Ukraine Minerals, LIVE Ryan Peterson Interview, Trump Pentagon Reform, $200B Meta AI Build

31:12Like, it's a raw level playing field here. The people who lose are you and all of us who buy, who use the ports, who ship stuff. Consumers will have to pay more for everything. And I don't know. By the same logic, like, we should all be farming with sticks instead of, you know, just dig a hole with a stick and put a seed in the ground. So I think it's very stupid. I'm sure the union will want to come after me for that. They're doing the right thing for themselves, by the way. They should represent their interests. That's their job as a union. So I don't criticize what they're doing, but my stance is very pro robotics and automation.

31:46I'm obviously we're a technology company. So yeah. Yeah. Broadly. I mean, there's been a lot of, uh, heat around the humanoid robotics space and just robotics broadly. Where, where do you see Flexport itself leveraging, uh, some of this tech? And, uh, I'd love, uh, I'd love to get your take on just the humanoid form factor generally. is that something that you see being integrated, you know, across, um, you know, all the different physical touch points of the flex port business, or do you think there's a better, you know, form factor, you know, it's not obvious to me that humanoids are going to be the right form factor for like 3PL and fulfillment, for example.

32:24Um, yeah, definitely not obvious. The whole thing is it's, I'm very much wait and see it's the humanoids are making enough progress that it's really causing me to second guess how much I want to spend on CapEx and a big automated system right now in a fulfillment center because you know three years from now i don't want to have this the life cycle on that investment they probably like 10 15 years at least right not hopefully it can pay back faster than that it would have to before we invested but like it's gonna it's gotta last that long i'm not gonna replace it and i could just totally imagine i have this like giant expensive system that three years from now is just obsolete because progress in humanoids or other types of robotics.

33:03So it's kind of interesting. One of these cycles where you're like, if it's improving that fast, then you definitely can't invest in it. Yeah. It's crazy. The future one is going to be way better. Yeah. Well, it's 11. Humanoids are good in that sense because they're modular. You can buy one at a time instead of like, well, the concern we've talked about this before. The concern with humanoids is just if humanoids depreciate at the rate that the model three does, are they viable investments? Right? You're just like sinking dollars into these things. And then the next year it's like, well, you know, I could have invested 50 grand into training this human.

33:38Who's going to be like better at their job and all this stuff. And I invested in this robot. Now it's like, just not even, uh, you know, effective or. Far for them to clear is so high too. I mean, workers are very like on an IQ basis. Like they're pretty smart. They got amazing dexterity in their fingers. They run around. They've got agency. Not that expensive. like there's a lot that bar is going to be really high for them to clear yep for sure so we're i'm we're still like pretty manual in our fulfillment so now we're digital in the sense that like we scan everything in and out and like a lot of you can't screw this up technology but the actual pick pack and parcel you know putting this putting it in the box is pretty manual and i i the bar is so high to clear.

34:25So we're kind of happy with that. Well, it's 11. We'll let you get out of here unless you want to lecture us on JFK. Otherwise, hope you have a great day. Did you see that? I did a TV interview yesterday and I was on the air to talk about ports and they're like in the back room waiting in the green room or whatever. And they're like, our next story is JFK assassination. But first we got to talk about ports. the end of my interview i'm like can i just stay let's talk jfk like yeah this is great well uh where can the listeners uh uh what's a good starting point to get into the jfk lore okay great well i'm here in dallas okay uh which obviously is at dealy plaza is where he got shot and if you are ever in dallas you got to go down to dealy plaza right at the scene of the crime there's this guy this fat guy in sweatpants he sits right there all day every day and he will tell you everything.

35:19You give him 20 bucks. He sells like this little magazine. Give him 20 bucks. He'll give you a tour going behind the bushes and be like, oh, the mafia was right here on this bridge. He will give you the whole layout of how it all went down. So I highly recommend Dallas. So you just got to go to the source. You're not even recommending a movie or a book. It's just go to Dallas and get the tour. I like it. Correct. This guy will tell you everything. That's great. Okay. That's amazing. Have a great rest of your day. Safe travels. Enjoy Dallas and let us know if you crack the case on the JFK stuff.

35:50Talk to you soon. Bye. See ya. Well, let's move on. That was great. That was great. Always candid. We do need to do a JFK deep dive. That's how we really blow this show up. Go into the conspiracy realm. No politics, just straight up tinfoil hats. The hat is right here. We need permanent tinfoil hats on the show. Constantly. Well, let's stay with the politics stuff. The Economist has an article on, will Donald Trump and Elon Musk wreck or reform the Pentagon? I don't know if you want to read from this, Jordy. You got a copy? I got a copy for you. I got a hard copy. The battle for the Pentagon. They got some nice work there.

36:28I want to dox your address. I got it here too. I'll kick it off. In the Pentagon, they must surely be on high alert. On February 9th, President Donald Trump declared that it would soon become the target for Elon musk's doge accusing it of hundreds of billions of fraud and abuse mr trump will unleash his insurgents fresh from the feeding foreign aid into the wood chipper um their work could not be more important or more risky and yeah i mean we've heard this for a while like oh the pentagon wasn't able to pass an audit no it's been like a decade in a row of being unable to i don't even know if it's a it's really the issue is the audit but it seems like they just don't use ramp they don't have they don't have a good grasp on you remember yeah last week i was you you were like how do we spend how do we spend so much money this month and i was like what can ramp and you like were able in like oh yeah literally 10 seconds to see exactly where everything was spent um but yeah they couldn't even hit that bar yeah uh which is we will definitely be passing our audits here at at this podcast yeah uh you don't become the most profitable podcast in the world without passing an audit yeah but i mean to kind of put on the steel hat and take off the tinfoil hat, the steel man hat.

37:40You know, I am okay with the idea of a black budget. I'm okay with paying my taxes and the Pentagon does stuff that I might - You don't need it to be all on chain. No, I don't need it to be all on chain because I don't want the adversaries to know. And I don't want the average citizen who does pay their taxes to just be able to say, hey, it's my right as an American to know exactly where the CIA is spending money. And then I can just immediately text that to someone in Russia or China. Like I'm fine with not knowing, but I don't want there to be just massive money stolen. Like that doesn't make sense.

38:10I want it to be, you know, some sort of accountability and checks and balance internally. And so this is a big debate here. So that is because America's armed forces face a real problem. Not since the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and built huge tank formations at the height of the Cold War have America's military vulnerabilities been so glaring. In the killing fields of Ukraine, America is being out-innovated by drone designers. In the seas and skies off China, it is losing its ability to deter a blockade or an invasion of Taiwan. And one thing interesting from this morning, I saw Chris from Amidon Heavy Industries.

38:48They're building maritime defense products. And he shared something earlier about how China was caught, I guess, in the last 24, 48 hours, cutting undersea cables off the west of Taiwan. So they had come sort of around the other side. And so there's that. The other thing that's relevant to the defense side, which is a whole front that people don't even really talk about, but a Texas rancher was killed by an improvised explosive device yesterday morning. Oh, I saw that. Which is just insane. And many people are saying that should be considered an act of, you know, basically, that's a terrorist activity.

39:28If on American soil, an American citizen was killed by a cartel, which you could easily, you know, Trump has already paved the way for basically labeling them as, I think he did label them as terrorists. Interesting. And so the problems are clearest in the struggle to turn technology into military advantage. The drones over Ukraine are upgraded every few weeks. a pace that is beyond the Pentagon's budgeting process, which takes years. And this is what we're seeing with NEROS and Anderol equipment going out. It gets revised much faster than the Pentagon can even update a requirements document. And so there's been a big push for updating the way procurement happens.

40:09We talked about this on a previous show. I have a good post here from Eliano over at Palantir. There's an article in Breaking Defense. Pentagon leaders are crafting a plan to shake up how they buy and field technology with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth starting things off by potentially directing that the department adopt the software acquisition pathway as the preferred method for software development. In a draft memo obtained by Breaking Defense, Hegseth calls on the department to adopt the software acquisition pathway, a practice created in 2020 to accelerate software development by implementing best practices from the private sector.

40:44At its core, SWP is a streamlined method for procuring software programs bespoke to DOD requirements, DOD requirements. Although the SWP organizations can deploy capabilities into platforms within six months or less, DOD has previously stated that the goal is to speed this process up into hours or just days, which makes a ton of sense so that companies like Palantir and other software providers to the DOD can push updates much faster than having all this back and forth. And so there's a lot going on there. But of course, a lot of people are worried that the Doge stuff will just result in smaller budgets.

41:16And then defense tech companies will be on their back foot because they're expecting an expansion and they can't get that if things are pulling back. But at the same time, the actual budget will be passed not by the executive branch, but by Congress. And it all looks like there's a continuing resolution and then maybe even an increase in defense spending. And so we can read more of this. I don't know if there's anything else you want to say? Not on that specifically. I'm sure there's other stuff in here, but, um, but yeah, I mean, we, we joked about this yesterday too. Every, it's sort of, um, what's interesting right now is every department feels like they are, knows they're under threat because to them, you know, if you're running a department or, or, you know, even if you're just an employee, generally everybody that's worked at a startup that has a massive, it's way more fun to have massive budgets that are sort of like, you don't really have to, you know, it's, you know, and this is the issue when, when startups raise too much money, they just start, you know, spending them or, or, or, you know, and so regardless, bloat, bloat is more fun than austerity and being, you know, and running, you know, highly efficiently and, and questioning every spending decision and cutting back and saying, oh, we can't do, you know, this idea is good, but we're not going to do it because we have, you know, somewhere better to spend that money, or it's just not good enough.

42:37It doesn't meet the bar. And so no, you know, historically, these departments have just sort of said, every year we need more and more money. We give them more and more money. They're not being evaluated purely on, they're certainly not being evaluated on efficiency. You know, you had that tinfoil hat conspiracy theory about NASA saying that they might be talking about the asteroid that's going to destroy Earth to keep them from getting the axe. It was just too conveniently timed. This thing's hitting in 2030, apparently, or might hit in 2030. And your math is so bad that every other day the odds go up by 1%.

43:12I don't know. No, the odds don't go up 1%. They were like doubling every two days. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who knows? Who knows? But I heard a similar conspiracy theory about the hypersonic missile stuff. It was always hard to tell when there would be a Chinese demonstration, like these undersea cables. Like on one hand, yes, it might be China's more dangerous than ever. So we need to increase military budgets or it could just be, I want an increased military budget. So I have an incentive to make China look more dangerous than ever. And so it's always really hard to figure out what is driving the narrative.

43:47And in the China case, I am a little worried. In the NASA case, I don't know how much I buy that conspiracy theory, but it is interesting. And I'm glad that the - I'm not betting the farm on it. But it's an important question to ask. This is an interesting line from here. behind this is the nightmare of budgets two-year delays are aggravated by congressional squabbling pork barreling politicians waste money by vetoing the end of programs they guard their control over spending so jealously that without congressional permission the pentagon cannot as a rule shift more than 15 million dollars from one line to another so if it's over 15 million dollars it has to go to congress and congress has to say okay yeah we'll take not even not even taxing more It's spending more.

44:30It's just reallocating. And they put it in context here. It says 15 million is too little to buy even four Patriot missiles. When the Pentagon proposed diverting just 0.5 % of the defense budget to buy thousands of drones under its replicator initiative in August, winning approval took almost 40 congressional meetings. So the idea that Mitch McConnell should have a say in this sort of individual line items of the Pentagon's budget is insane, especially when you consider that he goes, you know, anytime he does an interview, he, you know, sort of there's like a bug and, you know, poor guy. But there's a bug in the system that just causes him to just like, you know, you got to restart the computer, basically.

45:17He did just announce his retirement in 2026, or he's not going to run again in 2026. But unfortunately, that means for the foreseeable future, he will still have a say in things that generally this level of micromanagement should be done. Almost like looking back to say, like, we gave you this budget. Did you spend it efficiently? if not you know we there needs you know and then we're enforcing changes versus the micromanagement at the and i'm sure i i mean i'm i i need to look this up but it it feels like this 15 million dollar number is one of those uninflation adjusted numbers where yeah when they passed that rule they were like sounded they were like well yeah we don't want the pentagon to just randomly move 15 million dollars and be able to create a new manhattan project like you know oh 15 million dollars that's all of our aircraft carriers and now 15 million dollars is like four missiles and so the pentagon can't shift it around uh pentagon angst is as old as the military industrial complex past secretaries of defense including bob gates and the late ash carter were philosopher kings next to their new and manifestly unqualified successor pete hegseth who uh was a fox news host but has military experience i don't buy the unqualified narrative as much as some people, but he definitely has a different background from previous secretaries.

46:41Yeah, it's more so do we need a leader who's highly experienced as a warfighter and highly pragmatic and has deep relationships within the actively enlisted military? Or do we want the philosopher king who's going to sort of sit and uh you know tell everybody else how how things should be done without the sort of boots on the ground yeah it's almost like we need both you know we we need the guy like pete hegseth needs both right we need our we need our operators and we need our philosopher king absolutely sometimes they end up intersecting yeah a lot of times the philosopher king usually would write you know the book that then goes viral and becomes the the the tone that everyone's marching to the same drum of, but then you see what Pete Hugseth is doing with some of those photos where he's like working out with the guys and like really like leading from the front.

47:34And I think that that could be good. There was a great op-ed in the journal yesterday about army recruiting, falling off a cliff and now starting to climb back up and what they can do about this. And they actually mentioned the JFK proposed a 50 mile march, like nationally to like encourage men to like go and work out and like potentially join the army and so uh he was like proposing this it was very cool uh anyway uh there are two reasons why this moment may be different one is the time is ripe uh not only is the threat to american security becoming clear but a new generation of military technology firms including andurl palantir shield ai uh is banging on the pentagon doors indeed palantir is now worth more than any of the five prime contractors more controversially mr musk is eager to crack heads together an enthusiasm, which stems partly from the second reason to hope, his experience elsewhere.

48:26In the 2010s, to escape the ignominity of paying for rides to the International Space Station on Russian spacecraft, NASA put fixed price contracts to provide such services out to tender. Boeing offered something called Starliner. Mr. Musk's SpaceX offered Crew Dragon at a much lower cost. Crew Dragon has been a huge success. Starliner has yet to fly a successful mission and has left Boeing having to absorb billions of dollars of budget overruns. As they should. Yeah. And that's the nature of the free market. Like that is a good outcome, I think. From the 60s to 2010, the cost of getting a kilogram to orbit hovered around$12 ,000.

49:04SpaceX rockets have cut that by a factor of 10 already. It's 1 ,000 or 1 ,200 per kilogram and promised much more. Very, very fascinating. Mr. Musk's task is big and complex. American weapons need more AI, autonomy, and lower costs where possible. They should be made from cheap off-the-shelf parts that ride on advances in consumer tech. This is a lot of what Andrew Rill's doing. The Pentagon should foster competition and risk-taking, knowing that some schemes will fail. Yeah, it's interesting. Part of the reasons why these decisions end up being so contentious is that the individual senators have their constituents back home that are oftentimes dependent on jobs from specific programs.

49:51So it ends up getting into this position where we want to keep this program going because 300 people in this small town that voted for me rely on this program for their livelihood. And so it's a very, very complicated issue. And yeah, I'm interested to see. I would love to hear as this sort of Pentagon Doge, you know, collision happens. It would be really fascinating to hear what our analysts in China and Russia and any of our adversaries saying, because they might be, you know, they might be actually concerned about it because, hey, we have the biggest military budget in the world. And if we keep the budget the same, but spend it three times better, it'll actually be very bad for adversaries.

50:40But if we just cut, you know, and hack across the board, they might be, you know, rubbing their hands together saying like, this is this is great. Right. It makes us able to be more competitive. But this is one of those things every single American should want, if your tax dollars are being spent anywhere, you should want them to be spent right. And I don't think that that's a political issue at all. That's just called being pragmatic. Yeah. So if you're at the Pentagon and you're working, if you're burning the midnight oil, trying to figure out where the budget is going, figuring out how to optimize our military spend.

51:18There's no better mattress to sleep on than an eight sleep. Boom. Nights that fuel your best days. Turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. Go to eight sleep to purchase one. Big fan of eight sleep. Go to TBPN. You can compete. You can compete with John and I. Oh, yeah. Sleep scores. We should get just get like a group chat going and we can. I did not do well last night. I think I got like an 80 something. It was rough. Why was it rough? I don't know. I think I went to bed too late. I was the one. 83. Only six hours and 41 minutes. Not good. I'm balling. I'm balling off. I had a 96.

51:53And the thing that just keeps dinging me is I'm not getting quite, I'm barely getting more than seven, but I'm in the range. But something to work on. I've reflected on it. I think that choice of shirt and suit, phenomenal. Yeah. I think it's great. risky one today. I wasn't sure if this sort of off-white shirt could go with the suit, but it's working. I think it looks great. And you know who needs to put on a suit one of these days? Who's that? Mark Zuckerberg. That is true. He's a high beast. He's looked good. He put on a suit. It's a shame when a man only puts on a suit when they're in trouble.

52:30Exactly. You don't want to be the guy that only is wearing a suit when people are trying to come down on you because if you're wearing a suit all the time when you are you know in the shit yeah uh sorry swear jar sorry swear jar um but you know if zuckerberg wore a suit every single day and then he goes in front of senate and he's wearing a suit he doesn't look guilty i don't think he needs to wear it every day i just think we know he can pull off the cool t-shirt with the the graphic tee we know he can look good walking into ufc but i want to see more versatility more range in the The New York Times actually has an article in 2018 called Mr.

53:08Zuckerberg's I'm Sorry Suit. Oh, yeah. And another one from The Hollywood Reporter. Yes, Mark Zuckerberg wore a suit at the Senate hearing. So he's got a guy. The guy who had the sort of, you know, daily uniform. What was it like? The gray shirt. It was the gray sweatshirt, the hoodie. Yeah. And there was this famous interview with Kara Swisher where Kara Swisher is really putting the screws to him. Here's another one. These headlines are amazing. Washington Post 2018, Mark Zuckerberg is one of the suits now. He'd better learn to get comfortable in one. And so they're all just dunking on him from wearing a suit.

53:43But if he'd been wearing it even once a week prior to that, nobody would have been able to say anything. I mean, his suits looked great, but he could take it a step further now that he's so into fashion. He could really find something that's a standout suit and even blend in some of the hypebeast. he could take some creative risks with the suits that he chooses and how he puts them together and just throw it in every once in a while i'm not saying i'm not saying get rid of the t-shirt entirely i'm just saying yeah every once in a while show up in a suit show up in a button down let's see a polo let's see you be able to style you know it you know in any former facebook employee chamath was recently on his podcast talking about his uh laura piana addiction and he looked fantastic.

54:23He looks fantastic. I thought, you know, he was getting memed for it, but it, you know, I think he's got great. And yeah, it's hard to argue with that. It is. It is. Well, the reason we're talking about Zuck is because Meta is discussing an AI data center project that could cost$200 billion. And for reference, they are spending something between 60 and 80 billion on CapEx per year. Not all of that is for artificial intelligence. A lot of that's just for serving reels, which is obviously AI driven as well, but it's not for specifically for LLM training. But he's all in on AI and is now thinking, I'm sure this 200 billion is over a series of years.

55:03He's not just ramping up the CapEx by a factor of three or four overnight, but it is an exciting story. And it's interesting given that Nvidia earnings are happening later today. We'll see if this is something that moves the needle for Nvidia, because if they really do want to spend $200 billion. That's going to be a lot of GPUs. So I'll kick it off and then I want to get your take. Meta Platforms is in talks to build a new data center campus for its artificial intelligence endeavors that would dwarf anything the company has done to date and would be among the biggest of its kind. It would cost more than$200 billion.

55:36The proposed campus, which hasn't been previously reported, this is in the information, would be several times larger than a new AI data center in Louisiana that Mark Zuckerberg discussed last month, which he implied would be about four miles long. That data center would cost$10 billion. And so now we're going up 20x. The discussions suggest Meta is preparing for a multi-year surge in demand for generative AI among its billions of users through an AI chatbot available in all of its apps. It also shows the lengths to which Zuckerberg may go to keep up with its rival OpenAI, which has embarked on a joint venture with SoftBank to spend$500 billion over four years on new data centers for its AI.

56:17Like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, Meta has outlined plans to massively increase CapEx, largely for AI development. Meta said it will lift its CapEx to between$60 and$65 billion, that's the actual number, up nearly 70 % on last year. So there are these. And he's never been afraid to roll the dice on CapEx. Yes. And he's founder mode. He can just rip it. Well, just generally making big bets, obviously around uh you know he he he you know it's funny at the time meta yeah the rebrand seemed so silly to me and in the fullness of time Facebook is like 50 % of the metaverse that we experience, right?

57:00When you look at everything from Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp. It's actually a perfect name. I agree, I agree. I think it's aged very, very well. And I think it did get away from the blue app. People use Instagram, they use WhatsApp. Everyone uses a meta product, even if they don't use Facebook specifically. And I think that Zuck realized that. And he actually needed, so what we're seeing now is that every single one of Zuck's apps will eventually become somewhat irrelevant with the youth. And so he needed this sort of parent-level brand to say, you're investing in Meta and my leadership and this sort of collection of digital and now physical products.

57:48Some of them, they're going to have their time. But many people have reported, we talked about this probably a month ago at this point, a lot of people feeling like I don't use Instagram as much anymore. I don't post there. I'm, you know, my attention is being spread elsewhere. And so he needs to, I think it was really smart to not be the blue company, you know, the Facebook company. Totally. And yeah. Yeah, and there's something about CapEx spending like this that's somehow less risky than spending on a specific app or specific platform. Like when he, when they went to build out the last data center build, the last big data center plan, they got kind of caught flat-footed with reels because TikTok came out and the main, TikTok was, oh, it's vertical video that scrolls.

58:39But the real thing that made TikTok take off was that it is able to, with AI essentially, personalize a feed very, very quickly. And scale AI-esque. Yeah, I'm sure. But even then, it's clearly a very robust, algorithm in terms of understanding what is this content and how is it linked to other content in the feed and this person spent 45 seconds watching this one minute clip and 15 seconds watching this other clip so they like cars and not trucks or whatever uh and so it bringing that to bear in reels on instagram was something that required a new data center like it wasn't just something that they could just spin up on aws or on their own servers because it required new new ai uh new AI data centers.

59:25And so Zuck famously, when that happened, he said, I don't just want one reals sized data center. I want two. And because then if we get caught again, we'll just have one ready to go. And then of course the LLM boom happened and he was ready and he was able to train LLAMA really quickly. And then they have been not dependent on any other LLM provider and they've been able to just open source that, but also use it internally for their chatbots. And so you can imagine that, you know, this, it's like he spends$200 billion on this. Is it just to serve LLMs in all of their apps? They're probably looking at the data of how many people are chatting with Llama across all of their apps.

1:00:07It's looking really good. But even if that doesn't happen, maybe people start generating a lot more video. And that's really intense. Or people start doing something else. And it still requires a lot of hardware, a lot of AI chips, a lot of GPUs. And so it's also you have to imagine that that, you know, we're in this sort of more pro business administration. If M &A, you know, gets back on the menu in a big way, Zuck is going to get extremely aggressive, acquiring these sort of breakout consumer AI products. And being able to go to the founder of an AI company that has product market fit, but it's losing a billion dollars a year and saying, why don't you join Meta?

1:00:44I'll still let you run the business and you're going to have access to this$200 billion of, uh, you know, data center, uh, you would never be able to get on your own. Yeah. You could see character AI having like a very natural home and fit within that metaverse. And so I think my read on this is, is broadly that he wants meta to be independently competitive in AI have, not be held back by GPUs and just raw computing power and ultimately allow Meta to be a place where other companies can land and be competitive with Stargates and Elons and things like that. The other thing from this article that stood out to me is that this line, Leaders at Meta and OpenAI, grew concerned about the speed with which XAI stood up at data center to develop AI in Memphis, Tennessee last year.

1:01:37So every single person that wasn't at XAI watched what the XAI team did in Memphis, and that became the bar. And so if Zuck is paying some executive team specifically around data centers combined, I'm sure it's like$50 million, like some absurd amount of comp, he's looking at them and saying, this is the bar. You should be able to achieve this because I know it's possible. and there's some, we've talked about this yesterday but some constraints around potentially promises that were made around ESG and stuff like that, I don't know where meta lands with that, but ultimately that's the bar now and if Zuck is certainly going to be intense around that and say actually I would want you to do it even faster because that's him as a leader saying, you know, he was wanting to really set the pace, but that's a bar now.

1:02:38And yeah. And when you launch a new LLM, like because the landscape is somewhat commoditizing, you have to be superlative in some way. And so essentially like OpenAI seems to still be on the frontier of the frontier. They are the leading, but every other company is when they launch something, they always have some differentiator. Maybe they beat them by just a couple points on chatbot arena or mmlu or they're slightly bigger context window with google or you know oh it's uh you know it's it's open source and that's enough to be like well it's a gpt4 class model and it's open source so now it's it's it's in the conversation whereas if you're just launching a clone that's exactly like like you know uh open ai but like deep seek it's like oh they had this oh we were it's so cheap and it's really cheap to use and it was trained really small and you can run it uh you know you can inference it so cheaply it's like it didn't matter that they they weren't an order of magnitude better than chat gpt or gpt4 what mattered was that it was at the same level roughly but then also had a little bonus and i think that zuck is is thinking about that right now as xai spun this up is like can their llama 4 drop outdo xai's grok 3 because if it can't then they need a new twist on it they need something else that that will really otherwise it's just you know it's not going to become some popular product yeah one interesting thing is meta has not been nearly as aggressive of forcing llama down people's throats as xai and grok have right that does feel right so uh most people are using grok within x makes sense it's already there they have the standalone app now i think people are starting to use that more but uh meta with how much they're investing in ai how much zuck cares about this why is it that you go to your home you know why why have they not slammed this on the home row of instagram which is a you know an app that i don't know do they must have so i i would push back on that in some ways because they do show it's more just that there's a conversation about ai that's happening on x that we are very much a part of and so we see that integration i don't know if you know basketball twitter is using grok in the same way that tech twitter is um but if you go to instagram and you type in a search term there's an icon right here to click you know put this in a chat and all of a sudden i'm talking to llama and so it it pulls it up right here and and by the way guys john's explore page is cars watches and weight lifting very uh very pure yeah most expensive lambo let's do this and like very quickly it will it will insert me in a in a chat it used to be really aggressive where it was actually hard to to pull this up but like you can see that like this is like you know um it's like if you search in instagram you will get pipelined into a flow they've gotten less aggressive about it but uh they are definitely slipping the ai in uh i think they're trying to do it tastefully because there's there's often really big pushbacks to any changes in instagram even when they change to like hey we're going to put more reels in your main feed.

1:05:49There was a big like backlash to that, becoming more algorithmic. Hey, I built up a following of 5 million followers. Like now every post has to go viral or it's just a flop. Like that's not fun. Yeah. We use in the chat says, didn't meta add artificially generated profiles. I argue that's way worse than X. They did, but, but, but those never broke through in the same way that the grok narrative has on it's very different to be like i still use instagram search to search for specific things i don't go there with the intention at all of yeah i'm gonna ask this llm yeah a question that i have and they certainly they certainly have been pushing like a deep research comparable product in in any meta products that i'm aware of yep um it would be cool i mean i one of the favorite parts of x and xai is that you're on a you're on a post and you just click the button and then it just gives you more context then you can say hey write a whole report about this there could be that's a really good point there could be so much more like research like using instagram for research so if i want to it would be very cool to be able to and maybe maybe this is possible and we're just not engaged enough with with uh llama but being able to say who do i follow or who have i engaged with in the past that has talked about intermittent fasting and then get a bunch of, get a return.

1:07:10Yeah. I mean, I was thinking about this just on X. I really hope that XAI gets more access to my X profile so I could actually say, of the people I follow, who are the experts in this topic? Yeah, because right now it's a little bit random. It's really hard to search right now for what's happening. Sometimes I'll just do filter follows and then the topic. So I'll say, okay, I want to see anyone who's talked about metas I'll search like meta data center, filter follows. And then it filters out all the junk accounts that I don't follow. And I'll just see, okay, Dylan Patel posted about it. Someone else posted about it, et cetera.

1:07:47There's some interesting scale here we should go over. The meta executives discussed eventually needing between five and seven gigawatts of power for the site. By comparison, OpenAI has planned to acquire eight gigawatts of power for its proposed array of data centers known as Stargate. By 2030, each gigawatt is enough to power 750 ,000 homes to put OpenAI and Meta's projects in perspective. At the end of 2023, Microsoft's entire Azure cloud business had around five gigawatts of capacity and that's across the entire world. So getting up there, getting up there. Big, big data centers training huge.

1:08:25And we used around one gigawatt to run the show. Yeah. That's great. Anyway, so everyone is focused on this drastically more or drastically less. As Meta charts plans for a major expansion, it is waiting on some of the NVIDIA chip orders at place last year. Instagram head Adam Masseri told his staff in a note this month. Meta is also contending with uncertainty over how many AI chips it needs to train and run its AI. We may need drastically more or drastically less capacity than we thought to build frontier models. That's of course about DeepSea. I mean, that to me, I mean, it was relevant to Nvidia earnings later because it's possible that companies are just, you know, the risk right now for Nvidia is that companies massively, you know, overspend and then flood the secondary market, you know, end up having to offload some of these chips that are depreciating because the chips are actually getting better.

1:09:24And then it gets into a situation where you can go on the secondary market, not from NVIDIA and buy, you know, however many H100s and that revenue no longer goes directly to NVIDIA and NVIDIA nukes. That's a risk. And so to see the head, basically the CEO of Instagram, he operates very much as in sort of founder mode. He still makes great videos about the platform and helping creators there. To see him, you know, it sounds like he wasn't intending this for to be uh to be publicized but we may need drastically more drastically less capacity than we thought to build frontier models that just says we don't know what's going on uh we're not you know that that's not a high you would prefer him to say we think we're going to need you know we're pretty confident in our projections it's possible we might need more or less is very different than saying we may need drastically more or drastically less?

1:10:26We have no idea. No idea. We're going to find out. I tend to think we, I'm still pretty scale pilled. I still think we need a lot more. I think that the, the deep seek optimizations, maybe, maybe we'll see. Uh, but, but I, I, I think, I think the deep seek optimizations, you get those and that's kind of like a one-time algorithmic benefit, just like RLHF was kind of like an algorithmic benefit, but then you'd want to apply scale to it. And so I look at deep seek and I say, cool, let's do all of the optimizations that DeepSeek did around memory bandwidth and Int4 or Int8 instead of Int32, all of the different optimizations that they did.

1:11:04Let's take those and run that at 100X scale and we'll probably get better models. So the wild thing is right now, this is the interesting question and we're not gonna go Kramer and start making predictions, but NVIDIA is worth almost twice what meta is today. What does that look like in a decade from now? It's hard for me to imagine. It's easier for me to imagine Meta as a$10 trillion company than it is for me to imagine NVIDIA as a$10 trillion company. And that's a primarily vibes-based analysis. But anyways. anyways yeah i mean when you think about like potential platform shifts like um post gpu maybe you go tpu takes off that's rough for nvidia potentially if you're cutting i mean apple silicon is a non-nvidia product right it goes directly from apple design to tsmc kind of cutting out the middlemen uh and then quantum computing nvidia doesn't really have a piece in that at the same time like you know everyone's using these gpus right now and continues to versus the facebook narrative and the meta narrative of like if VR is a big platform well they're really well positioned for that if you know this social stuff is really really sticky people you know can't really go rebuild their social graphs everywhere else there's just all these different elements where Zuck seems to have his finger in so many different pies that could potentially be huge over a very long period of time but it's fun to figure it out but Jordy if you had 200 billion dollars to spend And how would you track it all?

1:12:46I would use Ramp. Oh, Ramp. Save time. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.com and we will move on. Wait, quick note. A Ramp SDR is in the chat right now under the account Ramp SDR. That's fantastic. And they say, when are you interviewing a Ramp SDR? Oh, there we go. We got to bring them up. I would say that we have a nightly interview where I just call them up and we just chit chat. That's fantastic. We should start bringing them on the show. Yeah, I love it. That's great. Did you see this Alex Jones post?

1:13:22Exactly what we want to be covering. But it is funny. Yeah, this is funny because you need to put it on anytime you interact with Alex Jones because he's tinfoil hat city. But he said, major scandal breaking. Apple iPhones now replace the word racist with Trump. So you would use the dictation. You would say racist and it would just autocorrect to Trump. Obviously, that was very controversial. And what's interesting is that there's a proposed community note here that says this is false. The only way this happens is if you set up personalized autocorrect in Apple's settings. This was staged for engagement farming.

1:13:56And I believed that. But then I opened the Wall Street Journal. And the Wall Street Journal has an article here saying Apple has pledged to fix transcription glitch that replaces racist with Trump. And so what's interesting is that, like, I guess it was a problem. I have no idea how this happened. I just, I'm going to text you right now. Yeah. Yeah. Test it out and see, and see what it does. If it auto fills, it needs to be the dictation. So you have to say it. You have to say, you have to say racist to the, to the, the, the, the, the, the dictation button and see if it replaces it. Let's, let's test this now live.

1:14:31We'll get to the bottom of this. Alex Jones, you're in the truth zone. No misinformation allowed here. Let's see. Racist. What does it say? It says racist. Okay, well, debunked. Alex Jones, you're on notice. But for some reason, Apple did actually address this. And they said they would fix the bug occurring on some iPhones in which its text-to-speech transcription software is sometimes replacing certain words with an R consonant, including racist with Trump. And I'm sure the words rampant and rampage at times also appear to be replaced with Trump. And I bet you that's just something in the they're updating the transcription algorithm, which we've talked about.

1:15:15We wanted them to do this. There are always hallucinations whenever you build these deep learning models. They're very hard to validate. And I'm sure just somewhere, you know, there's so much in the corpus of like YouTube videos. They're probably scraping to train these models of people saying Trump and racist in the same section or in the same sentence that some bit got flipped. And all of a sudden it thinks that they're similar. Yeah. I mean, what Alex Jones, I'm sure, would suggest is that it was an activist employee. yeah yeah of course oh yeah i hard-coded this in yeah and and i don't think that's what's what's happening did you notice that uh with some of the transcription models if you if you just triggered them and had it transcribed nothing like you didn't say anything and you said thanks like transcribe that basically it would say uh like thanks for watching and don't forget to subscribe because it was clearly trained on youtube videos and it was like the most the most popular thing humans say ever is please subscribe.

1:16:06Isn't that hilarious? That's hilarious. And so I would, I would say that I would open, no, no, we don't. We, we, we got it. But yeah, I would open it up and I would just push this and then this, and it would, and it would just say like, you know, oh, thanks for subscribing or please subscribe. Um, and so these, these errors happen all the time. People blow them out of, out of proportion. There was the, there was the Gemini image debacle. Uh, people said, oh, chat GPT can do all these things. Croc is, is advocating for, you know, given Trump the death penalty, it's all over the place. And people read into it whatever they want, whatever their political ideology.

1:16:38They're like, I got to score the points. And so it does seem like there was an error. It does seem like Apple's working on it. But it also seems like, you know, Alex Jones was engagement farming a little bit. But, you know, he's got to get that creator payout. Done that before. Done that before. This is crazy. A TikTok user who goes by the handle David Media in PDX said on a post on the platform, you say racist and it blurts out Trump. The software correctly renders racist or rampage several times, but occasionally when it is replaced, it will dictate the word Trump instead of racist. And so artificial intelligence has been known to generate unexpected results.

1:17:14The current excitement around general artificial intelligence, which is able to produce text and images, has attracted controversy over its propensity for presenting erroneous, fake, or harmful content. And this is why Apple's been so conservative with the generative AI stuff, like the Genmoji. Why is it restricted to the just cartoons? Well, if you tell the model, never create anything photo real ever, it's very hard to say. Someone used Genmoji to create a fake image of the president going to prison and it swung the election. And so that was the narrative of the election. And I had a prediction that, I think I posted this.

1:17:48I need to take a victory lap on this one. But I said that After Effects would be more, Adobe After Effects, Photoshop, the Adobe Creative Suite, that would be more impactful in the election than generative AI. Because generative AI was still very clockable. Like you could see, okay, that's clearly an AI rendering of Biden doing something stupid or Trump doing something stupid. Like not many people are falling for that and then voting based on that. But the video editing stuff was much easier to see. And we actually saw a lawsuit about this where, you know, I think it was, oh, I'm going to get this wrong.

1:18:25One of the major networks did an interview with Kamala Harris, and then they edited it down and they took out some pieces and Trump sued and said, you edited out the bad parts, which swung voters to vote for Kamala. That wasn't generative AI. That was just the razor tool. That was artisanal. Yeah, in Premiere, basically. And those types of edits, even just doing little things like you're watching a clip of Biden, you cut it and then you add some extra sound. And it sounds like he's taking an extra long amount of time to answer the question. Something like that can be misinformation more than you don't need generative AI to do that.

1:18:59And so Apple has been really on top of this stuff and playing it very safe. I think that they should be more aggressive. And I actually don't think this is that big of a deal and I don't care. What's your take? Yeah, it's just another moment that you can imagine the Apple execs are just deeply frustrated with all things AI summarization and AI, you know, dictation decoding. So anyways. Well, I'm sure Apple will need to clean up their reputation. They'll need to put up some new billboards. Those Genmoji billboards aren't doing a good job. And when they run their next billboard campaign, who should they use, Jordy?

1:19:34AdQuick. Let's go. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the out of the headaches of out of home advertising only ad quick combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe and i wanted to highlight a cool billboard from northrop grumman who uh you know the company's not doing as well palantir's bigger now we love andrel on this show but uh hey it's a cool billboard and uh it looks nice it's a little b20 yeah you have to you have You have to imagine, Anduril's been very, I think, effective with their out-of-home strategy.

1:20:10And in all the places that Northrop Grumman execs are also commuting around, you have to imagine that they felt a little bit of a fire. Look at where this billboard is. It's truly in the middle of nowhere. No, I think that's in deep California. Outside of their testing facility, which is cool. And yeah, I mean, if you're building hard tech, take a picture of the hard tech, make it look great, and throw it on a billboard. uh what a great way to get the message out there if you have a striking product and that's really where um where the the ad quick stuff and the out of home really uh hits its stride is when you can come up with with great copy great visuals that when they're put in the real world they make people stop they make people take a picture of it they make people post the picture of your ad for free on the internet because it's so cool and the opportunity for apple is to look back at you know know they're decades of incredible marketing and just run run back totally play the hits play the hits play the hits uh they're more of a luxury brand today than anything that's okay and gen moji doesn't feel like a luxury brand exactly it doesn't and and i mean i i hear you that they're a luxury brand and a lot of their products feel like they're like the the airpods max those feel very like you wear them as a status symbol uh and you know the phones certainly feel this way but they did they did have like the fun color the the see-through plastic iMacs back in the day they've always had a little bit of doing a see-through phone you can imagine almost like an acrylic phone would be harder to break yeah place but but good luck to them hopefully we'll see some cool stuff from apple and we wanted to move on to a new term we know we talk about deca millionaires centi millionaires centis billionaires deca billionaires and now there's the super billionaires and the wall street journal wants to introduce you to the world's 24 super billionaires the ultra rich are growing in numbers and changing wealth as we know it in 1987 forbes published its first billionaire list there were 140 people on it with a combined wealth of $295 billion.

1:22:19At the time, the richest person was Japan's Yoshiaki Tutsomi, a real estate tycoon worth$20 billion. Today, the world's richest person is Elon Musk with a net worth of$420 billion. I think Elon lost$20 billion yesterday. Just yesterday. It's a moment of silence for the capital erosion going on roughly 21 times as much as the previous peak. And so as the ranks of Global billionaires have swelled dramatically in recent years. A new category of ultra rich has emerged. The super billionaire. Musk is just one of 24 people worldwide who qualify for that distinction, which is defined as individuals worth 50 billion or more.

1:22:59As of February, these super billionaires. Imagine you're sitting at 48. You thought you're ready to retire. And they come out with this new definition. Yeah, yeah. And you're going to be thinking to yourself, I'm so embarrassed to go to Davos this year. I'm so embarrassed for Sun Valley. I'm not getting invited to the super beaner dinner. Totally. I mean, if I meet someone who's sitting at 48, 47 billion, I'm not even giving them the time of day. I'm kind of snickering. Oh, you want to be on the show? Why don't you pump those numbers up? Yeah. Why don't you go turbo long something right now and try and pump those numbers up?

1:23:36Well, they have a very interesting list. Tons of people worth deep diving. A lot of these people have been featured on David Senra's Founders Podcast, and let's go through them. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault, Larry Ellison, Zuck, Sergey Brin, Steve Ballmer, Warren Buffett, James Walton from Walmart, Samuel Walton as well from Walmart. Although they used to have the exact same net worth, James is pulling away with$117 billion. His brother,$114 billion. Yeah, something's going on there. Amancio Ortega ortega is at 113 billion alice walton is at 110 jensen wong at 100 man he's up there now but that that stock is doing well yeah generational run it has been it's it's fantastic he's been founder ceo of that company for what 30 years now yeah deserved uh bill gates michael bloomberg laurie larry page uh mikesh and bonnie charles coke julia coke uh francois bettencourt myers from L 'Oreal.

1:24:34Gautam Andani from the Andani Group is at$60 billion. Michael Dell is also at $60 billion. Zong Shan Shan from Nongfu Spring. No idea who that is. Yeah. And Prajogo Prang Etsu. Is Nongfu Spring the water company? I have no idea. It is. It's a dominant bottled water brand in China. Wow. That's fascinating. I want to know about that company. I have a book on this guy that's just been sitting there in my office at home. Maybe I got to pull it out. Nongfu spring mode. Yeah, that sounds great. In major luxury real estate markets like New York, Miami, Palm Beach, and Los Angeles and Aspen, new super tall towers and spec mansions have popped up geared specifically to the billionaire set.

1:25:23And there has been an explosion of nine figure home sales across the country. You remember the one in Beverly Hills? Yeah, that was a rough one. Yeah, but that was built on spec. They wanted to sell it for$500 million would be the most expensive home ever sold in America. And it was basically just like billionaire bait. It was like, we'll build this and somebody will come pick it up. Nobody really did. The market kind of crashed. It was kind of a disaster. I think the bank wound up selling it to the guy who started that fashion company, Fashion Nova. Yeah. But at maybe their cost or maybe they lost money on it.

1:25:57I think, I think the house is a hundred thousand square feet. It has a 50 car garage. It has a full club. That makes sense. It has a full club, like the club for like DJ. And like, you can host, you can host like thousands of people there. The LA fires are kicking off. You've got your 50 car garage at one house. Like I need to move all of these tonight. Yeah. Very, very difficult. Uh, did you see the, the video tour with the guy who built the one? It's fascinating. So maybe it's worth oh we should definitely dive this so he he basically made his money in uh directed to dvd movies so he made a ton of money in like the 80s and 90s uh taking like cheaply made movies and then distributing them into like grocery stores and people would pick up a new vhs oh some jog clock van damme movie or something and they'd pay for it so he made a bunch of money doing that in film production then got into real estate he built a home for the winklevoss twins i believe um and uh and then as the deal was kind of going south and he realized like hey maybe no one's gonna buy this 500 million dollar house uh he was like well now i'm pitching it as a reality show to netflix i'm gonna live here and we're gonna have concerts and he wanted to have like ufc fights there and stuff and he was really like scrapping it like any way to make this deal work and i think it uh eventually the bank said hey you owe us too much interest you gotta pay up I wonder what the appetite, I mean, a lot of these homes, you know, once you get into the$100 million plus range are very much trophy homes.

1:27:28And for the people that are buying them, they could burn to the ground without making really a dent, right? Like if you look at any of this list, if they lost$135 million home, it'd be basically an annoyance, but almost a minor one at that compared to the sort of day-to-day or year-to-year fluctuations in the stock. The one out of the LA fires that was wild was the$135 million home that was in succession that burned down. And the issue with these is they're just not, like you can get insurance on them, but not actually insurance that will cover any sort of, you know, even the rebuild on it. So anyways.

1:28:11Let me keep reading. the rise of the super billionaire marks a transformation in the composition of the world's ultra wealthy experts said in the 19th century and the early 20th century, the richest men were industrialists. John D. Rockefeller built standard oil into a monopoly. Andrew Carnegie dominated the steel industry and Cornelius Vanderbilt amassed a fortune through railroads. Their wealth, while vast, was spread across industries that defined an era of physical infrastructure and manufacturing. Through standard oil, John D. Rockefeller became the world's first confirmed billionaire in 1916.

1:28:44During that period, a company's value accounted for physical assets like property and machinery more so than the types of intellectual property and promise of future scale and earnings that push up values today. Today's tech billionaires make up a significant portion of the super billionaire pool. In addition to Musk, there's Bezos, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Ballmer. Their wealth is linked almost entirely to the stock prices and therefore future cash flows of the companies they started and there's an interesting kind of narrative violation in here steve balmer is at 157 billion bill gates is at 106 balmer balmer people don't like the balmer era for microsoft like the stock didn't do as well satya kind of brought it back she pivoted to cloud the only thing i remember is this is the video you know oh yeah and he was a salesman that was that was great but the wild thing we held on properly.

1:29:37This has been discussed a lot, but it's worth bringing up while we're on the subject. There's only one investor on the entire top 10 list, which is Warren Buffett. Every single other person on the list was a founder or CEO, you know, or part of the family that started one of these companies. And so, but I would argue that they're flexing on you and they're like, oh yeah, I'm a VC. I make so much money. Be like, oh, I'll see you on the super bean air list. Yeah. Good luck trying to make it good luck cracking the top 20 yeah good luck uh no but you you could also argue though that that elon you know people like bernard bezos elon are actually the world's best capital allocators they just sort of keep reinvesting into the machine yeah um and so uh unlike past generations where fortunes were built over decades today's tech-driven economy has also enabled founders to amass enormous sums in a matter of just a few years before his arrest in 2022, Sam Bankman-Fried, the now disgraced founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, who we covered on the Monday show because he did an interview from prison.

1:30:45He was worth$26 billion before the age of 30, for instance. That is so much money. Wow. Well, I mean, Sam is actually not, there's a world where if Sam gets another markup, he cracks his list. Because at the current, I would imagine, so at the current, he got seven-ish percent of OpenAI? Oh, you're talking about Sam Altman. Sam Altman. I'm pretty sure Sam Bangenfried has no equity in anything right now. He is destitute. You have to imagine that in all that, I bet you SBF has hidden away some coins. But no, Altman specifically, I think he, did he get 10? It was seven to 10 percent. Yeah, so he's climbing up.

1:31:24Could be in 10, 20 billion. If they get the$350 billion round down and then they get a nice 2X, just a simple 2X on that. Simple. Boom. He's in the territory. I mean, he's certainly shooting for a trillion dollar company. And, you know, consumer tech companies seem to be the ones that get to trillion dollar valuations. Certainly not in the rare mineral mining business over here. The great American fortunes of today are new money, not old, said a 2024 report by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, which noted the absence of names like Astor, Carnegie, Mellon, Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt on lists like the Forbes 400.

1:32:03Of the approximately 97 still living billionaires on the 2005 Forbes 400 list who inherited fortunes, less than half are still on the list today. The minority of heirs and heiresses who remain on the list today were three times more likely to have fallen in the Forbes rankings than have risen. And so bad day to be old money. Did you know that speaking of old money and uh television hosts uh anderson do you know that anderson cooper was a descendant of the vanderbilt family i did know that yeah um but his his mom balled out too hard really so he didn't actually inherit much money no way well he's done quite well but he's done well yeah self-made this this is hilarious so he only inherited 1.5 million uh which is actually very common right in some of these families for over time a couple generations down there's really uh nothing left uh so so they So they go to this economist, Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winning economist, a professor at Columbia University, said he attributes some of the rise of the super wealthy to the inability of antitrust laws to contend with monopoly power in the tech sector.

1:33:09We've covered this before because a lot of these tech companies, they do essentially have monopolies, but not because they are sequestering a particular resource. They're not cornering a resource. They have created aggregation platforms. Tesla is not a monopoly on cars. You can just go buy another car and yet the company is worth a ton of money. And so the antitrust laws are not really set up to bust these companies up. Yeah. Which is why Tesla is down however many percentages, specifically because they're not a tech company in many ways. Yeah. And so we have antitrust laws that were well adapted to standard oil, but that don't work well here in the tech sphere.

1:33:49Monopoly power has given rise to the potential of enormous amounts of wealth. These guys have both at the corporate level and at the individual level been even better at avoiding taxes than in making good products. Stiglitz says he's a little bit of a hater. The level of taxes they pay as a share of their profits should be an embarrassment to them. He's wagging the finger. But this is my favorite line in here. Wall Street Journal, they called for comment and they said, the 24 super billionaires declined to comment or didn't respond for requests for comment they sent they sent this article to 20 to all 24 people on the list and everybody everyone's like nah i don't want to be in this article i don't want to comment on my on on the tax subjects i mean berkshire and specifically warren have been smart about advertising how much taxes they pay yeah berkshire paid 28 and a half billion dollars of 2024 taxes.

1:34:44And I think at that scale, when you're, you know, I think they, you know, making a good argument that they're paying their fair share there. There's also the argument that like, yes, like Elon's not paying. That was the biggest tax bill, single tax bill in history. Yeah. And so a lot of these guys, they own, you know, 50 % of a company. It doubles in value. They make a hundred billion dollars. Sure. If they didn't sell, like, why would you tax them? That doesn't really make sense. But they generate tons of taxes because when you go and buy a Tesla, you have to pay taxes on that. When you buy a product through Amazon or you're paying sales tax and all this stuff.

1:35:20And so taxes are generated by their companies. And of course, there's income tax of everyone who's an employee and they are linked to lots of taxes. But yes, they are not taxed on their wealth until they go and sell it. And then they have to pay capital gains. Let's close out here. Regardless, the growth of the super billionaire segment shows no signs of slowing. It's plausible that we could see the world's first trillionaire in the next few decades. That'll be a size gone moment. It's very possible they are listening to the stream right now. It's possible. One would probably have said no in the past, but anything's possible these days.

1:35:54So fascinating. Well, if you're trying to win the favor of a super billionaire and you want to take come on a nice vacation where you going jordy wander find your happy place book a wander with inspiring views hotel grade amenities dreamy beds top tier cleaning and 24 7 concierge services a vacation home but better well we love wanders they are if you're looking to take a wander trip they're offering 400 off uh your trip uh for a spring sale that they're doing i think it's for the next 24 hours yeah you gotta move quick but uh we gotta get on wander ryan peterson because he's always traveling.

1:36:30He's always on the road. He just posted this right before he came on the show. He says, JetSuite X with Starlink is simply the best airline product in the world right now. He's getting blazing faster in our internet. He told me he was, we were trying to get him a call in yesterday and he was on a plane right when we were recording. I said, you got to get Starlink on the next flight. He had Starlink. So I experienced this exact combo on Saturday. Oh yeah. Flew up to the bay and back. And I think you could live stream like this connection. And the cool thing is, you know, if you're flying Delta or whatever, they don't even really turn on the Wi-Fi until you're in the air.

1:37:06And so you have this potentially like, you know, period where you're disconnected. Starlink is just constantly on when you're next to the plane or, you know, when you're in the vicinity of the plane. So you can get on the plane, sit down. Five minutes later, you take off. You're connected the whole time. It's amazing. It's beautiful. Huge fan. Huge fan of Starlink. I haven't had to use mine, actually. i i i bought it as a prepping thing and i fortunately had internet the entire time well we already talked about the dock workers so let's move on to uh casey neistat uh fantastic vlogger really pioneered the vlog on youtube he says terrible idea but hear me out buy up all the humane ai pins they closed the company last week reprogram them to only run grok sexy mode and boom we now have the thingy the joker was in love with in the movie her from 2013 he just calls joaquin phoenix the joker yeah i mean this is this is really what uh this is really the bull case for friends that is right people fall in love with their device and avi can jack up the price you know 20 bucks a month forever and people will spend you know uh thousands of dollars a year on their on their digital partner of sorts and so a lot of people were kind of going back and forth on this it's a little bit of a joke it's funny uh but i love this because oscar here says we dot dot dot may have made a prototype of this once and oscar was at humane he was at humane and so now that humane is is done all the humane people like they clearly had a very talented team we've been working with sam sheffer on pmf or die and uh it's great to see that you know the gloves are off.

1:38:49They can go have fun. They can say, Hey, look, we tried this, but it wasn't some fraud. You know, we were all talented designers, talented engineers. We just kind of missed the mark on the product. We got a soft landing at HP and now we're going to have fun. We're going to tell you the stories of, of what we did and, uh, and kind of go direct, which I think is great. Cause you know, this makes me aware of who this person is. They're going to find a job and it'll be great. Yeah. Yeah. And we didn't even cover grok sexy mode because it was a little classic And vulgar, yeah. But it's probably, I mean, what I think Grok is doing generally is very intelligent by just being kind of obscene.

1:39:25And the internet has always had corners of it that were obscene. And that's what gets people talking and using these products. And so I think that while it is vulgar, it is smart from a user acquisition standpoint. uh you know if somebody likes you know uh chat gpt for what it is a sort of work companion etc uh and then they hear hey there's a version of this product but it's actually insane and wild and entertaining they're much more likely to try that versus hey you know we have a one percent better version of you know uh oh one pro yeah like people just aren't going to care about that Yeah.

1:40:03Again, it goes back to this idea that like if you launch a frontier model, most people will not be able to detect two points higher in MMLU or chatbot arena. Like you got to come out with something different on the product side. You got to come out with a different, it needs to be opinionated. Yeah. And that's what's happening with all these products, even with Claude, you know, people, Claude is kind of the opposite. I don't think it's sexy mode. I think it's, but it is friendly and affable and people are, are excited about that. And then also it's just really good at coding. So people have been into that.

1:40:34Anyway, let's move on to Bridget Harris. We had her on the show yesterday. She's back. She's back. Welcome back, Bridget. She says, in the past three days, the SEC, the Securities Exchange Commission, has dropped their cases against Coinbase, Robinhood, and Uniswap. Let's go. This is great news. Yeah, good timing, Bridget, comments there. Just some nice wins for the industry amid the market absolutely nuking. Bitcoin's down at 83 today off of a high of 105 or something like that. We're off 20 % now. But I think a lot of this was priced in and people maybe got a little bit over their skis. I'm like, it's going to be perfect.

1:41:16And Trump is going to buy a trillion dollars of Bitcoin. And like, I'm pricing that in too. And so when everything doesn't, it was priced for perfection. And so now we're falling back. But it's good for the entrepreneurs that have been working on building products where the SEC cases, of course, if there's something really going wrong at a company, like it makes sense that the SEC would step in. But what about the situation where it's just purely based on some regulatory uncertainty or some lack of clarity around how you build these products? I think everyone just wants, everyone in the industry at least, who's a serious player, not like some new country.

1:41:48And it's interesting because these are across multiple categories. You have one, Coinbase, which was trying to be a basically a regulated crypto product, centralized exchange here in the US. You have Robinhood, which entered crypto at a much later point, I think in 2019 or 2020. The fractionalized Bitcoin. Yeah, it was fractionalized. You didn't really own it. And people pushed back against that at the time, but eventually got into some of these more high risk, volatile assets, even more high risk than Bitcoin itself. And then Uniswap is in a totally other category where this was a company that had a U.S.

1:42:25operation and team, but then also I'm assuming had sort of offshore foundations related to their token. And so they had like the most complex structure. So it's interesting to see that across the board, Coinbase, Robinhood and Uniswap squarely in three individual categories are all now not having to fight these cases. And I think it's Hayden from Uniswap had a rough few years just sort of battling this. I'm sure it was massively distracting. And, you know, Uniswap is an American company. They pay employees here in the U.S. And they very much, I think, suffered by having to fight with the SEC while international unregulated competitors ate into their market share.

1:43:09And so they lost, I think, a lot of market share over that period. but a good opportunity for them to refocus here in America. Obviously for a public company, it's rough, but for a private company, it gets really, really hard to underwrite that risk as an investor because you could say, okay, well, maybe this case gets completely dropped in the new administration. So the impact of the liability on their balance sheet right now is actually zero and I don't need to worry about it. Maybe just some legal fees to string out the lawsuit until gets dropped. Or it could be a million dollar fine or a$10 million fine, or it could be shut down the company and, you know, seize the founder's phone, you know, FBI raid.

1:43:46Like it's so hard to price what the impact of these suits will be because the regulatory clarity is so minimal. Yeah. And hopefully we're moving towards something that's a little bit more clear. Trump isn't exactly known for clarity. There's usually a lot of chaos, but hopefully things get clearer over the next couple of years. Yeah. It's wild to think about. There was a period in 2022 where coinbase was a seven billion dollar public company and they went on to get this wells notice which was the thing that everybody was afraid of and crypto was getting a wells notice uh if they were operating any type of exchange adjacent product um and now even though it's down you know dramatically in the last week still a 50 billion dollar company so they've they've finally, you know, uh, this, this recent news, you know, just happened and I think was probably priced in to some degree.

1:44:38Right. Um, but, uh, but yeah, they were a company doing, you know, basically over a billion dollars of earnings or something like that and getting, getting like a, getting 7 billion. Like it was almost offensive, but people didn't want to touch it. They said, this is going to get regulated into the ground. There was a big period as, as FTX was, you know, People thought Binance was at risk too. People had some of the stable coin companies were at risk. I remember seeing the exact Ethereum bottom, which was around, I think,$800. And thinking, I don't know what the floor is here. Because all this stuff had been happening and it just didn't seem, it felt like the equilibrium price for some of these assets was dramatically lower than it ended up being.

1:45:24And I think Coinbase has, coinbase also deserves a lot of credit for leading the charge around a lot of the different sort of movements within tech that have become now just uh part of the culture yeah it's interesting like coinbase has always been aggressive they've listed a lot of assets some of those assets have kind of like you know not done that well but i'm sure but they never became like complete like meme token like pump that they were oriented around economic freedom right yeah yeah so i feel economic freedom is still like people should be able to buy whatever they want exactly uh but but yeah they ran into trouble recently uh around just how do we process so many listings yeah there were you know it became clear that the meme sort of cycle sped up so quickly that if they didn't list an asset within the first 48 hours it wasn't going to get any buying activity at all because these things would pop and then just go yeah and then they become a huge market mover as well in the sense of like, if Coinbase lists it, you know, it's going to pop.

1:46:28And so there's all this speculation and then it's highly, you know, material, non-public information, whether or not they're going to, whether or not they're going to list it. And so it all gets very complex, but hopefully smooth sailing from here. Good luck to the Coinbase team. A big fan of Brian Armstrong over there leading the charge in more ways than one. But let's move on to David Senra. The man himself. Founders podcast. He says, A friend asked me to take a personality assessment, and then he used AI to analyze my personality in every single episode of Founders. This is the one thing the AI wanted me to know.

1:47:00One thing you might not fully realize about yourself is how rare you are and how valuable your level of obsession is. Your approach, deeply studying biographies, recognizing patterns across time, and distilling fundamental truths is something very few people have the discipline or patience to do consistently. Most people skim the surface. You go deep. This obsession has shaped Founders Podcast into more than just a podcast. It's becoming a timeless archive of entrepreneurial wisdom. You're essentially building a modern version of your personal library of the greatest minds of business history.

1:47:32It does seem like the AI is using his own words to describe. Hey, AI, let's put away the Glazenator 3000 here. Come on, tell me something. Tell me something Senra hasn't told us. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Throw some shade on Senra. Take him down a peg, AI. you know no take a bit build them back up build them back up yeah motivate him yeah hey say hey hey that last episode you know normally you you post weekly it's been two weeks what happened step it up yeah no we want senra to get he's already the best yeah let's make let's make him better motivate him to get better it's okay even the goats have had a rough season exactly it's an opportunity to come back exactly it makes for a better storyline like you you watch michael jordan you want to know oh he had that rough period where he dropped out when played baseball came back you know we want a comeback story here we don't just want oh he's been on a historic run no problems in this guy's life yeah i want to hear about times his microphone broke he couldn't get the rss feed to work couldn't upload it you got a bad did it anywhere yeah he's he's dealt with injuries he's told me yeah he's talked too much he's lost his voice yeah he's very he has all sorts of different like very lozenges to notice it's the moneymaker oh he knows it's the money maker so she said tell me about this your your ability to push through the pain that's what makes you great, David.

1:48:48Not just your content, which obviously is good. Your ability to connect past wisdom to present challenges and tell stories in a way that makes those lessons stick is a unique skill. You don't just transfer knowledge, you embed it in the people's minds in a way that compels them to take action. Many people want to learn from history. Very few dedicate themselves to living inside it like you do. That's what makes you work and your perspective so valuable. So on this note, the other two days ago, I posted a picture of David with a quote. I'm really in the pursuit of greatness. I know people don't usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats, David Senra.

1:49:26And nobody, only like a handful of people noticed that that was actually a quote from Timothee Chalamet. Yeah, that's great. But Senra actually talks like this. And the beauty of hanging out with Senra is that the podcast just morphs with real life. So in the same way that when we're working out in the morning, it's basically like an offline version of the podcast where we're just talking through what's happening and takes and different things like that. Whereas hanging out with Senra, you actually get the wisdom of all the history's greatest entrepreneurs because he'll just bring up the sort of obscure reference to, you know, something that, you know, Warren Buffett did that nobody else would even think of in that moment.

1:50:05but it'll tie it back into how it's relevant and it's truly priceless. I can't wait to have him on the show again. Next time with video. Yeah, so what we're gonna do, we haven't even told him this yet but when we are doing a deep dive on a specific company or entrepreneur, we're gonna just start calling him in and just start bringing that founders level analysis to TVPN. Can't wait for it. Well, let's move on. Mark Suster over at Upfront Ventures says, data rooms are where fundraising processes go to die quote tweeting bryce roberts friend of the show he says no one finds conviction in the data room so true but also you know so we were didn't really have a data room and sometimes like you know you need to do the due diligence so it cuts but it just had a model that was just extremely aggressive not an operating model at all just a purely community adjusted EBITDA based model.

1:51:02Yep. But yeah, I noticed, you know, I put this in the stack because when I am talking to a founder about investing, ultimately, if I want to invest, I, you know, on the first call, I'll basically be like, sometimes I'll decide on the first call if it's coming from an, you know, warm intro from somebody that I invest with a lot. I'll just tell them right on the first call. Yeah, I'm in for 25K. Just let me know when you need me to close. Right. Other times it's, hey, let's go meet up and grab lunch and I'll hear a little bit more. And, you know, I'm not a professional investor, so my process is should be quite different from institutional investors.

1:51:41But if I'm actually not at all convicted, I'll just be like, cool, send me the deck and I need to like sit with it for a little bit. And so investors, institutional investors will get to that point where they meet with a company two, three times. they don't have conviction yet and so they say send the data room and we'll discuss it internally and get back to you yeah and that is the point that the deal based oftentimes dies yeah because it's hard to just look at the numbers and actually build uh bryce here which which suger's quoting bryce roberts a friend of the show no one finds conviction in the data room right you find conviction in the conversation in the meeting and uh in the meetings and then um the data room is is sort of like almost, you know, checking the box off in case because you're only going to invest.

1:52:27You're only going to say no if you see what's in the data room. You're never going to be tepid and then see a data room, oh, I'm blown away. Yeah. You're seeing the data room and you're just, you're only going to invest in the business if you think that, you know, entrepreneur is going to take it, you know, 10, 20, a hundred times, you know. Yeah. But you're looking for, you're looking for bombs in the data room. You're looking for like some contract or some, I mean, we, we saw a funny one recently where someone sent out this is just an investor update but someone sent out uh a uh an investor update where they said they were they made like a million dollars in the last quarter and then they said they quote unquote burned like 500k or something but when you looked at it they really were using burn just as expenses yeah and they were actually profitable yeah and but i was super concerned when i first saw it like how are they burning so much when they're generating so much revenue, but in fact, they were just, they just misused the term burn to mean expenses and they were actually profitable.

1:53:22But yeah, that's an error to the upside, but you're often looking for that in the data room of like, is there something here where there's been a bunch of companies that have been solid and then you dig into it and it's like, oh, they have some crazy liability, some contract that they need to pay. That's going to be millions and millions of dollars. And that completely changes the business. And that's something that you might find in the data room. But you don't want the process to get stuck there. You want to be firmly handshaking. We're doing this unless there is a bomb that we find or someone finds in the data room.

1:53:56Interesting. Well, let's move on to perplexity. They launched a$50 million seed and pre-seed VC fund. Why'd you think this was interesting? Break it down. i i think this this doesn't make any sense okay uh for uh this this feels very 2021 coded where a lot of companies were basically saying yeah hey we should we should have our own little venture fund because everybody was getting a venture fund yep and it's really hard to generate returns in venture yep you got to be crazy insider networked great brand or you just have to outwork the competition or you have to get lucky. And perplexity, what's the reason that the next Google needs a pre-seed fund today?

1:54:46And who's going to be spending their time on it? And why are they spending resources here? And I'm sure they have a reason for it, but maybe it's that, hey, perplexity relies on a bunch of these up and coming models. We use them in our product. we want to be able to be invested in those companies and get some upside. But a$50 million fund, you're not really going to get enough ownership to be that meaningful, especially. And is it their money? If it's their money, I don't think that makes sense. There has to be better places that could spend it. If it's other people's money, then now they're managing this sort of LP base.

1:55:23It just seems like a distraction. Okay, let's do some steel manning on this. First one, Arvind is super well-connected. Totally. He's a super well-connected in AI. He's probably meeting a bunch of great founders. Maybe he doesn't want to sell$50 million in secondary and invest on his own balance sheet. Would you give him a$50 million sidecar fund to write million-dollar checks into companies that he meets randomly? Yeah, why not? I think that they will get into good companies. Sure. I think that this fund will not impact their success as a business. And I don't think they're, when you look at where they are in the app store charts, they don't have time to be distracted.

1:56:02That's fair. And, you know, looking here, the other. Hadley's in the comments says that should be enough for one investment. like kind of a joke but like some of these yeah the kind of rounds that uh uh are moving the needle in ai are are ones where you kind of have to around yeah you need to be writing a yeah you know some of the most competitive rounds are sort of these so the other flip side that i'm thinking is uh we've seen these types of small funds from startups and scale-ups before slack had one that was specifically targeting at if you're a company and you're building a slack integration a slack bought a company that will be built on top of the Slack API.

1:56:42We want to help you get off the ground. So we'll just throw you a venture investment to kind of help you build that business. I don't know if Perplexity is planning to think about it that way, but you could think about this as almost like you're outsourcing a little bit of development of the ecosystem around your product. I don't know if that works for Perplexity, but you could imagine that there's other products that you could build on top of the Perplexity API. And you want to build those companies. Perplexity has unique insight into what's going on with your product. So they let you build that.

1:57:14They put some money in. They're getting the investor updates. They see that you're taking off and then they can acquire you. And so it's kind of like corp dev marketing budget almost. Yeah, it's interesting. So the fund's GPs are Kelly Graziati and Joanna Lee Shevelenko. Okay. They had another venture fund. And so I imagine they're sort of rolling their efforts into this new fund. So in many ways, like, yeah, maybe this is primarily, you know, perplexities anchoring the fund with their own capital. But again, perplexity is going to win because consumers want information and they go to perplexity instead of Google or OpenAI or any of these other, you know, chat interfaces and ask perplexity.

1:58:01And right now I just think it is the most competitive category. Yep. And I think that the comments are very fair. Sure. To kind of push back on this. Yeah. I mean, OpenAI has a startup fund. They funded a lot of stuff. Sam has a fund. Yeah. But it's different because you're saying, you know, you're basically saying we're going to give you a million dollars. You're going to spend all that money back with us. Yep. And you're going to build on top of our platform. I don't see the case right now that people are going to be building on top of. Maybe they'll integrate perplexity, right? But, for example, public.com has a perplexity-like interface built on top of all of their data.

1:58:40Sure. And they would be a good candidate to use perplexity, but they built it in-house and it works really well. Yeah. No, I agree with you. I think you've convinced me, even though I played the steel man on this one. Somebody's got to be the steel man. Exactly. And again, at the end of the day, more money for great founders. Yeah. And I bet you they'll have good returns. I just think it makes sense for the community to push back a little bit and say, hey, we want you to just build the best possible search product, information engine, or what are they? Answer engine. Answer engine. Build the best possible answer engine.

1:59:16I don't care that you could 3X a$50 million fund. Yeah. Well, let's stay on AI and go to Andre Carpathie, former OpenAI employee, former Tesla employee. He says, agency is greater than intelligence. I had this intuitively wrong for decades. I think due to a pervasive cultural veneration of intelligence, various entertainment media, obsession with IQ, et cetera, agency is significantly more powerful and significantly more scarce. Are you hiring for agency? Are we educating for agency? Are you acting as if you had 10X agency? You know who has agency? The golden retriever. Golden retriever is going to get that ball when you throw it.

1:59:54Every time. not going to be the most intelligent dog but the dog is going to look good doing it grok explanation is close agency as a personality trait refers to an individual's capacity to take initiative make decisions and exert control over their actions and environment it's about being proactive rather than reactive someone with high agency doesn't just let life happen to them they shape it think of it as a blend of self self-efficiency determination and a sense of ownership over one's path. People with strong agency tend to set goals and pursue them with confidence, even in the face of obstacles.

2:00:30They're the type to say, I'll figure it out and then actually do it. I was thinking about this, like as a founder, um, like I probably don't have more skills or then like, you know, someone who's like a, you know, high level PM at a tech company, but like what the agency is the thing. It's basically just like, yeah, I'll grind on something for years and years and years and I'm used to like, oh, like things are terrible for multiple years. Like no problem. Yeah. And I don't think that that, that, that skill sets everywhere in certain organizations. It is certainly, but I noticed that in a class, like in the classroom growing up, having an understanding that I, that I wasn't necessarily more intelligent than someone else.

2:01:09Yeah. Uh, yet I had more ability to shape a conversation or shape a discussion or things like that and then carrying that into professional life and i think every anybody that decides i'm going to start a company is default sort of higher agency than you know or do anything right it's high agency for a lot gill to be like i'm just going to build a monument because i want to build beautiful things it's high agency for uh nat friedman to say i don't know how much plastic microplastics are in these fair life things i'm going to find out i'm going to test it i'm going to just make it available. Right.

2:01:46And so it shouldn't just that, that sent, you know, agency, uh, when channeled and an entrepreneurial way is, is one of the most powerful forces in the world, but it also is beautiful to channel it in other ways, right? It's, it's important to channel it in your relationships with, you know, with your family, with, I I've tried to leverage agency in my HOA. it's gone terribly uh uh uh but uh that's more of like a zoomer uh zoomer on boomer you know dynamic um but uh but yeah it's cool to see this because i think for a very long period in tech uh we've been obsessed with our high iq uh heroes and legends and i think that that's intelligence should be celebrated.

2:02:35But for too long, people would knock the founder that was high agency, got a little bit lucky, made it big. And then when they were successful, other people would say, oh, like he's not even that smart. He's not even that smart. And as sort of as a way to sort of take them down. And we should be celebrating our golden retrievers, the ones that go and get the ball. Totally. And yeah, they might look a little silly doing it sometimes, but they got the ball. And that's what matters. Yeah. I've heard some people riff on this where it's like, after you get to like 140 IQ, you get up too high. There's actually a fall off in terms of kind of your impact.

2:03:14And you just go into like chess or like pure math. And then that can be extremely valuable and great for the world. But it's not just that like the theory, the algorithm is not just, Hey, we want to run Microsoft. We need to find just to have everyone take an IQ test. And the person that scores the highest becomes the ceo yeah i was thinking about this satya it's like why is he such a great leader at that company like he's they're probably smarter people at the company presumably working on crazy quantum computing and algorithms and all sorts of stuff uh but he has some blend of skills that he can take initiative yeah make decisions and and exert control yeah and he also he's doing that communicator too you see him on the door he has so many other charisma it's like when you look at the stats i always think back to like if you're building a character in Diablo or something in some RPG, there's like strength, which is probably like your fortitude.

2:04:06How much, how willing, how willing are you to just like grind and grind and grind? There's intelligence of course, which we all know, but then there's also wisdom. How much knowledge do you have? There's plenty of people that have super high intelligence, but super low wisdom. So they don't know anything about it. It's not just street smarts. It could just be like a super, you take some math PhD or some chess master and you say, hey, come in and figure out this industrial supply chain. And they just don't know any of the power players. They don't know how the thing works. They don't know anything.

2:04:35And they have to get up to speed on that. And maybe they can quickly because they're intelligent. But then there's also charisma. There's luck. There's all these other skill points that you can kind of weave into your build. And it's always funny when you see someone who clearly specked into intelligence fully and none into whiz. And they wind up making really silly mistakes. So I think this is gonna be an increasing narrative in the age of AI as intelligence, you know, the golden retriever thing is like kind of a joke, but there is a shred of truth there, which is that purely relying on intelligence is not going to be enough.

2:05:08And there's going to be a blend of traits that we have a harder time building models against because we don't necessarily have evaluations for agency yet or evaluations. Yeah, like a good example here is some founder, you know, up and coming founder with high agency, the Augustus Dorico rainmaker, right? He wouldn't tell you he is the most gifted climate scientist in the world, right? Because I don't even believe he studied climate science in school, right? But he came out, he wanted to be able to make it rain on command. And he is just smashing through every possible door that gets put, or sort of wall that gets put in his path.

2:05:52yesterday he was posting that some state is trying to explicitly ban like his company from you know and he's just saying cool do it like i'm gonna i'm gonna make it rain uh and so that type of both tenacity initiative uh the ability to to have conviction in your decisions which i think is a big part of agency too a lot of people decide they want to do something take a few steps down on that path and then hit some type of wall and say, I'm gonna, I guess I went the wrong way. Well, speaking of agencies, we got a present from VC Fund that also has a marketing agency attached to it now. I think this one is yours, Jordy.

2:06:30This is from Wiz over at Space Cadet. Space Cadet. Classified. This is, I mean, the design here is fantastic. You open it and it plays a video of, uh it's an ai generated version of you my name is john kugel i live in this family pasadena whoever is seeing this by existing the yager way it's gonna find me it's not too late to fix it we don't have much but i can give you this very fun wait so did you get incredible execution but the only thing is that doesn't look anything like you in my opinion yeah some of them like uh shields shields looks pretty good very accurate there's the other guy from 50 years vc that i saw i haven't actually seen mine yet what yours looks like let's live so i mean very clearly it's like a pipeline of he took your profile photo or an image of you and he takes your your image and where you live my name is jordy that doesn't look like you

2:07:44it looks similar to my eyes there's something there the hair's all wrong too short you'd never do that with your hair okay i think we can close that up it's very loud uh anyway um what a cool drop and i love this as an idea for you know high value clients uh marketing for a company i i think this is super interesting i saw jake paul did something like this for w where they did the i don't know if it's ai deep fakes or something but uh the concept is really is really key here to getting it executed correctly obviously this is like a sci-fi themed venture fund uh so uh you know you want to make it uh you know science fiction tie in the chat said stuff called it timu jordy timu jordy yeah but uh but anyway so so one of the cool things was this was timed with basically the kickoff of their new fundraise yep and i saw wiz shared uh we officially kicked off fundraising two weeks ago and we're already 50 to first close which is just amazing uh and uh so anyways if you are planning stunts it's important to time them up in a way that you can benefit from the attention because there's a you know i've had super viral drops in the past where we had we dominated the timeline for a day and then you know it just you know the attention fades and what did you actually get from it.

2:09:08And so very well time for, for Wiz and the space cadet team to do this when they're, you know, wanting to get in front of, uh, you know, a bunch of LPs and other investors and, uh, it's clearly paying off. Yeah. He's done a ton of these drops. He did a cards against humanity spin on tech. Uh, I also got a deck of magic cards with a bunch of different characters from tech. imagined as magic card folks uh very fun very differentiated uh much better than a cold email for sure uh so always enjoy that uh well speaking of funds let's move on to uh pedro sorrentino he says today we are returning 7x cash on cash to our lps go pedro you know grateful get the side you got the size going handy here we go pedro this is for you and your lps that's fantastic we love to see it leak that and leak that yeah newcomer yeah uh and vc brags is in the is in the chat saying sweet so just some pure pure content from vc yeah if you're not if you're getting the engagement from vc brags but not the dunk you're doing something right yeah yeah flexing but not being like the humble brag, just actually laying out the facts.

2:10:26It's great. It's the right way to kind of brag. Just say, Hey, we did our job. This is amazing. People don't realize, you know, VCs get dragged a lot, but their job, imagine having a job where you think of it as a 10 year engagement and plus year engagement where you do most of the work upfront. And then you just kind of have to sit and wait to see how you did. And that level of waiting, like most people do work and they want to know right away or that month or that quarter if it's going to yield results and um it's just uh it's an entire skill set in itself to have that level of patience to be able to do a bunch of work wait a very long time and and uh i'm sure that uh you know he did very well from this and uh it should be celebrated right it's the same cultural movement as uh you know timothy chalamet talking about his orientation it's like we should celebrate when uh somebody has a very successful fund.

2:11:20That's what they set out to do. And there's nothing wrong with sharing news like that. So it's great. Well, speaking of sharing news, let's go to Lulu. She says, unrelenting torrent of AI news is the new normal. There used to be big launches every few months, then every few weeks. Now it's every day of the week. If you were waiting for an open window to do your launch, don't wait. And she's quote tweeting Vittorio, who says, just making sure I'm not losing my mind here. Last week, we got Grok 3 with Reasoning Plus Voice, Mira's Thinking Machines, Microsoft's Majorana 1 Quantum Chip, ARK and NVIDIA's Evo 2, Google AI's Co-Scientist, AI-Generated Gameplays, Helix by Figure, a new clone robotics.

2:12:00And it really is like every single day. That's why we need a daily show. I think we missed one of those. We missed NVIDIA Evo 2. We did miss that. God. Oh, we'll have to follow up. Yeah, no. And the main thing here is it does feel like if you have a, if you're a, you know, hyperscaler or, you know, one of these new model foundation model companies, you can just pick a random day and launch and you maybe want to feel around and make sure one of your immediate, most direct competitors is not launching. But one of the benefits. Oh, you think that's what they do? Because I think that they see when the person's launching and then they launch the day before.

2:12:37Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but I don't think that works. It also backfires to some degree because you can, maybe you're only getting your 24 hours of fame and then there's something new and exciting. So it's really difficult to time these. It's hard to know what the actual right strategy, but the other benefit of there being so much news is that people are more engaged in the news, right? We talked about this. Would we have been able to do this show two decades ago? Probably not. There just wasn't that much exciting stuff happening whereas now there's new exciting developments every single day and we have way more stuff to cover than what we can actually fit in the show uh and so anyways um double-edged sword but yeah uh important to break through i mean it really underscores like how impressive the chat gpt launch was in my mind because the internet is extremely noisy you can't even share links anymore on x like it's very hard to go viral with a new product launch to the tune of a billion users or a hundred million users, you know, yes, yes, it's totally possible to do a stunt or a viral video and get a few thousand people paying attention.

2:13:42And then that starts the flywheel of growth and you grow your business for a very long time, but it's hard to jump to, you know, consumer internet level scale very quickly. And, uh, yeah, I mean, breaking through is, is harder than ever. Um, so yeah, for a lot of startups, the answer is not waiting for the perfect moment where it's dead silent on the internet and hoping that your launch goes 10 times bigger. It's maybe launch as soon as you can and then do a six month second launch and launch again and then do a stunt. Yeah. And this is what we were talking about with Ryan earlier. A lot of, I think once you're at scale company, especially, you know, something, someone like a Flexport or an Airbnb, the average Airbnb user doesn't care about these incremental updates.

2:14:26It's, oh, we made it slightly easier to pick a, oh, you can now book anywhere in a 10-day period. It doesn't really matter. It's not as significant. But when you bundle all of those stuff, it can show, hey, we're making major advancements to the platform every six months. And people aren't going to care as much, oh, Airbnb hired a new director of marketing. No one cares, right? We care. We care. We're going to make an ESPN video out of it. Yeah, yeah, we will. But for small companies, I do think the right approach is you want to show the pace and the iteration and you want to just launch. I've told founders, figure out a way to launch something once a week.

2:15:08Try to be in the timeline in a big way 50 times a year and you will build a brand that way. You can't build a brand off of two touch points a year. Yeah. And also, I mean, talking to Ryan, it seems like the launch went well. He, you know, iterated through all the different product improvements that they made, but it didn't take over the internet the way, you know, Grok3 did. But it was incredibly valuable to the pace and culture at the company that they had this. And that's almost, and then that feeds into the brand and you start associating, okay, yes, this company feels like it's moving faster because I can see that there are events and updates.

2:15:48And so it's one of those like shoot for the moon, you'll land amongst the star situation where like if you start launching more frequently, you start batching launches. Even if those launches don't wind up going mega viral and 10Xing your business, at least you're on a product development cadence that is quick. And that's valuable. So I love that. So get out there and launch and call Lou if you're in trouble. I mean, an example of a launch that maybe is getting a little bit lost is this company Paper, which is coming out. And they look like they basically cloned Figma completely down to some of the branding even just feels like an extension of Figma.

2:16:28And again, they launched, they got some traction, but they didn't even break through to the same degree that I would have thought they did. They would have, you know, they got like 100K views to me. opportunity for them to just keep launching it and, you know, continuing to double down. Yep. Well, good luck to them. And that's our show for the day. Do you have anything else, Jordy? That's it. I'm excited for tomorrow. It's good to be back in the studio. Thank you guys for tuning in. Thank you for tuning in. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And when you leave us a review, put an ad for your company or your favorite company in the review description.

2:17:07We'll read it on the show. Send us any questions. Follow us at TBPN. Subscribe. Follow us on YouTube. All the things. And thanks for watching. We will see you tomorrow. Have a great day.