most things the anticipation is greater than the actual thing not the case you're watching tvpn we're live from the Temple of Technology The Fortress of Finance the capital of capital the dojo of the dollar the shrine of shareholder value and today is March 5th it's
Wednesday it's 2025 and we got a great show for you the show starts now we got a bunch of Callins we got Jeremy jefon jefon Jeremy we got Nick Carter in talking about cor weave talking about crypto I'm sure I'm sure we'll ask him a bunch of stuff and we got Shan Maguire
talking about the Elon Empire the Empire that Elon Musk has built across every SE has his tentacles all over right yes uh and that should be call The Puppet Master the Puppet Master the man pulling the man behind the curtain yeah The Wizard of Oz exactly yeah we we we we've
given our studio nicknames we need to give our guests nicknames we've done this pretty well with David senra The Godfather pod podcasting the most powerful man in Miami yes anyway uh speaking of very powerful men we are breaking down of course uh politics uh
Trump gave a speech uh I didn't watch it but I did control F and see did he mention Tech did he mention chips and yes he mentioned Tech twice uh and he said uh Ronald Reagan wanted to do it long ago but the technology just wasn't there he was referring to too
he's asking Congress to fund a state-of-the-art golden dome missile defense shield to protect our homeland I mean golden dome let's go I mean obviously referencing the Iron Dome but has to do it one greater hilarious hilarious coinage uh I think I'm on
board for golden dome this does seem big for you know obviously politics we try and stay away from it but the like the president is saying we're going to spend money on something that technologists build like Tech golden dome bus this is a huge opportunity exactly exactly
that's why we wanted to call it out yeah I really also I mean just generally you have to be Pro doome you recommend everyone had a golden dome already yeah uh so so whenever Star Wars do you remember Star Wars uh I I've I've not the not the show not the movie oh
right this is the Reagan uh so Ronald Reagan what what he's referencing here he says Ronald Reagan wanted to do it a long time ago referring to a golden dome but the technology just wasn't there the idea was Ronald Reagan had this uh Star
Wars program it got called Star Wars after the fact I think is a pejorative they were like oh he's going to put satellites in space and they're going to shoot down missiles like this guy's stupid and then like they it was like a hit piece and they're like oh he just
watched Star Wars and he wants to do it in real life and now it's like no actually we do need that that's that that's a good thing uh the same thing happened with Trump in the first Administration where uh the uh what was it the star what's the space force space
force yeah so he comes out with space force and it's like mocked and there's actually a show called space force that's like the office it's like a sitcom and it would originally was making fun of space force be like oh it's so ridiculous to have a space force
and but then the people who were writing the show were like wait like this is actually kind of cool and it kind of turned into like a my team has a space force exactly exactly uh and so uh yeah who knows but golden dome very silly name but probably some technology that
we want and will probably affect a lot of Defense tech companies uh that we know and love and have men on the show we should do a deeper segment on what is the difference between a generalized uh ICBM sort of missile defense system and whatever the golden dome is going to be
other than branding because it's fantastic branding branding matters naming matters uh I'm sure that Trump would like for his legacy yep to uh have at least a footnote about the golden dome yep but uh you know again going back to this idea of uh we we've had
sort of missile defense systems for decades and uh yeah so there are generally levels to this stuff like icbms we talked about this the Hypersonic thing like icbms they go in a parabolic Arc it's pretty easy to intercept them and shoot them down with
just another missile uh the Patriot missile and the and the Road Runner that anderol is building uh you know the whole idea is a cruise missile comes in you need to hit it with a with a drone or another like a patriot missile very expensive very you know not a
particularly a tradable system um and with with the with the dawn of hypersonics like you know you need to upgrade your Dome so I I think the question is like new dome alert yeah Dome is a binary term that sounds very good but realistically it's like this
massive gradient of like our capabilities versus uh things that want to penetrate a dome um but uh you know and Trump goes on to say uh uh and and other place they have it Israel has it other places have it and the United States should have it too right Kim
right they should yeah now that we are waging trade Wars with our neighbors we should uh you know be ready for anything this transcript is so funny I saw a bunch of transcripts like the top search result is like is like Trump's transcript and fact checked and like you
can barely read what he's saying because like every single line is fact check and I mean I mean reason and we do the same thing for the New York Times as well right it's one sentence trome trome uh but but I mean just listen to this
transcript uh they should have it too so I want to thank you but it's a very very important this is a very dangerous world we should have it we want to be protected and we're going to protect our citizens like never before it's like it really comes across in the actual uh
voice yeah yeah yeah the voice comes across even in the transcript just a couple sentences so the other Tech thing that was mentioned of course was uh SoftBank Oracle open AI uh uh Trump is tying this to his America First policies he claims uh that we have had 1.7
trillion of new investment in America in just the past few weeks that money hasn't been spent yet but it's been The Vibes of 1.7 trillion have happened that's actually an area where I would want to fact check not because I don't fully believe it but I would just like
to see it listed out so he goes on and he actually lists this down a little bit he says the combination of the election and the economic policies that people love soft bank one of the most brilliant anywhere in the world announced a $200
billion investment open Ai and Oracle I love how everybody's collectively just agreed that they're sizing down the 500 no no no no no no no there's thing so he says SoftBank is putting in 200 billion and then he says open Ai and Oracle Larry Ellison announced a $500 billion
investment which they wouldn't have done if K had won and it's like well I'm pretty sure that open AI Oracle 500 billion includes the 200 billion for SoftBank so you're kind of double counting that and then he says Apple announced 500 billion investment Tim
Cook called me and said I can't spend it fast enough I got it's got to be much higher than that and of course that contradict and of course that was like you know money that that Apple was like already spending to some degree uh but generally like this is good like
we want we want companies to invest in America like this is great um and and so it's it's funny because it's hyperbolic but it's also like directionally correct so like I'm I'm kind of down uh I believe they're building the best uh their plants here instead of China and
just yesterday Taiwan semiconductor the biggest in the world's most powerful in the world has a tremendous amount 97% of the market announced 165 billion investment to build the most powerful chips on earth right here in the US and we're not giving them any money trp
loves a deal deal and then he goes into the chips act he says your chips Act is a horrible horrible thing we give hundreds of billions of dollars and it doesn't mean a thing they take our money and they don't spend it all that all that meant to them we're giving them no
money all that was important to them was that they didn't want to pay the Tariff so they came and they're building building and many other companies are coming we don't have to give them money we just want to protect our businesses and our people and they will come
because they won't have to pay tariffs if they build it in America so it's very amazing you should get rid of the chips sack and whatever's left over Mr Speaker you should use it to reduce debt or any other reason you want to just iconic iconic paragraph yeah um
and so that's pretty much that that's pretty much the the the the entire coverage of tech and chips uh chips act you know uh obviously passed during the Biden Administration but was saber rattled for years and and you know the people always make the argument that
like americ is more divided than ever but with regard to China uh Trump and Biden had a lot of similar policies yeah and you see uh 100-year Marathon Michael Pillsbury that book really lays down hey China wants to be number one they're not going to stop
it's not that they're going to necessarily just go go to war but they are putting a plan in place very slowly to build and build and build and become you know the number one everyone wants to be number one why not uh and and so Michael Pillsbury kind of lays this down
then there's also this other book we have over here America against America um that was written by uh a Chinese researcher in the government came over here and was like I think America's going to destroy itself basically culturally and like we can kind of just
like sit back and let it happen uh very very weird like kind of blackpilling book it's very odd uh but at the same time there's a bunch of interesting things in it um but but every time we're about to destroy ourselves we find a trillion dollars in in minerals it's
true yeah and so uh uh and uh and so you know Trump comes in starts talking trade war starts talking you know competition that actually carries forward into the Biden admin and Biden says like yeah like I hated I'm very opposite of trump aesthetically and I'm opposite Trump on
many things like IM immigration uh but but on China and on Tac and on a lot of these things they the the two administrations were pretty similar and so uh the chips act goes out and now Trump is thinking about renegotiating which which is supported by Ben Thompson
at cery because right now the chips Act is structured as uh incentives to build plants not it's supply side not demand side basically uh Ben should give free subscriptions to anybody in the White House yes seriously if you want it you
can have it yeah because his his analysis is going to be yeah hopefully hopefully uh uh informing folks but uh you know I don't really when I tune on when I turn on C-Span I'm not really watching for the politics I'm not really watching I'm watching for the watches
that's right and so that's why we want to talk to you about bezel you can shop over 22,000 luxury watches fully authenticated in-house by bezel team of experts if you love Trump if you hate Trump uh his watch available on bezel he has a Vashon constanton or's uh Square
uh dress watch it's gold it's uh fantastic it's it's a fantastic piece but you know uh Obama known to wear a Rolex pick one up on bezel if you're if you're a Obama guy big rolly guy yeah so whatever your political persuasion there is a watch for you that will signal who
you who you stand with on bezel and this is what you want there 83 separate auctions live right now so if you're in the uh uh you know it's almost it's fun I do think one of the one of the most fun things about like watch hunting is finding these ones that have stories
like I'm pretty sure Obama has a Rolex that was given to him by a Navy SEAL who was on his security detail and saw him wearing one watch and was like like a Casio or something yeah like you gotta you gotta you got to take this Mr President like you got to step it up
something like that and I was just like boys like these guys giving a watch you love to somebody is the highest and then and then of course you can track it can see like oh yeah and then Obama wore it for like the next 25 years or something
or like 10 years and you're like that's awesome uh and so and so I think when there's a when there's a rich history about a watch like that like some story like the Rolex Presidential Day date like the the gold the gold Rolex worn by several presidents sure you're not
getting one that's worn by a president unless you're going and finding one for like a million dollars uh but even just having a story that you can tell around to watch is oh yeah this is the same model that was worn by Reagan to be honest I wouldn't be surprised if Trump
had some type of uh little scheme at some point where he would just take your day date wear it for like 30 seconds take it off you know and do like a 100 and he'd be creating you know it could be the Trump edition Rolex day so he just puts it on it's warn by Trump you
know they stamp it on the back on they go it's ridiculous anyway let's move on to some uh Tech news uh let's go to open AI Sam Alman told investors that he might launch agents costing between 2,000 to 20,000 a month to do tasks like coding and PhD level research uh Nick
here says LOL laau even uh this was something didn't we predict this yeah I think it said I wanted a 20K agent yeah we we had talked about this you know months ago yeah one of the things that I think we were more fixated on was if you
just gave me the best model and and let me have unlimited usage of it that would be worth around $2,000 a month sure in my opinion sure uh what they're saying and the push back here has been uh for $220,000 a month you could probably get four separate PhD level research
assistants and get them all the uh 01 Pro subscription yep for the cost of you know so so this agent can't just be a PhD level researcher it has to be vastly more effective yeah uh otherwise uh because 20K you know it says 2 to 20K right so we don't know
exactly what's fascinating is like there are now PhD level researchers that are in the training Loop in the rlf because at a certain point like like you can't just hire me and you to Y get generate training data for advanced mathematics on the humor side on the humor side yeah
when call us Sam when you need a humor eval and you need us to generate thousands of jokes uh yeah well we can do it but it's G to cost you a thousand times more per per uh per token um but uh but it is interesting to wonder you know like do you wind up putting those
folks in the loop at some point and do you just say hey yeah at 20K a month like 20K a month for a software product you usually get like an SDR you get like some like some sort of implementation person and so it wouldn't it would be
funny if like you're at 20K a month and like you also get like a human who you can just like act like a human you can text and call and be like hey yeah like I need the I need the AI agent to do this and then and then they're using the AI but actually you're you know
interacting with want to know I want to know how real this is right there's just been this uh open AI has been at the Leading Edge Y and they continue to impress uh even though many people said 45 was a let down yep uh I think many people just expected it so it shouldn't
have been a let down it should have just been sort of uh like I said expected all that said if Sam is out on the fundraising Trail and he needs to be able to show how they're going to add 101 billion of ARR that's that's not on their core consumer subscriptions Yep
this is one way to do it right when you're talking about $2 to $20,000 a month per sort of instance of the software you know it's very easy to get these sort of big numbers very quickly and so I don't think people with where 4.5 landed I don't think people
are in the way that SAA is talking people are starting to adjust sort of narrative around oh AGI is sort of three four months away you should invest now at this crazy valuation because we're going to control super intelligence there needs to be a new narrative from a
fundraising standpoint in my opinion uh you know to continue sort of commanding these really really really aggressive uh forward Revenue multiples and it's test time inference yeah like it is like when I hear 20K I I hear um like I'm signing up for that if I have a workload that
that needs to be done every single day I'm not exactly sure what a great example would be but uh I mean it's like you know run through every I'm an insurance company and look through every single policy every single day for anything that's out of the ordinary and
you're dumping in millions of pages of text again and again and again and and every time you query you want it to actually sit there and think for you know hours something like that and so the 20K I would imagine that the that the cogs on that and just every day
you're gonna say write me a standup joke the style of Shane Gillis and feel free to take 12 hours yeah but you better come back with something good otherwise I'm unsubscribing yeah I I was thinking about the jokes that people like it's
always like the public figures who say like be me be Andre karpathy and then it's like oh well it knows everything about Andre karpathy so it can tell a good joke uh I wonder I wonder when like normies will be like laughing at it because like it needs to know stuff
about them to actually deliver a good joke because a lot be me love DraftKings love Netflix exactly love parlay yeah yeah I don't know um anyway you had the question of like you know how real is this let's let's actually read the information to see how much info they
have uh basically open AI is now at a 4 billion ARR which is incredible gersner came came out and said they're projecting to be at somewhere near 11 by the end of the year the growth is still ridiculous yep yep yep the term agents typically refers to AIS that can take
take actions on behalf of customers without needing a lot of Direction while open AI investors SoftBank has committed to spend three billion on agents uh from open AI this year alone yeah yeah so so you saw Sam lesson had that billboard on the 101 that said
AI is not your remote he came out and he said I think it was basically on this digital billboard uh which hopefully they got through adquick otherwise they probably you know wasted money and did poor targeting and all that stuff but um uh he was saying that you know $3
billion of their sort of projected revenue is from SoftBank which soft bank is using those Pro projections to lever up raise tens of billions of dollars of debt to then invest in open AI so it feels it feels hard to believe that that SoftBank will actually spend $3 billion
on open AI agents this year just because I imagine the even even if the technology is there imagine rolling that out across your entire I mean portfolio3 billion do that's got to be on that's like in the same ballpark as Snapchat's Cloud bill with Google like it's like or
Netflix's infrastructure on AWS like they're probably higher than that but like in the billions like to spend billions with a single like you know software like you know tech company contract as a customer like you have to so much just to put it in perspective I
I just ran a few uh very basic uh calculations that would be them spending $250 250 million per month this year uh which sounds crazy but it's it's it's like $8 million a day on agents yeah and I think that of course open AI would let them spend that much but SoftBank is
also running a business right and they need to be there needs to be some real value exchange right and I think if you just turn on a bunch of these agents and you're spending $8 million a day on them very unclear if they yeah what's the
what I mean what's like the craziest steel man you could possibly think for this like what if you what if you just say Okay soft bank has a ton of employees doing a lot of different things for this year we're going to spend this massive investment but we're
going to effectively have every single employee SoftBank is going to have an AI agent shadow them so every task every email every slack message that goes to a a human SoftBank employee is also going to go to a a like a mirror World metaverse representation of that
employee that's run by an open ai ai agent and so you have information on hey uh SoftBank you know had customer service people let's see what the response from the human was let's see what the response was from the AI agent that was shadowing
them every single day and then do the same thing for the analyst do the same thing for the CFO do the same thing for the you know masayoshi yeah do do it for everyone and then you can and then you can see okay this is actually a replaceable job or this is a job that
that we got twice as much done and so there's actually twice as much value so we should expand keep the workforce but it was a good deal I don't know it seems it seems really hard to to to manage that much AI agency you know it's like it's a lot of it's a lot of intelligence
to just go say hey hey go do you know what $250 million of work a month I have trouble I have the 01 Pro I I have trouble you know dispatching enough valuable queries on a regular basis to really like get the most out of it and I talk to people and sometimes people
would be like oh you only use Chachi PT like five times a day I'm using it 20 times a day and it's like I don't know if that's like I don't know that you necessarily want to like be maximizing your AI usage and that's like the right
metric uh there might be something where it's like work smarter not harder but if I had a $250 million it's like uh Brewster's Millions have you seen Brewsters Millions kid inherits you know a billion dollars from his Like You Know Rich grandfather or something and says you
know in order to deal with this sudden wealth you have to spend you know $10 million this this weekend or something and if you can spend it it's all this analogy of like you know you catch the kid smoking a smoking a cigarette you make them smoke an entire pack and
they're like this disgusting they never smoke again right so uh Brewsters Millions the same idea with with money and if you Brewsters Millions me on AI agents and you gave me a $250 million budget and said go and deploy this and try and get to $250 Million worth of
value out of this I don't know I weird it's this weird House of Cards Right and and when you see it's completely unbelievable that SoftBank would effectively spend $3 billion year on agents today when I would guess that their actual spend on agents in the past 12 months was under
$100 million right yeah I mean um so so so that level of growth is not super believable yeah it is almost believable that Masa would say I will actually spend this money with you because SoftBank is going to be such a big investor in open AI that you know you
know we're willing to make this commitment and it's sort of like this crazy uh conflicted transaction that uh has a bunch of you know Sam is out there using this Revenue commitment to raise more money from other people open AI is using that you know open a or sorry
SoftBank is using open AI uh Revenue projections to raise debt against uh and the whole thing is just uh beautifully uh conflicted um and uh no conflict no interest no conflict no interest let's give a little bit more context than but we'll be able to
actually so the beautiful thing is we will be able to see pretty much exact not exactly necessarily but we'll be able to see if this spending spree from Masa on open AI was real because softbank's public company yeah so we'll be able to check back on this uh so open
AI is going have several tiers $2,000 a month gets you high income knowledge workers mid-tier agents for software development can go up to 10K a month and high-end agents acting as PhD level research agents could cost up to 20K per month um in the long run open AI expects
20 to 25% of the company's Revenue to come from agent products the person said uh our past reporting has given hints about each of these type of agents and so um so here's the thing that's somewhat you know just one way to push back here yeah uh Devon AI which is
built on top of open AI yep cost $500 a month yeah uh there's been reports that it's super effective in organizations yep well it's 500 a month and then there's also consumption based pricing right as the same thing with Claude code right uh
but all that being said yep uh is open ai's products going to be 2000 uh 20 or 10 times better than Devon is built on top of open AI yeah otherwise why would consumers use the open AI version that cost $10,000 yeah I don't know it'll be interesting there yeah there's so many
there's such a dance here between you know what are they going to release in the in the in the API what how how closely are they going to keep things held as Secrets um there's actually another story we're going to get to about uh ILO suer and how he's like
being really really secretive uh and it's interesting because yeah I mean if you're if you're vending your best model your model that costs um you know $22,000 a month out on API someone can wrap that maybe you don't want them to do that somebody can maybe distill that
or reverse engineer it and so uh there's there will continue to be the question of like how how much can you lock these down or how how long does the frontier last uh it's a it's an ongoing debate and it's fun to follow uh follow along
um but of course there are you know endless battles over open Ai and of course there is the news that uh Elon Musk and open AI are in a lawsuit uh and there's a breakdown here from Rob should we go through this yeah we can go through this briefly I'll cover it so
people are sleeping this is this morning at 3:00 a.m. uh he says people are sleeping on huge news in the musk vers open AI case today the judge finds that if musk's donation gives him legal standing she thinks it's very very likely she'd want to block their entire
hundred billion nonprofit to for-profit conversion and there's a highlighted uh piece of a legal document here that says next and similarly if a trust was created the balance of equities would certainly tip towards plaintiffs in the context of a breach as Alman and
Brockman made foundational commitments for swearing any intent to use open aai as a vehicle to enrich themselves uh the court finds no inequity in an injunction that seeks to preserve the status quo of open AI corporate form as long as the process proceeds in an expedited manner
Rob says musk is trying to stop the openi open AI business effectively converting from a nonprofit to a for-profit to do that he needs to prove that he is being wronged in a way that allows him to bring a case to the court which is the legal standing and the
conversion to a for-profit um which gets cut off here I'm going to try to see if I can find it briefly yeah this is this is a very high bar to reach interesting I mean I'm I'm still on like team like you know hopefully they can sort this out it does it does make sense
that it seems like such like a just an aberration of the legal system that we're in this situation where it's like hey there's this weird situation where we kind of have to switch from a nonprofit to a for-profit can we just have a one-time
grace period where anyone who donated to the nonprofit just gets a stake in the for-profit because that would be that that does feel like the most Fair but it feels like legally it can't happen or else there will be some crazy tax implication or it will get like blocked
yeah um but so I actually messaged Rob about coming on the show he responded back and he says you should have a lawyer on the show not me this a super complicated issue but uh overall my takeaway from the news today was that uh the the judge is not shutting down sort
of elon's efforts uh it seems like still very 5050 uh or maybe even uh 6040 Alman open AI versus the the team musk yep um so we we'll see what's H you know what what ends up happening but um uh overall uh you know this uh is pretty wild to just be kind of playing out in front of
everyone while open AI stays charging ahead while xai stays charging ahead and um yeah it certainly uh is evolving yeah I I wonder even like what the time we're going to get ASI before we get a legal conclusion on this case aren't we like this this is going to
drag out for years I mean the the musk pay package is still dragging out right like we don't we still don't have a conclusion on that because he's moving the he's moving Tesla from Delaware to Texas I believe and like reinstating it and then the judge blocked it and so uh
the the the legal world just moves so slow yeah it's rough anyway well yeah there's one more line in here that I is relevant it says for this inquiry the court looks at open AI certificates of incorporation in both Delaware and California which lay out the charitable
purposes behind the the corporation the documents state that openai quote was organized exclusively for charitable and educational purposes and not organized for the private gain of any person so this is basically what uh elon's legal
team is leaning on in terms of um uh you know making uh making their point hurt so we'll see how it goes well whether you're Elon Musk or Sam Altman you're not going to be building AGI or ASI unless you're getting a good night's sleep so both of you please go to eight
sleep.com tell them the technology tell them the technology Brothers sent you and uh turn your bed into the ultimate sleeping experience Sam Elon this is more important surely you guys can agree on this you guys can disagree on who owns what and what the companies are and
what nonprofit for-profit all that legal mum mumo jumbo we can put that aside and we can agree that we all just want to get 100 100% sleep scores and that's actually what's really important I did not get that last night I did not either
I got 84 what you got 96 you you roast me I'm back I'm back I've been having got nearly two hours of Deep Sleep two hours I got 79% on quality and 644 on time slept you're sick as a dog oh yeah but your energy is way back it is I'm pumping it up pumping it up I was asleep
at the wheel yesterday I think all the drugs taking mostly just robot usin it's acting like I'm high like that's great that's fun I I I'm I'm definitely letting it Loose uh I think the answer is like if I'm low energy just like Let It Fly because uh it makes for a better
show for sure absolutely all right eight sleep.com CBN go check it out yeah back to the show back to the show let's talk about ilas siter absolute goat raising billions of dollars I mean we've talked about it before apparently it's impossible if you're an
opena co-founder to build anything but a foundation model company yep we would love to see someone start I don't know supplements company yeah I want to see you know him build a you know I don't know or just say post economic I'm GNA go into bodybuilding yeah because go
golden retriever Max start a podcast do something I I don't know it's just like it's like all they can do is just Foundation model Foundation model Foundation model every single day every single person machine God is real yeah and what's weird is they don't want to
do it together never they all want their own companies they all want their own Foundation models uh but you know apparently it's profitable the company's already worth 30 billion raising multiple billions some of the f is that the fastest it's got to
be so anyway uh not not to say the value's already been created but has a company ever gone from Z to 30 less than a year I don't know so uh ilaser he was an open AI researcher he's the the one who found like the transformer paper and like you know Google built it but he
really recognized that it was very important he uh you know built the early uh GPT architecture was very foundational in in the development of llms and AI uh and he left to open AI last year now he has a new startup called safe super intelligence and it's
become one of the most valuable companies in Tech thanks to his reputation um uh and SSI says it doesn't plan to release any products until it develops super intelligence and I was thinking about this so they raised like a billion dollars or two billion at uh
at a 30 billion uh or they're they're in talks to raise funding at 30 billion what would be hilarious if if deep SE comes out they're raising like two billion Journal just front running this and saying his startup is already worth 30 billion because it sounds more
interesting yes yes definitely okay uh it would be so funny if it was like you're okay hey we need to train this Foundation model guys like we need like three billion uh we'll just give you like 10% so we'll do like 30 billion valuation but it makes sense cuz like
it's going to cost us 3 billion to build a Frontier Model and then DC comes out and they're like we actually only need like 300K to do this so we're still going to do the three billion but it's just going to be secondary and don't worry about that and but we're going to
keep the valuation where it is because it's like the same Tech that would be genius he's just in it for the cheeky secondary maybe I mean there is a there are group of groups of people who are basically like you know the my ASI AGI world is just like I need
to just Corner some resource because like like yeah there will be abundance but there will only be so much beachfront property and so like I must get my Beacher but of course like this isn't what IL is doing he's he's like obviously a True Believer in Ai and Tech
and also fantastically wealthy from open AI uh I forget what they get they get credits or unit yeah I would they have stock how much would you pay to get the full hourlong pitch for SSI because arguably just getting you know I'm sure he's pitching relatively few people for
this right he's not trying to go talk all over the town yeah a lot of people are conflicted already he probably is talking to Sovereign isn't this Nat fredman was the first group I thought and uh it's Gro Dani gr Daniel gross is the CEO right um yeah so so but
but getting the pitch from Ilia would be uh almost Priceless totally I would lover up tvpn to just get the full pitch and then be able to act according to um you know who knows he he seems like somebody who would give a very authentic pitch versus just you know promising you
know you know he he's sick of the sort of like highflying deal making approach of his former co-founder totally yeah I mean he seems he has that that quote in that it was like a guardian piece or something or SF Chronicle video where
he's like if a if if the AGI doesn't go well the entire Earth will be uh covered in solar panels have you heard about this half Earth Earth concept half Earth H FF uh I think his name is Peter half he's a a scientist he named it after himself yeah it's a coinage it's like
law great no this is like a real thing so so he's like a he's a like a futurist a scientist and he has this uh Theory there's like this four quadrant model for like how how uh how the Earth can develop and accumulate more and more energy over time like eventually like uh
we're growing our energy consumption at like 2% a year and if just play that exponentially eventually we will be consuming all of the energy that is that hits the earth from the sun and then eventually you go into Dyson spere that's like cev 2 uh but there's a
question about like do you go black or green green is like we we focus on like bio and and you have like you know more trees that are like you know absorbing energy essentially black is like solar panels and then the question of like do
you stay on Earth or do you go into space there's like this there's like this interesting four quadrant model um but half Earth is basically like yeah just uh just black out the sky put put solar panels everywhere and then uh we'll all live in pods and most of the
humans will die and we'll basically just be AIS and that'll be like our progyny and like dark maybe that's good for some people some people like it some people are into that not me they never been part of that whole world never been big into that never been big into that whole
that whole Matrix world uh but he's like worried about this like genuinely like like we're we're kind of joking like like like dancing around it but he he he Ilia definitely is like if if we mess this up we're just going to be continually optimizing like more
computers more computers more computers and then you're going to have solar panels everywhere and robots taken over okay here's a question and I don't mean this in an offensive way at all y I have many family members that struggle with hair loss I knew you were going to go
there is it possible that Ilia doesn't just shave his head because he wants to reach AGI before his hairline reaches the back of his head it is a funny choice but I think it's just because he's like focused on other stuff but yeah I mean but if you're looking at the
mirror every day and you you've got billions of dollars to deploy and your arch nemesis Sam Alman is racing to achieve AGI and you look in the mirror and you say look I maybe have I maybe have like 18 I maybe have eight I maybe have 18 months before uh to you know of of a
hairl uh you know I got to grind harder um this is disrespectful I won't I won't abide by this I think he looks great no he looks he's an absolute Chad he just he's just cares so much about the AI you know no and I think that's the right
approach yeah and he wears his suit an absolute Dog True an absolute dog yeah and no t-shirts over over here no I love it I'm excited to see this round get confirmed and uh I do think this will be a first of speedr running 0 to 30 billion in less than a year uh so check
this out uh he's running this place it's a super tight ship he's very very worried about um uh security and so uh most AI startups work hard to get attention hoping it will attract employees and investors in a highly competitive space SSI operates as
secretly as it can out of its offices in Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv its barebones website contains little more than a 223w mission statement candidates who secure an in-person interview are instructed to leave their phone in a faraday cage uh a container that blocks
cellular and Wi-Fi signals before entering ssi's office one of the knowledgeable people said most of its staffers aren't well known in Silicon Valley because the company is looking for promising technologists whom s sger can mentor rather than experience people
likely to jump between employers and take what they have learned with them I love that approach still silicon Valley's top investors including Sequoia and andri have poured money into the company the latest financing which mark a sixfold increase from its 5 billion
valuation is being led by Green Oaks capital ssis in talks to raise funding at 30 billion but doesn't include the new cash it's collecting which were previously reported by Bloomberg were seoan and dreon in the same round I must close you don't see that
much this also feels like super conflicted with aren't they both in xai too and they're doing the exact same thing like hey there's no conflicts in the foundation model World everybody's in everything I think it's yeah it's commoditizing it's it's drilling you're
drilling oil and like yeah I want piece of that well I want a piece of that well like let me get it all I guess I don't know it just seems like like there would be some discussion of like hey like can you not invest in a direct competitor but you know maybe it's dramatically
different like when you think about the pro like just the product pacing like grock 3 is very much like productizing so fast like yeah like grock one was immediately out and then and then embedded in Twitter and you can and we talked about like maybe it gets embedded
into Teslas and it becomes the you you talk to your car and and it it seems like Elon really really wants to like be product focused like there's the voice mode and like all the different features yeah we've talked about this that what
he sees in open AI is not benchmarks yep it is consumer adoption right open AI will probably reach a billion you know a billion users at some point this year somewhere close to that yep uh I think even potentially they could be in the territory of a billion like monthly
actives which is so so difficult to reach and Elon even if Elon got every person on X to download the gr Rock G he wouldn't even come close to that right there needs to be sort of organic adoption don't sell him short I do think Elon could potentially unseat Jimmy Johns for
number two that's true unseating open AI for number one is a tall order but never bet against Elon never bet never bet for it's hard to bet against Jimmy John's new hot honey sub but if anyone could take them down it is so funny that the number two
app in the app store they hit number one I think they hit number one they went number one they went number one uh Jimmy John's for some reason is the number one app in the app store amid all this like you know billion dooll you know lawsuits and and fights over well this is why IL
is staying out he's like I'm not going to release an app until it can just immediately be better than Jimmy johnes I'm not even going to try and go consumer sorry they I I'm I'm wrong they hit number one in food and drinks Chad gbt is still on top chat gbt is still
undefeated and which is why it's just why investors are willing to pay over $300 billion do well now now you know normally people would be like oh if you have Jimmy John's on the show it's no longer a tech show but now there's a tech angle so let's get him on yeah
let's get the founder on Jimmy Johns let's do it let's do it Jimmy himself anyway we got we got five minutes until our first guest is joining uh let's let's let's close this out um you know everyone's everyone's interested in following all the
different co-founders around the world as they build ever increasingly large uh Foundation models uh the interesting thing is like you know we we heard about uh uh what was it uh test time compute reinforcement learning deep deep research all these different tools that
were they clearly came out of Ilia projects early on at open AI uh I forget what they were originally called qar remember qar and it was like it was this was leaked that Ilia was working what did Ilia see right uh and so clearly he's he has some ability to put together
kind of new algorithmic paradigms and even though he was people people get so obsessed with like are is deep learning hitting a wall are you are you scaling pilled or not whereas Ilia was like he was both scaling pilled and went super long the Transformer and deep learning
architectures but at the same time was working on reinforcement learning approaches on top of uh on top of like the big massive scaled llms to bring those two together and I think they were kind of I I I guess they were kind of obvious uh I was watching a
video uh earlier from uh two-minute papers from five years ago from open Ai and it's talking about this this this game that they did where they had two AIS on each team so it's 2v2 game Hide and Seek yeah and and and they and they play and over like you know a million
rounds they simulate uh and like they just can't even find each other and then they get into like 10 million rounds and then they start learning these strategies of like well if I go in this in this box and then I put uh like a cardboard box here and I lock it in
place then I'll start winning and then and then the other AI figures out that if they take this like ramp they can surf up over it and eventually they start like figuring out how to like break the physics engine of the game and do all this cool stuff uh and and that
reinforcement learning obviously it played into when open AI played uh defense of the Ancients Dota 2 do you remember this at all they did like a 5v5 uh basically like Starcraft I mean they also did Starcraft literally uh they did uh they started playing video
gameson was a thing that would actually go viral and also live streaming it yeah yeah yeah yeah and so those types of well the Pokemon thing is interesting because it's not like they didn't train on Pokemon yeah it's just claw also running running a 247 experiment is also
very powerful and that you're putting it all out there it's verifiable yeah yeah um so anyway I don't know Ilia I hope he comes up with something cool it's it does seem like he's very aligned with safety to me this is this is my Ilia is
my bet on what Keith was getting at when we had him on the other day where he said what comes after the llm yeah it seems like every other former open AI early team member co-founders working on language models it's very possible Ilia is working on whatever comes after that
right sure um so very excited to see that play out and uh yeah like as the as the AI brain develops you have the the memory core the reasoning core like IL he set the expectations so incredibly High saying I'm not going to release a product until I you know presumably have
something that's significantly better than whatever else is on the market right yeah um I wonder how he would even release that like what what would the product instantiate itself as like we need we need another app there needs to be the information needs to send the
tech Paparazzi yeah you know outside of the Tel Aviv office snapping the picture of Ilia walking out you know all secretive that's the content I want the information um great well well you know what he has to do when he launches this
company Billboards Billard because he's going to have no one's going to know about this it's one thing if you're in and you launch immediately and you grow organically and you're going direct and you're posting but and you go viral for your he's going to have this fantastic
product but he's going to no one's going to know about it so Ilia is gonna have to buy some Billboards and he's got to do it on adquick so Ilia I know you're listening go to adi.com uh start working with the team now also I mean honestly
Ilia you could do some recruiting ads on there uh throw some Billboards up waterl Tel Aviv Silicon Valley put the Billboards up SSI we're hiring uh but go through ad Qui because they make out of home advertising easy and measurable Ilia I'm talking to you directly they
you can say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising Ilia uh only adquick combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe so Ilia go to adi.com tell them the technology brother sent you and uh good
luck with your new Venture and so we're gonna have Jeremy come on the show right now and you know our main advice for Jeremy was to start buying 101 Billboards start buying 101 Billboards uh saying you got a special situation raise too much money call Mr
gon what's up guys how you doing good how are you have you bought a billboard yet I'm working on it I'm working on it I think uh I think all the management fees need to go directly into Billboards that's that's what I've learned from the most profitable podcast that's great uh
break it down for us what would go on the billboard what's your business how do you pitch it to people these days uh my business is uh picking up the the roadkill of the Venture industry uh the the startups the startups the the founders that have
triumphantly built heroic and wonderful businesses and have gained millions and tens of millions of Revenue and built incredible teams and have a wonderful product and customers that love them uh but for the fact that they had too much Capital uh forced upon them and it has
buried them under an untenable prep stack and made the whole business not work and uh and left them with no choice but to kind of uh get stuck in no man's land and my my my mission is to uh to to to help those Founders get back in control of their businesses and and uh
and and run them you know as fully profitable cash flowing great businesses as God intended love it incredible line uh I would love to get a sense you know we spend a lot of time covering the news and the News tends to fix fixate on these sort of colossal failures and
these sort of uh moments of Glory the AI pin for example yeah ex exactly um yeah you're seeing the behind the scenes which is companies that raised a lot of money you know maybe three to five years ago that are now in a tough spot you
know the the the venture all this sort of turned sour on them what is the state of that market right now how busy are you uh I know you spent a lot of the last year raising your first uh independent fund now you're investing what what's uh kind of happening on the
ground yeah I mean look it's uh there's a lot of these a lot of businesses there's a lot of great businesses out there and a lot of like stuck Founders and uh and there's there's more and more of them and um and increasingly a lot more VCS who realize that like you know
um there is a there is a severe lack of DPI especially in the middle of the portfolio right now and so um you know there's you're starting to see a lot of uh a lot of great companies that realize they need probably a different owner uh
an owner that's more in line with actually like their their goal and and their vision and then a lot of funds that are realizing you know gross irr is is all well and good but eventually you know you you you you can only eat the DVI and uh and and that's that's kind of
that's that's what the you know that's what the capital allocators are starting to demand have you seen Founders that get in that position uh you know they have the opportunity you know they're talking to you or they get into a position are they ever trying to sort of pivot their
business into a better AI narrative and then go back to Market and is that working or are they trying that and giving you a call back and saying uh yeah you were right like let's try to figure something out well yeah so no what they're doing is what they're
realizing is that they can pivot to Ai and they don't need any more Capital oh interesting they they can you know especially if the business was built you know four or five years ago they can replace a lot of their cost with AI I think like every organization should be
thinking hard about whether or not they uh ought to cap headcount and just you know keep headcount at or below where it is and increase kind of headcount so to speak through AI um and I think you know I think we're we're we're about to see
kind of the the Renaissance the bootstrapper and so I think a lot of Founders are are starting to think like you know maybe I can grow my business 10x without more Capital because because of these tools and so you know yeah certainly you can you can you know slap
an AI label on and go raise another round um you know you you certainly have the founder who's in the uh just just two more million bucks bro like just give me give me two more million like I got this but I think that's a mistake I think I think we're about to see like an
era of incredibly like Capital efficient um businesses that by the way like are not giving up growth at all like you can still grow 100% a year um and if anything you can do with a lot less Capital you can own more of the business you can like um you know be a lot more
in the driver's driver's seat and uh and you know really kind of control your destiny versus kind of uh lever yourself up as much as I know that you know you guys are always in favor of the max lever option exactly uh can you walk me through uh anatomy of a deal and how
kind of the the pref stack water falls out on one of these uh what are the different um kind of tension points for some preed investor who feels like they're sitting on a 10x or 100x and then someone who got in late and clearly kind of knows they overpaid and just
wants to get something back uh like how do you get all the parties around the table and then think about incentivizing the team going forward look I mean I I think I think one thing Founders don't understand or or maybe underappreciate is that you
know your your cap table ultim like really affects your business in a wide variety of ways that are that are can be kind of very subtle um and so at some point you know maybe you go from having uh a venture fund as an ideal owner to
being a neutral owner I think a lot of funds are in that stage now where you know it's not detrimental to be owned by a venture back to be owned by a venture fund uh but maybe it's not super additive and then eventually you get to a point where it can start to become um
you know it can it can detract because just the incentives really diverge and so um you know what I'm really looking to do is like what I implore everyone to think about especially if they're not in a business that's like on a clear trajectory to raise you know need to
burn hundreds of millions in capex for some kind of like nine or 10 figured outcome is think a lot about like who are my owners what are their incentives and like you know when you get to the board meeting is it actually is there friction or are they actually behind me
and I think that's a lot of it and a lot of it could just comes down to like what is the cost of capital of your owners to get a little bit uh boring like the the cost of capital of um of the people that own you makes a really big difference um for like what they expect and what they
demand of of your business and so you know it varies like if you're an individual if you're you know preed or seed you're happy to stay in the business there's no reason for you to sell you can roll over um if you're like a growth bun that maybe did
you know a somewhat regretable you know it's a little bit wake up from the night after the party look around there's beer bottles everywhere would prefer to just pretend that it didn't happen maybe you want to get your Capital back like um um you know I think like often times the
best outcome is just returning Capital which used to kind of be a Norman Venture and because this like bifurcation between huge outcomes and then very little liquidity in the rest of portfolio um is not happening as much anymore uh every venture capitalist
today says they're in the people business right if you ask them like to have any type of specific thesis they just say you know we're we're in the people business found yeah yeah yeah so that that's that's gen generally uh the right take uh that's that's Center's
point of view uh are you more in the people business or the value business because from My Lens you know you're looking for value and in in some cases you're more than happy to let the founder move on to their next chapter and bring in a professional CEO is that
correct yeah I mean I I I I think I'm also entirely in the people business but it's you know is the I think everyone should be you know doing their highest and best use like following calling sometimes for a Founder that's that's you know getting more control
more more sovereignty over their business and really kind of being in it for the long haul having way more optionality in terms of like financing sometimes a Founder you know a thing that happens far too much that that no one talks about is all these Founders
who are stuck you know if you have 20 million of Revenue uh 100 employees and you've raised 100 million bucks you can't just quit if you're the founder even if it's clear that like what we're trying to do is build the next you know decacorn or whatever and so there's a
lot of Founders out there who are who know and what's funny is the board knows and the founders knows but they're like not willing to have that conversation and so um you know there's a lot of Founders who are stuck and and for those
who are stuck and would like to leave but don't want to abandon the building uh the the business I think um uh you know there's more options than you think and there's someone out there to get back to the people thing there's someone out there who is the perfect person to
come in and run a business like that because you know a lot of times the person who takes a business from 20 of Revenue to 100 of Revenue can be a very you're looking for a very different type of person than someone who's going to start it from zero and grow it into a
huge business and so it's really just about about like is this person doing the thing that they're really fired up about and if they're not then like do you really want to be in that seat are there any common character traits or or kind of either even background career
paths for that type of operator who's maybe not the founder but the type of person person that can with pretty high confidence take a business from 20 million to 100 million in your experience yeah I mean I think like um you know my friend Andrew Wilkinson has
has has written a lot about this I think he he really kind of has it right um You you know there's a lot of SE suite and Senior Executives at a business that's two or three times bigger than maybe the business you're looking at and those are people who are like highly capable has
at least some entrepreneurial Spirit but maybe not you know whether by Constitution or circumstance not interested in taking the full risk of a Founder but still want to be in the driver's seat want to you know want to run a business and there's actually a
lot of talent there that can be unlocked who are people who you know can't do the go through y YC thing but still you know would love to have real upside would love to to uh to lead a team and run a business and um yeah I think there's actually a lot of really untapped Talent
there um and uh it's kind of an underrated option it's kind of like how it used to be like buying business and running it if you're like an NBA or something was like an underrated path to you know quotequote entrepreneurship um I think coming in and
running like decently sized startup or business uh is kind of one of those now that that not a lot of people consider it's kind of like very like you're either a founder or you're just an exact um or maybe like a 4 500 CEO or something but there's a lot of middle
ground and and I think um yeah I think there's a ton of untapped Talent uh question going off that uh search funds got very popular uh simultaneously it seems like Venture the world of venture capital discovered private equity and rollups and you know
we've seen a number of companies come out the gates uh and decide they're going to uh basically raise Venture dollars to P pursue a PE style strategy that concerns me um you know given that uh private Equity is pretty good at what they do right they've sort of uh yeah
gotten better and better and better over the decades around you know Finding uh you know fairly priced businesses and making them more efficient and growing them and selling them uh what do you think happens to these sort of uh software or AI enabled rollups and are
you um salivating over the potential of of buying them uh down the road once [Laughter] they look I think um I think raising venture to acquire businesses is a great gig right now you know um it's yeah so so and here's here's why J like the Grim
Reaper like if you're if he's excited about something no and here's why right you can if typically in private Equity if you want to if you want to go buy businesses you raise a fund you get two in 20 which is a great business model you've talked about this before Jeremy
sort of the perfect business model but in the right now in Venture you can go raise $20 million at a 100 delute yourself 20% and so you actually have much better economics if you're going you know buying up these businesses uh and and eventually I think that's going
to stop right yeah and and by the way there there's there's a hurdle uh in private equity and there's no hurdle in Venture Capital which makes the whole thing even sweeter yeah UMES sense but you know I'm I I'm not I don't think I'm a grim reaper I I I think I think I
think I'm I think I'm a liberator I think all these Founders are trapped what I'm saying is that you're if you if you envision that you're gonna be doing a lot of business in the category in 10 years it's probably a bare signal right yeah I I think I think it's more uh more
seeing exuberance you know once the uh once the NBA's Pile in it it it might it might be over um but like look if you build a business to 30 million bucks of Revenue that's like a heroic feat it's extremely hard to do and uh and then you somehow end up
with eight% of it under a $200 million press stack yep that kind of sucks and I I don't think that's the outcome that's anyone is like trying to have happen but it happens as like a as a as a kind of um you know a spandrel of the of the
Venture industry yeah the Grim Reaper is the bankruptcy attorney you are the you are the winged Angel yeah and you know there there are there are there are if if you really want to sell your startup for parts there are people out there who can do that with brutal efficiency and
uh and they're great guys but like yeah I uh you know I'm a fund I want to sell these businesses for more money in the future which presumably means they get more they get more valuable you know I'm not I'm not a uh I don't want to just like you know make Toys R Us go bankrupt
that's uh that's someone else's job but I mean is is over the long is your business correlated with uh like frothiness and volatility like in a post froth post highly you know High exuberant High exuberance like that is a good signal for you right yeah there
will be more opportuni sure I mean I'm I'm I'm interested in in dislocations and dislocations certainly happen uh more in bubbles or exuberance um but I also it's happening more frequently too like it seems like it's a good mod it it
doesn't seem like it doesn't seem like your fund is like a onetime like oh they just like unique case right now it's like no VC is built to do these types of things there needs to be a system to help process the ones that uh don't go perfectly and that's where you can come
in yeah well look I mean venture has 10 AED in terms of dollars deployed in the last 10 years it's a completely different thing now you know just as the biggest firms are turning into PE shops the biggest Venture firms are functionally PE shops yep um there needs
to be there's basically one product in silon Valley and it's like primary growth capital Y and um and you know once these markets become bigger more liquid more efficient there needs to be uh different kind of different uh just as there is in Wall Street or like on
the East Coast there needs to be different um products offered to Founders like Equity at different costs of capital and things like that again like a really basic factor I think people should understand is like if you have if your model is to have a lot of
zeros in your portfolio your cost of capital I.E the like minimum return that you need is just really high which like creates all these knock on effects I really think Founders would like just take a crash course on Venture it would really help them a lot like a lot of
really exceptional Founders kind of get into bad situations um that they probably you know probably like 30 minutes with like Chad GPT could could really kind of help them avoid and like maybe you should make a rapper I I honestly think you should make a rapper
and just like create the the the sort of uh product for these Founders and say yeah anytime that somebody raises around send them your send them your little rapper and say hey put your sheet in here understand what what you're about to embark on and uh it's good could lead
lead generation for you yeah yeah I mean I think a lot of the board members could use the rapper as well got him okay uh another question for you historically you've been heavily focused on software you acquired 30 some uh odd businesses while at tiny uh we've
seen uh new categories attract Venture dollars like traditional basically traditional manufacturing businesses that have some sort of tech enablement is their world in the future where that is you know an area of interest for you or are you all in on software you know
indefinitely everything is of interest to me Jordy I I I I just love there's always there's always like interesting problems to be solved that can that can create like predo efficient outcomes in in everything right now there's like a
lot of them in sophomore Adventure but uh but yeah there will as long as like humans are not even in the drivy but like involved there's going to be like weird um you know uh dislocations and and and problems to be solved it's like amazing how many times everyone could be
better off if they just like you know it's not something that they could it's not something they need a third party to do um but uh but oftentimes like a third party really helps so yeah it'll be it'll be on all kinds of things I mean right now you're seeing the Venture
ification of Middle America and like as all these Venture Co start to buy up you know vets and and Med spas and all these things like Venture Capital I'm in like I'm in the rural Midwest right now uh and like you're gonna these people are going to start to feel Venture in a very
tangible physical way and I think that's really going to change um you know it's just going to change the industry dramatically do you be uh uh you had a great heuristic for you know early detection of potentially great Founders being I think you put it as uh stripe
account plus high school diploma or something High School report card can you break that down and tell me anym about that yeah if if if you made money online in high school I I I honestly can't think of an exception to of someone who's done that and has not
ended up being like quite a successful founder um in one way or another this is like the inter you can just go on there with a laptop and make money it's like you don't got to do all this you don't got to like go to Harvard and do YC and
all that like you can just go on there and like drop ship stuff make something that makes money that's a new tagline yeah uh what's your what's your read on uh General Catalyst exploring an IPO uh it's been something that everybody's sort of waiting for the first sort of
scaled Venture fund uh to go public do you see all the big firms going that direction over time or is it going to be a pretty um binary and that you know andreon stays private forever blah blah blah uh or you know what what does that look like so I think like one very simple cut
at this is just firms that are started by Founders versus firms that are started by investors so you know Mark and Ben they're Founders um uh you know GC it's also Founders um you know uh uh David Falco obviously entrepreneur um and so I think like I think it's it's
kind of expected to see that when a Founder starts a business even if it's an investing business um they're doing it to why is any founder start of business to grow a big business and um you know I I thought I thought Mark uh Andre put it nicely in in in uh on on on
Patrick's podcast when he talked about you know you can be a small partnership that generates some good returns and then kind of is uh relocated to um to some Wikipedia page or you can build know Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan or or
Andre s Horowitz you know I think it's also in the name like uh you know I think I think they they like put put a lot of Clues there so you know I think Founders great Founders are just going to build big important businesses and um you know your business can only really
get so big if you're actually in the business of like true Alpha out performance you can't you know build JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs or something do you think that there's a potentially Alpha in getting into one of those big VC firms but not in an investing role
instead going into an operating role uh like what you see as an you know not a deal team but operating partner at uh ban capital or Texas Pacific group or any of the large PE firms assuming that these these large organizations are going to wind up actually operating more
like PE firms not just at Financial scale but in terms of their behavior and so you're going to come in and and reliably be CEO of of Port uh portfolio companies that are coming in through like the PE arm essentially yeah I mean I I I think you know I think
it's like joining um you know joining Goldman in in this in the 70s or 80s or something um uh you know it kind of depends it's actually kind of funny this is like kind of a niche thing but it's very interesting to me how Coos at funds are either like incredibly
important heroic individuals that the firm would explode without or they're like completely back office kind of like low status no one likes them and they're also either they're either like extremely well paid or really badly paid and it's like which one of these very
like high variance roles and I think it depends a lot on the culture of the firm and so um yeah I mean I would argue that like a lot of these firms uh uh most the people there already are not um you know strictly investors in the sense that they're not making you know judgment
based Capital allocation decisions there research and all different portfolio support and all this stuff which is like um you know not what you would have thought Venture was in 2005 yeah yeah I mean I guess you just mentioned like the idea of like having a
venture owner uh is not the right thing and that's where you come in a lot of times but in the future some of these firms might actually kind of set up shops to become better owners of yeah turned around assets essentially right they already are I mean SE Heritage you
know seoa Heritage is is uh significantly uh or maybe not significantly but it's like roughly the size of seoa yeah um I know Andre's doing a kind of SEO Heritage thing GC is like they're all just starting to be giant at some sense in some scale you
just become an asset manager and really what you're looking for are um uh you know different fee paying products basically and like really about it yeah I mean I mean I guess there's still there's still like a decision to be made between like oh it's like an index fund
and they're just going to like blindly take a slice of everything versus they're going to like that's kind of been like the the meme around Andre a little bit is that they're just like in a lot of but then you have General Catalyst it's
like we're buying a hospital Network and that's much more like private equity and so I understand that like all of this is going towards like Venture becoming asset managers but there still bu there still will be Forks in the road like Goldman Sachs does have a proprietary uh
prop desk right but they don't have as much high frequency stuff as Jan street right there are different strategies uh and so it'll be interesting to see like where each fund kind of goes I think one more one more question for you uh mostly a prompt because we were
talking about this in uh in a group chat I think a week ago there was a chart showing some of these new uh AI startups and their sort of Revenue Milestones you you laid out very clearly somebody was basically somebody in the chat uh I think it was Bill uh said
something to the effect of uh are we short all of these and uh you know I've kind of like struggled with the question because people get a tremendous amount of value out of these products they love them they they've it's real Revenue it's real customers
sort of trading dollars you fired back and basically said Iron law of the universe Easy Come uh easy go uh maybe just kind of extrap extrapolate that in the context of the um you know current AI Market yeah look I mean I I I'm sure some of them will be great businesses
but it it it does seem very true to me that just you know anything that can be done very quickly can sort of be undone and I think you're seeing that I mean I think all the kind of like idees the best one changes from day to day the switching cost is pretty low like these
are very smart teams I'm sure they will come up with um Moes and and uh and and you know stickiness and all that kind of stuff but I think um you know I I think it's kind of like if you think about you know the Internet it's like yeah
everyone's gonna rush to use the internet enabled version of XY Z thing but is does that mean you know there's the um the idea that like Google is the last search engine not the first right and so I think um I think for a lot of a lot of the companies where it's just
like I wish I had an AI version of this I want like the consumer intent is like I want to buy an AI version of this not like I want you know um uh you know pick your pick your kind of specific AI business and so you know I think some of them will make it out but I think a lot
of them um will not because it's just that's just what the rush is it's like anyone who can add AI into this is adding so much value that I'll just like buy it I mean I I know like I pay for you know whatever six different models like that's probably not going to be
true in three years right like there's probably gonna be one that I'll end up paying for too there's certainly no reason to pay for six right now um and so yeah and like if you know if someone launches a slightly like an incrementally better model tomorrow
they're gonna get my 20 bucks a month until like you know until they don't and so um yeah I don't know I I just I I can't think of an example where like a whole class of businesses have cropped up grown immensely quickly and then kind of just been the new equilibrium um you
know that that's certainly not what happened in the doc com there's some exceptions but in general that makes sense we have a couple minutes left uh how are you thinking about building your firm are you hiring for any roles right now uh what does the future look like for
geffon and Company um yeah you know it's it's very interesting i' I've been I've been dutifully studying the uh all the great solo GPS of the Venture world and and and analyzing their their setups and everything I think it's very compelling
I think asset management is actually a great like AI use case um so yeah I think you know the answer is yes I'm hiring uh little little Tech Bros exclusive here hiring there we go breaking breaking news scoop put the Chiron up yeah uh yeah I'm
I'm I'm gon to make one hire I'm looking for like an investment principal someone who super smart wants to you know be kind of the first hire um keep the team really small you know a lot of Economics to carve up um and you know basically like I am uh I have more deal flow than
I can handle right now and what I need is is help basically and so um yeah you know if it just wants to be someone who joins me and then uh me and me and them and 30 AI agents uh you know allocating Capital if that sounds appealing uh reach out well we have our next guest on
the line right now thanks Jeremy Jeremy thank you for coming on we'll talk to you soon we love you guys talk soon this is fantastic Nick welcome to the show welc to the show hey guys I didn't mean to kick off the last guy and good what's that up I was three minutes early you're
all good how you doing doing great man how how did investment Community go uh break down introduce yourself what is what do you do and then what does investment committee mean on a Monday like what who's in the meeting what are you talking about no in a little asteris
first Nick just started lent and he's not uh he's giving up nicotine so he said he's a little bit grumpy today but we're gonna we're going to turn it around because we're going to eventually talk about cor weave which is uh maybe a
2,000 bagger or something in that I was trying to run the numbers on it but uh how how did investment committee go it was good yeah we're actually having I am having a poly crisis with all the the companies that I'm on the board of M uh so that part's not good so never become
a venture capitalist you know I don't advise it to any Young Folks listening don't do it okay go become an artist or become an artist become an artist what kind of art should should the fans do these days what's that what kind of art is not going to be immediately
commoditized by AI I don't know like sculpure you know I think you just have to learn to work with the AI you know you know look at Grimes model there the Grimes AI but people still like her you know so that's true that's good uh how often do you take a board seat when you
make an investment is that uh you you sound like future Investments you may just write the check and say you know good luck good luck no don't say that I can't have I can't have potential investees hearing that no no no uh I'm on five boards okay uh I've yeah I got
capacity you know I got I got some space still so um if I'm leading and it's my deal then and we try and Lead most around so I will I do we do end up on a lot of boards for sure would you want to be on a public company board at any point like you know how andreon has
visibility into Facebook and that's just like Alpha for the entire portfolio right yeah and I think they pay you as well so that that part's nice so I don't get paid to be on well maybe maybe cor weave will bring you up will bring you
back you know I'm silently hoping that they're gonna me to be on the board explain the business to us and if they like how you explain the business then you're on the board boom we'll send him this clip yeah we'll tell him the technology Brothers
uh collectively requested that Nick be added to the board prior to the IPO yeah and get a little uh yeah maybe maybe let's just break I'm a very small shareholder right right for now could start building that position up there when did you invest in core weave what
were they doing at the time and what are they doing now it's obviously been in the news but I would love to hear it from you what a fun story man I was my first Angel uh investment ever what uh yeah it was it was a good way to start becoming an angel investor uh so I have
like over 50 now but that was my first and I was not accredited at the time I mean you know Dirty Dog Dirty Dog no one checks okay that's the trick no one Chucks yes he doesn't Chuck I don't think I had the money to make the investment at the time I think
I borrowed it from my dad amazing uh and I had met these guys because we were mutual haters of ethereum um so we we hated ethereum proof of stake specifically and I think I found them on Reddit and um Brian Brian venturo he was posting on Reddit about how proof of
sake was stupid and bad because they were eth miners right they were mining e they're against the transition proof of stake and I was as well because I just love proof work and hate proof of steak so we we we you know we were kind of strange bed fellows and then uh you know they were
just mining eth that's what they were doing uh they had a different take on it than other eth miners they used more high-end inv videas which became very important later versus other e miners used amds more commodity commodity amds and then uh they we became friends I
became friends with Brandon and Brian and mo mostly centered on our our Mutual shared disdain for ethereum ethereum culture uh they had like a very like weird relationship with ethereum it was all their revenue but also they just like had a very antagonistic
relationship and then they pitched me the idea of of to repurposing their GPU Hardware just like idling by Mining eth and other proof OFW crypto assets and then uh also you know on a more bursty basis doing like rendering like CGI yeah yeah c yeah like blender so
that the AI wasn't even in the conversation wasn't even in the discussion this is 2018 though yeah no one except for gor knew yeah was this related to the the render Network like the octane renderer R anddr was that a thing or is this just like general
purpose rendering for do you know what they pitched me was like they were going to like go to the blender conferences and be like the industrial uh HPC farm for blender yeah and uh and movie studios and whatever and that sort of happened actually but then um so I I
did the the first round in which they rais capital I I think it was um was the only like VC to be on the cap table I did it personally actually brought it to the fund and we didn't do it because it was seen as outside of scope which was a catastrophic mistake obviously worst
mistake of my career by far like I just r the math that I did the numbers on it and yeah it would have been big it was our first fun fun one would have been a 50x fund on that alone wow if if we' done that check so uh that was that was
a Miss um and then uh what was the scope back then like like why was it not in scope cuz we had done some crypto mining stuff and then we got got really turned off by it okay and you know we invest in like more like asset light cryp we was totally out and the whole pitch
was we're going to stop doing crypto and we're pivot into this other stuff yeah makes sense so then in 2019 they almost went out of business because eth moved to proof of stake so all the proof of work market for gpus ceased to exist and but right around the same time
uh all of these early applications for LS uh like transform based LS came out like GPT 2 was actually really big for them uh because um there were all these apps that were built on it like AI dungeon if you guys remember that I think was you guys remember that that
was my first uh they were like yeah this thing's going crazy like the usage just hockey scking and I played it I'm like oh my God like wow this is actually like amazing technology like yeah uh that's when I realized LM or like you know the
Transformer model was was going to you know change the world and so then that just hockey sticked and they obviously did an incredible job of being creative about financing and uh you know magnetar was obviously a great um you know Capital Partner to them in many
different ways over the years and technically they've delivered um it's not it's not an undifferentiated product it really is um you know they built with the idea of HPC big performant synchronous HBC clusters in mind when absolutely no one was doing that none of
the hyperscalers were doing that um and then now of course everybody's realized AI specific data centers make sense but coru was really the first to do it and so you know they' they've been able to lock in you know long duration contract so so they've done very
well y very cool uh changing subjects a little bit uh I want to go back to it feels like a year ago it wasn't that long ago what was the vibe at the crypto ball which you were at uh once everybody started realizing that the the incoming president had launched a token no one
knew at the ball that the Trump coin had launched or maybe others knew but I certainly didn't know I think it launched around 900 p.m. and I didn't get out of there till like 11:30 and uh really so there wasn't too late there wasn't people were at the ball just
hanging out having fun and people weren't realizing what had happened yet nobody that I knew at the ball knew I certainly know no one was talking about it so I felt that we were rug pulled actually by Dr Trump yeah cuz cuz most most conferences there's quite a lot of
people just looking down at their phone the whole time because it's just not that and obviously this wasn't a conference it was a party um but uh the timing was hilarious and then and then the lesson from this last Sunday was if there's ever anything White House
related you know any type of crypto event expect some uh expect some big news I thought you had some of the best takes on the Strategic uh crypto Reserve now that a few days have passed have any of your thoughts changed you know you're generally um not super
excited about it you had written a post before that you were sort of broadly against it uh what's your thinking uh on today March 5th uh and and where does this all go yeah I mean we're going to find out on Friday what they're really proposing or thinking I think there's so
many unanswered questions like like how are they going to pay for it is Congress going to have to authorize are they just going to hold the seized Bitcoin are they going to sell the seized Bitcoin to buy cardano is that really going to happen I mean can you imagine hey
portfolio rebalancing you know it's strategically important for the United States to uh you know diversify yeah I mean really like if if they can't find some ot's way to finance this thing without asking Congress because they can't ask Congress let's be
real Congress is not going to pass this yeah so okay are they just going to use the Bitcoins they hold 200,000 Bitcoins okay we want to do a basket of Bitcoin cardano eth salana Ripple so you're selling Bitcoin to buy Ripple and card that's crazy come on uh so we're going
to find out what David sxs has up his sleeve I mean I like the guy I think he's smart I don't know how this policy came to be uh I don't support it uh continue to not support it whether or not it's just Bitcoin or Bitcoin in a basket of other crypto assets
it doesn't make sense at all there's no strategic purpose to uh owning crypto at the government level other strategic assets that we hold are Commodities that are like hard to acquire in a pinch if we have liabilities toomin in those Commodities right we it makes sense to
have a petroleum Reserve makes sense to have a Tungsten reserve a uranium Reserve even medical equipment agricultural Commodities whatever where is the industrial need to to own Bitcoin or Ripple or cardano there is none so I just don't understand
the whole thing seems totally incoherent to me what uh I think we share the same point of view on sax uh do you think that he is having real influence on the sort of messaging coming out of the White House related to crypto or is he finding out live like
the rest of us I think if it was just up to scks we wouldn't be talking about the reserve there wouldn't be a trump meme World Liberty F wouldn't be as big as it is uh what other crazy stuff did Trump do with crypto I don't know I mean I've just been hoping that Trump would just
fire Gensler put in Atkins and then never say the word Krypto ever again we' be so much better instead he's like hugging us to death you know and I don't know where it's coming from I don't know is it Baron is it Eric is it Dawn who's doing it who's who's the Puppeteer
whoever it is they need to stop hopefully saak can put an end to all this nonsense I just not for Trump to care it does feel like a distraction from the other side of Sax's responsibilities which is the uh AI stuff we heard we heard a good take uh
on the on the Strategic crypto Reserve yesterday that I want to get your feedback on uh Trump is known for coming out of the gate hot with a very aggressive proposal Canada is going to be the 51st state and then when All Things Are set are done it's like a 5%
tariff or something like that and and so the the idea here was hey maybe the cardano thing is is this opening Salvo of craziness that winds up just being pure Bitcoin Reserve do you think that's strategically 4D chess possible I know you're still against it even if it lands
there but is it possible that that's what's Happening Here Yeah certainly I mean the thing is I kind of like disagree with the premise of the question though like everybody says this is an amazing negotiation tactic but like I make deals for living right this
is what I do if a Founder came to me they're like yeah you know we're raising a preed it's $100 million pre money yeah and then they expect to get negotiated down to like 50 million or something I'm like this person is clearly insane and
not like trustworthy and I don't want especially if they like a track record of doing just that and it's like very public I mean yeah look Trump he wrote he wrote the order deal he's great dealmaker whatever I still don't like the strategy
what about just like being a fair and honest broker you know like what about that yeah yeah that's totally fine yeah uh does Trump launch another crypto project while in office W are you uh are you or you think he's he's had enough so he's launched what four five in CL six
if you count October Milani oh yeah four since October right so there's World Liberty 5 there's Trump coin there's Milani coin there's the reserve which kind of is a project is there's probably something else that I'm forgetting sure nfts he has Trump nfts two editions
actually not just one edition to be clear cuz I know a lot of the holders the first edition of the Trump nft they're very upset at the second edition okay yeah so delution and the Trump nft every says mutable you know no no inflated Supply no inflation but when
you issue a whole new batch of course you're going to dilute the problem with Melania too I mean look if we extrapolate this it'll be four 5,000 Trump crypto projects by the end of his they're gr exponentially supply of Trump trump
crypto projects is growing exponentially he loves it uh more broadly where does crypto go from here it it's sort of it feels like a very interesting moment because it's never had more attention it's never had more users it's never had more adoption right even you know with
stable coins things like that yet the uh the Vibes are are bad right like uh it there's a and and the price action is not what you would expect out of the government saying you know we're going to start buying these these assets where does it go from here how are you
thinking about it as a as an investor I think markets are calling Trump's Bluff I actually don't think we're going to see a reserve we might see a stockpile I don't think we're going to see a reserve where this we're using government taxpayer funds regardless of how they're
accounting for whatever accounting tricks they use we're not going to see taxpayer funds used to buy crypto assets that's crazy okay that's not going to happen markets calling is Bluff also you know risk markets are going crazy every war everyone's worried about the tariffs
and inflation and uh you know recessionary signals whatever that probably explains a lot of the selloff too uh Vibes are really bad in crypto because the big uh L1 launches of this year have not done well uh meme coins are dead as a category
um even though we have sort of like emerging regulatory Clarity around it like the retail bid's just not there I think retail got hosed one too many times yeah so they're just not willing to do that they don't want to buy the you know 30 billion fdv hot new L1 that
Andre put $400 million into right nobody wants to do that okay there's no ultimate buyer there just VC's buying from other VCS now with a lot of these launches so in terms of liquid tokens like everyone's down bad the cycle didn't happen Bitcoin did well nothing
else happened there was no alt season right so the framework people have this mental framework that's wrong that Cycles have to happen in a certain way and they happen every four years and it plays out like this it didn't happen like that um in terms of like actual
usage of blockchains like it couldn't be better stable coins are taking over all of ftech all of global Finance all banking remittances B2B uh you you know International Trade settlement like my corner of the world little stable coin Corner we couldn't be
happier but most people in crypto don't care about that uh the coins matter and uh the coins might be dead for a generation here so yeah how are you thinking about net new stable coin Investments where are the opportunities obviously uh anywhere that money you know Fiat moves today is
an opportunity for Stables uh but there's now been a bunch of teams sort of tackling you know these various areas for a while are you making a lot of net new kind of pure stable coin bets or are you kind of letting your bets uh ride yeah I have wires going out for two new
stable coin related deals this week um so we're at 19 now in our portfolio I believe uh I if you if you look at the stable coin stack I don't know how exciting this is but uh you know there's the issuers then there's like the infrastructure like the intermediaries
like the B2B stable coin startups then you have like consumer uh which are like fex built on Stables um the issue game is like immensely competitive and it's the domain of Banks and consorti now so like and also basically no one's ever
created a new stable coin issuer from scratch done well except for probably Athena I mean tether and circle dominate so that one's very hard the B stable coin payments like the PSP stable coin based PSP thing immensely commoditized there's like 100 new Bridges right
everybody wants to be the next Bridge uh very very competitive very hard going to be thin margin um I'm looking at um you know weird stuff like um you know the banking layer itself like uh you know how do you incorporate uh stable coins into the core banking
infrastructure um we're still looking at Regional fex that have a stable coin angle like that's very interesting to me but so you're looking for modes like that would be more of like maybe a regulatory driven mode or or local network effect something like that um
but yeah I think just like tossing checks into the next bridge that that's probably going to be a losing strategy is is trafi even trying to move to stable coins in a meaningful way like in AI you know we see yeah chat GPT is dominant but there's Gemini and and
copilot from Microsoft and every hyperscaler has their products baked in is Western Union thinking about working on this or is it just you know just completely the train just passing them by because it's more complex from the regulatory perspective I would say the
major fintex non-bank fintex are very usted they're looking at making Acquisitions sure the remitters are either being disrupted by stable coin remitters or building their own so for sure that's happening there the big credit cards like visa and M MasterCard are pretty
active like the big Global Payments networks uh are I would say all looking at it the last Bastion those Banks the domestic Banks foreign banks are actually doing a lot of stable coin stuff depending like look at so genen or um Standard Chartered uh tons and tons
of stable coin stuff the domestic banks have PTSD from what happened over the last two years with choke point they are very afraid um I think many of them would like to me in the business of issuing a stable coin or being a service provider
for stable coin being the first mile um that's going to take a lot longer they're they're still afraid that the FED is going to destroy them if they someone just think about stable coins is it shifting from like regulatory Arbitrage to more just like I don't know
like yeah yeah whatever the inverse of fear like boldness courage Arbitrage like if you're if you're courageous There's an opportunity right now I think so I think so that's good that feels good still a regar actually I mean yeah that's why people say rarb to mean crime
like I don't see it that way you know um a lot of like fintech thought leaders on Twitter will say that like oh you're just doing rarb like you're just a criminal yeah I mean stable coin there will be questions asked of how stable coins work from a kyc and surveillance
perspective that's actually not settled that's a big Grace Swan hang of the industry people don't really talk about much grace Swan never heard that term before I like that it's like a Black Swan but some of us know about it it's a known it's a Known Unknown not an not an
unknown unnown got it yeah cool like that uh what other grce swans are out there yeah gray Swan give me your top five grce Swans in crypto or just in general yeah in general uh I only know about crypto so I'm G to limit my okay that's fine tether is the top gry swan
in Krypto uh some kind of can you explain that we we have some crypto investors and entrepreneurs in the audience but I would say it's not the the average so why is tether so sketchy I know the answer but I'll let you kind of explain ah yes uh I mean you know
they made they did some like let's say light accounting fraud in in the past uh you know they were hacked for $850 million and then they uh or bitfinex was or was it bitfinex or tether anyway they co-mingled their balance sheets there's like a weird ersat promisory note alone
type thing um I mean look they're just an offshore dollar that serves people that want dollars on the blockchain in a kind of lightly surveilled way outside of the Contours of the US banking system so of course they're going to be used by
a lot of insalubrious people that's that was always going to happen and uh you know so the Wall Street journals is always going to be dig digging up examples of kind of nasty criminal use and there's only so much activity they can flag and freeze so that's just that's really it uh
obviously the reserves have been questionable in the past I think they're fine now but uh you fine because even if they got hacked for 850 million they just make so much money that presumably they would be able to cover the hole in the balance sheet is that the idea well
that they could do today yeah I mean the reason the hack was they were forced into it because no US Bank would really serve them so they had to use these sketchy Banks and one of them scammed them basically so like the sketchiness it like the fact that
they've been sketchy is also kind of a function of the fact that the doj is like chasing them around yeah yeah because they're like forced to use some of the worst intermediaries on the planet if that makes sense yeah now they've been able to legitimate themselves now they have caner
Fitzgerald they hold all the treasuries like that's probably fine but in the past that's that's like the thing that people don't understand about tether the reason that they looked sketchy sketchy and they like wouldn't disclose what banks are using whatever they were
untransparent was kind of because they were playing this cat and mouse game with the US government that makes sense any other Grace wans well if coinbase's custody setup gets hacked or anything happens they custody hundreds of billions they
were really the main custodian for all the ETFs that would be like absolutely catastrophic for the industry I don't expect it to happen but that's that'd be bad yeah is there I'm curious if you're looking at businesses uh there seems like some of the biggest opportunities in crypto
outside of stable coins are just solving uh like the security problem right and the and the the lack of you know once funds are onchain they can move around instantly right you know we saw that uh with um what's the firm that L that got hacked for 1.4
billion two weeks ago by bit we saw that by bit right there's not a lot of recourse there um is there opportunities around security and the sort of broader sort of like fat finger issue we talked about this you know yesterday in the context of City Bank you know
accidentally uh sending you know they're constantly uh sending money around sort of not actually sending dollars but like these dollars are sort of appearing in in client accounts uh are are you looking at opportunities uh where software and can kind of like solve for
that or is that just going to be kind of a everpresent sort of risk in the industry yeah so first of all yes cyber is actually one of our biggest investment themes on a go forward basis so we we think that we've really underinvested in like Security in the
crypto space second of all what I think we should do is take crypto away from being a real-time gross settlement Network or like a bearer asset a digital Bearer asset and then make it more like the way that traditional Finance works and I know like people like Matt LaVine
are going to like make fun of me for saying that like oh you're just rebuilding ntional Finance from scratch y my answer to that is yes that's exactly what we're doing okay but instead of working with like fax machines or whatever and like weird file
transfer protocols that predate the internet we're going to do it on a better substrate and we're going to introduce this amazing thing called deferred settlement where you don't settle the payment instantly and in so doing you obtain scalability and you
obtain recourse and so if we're able to create like pull payments as supposed to push uh you know all crypto payments are push that's solves a lot of this problem if we create a messaging layer alongside the settlement layer uh you know like
that's what Swift is to wires right it's the messaging layer to the settlement layer yep you know all of these structures that are to like make traditional payments work and be safe and have recourse uh they just don't exist in crypto it's it's so weird like if you
were to examine the crypto Market from first principles you be like this is garbage nonsense I don't know how anybody uses it I don't know how anybody cross Set uh so yeah it's just a matter of making it more like traditional payments and finance so that's the next
chapter here yeah I mean I I don't think it takes away from uh you know we built an alternative to traditional Financial rails and we did it in you know I say the the collective Wei we did it in 15 years and it's moving hundreds of billions of dollars around the world and
uh it's showing a lot of potential and I think it's totally I think your point of view uh and and share this view is it's okay if we're just sort of uh making a better version of of the sort of the Legacy systems that are more internet native so I love that point of view um
uh do you have anything else John this great to have you we'd love to have you as our resident uh uh uh [Music] cryptographer I don't actually know any cryptography but well it sounds Coy and that's what this show is about cryptographer sounds like we're going to
have him on the show to like people's passwords which would be a fun segment yeah just don't ask me to explain a CK proof I can't do that I'm sorry it's impossible no one can actually did any of that did that dark Forest game go anywhere people were pretty hyped on
that for a while uh was that like a paradigm thing I I don't know I I it was like a couple years ago uh it was ZK proof powered uh like multiplayer online game and the and the map like the fog of war is cryptographically sealed so I can we can both run open source
installations we know we're not hacking it was kind of a cool idea in general crypto rule thumb if you ask me did that crypto game go somewhere the answer is no and that's true 100% of the time it's never not been true yeah so there there's the answer yeah what's
interesting is that uh I mean did uh what was the thing you were talking about with gpt2 AI dungeon yeah yeah I I haven't seen like we have GPT 4.5 now and I'm still not seeing like dungeon games AI generated games taking off I see a lot of demos of people building
games with Claude code for example or cursor but I don't see a lot of people uh saying like this game is completely AI generated and it's a mobile game and we're printing millions of dollars and it's working it's like a business um it
seems Seems like somebody should have run with that or maybe they have and I just I'm not aware of it I don't know if you've seen anything like that I think AI dungeon was popular because people could people could just like jailbreak the game and then just use it as a
conventional while I'm pre- chat gbt but now you can just use that's why was so magical interesting yeah um yeah maybe this is the new Benchmark like can you make a good game with AI Soup To Nuts like that's what uh levels did right have you guys played his have you played
it yeah yeah I've i' I've spent like a weird amount of time playing you play a lot that's great so there's a there's a pmf or die blimp ad in there uh oh you guys sponsoring it pmf or die has a has like a blimp in the game I think they did some corrupt
bargain or something and they did I think Patty Patty uh one of the players was so excited that he just said I'm paying for this out of pocket oh W that's great very cool well I think this answers your question you can make a game with AI yeah it's just a it's a
horrible like flash game from 2000s but it's hey you're playing it it's got your attention yeah you're I know they got me it's a Skinner box you can make a Skinner box that's he's a whale on on the uh on the Peter on the Peter game on the levels iio flying flight simulator
that's great terrible game but it's fun you guys should get on there I will we'll see you in we'll see you in the air next time we're on we'll all be playing at the same time see see you in the Met Earth yeah see you later thank you for coming on Nick it's great take
care guys bye bye talk soon it's a lot of fun apparently levels is up to 58k Mr in about 14 days ripping this thing according to hes in the chat that's pretty good it's it's funny because he has enough of an audience now that he can almost release anything and hit
metrics like that great it is sort of potentially warping uh the the actual pmf um who knows though uh do we got a PO couple of posts we can run through before well I mean we're inviting a seoa investor on and you know Sequoia is an investor in ramp so let's do a ramp ad
there we go time is money save both easy to use corporate cards bill payments account and a whole lot more all in one place go to ramp.com to get started uh and uh what oh oh uh there was news about cor weave they're buying weights and biases for 1.7 billion did you see
this deal I saw that have you SE weights and biases before I've uh I used to watch these videos called two-minute papers and they had this very interesting like Professor who would have all these like funny turns of phrases and he would uh he would always
say hold on to your papers whenever he saw some like AI breakthrough and he was like and he had a bunch of other like funny funny like little phrases that everyone would like he had a great community of like uh just uh giving you updates on like what the latest AI
papers are uh and and weights and biases was like his main sponsor and so that's where I know about them uh so weights and biases they paid tools start for $50 per month for professionals have attracted data scientists from various Industries including Pharmaceuticals and
Medical Imaging firms it's more than 900,000 users hail from companies including open Ai seens and sales and so uh Cory is expected to IPO at a public market valuation north of 20 billion um but it's concentrated customer base has prompted investors to
debate how long the company's growth will continue weights and biases competes with major Cloud providers and other AI focused firms such as data bricks hugging face which sells similar tools to developers weights and biases are common terms in the AI field uh the
revenue the information couldn't figure out the revenue but they raised at a billion doll valuation in 21 and then uh 1.25 billion slight up round in 2023 company started in 2018 and previously raised 250 million in funding from investors including kotto
management Insight partners and felices I can never pronounce that Ficus is that what it is yeah I don't know I think you got it at the end well uh let's see about Sean let's see it's 12:31 I'm here I'm here what's up boys amazing welcome to the show I'm
scared to pop on with you guys you guys are uh Wittier Wittier than me and that's unfair territory well oh I love the T-shirt Counter-Strike do it I fig this one I I I what what what versions of Counterstrike did you play throughout the years so I I was unbelievably
hardcore and I mean I played early but primarily 1.0 to 1.6 1.0 I started in 1.3 I was 1.6 played multiple Cal invite teams Cal baby me too did you yeah yeah yeah God's exiled Angels gxa gxa dude I don't remember and then uh e the elite Knights for a while I was on a bunch of
these teams I remember I remember dek I was I mean I'm probably older than you yeah I was on a team called HTP high tech performance one called neg did you ever go to the CPL of course I I could never go I could never convince my parents to go cuz I was too young
they're like what are you doing lugging a CRT monitor out to Texas no way exactly in the Volvo station wagon yeah yeah exactly I and I would go to a lot of tournaments in SoCal is the best oh yeah yeah I remember going to a Best Buy a tournament at Best Buy and we played
against this team called uh what was it it was these guys made one of the uh the protocols before 3G there were there were two different Wireless protocols I forget what they were called I mean so I mean I think I can't remember the timing
like maybe one G was primarily tdma like the original time division multiplexing then that's right was primarily like CDMA CDMA yeah so we so we go up against these guys and their and their clan tag is CDMA and we're like why what what
does that stand for like it is it like you know counter cool guys you know like everyone everyone's name usually is like something a reference to like the game and name was like was like this reference to this Wireless protocol and and we were like why did you name it
that and they like well we're the guys that invented that and like way and like we're the founders of the company or something that did something and they absolutely destroyed us they were really really good yeah yeah exactly they were like Qualcomm Engineers basically uh and
so they destroy us and and then they felt so bad because we were like 13 years old that they gave us the prizes which was great so there was when I first started playing the best team in the world was called Tso and they were based in Seattle yeah um and they
were like I I never met them because I was a little kid at the time but they were described as like yeah Telecom Engineers too but they were more on I think more on the infrastructure side like they like they would actually build the early fiber connections and stuff
and so I mean that was how you got an advantage back then like if you could figure out a better internet connection you would have yeah you would have an advantage every time you played and so I got an F in Algebra 2 in high school but I but I got a networking education
through Counterstrike yeah fantastic uh well I don't know are we live guys we we are live we've been live anyway Sean Maguire's here partner it's yeah we're live I'm so glad we didn't have like a Zuck moment Zuck was on Rogan and he was
like pretend he was laring like he does like bow hunting and hunting and like Joe Rogan started kind of pressing him on it like John's asking you like oh you got the Counterstrike t-shirt and like you actually could back it up but like like uh of course zck like actually
didn't have much substance behind it I'm sure he had it but no we live uh super excited to chat there's been so many SpaceX Elon companies that's what we want to dive into today yeah first of all uh we are a show built on X uh take a little Victory lap on X you invested
in take private $800 million guys and no Victory laps until it's exited in liquid but there has been some saving of democracy that's been happening no in the bigger the bigger thing is you know I think around 6 months ago there had been uh you know Legacy Media like the
Washington Post basically reporting coming out and saying Sequoia capital and listing out all the investors have lost $20 billion on this investment now that obviously wasn't you know true it wasn't uh it had been I think marked down internally and some of the other
asset managers had but it was more so to kind of repic it for employees and uh you know it's very clear that the in in many ways uh there's there's two things happening right now one uh people that used to be active on Twitter that are less active
now they message us and they say like I'm I'm sh social yeah yeah um but I I think the app has never been better yeah and it's very clear that it's here to stay uh so I just wanted to give you a little bit of credit there uh you never lost conviction I mean no on on that I I
never lost conviction a lot of people did um and I think that I people people are very susceptible to believing what they're told and I think if you believed what you were told by the media then you could understand oh it's dead but if you used your own eyes it's like
the whole thing is operating no major outages Elon at the helm product Innovation happening and like lowering costs I I I honestly found that to be one of the more interesting like cultural Mass hysteria moments that I've lived through uh and that was just so
easily disprovable in like a short period of time but you know yeah teach their own I'm glad it I'm glad you only had to wait a couple years it would have been more excruciating if it if it had taken uh much longer to get kind of repriced um what uh there there's so
many different things we want to run through today I'd love to get your you know and we run through your guys style like how are you guys so well dressed well we had to come out the gates we we were calling ourselves you know uh we tech tech bro was sort of
derogatory we were the technology Brothers we need to kind of reclaim it elevate it and part of that was was dressing uh dressing nice but you've had your sort of uh Hands Across the whole sort of uh Elon Empire obviously have a relationship uh with Elon I kind of want
to go Company by company and just kind of get your take on them uh right now I think Tesla's very interesting it's uh it's not a pure play humanoid bet but it does feel like humanoids are the next platform for Tesla especially when you
look at uh sort of gen you know generalized EV sales uh for Tesla H have not been performing great uh talk about kind of the humanoid Market I'm sure you've gotten pitched by a lot of these uh companies I'm guessing you're still uh you know a Tesla shareholder but you
know talk to us about that category because it seems to have everybody's attention for good reason so let me first of all I work at a register investment advisor none of it is cial advice this is my own also not the opinion of SEO Capital
this is all me as a dumb individual sham Maguire a poster nonsense um and also we're not investors in Tesla just given the timing and that it was public we're you know major investors in SpaceX investors in boring company investors in X investors in XI um and I love all
those companies and very optimistic about all of them on humanoids uh um look I I strongly believe it's going to be a real thing and a giant thing I think the only question is like the time frame for when this happens I don't think it's a it's an if I think it's a when um I really
struggle to make a forecast there BEC in part because there's such a complex supply chain and there's like there's just so so many different subcomponents from you know my partner Constantine has spent a lot of time thinking about rare earth metals and like
getting uh you know different rare Earths for making magnets all the way to um you know like scaling manufacturing to you know like every just every individual sensor every actuator like I really just don't know the scaling of it but I was at the Tesla Optimus event I can't
remember when maybe you know months ago or whatever and it was more impressive in person than I think people realized online like you I was just standing there in the street is at some studio in LA and you're just standing there and all of a sudden like 20 robots
started walking out from behind a curtain like right next to me and I think it's one thing when you just like see a robot video it's another thing when you see like a tethered robot demo to see 20 untethered robots walking in like a progression and I I genuinely
couldn't tell at first if it was human in a costume or a robot and you I had to like figure out how do I verify because it's about the same size and they were maybe 20 feet away when they first started coming out and so I was like scanning down the whole thing and then
you look at the waist and the waist was very narrow it's like holy crap you know that really is a robot just walking and they were out there for for about two hours interacting with the crowd and um like even if there was like some
human control for safety reasons and all of that the vast majority of actuation and all that was autonomous you know meaning like the whenever you have multiple actuators you get feedback loops of you know all these things and like you can't no human can can like put
out handle all the like feedback loops intuitively and so you need controllers that smooth out all the noise and like can map whether it's like a computer brain that's telling you the goal or a human telling you the goal mapping it's it's almost like with computers how you
take raw electronic signal in transistors and then they there's like you have very very lowlevel programming um you know and then you have you know you have like you have assembly you have you know firmware you have operating system you have you know higher level
systems you have all these things up the que it's like everything other than maybe the final operating system level was everything else was basically autonomous and it was just it was insanely impressive and so it's just it really gave me the sense of the stuff
that's coming soon I just don't know exactly when and I look I think that for Elon he is playing all the different angles of AI from you know Foundation model with xai to to robots which I think will be like the ultimate embodiment of like the
combination of if you have AGI plus a robot that's what lets you do kind of un unlimited amounts of physical work in the real world the foundation model lets you do kind of un unlimited just knowledge work and then you know neuralink lets you merge with the AI if
we actually get like AGI that's way smarter than us it's maybe existential for humans but if you you know if we have neuralink we can merge merge uh just put the AGI in your own head and now you're you know an enhanced human um you know we're back to playing
Counterstrike me and you are going to be piloting Tesla Optimus robots against each other shooting each other CH like no human can beat the chess systems but it's still fun to play chess you still have Magnus yeah up you know Heroku or whatever his name is um you know we're
still gonna be tearing each other up at the land and I think we'll be doing more of that with AGI do you think it's a good time for me to put a deposit down on a Tesla Roadster I think I think think Elon might deliver it I think we've been waiting but all the pieces
are falling into place I think it's going to be an epic car when it drops what do you think I I actually have to be careful around any public company stuff no comments on I want know the car yeah let's so let's let's talk uh uh some some some of your uh recent
Investments so uh talk to us about reflect orbital that round got announced last year very exciting company uh uh I would love to hear it in your words and then a little bit more about your investment thesis uh and I'll stop there no I love it um so for anyone that
doesn't know reflect orbital is an absolutely insane idea where they want to eventually have a constellation of satellites that refle reflect sunlight back down to the Earth with kind of two phases of the business the first phase is lighting applications and that's
everything from like imagine in the LA fires um you know firefighters operating at night couldn't see anything it's it's genuinely really difficult to fight a fire at night and me able just like put sunlight and let these guys operate almost in daylight um you know say in a
disaster when there's a hurricane like the hurricane in North Carolina or you know anywhere there there's lighting or like let's say you're doing a giant construction project um somewhere like away from a city that the lighting costs on these projects are
insane um and so basically let you extend the hours especially like in Northern latitudes let you uh actually like do construction more year round um but the longer term Market is energy and you know I'll come back to like the thesis and why I was willing to make
this investment in a second but basically the like the real the crazy big business someday is extending the useful time of solar power plants by a few hours a day um you know so depends on the latitude and time of year but like a solar farm will you know
operate for with like decent efficiency call it 10 hours a day on average something like that and by having this reflector ring that basically lives kind of the satellite is a ring that basic the the constellations are a ring that basically only lives at the interface of
Sunrise and sunet all the time like just the the light dark boundary and you can basically extend the very high efficiency time of a solar farm by you know call it two hours before sunrise and two hours after sunset with this constellation um so anyways insane
idea I I I have been involved in the space Community for I mean officially for over 15 years unofficially for most of my life I've been obsessed with space since I was a little kid um like literally obsessed I can show you guys a sick ass video from I think like sixth
grade where I did this thing called Satellite amateur radio experiment sarx which was this NASA program uh sick retro 90s video where we uh learned ham radio and talked to astronauts aboard one of the shuttle missions you know using ham radio got to ask a question in
sixth grade it was pretty pretty fun but I've been obsess of space my whole life I've been skeptical on basically every space business model I've ever seen um the reflect guys there's a few things one I just profoundly believe that the launch costs launch Cost Plus a bit like
Mass to orbit over the next five years or so is gonna increase the costs are going to drop dramatically and mass orbits going to increase dramatically basically guaranteed SpaceX is driving this if you look at the mass to orbit curves from
the last five years like it's it's incredible how much more mass orbit we're doing every year because of SpaceX the cost hasn't dropped as much but I am very confident it will with Starship and so we're getting to the point where like you don't want to start making
space Investments once all of that has already happened like then you're late and it's competitive you want to be a little bit ahead of the curve so I think we're at a point right now where for like the right businesses it makes sense to be building them right now so you can
actually like be alive and be scaling a little bit as we hit like you you know you can ride with the cost and mass curve for what it's worth I passed on vaa early on obviously you guys are very close to Delan yeah I love Delan I think I should have done the
investment the like and and I'll tie it to reflect in a second but the with vaa in my opinion in the like seed pitch I think they had the wrong micro idea but the right macro idea and it was my mistake for wanting both the right micro and the
right macro and to unpack that like with Delian the first product that they wanted to do was ZB land so like this Ultra Pure um you know fiber optic cables that are really good for very long range Communications to me I just don't think that's a very important product and I
actually think that with starlink we're going to need very little like ZB land in the future almost all long range data movement in the future is going to be done via starlink in my opinion I think starlink has like 10x Plus cost Advantage per gigabyte for
Long Hall data transmission compared to say putting a fiber optic cable line under the ocean and that's where you actually get a benefit from something like ZB land and so anyways Dyan and I love to argue with each other super smart guy that's the one where like I
had been so involved in space for so long that I already had a thesis on ZB land and already thought it was like irrelevant with star link and kind of passed because of that but the Mac I think was 100% right of just like we at the right time in space and just
building an a cracked team of space engineers that know how to get things in and out of space like I think that will be very valuable and I I think it's like hard to imagine what varda's Revenue driving product will be in five to 10 years but I think they
will have a successful product I just can't tell you what it will be so anyways back to reflect like I've met with so many space teams in the past and these guys just they're just insanely good and they know they and they have like a real even
though it's such a crazy idea I think that the best businesses in history oftentimes sounded like insane ideas early on um you know a SEO was seed investor in Airbnb the like hearing the stories of how people thought about Airbnb in the beginning like it's crazy people were
like I would never share my you know house with a stranger they're going to trash it they're gonna like you know use all my toilet paper whatever people's issues were um but Lo behold like it worked and seoa we you know made a huge amount of money from this and they
couldn't even raise a seed round um you know if you look at SpaceX when Elon started it everyone thought he was insane like you're a internet entrepreneur is going to build a rocket company isn't there NASA for that um I just there's I think so many of the best
businesses in history really sounded insane but for reflect I think I think they have if you really go through the details and I think very few people have actually gone through the details like they have unbelievable macro Tailwind so one is like just dropping launch costs
second is I don't think you could have done this business 10 years ago even if the launch was there because we hadn't yet built enough like solar power plants on the ground um something that's nice for reflect is they don't we don't have to
build any of the ground infrastructure zero um there's already you know C 10,000 solar power plants we get to leverage that anyways you go is the idea that uh reflect would take basically a REV share on the incremental sort of energy generated that they are directing
at these farms and is that why uh yeah exactly right so basically um like for one of these solar Farms There is almost no additional operating expense to operate for these extra call it four hours throughout the day it's it's literally just like Silicon
photovoltaics sitting on the ground that is otherwise just not generating power um and so it's like either they get no revenue from this or if they work with us then they get revenue and it has it actually has very profound ramifications to the kind
of financial engineering of running a solar farm a lot of these utility style infrastructure projects you know you basically juice it where the con you use debt to build the solar farm and your revenue is we call it the first 15 years is just paying off the like all the debt
you have and then years 15 to 30 is like a lot of profit but it takes a long time to get to the point where you're you know you've paid off a lot of the loan and it's generating lots of profit if you can increase the useful Time by 40% whatever of a solar farm that's all
profit upfront it's insanely valuable and so it's like an incredibly easy sale so one of these things like if you build it they will come and they will come in droves um and but the the point is this company would have made zero sense before there were 10,000 solar Farms on
the ground because building each of we couldn't build those ourselves it'd be too expensive but now that they're there we have just this very clear value prop and and like I I I think these guys actually know how to build the satellites needed and anyways
it's an easy idea to on and it may not work you know like the but I believe in taking risk and I think these guys what I'm excited for I want to sit outside at night have set up our podcast set you come over and the sun just appears and we we do the uh you know the
first podcast uh under space sunlight um question for you I think uh you know it's easy to see why SpaceX is a multi hundred billion dollar company uh in many ways that feels cheap at times being the sort of toll road to space uh at the same time uh how do you advis is
there sort of any type of fear among Founders that are building uh you know space fairing startups that what if SpaceX does this right so so you're benefiting from the sort of decreased launch costs but at the same time there's this risk that somebody that uh
you know can can has even more access to the to space can can sort of enter that market how do you think about that risk well I think that I think that Elon has probably the biggest Target on his back from a like regulatory perspective of anyone and there's no one I'm aware of who
takes like antitrust and all that more seriously than him and like I I think that those guys are G to like they're just building the best launch platform in the world and they probably will launch some other business like obviously they launch starlink
but I I think there's also a fixation on on Mars that's sort of helpful right it's like it's actually great that the the you know attention is going there uh and and there's plenty of opportunity in sort of low earth orbit for the rest of
us yeah so I think that's a great Point um look I think I think SpaceX is deeply incentivized to have a giant ecosystem of lots of great independent companies in space and I think especially in Leo and yeah you're right I mean I think the focus is going to be Mars in addition to
Starling which is already you know Opera rating and scaling and om Mars I'll just say I was I mean I've always thought just from an intellectual perspective it's the coolest thing ever to build a city on Mars but from like when I wrote my
initial SpaceX investment memo you know was like yeah I don't really understand Mars from a business perspective but but like I think this is gonna be such a great company yeah like irrespective of it that it's fine like it's a side quest yeah from business perspective I'm now
at the point where I actually I I I really believe that Mars is going to be like one of the biggest profit generating Endeavors in history and not necessarily not like from the direct like building a city on Mars but from all the indirect things and I'm
sure you guys remember all the myths about or you know all the stories about NASA in the 60s and 70s all the spin-off technology microwaves materials and all these different things um I think this spin-off Technologies from having a clear goal of building a self-sustaining
City on Mars which will have about a million people or whatever in 30 years the spin-off techn is going to lead to it's basically probably GNA have to make sure that nuclear power plants in a box get built that are very safe and reliable and you can transport in space
going to have to perfect vertical farming you know GNA have to perfect surgical robots going to have to per you know or just have Optimus do it but you know it's there's so many things going to have to make Fabs that you can like assemble in space
that can remake whatever you know Leading Edge silicon you need gonna have to do mining I I just I think all the second order effect spin out businesses that are going to come from this are going to be outrageously valuable and there's something about when you have a
a clear goal and all the constraints of like being in Mars One it lets you recruit the best people in the world because it's such a cool project and the best people will do more than the SEC like a level below and the second is just having all these constraints forces
you to come up with Solutions you would never come up with otherwise and those are oftentimes better Solutions um so anyways I think we're gonna I think the company is g to rip we have one more minute I want some advice for new entrepreneurs uh new grad wants to work
with you wants to work with Sequoia wants to start a company at some point what are you telling them you had a little bit of an uh uncommon path PhD DARPA things what do you what do you recommend for new grads going into entrepreneurship in the age of AI in the
age of Mars colonization I I mean look I it's not what people want to hear but I think that if you don't have a very very clear idea don't don't start a company just for the sake of starting a company go join an go join SpaceX or Jo go join X
or Tesla or or you know some go join vaa go join some amazing company for a year or two I strong like I strongly think that's better than just like trying to start a company for the sake of starting a company um and then when you do like when you do have an idea for a company
don't listen to what other people tell you even even me even like VCS you got to you got to kind of think for yourself and a lot of the best ideas seem crazy question place to end great place to uh you are a new Resident space brother it's been great having you
fantastic nothing makes me happen than being your guys brother uh music my ears peace welcome welcome to the Brotherhood amazing thanks foring we're gonna play Counter Strike someday we should we should let's have a l party mid pod yeah yeah will be have a good one thanks
for coming on thanks for having you fantastic uh I got a call right now yeah we got to wrap up this was a fantastic show thank you for watching thank you for listening tune in tomorrow we're doing more call-ins we're going to do more timeline more deep Dives we're
just doing more of everything that's the theme of this year more and better and more and better and more and better and more and better Moss uh it's a live Moss lifestyle it's a live Moss lifestyle yes thank you everyone thanks everyone talk to you soon