xAI’s Colossus 2 Reactions, Sam Ross & Aaron Slodov LIVE in The Ultradome | Pippa Lamb, Ariana Thacker, Will Hurd

27:46Once XAI implements RL on human environments, they could dramatically improve engagement and eventually turn to other goals as well. becoming really good at slop is a potential path. I think we were talking about this earlier. It's just a fascinating concept of where this goes. It's a potentially very dark, very black mirror, very black pilling, but could be very cool. Creating many RL environments makes spiky intelligence, but if humans are the ones to optimize against, perhaps it will be general. It's debatable whether this leads to intelligence gains anytime soon. But if the goal is to expand beyond engagement, it could lead to impressive advancements.

28:31Or it could just lead to a dystopian future where people are addicted to some anime girl they talk to, says Dylan Patel over at Semi Analysis. It's a wild, wild. So the next section, the future of XAI. In the next two to three years, XAI's compute footprint will be heavily weighted towards training. Their inference demand is rising and will benefit the neocloud market. But in the short term, it will pale in comparison to their multi-gigawatt training expansion. While that situation isn't viable from a financial perspective, we think XAI's integration into X will likely provide some cash cushion.

29:06X is already integrating XAI technologies into its core advertising engine to increase monetization per user. Again, X, Twitter has never been incredible. cash engine throughout its history, but it's something. Semi-analysis says, but to support its LLM training build-out, XAI will need to generate tens of billions of dollars of revenue and follow the path of anthropic and open AI. The core question is whether XAI's success would take market share from them or create net new spending. We think it'll be a mix of both. XAI's ramp will enable Gen AI to reach a broader audience, but it also increases the financial of weakness of the Gen AI market and the risk of market turndown as training still outspends inference for a precise breakdown of training and inference capacity.

29:54Go hit the data center industry model. Do it. Just upgrade. Pull the trigger. Pull out the ramp card. Put it down for the semi-analysis. Gigatear. Pay the most. And then hop over to Figma.com. Think bigger. Build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products. together get started for free let's go and we have our first guest of the stream our european correspondent our uk correspondent

30:37i love this song we actually should license that we definitely are going to get demonetized for that is great to see you it's my it's my favorite sound i'm back in the studio got the soundtrack going it's such a banger song it really is uh give us give us the weather report first how was how was summer how was uh uh was it wimbledon you went to some tennis event what what did you do i had i had a tennis yeah i had a good tennis summer i was actually the US Open as well. Is that the same as Wimbledon? Are they the same thing? I mean, they're technically the same on like, you know, seniority, but I would say, you know, as a proud Brit that they are slightly different.

31:17Okay, got it. Got it. And then and then take us through this week. What? Why? Why are we paying attention to Europe? So I think, you know, the headline here, I know that Jordi sort of said, UK correspondent, not European, is that we've had this huge state visit this week from, you know, the White House delegation. We also had a huge tech delegation come over, which really sort of marks the first landmark, second state visit that a US president has been given, which President Trump likes to remind us lots of times. So it's the first time that a US president hasn't been invited for a second ceremonial visit to visit the royal family.

31:58So you had this sort of pageantry of this big White House delegation to Windsor Castle. There was a big state banquet. You had Jensen even taking off his black leather jacket and putting on his white tie, which is one level up from black tie. We get very significant here. I saw tons and tons of horses. There were a lot of horses. There was a lot of gold. We love gold. So we really had one day which was, you know, a showcase of diplomacy and tradition. And then you had a second day which was at Chequers, which is the UK Prime Minister's traditional sort of country home, you know, historical diplomacy is carried out there.

32:45And the focus on that was not just, you know, UK trade and investment. If you cast your mind back to May, I think I was on the show, we had the UK and the US come up with one of the first trade agreements, which, given the sort of the landscape of tariffs, I think was a demonstration by the White House that they're really keen to make trade deals where they can. So you had a continuation of that. But the real focus this time was on tech and innovation across both energy and nuclear. You had it across AI and quantum and then also, of course, defense and national security. So that's why you not only had the delegation from the White House and a lot of key politicians, but you also had some of our favorite tech CEOs from Silicon Valley making the trip over and putting on the white tie and also announcing a lot of investment.

33:36Who were some of the key names? Sam was there. I saw Jensen. Jensen, Benioff, right? But Palantir and Airol as well. Yeah. Yeah, so I guess the main companies, you had Microsoft, so you had Satya there, you had Google, you had NVIDIA. Also, Jensen was extremely bullish on the UK and we'll maybe come back to that because he sort of announced a multi-layered investment in the UK over multiple years. You also had, you know, Karp here from Palantir. You had Brian Shemp from Anduril. And yes, Sam Altman from OpenAI. So it was really, you know, and there are a few others as well across, you know, Blackstone and BlackRock.

34:20You also had a lot of the large big pharma and healthcare companies. You know, GSK, for example, Blackstone Smith's Klein has announced that it's going to be investing a lot into U.S. R &D. So it was really a big showing across major industries for investment on both sides of the Atlantic. But there was a huge representation from Silicon Valley. And I mean, just some of the numbers are quite impressive. So Microsoft announced that it's going to put$30 billion into the UK over the next four years. You had Google also committing around$7 billion. $30 billion. So much. That's crazy. You had Google announcing they're going to put$7 billion into a data center that they've already established.

35:04But the real number here that was impressive was NVIDIA. So Jensen really wasn't just taking off the black leather jacket for nothing. He's put$670 billion into a UK cloud computing company called Nscale, which is really designed to help the UK become an AI superpower, as he called it. So that specifically is into manufacturing and the infrastructure. And then he's also potentially talking about putting$500 million into Wave, which is the main autonomous vehicle company here in the UK. I don't know if you've had Alex Kendall on TVPN. He's an amazing founder, you know, brilliant, brilliant UK founder.

35:49So Jensen's really, I mean, he did a whole separate event where he met with Prime Minister Keir Starmer and really announced with a lot of enthusiasm, such as the Huang style, that the UK is going to be a superpower. So AI superpower. How should Americans be thinking about Keir Starmer as prime minister right now? Where does he fit in in the left-right continuum? Or there's a lot of countries that have leaders who are leaning more Trumpian in their style or leaning more focused on innovation or leaning less lawyerly, more engineering focused. How should people think about him who haven't dove very deep?

36:34Yeah, it's interesting. So I think the first thing to know is that Keir Starmer came in on a landslide mandate, similar to Trump, earlier in the year. So early in the year to Trump. So in the same way that you had a new leadership coming to the US at the end of last year, and then the inauguration earlier this year, the UK had a similar thing happen about six months before. So Keir Starmer came in, you know, his party, the Labour Party, had been in opposition for a very long time. You'd had Boris Johnson and conservatism for a long time. So it was a real big landslide change for the UK. So what that means is similarly to the White House currently, the UK Prime Minister has a pretty large mandate for change.

37:14So even though, you know, when I was sitting in the US at the end of last year, there was some trepidation around the fact that, you know, the party is traditionally more left leaning. It's called the Labour Party. However, what you've actually seen is one, a real ability to drive change. So, you know, the number one thing is, can you actually get legislation passed? And number two, and this was a sentiment echoed by quite a lot of tech CEOs yesterday, was a real pragmatism to actually getting stuff done. Now, my personal view is that the UK, after leaving the European Union, is now very much standing on its own.

37:52It's been able to reassert its relationship with the US. It's been able to carve out its own opinion on things like AI sovereignty. It can be sort of pro-AI. It doesn't get held back by some of the anti, or I should say more risk-averse EU legislation. More cookie-based. Yeah, exactly. So even though traditionally you might think the Labour Party is more left-leaning, in the UK everything is going to be slightly more central as well. It's just a smaller country. And so I think that you're not going to see us as extremes. But what I've been really happy to hear from a lot of the CEOs I've spoken with is that there's this pragmatism to getting stuff done and being a pro-business, open for business leadership within Europe.

38:48I feel like this is a new thing where America is going on tour. Like we saw this in the Middle East where it was like all of the tech CEOs and all the government people from the United States show up and they're like, we're all doing deals today. And then you see the Trump dinner. And it's a little competition. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Biggest deals. Yeah, and at the dinner, it's like Mark Zuckerberg throws out a number. And then Tim Cook throws out a number. And it feels like it was the same thing this weekend or this week. Thank you for saying that. It was like that but with frilly outfits. Yes, yes.

39:21Tim Cook was also there. I mean, I'm going to tweet an interesting list afterwards. But I highly recommend, if you have some downtime, just Googling some of the images from the last few days because they were really quite something. You know, the pageantry is quite impressive on the UK royal family side. Nobody does it like the royal family. What are the top sort of like priorities just for the British government right now? In the US, I mean, there's a lot of focus on tariffs, immigration, the overall economy. The economy feels like running hot. Everything's at all time highs from gold to Bitcoin to the stock market.

39:59At the same time, we're seeing weakness in the labor market. How are things feeling over in the UK broadly? I think the UK's main focus is on growth. There are definitely a lot of issues, of course, around immigration. I think some of the you know highlighted issues on places like X have kind of showed that there are a lot of I guess questions around immigration policy across Europe at the moment UK is definitely part of that I think you know from my perspective a lot of the focus is really trying to drive a pro-tech pro-growth environment I think that traditionally a lot of the growth in the UK has come from the city.

40:40So traditional big finance players, it was a real hub for financial services. And I think that there's a recognition that the UK is actually, if you look at it, a really big hub for R &D. You've had Google DeepMind originated in the UK. You've had a lot of advances in both synthetic bio and big pharma come out the UK. Hubs, not just in London, but you know real r &d centers like oxford and cambridge have really been leading for a long time you've got the big semis company arm based in the uk so in the last few years i think you've really seen uh governments on both sides of the aisle try and move away from like purely financial driven growth uh into uh you know tech and and r &d so that's something that i think the white house and 10 downing street are really aligned on and you know this is obviously was a big sort of PR campaign to also show that the special relationship, as we call it, goes both ways.

41:39And I think, you know, something that was significant, a lot of people have said to me, okay, what's in it for the US? You know, we're obviously investing a lot of money into the UK. But I think that if you look at how the US thinks about exporting its own AI data stack across the world, and you put that against some of the competition with, you know, the to kind of reassert its position as the dominant AI player. And, you know, they signed a really interesting memorandum. It was called the Tech Prosperity Deal. Lovely name. Let's give that for Tech Prosperity. Yeah, exactly. Which basically allows the U.S.

42:22to align on, you know, how data models are built and some of the kind of, you know, very core things that the U.S. cares about in terms of ensuring showing that the data stack is defined by the US and not by someone else. Take us through an update on the private markets in Europe broadly, in the UK. Who are folks focused on at the growth stage? We were at the New York Stock Exchange. Was that last week? I keep losing track of time. But Klarna IPO'd successfully, stock traded up. How was the mood? I mean, it's obviously continued to hold up pretty well. Yeah, the mood was good. Our takeaway was kind of interesting with the CEO is that it was just another day for him.

43:07He didn't bring his family. He just came, raised some money, got in, got out. It was a fundraise. It was a fundraise. Whereas with Figma, it was this huge moment because a lot of folks in Brooklyn use Figma and Manhattan use Figma. It's an American company. It's an American company. They really focus on the story of Dylan. and with Sebastian over at Klarna, it wasn't as much of like everyone is a partner in this ecosystem. But in general, it felt like a really good moment. People have been waiting for Klarna to go out for a long time and it was great to see them get out successfully. But who else is driving the market or the news?

43:46Yeah, do you expect any type of spin-outs from DeepMind as well into more application-layer companies? Or do you feel like the researchers there are just going to be content to, you know, double down. So I think just on that front, as well, as you mentioned, I think both Dylan and Sebastian, amazing founders, really exciting that we're seeing the IPO market off to a good start at the moment. And, you know, I think... Although StubHub, I think, StubHub is down. StubHub had a hard time. From listing price yesterday, so... It's okay. Okay, well... We'll get it all back in the next one. But I think that, you know, in terms of names to watch here, the big elephant in the room for a long time has been Revolut.

44:33So for those not familiar in the U.S. market, Revolut is really the largest fintech player here in the U.K. Its last valuation, I think, was around$70 billion. The last employee, I think that was a secondary. So that's really been the main question. some of the news stories around that have been around you know banking license over the years and and whether they were going to you know go for an IPO I think that one you know continue to watch on and and if you look at Jensen's comments even on this trip he's even said that you know Nvidia may also invest in in in Revolut so I think Jensen's really he's really keen on the UK We love Jensen.

45:17He's pumping everything. It's great. I think in terms of Google DeepMind, I'm unclear if they're going to be, you know, spin outs. I think that, you know, the UK government has always looked at DeepMind as an example of UK companies that really should have been able to stay and prosper in the UK or within Europe. And so I think that you're going to continue to see a lot of focus on, you know, UK's own AI infrastructure, the energy stack that's required for that. So we also had quite a lot of announcements around nuclear this week because, of course, the energy question is a big one for the UK.

45:57interestingly actually one of the other things the White House got out of this week's negotiations was that there was a commitment to the UK from being completely unreliant on any Russian nuclear energy as well so I think that you know you're really seeing both the UK shore up its energy stack and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that UK really wants to try and you know make itself a great hub for AI talent, whether that be through Google DeepMind or some of the other really exciting companies like Wave. Yeah. Makes sense. As extra context, in 2021, Demis Hacibus over at DeepMind co-founded Isomorphic Labs, which is a spin out, but still, I believe, private and owned by Alphabet and DeepMind.

46:46And they're focused on artificial intelligence for drug discovery. but owned that type of thing. And he's still based in the UK, which, you know, the Prime Minister always likes to point out, but he's still working with Satya. Every time you open up Gemini. Yeah, with Ruth. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for hopping on the show. Always great to get that update. Always great to hang out with you. Always fun to chat with you guys. We'll talk to you soon, Pippa. Cheers. Bye. Hopefully we can have a new tennis tournament sometime soon, so Pippa comes back to the US. I'd love it. Seems like that's what gets her over here.

47:18Should we talk about... Vanta, automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes your manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Back in America, we should talk about this house in Malibu. Johnny Carson's longtime Malibu home lists for$110 million. I've been to this house. An early investor in Juul and a Hard Rock Cafe, Aris, are selling the modern California house, which the talk show icon owned until his death in 2005.

47:53It's a 10 ,000 square foot, six-bedroom house on roughly four acres. And we'll go through a little bit of this. For more than 20 years, Johnny Carson lived in a modern, triangular-shaped home perched on a bluff overlooking Little Point Dune, Malibu. I've talked to you about this. You told me that Johnny Carson lived on the bluff in Point Dune. Yeah, I definitely told you this. As we were driving by it together. Interesting. Probably told you multiple times. Interesting. Who knows? You might have been locked in. You might have been on the timeline. I might have been locked in. There might have been something more.

48:23There might have been a more pressing current thing to be monitoring. You might have been monitoring the situation. This house is - It's amazing. The property, which has changed hands multiple times since his death, has been redecorated and is going back on the market. The price tag is more than double what the sellers paid for it in 2019. He paid$40 million in 2019. I know. I know. Every time you look back at things that you could buy before COVID, it's painful. Yeah, it's crazy. The famed talk show host bought the estate in the 1980s, about a decade before ending his 30-year run helming The Tonight Show.

49:00He owned the property at the time of his death in 2005. The current owners are the venture capitalist Reyes Valani, an early investor in the e-cigarette maker Juul, and his wife, Hard Rock Cafe, heiress Augusta Tigrette. The couple paid$40 million in 2019, as you mentioned. Look at Johnny Carson looking great. In, of course, a Johnny Carson suit. Fantastic, interesting story about this. Johnny Carson was so dominant in the culture. I mean, The Tonight Show was one of just a few late-night shows because we didn't have the proliferation of the internet. There were only a few things that you could watch every night, and he was absolutely dominant.

49:37How many viewers was he pulling nightly? I believe it was like tens of millions. It was massive. I might have that wrong. But the interesting story was that he was so focused on his craft, he was not interested in business at all, really. And so he had a business partner who said, hey, you wear a suit every night. We should get you a custom suit. We'll start a D2C apparel company effectively. Carson suits and, uh, and we'll sell those suits and then, uh, and then, uh, you'll be, you'll be able to market them on the, on the show. But, uh, he didn't, he didn't really care about contracts or understand business.

50:16And so his business partner, I got to get one of these, you can find, I'm on eBay right now, 1970s Johnny Carson suit for 170. You got to get one of those. That sounds amazing. I got to get one of these, but, uh, his business partner set up the, set up the Carson suit enterprise and I don't believe he had equity in it. And so he would get free suits, but he wasn't making any money off of it. And for years, Carson was not monetizing well at all. But eventually he went back and renegotiated his contract, got ownership over The Tonight Show and was one of the few late night hosts to actually own his own show, have full control over it.

50:57And then after he died and retired, The Tonight Show, the catalog, and there's merch, and there's DVD sales, and there's greatest hits. All of those would be sold and continue to generate revenue, even though it was a daily show. But there were, you know, a lot of iconic comedy moments that happened on that show. So back to the house. Riaz, Valani, and Tigret also have homes in London and Northern California. They viewed the estate as an investment property where they could entertain, Tigret said. They redecorated the two-bedroom main house and had plans drawn up to add two new houses and another pool, but didn't end up building them.

51:34It is a remarkable property how large it is, and then it's just a two-bedroom, but it has all these massive open spaces you can see in those images. They are selling because they have decided to focus on real estate investments in Northern California. It was designed by architect Ed Niles. The main house is about 7 ,100 square feet. Triangles appear throughout the house. The dining room is a triangular shape,

52:00as is the wood and glass ceiling of the central atrium where mature trees are situated. The estate also has a two-bedroom guest house, a tennis pavilion with two guest rooms, and is said to have been a gift to Carson from NBC. Tigrette said one of her favorite parts of the house is an outdoor dining area with a large round table where guests would congregate, violating the triangle symbolism with the round table. We had so many important business meetings there, she said. The era is naturally shaded thanks to a coral tree and a pepper tree whose branches grew together over time, creating a leafy canopy.

52:34And it is beautiful. There's a massive tree inside the house. I don't know if you can see this in the images. And the tennis court is so crazy how big this tennis court is. It's wild. Yeah, you can see that. That's insane. So insane. The property is among the largest in point doom. where standard lot sizes are roughly one acre. This one is, of course, four acres. The main house is situated - He said the listing agent, Chris Cortaza, friend of mine. Well, you know him? I bought my house through his firm. Oh, really? That's funny. The main house is situated closer to the bluff than houses that can be built today, he noted.

53:11The$110 million asking price is warranted by recent trades, he said, including a property that recently sold for$8 million. There's a house right nearby this that's like a, I think it's like a two bedroom house that has similar views that's sold for 80, it's literally a shack that's sold for 80 down the road. So this makes, that makes 110 for this spot look like an absolute bargain. It's great. You know what else is a bargain? Graphite.dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. You can get started for free. Road River Partners, I've never seen this account before, no profile picture, says in the late 1990s, a pal attended a dinner for tech hedge fund CIOs.

54:03All the top guys. All the top guys. All the top guys. All the top guys at the time. $25 ,000 of wine was consumed and portfolios were shared. My pal was sitting at 135 % gain for the year, and his performance was the worst in the room. By far, a week later, he'd went 100 % cash. He was the only one that survived the next three years. Insane. Pretty crazy. You're looking around. Too much wine. I'm up 135%. I look like the idiot. Maybe it's time to read it into something else. Yeah, the account here asking Coward, Mr. Coward. coward nut leg

54:46but why did he go 100 % cash because everyone else was up what if he just like gave up he's like I'm terrible at this selling to cash he's going to just like distribute everything out and just quit and then he's just looking around like wait I'm the only one standing that's remarkable I do know my dad always told me a story about one of his college buddies just went 100 % to gold right before the great financial crisis and just ended up just absolutely printing. Well, whatever asset you want to invest in, go to public.com. They've got multi-asset investing. It's investing for those who take it seriously.

55:32They've got industry-leading deals, trusted by millions. You can lock in. We're not allowed to give financial advice, but I think it's fair to ask you to take it seriously. In other news, we interviewed a lot of fun people at the Meta Connect 2025 event. The one that broke through on the internet, on Teapot, on Axe, was, of course, our interview with Chief Wearables Officer at Luxottica. Roco Basilico. Roco Basilico. Mullen says, I'm sorry, his name is what? We live in a simulation, dog. And this got 3 ,000 views. There were a couple other posts. There were a couple other posts like this. So we need to get some background on Rocco 7.4.

56:14No relation to Roscoe from the Roscoe Chicken and Waffles chain. That we know of. But we really enjoyed talking to him. Also no relation to Rothko, the artist. Oh, Mark Rothko. Yes, I don't think so. People had a ton of fun with this. Where was the other post in here? Someone else was saying something about it. Richard says, my name is Rocco's Basilisk, and I'm making artificial intelligence that you put on your body. So let's give some backstory. Tyler, do you want to give some backstory on Rocco? Yeah, what is the joke that people are making here? Okay, yes. So his name basically sounds like Rocco's Basilisk, which is like this famous thought experiment from LessWrong in like early 2010s, I think.

56:58yeah um basically the idea is like okay so there's going to be some future super intelligent ai yep um and like you can do this kind of like decision making where it's kind of similar to like this prisoner's dilemma thing where there's two agents yeah pascal's wager yeah he's pascal where basically you can chart it out to where like the idea is um you have this this this super intelligent ai by the time it gets to becoming like instantiated um the idea is that it's gonna like punish people that did not like accelerate it did not help it be born and and the idea is actually it's not just like you didn't if you didn't love me at my benchmarks you don't deserve me at my asi yeah yes so it's basically like the the whole thing is like it's like an information hazard this like term um eliezer actually banned like discussion of the topic less wrong for like five years oh because it's a justification for accelerating super intelligence uh i think so but also you don't want to be the safety guy yeah but but the whole thing is like if you chart it out basically it only applies to you if you like learned about this idea so like if you knew about the idea of of rocco then and you didn't like start uh accelerating ai then it's going to punish you yeah and this is why we covered metaconnect and we covered uh isn't there some lore about rocco's basilisk and like the whole idea is like it's a basilisk because like if you look at the basilisk is that a snake yeah it's like in mythology if you look at the basilisk in the eye then you like instantly die yeah so it's like if you learn about this thing and you don't do anything then you like will be punished by the future ai apparently this is this is what originally brought Elon Musk and Grimes together.

58:51Musk was going to tweet about Rococo's Basilisk, which is a reference to Rococo, the 18th century Baroque art style, and they bonded over that. He discovered that Grimes had made the same joke three years earlier and reached out to her about it. One can only speculate about that. Very, very interesting thought experiment. Well, we should have asked him about it, because I wonder how aware he is. It can't be the first time he's heard that his name sounds like Rocco's Basilisk, right? Yeah, I assume not. He must be aware. He's tapped in. Yeah, we'll have to check. I mean, the story of him just cold emailing Zuck.

59:31Like, hey, I think we should do some international business together. Let's hop on a quick call. He made it happen. I wonder if Zuck knew about Rocco's Netflix when he got that. because then it's like you're getting an email from asking if you want to help accelerate AI. You have to say yes. You have to say yes. I think it's one of the most under-hyped partnerships of the last few years. It's so strategic for both sides. It gives Meta this incredible durable advantage to be able to innovate on the technology side and not on the design side. And it gives Luxottica the ability to defend itself and actually thrive in a world where, you know, everybody's wearing smart glasses.

1:00:15I think that's actually a thing, right? It's like there's people that don't wear glasses today that may or may not be using smart glasses in a few years, but Zuck brought this up. There's like one to two billion people in the world that wear glasses all the time and looking good. Yeah, I mean, people were, we were debating with a few people about whether or not the meta AI glasses, oh, I just triggered it. It's talking now. Whether you can immediately clock them, whether they look like tech nerd gear or whether you can pass amongst normies, the unaugmented, as someone who's just wearing Ray-Bans.

1:00:58And I was leaning in the camp of like, if someone throws on meta Ray-Bans and they do have the cameras on there, but they're not recording, there's no light, you kind of don't notice. But other people were saying, I don't know, like you can still see the camera lenses and it still reads as, it's a little like tech nerdy. But I think it's like the best possible. That's a specific frame though. Like the Ray-Bans are a lot of. This is actually an Oakley frame with no with no sunglass in it, it's just eyeglasses. But the original Meta Ray-Bans, they do look exactly like Ray-Bans, an iconic silhouette and something that people are very confident in wearing and i think even with the cameras on there even though you can see them uh people are much more willing to throw them on when they go out and and yet you do you do face a little bit of like oh like you're like a tech nerd you're trying like the new thing like it's not as it's i mean it's like yeah but think of think of the billion plus people that just wear glasses because they need them to see they already wear glasses and then you say like hey do you want a small display in those that can give you directions that you can use to play music.

1:02:07Chunky frames are kind of in right now. Messages come in on. It's kind of a vibe. And so I think, I mean, I agree. It is an underrated partnership. It's a great partnership. I wonder, I'm like dying to know what the, well, first off, like what Apple's response will be like because I feel like they could, I'm imagining that they're going to be white for some reason. I don't know why, but I just have like an iPod on your face. Well, I also think they could do the clear one, like the old Macs where you could see all the internals. They've really moved away from that aesthetic though. But if they brought it back, I think people would like.

1:02:49It just feels like they haven't even done black AirPods, right? Like the AirPods. Maybe they could do the Beats line and use some of that. By the way, apparently the new phone scratches like crazy. I saw, yeah, I saw a picture of it cracking. A bunch of people have been reporting this. But yeah, what was it? They went back to aluminum or something? Yeah. People don't like that? Titanium. It was a good run. I don't know. It was a good run. You already purchased it, so it's in the mail? Yeah, this is bullish for Apple, the fact that I'm not going to get it for more than, like basically I'm going to get it in like three weeks.

1:03:21Yeah. Well. They're selling. Julius AI, what analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. Let's go to Julius. Let's pull up this video of Matthew McConaughey. I'll be right back. Matthew McConaughey says he wants a private LLM fed only with his books, notes, journals, and aspirations so he can ask it questions and get answers based solely on that information without any outside influence. Now, like, that's impossible, right? Just because you need to do pre-training on something or other, right? Yeah. I mean, unless his books are, like, the length of, like, the Internet.

1:04:00I don't think the model would be very good if you just train it on like five models. So really he's kind of saying he wants something fine-tuned? Yeah, I mean it seems like he doesn't really understand how they're trained. But yeah, you could instantiate this I guess through fine-tuning it. Let's play the Matthew McConaughey clip and see what he has to say. LLM, where I can upload, hey, here's three books I've written, here's my other favorite books, Right. Here's my favorite articles I've been cutting and pasting over the 10 years and log all that in. And here's all my journals, whatever the people out and log all that in so I can ask it questions based on that.

1:04:41Right. And basically learn more about myself. Right. I stand on the political spectrum. Right. I'd like to. No, that's that's what I would like to do, which is sort of a glorified word document. But it still would hold a lot more information than just, oh, can you find this term? I would be asking it and it would be responding to me on things that I've forgotten along the way. Load it with the information I'd like to load it with. Right. Yeah. Maybe even like I'm saying in the words of belief, in the man I'm working to be, the man I want, load it with that. Load it with my aspirational self. I'm a bunch of phrase for this.

1:05:17And then ask it. And it's given me answers going, oh, this is. But before, it's slowly learning about me through conversations. conversations then going oh i think this is what you like all right all right no i want the answers based on what i've uploaded again he uses some funny phrase well what does he say at the beginning i am interested though in a private llm private where i can upload hey here's three books are written here's my other favorite you can do this right here's my favorite articles i've been cutting and pasting you can do this with like a ton of rappers log all that in that's what he saying okay yeah i love that he says he wants to log it in no one's talking about logging data into your private llm like this is the future this has no one's tried logging content into a private llm this has like been possible for like three years but no one has embedding your embedding that doesn't sound like logging something in that's what i want i want to log it in i want to log in my favorite book i want to log in my favorite article log in the holy bible it sounds like That's what he's doing.

1:06:22He should hit up Salesforce for this. He's obviously close with Benioff. What do they have, Merlin AI or something? Well, he's close with Benioff. He's one of the faces of Salesforce. Yeah, he's one of the faces of Einstein AI. He should fine-tune it. Fine-tune it on Matthew McConaughey mode. I mean, Einstein AI, I feel like missed opportunity to personify the AI much more. Should have gone, you know, Microsoft's going to have Clippy. You know, we're getting Ani from XAI. Every company is going to need their own personified AI. And, you know, I'd be much more likely to use Salesforce's AI if I knew I was talking to Matthew McConaughey.

1:07:03In other news, Howard Lutnick is posting screenshots of his portfolio. Wait, really? No, I'm kidding. I mean, it's close. Pull up this next post. Yeah. It's a picture from Trump on Truth Social of an AI slop of him sitting at his desk with bought Intel at$20. Now it's$30. He's happy. Well, in other somewhat political news, TikTok sale announced by, we're tracking this on Polymarket, December 31st is now at a 79 % chance that a TikTok sale will be announced. And Polymarket also got a market up on will Tesla acquire XAI in 2025. So the market will resolve to yes. It is officially announced that XAI will be, has been, or is being acquired or merged with Tesla.

1:08:00I could see that happening. I'm interested to keep tracking. We will see. In other XAI news, Nikita Beer says, the goal for your X timeline is to get out of the mainstream algo and political crusades and find your niche. You should be able to post about your interests and have friendly, relevant people chime in. And I feel like I've been able to do this. You do have to be proactive about it still. You have to say, I'm not interested in this post. You have to send a lot of likes and retweets to content that you actually like, engage with it, reply to people that you like in real life, that you like in your niche, but my algorithm has been doing well, and I'm hoping that they continue to improve it.

1:08:38Elon says, the algorithm will be purely AI by November, with significant progress along the way. We will open source the algorithm every two weeks or so. I wonder how that, like, once it's purely AI, it's driven by just weights. Are they going to open source the weights? Open source, open weights, or fully open source the model? Like, that sounds crazy. What do you think, Tyler? It's kind of unclear what he, I mean, by AI, I assume he means, like, LLMs, Because if you just say AI, it's kind of already done by AI? Yeah, it'd be very interesting to open source the algorithm. And the algorithm is just like recommendation.next, parentheses.

1:09:16Inference the model is the Python code. And it's like, yep, we didn't change it. It still just goes in the lines of the next. This is crazy. Breaking news. Trump is adding a$100 ,000 fee, application fee, for H-1B visas in the latest crackdown. Another breaking news, fall.ai, the world's best generative image and video models all in one place, develop and fine-tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. In the Wall Street Journal. Tyler. UAE. Project. I want to add tbpn.com slash sounds. And it's the digital version of our soundboard that people can use in their meetings. Ooh, I like that.

1:09:58Yeah, we got to do that. Given to me in a DM. Yeah. Soundboard at home. Yeah, just try to wrap it up in the next five, ten minutes. Don't make mistakes. Don't make mistakes. The United Arab Emirates is buying houses in Washington, D.C. They have a$200 million collection now. The government's latest purchase is a$27.5 million spec home in McLean, Virginia. I don't know if I'm actually saying that correctly. This week it added a roughly 21 ,000-foot spec estate in Virginia, paying$27.5 million in an off-market deal. The deal is the most expensive home sale to close in the capital region this year.

1:10:40The UAE directly or through its employees or royals owns at least 21 properties in the area worth roughly$200 million. The Emiratis have purchased so much real estate at such high prices in recent years that they've helped reset values in the Gold Coast region. Let's give it up for resetting values. According to real estate agents. The house was recently restaged to give it a modern minimalist look. Each time they purchase something, it's a big number, says a real estate agent of Compass. Uh, the, uh, the estate is located near Langley where the CIA is based. Uh, the, with a six bedroom main house and a pool house, it was constructed as a spec home by Ambar Homes, a luxury development firm headed by local dentist and entrepreneur, Dr.

1:11:25Sonu Kakar. Kakar said he bought the land for 2.1 million, started construction, uh, in 2022. It took him four years to start construction, completed the house four years, uh, two years later. So he's selling this big house. It was first listed for$29.9. Came down a bit, but they got the deal done. There's a marketing video showing a motorcade of Cadillac Escalades resembling a diplomatic entourage heading up a winding driveway to the newly built modern mansion. Check this out. They made a hype video? They made a hype video. A startup launch video for their house. It's funny. It's like they knew they were selling this to.

1:12:02They were like, we got this house, and we're going to show a bunch of big Cadillacs. A home hype video. I hit the timeline. Wait, did you guys scroll that that fast? It plays it that fast? No, that's in the video. That's in the video. That's baked in. They're doing hype videos for sure. That's a vibe reel if I ever saw one. The UAE's residences are dotted in large clumps across the capital region, typically on prime waterfront lots. On Crest Lane, the country owns several homes in the Bank of the Potomac. That's where the ambassador's official residence and guest house are located. Well, you've got to go hang out in D.C., do deals, And so you got to have some big houses for your folks to come and hang out at.

1:12:40On Chain Bridge Road, one of the area's most upscale neighborhoods, the Emiratis paid just under$43 million in 2020 for a riverfront estate previously owned by AOL co-founder James Kimsey in 2020. The same year, the country purchased a vacant lot nearby for$20 million. Are they actually just buying these on the balance sheet? I think so. I think they got cash to spend. And they want to come visit. when they want to come visit. They want to have a nice place to entertain, host guests, do deals, all the above. If you're a startup, you got a couple hundred million dollars burning a hole in your pocket, you're doing deals in D.C., pick up a$23 million mansion.

1:13:20Yeah, why not? Mark Zuckerberg did. Earlier this year, met a founder, Mark Zuckerberg, and his wife, Priscilla Chan, purchased a$23 million mansion in Washington, D.C. Of course, that is much smaller than what the MRIs have been picking up. But regardless, you've got to get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT, go to Profound, reach millions of customers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. TJ Parker has posted. Yeah, that's a good post. The bold case for Apple and AI is they're going to completely avoid enormous amounts of CapEx spend, get most of the consumer value from intelligently integrating Gemini, and get paid a boatload of money from Google for doing so.

1:14:00And I agree. I think I do think it is frustrating as a user that Apple has moved slowly and somewhat ineffectively on AI. But I don't think they're in a bad spot from a business standpoint. No, no. Nothing's gotten me to consider moving off of Apple. Like even if iPhone Air doesn't have the right battery life or iPhone Pro, you know, cracks or whatever. If I need a case on it, it's like I'll solve all of that. I'm sticking with. And that's a big question. Sticking with Cupertino. The big question with the new meta displays is, is there a world where, because right now when we demo the displays, you can get an Instagram DM, you can get a WhatsApp message, and it will pop up in your display, nice little notification.

1:14:47But the question is, will they be able to figure out a deal with Apple so you can get iMessage piped into there? So yesterday, MetaConnect continued, and they did talk about the developer kit, the SDK, how developers can integrate. And they had a couple of integrations. They did one with Twitch, so you can live stream from the devices, from the MetaRayBan displays. They did one with Streamlabs and Disney, and there were a few others. they're still pretty niche and they're all partnered with pretty big companies, the type of companies that would do pretty big press junkets for these but some cool demos, I thought that they were interesting, I'm very interested in the Twitch demo, obviously we live stream on Twitch, thank you to Bobby Cosmic and the Twitch chat holding it down but it seemed like the live streaming capability which we didn't expect to launch very quickly, is going to launch it is gonna be live, you are gonna be able to live stream from the glasses, but the amount of time that you can actually spend live streaming is pretty short.

1:15:54It didn't seem like something where you could be streaming for hours. It was probably minutes, there were different timers that popped up when I was looking at the video, kind of showing, okay, if you keep streaming at this scale, the chips are gonna be on fire, you're gonna run out of battery life pretty quickly. and so like there might be all day battery life but that's more like all day battery life for the occasional picture and the occasional meta AI LLM query not all day battery life stream your entire life like you you were mentioning that the the AI mode was maybe an hour max live AI live AI was maybe an hour max there's not using it to translate yeah real time I think it's also taking pictures of what you're seeing while it's doing that for the actual for the extra context there anyway whatever if you're planning to to build a product that integrates with meta AI display glasses.

1:16:44You gotta get on Linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. It's a double kill. You can plan and build the products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. Jeremy Giffon has a post. Hot take. Wouldn't be surprised if this was printed in the legacy media soon. But for now, we're seeing it on x.ai. I wouldn't be surprised if he wrote it by hand, wrote some drafts out on a piece of paper and then transferred it. Yeah. Had maybe a member of his team, one of his guys actually posted for. So he says the chief of staff is overrated.

1:17:20We need more confidants. Eminence grizzies? I don't know what that is. Grizzies? Viziers, praetorians. There is a phalanx of different guys you can have at your side. You don't need to copy the president. Consider the king or the priest or the emperor instead. Banger. It must have the title grand in front. I think we got to give Nick a new title. He needs to be a confidant or a grand vizier. I think a vizier is a good title. Our first hire was a vice president. Our first hire was a vice president. We have a wheel man. We have a VP of logistics. We have a few other folks. A CIO, of course. Chief intern officer, Tyler Cosgrove, over there holding it down.

1:18:03Jim Cramer says, that 30-year treasury better start behaving. That is bar. He also posted a picture of him hugging Tim Cook, saying, own it, don't trade it. I love this. He said this 10 years ago. We reacted to his interview with Tim Cook on Squawk Box, or on Mad Money, a decade ago. The stock had sold off. They'd hit earnings. They beat earnings. They generated something like$10 billion in free cash flow, but it wasn't enough for the street. And so Kramer did a very interesting interview with Tim Cook where he explains that he is excited about the company. He personally is bullish on the company, but he has to get the story straight for what the street is saying.

1:18:53And the Wall Street traders were saying, Apple, will this company go the way of HP or Compaq or IBM? Like, have they reached stagnation? And Tim Cook says, no, we're going to keep growing. We're going to keep compounding. You don't even know how much revenue we're going to make off of the App Store. And he kind of teases. He says, hey, services are going to be big. The iPhone's still going to be very big. And he was 100 % right. Got a great toll road going. Based 16Z says. Speaking of toll roads, the tax is a toll road on your business. Don't waste any time with it. Head over to Numeral HQ. put your sales tax on autopilot.

1:19:33That's right. Numeral is the platform for sales tax and VAT compliance. And we have Sam from Numeral, the CEO, joining in just a little bit. Looking forward to that. Base16Z just shared a screenshot of CNBC. They said New York will soon send its, quote, first ever inflation refund checks to taxpayers. Is this the state or the city? The state of New York will be giving you a refund for inflation. they're paying back concerning what else we got here there's news about OpenAI OpenAI has approached Gore Tech which assembles AirPods, HomePods and Apple Watches to supply components such as speaker modules for OpenAI's future products one of the products OpenAI has talked to suppliers about making resembles a smart speaker without a display the people said would you carry this with you?

1:20:29Would you have this in your home? OpenAI has also considered building glasses, a digital voice recorder, and a wearable pin, and is targeting late 2026 or early 2027 for the release of its first devices. Digital voice recorder. You know who really convinced me, who was really convincing at the Meta Connect event? Was it the VP of wearables? He was saying he believes in kind of Lindy form factors. You wear a watch. Glasses. He had a garment on. You wear glasses. People don't wear a lot of pins. Maybe if you're the hand of the king, you wear a pin. Maybe a crown, a cane, a smart cane is an interesting idea.

1:21:13But it does seem like it's harder to get people to wear a chain of pins. Yeah, so it's interesting that OpenAI is saying we're going to do a speaker, or at least that's reading between the lines. That's what they would do here. but Apple is, remember, they're building the smart lamp? Yep. Are they? Well, this was teased a while back. Oh, yeah, it is. It's not really that. It's an iPad on a robotic arm that can follow you around the room in the kitchen. I know. I mean, I just meant more of the Pixar lamp. It does feel Pixar lamp-esque, and I'm actually very excited about that product. I think it'll be very cool.

1:21:48But maybe they should. We'll keep one here. There was a post a couple days ago from someone saying, like, Apple should lean into, they should make just an actual lamp. You don't need to throw crazy AI. It doesn't need to be iPhone level internals. Just apply your design skills to industrial design all over the home. Yeah, we've asked for this stuff, the TV. The TV, but it's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. Unless you have the full flywheel of you can take a cut of everything that happens on that device. You have an app store. You have all the downstream stuff. You have a solid replacement cycle.

1:22:23When was the last time you upgraded your TV? Happens like once every five years, 10 years. And yet people upgrade their phones. They lose their AirPods. They get new AirPods. They get the latest iMac. But if Apple made it a battery-powered TV, then you'd be forced to replace your TV every couple of years. I think you're talking about the Apple Vision Pro, which is the vision for where that goes. Well, speaking of Hollywood visions, Nier is shouting out Alibaba's character swap via WAN 2.2 Animate. Very impressive and free and open source. By the way, this lets you insert yourself as the main character or anyone.

1:22:59Here we go. Let's play it. Mr. Sorkin, you are five minutes late. Is there a reason why I should let you in? I'm just trying to ditch the cops, okay? I don't really care if you let me in or not. This is gonna be pretty viral. Mr. Spector will be right with you. This is gonna definitely launch some startup videos. Someone's gonna use this to do a startup launch video very soon. Pretty cool swapping yourself in. It really it really does it flawlessly. Remarkable. Look at that. I'm a fan.

1:23:37Yeah, another tool in the toolkit for video creators. Much like Finn.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake-offs, number one ranking on G2. We have another. It's the management section today. It's Friday in the Wall Street Journal. Another one. Kara Ross, the ex-wife of billionaire Stephen Ross, who created related properties, the man who created the strip mall, essentially. She is putting her New York home on the market. The gemologist and jewelry designer bought the Lenox Hill co-op around the same time she filed for divorce from the Miami Dolphins owner, Kara Ross.

1:24:159.75 million, she's asking. She bought it for 5.6 million in 2021 around the same time she filed for divorce. She tapped the lauded designers, Tony Ingrau and Randy Kemper, who worked on the couple's former home in Columbus Circle to reconfigure and redesign the apartment. The apartment is 2 ,500 square feet, has two bedrooms and a large terrace. The terrace is 2 ,000 square feet. So she referred to it as a diamond in the rough, of course, a play on words because she is a jewelry designer. Yeah, she is a jewelry designer. Her designs have been worn by the likes of former First Lady Michelle Obama.

1:24:54And so if you're looking to pick up something in Manhattan, give her a call. It was a classic old apartment with hallways and drop ceilings and beams in all the wrong places. They focused on opening up the layout so that the terrace is visible from the entrance to the apartment, even removing one of the three bedrooms. Now the expansive living area has a backlit onyx bar that can change color to fit the mood. They've really got to swap out the current furniture and just redo the interior because this place is not looking as good as it could. It doesn't look homey. It doesn't look like you could just hang out here and crash.

1:25:29in a short time that she's lived there car says she's hosted several events including her daughter's engagement party i love to have friends and family over to create a nice environment for them the co-op market has been soft and reached in recent years but listing agent expect to see demand for this property because it is newly renovated apartments like that sell for a premium because time is money homes that require renovation are still trading at a discount uh in in 2022 stephen ross sold the couple's former condo near columbus circle for about 40 million a significant discount from its original 75 million dollar price tag that building was completed in the early 2000s by a partnership that included related so he used his own firm stephen who acquired the dolphins around 2009 has since launched a new company focused on development in west palm beach which is very very popular and if you're looking to grow your business, get on Adio.

1:26:22Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. Ben Lang has a good purchase. Best$25 purchase, a Bluetooth device to connect AirPods on any plane. A couple people post about this. I put this in here not for this use case, but to bring up this sort of funny state of the world where every single like hospitality-esque business just like adopted usb yes at the worst possible now everything is usbc so i was on a uh uh plane the other week they had a us uh um usba usba um it was a charter that i got through preston holland preston holland um and i was just like Like the plane had been refurbished in like 2020 and it still had USB-A.

1:27:21I was like, what's going on here? And then we were at the hotel for Meta Connect the other day. And it's like, great. I'm glad I have USB-A charging here next to the. And it seems like you could create a business just like going around to like a lot of these different types of companies that have installed USB-A. And just be like, look, like this is not a real. This is no longer an amenity. In fact, it's a frustration. because I check into a hotel room and I'm like, great, I'm glad I could charge a USB-A device here. Thank you for this. Hopefully USB-C is the final format. Although you know that there are like 12 different standards for what goes in a USB-C cable.

1:28:03So USB-C is the shape. It's not actually the data transfer. The final shape. I just wanted to be the final shape. Which is fine, but there are slow USB-C ports. There are fast USB-C ports. There's Thunderbolt 4, which is a faster protocol that goes over USB-C. It's all a mess. Well, we have an iPhone review from Joanna Stern. Let's pull up this video. I thought this was important for the audience to see. So she has a new iPhone. This is the new iPhone. This is the Air? This is the Air. I feel like the Air had round edges. It has sharp edges. That looks like the Air to me. She's cutting cheese with it.

1:28:43She's cutting the cheese. She has a little viral sense going. She, of course, is the tech reviewer over at the Ultra Journal. Well, without further ado, we should bring on our second guest. Our first in-person guest, Aaron Slodov. Welcome to the show. How you doing, Aaron? Welcome to the show. Announces Series A today. Congratulations. Good to see you. Welcome to the Ultra Dome. Welcome. You got a mic here. Keep it close. Hello. Introduce yourself. How's it going? Aaron Slodov, CEO, Atomic Industries. Very, very few people have sat here at this table with us. I thought this was appropriate, right?

1:29:23Yeah, it's great. You got a round to announce? What's the news today? Well, the first news is I got some merch here. Let's see it. It's the first of kind merch. And you can take a look at the hats or some of the shirts. You're going with wild colors. I'm going with brown. Brown is the most underrated color on Earth. There we go. That's a clay. We got a good clay. Oh, a clay. Love it. Nice. Here we go. Very, very cool. What was the inspiration? The inspo for these? Yeah. So these are obviously not like our official logo. And I'm going to have to airdrop you some hoodies, I guess, too. Do it. I had a great guy on Instagram who basically takes corporate logos and, you know, vintage-ifies them.

1:30:04Yeah. And, yeah, so special edition. 2019. It's overnight success. Yeah. Yeah, we actually met in Pasadena. We got coffee probably 2021, something like that. Yeah. Broke it all down. It's been. Yeah. Absolutely brutal to start an American dynamism business like four years before the word was. Yeah. For sure. The trend was graded. Yeah. Yeah. Break down the news today. All right. So, Series A. You can hold this. Easy. Oh, boy. So, we have. A lot of gong hits. Yeah. A lot of gong hits. We put that through its paces. So this is kind of a bunch of great market validation. We're going to dump this into R &D, a little bit of expansion on the footprint.

1:30:52And actually, if you want, instead of doing a fancy render, I can actually show you guys a little clip of the new factory. Let's do it. We have a video pulled up already. Let's pull it up. Wait, wait, wait. This is in Detroit? This is in Detroit. Making Detroit. So you did less than a lease. This is, wow, that's huge. Wow, there we go. That is a huge facility. You can make a lot of things in that. Yeah, it's a lot of, we're going to keep the floor dirt like that. We had you call in, and you were walking around the previous facility. It didn't look small. What goes on the floor? Are you at the point where you're copy-pasting the same work cell over and over again?

1:31:32Not quite yet, but the idea behind what we're doing is we started kind of software first, right, to kind of prove the concept that we could actually design something in, you know, at the same clip that like a trade expert could. So we did that first. That was enough proof to actually get the first factory off the ground. And then the design software started, you know, saturating into the molds that we would make, right, like at that factory. Now we're kind of moving into the actual production of parts. So this facility, we're going to basically have factory one and two. That's the footprint that we're using.

1:32:06yeah um factory one makes the molds we ship it to factory two to actually make the parts so that facility will just be nothing but part making what's the wheelhouse part that you make what's the canonical example name it all name every part yeah name every part every part you make parts name every part we got a lot of parts here um yeah i mean basically what we're doing is trying to focus on taking like specialist shop knowledge right like you would go to a shop that's really good at doing like automotive parts or aerospace parts and generalizing that same capability like across the board so our envelope or constraint is kind of like size instead of industry or part so we can't do something like the size of the table obviously but we can work up to that you know so for now we're kind of like parts that are a couple shoe boxes are smaller like what was the thesis for your pitch to have every person who works in manufacturing and wear a pair of meta glasses and start collecting data?

1:33:06How would that actually flow through? So I started a lot of my earlier career in self-driving cars. I worked at Google 15 years ago. This is actually insane. I don't even like thinking about that. Were you like 15 years old at the time? Yeah, I was 10. I was a wunderkind. And a lot of the idea behind that is controlling a system well enough, like a human-controlled car. Same principles kind of apply to a factory, right? If you're producing the same thing over and over again, you can dial a factory like Elon does, right? And it's just like ultra efficient. The holy grail is being able to take a factory and kind of adapt to different things, you know, over and over again.

1:33:47And mold making is kind of like that because every part has a unique geometry. So ultimately the shape drives like the construction of every mold and it's a little bit different, right? But yeah, ultimately, that whole yeah i mean actually pulling data from someone who's working on a line i mean they're gonna see you're gonna see someone using a screwdriver one day and then a hammer and then different tools and then pushing buttons and maybe sitting in front of their computer like taking notes like uh isn't that just like a ton of messy data like how do you actually compress that into something that's actionable so the self-driving analogy is very similar to that Right.

1:34:25Like being able to actually intuit like a mechanical task. Sure. Right. Or I don't know anything like programming a machine or something like that. Right. If we have the ability to actually collect the data seamlessly and relatively easily, that's kind of a floodgate, you know, to being able to do a lot of these things. Processing them is a different problem depending on how general they get. But I do think that that's actually a pretty interesting use case for them. Yeah. Give us the update on reindustrialization broadly. There's been some headlines on the job side this year that have been not super thrilling to look at.

1:35:06Actually, reduction in manufacturing workforce. But what's actually. Yeah, a lot of energy in the space. What's the vibe like on the ground? The vibe on the ground. Actually, and to be clear, I want to get a sense of what the vibe is. Legacy manufacturing and then the reindustrialized crowd. Hmm. No way. You got to take that. I can't. I can't do that right now. No, you can take it. Wait, take it. Take it right now. He'll call back. He'll call back. That's actually, I mean, I don't know if you're fucking with us. Yeah, I don't know if you're messing with us, but it's fine. It's crazy. Big if true.

1:35:40Big if true. The, yeah, I mean, the vibe on the ground for this stuff is, it's interesting, right? Because there's a huge need for it. And economic data numbers go up and down all the time. And people will panic. Businesses might not actually take on more because CapEx is ultra expensive or something. At the end of the day, stuff still has to get made. And there's a lot of work that we're doing right now with the admin, which maybe we'll talk about someday. But people are very aware of this problem. right and we need to pump resources into the industrial base in a really meaningful and fast way so ultimately there's a huge demand and need um even without the tariffs it was still there right um and i mean yeah starting this company when i did was a really interesting moment in history and like i was trying to front run that problem and ultimately i didn't really do anything for, you know, 2020 at all.

1:36:43But yeah, I think people, you know, they're actually churning out parts and components are, you know, extremely happy with where things are at. But, you know, overall, this is something that, like, we have the same conversation about over and over and over again, which is, you know, factory jobs and manufacturing jobs. Like, a lot of people don't know if that actually means a specialist, you know, CNC machinist, a cam programmer, like somebody just pushing a button on a machine on a line somewhere. And ultimately, you'll kind of see a collapse, or you'll probably see a little bit of condensing of skilled trade labor as technology flows more into the industrial base, and we get more efficient factories that are cheaper.

1:37:29Ultimately, it's not a zero-sum game, right? It's like Jevin's paradox for stuff. If you can figure out a way to make more, we're going to make more. I feel like there's a ton of energy. like the biggest American dynamism story or the biggest re-industrialization story has oddly been like the XAI, Colossus, like the NeoClouds, what Crusoe's doing. Like, it feels like there's an immense pull from the industry to build big things. And they're building multi-billion dollar projects in America. It's very much assembling parts from all over the place. we just got a report that Elon's potentially buying a power plant internationally and then just rebuilding it in Memphis or Mississippi but do you think that that actually translates to going down the stack or do you think that all the AI energy will just wind up resulting in just build a big data center but still continue to to make the transformers wherever they need to be made or make the networking equipment wherever it needs to be made.

1:38:41I mean, the chips, the actual energy around moving chip production back to America, it's a multi-decade project. Yeah, I think there's a secret plan here that nobody's really talking about. What's that? You've seen Elon and Jensen hint at this in some of their public stuff that they've said. they're all driving for applying ai to like the physical oh sure right yeah um obviously we have to play with llms for a little bit and like cool video and image tools and stuff but ultimately i think that like you know we saw what was that like a week ago elon talking about making transformers now like just going straight for the kill um i think that ultimately and like how jensen talked about like you know i mean spacex vertically integrated a ton of uh a ton of part making internally because they were fed up.

1:39:33But what does that mean for your business? Right. So ultimately what it means is that you're going to have a trade-off where skilled trades people are kind of like, the replacement rate is very low. So you might actually see some kind of conglomeration or agglomeration of these trades kind of forming a foundational layer of building blocks where we can make components and parts. And the technology is applied to that. Right? Like, that's what I was saying. Like Jensen, his whole thing is like using tokens for whatever, right? Sure. If we can apply that to the part-making layer, right, it's just foundational kind of stuff.

1:40:11And then from there, you can build whatever you want. Yeah. Are there, I remember early on when we were talking, one of the interesting use cases for AI in a manufacturing context was you have a part that needs to be injection molded. You need to build the casting for that, right? And you need to figure out where you drill the holes to dissipate heat, right? And the example you gave me was like if you're molding a bumper for a car, it's a very odd shape. It's not just like something you can roll out on a sheet or cut stamp or do anything else, right? You need to actually mold it. And does that have any indexing towards like what goes on the data center?

1:40:54Are there parts that are benefiting in the data center context from that type of injection molding optimization work? Potentially. I mean, it's going to be a lot of racking and componentry. So if there's some kind of weird new form factor, probably not. Yeah, most of the data center just feels like it's vertical racks just bolted together. I mean, Zuck's building data centers in tents now. Like they're, they're, they're not going with like bespoke, like beautiful, like, you know, custom shapes or anything like that. I think, I think a lot of it, like whenever you need to form a part of some kind, right?

1:41:29You have to pick what type of methodology you're going to use, like whatever is most cost effective and also meets the requirements. So if it's a bunch of metal stuff, you're probably going to stamp it or, you know, it'll be made out of sheet metal or CNC'd or something. And then if it is a plastic thing that you can actually blast out in high volume and it's, it's actually worth it, that's a great problem to solve. And what we're doing is actually trying to lower that barrier. And not everything can be a plastic part. And people don't want that. But if you actually lower that barrier, then engineering changes, actually.

1:41:57Because now you can actually re-scope what is plastic, what is metal, and consider a different production method for it. How are the capital markets treating manufacturing businesses and especially tech-enabled manufacturing businesses today? I'm assuming you're not getting AI multiples, but hopefully there's plenty to go around. Well, that's the thing. There's no comp for this, right? Nobody's actually done this before. So, you know, TBD on that. But I do think that even, like, announcing the raise earlier, right, it was a huge mistake on LinkedIn, you know, just because I now have gotten probably 100 different emails and texts from, you know, people on the other side of venture.

1:42:39Yeah. They're just like, loans. You know, it's just like it's a wellspring of money. There's an ocean of capital on the other side of this if you can prove something viable. Where's the where's the business? I mean, you said twenty five million dollars series a massive facility that you showed us. How are you tracking with like revenue, headcount, anything else that you can share? Yeah. So with that kind of progression of going like software to mold making to part making, we picked up like our first couple big part production contracts. So interestingly enough, it's kind of like SAS. it's just like, you know, I need a widget for five years.

1:43:15Like you're in charge of making the mold and the part now. So we're going to start stacking like multi-year production programs. So we're kind of in the mid eight figure range for that right now. Let's go. Let's give it up for the mid eight figures. It's an amazing place to be. Underrated, right? People already always talk about nine figures. Being in the mid eight figures. The next time I'm back here, we'll be at nine figures. Fantastic. There we go. There we go. And then, yeah, we're kind of. Come back tomorrow. Yeah. Yeah, we'll be back tomorrow. Yeah, answer that phone call and then. Roughly 50 people right now.

1:43:50Oh, wow. And it's interesting, too, because that includes people that are in the factories themselves. Ever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is one of the main reasons we actually wanted to build in Detroit, right? Because even though I love California, that talent is not here. Yeah. So we do have to kind of like rely on that initially to build out the footprint there. And then once we actually have. Would you come to California? Yeah, for sure. Maybe is California anywhere near the top of the list? I feel like Texas, there's other, I mean, what's happening in Memphis and in Mississippi. Like there's so many other states that are more like, please bring your business here.

1:44:30Yeah. I mean, we're going to have to take a look at statewide, you know, incentive packages and see how that's looking. But that's kind of the model, right? Does California offer incentives for these kind of things? Disincentives, actually. Yeah, disincentives. If you come here, we'll make your life hell, but the weather's great. I was so funny. I was looking at the weather report yesterday, and I was like, this is why we do what we do. 75 today in Malibu, 75 in sunny, then 78 in sunny, then 77 in sunny, then 79 in sunny, and 79, and then 79, and then 77. I'm sure it's not that bad in Detroit right now.

1:45:08It's in the summer. Same exact forecast. Yeah, it's probably perfect right now. Everybody talks about fall in California. People don't talk about fall in Detroit. Fall in Detroit. I mean, in Chicago, it's the same thing. Chicago has fantastic summers. Yes, it's the people call Detroit the St. Tropez of America. It is. It is. Anyway, congratulations. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Dude, thank you for the first time. Hit that gong as hard as you can. Whoa, that was good. That was a good hit. You kept it in. That's a true test of strength. Being close to the gong and still getting that contact.

1:45:41Congratulations. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on. About all the progress, go take that call. We will talk to you soon. And we have Ariana coming on the show in just a few minutes. In the meantime, let me tell you about 8sleep. 8sleep.com. Get a pod five. Five-year warranty. 30-hour risk-free trial. Free returns. Free shipping. What did I do? You did well? I got a 94 last night, 7 hours, 56 minutes. Oh, a 94, eh? 94. 98. 98. I was not expecting that out of here. 98. Put that phone down. I beat Jordy Hayes. Great. The great sleep off. Yes. We should run a weekend average, see how we do. Sleep off.

1:46:33Anyway, there's a new paper that claims LLMs are better at selecting founders than venture capitalists. I don't believe it. VC Bench, the first benchmark for predicting for founder success in venture capital. This is from the University of Oxford. And Julia Hornstein shares thinking about this, quote, But for Andreessen, there is one job that AI will never do as well as a living, breathing human being his. Think I'm kidding? On an A16Z podcast last week, Andreessen opined that being a venture capitalist may be a profession that is quite literally timeless. When the AIs are doing everything else, he continued, that may be one of the last remaining fields that people are still doing.

1:47:17Didn't Vlad say something too? Like, you just invest for a living? i i agree with the the the sense that uh the the high level point which is that like humans humans will like raise capital yeah machines will probably deploy it yes but i do i do wonder i i would love to i i we have to we should dig into this vc bench thing more because i do think if i just like ran you could basically run a model against like a deck yes and even you can even analyze things like how fast a founder responds, right? People talk about some of these smaller data points, like founders that respond fast and really outperform.

1:48:02Outperforming, I mean, I'm not exactly sure what the outperformance was, but being in the 60th percentile of venture capitalists does not matter. You still do very poorly. You need to be at the long tail of the power law. I'd be fascinated to know - like one of the biggest drivers. Brands super important. But also I think, I mean, you read zero to one, the value of secrets, like secrets are not in the training data. And so there's so many decisions that are made in, in a business partnership or backing a founder that are secrets that never make their way onto the internet. They never make it way that they never make it into the weights whatsoever.

1:48:43Maybe they make it into a biography after someone passes away like decades later. But so much of decision in venture capital and decision making in business is really on the backbone of whisper networks and understanding - Being able to accurately predict the future. Subtext. It's not just accurately predicting the future. I feel like accurately predicting the future, like broadly, like AI is not that bad at that. But AI doesn't necessarily know like all the different secrets that are going into a business before. But if you were running, let's say you're running a model generally and you asked in 2017, do you think that bright young people in Silicon Valley are going to want to work in defense tech in seven years, a model might be like, eh, people have pretty bad taste in their mouth, like Google and yours are protesting even having any contracts, right?

1:49:42So it just depends on... I mean, yeah, the LLMs right now are not designed to be contrarian machines. Like, they're very much consensus-focused. And just getting to a model that thinks independently or can take a contrarian position that isn't just take your conclusion and add a minus sign in front of it. It's like, what if the average Redditor was deploying capital? That's certainly the bear case for this. At the same time, potentially, the average Redditor is deploying capital. And that might actually define the VC industry pretty accurately right now. And so I'm not surprised. Tyler, what's your take?

1:50:19OK, so I'm looking at the actual benchmark. Yes. So basically, the data set is 9 ,000 anonymized founder profiles. and then basically they're either labeled like success or i guess like failure depending on um do they return capital yeah if they exited ipo'd over 500 million or raised over 500 million um and then so it has like some of the stats are like uh tier one vcs are at predict 23 percent and then deep seek chat is at 80 percent it's kind of like it seems um hard to like anonymize these correctly where like you're still encapsulating like what made them a good founder but also still like different enough that a model can't just like be like oh that's just mark zuckerberg totally his name totally so like yes he's successful yes so yes it's i think it's the other thing is like bc is the the issue is like vc is not about identifying the great founders you have to identify them and win allocation at specific moments 100 that and then yeah and then And also it's identifying the next great founder, which is usually breaking a pattern.

1:51:25I mean, Paul Graham has a famous example where he over-indexed on Mark Zuckerberg, met a founder who literally looked like Mark Zuckerberg, wrote a check, and it was one of the most underperforming investments he's ever made. And he was like, yeah, I was just like this guy. He went to Harvard, dropped out of Harvard, looked like Mark. We have Ariana in the restream waiting room. Let's bring her in. Let's bring her in to TBPN. The mold company. The Ultradome. How are you doing? What's happening? Hi, Jordy. Hi, John. Great to be here. Great to meet you. Okay, I will start this off by saying I hate mold.

1:52:00I'm one of the number one haters. I had a rental once that had a mold problem. I got terribly sick, and it ended up being this crazy saga where I was fighting with my landlord because they were saying like there's no mold problem i was showing them test results that showed there was a mold problem they were kind of pushing back i think it's a huge problem i went down this rabbit hole i think a bunch of people are kind of like waking up to um how prevalent the issue is especially in like specific regions and even specific like like uh local communities so excited that you're building this and uh excited to hear about it thank you yeah there's definitely a cultural awakening happening.

1:52:45You might have even seen HBO shows and Netflix and throughout the Reddit forums, Facebook communities, influencers on Instagram, etc. Like it feels like there's this groundswell of education and awareness happening beyond even our company. Yeah. How did you, why did you start the company? Personal story? Yeah, super similar to yours. Went through that journey with my landlord as well. And prior to starting MoldCo, didn't have health issues, then experienced debilitating symptoms and actually developed something called chronic inflammatory response syndrome, which is the more formal name for mold toxicity or mold related illness, just in a six and a half month timeframe of being in my Miami unit, which was quite moldy.

1:53:27Crazy. Uh, what, uh, what is the, uh, I haven't, I easy to tell what the company does at a high level, but like, how are you, how are you kind of like tackling the problem? What does the business look like? Yeah, we're tackling this in a few different ways. So the vision is to drive the standard of care for mold treatment and mold labs. And what we do is offer labs both for health and the environment. So that includes four different tests available on our website today, specifically a three panel and a 16 panel for the LabCorp lab draw. And that's based on our 30 years of research in the field.

1:54:06So we have on our founding team, the world experts, the folks that not only pioneered the space, but also define chronic inflammatory response syndrome, came up with the biomarkers, came up with the treatment all in their lifetime, which is an extraordinary effort. So we have that. We also have something called HLA haplotype testing to see if you have a genetic susceptibility to mold related illness. And that impacts one in four here in the US. And we also have a test, which I frankly love over even a home inspector at times. It's just to quick litmus tests, low cost, use a swiffer pad to wipe down your surfaces.

1:54:39So we have that on the lab side. And then on the care side, we have our own in-house providers, and we built a platform to treat patients at scale. And that includes concierge care and our patient portal, and that includes a distillation of something called the Shoemaker Protocol, which is the only published peer-reviewed treatment approach in the space. There's hundreds of publications making the Mold Health Connection. There's really just a small body of work that demonstrates treatment and what's effective for patients so that's what we've done we've translated that into a virtual care clinic and we've done a lot of creative things to make that scalable for patients so we can keep the cost low and affordable what if somebody I guess like what is your recommendation you meet somebody like randomly they hear about your business like what is the first step because I think a lot of people you talked about people having like genetic susceptibility this this is I think important because it means that like a few people could be living in a house and like some people aren't having necessarily any issues or symptoms and like one person could be having a super adverse reaction and that I feel like can make can make people like just like not really be aware of the problem because if you have if somebody's in college and they have some roommates that are doing fine and they're struggling they can it can end up being confusing but what do you recommend to people?

1:56:00Where do you recommend people start if they're kind of concerned that they might be dealing with an issue? Yeah, absolutely. So we have testing options to meet patients where they are. So it really just depends on where they are in that journey. And you touched upon a really important topic, and that's the canary effect. There could be others in your household that start experiencing symptoms before you even experience symptoms. But it really just depends on where the patient is. Have they already made the mold health connection? Have they conducted a battery of lab tests to validate that. If so, those patients are often great to start care.

1:56:31If the patient hasn't even made the mold health connection, but they're sure that there's mold in their home, they can probably skip the dust test and even a visual inspection or having that musty earthy odor is sufficient. So for that type of patient, we may recommend even the starter panel, which is one of our three lab panels. And that has the highest signal biomarkers based on the research that we have to date, which I'm sure will evolve. We actually have an R &D arm with the largest data set in the world for what we're doing too. So we're looking to advance that and really drive the standard of care.

1:57:00Or if a patient doesn't know if they have mold in their home, but they're having the indicative symptoms, which includes brain fog, fatigue, gastrointestinal issues, et cetera, it's normally a multi-symptom issue, non-specific, but affecting multiple systems, then we would recommend a lab panel, such as the starter panel or a complete panel. Would you guys help clients, customers with legal? Because I ended up having to hire a lawyer when I was going through my issue because my landlord was just completely gaslighting me. Is that something that you guys would ever help people with, or is that outside of the wheelhouse?

1:57:45It's currently outside our scope. In terms of the next evolution of the company, The parent company is actually called the ImmuneCo, and our vision is to spin out LymeCo and LongCo next. Our thesis is that the data set we've collected, which is looking at these microbial insults, mold and biotoxins that lead to innate immune system dysregulation leading to chronic inflammation, can actually have the underlying research to help solve some of these other biotoxin-related issues. So we're more so going that direction versus expanding to horizontally within the mold economy. But I think there's definitely opportunity there for founders.

1:58:18The mold economy. We're here. How are you guys acquiring customers at this point? This feels like the kind of thing that, one, there's a lot of influencers that have dealt with this and that'll talk about it, but it also feels like you could have an organic TikTok or real strategy or something along those lines. yeah we're doing a lot of different things we actually just launched something called a content farm we had seven million views in the last week or week and a half or so just off of that um so we are tapping into tiktok and instagram and doing some fun things there we had a reddit ama with dr shoemaker the messiah of mold our founding physician and that went viral and read it yeah you got some you got some good good uh coinages here the mold economy the messiah of mold Thanks.

1:59:07I don't have bots on my cap table, though, so maybe next. But yeah, so we've done that. We've done we've had shout outs from patients. At least 15 % of our patient base is based on referrals, and we haven't even optimized for that yet. I've been on at least 30 podcasts at this point. So we're tapping into a lot of different ways to reach patients and increase education and awareness. But there already is a large portion of the US that has made the multi health connection. So it's been pretty streamlined targeting those patients and onboarding them into our care would you do anything last question i have i'm curious would you do anything around helping people make decisions on uh like specifically the moment in time where somebody's either buying a home or considering renting a property because the thing that's like tragic about like kind of the mold crisis if that's what you want to call it is there's a lot of homes that are brand new and they will literally have like a like a significant mold toxicity problem on day On day one because of the way they were built.

2:00:07Or you think about it, it's like houses can take a long time to build. They could have leaks, they could have a bunch of weather, all these different things. And then you move into a house that you think is brand new and it already is gonna like make you sick, which is just tragic. Thank you for touching on that misconception that new builds don't have mold issues. They definitely do. The building materials are left outside in the rain. The energy efficiency standards often have a tradeoff for having more microbial growth in the home. So I think there's a lot of dramatic irony there for homebuyers and renters.

2:00:39It's not something we're targeting at a deep level right now. I often say that the environmental side is more intractable than the healthcare side, just because the healthcare side already has the solution available. And every home is unique, every rental is unique. So we offer free educational guidance, but I think that's also another opportunity for a builder in this space if they want to help essentially renters and owners better navigate which homes have mold and to avoid that. And there's also novel materials coming out like sire wall too, to prevent mold in the first place. Awesome. Well, congratulations.

2:01:14Give us the fundraising news. What's the fundraising news? You announced it yesterday, right? yeah um yeah so we raised earlier this year a bit of a delayed announcement with uh cantos and collab fund as our lead and um yeah there we go how much did you raise uh eight million total there you go congratulations great names great names love to see it thanks so much for having me on the stream thanks for jumping on we'll talk to you soon Cheers. Bye. If you want to get away from your moldy old home, head over to Wander.com. That's right. Book a Wander with inspiring views, health-tech great amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service.

2:01:56It's a vacation home, but better, folks. Our next guest is Will Hurd from Chaos Industries. He's the chief strategy officer, former CIA, former congressperson. What's going on? How you doing? I'm doing fantastic. It's great to be on with y 'all. I feel like I'm on with the Shaq and Barkley of tech reporting. So thanks for having me. We'd love to hear that. Thank you. Let's go. Fun fact. We don't know about sports, but those sound like some big names. Fun fact. I endorsed you for president. I said, everyone else who's running is a lawyer. You're the only computer scientist. Talk to me about your journey studying computer science through working in the government.

2:02:37I want to get a little bit of backstory before we go into what you're doing now. Sure. You know, it was funny when I was in high school, I had the opportunity to do an internship with a woman who was at Southwest Research Institute. They are one of the largest private research entities in the country. And I fell in love with with computer science and decided to go to Texas A &M University, Giga Maggie's and, you know, study computer science. And when I first got to college, I thought I was going to go work at IBM. And then I had - Let's give it up for international business. International business machines.

2:03:15We love international business and machines. There we go. There we go. But I had this guy who was a guest lecturer in one of my classes that was a former CIA officer. And he told the most amazing stories. And I was like, I want to do that. And so when I graduated from college, I joined the CIA and I was a case officer. So my job was recruit spies and steal secrets. It was the best job. Yeah, that's an important distinction because I think people think about CIA agents, but those are the people that are recruited by the case officers who are doing the puppeteering. That's right. Or you could say the spymaster.

2:04:00Yeah, the spymaster. Spymaster. That's great. So, yeah, please. Look, it was an awesome gig, right? Two years India, two years in Pakistan. I did some interagency work in New York City around counterproliferation. And then a year and a half in Afghanistan where I managed all of our undercover operations. And in addition to collecting intelligence on our threats to our homelands, I had to brief members of Congress. And I was pretty shocked by the caliber of our elected leaders. So I decided to run for Congress. And that's kind of how that started. That's amazing. We had Dan Wang on the show recently.

2:04:36He wrote a book, Relentless, and he talks about, I hope I have that right. I might be messing some of that up. But the basic thesis of the book is that China has an engineering mindset and they employ a lot of engineers in the government, whereas America has become the lawyerly society. And we have a lot of lawmakers who are lawyers by training. And I'm wondering about your thoughts on the direction America should be going in terms of empowering folks who can think from first principles or have engineering mindsets to actually go and build things like high-speed rail or, you know, we got to the moon.

2:05:12And we're seeing a little bit of this with Doge and more engineers in the White House. What's your overall view on the level of engineering talent in government and the benefits and costs of that? Look, I think that thesis is actually correct. I've spent the last 25 years of my adult life in some form or fashion connected to national security, whether it was CIA, in Congress. I was on the House Intelligence Committee, seeing how things, our threats to our nation evolve. I was on the Appropriations Committee, making sure that we were spending trillions of dollars in the right way. I've been on the National Security Agency Advisory Board.

2:05:52when I was at Allen & Company, the New York Investment Bank, I was working with technology companies. And here's been one similar throughput to all this. The Chinese government has made it very clear. The way they're going to surpass the United States of America as the global superpower is by mastering a number of different technologies. It's about 15, 16, 17 of them, everything from AI to hypersonics. And with that as the overarching goal, there is a desire and interest in order to win. You mentioned the space race. Right now, we're rushing to go back to the moon. And guess what the Chinese are going to do?

2:06:32The Chinese are going to do it the exact same way we did it in the past, right? Shocker, they're going to steal all of our plans and ideas and replicate them. What? I'm hearing this for the first time. Exactly, exactly. But we're also seeing that in whether it's AI and how they're trying to dominate it. We saw them dominate 5G. The fact that the 5G infrastructure now is, I think it's over a third in the world is Chinese tech. In AI, the issue of AI, they're trying to make sure by 2030, every six-year-old is AI conversant. And we're still having debates here in the United States of America about whether AI should be included.

2:07:19And then I don't even tell you about what's happening on the battlefield, right? You know, we're seeing, they're learning from Ukraine, they're figuring out how to use autonomy in air, on land, and in the sea, their focus on electronic warfare, and how to disrupt our systems. They're trying to not only build more than what we have, they're also looking forward to making sure that they have mass and autonomy in warfare. And so this is the world in which we're living in. And we need people that actually understand technology to make sure that we can make it happen. Perfect example. No company cannot figure out, they don't know what their budget's going to be next year or what their plan for sales is next year.

2:08:03But within the federal government, we don't know necessarily from year to year what the funding is going to be. And for a trillion dollar enterprise, you can't do that. I think at a minimum, you should have a two year budget and appropriation so that you can you know with some certainty of where you need to go and not trying to go month to month to try to get things done. And I think that's right now one of the issues that I think a lot of venture capital and venture VC-backed companies are trying to change with DOD. It's slow. It's moving. It's changing. But we have to bring that mentality to government.

2:08:41Yeah. Talk about your path to chaos. It's a wild name for a defense tech company, but you're doing some very cool things. How did all this come together? Look, I didn't think slinging radars was on my bingo card. Right. But when when I got to meet Dr. Bomar, one of our co-CEOs and founders of Chaos, he had also previously founded Epirus, John Tennant, another one of our co-CEOs who I've known for some time. And he's like, look, we're doing something interesting. Why don't you come to L.A. and see our product? And I was blown away. Right. First off, unbelievable team. Right. This is these are, you know, engineers that have been quoted in in in Nobel Prizes.

2:09:30Right. You have you have real operators in government, Navy SEALs, folks that worked in in Delta Force, CIA. You know, you have operators that have been in the system and you're working on some of the most cutting edge technology. Right. Like, you know, we we have we have figured out a thing called coherent distributed networking. This is taking multiple things and talking to talking to each other. And we figured out how to do that to the picosecond. Now, a picosecond, you know, for some for some references, one picosecond to a second is like a second is to thirty two thousand years. That's really fast.

2:10:11And by figuring out how you have this time transfer work, we're able to build a more powerful system and a cheaper system. And so that amazed me. And ultimately, the vision of the company. Since, let's call it the end of the Korean War, America and our allies have had air superiority. and that air superiority has given our troops the ability to look forward, not above their heads at swarms. It's allowed commerce to whip around the world. And those days are over because of autonomy on the battlefield. 70 % of casualties in warfare right now are from autonomous systems and drones. And the time to detect and do something about it is shrinking.

2:11:00And ultimately what chaos is doing is we're giving the warfighter more time, A time to understand what's happening, time to decide what to do, and time to act. And so for me to get back to my roots of national security, it was exciting. And so that's how I ended up at Chaos. What's the highest priority threat that radar can help mitigate? Is it these autonomous drones these days? It is. Look, there's a lot of conversation right now around Golden Dome. And Golden Dome is something that we need to have. We need to be able to defend against nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles from our adversaries, primarily China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

2:11:44And this is a phased approach from detecting it when it launches from their homeland to trying to identify it in space. The technology that has evolved and what we're able to do now sensing in space is pretty fantastic. And this is an important problem. But the reality in my the most recent threat, like the threat we're most likely to see is a subsonic cruise missile or a drone. And this can be shot from a plane off the coast of California. It could be a van that is filled with a number of explosive drones. These are the things that we're going to see more likely than a nuclear weapon. And we call these underlayer threats.

2:12:33These are things that are happening under 50 ,000 feet. And that's something that radars is able to help detect. And one of the things that we're learning, because of some of the technological advances we've made, we can see big, high and far and low, small and near at the same time. And I always remind people, I think pretty much everybody in America watched Maverick, Top Gun 2. Top Gun, of course. That's a real thing. Flying below the radar is a real thing. And so we're able to see below that level. And that's something that is going to be helpful against this drone threat, which we've already seen.

2:13:13We've seen what the Ukrainians did in Russia. We've seen what Israel has done in Iran. And all of that being able to take out this exquisite infrastructure. And exquisite is actually a has a unique phrasing or definition in government. That means big ass expensive system. And so so so where you're able to take these systems out with a system that costs a billion dollars with a drone that costs 20 K. Right. So that cost asymmetry is one of the things that that the right radar and what we're doing in multi static radar. is something that is one of the reasons why we're getting traction and excitement within DOD and the rest of militaries around the world, to be honest.

2:14:04I don't know if you can say anything here, but are you guys doing anything on the counter-narcotics side? Yeah, we've been seeing some stuff here. I've watched a bunch of YouTube videos on narco subs that aren't true submarines but designed to be hard to detect. Look, this is an issue that's actually close to my heart. When I was in Congress, I represented a district that was 29 counties, two time zones, 825 miles of the border between Texas and Mexico. I had more border than any other member of Congress. And so what the narco-traficantes, the drug traffickers are doing, they're sophisticated.

2:14:44The narcos in Mexico alone are making roughly, and this is a conservative number,$60 billion in one year. The entire U.S. intelligence budget is$60 billion, right? You add up all the foundation model lab revenue and you don't get anything. You don't get there. It's bigger than AI. It's wild. And so, yes, you know, there is it is known in the end of in the last year, I think beginning of this year, Border Patrol testified in front of the Senate that there were, you know, something ridiculous like 41 ,000 drone sightings in just one sector of the border. So we know the narcos are using the drone warfare against themselves.

2:15:30Right. And so so like against rival rival gangs, basically. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's like the drone warfare you're seeing between Ukraine and Russia. They're adapting some of these tactics, techniques and procedures to that fight. And then we also know the only way you get$60 billion worth of drugs into the United States of America is by you bringing them in volume. and there is likely some coming via autonomous systems, air and sea. And we've had conversations with authorities in order to help with this project. And so once we learn more, we'll come back and I'll give you a report on some of the things that we're seeing.

2:16:14Can you give me some, describe the shape or the physicality of what you're building? You know, there's been, you look at those like Anduril submarines. They're square now. They look like they just fit in shipping containers. There's a lot of logistics that you get out of the box. If it fits in a shipping container, you can load it onto a boat, an autonomous boat. You can load it on a truck. There's also stuff that can be mounted on an aircraft or something that's, you know, getting into exquisite territory, exquisite system territory. Where do you see the opportunity to deploy new radar systems?

2:16:46So one of our products we call Vanquish is an expeditionary system. So the three of us can carry that. It can fit on the back of an ATV and go into a really rough train. Is that an invite if we're going ATVing? Let's do it. Hey, you know, I think we're just right around the corner from y 'all. Amazing. So next time we'll take y 'all out. That'd be great. And so that one is low form factors, small. that can be deployed in difficult environments. We have another system called Astria, which we were just celebrating. We had a major finance award from the U.S. Air Force about this product that we're deploying in Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.

2:17:31How much was that deal for? We like to ring the gong around here for big numbers. There we go. Hit it. How much was it? So 2 million. Boom. One more gong. We got one more. We got one more. Give it to us. The House of Representatives put in 10 million in the defense bill. There we go. Congratulations. I love to see it. We like to celebrate big contracts around here. What what what else are are you or defense tech companies or the United States government focused on in terms of actual deployment? I mean, there's been a lot of talk about, you know, the Ukraine war. It's been going on for a long time.

2:18:14Very sad. It's unfortunately become a serious business for many companies. There's also, Anderil announced a$1 billion deal with Australia. There's deals going on in Taiwan, obviously in the Middle East. Where else in the geopolitical realm should founders be thinking about understanding the nature of the changing warfighter and the changing battlefield and then building solutions for? If you're a defense tech company and you have an operator or aren't operating in Ukraine, that's going to be a problem. If you're investing in companies, if I'm going to be an investor in a defense tech company, my first question is, does your stuff work and has it worked in Ukraine in one of the most difficult environments on the planet right now?

2:19:04And that environment is going to make the first island chain, if we get into a conflict with the Chinese, look like a playground, by the way. And so we've been in Ukraine. We've been tested against the electronic warfare systems of the Russians. Ukrainians have asked us to come back. We're working on being able to do that. We were deployed in the Middle East during the 12-day war. We saw Shahid drones going back and forth between Israel and Iran. So we've been deployed there. Of course, the potential for geopolitical conflict in the Indo-Pacific is an important place where we're having conversations to be able to deploy against there.

2:19:44So we've been active. How quickly can you guys set up in a new region, right? Because like CENTCOM has been quieter, but feels like that could bubble up again at any point. Look, so our system deployed, you know, once it comes off the truck, we can put it up in about 15 minutes, right? And so doing that, but changing the flow within the U.S. government, Look, the value of a company like Chaos, when we have basically half a billion dollars in our bank account from all of our raises, is we're able to operate in these long sales cycles or potential changes within the federal government. And so part of us is just understanding where the threat is, making sure we're deploying.

2:20:33And one of the reasons we're kind of been a little bit more active in the public is that our stuff works. and we've been deployed and it's operating. We have a year of consistent deployment in really tough places. And so that's one of the things that's important for us. And we're going to go wherever the warfighter needs us. You're building a sensor. There are other companies building effectors. There are companies that want to integrate sensors and effectors. I'm thinking of Palantir. I'm thinking of Lattice from Anderil. Are those out-of-the-box integrations or those partnerships that you're talking to?

2:21:07You obviously are super close with a lot of those folks. What does building a product that integrates with everything else? Because I can't imagine that you're saying, oh, on day one, we want to be the only defense tech company. No, you're part of the ecosystem. You're building one solution. How do you think about integrating with the rest of the ecosystem? Part of this and what the U.S. government needs and wants is completing the kill chain. So you can sense and do the effector. And one of the areas, holy grail may be too strong of a word, but getting to an effector that's cheap or inexpensive is the word I should use.

2:21:45And so that integration is important. And so we've already demonstrated ability to integrate with our friends at Anderil. Look, Palmer and I go way back. When I was in Congress, I was talking about having a smart wall, right? And I get this phone call from some dude named Palmer Lucky. And I'm like, you know, he's like, I got your smart wall. And that began that began a relationship and helping those guys. Again, same with Palantir. Right. You know, I've seen Palantir for a really long time, even back to my days when when I was in the CIA. So our ability to integrate and work together and the unique thing about some of the technology that we're working on, this cutting edge stuff, is it actually can potentially be a force multiplier for other systems as well.

2:22:33And so the name of the game is to be able to integrate and make sure the command that we fit into the command and control infrastructure. And ultimately, our sensor can make every effector better. So this is exploring those areas as we explore the kill chain and all of our suite of products, making sure that, again, at the end of the day, we see farther. We see farther than everybody else, and we give that warfighter more time. And when you have more time, then you can decide, wait a minute, which tool in my toolkit do I want to use in order to deal with this threat? And the more time you have, the better it is.

2:23:11And when you have bombs dropping on your head or people shooting at you, even if it's five to ten more minutes, that's an eternity. And to be able to give that time back to the warfighters, what we're focused on. What's it like for people that are starting their career on the public sector side, whether it's intelligence or something like down at the border? Do they have a feeling that the tools are great? or are they still, or is the sense if you're actually, you know, the one needing to operate and use these tools that they can and should be a lot better? Look, it depends on which entity you're talking about.

2:23:54An organization like the CIA, which is geared towards helping the pointing end of the spear, whether that's the case offer that's collecting the information or the person doing a covert operation, there is a belief in that. You have entities like In-Q-Tel, which is focused on bringing in new technologies in to help the warfighter. When you look at some of the special forces units that are really good at adapting and making sure our boys and girls in those units have what it needs, but it's not uniform. and we always talk about how the procurement cycles of getting the right thing in the right hands matters and and here's where some uh startups that are that are vc bay based or coming out of silicon valley don't get wrong like we talk about these long cycles but guess what the stuff has to work out of the box when it comes to when it comes to getting in the hands of our of our military it has to work every time and and so the the training and evaluation matters And that's what adds to some of that time of getting those getting those equipment.

2:25:02And it has to work within our system. So I think if you talk to someone on the border or first in their in their early in their their career, they may be frustrated with the lack of some of the tools. But some of the problems is that that tool has to be, you know, be tested and it has to have the cybersecurity defend against the Chinese government. Talk to me about the path to program of record. You have this radar contract, more money coming from the house approval. The typical story that I hear from a lot of defense tech startups is they get a SBIR and then they sprint towards program of record.

2:25:41Obviously, over the long term, you want that durability of revenue that you can underwrite a massive manufacturing facility so you can be making this and improving it every year. what does the future of the company look like for you? Well, look, all those things are true, and we're far down. We've engaged with all of the branches on this. We're at certain levels of the buying process. It starts with a user wanting your thing. And if you have users wanting your thing, then it makes it a lot easier in order to connect the dots and get the money that you need, right? And so, look, I use the annual example when they did their first border technology.

2:26:26That was a$10 million appropriation in the budget, right, that led to one of their first program record. And so that's an example of how you get it. If you have a product that works, if you have a product that is doing something unique and you have a user wanting it, and you've demonstrated that capability in the difficult environments to operate, then guess what? Finding that path to program a record is not as difficult. And again, I'm not trying to act like it's easy. It's not. But being able to line up all of those things is something that we have experience with. Yes. Well, congratulations.

2:27:09Thanks so much for coming on the show. This was super fun. The chat loves you. The chat loves you. Everyone's going crazy. saying, Will Hurd's my dog. Yes. People are big fans. Thank you for joining. Thank you so much. Come back on when you have more news or if there's something in the world happening that you want to chat about. Would love to do that. Thanks, fellas. I really appreciate y 'all. We'll talk to you. Have a great weekend. Let me tell you about adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only adquick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe.

2:27:39We have our second in-person guest. Welcome to the stream. Looking good in the suit. Our second guest. Thank you. Thanks so much for joining. Oh, fantastic. We love hats here. I'm throwing it on. We got our second guest. Introduce yourself for the stream for those who don't know. $350 million man. Hello, how's it going? I'm Sam, co-founder and CEO of Numeral. Which you know, of course, because we have been partnered with Numeral for a number of months now. Kick us off with the news of the day. The news of the day is we raised$35 million on a$350 post. Congratulations. Do the honor. Take this. Hit that gong as hard as you want.

2:28:23Subtle, but firm. Not too hard. Coming off Series A from Benchmark as well. Was that earlier this year? Exactly. We did a Series A from Benchmark earlier this year, and so just following on there, you know, capitalizing on all the momentum. Who did the Series B? We did it with Mayfield. Mayfield. So classic fun got a classic fun got to keep it old school business for generations for decades We got to update Jordy's ad read for the probably the first 50 ad reads. He's a benchmark series Don't forget YC When did you do YC? We did YC beginning of 2023 Yeah, okay. I'm actually working with my old boss at Airbnb Gustav.

2:29:01So it was fun to get to work with him again Yeah, wait what uh When did you know you wanted to automate sales? Oh man, since in the womb actually I've been dreaming about it. You know, for me, I was similarly, as you guys, actually running e-commerce businesses. Still own a vitamin gummy shop. No way. 10 plus million a year. Amazing. And so. What is it about gummies that just sell better than any product? People love gummies. They don't want to. It's the best e-commerce business because, you know, you get that repeatability. It's easy to predict. You take two a day. And I think people don't like pills.

2:29:37Americans, we love sweets. We love candies. so little treat um that's great so you discover the problem through that business exactly so my co uh you know my co-founder there and i of the gummy business we were just dealing with um sales tax compliance for all we had to register in 40 plus states and so i was dealing with you know local parishes in louisiana and like on the phone with some women in west virginia and i got like an argument about penalty waivers and i'm like this is insane that i'm trying to spend my time on growth and marketing or product and things like that. And instead I was wasting like hours just dealing with, you know, the IRS compared to these States is like working with Apple or like Google or some like amazing company, like department of revenue, Alabama, like give them a call and it's insane.

2:30:22And so I think the thesis was you have, you've had these incumbent tools that have been around for 20 plus years. Um, the most famous one is this one called Avalara. And the problem with them is it's a, it's a kind of this very narrow tool and you have to spend hours and a month dealing with them. So you get physical mail from the States and then you have to figure out what to do with it, how to call the state. And they won't even pick up the, they're owned by private equity. So I don't even pick up the phone when you have an issue. So for us, it's, you know, we're not really trying to, you know, it's software, but we really, if you're a customer, you really want it to feel like service more than software because, you know, with AI, since we invented AGI, you know, we're using, we're using sales Sales tax AGI.

2:30:59Sales tax AGI, right? And so, no, well, yeah. With AI, you can deliver what feels more like a service. But, you know, fundamentally, it's still a software business. What was the fundraising process? Like, I want to know, just take the temperature of, like, you just went out and did a fundraising round. You talked to a lot of VCs. Were people trying to pull an AI story out of you? Was it Vibe Round, Excel Round? Like, what is the focus of Silicon Valley VCs right now since AI has become a tool that pretty much every company is pulling off the shelf? Just what was the vibe on the roadshow? That's a good question.

2:31:34I think, yeah, you have to, AI has to be, you know, front and center. Any friend that's, you know, is raising and not putting their front and center, it's hard to actually get a meeting or be taken seriously. My sense is, you know, it's starting to get maybe a little too far over the edge. I've seen some insane markups. say markups, like we intentionally actually took like a lower markup than we could have just because, you know, I just tend to run these things a little bit more incrementally and don't want to, you know, overextend yourself. I've seen, I've been in startups where we went a little too crazy and like, you know, it's easy, it's easy to kind of just, you have too much money, you spend too much.

2:32:10So, but, but yeah, it's, if you, if you, I think too, if you have like some good AI logos of companies you're working with. Oh, sure. I've been seeing some 100x, 200x multiples out there. It feels a little bit back. Just because they're working with a lab or something like that. Yeah, exactly. If you can close a lab, a couple labs, you're going crazy. I mean, in some cases, it's worth it, right? Look at Mercore, right? Because they're growing so fast. And that's their core business. That makes sense with Mercore. But yeah, if you're more of a software tool that could be used by any company, not directly indexed revenue-wise to the lab revenue, which is growing very fast, yeah, But yeah, it's a little bit of a just like, it's good.

2:32:46They're obviously cutting edge businesses. They probably select the best software. But it's definitely starting to get a little frothy. I'm not putting a ton of my own money into VC right now. Do you think that AI is changing any of the fundamental physics of the business models? We covered this story with Notion. Notion said they normally have 90 % gross margins. Now they have 80 % gross margins. But they're growing. And so it's mathing out. I feel like as we enter the SaaS-pocalypse where the legacy SaaS players aren't moving fast enough, and we see a new generation of companies come up, I'm wondering how much people should update on the actual foundational, is there something changing about the monopoly thesis, how companies accrue value, the margins, what the actual long-term cash flows will be.

2:33:33It feels very much like it's a big opportunity to build something new, get new customers on board, grow a big business. But it doesn't necessarily change the actual structure of the business. But what's your take? Yeah, I think each business is different. So, yeah, with the gross margins, even we've seen some compression because we're spending so much on running agents. And, yeah, we have, you know, if you have a state portal. So many people aren't willing to admit that. You ask them, they're like, it's actually a good thing if you're spending a lot on inference because it means you're actually using, you're not just saying you're - Well, a lot of people were also on credits for a long time.

2:34:08And so they were doing, or the credits were really discounted. But now we're in more of a stable inference cost,$4 per million tokens if you're doing something serious. Yeah, our AWS bill, I think, doubled relative to our revenue, right? So it's like our gross margins have actually compressed. Sure. But I think our product has gotten a lot better. and you know the hope is eventually over time you know these the inference costs go down the models get more efficient and so i think to me that's like a little neurotic to worry so i mean it depends who you are but to me that's like a neurotic thing to worry about like the short-term gross margins i think for me at least for my business where i'm excited is you know the services economy is like at least an order of magnitude larger than the than the software economy and so a lot of what we're starting to replace now is not really there's these legacy these software providers, but again, as you bigger companies, usually they don't even work directly with them.

2:35:00They'll hire an accounting firm to manage all the Laura or Vertex of these old school solutions. They're like, this, the software is so rough. I don't even want to hire somebody to hire that. I've literally been in that position trying to buy the competitor product years ago and, uh, and being like, it's expensive. And also I don't have the manpower to do it. So we'll just continue to just like file whenever we can. And it's very rough. It's all done in a spreadsheet. Yeah, I mean, we are the official. Do I have the real one? Yes. I got the tin here. The official tax provider of Lucy. My D2C nicotine product.

2:35:33They're going to get it right. We love Lucy. We are powered by Numeral. It's been a task. Yeah, and so it's interesting, right? So, for example, we filed taxes for someone this week in Tanzania, in Kenya. We're the only software provider on earth that's, I think, ever filed taxes in Tanzania. And so I think, let's go Tanzania. Hit the gong for Tanzania. There we go. You can send that to the office there. Yeah. Yeah. What you guys are scaling quickly. Yes. And it's a category that's like not. It's an interesting one because it feels like like investing in e-commerce infrastructure was at its hottest, like maybe like four or five years ago.

2:36:21Yeah. And so do you like that it's like a bit overlooked as a category? And like, where is most of the growth? Is most of the growth coming from like online retail companies or SaaS? Great question. What's that split? Yeah, so we started the business fully focused on e-commerce. That's where I was coming from. I mean, I'd worked at software businesses before. I was a PM at Airbnb. But we started just in e-com. And I think, yeah, that market's been really dry for, you know, people servicing the e-commerce space. space, like the software providing for that space, because the TAM is somewhat limited.

2:36:56E-commerce growth is something like 5 % year over year, which is tricky. This is a problem. Eventually, yeah, you saturate and then you're growing at 5 % and no VCs are giving you call. Exactly. Most of the good businesses I've seen being built are either bootstrapped or more like a venture light model, which makes sense just because the TAM is going to be more capped. More like an app in the Shopify app store, plug and play, do something minimal, scale it, but it's not really going to become like a public company. Exactly. I think we were the first company benchmark funded that's actually been servicing e-commerce merchants.

2:37:24And was that, do you think they had a sense of like this numeral, while it looks like a Shopify plugin or just like an e-commerce infrastructure tool, it's really going to be eating into the services revenue from these legacy tax like prep. I mean, it's so crazy with Lucy, like we did not rip out and replace to get a numeral. We went from nothing. And this was like a seven, eight-year-old business at the time. Yeah. And so, yeah. So, like, just to benchmark, like, our partner, Chathan, you know, when he was early in his career, he actually did an analysis on Avalara. You know, they were started in 2006, I think, Avalara.

2:38:00And so they were just going public or something. He's like, wow, this business should be amazing. And he checked back 10 years later and it was just being operated really poorly. That's why they had a, you know, private equity takeover because it wasn't, they weren't operating well. So I think he had seen this category and was, like, waiting for there to be someone to go and challenge. You know, we started fully e-commerce. Now, you know, it's a closer split. We have a lot more SaaS and e-commerce businesses, especially with our international service, with the only player in the space that can actually go and register and file in 60-plus countries.

2:38:32And so if you're... So like if you're making some consumer AI app and you're selling to users that are in Tanzania or something? Exactly, right. So Lucy's probably not selling a lot in Tanzania, but, you know, we have like these hot AI companies that, Like the one in Tanzania, they're like a year old, but they have, you know,$100 million of ARR. And so you have customers around the world. And, you know, your Stripe dashboard is blowing up with all these warnings. And people don't, you know, they get freaked out, but they don't want to do this. They just kind of kick the can for a long time. But, you know, sometimes you can, you know, do that and not get in trouble.

2:39:02But some places will just like, you know, you don't want to mess with those countries, right? You don't want to mess with Mexico. Like the authorities there. Yeah, it is a pretty new phenomenon that, I mean, there were a lot of apps, in the last boom of software that might be internationally distributed because of AWS and because of Google on day one, but they weren't necessarily taking money from individuals in that country on day one. It's more like there's ads that are being shown there, but the companies that are paying are in the United States or they're doing something else and they're just like, oh, we'll monetize it later.

2:39:39No, these companies that are doing new AI products or something like that, they're putting the credit card down in that local country on day one, and then you need to actually process that, right? Exactly. This round got leaked by R4Rock, right? Oh, yes, they did. What was that? Who do you think R4Rock is? What was the impact from that? Did that help? Was it helpful at all? Hard to know. Or was the round actually closed? The round had already closed by then, so it didn't really matter. But, you know, it was a little bit low on our revenue, so I did retweets. Oh, yeah, you were annoyed because they clocked the revenue too low.

2:40:13They clocked the revenue. Not like crazy amount low, but definitely seven figures low. Give me some credit. Yeah, I was like, come on. We have the most ARR of all the sales tax startups in the space and the most customers, the most money raised. And so you always want to be a little bit cocky there because it's hard to know. Yeah, what are you projecting out a few years? What do you think happens to the category? Can the category support a number of players? Do you think some of these venture-backed competitors will just end up being like a decent little business? Good question. Or do you think, I mean, there's a bunch of, you know, massive, massive, you know, tax prep, you know, big, big consulting.

2:40:55Yeah. So maybe it can support multiple billion dollar players. So when you look in the public markets, right, you have companies like Avalara who is taking, you know, they're going to go public again next year. People are saying like 1.1, 1.2 billion of revenue. Thomson Reuters has a subdivision doing indirect tax called OneSource. Secretly a billion dollars of revenue, supposedly. It's a thing nobody's looked at. It's like a plug-in to SAP and Oracle. The tool looks insane, like it's built in the 1970s. But if you're IBM or whoever, you might be using it. There's another one, Vertex Inc, founded in the 1970s, another public company, sales tax software.

2:41:38You know, it's companies like DoorDash still rely on Vertex and they rack physical service in San Francisco. No way. To get the right tax rate. I think they updated with like a CD-ROM. Whoa. The rates get updated. So are you, how much time are you spending, how much time are you spending like basically doing these like much bigger high level partnership stuff where you're going to these sort of scaled software companies and saying like, look, the way you're doing this is insane. Yeah. It's going to take time to switch over, but like there's a better way. Is that where you're spending a lot of time?

2:42:05Yeah, so we started more in the kind of SMB, e-commerce space. Yeah, just starting up a new product. And so that's where a lot of our early traction's been. Now we're starting to have conversations and starting to sign customers with hundreds of millions of revenue, work with a customer of you guys, Ate Sleep, right? There you go. That's another unicorn. And so we're starting to work with bigger and bigger businesses. Still really focused, though, on software, kind of startups and direct-to-consumer businesses. We haven't gone and started talking with legacy businesses a lot. That's working with accounting firms and things like the big four.

2:42:39It just takes a long time. And we've obviously had some of those conversations, but it's just not our focus. What's the ladder for signing bigger and bigger customers? Do you have a rule of thumb like never jump more than one order of magnitude? If you have a company that's doing$100 million in sales, you feel like, yeah, we could probably do a company with$800 million in sales. But if a company with$8 billion showed up tomorrow, that's going to be after we sign the$800 million contract? What do you think? Yeah, good question. I think, yeah, order of magnitude seems high. You know, you try to go a little bit conservatively, right, because we are running their tax engine, and, you know, you want to make sure that doesn't go down and lots of money on the line.

2:43:16So we try to have it, yeah, like 4X, roughly. 4X, double, 4X, just kind of ladder up. Or you scale up with folks. We've never had, like, an issue with outages and stuff. I think, you know, in 2025, it's not that hard to scale your servers and these type of things. But we do a lot of hype marketing, but we're still very conservative with the way we run our product just because it is a compliance product. And so we'll make a lot of noise. But when it actually comes down to the details, you've got to be pretty uptight about it. Is it tricky to use AI in a compliance context? What kind of guardrails do you have to put on the LLMs that are doing work?

2:43:55I can imagine a bunch of places where it's fine to have non-deterministic, you know, just data ingest or, you know, something where there's a human in the loop. But where have you shied away from putting it in place? Yeah, where we think about it is like there's still usually a human that does the last mile. So I'll give you a couple examples. Like one is we read for clients and you get physical mail from every state and country. And you'll get like a stack every month. And it's exhausting to have to read through all this physical mail. So we get it, we scan it, and we have AI take a first pass reading it.

2:44:26And most of the mail, the AI, you know, it's like, this is like. If you can take physical mail that is going to somebody, like the amount that I would, I actually should find a personal service. Like I never want to get mail like at my house, like ever. I used a service years ago. I have a scanning for like first company. You send all your mail there, they scan it, and then you get like an email inbox basically. Obviously, that's way better now with modern AI. And I can imagine that'd be part of the workflow. Well, it's like you get a letter from California or someone. It's like, oh, sometimes you get a little, like I get a little, you know.

2:44:57Like Joel. Like Joel of stress, right? Cortisol. That's the word I was looking for. You read my mind, yeah. You get a little cortisol from the IRS or whoever it is. But, you know, half the time it's like we got one last week for a client. It was, you know, breast pumps in California are tax exempt for the next three months. And like Lucy probably got this letter. And so you got the stress for nothing. But then sometimes it is maybe a letter, hey, there's a lien on your business. There's a big issue here. And so anything that requires human intervention, we have a mail team of six people that literally will go.

2:45:26They open up the – they'll read the letters. And they'll go and actually handle the last mile compliance. Similarly, on the tax research side, how do you know that Juneau – I'm making this up. Juneau, Alaska has a four-cent soda can tax law. Often it gets passed in some city council notes. And so the way these legacy providers do it is they have hundreds of lawyers and researchers just reading this stuff by hand. And like we asked, we hired some, we have a couple of lawyers on staff. We asked him like, how would you figure out the taxability of, I think it was like bagels in California. And he's like going on the California, it was like control F, bread, bagel.

2:46:00Like it didn't work. Okay. Baked goods finally worked. And so this is like such an obvious thing where AI is able to go and do that first pass of like, we put in bagels, a category. Okay. It finds all the baked goods. It makes a burst best first guess. But any single piece of tax research, it's not even that we have like one human lawyer look after. we actually have to have two legal opinions on any single fact. But it really makes them like 100x lawyers. So all the busy work they were wasting their time doing, they don't have to spend time. And then the things that are really complex that requires going through, you know, huge adjudications and things like this, they can really use their legal minds for.

2:46:31Are you writing scrapers yet to scrape every local law that's passed? And at least pipeline that in to say, hey, maybe we still need a lawyer to look at this, but like we noticed that something changed. Exactly. That's 100 % what we're doing, right? Right, so yeah, we have a lot of like, we have a tax research group, and yeah, that's where a lot of the fun work is getting done. This is the real AI research that we need. This is important. How are you thinking of scaling headcount? This feels like a business where, obviously, you probably will grow the team quite a bit post B, but it feels like the kind of business that you should be, like, you know, not like running in the red for 12 years in a row.

2:47:10Like, you can probably start to make, like, real profit. Yeah, hopefully. Yeah, so I mean, even like our raise, where I kept 10 % dilution, I could have raised like a bigger, louder round. But I think for us, you know, I've seen excess before and like excess hiring. So, you know, we don't have, so we started the year 25 folks. We're up to 65. That's great. But, you know, we, but we, but even that, like everyone, it always feels like tight, you know, there's no office manager, nothing like that. I was plunging the toys yesterday. We'll post some footage. Someone got of me. So I think, yeah. So I think the point is, though, I think we always try to run these things as lean as possible.

2:47:48I think still the hardest area to scale exponentially or like that tends to scale more linearly is your go-to-market sales team. It's just, you know, we have some self-service stuff we're building out. But I just think in general, AI has not replaced salespeople. It's still a very human endeavor. And so that's probably we and that and obviously I can eat steak, play a round of golf. Not yet. It's going to stay that way. We're getting there. You should cap off the show with us. Let's check the timeline and see if there's any breaking news before the weekend. Usually these companies wait until the second they see we go off the air.

2:48:24And then they publish a bunch of news. The big news that we haven't covered yet is NVIDIA did one of those zombie acquisitions. They bought this company in Fabrica. And they paid$900 million. They hired the CEO. And they licensed the startup's technology. The CEO is Roshan Sankar, the guy behind Broadcom's AVGO. Tomahawk switches. So NVIDIA is now getting into the app. This is some clear chat. Yes, yes, yes. NVIDIA isn't just buying talent. They're locking down the AI data center's networking backbone. Well, congrats. Dylan Patel is an early investor in South Africa. Somebody should make an AI text blocker for your browser so that it detects chat GPT-generated content.

2:49:05It does feel like it's pretty detectable at this point. But for some reason, it's not. What else is going on in here? Oh, JP Morgan put out a report on NVIDIA's investment in Intel. NVIDIA put$5 billion in, marked up the U.S. taxpayer, marked up Leopold Ochenbrenner. Let's hear it. Let's hear it for Leopold and the U.S. taxpayer. Fantastic. but JP Morgan's analysis said more value will be seen accruing to NVIDIA in the Intel collaboration there's still no commitment to Intel Foundry so Intel's still going around trying to get enough of those customers to justify their next big fab NVIDIA is is going to benefit a bunch from this so even though it's just interesting because there was one framing of this story which was like Nvidia is making this investment as like an olive branch.

2:49:58They just have$60 billion sitting around. They're going to throw$5 billion into Intel, maybe just because they think the stock will go up or maybe they'll basically give$5 billion away as an olive branch to support this American chip manufacturer. And then they'll trade something and they'll be able to sell into China or something like that. Well, no, J.B. Morgan's here saying that, yeah, Nvidia is actually going to get a lot of value out of this deal, which is kind of... Yeah, or they just, right day after the announcement, they just nuke the chart and mark itself. We've got a post here from Nat Eliason, who I saw in the chat earlier.

2:50:31It's just the reason you can so easily pull all-nighters in college is because you're supposed to be having kids at that age. 25 ,000 likes. That is a true gigabanger. You don't see that very often. Tyler, do you think that DeepMind solved Navier Stokes? You see this post from Google DeepMind. we're announcing a major advance in the study of fluid dynamics with AI. And then they put the water emoji in a joint paper with researchers from Brown University, NYU, and Stanford. They're announcing an announcement. They haven't actually announced this. What do you think? Are you familiar with this problem?

2:51:10Can you explain the significance of Navier-Stokes? Because Sam here says, don't tell me they figured out Navier-Stokes. I don't know that I can do a really good explanation, but I did see in the comments, It's like I'm pretty like 90 % sure it's not. It's not that. It's like some random math problem. Okay. Well. Not that interesting. So. Well, still, let's hear it for random math problems. We want to solve all the math problems. Come on. Let's do it. We also have some news in the chat. Netflix is trying to buy Warner Brothers Discovery. We thought. Wait. Oh, no. Ellison was bidding. No way. Netflix might be trying to bid.

2:51:44This is from Puck News. Thank you to Raghav for sharing that news. Hopefully you guys don't figure out that we'll read basically anything you put in the chat because you could put some crazy fake news in there if you wanted to. We talked about it. Paramount's up another almost 6 % today, 40 % over the last month. We have one last ad. Read GetBezel.com. Your bezel concierge is available now to source you. Any watch on the planet, seriously, any watch. You've got a Series B, you've got to pick something up at GetBezel. Yeah, you deserve a little treat. And we'll close with this question. How long is, this guy messaged me to, quote, hop on a quick call.

2:52:24How long are those supposed to typically last? Somebody asked you for a quick call. How long do you think that lasts? I mean, it's supposed to be 15, but it always ends up being 30. 15 to 30. Well, ChatGPT says a quick call can last anywhere from five minutes to two to four months. Some quick calls have even been going on since the early 1900s, with ancestors continuing the conversation to loop in key stakeholders and ensure cross-generational synergies with a warm handoff. But this would be a lot easier to explain over voice mode. Do you have five minutes to hop on a call? This is clearly Photoshop, but absolutely hilarious.

2:53:02Hilarious. I wasn't familiar. He has access to, is the ChatGPT5 Instant a real feature? I don't have that. Mine just says ChatGPT5 usually when I go to ChatGPT5. Auto? Yeah, he's getting access to Instant. This seems like some new feature. I don't know if it's all Photoshop, but it's clearly a very clever Photoshop. You guys should hop on a quick call with the weekend. With the weekend. Thank you for hanging out with us. Thank you for joining, Sam. Thank you. It's been an honor to have you, and the progress is tremendous. And everybody in the chat, everybody listening, have a fantastic weekend.

2:53:34We love you. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you. Thank you. Sales tax AGI.