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Today is Friday, June 13th, 2025.
2:28
We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.
2:37
We have a great show for you today, folks.
2:39
We're covering lots of stuff, taking you all over the world.
2:42
Uh we are going to touch on what's going on in Iran.
2:46
You know, we're not a political show, but obviously this has taken over the timeline and we do want to understand a little bit about what's going on.
2:55
So, we're going to have our good friend Josh Steinman jump on, get us up to speed.
2:59
We're going to run through a few posts before we bring him in.
3:02
Uh first one, apparently there's a Gwagon angle here. Have you heard this?
3:06
So, Faras Khan, friend of the show, says, "I love my G Wagons."
3:08
The Mercedes-Benz Gwagon G-Class exists largely because of Iran, specifically due to the influence and initiative of Muhammad Rees Sha Palavi, the Sha of Iran in the early 1970s. Yeah.
3:20
So, it was it was built for him. Oh, yes. That's right.
3:25
Built uh for the Sha purpose-built and became so popular that it became a global icon and arguably top five car, fantastic car of all time.
3:35
So hopefully we can move past the geopolitical conflict and get back to what matters, building cool cars together in a global community.
3:44
They probably have some insane vintage G Wagons ground.
3:48
Hopefully none of them were destroyed. Yes.
3:50
Um well, it's absolute chaos in the timeline.
3:52
Walter Bloomberg has a quote from Trump to the Wall Street Journal.
3:57
We'll see if this is a real quote. I don't know.
3:59
Attack would be great for the market because Iran will not have a nuclear weapon.
4:02
Uh the the market was not responding to that right now.
4:06
Michael Bur is is confused.
4:08
Uh and Shane Copelan does have the market you should be tracking.
4:10
Poly market the odds of an Israeli military strike against Iran were sure were surging yesterday before the market started selling off.
4:19
So Poly Market was once again ahead.
4:20
And so Shane says you knew this was coming if you were checking Poly Market.
4:24
That's why we're proud to partner with Poly Market because they bring you the news before it happens. Uh that's right.
4:30
Well, we there was some interesting activity.
4:35
People were looking on chain uh well that that too but you know people were looking on polychain apparently a wallet on a few different occasions during uh Israeli uh strikes like you know 12 hours before would people were creating accounts uh potentially to to trade against this stuff.
4:53
So um anyways that they're doing a service for other people to understand the world a little bit better.
4:59
But we're going to try and understand what's going on.
5:00
So, let's bring in Josh Steinman, the founder of Galvanic, to break it down for us.
5:06
Thanks so much for taking the time and hopping on. How are you doing? Doing great. Doing great.
5:10
Explain to us uh first off, let's start with what's going on right now.
5:16
Uh there's a lot of posts.
5:18
It's really hard to make sense of all what's AI slop.
5:20
There's some really striking images.
5:22
I saw one crazy photo of what appeared to be a drone that went directly into a single bedroom. Very, very precise.
5:30
How precise are these targets?
5:31
What's actually going on?
5:33
What's the scale of this? Is this World War III?
5:34
And then I want to get a little bit of the history from you. Yeah.
5:36
So, first of all, I think precision targeting is not like a new thing.
5:39
I mean, even as far back as like the uh the first Gulf War, there were reports that American cruise missiles were able to target, you know, very specific locations like uh you know, the thing that got leaked to the media was like, "Oh, we can we can hit a bedroom window with a cruise missile."
5:57
And I can't speak to whether or not that's accurate, but you know that's over 30 years ago.
6:02
So you can just think like things have gotten a lot better.
6:04
I think the big takeaway right here is we're seeing actual like next generation asymmetric capabilities being deployed uh and and they're being deployed in a way in which we're literally seeing them.
6:16
Obviously the footage is getting leaked.
6:17
There's all these reports of like Iranian missiles failing at launch.
6:21
So you have like possible next generation cyber weapons being deployed. Maybe it's RFW. You don't know.
6:29
But this is like really stuff that's happening.
6:31
I mean, they built drone bases supposedly inside Iran, which is wild.
6:35
Although obviously we just saw the Ukrainians do the same thing against the Russians.
6:39
Yeah, I heard some report that I think a hundred suicide drones left from Iran.
6:43
None of them made it to Israel.
6:46
And so uh some defense technology was clearly employed there to stop that.
6:50
Or maybe it's just shotty manufacturing. Who knows? Yeah.
6:54
Look, the point that I'd make here is like you just have to hand it to the president of the United States because from his perspective, this is all just a negotiation.
7:00
Like this guy's the goat, you know, and he's just like, "Hey, we're still open for negotiation."
7:05
Like, yeah, we're going to kill half your leadership.
7:08
And like, we'll see you at the table in 3 days. Yeah. I mean, this is Yeah.
7:12
What did you what did you think about the you know people were sharing around 61 days ago I guess he he gave like a 60-minute kind of uh deadline or sorry 60day deadline. We're on day 61. Day 61 this happened. Yeah.
7:24
Um did you were you reading into that at all? Were you expecting it?
7:29
Uh I wasn't personally expecting it but it does make sense.
7:34
Now, the question of whether or not that was directed or agreed upon or just sort of like a shelling point, like the Israelis looked at that date and they're like, "Okay, if we do it on this date, it'll seem coherent." You don't know.
7:44
I think probably one of the few people who will know on the planet is the president.
7:49
Uh, but it is nice because I mean, the president is very open about what he wants.
7:54
Um, and I think, you know, for the past 20 years, our foreign policy leaders, whether it's the president or secretary of state, they sort of had this like very amateur-ish attitude to foreign policy, like, "Oh, we're just going to play nice with everybody."
8:07
And Trump is just like, "No, we don't want you to have a nuclear weapon.
8:12
We're 100% fine with all of these other things.
8:14
We're negotiating on this and like, yeah, there are going to be consequences and you're literally going to see them right now." Okay.
8:19
Give me a little bit of the history.
8:21
Is it is it uh before we get into the history, is it too early?
8:24
People on the timeline are are calling it the one-day war.
8:26
They're taking victory laps.
8:29
And then there's the other side, which is it's World War II.
8:31
I was seeing that a lot last night. Which one is it?
8:33
It just feels a little too early for people to be claiming uh victory given we don't uh know the consequences.
8:40
We've also had a pretty poorest border for for years.
8:43
So, I think there should be concern, you know, even at home around Yeah. Yeah.
8:47
Sunsu and Clauswitz both write about how politics and war are essentially extensions of the same of the same thing, right?
8:56
How do you get other nations to do what you want them to do or to come to a negotiated uh you know agreement etc.
9:03
So I think you know I don't know I'm not even sure the degree to which if at all the United States is involved.
9:10
What I would say is it seems like Iranian air defense systems are essentially zeroed out.
9:14
So the war will go on as long as the Israelis want it to go on. Mh.
9:19
And so at that point then you create this like you know interesting triangulation relationship where the president is still offering what remains of the Iranian leadership an olive branch.
9:29
It is up to them to take it.
9:29
If they don't, you know, they have to know that the Israelis essentially have the capability and intention and and the willingness to essentially just do whatever they want, including high level leadership targets.
9:43
And I think you have to imagine if you're the Iranians that you know you're asking what else do they have in the tool box.
9:53
Uh give me a little bit of the history.
9:54
I think most of us are familiar with the meme of like this is a picture of Iran before the revolution. Very modern. We used to be allies.
10:03
Iran used to be a massive I think third largest GDP in the world.
10:08
Used to be an ally of Israel by the way.
10:10
you know, just talk about like weird turnabouts if you're crazy.
10:12
So, walk me through kind of the story of like how we got to this point. Yeah.
10:15
So, obviously there there's a lot here and I would encourage people to do their own research.
10:22
Uh lots of great books and I'm by no means uh an experts expert although I have been working was working in this area for at this point almost two decades. Yeah.
10:31
So yeah, there was a revolution um in uh in Iran to push back against uh leaders that the United States and the UK supported and wanted to remain in power.
10:43
And the main flip there was they went from essentially a capitalist democracy to a communist theocracy more or less.
10:52
Uh I mean, you know, the the sha of Iran is was essentially and you know, he he's still here, you could say.
10:59
uh I think he lives in Los Angeles.
11:01
Um so more of a I'd say more of a like capitalist monarchy although you know you'd have to go into the full details of how the government was architected.
11:09
So um it was very compatible with American It's interesting that he land he landed in the land of the Gwagon. Is it a coincidence?
11:17
The car that not a coincidence at all I would imagine. Okay.
11:20
Uh so you know there there was push back, there were elections, there was a lot of you know uh fment um the government essentially fell and then there was sort of a second revolution that happened shortly thereafter uh where the hardline uh Shia Islamic theocrats came to Bower.
11:43
So the first, you know, the first sort of situation happens where there's this, you know, not failed election, but election where the government is not um reified, I guess you could say.
11:53
I'm just trying to like compress all this down.
11:57
So, you know, a lot of unrest um and then the Islamic uh revolution comes to power uh in hostage crisis.
12:03
Obviously, a lot of things happened.
12:07
Uh for folks that don't know, you could check out how uh yes, they took Americans hostage that were at the embassy uh during this revolution. That was in 1979.
12:16
Again, a lot of dense history here. 400 days. Yeah. Long.
12:21
It was a long hostage crisis. 400 days.
12:23
Like that's that's really long in many.
12:25
And it happened alongside the uh the presidential election campaign um for Jimmy Carter. He lost.
12:35
won famously the um the Iranians didn't let the hostages go.
12:39
At the same time, there was a failed hostage rescue attempt that has very interesting history into the architecture of the US Department of Defense, US Special Operations Command comes out of that failure um known as Desert One.
12:51
So yeah, a lot of history there.
12:54
I think for folks that are not really tuned in on this, the thing that I would say is um you know the Iranians were very active in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
13:04
Um their explosively formed penetrators killed hundreds of Americans.
13:10
Their individual operatives who were both Iranian nationals and Iraqi nationals also directly responsible for the deaths of a ton of folks.
13:19
This has caused Sulmani for a long time leading the coups force in in Iraq, right? Yep. So, a lot of that.
13:27
Um, and so, you know, there was there was a lot of bad blood and so I'm not saying that, you know, oh, we should go to war with Iran.
13:33
I actually think let the Israelis handle it.
13:37
Um, I'd prefer we close the border.
13:39
U, but at the same time, like they're not good guys.
13:41
You know, they've been killing Americans for a very long time um in a bunch of different places.
13:45
And I think you've had a lot of US uh uh senior leaders whether it's President Obama or others try and find ways to build bridges to that government and essentially been rebuffed and then you know doubled down on.
14:00
So it's just like you know no heroes.
14:03
Last last question for me um yesterday the internet went down.
14:09
Cloudflare Google uh you know the the the tinfoil hat crowd is saying maybe they're linked happened.
14:14
I mean, Cloudflare said this is not we we weren't attacked.
14:18
We would say if we were attacked because it would it would be a get out of jail free card.
14:21
Like it seemed like it was an issue with their key value store. Uh what's your take? I don't know.
14:28
Obviously, you always want to wait until more facts come out.
14:29
Yeah, the timing didn't seem We don't need facts.
14:32
What's Give us the hottest take. Yeah.
14:36
Sorry, things sometimes happen, boys. So, uh say love.
14:38
Do you think do you think we'll ever do you think we'll ever have clarity on on the outage yesterday?
14:45
It was I think Cloudflare did a pretty good job explaining, but I don't know.
14:50
Look, here's what I would say for folks that want to look to the future.
14:53
Like what's the Iranian response going to be?
14:55
They absolutely have, you know, how many foreign sabotage teams are operating on US soil?
14:58
They they absolutely have assets here in the United States.
15:02
Those assets absolutely have access to asymmetric capabilities. Those could be drones.
15:07
It could be like hit squads, etc.
15:09
And I think that you'll be able to gauge the temperature by whether or not those assets start to get activated and start to then go after things here in the United States.
15:22
Especially because the president has been clear like maybe he was aware of what was going to happen, but there was no official, you know, logistical US support for the Israeli operation.
15:32
like they did that themselves, you know, maybe there was some sort of like sure do whatever you want.
15:37
Um, you know, permission from the United States, but you have a statement from Marco Rubio.
15:44
And so I would just say like stay tuned.
15:47
The asymmetric tools that were used against the Iranians are not, you know, unique to them.
15:52
These are things that are out in the wild right now.
15:53
So I'm certainly going to be paying a lot of attention to that.
15:56
And for TVPN viewers, I say that's where I'd, you know, be looking.
16:02
Well, thank you for monitoring the situation. Yes.
16:04
On behalf of uh on behalf of us.
16:07
There's no better place to monitor the situation than from the TVP and Ultra.
16:10
What we're doing at TVP from the Fortress.
16:13
We're constantly just monitoring the situation.
16:15
That's that's what the show is all about.
16:16
Thank you so much for hopping on, Josh. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks, Josh. Cheers. Enjoy your weekend.
16:21
Uh well, in some good news, um Chime went public 12 years ago.
16:28
Kristen Green writes, "They had a simple the founders had a simple conviction.
16:31
Americans deserve better from their banks.
16:33
Chime went public with 8.
16:33
6 million members, 121 billion in annual volume, and an average of 54 transactions per member per month.
16:41
So, congratulations to the Chime team. They rung the bell. Absolutely fantastic.
16:46
Congratulations to Kirsten Green on uh being their first backer. Great outcome. Congratulations.
16:55
How are they uh how are they trading is the big question.
16:57
Oh, it it it went way up. It did very well.
16:59
Uh the the company climbed 37% in debut after $864 million IPO. Very good news.
17:07
We can go into the whole story.
17:09
I'd love to know a little bit more about the back story.
17:10
I'd love to I actually guess it priced at $18. 4 billion. That's great.
17:15
Uh originally or or that's kind of how where they debuted and then and now it's trading at 11.
17:22
It's down a little bit, but still that that's in the range that that um I think a lot of analysts were were anticipating or or how they felt it would be fairly valued.
17:32
Well, if you love fintech, you got to get on ramp. Ramp. com. Time is money. Save both.
17:36
Easy to use corporate cards, bail, payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
17:39
And we have uh RAMP has uh Andrew as a customer.
17:46
We have a fun activity today in the studio.
17:48
Uh we have Tyler Cosgrove, our intern over there.
17:50
He will be assembling a Fury drone made out of Legos that was very nicely courtesy uh sent to us from the Anderal team. How you doing? Good. I'm very excited. Um break it down for us. What's the plan?
18:05
It's the the Fury Ander drone.
18:05
Um it's a group five autonomous air vehicle.
18:08
Um so I think it's it's I think 124 scale.
18:11
So the real thing is I believe 20 feet long, which is like around half the length of a F-16. Okay.
18:17
Um, but yeah, there's How many pieces are in here?
18:22
When's the last time you you put together a Lego set? Um, I was probably 12. Okay.
18:27
So, like eight years, a few years ago. I'm feeling pretty good.
18:30
I don't know who has the current record on on the, you know, the speedrun of this. Yes.
18:34
I I think you can set the world record.
18:36
It might be like Palmer's kids, but I believe they're pretty young, so I think I should have You're going to smoke them.
18:41
You're going to smoke them. Okay.
18:42
So, we're going for a world record.
18:43
Uh, we're not doing any percent here. We're doing 100%.
18:46
We're we're doing glitchless.
18:48
I don't want to see any any cheats employed over there.
18:52
We're going to be tracking the timer.
18:52
Uh production team's going to start a timer.
18:56
I don't know if we're going to be able to put on the screen, but we will uh be tracking him.
19:00
So, on your marks, get set. Do we Wait, wait, wait.
19:02
Do we want to do we want to have any like consequences like fantasy football consequences?
19:07
I have I have something for you. I think it's in my car.
19:09
I have If you can do it under How How long do you think it's going to take him?
19:14
I mean, I I think if you can do it, the reward should be under under 30 minutes. 20 minutes. 20 minutes. That's under 30. Under 30.
19:24
If you can do it under 30, I have an Anderl t-shirt and it's shareholder worn.
19:30
It's a shareholder worn Ander jersey. Wow, that's powerful.
19:35
Jersey worn by it signed.
19:35
I bet we could get it signed.
19:37
We get it signed um by Luke Metro. So, uh it's extra large.
19:39
I don't know if it'll fit you, but you will win an Ander t-shirt if you can do it in under 30 minutes.
19:46
On your marks, get set, go. Start your engines. Send it.
19:52
He's He's going to be working on that while the show goes on.
19:54
We're going to be bringing you the news. Break it down.
19:58
It looks pretty complicated. 600 pieces. We will see how he does. Okay.
20:03
We will be checking in with him over the next half hour, over the next hour.
20:05
Uh letting you know how it goes.
20:07
Anyway, let's read through some of this chime.
20:11
Let's tell you about Figma first. Figma.
20:12
com, think bigger, build faster.
20:14
Figma helps design and development teams build great products together.
20:16
If golden retrievers could design software, they would use Figma. Absolutely.
20:22
Uh designol uh Chime Financial rose 37% in its trading debut after pricing its shares above the marketed range to raise uh uh to raise uh $864 million in the year's sixth biggest US IPO. That's great.
20:37
The fintech firm shares opened at $43 after selling for 27 in the IPO and they've been kind of trading around since then.
20:48
Um yeah, they're sitting at $34 a share at this point. So down.
20:51
So still up from still up from 27 which is great.
20:53
Uh accounting for employee stock options and restricted stock units, Chime has a fully diluted value of about 15.
20:59
8 billion based on filings with the US SEC.
21:04
that fully diluted uh value is a sharp drop from the $25 billion valuation in a 20 2021 funding round at the peak of the tech tech boom.
21:12
And so we've seen a lot of these uh companies that had higher marks during the zero interest rate era.
21:17
But of course interest rates have gone up.
21:19
That affects the value of future cash flows.
21:23
It affects the value of tech companies in particular.
21:25
But it's still important to get out get liquidity even if it's not at the high mark.
21:28
Your LPS you can distribute.
21:31
They can choose what to do with it.
21:32
with it. maybe they hold because we've seen a lot of companies that go out at below the previous peak but then they grind up because they have a lot to build up and this isn't a situation where it's a company that's sneaking out at a 4 billion uh you know spack or
21:46
something this is a true IPO in the tens of billions still uh seems pretty solid so many private NEO banks that this is a very important sort of uh reality check on the market to understand how how the market you know the postser era is really going to value these. There was
22:02
There was another one that got out.
22:04
I think there was called Dave.
22:06
I'm actually curious to see how I know Dave. I know the founder. You know the founder. Dave is Dave.
22:09
Dave Grinded up at one point.
22:12
They were so we had we had one of the founders on the show.
22:16
He's working on that new Chrome.
22:18
Uh oh, that that was from Honey.
22:18
Honey Honey worked with another guy at Dave two years ago. John John Wall.
22:23
Dave was valued at $5 a share. Yes.
22:26
Today it is valued at $200 a share. Wow.
22:30
Wait, what's the So the market cap today is 2. 78 billion. So it traded down.
22:37
It was basically Wait, sorry.
22:40
Say the market cap again. Uh 2. 78 billion. 2. 7 billion. Wow. Yeah.
22:47
It was down at like 30 million or something.
22:48
And it was crazy because they had like 100 million in cash on the balance sheet.
22:51
And I know someone who's a significant shareholder in that company.
22:54
and and it was like it was like a really rough roller coaster because it like at one point it was worth a ton and then it was worth nothing and then it was back up again.
23:00
So it's still down 33% from its IPO but it's in a solid place to actually build back up.
23:06
So wow what a roller coaster. What a ride.
23:08
Um and you had to been very I mean very very different businesses but uh ultimately if you were a Chime investor watching Dave in the public market was was not uh was not very fun.
23:19
So, the CEO uh of Chime said, "We don't focus on short-term fluctuation of the stock.
23:25
Even if it goes up today, I'm sure there's going to be other days that won't be as great." Fact check. True.
23:28
Uh we remain focused on the long term.
23:30
So, the investors in Chime that are making money off this, DST Global, we know some folks over there, Crosslink Capital, Access Industries, General General Atlantic, uh Menllo Ventures, Cath Innovation, iconic, and it sounds like Kirsten Green as well over at For led the seed round of Chime.
23:48
Um Sean Carolyn, a Menllo Ventures partner and Chime board member, said he's relieved there was a reprieve in the markets following the tariff induced volatility in April. That IPO window closed. We it back open. The IPO window.
24:01
I was thinking it would be very interesting to see a president run on a platform of just keeping the IPO window open permanently, man mandating that it's open. Yeah. Yeah. create.
24:13
We should, you know, normally I'm I'm against big government, you know, intervening with with the market, but in this case, I think sort of mandating that the IPO window should always be open.
24:24
It should always be open.
24:26
You're really on to something here, John.
24:27
You you've always been very presidential, but but I I like where you're going.
24:31
This is a winning platform.
24:32
It'd be bipartisan, I think.
24:33
It's sort of like the opposite of the the freeze the rent guy over in New York.
24:37
So, yes, freeze the IPO window open. Freeze it open. Freeze it open.
24:41
Uh, all capital markets were like, "Holy cow, what does this mean?"
24:43
Caroline said, noting that Chime delayed its IPO.
24:47
The company's strong debut Thursday indicates how that now the markets are healthy. Yeah.
24:51
Um, since so a lot of people are very happy about that.
24:54
They've never taken their eye off the mission. Yeah, I'm surprised.
24:55
Tempted to chase the new shiny object. Yeah.
25:00
What are you surprised by? Yeah.
25:00
Oh, I was going to say um you know uh we'll see if uh Chime depending on what happens in Iran market might see that positively if Chime could enter you know bring neo bankanking toran Iran. That'd be amazing.
25:15
Um I'm surprised by how at iconic says uh they've never taken their eye off the mission.
25:22
They were never tempted to chase the shiny new object and yeah they've seemed to be just look at this murderer's row of IPO underwriters.
25:28
You got Morgan Stanley, you got Goldman Sachs, you got JP Morgan and 11 other banks worked on the offering.
25:34
Let's hear it for investor investment banks.
25:36
They don't get enough credit.
25:39
You know, investment banks, they just they just work tirelessly if the stock pops.
25:42
Where are the ticker tape parades for for the analysts that stayed up all night working on this IPO?
25:49
Uh anyway, uh Chimes marketing includes a deal with the NBA's Dallas Mavericks for its logo to appear on the team's jerseys. Pretty cool. Pretty cool. Great.
25:58
Anyway, let's tell you about Vant.
26:00
Vanta, automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously.
26:04
Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Anyway, moving on. Uh big news.
26:14
Uh all a whole bunch of tech leaders are now officially in the army.
26:21
So, the reserves army reserves palunteer Sham Sanker joined the army reserves today.
26:27
He broke it down in the free press.
26:29
Uh, also Bos from uh, Meta jumped in, honored to accept a direct commission as a lieutenant colonel in the US Army Reserve as part of the newly formed Detachment 2011, the Army's Executive Innovation Corps together with Sham Sankar, Kevin Wheel, and Bob Mcgru.
26:46
Uh, our primary role will be to serve as technical experts advising the Army's modernization efforts.
26:53
We've talked to the Secretary of the Army.
26:55
uh they're very dedicated to bringing in technology and modernizing the entire fighting force.
27:01
Very exciting and it's awesome that uh these tech leaders and executives can get in there and uh and start having an impact. So very very accepting. Uh very exciting.
27:09
Boss says, "I have accepted this commission in a personal capacity because I am deeply invested in helping advance American technological innovation."
27:17
Nerd Snipe, anyone care to venture a guess on why we called our detachment 2011? 2011.
27:21
That's got to be an HTTP thing, right?
27:25
HTTP 2011 is a personnel file in the intel community.
27:31
Oh, um I think it's I I think it's an HTTP reference.
27:35
So HTTP 2011 created status code indicates that there that the HTTP request has resulted in the creation of a new resource. I don't know. That's my guess.
27:46
Let me know what you think.
27:47
HTTP status code 201 means created according to at poker chessman.
27:53
That yeah, that that that sounds like what what it would be.
27:55
Uh well, out with the 404s, in with the 2011's.
28:00
Congratulations to everyone involved.
28:00
Uh Bob McGru says, "This evening I will become an officer in the Army, US Army Reserve as part of Detachment 2011, the Army's Executive Innovation Corps.
28:09
I'm proud to have the opportunity to serve."
28:12
Shaman Sankar also says, "Our mission is to help the Army transform for future missions and adopt bleeding edge tech.
28:18
America wins when we when we unite the dynamism of American innovation with the military's vital mission.
28:22
This was our this this was the key to our triumphs in the 20th century.
28:28
It can help us win again.
28:30
Uh Sham came on the show.
28:30
He told us about the dollar a year meant. You remember this? Yeah.
28:33
Talking about executives in business who could not they could not be paid they had to be paid a salary.
28:40
They couldn't work for free. Yeah.
28:43
To to help with the war effort during World War II.
28:44
And some of them worked incredibly hard pivoting manufacturing lines to you're making cars now you're making Jeeps and tanks.
28:53
And they worked really hard and they made a dollar a year because they legally had to make money.
28:55
You got to make something. Yeah, this is good.
28:57
Uh where you live in an unstable world.
28:59
We want our brightest technologists to be allies and a part of our defense efforts.
29:07
Maybe we should get the get the army on linear.
29:08
It's a purpose-built tool for planning and building products.
29:12
Meet the system for modern software development.
29:14
streamline issues, projects, product road maps, linear agents, you know, I don't think that was their original intention, but it would anywhere you're building software, you should be using linear. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
29:26
I should really join the Army Reserve and just be pitching SAS products the entire time.
29:29
Just just forward deployed BDR. Yeah. Yeah. You do a great job.
29:35
I don't really know that much about implementing this stuff, but I can sell it. Yeah.
29:37
Just like, hey, we're trying to have a meeting about, you know, modernization. Not now, John.
29:43
And I'm like, well, sales tax on numeral, what about that if you put it on autopilot?
29:48
Anyway, uh, congrats to Poly Market.
29:50
They're putting up massive numbers in terms of visits in May. Yeah.
29:54
So, they pulled data from Similar Web in May.
29:56
Robin Hood is sitting at 37. 1 million hits. Coinbase at 34. 7. Poly Market in third.
30:01
So, I think they're just pulling all the, you know, finance finance and like kind of new like these all lean like newer startup investing markets, but um Kraken at 7 million, pump fund at 5 million.
30:15
I would have assumed Pump Fund would be massive, but I mean 5 million is nothing to shake.
30:20
I think crypto is still it's still niche at 3 million, KHI at one.
30:23
I see this, you know, the the the reason that we were originally excited to partner with Poly Market is that it's an alternative to traditional news.
30:32
It's a way to understand the headlines of the future today or at least get you know odds against them and uh so I think this signals that a lot of people are just going to poly market to understand the world.
30:44
So congratulations to the whole team. Yep.
30:46
Uh this was an interesting post by friend of the show Casey Handmer.
30:51
Uh I had no idea it's a little bit dark but he's talking about the ISS's structural integrities.
30:56
quoting post from Christian Davenport who says the Axiom 4 mission is postponed indefinitely while NASA and Roscomos investigate a leak on the Russian side of the International Space Station.
31:08
And so Casey says the ISS's structural integrity is far more marginal than is being publicly discussed.
31:16
We are having multiple and increasingly frequent leaks from heavily fatigued node segments in the Russian section. John, yes.
31:24
This screams like the plot of a sci-fi movie.
31:29
Leaks coming from the Russian section. It's crazy. Yikes.
31:32
When aluminum gets flexed, it fatigues and gets harder, increasing its tendency to crack.
31:36
Cracks concentrate forces at their tips and spread over time.
31:41
Multiple cracks have been discovered.
31:43
There is no factor of safety associated with this failure mode.
31:47
None of the structural pressure vessels are meant to crack.
31:49
We are not even single fault tolerant on the structural integrity of the station.
31:54
We could wake up tomorrow and find that with zero warning, it has failed catastrophically.
32:00
Whether that means a leak slow enough to close some hatches, get the crew out, or at least into safer parts of the station, it's a roll of the dice.
32:08
It could also depressurize in less than a minute.
32:10
And Elon Musk says there are potentially serious concerns about the long-term safety of the of the International Space Station.
32:17
Some parts of it are simply getting too old.
32:18
And obviously that risk grows over time.
32:23
Even though SpaceX earns billions of dollars from transporting astronauts and cargo to the ISS.
32:26
I nonetheless would like to go on record recommending that it be deorbited within two years. Striking. Very interesting.
32:34
We got to put up a new one.
32:36
We got to put up 10 of these.
32:37
Like I know that they don't have that much economic value, but like this is what I love. Yes. Yes. We need we need ISS.
32:43
I know that it's so expensive.
32:46
I think I think it's one of the most expensive man-made objects ever built.
32:50
Although maybe Stargate will will will beat it out.
32:52
I I seem to remember the ISS being costing a total of a hundred billion dollars.
32:57
The thing with Stargate is it's a project that's happening across states and so it's hard to say that it's the most much like the ISS's different modules put together. Oh. Oh, kind of similar.
33:09
We could fit the ISS in a in a large enough warehouse. Yes. Yes. fit stargate series.
33:14
We have to have we have to have a human a human rated space station.
33:21
It's just we have to have a space station.
33:23
It's just so I would like to see an Elon mega project. There's that website. There's that website.
33:27
How many humans are in space? Have you seen this?
33:31
Humans are in space right now. Uh who is in space. com?
33:35
There are 13 humans in space right now. Who is in space?
33:38
The ISS Crew 10 launched March 14th, 2025.
33:45
There's four people there. There's the Soyos. There's people on there. Johnny Kim's up there. You know, wait, no way.
33:51
You know Johnny Kim, right? No.
33:51
Oh, Johnny Kim is a legend. So, Johnny Kim Oh, yeah.
33:55
This is the guy who did everything. Yes. He's done everything. Yes. So, he was a Navy Seal.
34:00
He's a doctor and he's also an astronaut.
34:03
And the whole meme is like his parents are finally uh are finally like proud of it because he did everything.
34:08
But it's like I'm sure they still want is is the best.
34:13
We should get them on the show from space up there for 60 people over there days.
34:16
And then uh and then Tang Gong space station, the Chinese space station has three astronauts on it and then another three from a different uh from a different mission.
34:25
And so there's six over there and then there's seven on on the uh on the ISS. And so we got 13. We need more.
34:33
We need we need we need we need to be bringing this exponentially. I want hundreds.
34:38
more like Kaiat like live streaming daily.
34:41
I'm sure they get a little content problem. It's a content problem.
34:45
They got to be marketing.
34:46
Everyone's like, "Oh, you're running some some scientific experiment.
34:48
When are we going to get the paper? That's boring."
34:52
No, they're like, "Thank you for the Thank you for the $5, thank you for the $5."
34:56
They're like doing impressions and stuff like that.
34:59
If you donate a hundred, they'll squeeze the washcloth and show how the water, you know, sticks around.
35:02
Uh let's check the NASA problem.
35:05
how he's doing an update.
35:12
Pieces are black and the table's black. It's quite hard to see. Okay.
35:14
I don't know how far I am uh right now. Okay.
35:18
What time I'm at, but he's at 15 minutes. Okay. I I can do it. I can do it. Okay. Keep going. Keep going. He's working. He's working.
35:25
Uh anyway, let's uh uh we are we we're releasing recap videos now.
35:31
uh roughly a 1-hour recap video of everything that happened on TBPN this entire week.
35:36
We know we put out a lot of content for you.
35:38
Uh this week we'll be recapping WWDC.
35:40
Apple released uh Liquid Glass.
35:44
It was a little bit controversial.
35:46
We talked to people that were very optimistic about the new design direction.
35:49
People settled down and they're I think they eventually settled down thinking to themselves, all right, this thing might be pretty nice looking.
35:56
probably will get pretty good and we'll all move on and they'll probably transition well to VR and platforms.
36:03
Yeah, it also it also tied uh really well to Apple's kind of retreat.
36:08
Uh Ben Thompson wrote about this.
36:08
Uh Apple is uh turning over the reigns to developers to develop some new AI applications.
36:15
So we're very optimistic about that.
36:17
Um we also had uh we had our intern Tyler Cosgrove.
36:21
is making Legos right now.
36:23
But on Monday, we had him assemble the first American iPhone from scratch.
36:27
Uh, and by scratch, I mean seven pieces that he had to kind of glue together, but he did it.
36:31
It was way more than some credit.
36:33
It was way more than seven, maybe 12.
36:34
Um, but it was fantastic.
36:36
Um, we have uh we had Andrew Huberman on the show. That was fantastic.
36:40
We got to talk to him about what's going on with NIH budgeting.
36:42
The proposal is that research funding will drop by 40%.
36:46
We tried to dig into what is what what what pieces of the research budget should we keep um how what is the dynamic between uh the different types of research that are funded and he really broke it down for us on the back of his 4hour interview with uh Dr.
37:00
Jay Bacharia who is the current NIH director.
37:08
Uh that was a very fun interview.
37:09
Uh we also went to Y Combinator demo day 2025.
37:11
We were live from San Francisco.
37:14
We talked to dozens of teams, dozens of founders.
37:16
We talked to high school dropouts, college dropouts, tons of AI agents.
37:20
About 90% of the new YC class is AI driven.
37:23
Um, but we had a bunch of interesting conversations.
37:28
We also talked to some venture capitalists there and we shot a lot of all the hard tech founders.
37:30
We did not see many of them.
37:33
There were a few, but we uh but we mostly AI deep dive. They were among us.
37:37
Uh, and then and then we also discussed the meta and scale acquisition or investment.
37:41
uh Meta is investing uh something like $15 billion.
37:46
The deal actually just closed today.
37:48
And so we had commentary from a number of uh founders and and uh pundits and uh journalists and also venture capitalists talking about the nature of that deal and how it came together.
38:01
And so uh we hope you enjoy this year this week's recap and uh it gives you it gives you a good overview.
38:08
We're one away from being seven days a week. Yes, we're very close.
38:12
Um, we also have a great show for you today.
38:14
We're we're we're having uh we already had Josh on the show, but we have um 1X is coming on to talk about humanoid robots.
38:19
We got Emily Sunberg coming on, the the fantastic writer of the newsletter Feed Me.
38:23
Uh we have John Doyle from Cape building a new uh cellular network.
38:28
There's a lot to talk about there.
38:29
And then we have um someone from the Rand Corporation coming on, which would be very fun.
38:33
And so um we will go back to the timeline, back to what people are talking about in the news.
38:39
Um uh more updates on what's going on in New York.
38:43
Zorand Mdani is surging, continues to surge in the polls and seems to be doing very well in the debates.
38:49
Um but is not popular on tech Twitter because uh he says capitalism is theft.
38:55
Uh the quote is taxation isn't theft, capitalism is.
38:58
Saon Mamani could soon be mayor of the finance capital of the world. Incredible.
39:03
It is it is a very odd choice for a city that is known for capitalism and finance finance finance and uh yeah we we will see how this one evolves.
39:15
It is already a case study in marketing.
39:17
Signal called this out earlier this week that he's just laser focused on a few key lines and it is resonating with some certainly not our corner or our audience of capital enthusiasts.
39:31
Well, if you're a capital enthusiast, head over to public.
39:33
com investing for those who take it seriously.
39:36
They got multiasset investing, industryleading yields, and they're trusted by millions. Uh, let's go to Pavle.
39:41
Pavle says, Pavle Esperoo says, uh, traditional company structure is falling apart.
39:46
Pretty much every organization should be structured in three parts.
39:49
People who sell things, people who do things, people who automate things.
39:54
Everything else is just fat. Very interesting.
39:56
Sellers, doers, automators. this kind of two.
39:59
Yeah, I would I think this is I mean great insight ultimately uh uh resonates but uh people who make things that people who sell things people who make things people who automate things people do things do things is just just doing things. Yeah. Yeah.
40:18
That is interesting that there's not Yeah.
40:20
the the the the doing things part of this is is the most vague, but maybe that's management and strategy and and deciding what to do in the organization.
40:30
But I do like the reframing.
40:32
Some people make things, some people sell things. And yes, I Yeah. Yeah.
40:36
Maybe maybe making things is is better.
40:38
But again, the automation thing seems like an interesting twist on um a traditional engineering organization.
40:43
As the role of the software engineer changes, it becomes more about automating any type of business process.
40:52
And I think the role of the software engineer uh is is definitely growing in scope.
40:56
It's not it's vibe coding an internal tool using cursor retool or all the different softwares that are available.
41:03
It's also um buying offtheshelf or bringing in off-the-shelf software to automate processes and the the leverage of the software engineer leads to just massive automation across the entire company.
41:16
Um the selling things is very is very interesting because even though that is automated in in some ways it it it increasingly relies on what's automated about a steak dinner. Exactly.
41:27
On imperson interpersonal relationships and communication and so that that has definitely uh you know carved itself out as a unique uh a unique function within the modern organization.
41:39
Uh but yes, I I think the people who do things is could be build, could be make things, but could also be um define the strategy and and and build the company.
41:49
Um but if you want to automate things, put your sales tax on autopilot with numeralhq. com.
41:56
Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Um just get on there.
42:00
And if you're one of those people that sells things Yeah.
42:02
And if you're one of those people that sells things, get on Adio, customer relationship magic.
42:07
Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level.
42:11
It is the backbone of our high velocity. It is guest program. Get on there.
42:19
Uh Chimath had a hilarious post that I really enjoyed.
42:21
He says, "Well, this is probably one of the funnier things I've done, but my friend and Somalier and I got a California liquor license and started a wine collective.
42:31
With our license, it allows us to buy wine directly from venters, get wholesale pricing, buy and house entire collections of wine.
42:38
We did we didn't do this just for us, but created it to allow our friends to participate as well.
42:45
At some point, we may open it up to the world as large at large.
42:47
If you love wine, want access to the best wines, and avoid retail markups, this may be a fit.
42:53
The team charges for shipping and handling, but otherwise pass through the raw cost to our members.
42:58
Right now, we're saving 15 to 40% per bottle depending on the winery/vintage.
43:02
We call it Drink with Me.
43:04
Uh we also create quarterly capsules of the best wines Josh and I have drank and allow members to buy in quantity. The first box is below.
43:10
So he it seems like he's like on the cusp of launching like a DTOC wine company.
43:14
But yeah, I mean this is a this is a wine membership wine club.
43:19
These there's there's thousands of these. Uh people love them.
43:23
I think it makes sense for Chimoth's Yeah. uh creator evolution.
43:25
Yeah. uh creator evolution. You know, he's in terms of his brand like he you know like he's always drinking wine on fantastic wines all in alone and just casually dropping you know a little note about drink with me or whatever wine he's drinking can probably you know
43:42
drive this to 10,000 plus you know subscribers I completely agree the creator market fit here is is fantastic powerful uh very fun and if you if you zoom in and says drink with me a curated wine collective by Chamath Polyhapatia and Somalia Joshua plaque Uh, it looks great. Again, congrats. I Again, congrats.
43:58
I mean, he he enjoy he has a passion for wine and he's expressing it in in a business. You love to see it. It's great.
44:05
Um, we talked a little bit about this, but uh, we didn't get back into this.
44:10
Scott Bellski came on the show this week, talked about uh, the data wars uh, and there's new and there's new reporting from the information.
44:18
Salesforce is blocking enterprise AI rivals like Glean from using Slack data for their applications.
44:23
This was a big issue back in like 2012 with this idea that that you had all this data in Facebook.
44:31
You had all this data in Google.
44:32
You had all this data with Apple and you could not even though every one of those companies would tell you it's not our data, it's your data.
44:39
You can take it with you. It's yours. You own your data.
44:45
People would say, "Okay, that's great.
44:47
Google, I'd like to give all of my data to Facebook because I want better I want better ads on Facebook and Facebook.
44:51
I want to give all my data to Google so that when I go in my Gmail, I can search my friends list.
44:57
And both companies would be like, "Oh, no, no, no, no.
44:59
We we don't trust the other company. It's your data.
45:03
You can export it through this like CSV zip file that you have to download every time, but we're not just going to let an API link these two services." Absolutely.
45:11
Because the walled garden must be maintained.
45:12
And you know, it's like, oh, oh, it's a beautiful garden.
45:17
You have to appreciate it's my it's my data.
45:19
it's my it's my data. then then then I can you know integrate my iMessage with my Android friends like oh no no no you couldn't possibly do that and uh and and I mean these big tech companies they have they have reasonable uh uh arguments for it but it but it always has been funny and now it's more
45:34
important than ever and so Scott says anticipated and referred to this as the impending data wars in previous editions of implications that's his newsletter that you should go subscribe to but didn't expect to start this quickly data grab and protectionism underway especially by those that don't own their own graphs or sophisticated permissioning layers. And so, yeah,
45:51
And so, yeah, there's this big question.
45:53
Open AI is is launching deep research.
45:55
It integrates with Gmail and Google Docs.
45:57
That's going to be fantastic.
46:00
If they cut that off entirely uh and they get cut off, like that might be something that actually drives enterprise adoption of Google's Gemini deep research project, right?
46:12
Because if we have a whole bunch of documents in Google Drive and we want someone to be able to run a deep research report around all of our internal documentation, which obviously they would want to do, and Google successfully cuts off OpenAI, like you're just going to have to go there or else it's going to be a hassle of like, okay, I guess download all of our PDFs from Google Drive and then feed them into chat GPT one at a time.
46:34
Like no one's going to do that.
46:36
The friction is going to be so high.
46:37
even if you can download your data, like it it needs to be there over an API.
46:41
Uh and so Salesforce is taking the first the first shot in the data wars.
46:45
Um and we'll be tracking it here on the show.
46:48
Shots fired for the next for the next forever.
46:53
Yeah, I mean this was a very timely call out from Scott on the show. Yes, it was.
46:57
Um well uh if you're losing sleep over the data wars, you got to get on a sleep. Go to eightleep. com/tbpn. Get a sleep.
47:05
How did you sleep last night, Jordy?
47:06
I'm on a generational run.
47:09
Put up huge numbers last night.
47:09
I think I got you beat this whole week across.
47:12
I I think it's I think it's tied up. Uh Monday 91. Tuesday 86.
47:16
Wednesday was on the road. Doesn't count. Thursday 91. Friday 95. Let's hear it for me. I got completely mogged. Soundboard not working.
47:29
I was expecting some clapping, but the soundboard must be broken. Oh, there we go. That's for you, John. That's my favorite 95. I'm happy for you. I'm happy for you. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Just throw up an excuse.
47:41
I'm sure you have a good excuse. Yeah, it's fine. It's Yeah. Let me hear it. Let me hear the excuse. It actually was funny.
47:46
I I I woke up uh a little late this morning because uh my son crawled into bed and basically pushed me so far off the edge of the bed that the eight alarm, the the vibration alarm was him up in front of you. He didn't even wake up.
48:01
He was just he was sleeping like a rock.
48:03
But but I was just feeling it like very faintly. Yeah. Yeah.
48:06
My son hops in the bed after I after I leave and uh and I use the warm-up alarm from eight sleep, which is fantastic.
48:12
Uh it it it really makes it easy to get out of bed.
48:15
But he loves it because he's like, "Oh, it's so warm and cozy."
48:19
And then he just gets like he gets he sleeps like an extra two hours cuz he likes it really warm and so he enjoys my my postal alarm side of the bed. Enjoys that. Uh very sweet.
48:27
Anyway, let's go back to uh the Army's newest recruits, tech executives from Meta, OpenAI, and more.
48:35
The Wall Street Journal was covering it.
48:36
Um, executives from Meta, Palanteer, and OpenAI are joining a new Army Innovation Corps, bringing tech upgrades to the military.
48:45
The tech reserist will serve 120 hours a year, so two hours, a little over two hours a week, as lieutenant colonels advising on AI and commercial tech acquisition. Very exciting.
48:55
Um, and so, uh, that I I like this from Ba from Bos, Andrew Bosworth over at Meta.
49:01
He says, "It's possible I watched too much Top Gun." He's 43. Standing more than 6'2.
49:09
Happens to the best of us. It does.
49:09
You can never watch too much Top Gun. Come on, boss. It's an amazing movie.
49:12
Uh, he was told he was too tall to realize his youthful ambitions of flying an F-16 fighter jet.
49:20
Did that happen to you, too?
49:21
Uh, it was never even in the conversation.
49:23
I remember I remember seeing a movie in like about the Vietnam War when I was like 13 and it was very obvious that I was never going to make it in in the military, but there was someone from my high school and I do have a family member who's flying F-16s and it seems like it's a it's a it's a wonderful program and still incredible.
49:41
You really have to be a very specific specimen to be a pilot. Yeah.
49:43
I I I I did flight lessons as a kid and I was in um the civil uh the civil what's it called?
49:51
Civil Air Patrol and uh they I was really worried as a kid.
49:55
I wanted to be a pilot and I was worried that my eyesight would degrade because you can't you can't have glasses, you can't have uh lasic or anything like that.
50:03
You just got to have perfect eyesight.
50:05
You got to be very specific height. And um anyways, yeah.
50:11
Um Bosworth went on to say there's a lot of patriotism that has been under the covers that I think is coming to light in the valley. I completely agree.
50:20
Um, they will be uh sworn in as uniformed officers in a public ceremony on Friday, the day before the Army's 250th birthday.
50:28
Happy birthday to the Army. Happy birthday.
50:30
Uh, less than a decade ago.
50:34
Even working on technology that might be used in defense, never mind suiting up for service, was anathema in Silicon Valley.
50:39
The new reserve program reflects how the relationship between the Pentagon and the tech industry has deepened.
50:44
Meta and OpenAI adjusted their policies to work more with the military last year.
50:49
Although Meta is not technically a defense contractor right now, they are a supplier to a defense contractor with their Anderal partnership.
50:56
Little bit of confusion there.
50:58
Uh that story went out and it was so fast a lot of people didn't understand they're not uh they're not of an official military contractor at this point.
51:06
Um although I would love if they were.
51:09
Palunteer has been involved in national security work for two decades.
51:12
It has an AI and data project with the Army worth potentially more than $1 billion.
51:16
Uh for the army, the deepening ties can prepare for it for wars of the future.
51:20
They are expected to be waged in part with uh with ground boot ground robots and drones and rely on networks of sensors and artificial intelligence to coordinate it all.
51:29
Um I mean looking at the conflict from yesterday in Iran, Yep.
51:35
that feels like in many ways the future of warfare. Yep. Zero troops deployed. Yep.
51:41
And you know, absolute devastation.
51:44
Well, speaking of war of robots, we're gonna have the founder of 1X on the show in just five minutes.
51:49
Um, but in the meantime, let me tell you about Adquising made easy and measurable.
51:55
Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising.
51:56
Only Adqubines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Go to adquick. com.
52:02
Uh, anyway, uh, Sham Sankar took to the free press to write a little bit of a I guess this is an op-ed or a little article about his experience.
52:11
He says, "I am the CTO of Palunteer.
52:13
The day I joined the army says, "My father grew up in a mud hut in India.
52:18
America gave him and me a life.
52:21
Now technologists like me need to give back."
52:23
Oh, this is heartwarming. Uh, fantastic article.
52:26
Uh, does he have a gigachad filter on here?
52:31
I love I love the best the best bit. Fantastic.
52:33
This is this is your new bit.
52:35
If you need a bit going into the weekend, if you see a picture of your of your absolute boy and they don't and and they clearly, you know, just a casual filter, accuse them of using a gig.
52:48
I mean, I mean, he looks like he's in shape.
52:49
Let's leave it at that without without bringing out the glazinator 3000. Uh later today, glaze. Triple glaze.
52:56
Uh receiving their commissions on my side will be some of the most impressive minds in the world of technology.
53:03
Kevin Wheel, the chief product officer at OpenAI, Andrew Bosworth, Bos, the chief technology officer at Meta, and Bob Mcgru, formerly the chief research officer at OpenAI and engineering director at Palanteer.
53:14
Um, none of these none of these men need to pad their resumes.
53:18
None of them have free time between fatherhood demanding day jobs and a dozen other demands. Are they all dads?
53:24
Let's hear for fatherhood. Let's go. Let's go.
53:26
I mean, we got 50% of this group on the show already.
53:29
We got We got to finish it out. We were close with B.
53:33
almost overlapped at some event.
53:33
We're going to we're going to make it happen.
53:36
We almost caught him at Figma Config.
53:38
We're going to get him on the show. Let's make it happen.
53:41
Uh a decade ago, it would have been unthinkable for so many tech heavyweights to openly align with the US military.
53:46
Equally, it would have been out of character for the military to enlist the support of the nation's business elite, much less create a special core that they could deploy their technical talents in service of the government.
53:54
But a sea change has taken place.
53:56
Um, wars in Europe and Middle East and above all the threat of war in the Pacific have focused on the national mind and initiated a scramble for mobilization.
54:06
Exploding pagers and long-distance drone strikes from shipping containers prove the technology has once again changed the battlefield.
54:12
Our military has to change with it.
54:14
The Army's Executive Innovation Corps under the direction of the Army's chief of staff, General Randy George, who has been on the show, is part of a larger effort by our military to transform the way it prepares for and fights wars in the 21st century, marrying the nation's most innovative private companies with our mo uh with our most important military missions is a is fundamental to that effort.
54:34
That cooperation relies on rel re reviving a sense of duty in in an American elite that has been has become disconnected from our nation and its tradition of service.
54:45
Let's check in with our intern and his tradition of service. How is it going, Tyler? Servicing Lego.
54:57
He's 75% of the way there.
54:57
This is much harder than I thought.
55:00
Well, well past 30 minutes. Okay.
55:02
Well, uh, we got to start thinking of the punishment. You don't get a prize.
55:06
You don't get a prize for I actually I have I have a really I have a really good one. What is it?
55:11
I have a really good one.
55:13
I know what you're thinking of.
55:14
And it's actually a bit No, you don't. You actually don't. Okay.
55:17
Because I was going to uh give this to you as as a gag.
55:20
The thing that I'm imagining was going to be a gag gift for you, but now it's going I'm going to sort of convert it into a punishment for Tyler.
55:30
Are you going to drop it right now?
55:31
What is Um, it's on the way here. It's on the way here.
55:33
It's in It's in It was in the car and uh and Ben's going to drop it here in the next few minutes.
55:39
So, we might have to wait till after the next guest, but uh you can look forward to that. Yeah. Yeah.
55:42
We didn't tell you, but uh if you'd been able to get it done in 10 minutes, we would have gotten you a fantastic new watch on bezel.
55:47
We we we had our finger hovering over the Philipp Nautilus, but uh that's kind of out of the window.
55:55
Would you have worked faster, Tyler, if you knew that?
55:56
You knew that there was a a novelist on you should have told me on the board.
56:00
Your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet.
56:05
It'll have to be next time.
56:05
But in the meantime, uh if you're listening, you should go to getbzzle. com.
56:09
We should treat this Lego set as sort of something that he can kind of iterate against, you know, like you don't just do a Rubik's cube once.
56:17
Like you do it once, you try to do it faster, etc.
56:18
And so I think we should give Tyler another crack at the Nautilus. Yes.
56:23
And uh now that he's dialed in, he should be able to do it a lot faster.
56:27
So uh Dylan, why don't you bring bring this up for a second?
56:29
Okay, this is this is the potential punishment.
56:32
What are we doing here, Jordan?
56:36
So, okay, I was going to give this to you, John, cuz you're a horseized human.
56:41
These are the Apple flavored electrolytes for horses. Can we play the horse?
56:47
It's from uh It's from Horse Health Products. horse all product.
56:52
It's a 40-day supply for classes for all classes of horses.
56:57
Show it show it to the single.
56:59
And uh and I'm just going to I'm going to go Tyler.
57:01
Your punishment is you have to finish this before your internship ends this summer.
57:04
It's totally safe for humans. It is.
57:09
40-day supply for a regular horse. Okay.
57:12
So, let's see how long it takes you.
57:16
We got to see how long you get through it.
57:17
Anyway, so you you have this waiting for you after the show.
57:19
Um, and and we could do something if if you finish the next one, the next iteration, if you do it in 30 minutes, maybe maybe you don't have to have it, but you might try it and discover that you actually love it. So, we'll see. Okay.
57:29
Tyler's still working on that. We'll check in with him. He does have two hours.
57:32
We have another hour of guests coming into the studio.
57:37
Uh, we have 1X coming up next um talking about humanoid robots.
57:40
Uh, but uh and I'm excited for this.
57:44
They've had a they've had a massive week.
57:46
And I have a ton of questions about about humanoid robots.
57:50
The biggest question is is is data that sim to real gap.
57:52
There was a there was something percolating in my mind related to the Alex Wang acquisition, the scale AI acquisition um of meta.
58:02
Um because robotics data is so difficult to get, maybe scale AI would play in that market.
58:06
We'll see where that develops.
58:08
But in the meantime, let's bring in the founder of 1X and start talking to him about humanoid robots. How you doing? There he is. What's happening? Welcome to the show. Doing good. Doing good. Thanks for having me. Excited. Fantastic. Um, yeah.
58:21
Give us some context on on your background on 1X and Neo.
58:23
And then we'll just get into a bunch of different questions.
58:29
I was about to tell John uh Neo was actually blessed by Lil B the base god a while ago, much like Timothy Shalomé was before the generational run.
58:39
So, it's very possible that that Neo is is on a similar run itself. I'm very excited.
58:44
So, anyways, uh, great to have you on, Burnt.
58:46
And uh yeah, give us give us some color. Awesome.
58:48
No, and I think like uh let's see. Thank you. Whoa. Hey over here. Wow. Wow. Okay, that's convenient.
59:00
I think um there has to be something through it, right?
59:02
It's it's been going pretty well lately like uh lately.
59:05
So um we have been blessed. Okay.
59:08
Um you've clearly made one.
59:08
How many How many have you made of these things? It's about 100. 100? Wow. Okay.
59:16
different versions though, right?
59:17
They're not still all operational.
59:17
Like we're very quickly cycling through hardware revisions to ensure we actually get to the launch by end of year.
59:23
So um we do quickly deprecate them as new ones come out. Sure.
59:27
What what does launch mean?
59:29
You want to be able to sell these to companies.
59:31
This is business to business, business to consumer.
59:33
I've seen them on streams.
59:34
They seem like kind of just like companions.
59:36
Uh it's less industrial, but what what's your thesis for the early adopter here?
59:41
Yeah, let me just jump in straight into it.
59:44
like who am I, who's the company, what are we doing, why are we doing this? So, I'm well, I'm Burnt. I'm the founder, um CEO.
59:50
Come to this from a robotics background.
59:53
U been on this journey all my life.
59:55
Uh picked apart all of my mom's kitchen appliances since they had motors when I was a kid.
59:59
Always liked building stuff, programming.
1:00:01
Started 1x 10 years ago and like the mission stayed pretty constant.
1:00:05
We want to create an abundance of artificial labor and we're doing this through creating these intelligent machines that can live and learn among us.
1:00:13
And that last part is so important.
1:00:15
I think what's really differentiates 1x from the rest of the pack here is the focus on making robots that are safe among people and that are very affordable. Right?
1:00:23
First principles engineering.
1:00:25
How do you make something that's like super lightweight, doesn't need very special uh raw materials, doesn't need like that tight tolerances in manufacturing.
1:00:34
Make something that's like closer to a refrigerator than a car, but still as capable as a human. Mhm.
1:00:40
Um, and when I say getting this out the door, what I mean is literally like getting it into your homes, right?
1:00:46
So, we're going through in-home testing among employees now.
1:00:50
I have one in my house in Redwood.
1:00:52
It's uh amazing to get to finally live with the product and there's going to be some uh customers having them quite soon, but like under NDA early testing and then if we play our cards right, it should be in the main market by end of year. That's the goal. Wild moving quick.
1:01:08
Um, how has a company evolved since 10 years ago?
1:01:14
Uh, humanoids have always been uh in people's minds to some degree.
1:01:17
They haven't been in the headlines as much as they've been, let's say, in the last couple years, but kind of walk us through maybe those different stages, how your vision evolved and and uh then I have a bunch of other questions.
1:01:29
Yeah, I mean it's the kind of product that we all know will happen, right?
1:01:33
all know will happen, right? and we've known it for like I don't know last 50 years like at some point this will happen and the impact is tremendous right so I think what's really changed uh the last couple years is uh to be very blunt that it works uh for the for
1:01:47
the first eight years it was kind of a grind and it's a kind of a problem that's really worth just like doubling down on like grinding and pushing on until it works uh and I don't think the impact of this type of technology can be exagregated right It's we're we're years not decades now away. It's it's very hard to like
1:02:05
It's it's very hard to like better put a specific date, but we're years not decades away from robots building robots, robots building out our data centers, our energy infrastructure, our chip manufacturing, like our mining in general, like this this kind of hard takeoff moment, right?
1:02:25
Where we can actually get to an ab abundance of artificial labor.
1:02:26
And it doesn't really even matter if it's like physical or digital, right?
1:02:30
Because once you have this engine running, you will just in general like have extremely intelligent agents whether they're in the digital or physical space and kind of will redefine what it means to be human.
1:02:43
Like what do we value in humans?
1:02:46
Like how do we see our own worth?
1:02:46
And I'm just really freaking lucky to be alive, right? To be part of that.
1:02:51
It's been my dream all my life.
1:02:53
And uh yeah, the timing is amazing.
1:02:55
What about what about getting getting into more specifics with Neo?
1:02:59
Do you have any sort of specific early use cases that you're focused on in all of the sort of uh sort of marketing that I've seen so far?
1:03:07
It it hasn't seemed focused on certain use cases like manufacturing or certainly not mining or things like that.
1:03:16
It feels like you're maybe more, you know, focused on the on the home.
1:03:20
Uh is that is that correct? Uh am I off? No, no, no. It's it's correct.
1:03:26
But really important there to point out that like you take a step back, right?
1:03:32
It's like we're years, not decades away from actual abundance of artificial labor.
1:03:36
So as a company, the only thing that makes sense here is to get there as quickly as possible. It's all we care about.
1:03:41
What's the shortest path?
1:03:43
So we're not a consumer company.
1:03:44
We're shortest path to artificial labor.
1:03:46
And it just happens to be that the shortest path is through consumer because you need to live and learn among people.
1:03:52
Like if it's one thing that's incredibly clear in AI, it is that the diversity or like the variance in your data set basically equals your intelligence, right?
1:04:03
That's that that's where intelligence emerges from.
1:04:04
And in a factory there just isn't enough diversity.
1:04:09
Think about like if you're if you're in a factory all your life moving something from A to B and that's all you're doing, then like you could ask like okay, how much do you actually learn, right?
1:04:16
And we actually have the answer.
1:04:17
you learn about you we need like 20 to 30 hours of data from that and then we don't learn anything more. Interesting.
1:04:23
So like that that's just like that's not where to deploy robots.
1:04:26
We want to deploy robots there but we have to deploy them first where we actually get the data that gets you through a true truly intelligent machine that doesn't just repeat a motion.
1:04:34
It understands deeply the task it's doing.
1:04:38
And this brings you into like something interesting that you said in your intro here which is companionship, right?
1:04:44
Because everything we do is social. Like work is social.
1:04:46
Like whenever you do something, usually it's because of someone wants something.
1:04:50
And usually someone's next to you or even like communication, the social context of objects, like hey, is this cup on the table? Someone using it. Is it yours?
1:05:02
Like is it is it half full, half empty? Is it dirty?
1:05:05
Like there's liquid in it?
1:05:07
But if it's coffee and it's cold, it's probably like not in use anymore. It's actually dirty.
1:05:11
like everything has this like social context and this is what creates this incredible variance and diversity in the home.
1:05:18
Not only is every home different, but like everything happening in the home is different every day and everything has a social context.
1:05:26
So I think we're seeing pretty strong proof now that like a lot of model intelligence comes from this diversity and we really want to double down on that.
1:05:36
that. And then the other part is I think it's just going to be incredible to live with these companions in our life that can not only give us back time in our everyday life with like household chores but actually be a trusted friend right
1:05:50
and we're talking to our phones with chat bots and being like these are our new companions but it's not the right interface right the right interface is something that you can really deeply connect with and that gets you away from a screen
1:06:02
bsentennial man a movie I know you haven't seen but is a fantastic story of a humanoid robot that that stays with the family for 200 years and and evolves and changes and uh Robin Williams it's a beautiful movie uh I want to talk to you about kind of the progression of the
1:06:19
software um tea operation super valuable in a bunch of different ways simulation uh we're seeing lots of promising data uh there's the sim toreal gap there's uh deterministic algorithms for walk cycles there's end to end systems. What is your
1:06:35
What is your view on the path that we need to go down to get to something that's truly generalizable so that you can put a humanoid robot in a completely novel situation, just talk to it and say, "Hey, clean up this table."
1:06:50
And it will remove all of these cans one at a time.
1:06:54
It knows exactly how to do it and it's never actually been trained on that specific task.
1:06:57
But it can generalize just like any other human can.
1:07:01
I think I there's two interesting answers.
1:07:04
The first one is no one knows how to solve that yet.
1:07:08
And then the second answer is we actually know really well how to solve that.
1:07:12
Uh which which is it's going to be some big transformer and you just need enough high quality data. Okay.
1:07:16
So we kind of know like it's an engineering problem at this point because even though we don't know the exact solution, we know what we need, right?
1:07:22
We just need an enormous amount of relevant data and this data is very different.
1:07:26
All models that you see today, they're trained on what I call like only observations.
1:07:32
So if you think about the internet where there's video or pictures or text or whatever um it's static, right?
1:07:38
So you're like given that I saw or read this, what's the next thing? Yeah.
1:07:42
But what you're actually missing and where in my opinion like a lot of like our ability to reason comes from is that you have some hypothesis about what's going to happen.
1:07:53
Like you have your own mental model of like this conversation. Yeah.
1:07:57
So when you're saying something, if I'm training just on what you're saying, that's not the same as if I'm training on what you were thinking and planning and then what you said and then what the result of that was with respect to like how I reacted to that. Yeah.
1:08:09
And robots actually allow you to do this, right?
1:08:13
Because you have what the robot is thinking and what it was planning to do, what it actually did, and what it resulted in.
1:08:19
And this data is what is needed to get to this.
1:08:21
And that's what we're gathering at scale. Yeah.
1:08:25
there's no real like massive data set like the web that you can just scrape.
1:08:28
Um folks are using tea operation to generate data. There's simulation data.
1:08:34
Like what are the richest sources of data for you?
1:08:35
Uh what do you see as being like the real trove that you're going to be doubling down on over the next few years?
1:08:44
I think it's all of them, but they're all just like a crutch.
1:08:47
It's like you're bootstrapping your way to where robots are learning in the real world. Yeah.
1:08:52
And this is really the direction we're moving in because teleoper operation does not scale, right?
1:08:56
It's super valuable and we need it, but it doesn't scale.
1:08:59
Um, simulated data very useful for simple things like walking. Yeah.
1:09:05
But for like peeling a shrimp or whatever, right?
1:09:06
It's like it's not nearly detailed enough like it doesn't work.
1:09:09
So um you just what you need is to use the internet data, some teleoperation, simulation, synthetic data, all of these things to get to where your model is able to sometimes succeed.
1:09:21
So when you say get me a Coke in the fridge, maybe there's a 50% chance that a robot comes back with a Coke.
1:09:27
Yeah, maybe it gets stuck somewhere on the way and didn't manage to do so.
1:09:30
But once this happens, then you can basically just tell it, "Hey, good job."
1:09:34
Or like, "Hey, weren't you supposed to get me a Coke?"
1:09:35
If it's just, I don't know, staring out the window instead.
1:09:37
Uh, and that's the data loop that scales, right?
1:09:41
And that's what we're deploying.
1:09:43
So, when we're saying like getting this into your home, what we mean is almost more like adopt a Neo to help us teach it.
1:09:49
It's not going to do everything in your home day one.
1:09:52
We're not there yet, but we're able to deliver a product that is really fun, very engaging, somewhat helpful, and really the ability to be part of this generational journey from the beginning, right? That's the product.
1:10:02
And that's how we gather that data.
1:10:04
And this comes back to how we design robots that are safe.
1:10:08
Because if you want the robots to actually be learning in the real world, they need to be safe not just with respect to you, but with respect to itself and your environment, right?
1:10:16
You don't want your kitchen to look like a robot has been ravaging around there when it's done.
1:10:21
You want your kitchen to look nice just like it did before the robot went there, even though the robot failed a few times opening.
1:10:26
The challenge is you don't have the luxury of of hallucinations long term.
1:10:30
Like if the robot is unloading the dishwasher and puts a bunch of knives in in the wrong cupboard, you know that it's like that's not safe, right?
1:10:40
Like if you have, you know, kids at home and, you know, so it's like the the bar for acceptable is is very high.
1:10:46
I want to ask about the supply chain.
1:10:49
Dylan Patel was on the show saying that no matter what happens with humanoid robotics, all the parts are going to be made in China.
1:10:57
Um I there were some actuator startups in the comments saying like that's not true.
1:11:03
We're going to build it here.
1:11:03
Uh we're going to fix the supply chain.
1:11:07
What's your view on the short, medium, and long term of the robotic supply chain and you know how to ask the hard questions.
1:11:15
questions. Um let's uh let's start by saying um to us this has been all about how do you don't like over constrain the system too early right so juvenid robots don't exist at scale yet so like if we were making a car if my new startup was a car I would
1:11:35
clearly utilize the existing supply chain of course what we've done is we've made everything ourselves and when I say literally here like I mean we're undergoing some patenting process for a new type of diecasting of aluminium at the same time that we're launching AI models. So we're like definition of
1:11:47
So we're like definition of vertical integrator including all the manufacturing technology.
1:11:53
Um that puts us in a position where we can actually kind of manufacture anywhere.
1:11:57
It just depends on access to raw materials, power and general like tariffs and everything else.
1:12:01
Um we are actually building a factory in the US right now.
1:12:05
M um there are challenges because like sourcing simple things in quotes like copper, aluminium, steel, these kind of things in the US for example is a lot more expensive than in China.
1:12:17
Logistically it's also kind of like a nightmare because you don't have kind of like the economic zones with like basically your metal refinery sits next to your forge.
1:12:23
Um and there so there's like pros and cons but I think there's a path.
1:12:30
I think what's the most important here to realize is that when people talk about like things need to be built in China, we're not necessarily talking only about this.
1:12:37
We're talking about actual access to knowledge about how to do manufacturing. Mhm.
1:12:42
And I think that that is the thing that takes the longest to kind of onshore, right?
1:12:49
So, uh sure there are things that needs to happen with rare earths.
1:12:51
There's things that need to happen with all these things.
1:12:53
But I think the main thing to really work on also is just making sure that people understand how incred incredibly exciting manufacturing is and make sure that our new generation actually really wants to work on the hard problems in manufacturing. Yeah.
1:13:07
Yeah, I mean, we talked to the the the author of Apple in China, and he really reframed the conversation about Apple's impact in China, not just as being a buyer, but actually being an educator in China and and and sending over massive teams of manufacturing designers to to create an to create a supply chain that didn't even exist, but was enabled by the scale of the population and the economic zones and everything.
1:13:35
you uh everything you articulated.
1:13:37
So uh yeah, I'm optimistic that in a new boom you could potentially set up trade deals such that you know if your business is scaling you would have the choice to to create a new generation of of manufacturing engineers in America or anywhere else that might be advantageous.
1:13:54
Um but this has been fantastic.
1:13:56
We we I'd love to have you back and go way deeper. Uh last question.
1:13:59
Congrats on all the new launches this week.
1:14:01
Uh excited to follow you and and and the whole team's work.
1:14:04
It's It's been awesome to see.
1:14:07
It was great talking to you guys and stay tuned.
1:14:09
There's actually more coming. Amazing. Wow.
1:14:14
And we'll uh we'll pull up another chair for Neo whenever you're ready.
1:14:16
We'll adopt Happy Happy to Happy to adopt one.
1:14:21
Bring us another energy drink.
1:14:21
Thank you so much for joining. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers, B. Bye.
1:14:24
Have a good Next up, we have John Doyle from Cape coming in the studio talking to us about wireless networking, cellular technology.
1:14:33
very excited to talk to him, especially with the backdrop of what happened in Ukraine two weeks ago.
1:14:37
Uh anyway, welcome to the studio, John. Good to have you here. How are you doing?
1:14:43
Hey guys, happy to be here. I'm doing great.
1:14:45
Thanks so much for joining.
1:14:47
Would you mind kicking us off with a little bit of introduction of yourself and the company maybe to get us started? Yeah, you bet.
1:14:53
I um I'm John Doyle, founder and CEO of Cape, is America's privacy first mobile network. Mhm.
1:14:59
Uh, two sentences on my background because it explains how I came to start this company.
1:15:06
I started my career in the Army Special Forces.
1:15:08
I was a communication sergeant on a fifth special forces group. Um, went to Palunteer.
1:15:11
I was there for nine years and at Palunteer I started in technical roles.
1:15:16
I wound up running the national security business for five years and that's where I learned about this whole, you know, PhD field of study worth of vulnerabilities that exist on the global cellular network. Interesting.
1:15:29
and I'm really passionate about solving them and so I started Cape in 2022 uh to get after that problem.
1:15:35
What is the biggest like uh concrete risk to the cellular network?
1:15:41
Is it is it like Well, I would just start at a at a higher level.
1:15:42
Is it how unsecure is the average cellular network completely?
1:15:48
And you know we saw um if you remember during the the last campaign the story came out about JD Vance's phone calls being listened to. Oh yeah. Right.
1:15:58
And and it um that kind of came and went as as these stories do, but it it snowballed into the story about Salt Typhoon, which the headline of that story is China has just explicitly and completely infiltrated all the major telos in the United States. Wow. Which is pretty bad.
1:16:14
But even before you get there, there all these they're really features that are baked into the protocols that run the network.
1:16:22
uh they're there for good reason, but in the hands of malicious actors, um some really bad effects can be drawn out of them.
1:16:28
And so, you know, we can get deep in the technical weeds if you want to, but basically the whole thing is blown.
1:16:33
And it's problematic because we are entirely reliant and kind of fundamentally reliant on the cellular network. Yeah.
1:16:40
What's a bigger risk right now? Espionage or sabotage?
1:16:47
That's a really good question.
1:16:47
Um I'm going to say espionage.
1:16:50
um because it is being like um it's absolutely happening right now.
1:16:56
The Vance story is a perfect example of that, right? Yeah.
1:16:57
Just listening to the future vice president's phone calls.
1:17:00
Although the sabotage question is interesting um I know you guys want to talk about or have been talking about spiderweb a bunch and and the um the drone attacks.
1:17:07
One of the really interesting features of that story of course from our perspective is the fact that the drones were piloted on um using cellular commercial cellular connection. Totally.
1:17:17
uh which is really interesting to us in a bunch of ways.
1:17:21
But importantly and it came out a bunch in the reporting when people start to think about countermeasures and you know how would we how do we guard against these attacks in the future?
1:17:29
One option that gets taken off the the table almost immediately is turning off the cellular network, right?
1:17:35
That has like disastrous consequences, right?
1:17:37
Because what if someone needs to call 911 and they can't? Something like that.
1:17:40
You're you're going to wind up impacts when there's when there's an AT&T outage. Yeah.
1:17:45
Um yeah, stuff grind, right? Yeah. Yeah.
1:17:49
I mean, we saw it yesterday with just like Cloudflare outage and it was very disruptive.
1:17:52
Um talk to me about uh how you actually go about building a new network.
1:17:58
Are you able to uh solve the problems that you're trying to solve just by pigging back piggybacking on the existing physical hardware or is this a crazy capex problem that you're we're going to see you raising a trillion dollars in debt and stuff?
1:18:11
Uh you could probably do that based on your background.
1:18:15
Uh but I'm always interested to know where you think like the right problem to solve is.
1:18:19
Yeah, it's a great question and we didn't know the answer to it when we started the company.
1:18:23
Uh thankfully it turns out you don't need to build the towers.
1:18:27
You don't need to own the the antennas or the spectrum. Got it.
1:18:30
Our approach is we own all the software that runs the network.
1:18:32
So we control authentication, billing, call routing, messaging, all the important stuff.
1:18:37
And we've done pretty extensive uh red teaming and testing especially with government partners um and proven out that if you own all the software you can actually make a lot of progress against the problem. Very cool.
1:18:47
So uh when I see one of those cell phone towers that might not be a Verizon tower specifically that might be owned by a different company that then is like leasing or running software for Verizon and AT&T within the same kind of like you could think of it almost like a multi-tenant data center.
1:19:04
Is that the right mental model when I see a cell phone tower? Yeah.
1:19:08
And that's a great um it's a really good observation and it turns out to be true. Okay.
1:19:12
The carriers, you know, the carriers, what the carriers own is Spectrum, right?
1:19:16
What Verizon owns is an amazing amount of spectrum that's super expensive and they administer it.
1:19:20
They don't even, you're right, they don't even own the towers most of the time.
1:19:23
like American Tower or some other company builds the tower oftentimes puts the radio on there or um the carriers will sign an agreement with Nokia or Ericson to put the antennas up there and often times the carriers don't actually run the radios.
1:19:35
They outsource that to Nokia and Ericen.
1:19:37
Um and so it has they they have sort of assumed the system integrator role.
1:19:41
Um and I think my personal opinion is that that has serious security implications has led to some of the um the problem that we find ourselves in. Sure.
1:19:50
Can you get me up to speed on 5G?
1:19:54
I remember the drama around Huawei and they had built 5G towers that we were not going to buy.
1:19:58
I also heard someone mention offhand that America doesn't really have 5G.
1:20:04
We have like fake 5G or something. Is there like I Yeah. Is it marketing?
1:20:10
Oh, you're like don't talk about it. Right. Yeah. Okay.
1:20:12
So, there's two things there.
1:20:14
Um, first you're like you're you're teeing up one of my favorite history lessons which is 20 20 years or so ago, 23 years ago, China made the strategic decision to capture as much footprint on the global cellular network as possible.
1:20:27
And the way that they achieved that was by pumping billions of dollars of subsidy into Huawei so that Huawei could run around the world and sell antennas and also core software, the software that runs the network at, you know, half or less of the price of any of their competitors.
1:20:43
And so it became really attractive and everyone went out and bought Huawei gear.
1:20:46
And the result was that um China now owns still not in the US so much anymore but around the world you know a huge percentage of the footprint on the network.
1:20:56
At almost exactly the same time the US and it's not um obviously a different kind of government so it wasn't like a centrallymade decision but US telecom started outsourcing and offshoring all of the technical um aspects of running the business.
1:21:10
So you know the core software now is built by Nokia or Ericson which are in Europe.
1:21:13
Um and very little of that capacity exists within the United States.
1:21:18
So while China's making all these really deep and recurring investments in the infrastructure, the US is really kind of divesting and just becoming these system integrator uh spectrum managers and that's how we find ourselves in this imbalance now.
1:21:30
And that when people talk about the race for 5G and how is the US positioned with respect to China, I think it's a little bit of a misnomer to say it's 5G because they're not talking about um when when 5G first started to to um get buzzy, the use cases were always like a heart surgeon in Boston is going to be doing surgery in Africa, right?
1:21:50
Because of the low low latency protocols and that stuff is cool, but that's not like how we're behind China.
1:21:54
How we're really behind China is just in how much footprint do we own and how much access, how much control do we have over the network?
1:22:00
And that's actually agnostic of which generation um or it's independent of what generation we're on.
1:22:04
The other So, and then are we really on 5G is such a good question.
1:22:08
There's like I think about it mostly from a bandwidth perspective.
1:22:12
Like I I be I became able to stream HD video at like retina resolution and I really don't have a daily use case that's goes beyond that in terms of bandwidth needs, right?
1:22:24
And so as long as but but every once in a while I notice if I'm about to take off on a plane and I know I want to download a movie right before the difference between fast for downloading like a full gig in 2 minutes and and 20 minutes is material.
1:22:38
Uh and so that's where I would think 5G would help.
1:22:40
But I've also heard about like streaming video games obviously 4K stuff.
1:22:44
But I I I I don't feel the pain that much that I'm not you know I'm not a single issue voter on the topic. But I am I am curious.
1:22:51
You're like I mean that observation is a threat to the entire like tele like like 3G to 4G was way better, right? Oh, totally.
1:23:00
It was it was night and day. Yeah.
1:23:02
Better more secure and 4G to 5G was arguably better, although not entirely because like 5G connection drains the battery on your phone a lot faster. Interesting.
1:23:10
There's some trade-offs there where LTE times 4G is actually like a better option in some in some.
1:23:16
But beyond that, like the hurry up and download a movie use case, yeah, there's kind of nothing left.
1:23:20
And so there's a big you know, shrug in the industry.
1:23:24
They're people are kind of waving their hands at AI like, well, we're going to do AI and that'll, you know, that'll change everything, but I don't know that that that um that comes into it. Everything's an S-curve. It's all sigmoid.
1:23:36
We saw band mobile bandwidth growing exponentially.
1:23:39
Everyone was like, you're going to be able to download 10 xabytes in two seconds.
1:23:43
And in fact, it was a sigmoid function like it always is.
1:23:45
I think and like I think you nailed the use case.
1:23:48
It's like as long as I can stream Netflix at maximum resolution, I'm done.
1:23:52
like that's who is the um who is the the core customer that you're going after?
1:23:58
Is it people in important positions?
1:23:58
You know, politicians, CEOs, etc.
1:24:00
Just JD Vance just JD1 billion.
1:24:09
You should be able to get a $1 billion ARR contract.
1:24:10
No, but I think but when I when I think about the broad consumer market, people say they want privacy, but in a lot of people just want $20 instead of $30, right? Yeah. Yeah.
1:24:18
I mean, both of those both those consumers exist in the market.
1:24:22
There are a lot of people.
1:24:24
Mint Mobile perfected the like how cheap can you offer a sale plan, right?
1:24:27
And like and they nailed it.
1:24:27
$20 a month turns out to be the the answer, right?
1:24:31
Ryan Reynolds undefeated. Undefeated. I love the answer. Undefeated.
1:24:36
When you have unlimited free marketing for Reynolds, win any game. Um, so, okay. So, yeah.
1:24:41
So, who like who are we trying to solve problems for?
1:24:43
I mean, I like my background is in special operations.
1:24:47
I am deeply passionate about um the fact that cellular phones have been a part of the battlefield for as long as we've had cellular phones and they are increasingly not decreasingly so over time.
1:24:58
We saw this in Ukraine like everyone the entire Ukrainian war is fought on the mobile network uh at least communications aspects of it.
1:25:05
Um and I'm deeply passionate about building technology that keeps people doing that work safe, right?
1:25:11
I think that's like a really important mission and I love it.
1:25:15
Um, and that is where we started when we were thinking about the product and starting to like build early versions and build early features. That was the market.
1:25:21
But we always had in mind and I in in my early life I was a special operations soldier.
1:25:25
In my later life I'm a parent and like and I even in my sort of relatively mundane parental, you know, mid-40s existence.
1:25:35
I I have worries about how reliant I am on my cell phone and the trade-offs I'm making and things like SIM swaps.
1:25:39
If you know what SIM swaps are, that's a huge problem, right?
1:25:43
And um you need you have to build technical solutions to problems like that.
1:25:47
Um and I have also like a general sense of indignation that um if I want to be a a subscriber to any traditional telco, I give away all of my personal information and then they lose it like clockwork four to five times a year. They really do.
1:25:59
They're giving it away internet.
1:26:01
Like it it doesn't have to be that way and it shouldn't be that way.
1:26:04
Well, thank you for your service both in the military and as a father. It's very important.
1:26:08
Um we got to get you Ryan Gosling.
1:26:11
I think I think you know Ryan Reynolds with Min Mobile. We get you Ryan Gosling. There's something there. There's something there. This is fantastic.
1:26:19
Well, now you're you're our chief mobile correspondent now. Yeah. Um Uh yeah.
1:26:25
I mean, do you have anything else or should we let him go? No, this was great.
1:26:28
I mean, seriously, we I think I think there's going to be I'm sure there'll be more stories this year.
1:26:35
Give some some deeper insight, but we'll let you get back to it. Important work.
1:26:38
Have a great rest of your day. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon.
1:26:40
Uh, let's quickly tell you about wander. Find your happy place. Find your happy place.
1:26:44
Book a wander within that when I point hotel amenities. Dreamy beds. Top tier cleaning 24/7. Yeah. So good. There we go. Top tier cleaning. 24/7 concier service.
1:26:58
It's a vacation home but better.
1:26:59
Yesterday I got a little spicy on the timeline. Said vacation.
1:27:00
I said traveling is overrated.
1:27:02
I wasn't talking about vacation. I love stations.
1:27:05
I love getting a wander in my hometown in something I can drive to.
1:27:11
Load up the entire family, load up the dogs, drive out to a wander, hit Malibu, marijuana and travel.
1:27:18
You need to go outside the country to enjoy a beautiful wander.
1:27:22
Although if travel is your ticket, go and go wander. It is all over the US.
1:27:28
Let's check in with our intern Tyler Cosgrove. Let's see. Tyler, how we doing?
1:27:32
Well, I I'm I'm very close, but this has been kind of a disappointment.
1:27:36
I'm extremely slow right now.
1:27:38
I mean, I thought I would been done 30 minutes. Are your hands aching?
1:27:39
Are your fingers breaking? I'm sweating. Oh, sweating. Okay.
1:27:43
Well, you're an hour and a half time.
1:27:44
But if you're sweating a lot, you should try these Apple decks.
1:27:48
Apple flavored course for electrolytes.
1:27:50
Let's get him Let's get him a Let's get him a cup. Let's get him a cup.
1:27:52
Uh, get him some electrolytes. Make sure he's hydrated.
1:27:55
I didn't tell Tyler this, but I took a picture of the Lego kit and I asked Chad GPT, "How long will this take?"
1:28:01
It said between two and four hours.
1:28:03
And then he was like, "I can do it in 30."
1:28:05
And I was like, "Okay, good luck."
1:28:07
Anyway, we have our next guest in the studio, Emily Sunberg, the writer of the fantastic Feed Me, the daily newsletter about the spirit of enterprise. Really?
1:28:14
Isn't that an incredible line?
1:28:16
That feels like a line we would use. How you doing? Welcome to the show. What's up, everyone? I'm happy to be here.
1:28:21
Everyone, all two of you. Yes, all of us. We have our intern here.
1:28:26
We're going to You know, uh Emily being a guest, I've gotten more random texts about it.
1:28:31
People being like, "Oh, you should ask her this. Oh, you should ask that.
1:28:34
people have uh paying attention. Is that a Google shirt? Exciting. That's scary. That's amazing.
1:28:41
Well, what what is your shirt? Let me see. Did you stand up?
1:28:45
I was at I was at WWDC on um on Monday and Yeah, you were you were reporting on what the really old folks are thinking about Apple, right?
1:28:53
Is that is that what they said? Yeah, I saw backlash.
1:28:57
They uh the people over at Puck said that um that Apple should have invited younger people to cover it. Wow.
1:29:04
Well, I'm a little little too old. Yeah.
1:29:07
Before we go to Is it true that Tim Cook begged for a selfie? Oh, yeah. Yeah, totally.
1:29:12
No, that was that was really fun. That was cool.
1:29:14
I didn't expect that to happen. Yeah. What was your reaction?
1:29:17
It feels like a lot of the liquid ga glass hate has blown over by now. People like most. Yeah.
1:29:23
I think like sitting there in real time reading Twitter and seeing people's reactions uh it seemed like people weren't excited and wanted more Apple intelligence updates.
1:29:35
But that night I went to Have you guys ever been to WWC? No, never.
1:29:37
I went to one of those like ancillary um engineer and developer barbecues like an hour away in an Airbnb with like 30 guys who who build apps and they were all really excited.
1:29:51
So I think they're the people who it's for and they're the people who are going to ultimately be using these updates and they seemed thrilled about it.
1:29:57
So yeah, it was a developer conference and they actually announced a lot of exciting things around developers and it also seemed like they seated some territory in the AI world that could potentially enable more AI apps to be owned by independent developers which is a huge huge boon for the ecosystem.
1:30:14
Did you get to press Tim Cook on the photos app at all?
1:30:16
Are you a photos app enjoyer?
1:30:18
I had about 14 seconds with him and Will before me.
1:30:21
So, it was like it not a lot of time. Next year. Next year. Next year. Um, awesome.
1:30:31
I I have a bunch of other random random questions to go through.
1:30:35
What be I want to ask about the state of Substack, but before we get into that, what is the state of the New York City uh election this mayor?
1:30:45
We've been kind of covering it.
1:30:47
our corner of the internet is not super excited about the potential of a of a socialist mayor.
1:30:53
What's actually happening on the ground?
1:30:55
Yeah, our friends that Photoshop beard job that felt more just like like a printing error.
1:31:03
Honestly, to me, it didn't seem like they did a ton of pre-processing.
1:31:07
Ink dripping down longer.
1:31:07
I didn't see it as longer.
1:31:10
I saw it more as just like when you reduce the resolution so much like like the the the the gaps between the hairs kind of blur altogether and it makes the beard look thicker.
1:31:19
I wasn't I wasn't fully like someone went in there superstitious with the mare stuff. Okay. Well, explain that.
1:31:26
Oh, I don't I don't want to talk about scared. Okay. Okay.
1:31:32
You don't want to jinx it. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
1:31:33
Your your single endorsement could actually shift the election.
1:31:36
interviewed um I interviewed four of them. I interviewed Quuomo.
1:31:43
I interviewed Zoran, Lander, and Stringer. Mhm.
1:31:46
Um for the newsletter last week. It was really fun. Oh, cool. Cool.
1:31:50
What's the next question?
1:31:50
I want to talk about Substack, how you're seeing it evolve.
1:31:54
It feels like it just continues to have a moment.
1:31:56
Uh you're dominating the platform.
1:32:00
At least that's what it looks like.
1:32:02
We're not super active there, but what what is the state of things?
1:32:07
Yeah, I've been on I've been writing on Substack for for five years now.
1:32:08
So, um I definitely had a I think I had a little bit of first mover advantage there.
1:32:16
Like I I know the platform so well.
1:32:18
And I think even just understanding the tools and like what works well on the heat map of my own audience has been super helpful for me.
1:32:26
Um, and for anybody listening to this who doesn't know, like I write a newsletter every single day.
1:32:29
So the opportunities for people to discover me are are a lot higher.
1:32:34
Um, but I think that's something that's interesting about Substack is that just because you have a large following somewhere else doesn't mean it's necessarily going to carry over to a newsletter.
1:32:44
Like yeah, the inbox seems like such precious real estate to people and who they who subscribers allow into that feels a little bit more intentional.
1:32:54
So, it's not like you're going to just follow a thousand people like you do on Instagram.
1:32:59
So, you have to be really good to make it.
1:33:01
And then you have to Sorry, can I curse on this?
1:33:02
We don't curse, but but you're welcome if you if you have to be really excellent at at content and something that I do.
1:33:14
Um, I have one of the more active chats on Substack like across the whole platform.
1:33:20
Um, and I'm in conversation with my readers constantly daily, and that's a lot of work as well.
1:33:25
Um, so the state of things on Substack, I'd say it's getting pretty competitive.
1:33:32
You're seeing a lot of people jump over there and maybe try to make it, but aren't necessarily making money yet.
1:33:35
Um, they also don't have an advertising integration like Beehive or even Twitter or YouTube do.
1:33:43
So, if you're going to sell ads, you're you're on your own for that or you have to get an agency. Um, yeah.
1:33:53
What specifically do you want to know? Yeah.
1:33:54
No, I'm cur I'm curious like specifically specifically like how much some of the new social features are driving growth.
1:34:00
Is that like a primary driver at this point or or would you do you still think audio and video?
1:34:05
Well, like all of the new social features, you know, I I just see like a lot of people are growing based on like recommendations in like like basically like cross promotions or collabs. So, yeah.
1:34:17
So, so for me like So, yeah. Yeah.
1:34:19
I was um I was in DC a few months ago and I met with somebody who who's invests in this space and he was asking me like why don't you consider like doing your own thing off platform and and building away from them and there's a few I used to think about that a lot more and I used to do that math a lot more.
1:34:37
And I showed him my analytics on my dashboard because you can see how many people are discovering you from um within the app and within their ecosystem.
1:34:45
And he was like, "They have you like you can't leave.
1:34:48
You're you're stuck there." And it's not a bad gig.
1:34:50
Like they take 10% of what I make, which I think is totally fair considering how they probably drive more than 10% of growth, right? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
1:35:00
They're probably driving consistently 10% growth and so that's totally that the maths out just fine. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
1:35:04
When I when I when I think about Substack, I think of peak Substack for me was like pre20 like that that era.
1:35:15
When I think about when I was like reading multiple substacks a day. Yep.
1:35:19
And now Feed Me is the actually only newsletter that breaks into the important tab of my Gmail.
1:35:24
And then, you know, there's a bunch of other substacks that are just kind of lost in the mix.
1:35:29
I've just been trying to get a a read on it.
1:35:32
But if you are going to be dependent on a social platform or any type of media platform, Substack is a great the friendliest one.
1:35:38
Take your newsletter, take your take your Stripe account if you ever need to.
1:35:42
Like you're so my subscriber list.
1:35:44
I get to sell my own ads, which is going very well.
1:35:47
And when things break, they fix them. So that's great. Great.
1:35:52
Um, talk about uh you had a fairly viral post, the tech guy in a hoodie stereotype is dead. Oh yeah.
1:36:00
you were at WWDC and seeing a bunch of different uh different uh labels and brands being worn. Does that surprise you?
1:36:09
Does it not surprise you?
1:36:11
What was your reaction broadly?
1:36:14
There's this morning where as a whole Well, Will Welch was there, so clearly there's something Will Welch is the editor of GQ.
1:36:20
or something happening, you know, just with his spirit in the in the air at the people always think of iOS developers as being, you know, at the foremost of fashion.
1:36:32
So, you should always be there if you're running Yeah.
1:36:33
I think I assumed more of them to look like the guys who work at the Apple store at my mall on Long Island or something.
1:36:39
Um, and it was impressive.
1:36:42
I mean, like guys looked good.
1:36:46
I wouldn't say capital S suiting, but like fits.
1:36:48
Um, there were a lot of cool sneakers.
1:36:52
I think that a few years ago it would have been more New Balance.
1:36:55
I think that like the Steve worshippers are sort of aging out a little bit.
1:37:00
Now there's these younger guys who probably are seeing that moment as like one of their big trips of the year and probably wanted to break out some fun outfits.
1:37:08
Saw a lot of good sneakers.
1:37:10
Saw a lot of big watches.
1:37:10
Saw like a Nautilus on a guy. There we go. There we go.
1:37:15
Was he did he have an Apple Watch on the other wrist or was that just fully committed?
1:37:19
A lot of Apple watches also, but a lot of nice watches.
1:37:23
Um, which like I don't know a lot of people don't wear nice watches in their cities anymore.
1:37:28
So, well, you can't in New York because it will be taken from you very quickly, right? Exactly. But it's safe. Yeah. At the at the donut.
1:37:37
Um, do you ever get tempted to angel invest?
1:37:39
I'm sure you get asked constantly.
1:37:44
Do I get tempted to angel invest?
1:37:44
I get asked, but that's not something that tempts me. No, why not?
1:37:51
My business is kind of my main focus right now. Yeah, that's good. That's good. That's good.
1:37:55
Are we Are we post peak celeb brand?
1:38:01
Are we post peak celeb brand? Yeah.
1:38:01
Are we on the down slope?
1:38:05
I think I think I think so. Yeah, I think so. Yeah.
1:38:08
So brands like what do you think the interaction between celebrities and consumer?
1:38:15
I think everybody knows the formula too well now which is that the celebrity isn't actually going into the office every day and like that illusion has broken, right?
1:38:23
So you can wear the suit on the stage at the conference and do the Forbes thing, but people are sort of understanding that they're not the operators and they're just sort of like a paid person to have their name on a brand, right? Yeah.
1:38:37
Um, and I think the other thing happens all the time where like the founder becomes a celebrity after they start the company. Yep.
1:38:44
Um, which is more interesting to me than like a famous person hiring a bunch of people to do their work for them and and getting paid for it. Yeah.
1:38:53
Do you think we move back to So I I I I think of the celeb corporation collaboration eras like you used to just pay a celebrity to appear in your Super Bowl ad and it would be like a million dollars in cash.
1:39:06
Then we got to the point all the way on the other side of the spectrum where celebrities were commanding 30 40 50% equity grants in businesses that were built entirely around their brands.
1:39:20
to your point, people are catching on that that means that yeah, they have a huge economic stake.
1:39:25
They're going to be talking about all the time, but they're not really driving the product forward in any meaningful way.
1:39:30
We could go back to just pay for a celebrity appearance in an ad, or we could move forward into something like what I've seen Saquon Barkley doing where he is essentially just angel investing in these companies.
1:39:46
And yes, he'll appear in the ads, but he's not saying he's building the company.
1:39:51
He's very transparent about that.
1:39:53
He will partner with them, but he's equity aligned, but just like any other investor.
1:39:57
And so I'm wondering if there will be a boom in that in that kind of paradigm or that model, or if we'll just go back to um you know, companies and startups just being more comfortable writing a $400,000 check for a celebrity to appear in an ad.
1:40:12
It's cash and you know what it is. Yeah.
1:40:14
I don't I don't see the ladder like being becoming a big thing.
1:40:19
I I just feel like it's such a specific kind of company that has that kind of marketing budget and it's also really risky to invest in celebrities and influencers now because people are so volatile.
1:40:28
Um I've definitely seen more of the angel investor in in like hot girl Instagram bios like Oh, sure. Angel investor. Interesting.
1:40:39
And I think it's like a flex, you know?
1:40:41
It's like I'm I'm I'm also a businesswoman.
1:40:43
Um so I think that's already happening.
1:40:47
Like there's like a soft boom of that of of people getting the opportunity to do that and basically only having one canned cocktail in their in their house and not because they're necessarily getting paid but because they quietly invested or not so quietly invested and they're able to sort of flex a portfolio of investing and that's like something they do besides whatever other things they do.
1:41:10
Um, but there was that um, Alex Earl Poppy deal last year where she was she was drinking it a lot and I guess her dad who sounds like a pretty savvy business guy uh, negotiated for her to get equity in the brand.
1:41:25
So that's sort of like a prime example of that where she wasn't talking around talking going around saying that she was an angel investor but I guess she was. Yeah. Well, yeah.
1:41:35
Poppy had had a stacked cap table of various personalities, celebrities, athletes, etc.
1:41:39
Most private equity founders, growth equity firms, too.
1:41:43
But yes, um where uh give us a temp check on wellness right now?
1:41:46
Are we are we past peak wellness in in many ways?
1:41:52
People are doing more wellnessy things, but at the same time, being unwell feels popular.
1:41:57
I did um I did like a a chat with my readers the other day about alcohol consumption.
1:42:05
And people are all over the map with that.
1:42:07
There are people who are like, "I'm 35.
1:42:09
I haven't had a drink in 10 years. I'm perfectly happy. Life is great."
1:42:13
Um, and then there's definitely a decent cohort of Oh, somebody said um that people are who have been sober for years are kind of like strategically or strategically drinking now, which was interesting to me. We strategically drink. We drink.
1:42:29
The king of wellness right now is GLP1s.
1:42:31
Like that's sort of the most exciting thing happening.
1:42:34
Is that getting wrapped in different brands right now to appeal to different uh cohorts or I just think it's changing people's chemical composition and changing the way that they think and work out and eat and socialize and that's very interesting to me what that what do you think that brands Yeah.
1:42:51
Do you think that brands are already being, you know, the the initial concern was that, you know, fast food brands were cooked because people just were going to eat less.
1:43:00
But then there's a downstream effect if if New York guries are micro doing GLP1s and then maybe they're like, I'm not going to go to Pilates today because, you know, I'm already, you know, happy with what I look, you know, whatever.
1:43:14
Uh, are you hearing any about any kind of like downstream business post GLP1?
1:43:19
Um, I don't think the Pilates industrial complex is affected.
1:43:23
They're sort of the new weed store to me. They're everywhere.
1:43:28
The Pilates studios, it's like people are buying these cheap made in China reformer machines, setting them up, and just like running crazy Pilates businesses.
1:43:35
So, I don't think that's going to be affected anytime soon.
1:43:39
Um, because even if you get really thin, you still want to be shredded. Shredded. Got to be shredded.
1:43:46
But also with like fast food, I'm pretty sure people on GLP ones are still eating it.
1:43:51
They're just not eating a lot of it. Like throwing it away.
1:43:55
It was a celebrity that said the other day that he was just eating eating through it.
1:43:59
He was just basically powering through it. He was powering through.
1:44:02
It was like I'm like convinced that my hunger would overpower it. But that's amazing.
1:44:08
Um what what about other downstream effects from GLP1s?
1:44:11
I was talking to somebody who was like they wanted to start a protein water company because they felt like with the GLP-1 boom people would be eating less.
1:44:20
They needed to supplement you.
1:44:21
Uh aside from the brands that have just wrapped GLP1 in different landing pages, are there other kind of winners from the GLP-1 boom that you've seen adjacent?
1:44:31
Somebody told me the other day that um like uh all these protein foods are not healing foods and it it changed the way that I think about people eating all this protein.
1:44:43
Um any other trickle down things? Yeah.
1:44:46
I'm sure there will be some sort of like therapy blowback like people needing more therapy, people women being anxious.
1:44:54
What's the state of Maja right now?
1:44:57
Are people building new businesses around that or they're mostly just old line businesses that are beneficiaries of Maha?
1:45:02
You guys follow Ballerina Farm?
1:45:04
Oh yeah, I have just opened a little store wherever she lives in the Midwest.
1:45:12
Um, she feels very Maja aligned.
1:45:12
Yeah, they like raw milk. They like farm stuff.
1:45:17
Uh, she's an interesting business person though.
1:45:20
I love Is any of that breaking through in New York?
1:45:21
It feels like a lot of the a lot of the actual products that are majal aligned feel very New York aligned and yet the politics of the products are could not be more disperate. You're right. It's so political.
1:45:35
It's like there was a store in New York that was selling raw milk out of one fridge.
1:45:40
It was like one of these and it probably wasn't a right-wing store, right?
1:45:43
I mean I I how I don't know but Yeah.
1:45:46
But like but they didn't present as like oh yes mega milk.
1:45:51
They presented as like rich women who are $20 smoothies.
1:45:52
So like fall all over the place on the spectrum honestly.
1:45:57
Um maybe but I don't think they sell it anymore because that's like bad for business if enough people call you out on it. Um wow.
1:46:05
Even like there's this guy at the farmers market, this Amish guy who used to sell raw milk and he's not there anymore and I don't where he went.
1:46:15
Big big milk took him out. Yeah, someone did. Brutal.
1:46:18
Uh where where do you get uh what's the the the most significant part of your scoop machine?
1:46:25
Is it is it readers giving you tips?
1:46:25
Is it walking around New York?
1:46:28
Is it a is it a combination?
1:46:30
One of your readers uh uh a asked me to ask you that.
1:46:36
I'm sure people of course they want to know where that is.
1:46:38
I have some really good readers. That's the IP. That's the IP. Yeah.
1:46:41
I I have some really good readers who are super loyal with sending me scoops and they could send them to New York Magazine or the New York Times or or Puck or Semaphore or whatever and they send them to me and I'm super grateful for that and um we have a good thing going.
1:46:57
I also have an anonymous tip line which is always I think people get a little confused about what falls qualifies pitches PR pitches insane gossip PR pitches aren't the bad the bad stuff is like um a politician walking out of a 3M screening of baby girl alone like I don't that's like let them run news yeah that's pretty funny though and then I go out a lot like I I go out four or five times times a week.
1:47:27
I go to parties, I go to dinners, I meet people, I meet readers. Um, yeah.
1:47:31
So, I it's like my life I feel sort of like a machine right now, but it's working really well, so I can't um get keep oiling the machine then.
1:47:41
Well, congratulations on building. Last question.
1:47:45
Do uh do copycats bother you?
1:47:47
I'm sure you've had hundreds of people by now be like, I'm going to make feed me for XYZ or Feed Me for that or just like blatant do they do they get under your skin?
1:47:58
Uh they used to, but data is a very calming force in my life right now and especially in my business.
1:48:03
And the numbers calm calm me down. Numbers don't lie. Yeah, it's fantastic. There we go.
1:48:10
We're hitting the size gone.
1:48:10
Well, congratulations on everything and thanks for stopping. Thanks for coming on. You're always welcome.
1:48:14
Yeah, we'd love to have you back and talk more. Cheers. Talk to you soon.
1:48:16
Uh up next, we have Leonard Heim uh calling in from the RAN Corporation.
1:48:21
We're going to talk about uh AI models.
1:48:23
We're talking about we got crazy crazy range today. Crazy range today.
1:48:28
It's a it's a whirlwind tour.
1:48:28
Uh wait, let's check on Tyler. How's it How you doing? I'm done. He's done.
1:48:32
The Fury has been assembled.
1:48:35
I think my final time was somewhere around hour 15. So double hour. Hour 19.
1:48:39
So yeah, I mean pretty shameful for uh I think it looks good.
1:48:46
I mean yeah, send send the electrolytes my way.
1:48:48
Okay, I'll start chilling.
1:48:50
I think Dylan grabbed the cup and some water if uh if you guys want to grab it.
1:48:54
Let's get some electrolytes going up in here. Very beautiful model. It looks great. Yeah, it's really cool. Very cool.
1:48:59
I'm glad we have that in the studio now.
1:49:00
Uh well, enjoy your horse electrolytes.
1:49:03
Uh hope you have a rest a good rest of the stream.
1:49:04
Uh we will hop on with our next We'll check back in with for a for a taste uh taste review. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
1:49:10
But when we finish this next interview.
1:49:13
Uh anyway, welcome to the studio, Leonard. How are you doing today?
1:49:17
Let's bring in Leonard and chat about artificial intelligence and geopolitics. How are you doing? Hey, good to see you. I'm doing great. How are you guys? Uh we're great.
1:49:25
Uh would you mind uh kicking us off with a little introduction on yourself and what you do day-to-day? Sure. Yeah.
1:49:31
Leonard Time calling in from Washington DC.
1:49:33
Um I'm a what do I call myself?
1:49:36
Researcher working on AI policy governance background electric engineering.
1:49:39
I think part of my mission is to to bridge the technical world and the policy world and that's what I've been doing before before AI was cool the last four or five years actually. Yeah.
1:49:48
And now AI is cool and since then I've been ever busy. It is extremely cool.
1:49:51
It's driving the news cycle every single day. Yeah.
1:49:53
Pretty much the coolest technology.
1:49:56
Uh uh do a little uh level setting for us.
1:49:59
What is uh the dominant story?
1:50:01
How is the race between the US and China shaping up uh on the AI front?
1:50:07
Um, what are the interesting threads to pull on?
1:50:09
What are the most important companies to be tracking right now?
1:50:14
Yeah, well that's a tough question where to start.
1:50:16
I think it's like still the deep sea trauma is like still still there, still dominant, right?
1:50:19
I think that was like this initial story.
1:50:21
The US is like so far ahead.
1:50:23
is like so far ahead. there is no Chinese model being closed and then deep sea came out and definitely had a big impact in DC but I guess also in the broader world as we saw in the stock market and I think it's pretty dominant here still in DC you know like in DC always talk about things which Silicon
1:50:37
Valley did half a year ago even a year ago so that's still part of the dominant discussion and then export controls I guess is also a big topic right now right you got the US China trade talks going on right now where they're negotiating beyond export controls which impact AI but export controls famously had an impact big impact on AI in China. Yeah. Yeah.
1:50:56
So, let's talk about deepseek.
1:50:56
Uh, one of the narratives that came out of the Deep Seek story was, uh, all the American labs are completely cooked.
1:51:02
Uh, and then we got Jevans Paradox and Nvidia popped back up and and and all the labs seem to be making tons of money.
1:51:11
OpenAI crossed$10 billion in revenue run rate.
1:51:14
Uh, and things seem to be going well.
1:51:17
But what what are the wrong lessons from Deepseek?
1:51:19
What are people getting wrong about the Deep Seek story?
1:51:22
How relevant is Deep Seek?
1:51:22
We're still hearing about it as being important geopolitically in some of these jump ball nations that aren't quite allies, aren't quite uh rivals.
1:51:34
Um, and they might be interested in building a an open source stack on top of Huawei Ascend, uh, DeepSeek, Manis, that type of uh stack.
1:51:42
Uh, what what are the the wrong lessons that people are learning from the Deepseek story?
1:51:47
being deepseek made such a big noise because we're just lacking a good reference class.
1:51:52
They just came out pretty impressive model.
1:51:54
It was openly available and we had a paper attached to it, right?
1:51:57
Then it came out also saying it cost us 6 million.
1:51:59
Does anyone of us know how much it cost OpenAI or like Enthropic or any of these other companies what to do? We don't, right?
1:52:07
And I think this just really made headline news.
1:52:08
We like sometimes get like Sam Oldman going on stage saying I think at some point he said it costed him 100 million to do GB4. Y but 100 million what? Just a training compute?
1:52:18
Is it is it just like buying the the hardware? Probably not.
1:52:20
Is it paying the staff engineers?
1:52:21
So like the reference class is like pretty important here.
1:52:23
But then it costed them 100 million what like this not two years ago even more and now deep6 million.
1:52:29
So I think people just like we're lacking.
1:52:31
It's like wow this sounds impressive but like they had just no reference class what's actually going on within the companies.
1:52:36
And I think a couple of weeks later Andropic CEO Dario put out a blog post saying like actually we can train to the same efficiency.
1:52:43
And I think this was like for people monitoring the market. Not surprising.
1:52:47
We just like know the trend lines and we know it gets like vastly cheaper every single goddamn day to train such a system.
1:52:53
So to that somewhat surprising, but like you look at this, you don't have a reference class and then it just looks really impressing, right? Yeah.
1:53:00
I I I think a lot of the a lot of the more technical analysts in the AI world uh were excited to see the open source results, excited to hear about FP8 training.
1:53:10
For example, we talked to Dylan Patel.
1:53:12
He was telling us, "Oh, well, OpenAI was doing FBA training years ago.
1:53:16
They just didn't tell anyone because it was kind of like their edge, I guess."
1:53:19
But all the labs had kind of figured that stuff out.
1:53:22
They just hadn't told everyone uh exactly how they did.
1:53:26
Deep Sea came out there and told everyone and sounded like they really had jumped ahead.
1:53:29
Instead, it seemed like they just jumped to the frontier, had not fully advanced beyond the frontier necessarily, um, but then done it in an open source way.
1:53:38
What was the read on the strategy to open source?
1:53:41
It felt like there was a very deliberate uh like that launch if it had been closed source, $20 a month, you know, very difficult to access, rate limited, lots of safety harness around it.
1:53:53
Um that we would have been telling a very different story about DeepSync if they had said, "Oh, this is this cost a trillion dollars. It took us forever."
1:54:01
Instead, it seemed like there were like a number of superlative and viral hooks that really captured the American news media and drove a big uh cycle.
1:54:09
How much of that was intentional versus how much of that was just uh like a like a random byproduct?
1:54:18
Yeah, I think as you're saying there were just like so many check boxes that ticked.
1:54:22
It was didn't during the first week of Trump.
1:54:24
It was an open release model weight, right?
1:54:26
It was surprisingly so cheap.
1:54:28
It's coming out of China. Y.
1:54:30
Oh, and it was like the first public reasoning model. Yeah. Right.
1:54:32
So like all of the things happening at the same time.
1:54:36
So like wherever you're coming from, DC excited because it's out of China, but we thought we fixed it. We did export controls. Right.
1:54:41
So they can barely oh it's an open source model, right?
1:54:45
And everybody looking at like actually how does this reason work because OpenI did it before but they didn't tell us, right?
1:54:49
So again just ticking all of these boxes.
1:54:51
How much of this was deliberate?
1:54:53
Um I don't think this is like a state coordinated effort that they said like this is how we're going to do I think DeepSync had like a pretty open commitment to like releasing models publicly before, right?
1:55:03
Um, so they were just been following that.
1:55:06
Um, it just it was just like to some degree if there's a marketing strategy behind it, they did it right.
1:55:12
I just expect most of the things are just like how the tech works, right?
1:55:15
And they were early on reasoning.
1:55:16
They were like one of the first companies doing it publicly and then it just made a ton of noise.
1:55:20
And again, and even though chatbt had a reasoning model available, it was only available at a premium tier.
1:55:26
And so for a lot of AI consumers, I think their first interaction with a reasoning model was Deepseek or the Deepseek app uh which was just a very interesting kind of uh like go to market strategy essentially.
1:55:41
Um and also seeing the chain of thought, right? Yeah.
1:55:43
Like the reasoning which we didn't see before, right? Like this changed a ton. Yeah.
1:55:49
Even a cost thing a lot of a lot of financial uh folks you I mean you mentioned that Silicon Valley was excited about open source.
1:55:54
excited about open source. uh Washington was you know interested in the story because of the China angle but also the financeers the Nvidia investors were interested in the financial impact of this uh so yeah it was fascinating I got it wrong right yeah yeah yeah for sure
1:56:07
my take uh how much of the existence of deepseek do you ascribe to China's positioning around high frequency trading oh that's an interesting one I mean like deepseek sits in the the hedge fund right yes and they were initially buying 10,000 A100s or 5,000 A100s in 2022 I think before the export controls. Yes. Yes.
1:56:30
And tons of GPUs always still go to hedge funds because they well we don't exactly know what they're doing but they definitely like accelerated computing and partially machine yeah machine learning bunch of other stuff.
1:56:38
Are they all training large language models? Probably not.
1:56:41
And I think then one theory I've heard I'm not sure how true it is that was like the like the crackdown in China on the tech sector right including high frequency trading hedge funds and more.
1:56:50
hedge funds and more. this made them then pivot to AI is like well if we can't trade on the market anymore what should we do with all of these GPUs or it turns out AI is this new hot cool thing um and then I think the other thing which is important here when you have these hedge funds they do like really lowlevel optimizations like writing their own kernels they just they
1:57:07
don't do like just high level pietorrch they go down there and try to get like every single point of utilization out of the models uh out of the hardware and this helped them right we know like deep has pretty crack engineers I think this was like pretty obvious once we saw like the code Um, and this then helped them to then train a pretty pretty decent good model. Let's talk about Llama. The Let's talk about Llama.
1:57:24
The Llama 4 launch was a little rocky.
1:57:30
Obviously, there was allegations of some benchmark o just overoptimization.
1:57:32
It seems like a lot of the the the big frontier labs or the independent labs kind of just don't even care about benchmarks anymore.
1:57:39
It's all about big model smell and and just uh the actual performance of the products.
1:57:43
Um, at the same time, I've been really interested in this narrative of llama as a very important American export, as a counter to the Huawei SN, DeepSeek, Manis stack that other uh other countries might be comping because yes, they might be interested in doing a deal with Stargate and building some and buying a whole bunch of Nvidia chips, but what are they going to put on top of it?
1:58:08
Are they going to maybe they don't want to go all the way with OpenAI or Anthropic?
1:58:11
llama seems like an interesting uh wedge there. How important is that?
1:58:16
What what is your reaction to the the metal llama strategy and how they're being perceived in Washington right now?
1:58:24
I would be curious on your guys takes on this.
1:58:25
I'm like still unsure how how I feel about this.
1:58:27
I mean, let's just start with Deep Seek.
1:58:28
I think it's an interesting moment in time when all of the leading US models are just behind closed doors and the best open model is coming out of China.
1:58:36
I'm worried about it because this model is partially biased and it lies about the CCP.
1:58:40
It has some Chinese propaganda in it, right? Why is this bad?
1:58:44
Imagine you're like some developer in another country.
1:58:46
You want to build a new education app.
1:58:50
You're using this model and then you know you teach your kids Chinese propaganda.
1:58:53
I think that's great, right?
1:58:55
I think it's even worse if you think about sleep agents.
1:58:56
People know about this paper from a propic, right?
1:58:58
You can basically have like sleep agents sitting in this model.
1:59:03
When you talk about a certain topic, it starts giving you code with vulnerabilities.
1:59:06
but this can apply to anything else and it's like really hard to look for it because you don't know what to look for, right? Um so that's worrying.
1:59:13
I don't think that's the case with Deep Seek right now.
1:59:14
But going forward in the future, the case just like if you use an open model, you don't really know what's in there, what's hiding in there, right?
1:59:20
This goes for all companies, but I think we got more reason to mistrust um certain other companies than for example Meta.
1:59:26
Yeah, it kind of makes me think that uh it kind of makes me think that Anthropic might have a real business on their hands with uh AI safety.
1:59:34
hands with uh AI safety. Obviously, they they branded it all around, you know, oh, like, you know, we want to prevent AGI doom and fast takeoffs, but if you just think about like, hey, we're going to launch this model in our organization
1:59:47
and we want to make sure that the code that it writes doesn't have random vulnerabilities, that feels like a a very important like AI safety product almost to to to evaluate these models, test them, and essentially root out sleeper agents. And so I I've all of a
2:00:00
And so I I've all of a sudden flipped to like very excited about the work that Anthropic is doing on that front.
2:00:06
Uh Jordan, do you have any questions?
2:00:07
I think this could be like a real benefit to them, right?
2:00:08
And and that's like that's kind of how it started.
2:00:11
Reinforcement learning from human feedback gave chise was like some people trying to make the models more useful but also less harmful.
2:00:17
And turns out they turn out to be a bunch more useful and I guess like we will see more about this going forward and particularly for code or even if government wants to adopt these models. Yep. Right.
2:00:26
You just better be goddamn sure.
2:00:29
Um my question was around uh news from the last 24 hours basically.
2:00:32
Um, and specifically people talk about the application of of AI in warfare, but it's always at this sort of like very generalized high level of like, oh, we're using AI and and and I and I can easily imagine, you know, um, simulation scenarios, data collection, processing, all that stuff like kind of going up to the point of a conflict and then autonomous, you know, drones and things like that.
2:00:59
But what what are the ways in which um you've understood AI to be used in in an actual like conflict scenario? Sure.
2:01:06
I mean I mean look I don't do narrow AI or drones to some extent.
2:01:11
I expect there's like a bunch of just like computer vision applications and more.
2:01:14
But if you look at like frontier like if you look at large language models I think one big application just intelligence. Mhm. Right.
2:01:20
Literally my job on a day-to-day basis is like open source intelligence.
2:01:24
I want to know what's going on around the world.
2:01:25
the world. Nobody's telling me well except Deepseek they sometimes publish a paper but like I don't know what the US companies are doing I don't know what's going on in China and the semiconductor industry so just a bunch of data I feed into my LLMs and ask them what's going on right and for intelligence operations it's the same we saw in the last 24
2:01:40
hours pretty targeted attacks Israel is famously known for pretty good intelligence operations and I think they exactly knew who they were hitting um based on these types of operations right and if you just have like a nice backdo smartphone and you just like feed all of the chat transcript in an LLM can make sense out of this, right? You can do it at a
2:01:58
You can do it at a larger way bigger scale to identify the targets and also identify patterns which again might be harder for humans to do.
2:02:06
At least you can like auto like well no like augment humans.
2:02:08
Yeah, I mean they used to do that with like keyword search.
2:02:11
Okay, like let's we have a ton of data.
2:02:13
Who's talking about bombs?
2:02:15
Who's talking about attacks?
2:02:15
And uh people would use code words and LLMs are really good at deciphering that type of stuff. Uh fascinating.
2:02:21
give us a state of the union on export controls for AI chips.
2:02:26
Um what is uh what's expected on the horizon?
2:02:30
How has the landscape changed over the last you know couple months at least?
2:02:36
Ray um I mean when Biden left the office there was like two two big rules coming out.
2:02:41
The one rule was I think many people are tracking the foundry due to diligence rule.
2:02:44
It was a big hiccup where Huawei produced a bunch of chips over TSMC in Taiwan which they were not supposed to.
2:02:51
supposed to. Y they did it via shell company 3 million chips that's quite a lot that's way more than they produce that's what they got their hands on and government reacted with a new rule basically telling TSMC like godamn you got to be do better due to diligence and like check who your customer is and make
2:03:06
sure they don't end up with Huawei because they broke two rules no chips for Huawei at all and please no big AI chips for any entity in China right so this was big move that's still the case I applaud that I think this was a pretty sensible move um to just make sure they can't again get their access to that many chips. And the other one was the
2:03:23
And the other one was the diffusion framework which I guess you probably discussed at some point before right like broader controls to some all of the world deciding to some degree dealing with the Gulf States dealing dealing with a bunch of in between countries um where people were worried about chip smuggling but also data centers being built there.
2:03:40
Malaysia is being such a country where a bunch of data centers being built there.
2:03:44
really interesting reporting today where I think the Wall Street Journal reported people were like going back and forth on an airplane with hard drives to train models over Malaysia. I saw that. We were gonna read that.
2:03:54
Wild which again speaks to the efforts they're going to to get access to AI chips and how creative they get.
2:04:01
And also from my point of view, I'm just getting surprised every single time of um how creative they get to get access to AI chips.
2:04:08
Anyway, that's what they did, but this one is not being enforced right now.
2:04:11
It's not officially revoked yet.
2:04:13
We're still waiting for it to officially be gone, but at least commerce Latnik and Kesler put out a statement saying they're not enforcing it.
2:04:18
They will come up with a replacement rule.
2:04:20
And this replacement rule then needs to deal with well, yeah, basically all the countries except the clearly competitors, China, Russia, North Korea, they're all controlled.
2:04:30
They will continue being controlled.
2:04:31
But what about all the other countries like the Gulf States, like countries with a bunch of smuggling going on?
2:04:37
And yeah, me as somebody from outside the government is waiting to see more moves there. Yep.
2:04:41
Uh I have one last question. Good Jordy.
2:04:44
Um uh today a bunch of technologists join the Army Reserve in the newly formed Attachment 2011, Executive Innovation Corps.
2:04:51
Can you tell me a little bit about how you're seeing technologists and the tech community plug in in DC? Um what is needed there?
2:05:02
What do you want to see on the horizon?
2:05:04
This seems like a step in the right direction, but it feels like a job's not finished moment.
2:05:08
Yeah, I think that's the right audience.
2:05:10
Like a call to all the techies to come to DC.
2:05:12
Y um the pay is not better here.
2:05:15
It's also pretty damn hard.
2:05:17
We're living on a swamp here.
2:05:18
But I think there's a strong case for impact.
2:05:20
So as a techie, I think like when I talk to like young undergrads like oh in DC like I just did like a bachelor's in machine learning. What do I know?
2:05:28
What do I know? was like it's plausible you're the smartest person in the room in many times in DC which is way harder than in San Francisco people don't know a policy but sometimes can be a benefit to be like bit like a bit ignorant about like how the game is being played just
2:05:42
like look here just here's just the math works out right yeah so like I love techies coming to government just like crunching numbers I think there should sometimes be less opinionated just like look here are the numbers we crunch them could suggest this could suggest that but just like grounding it like an
2:05:58
analysis like an objective things when I think about China and AI chips I can crunch the numbers on how fast the chips are how many they're producing and in contrast how fast American chips are and how many we're producing right and this is just a good analysis to be run how this then impacts the broader scheme of
2:06:14
the AI ecosystem and who's winning the AI race and what it's a different question but we can then take it from there right so if I see stuff like this be it in again in the military but also just generally in government particularly anything around export controls anything around just understanding of what the hell is going on. Just like
2:06:30
Just like having somebody explain like hey deep sea ging model what is everybody talked about distillation like really just explaining the basics is like yeah things people should do and I think people with a CS like an undergrad degree in computer science they can do it and I would love to have them there.
2:06:47
I'm hiring by the way so if anybody's listening please join me apply. Amazing.
2:06:52
Yeah, in general, I think it's good that we don't just have, you know, these sort of high-profile technologists only joining Doge.
2:06:58
Like, there's other things that are important in the government besides just, you know, taking a sledgehammer or scalpel to different different parts of the government.
2:07:06
So, this government getting stuff wrong.
2:07:07
I think the most famous example is the initial Xbox controls 2022 were trying to control AI chips. Yeah.
2:07:13
And they use two parameters, technical parameters, which probably 99% of TC won't understand.
2:07:18
total processing performance, how many flops it got, and then also the interconnect bandwidth, how fast it can talk to other chips, and they messed something up there, then Nvidia could basically design a new chip sitting right at the threshold, but still having high flops, which is basically as good as the other chips.
2:07:32
And that's what Deep Seek used.
2:07:32
And then it took them a damn year to fix it.
2:07:34
And I can confidently say they knew a month later they should do better there.
2:07:38
And that's just the thing where like techies, and you didn't need to be the smartest person.
2:07:42
I've never trained a really big model.
2:07:44
You can just tell by the specs like, "Guys, something something is off here."
2:07:46
something is off here." and or even just ask difference even just asking like you know one of the foundation model labs like open AI I'm sure they could tell you like hey like do not restrict these three parameters um and and it just seems like there was not enough uh back to answer Nvidia doesn't answer these questions but I think yeah Nvidia
2:08:04
wouldn't but I mean you could imagine that plenty of the labs that will compete with Chinese labs would love to answer that question right because they have a huge incentive not to be out competed by deepseek right y um and so you got to but maybe they talk their own book too much you know there's always dynamic ICS, but at least having a technologist in the room would be beneficial. Anyway, this was fantastic.
2:08:20
Anyway, this was fantastic.
2:08:22
Thank you so much for hopping on.
2:08:22
We'd love to have you back. More news.
2:08:23
We will talk to you soon. Have a great weekend. Kiss you, too. Talk to you soon.
2:08:29
Um, closing out the news for the week.
2:08:32
We have Let's take it over to Tyler.
2:08:34
How are the horse electrolytes?
2:08:37
Okay, so I haven't tried it yet. Scoop, I think. Uh, so it says a scoop.
2:08:39
One scoop is for light exercise. Okay.
2:08:42
Uh, so for I think probably a mediumsized horse, I assume. Okay.
2:08:46
So, uh, it's I'm looking at the ingredients.
2:08:49
It's there's an incredible amount. It's like all salt. It's all of course. Of course.
2:08:56
You have to at least chat GPT that you're not like taking a deadly dose of salt right now.
2:09:00
I think it's probably fine. Probably fine.
2:09:04
We'll go with probably fine.
2:09:05
That's the horse mentality. Smells smells good.
2:09:07
Does it have like a lemon lime taste to it? Is it apple? Oh. strong.
2:09:13
It's like I'm drinking salt water. Yeah. Amazing.
2:09:14
I think you might have to water. The lemon. There's lemon in there.
2:09:18
There's some There's definitely some flavor.
2:09:20
I mean, it says apple flavor.
2:09:21
I'm not really getting any apple notes. Yes. Okay. Well, congratulations.
2:09:26
You did it in under an hour and a half. You did it well.
2:09:30
You have a whole summer to finish the whole bucket. Yeah.
2:09:31
Wait, what was the final time? An hour and 15 minutes. I think hour 19. Hour 19.
2:09:34
That's still way faster than Chad GBT clocked it.
2:09:36
I I took a picture of that of that Anderal Lego set build time.
2:09:43
I said, "How long do you think it will take to put together this pretty simple 619 piece Lego set a beginner would take three to four hours.
2:09:50
An intermediate builder 2 to three hours and an experienced LEGO fan 1. 5 to two hours.
2:09:56
You did it better than they did."
2:09:58
So, I think you were only wrong in your own you overestimated yourself, but you should always the average Lego builder. So, congrats for that. Enjoy the horse. I'm sweating a lot.
2:10:09
I think this will help me, you know, bring me back to Yeah. Yeah.
2:10:11
You you're you're sweating out the electrolytes. You need to refresh.
2:10:13
This makes a lot of sense. This is great.
2:10:17
Everybody in tech is always talking about going to the horse doctor, but never talking about uh getting horse electrolytes over the counter. Yes. Yes. The horse electrolytes.
2:10:27
That's where that's where you want to be taking.
2:10:28
Uh well, the scale the scale deal has officially closed. Met is paying 14.
2:10:32
3 billion to buy 49% of scale, the industry's leading data dealer.
2:10:37
Alex Wang wrote us wrote a note to scale employees.
2:10:41
He said, "When I founded scale in 2016, it was amidst some of the early AI breakthroughs.
2:10:45
Deepmind had just released.
2:10:46
Alph Go and Google had just released TensorFlow. It was incredibly early.
2:10:50
It was clear even then that data was the lifeblood of AI systems and that was the inspiration behind starting scale.
2:10:57
Since then, the journey has been extra extraordinary.
2:11:00
We've grown to over 1500 people, become a trusted partner for model builders, enterprises, and governments building and deploying the smartest AI tools and applications.
2:11:08
Scale is now one of the most impactful companies in the world.
2:11:13
He he closes by saying, "Today's investment also allows us to give back in recognition of your hard work and dedication to scale over the past several years.
2:11:19
The proceeds from Meta's investment will be distributed to those of you who are shareholders, invested equity holders while maintaining the opportunity to continue participating in our future growth as ongoing equity holders.
2:11:31
The exceptional team here has been key to our success.
2:11:33
So, I'm thrilled to be able to return the favor with this meaningful liquidity distribution.
2:11:39
So, congratulations to everyone. Let's give it up.
2:11:41
Hit the gong for liquidity events.
2:11:43
John Lee Marie, Eric Torrenberg, lots of winners.
2:11:50
Lots of winners, lots of lots of friends of the show.
2:11:52
Um, uh, Ben Thompson broke it down in a piece uh, talking about Meta and Scale AI.
2:11:59
The most obvious explanation for the structure is that Meta wants to avoid the sort of antitrust scrutiny that would attend to an acquisition.
2:12:04
This explanation applies broadly.
2:12:07
Big tech generally and Meta specifically are under massive scrutiny in terms of acquisitions including Meta going to trial for acquisitions made over a decade ago and narrowly scale AAI is a supplier for not just Meta but also Meta's competitors.
2:12:18
The problem is that it's is is that just Meta isn't acquiring Scale AAI doesn't mean the deal can't be scrutinized.
2:12:26
Indeed, section seven of the Clayton Act is explicit about covering only partial acquisitions.
2:12:32
So the FTC can still review this, but it'll probably be a little bit easier.
2:12:36
And so that's what they're gunning for.
2:12:37
Uh these guidelines were reaffirmed by the Trump administration earlier this year.
2:12:41
So a lot of people were expecting it to be complete game on anyone can acquire anything.
2:12:47
That hasn't been the case.
2:12:47
Uh we heard about this on the campaign trail.
2:12:50
A lot of folks in the Trump administration were signaling that Lena Khan made some good points and they were not going to completely reverse course even if they were going to replace her.
2:13:00
Uh even beyond that says Ben Thompson.
2:13:02
However, and and perhaps this makes the regulators point.
2:13:05
It seems likely that this will kill scale scale AI's business with the big labs in particular who would be concerned about their data ending up in the hands of Meta, which is to say that this is a deal that would destroy the enterprise value of that Meta is theoretically investing in.
2:13:17
And so that will be something that will be debated in these merger guidelines when the FTC ultimately reviews it.
2:13:23
But it's looking pretty good because they close pretty quickly.
2:13:27
pretty quickly. uh as it is many of the labs particularly open AAI have been bringing in more of their data work inhouse which helped contribute to scale AI missing revenue targets last year from the information they reported this uh I mean they still put up amazing numbers and so obviously a lot of stuff
2:13:44
was working but you could imagine that some of the labs were starting to bring these if they if they really are believers and hey we got to own our data collection and data processing forever let's build that function inhouse and I think they started to do that or at least partner with other competitors in the space. And so Ben Thompson continues
2:13:59
And so Ben Thompson continues to write about Meta's reset.
2:14:01
Uh in fact, the more pertinent angle to discuss this deal is probably Llama.
2:14:06
Llama 4 was widely viewed as a disappointing model, and a big portion of the original Llama team has since left Meta.
2:14:11
Um and uh and Ben Thompson thought that Mark Zuckerberg's media tour about AI seemed a bit forced and unfocused and had heard through the grapevine that Zuckerberg was considering a wholesale reset of the company's AI efforts.
2:14:23
uh with the biggest priority being the search for a new AI chief to take firmer control over the company effort.
2:14:28
In that uh that in the end may be the AAM's razor explanation for the deal.
2:14:32
This is a very expensive aqua hire Alexander Wang, Scale AI's co-founder and CEO with the price softened a bit by virtue of paying Scale AI for work that Meta was going to have the company do anyway.
2:14:42
Wang isn't a researcher, but he's an executive and leader who is familiar with the space.
2:14:47
And Meta needs leadership in addition to talent. He's a deals guy. He's a deals guy.
2:14:52
go to Meta and continue to be dealm and so uh Ben Thompson closes with a little bit on sustaining versus disruptive innovation.
2:15:03
The other reason to believe meta versus Google comes down to the difference between disruptive and sustaining innovations.
2:15:09
The late professor Clayton Christensen described the difference uh and we're familiar with that.
2:15:14
So the question of whether generative AI is sustaining or disruptive innovation for Google remains uncertain.
2:15:19
uncertain. two years after uh Ben Thompson raised the question obviously Google has tremendous AI capabilities both in terms of infrastructure and research and generative AI is a sustaining innovation for its display advertising business and its cloud business at the same time the long-term questions around search monetization
2:15:35
remain as pertinent as ever and this is a question I want to debate with Ben when he comes on the show um there is this there there's this idea so it came out earlier that Cinder Pai had not read the innovator's dilemma and people were saying oh like he should have because this is the this is the classic example of Google being disrupted by a new technology, generative AI. Uh Ben
2:15:52
Uh Ben Thompson said it doesn't matter.
2:15:54
The whole point of disruptive innovation is that is structural and therefore uh it doesn't matter if you've read the book, there's nothing you can do about it.
2:16:02
That's kind of the point of disruptive innovation. You're being disrupted.
2:16:03
But my question is, what if Google had chat bots before Chat GBT?
2:16:09
What if they had launched the Gemini app first and been the first to market and gained all of that like mimetic attention? Yeah.
2:16:15
Well, the disruptive innovation framework would say that Google would be in a tough spot because they wouldn't be able to monetize Gemini as quickly as they were losing volume in search.
2:16:28
And so, search revenues would decline faster than they could make it back up on the new model.
2:16:34
And so, what we're seeing right now is JT GPT is growing.
2:16:36
They're 10 billion in revenue.
2:16:38
But I don't think we're seeing a fall-off in search. It seems additive.
2:16:42
And so the weirdest thing is that is that if you ran back the simulation and you did put Google in a position like let's just say Google owned 100% of chatbt like the the combined enterprise value would not be the stock would not be in the trash as they disrupted themselves.
2:16:58
And so there's this interesting question of like there's this fear that your earnings will drop as you pivot away from searchbased display advertising search advertising to a subscription chatbot model.
2:17:10
But I don't know if that's actually playing out because the overall market the combined revenues of Google and open AI seem to be not declining like we're not in this nadier.
2:17:22
We're not in this in in this trough of like disruption necessarily.
2:17:24
Meta Meta and Facebook had the luxury of you know acquiring Instagram starting to monetize Instagram still being able to grow Facebook at that time.
2:17:33
I mean maybe there's a little bit in deceleration.
2:17:37
And I remember when when when Meta was was like in the process of somewhat being disrupted by Tik Tok, they launched reels and there was questions about reels monetization because if people spend more time on reels than than the normal Instagram feed and there aren't as many ads in reels as there are in the feed, well then even though the user time might be going up, your revenue might be going down.
2:17:57
And so that was a fear that was something that was weighing on the stock.
2:18:00
Ultimately, it was not borne out.
2:18:02
But uh I don't I I'm just not seeing the data, but I want to dig into it more.
2:18:06
I want to talk to Ben about it because uh there's clearly I I I I I think I'm wrong but for diff for reasons I'm unaware of and so I'm I've I've been digging into that.
2:18:14
So um uh Ben goes on to write meta however does not have a search business to potentially disrupt and a whole host of ways to leverage generative AI across his business.
2:18:23
This is what I was talking about with Joe Weisenthal talking about even if Meta doesn't get like a banger AI first consumer product out into the market, they just have so many AI generative AI workloads, whether that's uh sorting ads, generating ads, internal profanity filtering, you know, all all their different content moderation.
2:18:45
Also, I think it's easy to see how meta will benefit from more in in 10 years from now, more content will be produced, which means better the more good content will be produced even if it looks like AI slop right now.
2:18:59
And when you think about the business holistically and meta as effectively, you know, an entertainment company, will people can want more and more entertainment?
2:19:09
You know, this is what Ben Thompson was writing about.
2:19:12
He said uh meta strategy is to commoditize your compliments.
2:19:14
You you you you a generative AI is a complement to meta's platforms.
2:19:19
And so yes, if people are using generative AI to generate slob, that's still fine as long as people are enjoying it.
2:19:27
But uh ultimately people will use it as a different tool for video editing and sound generation and drop out the background noise and replace my background with a with a cinematic, you know, vista or something like that.
2:19:37
So um uh so for Zuckerberg and company Ben Thompson thinks AI is absolutely a sustaining technology which is why it ultimately makes sense to spend whatever is necessary to get the company moving in the right direction.
2:19:50
It's also worth noting that Meta doesn't really have any alternatives other than continuing to invest.
2:19:55
Google is a competitor for advertising the most financially compelling use case today.
2:19:58
OpenAI is a competitor for consumer attention.
2:20:02
Meta's most important scarce resource.
2:20:04
Uh, I suppose Anthropic would be a potential partner, but per the point above, that seems like the ultimate culture culture clash.
2:20:09
If anything, the most compatible partners for Meta would be Microsoft and Apple, but the former is obviously tied up with OpenAI, and the latter, well, never say never forever, but definitely never for now.
2:20:23
Great ending to Ben Thompson's update. That's right.
2:20:25
Well, we have a video that we can pull up uh that was that hit the timeline earlier this morning. Let's review it.
2:20:32
Um, I was able to confront uh PT. Oh, yeah.
2:20:36
And I think we should play. Saw him on the street. Let's play it. Saw him on the street.
2:20:40
Is it true that competition is for losers, sir?
2:20:46
Is it true that you encourage young people to drop out of university? The background. Mr.
2:20:51
Is it true that your funds have doubledigit GP commits?
2:20:58
Sir, how can you say you're contrarian when everyone is contrarian? Mr.
2:21:03
Teal, is it possible for there to be too much venture capital? Never. Mr.
2:21:09
Teal, have you been a victim of other VCs gaming the Midas list? Absolutely.
2:21:16
Sir, why do you refuse to pick a favorite Rene Gerard book? Mr.
2:21:21
Teal, what do you have to say to people that think they're a lottery ticket? Mr.
2:21:26
Teal, must all venture returns be power law distributed?
2:21:32
Sir, why do you think why questions are overdetermined? Oh man.
2:21:37
Well, really asking the pressing important questions, the questions that, you know, he clearly doesn't want to answer.
2:21:44
Um, but uh I'm sure over time, you know, we'll we'll uh we'll have him on the show and we'll try to we'll try to pull some of those those answers out. Lots of fun.
2:21:51
Uh, I mean the last story we should cover before we drop off, uh, Chinese AI companies dodge US chip curbs by flying suitcases of hard drives abroad.
2:22:00
Leonard on the show mentioned this.
2:22:02
Engineers are carrying data to countries where Nvidia chips are available.
2:22:06
Frustrating Washington's aims.
2:22:08
No one really anticipated this, but uh, apparently Chinese engineers are transporting hard drives with AI training data to Malaysia.
2:22:14
So they they they they take all their training data, they load it onto a bunch of hard drives, throw those in suitcases, fly to Malaysia, and then do the training run there, and then take the weights back.
2:22:26
And so that's like the chips aren't even moving.
2:22:27
Like the whole idea of of exporting chips is is now irrelevant if you can do the run locally in a different country.
2:22:33
So this this AI diffusion story is going to become so much more complex.
2:22:38
It's like it's just going to be so complicated forever because there's going to be shell companies and if people are willing to do this, anything's on the table.
2:22:43
The next Deep Seek Run is going to be uh it's going to be a movie.
2:22:47
It's going to be a movie.
2:22:49
Anyway, we will be following it here.
2:22:51
Uh we hope you have a fantastic weekend and we will see you on Monday. I cannot wait, John. Cannot wait for Monday. Be back at this table. Two more sleeps. Two more sleeps.
2:23:01
Two more sleeps or three.
2:23:06
We're not going live on on Sunday.
2:23:06
We might we might we might if there's if there's emergency we might go live. You never know.
2:23:12
Uh but until then thank you for tuning in folks.