X Article Apocalypse, Hollywood's AI Takes | Jordan Schneider, Eliot Pence, Fil Aronshtein & Matt Grimm

25:47You can pay annually, get a discount. You can also do VIP tiers, different tiers, access to discords, access to different things, participate in the live stream, get the chat. And then there's also business plans, group plans. So they just have a way more mature product catalog when it comes to monetizing a customer list or an email list. And then obviously you can take them elsewhere. So if you ever don't, if you want to, if you're like, look, my newsletter product has grown so much that I have like enterprise level needs. I have to be off Substack. You can go and build something from scratch that does exactly what you want and has all the different integrations.

26:25And, you know, some companies have done that. Other companies, I mean, the free press has scaled immensely with Substack. And you go to the free press's homepage and it's like, it looks like the New York Times. Like there's like 25 different articles popping up. little subsections. Like it is a full featured CMS for like a newspaper, for like a modern newspaper. Anyway, MongoDB, choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best in class embedding models and re-rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. Let's Mongo. So how did you conclude? So what was your takeaway? My question was, so I don't see anyone who's a writer online, who's on Substack being like, okay, now's the moment.

27:06a million dollars on the table. I'm shutting down my sub stack and I'm going over to X exclusively. But a lot of people cross post. That's what we do. I think a lot of people, if you have a free, if you have a sub stack that's part free, part paid, post the free part on X. Why not? It's all upside. It's just more attention that can actually get you into funnel. I believe that the posting of the articles on X has been additive to our sub stack list because at the end of the post, we follow up and say, hey, this post is emailed as well. You want to go check it out, go to tbpn.com. And so I think this has been net growth.

27:41I don't think people have been like, oh, I'm unsubscribing from TBPN's newsletter because I'm getting it on John's random Twitter feed that may or may not surface to me in the algorithm. So I don't think X needs writers to go all in. I just think that they want more copies of the best writing to make their way to X. and so if you have a great YouTube video they want you to share it on X as well so then they can surface that to people if you have a great piece of writing put it on X as well and I think this does that and I think they'll be successful there and I think they can yeah the question I mean if they're really successful and you have like YouTube for long form writing like the UGC platform for long form writing it's probably it's probably a solid business but it's not going to be a juggernaut like YouTube specifically because it's not going to monetize nearly as well, right?

28:31You have, like, they don't put ads in articles today. No, it's such an active. They could add them in, but you're, like, locked in reading an article versus, like, when you're watching something. Totally. If somebody's watching football. Yeah, you can put a two-hour YouTube video on your smart TV, and it will just play an ad, and you just won't. You don't need to do anything. Whereas if you're scrolling an article, and then all of a sudden an ad pops up, that breaks the flow of what you're doing. It's not a passive experience. It's an active experience. So yeah, I completely agree with you. I want your take on the actual article experience.

29:10First, I'm going to tell you about Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build, create code-backed prototypes and apps fast. So I was chatting with some folks who are really, really big on Twitter, a little group of folks who are all well over 100k have gotten there back in like the thread era they were like thread guys basically and uh and they were saying like i don't think nival's how to get rich without getting lucky thread would have worked as an article that the fact that it was all these bite-sized pieces like that's that's that was what was special now i think personally that meta has sort of died and we haven't seen that work but what do you think coming back and just unironically ripping threads why not i'd say do you miss threads you mean just like like do you miss that error at all is it can you remember any iconic threads other than lulu's and nival's and apparently lulu was was just a long post uh someone corrected in the chat.

30:15So, uh, uh, no, Naval is the main one that I remember. Uh, I probably scrolled a few threads. I actually did have a thread that like actually blew up my account. Uh, so I was at 10 ,000 followers. Is this the Alaska one? No, that was not that, that got me unfollows because I posted about, uh, bringing tech, you know, I was early on the let's leave California train. I said, we got to go to Alaska. We're not going to Miami. We're not going to Texas. We're going to Alaska because if you have runaway global warming, it's going to be beachfront property up there, baby. It's going to be 72 and sunny every day in Alaska.

30:51Palm trees. Alternatively, if we solve global warming, we will have unlimited nuclear power. You will be able to heat, air condition, do whatever you need in your Alaska compound because you will have a one megawatt nuclear reactor dropped on your doorstep and you will have unlimited power and you'll be lounging in a beautiful scenic mountain retreat perfectly temperature controlled. And Alaska did not like that. They did not like that. I got a lot of DMs from a lot of people showing me their guns, saying, if you come up here, California boy, there will be consequences. And it was a rough day on the internet.

31:23I had to lock my account. It was very funny. But anyway, I survived that. But the post that blew up my account was I had written a... So Chris Miller had kind of popularized the idea of TSMC and Taiwan as an important geopolitical football in the US-China battle. And I'd read the book, really enjoyed it. I had done a YouTube video all about US-China competition that had done very well on YouTube. So basically what I did was I recontextualized everything that I'd learned and pieced together for that YouTube video into a thread. And I gave it a very salacious title. I said, because FTX was collapsing at the time.

32:05Something else was going on crazy. There were like two major current things happening. Is it ChatGPT launching? I don't know if it's ChatGPT launching, but basically I was like, FTX is a distraction. Elon Musk is a distraction. You need to be focusing on US-China policy or whatever. And I just sort of contextualized why Taiwan is important for the semiconductor supply chain in the AI boom. And it wasn't anything revolutionary for anyone who was paying attention, but there were a lot of people who just hadn't really learned what ASML was or TSMC was at the time. And so just having that in a nice digestible feed, it went super viral.

32:41And because it was so like authoritative, it took me from 10 ,000 followers to 20 ,000 followers in like a week. And it was, it was like really, really gross, really, really, it's like the clearest jump in the follower graph. And then everything else has just been like slow growth. And we know this from posting, like you, you post like a viral funny banger. It doesn't like double your account, but if you posted a really, really great thread, people would follow you. And I think that's true for the articles too. The guy who wrote the, uh, the, how to change your life in one day, uh, he has almost a million followers now.

33:12And I imagine that he had way less than that. Cause I'd never seen his account before. Yeah. So cause he's, he's providing like insight. Yes. Well, you know, people could critique the article or say it's, you know, a lot of these ideas have been talked about before, but for better or worse, he summarized like some key insights. He shared it on how to improve your life. That is value that somebody is like, I want to keep improving my life. I'll follow. Or they didn't read the article. They just saved it and followed them because they don't have time to improve their life. I'm busy right now. We didn't say which day they were going to use.

33:44It could be any day. So they'll circle back on that. Circle back. Whereas if you just make somebody chuckle. And then there's also the fact that if you spend an hour with someone, or it takes half an hour to read that piece from start to finish. If you spend half an hour with someone, you feel like you know their perspective. You've learn more about them, as opposed to you just see some funny posts and you're like, ah, that's funny. They made me chuckle. Okay. I don't need to like be in, I don't really have a relationship with that person. But once you've spent a half an hour sort of cohabiting with them, you're more likely to hang out.

34:15So I closed out saying that, you know, maybe there's a, you know, article apocalypse. I'm not really seeing it. I think the algorithm is pretty well equipped to handle stuff like this. People always seem grumpy with X generally, and honestly, Nikita specifically, a lot of times. But I've always felt like the sloppy algorithm changes that happen, like they sort themselves out really quickly. Like there's plenty of times when we will come in on a Monday and we'll be like, wow, the algorithm was really brutal over the weekend. Like I was just seeing like just junk that didn't feel at all tied to what we're interested in.

34:50It just seemed like they made some change and someone hacked it and it's all just like viral videos or some quote tweet meta or some meme format. There was an era where you'd get eight Elon posts in a row. That happened. So there were like a whole bunch of different, there were just a whole bunch of different like crises where people were like, it's over. And then a week later, the algorithm sort of adjusts and learns that people don't actually like all that slop or they don't like this thing. And then they adjust and it's fine. And so the other little like quick tip is that if you ever really get sick of the For you page, you can actually disable it by uninstalling the app, bookmarking x.com as like a homepage icon that just opens in Safari if you're on an iPhone.

35:31And then you can install this extension called Social Focus that will allow you to turn off the for you page. So it opens to your following tab by default, and you just can't even access the for you page. So you can always do that. I've done that for like a month here, a month there. Honestly, it's not that much better. And it's one of those things that's classic stated preference versus revealed preference. Stated preference is, oh, I just want to see who I follow. I don't want to see these random viral posts. And then the revealed preference is like, actually, some of these viral posts are pretty good.

36:02They're pretty funny, and I enjoy them. And the problem with the following tab is that there are some people that post a ton, and there are some people that post very rarely, and you want to see some sort of even balance and you don't realize that there are some folks that you follow who post a lot, a lot, a lot. And then it's like, really, I just want to see the cream of the crop. I just want to see their best posts, but then I want to see every post from certain people and it's hard to find too. Long term, I think, we'll get to a point where you can define your algorithm a little bit more, but for now, you're subject to the whims of Nikita Beer.

36:40Should we talk about... Graphite? Absolutely. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. What should we talk about? We should talk about XAI. Oh, yes. What's going on with XAI? So, Ty Morse did a podcast with, I'm going to potentially not pronounce his name right. Suleiman. Suleiman Khan Ghori. Yeah. Who was previously, at the time when the podcast was done, he, of course, was working at XAI. He came in. He talked about WTF is happening at XAI, predicting bottlenecks, bootstrapping off the Tesla network, how Elon deals with fires, what it's like working at XAI, Cybertruck bet with Elon, how they built Colossus, how XAI hires experimentation, how Elon recalibrated his timeline estimates.

37:32No one tells me no. That's important. That's a wild one. Why the fuzziness between teams is an advantage, testing human emulators as employees, biggest blunders, what a meeting with Elon is like. how Elon gives feedback, figuring out what is truth for Grokipedia, what happens when Elon sees wrong Grok outputs on X, what it's like operating in XAI's war room, and a number of other things. Massively viral, by the way. Four million views just on X, 5 ,000 likes. This is a massive performance. And so anyways, I'll start by saying that this is fantastic content. Beautifully shot. Well, that. Ty Morris has a fantastic content.

38:14Fantastic team. Very well done. Yes. And great content, right? People are so curious about what's happening at XAI, right? We want to understand how they're approaching different problems. And Elon talks about it in such high level. He's talking about AI, AGI, super futuristic. And then he'll give little details on some massive build-out that he's working on. But he's not in the nitty-gritty. One small problem, though. Yes. usually a 200 billion dollar company likes to likes to control who out who's going to go out and do a tell all about the company yes and specifically with elon companies yes if you if you hadn't noticed there's not a lot of people that work for elon companies no that go and do the podcast circuit yeah talk about everything going on no i mean at at spacex gwen shotwell has given a few speeches, mostly at like commencement speeches, like inspirational speeches to colleges and that type of stuff.

39:11She's not going on Rogan or different space podcasts or tech podcasts. It's very rare to see content with her. And then Kiko Donchev is their head of launch and he will do engagement with NASA. And if there's a real heavy industry-focused panel he might attend, but he's also not just hopping on stuff. And then beyond that - And Elon, generally, he's not trying to create like thousands of superstars, right? He wants you to work for him forever. Yeah. I saw a post in here. It was a picture - But when a company, when someone super talented leaves, it's not like Elon in general is lining up and saying like, let me do your first round.

39:53Let me do your first like 10 million, 20 million, 50 million bucks, right? He's actively trying to incentivize people to not develop big brands. He wants people to stay. And he wants to be able to control the messaging. And wait, speaking of that, look at this Sam Sheffer post. He went and found, 15 years ago, they did a SpaceX office tour. It is so, like, it's just, it's crazy. It just looks like a cubicle office. But in there, Sam Sheffer finds that there's someone who works on propulsion named Matthew McCune. McCune. And he's been on propulsion for 17 years and eight months. Like that's exactly what Elon wants.

40:33A true believer who's riding with him through thick and thin and has probably done extremely well financially, worked on really interesting problems. Is he going to be a household name? Is he going to be a podcast circuit? No. But does Matthew really want that? Probably not. He wants to propel the rockets. And that's exactly what he's done for nearly two decades now. So that's the Elon strategy. And you should know that going into that environment, maybe it should be more explained, but it certainly ended in disaster in this. Yeah, the funny thing is, I didn't catch all the interview, but they talk about like how like HR, HR in general is like not super formalized at the company.

41:17And so you can also imagine that like PR and the media relations team is not super active. Maybe nobody in HR said, hey, don't go do an hour-long podcast. If you're anybody but Elon, maybe don't do an hour-long podcast, telling all. And so, of course, people... What happened, ultimately, Suleiman... He said he's left SAI. We don't actually know what happened, but it is odd to go do an hour-long interview and then quit. Anyway, so I think good intentions potentially took the concept which he talks about in here. No one tells me no a little bit too far. But I posted earlier, you can't even share the internal secrets of your AI lab on a cinematic podcast in this country anymore.

42:08Brutal. Andrew Curran had some good context here. He said the speculation is that this is the result of the interview he gave where he said XAI intends to run one million human emulations, a digital version of Optimus for online work, which will be powered by leasing compute from Tesla owners when the car is parked and charging. So that's an interesting development that we actually haven't heard about before. This idea that you have a pretty advanced AI chip doing self-driving in the Teslas. They're just sitting there overnight. Why not do some inference and lease that back to the network? Why is it a digital version of Optimus?

42:49Is it going to be sitting there in the corner like Clippy? I mean, I think realistically it's probably just like agentic rollouts. So if it's for online work, it's like, you know, what are a bunch of tasks that you could like turn Grok loose on? Everything from like, you know, the classic like order DoorDash in a simulation, try and buy something on Amazon in a simulation. All these things that require moving around on a screen, doing computer work, using Excel, building stuff, writing code. All these things that require a lot of heavy inference to roll it out, create a plan, write some code, test it, go back, double check, test it again, blah, blah, blah.

43:28Oh, so this is no. I somewhat remember, but maybe not quite in as much detail. I feel like when I remember him talking about this kind of thing, it was like, yeah, we have distributed compute that we can leverage. Yeah, this might be in more detail. But still, again, if you're at a company, any company, you should probably clear the public speaking engagements with... Solomon didn't just read Lulu's going direct. He studied and he sat down. That's wild. And I actually DMed with him briefly this morning, and I think he's going to work on a startup. Okay, cool. We'll have to have him on at some point when he's ready to talk about it.

44:06I mean, he certainly has the lore now. Honestly, kind of benefit of going and working at a Google or a Meta is they'll straight up tell you, don't talk to the media unless you've been explicitly. Yeah, wrapped or go. I mean, there's different strategies at different companies. Some companies are totally cool with a bunch of people going out and talking about their business. But yeah, this seems like one of the more secretive organizations. So a life lesson there. Anyway, console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70 % of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

44:45Let's go over to Ben Affleck. Ben Affleck. You know, I had a premonition, a little preview that this was going to happen. He went on Joe Rogan and gave some very good takes on AI. There's some discussion over how good of takes they are. But I ran into somebody that said that they met Ben Affleck. They were like a proper AI researcher. And they said that they met Ben Affleck. And he used compute as a noun. And they were like, yeah, that was impressive. Like, he's talking about, like, scaling compute. He's actually very, very deep in this. Which, you know, he went to Harvard. It's not shocking. But I think there's just a general vibe that, like, Hollywood is behind or out of the loop to the point where they wouldn't know the big models.

45:25They wouldn't have tested them. It's like, no, this is their business. I mean, there are some, like Joseph Gordon-Levitt is pretty tapped in. Isn't his wife on that board of OpenAI back in the day? She was. She was. Yeah. You can't get more tapped in than that. Well, hasn't he just been spewing like AI safety nonsense constantly? Yeah, he's a big safety guy. He's a doomer or just a safety guy? He's a doomer. Doomer. He said, today we're announcing a new organization called the Creators Coalition on AI. Well, fortunately, we have the counterpoint to that because Ben Affleck is not a doomer. He's actually pretty white-pilled, and it seemed like a really good interview.

46:01Let's play this first clip from Forrest, who says that Ben Affleck has great takes across the board. What I see is, for example, if you try to get ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini to write you something, it's really shitty. And it's shitty because by its nature, it goes to the mean, to the average. And it's not reliable. And it's, I mean, I just can't stand to see what it writes. Now, it's a useful tool if you're a writer and you're going, ah, what's the thing? I'm trying to set something up or somebody sends someone a letter, but it's delayed two days and gets, and it can give you some examples of that.

46:37I actually don't think it's very likely that it can, it's going to be able to write anything meaningful or, and in particular, that it's going to be making movies like from whole cloth, like Tilly Norwood. Like that's bullshit. I don't think that's going to happen. I think it's not, I think it actually turns out the technology is not progressing in exactly the same way they sort of presented it. And really what it is, it's going to be just like sort of visual facts. There was a line in here where I was like, that is a Carpathie line. Like he definitely heard this from Carpathie. He's listening to Rakesh for sure.

47:09For money. I can't, you can sue me, period. It kind of feels to me like the thing we were talking about earlier, where there's a lot more fear. The whole idea of like these models being mid, that's not quite true. I mean, It's hard to develop a reinforcement learning environment with a verifiable reward for a great script that will break through, because even the great script writers have flops that are unexpected. Literally everyone thinks it's great, and then it goes out and it just is a box office bomb. We can pause this for a minute. But later, he actually makes a stronger case, I think, because they're talking about Dwayne The Rock Johnson in the film The Smashing Machine, and Matt Damon is recalling an interview that he did with Dwayne Johnson about his, you know, one of the most climactic scenes in The Smashing Machine that's very emotional.

48:01And he asks Dwayne, you know, how did you pick this, you know, motion? He pulls up a sheet because he's sad and like, what were you conjuring? What were you drawing on to create that experience as an actor and bring that emotion to the screen because Matt Damon's saying, like, I love that. I love that scene. I loved your performance. Where'd that come from? Because you're thinking about content without ads in order to draw on the sort of like deep, sad. Yes. Yes. Yes. That might be what that does for you. But I mean, Dwayne Johnson gave like a very emotional response about a family member who was diagnosed with cancer and he was in the room when she got the news.

48:42And so and so her reaction, He was like channeling that. It was very emotional. And then the other one was, I think, about another family member who had substance abuse issues. And so it was just this very unique blend of human experiences that he was able to bring to bear. And I continue to think that the lore and the storytelling that happens outside of a piece of content is as important as the actual content in many cases. This was the same thing with art and the NFT boom. It's not like the scarcity is important, but the storytelling behind the art piece is a lot of it. People like a Van Gogh because they know about him cutting off his ear and all this history, and he's in all the history books, and everyone just knows Van Gogh.

49:28And yes, you can go and recreate. Even with cars, right? A car is worth more if the previous owner was significant in some way. Yes, yes, yes. Steve McQueen is gonna sell for more. And I think that for certain storytelling elements, for certain stories, that lore of like who this person is and their likeness, and then he also makes a really good point that it's like, yes, you can, I mean, you can obviously generate something that looks exactly like a Van Gogh right now. You can paint it with someone who knows exactly how to paint like Van Gogh. It's not gonna have anywhere near the value. And when he gets to the idea of just AI generating a Dwayne Johnson movie, it's like, well, he'll sue you immediately.

50:12And that's very easy. And you've been able to Photoshop Dwayne Johnson into marketing materials for years. And we've had a system for counteracting that. Like, you have to pay licensing fees. And that will happen. So he has a good balance. We can go into this second clip from Barely AI. I think that's Trung Fans Company, because it's a little bit long. It's about a four-minute piece. So while we pull that up, let me tell you about LabelBox, RL Environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. LabelBox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. Get in the box. The LabelBox.

50:50The LabelBox. Let's pull up Ben Affleck diving a little bit deeper. And we might have to skip ahead. Yeah, we've been spending time looking at this. My belief is sort of like, what's going to happen with electricity? Skip to like 50 seconds. Well, a lot of shit's going to happen with electricity. And I don't think it's very likely that it's going to be able to write anything meaningful. And in particular, that it's going to be making movies from whole cloth, like Tilly Norwood. That's bullshit. Can you pause this? So I think that he basically says that he doesn't think that an iconic, amazing movie is going to be generated by AI.

51:24And I sort of agree with that, but I think it's important to consider, like, what are we defining as a movie? Because we don't really watch movies anymore anyway. People watch content. And if you think about it, like, you know, decades ago, people might see one movie a month or one movie a week. And that's like two to eight hours a month of screen time. Well, now people are doing two to eight hours of screen time a day. But it's these fragmented pieces. And so if AI seeps into the cracks, within the cracks, within the cracks, and the goal is not to create the experience of a two-hour movie that you show in a theater and you get everyone to come and buy tickets.

52:07Joe Rogan's really turned into Dwarkesh for A-listers. Just come on and talk about AI, right? It's really – Gregory McConaughey was talking about wanting this personal LLM. Oh, yeah. Where you can log the data in. Yeah, that one was a little bit rougher than this. Affleck's got a dial. Let's continue with Affleck. I think it actually turns out the technology is not progressing in exactly the same way they sort of presented it. And really what it is, it's going to be a tool. Just like sort of visual facts. And yeah, it needs to have language around it. You need to protect your name and likeness.

52:41You can do that. You can watermark it. Those laws already exist. I can't sell your fucking picture for money. I can't. You can sue me, period. I might have the ability to draw you, to make you in a very realistic way, but that's already against the law. And the unions are going to, the guilds are going to manage this where it's like, okay, look, if this is a tool that actually helps us, for example, we don't have to go to the North Pole, right? We can shoot the scene here in our parkas and, you know, whatever it is, and, but then make it appear very realistically as if we're in the North Pole, it'll save us a lot of money, a lot of time.

53:15We're going to focus on the performances and not be freezing our ass off out there and running back inside. Pause for a second. Just like Spencer Tracy. What if? Before you rebut this, let me tell you about that. Vibe.co, where D2C brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta. Continue. Small chance that AI saves Hollywood as a place, right? You're getting clapsed. As a place. Yeah. And the reason for that is one of the issues right now is filming is so expensive in LA. There's so much red tape that people have to go to Atlanta, Canada, Europe, whatever, international.

53:53But all the talent, the writers, directors, producers, the platforms, they're still here, right? It's very depressing. It's a bad vibe. All the restaurants are shutting down. Everything's cooked. But if you can start to generate the content here just on your computer, there's a chance that you see a kind of resurgence in Hollywood, the place, right? Yeah. And I think that realistically, that is the strategy that the industry should take, because having this concentration here, there's already so much talent, keeping it here, and actually embracing AI is much more likely to revitalize the city.

54:34Yeah. There's an incredible quote in here. Hopefully we can get to it. Let's skip ahead in play because he has a line that truly is directly out of Andre Kirpathy's mouth. The thing we were talking about earlier where there's a lot more fear because we have the sense of this existential dread. It's going to wipe everything out. But that actually runs counter, in my view, to what history seems to show, which is slow. It's incremental. Let's go. I think a lot of that rhetoric comes from people who are trying to justify valuations around companies. We're going to change everything. It's literally a Carpathian lie.

55:10The reason they're saying that is because they need to ascribe a valuation for investment that can warrant the capex. He didn't just watch Carpathian. He's sitting there taking notes. Make the social network three. But it's just about Dwarkesh and Carpathian hanging out in Ilya. It's just about AI research. It's about an exciting NeurIPS. And that's it. I don't know. Applovin'. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. People are already having fun with the memes out of this. I like this amend and pretend. Ben Affleck on AI Software.

55:53I suspect many AI native software companies are misrepresenting their growth and quality of revenue. Use of credits, annualizing proof of concept revenue, and lack of annual contracts lowers the overall quality of revenue and ultimately the multiple. I mean, this is a joke. I didn't actually say that. But he's not that far off from what he's actually saying. This is a great template. I hope this meme runs way further because it's so good. Banger. I love it. Oh, Forrest also clipped Ben Affleck talking about the GPT-4-0 people. Let's play this because this is interesting. And while we pull it up, let me tell you about Cisco.

56:31Critical infrastructure for the AI era. We are very pleased. to be partnered with Cisco, AI's new frontier, the edge. Let's do it. Early AI, the line went up very steeply, and it's now sort of leveling off. I think it's because, and yes, it'll get better, but it's gonna be really expensive to get better. And a lot of people were like, fuck this, we want your edge before, because it turned out like the vast majority of people who use AI are using it to like, as like companion bots to chat with at night. And so there's no work, there's no productivity, there's no value to it. I would argue there's also not a lot of social value to getting people to like focus on an AI friend who's you know telling you that you're great and listening to everything you say and being sycophantic.

57:16Absolutely right. That's sort of a side issue. Tyler's just engaged over there. Yeah yeah yeah. What's your rebuttal? Let's give Tyler a rebuttal. Defend AI. I think most of these takes are like pretty outdated. Okay. Like writing is actually AI writing. you can still tell that it's AI, but it's good. It's good. Videos are like, I think. Okay, okay. Sell a screenplay then. Sell a screenplay. Yeah. Do it. Shop a screenplay. Do it. Just prompt it. Why would I sell a screenplay? I could just make the whole movie myself. Okay. Just make the movie. Just make the finished movie, call on Netflix, and get a million dollar advance for your movie.

57:55Instead of filming in Antarctica, you can just get in the parkas and film it here, right? But you don't need the parkers either because you can just have them be in normal clothes. That's true. And then it's like, well, you don't actually need the people, right? Because you can just maybe fine tune a model so you get consistent characters. Sure, sure, sure. And then. Yeah, I will say just in the last two weeks, I am getting served AI content. That's pretty good. Pretty good. Pretty good. There's some pretty good stuff out there. Now, a lot of it still has that creative human element. Like someone will take an iconic movie scene.

58:25It's still all about the idea. It's about the idea. And the idea didn't come from the model. It's a bull market for ideas. It'll be good. And maybe the AI will get good ideas, but that does feel like the next breakthrough. This idea that Ben's saying, I would push back a little bit on Ben's saying, you're not just going to be able to generate a film. You will, but it won't be a film in the sense that it won't be Titanic. It won't be something that everyone goes to the movie theater, sits down, watches the same film. It will be a lot of films that are for different people. I don't think there'll be anything else.

58:56But I'm just saying people are going to create insane fan fiction style hero's journey, kind of standardized plot. But for a specific sub-community, you'll have one subreddit where everyone has watched it. And I mean, there is a lot of just slop movie content on streaming platforms right now. You can just go and watch. Gap your Tyler. Put Affleck in the truth zone. Not everything is. Yeah. Not every movie is Titanic, is Sicario. Yeah, look on Netflix. There's a lot of stuff that's like, yeah, they spent a million dollars. Every time I look on Netflix, I'm like, these are films? I know. There's a lot of slop on there.

59:42Anyway. So I think in Hollywood, at least, I like a lot of movies. There's certain writers that I like. Okay, you like movies? It's hard to get. Wait, you said you like movies? All right. Name every film. Name every film on the TVPN chat best film list. Best movie list. Okay, but you always hear about certain writers, they have a hard time getting their films made because maybe it's kind of a weird concept or something. It's hard to market. But AI is actually much better for them, right? Because if you have someone who actually has some unique look at the world or they're very creative or something, AI is super good for them, but kind of only for them, right?

1:00:18So maybe in the industry, it's not super great. But for the people, like, if there's a certain director that I, like, really love, they're going to be, you know, they're going to be able to make way more of their movies or whatever, you know, instantiate all their ideas. Why are people saying that the Papa Tai is AI generated? This song's from 2013. Someone's saying that there's the most viral song of the year so far is an AI generated song, but it must be based on another? It's an AI cover of a human written song. Okay, yeah, so it's like style transfer on top of, it's like a filter. This still feels like tool level, not to push back.

1:01:00I mean, that is an interesting watershed moment that something that involves AI could be so dominant, but there is a lot of like human work at play there to build the original song that then was edited with AI. anyway cognition they're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team anything else on Hollywood or should we move on to the battle Chad is calling Tyler based Zoomer he's Zoomer, it's good, good times okay so there's an update to the Elon Musk OpenAI lawsuit which is sitting at about 60 % chance that Elon wins on Kalshi right now on the prediction markets.

1:01:48But Elon Musk is now seeking. So on the day that the Brockman files went out, started going viral, OpenAI put out a release. They countered some of the narratives, added some more context. But they also sent out a letter to their investors saying, hey, look, we think it's going to be$34 million or something at worst. We'll have to pay him back for what he donated. But it's not going to be. Well, they said we think. We think this is the most, but it could be more. It could be more. And Elon said, yeah, it's going to be more. It's going to be$134 billion in damages is what Elon is seeking. Musk's legal team argues that his early funding and involvement materially contributed to OpenAI's rise, which is now valued at$500 billion, and he wants a slice.

1:02:36The lawsuit says OpenAI has become a for-profit company, entitling Musk to compensation tied to the value created from his early contributions. Musk helped found OpenAI in 2015 and donated approximately$38 million in early funding. When asked about the lawsuit, Elon Musk responded, I've lost a few battles over the years, but I've never lost a war. It's funny. And here's the thing. Here's the thing. So great line. Yes. But I don't think this lawsuit is the war. Yes. I think it's a battle in a longer war. Yes. And I think that it may play a role in how this sort of, like, war between XAI and OpenAI or Elon versus Sam evolves.

1:03:21But ultimately, like, this judge is not going to make, you know, the judge and jury are not going to make a decision that just, like, decides to war, right? Yes. It's just like the war is going to be won by overwhelming domination in the categories that they compete, which right now, consumer enterprise. And I'm sure. If he gets that, it's like over 25 % of the company, something like that. And that's going to be hard, again, depending. I'm sure it'll come out how much Sam owns exactly in the case. Yeah. But it's going to be hard to justify that he deserves more than Sam given their... And also just play out what happens if Elon does get all$134 billion.

1:04:07It's like you're not CEO. You don't have board control. You don't have super voting shares. but you're a massive shareholder that can just constantly do shareholder lawsuits. And so that's going to be incredibly annoying and very bad. But at the same time, like maybe a distraction. How do you actually get to control if that's what Elon's going for? It's a very, very odd scenario to work through, even though I don't think it's likely that it lands there. We will see what the judge thinks and where the damages land if he wins, which is still not guaranteed by any means. It could wind up being a FURIK victory for Elon.

1:04:46It could be something where he wins the battle, but he loses the war in the sense that it's a distraction. There's going to be a ton of discovery. It'll be ultimately, even if he gets$100 billion, he's worth$700 billion. It's like a drop in the bucket. I mean, he's like 10 % richer then? Okay. Does that really matter? 20 % richer? Of course it matters. But it's not that great. Gabe says, once I churn from ChatGBT, they are screwed. The straw that broke the... Yeah, a couple people have been coming out rallying, supportive, Elon, saying that they're churning, they're out. Seems like Sequoia is maybe picking a winner.

1:05:28Happy to diversify. They're planning a big investment into Anthropic, joining a round led by GIC and CO2. They're investing 1.5 each. Anthropic is raising the aim$25 billion. And this is, yeah, Sequoia gets the Financial Times article because it's an exciting moment to have them pick. So Financial Times says, Sequoia Capital is lining up a big investment into Anthropic, throwing its weight behind the AI startup for the first time as part of a funding round set to raise tens of billions of dollars. The California Adventure Capital Group is funding a round led by Singaporean sovereign wealth fund, GIC, and U.S.

1:06:03investor, Cotu, who are contributing$1.5 billion each, according to multiple people. These people said Anthropoc is raising$25 billion in a deal that values the company at$350, more than doubling its$170 billion valuation just four months ago. We've heard about this round for months now, but these things take a long time. So we won't be ringing the gong until we get Dario on the show and the deal is closed. So Microsoft and NVIDIA have committed to invest up to$15 billion into the company, and VCs and other investors are doing 10 of the 25 that they're raising. Sequoia obviously had the shakeup.

1:06:40Roloff, both in charge of Sequoia, passed on previous funding rounds for Anthropic, was wary of the concentration of VC investment into a handful of highly valued startups, arguing that venture capital was not an asset class. He said in an interview last year that throwing money into Silicon Valley doesn't yield more great companies. He was ousted in November with the firm's partners electing Pat Grady and Alfred Lind to co-lead the firm instead. Sequoia was an early investor in Google, Apple, Airbnb, and Stripe. and has backed some of Anthropik's biggest rivals. Sequoia invested in OpenAI's funding round last year and Elon Musk's AI Group, XAI.

1:07:15So venture capital firms rarely back rival startups in the same field, preferring to pick winners in each category. But the scale of the financial opportunity in AI has changed that approach. And cloud code is just too much fun. They love it. They can't stop using it. And so they have to get a check-in. But gotta get a piece. Anyway, Railway. Railway simplifies software deployment, web servers, apps, and databases run in one place with scaling, monitoring, and security built in. Well said, John. Continuing. Little known fact, Sequoia was an early investor in Ilfernaio, owning 6.3 % of the company at its 1997 IPO.

1:07:51I love that the Sequoia team in the early days was doing pizza joints and restaurants and software. Didn't they own Chuck E. Cheese, right? Yep. That was a funny one. So yeah, this is from Andrew Reid. So Il Fornaio owns and operates 13 full-service white tablecloth Italian restaurants serving creatively prepared, premium-quality Italian cuisine based on authentic regional recipes. What a fantastic business. And Sequoia Capital got a huge slug, 6.3 % at the IPO. Yeah, so sad news. Il Fornaio. How do you say it? Il Fornaio. Il Fornaio. as they're closing their restaurant in the Bay. Over in Iowa was like the cool spot to go before high school dances when I grew up.

1:08:40It was like the, I think there's one in Pasadena. It's really good. I hope that they can keep it open somehow or someone can rescue. This feels like FTX. Tiny, tiny.

1:08:53Shutting down, closing locations. Sure, yeah. So much history. Sequoia involvement. Sequoia involvement. Ridiculous. That was obviously years and years ago. Anyway, these guys love violating narratives. It is so funny to think about Sequoia getting a deck for a restaurant. Being like, this is right in the sweet spot. We've got to get into this one. This is right down the way. We've got to get right down the fairway. Right down the fairway. This is a sweet spot. We've been waiting. We had a market map of restaurants. We had authentic Italian carved out. There was no one there. We did a two-axis graph.

1:09:29Italian, authentic. tick, you're in the sweet spot. You got a deal. We're taking, you're not going to believe this. The founder for the, for the partner meeting invited us to the restaurant. The food was fantastic. You know, they actually did another restaurant later. They did the melt. Are you familiar with this? Sequoia? Yeah. Sequoia did the melt, uh, which is a grilled cheese spot. It's still going. It's all around LA. I, I, I enjoy the melt. That is, yeah, it's a grilled cheese. If I needed a reason to love Sequoia more. I know they're amazing. They're supporting the grilled cheese economy.

1:09:58It's a really funny story because the founder, I believe, was like an amazing physicist, like a genius mathematician or someone that's really, really quantitative. And they were like, you're the one that can solve fast, casual grilled cheeses. And I think he scaled the business. I think it's done pretty well. Wall Street Journal article from 2014. Sequoia backs the melt, moves beyond grilled cheese. Yes. Yeah, they have burgers now. They have soups. I used to go there. They got burger melts, chicken melts, mac and cheese. I'd get a grilled cheese and a cup of tomato soup. It was delicious. It was amazing.

1:10:29Anyway, Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. So David Sachs says, narrative violation. And Joe Wazenthal says, these guys love violating narratives. The narrative violation is that the largest AI data center uses roughly the same amount of water as two burger joints. There are over 200 ,000 fast food restaurants in the United States, so this is a tiny amount. This is, of course, from semi-analysis. They did a whole write-up, a breakdown, comparing various water usage.

1:11:06We were asking, when is the semi-analysis water model coming? Well, it's here, and they did a whole analysis on how much water these data centers are using, and it's a lot lower than people think. It's, in many cases, less than golf courses. it's not nothing, but it certainly seems manageable, which is great news because people have been worried about this. Now we have some hard data to point to when you want to say, hey, the water thing is actually not that big of a deal. Let's focus on the energy thing because that actually is a big deal. Let's build some nuclear power plants. Let's get some solar on the ground.

1:11:41And let's get some more energy up and to the right. So there's another narrative violation. Another narrative violation has hit the timeline. David Sachs says, narrative violation, according to BlackRock, the US does not have enough workers to meet the surging demand for the construction boom. AI is creating too many jobs. And there's a beautiful picture of a - Overnight success. Some sort of construction equipment. And so BlackRock is now warning that a worker shortage could hurt construction boom. We heard that - If I was graduating high school, college, didn't want to work in an office, I would actually get a plane ticket down to Texas, I'd show up to Abilene with my ID and say, put me to work.

1:12:27And I bet you could get a job. I've told several people to do that, at least take the trip to some of these new gold rush towns and see if there's a way to bring your business there as a real estate agent, a lawyer, whatever you're doing. Actually go and understand how much is this going to change the community? Because it certainly has in the past. Anyway, CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. We were hanging out with some folks at the Singer Drivers Club yesterday, our friend of the show, Paul, and a number of the coaches who are professional drivers were talking about how much a legend George, founder of CrowdStrike is.

1:13:12He has the respect of the most elite drivers in the world. This guy is the real deal. Speaking of driving, we have seen Elon, he's beefing with Sam, he's suing OpenAI, and he wants 136 billion, something like that. He said that he will drop the lawsuit if they change their name to closed AI. And there has to be a point where if the judge is about to actually issue 136 billion - Call up Delaware. Hey, I got a name change. This is not a joke. I mean, would ChatGPT actually see a decline in user numbers if they change the company's name to closed AI? I don't think so. I think a lot of people just think about his chat.

1:14:02They think about ChatGPT. They maybe know OpenAI. They maybe know Sam Allman's name. They don't know Greg Brockman. Like the average ChatGPT user could probably deal with the name change. I don't think Ben Affleck would be able to handle it. I know. He would be upset. But truly, like, I mean, Facebook rebranded to Meta. It's entirely new name. Okay, John. But like, realistically, the lawsuit's not getting dropped because of the name change. A post is not a contract. He will abide by the results, okay? He will abide by the results. Well, he's also asking if we should buy Ryanair. Have you seen that?

1:14:37Yeah, I've seen that. But I have another way to resolve the lawsuit. Okay, so when Elon was beefing with Zuck, do you remember when they were going to go in the octagon? They were going to fight it out. They were going to do UFC, mixed martial arts battle. Do you remember what they were fighting over? No. Isn't that hilarious? Do you remember what they were fighting over? No. I can't remember. I can only remember the fight. But I looked it up and they were fighting because Mark Zuckerberg was about to launch threads. And Elon was in this vulnerable position where he levered up to buy Twitter and he bought it sort of at the top and Twitter and the whole market was down and he was legally obligated to buy it.

1:15:15And so there was a lot of debt. There was a big question of like, what is he going to do with Twitter? Is he going to be able to juice it and get the ad product working? All the advertisers were leaving. He was in a vulnerable position. And that's when Mark Zuckerberg was like, I'm jumping in with my competitor threads and I'm leveraging the Instagram network. I'm really piping everyone in. It's a shot across the bow. And so Elon said - Connor Hayes, absolute dog. Yeah, he put Connor in charge. And Elon took it personally and said, we got to settle this in the octagon. But it never happened. They were thinking about doing the Coliseum.

1:15:46Dana White said, I'll officiate. I'll make it happen. I'm down. I'm into this. Never happened. But I was thinking, how can Sam and Elon settle their lawsuit that doesn't require a bunch of jurors in Oakland wasting a bunch of time in the courtroom. They've got to settle in on the track. They've got to hit the track. I thought you were going to say pay-per-view as well. No, no, no. Obviously, they're not getting into the octagon. That's not going to happen. Track is good. Tesla starts their own Formula One team. Sam's got his McLaren F1. Yeah. I want to see Sam in the McLaren F1, Elon in the Tesla Plaid.

1:16:19I want them around the Nürburgring. 24 hours of Le Mans style. They've got to go for 24 hours. And then they got to do a 0-60. They got to do a quarter-mile race. They got to do an illegal street race for sure. That's definitely going to happen. They also got to do a drift track. I want to see them both drifting. And they probably got to do a Pike's Peak as well. I want to hear both of them racing up Pike's Peak. And then you do sort of like best of five. Like you do a 24 hours of Le Mans, see who does best there. Average that with whoever's quickest off the line in a quarter mile. The drag race too.

1:16:52Maybe throw in an Indy 500. I want like a month of Elon and Sam just racing various vehicles against each other. And this would satisfy the people that are saying, pause the AI. Yeah, the AI pause. They're like, okay, we'll pause. Yes. And it's a month of live streamed races between Sam and Elon. It's like Tour de France. Yes. Yeah. Exactly. They go from one place to another, do every different circuit. Yeah, Bobby says, and a cannonball. They definitely have to do a cannonball. Totally agree. Just whoever gets from New York to LA faster, we drop the lawsuit. They win the lawsuit. That would be ideal.

1:17:25Anyway, Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training inference with scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. So Rune posted, do your duty while weeping if you must. There's nothing clean and gentle in the crooked timber of human relations. And Gabriel says, every Rune tweet contains material non-public information, and it's your job to get it out. And there has been a lot to read into the ruined tweets lately. He's been on a tear. But we won't speculate anymore. What else should we do? In the journal. In the journal. Why the tech world thinks the American dream is dying.

1:18:04Silicon Valley fears this is the last chance to amass generational wealth before AI makes money worthless. People are really into the underclass. This has got a lot of commentary. A lot of chatter. A thousand comments on the WSJ. It's kind of a confusing subtitle. Because why would you, if AI makes money, like the people that think AI is going to make money worthless are the ones that are just going to go sit in the park, right? Is that the whole point? Potentially. Let's get into it. Silicon Valley is filled with all sorts of dreams, but one of those wild-eyed ideas long debated on subreddits and in hacker houses is becoming a real-life nightmare.

1:18:39Will the AI boom be the last chance to get rich before AI makes money essentially worthless? One note. Yeah. There's some people that love Mikey Money so much, they will keep doing it for the love of the game. It's just going to be like a sport. It'll be like going and playing, putting on the cleats and playing a little soccer, right? You just want to run up the score sometimes. Even if money becomes worthless, you know people are still going to be looks maxing. It's going to be all status games. It's all going to be height maxing, various levels of inserts in the shoes. It's going to be a whole game.

1:19:12No, I think what I've been saying is like in that scenario, it would actually just be like a video game. Like, yeah, I made a unicorn. Did it change my life? No. I just wanted to prove that I could do it. Sure, sure. Right? It's like somebody that's running a marathon. You mean like grow a unicorn? Like the bio company we talked to? What do you mean make a unicorn? Oh, like actually build a company. Oh, build a company. Just purely for the love of the game. Not like a literal unicorn. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because in this AI abundance area, you could potentially go to Claude Cote and say, don't make mistakes, make a unicorn.

1:19:41Make a unicorn. Genetically taught by a horse. Anyways, continuing. The argument is that tech companies and their leaders will become a class unto their own with infinite wealth. No one else will have the means to generate money for themselves because AI will have taken their jobs and opportunities. In other words, the bridge is about to be raised for those chasing the American dream, and everyone is worried about being left on the wrong side. It's the kind of FOMO that, on first blush, seems to require a huge suspension of disbelief. But the idea's mere existence helps explain some of the increasing class worries in California.

1:20:08where a growing movement to tax billionaires, we're calling this the business elimination tax, is the new branding, according to Lulu, is roiling the Democratic Party. Affordable housing is real concern, and the idea of the middle class seems out of reach. Yet it smacks of sci-fi thinking, but in San Francisco it feels real, and it's made more believable by the exploits of Elon Musk, the rise of OpenAI's Sam Altman, and warnings by Anthropics Dario about Great Depression-like worker displacement. The transition will be bumpy. Musk said this month on a podcast, we'll have radical change, social unrest, and immense prosperity.

1:20:44A little bit of a roller coaster ride. It's a universal high income is his term for it. And that's Musk's best case scenario. History is filled with technology booms that create new winners and losers. AI optimists like to point out that a rising tide has tended to lift all boats. What's being talked about now, massive job loss to automation and the need for public safety nets in the form of universal basic income paints a dramatically different future. It's still not clear if there's an appetite for so-called UBI, which runs counter to many Americans' bedrock ideals of personal achievement. Quote, I used to be excited about UBI, but I think people really need agency.

1:21:21They need to feel like they have a voice in governing the future and deciding where things go. Altman, OpenAI's chief executive, said last year when asked by a podcaster about how people will create wealth in the AI era. Quote, if you just say, okay, AI is going to do everything and then everybody gets a dividend from that, it's not gonna feel good. You gotta lock in, you gotta grind. He didn't say that part. And I don't think it's what would actually be good for people. If money is out, scarce assets like art could become key. We saw some massive results at a Ferrari auction this weekend. A bunch of Ferraris trading for maybe three over what people thought the market was gonna be.

1:22:03Lots of speculation about what's going on there. But people are certainly getting in on luxury goods. If you don't have a scarcity of resources, it's not clear what purpose money has, he said at a conference last year. More recently, Musk suggested people shouldn't even worry about saving for retirement, predicting AI will provide health care and entertainment. You like that, Tyler? No, I was just going to say, I think I've heard at Anthropic, at least, a lot of people don't contribute to their 401k for these reasons. Interesting. Still, it looks... I mean, it also helps that if you've been there a while, your company went from sub$10 billion valuation to$500 in the span of a few years.

1:22:41You're not like, oh, I better... I'm so worried I haven't added much to my 401k. Yeah. But... Well... Okay, that's fair. Maybe you don't want to contribute to your 401k, but if you want to change the world, you got to raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We're very pleased to be partnered with the New York Stock Exchange, where you can go and change the world by raising capital. Let's finish this out. Weeks later, social media posts on X and LinkedIn and Facebook began claiming. NVIDIA's Jensen Wong said something similar. The CEO of these breathless posts claimed was warning, quote, the period from 2025 to 2030 may be the last major chance for everyday people to build wealth through technology.

1:23:27Scary stuff, except Jensen, he didn't say it. Rather, his numerous public appearances in the past few months have been filled with talk about the potential for AI to be more of an equalizing force for technology. Quote, we're going to have a wealth of resources, things that we think are valuable today that in the future are just not that valuable because it's automated, he told Joe Rogan last month. It can be hard to sort fact from fiction in an era of technology that seems pulled straight from an Ian Banks novel. And backers of AI companies have billions, if not trillions, of reasons to hope their gambles aren't just once-in-a-generation jackpots, but once-in-a-human existence.

1:24:10Further contributing to the FOMO in San Francisco is the expectation that local AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic will soon go public, minting many more millionaires. After the New York Times ran a headline this past week about a wave of mega IPOs expected this year, local real estate agent Rohan Dar posted on X, may I humbly suggest you buy your house in San Francisco before this. It is interesting. I feel like the SF housing market has really been through some crazy gyrations. It was way down for a little bit. And yes, I mean, I agree. I expect it goes way up. The tech entrepreneur who was once part of Y Combinator years ago told me he was drawn to real estate in part because of a belief new AI wealth will fuel a housing boom, or as he predicted last year, the mother of all tech booms is coming.

1:24:54Get some while you can. Well, thank you to Tim. One of the comments here is interesting. Somebody, Jason Barger says, when I graduated college in 1999, I remember those pursuing teaching being mocked for going into an obsolete field. The internet was going to replace teachers. Some thought it would replace educational institutions themselves. uh anyways well we have jordan schneider from china talk in the restring room before we bring him in let me tell you about turbo puffer serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable uh let's bring jordan schneider in to the tbp and ultra dumb jordan how are you doing good to see you i am doing amazing i'm so glad to be here i just love listening to your ad reads they're truly the best ad reads on the planet.

1:25:42Thank you. I appreciate it. It's no competition. We love ads. Careful what you say. John is really tempted to start doing them during guest interviews, and I'm like, I don't know if we want to. We've said like 30 minutes is a lot of time to hang out with Jordan. We might need a break halfway through, slip in an ad. Every once in a while, I do it. Specifically, if a VC is on and they're pumping their bags and one of the bags they're pumping happens to be a sponsor, why not slip in an ad read? Yeah, why not be explicit about it? I'd be a little on the nose. John, I give you the pass. I give you the pass.

1:26:14I'm ready for it. I want to see the creativity. Well, if there's a lull in the conversation, expect an ad read. But anyway. Dude, you seem pretty happy right now. Yes. What's going on? You're like in the best mood ever for a TVP appearance. Do you get a vacation? What's new with you? I'm actually in a terrible mood because the Bills just fired Sean McDermott, our God head coach for the past nine years. It's some Game of Thrones shit. The GM is like, you know, knifed him in the back. He's now got a promotion. And I was asking ChatGPT and Claude what the correct tech analogy would be to explain this to the TVPN audience.

1:26:51And there was not a good one. So I guess AGI is not a good one. And back up for the viewers, who are the Bills? The Buffalo Bills are an American football team. Okay. Plays in Western New York. They've had a great run. They have a wonderful quarterback. Everyone should root for them. They have a lovable loser reputation, never won a Super Bowl, and have been on a generational run. They've been the second most winning team over the past 10 years. Can't seem to get over the hump, and we can talk about something else. I know this is not good. So I just looked at 12 teams have never won a Super Bowl.

1:27:29Is that, like, imagine being in the – Well, a lot of them are new. A lot of them are newer. Jacksonville Jaguars, for example. Okay. I know both. But the Bills, we've been there for a few years. Jaguars, Cardinals. It's a lot of teams. I'm glad we get to do it. You know, it's a – this is like the debate among, I guess, new parents. How do you watch football, though? It's like, do you want your kids to suffer? Okay. Oh, how do I watch football? Okay, that's a transition. YouTube TV now. Do you do the David Sendra and, like, you lean forward and you just, like, really focus like this? Or are you kind of, like, writing the newsletter?

1:28:04It's a family event. And I think the level, like myself, my brother, and my father's levels of intensity of fandom have evolved over the years. I have started to lean back a little bit. But when the playoffs come around, I am screaming and cursing and getting very heated again. So I kind of, like, taper in over the course of the season until they inevitably rip my heart out. not only with errors on the field, but apparently errors in the management side of things as well. But anyways, we'll see. We can talk about China if you want. I also have some media criticism of you guys I want to do. Okay, yeah.

1:28:43We can talk about that. I'm just glad that you're coming on blackpilled about sports as opposed to geopolitics because - Oh, I'm sure he's blackpilled about geopolitics too. But at least you didn't lead off with it because if you came on here and you were like, invasion of Taiwan's imminent, it's all - Wait, why don't you give us the geopolitical comp for whatever the bills just did? I don't even remember. They, like, let go of the head coach. It's Operation Paperclip. You know what my analogy? Here's my analogy, okay? So, like, talking about invading Greenland is what Trump wants you to do. I don't think he's going to do it.

1:29:21But, like, the thing that gets him jazzed up is people being upset about crazy ideas he has in the pushback. And this, I think the fascinating analogy here is the whole Ro Khanna saga that we've had over the past month or two. Because, like, the amount, like, this is what he wanted to happen. He is not dumb. He is a politician who has a national presence and has ambitions. And what he wants to do is, as the Silicon Valley representative, like, there is a risk for him in a potential 2028 Democratic primary of saying, oh, you're just in the bag for these guys. So having like being able to sort of manufacture this enemy of all these like rich billionaires who, hey, by 2029, when no one has jobs, or 2028, 2027, when no one has jobs anymore, like, and we have two more years of tech bros running the White House, like the Q score of that segment of society may be down.

1:30:18Like having all these people on the record saying, we're going to take him down. We want to run against him. He's going to take our money, which by the way, is something a lot of Americans, I don't think would be all that upset about. And like, yes, your median TVPN listener understands the nuances of taxing unrealized gains may not be the best thing for innovation. But like the ease at which this entire ecosystem was baited, I just found to be fascinating. And it's kind of the same thing. I think that's a good I think it's generally a good take, because if you actually press, you know, anybody that's actually press row, like he has no defense for his political.

1:30:56you know, policy stance on this. Like he, he actually cannot defend it and, and stay logically coherent. Right. Like it's like he's running, he really is. It seems like he's running like a bit. But since, but since when has that mattered in politics? I don't know, like the, the Kennedy Nixon debates or something like, yeah, he is now setting himself up against billionaire capitalist overlords who are apparently on the other side of him and hate him and want to do everything to bring him down. And like, that is a winning play for him. And these, these folks are so scared of their bags and they're so confident that like, oh, like they say something and then it will happens and no, there won't be second order consequences that, um, I don't know.

1:31:40It was a fascinating saga to watch from the sidelines. Yeah. He's on a whole, he's on a whole media tour now. He's done a ton of, he's popping up everywhere. Um, and he's definitely taking advantage of the moment he's done really well because he's got some haters because he's smart yeah yeah yeah yeah you need he's playing the heel he studied he sat he sat down he watched a bunch of wwe game tape and he's like okay i know i know what i gotta do yeah yeah okay uh all right yeah this this brings me this brings me to my media criticism um and i think like look you guys have gotten a lot better and the show has evolved and the centrality of it in like American discourse um is really something to behold and with that comes responsibility okay and I think you are slowly but surely maturing into that I mean the big moment you had a few months ago making fun of and everything um is an important part of that maturation process and you know the rage are you Are you talking about the case against rage bait?

1:32:42Yeah, the case against rage bait. And sort of as you're doing more of this, like, you know, pushing yourselves to do like more independent thinking and writing with the essays every day, you're going to have more politicians on. You're going to have more – like more and more of this is going to be trending towards that. I'm sure all the presidential candidates are going to want to come on. Same with the 2026 candidates. I just think it's really cool. And politics matters to this world, whether we like it or not. And watching you guys kind of like grow into being, having the stature and comfort to ask harder questions of guests, I think is really cool.

1:33:20So I just want to give you kudos. And I'm excited to see where all that goes. I like that. You're trying to rage bait us into politics. Yeah. So I mean like, so you're 100 % right. There is a weird dynamic where, at least with our viewership, we actually do notice a decline in the metrics when we talk about politics and have politicians on. And some of the chat will just be like, go back to talking about space or tech or whatever. But I understand it. It's going to happen. At the same time, I really enjoyed Joe Weisenthal on China Talk. And I particularly liked Joe's point that on the hard question issue, people often have this fantasy that if you're talking to someone, you're like, okay, here's a hard question.

1:34:07Are you a fraud? They'll just be like, you got me. I am a fraud. Like, ask the hard question. Like, I can't lie. When in fact. Well, we actually did ask somebody that. We actually did do that once, and it did work. They did say the F word. And ironically, it worked with Joe Weisenthal, too, because on Odd Lots with Matt Levine, they asked SBF, like, how does this work? And SBF was kind of like, it's a Ponzi scheme. And Matt Levine says, so you're in the Ponzi business and it's a good business. And he says, yeah. And so he kind of confessed. So there is a way to ask a hard question. But I'm interested in meeting how you reflect.

1:34:39Can we talk about B2B sacks instead?

1:34:46Yes, we can. Restream. One live stream, 30-plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to restream.com. That's some B2B SaaS for you, folks. Also applicable to China Talk. Maybe we'll get you live streaming this year. Anyway, so give us how you process the hard questions. Well, before that, I think the question I would ask you, because people ask us, like, the topics that you discuss become, you may not be approaching them from a political angle, but they have political implications. Yes. Like it's your duty to talk about them. And my response historically has been, obviously, tech influences politics.

1:35:25Obviously, it's going to be like a large part of the debates in 2028 in the midterms. And, and, but that being said, I've, I've always seen our role is like talk with really smart people and get an understanding of the individual players, the teams, the companies, the startups, the public companies, and then get an understanding of the industries. And then there's an opportunity for people to do kind of like meta political analysis, even based on that understanding, like something that we've like people. I think defining it as covering politics is a little too narrow. I think it's more like there are aspects to all of this which are bigger than will this company grow its revenue at this rate and will these guys beat out those guys?

1:36:20That's exactly what I want to talk about though. You have to hold me back. I want to talk about revenue. So I'll give you another example. So I wrote maybe a week or so ago, like, why would Americans be excited about AI? Like, there's a video on Instagram, and I'm sure there's hundreds, of Sam Altman saying AI is probably going to kill everyone, but it's going to create some cool companies in the meantime, right? Like, that is like a mainstream, like, video that millions and millions and millions of people have seen. and they'll use ChatGPT and they'll use some other AI product and they're like, this is cool, but I actually like the world and I don't want, I'd be down to like, so part of it's like, I definitely think it's our responsibility or worth talking about questions like that, which is like, you're not giving people a real reason to be you can't say like, we're curing cancer or AI is going to cure cancer and then simultaneously say all these other things and expect people to just broadly say like you guys are the greatest thing to ever happen to humanity like keep it up right like why totally yeah i mean i think coming back to a point that john made of like like asking the hard questions is not does not necessarily conflate with being a dick to your guests um i mean just just recently like i had this thing that went viral i was having two folks on the China Commission on, and they were talking about like the downsides of, you know, China developing.

1:37:57And one of the things they said is like, wouldn't it be really bad if China cured cancer before the US? I was like, really? Like, are we sure about that one? Look, I want to save, I want to save humanity, but I don't want anyone to save it harder than me. Exactly. But, you know, and kind of getting to that point in the conversation of like, Like exploring what your views are at the limit doesn't necessarily mean that you have to say, oh, don't you, you know, you want to kill grandmas or whatever. It's like, you know, viewers aren't stupid. They can kind of read into that what they please or like, you know, make a decision based on what the guest says.

1:38:38But you do need to like take the guests there and bring them, as you guys said, to conversations which are a little deeper than, you know, revenue targets and new products. And I do enjoy those types of conversations with business leaders. Maybe I'm just new to talking to a politician, but it feels like it's an entirely different game. The type of conversation we're having right now is we're both podcasters. We're just talking back and forth. It's great. I can get a CEO on and they're there to talk about a specific launch. Halfway there, yeah. And it's halfway. It's some conversation. We might be able to get them to crack up.

1:39:14We rang a gong. We do a bunch of stuff to engage them. I know a little bit of lore. There's stuff that can get there. But the politicians, at least for right now, I don't know the lore. I don't know all their positions. And so it can just be, I just feel like I'm struggling to keep the car on the track. I'm spinning out a lot. I'm spinning my tires a lot. The cool thing with the CEO is they're playing the game of capitalism. And whatever they're saying, you know at the end of the day for the most part that they just want to make their company bigger. Whereas with a politician like Ro Khanna is talking about these insane policies that will make California descend into a tourism and agriculture-based economy.

1:39:56And I don't want that for California. I've lived here my whole life. My family has been in California for over 100 years. It's very important to me. um but and and i'm not even like i'm not tapped into this whole washington thing and it makes sense when you say like okay he's just doing this to like prove that he stood up to the tech guys and so that he can go on his presidential run but i have no interest in like really engaging in that specifically because there's enough enterprise sass to talk about and there's also there's also a lot of good media coverage in politics or at least there's a lot of there's a lot of media coverage in politics.

1:40:33Like there's so many huge outlets that do huge numbers and there's plenty of outlets on the left and the right for all sorts of things. And, and also it feels like a lot of the politicians are, are crossing over for like, for a while there was this criticism that like, there was like the right podcast echo chamber and the left mainstream media, uh, echo chamber. But in the last year, it feels like there's been pretty massive crossover, whether it's like Gavin Newsom having conversations with people on the right, the New York times platform, Well, the moderates over at the Nelk Boys. Yeah, the Nelk Boys have platformed everyone.

1:41:05Where's your Nelk Boys crossover? We're ready to get them on the show. We got it. We got the Happy Dad Seltzer right over there. We love the Nelk Boys over here. Yeah, we had John Shahidi on the show live in person in the Ultradome. When are you getting to the Ultradome? You've got to come out. The steward of the Nelk Boys. Next time you're in LA, you've got to come hang out in person. CBD. CBD. It's great. Anyway. I've got more topics for you guys. Please, please, please. We're going to talk NVIDIA PR stumbles. We got my Claude Code games. Okay, okay. I want to hear about the NVIDIA stumbles.

1:41:37Is this Jensen specifically? Walk me through what you're thinking. No. So I guess it was last week in the House of Representatives, there was an act introduced called the AI Overwatch Act, which basically would essentially start to require congressional approval for AI exports, certain AI exports in the same way that Congress has a role to play when it comes to exporting arms sales abroad. So if you sell fighter jets to Israel or Saudi Arabia or Taiwan, Congress has to like give a nod to that. And within two days, you saw Lara Loomer, Brad Parscale and like a long tail of 10 to 15 other right wing influencers basically all tweet the same thing.

1:42:24A lot of phrases were repeated. House Republicans are being lied to. We need to win the I.I. race. This is going to strip Trump of his foreign policy powers. But the funniest part was that AI was spelled not A capital I, but A lowercase L across every single one of these cities. That's crazy. So I have a story like this. There was a – I mean, to be clear, we do need to win the owl race as well. We need as many Alfreds as possible. We need Al in charge. We need total control over Al. We got an Al in at Sequoia, Alfred Lynn. That's right. There's a couple other Alberts and Alfreds all over America.

1:43:06We need to capitalize on them. I once gave some what ended up being bad advice to a portfolio company. They were asking me, how should I handle my launch? And I was like, basically, you need to prepare your investors that you're going to launch and then encourage them to share it and maybe give them some thought starters on what they could share. Because they're going to be busy. They're going to be in a meeting. Yeah. And and so it very clearly was like rewrite in your own words. Yeah. Like these are just examples. And then and then everyone just copy the first one or seven people just like copy and paste it.

1:43:44No, just like and then, of course. Yeah. Yeah. There's been a couple of quote tweets I've seen hit the timeline from people who are clearly very busy where it where the whole quote tweet starts with a bullet point. And you're like, I know what's going on there. Yeah. It's become its own meme format. Anyway, so how does this tie to Invidia? We should run this as a bit. We get like 20 of us to like all share. Yes, yes. The same. Yeah, we should all quote the latest China Talk episode. What's that Italian restaurant? Bullet point. Jordan is a truly masterful interviewer. Parentheses. Please feel free to rewrite this in your own voice.

1:44:22No, we got to do it for the Italian restaurant that's shutting down. Oh, El For Now. It's like El For Now is one of the most storied institutions a Sequoia-backed company, it is absolutely imperative that it stays operational in San Francisco. It needs a taxpayer bailout. It needs a taxpayer bailout. Bailout. The Treasury should wire a billion dollars right now for 10%. Wait, so tie this to NVIDIA. You said NVIDIA was involved in this. Explain. Well, I don't know who else is paying Laura and Brad Parscale 50 grand, 100 grand for these days. But why doesn't NVIDIA want this to happen? Oh, well, because they want to be able to export ships to China.

1:44:59Because they want to win the AI race, not the owl race. They want to win the IR risk.

1:45:05Okay, so they want to be able to sell internationally as freely as possible with as little oversight and maybe just a rubber stamp from the president gets it done. If it goes to Congress, it's going to be more complicated. And to be clear, this seems like something a PR team, a PR firm ran where they're like engaged by NVIDIA. It sounds like I'm just speculating. It could be engaged by anyone in the company engages a PR. Yeah. And they're like, we're going to engage key opinion leaders. And then, of course, as soon as the KOLs get involved, it's all over. Interesting. Yeah. OK. I mean, to be clear, this bill would put these restrictions for exports to Russia, Iran, China, and the DPRK.

1:45:49So I don't know. But look, it's funny because there's been this real learning arc with NVIDIA and Washington where, I mean, as of three years ago, there was like one person in D.C. It was really not a company that engaged deeply with D.C. And then October 2022, you have these export controls, and all of a sudden this firm has to ramp up. And what they've kind of seen or the success that they had over the course of 2025 was basically Jensen doing the job of convincing the president. We were looking earlier this year on how much they actually spend on lobbying. Really low. Super low, like single-digit millions whenever I checked.

1:46:31But travel. And I was like, Jensen's gas bill could very well be higher than how much they're actually spending on lobbying. But to finish the thought, so, you know, OK, they've got the White House won over. They've got the president won over. But the problem is this is not – the idea of exporting chips to China is not popular in Congress. You've had a number of bipartisan bills be introduced in the Senate and the House, which have basically tried to cramp Trump's style when it comes to how he wants to sell these chips to the PRC. And so, you know, starting to do starting to play that and they've been able to actually kill one or two of these bills.

1:47:11But the momentum does seem to be building. So having a flailing response like this is like, yeah, kind of cringe, makes for some good TVPN laughs, but also is indicative of the fact that like, yeah, they are worried enough about what's happening on the Hill with respect to AI exports that they feel like they need to start to play these sorts of games. But what if we sell a ton of GPUs to North Korea and they cure cancer? Look. Would that be so bad? What's North Korea's AI-al strategy? Their owl strategy is probably all fine-tuning on the glorious leader. He's absolutely right. He does hit a hole in one every time he golfs.

1:47:54Just hard-coded in the weights. Back to media criticism. I love that Vanity Fair piece and the last paragraph where I forget what it was, but there was some funny tweet. and it's like this is the reason that all these other ones fail is because you guys are talented and you guys are very funny. And like that is a thin diagram of not a lot of people who can like check all these boxes. So anyways, hats off to you. Yeah. I mean hats off to Transistor Radio. It's one of the funniest podcasts ever. It's amazing. Every time you guys drop one, I turn it on immediately. It's fantastic. Never quit. It's amazing.

1:48:34Sorry. Did you want to move on to something else? because I still want to get the update on just broad China, Taiwan. We talked to someone who was particularly blackpilled, seemed like they were very upset with America's capacity to protect Taiwan. And I was wondering if you've seen any movement there. From my perspective, it feels like it's been kind of quiet. All of 2025 was sort of quiet. I don't know if that's just me focusing on U.S. tech and AI race stuff, and I'm out of the loop, but would love just sort of your lay of the land on US, China, Taiwan negotiations. Sure. So I think the big story of, I mean, there was a lot of drama over the course of 2025.

1:49:16Liberation Day, we forgot. There is a whole nother arc, which of course included 150 % tariffs on China, which got negotiated and down and then got ramped back up. Then you had rare earth controls. And then finally, we've sort of seemed to reach a bit of a equilibrium. Trump's supposed to go there in I think March or April. Nobody really wants to rock the boat too much. But specifically on the Taiwan issue, no blockade, no invasion, no like, you know, firing back and forth or drones or conflict that I remember seeing anything like that. And that was sort of like the worst case scenario was that maybe they were going to start with some sort of soft blockade and it wasn't going to be violent, but it was going to really escalate the situation to like we're reprimand.

1:49:58positioning ships. Yeah. I mean, this has been one of my polymarket trade recommendations over the past few years is no war invasion. I'm not particularly surprised we've had something crazy. Look, I think Xi sees a lot of upside in the direction of travel of a lot of things. And yes, China has problems, but like starting World War III. I mean, right now, he has like a pretty good equilibrium with the US and that all of the kind of like we had a sort of slow but steady creep up in controls over the course of, you know, really starting and towards the second half of Trump won. And that with what she has been able to do by kind of throwing the rare earth thing back in America's face to stop that.

1:50:50And, you know, I think who's the really old guy who does trade in the White House, but who like had the, he says like dumplings are bad or something. I can't remember his name. Anyway, Peter Navarro, Peter Navarro. You're like, you guys are ready to cover DC. We're like, couldn't tell you who works there. Dumpling man. Google this dumpling quote while I'm looking. Peter Navarro dumplings. Okay, I have heard of him. I'm sure he's a nice guy. He said, look, like it's a different chessboard from what it was a while ago. And the fact that China both has leverage and is willing to, and more importantly, is willing to use it and understands that using it will get the US to back down, I think is a new dynamic, which we hadn't really seen in the trade war arc of Trump one, and then in the Biden administration.

1:51:41The one thing that I do want to flag to you guys a little bit is this saga currently going on between Japan and China, where the new PM Prime Minister of Japan made some not super offhanded remark, basically saying like a problem that China has with Taiwan is a problem that we have. And it's very likely that we would be involved in any kind of scenario. And this has basically been the goal of American presidents for decades now to kind of get Japan off of its butt, get it spending more on its military and And get it, you know, really part of the equation to dissuade, to like make the balance of military power in the region such that China has no interest in going into Taiwan.

1:52:29And what you sort of saw in response to the Trump administration was kind of nothing. No big statement, no saying, hey, we're here to support you. Basically, Trump called Xi and then Trump called Takeuchi saying, hey, chill out. And look, like they just had a nice visit. the defense minister Koizumi, the son of the old prime minister, uh, who like, it's like a hotshot 37 or something. You guys should have him on. Um, uh, they had a nice meeting. We say that the Alliance is okay, but I did find it a little disappointing that like, we're not kind of cheering them on when the whole thesis of the Trump administration is like, we want to step back and have our allies do more of the heavy lifting.

1:53:09So you're famous for the The mandate of heaven tier list amongst AI labs. Have you been feeling that China labs have been falling off? It feels like they've certainly been making less sort of like dramatic breakthroughs like the original DeepSea. Manus is now an American company. Let's go. Let's hear it for Zuck. There was an article in the journal. And the coin models are great, but, you know, it just doesn't feel like it's in the conversation as like, this is an existential risk to open AI or Anthropic or Google. Like the real like heavy hitters are like the main labs in America and then even XAI and MSL are doing exciting things.

1:53:48And so you have like five significant efforts and it feels like the open source narrative has sort of like fallen back. It's still there, but it's not nearly as existential or as just as embarrassing as it used to be where when, you know, a hedge fund could spend 10 mil and defeat Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah. I mean, I think the big thing that folks need to remember when it comes to the US and China is on the talent side, roughly equivalent. Maybe the US has an edge because we can pay higher salaries. On the data side, still probably a wash. But when it comes to compute and the ability to deploy these models, there's really no contest, as well as capital able to be put behind this whole arc.

1:54:41There's really not a contest between the US and China. I think current numbers are like TSM, like SMIC and Huawei production is like one 15th what NVIDIA plus TSMC plus all the ASICs can pump out. And, you know, this matters less in a future where you aren't kind of using all the available compute. But look, people are going to come up with ways to use this stuff. I'm doing so much dumb shit on cloud code every day. So is the best of the economy. How optimized is your cloud code setup? I'm sure you spent all the weekend on it. Not at all. I just use the terminal and like spin up fun apps. But the fact of the matter is like, I think it is, this is why the AI chip exports are so concerning is I really do think like the ecosystem with the compute and the capital is going to be able to drive ahead because then you'll have these great kind of reinforcing loops of productivity gains and growth, then leading to kind of, you know, more development, more compute, and so on and so forth.

1:55:49And the fact of the matter is that China, even though it has really good engineers that can train good models, is compute constrained when it comes to development and deployment. We just translated this really interesting panel that happened in China with, I think it was like the CEOs of four of the top labs. So Jerpu, Quinn, Minimax, and someone from Tencent. And basically all of them were like, look, we are so jealous of OpenAI and Anthropic. Like we have to use all of our compute to deploy stuff just to kind of keep the business going. Like the amount of, you know, the scale at which they can deploy compute, the amount of data they're getting from their users, And then the ability of these firms to run experiments to kind of put into the next stuff and get to the next breakthrough really means that in the current paradigm, America and the broader kind of Western AI ecosystem has a real edge.

1:56:42And throwing that away to export a handful of chips to China and the – in my idea, Pyrrhic vision that we can still hook them on NVIDIA seems a little silly. But overall, yeah, it's been a pretty good six months for American AI. Let's go. One more question. Can you give us a take on Canada's new deal with China, specifically this trade? You get soybeans. I get infinite cheap EVs. What's going on there? Um, my sense is it's a bit of a bait as well. um perhaps a perhaps a rocanna play to get the white house's attention maybe a little escalate to de-escalate what's interesting is like i think the amount of evs they're letting in is pretty low um so i would not be shocked if this was an more of a negotiating tactic um to get the usmca uh in a place which is more favorable yeah so canada canada buys around two million new vehicles a year i think the cap is at like 50 000 initially and then it goes up to 70 000 okay yeah that's not that's uh two percent yeah not not huge yeah uh it'll be fun seeing the the young wang u9 jumping over potholes in uh toronto saskatchewan saskatchewan that's where they got the potholes anyway only waste only waste men will drive those for coming on the show jordan uh i'm glad to hear that your 2026 is off to a great start.

1:58:18Can't wait to have you back on the show. I know. And let us know when you're in LA. I wish we had more time. Hey, we're about to have Dan, the founder of T1 Energy, the solar manufacturing company that previously was Chinese owned and they were forced to sell it. I believe I have the history right. So you might enjoy listening into this one because when I saw the T1 Energy had a video go out and it was just showing this incredible high volume advanced manufacturing, I was like, America's back. It was not quite built by a Chinese plan. Anyway, but it's American now going through transformation.

1:58:58Anyway, anyways, we'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Go bye. Century. Century shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150 ,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. Our next guest is Dan from T1 Energy. We're going to bring him in in just a few minutes. I don't think he's ready yet. He's not ready yet. False alarm. We will tell you, we'll give you some more news. The New York Stock Exchange, our partner today, they're announcing that the development of a platform for trading and on-chain settlement of tokenized securities, the New York Stock Exchange's new digital platform will enable tokenized trading experiences, including 24-7 operations, instant settlement, orders sized in dollar amounts and stablecoin-based funding.

1:59:43Its design combines the New York Stock Exchange's cutting-edge pillar matching engine with blockchain-based post-trade systems. This is obviously very exciting. We've been talking about 24-7 trading happening a long time. The interesting thing to track is that the volumes, even when you enable overnight trading, the volume is not the same during the day. And the reason is because a lot of the traders work nine to five in New York hours, and they have families, and they want to go home and sleep. And so some hedge funds have set up overnight desks, but they basically take less risk during the night because there's less people on staff, and you can't escalate, oh, some trade's happening.

2:00:24We think that there's news that's happened at 2 a.m., and we think this might be mispriced, so we should be trading. But we don't have the rest of our risk team here to price it, so we're going to be a little bit more risk off. So the volume is much lower. So I'm interested to see where this goes and how much the volume ramps up. But obviously, it's just a very exciting development for the New York stock industry. And ultimately, this is still going to be subject to regulatory approvals and the bill that's been... We got to have somebody on to talk about because there was some beef going back and forth between Coinbase, not happy with how the market structure bill was coming together.

2:01:02Well, let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom Card. Lulu has proposed that we don't call it the billionaire tax. We don't call it the wealth tax. We call it the business termination act. Or Moses says the job destruction act. If people are against it and they're rebranding it against, they need an anti, the people that are pro this act will need to rebrand it as well. And so I think that they should do like the grind incentive initiative, something like that, to reframe it as it's a, you know, we're not, it's not a billionaire tax.

2:01:41It just incentivizes everyone to grind harder. You're 5 % down. Now you've got to build yourself out of that hole. It's almost like a prestige in Call of Duty. Exactly. Yeah, prestige. You've got to start again. Exactly. Yeah, maybe they should do it. Prestigying for being rich. Yeah, like how many times have you prestige? Yes, yes. Maybe if you, so they could call it the 10x tax, where it's a wealth tax, but it only applies to people that are not 10xing their net worth annually. That's true. Because like, you really like, ideally, if you're trying to build wealth, you should 10x your portfolio, 10x it again, and then 10x it again.

2:02:17You'll be in a really good spot. And so we should have, if we're going to have government regulation, we want it to encourage people to really. It should ramp up every year. They should 1%, then 2%, then 3%. Eventually, everyone has nothing. But the last man standing is kind of like a, you know, what do they call it? Badge of honor? I don't know. I lost it. Anyway, let's go to Flo. Flo Crevelio, Altimor, has been on the show multiple times. He says, almost every single founder I know in San Francisco, including me, has reached the same conclusion over the last few weeks, that it's only a matter of time before we have to leave California.

2:02:55I love it here. I truly do want to stay and until recently intended to be here all my life. But now it's obvious that we won't be possible. Whether that's two, five or 10 years from now, there's no future for founders in California. But maybe he'll get a spot in Klein Village. Maybe he'll domicile in Miami or Nevada. There are plenty of ways. And I would be surprised if everyone fully relocates. I think people will spending a lot of time in San Francisco, but probably less than 180 days. We'll see. Well, it makes absolutely no sense. Every state in the country wants these kind of companies to be created.

2:03:39We got to talk about some other better news. How well do you know Preppy? Let's play a quiz. There's a quiz in the Wall Street Journal. How well do you know Preppy? It is in the timeline. You can pull it up and play live, but I'm going to read this to you. So it's 10 questions on lacrosse, J Press, and more. We're going to see how you do. So the first question, which of the following is not a preppy approved label? Lily Pulitzer, J Press, Versace, or LL Bean? Tyler, do you know? I'm going to go, what is Versace? Nailed it. He got it. He got it. What type of shoes are you wearing right now? Oh, that's a preppy shoe.

2:04:17The term preppy is used as a slur in which canonical prep novel? A, The Catcher in the Rye. B, Love Story. C, A Separate Piece. Or D, The Great Gatsby. What do you think it is? I think I've only read The Great Gatsby. I'm going to say... You ever read Catcher in the Rye? No, we didn't do that. I don't even... Love Story? Yes, you got it. Love Story. Wow. Okay. Name the non-preppy sport, the least crappy sport. Volleyball, rugby, lacrosse, or squash? Volleyball. Nailed it. Nailed it again. Which New York cool girl collaborated with G.H. Bass in a Weijan design? Eddie Sedgwick, Diane Brill, Chloe Svigny, or Leandra Medine-Cohen?

2:05:04The last one. No, Chloe Svigny. Although I thought she was in L.A., but I guess she's also a New York cool girl. Which shades of pink and green should be combined for optimum preppiness? Fuchsia and forest green, baby pink and emerald, hot pink and lime green, or cerise and chartreuse? I'm going to go baby pink and emerald. Emerald? Wrong. Hot pink and lime green. Rookie. I think. I think. I have to flip the whole page over to see the other side. Five is C, which is, yeah. C is hot pink and lime green. Let's see what else we got in here. What is the origin of the term urban hot bourgeoisie? Henry James' The Portrait of Lady, Wilt Stillman's Metropolitan, Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr.

2:05:57Ripley, Andy Warhol's The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. These are hard. Really hard. Have you ever been into dressing preppy? I don't know. Not really. I've never had any sort of like lane. I just put on clothes as they're made available to me. Anyway, there's some other good news. DHH is racing again. Shopify LMP2 is back in action for the Daytona Rolex 24. New team, new co-drivers. Still, Toby Lutke and DHH at the wheel now riding with Rails and OMARQE2. They got their whole livery. It's amazing. Ruby on Rails base camp on there. the shop app and Shopify on the livery. It's green. Okay. We might have to do it.

2:06:44We might have to ride with them. We might have to do the 24 hour watch along live stream. This might be the one that we need to do. This is, this is absolutely amazing. And I'm always excited when I see the race. Let me confirm is going to be later this month. Actually. There's also a post by Toby Lutke. Good testing days. Can't wait for the Rolex 24 next week. This photo is incredible. This is this weekend. So it's 24 hours. They'll be racing. And, yeah, Toby, look, he needs to do a racing podcast. He should go on Vincenzo Landino's show. He's done shows about StarCraft, all about gaming. I've never heard him talk specifically about racing, but what a sport.

2:07:31What a sport. Pin.ai. It's the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. We should pull up some of the new livery that was announced. Gabe was sharing earlier. He said that Zinn made it on to Ferrari this year. They're allowing a nicotine sponsorship. No, no way. What is this? And Haas, if you pull up this post, somebody was showing off Haas' new livery from above. I'm in the timeline. you can see it looks almost uncannily like the top of this toilet. What? You see that? No. Oh, wait. No, what is that? I mean, it's just part of the aero on the top part.

2:08:19Anyways, I think the Haas car looks fantastic. Yeah. I also like that it's an American machinery company, right, Haas? And, yeah, it's just a cool little, you know, obviously not a car maker. You can't go buy a Haas and drive it around. but still a lot of lineage and logic to it. I mean, Red Bull's been so good that it sort of tracks for me anyway. It doesn't seem jarring or anything that you have an energy drink car on the grid. But I feel like I still like the Ferrari. I'm excited that Audi and Cadillac are getting in. I like when the other one person can just go and get it. I haven't seen the livery.

2:09:01I saw Vincenzo Landino posting some absolutely hilarious images of sort of what he thinks the Cadillac should look like. I don't know if we can pull up his post. I know he replies to all this stuff. What did he post? He posted some hilarious Cadillac livery that was an AI image here. My neighbor sent me this photo of the new Cadillac F1 car. You've got to see this, Jordan. It's amazing. Drop it in. I think it might be already in there. I think I got it. But if we can pull this out. He said, my neighbor actually did send me this photo that his friend sent him. I have no idea whose credit goes to.

2:09:39If this is yours, let me know. Is this in the bottom of the timeline? Did it go through? Let's see. Yeah, it's here. Look at that. That's incredible. So funny. It has to be AI, or did they actually raise something like this at one point? I don't know. I sort of assume AI at this point. Who else is in the news? Three teams have now revealed their 2026 liveries. Red Bull's looks a lot less shiny. When we saw them in Vegas, it felt very pearlescent, very like almost pink sparkle to it. This looks like a little more classic to me. Well, we should talk more through, Speaking of cars, Porsche has suffered the biggest sales fall since 2009.

2:10:29People are not buying Porsches. The German sports car maker was hit by a lack of petrol variants for best-selling Macan and weak demand in China. So Porsche sales slumped by a tenth last year. They lost 10 % just in a single year. As the German sports car maker faced weaker-than-expected demand for its electric models and struggled in the Chinese market. the company sold about 280 ,000 vehicles, which is down from 310 ,000 the year prior. That was the steepest slide since 2009 in the midst of the global financial crisis when deliveries fell by 13.7%. That makes sense. The economy is not doing well.

2:11:07People are going to stop buying Porsches, but the economy did well in 2025. So what's going on? We're going to dig into it. The decline underlines the challenges ahead for the new Porsche chief executive, Michael Letters, who took the reins at the start of the year. The company has embarked on a restructuring program to reduce its production capacity and is in talks with trade unions in Germany about further savings. Porsche last year was forced into a costly adjustment to its model range, shifting the emphasis back to petrol and hybrid models and shelving plants for new electric vehicles. The market has just completely rejected EVs.

2:11:45Do you think they will ever ship the, I can't even remember, what's their new hypercar? The one that is the, it goes Carrera GT, 918 Spyder, and then it was the Mission E or Mission X. That was supposed to be the electric hypercar from Porsche. And it was rumored for years. And we saw a lot of the other hypercars. There was a whole idea of like, there's going to be a new Holy Trinity. The Holy Trinity, of course, versus what the 918 Spyder, the LaFerrari, or the Enzo, and the P1. And then you kind of go back and you retcon a Holy Trinity out of the Carrera GT, the F40, like you kind of piece it together with the McLaren F1.

2:12:25Even though that wasn't really a trilogy, people sort of put those into like legendary bucket together. And there was this idea that, okay, maybe McLaren's coming out with a W1, that'll be exciting. You have the F80, that's exciting. And then maybe Porsche will come in with something that's in the lineage of the Carrera GT and the 918 Spyder. And if they'd read the room around the 918, it seemed like Carrera GT was way more popular. So maybe go back to that or do something there. Well, Ford said, hold my beer. Yeah. Because they're coming in with a new hypercar. That's true. Do we have any details?

2:12:55So they did confirm that Ford will be making a hypercar or supercar. In 2027. And it's not just a continuation of the Ford GT. It's not a Ford GT B3 because there's been a number of those. we had the good fortune of seeing one on the track over the weekend looked beautiful out there performed very well but back to Porsche while you looked that up last last year's sales slump has been partly due to supply gaps for the 7 for the 718 and the Macan its best-selling model so they're not making enough of those Porsche stopped selling petrol versions of both models in Europe over a failure to comply with EU cybersecurity regulations.

2:13:36What? They got to get on CrowdStrike and decided against developing replacements that would have met new standards. So they're down. They've had a number of really high growth years. They came roaring back after the 2009 global financial crisis. 2010, they were up 25%. 2011, they were up 20%. They were putting up 20 % growth years for five years straight, basically. Then the last decade's been a little bit slower, but not contracting. And now we're way down, way off peak, which is not good. So despite an increase in US tariffs announced in 2025, North America was its best performing region, down only a few hundred units compared with significant declines elsewhere.

2:14:23Sales collapsed by 16 % in Germany, Porsche's home market, with a 13 % decline for Europe. Do you want to give everyone an update on T1 Energy, Dan Barkello? Because I believe we're rescheduling. Oh, yes. Sorry, everybody. We're going to reschedule. There was a scheduling mix-up. It happens. So we'll get Dan back on. So the next guest will be Elliot from Dominion Dynamics at 125 in about five minutes. So I'm going to continue with this Porsche piece. Continuing with weak demand in China, where European car makers have found it increasingly difficult to sell luxury vehicles amid growing domestic competition.

2:14:58Also, wait on the tally. Yeah. In China, I mean, there's a lot of homegrown heroes. You're really excited about your national champion, whether it's Huawei or some phone maker. It seems a little silly, but the cars are cheap. They're great. They have fun, crazy features. They can jump up and down. They can go zero to 60 in two seconds. They look exactly like Porsches. and if you're a local you're just looking at the dollars and cents and then also you're supporting your buddy who runs the company or builds it online you know why not buy buy local you know it's popular over here it's popular over there so i'm trying to figure out 41 000 porsches in in china which has been down 26 on the previous year and it's under half the total for 2022 so back in 2022 they were selling 80 000 cars now they're selling 40 000 that's not good you want to be up and to the right and they are down and to the right.

2:15:49Sorry. Yeah, I'm trying to figure out how much of a factor. According to registration data for the full year of 2025, Chinese branded auto manufacturers sold approximately 60 ,000 to 70 ,000 vehicles in Germany. That's still only two and a half percent of the total German car market. But if that's eating into Porsche's sale of some of these like kind of more entry level EVs could definitely be a real factor. Cool. Well, we, I believe we have Elliot in the restroom waiting room a little bit early. I see no reason not to bring him in as long as he's ready to hop into the TVP and ultra dome. Let's do it.

2:16:28Oh, we bring him in. How you doing? What's happening? Hey guys. How are you? Uh, great to have you on the show. Uh, would love a quick intro on yourself and the company sure nice to meet you guys Elliot Pence so founder CEO Dominion Dynamics Dominion is building a tribute distributed attributable mesh networks in the Arctic amongst other things that's well the wedge in very interesting how how do you start what brings you to building something like this? Look, the Arctic is a huge challenge, as is very clear. Over the last couple of months, it's been kind of at the foreground of geopolitics. Canada has underinvested in securing the Arctic.

2:17:18Awareness is core to securing it, and we're building for that. So we started in June of last year and have built about a dozen products, deployed them a few times, and about deploy them again and just outside of the Northwest Passage. So the highest north of them. Very cool. So what does it actually look like in practice? These are hardware that is being deployed, but give me a sense of it more practically. Yeah. So it's basically, it's us building on top of COTS system. So we're not building the hardware. We're using radios that are, from MeshTastic to Persistent Systems to Gotenna to Sylvus.

2:18:07We build software that sits on top of that RF that allows Rangers, which is Canada's kind of reservist fourth that exists across the country, but in particular in the Arctic, to capture more information from their environments, allows them to take videos, to take pictures, to do voice notes. We compress that information down and then manage that across a mesh network. And then we reinflate that data when it gets to a satellite backhaul and push it up into a common operating picture. Very interesting. So give me a sense of how the rangers even approach trying to secure and understand the Arctic.

2:18:51I imagine it's like one ranger for every multiple thousand square miles. Like it's not a very large area. Imagine they can't have people everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. This is the fundamental challenge, right? There's 5 ,500 rangers across the country. Canada has a coastline of 200 ,000 kilometers. Their principal task is they do a sort of anomaly detection patrols every other week. And on those patrols are often out for sort of 48 hours looking to see if they can find anomalies, whether that's like on roads, whether that's in the water, drones in the sky. But they're radioing that stuff back and they're capturing it in kind of an analog way.

2:19:37what we're building is a way for them to capture all that data, store it, and then to start thinking about, okay, well, what are some predictive processes that we could build into this, this community of 5 ,500 reservists? Do they, do they, do they roll as kind of like a little squad or is it just like one guy out there on a boat? You just like, like, yeah, you can, I can just imagine, you know, a movie of like, you know, Lone Ranger. It's one guy out there just going crazy in the wilderness thinking that. They're all deep. It's like 30 per patrol. And then, you know, they're doing this all the time.

2:20:19So specifically the anomalies that they're looking for, is that like foreign intrusion, like surveillance? It's a mix of things, right? It's like, you know, is a roadblock that's critical for a community. You know, a few years ago, we had a Chinese balloon that really nobody knew about for a while. There's indications that there's buoys in some of the channels up in the Arctic. So it's it's both strategic and just tactical of like, how do I get to where I need to be going in an emergency? Is the buoy like the Chinese weather balloon story where you just kind of like send it off and collect whatever data you can basically?

2:21:06Effectively, right? I mean, part of what we believe is happening just outside of the Arctic is they basically put buoys in currents that brings it through the Arctic. And they're just sucking up information about what is the operating dynamic like. So we want to be ahead of that. Is it like how thick the ice is? So if you brought an icebreaker ship, like how big would that ship need to be? How many would you need to get through to bring a warship through or something like that? Just strategic intelligence. Yeah, honestly, I'm not sure why, but that's one possible reason. If you were in charge, you'd be doing that.

2:21:43Why, why this market? How does this, how does this fit? It's like a beautifully niche in that, you know, probably somewhat of a small market initially, but you can probably saturate it and then expand from there. But why specifically the Rangers? Well, so the Rangers were the sort of least technically advanced group, but they had the hardest problem set. And for Canada and for the NATO alliance, the Arctic is becoming really quite critical. And so it's sort of niche right now, But it also gives us sort of a good user community to build a useful product and have an extreme delta, like an extreme effect on.

2:22:31So we want to build, you know, broader than just that community. But that's a good story. This is like the iPhone moment for the Rangers. Right. Where are you building the company? Where are you based? Where's the team based? What's hiring look like? Yeah, so it's a very Canadian company. It's deliberately Canadian. The company is headquartered in Ottawa. We have offices in Kingston, Toronto, and Ottawa. I'll be based in Ottawa. I've been based in the U.S. and D.C. for the past 20 years. It's backed principally by Canadians as well. Yeah, I saw. But, yeah. Yeah. What about hiring? is is is canada caught up to america with the defense tech fervor the the palmer lucky podcasts have not reached canada yet they get stopped at the border they get stopped at the border yeah yeah i mean but seriously like where are you recruiting from uh who what type of people are you recruiting and is there this idea of like serving the national interest working in government technology that might be slower there might be it might be harder might be longer hours might be more technical, but there's some sort of light at the end of the tunnel in terms of impact.

2:23:47Yeah, there's no TBPN in Canada yet. This interview is making me feel like TBPN is the TBPN for Canada. Yeah, we've got to ship it out. North America. I know Carney's not making it seem like we're all one big happy family the last 48 hours, but we're still, in our world, we're still family. We're good. We're still family. So Canada has not caught up on the defense tech sort of surge. That's kind of what we're looking to catalyze. I would say that when we raised our pre-seed, we had literally hundreds of Canadians that are working at U.S. companies come back up and want to build something for sovereign capability or sovereign capacity.

2:24:32And there's an immense amount of talent in Canada. Like the Waterloo Quadro is ridiculous. Um, talk about the process of actually selling into the government and how it's different. I think most people will be familiar with the American defense tech arc of, uh, SBIRs program of record, how you kind of sell into the U S government, the department of war, what's different, what's similar. How are you thinking about it? Well, the thing that's similar is they have a version of SBIRs in Canada. They call it ideas. I would say it's a little slower, a little less money, a little less diverse. Sure. But it still sort of doesn't get you into a program of record.

2:25:12So you still need to figure out how do you get into those kind of long tail contracts. What's different with Canada, and this is changing right now, is there's no version of an OTA. There's no other transaction authority. So you can't getting on to a contract is a real challenge. And that's what we're hoping to change and catalyze and lobby for. Because without the ability to get on contract, this market doesn't make sense for anybody. government knows it and is trying to change it yeah so it's a very canadian company but is this just a foothold and then ultimately you'll sell to folks in alaska greenland maybe the nordics like where do you see this going over time is it like if you can do it in canada you can do it anywhere yeah the basic logic is this is the hardest operating environment on earth if you can build tech that works in the Arctic, it will be valuable to everybody, the US, Europe, NATO allies.

2:26:11It doesn't matter. I don't want to build just a Canadian company just focused on Canada. This is a Canadian company focused on the world. Yeah. What does the supply chain look like? I mean, you mentioned that you're partnering with like Gotenna and building on top of a lot of things. Does that make it less capital intensive? And you do need to build stuff on top of it, but it looks more like software teams, engineers and you're maybe able to match it with the money that's coming from the government on the sales side yeah yeah we're definitely software first there is a supply chain in Canada it is pretty extensive it's actually built pretty I mean most of Canada's defense hardware is American about 80 % of it and so they're integrated into large American platforms but we are a software first company.

2:26:59We're taking a similar approach to a lot of the other neoprimes where you start off with software, you realize you need to do hardware, you vertically integrate, you push platforms, that sort of thing. Yeah. What's exciting on the connectivity side? Obviously, the Starlink story is big. Is that the main driver of progress there? Are there any other connectivity stories that you've been benefiting from? Well, one of the challenges is that Starlink isn't so the polar orbit doesn't have a ton of start the set i didn't realize the polar orbit sucks right like there's nobody that really does polar orbit okay and so that's actually what we're solving for we're solving for localized connectivity okay starlink iridium one web there's a Canadian company called telesat they're all kind of coming up there but the connectivity still sucks interesting and that like it's across like it affects you know your localization your PNT, how you move autonomous systems.

2:27:54So connectivity is a real challenge. Yeah. Do you have an idea of how Astronus fits in here? I know that they do geostationary, large satellites for internet. They were putting one over Taiwan and they were putting one over different countries. Is that something that they could track? I mean, obviously we can ask it from them directly, but I'm wondering if you've gone down that rabbit hole. Yeah, no, we're going down that rabbit hole now. There's a bunch of new providers and I think the the satellite problem will be solved over the next five years but like five years is a long time yeah that's great news well we gotta hit the gong tell us how much is this the biggest what's what's the biggest seed round in canadian history i think it might be the second biggest canadian seed round in history definitely the biggest in defense well this is going to be the biggest gong hit in canadian history okay i think so like how much 21 million dollars there we go uh great to meet you uh thank you so much for coming on and uh yeah glad glad you guys are focused on the arctic cultivating arctic power keep us safe thanks for having me guys great to meet you have a great rest of your day let me tell you about gusto the unified platform for payroll benefits and hr built to evolve with modern small and medium-sized businesses and without further ado we have phil and matt grim in the studio in the tbp and ultradom come on Come on down, guys.

2:29:15Thank you so much for taking the time to come to the TV Pit Ultra Dome. Great to see you. Good to see you. Two of the most athletic men in tech, both athletes in their own right. Bench press world champion, bench press high school champion. What was the stat again? At the age of 17. 17. Broke a bench state record for New York. Let's go. Something to do. Something to do.

2:29:42That's the real news. What was the actual amount of weight? Nothing crazy. Oh, okay. What's the number? What's the number? Three plates? It was 275. At the time, I could do three plates. Okay. I overshot it in time to do 355. Oh, no. I didn't actually get to do a 335. Oh, no. But it is what it is. Wait, so that was a high school state record? Yeah. Yeah. For age and weight class, I was 17. Amazing. I weighed like 190 at the time. And what's the latest on the MRF? Is this an annual thing now? It's an annual thing. We're doing it again this year, rolling it back. Do you think you'll beat your time?

2:30:11Definitely beating the time. Oh, yeah? I have a one-hour goal, so I was an hour and 12 minutes last year. Okay. You're going to shave off 12 minutes? Yeah, yeah. That's, what, 20 % of the time? A lot of training. Yeah, you're going to come out and do it this year? Yeah, I'll be there. Last year, there was a lot of talk and then not a lot of follow-up. So, you know, you keep coming out heavy. You know, when we started the show, you invited me down, and we did a MRF. We didn't even do a full MRF. We just did, like, some training, and I was completely dead. And I went down, and I had, like, a fever for, like, a month.

2:30:38It was brutal. I was so sick doing the show. It was absolutely perfect. But this year, yeah, we're rolling it back. And then most importantly, we're going to do a big one in Ohio as a partnership with Ohio State. Cool. And the launching of our Alcina One factory there. Okay. With everything getting up and moving. By the time the MRF comes around, we'll be just opening for production at the factory there. So it'll be a pretty big day for us. Great timing. Let's rewind. Introduce yourselves just so we have it on the record. I think everyone knows since you repeat guests. But kick it off. Oh, I mean, I'm Phil.

2:31:05I'm the co-founder and CEO of Dirac. Yeah. We are building the first AI native production orchestration platform, starting with automated work instructions. Okay. And then I'm Matt Grimm, the co-founder and COO of Andruil Industries. Okay. And then why are you two here today together? We are very, very fortunate to chat with you guys about an excellent partnership that the folks at Dirac and Andruil have come to. Cool. We signed an excellent multi-year agreement to roll out Dirac across all of Andruil's manufacturing facilities. Okay. So that includes the one in Ohio. We'll include the one in Ohio.

2:31:36So I first met Phil about two years ago and change. There was a video that they sent around that went kind of viral in kind of manufacturing tech nerd circles. And it was a video of an earlier iteration of their BuildOS showing how you could go from a model in CAD and that the BuildOS platform would then take that, break it down, and turn that into instructions for factory floor workers to actually put together and assemble. So I saw the video, reached out, and said, like, hey, this seems kind of cool. We've got a lot of factories. We're growing, we're building. Could we set up a call? So we did a couple of calls, did a couple of videos, video Zoom screens, and then I brought them in to do a proof of concept.

2:32:18And we've been building together for the last two years, fully integrating the BuildOS platform into our existing suite of tools. We call the tools the Arsenal OS, that is the combination of our ERP on the back end, then our PLM that our CAD designers use every day to design the software, There are MES on the floor that our production workers are interacting with and then getting DRock's BuildOS plugged directly into that, which will then reduce the amount of time going from an idea on a whiteboard to a model in CAD, then ultimately to those work instructions that the factory floor workers need to actually assemble the products.

2:32:52So with BuildOS implemented, we've seen pretty wild, wild improvements. And the time that it takes to go from that CAD model to that work instruction for the factory floor was the number 80-something. Oh, 87.5%. There we go. It was a 12-hour reduction. It went from 12 hours down to 90 minutes. That's amazing. Yeah, pretty well. Let's give it up for SAS. Yeah. SAS has been not getting enough luck. How often are the work instructions changing? Is this more unique to Anduril because you're developing new products, new CAD designs, and so you need to go from CAD design to work instruction every day, every month, every year, versus someone who's just like, look, I make five, five, six rounds.

2:33:34It's the same CAD design, same work instructions for the last decade. I'm just doing the thing that I'm doing. Why is this important for you and how does Dirac plug in? This is an excellent question. So you're not just a pretty talking character. You know some things. So the challenge for a company like Andrel as we scale up and we're diversifying across a number of different product lines and a number of different geographies is then you have engineers with an idea who want to make a tweak or make a change or sometimes who are responsive to quality issues in the field or something like that. They want to make a design change.

2:34:04So then every time a design change gets made, the current method for doing work instructions is predominantly manual. So every time a bracket or a wiring harness or a connector or a circuit board changes, you have to change the work instructions, else on the factory floor you get an instruction that says, like, you know, screw bolt number ABC123 into this hole, tighten to this torque, whatever, but it's a different bolt now. So then the guy on the floor gets an instruction and is like, but it doesn't fit. So then for us, as we scale, and we're specifically trying to take a faster iteration, kind of faster mentality to this manufacturing process, reducing that time is absolutely clutch and critical.

2:34:43So for us, it is especially paramount. Though I will say that I think this is a problem that plagues a lot of industries and a lot of our supply chain, a lot of our other partners and vendors. So I'll let Phil speak more to the rest of the market, but it's definitely compelling and working for us. Yeah. Because you've had success in, like, automobile manufacturing as well. Underbuilding. We're pretty vertical in office. Last time I came on the show, we talked about a shipbuilding partner. Yeah, that's right. Andruil makes a ton of things. Sure. Plane, ships, all sorts of different things. And what we've seen, at least with Dirac, is that our problem set that we work on, right, automated work construction, it's not just useful for just defense folks, right?

2:35:20But because we end up working with folks in aerospace and defense, automotive, agriculture, construction machinery, maritime, complex industrial machinery, really anybody that has any sort of complex assembly, you need operators on the shop floor who know exactly what to build and when. And when it takes weeks or months to make a work instruction, a guide for your folks on the shop floor, most of the time they're operating on outdated information. And when you want to have an industrial base that is agile and robust, you can't have your operators and your technicians operating on outdated information, on outdated context.

2:35:54And that, you know, we often talk about the work construction as the core atomic unit of information in the factory. And if that is the core driving force by which your factory builds, you can't let it be manual. It can't be PowerPoint. point you know can't yeah my only reference here is if you've ever gotten uh you know like like some baby furniture thing and you got the instruction set and like if you're actually following it closely and you realize that the instructions are wrong it's just the most enraging experience ever and so i imagine even for like like employee morale like on the shop floor if like you're constantly dealing with just like terrible instructions why should somebody be like yeah it's great if they're high agency and they're going to try to like fix it and manage up.

2:36:37But at the same time, a lot of people are just going to be like, you know, just actually become less engaged. Like I'm not getting the right information and the resources. Why should I even, why should I even try? Correct. And in your baby furniture example, that is, that is not an electronic product. So you have to think of that exact problem and then layer on all the complexity of electronics and wiring harnesses and power distribution and all those extra components. So one of the major challenges is that there's a quick iteration of chips. There'll just be a new chip that'll be faster on a different board, kind of new power specs or whatever.

2:37:09So you need to make a slight tweak. The traditional way of doing that is to take all of those changes that you want to make on a very slow cadence, somewhere on the area of annual, sometimes biannual, and batch all of those changes up into a single block upgrade that you then do all at once. So then for a long period of time, you're deploying outdated hardware. So you want to be deploying the best that you possibly can to your customers. But to Phil's point, in order to get the best onto the factory floor and then ultimately into the hands of the customer, you drastically need to reduce the time from idea to work construction to factory floor.

2:37:43And then most importantly, keep all of that in sync. Because when you have at our scale with thousands of design engineers and then many thousands of factory floor workers, like keeping them all talking off the same sheet of music becomes a really hard orchestration problem to keep everybody talking together. Thousands of design engineers? Yeah. That's a ton. We just passed through 7 ,000 employees. Wow, congratulations. Thank you, thank you. 7 ,000 employees.

2:38:08We've got to bring that gong closer for you here. It's too far. How are the work instructions actually evolving from a form factor standpoint? I imagine historically you just get a printed out kind of, I don't know, big stack of papers. I can imagine every time. Like a very thick IKEA instruction. Yeah, and I think the number of companies have come and gone trying to basically put work instructions into VR and stuff like that. How far away are we from that? I imagine this is a question that's come up with investor pitches. VR is an interesting modality for displaying work instructions. Typically, what we see nowadays on the shop floor before we come in, most manufacturing engineers are using PowerPoint or Word.

2:38:49Microsoft, that old beast, is still dominating the work instruction market. So they just have a laptop pulled up. oftentimes so they will draft it into PowerPoint or Word they'll then print it out and it'll sit in a thick white binder on the assembly station if they're lucky they're updating it maybe you know once or twice a year flipping through say oh it's this version no way get that binder off the rack over there to make this different model on the the way that we think about it right the way that we've seen it on the design side of things right we've seen 15 20 years of an explosion of excellent software in the design side and because CAD is so advanced, what we've seen is an explosion in the variance that people are able to design.

2:39:31Think about the increasing complexity of the different modular builds. A company like Andrel has modular products that have different payloads that are reconfigurable. Now, think about that from the design perspective. Great. We can swap out a bunch of different modules. Now, from the manufacturing perspective, that means that you have to have, when you can have thousands of different combinations of things, you now need thousands of different work instructions. Where if one picture is off and one step is off, you have somebody building a completely different thing. And thinking about that from the top level build perspective, that makes sense, right?

2:40:06Like that's a ton of different configurations. But when we're looking at all the people who make up the supplier base of the companies that make planes, cars, trains, everything in between, we're talking about companies that make pumps and valves, complex mechanical sub-assemblies, right? Think about how many different variants those guys have to have. Now, they're in deep trouble because when they lose the ability to not only have folks on their shop floor that are 30-year veterans who just know off the back of their heads, okay, I remember how we built this last time. I don't really need instructions.

2:40:37Because all those folks are also retiring, our entire industrial base and our supplier base is also at risk because we haven't codified all of that tribal knowledge. And that is a key mission of ours as well, not just to be a rubber band around the variants, but to also codify and capture. Basically, like, how do we used to do it? Why do we stop doing it that way? Like making sure that's maintained. So if a guy doesn't retire, you're not calling him up. Like, you know, what are you used to do in this situation? Exactly. Similar to a McKinsey analyst who put together a spreadsheet or a PowerPoint that was like, you know, 150 slides.

2:41:11They're like, hey, how did you what macros did you use? What formulas did you use for this thing? That's like another framing to think about it, except that guy retired. How many products does Anderil have now? Because I think most people know Fury, Roadrunner, Dive, but there's different variants with each product. How do you think about the product footprint? To Phil's point, there are roundabouts 30 of the core products, but then there are many, many hundreds of individual variants that will come along with those. So, for example, the Australian military might use a slightly different radio than the U.S.

2:41:45military. So then there's just – and it's not a hard change, but it's still a change, a slightly different bracket, a slightly different connector. Because they're not standardized on a specific size. So you need different bracket sizes and all that. Exactly. And then to Phil's point about payloads, so for on the Dive XL, for example, maybe you want to put a very advanced sonar package or maybe you want to put a mine-sweeping package or something along those lines. so that the actual dive is still the same but then inside you need a slightly different bracket to hold the thing a slightly different plug usbc this is this is this is this is this would be the ideal i think it's a long ways out though it is right because standards i mean they it takes so long even just to roll out into the phones i mean how long was it before the iphone and the android phone had the same charger clearly we need a european style regulation to force us to force us into it.

2:42:30Seriously, like, do we, like, does it need to be defined from the government? So there are a number of standards that exist out there specifically about, you know, communication protocols and things. And then this is part of why we run these international multi-military exercises, partly to kind of work through these types of issues. Especially for comms, I imagine. Exactly. Exactly. If this helicopter can't talk to that plane, you're dead. It's a huge pain point. Yeah. So there is some standardization, but that doesn't quite get down to the chip level. Sure. Like inside the seeker head of a Barracuda, that there's maybe a slightly different sensor that this customer or that customer wants to use.

2:43:06The body of the Barracuda is the same. The wings are the same. The engine's the same. The power module's the same. All that's the same. But at the front, there's a slightly different module, which then to Phil's point means then you need another set of work instructions. You need to train your workers a different way. And then that becomes very hard to manage at scale. So with Phil's platform, we'll be able to kind of bring that together and shorten that time and ultimately lead to products getting in the field quicker. Talk about Ohio. How far along are you with the project? Is Trey vindicated in all of his Ohio politics?

2:43:40You know, I don't want to take swings at Trey here, but the Arsenal One project in Columbus, Ohio is running incredibly smoothly. We've got about the first 30 and change Ohioans hired already. We hired them about six months ago and then brought them out to California. So they've been at headquarters where we've been building the first few tails of the Fury line. Then they're coming back to Ohio this month. And then we're doing the stand-up and provisioning of the line. So the ultimate Arsenal 1 campus will be about a dozen buildings, totaling in the neighborhood of about 5 million square feet total.

2:44:13The first building that's about just shy of a million square feet, it's like 800 ,000 square feet, is fully built. The internal is being constructed now, the inside. and the production line on all the equipment, all of that test rigs and all of those things are being provisioned. And we'll start production on Fury this summer. Building two, the walls are vertical, so that's going up. And then building three is immediately thereafter, and building four right thereafter. So we'll be rolling out a new building about every year-ish for about the next seven, eight years. You said the Fury tails are being built one place.

2:44:43Is this a matter of building different pieces than bringing them all together? Is there an assembly line? Is it like a manufacturing of 150? A term of industry, tail being the full plane. Like a tail number on the plane. Oh, okay. Yes, yes, yes. Got it. Yes, yes, yes. So the first four or five, I'm going to get in trouble for not remembering. The first four or five will be assembled at HQ and then test flown at our test range nearby. And then the next one will be built. Just the tail? Why not? The whole thing. The tail number, the whole plane. But then from there on out, they'll be manufactured.

2:45:15In terms of assembly lines, are we still paying homage to Henry Ford with a plane that moves down and gets things added? Or is it a more integrated process? For Fury's line, it will resemble something in the neighborhood of Henry Ford. So it will move from station to station. It's actually more like the Grimm method. There you go. There you go. There you go. We'll coin that one. We need a gong hit for that. Perfect. Let's give it up for the Grimm. Perfect. Thank you. Thank you. But the line will resemble closer to that, where at station one, we do the hydraulics at station two, we do the electronics at station three, we do the fuel system, something along those lines.

2:45:53And then it's ultimately the Fury line will be 22 stations. And then where the Fury line in particular gets complicated is that we have to do a number of very complicated coatings and paintings on it. So that's a little bit tricky and specific. And then, of course, the propulsion element of it is just very, very complicated. Talk to, yeah. Testament to how far out Mr. Matt Grimm thinks about, has been thinking about Fury. Two years ago when he initially reached out after seeing our demo of BuildOS, his initial outreach was, hey, I saw what you guys are working on. Can you use it to build robotic fighter jets?

2:46:31And I said, yeah, I mean, depending on how cool they are, of course. Yeah, yeah. Two years later, here we are. Here we are. Yeah, and what a moment, too. Yeah. And how validating this is for Dirac. I mean, I feel like part of why you guys are coming out and talking about it together is I imagine you want your supply chain to probably get on Dirac. Is that a part of it? Like wanting the whole supply chain to modernize? Are there synergies there, or is it just a quality part that you get at the end of the day? Good question. So there's a couple reasons why I'm here in particular to support the announcement here.

2:47:00First is that Andrill's on a mission to save the West. It's kind of the name of the company baked into that. And it is my firm conviction that part of that journey will be reindustrializing the West and reindustrializing America. And part of that is getting supply chain teams and get manufacturing organizations, production operations to be more tech forward and be more tech enabled. And just like accounting software and sort of like traditional kind of big, big software platforms, a lot of the core technology in that ecosystem is pretty hard to use. It's almost user hostile. It's just very difficult.

2:47:31So part of the mission here is that, like, yes, of course, we want to adopt it. then we want the supply chain that supports us to adopt it. And then in the long run, we want more and more and more and more factories operating this way. Because if we're going to compete with China and the rest of the world on the large scale manufacturing, we need to get faster at this. And part of the lag in Western manufacturing is exactly that, to your point about the work instructions of a kid's play set that aren't quite right. What happens on a line then is it's like then the line is stopped at station seven because the station seven instructions.

2:48:05Yeah, it's just piling, piling. So then you just get like, okay, well, then it stopped here, stopped at six, stopped at five, stopped at four, because that guy is like, I don't know what to do. I can't fit this. So then extrapolate that out across industries, and there's just so much wasted time and effort that gets spent on problems like this that I think can be solved with technology. It's a perfect application of where AI can be very powerful to help accelerate the development and the shipping process. So that's one point. And then the other point I want to bring up is that we've seen this very fascinating and honestly unpredicted outcome of our work with DRock is that by talking to our customers, so talking to the Navy, the Air Force, et cetera, about how we are going to scale manufacturing and talking to them about how we go from designs into PDRs and CDRs and MRRs, the whole engineering process to get something designed and fielded, we've been specifically pitching DRock Solution as part of that ecosystem to help them understand exactly this question about how we get from that idea to that work instruction to the factory floor to help us accelerate.

2:49:01And it's been pretty good ahead of sales. In a bizarre way, it's been an accelerant for our sales to help our customers see that we're leveraging this newfangled technology, this AI, because the government customers are like, what is this AI stuff? How am I going to use it? And we come in and say, here's how you're going to use it. We're going to use it on autonomy on your end products. You're going to use it in the manufacturing line. You're going to use it in the back office. And here's how it's going to ultimately get you better products fielded for cheaper. Yeah. I want to talk to you guys about the labor market in manufacturing.

2:49:28specifically, are you guys going, there's so much demand for probably a type of talent that could do manufacturing or they could go work in a data center development project. Are you guys competing for talent with the data center build out? Is there enough people excited about entering this workforce? So there's actually two pieces to talk about there. Interesting thing to bring up data centers. increasingly, rather historically, the way the data centers have been built out, right? It looks a lot more like architecture projects. And so you've seen the tooling that people use to design data centers historically on AutoCAD, Autodesk, which is a little bit more of the architecture, or, you know, they're doing it in BIM, which is like...

2:50:12Yeah, building a building. Yes, exactly. They're just going to throw a bunch of racks in there. Historically, yes. But now, something that we are seeing as a company through the companies that we're working with, increasingly more data center companies coming to us and saying, hey, we need to start building at scale the same way we produce electronic systems at scale. And so we are seeing a massive migration of data center producers and data center builders away from traditional architecture oriented design and build systems towards the more manufacturing oriented design and build systems. And with that, they're saying, hey, we are going to have to build data center systems all over the world, and we cannot have folks not having the context of what to build, can Dirac's work instruction software be useful for this?

2:50:56And so, of course, we say yes. And so that's one thing about the data centers, just as an interesting anecdote that might be interesting for folks to know about, that we are also trying to build data centers the same way we build cars and planes and everything else. And then on the labor question, another thing that we think about is radically reducing the barrier to entry for net new folks into manufacturing. because a picture's worth a thousand words, but an animation's worth a million. Earlier you were asking about how do we change the modality of the way a person interacts with a work instruction.

2:51:25With our software, it is not just a picture, not just a photo, not just a printed out thing. It is a 3D, interactive, animated, dynamic work instruction that an operator technician can interact with. Picture's worth a thousand words, but an animation's worth a million. And so because you were able to have less skilled folks potentially take the roles of operators, and because you're also codifying and aggregating all of that tribal knowledge and context, we're seeing that the companies that we work with are actually able to hire less trained technicians, and so it's easing that burden and pain for them.

2:51:58On the Andrel side, I'd add a couple points there. First is that on the data center side, in the construction market, it's becoming pretty contentious just because big, huge builds meet big, huge bulldozers and concrete layers and electricians and et cetera. So on the construction side, that is... Yeah, you guys are basically competing for the same kind of firms, for the time of firms that are getting offers from data centers that maybe have a different economic... So on the construction and build kind of side of things, yes, that's certainly getting competitive. On the actual technicians on the factory floor, we haven't seen pressures from data centers because the dot I would add is that these data centers, while very big and very powerful, tend to employ very few people.

2:52:38There's not that many people engaged in the actual day-to-day running of the place. So for us, like on the technician side, we don't see much competition from them. And where we are spending a lot of our effort is investing into the local communities, including in Ohio, through partnerships with local universities and trade schools and community colleges, like that kind of ecosystem to work with them on the types of skills that we want to see new hires have, whether that's additive manufacturing or welding or particular CNC programming or just like electronics assembly, whatever that skill set is, helping design curriculums that can then produce graduates of those programs that are ready to come get a job at Anderrill.

2:53:14So for us, it's kind of a long play because we invest that time up now and those graduates won't come out for a couple of years. But in the long run, we think we'll lead to a pretty fertile supply to say nothing of being good for the communities that we're engaged in. What are you seeing within the armed forces on the self-repair side? There's been a couple of press releases about being able to repair a drone or something on the fly. I remember I toured an aircraft carrier, and they had a machine shop, and there was a sailor in the machine shop who was talking about if something breaks on the ship, they will go and mill the bolt right there.

2:53:52They don't go and buy it because, and he was very proud to say, you know, we're saving the taxpayer. They want to charge us$1 ,000 for this bolt. I made it for$5. That seems like a really positive thing. Does that play into automated work instructions at some point, some digital solution, And then just what are you seeing on the overall repairability from the systems that you'll be deploying and are deploying? So, yeah, funny enough, maintenance and repair is a very, very common next question when folks ask us about work instructions, right? Most of the time when they're saying, hey, awesome, you can now automatically generate my work instructions for me.

2:54:27I can now have operators and technicians interact with it in a 3D manner. Awesome. Now, can you do maintenance and repair instructions? And our answer is, of course, yes, right? MRO is a natural inverse, generally, of actually the initial build of the thing. And so part of what our roadmap is, part of the things that we're working on with a variety of different folks is automating maintenance and repair instructions. So we're very big proponents of, you were mentioning, the right to repair not just of tractors, but of drones out in the field. It's a very big thing that we've been talking to a lot of different folks about.

2:54:58And it's something that we're a big proponent of because we don't think that these should be two different domains of instruction sets. context should live on the model context should live in the hands of folks who are actually designing and building those systems and repairing them and so you should at the time of making your first instruction set have the ability to codify all that context into one core instruction set and maintenance and repair instruction should fall naturally out of that and that's it's a lot of how we think about things yeah that makes a lot of sense from a policy perspective where i think the lines get a little bit blurred is that we're talking about a bolt or a bracket or a fixture or something that you can carve out of metal makes obvious sense in one area.

2:55:37And then the next area would be somewhere in the middle of rewiring or reconnecting an additional battery pack or something like that that's kind of in the middle. And then all the way on the other end is like all the way down to the chip level. The chip broke. You're not going to fab it. Yeah, you're not laying silicon chips out on an aircraft carrier or something, right? So there is a spectrum there at which point at some point on that spectrum you say like, actually, I do need to call the experts to help me on this. Right. But in my opinion, the default of saying don't touch it, we'll come repair it, ship it all the way back to our factory, that's just not going to fly at any time of conflict.

2:56:11Because, like, we do need our sailors and our airmen and our soldiers in the field to be able to, at minimum, replace the consumables, you know, the brake pads, the tires, et cetera. But then also to do kind of the next level of repair into, you know, replace a fuel pump or something along those lines. When it gets down to the chip level, though, you're like, I'll probably send you a replacement module. And then maybe the work instructions say take bad module, output new module in, reconnect these cables. But in general, yeah, we want to be as friendly as we can be to this forward repair concept.

2:56:42Because in a time of conflict, you just think like, I need the thing now. I need to go on a mission. You said brake pads. And mine went to motorsports because I know Anderol is sporting NASCAR. And then I was curious, are you guys working? Has there been any inbound from any racing organizations that are having to make parts on the fly and are in heavy R &D? And maybe they only make the part, like maybe they're making different variations of the part, but they're not actually doing it at scale because it's not a manufacturing business. Any opportunities there? So funny enough, I cannot confirm or deny explicit names, but we are actually in conversation with several motorsports teams who are actively evaluating us for use cases on and off the track.

2:57:26Yeah, probably like a very different workflow, but so many learnings and just great for the brand and whatnot. Exactly. How are you reflecting on the DOD or Department of War budget potentially being increased? I still say DOD too. I'm trying, but it's, you know, years of it. The Dow. Yeah. I mean, the post saying that we might go to$1.5 trillion. That seems like that was not Anderle's original mission. Andrew was all about doing more with less. But at the same time, if it accelerates the mission, that could be good. How have you been processing it internally? Well, I mean, I think any time a customer says they want to spend more on the things you make is generally a good thing for us.

2:58:12That said, exactly to your point, like we would love to see this increase in funding. If it happens, of course, it's got to go through Congress and all the usual. But if it happens, be spent smartly and on new technologies, new approaches, and not just kind of funding the old way of doing things in the old kind of legacy model that, in our opinion, hasn't worked for decades. So, yeah, of course, you know, customer spending more money is good for us. But we're going to be lobbying pretty heavily to have them spend it on more AI-powered, you know, weapons of futures, autonomy, that kind of construct.

2:58:43and especially on a different kind of contracting model, more towards the cost plus type of model. Sorry, away from the cost plus type of model to the firm fixed type of model that we like to do business with. So still a lot to digest there, but we're in general pretty excited as part of... That initial like flipped model of like, you know, like raise venture, take risk capital, build a prototype, build something, then show up to the Department of War with a concept or something that's maybe ready to be fielded and then say buy it. Has that held as long as you thought it would? Do you think it holds forever?

2:59:16Because at some point, if a customer shows up and says, I'll pay you to do the R &D, what are you going to do? Turn them away? But at the same time, there's the financial hazard that the firm was founded around. So how has your thinking evolved around the whole flipped model and doing R &D on your balance sheet? Yeah, a couple of thoughts there. First is that we spend an inordinate amount of money on our own internal research and defense, IRAN type research and development, rather, spending, just an absolute inordinate amount of money. And we're grateful to have the support of our investors who believe in this business model.

2:59:50So for us, we haven't not at all seen a, like, let's just shift back to that way. It's a lot capital, you know, less risky, capital safer, all of that. So, no, I'm not surprised. Like, to your point, this is exactly the kind of thesis, the mission of what we're trying to do. If anything, we've been very happy to see venture capital funding to the sector increase to fund more companies approaching it this way. Because I think that for us to win a great power conflict, we're not going to need one andro. We're going to need five or eight or ten of them. So we're excited to see new companies get started with this kind of mindset and go out and chip off parts of the ecosystem here.

3:00:26The last point I would say is that to date, something in the neighborhood of 85%, 90 % of our revenue has not been from these kind of cost-plus traditional customer-funded models. The vast majority of it comes from us selling our product to our customers at a fixed price. And then a bit of recurring revenue tied to that. Think of it like an extended warranty kind of concept where we are doing the maintenance. We are providing the support. We're doing the security upgrades, the patching, all of that, which from our perspective really aligns incentives for us to deliver the best possible product.

3:01:00Because to be blunt, like we will have a higher margin if we don't have to send repair guys out and keep replacing things. But then also gives the customer a more reliable product. And then importantly, gives the customer predictable pricing. So they know what their total four-year, five-year cost of ownership for a product will be. Because they know that within that number, we're responsible for anything that breaks, any sort of problems or maintenance that needs to happen. that aligns everybody, and we're seeing a broader acceptance of that business model within both the DOW and with DHS. So we're pretty excited to see those messages landing.

3:01:29Give us an update on the secondary wars. Ooh,

3:01:37spicy. Are you the head of investment relations? I'm not, I'm not, I'm not. Allison Lazarus is our... You're the guy she calls to lay the smack down. To be honest, at some point, there's going to be some enterprising young SPV slinger that's like, if I make a really heinous memo, Matt Grimm is going to pump it. The Grimm Reaper is going to come to a timeline. So give us some backstory first. Okay. So first I would say that our investor relations is run by this incredibly talented woman named Allison Lazarus. She's great. She works closely with Trey on kind of managing the cap table and all the inbound and interested investors and all of that.

3:02:14So not really my turf anymore. That said, I've had a long-running battle against what I would call the wildcats in the secondary market who have absolutely zero respect for any sort of control of the cap table, like who our investors are, information rights, any of that. And they're just out kind of slinging offers at early investors, early employees, at share prices that are completely insane. And those people don't care whatsoever about the impact that has on the company, whether that's around 49A valuation or RSU pricing or any of those kind of internal dynamics. they don't give a shit. So they just kind of create headache for us by then us having to field this inbound.

3:02:52So beyond the headache, the point that I'm really worried about, and I think the SpaceX IPO will be very, very interesting, because this is going to be a situation where there are, you know, the tide goes out, and there's going to be a lot of people without trunks on. That's just the people have been out there slinging, in our case, access to Anderol, or I have limited access to their next round at some insane price that is nowhere close to what the actual price is, as set by the market. And then people are buying... And that's not even factoring in the fees, which are sometimes not actually in line.

3:03:22Kind of crazy layered fees. So there was this one situation of someone slinging an offer around that was an SPV into another SPV that was buying a chunk of an early investor's holdings. So there's like layers and layers of fees and carries on top of that at a price per share that was something like 70 % above what the last round traded at. So it's just an insane thing where they're pitching access to a deal they don't have. And I know for a fact that there are, there was a recent indictment announced in New York around a case where someone was out slinging Anderle SPVs that did not have access to Anderle and the guy was just pocketing the cash and then he was just indicted and arrested at JFK.

3:04:04So like this is a thing that happens and the reason I bring up SpaceX is not to create more work for them, but that the world of SpaceX SPVs... Well, it's got to be a$1.5 trillion IPO because the legal fees of unwinding all these. It's wild, right? Because there's a lot of this nesting. SpaceX is a fantastic company that's been in business for a long time. So there's so many of these nests of who owns what. For a lot of these types of main street investors, it's totally possible that they're thinking, well, I got into SpaceX at 200 when you didn't. And then it goes out at 1.5 and that's my retirement.

3:04:35And then it goes out and you're like, where are my shares? And the guys skipped town. And the guys skipped town. And then you're just out whatever you put in. And not only did you lose the whatever you put in, but you also lost the mental of where you thought you were and what you were planning. You might have been planning a certain lifestyle. Of course, and the opportunity cost of deploying that capital somewhere else. It's a very big problem. And I've used this joke before. My joke is that how many investors in America think they own a chunk of SpaceX when they're actually funding their ex-roommate's boyfriend's coke habit in Miami?

3:05:04And it's like probably a non-zero amount, right? What do you think the solution is? Can the investor community police itself? It seems like, obviously, you have a legal team that's working on this stuff, but there is an element of going direct. You need to get the word out that this is happening, and that's important too. Yes, so this is why we as a company have been more public about this, because we're specifically trying to send a message to the market that's like, we see you, we're aware of you, and secondaries, of course, have their purpose. Of course, there are early investors who need to liquidate funds or fund lifecycle problems, of course.

3:05:40So this isn't a blanket comment that all secondaries are bad. They're not. They're not. There is a category of these people who just have, like, really no respect and are basically just fraudsters, hucksters. And what I think needs to happen is two things. One, the investor community needs to be better at policing ourselves around just who these bad actors are and kind of shining a light on them. And then second, sadly, I think it's going to take law enforcement action, whether the SEC or the FBI, you know, thwacking enough of these folks that that community starts to see like, this isn't good for me.

3:06:10And it just kind of puts a damper on that side as well. Last question for me. Adam Porter Price has been on a tear, doing deals, buying companies. Yep. As COO, what is the key to a great post-merger integration? The is a great question and an often overlooked part of doing these deals. The deal makes a headline. I'm busy popping champagne and then you got to get to work. Adam lost more more airline miles and more and more iPhone minutes than me and Brian and Trey than anybody. Wow. Because he's constantly out there. The best of them is doing this. So from a post-merger perspective, there's a ticky-tacky piece of it that is important, which is payroll, benefits, equity ownership, all the 401k transitions, the email has to migrate.

3:07:03But making it sure it happens on day one. Correct. There's no, oh, yeah, you'll get your paycheck, but it's delayed a week. That's annoying. Correct. No one wants that. Correct. It's that taste. Nothing will burn your trust with a company faster than screwing up their first paycheck. So for us, it's a thing that we try to lean as heavy as we can into that employee education and systems transition up front. It's not possible to transition like ERPs and years of design software. That takes usually, you know, six to nine to 12 months on the long end to get those systems fully working. But like the guts have to work first.

3:07:30And then second, as I would say, is a cultural alignment. That's just like how we pitch our products, how we price our products, how we plug into the kind of go to market ecosystem and engine. Like we have to we have to get that right. And then the third piece, I would say, is trying to get some wins pretty quick. Because if you're an acquired company and you get integrated and you're like, who are all these people? This is different. I like it when we were smaller. Maybe they're in scrappy mode and then they're like, hey, I'm in a 70s. I saw the campaign, don't work at Andro. Why would I work at Andro?

3:08:02Well, I'm at Andro. I just don't work. I just broke my paycheck. So kind of aligning with the what are we trying to build? Why are we building it? What's the goal? What are the deliverables we're trying to hit? Like getting that kind of alignment for folks to see the destination, see the lighthouse on the hill and say that's where we're going and aligning folks to that. And it's those second two that are really hard because that's much more kind of personality based and kind of relationship based. So it takes a lot of investment from the leadership team, takes a lot of investment on the engineering team especially.

3:08:32How are you designing your products now? What's your release cycle like? How do we get that into Andruil's kind of way of doing business? There's just a big transition there. but it seems there's been this uh maybe kind of sentiment or joke uh shoot for nicey even if you miss you'll land at anduril you know this idea of like you know maybe maybe i don't build a multi-billion dollar company in as a new like neoprime but i have it you know maybe like the the not the next outcome is i land at anduril can you reality check that because i feel like and practice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no. And I'm just saying, I think it's like for founders to understand like, what is the actual bar?

3:09:16Because you guys, every company that's built a great product, but maybe the business side isn't like fully working yet. And they're thinking like, okay, like my product's great. Our team's great. I bet we could fit in there. Reality check that. Yeah. So the reason I'm pretty dismissive of it is that implies that Andrew will acquire anything or any company that's struggling or not. Yeah. Because Adam's logging all these miles, but he's not exactly doing it a week. No, we do like two a year on average, if that, right? So he's saying no a lot, a lot. But what we look for in acquisitions is really a sweet spot of two things.

3:09:52One is a very strong engineering team. They have to have something that's very compelling and very unique and very interesting. And then the second is a area where we can add a lot of value or accelerant or fuel to their go-to-market. Yeah, like how do we speed up the timeline? Exactly. And you guys talk a lot with defense founders and you've had a lot on and folks will consistently talk about how hard it is for the go to market engine. And there's a lot of nuts and bolts around that that get underestimated around what formal government proposals look like, how to do formal government contracting, security clearances, the government relations kind of lobbying side of this to be to be a player on these bigger deals than relationships within your customer that are.

3:10:32So you're not just pitching, you know, the guy flying the drone out in the field. You're pitching the whole chain and how it fits into their ecosystem, how it fits into the program. There's a whole lot of that infrastructure that, to be blunt, like we're pretty good at. We've gotten pretty good at this. So when we find a company that has an incredible team building a really cool product that's like really unique and interesting, but is maybe struggling there. They haven't seen kind of the ramp that they want. And we see that and say, hey, look, we can help with capital, obviously. We can also help with this go-to-market engine.

3:10:59We've built this legal infrastructure, this facilities infrastructure, this government relations infrastructure, all of that, that will then take your product and can help really accelerate and get it deployed both to the U.S. and to friendly governments around the world. Like that ends up being the sweet spot. So the reason I would say that the base question that you started from is just completely off base is like we're not going to go look and try to find a company that like isn't clicking. They don't have a great product. They don't have a strong team. And they haven't sold a lot. And then be like, yeah, let's go get them.

3:11:29My sense is that if you're doing a couple deals a year, it's like usually like you're going in and being like we want to buy this company. Yes. Less like, hey, like things aren't working that well. We should try to sell. Yes. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Right. And the last point I would make on that is that to date, we've done exactly zero turnarounds. And I think this is a kind of a mental model for us is that like in general, we don't really want to be in the turnaround business of take something that's struggling and come in and fix it and like deploy our team of operators to go fix it. Like there are plenty of PE firms who are very good at doing that.

3:11:59There are plenty of other organizations who are honestly better positioned to do that. For us, we really look for that strong team, strong product, and then where we can really accelerate sales and go make an impact. Very cool. Do you have a favorite? I don't want to put you in hot water. There's no chance I'll answer that question. No, no, no. Don't want to put you in hot water. I love all of my children equally, yes. Excellent. So which one did you log the most? I think we know. There's a great company we acquired in Ireland that was called Klaas. Klaas, and they make these absolutely incredible computers and networking.

3:12:34When I saw that, I was like, I want one of those. Yeah, they're great devices, great team. but it's headquartered in Dublin, which is very far. So a lot of time spent over there. And that acquisition has gone absolutely swimmingly. Couldn't be happier. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you guys for having us. Appreciate you. Hang out for a second. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. We will be live tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com. And thank you. We will see you tomorrow. See you tomorrow, folks. Have a great MLK day. Thanks for hanging out.

3:13:09Goodbye. Cheers.