, oh, no, what he meant. Oh, sorry, man. He doesn't. So to answer your question, yeah, you just learn so much more. And then like even with somebody like James Dyson, right? I read his first autobiography five times. I've read his second one at least two times. I've read highlights from both those books dozens of times. I read his encyclopedia on the history of greatest inventions over and over again.

3:19:46I thought I knew everything about the guy. And like then I got to spend three hours with him in New York. And it was just like I was learning more about what motivates him, how he was. And the cool thing is how great all these people have been. Unbelievably witty, kind, generous, just like great people. I think I ended that episode where everybody says, hey, don't meet your heroes. I was like, fuck those people. They're wrong. I meant my heroes. Has James Dyson seen the Dyson Airblade meme? Have you seen this? No, I haven't. So there's this meme that goes viral every Christmas. So you're familiar with the Dyson Airwrap?

3:20:14Of course. It's the hottest gift for men to give their wives, probably something like that. But it's usually used by women with long hair. And Dyson also makes the Dyson Airblade, which is when you're at the airport bathroom, You put your hands in, and it dries your hands very aggressively. Can you stop doing that? Yeah. And so the joke is always someone takes a picture of the Dyson Airblade and says, I got this for my wife, and she's upset with me. What happened? And it's just a very funny thing because, you know, imagine giving something. Can I use Dyson? Okay. One of the best comms case studies comes from Dyson.

3:20:51This is when the predecessor to the Airwrap, which was the blow dryer, was coming out. like the hair dryer and i actually flew to china and met with the guy who was responsible for spreading the gospel of the dyson hair dryer in asia at a time when everybody still thought of them as just like air filters and vacuums and stuff so what they did was okay normally what you would do is you have an ad campaign and then you put it in the stores and then you you advertise that they're in the stores and you try to get people to buy them what they did was they went in completely stealth mode under the cover of night and put them into the most expensive salons and then didn't say anything.

3:21:27They told me about this. So then, okay, I'll tell you the person I heard. No, no, tell me. Go ahead. So they put them into the, we should learn to speak in unison. They put them into the most expensive salons, and then after every cut, at least for women's hair, what men do, for every cut, you get a blow dry. I once tried to not get the blow dry, and they tried to make me pay extra. Like, you must get a blow dry, so you get a cut and blow dry. So they just start doing your hair with it, and then it blow dries it much faster and better, I guess. and then the women ask, what is this thing? And it looks really different too.

3:21:59It looks super futuristic. What is this thing? Where can I get one? I'm sorry, you can't get one. It's only for salons. You have to be a special. So now you've got the richest women in China with the right hair for it who like really care about their hair, obsessed with this thing that they hope that they can get. That they can't get. Yeah, that's the story. Does that come from Dyson or people he hires? I don't know who it came from, but the interesting story is... But is he a distribution genius in addition? to being an inventor or is he someone who's very good at hiring marketing? He describes himself as an engineer.

3:22:29There's a lot in the way Dyson thinks that's very similar to Kareem, where like I asked him about this on the episode too, where it's like he has a very, Dyson has a very simple organizing principle. It's just like he picks up a product and he's just like, why can't this be better? And so he goes, then I make it better. And then I put it back down and then I pick it back up and go, why can't this be better? And I find another way to make it better. And he goes, I just never interrupted the compounding. So I've been doing it for 45 years. And so I just read about his family office. He's reorganizing his family office right now.

3:22:56He's the richest person in Britain. And from what I understand, the numbers are reported are vastly under - Do you want to hit the gun for him? Does he have an heir to the Dyson empire? Like, do we know who this next CEO is going to be? Is it like a Warren Buffett situation where Greg Abel was going to come in? His son works in the business. I highly suspect they're going to go the route of what the Waltons did, where, like, transition to professional management. That's nothing they told me. but that's just like my read on the situation. What was the question about Dyson before? Oh, just is he a marketing genius?

3:23:27Oh, no, the engineer. No, so yeah, his whole thing was just like, I just have to make it better. The largest, the crazy thing about the beauty categories, which she's talking about, is like how do you actually infiltrate and like spread that? And it's exactly what Lululew said. And then what they told me is, you know, the biggest revenue category is still obviously the vacuum cleaners. It's like everybody has them. They're$500, high margin. but their beauty category is only 10 years old and it's also already the second biggest source of revenue i highly suspect they think it's going to be bigger than the um vacuum cleaners but it gives you insight to dyson because dyson is obsessed with vertical integration and so he starts with beauty supplies and then what else do you need well what else you now he has like styling creams and stuff like that but it's not he's like i'm not just going to make a styling cream just to make selling cream so he also has that's not vertical integration that's horizontal.

3:24:16No, no, check this out. I'm about to get there. So next year, they want me to go to their UK. We're going to do another episode with them. I'm going to tour his UK headquarters and the farming because he's essentially applying some of the highest tech farming. Oh, okay. So this is the way he thinks, though. If I'm going to do styling cream, every single ingredient from the styling cream and all these other things have to come from my farm. Interesting. Yeah. He's like Zuckerberg with the macadamia nuts. Wait, he's doing macadamia nuts? I thought he was only doing beef. No, he's got to make the nuts to feed the...

3:24:44No. Really? He plants the macadamia trees to get the macadamia. I have no idea. You don't? You just use store-bought macadamia nuts? Whoa. I get chicken fingers from Taco Bell. I talked to a guy that listens to founders that cornered the world market on macadamia nuts. He's like a young kid. What's the brand that's advertised on Rick Rubin's podcast and all the other ones? I don't know. Okay. Well, it's one 28-year-old kid in South Africa. Wow. Can I tell you about a beauty thing? Yeah, please. So anytime something becomes a beauty thing, the margins get better and the cost goes up. So like Stanley Cups, remember how a year and a half ago Stanley Tumblers became viral?

3:25:25They did this massive influencer campaign, but they didn't go to like water influencers. So the way that Stanley Cups were positioned before was a blue collar working man would take a Stanley Cup to work alongside his like pail. Yeah, I always saw it as a camping brand. It was. And then they went to beauty influencers and grouped it as a wellness product along their wellness and beauty things. So you might pay$10,$15 for like a water bottle to drink water out of, but you would pay nearly infinite dollars for wellness and hydration. So they went to like beauty and wellness influencers who would do like yoga stuff.

3:26:01And then after their workout, they would do like dewy skincare and then they would have like their Stanley thing there the whole time. So you could charge like 5x more. That's very interesting. When you talked about the... That looks delicious. I love these things. I'm drinking way too much, by the way. So when you talk about like the comps predictions for 2026, and you talked about there's going to be emphasis on beauty. Like what is that actually like? What's an example of that? An example is the basics, like the website looks good, the product looks good. But then the experience is beautiful.

3:26:35The experience feels calm and serene. There are some things where it just feels chaotic and stressful. It's like a beautiful experience, beautiful physical spaces. So physical spaces in general, I think, are going to be a big deal because these are solid, tangible. Anti-AI. I don't think it's anti-AI, but we still exist here in meatspace, IRL, in the world of atoms. And so making beautiful spaces. It's a little rough. It's a little rough. It's a celebration of podcasting. It's masculine beauty. I feel like I'm in like a spaceship. Yeah. Yeah. But it's very intentional. On that note, so with spaces, how do you coach founders on the value of community events?

3:27:18Because I've gone back and forth on this. Sometimes when like a small company is like, yeah, we're hosting a dinner with like a bunch of founders. I'm like, should you really host a dinner or should you like? Any founder that goes to dinner is not any good. So that's your take. No, no. No, but how do you understand the value of, like, community building and IRL community building? So you have to define the community. If you're going to create beautiful spaces, obviously you want people to, whether they're your team or customers, et cetera. So one of the other themes I think are useful to, one of the other themes that I think is useful to think about for this year is qualitative over quantitative.

3:28:01So last year was very quantitative. It's just, like, get as many clicks, get as much engagement as possible. This year, I hope that we all think more about, well, who is it and what is it? And so who is in the community? People will say our community and what they mean is anybody with a credit card. And actually, it should feel like, well, there are some people who don't belong in this community. Because if it's exclusive, then there's more value. You don't want to go to a club, whatever secret club you went to with Jocko. People don't want to go into a club that anybody can walk into. You don't want to go into a club that has no bouncers.

3:28:30It's a CrossFit gym. It's a CrossFit gym just for podcasters. That's great. Do you think we're actually in a post-ragebait era? No. Because we – okay. He's mad at the question. Because we saw a lot of ragebait projects. I think every podcast is the same. They are. And then Jordy wrote Ragebait is for Losers, And it felt like it did sort of update the Valley and VCs to where a VC would kind of say, like, oh, this is maybe not the deal I should be doing. They're going to think twice about it. It's a little bit less like handcuffs off. But we had Jake Paul on earlier. It just works and it's human.

3:29:13It's human. He's going to effectively make a billion dollars from rage baiting, right? Like he's rage baited his way to 100 million. Because of boxing? Yeah, 100 million. Every time he fights now, he makes 100 million dollars. But how is that rage bait? I mean, the entire marketing process. just to see him get knocked out. Do you think so? It's the way he shows up. He's like, he wants to be like the most punchable. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He wants to be the guy that people want to see get punched. It's being the heel, the heel. Yeah, he's the heel. Sure, okay. So that's like a durable strategy.

3:29:40But there's something underlying that. So underlying that is the heel persona and then the actual punch to the actual face happens. He's actually in the ring. There are people who are, who at least have created things that are just pure rage bait and then when you sweep away the rage bait, there's nothing else there. There's nothing there. It's just rage bait all the way down. You said something interesting that me, John and Jory talk about off camera all the time, that people are chasing numbers. But it's more important than the numbers. It's like who is in that number? What does that number represent?

3:30:06So, like, if you ask John and Jory, like, they're not trying to be like Mr. Beast. They're not trying to get the most views. They said, I don't know. Quality of audience. I'll just say this publicly. They were like, we want the top 200 ,000 people in tech and finance and business paying attention to every single day. Like, the best of the best. And if we hit that, they'll get everything they want out of life as opposed to having 20 million people sitting in Idaho. No offense to your new hire. Nothing wrong with Idaho. We love Idaho. Idaho is sitting on a couch eating chips or some shit. It's just like I'm not interested in entertaining that person or educating that person.

3:30:38But this is something that – it's fascinating you brought that. You're bringing it to what's happening in 2026 where it's like I feel like if you talk to podcasters, especially in business, It's something we've been doing for a long period of time, where it's just like you're not just going after views. You're going after actually high-quality people and giving them useful information so they can actually utilize it in their daily life. You would not trade one Michael Dell listener for any number of non-Michael Dell listeners. For 500 ,000. Millions, we wouldn't take it. How are you thinking about, does AI have a narrative problem?

3:31:14Does it have a reality problem? Are we entering the new tech lash, updated tech lash, probably? We talk to someone with Jetty about this all the time. Yeah, and I just think you can't... We have venture capitalists come on the show, and they'll say, I don't care about margins because we're displacing labor. And I'm like, you've got to rephrase that. You've got to reposition that because you're pissing off everyone. On one hand, you're saying we're burning money. Even the investors are unhappy in this case. David Sander is like, you make some money. You're excited about... Like you have a, people are, yeah, people are basically like, they're like, no, this is amazing because it's going to create job loss.

3:31:58And it's like. Well, we're destroying jobs. You've got to figure out a different. Yeah. And I don't even know, you know, again, you can debate on whether or not that's actually going to be true, right? Like hundreds of years ago, if you told people, like, you're not going to have to work in the field. You're going to go get your matcha, go to a Pilates class, and then you're going to send three emails, and then you're going to go home. And you're going to earn a living like that. Day in the life. Day in the life. It's like a good TikTok. Office cafeteria. But yeah, the comms issue in AI. And just tech fraudly.

3:32:30There's so much. We just talked to a guy who now has made an AI that is licensed to practice medicine in Utah, right? Should be a huge white pill, right? It's going to be like the cheapest possible way to get access to what should be quality care. And also just inconvenient. Even if you have the money, you have to go to a bucket. It's a whole thing. Lowering access is amazing. But there's a lot of tech leaders who aren't making that case effectively. What do you think? You know the David Foster Wallace anecdote that he said with the two young fish are swimming and they come across an older fish and the older fish says, Morning boys, how's the water today?

3:33:07And they said, what's water? AI feels like water to fish now. It's like everywhere all the time. And so when I see companies try to use having AI as a selling point, it's like bragging that you have cloud storage. Or like, you know, right? Like, yes, and. And I think there's a lot. Software now in the cloud. With connected solutions. It feels not only just tired and worn out. What is it that Dave Chappelle said about Afghanistan? It's bombed out and depleted. There's just no more value to come from using the list of AI buzzwords. People are fatigued. So just skip to what is the thing that it actually does and then prove to me that it actually does do that, and then you're good.

3:33:52And then as for the broader messaging... Yeah, it feels like tech right now is a heel, right? It's like, yeah, we're going to automate a bunch of work. And tech has historically played the role of we're connecting the world. We're changing the world. or we're just giving you something that delights you. And right now the tech industry is like unintentionally operating as the heel. So it's like if you want to be a heel like Jake Paul and you want people to kind of try to punch you, want to see you get punched, that's one thing. But I don't think the tech industry actually wants the entire world to hate it.

3:34:25No, not at all. Well, there's a tension between what you want to say to attract talent and then what you want to say to not be hated and maybe get customers. And these people live in different worlds. So the customers and please don't hate me category of people are not in this tech bubble, whereas the engineers and technical people you want to attract very much are. And so sometimes companies feel like, I get this question a lot, like how do we talk to both audiences at the same time? And sometimes what they'll do is they'll say, okay, well, talent matters most of all. We're just going to talk about how awesome and technical this is and how much money we're all going to make and how many jobs it'll replace.

3:35:03and then that lives forever and now they have to go encounter normal people and their reputation is and the the old interviews are going to get pulled up right like how often do the lab leaders have a comment that they made about like at some like at a less wrong like yeah convention like seven years ago comes up today and it's like wait you're trying to sell me ai you told you were telling people seven years ago that it was going to kill everyone yeah how do i square these things yeah the famous quote is Sam Altman, something to the effect of AI might kill everyone, but in the meantime, it will create a lot of profitable businesses.

3:35:38It's like, you're clearly trying to talk to two different audiences in that same sentence. One is like, I'm taking AI doom seriously, which is good, but in one community gets that and likes that. And then another is like, Hey, there's economic opportunity here for businesses and startups. And he's kind of put his YC hat on for that one. And it's like two different messages in one sentence. So what people miss is that there is overlap in the Venn diagram. So it's not just over here and over here. There's actually some overlap, even if it's just a sliver. So for example, the concept of what makes my own life better, and it's made my life better so much that I want this for other people too, that appeals to talent, that appeals to normal people, or something that is like, okay, in this world where a lot of things are ephemeral or fake or are not making our lives better, I want to make something that is high quality and enduring that I'm proud to one day tell my grandkids about.

3:36:29That's a great message for talent. they don't want to build the next little toy that goes away in six months after raising a bunch of venture money. They want to build the thing that is like an enduring artifact of human ingenuity. And that's the thing that people also want to experience. I think Bezos has the best line of this. He's like, we're trying to build something that we can be proud to tell our grandkids about. So if you look at what you're doing through that lens, your grandson's on your lap 20, 30 years from now. Like, would I be proud of, like, grandfather did, granddad did this shit.

3:37:03We were on the phone. You mentioned about being anti-ephemeral as, like, something else that you think is going to happen in 2026. Like, can you say more about that? I don't know that it'll happen, but it's what I hope will happen, and it's what I would encourage founders to try to make happen, which is so much is happening all the time. So I looked up the literal technical definition of white noise, and it's basically just maximum intensity at every frequency all together so that it's mushed into this nothingness. And that feels like the information environment that we're in. And the only way to break through the white noise is you don't actually compete on being loud.

3:37:39And competing on temporary intensity is not it. But one normal volume or quieter note that is sustained for a long period of time actually does cut through. The other thing that cuts through is super personalized. and super local things where someone could only be talking to you. Like if you're at a cocktail party, have you heard of the cocktail party effect? If you're at a cocktail party. I wouldn't be at a cocktail party. You're at a secret podcaster CrossFit retreat in the ocean before the Venezuela raid. And there's just noise and you can't hear anything. But if somebody says David Senra, by David Senra featuring David Senra, then you would hear that because this is like, the secret frequency for you.

3:38:25Yeah. People love hearing it on him. Yeah. But, but people also love hearing the thing that they are feeling and can't express articulated in words that they wish they could have thought of. This is, this is going to be a random, um, thought that kind of, um, affirms what you just said. I just spent a crazy amount of time reading Bruce Springsteen's autobiography and it's kind of crazy. It's 600 pages and he wrote the entire thing by hand. It took him seven years. He wrote it like out longhand multiple times, but he said something that I feel One of the reasons people listen to Founders is very similar to why he says people go to his concerts.

3:38:57He's like, people aren't coming to my concerts to learn something new. They're coming to remember something that they already know is true. To be reminded of what they already know is true. I think it's very powerful. There are not that many new truths in the world. Play the hits. Play the hits. There's a few eternal truths that resonate to all humans from the dawn of civilization. I need to put like faces on these ideas though. So like who else is doing comms the way that you would recommend? Like who do you just think is doing, the founders are doing the best at this? Are they just literally, you're fucking all your clients?

3:39:38It's a journey for everybody. Part of it is you're selective about the clients you work with. so you have the luxury of being like, well, I only want to work with people that I think can be great because I am going to be limited in my ability to provide a great service by how great, like somebody like Augustus, like fresh out of college, you can tell from a first conversation with him that he has a potential to be a Joe Rogan CEO, right? Like there's just something within him, right? And you can identify that pretty quickly, at least I personally can clock that in like a 15 minute interview. If somebody is going to actually, if somebody is like well suited to be the kind of going direct CEO, that kind of thing.

3:40:22But there's different, again, there's different archetypes that work for different people. Augustus is amazing. He does his own stuff. Like he's had these huge high profile interviews. He just sets it up. I have a couple Augustus stories that I think are so emblematic of how he does these things. One is the first time we ever met was after a Founders Fund event, and everybody had this huge sushi dinner. And then the next morning, which was eight hours from the time the dinner had concluded, he texted me, he's like, want to lift? He's just like, oh, it's on. But the second thing is there was this incoming potential hit piece about how, it was about how the gundo was too male-dominated.

3:41:06You know, there was some reporter that was still stuck in 2019, wanted to write an article about, like, there's not enough female representation in the gundo. And he texted me, and he's like, got to go consult with the boys. So he goes and consults with the boys. And he's like, all right, we're ready to deal with this. What should we do? And I said, well, I think you should just talk to her. And he said, has anybody ever tried just being hot and charming? I actually think, no, it hasn't really been tried. You should go try it. Do you want to know the advice I gave Augustus? Didn't that work with Shkreli, too?

3:41:36Martin Shkreli? It really worked. Didn't he rise up like journalists? Oh, God damn. We were under her marriage, and then she wrote a book about it. She left her husband. That's great. Alpha widow. Guess the advice I gave him. You need to spend more time with these older entrepreneurs. I swear to God. Because he's like, my boys are killing it. I go, listen, man. I like you. You're a nice kid. There's 100 fucking companies there. Five are going to be here five years from now. They're all dead. They don't even know it. Like you're just, you don't know what you don't know because you're so goddamn young.

3:42:08I go, go spend time with older entrepreneurs. I just promise. Like still hang out with the young guys, still do whatever you're doing. It's like just talk to somebody that actually survived, was successful and survived for half a century. This is good. You're going to bait the gundo into having 100 % success rate. We're not going to let this podcast come over from Miami and say that only five of us are going to be standing here. That is how they operate. Yeah, this is good. I can see what you're doing. No, it's all startups. It's not just that. It's nothing to do with wherever they happen to be geographically concentrated.

3:42:35It's just most of them are all dead. And that's the point. It's like you're paying attention. Building during things. Exactly. I'm anti-ephemeral. I am succeed today, tomorrow, five years from now, ten years from now, 40 years from now. Like that's I think the important thing. I'm scared. You told me that I introduce a lot of people to you. I'm scared to introduce someone to him who hasn't been in business for like ten years and made billions of dollars because he's not being a guy. He's like, call me when you're a billionaire. No, that's not true. kind of um no i i've been doing a bad job of just hanging out with all the older entrepreneurs because this is what i happen to be interested in and no because you just learned dude i told this story uh recently it's like i spent um i'm part of the thing about differentiation which is why i love dyson and i think what we talk me and we talk about this all the time podcasters don't think about differentiation so i'm like okay yeah i'm gonna grab some interesting podcast guests that i know are really good but i also want to convince people that don't do podcasts at all to come on.

3:43:29And I've spent a lot of time doing this, and it takes a long time. He's getting it. You saw that? I didn't curse. Almost. And so I talked to one guy. He's 71 years old. He worked in his company for 50 years. He just sold it for$50 billion. And I spent an hour with him in New York. And the information he transferred to me in an hour, it's just like, it's crazy how much information that could happen. So what I have to do a better job of taking that information, I mean, I guess the, no, I don't have to do a better job at this. I do this on the podcast. Just listen to the podcast. Like take the information from the old guys and push it to the young ones.

3:44:02You just got to listen. I want to go back to this though because I'm still not getting what I want. Who's doing it well? I loved your Pirate Writers piece that came out I think yesterday or the day before. It literally just comes down to this last paragraph. Like the people who are really going to stand out are the people who are willing to be candid and truthful. Yes. So – Wow. Agree with Jake Paul. That was his number one advice for creators in 2026. It's very similar. You, me, Jake Paul. Yeah. I feel like when people are like the idea of authenticity is important. People have just heard that so much it means nothing anymore.

3:44:33It's just like, yeah, it's important. But then they don't actually go and practice it. Can I tell you a secret? Why don't you think they practice it? I think people are... They're scared. And they're getting gaslit. They don't love themselves. Why'd you have to take it to another level like that? Because that's all the stuff that's important. I'm looking for what's real and the noise. They're getting gaslit from the outside. A lot of people are so terrified of what other people think about them. They have low self-esteem. I have this argument on with most people think entrepreneurs are like too arrogant, and I say the opposite.

3:45:03I was just like, we could have so many more entrepreneurs. We don't have an epidemic of overconfidence. We have an epidemic of humbleness. No, we have an epidemic. America's too humble. We have an epidemic of people that don't believe in themselves enough. Which is why they let themselves get gaslit. How? I don't understand that. I don't hear that. So I'll give you a little bit of a roundabout answer because you asked who does this really well. Eric and Kareem were great before I met them. What companies? Time is funny to say both. They were great before I met them. Do I have a ramp shirt on? No.

3:45:37Oh, god damn. We're on it. We're live. This is why they were great before I ever met them. And if I had never met them, they would just continue to be great. And when we talk and brainstorm, a lot of these, it's not like they want to do nothing or they want to do something that sucks. And I'm like, no, you should do something that's good. And they take that away. They have the fire, the ideas. There's a million things that they want to do. And sometimes it's helpful to have somebody bounce that with you and say, like, even if this is not normal, do it anyway. Right. A lot of times. You got a little like Rick Rubin in you.

3:46:13Has anybody ever told you that? Is it the beard? No. No, it's not that. I'm stuck in this edit from hell for like 15 hours. That damn episode is only going to be like 40 minutes long, but I kind of mess it up. And so I'm like, I've been inside of his brain for a while. And I also re-listened to the old episodes I did on him. I really admire, like, do you remember when I texted you? I was like, dude, or I didn't say dude. I was like, I want you to do the new show. Do you remember how you responded? You said, you're crazy. And I was like, no, I'm serious. No, I was like, I'm serious. Oh, I said, David, are you out of your mind?

3:46:47Yes. Yes. And then you hit me with a meme. Do you remember the meme you sent? Have you ever seen this meme? I don't remember anything about yesterday. It's like, oh, my God. Oh, is it Big Bird at the table? Yes. I sent him the Big Bird at the table. And so it's like Lulu's Big Bird, and you have, like, Daniel Ek or Brad Jacobs on the other ones. I'm very fascinated and kind of obsessed with people that have singular careers, and that's what I told you. It's like you are literally like people don't – I don't even know how to say your last name. I have no idea how to pronounce it because I don't even remember.

3:47:14I don't even ever hear it. It's just Lulu. You have a very single career. I've only seen it in writing. But the stuff here that's coming out of your mouth is very strange to me because it sounds like I'm hearing Rick Rubin. You should read his book, The Creative. I have. It's great. Oh, yeah. There's a lot of, like, you got a lot of Rick Rubin. But sometimes you just give people permission to do the thing that they would have liked to do. That sounds like Rick Rubin. That the world is telling them is not normal and they shouldn't do it. Yes. And his whole thing is about listening without judgment.

3:47:41and just like you go into this idea where like the world is way more complex and you, we tell stories about the world, but we don't actually understand what's going on, right? And so his whole point was just like, stop overanalyzing, stop overthinking, like try it and then see what happens and see how it feels. And he basically goes off a lot of intuition and he thinks like the, essentially, I'm not gonna speak for him, but I highly suspect that he thinks the truest human wisdom is actually in like from the subconscious, not from like the rational like part of our brain or even the storytelling part of our brain.

3:48:11Yeah, which suppresses the good part. But again, he does a great job too because obviously he went direct. He has his own podcast. But when he goes on other people's podcasts, it's not like, oh, who's this? He's the same person everywhere he goes, which goes back to your importance of consistency. John, don't even try to end the show. We've got to hop on with Munich. Sorry. I can feel the body language as soon as you do this. Thank you so much for coming on the show. That's the mark of a good podcaster. It's been a fantastic show today. We almost made it to the fifth hour. We almost did. How long has it been?

3:48:39We do have to help on with just a few minutes. We'd love to have you back on the show many times this year. It's going to be a great year. Thank you both for coming on. David just had to get one more podcast in for the day. He's got a true addict. Thank you, everyone, for listening. Thank you for being here today. We will be back at 11 a.m. Pacific tomorrow. Thank you for tuning in. Cheers. Goodbye. The four of us need.