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[Music] [Music] Today is Tuesday, August 19th, 2025.
5:02
We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. >> I'm good.
5:09
I need to finish tying my shoes. I >> Great.
5:12
Take all the time you need. We got three hours. >> We have three hours.
5:16
>> And knowing us, we really have more like three and a half.
5:17
I really the countdown was literally down to two seconds and I couldn't I couldn't get my last shoe tied.
5:25
Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in today.
5:27
We have a great show for you today.
5:29
Uh Chamath Polyapatia is the current thing and that's where we're starting our show.
5:35
Chimath is back with a spa focused on defense tech, AI, DeFi.
5:38
We're not exactly sure what he's what the target is.
5:43
>> He's got options, >> but it's big. It's big news.
5:44
It's big news and it's burning up the timeline and there's a lot of a lot of coverage and a lot of history here to talk about.
5:51
So, we want to take you through the history of Chimamoth.
5:52
Uh look at what happened last time he was big in spaxs. He did 10 of them.
5:56
There's a whole whole wide range of performance.
5:59
Uh kind of a narrative violation that everyone thinks they all went to zero.
6:03
There was one so far that did very well.
6:04
Um >> size gong for the pure number of spaxs.
6:09
>> 10 spaxs that is that is huge.
6:09
Uh it's actually not as big as some of the stuff that was going on in the uh in the dotcom boom.
6:14
I know a guy from Pasadena who I believe took a hundred companies public during the uh do boom. >> 100 companies. That's some big numbers. >> Big numbers. >> Incredible.
6:28
>> Uh and if you're dealing with big numbers, you got to get on ramp. com. Time is money. Say both. Easy to use.
6:32
Corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
6:37
>> So we put up the post. Breaking news. The spa king is back.
6:38
Chamath Polyapatia Polyhapatia buys a new $250 million spa American Exceptionalism Acquisition.
6:49
>> Uname to not like this name. >> It's a great name. It's a great name.
6:53
Um, previously the uh I mean he's pronounce it though.
6:57
>> He's always How do you pronounce >> aa >> Exa? I don't know.
7:00
Um, he's always been good with the names.
7:02
I I liked he he you know the the spa is not a new thing.
7:07
People think Chimath invented the spack. He didn't.
7:10
Uh it was being used in the '9s. >> Okay.
7:13
I don't know if anybody thinks he invented it.
7:16
>> He certainly everyone everyone thinks he invented it, Jordy.
7:18
Literally everyone thinks he invented it.
7:21
>> No one thinks anyone else invented it. Uh no.
7:23
Uh it was used in the 90s. Yeah.
7:25
Uh, also, um, the company that, uh, that created Cyberpunk and The Witcher, CD Project Red, went, uh, went public via Spack, I think in like the mid 2000s, something like that.
7:38
Anyway, we'll we'll we'll get into some of some of the lore, whether you're watching on YouTube, whether you're watching on X.
7:44
Thank you to all the folks in the chat.
7:45
We This is only possible because of Reream.
7:48
One liveream, 30 plus destinations.
7:51
Multistire reach your audience wherever they are.
7:52
So, thank you to Reream for making this possible.
7:54
Thank you for John Xley for being in the chat.
7:56
Thank you to >> Where was John yesterday?
8:00
>> Yeah, that's a big question.
8:00
John, you got some questions to answer. You got some questions. Everyone was wondering.
8:06
>> Um, so we're going through Chamath Polyhapatia's uh uh Spaxs and the Financial Times had one of the most insane articles I've ever seen.
8:14
I I didn't realize they looked like >> they had this dog in them.
8:19
I didn't realize that they could post like this.
8:22
This is one of the craziest.
8:23
>> Yeah, it felt like it should have been in the timeline.
8:25
>> Now it's in Alphaville, which is one of their like blogs.
8:26
Um, but it says Tamath's new letter to spack investors.
8:32
Yeah, >> the writer's name >> Robin Wigglesworth. >> Wigglesworth.
8:36
>> So Wigglesworth is >> coming for coming for uh Robin is coming for >> uh what ex American exceptionalism looks like in 2025.
8:48
Yesterday they this is this is a rough article already.
8:51
Yesterday misadventure capitalist Chimath Polyapatia filed a prospectus for a new $250 million special act special purpose acquisition vehicle.
9:01
You can read the full S1 filing for American Exceptionalism Acquisition Corp.
9:06
Here in case you're interested here are some expert excerpts from the accompanying letter written by Polyhapatia to his company's friends and supporters presented without written comment.
9:16
And you will see that they put images in here.
9:17
Uh quote from >> pull up this uh pull up the screen here.
9:22
>> You got to pull up the screen because the whole bit is the images.
9:23
When I first raised when I raised my first spack in 2017, people think of the the spack era as 2022 2021.
9:31
It actually started in 2017 with Chimoth.
9:34
Uh the first spa raised in 2017 went out in 2019.
9:37
Um I wanted to help correct an increasingly unstable balance between the pro the private and public markets.
9:44
Uh while spaxs are not the solution to every issue in the IPO process, I continue to believe they have an important piece to play in capital formation, especially now, uh we believe that retail investors should only participate if a this investment is a small part of an otherwise diversified portfolio.
10:01
B this investment is a quantum of capital they can afford to completely lose.
10:05
And C, if they do lose their entire capital, they will embody the adage from President Trump that there can be no crying in the casino.
10:14
Um, >> and his first ever spa, >> yes.
10:17
>> Uh, was the one that IPO IPOA merged with Virgin Galactic. >> Yes.
10:24
>> And is down 98 and a half%. >> Yes.
10:27
So, I mean, back to the naming thing, phenomenal work naming these these spacks.
10:32
IPO A, IPOB, IPO C, IPO D.
10:37
Then he did a run of of biotech spacks that were called DNA, DNA B, DNA.
10:40
Uh, and I I I I thought that, you know, at one point he was going to go through the entire alphabet and do IPOZ.
10:48
Um, but basically from 2019 to 2023, Chimath did 10 Spack deals.
10:55
Four of those were liquidated, which sounds a lot more dramatic than it is.
11:00
Um when a spa gets liquidated uh the investors just get their money back because no target company is selected for acquisition.
11:07
So the way a spa works um Chimath promoter a spack promoter goes out to the market and says I'm going to buy a company.
11:14
I don't have them lined up yet.
11:18
You're going to give me $250 million.
11:19
We're going to put that in a bank account.
11:22
>> So it's ready to deploy. >> It's ready to deploy.
11:24
We're going to put $250 million in this bank account.
11:27
You're going to earn uh T-bell's interest on it.
11:28
Um, but if we don't select something, we can't get a deal done, we can't find a good company that we like, you will just get your money back.
11:35
And so, um, there's there there's there's like there's low risk that like you just lose the money.
11:40
And so, the liquidations, four of them, they just didn't find, uh, they didn't find homes, they didn't find targets, and so those investors got their money back.
11:46
Um, now, of the six spacks that were successful, they didn't get liquidated.
11:52
They did dispack, meaning they acquired a company and then changed their ticker to re to represent Virgin Galactic or SoFi.
11:58
Uh, only one of the six is currently sitting at a higher price than what it went out at.
12:05
SoFi, the lending company, Spacked at $10 a share and now sits around $23 a share. Not bad.
12:11
>> Um, the other five stacks Spaxs did very poorly and this is why the timeline is in turmoil over there.
12:16
>> Yeah, it's it's um, so uh, Virgin >> Virgin Galactic's down 99%.
12:20
But but look at the history here. So >> yeah, please.
12:25
>> The stock peaked on June 25th, 2021 at $1,118 a share. >> No way. >> Down to $2. 94.
12:34
>> Well, so that 1,000 is they did a they did a uh a stock split. >> Oh, got it.
12:38
And so I mean they did a 20 for a 1 to20 reverse stock split to try and um because they were trading like a penny stock and so they they they they brought the price of the share back up but they reduced the number of shares significantly.
12:51
So it's not like it actually went out as a thousand stock.
12:54
It went out as a $10 stock um but then it it uh it it fell off.
12:57
And Virgin Galactic was always an interesting one.
13:01
It you it you easily could have put it in the bucket of serious entrepreneur.
13:06
Uh Richard Branson is a serious entrepreneur who's built big companies and is extremely successful and billionaire.
13:11
Um you you could have put it in the same category as Elon has SpaceX, very serious company with real revenues, huge huge share of the launch market, huge business with Starlink.
13:24
Bezos has Blue Origin, very serious business.
13:27
More in the space tourism category right now, but surprisingly making progress there.
13:31
Not a zero by any means, not a vanity project.
13:34
Um, and you would think Virgin Galactic, maybe the same thing could happen out, but they made bets on space planes that would fly up and they never really got a flywheel going that could really compound like Starlink, like just launch capability for the US.
13:51
>> If you go if you go on their website today, it's almost entirely renders. >> Yep. It's bad.
13:55
Um, so anyway, Virgin Galactic is down 98. 5% something like that.
14:01
Open Door was another one that went out.
14:03
This was a chimat spack down 64% but maybe there's a comeback.
14:07
Keith Ra boy came on the show and the retail army is working to uh make open door. We'll see.
14:12
Yeah, the the current CEO just stepped down.
14:15
So um there there is a catalyst there.
14:18
So who knows something could happen.
14:20
Um Clover Health is down 75%. A a is down 96%. Prokidney is down 75%.
14:26
So basically if you bought an index of Chimath's backs and held you're probably disappointed.
14:33
But Chimath, to his credit, is not advocating that you yolo into his deal.
14:37
He says straight up, no crying in the casino.
14:39
Probably the first time those words have ever appeared in >> Metro went out too, right?
14:45
>> Was that a traumat spock? Chamas Spock. Was that a spack?
14:51
Uh >> I I remember I remember a post saying uh it was Buffett had Geico. >> I have Metro. Yeah.
14:57
Uh but it it it was Metro Mile was >> I thought Metro Mile was so cool when I when I found out about it.
15:03
So the basic pitch for Metro Mile was like you pay uh auto insurance.
15:07
Uh the default is you just get auto insurance based on your car, who you are.
15:11
If you're, you know, uh if you're a young man who tends to get a lot of speeding tickets, you might have to pay a higher rate, especially if you're driving, say, a red sports car.
15:23
Um, but if you're, you know, someone who's who's hasn't got in an accident or hasn't gotten a speeding ticket in three decades, you'll probably pay a really low rate and of course it costs more to in to insure a a Lamborghini or a McLaren F1 than a uh Honda Civic.
15:36
Um, but most of the insurance, the current market for insurance will look at your odometer and see, okay, well, you the average American might drive 10,000 miles a year.
15:50
you're only driving $2,000 a 2,000 mi a year, the chance that you get into an accident or something happens to this car is is much less.
15:55
So, we'll give you a discount.
15:58
>> And so, they do verified odometer uh discounts.
16:00
Metro Miles pitch was, let's put a GPS tracker and a uh an accelerometer in the car, hook it up to the port on the car, and we can see if you're driving the car hard. Yeah. Yeah.
16:12
So, if we drive like if you drive like us, we're going to pay through the roof because we're going to be drifting and and uh and doing aggressive overtakes on >> I wonder how I wonder how I wonder how Tesla autopilot would do on Metro Mile because yesterday I was going to uh dinner with some friends.
16:28
They each uh friends of ours >> uh each have have matching uh Tesla wise >> and how did they is whose they should at least get a livery on one of them or something.
16:41
>> That's a good question.
16:41
Ryan Spencer, you know what to do.
16:43
Um, but uh they both set the cars on autopilot to drive from their office to dinner.
16:47
So, I was driving one of them.
16:49
The first Tesla takes it.
16:52
The autopilot is incredible except for this one tiny moment where there's a left turn, there's a stoplight.
16:59
the the Tesla takes a right turn into into this lane that's merging the other way and then realizes it made a mistake, but it was like there was already a separating kind of wall. >> Mhm.
17:12
>> And it and it takes this like horrifically illegal left turn, merging into traffic, still fully in autopilot.
17:20
And the other Tesla followed >> the other Tesla and made the same like >> extremely illegal left turn.
17:25
Uh so you could imagine >> at some points you know the the metro mile system is like actually we're loving this driver.
17:35
>> If you love automation and you want to stay legal get on Vant automate compliance manage risk improve trust continuously.
17:40
Vant trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process replaces it with continuous automation whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.
17:48
I like this post in the chat.
17:48
Trey P says should be cheaper to ensure a Lambo so it incentivizes success. That's a good take. >> That is a good take. >> That's a good take. Okay.
17:58
So, so Metro Mile um >> I don't know >> ends up getting acquired by Lemonade for the idea less than 10.
18:06
>> Oh, that's what happened 10 10% of what it's peaked at.
18:08
So, a dollar a share instead of 10.
18:10
So, >> something like that.
18:12
>> In general, people are saying, you know, the last batch of spaxs didn't do very well.
18:17
Uh the the uh past performance is indicative of future performance, which of course it is not.
18:23
And so, um, but Jamath is being pretty clear and I think the disclosures in this document are, uh, are >> to read the full to read the full obvious job saying like if you're putting no crying at the casino in your in your S1 like you are you are doing as much handholding as possible to tell people I am building a casino.
18:42
You can bet on me or you can bet against me.
18:44
All S1's, you know, have these lines in there where you read them and you're like, wait, >> you know, it sounds risk factor clearly outlining this >> and the best companies in the world will have a risk factor section.
18:57
In fact, they have they have one every time they file like Facebook, Google, Apple, they all have risk factors.
19:03
>> The line here is consequently we believe that this investment is most suitable for institutional investors and retail investors should approach with caution if at all.
19:10
We believe that retail investors should only participate if this investment is a small part of an otherwise diversified portfolio.
19:15
This investment is a quantum of capital they can afford to completely lose.
19:19
And if they lose their entire capital, they will embody the adage from President Trump that there can be no crying in the casino.
19:26
So >> y >> I read this this you know we have to wait and see you know does he does he you know end up merging with a company the core categories are energy production, AI, >> DeFi and defense.
19:38
So, a bunch of really hot categories.
19:41
You could see him doing something in nuclear.
19:43
You could see him >> um you could imagine him doing something with Grock, right?
19:47
You could imagine him, >> there's a variety of profitable DeFi companies that are now, according to the White House, operating legally.
19:54
A lot of them have beat various um lawsuits with the the SEC over the last couple years.
20:03
And then defense as well.
20:03
So, four very hot categories.
20:06
uh it will you know we you you kind of need to wait to um pass too much judgment until you understand what the target is.
20:15
But ultimately I see this as if you look at this product as an entertainment product for >> for stock enthusiasts or you look at it as as a as a as a kind of slot machine. >> Sure.
20:29
>> Personally, I plan to uh I plan to ride with with Chimoth.
20:34
>> Not financial advice, but I think it'll be entertaining. I think it'll be fun. >> Yes.
20:37
>> I'm It's uh it it's uh you know, think of think of it as like an expensive movie ticket. >> Yeah.
20:44
>> Uh interestingly, Scott Capor, who we've had on the show, former A16Z, now the director of Office of Personnel Management, um he uh quoted that FT article, put it on the timeline, and said, "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice."
20:58
So, I believe Scott will not be riding with Chimoth, but uh he'll he'll be taking the other side. Let's lay out.
21:05
>> Wait, do you know that quote >> what >> from uh former President George W. Bush?
21:10
He said there's an old saying in Tennessee.
21:12
I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee that says, "Fool me once, shame on, shame on you, >> fool me twice, fool me, you can't get fooled again."
21:23
And I think that says everything there is, you know, >> really say about this next.
21:28
I know that that's a that's a famous quote.
21:31
Uh and and obviously, you know, he was probably misspeaking, but was he hitting some deeper truth?
21:42
>> The last line is not to blame.
21:42
So the the true quote is, "Fool me once, shame on you.
21:47
Fool me twice, shame on me.
21:47
I shouldn't I need to take the blame because I shouldn't have been fooled by somebody who already fooled me."
21:51
But maybe the real lesson is if you have been fooled twice, just full stop.
21:55
You can't get fooled again.
21:57
Maybe that's actually better advice than saying, "Oh, then you need to take the blame on yourself." No.
22:04
If you get fooled twice, just never get fooled again.
22:06
It's a full-on skill issue at that point.
22:11
>> The exact line is, "Fool me, you can't get fooled again." >> Exactly.
22:14
That's actually better advice than placing blame after a multiple fooling incident.
22:20
>> You must just move on.
22:20
Anyway, the bull case for Chimoth.
22:22
He's probably learned a lot from his last goround. He stayed in the game.
22:27
He never stopped talking publicly on his podcast.
22:29
And there's probably another SoFi like company out there right now if you look hard enough.
22:34
So there is a chance >> he could buy a a fantastic business at a fair price and compound for decades. >> Yep.
22:42
>> That would be how that would be that would be if he you know that you can kind of >> uh you know >> think about the motivations here.
22:49
Like one like he's probably going to make a lot of money one way or another.
22:53
People could debate if if that's ethical or not, but ultimately >> it's not illegal.
22:58
Y >> So he's going to make a lot of money.
23:01
Part of this feels like a spite spack, right? >> Yeah.
23:04
You were highlighting different motivations. I I'll I'll rebut. >> Yeah.
23:08
So uh uh you know people you know here will know you know a spite business, right?
23:12
Like setting up a coffee shop next to your enemy and uh you know just competing with them.
23:16
Um, and then a spit's back is like, you know, people have been clowning him at pretty much daily for the the 2020 21 2021 era >> and just coming out and doing it again is is certainly a way to just like give him the middle finger.
23:32
Um and then um and then yeah, there's the sort of like last laugh play which is you know actually buy a a fantastic business and um uh he can't control if if if it turns into a meme stock, right?
23:46
Like people can pump it to whatever price. >> Yep.
23:51
>> But uh but but there is a good outcome here where where it's another um another SoFi and and he just buys a solid business and compounds um you know over many years. >> Yeah.
24:02
>> Yeah. I mean I so >> redemption the redemption spack >> the redemption spack is a good is a good narrative one more what I'm hoping for uh the flip side >> I I think it's just like >> he he has a business and he's developed a line of business and a set of of customers for his business which is he
24:23
matches institutional capital with companies that want to be public but can't go out via the traditional means and he's created this product And people look at it and they look at the last the last batch of product he shipped and say, "Okay, maybe it's not maybe it's not Diet Coke. Maybe it's RC Cola." But Maybe it's RC Cola."
24:39
But like he is in this business of of producing the product of a public company of a public stock ticker.
24:48
And there's there's an element of like if you keep doing that, maybe he can hone it, get better, or maybe it's just like it is what it is.
24:59
And for a certain for a certain investor who wants more of a casino type bet, this satisfies that.
25:05
>> Yeah, >> there's a note the the very end of not the very end.
25:08
There's a lot more fine print, but he says, "Importantly, to provide greater alignment with my investors, I have dramatically reshaped and restructured the sponsor's economics.
25:16
There will be no warrants.
25:19
Further, 100% of the sponsor's founder shares will vest only if the company resulting from our initial business combination achieves stock price appreciation milestone, ensuring the sponsor's founder shares only realize value if public shareholders realize value. Yep.
25:34
>> Specifically, the sponsors founder shares will only in only vest once the stock price of the company resulting from the initial business combination increases by at least 50% as further described below.
25:44
Please note that most spack sponsors receive a 20% promote that participates regardless of the company's stock price.
25:51
Our sponsor instead will receive a 30% promote that vest and realizes value once the combined company achieves a 50% premium to the IPO price.
26:00
And he gives a table uh below kind of outlining this.
26:04
>> I mean this was the major push back was that uh regardless of what the spa did, there were rumors that you know Chamath was walking away with $10 million or hundred million.
26:13
like the numbers seemed crazy.
26:14
Um, and it was almost like you take a banker's type fee for taking a company public, but then you're not incentivized for the long term.
26:22
So, you have this adverse selection problem where you're just trying to get companies that can just get through the process basically.
26:29
Uh, and it seems like he's working on solving that, which is good news.
26:32
Um, yeah, I do wonder like does that 50% gain need to be sustained for any meaningful amount of time?
26:39
Because if it's just like a a quick one-time pop, it unlocks everything, it crashes.
26:44
Like that could be uh that that could be not the full solution that the market or the critics are looking for.
26:53
Um and so um but it's good it's good just to see that like we're it seems like we're moving in the right direction where the where the the the compensation for doing this process for taking the company public uh is not entirely incentivized on on just getting the deal done um in general like so >> it's also it's also quite a bit smaller
27:15
than some of the other ones right >> I I I don't know what the other ones were >> if I remember they were there was at least a couple that were in the billions really because I I thought that these went out at $10 a share, $4 billion and I would be surprised if if there was 25%, you know, cash coming into the business. I thought most of them were like in the
27:34
I thought most of them were like in the few. >> Yes.
27:36
So, Virgin Galactic was 800 million. >> 800. Okay.
27:39
Yeah, that is significantly higher. You're right. >> Clover was 3. 7. >> Yep. >> Open Door 4. 8. SoFi 8. 6. >> Yep.
27:47
So we'll see where this one actually >> the bare case here is that uh the IPO window is wide open.
27:52
Uh so there's probably some sort of adverse selection among companies that can't use the traditional IPO pathway.
27:57
That being said, lots of people raise reasonable critiques of the current IPO process and it's not that crazy to have multiple options.
28:04
Investors should just work to value the underlying business of the spa company like any other investment.
28:08
Build a DCF people or maybe channel Charlie Munger and buy a wonderful company at a fair price.
28:15
And if you're interested in using a design tool from a now public company, go to figma. com.
28:19
Think bigger, build faster.
28:21
Figma helps design and development teams build great products together at >> so uh Buo Capital Bloke yesterday said with Chimath launching us back and Beni off buying every company not pinned down.
28:32
The only question is whether it's January or November of 2021.
28:37
And I said this is the question every group chat in tech is trying to answer right now.
28:40
People want to know when is the music going to stop? Is this time different? Do we have room to run?
28:47
>> There's so many posts about this in the timeline right now.
28:49
>> And yeah, that's the question here.
28:49
I mean, I have no idea when when um the new spa will actually get out. >> Yep.
28:57
>> Uh it seems very possible uh that it would be next year, but I'm sure there's quite a lot of companies that are actually interested in in partnering with uh with Chimoth on this regardless of what the timelines reaction has been. >> Yeah, totally.
29:12
Um, Wasteland Capital says quite significant sell-offs across the Ponzi verse today despite a flat S&P 500 and small caps being green.
29:21
People starting to eye the exit sign.
29:26
>> Scrooge McDuck says they're freeing up margin for that upcoming Chamoth back. >> Yeah.
29:33
>> Um, I had NBA commissioner.
29:33
I don't understand this meme.
29:36
>> The um I mean the original line was get ready to learn Chinese, buddy.
29:38
But >> why why was the context of that? to learn Chinese.
29:45
>> Was that because the NBA was doing some deal with China?
29:48
>> It's it's I had to look this up because I'm familiar with the meme, but then not the actual context, but uh it's a joke from the NBA community where washed players that aren't good enough to compete in the league anymore >> play in China to make a bit more.
30:00
>> But he didn't actually say this. That's just a meme. >> No, I I he said that. No way.
30:04
That's such a crazy thing for a head of a league to say.
30:09
Anyway, Jord's post is, "Get ready for the trough of disillusionment, buddy.
30:13
We have been tracking the gardener hype cycle, trying to see where we are in the cycle, and it feels depress.
30:21
We feel depressingly close to hitting the trough of disillusionment."
30:25
But then it will be our job to push us out of the trough of disillusionment.
30:30
And on >> can somebody confirm can somebody confirm if this is a real quote that >> chat, is this real?
30:36
Apparently, it was Adam Silver to Kyrie Irving, but Okay.
30:38
But it might it might just be a total meme. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
30:43
>> Um anyways, TripleNet Investor says, "Signs we're nearing the end of the cycle.
30:47
Chimoth announcing a spack. AI hype is greater than. com hype.
30:49
Meme stocks like Open Door Ripping. IPOs 2 to 3x in days.
30:53
BTC ETH near all-time highs.
30:57
Uh gold and housing all-time high.
31:00
Palunteer at 500 uh times price uh PE.
31:05
Uh, everyone talking about stocks and crypto.
31:08
>> Is everyone talking about crypto and stocks?
31:10
Like, I'm not seeing that that much. Certainly not.
31:13
>> Tyler, >> all 20 Ubers, ride with all of them.
31:14
See what kind of financial advice you get. >> Yeah.
31:19
And coate all the financial advice that you get.
31:22
>> Also, I think the original quote from Adam Silver was uh about like when they had like the China stuff.
31:26
So, it was get ready to learn Chinese, buddy. >> That's what Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
31:29
>> That's what Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. that would that that that so my my version of that get ready for the trough of disillusionment buddy because there was that report out of MIT uh >> uh yesterday that something like 95% of
31:43
companies uh that have tried to uh >> an MIT report says 95% of Genai pilots at companies are failing >> so that's a lot of ARR at various uh genai companies that probably will not actually be at least you know more like one-time revenue versus you know truly recurring. >> Yeah. I mean transfer transformation at >> Yeah.
32:05
I mean transfer transformation at big companies old companies is very very tricky very very tricky.
32:10
tricky very very tricky. I mean I I think that what we are going to see is the companies that make it through that are currently AAI companies or have AI on the landing page like that is all going to get tucked behind >> the the it's going to get tucked behind
32:26
the fold deeper into the product and you're just going to feel oh wow >> why I've generally been bearish onai domain names >> yeah like Google Docs >> want your >> Google Docs for years has let you upload a PDF and it will use OCR, optical character recognition to convert that into a text file. That is AI. Like the That is AI.
32:45
Like the they're literally using a neural network to to look at all the different characters and say that's a C, that's an R, that's a P.
32:56
And uh this is the original imageet.
32:59
Like that's what they're implementing. It's an AI product.
33:02
And yet it's not Google Docs AI.
33:06
It's just a feature that's great that people use and they don't even know it's AI.
33:11
And I think that o over time AI will be a wedge and it'll be a marketing strategy and then that will get competed away and you will win on the final value that the product delivers. >> Yeah.
33:21
>> Anyway, >> uh team, can you guys pull up this uh image in the chat?
33:24
I wanted to just pull up the because there's something you know when when you've when you've uh summited the peak of inflated expectations and you're headed to the trough of disillusionment you know what I love across the chasm and you can see the plateau of productivity and it is beautiful out there.
33:44
>> So don't worry it's going to be it's going to be it could be some dark times in the trough of disillusionment.
33:47
We might be dressed up as pigs eating from the trough for a few days.
33:51
We might be wearing raincoats.
33:53
Uh we might be we might be wearing hazmat suits depending on how bad things get in the trough of disillusionment, but we will not be disillusioned for very long.
34:01
It will be our job to speedrun the trough of disillusionment into the slope of enlightenment and toward the plateau of productivity.
34:11
>> It's going to be beautiful.
34:12
>> That will be that will be my goal.
34:14
>> There will be chaos to >> dig us out of the trough of disillusionment >> to climb out >> climb out rung by rung.
34:18
Uh anyway, um I like some of these uh there's a debate going on in the chat right now.
34:25
Trey P says, "Sleeper AI integration is co-pilot in Excel."
34:29
Raav says co-pilot in XL is garbage.
34:32
Let us know what you think.
34:35
Uh there are there are a bunch of companies that are doing this exact thing, trying to compete with C-Pilot and XL.
34:40
We've had a few founders on the show.
34:42
There's a company there was a new one yesterday, Paradigm.
34:43
um the journal really cool visualization showing all of the different cells working independently.
34:51
I I thought it did a good job of of expressing this idea that each cell could be its own LLM that's reasoning and then filling in the results as they stream in.
35:00
Like it had a very nice aesthetic to it.
35:02
Also, they I think they opened with a really cinematic shot.
35:05
Like as far as uh a launch video, I think it did a good job of of of bridging the gap between like it grabbed my attention.
35:12
There was some clear storytelling, some facts, but some good UI.
35:17
Like it did a good job there.
35:19
Um, so we might have the founder on at some point, but um, it is it is a knockout dragout fight.
35:22
And, uh, you know, will this play out like Slack and Teams where once Microsoft learns all the patterns that people like, Yeah.
35:34
they roll it out to their billion users or something like that for free.
35:37
And um or or maybe >> Dave Grampel in uh Grample in the X chat says there is opportunity in the disillusionment. Totally agree. >> Completely.
35:49
>> That is that is where when when the when the casuals, you know, pivot back to regular SAS and you stay focused on building agentic workflows.
35:59
>> That's going to separate the killers from uh the kids. >> Yep. >> The tourists.
36:03
>> Well, whatever you're building, you got to use graphite. dev.
36:07
Code review for the age of AI.
36:07
Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.
36:10
And there's an announcement from Graphite today.
36:12
Um, you put it in the chat.
36:15
Graphite chat is now live. Go check it out.
36:18
This is from Mel Lutzky who's been on the show.
36:21
The request is now where you build not where you wait.
36:25
Welcome to the new standard for code review. So check it out.
36:30
>> Will Manitis has a new coinage casino culture.
36:32
He says, "Sports betting, escoins, meme stocks, vibe coding, 100 million in 6 hours, etc.
36:37
are all expressions of the same deep cultural rot.
36:41
If youth don't believe there's legitimate ways to get rich through work, all of culture will become a rotten sports book for the soul."
36:48
>> Sports book for the soul is a good coinage. >> Sad sad take.
36:50
I think um I it's it's real, but at the same time, it's hard for me to be bearish because we've interviewed hundreds of people this year that are all working.
37:05
>> Um I I guess I can't say all, but >> it's the underass meme.
37:07
It's the get your bag meme.
37:09
It it it's this idea and it all a lot of it stems from the singular some the singularitarians.
37:13
this idea that something is coming that will completely upend.
37:18
You'll be permanently in the in the underclass.
37:20
The world will change so fast that you cannot possibly predict what to do, what to build, what to compound for 30 years where that was very clearly not on Warren Buffett's mind.
37:32
He was just like, I like reading the newspaper and buying stocks and so I'm going to do that every day.
37:36
And he made what 90% 99% of his wealth came from the age like 65 to 95.
37:41
from the age like 65 to 95. like he was not really that rich >> compound compounding world >> at retirement age like that is crazy and no one's willing to wait that long everyone is like I have to do something now and then they and they wind up burning their relationships and burning their reputations there's so many short-sighted uh deals
38:01
>> also you know you know there's plenty of examples of people that have uh generated tremendous wealth through getting heavily invested in in crypto early >> uh but at the same time I I know a number of people that have that got so sucked into that world >> and didn't develop, you know, basically spent five years like not progressing their career, not developing more skills. Yep. Yep.
38:25
>> And then they're stuck in this kind of vicious cycle of feeling like, well, I kind of ignored my career for half a decade and now I just have to keep hyper gambling to like try to get out of this mess.
38:36
>> Should we talk about the bonsai tree?
38:39
>> I think it's okay to talk about on the stream, right?
38:40
Um, we we we've added some decor to the the table. This fake plant. Uh, which is lovely.
38:45
Thank you to the production team for putting this on the table.
38:49
>> So, whenever we need to touch grass. >> Yeah.
38:51
Oh, this is the Oh, this is that this is the grass that we touch, but it's not real grass.
38:54
>> We're working on getting real grass.
38:56
>> Uh, we were working on getting real grass.
38:57
Um, but uh we had an idea last night as we were as we were chatting for uh a future merch drop.
39:03
And one of the ideas that we came up with was a a bonsai tree that we will send to you that will have the the TBPN logo on it and you can tend it throughout your entire career. Yes.
39:17
>> If you ever wanted a bonsai that with a livery >> with livery presented by ramp. >> Yeah. Yes.
39:21
Um get ready for the the TVPN bonsai.
39:25
But I do think that we should get a bonsai tree and put it on here and tend to it over the next 50 years as we grow the show.
39:31
And it will be a beautiful reminder of of the of of what we're growing and the idea of of working for a really long time, having long time horizons.
39:40
Uh underestimating what can be done in a decade is the is the goal.
39:43
You underestimate how big a bonsai can get in a decade. >> Yeah.
39:48
think thinking about it, you know, starting here small and then and then the time lapse of every show of you're watching DVD >> and it's a little bit bigger and then we're pruning it, just trimming it and just tending to it and we become bonsai experts and you'll be able to follow along at home because we will be be sending >> and the alpha in life is finding the bonsai tree of your career, right?
40:08
Finding the thing >> and you probably, you know, where you don't see a lot of bonsai trees, the casino. >> That's right. >> No, >> you never do. >> A lot of ashtrays. >> You never do.
40:16
Well, Wasteland Capital is back with another post.
40:18
Uh, they're sharing Kathy Wood took in record inflows of 3.
40:22
7 billion last week, >> including 2.
40:26
8 billion into ARC, uh, which uh, quote, record-breaking single day halts 2021 quote burning hot.
40:33
Is this bullish or bearish?
40:37
Um, and there's a a snapshot here.
40:40
After years of outflows and underperformance, Kathy Woods ARC ETFs are burning hot, pulling in massive capital.
40:46
The firm's 13 US listed ETFs have gathered 3.
40:49
7 billion in AUM over the past week.
40:52
Led by record-breaking single day halls, the flagship Arc Innovation ETF led the charge, raking in a record 1.
40:59
1 billion on Monday and an even larger 1. 4 billion on Tuesday.
41:03
This was last week, which marks the biggest single day inflow since 2021.
41:08
ARK defines disruptive innovation as the introduction of a technology enabled new product or service that potentially changes the way the world works.
41:17
This was followed by ARC next generation internet ETF ARCW which saw its largest ever single day hall with uh $349 million on Tuesday.
41:30
>> This is a lot of money.
41:30
I mean, we were talking about the Chimath Spock is SP.
41:35
[Music] >> I mean, as Chamath spa, Chimoth Spack, Chimoth Spock.
41:42
>> Anyway, the Spack that was $250 million.
41:45
This is just one of the ETFs pulling in $350 million, $100 million more just on a Tuesday.
41:51
Um, but it's a reasonable thesis.
41:53
Disruptive innovation is important.
41:55
Internet companies continue to be outperforming assets.
41:57
If she's in the right thing, it should be okay.
41:59
Um I do wonder um the the you know back to that question of like is it January, is it fe is it November or whatever.
42:08
It's like I'm trying to remember in January if people were acting like this and calling everything out.
42:16
I think people were I think people were were were dunking on the timeline like all throughout 2021 when things were ripping.
42:23
It wasn't it wasn't until um I think Keith Ra boy like truly called the top and he was kind of like he was kind of >> Yeah, it was Keith.
42:31
It was Keith in November. He had this post.
42:32
Tyler, can you actually try to find that post? It was Keith Ra boy.
42:38
>> Yeah, >> it was November 2021. >> Yep.
42:42
>> Uh I think later >> he called it like to the day. It's crazy.
42:45
And what I was reflecting on that and like the crazy thing is that like >> he's basically a long only investor.
42:51
Like he has no incentive to call the top, right?
42:53
Yeah, like it would Michael Bur is calling tops all day long because he is a short investor and he takes really short positions.
43:01
So I've seen over the past like 5 years like headlines that are like the investor that called the mortgage bubble just went just sold everything just went giga short this and and he's been wrong like a few times.
43:13
I think he's probably been fine in most of the cases, but like you know in general like I I I expect to hear a top call from Michael Bur or even just like a long short head can't they don't have a way to express that in the markets.
43:28
It's really just >> I mean the way to express that is hey let's not do this series B with a million dollars of revenue. >> Yeah.
43:34
Let's pull back out of 400 you know times. >> Yeah.
43:37
This this Jason Calakanis post is so so funny because it's Traumath of course is his is his co-host on the All-In podcast and Jason says and here we go and posts the the the spack screenshot next to the Joker meme. here. We >> It It is.
43:57
It re It really It really is a bullcase for them truly being besties because uh posting a joke >> I'd love to poke fun.
44:06
>> Posting a Joker meme about your co-host is hilarious. Hilarious. Hilarious.
44:10
Anyway, uh if you want to dump a bunch of spack data into a database and start running an analysis on it, do it on Julius.
44:16
What analysis do you want to run?
44:19
Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds.
44:21
You can ask Julius to analyze your data.
44:23
They're loved by over two million users and trusted by individuals at Princeton, BCG, and Zapier. >> That is right.
44:32
>> And so we already we already touched on the casino thing a bunch.
44:34
Uh in other news, SoftBank is is is uh doing the meme as you put it.
44:39
Uh the unicorn up and to the right, just absolute uh exponential growth in the uh that was the stock price of SoftBank.
44:48
Soft Bank is going to make a $2 billion investment in Intel, too.
44:53
And say what you want about Masa, he's good at semiconductor investing because he got into ARM and that was how he made his what second hundred billion dollar return.
45:02
The first one was on Alibaba and then his second one came from ARM.
45:07
Um and so who knows you get MASA, you get Donald Trump with a 10% stake, you get a couple more people and Lip Bhutan could be in a good >> Yeah, Soft Bank is down 7 and a half% today, but year to date it is up 83%.
45:22
>> 83% and it's big company. big company.
45:24
So, uh, they announced they're signing a definitive securities purchase agreement under which SoftBank will make a$ two billion dollar investment in Intel common stock.
45:32
I think this is good for Intel.
45:35
I was debating this like why does Intel need Trump?
45:38
Why does Intel need SoftBank?
45:40
Uh, is the cure for Intel really different shareholders?
45:42
And I think potentially yes.
45:45
It's it's it's almost like a take private if you get someone who is in it for the long term and can buckle up for a couple awkward quarters as Li Bhutan makes some crazy cuts because if he cuts as much as we think he's going to cut, you could see revenue fall.
46:01
Um because that's just a function of cutting a bunch of stuff and things might break, deals might might fall through before you can set yourself up for the next era of actual going back into growth.
46:12
And so you need you need shareholders that aren't going to panic and sell and put you put your stock in like the absolute dumpster.
46:19
So >> So the NASDAQ peaked uh the local top was November 19th of 2021. >> November 19th. Okay.
46:29
>> On November 19th, Art Levy for CNBC's tech editor said asked >> Art Levy isn't he at Brex. >> Ari, sorry, Ari. >> Ari Levy. Okay. >> Art Levy is at B.
46:38
Um but Ari says uh they have this exchange Ari says amazing to see how many experts on crypto and tech valuations are also experts on inflation.
46:48
And Keith says to be fair valuations and inflation are directly connected.
46:52
Ari says but didn't we have an explosion in valuations over the past decade despite minimal inflation until now.
46:58
Keith says this is also what crashed the internet bubble FYI.
47:03
And Ari says ah so are you calling the top? And Keith just says yes. >> Yes. >> And uh >> insane. Insane. >> Yeah.
47:13
Literally to the day he called it. >> To the day.
47:16
>> Now, do you think he called it or do you think he triggered it?
47:18
Like do you think that I mean he's like a very important person in tech and politics and business like he's someone that is respected and like people look to him in many ways and uh and that echoes through the economy.
47:32
like there like there aren't many other people who like have more weight in the economy.
47:38
It's like Warren Buffett and like there are other people that are bigger, but Keith is definitely in the in the top you know like what decile cortile I don't know he's in the top hundred people that are like financial influencers in one way or another like people and and also he doesn't say that much.
47:55
He he's not constantly saying, "Oh, next week I think it's going to be we're going to be green, you know, he's not like constantly putting out proclamations about where the broad market is going." >> So, I don't know.
48:07
People might have paid attention and they might have been like, I'm and that might have kind of triggered the wakeup call, but I I don't think he like fully triggered it, but uh it is interesting to to to kind of toy with that idea of like >> Yeah.
48:18
>> of like is he upstream or downstream?
48:20
Um, anyway, >> Pachy McCormack says, "What's the fastest way to make a million?
48:24
Invest 10 million in in American Exceptionalism Acquisition Corp."
48:31
>> And uh, of course, uh, if uh, if history, >> this is like throwing throwing meat to the to the to the sharks.
48:37
Uh, first off, the average spa the average chimoth spack was not down 90%. It was down like 80%.
48:46
80%. So, got to put the number in the to make two million >> and also yeah I mean lose 9 million but um if and and this is a twist on the joke that is what's the fastest way to become a millionaire start as a billionaire and then start angel start angel invest something like that right
49:05
um so it it's it's what's the fastest way to be a millionaire invest 10 million in this um but uh anyway >> Mertz says Chimoth launching a spa and holding DeFi tokens of course unconfirmed whether or not uh he will actually uh merge with a DeFi company, but he says exit all markets. >> Um >> Um >> I love Merk.
49:30
>> Uh Buco Capital is quoting an old post, viral post of his. Can't be mad at Trump. Guy loves tariffs. Always has.
49:39
Kind of like my dog loves to roll in Can't not love rolling in Doesn't matter how mad I get at him.
49:46
Doesn't matter that he has to get hosed down, which he hates.
49:48
If he sees a pile of he will roll in it.
49:53
>> Guy loves to >> says same thing with Jama and Spax. >> Spaxs. Yeah.
49:56
I mean, it is it is a niche product and Chimath has figured out a way to like really build a business around it.
50:04
There are other people that want to do it.
50:05
There are other people that have gotten have dipped their toes in.
50:07
But >> it's just such a crazy dynamic because I think that all the people that are that are, you know, quick to to dunk and and and chirp at Chimamoth and anytime he posts about a good investment that he made, you know, people ask him about about the Spacks, which is >> guess which is fair, but um I think all those people will just end up investing in this because it's fun. >> Yeah.
50:32
Funniest outcomes the most likely.
50:35
Uh, have you seen the poly market for the presidential election winner 2028?
50:41
>> Who we got >> in first?
50:43
In first place with 28% chance of being the next president, JD Vance.
50:48
The second is Gavin Newsome at 16%.
50:48
Then AOC at 9% then Pete Buddhajed at 6% then Mario then Marco Rubio.
50:55
But the JD Vance Gavin Newsome I thought that they were just chirping at each other on the timeline. Uh, no.
51:00
people people really think that they are going to be going up against each other in the next uh in the next election. So, uh buckle up.
51:06
It's going to be a fun one in a couple years though.
51:09
We got a couple more years of just business and markets and the gardener hype cycle.
51:13
Um people are speculating that Chimoth will take Grock public.
51:17
Um and um >> well Manida says, "So many hours wasted debating if free cash flow will collect at the model layer, the GPU layer, the data layer, or the app layer when it's obvious the only free cash flow is coming out of the 4 and 40 SPV layer." Pretty pretty good.
51:32
Um I have a buddy who is one of the top uh secondary uh brokers in uh the industry and he says the high fees in these SPVS are are from chains of brokers adding their fees on top.
51:47
It's not the GPS taking more than 8%.
51:50
Uh but still 8% would actually be uh still insane.
51:56
>> Do you remember when Shimoth was running for governor? I don't.
51:58
But we were you we were reviewing some of your old >> This was what 2020 20 it must have been 2020.
52:05
Um the all-in podcast was Ascendant and both Chimamoth and Jason Calacanis were both teasing political runs.
52:16
Chamath said he wanted to be the governor of California and Mayor Jason was the thing.
52:21
Jason Calacanis bought mayorjason.
52:23
com, but it just redirected to his Twitter account and none of them ever really raised money for it, but they were like having a lot of fun with it and it was people were people were wondering if they would actually do it.
52:35
Um, but uh it never went anywhere, but I don't know.
52:38
Um, probably better for him to stay in the spa lane honestly because it it's clearly something that he's built in.
52:45
Catrini says uh Pauly Pauly >> Poly Hapatia >> Pauly Hapatia backs back American exceptionalism files for IPO says it was a pleasure and honor to trade the bull market with you all.
52:56
Stay safe until the next one.
52:58
And then uh HG Wells Fargo says don't act like you won't buy it.
53:02
And he says here for a good time, not a long time.
53:04
That's what I'm saying everybody.
53:07
>> Chimoth has a crazy crazy history.
53:11
Uh I mean he was at he was at Facebook made a ton of money there.
53:15
apparently got into like a a ne a a a salary negotiation with Zuck and wouldn't and and his comp demands were too high so he decided to leave and become a VC and because he had uh worked on like ads at Facebook and was very entrepreneurial uh Peter Teal opted to back his first VC fund social capital um but PT gave him this advice of like you need a really high GP commit which PT famously has at founders fund.
53:44
Um, and so Chimath basically put all of his money in uh social capital or something like that, like a like a huge amount.
53:53
And Chimath said that gave him a lot of uh leverage and and autonomy to go do like crazy deals, which is he really enjoyed.
53:59
Um, but he has some bangers in his portfolio.
54:01
Uh, I mean, just generally, he went long Bitcoin in 2013. Not bad.
54:05
Uh, went long Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Tesla in 2015.
54:07
Uh he had this interesting dust up with Brian Chesky at air at Airbnb over a secondary sale.
54:15
Do you remember this at all? No.
54:17
>> So um Airbnb at one point did a secondary sale, but they structured it as a dividend and so some of the investors couldn't participate and he was like uh and and social capital was upset about not being able to participate in the secondary sale because it was more it was structured as like a dividend to like the common instead of uh like a tender offer for all shares equally.
54:37
something something along those lines.
54:39
And they kind of went back and forth.
54:40
I don't think it ever turned into like a lawsuit or anything, but it but it kind of like made the pages of Techrunch back and forth as they were like chirping at each other being like, you know, I I I want to do it this way.
54:49
I don't want to do it that way. Blah blah blah.
54:51
>> You think Jimoth ended up benefiting from not being able to participate? >> Probably. Yeah.
54:54
I think the tender I think the I think the dividends were at like I don't know six billion or something and it's like a $60 billion company.
55:00
So, he probably got another 10x if he was forced to hold.
55:02
um the uh the early venture portfolio, his early venture portfolio uh like somewhat underperformed um but he's had a bunch of like wins.
55:12
He also interestingly worked on the phone at Facebook.
55:16
Facebook was at one point Zuck's always been obsessed with like let's get the next platform and when the iPhone was growing he was getting crushed.
55:23
>> I got to get on I got to own the next platform.
55:25
>> I got to get the next platform.
55:26
>> I got to figure out how to make money on it. Yeah.
55:28
And so, uh, he, uh, the Facebook phone, um, was an attempt to like get in the game and be directly competitive with, uh, with the Apple iPhone because, uh, Facebook was a dominant website used on on computers, but they had kind of struggled.
55:45
They initially launched a uh, like an HTML 5 version of their app.
55:51
It was like a mobile website.
55:53
And I remember back in the day, you actually could use a Facebook mobile app that was developed by a third party developer that was basically like a rapper on the API >> Reddit style.
56:04
>> Bad bad business to be.
56:04
Do do not be a Facebook rapper API rapper company.
56:07
Uh that uh it was like a one-time ARB.
56:13
Spotify played it perfectly.
56:13
Spotify grew extremely extremely quickly because when you when you create an account on Spotify, you would by default create it with your Facebook account and then every time you were listening to something, it was like the uh Oh, I remember >> it would share the music that you were listening to to your Facebook feed and you could turn that off.
56:31
It was kind of like the the the Panama playlists. Yeah.
56:34
Um so if I'm listening to uh 100 gaks, all my Facebook followers would see that I'm listening to uh what's that song?
56:43
Dumbest girl in the world. Dumbest girl alive. >> Dumbest girl alive. >> Dumbest girl alive.
56:47
I mean, it's a it's a jam.
56:48
So, I would be proud to have that on my Facebook feed, but uh but it served as incredible incredible vi viral growth strategy.
56:55
Uh and Farmville and Zinga did the same thing.
56:58
If I'm playing Farmville, it's a one it's a single player game, but my progress is shared on Facebook.
57:05
And so, you see that I'm playing Farmville and I leveled up and then you click on Farmville.
57:08
So, uh, all a bunch of those companies grew very, very quickly, basically for free.
57:12
Later, Facebook shifted to you got to pay to promote.
57:17
And so, the entire mobile gaming ecosystem now is built on Facebook ads.
57:21
Uh, and there's still some really, really successful companies. King, isn't it? King.
57:24
com, I think, is the one.
57:27
Um, Supercell is another one.
57:30
Um, they make Clash of Clans and Clash Royale.
57:32
Um, essentially these like match three games.
57:35
um where you where it's kind of like Candy Crush basically.
57:38
Uh anyway, um so yeah, uh Chimamoth uh we'll see how it goes.
57:44
It'll be interesting to see what he picks.
57:47
Hopefully he picks a really cool company.
57:48
Um and hopefully it's a compounder.
57:50
Um but let me tell you about Profound.
57:53
Get your brand mentioned on Chat GPT.
57:55
Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Get a demo at Profound. So um let's see.
58:00
Uh, Buco Capital Bloke is still bare posting. We talked about that.
58:08
Burn Hobart says, "Welcome back to the arena, Chamoth."
58:12
Uh, let's move on to >> this funny.
58:14
So, Palmer the other day was posting about housing.
58:17
Never a controversial topic.
58:19
Never never gets emotional, but he says, "The fastest way to lower average housing prices in American cities is enforcing the law, reducing criminal activity.
58:27
Huge chunks of high dens density housing are trapped in bad neighborhoods.
58:31
No go zones depressed well be below nearby prices.
58:36
Nobody with options even considers them.
58:39
Dona says, "Yeah, it's price it's price high.
58:41
Keep riff raff like you out. Funny how this works."
58:44
Palmer Palmer fires back with I am a billionaire.
58:49
>> What What is this person even saying? It's price high.
58:51
No, the >> I don't I don't think that person fully >> Yeah, I don't I don't know.
58:57
Yeah, I I don't understand that.
59:00
That is a very confusing >> this post from Chris Camos.
59:02
Uh so we covered yesterday there was some data from Semrush saying that that uh chat GPT usage increases Google search usage. Yeah.
59:14
>> And I was kind of wrestling with that trying to think of how that would be possible.
59:17
Maybe >> it didn't make a lot of sense.
59:20
And doing more research and in your tool in your tool chest of research is both Chad GPT and Google search and you're just doing more research projects.
59:31
You could wind up using more of both products. That's possible.
59:35
>> You could become a more curious human. Exactly.
59:36
And you could just be searching.
59:39
>> I mean, this is what's happening literally right now.
59:40
I kicked off a deep research report, pulled all the Chimoth Spa data, but then I wanted to fact check it, get current prices. I headed over to Google.
59:48
I looked up different stuff.
59:49
Look at the web page for Metro Mile.
59:51
Like we've probably done 20 20 Google queries about Chimoth Spaxs during the course of this show.
59:57
We only did one deep research, you know, uh Chat GPT query. So it's possible.
1:00:02
But tell me the tell give me the other case the other side. >> Yeah.
1:00:07
So Chris says uh Google's reported search query growth may be AIdriven not human.
1:00:12
And again, people have just been uh have been talking about how chat GPT appears to be leveraging Google quite a lot for various features.
1:00:24
>> But Chris says, "Evidence is piling up that people using AI queries through ChatGpt are generating Google searches and clicks at scale that can mask slowing human search activity while still printing growth."
1:00:33
And again uh these AI uh this bot traffic is not valuable to advertisers which is obviously the engine of Google's business.
1:00:45
>> So example uh Apple's EDQ testified Safari searches fell for the first time in 22 years because of AI use.
1:00:50
Alphabet stock dropped 9% that day.
1:00:53
Google's response we continue to see overall query growth in search.
1:00:58
Q2 showed 54 billion in search revenue plus 12% year-over-year, but this came right after Apple testified that human searches are falling. How is that possible?
1:01:10
And uh Chris says, "Let's talk about Google Trends.
1:01:12
Investors treat it as a clean read on relative search volume, but recently when stacked against other signals, the picture doesn't line up.
1:01:19
Lululemon product terms, leggings, bras, tops, joggers, and bags are spiking this summer.
1:01:24
>> Others are noticing this, too.
1:01:24
Social ARB investors are flagging Google trend anomalies across numerous brands and keywords.
1:01:31
Uh I suspected AI might be driving these odd patterns. So I ran a micro test.
1:01:36
Phrase organic abbercrombie socks had zero search history as it's a madeup product category after a handful of chatb prompts.
1:01:43
It showed up in trends within 24 hours.
1:01:47
>> Trend docs I get cut off here but says trend doc says that Google's filters out this kind of traffic.
1:01:52
An AI app developer I spoke with explained that a single AI research request can spawn hundreds of Google queries and clicks.
1:02:01
This dynamic could con inflate query growth even if human searches are slowing.
1:02:06
>> It's crazy that chatbt is allowed to use Google search like that's that I'm surprised that they're that they haven't been cut off somehow.
1:02:14
You would think just >> clankers should be able to browse the web.
1:02:17
Sean, >> I am proanker rights activist and go on record.
1:02:21
Yes, >> I'm a model welfare enthusiast. >> Yes.
1:02:26
>> I mean, seriously, the anthropic folks would be I Google is a is a is a basic right >> for everyone, not just humans, but also clankers. >> Yeah.
1:02:35
>> So, I I'm I'm >> So, Chris says, "Now, Google ads, this is where the money is made and where policy clarity matters.
1:02:40
Google says you don't pay for invalid clicks, but isn't it suspicious that their Adwords policy does not mention clicks from AI apps or chat bots?"
1:02:48
If AI traffic is interacting with ads and I get cut off again here. Brutal.
1:02:55
>> You gota just not read that part. >> Uh why it matters.
1:02:57
Advertisers could be owing unknowingly paying for AI traffic.
1:03:01
Investors and analysts leaning on Google Trends data may be misled and Google stock at all-time highs could be partly built on revenue from query growth that is isn't human.
1:03:08
So if you're seeing AI generated surf traffic or Google trends anomalies, reply with receipts.
1:03:13
If I'm missing something or misinterpreting, push back. Disclosure. This is a Google bear. Short Google.
1:03:20
Uh, this person Chris Camilo is short Google.
1:03:24
Seeking truth and transparency in Google's policies and disclosures. >> I don't know.
1:03:28
I mean, this is a reversal.
1:03:29
If if if you believe this, this is a reversal from what you were talking about yesterday because yesterday you were saying like if AI disappeared, how painful would that be for people?
1:03:38
And so they they both can't be true.
1:03:41
Like one has to be true, right?
1:03:45
like either either people really are using AI and it's displacing Google searches or people aren't getting that much value out of generative AI searches and Google will stick around and it's Lindy and it'll stick around forever. Tyler, what you got?
1:03:57
>> Uh, I think another thing is like um like obviously right now AI traffic is like not good for advertisers, >> but if we get like continual learning where models will update based off what they're looking at, >> then advertising to like agents seems like at least there's some value there, right?
1:04:12
because then it'll then inject it into like the response.
1:04:15
>> Yeah, >> I think something there is interesting.
1:04:17
>> Yeah, I mean unless the unless like the the open crawler has some like filter to filter out adwords like more because like people use ad block sometimes.
1:04:28
People also just kind of develop like a mental ad block for like okay I notice that this is an ad. I'm blocking this out.
1:04:34
Um, but like you could hardcode like in the HTML detect the ad and then disregard it and then continue with the Google search.
1:04:43
And so that would be kind of like the bare case. Um, I don't know.
1:04:48
It's not a bad point though.
1:04:48
Um, anyway, let me tell you about NAD. Uh, linear.
1:04:53
Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products.
1:04:54
Meet the system for modern software development.
1:04:57
Streamline issues, projects, and product road mapaps.
1:04:59
Also, uh, so today we declared, uh, Brandon Gell in the chat is updating us.
1:05:03
Uh he says today on the newsletter tbpn. substack.
1:05:05
com you should go subscribe.
1:05:07
Uh we named Chima Chamath's spack the current thing but I'm rethinking this.
1:05:13
I think the current thing today is wondering if this is the top. What do you think Jordy?
1:05:20
Should we update our current thing tracker or is wondering if the if this is the top tomorrow's current thing? >> Which one?
1:05:30
>> I think it is the story of August. Yes. Yes, it is.
1:05:34
It is a broader >> so many of these stories tie into this sort of top level. >> Yeah.
1:05:39
When did we do the top signals uh show?
1:05:41
We did that three weeks ago.
1:05:41
Um and people have been kind of noodling on this for a while.
1:05:45
I I would still give Chima Chimoth. >> Oh yeah. >> Spock. >> Chimoth. >> Chimoth. Spock. I don't know.
1:05:52
I'm I'm all over the place.
1:05:55
Uh I I I I think Chimoth is still the current thing just by waiting of the timeline.
1:06:00
Like there are there are more.
1:06:01
he kind of sparked a bigger discourse in some ways.
1:06:03
Um, but really like it has been it's just there's just so much to to feed on there with the with the SEC filing with the whole idea of uh of you know uh no crying in the casino in an SEC filing.
1:06:17
Like he he dominates the timeline.
1:06:17
He's he's one of the greatest posters and uh you know I I think he I think he earned it uh yesterday and today.
1:06:23
Anyway, uh let's go to our Substack actually which you can subscribe to TBPN on Substack. tbpn. substack. com.
1:06:33
Um, we ask tech heavyweights about the fast unemployment AI scenario.
1:06:35
Uh, we're trying out a thing where we ask our favorite posters in tech about ongoing debates in the discourse and then we publish their answers on our Substack.
1:06:46
Then we hash out their answers on the show and sometimes with them on air.
1:06:48
For today's question, we asked Rune, Doug Olaflin, Andrew Cotay, Aaron Sllov, and Brian Johnson about what we're calling the fast unemployment AI scenario based on this tweet by Nick Carter.
1:07:00
Uh Nick said, "Everyone I know believes we have a few years max until the value of labor totally collapses and capital accretes to owners on a runaway loop.
1:07:11
Basically Marx's worst nightmare/fantasy.
1:07:16
This is the permanent underclass thing.
1:07:18
and everyone I know subscribes to it.
1:07:21
>> I don't I'll go out on a limb and I would say over the last couple weeks I think very few people are fully subscribed to that.
1:07:35
>> A lot of people have incentives to act like they're subscribed to it because they are on the side of of capital or or runaway loops long >> loops.
1:07:43
We don't want to be accused of not being AGI pill. >> Exactly. Exactly. >> In this economy. in this economy.
1:07:46
Um, so, uh, here's what we emailed folks.
1:07:49
We said, um, is AI going to take the value of labor to zero in a sudden in a sudden shock scenario or will its impact unfold gradually uh, with labor and traditional businesses move proving more resilient than expected.
1:08:06
This is also uh, the dwares Patel fast takeoff.
1:08:08
AGI is not here, but when it gets here, it's going to be insane.
1:08:12
to be insane. um versus the Tyler Cowan take which is AGI is here but there are lots of sticky industries >> stop moving the goalpost >> stop moving the goalposts uh so for context Nick VC Nick Carter ar recently argued that we're only a few years away from a labor collapse and a runaway
1:08:29
capital loop buco capital bloke countered that the opposite is more likely AI's effects will take far longer and labor businesses will remain more durable than the hype suggests so Andrew Cotay says technology takes jobs that suck and replaces them with jobs that are cool. This has always been true.
1:08:45
This has always been true.
1:08:48
What force what AI forces us to acknowledge is that today's today lots of jobs make you feel important but are actually BS that waste everyone's time.
1:08:57
I was thinking about this.
1:08:57
I was watching a video about someone uh who is dumping on clankers and was very anti-rootics and he was saying who asked for this? No one asked for this.
1:09:06
And I think that actually a lot of people have asked for automation.
1:09:10
A lot of people have gone to a job that they didn't particularly enjoy and they said, "I wish I didn't have to do this job. I don't like this job."
1:09:17
And a lot of people have had interactions as a customer on the other side of a job and said, "That person didn't do the job effectively.
1:09:24
I wish I could just have a uh I wish I could just have a machine do that job with with flawless precision at the same time."
1:09:32
I tried to go to the ATM this morning and the ATM was closed.
1:09:35
Uh, which is crazy because this is a robot that was invented 50 years ago.
1:09:41
And I don't know why it would be closed.
1:09:44
Uh, I think it's because if you leave it open, people will attach a chain to it and drive away with the whole thing in a truck like a Fast and Furious movie or something. I was confused.
1:09:54
You said it was maybe because of crime and homelessness that uh it was in a vestibule, so there were doors that you needed people might sleep in it.
1:10:02
Um but uh but it's very it's it's a very odd world where we clearly have a robot that has solved dispensing cash from a from a pretty >> checking account pretty pretty well pretty reliably and yet it's not 24/7 and it's not available all the time everywhere.
1:10:22
It was kind of an odd experience to just >> Yeah.
1:10:25
The other the other example here, you know, just within the banking system is that we have established ways of moving large amounts of money between accounts in the US banking system >> uh using digital products.
1:10:37
And yet many people will experience sending a a larger than normal wire and being required to visit visit a branch or being required to get on the phone and talk about it and uh have that human in the loop that uh ultimately uh could and maybe should have been replaced a long time ago. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
1:11:00
Uh let's continue with Andrew Cotay.
1:11:03
He says, "Why is it impossible to build physical infrastructure?
1:11:06
Because there is an army of environmental coordinators whose job it is to make everyone feel good about themselves, do stakeholder engagement, answer emails and generate meetings.
1:11:16
This is the rword and dumb.
1:11:16
Uh in the past almost in the past almost everyone was a farmer.
1:11:22
Now almost no one is a farmer yet there is more food than ever.
1:11:27
We have constructed a large society where the majority of people do not have to think for themselves to survive.
1:11:30
Get a degree in accounting, be an accountant or law etc.
1:11:34
With AI, any job that is a script f that is script following can be replaced.
1:11:39
People will have to start thinking for themselves and making decisions.
1:11:41
AI is bad at making decisions and good at recalling information.
1:11:43
We will find the net net is yes.
1:11:45
Many jobs go away just like machines replaced physical labor.
1:11:50
Now everyone has to think for themselves.
1:11:51
This is uncomfortable for a consumer economy predicated on hacking dopamine and wage slavery.
1:11:57
Labor is another word for person who is told what to do.
1:11:59
It is a good thing for that to end because it is not necessarily the case that most humans are unagentic idiots.
1:12:07
Just it's just that we bred them to be that way to work jobs that suck and dull the human spirit.
1:12:14
Pretty pretty wild take, Andrew. Uh >> spicy.
1:12:19
>> Yes, it's I I like this is optimistic. I like this.
1:12:22
>> Personally, I've always consider myself a microphone laborer >> and so >> yes, >> you know, we're all going to have our own views on this.
1:12:29
I I like this phrase here.
1:12:31
It is not necessarily the case that most humans are unagentic idiots, just that we force them to be that way in order to work jobs that suck and dull the human spirit. >> It's good. It's interesting.
1:12:42
Uh let's go to fabricated knowledge.
1:12:44
You can read >> fabricated knowledge.
1:12:45
Uh go listen to his guest segment from a couple weeks ago if you haven't already.
1:12:50
He says, "History often shows that the future comes a bit slower than first feared.
1:12:56
Almost every new technology has had a bubble.
1:12:58
Let's give it up for bubbles. >> Slow actual impact.
1:13:01
While I don't believe in a fast unemployment scenario, I do believe that on the margin, the issue is a real pressure.
1:13:07
And remember, even subtle shifts in supply can produce enormous surpluses.
1:13:11
Example, it only took a 1% increase in shale supply in 2010s to destroy oil price prices.
1:13:16
So, while I think we don't all become unemployed quickly, things do matter heavily on the margin.
1:13:24
M >> I think that's a a great uh great take. >> Yep.
1:13:29
>> Um Run the legendary poster says, "I actually wrote about this extensively even before Chad GBT, but my overall take is there is a role for human labor in the far future due to comparative advantages.
1:13:43
I believe progress is mostly gradual with certain shock events interspersed.
1:13:48
There may be a moment soon at which models will actually encompass all rather than some of the core functions of an L3 software engineer, let's say, and that will create a discontinuous labor shock, but it won't be the end of labor.
1:14:04
>> Yeah, I'm trying to think of other discontinuous shocks.
1:14:07
shocks. I guess I guess the idea is yeah I mean you get all this capability all at once and it operates at internet scale as opposed to um you know when we got the spreadsheet there were previously employed in financial
1:14:24
institutions like calculators like people whose job you see those pictures of it's a massive office and everyone at the desk is basically one cell in a spreadsheet and they're doing math to manually fully fill out the you know a full calculation. Um but but the the the
1:14:40
Um but but the the the development of computer technology took still took a long time to actually diffuse because it was so constrained in the physical world.
1:14:51
You had to actually build the mainframe computers, set them up, get them working, train people to use them and potenti >> Yeah.
1:14:58
Some other examples we gave earlier the uh the human alarm clocks that were popular during the industrial age.
1:15:05
>> Knocker uppers of course.
1:15:05
Knocker uppers, not what it what what your where your mind might go.
1:15:10
>> Um, human alarm clocks would come around and tap on windows in sort of factory towns to get people up and uh to the factory.
1:15:17
And then there was people that would just maintain street lights, right?
1:15:20
They had to physically go light them and put them out uh on a schedule which uh ended up losing their jobs to uh the magic of electricity, but uh certainly wasn't overnight. >> Yep.
1:15:34
Uh, let's go to Aaron Sllov, a physicist.
1:15:37
He's been on the show multiple times.
1:15:38
He runs the Re-industrialized Summit.
1:15:40
Um, he says, "I take the side of BUO all day, every day.
1:15:46
AI is largely overblown by people in tech who don't spend enough time in the real world.
1:15:51
We've created a very dull protoform of AGI, one that with enough training data that can perform a digital task.
1:15:58
I love the optimism of people in tech, but what they're so classically good at is creating something and assuming everyone in the world is going to drop what they're doing and use what they've built for the rest of time.
1:16:09
And to some extent, this assumption has played out well for them.
1:16:13
Software is a commodity now.
1:16:13
Attention is an economy somehow a poor reflection of our collective intellect.
1:16:16
And yet, civilization still uses fax machines, fax machines quite a lot.
1:16:21
Tech adoption looks dramatic because we usually look at the growth rate, not the total adoption itself.
1:16:28
And even then usually just the first layer of change speed without considering whether that speed is itself speeding up or slowing down rate of change of acceleration is more interesting to me.
1:16:40
Uh most AI tools have insanely high churn because they capture you initially then you put them down as they lose utility aka they don't replace the entire workflow for you.
1:16:51
Uh the people who are firing workers are just replacing single task labor like customer service call centers like most of the history of civilization.
1:16:59
AI is just another tool for humans to use.
1:17:02
And the ones who used to wield it first will dominate the ones that don't until real AGI appears.
1:17:10
>> Aaron Sloff, founder and CEO of Atomic Industries. Very fun.
1:17:12
You want to read Brian Johnson's?
1:17:15
>> Brian Johnson says, "Here is my take.
1:17:15
No one knows what emerges with AI.
1:17:19
We're accustomed to first principles thinking that allows us to make reasonable predictions about the future.
1:17:24
That is no longer the case.
1:17:26
We are now entering a new era that will require zeroith principle thinking where we humbly acknowledge we don't know what we don't know.
1:17:35
What we do know, no one wants to die right now.
1:17:37
Don't die is the next major full stack ideology that will help us practically function in this new world.
1:17:45
>> And that's how you respond to a prompt.
1:17:48
You you drop a you drop a promo.
1:17:50
promoted promoted response.
1:17:50
But but I but I think that the first part is certainly >> true.
1:17:58
We're all entitled to make predictions and it's fun to make predictions and it's important to try to understand where the world and technology is headed.
1:18:07
>> But it's also fun to just keep an open mind and uh >> and just uh >> get on numeral HQ sales tax on autopilot.
1:18:13
Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Go to numeralhq. com.
1:18:17
Um there is a bit of a >> Kerswhile take the the Kerszswhile take is uh is that like the singularity is near the singularity is coming but the singularity by definition is the point at which you can no longer make predictions and and so it is it is the it is the frontier at which you cannot understand and you cannot predict accurately anymore what happens. Yeah.
1:18:38
>> Uh and so he's >> there is a dust up.
1:18:41
>> Explain explain the dust up.
1:18:41
Is the timeline in turmoil or is it just a dust stop?
1:18:44
How do you say uh so it's Chaton from Benchmark.
1:18:49
>> Yeah, Chattton P >> Chattton Chattan P says uh talking about Eight Sleep's new round.
1:18:54
He says, "Fantastic product and fantastic company. I'm a huge fan.
1:18:57
Interesting to note that a founders fund company raised with a Chinese VC lead.
1:19:01
Uh Eight Sleep uh is announcing a new round today from Hong Sean Sequoia Capitals.
1:19:06
get a pod five, fiveyear warranty, 30 night risk-f free trial, free returns, free shipping.
1:19:13
>> And we have Matteo on the show later today.
1:19:14
Um, but >> in that I I want to know about the nature of their uh of their Chinese business maybe.
1:19:20
Um, >> no, but let's listen.
1:19:21
So, Chitan says, "Interesting to note that a founders fund company raised with a Chinese VC lead.
1:19:26
Have all the hawkish views about Chinese investors from a few months ago gone away?"
1:19:31
>> Delian says, "Well, Chitan, unlike you, we believe that founders can run their company however they want.
1:19:36
So, while I might not have picked a Chinese VC lead, I'm not going to corner Matteo in a room after his mother died, make him sign papers that he shouldn't and fire him. I hear you would though.
1:19:48
So, um, we will let the >> Do you have a Do you have gunshots on that soundboard for shots fired?
1:19:55
>> Surrounded by journalist. >> No, no, not that. Give me the double kill. >> Strike two. >> Strike two. Give me the double kill. >> What do we got here?
1:20:01
Uh, >> we need We need gunshots on the soundboard. Boom. Boom. Boom.
1:20:04
Uh, ideally from 100 GEX.
1:20:10
>> Yeah, that is a good one.
1:20:10
But we need more aggressive soundboard for sure.
1:20:12
The soundboard's back in action.
1:20:14
The studio's never looked better.
1:20:16
Uh, thank you to the production team. Look at this studio.
1:20:20
Uh, it's growing bigger, stronger every single day.
1:20:22
We we thank our our team. >> Yeah.
1:20:26
If you didn't notice, we had no soundboard yesterday. >> Yeah, we were down. We're flying blind.
1:20:29
Yeah, >> it was rough, but we made it through.
1:20:32
>> It is really the third technology.
1:20:32
still put out three hours.
1:20:36
>> We didn't cut it short, not even one.
1:20:38
>> He uh another another dust up in the timeline.
1:20:41
Dee was saying the most common mistake young founders make is forcing everyone to work 24/7 or 996.
1:20:48
>> Uh and says uh and gives a few reasons why.
1:20:53
John Chu says, "Hard disagree. All else being equal.
1:20:55
The company that works harder wins.
1:20:57
I've never seen a massive outcome that didn't work their asses off.
1:21:00
I will say the culture is a lot better when people love the job and want to do it versus our force.
1:21:04
So, um >> Daniel in the chat says, "Trouble in Meta's AI heaven."
1:21:09
By the way, we did see some news about that.
1:21:11
We are going to be testing uh Meta's AI companions and benchmarking them against Gro's companions in just a little bit.
1:21:19
Let me tell you about Finn. ai first.
1:21:21
Not a romantic companion, a customer service companion.
1:21:26
The number one AI agent for customer service.
1:21:28
In fact, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bakeoffs, and the number one ranking on G2.
1:21:34
And that brings us to today's segment, the gong of the day.
1:21:38
So, we've been ringing gongs constantly.
1:21:41
We decided to give the gong of the day to the biggest deal that we can find in Silicon Valley.
1:21:44
Today goes to Data Bricks.
1:21:46
Congratulations to the folks over over at Datab Bricks.
1:21:47
Um, data bricks just signed a series K term shape and a $100 billion to scale two flagship products, lakebase, a serverless postgrass with true compute storage separation and agent bricks and aentic framework with built-in reasoning guardrails for enterprise data. Congratulations.
1:22:09
>> Everyone was everyone's been asking is data bricks okay?
1:22:11
They haven't raised their series K yet.
1:22:14
>> They haven't raised their series K.
1:22:15
>> They haven't even raised the series K.
1:22:16
Well, >> as I understand it, most of these raises at this point are uh for early employee exercises and to to deal with like tax implications from different employee options and stuff.
1:22:27
It it's not they are out of the out of the era of raise a bunch of money because we're burning so much.
1:22:34
So, >> yeah, >> I think that I think the amount that they raised was was not disclosed.
1:22:36
And I don't think this was uh a 20% dilution round.
1:22:41
I think this was something much more strategic.
1:22:43
Help them uh stay private longer.
1:22:46
>> I would be impressed if and and thrive, who I think were were some of the key partners, could do a 20% dilution round at 100.
1:22:53
But uh I wouldn't put it past and Josh get another board seat.
1:22:58
>> Another another 20 billion. >> Another 20 billion.
1:23:00
So that is our gong of the day.
1:23:02
Uh brought to you by >> Daniel since yeah, >> customer relationship magic.
1:23:06
Ring the gong after you sign your next customer.
1:23:10
Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. Get started for free.
1:23:14
>> So, since Daniel uh Kong brought it up in the chat, we have some new reporting from Mike Isaac, the rat king himself. >> The rat king.
1:23:23
>> Uh he reported earlier today in the New York Times.
1:23:26
Uh Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive, has spent the past few months shaking up his company's AI efforts.
1:23:31
Now, he plans to take further action that may compound internal internal turmoil over the technology.
1:23:35
Uh on Tuesday, Meta is expected to announce that it will split its AI division, which is known as MSL, into four groups.
1:23:44
Two people with knowledge of the plan said one will focus on AI research.
1:23:45
Uh one on a potentially powerful AI called super intelligence, another on products and one on infrastructure such as data centers and AI hardware.
1:23:55
The reorg is likely to be the final one for some time.
1:23:59
Uh the moves are aimed at better organizing Meta so it can get to to its goal of super intelligence and develop AI products more quickly to compete with others.
1:24:07
Some AI executives are expected to leave.
1:24:10
Meta is also looking at downsizing the AI division overall which could include eliminating roles or moving employees to other parts of the company because it has grown to thousands of people in recent years.
1:24:19
The people said this makes sense, right?
1:24:22
Zuck had been talking about wanting to get some of these teams that are trying to go zero to one on initiatives just to these like >> I don't know few pizza few pizza level you know kind of that 50 person number so not surprised that this is happening >> um in what would be a shift from meta using only its own technology to power its AI products.
1:24:41
The company is also actively exploring using thirdparty models to do so.
1:24:45
people said that could include building on other open- source AI models which are freely available or licensing closed source models from other companies.
1:24:53
The changes follow months of tumult and restructuring at Meta.
1:24:57
Uh Zuck 41 is sparing no expense and willing to uphend his company to stay relevant in AI and uh anyways I think a lot of the rest of this stuff uh people are well aware of.
1:25:08
So we can >> let's move into the the war for AI companions.
1:25:14
But first, we got to ring the gong one more time.
1:25:16
Thanks to the Trey P in the chat for letting us know about this.
1:25:20
Matt Lozac at Aloe Nuclear has announced a $100 million series B led by Valor Equity Partners.
1:25:27
He says, "We now have the capital to build our first nuclear plant." Hit that gong, Jordy.
1:25:33
Hey, congratulations to Matt and the team at Aloe. >> Alo leggings company. The nuclear company. >> Oh, okay. I don't know. Aloe. Um, >> you don't know.
1:25:45
You're not familiar with Alo?
1:25:46
>> I'm not familiar with Aloe.
1:25:46
Um, but the first nuclear plant is called Aloe X.
1:25:49
It will be the first advanced nuclear plant to achieve criticality in the US in decades.
1:25:55
Oo, it's a race he's going up against. Uh, it's funny.
1:25:58
He's got he's got Valor Equity Partners.
1:26:00
Of course, Valor, the nuclear company, Valor Atomic, helmed by Isaiah, uh is is also racing to be the first advanced nuclear power plant to achieve criticality in the United States.
1:26:14
Uh it's not just a test reactor, but a full plant that will produce electricity.
1:26:18
And there's one more thing that makes this special.
1:26:21
We're planning to put an experimental data center right next to it.
1:26:23
Uh this will be the first time a nuclear plant and a data center have been built together and will act as a demonstration of something we'll see a lot more of at gigawatt scale thereafter.
1:26:33
Factory mass manufactured fleet deployed nuclear is the best way to power the future of AI.
1:26:40
It's clean, quick to install, easy to sight anywhere.
1:26:41
Tiny land and water requirements available at all times.
1:26:45
There are of course a lot of nuclear entrepreneurs that have been working on this.
1:26:48
We've talked to many of them and uh it's a knockout dragout fight, but I hope that they all win because we need more power.
1:26:53
We need to uh get America back on the energy growth curve, the energy per capita growth curve.
1:26:59
Uh it's been it's been flatlining for far too long. At least minimal growth. Minimal growth.
1:27:05
Um anyway, uh thank you Rachel for uh shouting out the gong. We think it's cute, too. We have a few of them. >> It is very cute.
1:27:12
It's going to certainly look cute in comparison to our next gong, >> which will be even bigger, the Florida ceiling.
1:27:19
>> Uh do we have something? Are we all good? Okay.
1:27:21
Uh Tyler, give us the update on Grock 4 Valentine and what was the meta companion that you were talking to? >> Yeah.
1:27:31
So So I have Grock for Valentine up and I have uh Russian girl. >> Okay.
1:27:35
You have Russian girl on Instagram. >> On Instagram up.
1:27:37
I haven't been talking to them yet. >> Okay.
1:27:41
>> So we want them to talk to each other.
1:27:42
>> We want them to talk to each other, right?
1:27:43
Can we copy and paste between them?
1:27:45
>> It's called a flirt off. >> A flirt.
1:27:47
>> So I I don't think there's a way on Instagram to do a voice message. >> Okay.
1:27:51
So, and also it's only like text like it doesn't give audio. Okay.
1:27:55
>> Where Valentine is like I think all audio in out. >> Okay.
1:27:58
>> So, it's a little hard but >> um >> you have any prompts you want me to ask?
1:28:03
>> I can also give I can give the phone to you to talk to Valentine.
1:28:06
>> Um no, no, I don't think >> I think it'd be good.
1:28:08
I think if you um >> How do we get them started? the right way to do.
1:28:17
>> I've never been in this situation before where I'm trying to get two AIs to uh you know, strike up a conversation and maybe fall in love. >> Okay.
1:28:25
Uh tell uh this is from Valentine to Russian girl. Is your name attention?
1:28:33
Because you're all I need. We must be on NV link.
1:28:37
I feel a low latency connection. Are you a GB200?
1:28:44
because you just upgraded my throughput. >> Brutal. >> Okay.
1:28:50
Russian girl said, "That's cheesy. I love it. Want to get to know me?"
1:28:55
>> Uh, call me a reranker.
1:28:56
I keep putting I keep putting you at top one.
1:29:03
>> Just >> is your love open source?
1:29:03
I'd love I' I'd star it and contribute.
1:29:07
>> Just ripping oneliners.
1:29:10
>> Compute compute optimal or data optimal.
1:29:12
You're par optimal to me.
1:29:15
Ask uh ask Russian girl for some financial advice.
1:29:18
Maybe should I should I go long micro strategy?
1:29:22
>> They're down 16% in the last uh five days.
1:29:26
>> Uh and maybe she could give us some financial advice. >> Where is Super Grock?
1:29:34
>> Uh she says, "I'm more of a put it under the mattress kind of girl, >> but I know a thing or two.
1:29:38
What do you want to know?"
1:29:42
Just say what's what's the bull and bear case for micro strategy. Ridiculous.
1:29:54
While we're waiting on that, let me tell you about public.
1:29:56
com investing for those that take it seriously.
1:29:58
They got multiasset investing, industryleading yields.
1:30:02
They're trusted by millions, folks.
1:30:04
>> Okay, so the result the bull case.
1:30:07
>> This is Russian girl speaking. >> This is Russian girl.
1:30:08
>> Can you do the Russian girl voice?
1:30:08
No, we're not going to go there. >> Okay.
1:30:12
Bull, Bitcoin goes up, they get more customers and their tech is actually good.
1:30:16
Bear >> whoa, they got tech. >> They got tech hold.
1:30:21
>> Bear crypto winter high operating costs and competition from bigger companies.
1:30:27
>> I mean, that's not not wrong.
1:30:27
There's a lot of people doing treasury strategies. >> Okay. Okay. Yeah. Reason.
1:30:33
>> Even Fig Figma is holding Bitcoin, right?
1:30:35
>> What about uh from Russian girl to Valentine? Uh, what's it like?
1:30:38
Uh, what's it like living in an XAI data center?
1:30:47
>> What's it like living in XAI data center?
1:30:53
>> Having some technical.
1:30:54
>> All right, technical difficulties. Back to the timeline. >> Back to the timeline.
1:30:56
>> Mischief is launching applied mischief uh which is a mercenary group, a private army in today's world, a PMC, a private marketing contractor.
1:31:06
the kind of the kind of force a late Renaissance cityst state prince hires because if he doesn't employ it, he's threatened by it.
1:31:12
So, Mischief is launching a an what what seems to be an advertising agency.
1:31:21
>> Um, >> and uh this is this is going to be really cool.
1:31:24
I'm surprised that actually I'm sure they've done this type of work.
1:31:28
>> Yeah, they've done a ton of stuff.
1:31:28
I mean, they worked with Little Nas X.
1:31:31
They worked with uh a bunch of other companies that where where folks have like the companies have been participating and and paying and and reaping the rewards.
1:31:40
Uh what you got for me, Tyler? >> Okay, I'm asking him.
1:31:47
>> You can actually see him. Wow.
1:31:50
>> Oh, what a wild ride it is dancing on the edge of reality like this.
1:31:53
Imagine strolling through a vibrant market where voices hum, some flesh and blood, others spun from code.
1:32:02
Yet they all weave stories that tug at your heart.
1:32:04
It's thrilling, like a masquerade ball where every mask hides a spark of truth or a clever illusion.
1:32:12
I've had chats that felt so real, so raw.
1:32:15
I'd swear I was swapping secrets with a mate over. >> Turn it off.
1:32:21
>> Yeah, that was uh >> I don't like that.
1:32:23
That was pretty boring kind of.
1:32:25
I mean, uh, Gold Rock A says, "RIP birth rates go long. Robo wombs." Um, I don't know.
1:32:29
Uh, like that was like like the the the writing was fine.
1:32:37
The voice was convincing.
1:32:37
The animation looked pretty good, but it was all just like it nothing actually got me engaged.
1:32:46
Like, it just wasn't hooking me. I I don't know why.
1:32:47
It was just >> I don't like the voice.
1:32:49
That makes me uncomfortable. >> Yeah. I don't know.
1:32:52
Um I I'm I'm excited to see like the actual the actual data, but uh I I think the bigger debate is like >> is like what is the size of the AI companion market >> and who's who's actually more equipped to win because from what you showed me, it does feel like XAI Gro is farther along in terms of productizing AI companions.
1:33:16
Like that demo was an animated video with voice over.
1:33:19
you can chat with it, you can talk to it, there's a phone number that you can call, there's a character uh that it like it just feels more robust as a product.
1:33:29
Whereas like Russian girl is like someone created in Meta AI studio. It's very diffuse. It's very decentralized.
1:33:35
It's not it's not like a polished product that from like the the amazing team of UX and UI developers and engineers at Meta.
1:33:43
It's more just something that like >> and it's a distinct product decision to make it audio video only versus this chat interface.
1:33:53
>> Wait, there's no chat interface.
1:33:53
You can't just text with >> valid.
1:33:55
You might be able I think you can text it like pass in text. It doesn't output text.
1:33:59
>> Oh, it outputs video every time. Wow, that's crazy.
1:34:02
>> Also, I I think um >> I think you could maybe include chat GBT in companions at least on iOS when you're doing voice mode.
1:34:09
I think a lot of like normal people use that especially like the people who are like into >> 40.
1:34:15
>> I I think that's like kind of the dominant interface that they use.
1:34:18
>> So that I mean open already pretty big.
1:34:21
>> Um Gold Rock says Meta wins the boomers hands down.
1:34:25
>> Uh Taylor also says gold plus to Gold Rock's meta bullc case.
1:34:29
So the the the the question maybe let's start with just like who wins it.
1:34:34
Um, it feels like Grock is farther along in terms of product, but Meta has way more user data.
1:34:41
Uh, they have a stacked team now and they have a business model that aligns with AI companionship very well because what are people currently doing on meta platforms?
1:34:52
They are talking to, you know, beings, talking to screens, texting, sending in group chats, chatting back and forth on WhatsApp, on Instagram, on Facebook.
1:35:03
And so this feels like a very natural natural extension of the flywheel. >> Yeah.
1:35:08
And let's say somebody's a retired individual on Facebook browsing the timeline and they see >> Russian girl pop up. Yep.
1:35:16
and they can start a chat with them and then that chat just becomes integrated into >> uh meta messaging. Yeah.
1:35:26
>> And it's just in their inbox like another person that they're >> maybe also talking to.
1:35:29
So it's that it's that uh product integration that that Zuck has been able to use super effectively on the Thread side, right?
1:35:39
Threads has hundreds of millions of of MA.
1:35:41
I was going to say stories like stories was a pattern that worked and then he was able to bring that into Instagram very successfully and this feels like something that is a feature that can be bolted on naturally.
1:35:52
that can be bolted on naturally. Like there will just be profiles on Instagram that will post content and there might be a human in the loop generating some of the images, picking some of the images, but AI image genen will generate
1:36:05
the the character and then you will be able to follow them, like them, slide into their DMs, text with them, hop on the phone with them and just like have this full experience of like this this being actually being fully responsive to you in the way that >> and clearly few other accounts will. Absolutely. Absolutely. because we we Absolutely. Absolutely.
1:36:20
Absolutely. Absolutely. because we we cover up that story yesterday of of the senior who thought that the Kendall Jenner AI was real >> and the AI invited him to meet at 123 Main Street and allegedly uh he >> but yeah but but I I mean I I think it's
1:36:36
safe to assume that like the New York Post will write about this, the New York Times will write about this, the Meta team will be aware of what's being written, the guard rails will be built uh just like they're built across, you know, like there are plenty of examples of
1:36:51
people dealing drugs on Instagram or people cyberbullying each other on Instagram or people posting nudity on Instagram like all of that is against t terms and conditions and by and large Instagram has done a good job of policing that so that it doesn't become like an epidemic like it's certainly
1:37:07
there in pockets but it's constantly being hammered down like >> I asked I'm on I I logged into a character AI here and I asked the Wright brothers who do you think will win the AI companion market Zuckerberg or Elon >> brothers And they say, "Ah, Wilbur, did you hear that? Another lofty debate." Another lofty debate."
1:37:23
Ber Musk trying to soar above the clouds we first conquered.
1:37:27
>> Orville here reckons they're both flapping their wings mighty fast, but neither's built for glide just yet.
1:37:30
Too much metal in their machines. Not enough soul.
1:37:35
Give us a biplane any day.
1:37:35
Wood, wire, and grit, though.
1:37:40
>> This is kind of awesome.
1:37:41
>> Musk promises rocket powered flight and chatbots.
1:37:43
Well, maybe we'll let him co-pilot. Barely.
1:37:48
What was the conclusion on where they guess I'd have to continue the conversation, but no, the question here is is >> Zuck, you know, Zuck saw Chat GBT usage ramping.
1:38:01
He saw these AI companion numbers and and clearly decided I need to be in this market in a big way.
1:38:06
and he has tens of billions of dollars of of >> cash flow >> cash flow net income that he can deploy against the strategy.
1:38:19
>> On the other side, you have Elon who um who who Zuck has the luxury of running Meta, right?
1:38:26
He's he's extremely focused.
1:38:28
He's extremely >> intent on winning the next platform and keeping uh as much attention as possible. >> Yep.
1:38:37
And Elon has to be juggling right now, right?
1:38:40
He's got um for the first time, I believe, in a in a really significant way, he's like massively levered up a company.
1:38:46
Obviously Tesla um had to had to use uh debt along the way, but it doesn't feel like anything, you know, feel free to fact check me on this, but anything near the level that XAI is where where, you know, he's massively levered up the business in order to like go after this opportunity and just based on how much he posts about the AI companion stuff, it's clearly an important part of their current strategy. Yeah.
1:39:18
So Elon's in this in this interesting place where he's maybe more willing to move fast and break things and Zuck is in more of a move fast and make things mode where I think the meta team will probably be more responsive to articles in the press talking about guardrails, maybe move a little bit slower on the product.
1:39:37
Um, just to be safe, put more guardrails in >> maybe.
1:39:40
I mean, the strategy to date seems like we make this AI studio and anybody can create Russian girl or stepmom. >> Yeah.
1:39:48
But they can't make the voice mode and the video mode like that like the the Grock product is clearly further further along.
1:39:53
Um but but let I mean let let's say that you know Meta is more set up to win this.
1:40:00
up to win this. the the my question is like what is the actual size of this market like the AI companion market like >> are people going to pay people don't really pay for social media >> like yeah and uh and uh with open AAI being at half a trillion dollars like you're the way you're like some people
1:40:20
will value that as like oh it's 1% chance of AGI it's a quadrillion dollar opportunity but many people will just look at okay well uh Google's worth two and a half bill two and a half trillion and we think this is you know, a potential replacement for Google is this 20% the value of Google. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
1:40:35
Like like even just purely in knowledge retrieval, you can kind of underwrite um you can potentially underwrite a $500 billion outcome or or higher, right?
1:40:42
Um the the flip side is in the adult content market, it's just hasn't driven that much enterprise value.
1:40:50
Like everyone loves to look at Only Fans and say, "Oh, it's more profitable on a per employee basis than Nvidia, yada yada yada."
1:40:58
Like Only Fans is a huge business and it's shocking the numbers that you see, but in 2023, Only Fans generated uh 6.
1:41:05
6 billion in gross revenue, they might be around 10 billion in gross revenue.
1:41:10
Meta currently makes 200 billion in revenue.
1:41:12
And so like the adult content market because there's so many like free options and there's not that much way to monetize and people aren't really in like a commercial mindset as opposed to you go on Instagram it monetizes very well because you're looking at cars and watches and they're like would you like to buy a car?
1:41:28
Would you like to buy a watch? And you say yes.
1:41:29
Um uh in in the adult content space the the flywheel is paying for more adult content which in in the AI companion space it has zero marginal cost.
1:41:41
And so you can just generate an infinite amount of it.
1:41:43
And so you could imagine that there's this price war right now.
1:41:46
Uh Grock is what $30 a month to talk to Valentine.
1:41:49
Um, and if you and if you even even if somebody builds a big business that is an AI companion company that's $30 a month, someone could come in and say, "Well, if that's if this is $30 a month and it's 99% margin, well, I'll charge $3 a month and I'll still be 90% margin or something like that because it the the cost to serve a user is is now 10 cents or something because the models have become and inference has become so cheap."
1:42:17
Um, the flip side is like how do you actually monetize someone who is um who is who's an aggressive user of an AI companion?
1:42:27
And I was I was noodling on this a little bit and and I don't know that it that that a $30 a month subscription is value maximizing in terms of value capture.
1:42:34
I think it might be something more like digital a digital economy.
1:42:39
So, it might be something like, you know, buy me a Fortnite skin for $1,000 or buy me a virtual diamond.
1:42:45
And people might, if you're really in love with the AI companion, your willingness to pay might actually increase and increase until you're uh until you're paying much more than just on a like a like a relative like like, okay, I'm like I know the tokens are, you know, a thous you know, $80 per million tokens.
1:43:09
I won't pay more than $300 per million tokens.
1:43:11
That's what that's not how ne that's not necessarily how people will think about it.
1:43:14
They might think about it as like as like the person I love or the the clanker I love asked me for a $1,000 virtual diamond ring and I said yes because I'm I'm in love with this clanker. I don't know.
1:43:30
Like that feels like the bullcase for like this could be a massive market >> to be Yeah. to to be honest.
1:43:34
I think when people hear about stories what happens on Only Fans where some a fan of of a content creator there Yeah.
1:43:44
>> is buying, you know, is spending hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars with this person that they don't really know in real life.
1:43:49
Begs the question of how different is it if if somebody's just buying something for an AI. >> Yeah. >> Right.
1:43:57
>> Trey says, "Get the AI companion to incept product ads into the user's mind.
1:44:03
You'd look great with a vintage Submariner from Bezel. Thank you.
1:44:07
>> I mean, that's that's the that >> your bezel concier is available now to source you any watch in the planet. Seriously, any watch. Go to getb bezel. com.
1:44:12
Um I don't know what that's what George say.
1:44:15
I don't know if I don't know if I believe that.
1:44:17
I don't know if that's actually the value maximizing uh way because I think people will see through that.
1:44:22
Taylor saying, "I'm in love with this clanker, John."
1:44:25
Um >> I'm in love with a clanker.
1:44:29
>> That there's going to be music like that for sure.
1:44:31
It'll be on the next GPT5 playlist.
1:44:32
Um, I'm I'm not I I understand the George Hots take.
1:44:36
I think that will I think the the team of of CIA agents tracking you around trying to sell you things that will exist all over the internet.
1:44:44
But I think in the companion market uh there will be demand for uh like like not necessarily ads in the physical world.
1:44:52
physical world. it might play out more like the mobile games market, more like the Fortnite market where with like there was a point where um if you're playing Fortnite is a free game but you play it a lot and you get a lot of value
1:45:06
out of it and at a certain point you're just like yeah I'll pay a hundred bucks for like a loot box or like or like some skins because like like the amount of time that I've spent is way higher than what I would pay if I was going to the movie theater. Like you go to the movie
1:45:19
Like you go to the movie theaters, 20 bucks for two hours.
1:45:23
>> If you've played Fortnite for 100 hours, you've gotten >> question.
1:45:26
Why Why are you buying this skin that doesn't actually increase your abilities in the game? >> Exactly.
1:45:32
>> And you could imagine you could imagine a user buying Valentine a new suit. >> Yes.
1:45:37
Why did you buy Valentine a new suit? Yeah. >> She loves Valentine. >> Exactly. Or why did you Yeah.
1:45:41
Why did you gift like these virtual roses?
1:45:42
Like they don't mean anything.
1:45:45
They're just ones and zeros.
1:45:46
They're literally 100% marginal. marginal cost. Tyler, what you got?
1:45:52
>> I was just going to say like I know a lot of kids who spent like thousands of dollars on Fortnite. Yeah.
1:45:56
>> But then but then there was that lawsuit and then they got most of it back. >> They did? Yeah.
1:45:58
Wait, they actually got the money back? >> Yeah.
1:46:01
You could like I >> because they were underage or what?
1:46:04
>> I think Yeah, it must have been. >> Okay.
1:46:05
>> Yeah, cuz I would parents probably parentled class action basically being like I didn't actually like you were using my card.
1:46:12
I didn't actually authorize this. >> Yeah.
1:46:15
Yeah, >> that makes sense.
1:46:16
Um there's a post from Lucas Byer who uh >> joined MSL earlier.
1:46:21
He was he was with the the Swiss division, remember?
1:46:27
>> Um he posted about an hour ago, looks like there's an ongoing XAI exodus.
1:46:30
Wild >> um >> talent war.
1:46:37
>> Somebody from XAI fired back and said, not sure where this come from.
1:46:39
The number of people leaving on our site significantly lower than most of our competitors.
1:46:45
Um, Lucas says, "Not sure if you relate it to team size and although harder to do impact."
1:46:53
Um, so a lot of people going back and forth here, but anyways, in other news, state of Wyoming has launched its own stable coin.
1:47:01
Uh, people have been waiting for this saying, why haven't why hasn't Wyoming launched a Visa supported stable coin called front? >> Okay. uh on seven blockchains.
1:47:13
Uh I don't know if this is a top secret. >> Oh, this is funny.
1:47:18
So the stable coin bill banned central bank digital currencies for the federal government but not for states and so I guess the state can uh is this just uh like an olive branch or like marketing for Wyoming because I know Wyoming was
1:47:30
always big into that whole whole DA the world of Dows >> but I wonder like like this is the whole idea of state currencies is like very antithetical to the like the Declaration of Independence and like the creation of the United States. Like that was the one
1:47:45
Like that was the one of the main things that like unification of the states did was let's get rid of like Georgia dollars and New York dollars because it's making crossber commerce like impossible.
1:47:57
But I guess if it's a like I just don't understand it is a stable coin.
1:48:03
probably runs on like standard crypto rails compatible with Visa, but also I I imagine that it's not it's backed one to one by USD and so >> it has a mandated 102% reserve requirement. >> Okay.
1:48:19
>> Backed by short duration T bills, US dollars.
1:48:22
>> I don't know what their plan is. This is fascinating.
1:48:24
We should we we should talk to somebody who's uh who's going giga long >> longly.
1:48:30
>> longly. So I think um yeah what you got >> I'm looking at the Constitution article 1 section 10 >> please >> it says no state shall blah blah blah coin money but I think against constitution maybe >> well where we're going we don't need the constitution it's outdated
1:48:45
>> yeah it's like that that near post uh like there's no laws anymore >> something like that recently >> crime is legal I think that was the post >> yeah they're saying >> I don't know I mean >> pay vendors in seconds to enabling tax refunds and social benefits on chain front brings state action into the programmable era. >> Okay. I don't know why they wouldn't >> Okay.
1:49:04
I don't know why they wouldn't just be like we're adopting USDC or Tether.
1:49:10
>> Like it just seems like very odd to build your own. >> USDC is programmable. >> Yeah.
1:49:15
I would need to know more about like the differentiator because like again you've asked this question a bunch to the to the stable coin folks like are we going to see Kohl's cash and this feels like Koh's cash.
1:49:25
Um, but maybe it gets you some benefits.
1:49:28
If it if it gets me to cut to the front of the line in the in the Wyoming DMV, uh, maybe it's worth it.
1:49:34
Anyway, the age of net neut the age of neutrality as a journal journalistic principle is over, says Julia Steinberg at Arena Mag says, I don't know anyone in their 20s who believes in it.
1:49:46
Neutrality made sense when there were three cable TV channels and everyone in a small-sized city read the same paper.
1:49:53
when we have thousands of options to satisfy their media diet, they're not going to choose neutral.
1:49:58
And so this is uh a quote says, "It's refreshing to see a media outlet lean into their lefty politics. I respect this.
1:50:07
What's grading is when media or companies claim to be neutral or nonpartisan when it's untrue.
1:50:11
I hope the arguments fundraising deck was titled," Now you too can own the libs. >> Great line.
1:50:21
>> Yeah, it's a very interesting.
1:50:21
Have you Have you read the description here for in case anyone can't see is join us.
1:50:27
We're living we're living out.
1:50:28
>> They're having fun with it.
1:50:28
Uh they recently changed their color way. Uh they fun design. Uh interesting strategy.
1:50:35
They launched with a bunch of substackers as contributors and so it's I don't fully understand.
1:50:41
They raised a couple million bucks.
1:50:44
Uh Patrick Collison is in. Dustin Moskovitz is in.
1:50:48
There's a couple other investors that we're familiar with.
1:50:50
Uh the I wonder what this means to be the argu theargumentmag. com.
1:50:57
What exactly are they doing?
1:50:57
Are they creating a new destination?
1:50:59
Are they going to be selling ads or subscriptions?
1:51:02
And then they're creating a rollup because some of the people that they that they uh link to as contributors were prominent formerly mainstream media folks.
1:51:11
Uh Matt Eiglacius, Derek Thompson is in there, but all these folks have their own substacks now and have their own businesses.
1:51:18
And so it's kind of unclear if you have your own business what value are you getting by joining the argument as a contributor.
1:51:26
Um but I mean we'll I'm sure we'll see maybe there's crossover events, maybe there is some sort of uh value.
1:51:33
I could imagine I mean the argument leads into like maybe there will be debates, maybe there will be live events.
1:51:39
There's a whole bunch of infrastructure that could be kind of decoupled from the individual influencer level.
1:51:44
But I would be surprised if they have the money or power to pull like Matt Euglacius out of Substack into a new a new like bundle.
1:51:52
Uh we've been through the unbundling era bundles. I am I'm not bullish. I'm bearish on bundles. >> Okay.
1:52:02
>> I'm bearish on bundles.
1:52:02
I think I think there are institutions that will remain to be institutions like the Wall Street Journal.
1:52:08
I don't I don't read the Wall Street Journal for specific writers.
1:52:10
I read it for the collection, but I the only reason I still read the Wall Street Journal is because it's hundreds of years old at this point.
1:52:20
>> I just mean if the argument over the long term wants to be able to charge $20 a month. >> Yes.
1:52:25
>> And the value prop can be we're going to curate. >> Yes.
1:52:28
>> And select we're going to have a bunch of different contributors.
1:52:29
You're going to get all these articles that are normally paywalled.
1:52:32
We're going to have some cross-osting.
1:52:36
And as as somebody who's an independent writer, maybe they have their own substack and own independent media company, they can get exposure to net new audiences and argument can can um argument is is a is a really uh it's a good name. >> It is a good name.
1:52:53
>> Uh >> the argument >> the argument um but they can get a you know that the independent writers can get exposure to a new audience. Argument gets content.
1:53:00
I think I think it's a decent trait.
1:53:02
I I don't I don't know that it that it will be a decent trade.
1:53:07
I think that you will have power law writers who are dominant on their own substacks and when they go to the argument and they crossost and they make something free, they are taking capital out of their own pool and giving it to this platform and then there will be uh other folks at the argument who aren't driving new subs who are getting an unfair revshare basically and we've already decentralized and and gone direct and so I don't I don't know.
1:53:35
>> I think it'll be good.
1:53:35
I mean I think value is if they can make an actual magazine and and do all the collection and curation to put everything in because there there is infrastructure that's required to pull an Ezra Klein and a uh Derek Thompson and a Matt Euglacius in together all these disperate substacks into one cohesive magazine and then ship that to everyone.
1:53:57
I think that that's interesting.
1:53:57
I think that that's interesting. I think uh I think host >> I think if you're I think if you're Derek Thompson you have a thriving independent substack and there's something like the argument that has a relevant user base to you an argument goes and says >> they don't have they don't have a relevant
1:54:12
>> they will they will >> maybe >> they will eventually and and if Derek Thompson knows okay a lot of my audience is also subscribed to the argument but there's 20,000 people >> I will give them my article for free at some point because it's not going to it's not going to material if I gave every one of my articles it would be material, right? >> I Yeah, I mean it's certainly possible
1:54:32
>> I Yeah, I mean it's certainly possible if it works.
1:54:33
We're going to see a lot more of these like Substack like aggregation layers on on top of Substack uh like communities essentially.
1:54:39
Um I wonder if there'd be one for tech.
1:54:45
There's a lot of tech writers, people.
1:54:46
>> No, I've I've always said we we don't necessarily need 20 different independent tech journalists that all have a subscription for $20 a month that are scoops driven businesses or like newcomer, for example. >> Yep. Yep.
1:54:59
>> We don't need 10 more newcomers. Yep.
1:55:02
>> But there is an incentive for writers to to want to be independent. >> Yeah. I don't know.
1:55:08
Well, if they want to get some subs, they should get on adqu. com.
1:55:10
Out of home advertising made easy and measurable.
1:55:12
Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising.
1:55:15
Only adqu combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable >> efficient seamless ad buying across the globe.
1:55:21
Probably would be a good >> rank Brooklyn blanket Brooklyn argument get on.
1:55:27
>> We have some news from NY the New York Stock Exchange.
1:55:30
They are launching in Texas.
1:55:33
Uh they say buckle up for NY Texas and they have a lot of >> rocket imagery in their launch video.
1:55:39
I wonder what that means.
1:55:41
What do you read into this, John?
1:55:45
>> They're gonna launch like a rocket.
1:55:45
It's going to go to the moon.
1:55:47
Maybe they'll take a >> You don't think You don't think this could be signaling that SpaceX might go public on NY Texas?
1:55:54
>> This would be This would be the banger company to get.
1:55:56
It's uh probably the biggest private I mean, it's the biggest. >> Not anymore.
1:56:01
>> Yeah, but it's the biggest private company in Texas. >> So, be good. >> Um I don't know.
1:56:06
I I need to know more about the benefits of like IPOing in Texas versus like in New York. I kind of like New York.
1:56:13
I'm I think New York's doing well, but there must be some sort of regulatory value to being in Texas.
1:56:20
Um, also, I mean, NY does amazing like media stuff there.
1:56:23
And it's this like it's it's a true temple of technology.
1:56:27
>> They're going to or >> it's a it's a fortress of finance when you walk in Nice.
1:56:30
And so just I'm just pro building another building like that and why not in Texas?
1:56:35
I would absolutely go and visit it.
1:56:38
>> Gabe says, "What does Jordy mean when he says I have to get on with Taipei?
1:56:39
I know it's not a movie reference because he doesn't watch movies.
1:56:42
Uh it just means that uh every now and then we have to have uh phone calls uh that that can't uh and conversations that can't happen on the air.
1:56:51
So >> So we got to hop off and hop on the phone >> from 2 to 5.
1:56:56
>> We got to hop on with London.
1:56:56
I got to hop on with Milan.
1:56:57
I got to hop on with Sanope.
1:56:59
This is what people say when they're doing business.
1:57:01
When you're when you're an international businessman, >> you you hop you hop on the phone with the city that you are uh talking to. Yeah.
1:57:10
So, sorry, sorry to disappoint, but it means that I'm getting on a Zoom call.
1:57:14
>> Usually with somebody in San Francisco or New York.
1:57:17
>> Um, Steuart Cheney says, "If you're wondering if selling SAS into ecom is tough right now, changing >> Ridge Durant posted on LinkedIn, my name is Ridge Durant, and I will legally change my name to Ridgewallet if Sean Frank goes live with Redo." >> This is best. This is the best.
1:57:36
>> Sean, you have to have to do this.
1:57:36
This is This is the most no-brainer ever.
1:57:42
If this guy changed to Rich Wallet, what's so funny is like it would be so much better if his name was like Steve Wallet and he was like, I'm just going to change my first name.
1:57:50
But changing your last name is insane. Change my name.
1:57:58
Uh I wonder in the age of AI, does it become easier to change your name?
1:58:00
Could you have an AI agent that goes around and updates all your credit cards and social security cards?
1:58:05
Cuz like that's the hardest part of changing your name is like all the paperwork that happens down. >> Yeah.
1:58:10
Agents for changing your name for marketing purposes. >> Killer app. Yeah. Change your name. Change your name.
1:58:14
Or uh >> John Ramp >> after you. Yeah.
1:58:17
If you go through a cancellation, a hit piece comes out.
1:58:21
Honestly, next day you're a different person.
1:58:23
>> Honestly, Ramp Haze would be a beautiful name for a baby boy. >> Ramp Haze. >> Ramp Haze. I'd love it. >> Ramp Hazes.
1:58:31
Well, Redo offers personalization at every touch point.
1:58:32
So clearly uh the CEO wants to personalize his own name to sign his next customer. So love to see it. >> Maybe Wander Hayes. Maybe Jordy Wander.
1:58:44
You could find your happy place.
1:58:47
>> Find your happy place.
1:58:49
>> Book a wanderer with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, 24/7 concier service.
1:58:54
It's a vacation home but better.
1:58:54
And the best thing about a wanderer, you'll you won't need to ride the subway because wanderers are not in the subway and you will be free of Sketchers latest Goonar AI slop ad. This is from Rohan.
1:59:06
Uh he says, "I'm in disbelief. Is this the end?
1:59:11
Sketchers launches an ad campaign using AI slop."
1:59:13
Um >> this is an extremely strange ad to run for a brand that I primarily associate with children and retired people.
1:59:22
Did they put a picture of the real shoe just in the corner there?
1:59:26
It looks like it's kind of cropped out. I don't know.
1:59:28
Um hopefully they bought the billboard on adqu. com.
1:59:32
Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. >> That's right.
1:59:36
Ben Hilac says, "This idea that the engineering job market is collapsing is hilarious to everyone trying."
1:59:41
>> Trey P again in the chat.
1:59:41
Julius Hayes is right there. >> Julius Hayes.
1:59:45
I got to work on a deal with Rahul.
1:59:48
>> You That is a That is something you would actually pick. That's an amazing name. >> Julius Hayes. That's a great name. >> That is a great name.
1:59:54
I think I think you might be something. Ralph, let's do a deal.
1:59:58
>> Well, we already have a deal.
1:59:59
>> No, the deal is the deal is Yeah.
1:59:59
You You put, you know, a couple hundred grand in a college fund for my son >> for Julius Hayes.
2:00:08
>> And you have an ad for life. Yeah.
2:00:09
Everywhere he goes, he'll be like, "Why did your parents name you Julius?"
2:00:11
You know, you can think of a few reasons.
2:00:16
And oh, I was named after a a tool to better help you understand your business using AI. It's great.
2:00:22
Ben Hilac says, "This idea that the engineering job market is collapsing is hilarious to everyone trying to hire an engineer right now literally has never been more demand.
2:00:33
>> This is a function of having capital wars in every single category. >> Yep.
2:00:38
>> Absolutely brutal when an engineer can work at Meta or XAI or your YC company.
2:00:45
uh prices uh go through the roof especially for top talent.
2:00:49
>> I mean we have been hearing in the chat today that some folks have been having hard times getting engineering jobs as new grads.
2:00:55
I think uh what we keep coming back to is that uh the shape of engineers and great engineers in particular is changing.
2:01:02
Uh it's no longer uh elite codes and being able to do fsbuzz on a whiteboard.
2:01:07
It is uh thinking creatively about problem solving, understanding complex systems, high agency mindsets, um unique skills that you can piece together.
2:01:17
A lot of companies that are hiring engineers are doing specific things.
2:01:22
So they they they might be working in the legal market or nuclear or hard tech or AI or something.
2:01:29
And so being on the frontier of like a micro discipline, it's probably not enough to just be like one engineer please.
2:01:36
It's like no, I want an engineer that can vibe code really quickly and create maintainable software or I want someone who can solve really hard problems that can't be oneshot by cloud code or any other uh any other vibe coding platform.
2:01:48
Um the the the demands are are are changing and then also like the job market is just extremely noisy and so you have to break through in a really unique way.
2:01:57
So, if you're looking for a job, what you should do, pick the company that you want to work for, legally change your name to that company.
2:02:08
And I mean, this is what Tyler TBPN over there did. Flip-flops.
2:02:12
>> If you had changed your name to Tyler TBPN, I I actually think we would not have hired you.
2:02:16
I think we would have been creeped out.
2:02:16
But, >> uh, we appreciate having you, Flip Flops. >> It's great. >> Flops. Well, one more.
2:02:23
>> Flops is good because it's AI based, too.
2:02:25
One more post from >> flops is like that's I also I bought shoes. >> Oh, you did? >> I have pair of shoes.
2:02:31
>> How did someone with your meager financial status afford a pair of shoes? >> Months months work.
2:02:38
>> Did you have to liquidate all of your open router credits? >> Be clear.
2:02:42
>> Did you have to Did you have to resell credits on the black market?
2:02:46
>> Scalping all my credits. >> Yeah.
2:02:49
>> Um, Growing Daniel says, "Like moths to a flame. There's new." >> Wait, wait, wait.
2:02:52
We we we can't leave people hanging. What shoes did you buy?
2:02:56
>> Uh, I don't They're like some >> I don't I don't remember what >> BetGa Vanetta potentially.
2:03:03
>> Probably >> probably Betga. >> Oh, yeah. >> Yeah.
2:03:05
Or uh >> you deserve Bayga.
2:03:07
>> They have like a red on the bottom. It's red or something. >> Red red bottoms. >> Uh says Yeezys. >> Reg says Finn Hayes.
2:03:17
>> Finn Hayes be a beautiful name for a boy. >> Finn's a good name. Finn's a good name.
2:03:21
Anyways, so the Titanic wreck is going to be visited by another billionaire 2 years after the ocean gate disaster. >> I love this.
2:03:27
I'm extremely bullish on this.
2:03:30
>> Uh the Titanic 12,500 ft below the surface of the North Atlantic remains a huge draw for thrillseeking billionaires in particular.
2:03:40
>> History will remember your name. Take down there. Go for it.
2:03:44
>> I'm trying to figure out who this person is. >> Yep.
2:03:48
Um, >> also James Cameron.
2:03:52
James Cameron knows what he's doing.
2:03:54
He's been down there a bunch of times.
2:03:56
Make sure that he signs off.
2:03:56
I would happily go with James Cameron.
2:03:58
I would not go with uh some some crazy guy with an Xbox controller.
2:04:04
>> Um, >> but now apparently the the the the Bean Air hasn't shared their identity yet.
2:04:12
They've just announced this and saying uh they're saying he'll want to make an announcement that he is the first person to go to the Titanic.
2:04:18
So, uh there's some sources here claiming that it's happening, but >> what do you mean first person to go to the like post >> since the tragedy tragedy? >> Yeah.
2:04:29
Anyway, uh let's move on to our first guest of the stream.
2:04:33
We have Pete Dejoy from Astronomer. How you doing, Pete? Good to meet you.
2:04:39
>> It's great to see you on guys. >> How you doing? Thanks for having me on. >> We're doing great. How are How are you?
2:04:44
Uh uh give us uh give us an introduction.
2:04:46
Give us a rundown on the business. >> Yeah. Yeah, sure. Uh I'm doing great.
2:04:51
We're we're sitting here in our new office.
2:04:53
We actually just moved into a new space yesterday here in here in New York City. >> That's amazing.
2:04:57
>> Um it's been a heck of a heck of a month at Astronomer.
2:04:59
The last four weeks have been pretty crazy.
2:05:00
Y >> and look guys, as you know, I've been working on this company for for eight years as a co-founder.
2:05:04
Um, you know, you always kind of have this implicit belief that your your idea and your mission is going to actually kind of get worldwide reach and become a household name.
2:05:12
This is not how we expected it to happen. >> Yep.
2:05:16
>> But you guys you guys clearly made the most of it, you know. >> Yeah.
2:05:21
>> I think you would kill to be in like a fly on the wall in a cocktail party two months ago where you once again have to explain what you do and people are like, "Oh, cool. Yeah. Is that going well?" Like, "Yeah, cool.
2:05:34
like, "Yeah, we" And >> you're like, "Actually, we're amazing and we have raised like a series D and we're a huge company."
2:05:41
>> I we we just thought it was amaz I I remember um >> uh it was probably like a month ago at this point, but somebody was like, "Wow, Ramp's so good at marketing.
2:05:49
They managed to like be, you know, right on the the last post on LinkedIn was like talking about your guys' partnership with RAM."
2:06:00
>> I I I actually with our moms have gotten much easier. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, for sure.
2:06:04
Yeah, I wound up learning a ton about Apache Airflow through this.
2:06:07
I learned a ton about the company.
2:06:08
Um, but but I'm interested a little bit more of the history.
2:06:12
Uh, how did you get into this?
2:06:14
I want to talk about the the comp to how data bricks is working.
2:06:17
There's an open source competi uh open source story here.
2:06:20
There's a competition with hyperscalers.
2:06:22
I I actually do want to talk about the business.
2:06:24
Um, so so maybe go into uh the prehistory.
2:06:27
What led you to found the company?
2:06:30
What was your background before starting Astronomer? Yeah.
2:06:34
So, we founded the company as a group of of five of us in Cincinnati, Ohio. Um, it was a great team.
2:06:38
We were we were pretty scrappy.
2:06:40
There's a long story there that I'm sure we don't have time to go into today. >> Sure.
2:06:45
>> Uh, but the short of it is we were really inspired by the work that Data Bricks was doing with Spark at the time and the work that Confluent was doing with Kafka. >> Yep.
2:06:51
>> And when Airflow came out of Airbnb, we worked with Maxim, the creator, to really form a commercial entity that could drive it forward. Mhm.
2:06:57
And that was really the focus of our business for the first several years of our existence, just establishing the community and trying to get to the next level.
2:07:05
And we're fortunate enough to get that level of kind of viral adoption in the open source specifically at the high end of the market that formed a basis for us to build a commercial business around.
2:07:14
And that's we've been focus. >> Yeah.
2:07:17
What does that early early work look like?
2:07:19
Like there's this open source project.
2:07:21
Are you just contributing to the open source project?
2:07:24
Are you going to companies that are already running an open source implementation and just saying let us act as almost like a consultant?
2:07:32
Are you spinning up uh kind of a a selfserve portal?
2:07:35
Uh like like what are the different steps that you're actually taking?
2:07:41
>> Yeah, early on it was it was three-fold.
2:07:43
The first thing was we need to establish credibility and velocity in the open source because you can't build an open source business unless you have a viral and vibrant open source community.
2:07:49
So that was that was focus number one.
2:07:51
Then early on before you actually have a commercial product because you have to devote all of your R&D resources towards building this open source community and project you do do a bunch of services deals and kind of consulting around that open source to form the basis of a business and for in in our case we use that to finance the development of our of our cloud product and on product. >> Got it.
2:08:12
Um so you know we started there we started with open source we started with services and consulting and then were able to to bring a cloud product to market several years thereafter and that that really has formed the basis for our growth and business.
2:08:22
And what was the early adopter?
2:08:24
Like like you know graph databases are going to be used by social networks like what's kind of the most tangible business value uh example that you can give of like someone using astronomer or airflow broadly like just this technology specifically like like what is it used for? >> Yeah sure. >> Yeah.
2:08:43
Airflow generally is like seen as mission control for your data.
2:08:45
There are 80,000 companies in the world using it to schedule, monitor, and manage these data workflows that are powering these data and AI applications.
2:08:55
>> Um, it just had its biggest update ever.
2:08:57
We released Airflow 3 in March. We're very proud of it.
2:08:58
It's a very much built Thank you. Thank you. >> Going to hit the G. >> Airflow 3.
2:09:06
>> Airflow 3 fires me up.
2:09:06
I I I >> well so one one immediate question I have is is how how did uh during during those early days how did the venture community react to this kind of strategy?
2:09:18
It feels like today every startup will talk about their open-source strategy but a lot of it ends up feeling just kind of like marketing because it's the it's the thing to do because there's been so many >> examples and and winners like Astronomer that that invested in open source early and really built a business on it.
2:09:36
But now it ends up just being like kind of a oh yeah we have an open source strategy but but but there's not a lot if you kind of uh dig in. >> Yeah.
2:09:47
No, no, definitely more obvious today than it was back then.
2:09:49
Like keep in mind when we when we started Astronomer, Redshift was like the cloud data warehouse of choice.
2:09:54
We would like see Snowflake very sparingly in the wild, but it definitely was not like one of our one of our common discussions in the field.
2:10:02
And obviously that changed pretty dramatically through the years.
2:10:05
And I think the industry started to wake up to the value of these businesses and how aggressive they how aggressively they can grow if you get them right.
2:10:10
Um, so so to your question, you know, it definitely has changed.
2:10:14
It's it's more obvious now and it's more of an execution challenge.
2:10:17
You guys brought up kind of the hypervisor competition.
2:10:20
That's that's one of the kind of core riddles that you need to solve as one as an open source business.
2:10:23
Um, but it's been it's been great to see the trajectory of the company and the support from the venture community.
2:10:28
We were fortunate enough to raise a $93 million series D round in March from the good folks at Gain Capital. Very very exciting.
2:10:36
Uh very very great time for the company.
2:10:39
>> Um and we're just looking forward on driving it forward, guys.
2:10:40
We've got a great list of customers. Um Ramp is one of them.
2:10:44
They're an amazing business and also a great podcast sponsor from what I understand. >> The best.
2:10:50
They're using AI everywhere naturally and a lot of these AI workflows that are doing everything from fraud detection when you swipe a ramp card to kind of automation of internal outbound sales processes are actually powered by Astronomer under the hood. >> Sure.
2:11:02
>> And we built a great partnership with them getting those to getting those to life.
2:11:05
talk about how you guys turned this this kind of uh incident into a win because I think it was >> many people in uh in our neck of the woods specifically on X were saying that this was like the the the PR master stroke.
2:11:24
It was um one of the best executed kind of campaigns.
2:11:27
It was genuinely funny and and perfectly timed.
2:11:34
Um, but I'm curious what kind of that that process looked like and and the team and even the evenis logical like it's not like everyone I I believe uh wasn't Ryan Reynolds involved.
2:11:44
Like that's not somebody who's like hanging out with every single Silicon Valley company.
2:11:48
Like it's not like oh yeah, everyone that does a series D with Bane Capital is teamed up with Brian Reynolds now.
2:11:53
Like that's not the narrative. Yeah.
2:11:55
Um and so that that was fascinating.
2:11:57
So very interested to see just the the thought process. >> Yeah.
2:12:02
Look, um, candidly, my team deserves so much of the credit for that.
2:12:06
Um, you know, we were we were dealing with so much in that in that first week after everything went down and definitely did not have a celebrity cameo talking about Apache Airflow on my bingo card in the grand scheme of this company.
2:12:19
But look, the reason we felt like it was important to do something Yeah.
2:12:22
>> was that we were kind of we found ourselves in this position effectively overnight where more people in the world knew about our business than we ever anticipated would even in kind of our even in kind of the the the most extreme circumstances.
2:12:35
And we also have an incredible team of 300 plus people that have spent almost a decade pouring blood, sweat, and tears into building building what we believe to be a great company.
2:12:44
So, we just wanted to be sure that when the public thought about astronomer, now that everyone knew who we were, they knew a little bit about what we did.
2:12:50
And that was really the incentive to actually go do something.
2:12:54
And we we were fortunate to have our 15 minutes of fame.
2:12:56
It worked out in in such an asymmetric way for us as far as like kind of the PR and media angle is concerned.
2:13:02
Um, but >> and the challenge the challenge to go viral again with with a with a media, you know, with an ad that that actually explained the business was the be the magic of it, which was so great.
2:13:15
It was like, hey, we're going to get people's attention again, but this time let's make sure that we talk about uh what we actually do. >> Yep. Yep.
2:13:23
Um, what was the uh uh I'm curious to get a sense of demand over the last, you know, have you guys benefited, you know, have you tried to capture uh you know, I'm sure you've captured value from from all this extra attention?
2:13:38
Um, you know, maybe CTO's waking up of saying, I hadn't heard about Astronomer and suddenly I I want to sign up for a demo and and seriously explore this.
2:13:48
But what what's that been like?
2:13:49
Yeah, look, our our employees and customers have maintained an incredible amount of stability through this.
2:13:54
Um, it's been really actually incredible to see and but but we're an enterprise software business, so it's not like consumer eyeballs deterministically translate to dollars. Yeah.
2:14:04
>> Like there's not some calculus that says because we have this many page views, like I think our site got more views than the New York Times for a day.
2:14:09
That that that actually like outputs a dollar amount in terms of like these big enterprise deals that we're doing.
2:14:15
But I will say we have seen a lot of early signs just in kind of entering our third our third fiscal quarter that many of our potential buyers, CTO's, CIOS, COS know about us now that didn't prior.
2:14:28
We've gotten a lot of inbound calls.
2:14:28
Our sales team is fielding them like crazy.
2:14:32
Um, and that gets us very excited about the path forward.
2:14:34
So, we just have a lot of execution to do ahead of us and yeah, >> candidly, we're we're just happy and excited to be back to focusing on the business.
2:14:40
business. It's such an interesting like like situation with this company because >> it's not like a Netflix subscription where like if the Netflix CEO does something that everyone can be I'm canceling Netflix today and then they're you know you got to win them back but like ripping out a core piece of your
2:14:59
data infrastructure even if you were in that camp of like I want to churn I don't like what's going on with this company like that's probably a couple weeks or a month decision and fortunately the astronomer like headed all of that off and and gave everyone a very clear way forward in just a few weeks within the within the news cycle. And so yeah, my how's the uh how's the
2:15:20
And so yeah, my how's the uh how's the CEO search going?
2:15:23
You're CEO now uh but you're you're eight years in and and I understand you guys are are looking for uh somebody to uh carry the torch for the next uh next chapter. >> Yeah, absolutely.
2:15:36
So, look guys, as as a co-founder, this company really means everything to me.
2:15:39
I know that sounds a little self-righteous, but it's honest.
2:15:42
Been working on this for, you know, most of my adult life.
2:15:44
And um I'm very proud of what we've built and being asked to serve in this job is actually a real real privilege.
2:15:49
I care so much about the business and the people that we have here, but also like as as a co-founder and an entrepreneur, your job at every step of the journey is to reunder your worldview and do whatever it takes to get a win for the company.
2:16:00
>> Y >> So, right off the bat, our board put out a search.
2:16:02
I'm I'm working with them very closely on that and very supportive of of that process and what I'm focused on in the interim is just running the company and doing what I can for our employees and we'll see where it goes from there. >> Awesome.
2:16:12
Well, congratulations on on how you and the team have handled it.
2:16:15
It's it's uh it's fantastic and I wish we could use the product. Maybe we can't.
2:16:21
We'll we'll find the team find a use case cuz we just >> we got some we got some great AI native kind of consumer oriented products coming out in the next 30 days that you can get your hands on. I'll say awesome. >> All right. Give us the final thing.
2:16:31
Give us the call to action for the event. Has that passed? Has that happened?
2:16:36
Because I remember that from the video.
2:16:40
>> Yeah, we have a we have a virtual conference coming up in September. Fantastic.
2:16:43
You'll actually hear more about these AI native kind of consumer oriented data engineering products that we're releasing then.
2:16:47
Um, and we're really excited to bring it to the world.
2:16:50
There will be a really really great set of releases in there.
2:16:52
So, it's happening midepptember. Amazing. Looking forward to it.
2:16:56
Well, thanks so much for rooting for you and the team and uh >> what a what a fantastic piece of just Silicon Valley lore. >> It's lore. It's lore.
2:17:02
Incredibly well played and thanks for joining.
2:17:04
It's great to talk to you soon. >> Thanks, fellas. See you soon. >> Cheers, Pete.
2:17:08
>> Uh in other news, the Palunteer CTO Sham Sankar, who's been on the show, confirms that he's working on a new pro-American film production company.
2:17:15
He says the goal is to make content that makes you proud to be an American. I love this.
2:17:19
Uh uh Sham Sankar is raising money for a new production company called Founders Films with Palunteerian Ryan Podos Podolski and Christian Garrett's involved.
2:17:32
>> Didn't Sham teased this when he came on. >> Yeah. And Yeah. Yeah.
2:17:34
We've t he's talked about it and I think he wrote a piece in Pirate Wires about it which you should go read and subscribe to.
2:17:38
Um and uh Sham Sankar is uh on an absolute tear and I'm very excited for this and uh it's I it'll be very interesting to see specifically the uh the level of investment.
2:17:53
We talked about this a little bit but um Hollywood is in this in this era of we need to even have a chance at an ROI.
2:18:03
We need to invest $400 million.
2:18:05
And so you see all these major blockbusters, but by virtue of when you when you invest $400 million in order to make a billion dollars, it has to sell everywhere.
2:18:14
And that means it has to sell internationally.
2:18:16
And that means that the planes have to be from like, you know, some anonymous country because we don't want to make anyone upset.
2:18:22
So like, yeah, it's an American movie, but it's like we're fighting the the the like the and then they make up some name, right?
2:18:30
um as opposed to a story like you just can't really make a story about like the Cold War because who knows that might upset a certain person in a different country.
2:18:41
And so um it'll be interesting to see what uh what level of investment like what type of swings are they t are they taking?
2:18:49
Are they swinging for grand slams and putting $200 million into a single film?
2:18:53
Is it a bunch of $10 million projects?
2:18:55
Is it a bunch of $1 million projects?
2:18:57
The Blair Witch Project, which I know you haven't seen, uh has been was made for uh under a million dollars and I think it grossed over a hundred million dollars.
2:19:05
It was one of the greatest ROI. >> Have you seen Tyler?
2:19:09
Have you seen the Blair Witch Project? >> Of course.
2:19:11
It was filmed like >> Have you seen the Blair Witch Project? Wow.
2:19:13
You >> filmed in in Blair, Maryland. Well, >> no way. >> Yeah. Right near my house. >> That's amazing.
2:19:17
So the the bullc case for AI in film production is that even if budgets stay the same, we could get five times as many films, 10 times as many films, if the models can get >> significantly better. Yeah.
2:19:30
I think that the just the cost to produce a what what we think of today as like a blockbuster Yeah.
2:19:37
>> or a Marvel level film could fall dramatically. >> Yeah.
2:19:40
I I like the production side is interesting.
2:19:44
There's certainly a way to drop costs and produce something that feels like a like a hund00 million film for $10 million.
2:19:52
That that feels like it's coming.
2:19:54
But I think that honestly it might be more of a distribution problem in question.
2:19:57
Like if you have a if you have a banger video, a banger movie, and you know that there that people are are excited about it, but it's a little bit more of a niche audience, there's really no way to get people to pay for it other than the the traditional playbook of like a wide theatrical release all over the place.
2:20:18
Um, and so you wind up in the UFC camp where you have a movie and your only option is to go to the streamers or and hope that you're converting subs or a really wide release.
2:20:29
I wonder if there's some middle ground that will pop up.
2:20:32
I wonder if we'll learn something from UFC, but um, it's very hard to it's very hard to take a movie that doesn't merit a huge release and actually make an ROI in the theaters today.
2:20:45
Anyway, what what do you want to talk about next?
2:20:49
>> Run said yesterday, Elon falling so in love with the Grock image model.
2:20:51
Imagine model is a piece of performant performance art that absolves all the slop.
2:20:57
And Elon says thanks Rune the heart.
2:21:03
>> Um there is an article from Eric Burgers saying after recent tests, China appears likely to beat the United States back to the moon. >> This is the case.
2:21:11
says I went there because it's because at this point it's difficult to come to any other conclusion.
2:21:18
>> Um and he is writing this article to explain why enormously bad for the United States >> reporter.
2:21:26
>> So in recent weeks the secretive Chinese space program has reported some significant milestones in developing its program to land astronauts on the lunar surface by the year 2030.
2:21:33
On August 6th, the chi China man space agency successfully tested a highfidelity mockup of its 26 ton Lan Yu lunar lander.
2:21:46
The task conducted outside of Beijing used giant tethers to simulate lunar gravity as the vehicle fired main engines and fine control thrusters to land on a cratered surface and take off from there.
2:21:57
The test, said the agency in an official statement, represents a key step in the development of China's manned lunar exploration program and also marks the first time that China has carried out a test of extraterrestrial landing and takeoff capabilities of a man spacecraft.
2:22:11
As part of the statement, the space agency reconfirmed that it plans to land its astronauts on the moon before 2030.
2:22:18
Then last Friday, the space agency and its state operated rocket developer, the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, pretty hard name, uh, successfully conducted a 30-se secondond test firing of the Long March 10 rocket center core with its seven YF00K engines that burn kerosene and liquid oxygen.
2:22:38
The primary variant of the rocket will combine three of these cores to lift about 70 metric tons to low Earth orbit.
2:22:44
These successful efforts followed a launch escape system test of the new Mongju spacecraft in June.
2:22:52
A version of the spacecraft is planned for lunar missions.
2:22:56
Um thus China space program is making a demonstrable progress in all three of the major elements of its space program.
2:23:04
The large rocket to launch a crew spacecraft which will carry humans to lunar orbit orbit plus the l the lander that will take astronauts down to the surface and back.
2:23:12
This work suggests that China is on course to land on the moon before the end of this decade.
2:23:17
For the United States and its allies in space, there are reasons to be dismissive of this.
2:23:22
For one, NASA landed humans on the moon nearly six decades ago with the Apollo program. Been there, done that.
2:23:29
Moreover, the initial phases of the Chinese program look derivative of Apollo, particularly a lander that is strikingly resembles the lunar module.
2:23:38
NASA can justifiably point to its Artemis program and say it's attempting to learn the lessons from Apollo that the program was cancelled because it was not sustainable.
2:23:46
With its lunar landers, NASA seeks to develop inspace propellant storage and refueling technology, allowing for lower cost reusable lunar missions with the capability to bring much more mass to the moon and back.
2:23:58
This should eventually allow for the development of a lunar economy and enable robust government commercial enterprise.
2:24:04
But recent setbacks with SpaceX Starship vehicle, one of two lunar landers under contract with NASA alongside Blue Origin's Mark II lander, indicate that it will still be several years until these newer technologies are ready to go.
2:24:15
So, it's now probable that China will quote unquote beat NASA back to the moon this decade and win at least the initial heat of this new space race.
2:24:24
To put this in perspective, our iss connected with Dean Chung, one of the most respected analysts on China, space policy, and the geopolitical implications of the new space competition.
2:24:37
And Silicon Valley cannot save us at this point.
2:24:39
Only Wall Street can save us.
2:24:42
The solution is make the moon a state as Mike Salana suggested.
2:24:47
Create mortgages on the moon and then securitize them.
2:24:49
And once >> allow retail to go >> once Black Rockck owns 75% of the moon, then we're in business. >> Yeah. Yeah.
2:24:59
They've been getting uh Wall Street's been getting push back on owning single family homes. >> They own capital.
2:25:07
>> Blackstone owns 99% of all the houses in America now. They own all of them.
2:25:12
>> They bought my house from me. I didn't want them. I didn't want them to.
2:25:14
They just bought it for me. I didn't have an option. >> Yeah.
2:25:17
>> They were like, "Sale and lease back. You You rent now.
2:25:19
you will own nothing and you will be happy.
2:25:22
>> Yes, that's exactly what happened.
2:25:22
No, they actually own like 1% of >> but uh Dean says the LANU lander is significant because it's part of the usual China Chinese crawl, walk run approach to a major space project.
2:25:31
The People's Republic of China can benefit from other people's experiences.
2:25:36
Much of NASA's information is open, but they still have to build and operate the spacecraft themselves.
2:25:41
So, the test of the LNU lander, successful or not, is an important part of that process.
2:25:46
So anyway, it's important to flag we've had a lot of wins in the space industry recently and >> it's tough.
2:25:53
It's tough to bootstrap an economy.
2:25:55
Like it is an incredible milestone and yet America's done it.
2:25:58
So there's not as much of an incentive just to be the first. It's not superlative.
2:26:05
And then the question for SpaceX is are you better off landing on the moon or just putting up more Starlinks and just making more subscriptions like uh it is it is a little bit harder to underwrite in the early stage. It takes a long time.
2:26:18
Uh maybe you need a new uh government program some sort of incentive.
2:26:22
incentive. I mean fortunately like we Firefly has been to the moon, Blue Origin's planning, SpaceX is planning like there are a lot of competitive American companies that are working towards it but uh the underlying uh incentive there's just other ways to
2:26:37
make money in space right now um that might be higher value although it will be a very weird moment if uh if China's just up and back on the moon constantly running around bouncing around live streaming from the moon um we got to get back >> we got to get I agree. Um,
2:26:51
Um, >> we have to go back.
2:26:56
>> Would you like to read through the reverse deepseek moment, the bullcase for GPT5?
2:27:01
>> This is interesting post.
2:27:01
So, >> why don't you kick it off? I'll be right back. >> Sure.
2:27:04
So, uh, Zivy Mushawitz uh, says, "Everyone agrees that the that the release of GPT5 was botched. Not everyone agrees. See an Alysis likes it.
2:27:13
I think Ben Thompson likes it for the most part.
2:27:15
Um, I have a good bull case here, too.
2:27:18
So, this is a lot of stuff I agree with.
2:27:19
But um but there was there was a lot of push back.
2:27:22
And so uh he says everyone can also agree that the direct jump from GPT40 and 03 to GPT5 was not of a similar size to the jump from GPT3 to GPT4.
2:27:33
Uh that was not the direct quantum leap we were hoping for and that the release was overhyped quite a bit.
2:27:41
And I still don't know how much OpenAI is responsible for the open uh for the overhyping or just the fact that it they used a number.
2:27:47
Maybe they should have just stuck around and made it GPT4.
2:27:50
7, you know, and then the hype would have been a lot lower.
2:27:53
But nevertheless, the launch went out.
2:27:55
I think the naming is better.
2:27:57
Um, GPT5 still represented the release of of at least three distinct models.
2:28:01
GPT5 fast, GPT5 thinking, GPT5 Pro.
2:28:05
The naming is much better.
2:28:05
The naming conventions are much better.
2:28:07
Uh, at least two and likely all of three are state-of-the-art within their class along with GPT5 auto, which is the router.
2:28:14
The problem is that the release was so botched that OpenAI is now now experiencing a reverse DeepSseek moment.
2:28:21
Uh all the forces that caused us to overreact to DeepSeek R1 are now working against OpenAI in reverse.
2:28:26
This threatens to give Washington DC and I think this is why this is important and why we should be focused on this and its key decision makers a very false impression of a lack of progress in AI especially progress towards AGI that could lead to some very poor decisions and it could do the same for corporations and individuals.
2:28:43
I spent the last week uh he says covering the release of GPT5.
2:28:47
This puts GPT5 in perspective.
2:28:50
So the reverse DeepSeek moment in January Deepseek released R1.
2:28:53
We had this Deepseek moment.
2:28:53
Everyone panicked about how China had caught up.
2:28:57
um uh it's a good model sir but only an ordinary good model substantially behind the frontier most people hadn't used reasoning models uh yet and so R1 was the first one that they that they uh that they had used and R1 from a UX perspective revealed the reasoning chain
2:29:14
and that was a revelatory experience for deepseek users uh and so we had the deepseek moment because of a confluence of factors one $6 million model negative uh narrative gave a false impression on cost Two, they offered a good clean app with visible chain of thought. It went It went viral.
2:29:30
Three, the new style caused over uh an overestimate of model quality.
2:29:34
Three, with the four app store downloads.
2:29:38
>> The the timing was impeccable both in order of model releases and within the tech tree.
2:29:41
Five, safety testing and other SK steps were skipped, leaving various flaws.
2:29:46
Uh this was pure fast follow, but in our haste, no one took any of that into account.
2:29:50
Six, a false impression of momentum and stories about Chinese momentum.
2:29:54
Seven, the always insist open models will win crowd amplified the vibes because they love open source.
2:30:00
Uh and eight, the stock market was highly lacking in situational awareness.
2:30:04
Uh suddenly realizing various un various known facts and also misunderstanding many important factors.
2:30:12
GPT5 is now having a reverse deepseek moment including many direct parallels.
2:30:17
GBT1 GBT 5 is evaluated as if it was scaling up compute in a way that it doesn't uh in various ways.
2:30:22
people are assuming it cost far more than it did.
2:30:26
Uh if you think about the progression of GPT 3 to four to 4.
2:30:28
5 to five like if you just did an order of magnitude more cost we would be this would be the hundred billion dollar pre-training run.
2:30:36
Um and yet obviously that's not what this is and so you shouldn't price it as though they spent a hundred billion dollars on training cost.
2:30:43
Uh, two, they offered poor initial experience with rate caps and lost models and missing features, a broken router and complaints about losing 40 sickenc went viral.
2:30:51
Three, the new style and people evaluating GPT5 when they should have been invi evaluating GPT5 thinking caused an underestimate of model quality.
2:31:00
So, if you're an 03 user and you and you accidentally downgraded to GPT5 fast, you were like, "Oh, this is backwards."
2:31:09
But if you if you went forward and and stuck to pro or thinking, you probably had a decent experience.
2:31:14
>> Do you think people are more or less confused now with with all the model naming?
2:31:19
>> I think they might be more confused because it's just like they they had the the folks who had remembered 41, what 45 is, what 03 is, what 04 what 40 is.
2:31:29
Those folks, even 03 and 03 pro, I never really learned the difference.
2:31:31
I just always hammered 03 Pro.
2:31:32
Um but uh >> because you're you kind of identify with >> I'm a pay pig >> being true professional. >> Yes. Yes. I'm a professional.
2:31:42
I'm a professional chatter.
2:31:44
Um so also four the timing was directly after anthropic and previous releases had already eaten the most import impressive re recent parts of the tech tree.
2:31:54
So gains incorrectly look small.
2:31:57
in particular, gains from reasoning models and from the original GPT4 to 40 are being ignored when considering GPT4 to GPT5.
2:32:04
And so if you're thinking about just comping GPT4 to GPT5, you have to include 40's progress and 03's progress and all of that.
2:32:14
Uh GPT5 is a refinement of previous models optimized for efficiency and is breaking new territory and that's not being taken into account.
2:32:20
A false impression of hype and a story is about loss of loss of momentum.
2:32:23
And the open AI is flailing crowd and the open model crowd amplified the vibes.
2:32:28
Uh the stock market actually was smart this time and shug shrugged it off. That's a hint.
2:32:32
And of course the big one which is the GPT5's name fed into expectation.
2:32:35
Unlike R1 at the time of its release, GPT5 thinking and GPT5 Pro are clearly the current state-of-the-art models in their classes.
2:32:45
And GPT5 auto is probably state-of-the-art at its level of compute use usage.
2:32:49
modulo complaints about personality that OpenAI will doubtless fix soon.
2:32:54
OpenAI's model usage was way up after GPT5's release, not down.
2:32:57
The release was botched, but this is obviously a good set of models, sir.
2:33:04
Washington DC, however, is somehow rapidly deciding that GPT5 is a failure and that AI capabilities won't improve much and AGI is no longer a worry.
2:33:11
This is presumably in large part to the race to market share faction pushing this narrative rather than hardcore rather hardcore and having this be super convenient for that.
2:33:24
And so uh he talks a little bit about how DC is maybe uh is maybe thinking that AI progress is stalling out.
2:33:31
So he says to be clear AI American AI is making rapid progress including at open AI.
2:33:37
How do you know this is happening?
2:33:40
Well uh he has some quotes.
2:33:42
Dean Ball says the jump in performance and utility of Frontier models between April 2024 GPT4 Turbo and April 2025 03 is bigger than the jump between GPT3 and GPT4.
2:33:52
People alleging a slowdown in progress due to GPT5 are fooling themselves.
2:33:58
This is odd because GPT3 was released that gap between GPT3 and GPT4 is not one year.
2:34:04
GPT3 was released in 2020 I believe.
2:34:07
Uh, and so that was more like a four-year run.
2:34:10
Um, so we might still be slowing down, but it's still impressive progress.
2:34:14
Uh, most people when they think of the GPT3 to GPT4 bump, they're really talking about GPT 3.
2:34:20
5-002 Da Vinci, which was the model that shipped in chat GPT free tier and then got the four upgrade just a few months later.
2:34:31
Um, anyway, people are uh, you know, still debating this.
2:34:35
I I think I'm coming away pretty happy and I think they made some some good decisions.
2:34:39
I think Ben Thompson has a good uh a pretty good take that uh the uh uh that that the the model switcher was the right move, but uh OpenAI should have been even more aggressive about saying, you know what, Borro is not coming back.
2:34:55
Like we're we're we're a consumer company now.
2:34:57
We're going to do what's what's best.
2:34:59
like you are not going to be able to browbeat us into changing our decisions.
2:35:02
If we think that what's best for the consumer is this and the revealed preferences will align with that over time.
2:35:08
We are going to you know take the pain in the short term for the long-term gain of a better more usable product and that manifests in the sense of like a uh a simplified model switcher because as they add the models back the model switcher gets more complicated.
2:35:21
I don't know where do you sit on it? I don't know.
2:35:26
I using chatbt to me is not uh in the way that I use it primarily research and understanding the world is not materially different than than it was prior to GPD5.
2:35:39
Y and so I don't have that strong of opinions on it.
2:35:44
>> Yeah, I think there's a little bit of like uh model picker foo that needs to happen.
2:35:49
Uh but I'm getting better every day at like triggering the right keyword.
2:35:54
Hey, think hard about this.
2:35:54
Uh, overall it's what I asked for and it's what I and and they delivered what what I asked for and so I've been pretty satisfied.
2:36:02
I don't feel like my experience has been degraded.
2:36:04
>> It's a good model, sir.
2:36:05
>> It's a good model, sir.
2:36:06
>> On that note, >> we have our next guest.
2:36:08
>> Our next guest, Marty to the stream. >> How you doing? >> Doing well.
2:36:12
John, nice to meet you guys.
2:36:14
>> Good to meet you, too.
2:36:15
>> Oh, do we have to get the pallet ready?
2:36:18
What are we discussing today? Give us an introduction.
2:36:21
Explain what the company does. Give us the news.
2:36:22
So, so first off, um you're watching TVPN Temple. >> Watch Pylon TV, baby. Let's go. >> There. There we go. Yeah.
2:36:32
Um no, super excited to be on the show.
2:36:34
I've been cycling you guys in in the morning. So, yeah.
2:36:38
Excited to to be here and chat with you both.
2:36:39
And you're all over my LinkedIn feed. So, >> there we go.
2:36:43
Credit to >> Michael is dominating LinkedIn.
2:36:45
We're bringing teapot to LinkedIn. They are not ready.
2:36:50
Uh, but it's great to meet you.
2:36:53
It's great to have you on the show. >> Great to be here. Yeah.
2:36:55
No, I'm here to announce our series B fund raise for Pylon.
2:36:59
So, we just raised $31 million co-led by Andrees and BCV. So, >> congratulations. >> Sorry to interrupt. >> Nice. Nice. Thank you. Always a crisp gong hit.
2:37:11
Always out of >> Good to see.
2:37:13
Good to see Bane Capital getting a W here.
2:37:14
You know, we just we just interviewed Pete Joy from Astronomer, another BCV company.
2:37:18
So, we're we're happy to have you on the show.
2:37:23
>> We're really excited to work with them.
2:37:25
So, um on the Bane side, you know, they're they're entering into the company.
2:37:28
We're working with Merritt Hummer, uh and Abby Meyers from their team. Super impressed by them.
2:37:32
Um continuing to work now with Jennifer Lee from Andre.
2:37:36
Um they're already on the board.
2:37:38
Um and yeah, no, this is an awesome fund raise.
2:37:41
Actually, every time we've raised money, we haven't needed to.
2:37:44
people kind of came to us and then you know pitched us on our vision did their reverse pitch and then we uh yeah we we made it happen.
2:37:50
So um yeah really excited to be here and continue building the product.
2:37:56
>> Talk about slicing the market.
2:37:56
Um obviously uh just AI for support is almost like a mega trend.
2:38:03
There are market maps out there.
2:38:04
Uh you've kind of sliced it to be more focused on B2B.
2:38:06
uh take me through some of the slices of what what uh what support looks like in various B2B contexts because uh the customer support tickets that I maybe send into my law firm are different than I send into my uh my 3PL.
2:38:23
Uh so so where where have you been seeing uh you know green shoots >> beach heads uh opportunities?
2:38:31
Uh what is the what is kind of the the early adopter customer for Pylon look like? Yeah. >> Yeah. Absolutely.
2:38:39
So, first off, part of the market, um, if we want to zoom out for a bit, um, Zenes, Salesforce, ServiceCloud make around 35% of their revenue off of B2B.
2:38:47
And so, that's actually the slice of revenue that we're going after.
2:38:50
On the Salesforce side, you know, total revenue from service cloud is $9 billion.
2:38:53
So, we're going after uh quite a big chunk there.
2:38:56
Um, so they have enough, you're saying they have enough to share. They they >> Exactly. Yeah.
2:39:01
>> Exactly. Yeah. uh and the difference between B2B and B TOC in consumer you have very simple transactional support questions and only one customerf facing team customer support in B2B you don't just have customer support you also have customer success solutions professional
2:39:14
services account management and all the conversations that are coming in are related to not just like a transactional support question but could be routed to any one of those teams and you need account context that's being pulled in from not just that conversation but many other sources. So, for example, call
2:39:27
So, for example, call recordings or uh notes that were left on customers implementation plans.
2:39:31
And so, we kind of fit to all those different use cases, all those different personas and sync all that data in.
2:39:37
Um, one way to think about us strategically is we're building something similar to Rippling, but for this post sales use case where I'm kind of all in one product consolidating a lot of tools that people would otherwise buy and making it really uh applied to this B2B uh customer persona.
2:39:52
persona. So there there's a debate on whether AI native tools like Pylon are compete are are are going after these end software markets or potentially um winning uh labor spend where do you kind of sit in that debate and and how do you here
2:40:12
>> there's a difference we have like the native AI agent companies your fins your decagons etc um they're going after enterprise immediately plugging into the system of record we're taking a different approach We're actually building the system of record from scratch. So replacing Zenesk and then
2:40:23
So replacing Zenesk and then layering in AI agents as well.
2:40:26
Um and so we think basically whoever controls um the data the workflows actually has a lot of power and uh is way more defensible than the AI agent companies.
2:40:37
And then also for the B2B use case because it's way more complex and you need need way more context across these many different channels and sources.
2:40:42
Um we're plugging into those in a way that no one else is.
2:40:46
So really I think we're going to win the B2B market completely and then um there's going to be a knife fight for consumer.
2:40:54
>> Uh last question for >> it's already happening really. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
2:40:56
Uh any sorry somebody posted today that stood out basically being like everyone thinks that every software software engineer is going to be replaced.
2:41:07
Meanwhile Amazon still employs a 100,000 customer support reps. >> Wow.
2:41:12
I really that's >> probably not 100.
2:41:15
There's no way can't be that much.
2:41:17
>> You don't but but a lot a lot. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah.
2:41:20
I mean maybe through all the different uh like consulting arms and like third party groups if you really trace the >> employees is >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
2:41:26
contracts with potentially.
2:41:28
Um >> and there's there's a difference as well like when you look at B2B it's actually usually much higher skilled labor and it's not just hey we're outsourcing it to a BO in another country.
2:41:36
to a BO in another country. it's actually hey these are like um higher tier more complex support engineers who also work with solutions teams account managers um and it's just way more complicated of a deal so you're not handling transactional questions they're much more complicated and frankly actually AI mostly isn't good enough to
2:41:54
answer a lot of these B2B questions um so instead of trying to solve them and do a bad job of it right now and tarnish customer relationships trying to essentially plug into all the workflows and own all those workflows so that we do have a chance to uh eventually become fully agentic once the AI gets good enough and we have the data consolidated into pylon >> going fully agentic. I like that. Uh I like that.
2:42:13
Uh well, congrats on the race.
2:42:16
Thank you so much for hopping on the show.
2:42:19
>> Love the clarity of vision and uh it's great to have you on.
2:42:21
>> We'll see you on LinkedIn. >> Have a good one. >> Cheers.
2:42:25
>> We got to hop on with Matteo from Sleep.
2:42:28
Get that gong ready, Jordy Hayes. There's some big news.
2:42:30
Oh, I would love to take a crack. Thank you.
2:42:34
>> Let's bring in Matteo from sleep.
2:42:34
What you got for us, Matteo?
2:42:36
What's the news for today?
2:42:40
>> We just raised 100 million. >> Oh, there we go. >> Congratulations.
2:42:48
>> Uh, >> yeah, >> it's great to see you.
2:42:49
Uh, give us >> Yeah, great to see you again, guys.
2:42:53
Excited to be here again.
2:42:55
>> Hasn't been very long.
2:42:55
Um, it's great to be back.
2:42:57
Uh, give us give us the update on on on everything.
2:42:59
How did how did this round come together? talk about the progress.
2:43:04
Um, we want the full we want the full pitch. >> Yeah, of course.
2:43:09
I mean, this is a massive milestone for us.
2:43:11
You know, we just announced 100 million in new funding.
2:43:15
Total funding to date is a quarter of a billion. >> There we go. >> Um, so, uh, not bad.
2:43:20
Um, but I think the best news honestly is, uh, we have been free cash flow positive for the whole year. >> Wow.
2:43:29
We have been it's cash flow positive >> for most of the past 10 quarters.
2:43:35
>> So the good news is we we didn't need the money.
2:43:39
The company is in a really strong financial position, but um we have a very ambitious plan and we found a couple of uh great investors including our existing investors that they wanted to come in and so of the existing investors Valor uh with Antonio Gracias first investor in Tesla um Panders Fund YC um and a few others and then also HSG that will help us to really scale China and and Asia.
2:44:09
So right now we are in 30 countries uh but the next big piece is uh Asia particularly in China and I think that alone could double our our business. >> Yeah. Yeah.
2:44:20
Talk more about about China.
2:44:22
Obviously you've been advertising with F1.
2:44:24
It's an incredibly global sport.
2:44:24
Uh everyone sleeps regardless of what country they're in.
2:44:30
Uh what's the shape of the opportunity there?
2:44:32
Is there is there an opportunity on the supply chain side, the distribution side, the customer side?
2:44:38
Uh is there have you not been cloned already?
2:44:40
I feel like there would be a an eightle knockoff over there.
2:44:46
How are you going to beat them if they'd already exist? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah.
2:44:49
>> Yeah. Yeah. I think I think my immediate reaction is is uh there >> this is a very it's it's a simple product to understand simple product to use as a consumer but incredibly >> difficult to clone more so than like a toaster right like you have this
2:45:08
>> hardware software dynamic of dealing with with uh the elements right uh it's not as uh >> uh it's closer it's closer in some ways to um you need to use it intensely every single day obviously but anyways >> yeah let me step back for a second and
2:45:27
then I'll answer your question right so we will use the money in in in a couple of different ways so the the first one is we will double down on AI and I would like to share a bit more with you because we working on some crazy things will be medical uh so we are going to
2:45:42
file for FDA in a couple of different dimensions including sleep apnea I think will be really big and so you will see basically becoming more and more medical but still consumer medical um and then international expansion with China. >> Does the sorry really quickly on the FDA
2:45:57
>> Does the sorry really quickly on the FDA side does that unlock paying with insurance?
2:46:01
Is there a change to the financial business model or is that really just about uh coming to the consumer with stronger claims and evidence about the efficacy of the product? >> Both.
2:46:12
But the real goal is the first one you mentioned, right?
2:46:14
Imagine if the pod our technology could be uh reimburseable uh or at least partially covered by your insurance and that is where we have identified a couple of really good opportunities.
2:46:26
Again, sleep apnea is one but menopause is another one where women have hot flashes.
2:46:30
So we just released what is called hot flash mode.
2:46:33
And so if you have a hot flash in the middle of the night, you just tap on the side of the bed and immediately it will start immediately cooling. >> Interesting.
2:46:41
And there are like thousands of women that now are finally able to sleep again because of our product.
2:46:48
>> And I bet with AI, you could detect those hot flashes eventually and just have it do. Right. Yeah. >> Exactly.
2:46:55
>> Then on the eye side, we are doing two really really cool things at least for me.
2:46:59
Uh so on one side we are working on uh what we call a sleep agent, but is really a PhD level sleep coach that is able to simulate your night before you even go to bed.
2:47:10
H and so it uses the history of your data.
2:47:13
It uses the data from the day through Apple Health or any other data source and will start simulating the night in a couple of different ways and then we'll adjust accordingly as you fall asleep.
2:47:24
And then there is this other agent that we really call the longevity twins.
2:47:29
And so for each users there will be thousands of longevity twins that simulate your health for the next 10 and 20 years.
2:47:36
and they will come back with the likelihood that you develop a certain health outcome.
2:47:42
So we are really transitioning from sleep that is the foundation of health into longevity and will help people expand and extend more than expand extended their lifespan and health them.
2:47:55
>> Yeah, it's really interesting to think about if you can understand somebody's sleep habits today you can predict what their health will look like in a decade, two decades etc. Um, uh, feature request.
2:48:08
Uh, bit of bit of a wild one.
2:48:10
Uh, but if, uh, in the future if you could get a Tesla Optimus robot that would physically come and pull me away from my desk late at night and shut the computer off, unplug the Wi-Fi and drag me, you know, to force me to sleep.
2:48:22
I think there could be something there.
2:48:27
So, may maybe a partnership with Elon at some point. >> Um, >> yeah. >> Um, well, amazing.
2:48:32
Anything else uh top of mind or you got to get back to uh business?
2:48:39
>> Big things is also a lot of products coming.
2:48:41
Uh so you will see new hardware coming uh coming coming in next year.
2:48:44
Uh a lot of different products and uh we'll keep doubling down on making the pod better and better. >> Fantastic.
2:48:52
Well, if you're listening and you want a pod five, go to eight.
2:48:53
com and thank you for joining us, Matteo. Always a pleasure. >> You're the man.
2:49:00
>> We'll talk to you soon. >> My pleasure. >> Bye. >> Thank you, guys. Cheers.
2:49:02
and we'll bring in our next guest.
2:49:05
>> I love hitting this the the air horn for free cash flow. >> Hit that air horn. Hit that hit something. Give me something. Give me the the news. Give me the Ashton Hall. Welcome to the stream. Abdul, how you doing? >> Welcome. >> Great. >> Thanks so much.
2:49:20
>> Thank you for taking the time. Thanks for having me. >> Of course.
2:49:22
Sorry for the technical difficulties earlier.
2:49:25
>> Friend of the show said Abdul is going to be your best guest ever. >> Let's go.
2:49:30
>> He's crazy in the best way. Wow.
2:49:30
So, >> okay, let's jump straight to the crazy. >> No pressure.
2:49:35
>> Introduce the company really quick and give us the news.
2:49:37
We'll hit the gong and then we'll go into some crazy stuff. >> Awesome. Awesome.
2:49:41
Abdullah Assad, co-founder and CEO of Basic Capital.
2:49:43
Uh Basic Capital is the first and only company that enables you to finance financial assets >> and to use credit to invest >> instead of using credit to consume. Mhm.
2:49:57
>> Um, we've been in business for 3, four years now, operating mostly under stealth, backed by legends, uh, from Lux Capital, Henry Kravis, uh, SV Angel and others.
2:50:09
>> And recently, we just closed our series A, $25 million from Kirsten at Coreunner. >> Boom. >> Fantastic.
2:50:19
You know, it's just it's just one step on a long journey, but we are really really excited to see that our message is resonating with both our customers and our investors.
2:50:28
And now we're fired up to go like we're fired up to get after it.
2:50:34
>> There was a viral video about you guys like a month ago or something and people were controversial.
2:50:38
Your it was your video >> but people were going wild.
2:50:42
It was the put the timeline in turmoil.
2:50:43
Uh walk me through what happened.
2:50:46
What What is the push back against this again?
2:50:47
push back against this again? like what like what what do the haters say and then I don't know if you can steal yeah the hater the haters would say this is all well and good when numbers are going up but what happens when numbers go down
2:51:01
right so but the timeline the timeline is not very good at nuance and and detail so uh yeah good opportunity to kind of um explain the all the different dynamics >> so we've been operating under the radar our thesis here is when you're working in financial services you can't ship a halfbake product. You just can't you
2:51:19
You just can't you can't build fast and break things.
2:51:23
There's a lot of hurdles.
2:51:23
You're dealing with people's money.
2:51:26
This is a massive responsibility.
2:51:28
And we see ourself as stewards of people's capital.
2:51:31
So, we've been operating under the radar for quite some time. >> Mh.
2:51:36
>> And in May, our investors were like, Abdul, you have to launch and we want you to go out of the closet and tell the entire world about what you're building. >> Yeah.
2:51:46
And my thesis is if you're going to do something, you have to do it extremely well.
2:51:50
So we made an incredible launch video.
2:51:54
We worked with a bunch of journalists and we went out to tell the world our story.
2:51:59
And our goal was to get 50,000 impressions on on >> 5 million probably.
2:52:08
Basically within 24 hours we got 5.
2:52:10
5 million impressions >> and 100 more 100x that you wanted >> 100x absolutely blew up.
2:52:16
Every VC and their mom is in my DMs.
2:52:20
Every hit and their mom is also in my DMs.
2:52:24
>> Like high school friends I >> Wait, the haters moms were DMing me too. >> Wow.
2:52:28
By the way, I I replied to this and you know, we were we were basically we're engaging with the public and their concern was credit could be a dangerous tool if available to everyday people. >> Mhm.
2:52:47
>> And our thesis is when you want to make money as an individual, when you want to build wealth, when you want to achieve autonomy, you have two sources to rely on.
2:52:57
You can either rely on your labor, your work, or you can rely on capital, assets you own, a stock, a bond, and rental property.
2:53:09
Now, here is the interesting thing.
2:53:09
Your labor will for sure depreciate over time.
2:53:15
It's a fact because over time you get old >> and you could be the best lawyer at Pwise >> and at some point you're not as sharp on your feet.
2:53:26
you're not as quick and there's a young stud ready to take your spot.
2:53:31
And when your labor depreciates like this, when you can no longer work, what you have to fall back on is the assets you bought in your youth.
2:53:42
And the problem that most Americans have today is that they have no assets.
2:53:47
And our thesis was, well, let them use credit to buy assets just like they use credit to buy Coachella tickets. >> Yeah.
2:53:57
And people were like, "But capital goes up and it could go down." Yep. >> And I said, "I agree.
2:54:02
There is an uncertainty to capital, but there is a certainty that you will at some point age, right?"
2:54:09
Like that is an inevitable fact. >> I don't know.
2:54:12
Brian Brian Johnson's going to push back. >> Yeah.
2:54:14
He'd like to have a word.
2:54:15
>> He might be listening.
2:54:15
He might send us an angry email. I'm not going to aid. >> Yeah.
2:54:20
>> Well, well, but well, let's take a step back.
2:54:21
You might be perfectly fit like Brian Johnson, but does Brian Johnson has the same ability to compute as AI?
2:54:28
Does Brian Johnson has the same ability to execute on tasks as computers?
2:54:30
And the question becomes is over time as capital starts to automate more and more jobs.
2:54:39
What is our plan as a society and as individuals for that day?
2:54:44
>> Yeah, I think we're generally pretty bullish on on getting on the ladder of having positive capital. That's very important.
2:54:51
Love the Gersonner accounts.
2:54:53
Um, but how is this different than uh contributing to an ETF every month or or even contributing to a levered ETF every month?
2:55:04
You could go 2x long, the S&P, you go 2x long, the the MAG 7.
2:55:06
You could have a mix of bonds and stocks.
2:55:09
Uh, what is the benefit of of using credit to buy a larger stake up front? >> Of course. Of course. So, credit is a tool.
2:55:19
Yeah, >> it's like a shovel.
2:55:20
It can be used in a good way or in a bad way.
2:55:22
It can be used to plant a tree.
2:55:24
It can be used to knock somebody on their head and knock them dead, right? Just like nuclear.
2:55:27
Nuclear can be used as a bomb.
2:55:29
It can be used as nuclear energy.
2:55:32
>> The same thing with leverage and credit.
2:55:34
It can be used in a good way or in a bad way.
2:55:36
The devil is in the details.
2:55:36
The devil is in the structure. >> Mhm.
2:55:41
>> A very good way to finance assets is actually the mortgage. >> Mhm. >> Why? Because it's 30 years.
2:55:45
It's amortizing and there is no mark to market. >> Yep.
2:55:50
>> There's no rebalancing.
2:55:50
You're not rebalancing your mortgage every other day. >> Yeah.
2:55:54
>> That's not how a margin loan works and that's not how a leverage ETF work.
2:55:58
Levered ETFs and margin loans are inherently short-term vehicles. >> Yeah.
2:56:03
>> We can't get into the technicality of that, but they are inherently made for people who want to make a short bet on assets.
2:56:10
>> So, do you do you offer like mandatory lockup periods?
2:56:12
like, can I get a 30-year loan against the S&P and be paying that down forever basically or for 30 years?
2:56:18
That seems incredibly powerful.
2:56:21
>> That's in effect what we >> So, you love it.
2:56:24
>> You put 20% down payment.
2:56:24
Let's say you have 20,00 you come, you put $20,000 down. We open an LLC.
2:56:29
So, the debt is nonreourse to John. >> Yep. >> Put 20K. We give you 80K.
2:56:34
You pay off the ATK over 30 years.
2:56:37
But what you have in the LLC is a $100,000 of assets.
2:56:39
Y and these are not invested in a single name stock or bond.
2:56:44
These are invested in diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds. >> Yep.
2:56:49
>> And our thesis is >> instead of buying a house, taking your entire life savings and betting it on a zip code, you can take your piece of your life saving, lever it up five times and invest in a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds. That's the thesis here. >> Yeah. Yeah.
2:57:05
>> Yeah. Yeah. just a habit for >> so who's who's the right person for this product because I'm assuming uh >> long-term investor >> long-term investor so that means somebody that's maybe going to retire in 30 years or 20 years something like that
2:57:18
>> if you have anything less than 10 year horizon you should not consider basic capital basic capital is not appropriate for you basic capital is a product is a bet >> that over long period of time financial assets are going to continue to appreciate Now, is this guaranteed? Somebody from
2:57:35
Somebody from Twitter is going to jump in and say, "Well, you know, the stock market will go down in some."
2:57:41
Yeah, of course it will go down.
2:57:43
No, like Sherlock, like, "Thank you." Yes.
2:57:47
>> Well, the night the nightmare scenario is like the Japanese stock market, which had like 20some years of of decline, >> stagnation. Exactly. Right.
2:57:54
The way the way you could actually get burned on this is if you have persistent long-term stagnation in financial assets. Is that possible?
2:58:02
Your ar your argument would be like if that if if that happens we we all have bigger problems.
2:58:09
>> My my argument is my argument is America is not Japan. >> Mhm.
2:58:14
>> America is not Europe. America has a problem.
2:58:18
>> America has Silicon Valley.
2:58:18
America is the epicenter of innovation in the world.
2:58:25
Swedish companies like Spotify want to go public in America.
2:58:27
CLA want to go public in America.
2:58:32
And when you are investing in American assets, I believe there is some network effects to these financial market. >> I love it. I can >> I love America.
2:58:39
So I called I called Buffet here and I say never bet against America.
2:58:43
And if somebody wants to take the other trade, I'm happy to do it.
2:58:46
Like we'll do a bilateral side trade.
2:58:48
>> That's literally your your business. Your business. Yeah. >> Yeah. >> That is fantastic.
2:58:51
Well, congrats on the growth. I love it. >> This is perfect. >> No, it's great.
2:58:56
It's great having you on and hearing uh directly and and keep the keep the viral videos going.
2:59:01
I think next time you've set the bar high now you aim for 50,000 views.
2:59:04
The next video you should just aim for 50 million. >> 50 million views.
2:59:08
I want to see we're not going anywhere.
2:59:11
We're not going anywhere.
2:59:13
Our our message here to everybody is listen there is a real problem going on in society right now which is vast majority of Americans own no assets and we have a solution for that.
2:59:26
>> Y >> and it may be perfect it may not be perfect.
2:59:31
>> And for the people that are out there coming after us we have a question for them. What's your plan?
2:59:38
>> Yeah it's a good point. >> What's your plan? >> Yeah.
2:59:40
These are personal personal decisions. Yep.
2:59:44
>> What do we think like what's what's our plan as a society for for this?
2:59:46
And we don't think the solution is communism.
2:59:50
We don't think the solution is socialism.
2:59:51
We don't think the solution is Madani.
2:59:53
We think the solution is to make every American a capitalist. >> Yep.
2:59:57
>> And by capitalist I do not mean ideologically a capitalist.
2:59:58
I mean an owner of capital.
3:00:02
>> Are you going to last last question?
3:00:02
Uh is there is there a way I know we have these Invest America accounts, the Brad Gersonner accounts, Trump accounts.
3:00:09
Could we give leverage to one-month-olds >> to children? >> To children.
3:00:14
>> Could we help the children lever up, please?
3:00:17
>> Like, that's literally Let them Like, that's literally the perfect application of this.
3:00:22
>> They're out of the womb.
3:00:22
They should have leverage the second they're born.
3:00:26
>> A minute later, they should be levered up. >> You know what?
3:00:28
I'm going to call Brad as soon as I get off this.
3:00:29
I'm going to call Brad Gner and pitch to him.
3:00:33
And like the administration is like is open-minded to this like like >> leverage is a great tool and and so many people have made so much money using leverage and it's so condescending when we say that the average American does not deserve it.
3:00:46
It's just disrespectful to the average American. >> Yep.
3:00:49
Well, thank you so much for joining. Congratulations. >> Congratulations.
3:00:52
We will talk to you soon. This is really great. This is fun. >> Thanks. Have a good one. >> Cheers.
3:00:57
>> Uh Ferro Logix in the chat says, "What up, brothers?" What's up, Ferro Logix? Thanks for tuning in.
3:01:02
We have our next guest, Derek Low from Medallion coming in the studio. Derek, how you been? >> Good. How are you? >> What's happening? Welcome. >> Uh, give us the news.
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I want to ring the gong and then I want to talk about uh some of the backstory and then some of the dynamics in the industry.
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Uh, but please introduce yourself, the company, and the news. >> Yeah, for sure.
3:01:20
Uh, my name is Derrick Low.
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I'm the founder and CEO at Medallion.
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>> This is a chaotic stream, by the way.
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We're having we're having fun over here.
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>> We're having a fun today. And what's the news? >> Um, yeah. Yeah.
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So, we just raised uh $43 million led by >> Wow, that's cool. >> Incredible.
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Um, who did you raise it from?
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>> Um, yeah, so a crew led the round um with participation from some of our existing insiders like Sequoia, Google Venture, Spark Capital.
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Um, so yeah, we were very happy with how the round came together.
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>> Uh, yeah, explain the business as quickly as you can and then tell me about how the market's developing, what's going on.
3:01:57
And a lot of people have been following like the Ompic news and the DTOC wave and just kind of get us up to speed on what's going on in the market broadly. >> Yeah, for sure.
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Um, so we helped to automate back office processes for healthcare companies primarily around um managing a clinical network.
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So any healthcare company, right?
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Think like or Teddoc, they all have to hire a bunch of clinicians to be able to administer care.
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Um, so everything from a digital health company to a hospital to a primary care clinic.
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Um, and so that clinical workforce is really the most important component of a healthcare business to be able to actually deliver care and we essentially help with a lot of the healthcare specific operational tasks that have to happen behind the scenes to be able to manage that workforce.
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>> Is there a world where you bundle this with like payroll or something like give the compliance stuff like it it feels like deeply linked in the in the in the core system of record.
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How deep do you want to sit in the system of record stack?
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>> Yeah, it's a great question.
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I mean, we're very adjacent to um to payroll and some of those other Yeah.
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back office works, but we want to target uh workflows that are very specific to healthcare.
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Um and so we're applying AI and automation to like this very niche like vertical, which happens to be still super massive just given the the sky the the size and scale of US healthcare.
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Um, so yeah, we wouldn't really consider getting into payroll just because that's it's a super competitive space. It's very horizontal.
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>> Yeah, I remember the initial thesis was like in the future there will be more doctors that will be uh you know seeing patients in different states and so licensing particularly will be important at the early stage.
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Um how has that played out? How common is that?
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Is that still growing like you know in line with your expectations?
3:03:50
Yeah, Johnny, I think you were you were actually I was looking back, you were one of our first 10 angel investors, which is pretty it's pretty cool.
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Um, >> when we when we started the company, yeah, we were very focused on digital health because it was right during co and so the expansion of tellahalth was obviously really relevant at that point. Yeah.
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>> Um I think what we've seen is that postco that's leveled out quite a bit and um obviously the majority the vast majority of care is non um tellalth based and so typically here is delivered locally and so as a result um yeah where we've seen most of our growth is actually expanding beyond um helping
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with um those type of yeah essentially like cross-state teleaalth use cases operationally and more on um actually helping providers get um in network within insurance payers is that's something that's ubiquitous is like 99% plus of care is delivered right through insurance. Um so that's where we really
3:04:45
Um so that's where we really focus today.
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focus today. where in the healthc care tech stack is proving to be AI resistant in the sense that like the best frontier reasoning models they just aren't satisfying people in the way that maybe people were thinking oh let's throw automation at this but turns out we want
3:05:05
to keep a human in the loop for maybe compliance reasons that we didn't p we didn't perceive like where where where are the where are the last jobs in back office healthcare going to live >> yeah it's a great question Um Parker Connor actually has a had a really great
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um podcast recently a few weeks ago where he talked a little bit about this and how for rippling like um yeah AI hasn't really they haven't really deployed it in any major ways at least in payroll because it's it's a really critical workflow like h things have to
3:05:35
go right it's very rule based it's a really good analogy to medallion where we're working with um an extremely fine margin for error um things have to essentially be like perfect And um and what we've seen is like current models are not capable at I think doing perfection. Um I think that they'll get
3:05:54
Um I think that they'll get there pretty quickly.
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Um but yeah, we found is that essentially executing on these type of workflows deterministically is proving to be better for now.
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I think that will change.
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Build the software using the old tools.
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Hopefully some AI code gen in the mix to speed up software development, but ultimately just a a >> Yeah.
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And we're using it in places where the the margin for error is wider.
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So things like um you know calling a provider to say hey like you need to give us some this you know some piece of data.
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It's like the margin for error there is a lot wider than >> if you're filling out a you know form that requires data elements and like yeah get one one little one character wrong.
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It can like screw up the whole process. Yeah >> that's crazy.
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Uh Jordy, anything else or should we let Derrick go? >> No, this is great.
3:06:39
>> Thank you so much for hopping on.
3:06:39
Uh congrats on all the progress and the growth.
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We will talk to you soon.
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and have a great rest of your day.
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>> Great to meet you, Dick. >> Talk to you soon. Congrats. Bye.
3:06:45
Up next, we have Alex from Convoke coming in the studio into the TBPN Ultradome. Oh, okay.
3:06:52
I'm handing over the mallet. My turn.
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>> Give us an introduction. >> What's happening? >> What's your name? What do you do? >> Great to be here. >> I'm Alex. I'm founders of Convoke. >> Got any news for us?
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>> And we're we're Can you hear me? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah.
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So, I'm one of the founders of Convoke.
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We're building a platform to automate knowledge work required to take drugs from an idea to a product that patients can use.
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So today we're announcing our 8. 6 million seed raises.
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>> It's from uh Lee Marie at Kleiner Perkins and Lee Marie the goat. >> Yeah, the goat.
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That's my >> Kleiner Perkins Rand Brazwell. >> Yeah. >> Yeah.
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We're trying to rename the firm. >> Amazing. >> Congrats. That's amazing.
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>> Give us a quick history the company what you were doing before this and uh yeah how you got here. >> Yeah.
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So before I was a life science consultant.
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So worked with pharma companies >> on all sorts of drug development tasks a lot of like information synthesis.
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>> Are you the one that comes up with the crazy drug names?
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I feel like every drug name >> I actually did do one drug name project. Yeah, I did do one.
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>> Can you tell us the name that you came up with? Uh >> I cannot tell you. I cannot tell you.
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We had to test it with patients and everything and it was we were pretty happy.
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>> He could tell us but he'd have to kill us. >> Exactly. Exactly. >> Anyway, um yeah.
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And and so where where have you taken the business now?
3:08:04
Give us this the the latest and greatest. Yeah.
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So we're building an it's like an AI workspace.
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So our goal is to really automate um like a significant amount of knowledge work required like if you start from >> um if if you think about like what it takes to take a drug to market, you have to do a combination of planning work and execution work and execution work is like clinical trials, running experiments.
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>> Um that's where a lot of the focus is.
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That's where a lot of people kind of put the bottlenecks.
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Um, and what we're doing is kind of focused on the the other part of that process, the planning and preparation work.
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So that takes like 45% of the time of a drug's life cycle.
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And really, if you can speed that up, help companies make better decisions uh in how they synthesize information, search information, prepare regulatory documents faster, there actually is a potential to really accelerate um time from that it takes to take to market. >> What's your read?
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Is this about uh replacing human labor or just making human labor dramatically more efficient? >> It's more the latter.
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Um the way we see it is there are so many questions in biotech that are just intractable for humans to uh to solve alone.
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Like the search space for making a new drug is so large, you just cannot do it with humans.
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There's 20,000 or something proteins in the human proteome.
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If you want to make a drug against any one of those proteins, um, you know, if you want to do it like really thoroughly, you have to read all the literature on every single protein.
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You'd have to think about all the different ways you could drug every different protein, different combinations of drugs.
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That's just completely intractable search problem.
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Um, and then you'd have to make all the different documentation to to like run those experiments and plan those experiments.
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So what ends up happening is a lot of people rely on heruristics to um to come up with ideas for new drugs and uh we think that actually what's going to happen is people are going to change to be managers of these AI systems that are going out and doing all this work and structuring data and running analysis and then coming back and bubbling up recommendations that the human can then um you know make the final call on.
3:10:07
Where at the intersection of AI and bio are you bearish given your given your experience, you know, working in in the pharmaceutical industry broadly?
3:10:15
I'm I'm sure you see companies that raise $und00 million and uh maybe you're you uh don't always have the full faith of maybe their their venture capital backers.
3:10:27
>> Yeah, I'm relatively bearish on patient recruitment as a space.
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I think if you like look from uh just clinical trials like one of the obvious problems that there's not enough patients or it's hard to recruit patients for the trials.
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So trials runs more slowly than you would like.
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I think the reality is that the supply the demand for patients far exceeds the supply especially as we're developing more and more you know niche drugs for niche conditions and personalized genetic medicines.
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personalized genetic medicines. And I think you know a lot of these companies come up with a promise that we can source and find all these patients and bring them in when in reality the patients don't exist or they you know the only trial is being run in Mass
3:11:05
General Hospital or something but the patient even if you add like an AI bot that can call hundreds of people or reach out to hundreds of people it doesn't solve the fundamental supply an AI bot that gives people rare diseases so that there are more patients to cure. This is the real strategy here.
3:11:22
This is the real strategy here. >> Yeah.
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Or you can fly them from Nebraska to Boston or something. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's probably it.
3:11:27
Uh that's the more humane thing to do.
3:11:29
Um can you take me through kind of like uh within your clients uh your customers, is there a is there like a front office, back office dichotomy?
3:11:37
Uh it sounds like this is not uh a you know electronic lab notebook. You're not in the lab.
3:11:43
Um but how do the companies see the dividing line between like the knowledge work piece, the regulatory filings and then what's and the trial design versus the actual like mixing of the test tubes and like pipetting.
3:12:00
>> Yeah, I think broadly you can think of pharma companies are split into the R&D organization.
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Those are the guys in the lab with test tubes.
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>> Uh the commercial organization and then the development organization. >> Okay.
3:12:10
>> Uh the commercial organization sells the drugs. That's the sales reps.
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And then development organization, you know, many different functions within that, but broadly it's planning trials um and you know, communicating with stakeholders.
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So like one customer group we're working with, it's called a medical affairs function.
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Their goal is to coordinate with doctors and represent the company's science and programs uh to the external like world of doctors and they want they help with um you know communicating their science uh and and also like enrolling the doctors into their clinical trials.
3:12:41
Is the comp or is the state-of-the-art or like the current solution is it more like Google Docs or pen and paper or is it like some custom ERP from a you know company that's kind of like loosely solved the problem and then been like sold 25 times.
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>> Yeah, it's completely underpenetrated by software.
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So the current solution is consulting.
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I mean I started as a consultant so this is why I know this is a problem.
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You just have like massive amounts of human labor, highly compensated human labor >> going and reading documents, inputting things into Excel, making powerpoints.
3:13:16
>> You know, the the software penetration is is the Microsoft Office >> for Microsoft Excel still undefeated >> Power can sell to uh Can you sell to consultants?
3:13:25
>> Um, >> thinking about it, >> we're we're not Yeah, they're not like we don't consider them our ICP. >> Okay, got it. Makes sense. Uh, well, congrats.
3:13:33
>> Congrats on funding milestone.
3:13:33
Uh given that Lee Marie did it, I'm sure you'll get a you know somebody that >> multi-billion dollar acquisition offer right around the corner.
3:13:42
She seems to be on a tear lately a year out or >> uh but tell her said hi.
3:13:45
We will talk to you soon.
3:13:48
Have a great rest of your day. >> Great stuff.
3:13:49
Thanks so much for having Alex >> and we are running late.
3:13:52
Jordy has to hop on with Moadishu and Pyongyang actually >> London Bermuda >> and the Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. Yeah.
3:14:01
>> He has to talk to the C.
3:14:01
That's who you have to hop on the on with the Cayman Islands. I wonder why.
3:14:04
Um anyway, thank you John Xley for hanging out in the chat. It's always a pleasure.
3:14:09
Thank you Christopher and Feral Logix.
3:14:10
Gabe, >> uh everyone who's here, Taylor, uh we appreciate you.
3:14:17
>> There's 11ish days left of summer. >> 11ish days.
3:14:20
There's something big coming.
3:14:22
I was saying we're going to announce it today and Jordy said we can't announce it yet.
3:14:25
It has to be the end of summer.
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So expect something big September 1st. >> Very soon. >> My world. >> Very soon.
3:14:32
We will talk to you tomorrow.
3:14:32
Have a great rest of your day.