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>> Today is Thursday, July 24th, 2025.
5:01
We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome, >> the Temple of Technology, the Fort the Capital of Capital. It's Google earnings. Earnings season, baby.
5:09
Big tech earnings are happening now.
5:12
Google reported earnings last night.
5:15
Ben Thompson has a breakdown.
5:17
It's in the It's in the Wall Street Journal.
5:19
There's a bunch of good posts.
5:21
We're going to break it down for you today.
5:22
So, uh, Bugo Capital Bloke says, "Many queries that moved to OpenAI will move back to Google.
5:28
AI overviews are good now. Less hallucinations." I've experienced that.
5:34
Uh, for some of those quick answers, Google's still really fast.
5:36
Uh, two, uh, can move to AI mode for follow-up.
5:39
I haven't really played around with that yet.
5:42
Have you bounced into AI mode very much? >> Of course, you have.
5:45
Of course, in Google searches, you've actually done that. >> Yeah. >> Oh, interesting.
5:49
>> It and and the main thing missing from Google search and the reason why chat GBT has been so good is you can search something, get information, and then chat with that information. >> Yeah.
5:58
>> And before typical, you know, you're going down a a search query, you click onto a page, you can't really chat with the page or you could maybe search for information on that page.
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So >> that was the key innovation. >> Yeah.
6:12
Uh type into toolbar v open new app.
6:15
That is a huge advantage.
6:15
A lot of people have, you know, the primary app on their laptop is that's open is a Chrome browser for most people.
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And so, uh, you know, command T and you're already searching.
6:25
That is a huge advantage.
6:27
And that's probably why Chad GPT is starting and open thinking about a browser because if they can replace that, they can, um, get way more queries into Chad GPT for Google's models are better.
6:36
They search the web better.
6:36
I don't know that their models are that much better.
6:39
I haven't noticed that specifically.
6:41
I know that they're better on like some benchmarks and they're certainly dominating on that paro frontier graph that Swix puts out.
6:46
Um it feels pretty comparable to me.
6:50
Uh but yeah, it makes sense that they would search the web better because they have you know what two three decades it's it's they they try to obuscate it but to my knowledge chat GPT will leverage Google search.
7:03
It does feel like that's kind of happening.
7:06
And then uh Cloudflare just gave them a massive structural advantage.
7:10
That of course is because Cloudflare by default now they used to have like the big easy button for blocking all AI crawlers.
7:19
Previously, if you had a website and you didn't want to be crawled, you could put that in your robots do robots. txt.
7:23
So whatever your website was. txt. Yeah.
7:29
>> Uh crawlers should go there and out of the goodness of their own heart, they would respect that.
7:33
But it was not legally binding.
7:34
So you could still scrape a website legally if you were using it in a fair use context, transforming it like for search.
7:41
Now Google famously did respect robots. txt.
7:47
They did for a long time. They still do.
7:49
But now Cloudflare has disabled AI crawlers by default.
7:52
The problem is is that Google has two crawlers.
7:55
They have Googlebot which crawls for Google search which you definitely want to be in for sure for the SEO.
8:01
who doesn't want to be findable in Google.
8:04
findable in Google. Uh and then they have Gemini crawler, separate crawler that you can disable with Cloudflare, but the there is still AI sort of crawling happening with the Google bot because if the Google bot goes and and
8:18
crawls all your web pages for search that your data will show up in the in the uh AI overviews, which feels like they're not maybe training the foundation model, but they're still summarizing it and they still might be um they still might be reducing traffic. Now, for publishers and content
8:31
Now, for publishers and content creators, that's harmful potentially, but for e-commerce people, it's great.
8:38
So, >> there was a post on r/SEO 5 days ago titled, "Chat GPT plus is secretly Google powered.
8:46
My hidden page experiment proves it."
8:48
So, he created a dummy page index only in Google and got it to show up in chat GBT plus results within hours.
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The same query in Bing, Duck. Go, etc.
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still returned zero results. >> Interesting.
9:02
>> And uh he did this by coining a nonsense word, put it on a page that was not linked anywhere, forced Google to index it via the search console, >> and then asked ChatGBT Plus to define the term which he invented, and it quoted the hidden page verbatim. >> Interesting.
9:18
>> So yeah, I wonder what that relationship's like.
9:20
I mean, uh, OpenAI has, you know, I I I felt like they were always be there would always be some relationship with Microsoft because Bing has really solid search infrastructure.
9:32
Like for a while, people were saying like Bing has as robust as of a crawling infrastructure as Google.
9:36
Like they built the technology, they just weren't able to actually transform, you know, customer behavior to the degree that people would by default go to Bing.
9:43
They ran this big campaign, Bing it and go and all this.
9:47
And it never really happened.
9:49
But the tech was always good because they were they knew what to build and they went and built it.
9:52
They just couldn't change people's behaviors. Um so interesting.
9:56
I wonder if Google will be uh bringing out the sharp elbows anytime soon for OpenAI.
10:01
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10:10
Um so Tane, who's been on the show before says Sundar Pachai on Google Capex.
10:14
With this strong and growing demand for our cloud products and services, we are increasing our investment in capital expenditures in 2025 to approximately 85 billion and are excited by the opportunity ahead. We got to hit the gong.
10:27
>> Hit the gong for Sundar. Welld deserved. >> Sundar pitch AI.
10:34
>> He's pitching AI and he's pitching it.
10:36
He's pitching it successfully.
10:36
The the the Google earnings are staggering.
10:37
So, uh 14% jump in year-over-year revenue.
10:44
Uh guess their ARR their annualized uh revenue. >> Wow.
10:48
I don't even Oh, run >> their run rating 400 billion almost. >> Okay.
10:54
>> They did they put up 96.
10:54
4 billion in the second quarter.
10:57
Uh and said capex uh it's like it would be a lot if it was in millions. It's in billions.
11:02
Um they said that capex would increase 13% to 85 billion and that compares with 52 billion last year.
11:11
So that's a big big increase even above expectations.
11:14
Ben Thompson has a great analysis of this and is uh it came away from my reading pretty excited about it.
11:21
So uh Andrew Curran also has a post here says Sonar Pachai on the earnings call.
11:26
The growth in usage has been incredible.
11:27
At IO in May we announced that we processed 480 trillion monthly tokens across our surfaces.
11:35
So that's both AI search features and Google search AI mode Gemini also API stuff.
11:40
So overall tokens, we're gonna have Nikki Mula on the show later.
11:45
He's going to talk about token factories.
11:46
Um the demand for tokens is is immense.
11:49
And um and it's and it's really just weaving its way into all these different nooks and crannies.
11:54
It's certainly going mainstream.
11:56
If you just ask a friend who's not, you know, in the horse race of who's going to win, just a just a normal friend.
12:03
Uh look at let's look at your screen time.
12:05
How much time are you looking on Chachi PT?
12:06
You're going to see 10 minutes.
12:08
You're going to see 30 minutes a day.
12:10
>> This was buried not in the main post, but Andrew follows up and said he said there will be over 70 million user videos made with VO3.
12:15
Uh which is which is impressive, especially considering that they massively rate limit everyone.
12:22
You pay $500 a month and you get a a measly couple videos a day.
12:25
It's hard to actually >> somebody made a great made a great very cool intro uh video uh using V3.
12:33
>> So they've doubled tokens since May.
12:33
And then yeah, >> the more interesting uh thing here is that uh safe super intelligence Ilia's uh small $ 32 billion >> AI upstart is going to exclusively use Google Tpus. >> That's exciting.
12:51
>> That seems like a bombshell. >> Maybe.
12:52
I mean, you got to get big infrastructure somewhere and if everyone's optimizing against Nvidia, maybe there's maybe there's like uh slack capacity in TPUs.
13:02
I mean you certainly like if you are trying to bet on a hyperscaler to hit your horse too and you see that Google's increasing their capex pretty significantly to 85 billion like you you know that they are going to have like enough capacity to surface to to to service you to the tune of one gigawatt or something like that if you want to do some massive training run.
13:24
run. I do wonder how how compute constrained SSI is in the sense like like how much is Ilia feeling the scaling wall because for a long time it was scale is all you need just go bigger bigger bigger and that's certainly the
13:38
playbook that we've seen uh Sam Alman run with with the Stargate project and with the bringing in Masayoshi Sone bringing in Donald Trump and Crusoe and putting together this like team that can actually marshall half a quadrillion dollars is that right It's 500. No, no, No, no, half a trillion.
13:55
It's 500 billion they want to spend.
13:58
>> They haven't marshaled it yet, John. >> It's a lot of money.
14:01
>> Yeah, they're working on it.
14:01
It's it's half a trillion.
14:02
But but but uh SSI at least at least like the the the the rumors or the memes around it have been very much have been more focused on uh let's advance the research le and maybe that next phase of research is not purely compute bound.
14:19
It's not it's not purely hey we're in this scaling race.
14:23
we're going to build a bigger transformer.
14:24
That's that's honestly a little bit of what Elon's been doing is saying like we have the transformer architecture.
14:28
We're going to scale this up a ton and and where we are great is building a massive cluster, the Colossus, 100,000 uh GPUs.
14:34
We'll build it faster and we'll get it up to speed and we'll train it and in three months when most people would think it would take a year.
14:42
We haven't been seeing that from SSI.
14:44
SS SS we haven't seen, oh SSI has tenths with GPUs in it.
14:47
That that's their that's their edge.
14:49
their that's their edge. uh the the uh the edge with SSI as it's been pitched at least has always been foundational research progress just making making progress on on the underlying research that might be an elegant solution that increases the efficiency and you get a
15:05
better model with even less GPUs but if they need a ton Google will have them because they're investing more in capex more than ever before uh while talking while taking a question on agentic capabilities uh it sounds like Sundar said this when we built our series of 2.5 pro models models. It's the 5 pro models models.
15:19
It's the direction where we are investing the most.
15:22
That's definitely exciting progress including in the models we haven't fully released yet.
15:26
Long answer on agentic progress.
15:28
The good news here is that we are making robust progress.
15:31
We think we are at the frontier here.
15:31
He said that they he said they have projects running internally but now they are slow and expensive.
15:37
They see the potential and are making progress on both.
15:41
Um Gemini has a deep research product which I would call an agentic product.
15:46
Uh the question is are they going to try and match what chatbt launched with agent mode sooner than later?
15:54
Is there a security or a risk thing?
15:56
Google's been a little bit more hesitant to just throw stuff out in the wild, but they're moving very quickly.
16:01
And I think um they will probably be able to get something out.
16:04
There's certainly nothing on the capex or or model capability side that would stop them.
16:08
And Elon Musk just says, "Wow."
16:10
>> Well, Elon is uh playing the enemy of my enemy is my friend mode.
16:16
It's like I I love these guys. Yeah. >> Love to see it.
16:18
>> It's not a It's not a knockout dragout fight.
16:20
Um so, uh let's go over to Oh, this is interesting.
16:25
So, uh Moffett Nathansson Na uh Michael Nathansson who's been on Strateery a few times um in the Wall Street Journal was quoted uh what people worry about is just the math around search.
16:36
Isn't AI going to be negative to search?
16:38
And they went out of the way many times on the call to say that's not what we're seeing.
16:42
And so there's this big question on can can Google avoid disruption by integrating the new disruptive technology artificial intelligence in a way that doesn't destroy their core business, which is search ads.
16:58
They're putting up 80 billion in revenue a year on it.
17:03
>> My personal feeling is that uh Chrome specifically is just so unbelievably sticky. >> Yeah.
17:09
And as long as it takes the average person two two, you know, hitting hitting two buttons to get to the point where they can do any type of search, Google will continue to dominate because right now I can hit command T. Yep.
17:24
>> Search something quickly.
17:24
Yes, I'm sure I could update >> um the default like search to something else, but I haven't. I love the model.
17:33
>> There was a time when I bounced around.
17:34
I remember having Opera installed and Firefox installed for a while and then for the last decade it's just been >> I used to love there was a moment like probably five years ago that I was loving Safari.
17:44
It was just so snappy and fast and simple.
17:48
>> I believe it's also built on Chromium but yes but it's not a Google product.
17:51
So they so they could in theory reroute uh reroute.
17:56
>> Now Safari is not built on Chromium. >> Interesting.
17:59
>> Uses Apple's own WebKit rendering engine. >> Okay.
18:01
I do I do like So it's weird.
18:01
I use I use Safari on my phone and Chrome on my desktop which feels like it totally breaks the continuity, right?
18:09
Um but uh I've just I've just kind of stuck with that and it's been fine and I don't have like tabs that float in between.
18:17
They're kind of separate but it's fine.
18:19
Uh really quickly, this show is brought to you by Reream.
18:21
One stream 30 destinations multiream and reach your audience wherever they are. We love Reream.
18:27
You can sign up for free.
18:27
Um, so let's go over to uh Ben Thompson talking about Google earnings.
18:31
Um, he has said, "I've repeatedly laid out the theoretical case for why AI is potentially disruptive to Google."
18:38
And we asked him about this when he came on the show.
18:41
My question was like is there a world where where revenue and profit from from generative AI products is actually not as counterpositioned against Google in the sense that like if they had launched the Gemini app first and become the chat GPT.
18:57
They'd probably be seeing a drop in search volume but then also seeing revenue spike from an even more popular Gemini that's monetizing even better.
19:05
And and was it a question of them just like not being able to take that pill or was it more about like the risk and PR nervousness than >> The thing that Ben said that stood out to most the the most to me and I'll probably butcher it a little bit but he effectively was saying like >> it's really hard for companies to change who they are.
19:25
When you look at Google's mission statement to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, >> that is so deeply aligned with AI.
19:34
It's like what does chat GBT do?
19:36
Like organizes information >> and makes it useful, right?
19:40
Agents like chatbt agent is making that information >> useful. Yep.
19:46
>> Um and so it just feels like again like generative AI is like deeply aligned with the core mission >> and so it's easy to see, you know, them continuing to win here.
19:55
Yeah, I I I think the the problem is is like the like disruption comes when you create a product that is not as good but the financials are structurally different.
20:10
So the idea of like if AI disrupts like a law firm, you look at this product or even like I don't know what what's the classic example of of of disruption that people go through.
20:22
Um I don't know but like th this idea of like >> Yeah.
20:27
The big thing was innovator's dilemma, right? >> Yeah.
20:29
In the in the innovator's dilemma, the example is like a new product comes to market that does something 90% as well.
20:37
And uh and so it's like unacceptable to the people that are buying the current product, but then over time it gets better and better and better until it replaces the current product.
20:48
And so there is a world where if they had just changed the the Google search bar to just be like this is just an LLM now people would have been really really disappointed with that shift and they would have been like I want to go back and ripping that band-aid off to the tune of what $300 billion a year in in search revenue would be really painful.
21:09
So they had to take a more um a more iterative like stepwise improvements.
21:13
But it seems like they're doing well.
21:15
And Ben Thompson is kind of echoing this.
21:16
says uh once again and however I have to come to Google's defense.
21:20
All available metrics suggest that the company is doing quite well.
21:24
Indeed, I would go further.
21:24
You can make the case that the company's biggest mistake is not going harder.
21:27
Uh and so they flipped the switch on cloud, their infrastructure spending is through the roof as we mentioned.
21:34
Um uh so uh in in after the Q4 2024 earnings and their announcement that they would spending 75 billion on capex then uh Google Google cloud's revenue numbers disappointed but this was because um they didn't have enough GPUs and they were actually constrained.
21:53
So they they missed on topline like they didn't bring in enough revenue but their margins actually improved.
21:59
improved. And so what that means is that there was so much demand they had pricing power and they could say no we're not giving you any discounts because everyone wants these GPUs right now or the TPUs they want our infrastructure so we don't need to we don't need to sell them at a discount
22:13
and so their margins were really good and what that revealed was that they were they were capacity constrained and that justifies the bigger capex spend that they're going into right now >> and uh Google is still the poly market which company has the best AI model end of 2025 so December 31st First, there's been uh 1 and a.5 million in volume and
22:30
5 million in volume and Google is still sitting comfortably at 46% chance of of being at the top of LM arena at the end of the year.
22:42
>> Yeah, this is this is such a crazy supply constraint metric.
22:44
So, uh the Google CFO Anat Ashkenazi said on the earnings call, "In cloud, as I mentioned, the demand for our products is high as evidenced by the continued revenue growth and the cloud backlog.
22:58
Guess how big their cloud backlog is.
23:00
Just the demand for for Google Cloud products that they can't fulfill because they haven't built the data centers.
23:05
Like, but if they had more capacity, they think that they could deliver this. >> 106 billion. That is so much money. >> That is >> great.
23:13
Honestly, honestly, more businesses should try to put themselves in the position they have.
23:19
>> 60 billion of demand that they >> 106 billion.
23:23
>> We try to not give business advice because it's so >> fraugh.
23:27
Well, it's just it's just like every business is different.
23:29
Every every founder is different.
23:31
But, uh, in general, >> if you can develop a demand, you know, >> it's a good call for like a YC company.
23:37
Like if you go on stage at demo day and you say like, "Yeah, we have LOIs and we have some demand backlog.
23:42
>> We have six billion of demand that we're unable.
23:44
There was actually a YC company yesterday or or two days ago that that was getting a little bit roasted because >> they were like they launched a product and they were like, "Wow, today was insane.
23:55
Our servers our servers went down immediately >> and you could see the user chart and they had like 250 users and so people are like wait like your entire your product went down on 250 users. >> That's ridiculous.
24:10
>> So anyways, but happy happy for their success. >> Yeah.
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24:19
Um and so this so he keeps going into the capex before we do that.
24:25
Figma make is generally available today. You can go to figma.
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com/make and just start building various products.
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Tyler has been using Figma make to make a product that we'll be releasing very soon.
24:40
>> Very excited for that.
24:40
We will we will announce that soon.
24:43
Uh so uh from the earnings call given the strong demand for our cloud products and services we now expect to invest 85 billion in capex from 25 2025 up from a previous estimate of 75 billion just a 10 billion incremental investment absolutely massive.
25:00
Our updated outlook reflects in additional investment in servers the timing of delivery of servers and an acceleration of the pace of data center construction primarily to com to meet cloud customer demand.
25:09
uh the challenge pitch uh cautioned in an answer to an analyst question is that it takes a while for these investments to come on board.
25:19
So of course the the risk is like you overbuild but there's certainly no uh evidence of that given the massive backlog.
25:25
So um the other interesting thing uh that um Ben dips his toe into so Ben Thompson Mr.
25:32
Terrier famously does not get caught up in trade deals and uh nonCEO uh employee shifts.
25:42
>> They're below his line.
25:43
>> They are below his line.
25:43
They're below his line, but he had to chime in on the CFO change that happened at Google.
25:47
So, uh he says, "I'm always hesitant to delve too much."
25:51
I like that he's throwing in a delve.
25:53
You know, it's not written by a but he's baiting.
25:55
Yeah, he's baiting people for sure.
25:59
>> He's like, "How dare you accuse?"
25:59
He's like, "You can go back and look at how many time I've used Delion. >> I created Dell. I coined that word."
26:08
>> There's there's a there's a there's a a YC company called Dell as well that's doing well.
26:14
>> Um so, uh he says, "But it's interesting that the goo that the earnings call was Ruth Pat's last one as CFO.
26:19
Parat earned a lot of plaudits for getting Google's spending under control in the late 2010s.
26:28
But what seems clear in retrospect that is that 52.
26:30
5 billion that Google spent on capex in 2024 was too little little.
26:37
And so he's kind of like, you know, noodling on this idea that maybe the CFO was too cautious going into an AI boom.
26:48
>> You could lose your job over that.
26:49
>> Called a maybe Ruth Parat was calling top signals like us. It looks terrible.
26:54
Fortunately, we don't lose our job and we >> There's nothing wrong with calling top signals.
26:59
>> There there there's something wrong with under water if you're call specifically calling the top. >> Yes.
27:05
>> Trying to identify top signals >> is more of a metag game. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
27:08
So, uh so basically um Google it it it does seem like Google underinvested in capex in 2024 based on demand.
27:16
Wound up with that massive backlog. Missed on topline.
27:18
Couldn't couldn't make enough money.
27:21
Couldn't generate enough revenue.
27:22
had higher margins, that's great, but uh but didn't deliver on the cloud side uh on on the actual scale.
27:28
So, Ashkanazi's Ashkenazi's calls meanwhile have repeatedly reiterated that Google Cloud is particularly supply constrained.
27:34
They don't have enough servers and the company has now surprised investors twice in six months with the scale of its capex plans. Let's go.
27:42
Um says, "This in my opinion is incredibly bullish for Google.
27:47
Go back to this the disruption lens which we were kind of noodling on earlier.
27:50
noodling on earlier. The exact avenue from which you would expect management resistance to a disruptive innovation to to flow is from the is the CFO office like the CFO uh should be resistant to uh disruptive innovation and when you look at the history of companies that
28:08
got disrupted the CFO is saying we have a good business let's just keep printing cash like this new thing let's not worry about it let's not go >> Nokia C CFO he's like are you guys seeing the numbers >> yeah but Like for a lot of those companies that got disrupted, it's like they were printing cash high dividends for decades. Even after the disruption
28:25
Even after the disruption happened, the next the iPhone comes out and in order to actually do something to compete, they have to completely go into startup mode.
28:33
They have to burn a ton of cash, cut their dividend, stopping cash, issue debt, do a ton, raise more equity, maybe like they have to become a new product development company, and it would be very very difficult usually.
28:44
Um but >> Blackberry's annual revenue in 2005 1.
28:47
9 billion >> Blackberries completely >> BlackBerry's annual revenue >> in 2024 580 million.
28:59
>> It's a cyber security company now.
28:59
They bought a couple cyber security assets while they were valuable, while they were um like, you know, while the stock was up and then eventually they wound down the phone business and just kind of became a cyber security company.
29:13
Um because obviously they had a ton of enterprise contracts because Blackberries were sold into like large enterprises as you know work phones.
29:23
Very few people had Blackberries as like everyday phones.
29:25
Um but so they had all those they had like solid sales team, solid connections, bought a new asset and were able to continue the business even though obviously it's not the company that it once was.
29:35
Um so um Ben Thompson goes on to say there's a there does seem to be a major shift in mindset in terms of the company's willingness to lean into AI particularly for a segment Google Cloud that even in the best case scenarios is significantly lower margin than the company's core business.
29:52
What's interesting about that margin point, however, is that it too is another reason to be bullish on Google's prospects.
29:58
Google is the only company, we talked about the TPU thing, they're the only company with an atscale ASIC alternative to Nvidia's GPUs, which should give them a meaningful cost advantage to that end uh to the extent that cloud comput they're going to be able to support >> SSI >> SSI, >> which is crazy, >> not just their own needs.
30:18
>> And then and then there's also questions.
30:20
>> The dynamic that's interesting is like Open AI needs to massively scale infrastructure and and uh as we covered earlier this week commit to spending tens of billions of dollars with with Oracle. >> Yep.
30:33
>> And their revenue today doesn't support that.
30:36
Obviously their their growth trajectory is absolutely insane.
30:40
>> But OpenAI being in a position where they are competing headon with Google for this very very critical consumer use case search knowledge retrieval. Yep.
30:50
and ultimately uh usefulness.
30:50
It is an extremely tough position for OpenAI to be in. >> Yeah.
30:56
So the other hyperscalers are working on A6 that are alternative to Nvidia GPUs, but they all seem to be following the similar path trying to get line time at TSMC, not fully at scale.
31:08
Then there's also the question, you know, I think a lot of people's mind is like, is this the end of history?
31:11
Is there something that's coming down the pipe that could disrupt the NVIDIA GPU monopoly, the CUDA ecosystem, or even the Google TPU?
31:20
And Semi analysis has a funny meme here um way down in the stack uh about the next generation of chips that were that have been pitched from startups like uh um etched and a few others.
31:34
So, semi- analysis says although baking transformers into silicon may sound cool, it's most mostly just a marketing slogan.
31:42
90% of transformers flops are just GMM and 256 x 256 or 128 x 128 systolic arrays in TPU and in TPU tranium are already optimized for these.
31:57
Even modern GPGPUs with tensor cores are optimized well for GMM.
32:00
Even if you bake transformers into silicon aka just create a giant systolic array, most of your die area will still be taken up with SRAM cells.
32:08
with SRAM cells. the memory um and you will still face the memory wall since your HBM memory bandwidth will be the same as GPGPUs, TPUs and tranium and so uh the meme is TW not transformers are just 90% Matt moles uh George hot had a similar analysis or take just saying
32:26
that um if you look at the actual energy use of GPUs right now there isn't that much opportunity to squeeze more value out of them they're pretty efficient and most of the most of the energy that goes in goes into these very very specific math calculations that are already pretty optimized. We did hear from
32:43
We did hear from someone something about the uh this was from Martin Sklly that Jane Street or was it uh was it Jane Street one of the high frequency trading firms figured out how to run one of those very very basic mat calculations on a GPU more efficiently and I guess kind of open sourced it or something or got out into the into the research world.
33:02
Um, so it it doesn't it doesn't feel like at this moment I still think that there's a interesting bullcase for the Etch Crew in some ways in some niches or something some specific models.
33:13
Um, but it doesn't seem like there's some new disruptive chip architecture that's going to come out and and obiate the need for both Nvidia GPUs and Google TPUs.
33:23
And so Google's very well positioned as Ben Thompson is writing.
33:28
Thompson is writing. So um he says uh this should give them their position that they have an atscale ASIC alternative to Nvidia GPUs should give them a meaningful cost advantage to that end to the extent that cloud compute
33:42
becomes commoditized is the extent to which Google actually has a margin advantage because if all of the clouds are commoditized but all of them are on Nvidia and then Google is taking the Nvidia margin basically from their TPU uh they should be in a very good spot. This is to be sure a bit weird. Parat
33:56
This is to be sure a bit weird.
33:56
Parat gained these plaudits, those plaudits because there was so much waste in Google to cut, which was downstream of the company's amazing monopoly in margins and search, which hardly seems like the recipe for a structural cost advantage, but here we are.
34:11
>> Sundar is going to tell every employee, "We're cutting your daily massage allowance from three massages down to one.
34:16
We're deeply sorry, but we need to get fit." >> Got to get fit.
34:20
And you got to get on Vant.
34:22
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34:34
>> It was great >> talking with Christina yesterday. She's an absolute dog. >> Boardroom general.
34:40
>> The boardroom general.
34:41
>> She put the KPIs in orbit. >> She she really has. >> She really has. >> Did you see that?
34:45
Did you that Reed shared? >> Yeah. this chart.
34:48
She says, uh, >> Andrew said, "Christina often talks about stacking rice on the chessboard." >> Yeah.
34:56
>> And I didn't see this until after the show, but I was like, it seems like you guys are just chopping wood like every day just out there like >> that's what it is. >> Putting in the work.
35:04
>> Just, you know, couple percent here, couple percent here.
35:06
Just very consistent growth, very consistent growth, very smooth growth curve into a monster of a business.
35:11
So, um, congrats to everyone over at Vanta on the new round and we will go back to Google.
35:14
Um, so, uh, more broadly, the way in which Google seems to have flipped the switch in terms of going allin on AI along with Meta's spending on AI talent really does strongly suggest that AI in the end is a sustaining technology that favors the incumbents most of all.
35:30
Both see a line of sight to new revenue streams and critically both can fund AI from profits, not speculative investment or debt.
35:40
And of course, both have distribution, including search.
35:43
Sometimes the empire strikes back. I love that.
35:45
So there were other takes from uh from search.
35:47
You'll have to subscribe to certy to get the full analysis.
35:51
You got to go and subscribe to certy.
35:54
If you're not subscribed, what are you doing?
35:55
Um uh but the interesting takeaway from uh from search is that there it seems like Google's being a little squishy about, hey, we don't want to report certain KPIs anymore.
36:06
Uh so they used to report paid clicks and now the chief business officer Philip Schindler is saying um and and on your paid click qu question look to be very clear I think we said this before we manage the business to drive great outcomes for our users and attract attractive ROI for our advertisers.
36:24
We don't we actually don't manage to pay clicks or CPC targets which is fair and good but it's funny because Ben Thompson is like but I want that data that would be helpful to me.
36:34
I mean, when a business has a metric that they tell you is important for a long time, and then they suddenly tell you it's not important, you got to make sense. They're a huge business.
36:43
They've moved on to to bigger and like higher levels of abstraction.
36:47
>> Just look at the growth in tokens. >> Yeah. Yeah.
36:49
But don't worry about anything else.
36:51
>> What what he says is that there are there are product changes and policy changes that actually drive better monetization, but at the expense of paid clicks and that's probably uh AI searches and stuff like that.
37:01
You'll see in the 10 Q paid clicks were up 4% year-on-year, but a number of factors affecting this these metrics from quarter to quarter uh such as advertiser spending, product changes, policy changes, user engagement.
37:13
So, it's really important when it comes to pay clicks and CPC to avoid drawing overly broad conclusions solely based on these metrics.
37:21
Don't put me in the truth zone on this, he says.
37:23
Uh so, uh Ben Thompson, this is exactly what you said.
37:28
I don't even think you you pre-eread this, but you basically have Ben Thompson working in your head cuz >> this is what I said when Ben Thompson came on the show.
37:33
I was like, I think your way of thinking has been so ingrained into my mind that I I think that I have an original thought and you've already thought it.
37:41
>> Okay, so this is what he says and it's literally >> the article.
37:43
It says, >> "The more that management tells me not to pay attention to paid click rates, the more I want to pay attention, which is exactly what you just said.
37:53
Regardless, once again, the fact that paid clips paid click paid clicks were up 4% and search revenue was up 12% makes it clear that search growth is primarily being driven by higher prices.
38:05
And so the actual number of clicks is up 4% but revenue is up 12%.
38:07
That means that they're monetizing each click better.
38:11
Um, but people are obviously going to read into, oh, paid clicks aren't growing that fast.
38:16
Like the actual pie isn't growing that fast.
38:19
they're just getting like it's basically like, you know, once Instagram reels is is popular, everyone's watching it, then you just got to put more ads in the feed, right?
38:27
And that's kind of that seems like what they're doing and that's what's driving search revenue up 12%.
38:30
Um AI overviews is another question.
38:34
Uh this is a funny one where um uh basically the uh the chief business officer Philip Schindler at Google says um uh basically says that uh AI overviews are monetizing as well as other Google searches and Ben Thompson says given the fact that the vast majority of Google searches don't monetize at all because people just click on a link say the often times the if you're searching for information that you can have very low purchase intent, right?
39:06
Like, how many times a day do I search for a specific fact? >> Yep.
39:10
>> And never would have you could show me the best ad in the world and I wouldn't click through because I'm just looking for a fact. >> Yep.
39:16
So, if you're looking for something like, you know, Hulk Hogan's age, that's not a that's not a purchase intent.
39:20
If that comes from an AI overview or it comes from a you know how they used to have those like knowledge boxes or like it would pull from Wikipedia or if you click on Wikipedia, none of that is making Google any money.
39:33
So it really doesn't matter the UI or the actual underlying technology to get you that answer.
39:39
Um and then uh Gemini is on absolute tear. Uh really remarkable.
39:42
How how many monthly active users do you think the Gemini app has?
39:50
>> These are MAUs, not DU on the mobile app, web app. >> Gemini app combined.
39:55
>> Uh I think this is probably across mobile, web and desktop, but I would assume mobile. >> 70 million. >> 450 million. big, right?
40:02
And it doesn't sign like I guess I get I mean they kind of get the it's kind of a >> they they have a cheat code because everybody already has a Google account so they're like signed in. >> Yep.
40:13
>> But in in term I I don't know >> they're monthly and and what we know from semi analysis is that they're not taking share of queries that much but 450 million downloads on an app and monthly active users is pretty pretty high.
40:27
high. And so if there's if there's a world where Google can build a business around if they can bring in ads faster and keep the Gemini app cheaper and offer better products and like you get deep research you get agent you get the $200 tier the ad free if if OpenAI and Chat GPT has a
40:48
$200 tier that's adree and then Google's giving you the same product and the same experience but with ads for free like that feels like an Android iOS battle going on that feels like something that could actually uh be pretty sustainable and kind of drive this like little bit of a duopoly. I don't know. Uh we'll I don't know.
41:03
Uh we'll have to see how it goes.
41:05
But uh daily requests grew over 50% from Q1 to Q2.
41:07
Um and uh I think everyone everyone is is pretty surprised uh by that.
41:14
Um and I was also surprised when I went and pulled up the uh the Gemini app when I went to go download it.
41:23
Um the number of five star reviews is like hundreds of thousands and I was like, okay, this is very serious.
41:30
And that reflects the actual number that they shared, 450 million monthly active users.
41:33
So, still a lot of work to be done.
41:36
I was very frustrated when I went to go get V3.
41:38
I got the Gemini app and they were advertising, but I couldn't frustr in in Android yet. >> I don't know.
41:49
I I imagine that it has to be pre-installed in the next round of Android phones that go out.
41:53
Why would you not want that pre-installed and and there?
41:58
But I don't I would be surprised if that's what's driving it because I mean, how many Samsung Galaxies have they sold in the last quarter?
42:02
Probably not 200 million, right?
42:04
I I doubt that that's what's driving the uh the growth.
42:08
But maybe that might be an interesting thing.
42:11
How many of them are pre-installs, preloads, but even then you have to open it to become a to become an MAU.
42:16
But yeah, maybe maybe they're testing.
42:18
Maybe people will churn and go back to OpenAI and >> CHP.
42:20
Android users have had access to Google Assistant for a long time.
42:23
That's getting phased out, which is going to be Gemini. >> Yep.
42:28
Uh well, let me tell you about graphite.
42:29
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42:31
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42:34
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42:37
>> I don't know if people can hear, but anytime we do a uh an ad read, the entire team breaks out in applause in the studio.
42:44
So, it's really >> Let's hear for some advertisements. There we go.
42:51
Um, in other very very sad news, uh, Hulk Hogan has passed away at age 71.
42:57
Um, cardiac arrest was what you said, right, Jordy?
42:59
I didn't actually into that.
43:02
I looked a little bit more into, um, some of the history.
43:04
I wanted to know a little bit more about his his story.
43:08
There's a whole bunch of different profiles.
43:10
Um, there was at one point going to be a biopic about him.
43:14
Uh, in a recent interview with Variety, director Todd Phillips revealed that his long gestating Hulk Hogan biopic will not progress.
43:22
Unfortunately, it got canned.
43:24
This was back in about a year ago today.
43:26
Um, I love what we were trying to do, but that's not going to come together for me.
43:30
Chris Hemsworth had signed on to play Ho Hogan in early 2019 with the Joker writer and director duo Todd Phillips and Scott Silver attached to lead the charge. film's producers.
43:42
Uh, you got Phillips Hogan Hemsworth, Bradley Cooper, Michael Sugar, Sugar, Sugar, I don't know, uh, and Hogan's long longtime pal and and New World Order stablemate Eric Bishoff.
43:57
Uh, in a July 2020 interview with Total Film, Hemsworth described the training he'd have to undergo to transform into the 80s WWE icon.
44:03
As you can imagine, the preparation for the role will be insanely physical.
44:08
I will have to put on more size than I ever have before, even more than I put on for Thor.
44:13
There is this accent as well as the physicality and the attitude.
44:17
Hemsworth said the Hogan biopic would explore his rise to stardom in the early 1980s.
44:21
His WWF World Heavyweight Championship win over the Iron Chic in 198. >> That's a good role.
44:28
You know that Hemsworth has a personal fitness training app called Center. >> I have heard of that. Is it good?
44:35
>> Like, well, I'm really going to have to use my app a lot for this role.
44:36
Maybe we should start using his app. Get on the Hulk train.
44:43
Become Hulkamomaniacs as they call them.
44:45
Uh, >> did you grow up watching wrestling at all?
44:48
>> I didn't, but I was aware of Hulk Hogan just through the lore because it was so dark.
44:54
>> Well, even I I feel like I would hear more about Hulk uh Hulk Hogan in the context of the Gawker saga. >> Oh, yeah. We should go into that.
45:03
Uh, I wanna I want to pull up this Hulk Hogan video.
45:07
I'll send it to the the team.
45:09
There's some like great like rants. Where is it?
45:11
There's one where he's where he's uh talking trash about something. Wow.
45:20
Everything's just like rip.
45:24
But he was he was legendary at uh like I don't what do they call in UFC where you like or pre-show pump up talking about the competition.
45:33
Uh I guess it's like a promo. Is that what it is? >> That makes sense. >> Promo. Yeah, this one. Seek and destroy. We got to watch this.
45:40
I will put it in the tab so we can watch this.
45:42
Um and then yeah, we should talk about the Gawker Fallout a little bit.
45:46
Let me put that in there. The best promos.
45:49
Hulk Hogan, Seek and Destroy. Let's pull that up.
45:56
>> Hulk Hogan uh has recently been a founder.
45:59
He has >> Real American Beer, >> which he did with uh the Budweiser family.
46:06
>> This is what we need to channel.
46:06
We need to bring this energy to the show every day. >> Defending.
46:11
But there are those right now that are questioning whether you can withstand the big man.
46:16
>> I don't care about those people, man.
46:16
I don't care about those people that aren't star craving hulk maniacs.
46:20
I could care less what they think.
46:22
I'm fighting for life, brother.
46:25
I'm fighting for all those people that have remolded their lives, man.
46:29
Modeled after Hulkcomania.
46:31
Get their priorities in order, man.
46:34
Walk around with a lot of pride.
46:35
As far as those people that are on Andre the Giant side, I wish you'd come on down, too.
46:40
I like to slap them around just for a warm-up, but I've already gone through my transformation, man.
46:45
I'm running for Pontiac, Michigan.
46:48
I'm not the Hulk anymore. I'm the Hulkster man.
46:49
Looking through my eyes, man. >> Come on. That mountain top. Back off, little man.
46:55
I'm on that mountain top, and I'm waiting for you, Andre.
46:57
And I'm guarding that mountain.
47:00
And the Hulkster in its garden has got a 32-in neck, a 64 in chest, the largest arms in the world.
47:10
And I'm here to seek and destroy.
47:10
Seek and destroy the cancer of Andre the Giant.
47:16
seek and destroy the weasel's empire.
47:18
And what you going to do, Andre, in Pontiac, Michigan, when Hulk comedia destroys you?
47:27
>> He is indeed absolutely livid going against the man that one time he looked up to and respected. Hulk Hogan to defend.
47:34
>> That's the energy I want Cindar Pai to bring to bring to Google.
47:37
I got 85 billion of capex. I grew 50% top line.
47:43
And I'm coming for Sam Alman. >> You're coming for me.
47:44
I'm coming for I'm coming for you. I'm coming for that.
47:48
>> I got 450 million ma on the Gemini app.
47:53
The search overviews are going great.
47:55
They're monetizing just as well as regular search results.
47:57
Come here to Mountain View.
48:01
Catch your Get down to Mountain View.
48:04
And if you're riding with uh if you're riding with the the Andre the Giant, like you got to be a Star Raven Hulkcommaniac. It's so good. I love it.
48:13
Uh Chris Hemsworth signed on to play Thor uh from Thor signed on to play Hogan in early 2019.
48:21
He said he had to put on a lot of size.
48:23
It the biopic would have explored his rise to stardom in the early 1980s and then Hulkamania takeover that ruled the wrestling world well into the 1990s.
48:33
Philip's take on Hulkamania was going to stay away from Hogan's recent controversies.
48:38
Instead focus solely on the early years.
48:41
Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are currently developing a film titled Killing Gawker that will explore Hogan's campaign against the media empire in the wake of an explosive home video.
48:53
>> Hulk Hogan was 6'7, which is why you'd be able to hypemog him. >> Pretty close to me. It is crazy.
49:01
>> He's got you on uh next >> got me on next for sure. >> For sure.
49:05
And I think I will be staying away from his supplement stack.
49:07
Uh hopeully hoping hoping to make it Yeah. longer.
49:12
>> Um >> really sad though. >> Yeah. Very sad. What a what a career.
49:15
And what a fantastic the Hulk uh the Hulk Hogan theme song. I am a real American. Such a good song.
49:20
Such a great rallying cry.
49:24
>> That's the name of his beer. Real American beer. >> Yeah.
49:26
Fight for the rights of every man. Such a good song.
49:30
Um >> light, crisp, crushable.
49:32
So there is a uh there is a a reflective piece in the New Yorker about uh Hulk Hogan's Gawker lawsuit that we can go through.
49:41
But first let me tell you about linear.
49:46
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49:57
>> And you know if Hogan's selling beer, you got to get you on numeralhq. com.
50:02
sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.
50:05
Um, >> friend of mine is uh was business partners with with Hogan on that. >> That's crazy.
50:14
>> Uh, so we have Zack Kukov joining at noon to break down the AI day yesterday in Washington DC.
50:19
The besties met up with the >> Hill and Valley crew. Honestly crushed it.
50:25
We have a bunch of great posts that we can run through.
50:27
Um, first let's go through a little bit of the Hulk Hogan loss uh Gawker lawsuit.
50:31
This is from 2016, well before we actually saw the the results from all this.
50:37
But uh on Monday afternoon, a Florida jury added $25 million in punitive damages to uh the $115 million it had awarded Hulk Hogan on Friday in his invasion of privacy case against Gawker Media.
50:51
Hogan sued Gawker for posting portions of a sex tape it received from an anonymous sender.
50:58
It's a shocking amount, not least because it's $40 million more than Hogan, whose real name is had demanded.
51:05
Verdicts of this size can pose an existential risk to media to a media company.
51:09
That's what happened to Gawker.
51:10
Gawker has reported that it earned $44 million in revenue in 2014.
51:14
In go in January, Gawker's owner Nick Denton announced that he had sold a portion of his company to investors in order to fund this case.
51:21
Gawker will certainly appeal the verdict, as it should, after it pays a bond of up to $50 million, arguing that the jury was unreasonable in finding that Hogan's right to privacy outweighed Gawker's right to publish the material, which it believes was of public interest, which is a very uh Yeah, it's strange defense. >> It is. It is. It is hard to to argue.
51:39
Um he is a public figure, but this is a very personal thing.
51:44
Um >> they had just posted that it existed and they had seen it. >> That's true.
51:50
And that's kind of what's happening with the Wall Street Journal.
51:53
They're not posting everything all the time with regards to the to the to the Trump Epstein stuff, but they're they're referencing that it exists, that they verified it.
52:01
And that seems to be a safer path for media companies to to kind of report that they've confirmed that something exists without actually putting everything out necessarily. H.
52:11
So, the publication of the videotape of consensual sex between adults is not the most appealing place to plant a First Amendment flag, but is worth considering the possible effects on publishers if a judgment of this magnitude is allowed to stand.
52:22
And so, the the fallout from Gawker was uh certainly celebrated in tech because they also had uh Valley Wag, which was uh very annoying to a lot of people in tech because it was basically like TMZ for tech.
52:36
I don't know if you were aware of Valleywag back before your time.
52:38
Um, but it it did have like a chilling effect.
52:42
I remember being at South by Southwest and uh a friend of mine who's a ventureback founder at the time was uh was really into doing handstand push-ups and was doing handstand push-ups at a at like a party that was being thrown that were people just kind of hanging out and he was just doing some handstand push-ups as one as one does.
52:59
Um and and there was a Valleywag reporter there and wrote about it as a characterization of like how broy the situation was but didn't include his name and he was like I dodged a bullet because like he could have been forever outed as >> I mean in many ways in many ways it could have built his aura if if he was named >> in the modern era it would have been incredibly bullish but at that time it did feel like something that could destroy you.
53:24
It was it was a very tense time very very tense time.
53:26
Roy Lee uh would not have done well during that era.
53:32
>> Yeah, >> maybe he would have maybe he would have changed the meta though because he's making he's making shirtless posts on the timeline, you know, bring them >> Yeah.
53:40
>> bring them into the modern era.
53:42
>> Yeah, it is it is it is an interesting interesting thing.
53:44
Like Valwag would probably be writing about Clo a lot and framing it in a different way.
53:48
there's already probably folks out there who are framing Cluly as particularly bad on the other side of the aisle or in the in the anti-tech category.
53:57
Um, but it just doesn't seem to have the same effect.
54:00
It certainly doesn't stop venture funding or customers or any of that.
54:03
It doesn't it it seems to be that we're in a different era where people people in tech were were clearly was controversial in tech.
54:12
People were definitely divided.
54:14
I think it would be good if there was some law that required if if uh a media company wanted to write about someone's physique, they should have to post physique.
54:23
>> Oh, their own physique. Yes.
54:25
>> So, that should just be in the footnotes. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
54:28
>> It's important context.
54:29
>> Anyway, in other uh in other news, Finn.
54:32
ai the number one customer uh the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bakeoffs, number one on ranking on G2. Go check out Finn. ai.
54:41
Um, >> and OWN is apparently helping launch a media company.
54:47
And so if you want to go work for OWN, uh, or this new company, which I believe is called Cool Tech News, go check it out.
54:53
They're looking for a, uh, producer.
54:58
>> Um, the founder of Nickeola, the electric vehicle company that went bankrupt and landed its CEO founder in prison for a brief time. He was in jail for life. Uh then he got pardoned.
55:11
Um just did a sit down interview with Tucker Carlson.
55:17
And uh Nate Anderson from Hindenburg Hindenburg Research had a lengthy rebuttal to this that I thought was pretty interesting.
55:27
So uh Nate says, "I am Nate Anderson, the founder of Hindenburg Research reference." Okay.
55:32
And just for context, if people haven't seen this yet, >> Tucker is basically positioning the takedown of Nicola as a woke witch hunt.
55:42
>> Is that is that is that an accurate summary?
55:45
>> It's it's kind of unclear.
55:45
I think he's I think he's more just really really open and digging into like, hey, Trevor Milton, like tell your side of the story.
55:55
And um it seemed like it seemed like Tucker didn't come with really strong opinions.
55:59
At least for the part that I saw, it didn't seem like he was taking a super strong stance on like whether hydrogen is a good strategy or what happened.
56:08
Um I haven't dug in dug into but a lot of it a lot of those claims I think don't come from Tucker.
56:12
I think they come from uh from Trevor Milton.
56:16
And so uh the the real debate it seems like is between Nate Anderson and Trevor Milton's side of the story.
56:21
I wouldn't say that in this podcast interview Tucker has a particular like thesis that he's advancing.
56:29
He's more just asking um Trevor Milton to tell his side of the story. >> And people are not.
56:37
>> People are not happy with this for sure.
56:38
>> People are saying pitiful.
56:41
Someone else is saying Trevor Milton is a convicted fraudster and pathological liar.
56:44
Another guy is saying terrible take. Scam artist platformed.
56:50
Um anyways, another person just says seriously question mark and even Tik Tok investors is uh it just being like wow this is >> this is >> a lot of people got burned right >> the funny thing too is is uh he was wasn't he initially prosecuted during the Trump admin >> yes so uh Nate goes into this uh he says
57:10
uh I'm the founder of Hindenberg Research referenced repeatedly in this bizarre and fantastical interview during my career I helped expose numerous financial scams including over a dozen Ponzi schemes and numerous instances of public companies lying to and stealing from investors. Of course, he's talking
57:24
Of course, he's talking about Hindenburg Research, his firm.
57:26
Uh I am immensely proud of the career uh of that career, including our work on Nicola Motors, referenced in this interview.
57:34
Trevor Milton is a convicted fraudster held criminally responsible for the incineration of hundreds of millions of dollars in retail investors hard-earned money.
57:41
And should and as should be unsurprising, Milton in this interview seems just to fabricate key events and information out of thin air.
57:48
Unfortunately, with zero critical questioning or push back from Tucker.
57:52
For starters, contrary to Trevor Milton's implications that his prosecution was some sort of Biden administration conspiracy.
57:57
Conveniently, neither Milton nor Tucker share that the investigation into Milton was started and disclosed in September 2020 under the first Trump admin as well as before the 2020 election.
58:09
There were numerous inaccuracies throughout this interview.
58:13
The claim that Hindenburg paid employees for inside information is patently absurd.
58:16
The key whistleblower discussed in the interview was only briefly a contractor for Milton.
58:21
He was so horrified by what he viewed as Milton's repeated false claims that he did a tremendous amount of research on his own, unraveling numerous additional suspected lies that Milton pedled to the investing public.
58:32
Further, Hindenberg didn't coordinate anything with media or the DOJ.
58:37
such entities ran their own investigations for the for their own purposes unconnected to us.
58:40
There was ample evidence that Milton misstated numerous aspects of his business and as as the company later itself acknowledged.
58:48
What's interesting is like I feel like when we talked about the Marquez Brownley uh uh Escobar phone like MKBHD kind of broke that story and did some investigative journalism um wound up getting his hands on the phone and then the DOJ or the FBI came and said, "Hey, we want that phone as evidence.
59:06
we'll give it back to you maybe in 5 years.
59:07
Um, and so it's interesting that uh that it seems like the DOJ, according to uh Nate Anderson, did not coordinate with Hindenburg.
59:17
Maybe that's just because Hindenburg was doing public research or just doing likeformational research and didn't have any like hard physical evidence.
59:22
Um, but uh I certainly wouldn't be surprised if the DOJ reached out to Hindenburg, but it seems like they didn't coordinate.
59:32
According to Nate Anderson, it would take hours to write out all the other absurdities have truth, innuendos, and false statements in this interview, but in the interest of correcting some of the record, here's a handful.
59:40
Milton waxes on about his pardon, but no one mentions that Milton's lawyer was Brad Bondi, the brother of AG Pam Bondi.
59:45
Nor did anyone mention that Milton donated $900,000 to Trump in October 2024, less than a month before the recent election.
59:55
Strategically timed well after his criminal conviction and immediately prior to the presidential election.
1:00:01
What's interesting is like like you know you you you you take a company to bankruptcy, you wind up in prison for life, you would think that you get zeroed pretty hard to the degree that you don't have $900,000 sitting around to make a political donation.
1:00:15
So, I'm very curious about how the money flowed around post bankruptcy, post post uh post indictment and and conviction because um >> I think that will change the calculus of people that are thinking about doing crazy stuff in the public markets. Yeah.
1:00:35
>> Because if you're like, okay, yes, I might get thrown in jail, but then I can squirrel away some money, donate it, get pardoned, and then have half left over to hang out.
1:00:44
like that's a pretty good deal.
1:00:46
So, uh certainly not the functioning of the system that we want. Uh very very odd. >> Yeah.
1:00:52
The the other thing that uh Nate calls out.
1:00:55
He says um >> waxing poetic about hydrogen in the interview echoes Nicola's lies to retail investors that it successfully produced hydrogen at a cost 81% lower than anyone on Earth.
1:01:09
A feat that would have upended the entire energy industry had it been remotely true.
1:01:14
Nicola's head of hydrogen production, presumably in charge of this world, worldchanging scientific breakthrough, turned out to be Milton's own brother, who had no scientific background and previously did odd construction jobs in Hawaii.
1:01:27
So, >> see, I want to push back on that because last night I was like 7,000 deep and I feel like I cracked the code to upending the e the energy market.
1:01:37
GPT had you pretty convinced that you could produce hydrogen.
1:01:43
>> It was like John, you're you're on to something.
1:01:45
>> You're on to something here. Doesn't matter. You're a podcaster. >> Go public.
1:01:48
>> It does not matter that you were just a mere podcaster. >> You cracked it. You cracked the code. >> Yeah.
1:01:53
I mean, the the you know, one thing you can kind of uh Tucker could have pushed on was >> uh you rolled a truck downhill and you and you market it as though it was a functioning vehicle. >> Yep.
1:02:07
>> Uh >> that was a big one.
1:02:07
and uh doesn't seem to be something that he pushed back on. >> Yeah.
1:02:14
Um big questions about shortselling uh and and he makes the case that short selling is good um because it creates a financial incentive to expose companies that lie and engage in fraud.
1:02:25
Um I think I agree with that.
1:02:28
I think I I I think I'm pro-short sellers.
1:02:29
Um although of course they can be very frustrating if you're on the other side and you're being shorted.
1:02:34
Um, fortunately TVPN is a privately held company, so we don't have to deal with short attacks.
1:02:40
At least not now, but who knows?
1:02:43
>> With that, let's bring in our Washington correspondent, Zack Kukov. >> Zack, how you doing?
1:02:49
>> What was your reaction?
1:02:49
What was your reaction to uh Trevor Milton going on on Tuck Tuck radio?
1:02:56
>> I just think terrible choice of uh network to go on first.
1:02:58
The clear answer was TBPN.
1:03:02
>> I I don't know if I'm ready. >> I don't know. I don't know. >> That's a tough one.
1:03:04
just come we'd come with a fact sheet of just fact by fact and say did you roll the truck down the hill?
1:03:12
>> You're telling me you wouldn't have coddled him the way that uh Tucker did? >> I don't know. >> I don't know.
1:03:16
When we had Sohan Periq on people people were saying we went we went too easy.
1:03:20
But uh clearly we got him to just admit to having multiple jobs question was was are you working multiple jobs?
1:03:29
That was my first question. He just said yes.
1:03:30
And then, you know, from there it's like, okay, he's admitted it.
1:03:33
Like, let's talk about redemption. Is there a possibility?
1:03:36
>> What else did people want him to admit?
1:03:37
Like, five other madeup things he hadn't done.
1:03:39
>> I think I think I think the critique that was fair was that he's clearly a pathological liar and fairly charismatic.
1:03:50
And we probably just should have said, "Hey, seems like you're still lying."
1:03:55
But at the same time, we got to check in with the company he just joined.
1:03:56
He said he's going, what did he say?
1:03:58
He said he's going Exclusive. >> Exclusive.
1:04:02
>> Exclusive is the term.
1:04:03
>> Excl I'm going exclusive. >> I'm going exclusive. Just one job now. So, I don't know.
1:04:06
I I still want to believe in redemption.
1:04:08
Not many people believe in redemption.
1:04:10
That's where it was interesting.
1:04:12
Um, but yeah, I mean like like the I suppose that if I was interviewing Trevor Milton, the first question would be, did you roll the truck down the hill?
1:04:20
And did you did you actually do that?
1:04:22
Uh, because that is the fraud claim mainly.
1:04:24
And if if it's like, okay, yeah, I did that. I made a mistake.
1:04:28
Now I'm on the redemption path.
1:04:30
Uh as opposed to, you know, like, you know, waffling around it.
1:04:33
But >> as opposed to, no, I didn't roll it downhill.
1:04:35
The truck was just built that way and the hill was just fine.
1:04:38
>> I mean, this has been a big, we got to call out, this has been a big week for podcasting.
1:04:41
You have Sam Alman on the Ovon.
1:04:44
You have Netanyahu on the NO and you have Trevor Milton on Tucker Carlson. I mean, >> what a week. What a week.
1:04:51
But um equal, Zach Koff, four figures of equal stature. Correct. Thank you very much.
1:04:59
>> I think uh I think higher stature than some of the others. >> Yeah.
1:05:01
Well, higher than some, lower than others. Correct. >> Exactly.
1:05:05
>> What's going on in your world? How was yesterday?
1:05:06
It looked uh like total total also total podcast victory.
1:05:11
>> Total podcast victory for sure. >> Yeah.
1:05:14
Yesterday I think uh somebody said allin is now state media which I loved.
1:05:18
I was like yesterday literally was total podcast dominance. Um which was wild. It was very well done.
1:05:24
Uh, major props to frequent TBPN guest Delian who did an amazing job.
1:05:29
And you know, they hold the whole thing together in like Christian and Delian. Yeah.
1:05:32
They put the whole thing together in like 10 days.
1:05:34
You guys notice the whole thing came from nothing. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> 10 days.
1:05:39
>> When you get a 20minute block on the president's schedule, you got to move quick. >> Yep.
1:05:43
>> That is exactly exactly true.
1:05:43
So, >> they started Hilling Valley a couple years ago just as a dinner, but now there's like enough of an organization.
1:05:50
I think it is like a company at this point that's doing these events and they have a playbook and they every time they execute it's better than the last one.
1:05:57
So really >> my understanding is they have like 30 something people who help put these things together.
1:06:00
It's a serious it's a real operation that really staffs it up. >> Uh where was it?
1:06:06
>> It was at the Melon Auditorium which funnily enough is like next door or maybe even part of the environmental protection agency the EPA.
1:06:11
So, it's a nice It was very funny because uh I would not say it was a particularly environmentally focused group in the audience, but uh beautiful space nonetheless.
1:06:22
>> Honestly, highlight of the day for me and probably for everybody there.
1:06:24
Uh a very funny, very well done uh pus speech at end of the day keynote.
1:06:31
Um real red meat for us and for tech on a lot of the key questions on AI development.
1:06:37
Also, a lot of very funny uh crowd work, like really talented crowdwork bits on Jensen and on Doug Bergam.
1:06:45
I was like, "Wow, it's gonna be a really talented Netflix special."
1:06:49
This all gets packaged up.
1:06:50
>> Did he have a Did he have did Did Trump have a good line on Jason, too?
1:06:52
Or I couldn't tell if that was fake news or it was real?
1:06:57
>> No, it was it was real.
1:06:57
Trump gets up, first thing he says is, "Thanks the All-In podcast."
1:07:00
Uh, Chimoth and David and yes, even Jason.
1:07:04
And there was a huge pause for laughter.
1:07:06
and he goes, "Yes, we're even thanking Jason today."
1:07:09
A lot of uh Jason Galcanis jokes.
1:07:09
I will say one interesting dynamic at the thing that I don't know I don't know what was streamed online and what wasn't, but one interesting dynamic that I don't know if folks saw the uh Jason was doing the voice of the liberal in the in the questioning.
1:07:23
He was like trying to really put a little bit of the heat on some of the uh Trump admin guests and it was an interesting departure from everybody else who was asking uh questions. >> That's good.
1:07:33
People will find a way to hate that, but it's good. >> Yeah.
1:07:38
>> No, it's good to get the diversity of voices.
1:07:39
I will say clearly some people that I don't think necessarily expected it, but yeah, it was good to get the uh the diversity of voices. >> That's fun up there. >> Okay.
1:07:47
What was the best line though?
1:07:47
The best the best line to me was >> uh somebody asked Jensen to talk about America's AI advantage and he said, >> "The one thing that no other country has is President Trump." >> That's right.
1:08:02
That's why Jensen gets to That's why Jensen gets to export H20s because he's has good lines like that, you know. >> Wilding.
1:08:10
>> Um, it was a well done speech.
1:08:10
Honestly, it was well done event.
1:08:12
I would say uh highlights for me from like a serious way.
1:08:16
The big one for me was uh fair use training of the copyright material for AI.
1:08:21
This has been one we've been asking about for a while and a lot of companies have been talking about it.
1:08:24
In fact, there was a recent entropic court case that ruled on this said, "Look, if it's trained on legally procured, legally purchased copyright material, that's fair use. That's in scope.
1:08:35
If it's stuff that you're pirating, which allegedly Anthropic and Meta and others have done to build their corpus of data, that's when you get into legal trouble."
1:08:43
This was the first time that I've heard the admin come out and codify that, which is really nice. So, I loved that.
1:08:48
I loved the energy permitting stuff.
1:08:50
There was a lot of stuff for all the abundance boys on uh permitting, a lot of permitting reform questions, a lot of accelerating data center buildouts, a lot of trying to streamline getting new sources of energy online.
1:09:02
And then yes, there was some talk about how do you try to tighten even while we're still letting folks like China buy H20s, some talk about things like location tracking for export controls, too.
1:09:12
So, there was a lot to like in the speech.
1:09:14
I actually thought it was a very, very well done speech.
1:09:17
Um, and it was funny because there was actually a live I was is who's uh who's your partner?
1:09:22
Is it Khi or Poly Market? >> Poly Market. >> Okay.
1:09:25
So, there was probably a poly market. I saw it on Khi.
1:09:27
There's probably a poly market going at the same time where people were betting on things like will Trump say uh David Sach's name in the speech. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Before it gets resolved.
1:09:37
So, I thought it was really really well done. Vance spoke super well.
1:09:40
Bergam and Chris Wright had a very funny panel with the two of them together where Chris Wright and Jason got into it mono a little bit which was uh interesting to hear too but great and really good energy in the space. A lot of good companies.
1:09:54
Hrien did a very good uh almost like a sermon on the enthusiasm of reindustrialization that I loved.
1:09:59
Chris from Hrien did that.
1:10:01
>> Yeah, he's been on the he's been on the road show with that because uh he's probably giving something some similar version of that at reindustrialized.
1:10:08
worked worked out the bit.
1:10:08
Took the tight five to DC. We love to see it.
1:10:10
Um >> it was a tight five. It was great. >> That's great.
1:10:14
Um what uh how should I think about this AI plan, this documented website that's been floating around?
1:10:22
Is this is this more of like like laws aren't changing, but this is just these are this is the plan for the laws that we will eventually change. Is that the idea?
1:10:33
>> So think about it in two ways.
1:10:33
One way is this is the White House using its bully pulpit to call for a series of changes that yes would need Congress to enact them or would need agencies to change their policy.
1:10:44
Right now agencies changing their policy is something the White House can do.
1:10:48
>> The other side is look there are two EOS that were signed uh live on stage yesterday that Trump did a very theatrical signing of which is beautiful.
1:10:56
>> Uh and those are things that the admin can do directly.
1:10:58
can do directly. So there are some things for example some of the energy permitting stuff uh it's you know there's certain things like doing categorical exclusions from NEPA that are a little bit more within the realm of uh things that can be done my understanding is via EO but there are also things as you guys know a lot of
1:11:13
permitting is done at the state and local level right so the white house can't necessarily say we're going to overrule what state and local government does on permitting as a fiat they have to work with partners all up and down the stack of government to get what the AI action plan calls for actually implemented Yeah. So, um how big are
1:11:28
So, um how big are those EOS?
1:11:32
Like what were people tracking on those?
1:11:34
And then, um I >> what was the specifics?
1:11:38
There was uh was was one of the EOS around uh making it so that states can't enact AI safety laws for the next 10 years.
1:11:48
What do do you have specifics on that?
1:11:50
That felt super significant.
1:11:54
So there were three uh AIOS said two earlier I was on there three AIEOS and sometimes why one was on bias free AI which is something I would instead frame as transparency right there was a lot of talk about woke AI and removing things
1:12:10
like DEI from AI implementation the actually specific version of that the the instantiated version of that is that model providers if they want to be used in government procurement have to attest to the values to be transparent about the values that go into their models. That's AIO number one. AIO number two is That's AIO number one.
1:12:24
AIO number two is trying to fasttrack some of the development work we did.
1:12:30
So fasttracking some of the data center permitting stuff that we did.
1:12:33
And the third AIO that we talked about is the export expansion.
1:12:36
It's funny, Jordy, the thing that you're asking about which we talked about last time, right?
1:12:39
This idea of a moratorum on AI regulation for 10 years.
1:12:41
The big challenge is to actually get that done.
1:12:46
That's something that has to be now done actually beyond my understanding is beyond the scope of just what can be done in an EO, right?
1:12:51
something that can be started has to actually transcend that as well.
1:12:54
And some of the challenge like you saw today, California is already starting to push back on the idea that the federal government has preeemption ability over California's ability to regulate eye.
1:13:02
ability to regulate eye. And the truth is there are powerful senators like Marcia Blackburn who we discussed last time whose job it is to protect their local industries like the music industry in Nashville, Tennessee, right, her home state, who are not going to be thrilled
1:13:15
about what I think is a pretty reasonable but ultimately controversial idea of trying to create a standard set of regulations that aren't 50 patchwork states because the default and Trump mentioned this in his speech is that in 50 different states whoever's the most restrictive is whom people end up following. >> Yeah. um one >> Yeah.
1:13:30
um one >> because if you're a product if you're a product company or or a foundation model lab, >> you want to be available everywhere.
1:13:36
So the default is like basically be be uh allowed under the most restrictive uh regulations. >> That's right.
1:13:46
>> One kind of uh funny framing I was was was kicking around was the idea of no paper clips.
1:13:52
Um so this kind of marks a shift away from worrying about AI doom.
1:13:58
We're not worried about getting paperclipipped.
1:14:00
We're not worried about fast takeoff, this crazy doom scenario.
1:14:05
So, we're pulling back on safety, pulling more, pushing more into geopolitics.
1:14:08
Let's actually scale up infrastructure, get these products out into the world because we think that by and large they're safe.
1:14:15
And now the game is to win on more or less like industrial capacity.
1:14:20
Like if we're just producing way more tokens than every other country, that will help our GDP. We will grow that way.
1:14:26
The flip side of the no paper clips is that there's no move to do a new operation paperclipip where we where we pulled scientists from Germany to America to build the bomb.
1:14:38
>> Um and the and the and the the reference point there is that something like >> uh something like 75% of AI researchers on Meta super intelligence team are I think on 01s or they're not American citizens.
1:14:51
And we've seen the Deep Seek team and Manis and you know there's some venture capital firms that are investing in Chinese AI and kind of the bullcase is like okay well get them from China Singapore and then get them to Silicon Valley and then we have the team on our side and so it feels like that's the one area that wasn't really discussed.
1:15:08
I I know immigration is obviously just a broadly hot topic, but in terms of like brain drain of the ultimate top AI scientists.
1:15:18
Is there any movement or people thinking about that?
1:15:21
Is there any nuance coming up between Okay, maybe that's a different maybe that's a different problem set or different question than like dealing with like fentanyl dealers coming across the border.
1:15:32
>> So I don't know that that was super within scope for the AI action plan.
1:15:36
I'll tell you personally there are definitely people who are thinking about an operation paperclipip or how do we get the world's best and brightest the truly truly elites right even above people who might qualify for O1's to come and build in America AI with their families that's the first thing second
1:15:50
thing is listen the question you're getting to which is a question of soft power is a question the admin is thinking about right and so the reason that the AIO sorry the AI action plan is so supportive of open- source and openweight models is because the admin views it as a national security imperative to get American soft power, i.e. American models to become the most e.
1:16:07
American models to become the most widely used in the world.
1:16:09
So the soft power lever the admin's pulling I would like to see more and I'm hugely supportive of getting people here on a really targeted basis ultra elite talent to come here and build opposed to building for adversaries. >> Yeah.
1:16:22
I mean we're talking about like 50 people.
1:16:24
It's like it's super it should be a completely different different discussion than like you know border wall or anything like that.
1:16:33
No AI researcher has ever been impacted by a wall.
1:16:35
Like that's not maybe the pre-training scaling wall is their problem.
1:16:39
But >> I know I know you have to run there.
1:16:44
There was a post yesterday going viral.
1:16:46
Somebody realized you could Venmo the government to help reduce the national debt.
1:16:50
What's the right amount to start Venmoing Uncle Sam if you want to do your part?
1:16:56
>> Listen, tax on tips now.
1:16:56
So we should all be tipping the government. Help them. They should be tipping.
1:17:00
We should be getting tipped, paid in tips, no tax on that.
1:17:03
And then we could turn around and tip the government in Venmo as well.
1:17:07
I would say based economy typically as much as much as you can do but every day.
1:17:11
Really quickly every day. La last question for me. We'll let you go.
1:17:14
Um uh that point on open source is really interesting.
1:17:17
It feels like Mark Zuckerberg could be the national champion.
1:17:21
He could be the hero of American open source with the Llama project.
1:17:24
We don't know if Llama 5 is going to be open source.
1:17:26
Behemoth had trouble getting out.
1:17:27
he hasn't really given clear guidance on how hard he's going into um uh how how hard he's going to stay in open source, but what uh how do you think the mood is around uh Mark Zuckerberg in DC?
1:17:40
Is he a winner or a loser?
1:17:43
The Wall Street Journal had this article on, you know, how much people have donated?
1:17:47
Obviously, Jensen feels ascendant.
1:17:49
Elon feels like he was at the top and then kind of dialed back a little bit but is still doing okay.
1:17:53
little bit but is still doing okay. the other hyperscaler CEOs are like none of them are in bad bad positions but Zuck is like the interesting one where you could see a really interesting partnership form but I don't know where we are on that >> Zuck I think is interesting he took a big swing right listen I want to go do
1:18:11
the cultural work I want to ensh myself really deeply y >> and what we've learned is this is an admin that really respects power and success right success is its own ability to attract more success the virtuous cycle Jensen does well in part because he's tremendously gifted interpersonally but also because he's the CEO of the most valuable company in the world and the admin, right? And Jensen has that. Zuck uh Zuck tried And Jensen has that.
1:18:36
Zuck uh Zuck tried to or a little bit, you know what I mean?
1:18:40
He tried to get in here and do a little bit of that and I don't know that it's fully landed for him. I agree.
1:18:45
Listen, I hope he keeps Llama 5 open source predominantly because I think it would be a great bite at the apple for him with national priority here.
1:18:50
But part of that's going to also be his ability to invest and do some of the interpersonal retail stuff that Jensen's done so well. >> Yeah. Yeah.
1:18:58
With with OpenAI launching the open source model, you have to wonder if if if like national open source champion of America is a title that Sam Alman is like, I'd like that.
1:19:09
Uh even if it doesn't have even if it doesn't have like direct economic value, if it comes with polit political power, that could be incredibly valuable.
1:19:16
So, uh interesting to see how it breaks down.
1:19:19
Thank you so much for joining.
1:19:20
We'll let you get to your >> next think making you miss your next one. >> No worries. Talk to you soon.
1:19:23
Uh and we will tell you about Adio customer relationship magic.
1:19:27
Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. Get >> the next gen CRM.
1:19:34
>> It's the next gen of CRM.
1:19:34
And speaking of gens, Gen Z has a particular nihilism I call get my bag culture, says Jasmine's son.
1:19:41
Uh the mentality of everyone's grifting, so I better get my own.
1:19:45
This ties into the Trevor Milton uh debate that we were having earlier.
1:19:48
Uh, they've never voted without Trump on the ballot.
1:19:51
All content is sponsored content unless proved otherwise.
1:19:53
Post-truth politics is all they know.
1:19:55
The president's been scamming for the last 10 years, so don't be meek and virtuous or else you're going to lose.
1:20:00
So, no wonder why you end up with Clo. Bit of a hot take. Uh, interesting.
1:20:05
But I do think that there's this there is this >> interesting thing though just to call out uh that the the Cleul haters will be in shambles over this.
1:20:13
But um >> Roy was posting yesterday that he set up a 20% employee option pool at Cle.
1:20:20
>> So he's paying a lot and people are pushing back and being like your burn's got to be crazy and his push back was basically we're way more efficient to you know you can get to 10 million of ARR with a small team.
1:20:31
>> I pay people a lot and I also you can also give them a lot of equity. So >> yeah. Yeah, interesting.
1:20:35
I I do I do worry a little bit about um just as we see more meme stocks, it gets more tempting.
1:20:43
So for like ah like and that that meme about like you have five years to get the bag before the permanent underclass like and and if you're just seeing people get away with things that feel crazy and you're like well they like everyone else got away with it.
1:20:58
Maybe I should get away with it too. Um it is it is sad.
1:21:01
We need Gen Z founders building permanent structures, institutions, products that will outlive them.
1:21:08
And uh there hasn't been a ton of those.
1:21:11
Uh Alex Wang was certainly the the leading candidate as kind of all-star Gen Z company. >> Yeah.
1:21:17
And people people were pissed when uh I mean a lot of people were super happy when Ross Olrich was pardoned.
1:21:20
A lot of people were upset.
1:21:22
They were like he was dealing drugs on the internet and tried to kill someone.
1:21:26
Um, so I think there's allegedly allegedly allegedly. >> Is it alleged?
1:21:31
>> No, I think I think he did order the hit, but it didn't work. >> Okay. Okay.
1:21:36
>> Like it didn't go through because he was talking with a with a undercover agent.
1:21:40
>> Happens to the best of us.
1:21:42
>> Sometimes Sometimes you put something on the list.
1:21:44
Who hasn't ordered a hit? >> Yeah.
1:21:46
Sometimes you put >> You never order one hit. >> Not even one.
1:21:49
Sometimes you put something on on an underling's to-do list and they just forget about it.
1:21:52
It happens and you're like, "Ah, they dropped the ball." It it happens.
1:21:57
Anyway, in other better news, uh there's a profile in Colossus of Rompton Naami.
1:22:04
Uh >> my boy >> uh who you uh you you've worked with. You've met.
1:22:07
Uh and he says >> a dear friend.
1:22:10
>> We we've been quietly building abstract for nine years. He's your friend.
1:22:12
He hasn't been on the show.
1:22:15
>> Well, he's never done any media. Literally never.
1:22:17
So, this is like the first significant media that he's ever done.
1:22:20
He's been very very uh under the radar.
1:22:23
We don't have to list out his full portfolio, but uh if you look at you can go to abstract. vc and check it out.
1:22:29
He's backed a lot of incredible companies.
1:22:30
Uh he backed my last company.
1:22:34
>> Uh he uh was was an incredible partner and um has been a true friend uh throughout uh as long as I've known him.
1:22:43
And I'm excited for him to talk about it. It's a crazy story.
1:22:45
Uh he had um a fund, blew up, went bankrupt when he was 24 and he's 34 now, has 1.
1:22:52
8 billion under management.
1:22:56
>> Wow, that's impressive.
1:22:57
>> And he's an absolute dog.
1:22:57
I can't wait to see him at the top of the Midas list >> for sure. >> It's going to happen.
1:23:02
>> Uh so that will be in the next edition of Colossus magazine, which you should of course subscribe to.
1:23:07
Um >> yeah, you can read this article now.
1:23:08
The man with the hot to get the print edition.
1:23:13
>> The man with the hot hand uh needs to link up with the man with the hot leather jacket.
1:23:17
Jensen Wong apparently dropping a bombshell at the AI summit that we were just talking to Zack Kukov about.
1:23:23
I have 60 plus leather jackets. My wife picks them.
1:23:26
That is the scoop that I need to hear.
1:23:29
Beth, thank you for reporting on the ground.
1:23:31
Jensen Wong says, "I have 60 plus leather jackets." That's a lot.
1:23:36
One for every week of the year. I love it.
1:23:38
year. I love it. Um anyway uh uh another quote from uh which you mentioned Jensen Wong America's unique advantage is that no country could no country could possibly have is President Trump uh he is uh happy to be partnering with the
1:23:56
president the commander-in-chief also a reconciliation of sorts between Delian as Bruhov and Chimath Polyhapatia in DC they're comparing Anacondas and AIRRS Delian and Chimath of course to put the timeline line in turmoil a couple weeks ago talking trash to each other. Uh all
1:24:11
Uh all friendly all's fair and love and war all fair on the timeline taking a friendly picture together. You'll love to see it.
1:24:20
I love a reconciliation even if the the language is a little vulgar for my taste but great to see two capital allocators hanging out in DC together.
1:24:29
Uh Christian Garrett also broke it down.
1:24:32
So >> man behind the behind the scenes pulling all the strings pulling all the strings.
1:24:39
Last night was truly something special.
1:24:40
David Saxs and the all-in pod brought Jacob Hellberg and Delian and I in to something that we'll all never forget.
1:24:47
The business of America is business as Calvin Kulage said and it was never more important than last night.
1:24:51
Freedberg stressed the importance of showing how the everyday American and those who the system has not worked for are already experiencing job creation and transformation due to AI.
1:25:03
Winning the AI race will be a bigger will be part of a bigger story that benefits us all.
1:25:07
There were members of Congress from both sides at the event uh showing how there is a unified front that's bipartisan around technoindustrial policy and the opportunity AI presents itself.
1:25:18
Jacob Hellberg and those in the admin now have to get to good work. Amazing work, dude.
1:25:25
Congrats, says Will O'Brien.
1:25:25
Bobby Good Latte says, "Saw some of the post. Looks absolutely epic."
1:25:29
So, all three former guests, you love to see it.
1:25:32
Um, so President Trump said he had planned to break Nvidia up until he learned who Jensen Wong was.
1:25:40
What's funny is I don't I I don't even know how you would break up Nvidia.
1:25:45
like it's it's just just a like it's a fabless semiconductor company like they it's not like the Intel thing where you have you have a fab and then you also have a design company.
1:25:55
Uh I mean I guess you could break down like gaming and AI training or something or I I I just I I don't know where the the dividing line would be would be.
1:26:04
It's really just like they haven't the story of Nvidia isn't they don't have an Instagram.
1:26:08
It's not they don't have a story of oh they acquired this company and it and it got really big and it saved them from >> disruption.
1:26:14
break it up and say, "Okay, you're going to have an AI division and a gaming, you know, just but gaming's like a rounding error."
1:26:22
>> I mean, they have some other stuff that's in there. I mean, I don't know.
1:26:24
You break out Cuda or something.
1:26:24
I I don't know how >> they force Jensen to sell off the majority of his jackets. >> Yeah. Yeah.
1:26:31
Break up the jackets, >> pay down the national debt.
1:26:33
>> Um, but anyway, Jensen's been in DC.
1:26:33
We saw him there uh a couple weeks ago, a couple months ago, and uh he's been doing the work to get to know Donald Trump, and it has worked out spectacularly.
1:26:42
And now Jensen is the >> I have a I we I this will go unment mentioned but I had we have a friend of the show uh and Jensen walked up to us and the friend introduced himself and his company and Jensen didn't know the company and he's like h so bearish for me.
1:27:03
>> Wait that was Jensen that he was oh okay I know the other side of that story. I didn't realize it.
1:27:07
I thought it was random person.
1:27:08
>> He's like he really took it personally.
1:27:11
Um, well, he's been on a generational run since.
1:27:13
>> You want to be known by the greats, the the folks who only worked at Denny's and then started a generational company at AMD.
1:27:24
>> Um, this is an interesting thread by Kevin Brian um, talking about how the New York Times is reporting on the AI action plan.
1:27:31
Kevin says, "Come on, man.
1:27:34
There's no way you can read the AI action plan and think this is the first order thing that that the first order thing that New York Times readers should know about it. Enthropic is positive.
1:27:43
AI has huge implications for the national economy, defense, future of science.
1:27:50
Half this article is about copyright.
1:27:50
Um it is wild how much tech journalism comes from a place of extreme hostility towards the technology.
1:27:56
It often reads like a RFK writing articles about new pharmaceutical breakthroughs.
1:28:01
No wonder the Silicon Valley set completely ignores this.
1:28:04
And then he closes with a post about uh 90% of mainstream writing on AI is one encoded bias, two theft of copyright, three wasting water and electricity adnauseium.
1:28:15
Gangs gang folks in these labs think they're curing cancer.
1:28:19
Honestly, who gives anything about one, two, and three given that even if those worries were true, they aren't.
1:28:26
If you think those three things are the most important policy issues or even the biggest downside risks of AI, and I mean this in a let's be real, not >> Yeah.
1:28:35
It's hard it's hard to argue that energy use by itself is a bad thing. >> Yeah.
1:28:41
>> And it and it is true that uh data centers require an obscene amount of energy.
1:28:46
We talked earlier this week about how uh Oracle's Oracle's um partnership with OpenAI where OpenAI will be spending uh $30 billion a year with Oracle by 2027 at least how it was reported will require two Hoover Dams worth of energy uh which is an exceptional amount but um as energy production has gone up so has human prosperity >> water production there's plenty of water for the data centers there's Plenty of water to fill your eightle. You can go to at eight. com. Get a pod five. >> I'm back.
1:29:22
>> Five year back in the game.
1:29:22
Free night risk, free trial, free returns, free shipping. Go get a pod five. >> I've been ill.
1:29:27
I finally put up seven and a half hours last night. I'm back in range.
1:29:33
My HRV I'm no longer looking dead >> and I got over two hours of REM sleep last night.
1:29:39
So, we have a lot better from Andre and Horowitz joining in just a few minutes.
1:29:44
Uh, in the meantime, let's do some timeline.
1:29:45
I want to dig into this Financial Times, uh, article.
1:29:49
I think we're gonna need more time. Let's do that later.
1:29:50
Uh, the headline, of course, just to keep you up to speed, is that Nvidia chips worth 1 billion were smuggled into China after Trump export controls.
1:29:59
We've heard about this black market.
1:30:01
We've heard about people stuffing suitcases full of them and flying around the country.
1:30:05
Uh, they're not the biggest thing in the world, so it's easy to route them around.
1:30:08
There's always a question, could the government have done more?
1:30:12
Could Nvidia have done more?
1:30:14
Um, what are who are who are the truly the bad actors?
1:30:16
There's the >> crazy graphic right there. >> Good graphic. Love it.
1:30:19
But we will we will cover this later in the show.
1:30:23
>> Danish is uh throwing some shade at Ilia.
1:30:26
He says, "How you got 32 billion?"
1:30:30
Uh, he doesn't have 32 billion.
1:30:30
Uh, and don't take the turkey flight to restore the hairline.
1:30:34
I would have pavurovved myself into a Greek god the instant it was financially feasible.
1:30:40
dude does not give an F about anything but the mission. Incredibly bullish. Okay.
1:30:47
>> You don't think super intelligence is going to be able to cure hair loss?
1:30:48
Like that's going to be the single prompt >> right before cancer >> probably.
1:30:53
It does seem more tractable.
1:30:56
It doesn't seem that crazy. Uh very rude.
1:30:58
Um anyway, uh people having fun on the timeline.
1:31:01
Uh well, we have Andre and Horowits partner Venita joining in just a few minutes.
1:31:05
And there's a post about Andre and Horwit.
1:31:06
So, uh James Lynn says A16Z and Sutter Hill Ventures.
1:31:08
Well, so the context here, oh yes, >> Avdon Rodins Rodonssky says, "Recently got asked which VC firm changed the game like Steph Curry did for >> lot of sports metaphors in tech these days. You'd love to see it.
1:31:21
It's >> tough when you know nothing about the two examples of VC firms that changed the game like Steph Curry did for the NBA.
1:31:27
Anderson Horowitz and Sutter Hill Ventures, but in completely different ways.
1:31:31
Uh, James Lynn here says, "A16Z realized that everyone was undervaluing startups and massively overbid, 10x what other people were offering."
1:31:38
I don't know if that's actually happened that often that you go get a term sheet and injuries and comes in at 10x the price, but they've certainly been aggressive on pricing and it's worked out in many cases for early >> 50% higher.
1:31:52
But >> yeah, but um uh so it got them Twitter, Instagram, Coinbase, GitHub, Anderal, Airbnb, Slack, round sizes went up after that.
1:32:02
Uh Sutter Hill saw trends in cloud computing and incubated Snowflake from idea to IPO.
1:32:06
They made Mike Spicer a partner, the interim CEO, hired the technical co-founders, funded the entire series A.
1:32:12
They had 20% stake in Snowflake at IPO at a $33 billion. >> That was worth 12.
1:32:17
It was a 12 billion position for them.
1:32:20
So pretty much the best incubation of all time.
1:32:24
>> So A16Z finds talent and makes several outsized bets.
1:32:27
Sutter Hill sees a trend and operationalizes one to two companies completely in-house.
1:32:32
Now larger rounds are the norm and the venture studio model is much more common.
1:32:36
That makes a ton of sense.
1:32:39
We'll have to ask Venita about that when she joins.
1:32:41
Um what else do we have here in the timeline?
1:32:44
We >> I also think you can't you you can't leave YC out of that group, right? It's changed the game.
1:32:50
It's an entirely uh different model but highly highly highly effective.
1:32:55
>> Yeah, I think the initial YC the way it changed the game was that it made it completely possible for college new grads to go and start a company without getting any experience in enterprise or in business.
1:33:10
And so that was the initial ARB.
1:33:14
Like Sand Hill Road existed, Sequoia Capital existed, Kleiner Perkins existed, but if the Airbnb guys had gone to friends and family round to get a friends and family round done. >> Exactly.
1:33:25
So if the Airbnb guys I think had showed up to Kleiner Perkins or Sequoia, who actually I think wound up doing the Airbnb deal later.
1:33:31
I think Sequoia did um preyc that might have been like this is a little weird company.
1:33:37
This is a little bit out of our sweet spot.
1:33:39
But then you go through YC, you get coached by Paul Graham at the time and you polish things up such that you're ready to go and ready to talk to the big firms and Paul Graham I think famously told the Sequoia partner like you should do the Airbnb deal even as weird as it is like think about you know eBay for space and it worked out.
1:33:56
Uh fantastic story we have Venita from Andre and Horowitz in the studio. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? >> Good to meet you.
1:34:05
How are you doing Airbnb? Yes. What? Yeah.
1:34:07
What's your what what's your take on this uh on this A16Z changing the game by uh recognizing that everyone was undervaluing startups and massively over bidding for early rounds.
1:34:20
Um what do do you think that resonates?
1:34:22
Do you feel like Andre and Horus has changed the game in venture?
1:34:25
>> Totally unbiased take too coming. >> Totally unbiased.
1:34:28
I do believe my partners are changing the game. No.
1:34:30
And part of what's amazing about A16Z is our willingness to bet in every sector, every vertical, every part of the economy.
1:34:37
uh really every part of the economy you know both locally domestically and uh globally.
1:34:40
So my corner of the world it's a big corner of the world it's a five trillion dollar corner of the world is healthcare and um one of the things I love about our firm is that we've really established a dedicated strategy here too and hopefully changing the game here too. >> Yeah.
1:34:56
Has uh how has bio investing healthcare investing changed?
1:34:59
Uh we were talking about the Airbnb example.
1:35:02
It feels like it's it's it's easy for a couple folks with just a hope and a dream.
1:35:10
They don't need to do a friends and family round.
1:35:11
They can just go to Sand Hill Road.
1:35:12
They can go to places like YC.
1:35:13
They can go to Andreas Norwitz directly and and raise a seed round and have enough to actually pay the bills, hire a couple people, do a couple tests, launch a consumer app, launch an enterprise app.
1:35:24
Uh has there been a meaningful change in the way healthcare and bio companies get started?
1:35:28
For a long time, it felt like the only way to do a company in that space was you're at MIT and you do some, you know, partnership with flagship pioneering and then you IPO and then you're living and dying by your FDA trials.
1:35:43
Uh the traditional venture path felt very um just like a completely separate track, but how has it evolved from your experience? >> Yeah, great question.
1:35:52
I mean, I think we're absolutely um we're absolutely part of the agentic wave.
1:35:59
I've never seen so much interest in >> in the role of AI agents in transforming how science is done, how research is done, how discoveries are made, how drugs could be developed.
1:36:08
Um the FDA launched an AI agent called ELSA.
1:36:11
Um cute name, but you know potentially signaling, you know, a transformative role for AI even in the regulatory agency, which is kind of a mind-blowing mind-blowing thing to think about, right?
1:36:24
it you would have thought that it would have been the innovators and the startups kind of pushing AI first and then waiting for the regulator to say yes we believe these predictive tools are going to help us make drugs.
1:36:34
So I think we are seeing a really different market pull than ever before.
1:36:37
At the same time the business models in healthcare um you know uh are still similar and the core products that drive value are still similar.
1:36:46
So we're in the business of making new medicines.
1:36:48
So are the startups that we back um in large part uh or making the practice of medicine way better and transforming the practice of medicine.
1:36:57
And both have some really established business models around them.
1:37:01
Um drugs that work that have an impact on patients get paid for.
1:37:05
They get paid for because they save the system money.
1:37:07
Um services we pay for because people need services um on time at you know from the right specialist for the right disease.
1:37:15
And so those are all, you know, great business models in which to uh in which to invest and in which startups can run, but certainly startups are now running in a much more capital efficient way, in a much more AI powered way than they ever were before.
1:37:29
We need agents in the game in our >> Where is Silicon Valley's sweet spot or like strike zone in bio?
1:37:34
Because I I was reading the Wall Street Journal today about a company that does uh they're developing robotics for lab testing equipment.
1:37:42
So basically like pipetting, you know, famously it's like a PhD student just going like this all day long.
1:37:47
Uh bunch of robots doing that makes a ton of sense.
1:37:50
That feels like Silicon Valley all the way. Same thing.
1:37:53
>> Wait, how many how many cursor for bio pitches have you have you got?
1:37:56
Is it is it in the hundreds?
1:37:59
>> But that feels like more in the sweet spot when I think about like an ERP system for for biotech companies.
1:38:02
That feels a lot easier than saying I'm going to take a cancer drug through the FDA trials and I'm never going to go public.
1:38:11
I'm going to raise growth rounds at every stage.
1:38:13
Like we haven't seen that that much, but maybe we're still just early in that trend changing. >> Yeah.
1:38:19
And I think part of that the trend is changing in part because of the same trends we're seeing in other verticals that AI is getting paid for through labor budgets and AI is not necessarily replacing but augmenting labor. Right?
1:38:32
90% 90 plus% of all chemical screens for new drugs fail. No drug comes out of it.
1:38:39
10% of all nurse positions across the health care system are vacant.
1:38:41
We can't find the nurses to fill the positions. Right?
1:38:45
So, we're living in a world where actually we need agentic resources to come in as labor.
1:38:50
come in as labor. And that is different than the world we were living in before where we were trying to squeeze out IT budget um from you know let's say a large pharma company or let's say a hospital system to uh deploy the types of Silicon Valley technologies that
1:39:07
could have been transformative for the industries and so now that there's a lot more you know autonomous task completion as well as augmentation well beyond what humans could do in those fields I do think some of those Silicon Valley technologies you know obviously ly. Yes,
1:39:20
Yes, they are being formed.
1:39:22
Yes, we are absolutely being pitched the cursor for bio right now.
1:39:26
And and we think it's very credible.
1:39:28
We think it absolutely is the case that if you have a lot of data, you you're a company that's let's say run clinical trials before, managed many many drugs through development, you should have agents crawling through that data, learning what humans might have missed, learning why things failed, why things succeeded, and then bringing that knowledge to your next set of set of endeavors.
1:39:49
And so absolutely you know this kind of regime of a of a fully virtual agentic uh lab that for every one human scientist you know has hundreds of agentic scientists is a really really interesting interesting vision.
1:40:05
At the same time making the drug is really valuable.
1:40:10
So we really do think that great innovation can take it all the way and can you know great startups can actually develop their own. >> Yeah.
1:40:19
How how often a company comes to you that wants to be more on the picks and shovels side kind of infrastructure maybe more B2B.
1:40:26
How often do you find yourself encouraging them to own try to take it all the way and actually like use whatever innovation or or insight they have to not just make that product available to other uh bio or pharma companies but uh you know actually deliver the end value.
1:40:46
>> I think it really depends on the founders and exactly where the innovation sits. We've backed both.
1:40:48
Um we're long on both infrastructure for the industry and um you know uh SAS forward deployed SAS SAS plus agentic implementations and you know I think we think a lot of that has a ton of value and will fundamentally change how every organization operates and not every organization is going to build their own cursor-like tools for research.
1:41:09
Um, at the same time, sometimes the innovators who are closest, I'll give you a real example, you know, autoimmune disease is horrible.
1:41:19
10% of people have an autoimmune disease.
1:41:21
Um, and sounds like science fiction, but recently we tried CARTT therapy.
1:41:26
Take take my tea cells out of my body, >> engineer them, and instead of attacking a tumor cell, attack bad autoimmune cells. Okay.
1:41:34
Well, that's interesting.
1:41:37
And what if I could deliver it in the same type of vaccine type format that you got your COVID jab in an LNP >> um and an RNA that >> I'm kind of surprised to hear you calling a vaccine I'm kind of surprised to hear you calling a vaccine a jab.
1:41:54
>> Uh but maybe that's just a comment. >> That's what it is.
1:41:55
Um it's like it's like reclaiming tech. >> Yeah, reclaim it.
1:41:58
We reclaim tech bro technology brothers.
1:42:01
>> Yeah, the pharmaceutical industry definitely needs to reclaim change the name of this thing to tech nerds.
1:42:04
name of this thing to tech nerds. just >> um what about uh you know just to finish that story out to make that requires a lot of engineering and a lot of optimization and a lot of so-called Silicon Valley style >> sure >> optimization and so we're seeing that a
1:42:20
company in our portfolio called orbital therapeutics announced really exciting data in monkeys you know demonstrating that that might be possible for autoimmune disease so that's cool um I think it goes both ways Silicon Valley tech is going to permeate every company whether they're based here or not and whether they're drugs or not. >> Do you do you think that uh these sort
1:42:37
>> Do you do you think that uh these sort of early IPOs that that drug companies have done historically is a feature or a bug?
1:42:44
Like if if we have more developed private capital markets, do you think that uh like is it even right that ret effectively retail uneducated retail could just be taking these like you know gambling in in the public markets on on on effectively FDA trials or or um is there a better way?
1:43:06
>> There is a huge public market for biotech.
1:43:08
um the stage at which companies accessed those markets in the last few years was um was miscalibrated.
1:43:14
And so that's why you see the headlines you're seeing with respect to public biotech stock performance, with respect to um public fundraising challenges for companies because they were very far from the clinic.
1:43:29
They were very far from generating commercial value.
1:43:31
They were very far from demonstrating hard data that they were close to developing a product of value.
1:43:37
Um, so I do think the p the private markets continue to be to have massive pools of capital in them and biotech companies will stay private for longer.
1:43:46
Um, but you know at the same time we're seeing huge demand and appetite for technologies that work from pharma companies that have a really rich ability to continue to back biotech companies, partner with biotech companies, fund biotech companies, buy biotech companies.
1:44:01
So um we partnered up with Eli Liy on that front and started a whole dedicated fund focused on supporting the biotech ecosystem and that serves pharma and it serves the biotech ecosystem too, right?
1:44:11
And so there are lots of ways for companies to continue to make progress on those technologies while private um until they until they have the metrics that justify justify going public. >> That makes sense.
1:44:24
You said something earlier around uh nursing job vacancies.
1:44:29
How do you what's your thesis on how that market evolves in four years?
1:44:31
Are we still going to see you know hospital systems unable and and various groups unable to get the nurses that they want or do you think that uh agentic systems can can kind of backfill those roles and and they just there there will be more kind of balance in the market.
1:44:52
>> Yeah, I I hope we also project needing fewer roles.
1:44:55
I mean, we are projecting that we're going to be short over 3 million healthare workers just in the United States alone over the next year, right? So, it's a huge number.
1:45:05
>> And the people So, and and and the people making those projections, are they AGI pilled?
1:45:09
Are they humanoid robot build?
1:45:12
Like I I I it's cool that the FDA has a chief AI officer. That feels important.
1:45:18
Um, but anytime I'm like reading into projections, uh, it's more interesting to get a projection or or insight from you given that you're backing all these companies that understand that reality and want to and want to >> Right.
1:45:32
That's a big number that's based on, you know, the job count, you know, jobs that health systems and providers are opening but unable to fill based on the projected increase in healthcare demand as our population ages.
1:45:42
But absolutely I I hope it's not really that high because there's only like eight million total job vacancies in the US.
1:45:50
That's like almost half our total job vacancies in healthcare alone.
1:45:52
So we have to actually decrease our need for those jobs and we could redirect some of our extremely skilled healthcare existing workforce from answering phone calls, dropping up picked, you know, picking up drop balls, recommunicating the same information to patients, recommunicating the same information between providers who are trying to coordinate.
1:46:13
There are million ways in which our system does not work today.
1:46:17
And so I hope that number goes down.
1:46:17
Um but the reality is that um the willingness to try out the agentic solution whether it's for documentation whether it's for getting prior off from an insurance company or whether it's for actually providing a clinical consult um has never been higher because the reality is today we don't have the humans to fill those jobs. Um wait times are long.
1:46:41
30% of Americans skip care like they skip or delay prescribed care.
1:46:48
We're a developed country in which that's happening and 60 70% of Americans say I will see an AI doctor like just I will see one like at least I will engage with one and in fact I'm probably going to engage with one before I engage with a human doctor now right we've all changed our consumer behavior that way um almost overnight.
1:47:07
So, it's a pretty remarkable shift that's happening that will, I hope, make us need a lot fewer than than those, you know, that number of of open jobs.
1:47:18
>> I I I remember what was it in like 2008 there was a boom in electronic medical records startups like Athena Health was one of them.
1:47:26
And there was kind of like two waves going on that were kind of adding together and making those businesses work.
1:47:32
businesses work. One is like a technological wave obviously like we had access to cloud databases and cloud infrastructure and better software and so you could actually like put medical records sa securely in a cloud and so
1:47:44
that was obviously like a great business but then there was also an EHR mandate from the Obamacare legislation I believe are there any uh regulatory tailwinds that are adding on top of like the AI technology tailwinds right now in bio or healthcare broadly. Yeah, absolutely. So Yeah, absolutely.
1:48:00
healthcare broadly. Yeah, absolutely. So there are um uh first of all I will say historically um historically a lot of healthcare software and technology was adopted because of regulatory incentives and payment incentives but for the first time we are seeing bottoms up adoption
1:48:17
of tools and technologies and and an extraordinary NPS of healthcare software with scribing tools um like those developed by companies like Ambience and Abridge um you know uh uh you know you evidence access tools like what what open evidence has built and so for the
1:48:35
first time we're also seeing pull that's just like hey this is better I don't need the government to give me a you know a kickback to tell me it's better but it is better so that's a separate trend that we're very excited about um but uh huge regulations are also going
1:48:49
to incentivize um a better technology infrastructure so price transparency is a good example there are clear incentives and penalties for not being able to share transparently your price your pricing cards as a provider, as a payer, and to create that type of open access for patients. And so building
1:49:05
And so building that infrastructure layer is going to be super important.
1:49:09
Um the administration's talked a lot about patient choice.
1:49:12
That could be patient choice with respect to how you use your benefit dollar, patient choice with respect to what um uh plan coverage you select.
1:49:20
um and IKRA is a good example of um of uh of of a potentially big change in the employer sponsored healthcare space.
1:49:29
So these are all financial rails and incentives.
1:49:31
all financial rails and incentives. CMMI continues to advance value-based initiatives um that uh that basically prioritize preventive care and say hey at the end of the year if you save the government a dollar if you save CMS money uh dear smart provider who is using technology you'll make money right
1:49:51
so that's a clear financial incentive it's good for patients generally being out of the health care system preventing something before it costs a lot of money is good for patients um but the financial incentives and policy incentives do need to, you know, do provide a huge accelerate in our space and that will continue to be the case. >> Can you give us the update on the drug
1:50:08
>> Can you give us the update on the drug pricing EO from, I don't know, was it 6 weeks ago, 8 weeks ago?
1:50:13
It feels like a year ago at this point.
1:50:15
There's been a lot that that happened.
1:50:17
We had a bunch of people on the day of.
1:50:18
Um, and a lot of people were kind of saying that it wasn't going to be as impactful as it kind of felt in the moment, but what's the update there?
1:50:28
I don't think there's been a policy update like you know nothing has been enacted yet that's still an EO.
1:50:34
Um the the concept of it of course was to say um was to use international trade as a backdrop for holistic negotiations inclusive of drug pricing to say you know as part of an overall tariff negotiation.
1:50:51
Why is it the case that the US pays two or three times or more for the same exact drug that another that another country pays?
1:51:00
And so it is a logical question to ask and um we know that CMS is continuing to ask that question but the actual policy is going to depend on quite a bit of you know there are a number of moving parts and a holistic policy with respect to every other every other country.
1:51:16
So, it's important for us to retain huge incentives.
1:51:20
Um, and it's not going to be as simple as cut the price, get great drugs.
1:51:25
That's not how the market works.
1:51:28
Um, but should the price be more equitably shared across countries?
1:51:30
It's an absolutely reasonable perspective to have.
1:51:36
>> How popular is open source in the bio world?
1:51:39
I feel like like the cursor for bio thing is very interesting.
1:51:40
Um, but when I think about the electronic lab notebooks that folks are using, like if it's not open source, you can't fork it.
1:51:50
And it feels like part of Cursor's ability to grow really fast was that they they they sit on top of your codebase and you can change idees very quickly.
1:52:00
But if you're you if a if a researcher is using a closed source lab notebook that has a database built in, that company is going to be like, "No, no, no."
1:52:11
no, no." like I do not want you just stealing all my customers or like migrating off but are is open source popular are there opportunities like what's the VS code equivalent I guess would be the question >> yeah I think there's a lot you know in bio research there's a lot more
1:52:26
informatics and and less organized software I think that will change but historically um historically there is a lot of bespoke informatics which is why some of the agentic adoption like for exploratory informatics research is happening on its own and people are adopting open-source agents for resources like that. um you know the
1:52:46
resources like that. um you know the structure mo the protein structure models like alphafold >> sure >> um were followed by a number of models that were open sourced and within a period of weeks thousands of scientists thousands of companies adopted um additional structure prediction models
1:53:05
bolts 2 was a popular one the chai model a number of startups put out open-source models and we saw really fast adoption which is kind of cool right it's like it's a scientist sitting in a company who says I want to try that you and see if it would help my workflow and actually I want to benchmark it and I want to try three at the same time. So
1:53:20
So we didn't have that many great open-source resources like that before.
1:53:26
We had data sets um but not necessarily models and APIs to those models that made them easy to use.
1:53:31
So I think that that in that whole ecosystem is in its like square one infancy of growing and exploding.
1:53:39
But you're going to need a library of models.
1:53:41
You want to be able to try all the models.
1:53:43
You want your agents to be able to use the models without even a human interface.
1:53:48
And so suddenly the same thing that's happening in enterprise software in every vertical is going to happen here too.
1:53:54
you know, agents on behalf of scientists will be able to select which models to use, try five models at once, um, and then incorporate the results and predictions of those models into a workflow, um, you know, that is deeply integrated with, um, you know, with other agentic automation.
1:54:14
So, it's none of that's built, I would say, for the vast majority of the industry.
1:54:19
And so, it's a huge huge opportunity for um, for startups to build. >> Yeah. Last quick question.
1:54:25
Um maybe if you could answer in uh 60 seconds. That's the challenge.
1:54:30
Uh what what is the uh what's the vibe on the Stamford campus right now?
1:54:35
Are people dropping out of you know PhD programs to start companies in in bio?
1:54:40
I'm sure we're seeing uh people dropping out of PhDs to join Meta and other AI research orgs broadly, but I'm curious if that's happening in in bio.
1:54:52
Um there have there are a number of um fast growing AI biotech startups right that are bringing AI and um computational tools to model training.
1:55:02
So we are seeing that if you're asking you know is it a response to federal funding changes um I think the you know that's always been the case that a large fraction of trainees from university campuses end up in biotech and pharma companies and that's great it's a great outcome.
1:55:18
Um, I don't think uh, you know, I do think there's probably in the near term going to be continued exploration of industry alternatives to federally funded research.
1:55:28
Um, and I really hope that there that the the, you know, federal grant funding is clarified and and um, >> and uh, and that there's more stability on university campuses for fally funded research because some of that infrastructure is absolutely has been behind a huge number of these of these innovations. Makes sense.
1:55:49
Thank you so much for joining.
1:55:51
>> Yeah, thank you so much. >> Great to chat. >> Talk to you soon. >> Cheers.
1:55:54
>> Up next, we have Mickey Mala, the founder of Ribbit Capital.
1:55:56
Really quickly, I will tell you about Adqu.
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1:56:09
And we hopefully have Mickey Mala. How you doing, Mickey? Good to meet you. >> Hi, guys.
1:56:15
Good to see you, John and Jordy. How are you guys?
1:56:18
>> Welcome to the stream. >> Great background. Good.
1:56:19
Yeah, >> great background. What's going on? >> Background. Break it down for us. >> Those are some NFTTS.
1:56:24
>> Wonderful collection from an artist called Bright Moments.
1:56:27
They did a exhibition all over the world.
1:56:28
And these are cryptocitizens from the 10 cities around the world where they had their exhibitions. >> Amazing. Amazing.
1:56:35
Uh it's great to have you on the show.
1:56:38
We've been excited for this.
1:56:39
Uh you guys have been on a absolutely crazy run and it's awesome that you're starting to talk about it a bit more. >> Yeah.
1:56:46
I I want to start with like your background.
1:56:47
I think that you might actually have a non-traditional path to venture or at least uh a very interesting entrepreneurial journey prior to launching a venture firm.
1:56:55
So, uh can you just give us a little bit of background on your history and how you wound up running uh Rivet?
1:57:02
>> So, I'm an entrepreneur and I'm still entrepreneur.
1:57:03
It just happens that I started when I was 17 years old and uh that's all I know how to do and I started in financial services.
1:57:09
Uh, growing up in Venezuela in the early '9s, it was inflation, crisises, bank failures, all the things that you need to learn in your life.
1:57:20
I had them by the time I was 22 years old. >> Speedun. >> Oh my god. Yes.
1:57:26
Light speed through all of that.
1:57:28
So, uh, I started four different companies around the world before the the word fintech or crypto even existed.
1:57:34
always trying to do something in in around the internet and making money better.
1:57:40
Simply that was the whole thing.
1:57:42
And >> and what did and what did what did some of those first companies look like?
1:57:44
Were they specific to problems that you were having in in Venezuela or were they global by nature?
1:57:54
>> The first one was uh it was the first online trading platform for Latin America.
1:57:57
A little bit what Robin Hood is today. >> Yeah.
1:57:59
But imagine that in 1998 in the beginning of the internet and you could trade online stocks of every local Latin American market, Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, Chile, we had a Brazil, we had a we bought it stock exchange uh seats in all of them and we were able to allow people to trade.
1:58:18
>> So that that was the one of the first ones and then I I >> And you were you were you were like 20 at this time?
1:58:25
>> I was 23 24 when I started. Yes. >> Wow.
1:58:28
that company >> and um and there were no venture capitalists in Latin America. There was nobody.
1:58:34
Uh we had to convince some people in the US and New York to fund us.
1:58:38
Uh and headquartered in Miami to avoid any kind of problem with choosing a place in Latin America and and that company uh became the largest online broker dealer in South America. >> Wow. Insane.
1:58:51
Um and then where did you go from there?
1:58:54
Uh I went to Spain because my first company was acquired by a Bing Spaner bank and the internet had blown up a little bit like when they think it was all hype.
1:59:02
Uh it will happen to AI eventually when it all people will think it was it was all wrong in eventually the future.
1:59:09
But um and I started the first online bank in Europe.
1:59:15
There was no online banks.
1:59:15
Uh it was a bank called Open Bank because it was supposed to be open 247 365.
1:59:19
It still runs uh in Spain and it was >> Were you Were you the Was was adding open to the start of a word?
1:59:28
Were you the first person to do that because openings were taking over the open words these days? >> Yeah. >> Pay me my fee. I I coined that. Uh yeah, that's wild.
1:59:43
Uh what uh who was the first LP uh to kick you off? Like what was the story?
1:59:48
Well, well, first I have to ask I'm assuming there wasn't bank there wasn't like 20 banking as a service platforms back then.
1:59:52
How did how did you get how did you how did you convince a bank to in uh in Europe to to bank?
1:59:59
>> Well, I I I had to become regulated.
1:59:59
By the time I was 25 or 26, I was regulated by eight central banks. >> Wow.
2:00:07
>> To uh go through the whole KYC bank approval process myself. What was the secret?
2:00:13
Is it more just like you filled out the forms perfectly, you sent the right messages, or were you like kind of knocking on doors trying to grease palms to make it happen? >> All of the above. >> All of the above.
2:00:26
>> Uh depending on the country, you had to do a lot more.
2:00:28
Some were a lot more technical than others, >> but definitely you had to see they had to see that I was not just this kid who didn't know anything about finance.
2:00:35
And then I had to pretend I knew a lot about finance. Mhm.
2:00:39
>> So yeah, you want to continue with that? >> No.
2:00:42
From where where did that go?
2:00:42
I I I don't want to leave a cliffhanger.
2:00:45
>> So So that business uh grew to the fastest bank in Europe.
2:00:47
fastest bank in Europe. I sold it back to them to the uh to the bank that uh we were partnered with and then I moved to Brazil started and I got approval by the president of Brazil back then Lula was which is again president now to approve a new banking license granted so we
2:01:05
could start a bank to serve the unbank with financial services so I lived in S Pablo did that for three years became the largest retail bank in the country serving almost 15 million customers that was now >> I'm seeing a trend I'm seeing a trend >> on you like No, no. I was going to say
2:01:20
I was going to say you seem to like being the fastest growing or the number one in your category.
2:01:27
>> You You know what I like is making allowing people to when when people have access to better money.
2:01:34
>> It makes their life better.
2:01:36
>> It's not about having more money or less money.
2:01:38
It's just making money better.
2:01:40
And better money means you should be able to invest the same way I can anywhere in the world.
2:01:46
You should be able to get the best loan and not get your knees beaten up if you don't pay back a credit.
2:01:52
You should be able to get a good insurance product no matter where you are or what you're trying to do.
2:01:57
That's what I call better money.
2:01:57
So, I think the journey of my life has been one of pursuing that better money makes life better.
2:02:05
And moved to Silicon Valley 18 years ago to start a company in payments before the iPhone came out.
2:02:11
I I had a feeling people were going to tap and pay with their phones.
2:02:15
So, uh, we were one of the first companies tapping on NFC stickers, putting them on back of the phones.
2:02:22
You could pay for in merchants and and that when the app store came out with the iPhone, we were the first wallet in the phone. >> Wow.
2:02:32
>> So, that moment was like an aha moment when you saw mobile and you saw the app store.
2:02:37
This is like this is what I had been waiting for 20 years as an entrepreneur.
2:02:40
that moment in time when suddenly you can compete with incumbents in a playing field that they were not looking at.
2:02:50
>> So that's where Rivet Capital started instead of building one more company because I always consider myself even though we always moved the ball forward.
2:03:00
I was a fail entrepreneur because the best entrepreneurs never sell their companies.
2:03:04
So, I decided to start Rivet as a way to say this is the one I'm going to run until the last day I want to run it. >> That's fantastic.
2:03:12
Um, sorry, now we're now I'm going backwards.
2:03:15
Uh, can you talk to me about some of the wedges that you used in the previous companies to actually drive adoption of a new banking product or a new bank online?
2:03:25
um the so many different >> I have to imagine I have to imagine starting in markets like you know Spain, Brazil uh etc.
2:03:34
Brazil uh etc. help helped you you know many it's been the narrative violation over the last 20 years has been that uh developing countries adopted fintech faster they adopted new methods of payments new uh you know much faster than developing countries in many ways
2:03:54
because there just wasn't that legacy infrastructure so I'm curious if you even think you would have been successful if you had had just tried to come and only crack you know the the US market >> no I would have been afraid uh I would not understand uh the world. I I'm I was never the best student at
2:04:09
I I'm I was never the best student at school, but I was a student of life.
2:04:12
and walking through the streets of all these countries and seeing how people behave with money was the best class and the best master class I could have gotten because at the end everything you do is building a brand and you and brand means trust and it's very underrated to understand how long it takes to build trust and how fast can you make it shake or disappear or fracture and then how long it takes to bring it back. Mhm.
2:04:42
>> So if you see a pattern in everything that we've done is working with teams that we believe can build a brand and working with them because that is the only moat that you can build that gives you the chance to succeed in financial services because every financial product at the end it's a commodity. It can be copied.
2:05:00
You can start with free commissions it will be copied.
2:05:02
You can start with free credit scores it will be copied.
2:05:07
You can start with free interest rate lendings or tipping it will be copied.
2:05:12
So it has to be the brand and that's a special DNA that I got to understand from working in markets where people's level of trust was even lower than in developed markets. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah.
2:05:27
How do you actually build that trust and build that brand in some of those markets?
2:05:31
Is it different in Brazil than other countries?
2:05:34
Are you talking about the the feel of the product or actually just the marketing and telling people what your brand stands for or does it infuse through the interactions with a a bank teller in the virtual environment?
2:05:49
Probably >> I think it's all the above.
2:05:50
It's in the little things.
2:05:51
It's really uh telling a story in a way that people believe and consistently see that you're doing that >> and everyone every company does it in a different way.
2:06:03
So there was a a story I remember from New Bank in Brazil when we backed them super early.
2:06:08
You know in Sao Pablo they are 18 million people but there's I think there's like four million dogs.
2:06:16
It's almost like one dog for and so whenever they saw that you you had a transaction on your credit card for a a a vet you you they will send you cookies to your house. >> Wow. >> Right.
2:06:30
Uh because it meant that your dog was sick or something was happening.
2:06:31
So imagine, but those are little things that you do that with consistency.
2:06:36
And if the message is we care about you and we're paying attention to what's going on in your life, that's how you build that trust.
2:06:46
It's a bunch of little details.
2:06:49
There's never a big thing, but it has to be genuine.
2:06:51
And you can see when when CEOs or teams are not genuine, you can see it 10 miles away.
2:07:00
How do you feel about so so you did the first institutional round of Coinbase and Robin Hood? Correct. >> Yes.
2:07:07
>> And do did you did you think at the time that that those companies did you have a feeling that that if they were successful they would end up ultimately competing with each other?
2:07:15
Because it's not exactly head-to-head yet, but you can imagine 10 years from today these companies will just be going at it.
2:07:21
And maybe that's just because of the trends around bundling in fintech, right?
2:07:25
If you can create one product, you can add a bunch of others.
2:07:29
If you can earn someone's trust in one category, you can expand out.
2:07:33
Uh but I think we're at this really interesting moment where the last 10 years were about you had uh leg, you know, traditional fintech and you had crypto and they were these distinct categories, but it seems that it seems very obvious now that they will be, you know, massively overlapped in ultimately just one category which is money. >> Yes.
2:07:53
So we we were the first institutional round to Coinbase and Robin Hood but also to Revolute which is in the same camp and and also to Newang. Yeah.
2:08:03
>> Also to we were super early and we build with Marcalo Libre Marcalo Pago which is a competitor of Newang now.
2:08:08
So if you had told me back then that all these companies were going to be competing for this uh we would have never guessed it ever.
2:08:17
And and the reality is >> Well, I'm surprised you say that because it seems like you have a bit of a you got a secret crystal ball or something.
2:08:25
If you were >> Well, five years ago, we told our our our LPs, our investors in our one of our investor day meetings that the rails of crypto and and financial services were actually starting to blend and it was going to be indifferent and then companies that didn't do both were going to be completely spaced out or lost the window of chance to build.
2:08:46
So five years ago we started to see it but now it wasn't obvious before that uh because there were different geographies and all of that but now they're competing globally to each other.
2:08:55
So the way I think about it is the first decade of all of this momentum was the few companies that will have the right to win and they've earned it by building brand by building teams by delivering on services by getting licenses by doing all these things that they needed to do.
2:09:12
So now we have a call it 30 or 40 players worldwide that we call the compounders.
2:09:18
The one that will deliver and compound for the next decade.
2:09:22
Now this second decade of those 40 names or 30 names is the decade where they steal market share from every single incumbent >> because so far they haven't that much. >> Yeah.
2:09:36
But this decade with AI, with crypto, with the way they're building new products, with the way they're using their own brands, with the trust they have, with the government regulators leverage they have today versus five years ago.
2:09:49
Buckle up because what's coming is going to be really fun if you're an incumbent and really tough if you're an incumbent.
2:09:57
>> What lessons do you think the uh the company, the Coinbases, the Robin Hoods, uh, etc.
2:10:03
of the world learned in 2020 dur in 2021 during that sort of chaotic market cycle that uh it it it feels good and that and that many of them uh learned various lessons.
2:10:16
learned various lessons. I was also told to ask you about um >> are you talking about uh COVID era or or >> Yeah, just the whole like you know you know the SVB crisis felt like Robin Hood that felt like >> you know the Robin Hood GameStop saga those moments it feels like there was a lot of hard ones lessons and then we've
2:10:33
started this new cycle this new bubble whatever you want to call it uh and hopefully a lot of them have taken those uh taken learnings from that and are are implementing it whether it's around risk management things like that >> yeah so I think the lesson from that time was when COVID started most of these companies were not ready to turbocharge. And what happened during
2:10:51
And what happened during COVID if you look back is that you probably fast track four or five years of customers and growth into 12 months. >> Yeah.
2:11:00
>> And none of these teams were prepared for that.
2:11:02
being at home, not being able to do much more.
2:11:05
It just supercharged all of these companies and they overhire and they were working remote and they didn't have capital, you know, frameworks in place because the growth was unexpected.
2:11:15
And we remember getting a bunch of calls during that time, the beginning like this is amazing and then like this is getting tough and this is going to be problematic and and it it can crack here or there.
2:11:29
And when we got the phone call at 3 4 or 5 in the morning from Robin Hood saying the GameStop day and what needed to be done and we funded them in four hours almost half a billion dollars that we didn't have that we asked a bank to lend us to do it.
2:11:45
Uh we've all >> called in an old favor from an old friend. >> Yes.
2:11:50
Literally a favor from literally a favor from an old friend.
2:11:52
Uh and that's what it takes to build relationships in banking.
2:11:56
need decades of that so you can call in that favor when it's needed.
2:11:58
Um, and that day and look at how long it took for the brand to regain the trust of the market.
2:12:07
It was almost two and a half years. >> Yeah. >> From that moment.
2:12:10
And you got to be a special leader and a special team to go through that turf and come back out of it.
2:12:18
And now they're hitting their cylinders, but they got their story right.
2:12:22
So you can see it in the Brian Armstrongs, in the Nikolai Seronskys, in the Vlatenev, in the David Veles. They have that now.
2:12:28
Uh they went through that and they're on the other side and they're all between 38 and 41.
2:12:36
So they got the best decade of their life coming coming their way. >> Yeah.
2:12:40
What does that mean for competition at the early stage?
2:12:42
competition at the early stage? feels like it's it was really it was in in in retrospect it seems like a no-brainer to back disruptive technologies in this huge market finance but now you have if you're starting a company that's going to carve out a little slice of oh Robin
2:13:00
Hood's not touching this yet or Coinbase isn't touching this yet it's like well those companies are incredibly well pack capitalized and they're run by founders who are not about to retire anytime soon seems kind of dangerous so where are you seeing pockets of opportunity and the early stage. What are you seeing in the
2:13:13
What are you seeing in the next generation of founders that might actually go and be able to carve out enough of a slice to grow into a generational company?
2:13:22
>> Yeah, I think what's coming for I'm more excited for what's coming this next decade than the last decade if you ask me.
2:13:28
Um the last decade was just a setup for this decade.
2:13:31
uh and there will be a bunch of new teams and companies and we have been spending time with the young generation like kids who are between founders who are between 19 and 25. >> Yeah.
2:13:44
>> And or 19 and 27 call it their brains are just faster.
2:13:47
Their ways of thinking about how to build products is just different.
2:13:52
They are they they spend the best years the the year of COVID learning >> and learning how to think really fast.
2:14:01
And I've been blown away on how quick they are understanding and how quick they are to build.
2:14:06
So we have this thesis that we've we've been we've been uh we wrote it took us almost a year to write which we call it token factories.
2:14:15
>> And it's this world where forget about crypto rails or or fintech or AI all of these things are blending.
2:14:22
If before it was fintech here and AI and crypto here and we said that they blended.
2:14:26
Now we have financial services, we have crypto rails, we have AIS and the thing between all of them is that they're all tokens. Everything is a token.
2:14:38
>> So we we call it the token factory er token revolution era.
2:14:41
And tokenizing information, tokenizing money, and tokenizing power.
2:14:48
And how those three things combine is where we're seeing some of the best entrepreneurs working.
2:14:55
So that's what gots us really excited.
2:14:56
So we found a bunch of small young teams who are building what we call now token factories.
2:15:01
Companies that are building either access tokens that give you abilities to connect anywhere they want in the world to do anything. There's expert tokens.
2:15:09
These are companies that are generating knowledge or expert information that is solely unique that is going to change the way you manage wealth management, wealth advisory, the way you manage insurance product, insurance um agents.
2:15:22
Um and then you have what we call asset tokens >> and stable coins is the first of the asset tokens outside of Bitcoin.
2:15:32
It's the first of the of the true asset tokens.
2:15:36
>> Talk to me about real estate.
2:15:36
I feel like that's the that was something in the at the peak of the crypto boom 2022.
2:15:43
We were starting to hear about mortgages on chain, physical assets on chain.
2:15:45
Uh we're now starting to see uh stocks get on chain and and obviously US dollars which are uh much more tangible than artworks for example.
2:15:57
Um, but uh it feels like most of this generation's entrepreneurs probably learned a hard lesson during the global financial crisis of like the risks of over financialization in the real estate markets, but maybe like how do you see things developing or or or real estate assets playing out uh generally over the next decade?
2:16:19
>> So I I I think you you John you said something that was really important.
2:16:21
If you look this wall behind me >> Yeah.
2:16:24
Uh, artists always tell you where the future is going before we get there. >> Sure.
2:16:29
>> And NFTTS was a and it wasn't about just about the beauty of the art and the tokenization and the provenence and and the transferability and the democratic.
2:16:38
It was the first asset that was truly put on chain >> that you trusted that you knew there was only one of each that you knew who had it and you knew when it was minted and you could finance you can lend against it, you can pledge it, you can do whatever. So guess what? Artists did their job.
2:16:54
They showed us where the world was going.
2:16:58
>> So to me that I I'm very grateful because that's how we learned what was going on.
2:17:04
>> And then we found companies like Figure who tokenize most of the mortgages that you hel right now.
2:17:09
They're the biggest helo tokenizer in America.
2:17:11
Then you had the circus of the worlds and the Tethers tokenizing dollars and there's like 10 more coming behind them.
2:17:18
>> Then now you have Robin Hood tokenizing stocks.
2:17:20
So I think the problem with mortgages is that they don't move that much out of all the financial assets.
2:17:28
They probably transfer themselves 10 times in a in your lifetime, maybe five.
2:17:32
Maybe you buy a home, you have a four.
2:17:33
So it's not the lowest hanging fruit need of a tokenized asset even though it's a great asset to tokenize. Mhm.
2:17:40
>> Um, but I think we're going to get there because right now the SEC and the all the regulators have put the real rules in place to see tokenization and the best organizations you're not going to see.
2:17:52
You're not going to realize their tokens. >> Yeah.
2:17:56
>> But suddenly you're going to be able to click make two clicks and get a mortgage against >> this.
2:18:00
>> And you're going to be able to do one more click and swap to another mortgage issuer and not miss a beep on your payments >> or or in your servicing.
2:18:07
those that's what the consumer is going to see.
2:18:12
That's what the consumer is going to see with Robin Hood uh token stocks.
2:18:13
You don't you're going to have the same UX experience and just trade stocks anywhere in the world not knowing that they're tokenized.
2:18:21
And that's that's where we get super excited uh because we're just at the beginning of that ecosystem which is probably like growing up again in the 1970s when you're about to electronic create electronic uh payment transfers.
2:18:38
uh how how have you thought about uh the investability of stable coins as a category when it feels like a feature for so many of the companies that you've already backed?
2:18:47
I know I know you guys did Privy >> which uh recently sold to Stripe, but that Bridge >> Yeah, you did both.
2:18:58
>> What was the other one? >> Bridge. >> Bridge. >> Oh, there you go. >> All of them. >> I love it.
2:19:02
>> It sounds like I we we told the Strive that we're shareholders. We love them.
2:19:07
We're good friends with Patrick and John and the whole team and will >> we told them that we felt that we were we were we were their core dev team because the two investments we did in stable going infrastructure they took out of our plates in less than a year. >> Yeah.
2:19:19
>> Wild but how but yeah so so you you made some infrastructure bets.
2:19:22
Are there are there consumer bets that you see going forward?
2:19:28
I I know there's a bunch of different potential use cases, but again, it's so easy for an existing company to add stable coins and they already have the distribution and the customer network to uh quickly uh you know uh service. >> Yeah.
2:19:43
So, it's a great question, Joy.
2:19:43
We we've been trying to find we've been looking worldwide for consumer applications that start with stable coins first as a user experience.
2:19:51
we haven't found one that will say this is the way it's going to work to scale globally at a scale that matters.
2:19:59
Uh so that's why we have been backing much more the infrastructure providers of all these schemes because they feel like they have a lot more uh growth potential than than the consumer side.
2:20:11
But I think we're just starting.
2:20:14
I think now we're starting to see the beginning of agentic experiences with uh crypto rails and and AI >> with through agents.
2:20:24
And I think in that intersection, we're going to find native stablecoin retail brands that are going to provide services that you don't expect.
2:20:33
So we've been we've been investing a lot there in learning.
2:20:36
We've been testing ourselves a lot there.
2:20:38
We have our own thesis on how it's going to work.
2:20:41
So, we're actually building some of them and learning, but we expect to see entrepreneurs worldwide working around them in the very near future.
2:20:47
My guess is in the next year, we will be surprised to find a few already.
2:20:53
>> Well, when we when you come back on and and uh hopefully you'll come back on many more times between now and then, but in I'm assuming in 2030, we'll have the same conversation again.
2:21:02
And you got every single new stable coin pure play that mattered.
2:21:06
Uh what about on the issuer side?
2:21:08
Uh, I feel like the big now that stable coins have clear regulation, uh, it seems like we'll see a lot more people start to issue them. Is that needed?
2:21:18
Do you see use cases or are the USDC's and the tethers uh, like providing kind of enough value right now?
2:21:27
>> I think uh, people underestimate how important the Tether brand is worldwide.
2:21:33
I think when you when you are in Argentina or in Venezuela or you're in Indonesia, they don't even say USDT.
2:21:40
They just call it Tether, >> right?
2:21:42
And I think Tether has a chance to be a really global brand that most people will will under imagine the scale of it.
2:21:52
Ciro has a great reputation institutional side, but we're super early. I mean, think about it.
2:21:58
We're only $250 billion into stable coins. Mhm.
2:22:02
>> We should be in two trillion dollars in the next year or a year and a half or two.
2:22:06
And if we're not there, something's off.
2:22:08
>> So for that, we will probably need like five, seven, 10 more names.
2:22:10
Now, you're not going to care as a user, to be honest.
2:22:16
You may have a preference.
2:22:16
I remember growing up, uh, my parents and us to to save money from inflation in Venezuela.
2:22:22
Every Friday we walked to the bank branch and we bought travel checks and and it was a way a way of saving which is literally the same as stable coins today.
2:22:32
And those travel checks in the era you could buy American Express travel checks.
2:22:36
You can buy Thomas Cook which were Mastercard travel checks and there was another third brand I forget.
2:22:42
>> I didn't care which one we got.
2:22:45
>> All I care was getting the dollars and being able to save.
2:22:48
So I think but over time I remember my family's Q2 American Express travel checks for whatever reason it had like a better recognition brand.
2:22:57
So I think we're still in the early days of that and that's going to happen and I think uh we're going to see five to 10 and we're going to see the incumbents issuing their own token and stable coins and now the bridges of the world are going to be super important because they're going to be the bridge to connect all of them no matter what what what you're doing and it's going to be very simple to solve.
2:23:16
So my guess is five brands in the next five years. >> Wow. >> Great. Great. >> Very exciting. >> This was awesome. >> Yeah. Thanks so much. >> You're a legend. >> Hoping on.
2:23:27
>> Come back on again soon.
2:23:28
>> You guys are doing amazing job.
2:23:28
We following your show and congratulations.
2:23:32
It's really fun and you bring super fresh content and news and people to the show. >> Thank you so much. >> Talk to you soon. Looking forward to it. >> Bye. >> Bye.
2:23:42
>> Up next we have Casey Neistat.
2:23:45
>> Recently >> the YouTuber the creator over at Mod Retro now >> working on the chromatic which we've been playing in the studio working on the M64. How you doing Casey?
2:23:58
>> Helen, good to see you.
2:24:00
>> Welcome to the stream.
2:24:00
Uh what's new in your world?
2:24:02
Uh how did the are those the nothing ears? Give us a little review.
2:24:07
Oh yeah, these are fantastic.
2:24:07
Actually to take them off because the noise cancelling on these is um it's it's like too good and I'm at home right now and my kids were screaming two seconds ago.
2:24:19
>> But yeah, these things are fantastic.
2:24:21
>> Yeah, we had Carl Pay on the show a week ago and >> uh he put them down and I was like I was too afraid to ask like, "Oh, are those for me?"
2:24:27
Like are you going to leave those for I kind of want those. I need a new pair. I'll have to pick them.
2:24:31
>> You know what is I'm not enough of an audio file to know what if something sounds good or not.
2:24:36
It's either good or it's not good.
2:24:38
>> But the >> physical switches like buttons you can touch. >> Yeah.
2:24:44
>> I really like and the like the Apple I don't know what they're called. What are they? AirPod Maxes. >> AirPod Maxes.
2:24:51
>> There's no onoff switch. >> Yeah.
2:24:54
>> Like I can't >> that digital crown.
2:24:55
>> I needed I need an onoff switch and you have that. >> I like I like Yeah.
2:24:58
Are you Are you big Teenage Engineering guy?
2:25:01
It feels like kind of like that that they're almost coining like a trend that's like becoming more mainstream now.
2:25:08
>> Teenage Engineering is the only company whose products I buy religiously even though I have no idea how to use any of them.
2:25:16
>> The same thing happened to me.
2:25:16
I bought the little keyboard. Like I'm a musician now.
2:25:19
Couldn't figure out how to make a song. But I use it. >> I love it. It's amazing. >> Beautiful. >> It's so beautiful.
2:25:26
>> And like someone that cares that much about the craft part of that.
2:25:30
support them unconditionally. Uh yeah.
2:25:31
So tell me about Mod Retro.
2:25:33
How'd that come together?
2:25:34
Uh what what what is the news in your world?
2:25:38
>> Um you know, the Mod Retro thing is really funny because uh I my video says all this, but like I'm a big retro gamer.
2:25:46
>> Um I'm guilty of sometimes playing Call of Duty on my Xbox, but that doesn't work out when you got a wife and kids. >> I'm not being guilty.
2:25:53
Every every man should have an allocation of time daily for Call of Duty.
2:25:56
you know, getting on rust.
2:25:58
Getting on rust with your boys.
2:26:02
>> So close to that W and then the door comes flying open, the children come running in. >> It's challenging. >> But I'm 44.
2:26:08
So like >> Apex of video games for me was like 1989, I think.
2:26:15
Getting a Game Boy for my grandmother for Christmas.
2:26:18
And like you guys are younger than me, but before that all we had were those like L le Led LCD games that were like really janky like the tiger games and they were terrible.
2:26:31
>> And the first time I turned on the Game Boy and like saw the Nintendo come down, I was like, "Holy, this is such a moment."
2:26:38
>> Um, and then Nintendo 64 came out when I was I was in like just getting into high school as a freshman.
2:26:44
We used to sneak out of high school, get on the city bus, like the the the regular bus, and then drive two towns across, and then walk a mile and a half to Toys R Us to sit in Toys R Us and play the demo of Mario 64 when that thing came out.
2:26:59
I think it was in '94, so I was 12 or 13 years old. >> Yeah.
2:27:04
>> So, I I love that stuff.
2:27:04
And Mod Retro, when I first learned about it, when I first learned about the Chromatic, their Game Boy, >> I thought it was really stupid.
2:27:11
I didn't understand because you can get those like Chinese ones off of Amazon for 50 bucks.
2:27:18
And um a friend of mine was like, "No, this is great.
2:27:22
They're doing great things.
2:27:23
Do you want to talk to Palmer about it?"
2:27:25
And I'm a huge Palmer Lucky fan.
2:27:28
>> And I was like, "I'd love to."
2:27:28
And I don't know that I've ever been evangelized so much in my life.
2:27:31
Like by the end of that call, he didn't just convince me, but I was like I felt like an idiot for not seeing what Mod Retro was.
2:27:42
And then as I got to know Torin, who who is the the CEO of Mod Retro, and understand the vision for the company, I was just so like overwhelmed.
2:27:49
I was like, "This is the most like beautiful vision ever.
2:27:52
I don't understand the business of it. It makes no sense to me.
2:27:57
But the fact that these guys have the guts to do this, like can I be a part of it?"
2:28:01
And I think I pitched back to them what I understood the company was and they're like, "That's it.
2:28:06
That's what we want to say."
2:28:07
And I was like, "All right, give me a job and my job will be to figure out how to communicate that and we'll make videos and stuff."
2:28:13
And they're like, "Sure, but we're not going to pay you." And I was like, "Great.
2:28:17
I'll take a business card."
2:28:19
>> And um, >> it's been great working with I also I'm an investor in Mod Retro.
2:28:22
I have a vested interest in them succeeding, but I mean that's not the that's not where the passion to be a part of what they're up to comes from for me. >> Yeah.
2:28:32
So many places we could go with this. Uh this is fantastic. Um what uh Yeah.
2:28:39
Do you think that there's a world I mean that I I love the handheld gaming stuff.
2:28:42
I my my experience having kids was I stopped playing console games.
2:28:45
The N64 was actually my first console ever and uh but once I started kids >> uh Super Mario 64 for sure. Golden Eye was big. Big head golden gun. You gotta do that.
2:28:59
Um, and then a couple other Donkey Kong and uh was never really into the Mario Kart racers, but then Smash Brothers kind of took over and that was the real competition with everyone eventually.
2:29:10
Um, >> I think what I think what what's exciting to me is like building new new heart consumer hardware that will still turn on and work and bring joy 20 years from now.
2:29:20
I had I had the the game I have like my Game Boy Pikachu edition from growing up and I when Mod Retro came out I went and found it and I turned it on and it worked >> and that was like such an amazing moment for me cuz like when like I haven't I've got old iPhones laying around.
2:29:36
I've never been like not one I've never been like oh I should turn that on.
2:29:39
It's going to be fun, right?
2:29:41
Because it's like it's not evergreen.
2:29:42
It was of the moment and you just move on.
2:29:45
And so I think if Mod Retro can do anything, which is like make consumer hardware, which is so disposable today across all these different categories and make it so that yeah, you're going to get your Mod Retro or your M64, you know, this year and then you're going to turn it on in 30 years and like, you know, bridge generations. >> Yeah. >> Yeah.
2:30:06
You know, it's I think there's there's it's easy to sort of on um planned obsolescence because it is real.
2:30:15
I think of that like >> we woke up, my house woke up this morning at 7:30 a. m.
2:30:19
because the refrigerator repair man finally showed up and was banging on our door at at 7:30 in the morning.
2:30:24
The dog was freaking out because our 2-year-old refrigerator doesn't work.
2:30:29
>> And this is a refrigerator that has Wi-Fi. >> There we go.
2:30:33
>> Let's give it up for Wi-Fi.
2:30:33
Everybody's always >> It doesn't work. It doesn't work.
2:30:37
And when I think about that, it's like that refrigerator that we had as kids with the one big heavy aluminum door, like it just worked. It worked forever.
2:30:47
>> But in order to keep selling you have to keep coming out with new things.
2:30:51
And I think that's the negative of planned obsolescence.
2:30:53
But I think when it comes to consumer technology, there is an argument for having to keep up with the rate of innovation.
2:30:59
You know, like the new phones that come out, every time you get a new phone, it does do something that your other phone didn't.
2:31:07
So there's a maybe a reason for that, >> but I think with that sort of title wave of innovation that feels faster now than it ever felt when I was young.
2:31:15
Um I think we we lose some great things. >> Yeah.
2:31:20
>> And you know my understanding of mod retro, at least what I want it to be and I think what what what Palmer and and what Torren also want it to be is like let's identify consumer electronics that people just loved like had an unbelievable relationship with.
2:31:33
They really like the love I had for my Game Boy.
2:31:37
I don't know that there was another thing that I owned through my adolescence that I treasured more than my Game Boy.
2:31:41
And let's bring them back and let's do them justice.
2:31:45
Let's build them so they last forever.
2:31:47
I think Palmer's quote when I was interviewing was we don't want to build another Game Boy.
2:31:53
We want to build the last Game Boy, like the last one that ever needs to be built.
2:31:57
And that's the vision with M64 as well.
2:32:00
Like you can get emulators that kind of they kind of work.
2:32:02
Um, but let's let's build the thing that that, you know, you and I had, John, when when we were kids, and let's have it last forever.
2:32:12
>> And I, you know, I just think there's so so much romance in that.
2:32:13
When you start digging deep, you can start to see products everywhere.
2:32:17
And, you know, Mod Retro is tiny.
2:32:19
It's a couple people working out of a small office, but like the list of of products that that we want to build, the list of ideas that we have is is endless.
2:32:29
And that's like a that's a really exciting thing to take out of.
2:32:34
>> It's also such an interesting uh company because you're trying to recreate things of the past that were good products and you want to improve on them, but you need to stay true to the original product.
2:32:46
product. Otherwise, you know, what do you I mean, it's not to say that that Mod Retro couldn't one day create, you know, novel to totally novel products, but it is like an interesting constraint and challenge and you actually have to it's it's really in some ways it's easy
2:33:02
because you know exactly what you need to build, but in other ways it's harder because you're taking a product that was almost perfect in its original form and still like you need to make it it needs it should be better otherwise you know what are you doing? >> Yeah. You know, like one interesting >> Yeah.
2:33:14
You know, like one interesting challenge, and I'm not the right person to speak to this, so I'm not the technical guy, but to make the screen match the old Game Boy screen was an exhaustive process.
2:33:25
So, when you buy one of those handheld emulators that looks like a Game Boy, the Chinese-made ones, they have fairly high high pixel density screens on them.
2:33:32
So, in order for them to give the look of an old Game Boy, you're using multiple pixels to emulate a single pixel. >> So, it's inaccurate.
2:33:41
And real psychopaths, I'm not one of them, but I appreciate it.
2:33:45
Real psychopaths on Twitter have done like this super zoom into a pixel, and you realize that Mario is like jumping a half a pixel too low or a half a pixel too high within the frame because of the limitation of the screen.
2:33:59
And Torin and and Palmer's like religious obsession with matching that screen was one of the hardest things to overcome.
2:34:08
So, it was actually harder to build something that matched the quality of a product that's 20 years old than it would be to actually get the latest and greatest screen and just plug it in there. >> Yeah.
2:34:18
I remember Palmer saying something about like a couple of the companies, the screen is actually rotated 90 degrees.
2:34:23
So, instead of the scan lines coming down this way, they go across this way and then they just transform it at the last second.
2:34:27
But it's like this bizarre bizarre thing that you would never really notice of, but it's this craftsmanship that actually you feel I feel like and it feels like something that's just like been lost in this like everything's disposable, everything's junk, everything's a knockoff culture.
2:34:45
And it feels like I I don't know.
2:34:45
Like it just feels like it's worth it to have stuff that exhibits craft and taste.
2:34:50
And even if I don't even if I'm not the one that can tell that Mario's one pixel too low when I do the jump, like the fact that the craftsman worked on the product means something.
2:35:02
And I I it's hard to put a exact like quantitative value on it, but you feel it, right?
2:35:08
>> That that is the gamble that is the company.
2:35:10
Said that in my video, but he's like, >> you know, maybe nobody cares about this, but but weirdos like you and me, but that's enough.
2:35:18
And I think it's like there is an argument that's like, well, who cares if it's off by half a pixel.
2:35:24
>> And if you're one of those people, totally cool.
2:35:25
You're well, there's plenty of products in the market for you.
2:35:29
But if you're someone who does care if you're that weirdo that buys Teenage Engineering products because you just value the integrity of the product so much, you want to have it, >> then, you know, there's a place in this world for companies like Mod Retro. >> Yeah.
2:35:40
What What do you think about um like the temptation to just make like one small change?
2:35:45
Like the chromatic has a USBC port on it. That's a huge upgrade.
2:35:49
But you could easily turn this into like well like you know we have the technology to make the M64 handheld and then you know then you're in Switch territory and all of a sudden it's like a completely different product, right?
2:36:00
a completely different product, right? I look that's everpresent and that's that's the problem with sort of limitless you know like when Nintendo was building this what was almost 40 years ago 35 years ago now they were so
2:36:14
limited by what the technology enabled them to do >> like when you think about the Sega Game Gear I don't know if you ever had one of those great product >> this big but it was the first one that had really great color screen on it and it took six AA batteries instead of four like the Game Boy. But the battery life
2:36:29
But the battery life on it was like 40 minutes. >> Yeah.
2:36:33
>> And um >> do you remember the N64 like expansion pack that you put in to like double the memory? That was >> Yeah, dude. I remember that.
2:36:38
What about the rumble pack that shipped with Star Fox?
2:36:41
That was like the greatest innovation ever.
2:36:43
>> Funny exploded when the controller shook. >> Yeah, dude.
2:36:46
These like uh like these add-ons cuz like they couldn't bake it all into the first product and then up >> and that's that's indicative of the limitations of what tech can do. Totally.
2:36:55
And when you look at like, you know, I don't know what what Samsung announced last week at two weeks ago unpacked and you're looking at what the limitations are today of like a folding screen that's as thick as 10 sheets of paper, you realize how far we've come.
2:37:09
>> But when you go in the other direction, there's kind of no limits and you're looking to make something that was made 30 years ago.
2:37:14
The problem is like where do you draw the line?
2:37:16
And I think that's a really uh it's a really interesting thing to try to overcome and confront. >> Yeah.
2:37:23
What can you teach me about the lore of uh in the video camera world?
2:37:24
I was looking at a cool new music video and it had this fisheye lens and this grain and I was kind of digging in.
2:37:32
It seemed like they shot it on like a Sony skate camera with mini DV tapes.
2:37:36
Like this feels like something that I was looking like maybe I could buy one on eBay but it's probably broken and I want someone to go remake it.
2:37:44
But then of course you always have like oh you could just like throw the filter on there in Premiere or whatever.
2:37:49
But what what are some of the what are some of the iconic video cameras or just like creative tools that might uh you know be worth revisiting at some point?
2:38:00
>> Yeah, it's it's such an interesting examination and and your your question is great because my family and I are out.
2:38:07
We're in Massachusetts for for summer vacation and there's a lot of kids around like we went and got ice cream last night.
2:38:12
A lot of teenagers around >> and a lot of these kids come up and they ask me for selfies. >> Sure.
2:38:17
And the amount of teenagers that come up to me and ask me for selfies and they're carrying the point and shoots >> that we had in like the 2010s, like before your phone camera was good enough. >> Yeah. >> They all carry them.
2:38:30
>> No one makes that camera anymore, which means if you have one, you have an old one. >> Yeah.
2:38:35
>> And every one of these kids has it.
2:38:35
And when I I asked them because I'm curious like why do you carry that?
2:38:39
They're like, I love the way it looks. >> Yeah.
2:38:42
And I think we've reached this point like iPhone cell phone photography, it all looks so perfect in a way that it almost becomes artificial.
2:38:51
Like I think the iPhone 5 was the last iPhone where when you took a picture just sort of took a picture and then after that every time you take a picture now on any modern smartphone, it takes a picture and then runs it through an algorithm to make the picture sweeter and cleaner and sharper and better for you.
2:39:05
>> And I think there's sort of this yearning for something that feels more real and authentic.
2:39:07
real and authentic. It's like you look at a you're at a store looking at at a picture, you know, a camera from a picture from from 2010 uh or a camera or a picture from an iPhone today is like you're at you're at the grocery store and there's the organic apples and they
2:39:24
look they look good but like they're a little up and and and you know they maybe like whatever part of it's kind of rotten and then you look over and you see the perfect apple and like intuitively you know that you're like that it's a little bit too good to be screw that Apple over there, you know. And I think I don't know the other thing
2:39:40
And I think I don't know the other thing that's real is >> t removing the camera like adding the camera to the phone has been one of the greatest innovations of the century, right?
2:39:51
In in in many ways, but now removing it, removing the camera from the phone and being able to leave your phone and just bring a camera around is also an innovation, right?
2:39:59
Going going going going backwards.
2:40:01
And I think that's the other thing that that kids like and and I've found that's nice.
2:40:05
If I'm going to the beach with my kids, it's nice to be able to bring a camera but not have my phone. >> Yeah.
2:40:13
Um my daughter is 10, so this is the first summer she's allowed to like walk around with her friends without a parent.
2:40:19
And she has a flip phone.
2:40:19
And she had this whole argument for getting an iPhone that has nothing on it but the phone and messaging.
2:40:27
And my wife and I have this discussion and the reason why we said no, it has to be the flip phone is because of the camera.
2:40:32
like it it introduces a new level of sort of attention and why you're in purpose >> and the reason why we wanted her to have a phone is simply to stay in touch with us. No other reason.
2:40:43
But the minute you introduce this other sort of novel aspect of it, it becomes much more of a social dynamic and a social consideration and the way that you're trying to get away from that.
2:40:53
Um but I think just going back to the camera things, this is such an obsession of mine.
2:40:59
I think that we are quick to quick to ignore or look past the relationship we have with with the aesthetic that a camera yields.
2:41:08
And when you see those pictures off those old point and shoots, they look like something specific.
2:41:12
Like when you were talking about that old skateboard fisheye DVD look, it looks like something specific.
2:41:17
You have a relationship with that.
2:41:20
When we see stuff that looks like it's VHS, we think of the 80s or the 90s.
2:41:22
And I think now there's just sort of this generic aesthetic across the board.
2:41:27
this like crispy flat 4K phone thing and there's this desire to have something that that has some sense of identity attached to it.
2:41:37
And that's why we're seeing these sort of Gen Z types, you know, looking for older tech that's that reflects more of who they are, more individuality.
2:41:43
And I think that's a trend that we're going to see continue.
2:41:48
>> Yeah, it's this generation's vinyl. >> Yeah.
2:41:50
I I I've joked that I want to film I want to film the first podcast on Panavision film or something.
2:41:54
just spend a fortune developing the film.
2:42:00
>> What other what other what other c consumer tech categories are you excited about?
2:42:04
We're having we're having the founder of Wave uh on and I and I in 20 minutes and they got like 12 million views yesterday for launching like sunglasses that will just live stream constantly.
2:42:18
>> Do you have a do you have a ratio of um positive to negative mentions in those 12 million views?
2:42:23
I mean, I think everybody people had a viscerally negative reaction to it.
2:42:29
>> That's that's my take on it as well.
2:42:31
>> And it makes me think, >> you know, my my software development company Beam my startup um and we started that company in 2014 and a little known aspect of that company is initially it was built around Google Glass. >> No way.
2:42:46
>> And we actually, you know, we we rewrote the code, we rewrote the the software that Google Glass ran.
2:42:50
So, it had a singular function which was you push a button like this, it captures 10 seconds and immediately shares it to your feed.
2:42:57
>> That's where we started with that.
2:42:57
And I remember meeting with Google and they were excited about it and they showed us what Google Glass 2 was going to look like and we're like, "Fuck yeah."
2:43:04
We started raising money based on that >> and then a week later they announced they were killing the entire Google Glass program >> and we we backed off.
2:43:11
We're like, "We'll just do it on the phone now."
2:43:13
Um, but I think when you ask about sort of the social impact of being able to live stream all the time or the negative reaction that we're seeing based on on Waves uh video they posted yesterday.
2:43:22
I think the social dynamic is something that is often um overlooked in in the hardware startup world.
2:43:31
I think of the humane AI pin.
2:43:33
You know, a really good friend of mine worked for for humane and obviously super excited about new technology. Yeah. Sam. Um, yeah.
2:43:42
Which parenthetically, you joke about Panavision for a podcast.
2:43:44
Sam Schffer has in his studio for his live streaming setup a VHS camera hardwired into his deck so he can live stream from VHS. >> That's amazing.
2:43:56
>> But Sam would be around.
2:43:57
>> We tried to I tried to hire Sam, by the way.
2:43:58
We worked with him on a project and I was like, >> he's way too hot. He's way too hot.
2:44:02
>> He's got to be He's got to be sold.
2:44:04
>> He's way too big of a deal. >> Sam's the best.
2:44:07
But when I'd be around him and he had his AI pin on, I was always sort of looking down at that or like thinking about what I'm saying and uncomfortable about, you know, speaking openly to him.
2:44:19
>> And I think like that's what I mean by so social implications.
2:44:20
Like, you know, my phone is on my couch right here, but if we're sitting together and I'm holding my phone like this the whole time we're talking, you're uneasy about that.
2:44:30
And so when I think of a pair of glasses that are live streaming or at least have the capability of live streaming the whole time, when I look at them, I'm uneasy.
2:44:39
>> And I think of this, you know, maybe the most extreme example of this is um Apple Vision Pro, >> which, you know, blew my mind when I got that thing.
2:44:47
Like I made the most the most glowing video about it because it was the greatest technology I've ever used.
2:44:52
But later that night, because I made the video the same day I got them, I'm at home using them.
2:44:57
And my wife is like, "Casey, take those things off your face and pay attention to your kids."
2:45:03
And I was like, "Oh, you can't wear these around other people." >> Yeah.
2:45:09
>> And I was like, "How do they not see that?"
2:45:13
>> And I So I I think about that because like we're sort of accustomed to people using their phones and it's kind of okay. Like we're used to this. This is not okay. Yeah.
2:45:22
>> And so when I think about wearables, I think that that is going to be a gigantic thing to overcome which is >> well the crazy so so Amazon acquired a company uh it got announced this week called B which is a brace after after all everything they faced with Siri's listening to me.
2:45:38
The B band just listens to you all day long every single conversation.
2:45:42
And uh and I and it's and it's cool like I I think all new tech for the most part is cool.
2:45:49
Do I want my team to be wearing a B bracelet?
2:45:51
Are we going to allow people to wear Bands?
2:45:55
>> Might be a B free zone.
2:45:56
>> This might be a B free zone.
2:45:56
You know, there's >> I'm not going to have any friends that wear bees.
2:46:00
I don't have any friends anyways, but if you have a be it just means like we can't hang out.
2:46:05
>> Yeah, >> because it makes it makes me uncom.
2:46:06
And look, I think there's an argument. It's like get over it. Like you lite.
2:46:12
Like this is the direction everything's headed and you're being recorded all the time anyway. >> Sure.
2:46:16
But in the interim, I do think like there is a there's a learning curve.
2:46:20
I think that Meta's decision to put wearable glasses with a camera on them in Ray-B bands, the most common sunglasses in the world was brilliant because we're all familiar with this pair of sunglasses.
2:46:32
Like there was no learning curve.
2:46:34
There was no like what's that thing on your face? We know what it is.
2:46:38
>> I think how emphatic they are about having the indicator light.
2:46:40
There's no way you can turn it off.
2:46:41
If you cover it, they don't record.
2:46:44
>> There's some degree at least there's Like my my question my question for the the wave founder in 20 minutes is >> should your glasses be bright red and have like you know a circle in the middle of your head that's flashing that says I'm recording I mean so that people shows up with a TV camera like I don't feel like oh this is in violation of my privacy.
2:47:05
I'm like I know exactly what's going on.
2:47:06
news is here and if I step in front of the camera, I'm on the news.
2:47:09
Like it it we have a social understanding of that and >> you still might not want to be around it.
2:47:15
>> They might be like, "Actually, I'm going to turn around and walk the other way because I don't want to be seen on on this camera or whatever." I don't know.
2:47:20
>> But there's there's an understanding there. Yeah.
2:47:21
And look on on Wave's website in the Q&A there's a question like, "Is there an indicator light?"
2:47:24
And their answer is, "Yeah, but you can turn it off."
2:47:30
>> And so like I you know, I don't know that I read that and it makes me a little bit queasy. >> Yeah.
2:47:33
as a guy who has a camera on him, you know, all the time.
2:47:35
And and so much of the the videos that I've made is about filming everyone in the whole world around me.
2:47:41
I still think there's something honest about having that camera on your shoulder, pointing a camera at someone.
2:47:46
Um versus like, you know, the glass hole >> movement of the, you know, Google Glass, which like by having this on your face, everyone was uneasy around you.
2:47:54
I think it's going be a big hurdle to overcome as we eventually like figure out what this hardware AI future is going to look like. >> Yeah.
2:48:04
What do you think about uh like airplane demos?
2:48:06
It feels like all there's so much tech where the demo is like you'll love this on an airplane.
2:48:11
The Apple Vision Pro is a great example.
2:48:13
A lot of the a lot of the the handheld devices, >> it doesn't work when it's dark.
2:48:17
>> Uh it's not too dark on planes.
2:48:17
It does work very well on planes, but it's this like weird niche use case that feels like killer application and then you actually get out into most of your life is not spent on airplanes usually.
2:48:26
And so >> yeah, look, if if that's the best you've got, like I travel more than most people I know and we're still talking about, you know, maybe double digits, maybe 10 hours a month tops. >> Yeah.
2:48:39
>> So, you know, 4,000 bucks for a face computer that I use 10 hours a month on an airplane, which by the way doesn't work for me on an airplane.
2:48:44
Like I didn't like it at all on an airplane. >> Okay. No, it will work.
2:48:47
Like the technology works perfectly.
2:48:52
>> No, when you're on an airplane, you're surrounded by strangers. >> Yeah. Yeah.
2:48:56
>> So, the idea that like I'm just gonna >> go like that and watch Avatar with all these people around me.
2:49:01
You know, I don't fly Spirit that often, but I have flown Spirit and I know what goes on on those flights.
2:49:07
Like, it it just again like Yeah.
2:49:10
the social implication of it, >> you I think if that's the best you've got, then maybe, you know, maybe you're not thinking holistically enough about your about your hardware. >> Yeah.
2:49:20
>> How do you how do you spot talent?
2:49:20
You you you discovered, Sam, uh someone in the chat was asking.
2:49:25
Uh it's a great question.
2:49:28
>> You have a framework for it.
2:49:30
It's a it's a it's a difficult question, but you know, it's the same I I approach it the same way that I approach uh investments and it's seldom the work and it's almost always the the individual, you know, like I I think Sam is brilliant, but he's brilliant at everything that he does.
2:49:47
He's brilliant with the work he did at Humane.
2:49:49
He's brilliant the work that he did at the Verge before that.
2:49:51
He's brilliant with his own YouTube channel.
2:49:53
You know, I've got a dear friend of mine, a kid named Hunter, who works in the building with me, but Hunter's a friend and we invest together.
2:50:01
So >> Hunter's Hunter's fantastic and like I don't know what Hunter does because every time I have a conversation with him, he's starting some new business or some new endeavor.
2:50:09
Like the work is almost irrelevant. It's the individual.
2:50:14
And I think it's like it's that mentality that you have or you don't have. Not everyone has it.
2:50:17
I do think maybe you can get it if you don't have it.
2:50:22
But when I see that in people, I I have a tendency to sort of gravitate towards those people.
2:50:26
And when I look at the when I look around at the friends of mine that I have some sort of professional relationship with a professional admiration for, they all have that thing that that sort of desire to uh to see it through whatever the it may be.
2:50:41
So, you know, I guess the short answer is like it's always the person, never the never the product. >> That's great.
2:50:48
Hunter's in the chat, by the way. He says hello.
2:50:50
Um the uh another question I have is we've been thinking about uh AI generated images, video, etc. is getting so good.
2:50:59
If it stays at this pace, you're going to be able to generate characters consistently.
2:51:07
Uh you're you're already seeing this on Instagram, people just creating entire personalities for influencers in different verticals.
2:51:14
Do you have any type of strong thesis around how um how that will play out if we're going to have sort of organic influencers, regular humans, and then you know these synthetic?
2:51:27
>> I've been thinking about in the context of um you know an example is like I don't want the AI Andrew Huberman.
2:51:31
I want Andrew Hubman to get health advice from because I know Andrew and I trust that he's making the best decisions and and studying uh you know and making you know these recommendations and and understands the weight of that and you have you have like a synthetic Andrew Huberman in 5 years doesn't care if he could convinces a million people to do something dumb with their health because he can just shut the account down and turn a new one on.
2:51:59
But I'm curious how you think. >> Yeah. Okay.
2:52:02
My cynical take on it, which is which I believe is accurate, um, I'd wager that this is accurate, is that it's a title wave that none of us will will be able to to overcome.
2:52:11
We can hold our breath for a while. It is a title wave.
2:52:16
And I wish I had a better analogy, but it's a little bit like, you know, when Toy Story came out in 1999, it was the first computer animated feature film, and it was great. I loved it.
2:52:23
But then five, six years later, there was just this, you know, onslaught of computer animated films.
2:52:29
And I was like, you know what, the handdrawn stuff is better. I miss that.
2:52:32
When CGI first started getting introduced into films, I was like, no, practical is better.
2:52:36
Um, I like practical better.
2:52:38
That's going to be the thing.
2:52:40
And it's like, no, you're going to lose.
2:52:41
And I think AI is probably the most existential version of that.
2:52:46
I think that it's just going to be so good that it's going to become irrelevant.
2:52:50
And old people like us might appreciate, you know, real human things and we might keep it alive.
2:52:56
But the generation behind us, my children, when they see draw handdrawn animation, they're like, "What is this?" They don't care.
2:53:04
It means nothing to them.
2:53:04
So, I think it's just going to get so good that it really doesn't matter.
2:53:09
And that that title wave is going to consume everything.
2:53:13
And um I think that we're we're it's the progress that we've seen over the last couple years of how good it is and how quickly it's developing is incredible.
2:53:23
incredible. But when you look at the capabilities of you know the latest Grock uh and the latest GPT you look at how smart these things are you look at what the sort of conversations you can have wi with um any of these agents and then you look at how good the images that can be spit out by um you know
2:53:39
Google's video or whichever whichever AI uh you you might be fond of it's like they're just going to marry really really quickly and I think five or six years from now we're going to start to see real sort of erosion in the space because what they're delivering is going to be so good. You know, like another
2:53:53
You know, like another example is like we haven't had a number one song yet that's completely AI generated, but it's going to come out of nowhere.
2:54:01
It's going to be like Gangnam style, which like the novelty of it allows us to dismiss the lack of humanity that this song has.
2:54:08
The first AI song that's going to be a number one hit is not going to be a Bob Dylanesque song that comes from the soul.
2:54:14
It's going to be something fun and outrageous, and we're going to forgive that AI made it, and then slowly it's going to start to chip away.
2:54:21
But I think it is a losing battle and the optimistic take on that is I think that there is going to be an extreme premium put on the humans that are able to sustain because of of what they represent uniquely.
2:54:37
Um you know maybe another bad analogy is it's like I love Marvel movies. They're fantastic.
2:54:42
But as far as cinema goes, like you know, there's an argument that said it's like the kind of artistry that we saw in the the 70s or ' 80s, like the apex of cinema where it comes from one when you think of a Tarantino movie, you think of um you know, a truly great filmmaker with a voice.
2:55:01
>> Marvel movies are something else.
2:55:01
Yeah, >> they're great and we love them.
2:55:04
We all show up to see them and we're okay with that.
2:55:05
And I think that's going to happen with AI, but it's going to happen at a rate of acceleration that we've never encountered before.
2:55:11
And it's going to be so good that we're willing to forgive it.
2:55:15
And I think it's going to leave a handful of people out there.
2:55:18
Maybe Andrew Humeman will be one of them. I hope so.
2:55:20
I'm a fan of his as well.
2:55:21
But it will put an extreme premium on the sort of human voices that are distinctly um human that distinctly represents something that AI could never.
2:55:30
When you look at the landscape of media, a lot of that could be replaced by AI.
2:55:38
>> So, the power law gets steeper. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Makes sense.
2:55:42
Well, >> that's like a 5 hour conversation, by the way.
2:55:45
>> Well, we'll have you back on again soon. This was awesome.
2:55:47
And congrats on your new your new uh fake but very real role at Mod Retro. >> Congrats. >> I appreciate it.
2:55:55
>> Thanks for the time, guys.
2:55:57
>> Have fun in Massachusetts. We'll talk soon. >> We'll talk soon. >> Take care. >> Have a good one. Bye. Airhorn for Casey.
2:56:04
>> Up next, we have Alex from Bright AI coming in the studio.
2:56:06
Um, but let me tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously.
2:56:10
They got multiasset investing, industryleading yields, and they're trusted by millions folks. Um, interesting.
2:56:18
Um, what else do we need to cover today?
2:56:21
There are a bunch of posts we've been through, but we have our next guest here in the studio. We will welcome him in. How you doing? Welcome. >> Welcome, Alex. what's happening.
2:56:32
>> Hey guys, thanks for having me on.
2:56:34
>> Yeah, thanks for hopping on.
2:56:34
Um, give us an intro, break down, uh, who you are, what you do for everyone who's listening.
2:56:40
>> Yeah, so I'm CEO and founder of Bright AI.
2:56:42
Uh, we build physical AI solutions for all the sort of essential services that society can't live without.
2:56:47
So things like uh, energy grid, uh, you know, power supply, uh, water infrastructure, HVAC, pest control, and all those things.
2:56:56
So we have a platform that lets you kind of real-time observe this distributed physical infrastructure in the world and uh solves a bunch of the problems that people have in those industries in terms of like labor shortages. >> Yeah.
2:57:10
>> You know breakdown in the aging infrastructure, sustainability challenges, all those things.
2:57:14
>> Is the customer more government focused or private companies?
2:57:18
>> They're private companies now.
2:57:18
>> They're private companies now. it sort of touches uh touches everything you know these these services have obviously every everybody >> alive is a consumer of these things >> um you know and as a result of that there's plenty of government involvement but uh they tend to be owned privately
2:57:34
in the US so big utility companies um service providers you know pest control operators like all different sorts of companies and then >> you've got this crossover interest with the you know the national interests and so on as well >> where's the strain the worst right Now across those different areas or like where are we seeing the most strain? What's the evidence of the strain?
2:57:53
What's the evidence of the strain?
2:57:56
>> It's uh it's pretty severe everywhere.
2:57:58
So like the US has got a you know if you grade the infrastructure it's like a C minus or a D.
2:58:01
So >> most of the critical infrastructure was built you know just before and after World War II and it's like of course like typical American plan with a 20-year lifespan.
2:58:10
we'll figure it out afterwards.
2:58:11
And now it's just, >> you know, in a lot of places it's like really held together with duct tape and and wire.
2:58:16
And uh so if you look at all those industries, you have this aging infrastructure.
2:58:22
Um and then you have a labor force like a systemic labor problems because older like older technicians are aging out and sort of it's a bigger economy now I guess you know it's still cool work to do but younger workers are just not signing up for the journey to be a you know 25 year time horizon to be a master technician in these spaces.
2:58:39
So >> all that's crushing I mean to give one example would be like water infrastructure.
2:58:44
Like 30% of the water we clean up leeches back out into the environment due to leaks in the pipes everywhere.
2:58:51
Like my town has wooden pipes if you can believe that. >> It's crazy.
2:58:56
I mean >> I know about I know about all the lead pipe that that our country depends upon to deliver water to uh to homes which is concerning.
2:59:06
But wood pipes sound too >> a good thing.
2:59:08
It feels like an aqueduct. I'm I'm down. Give me a wooden. >> It's probably safer. I don't know.
2:59:12
It's like something a >> beaver.
2:59:15
I don't know, but it's uh it's bad.
2:59:17
It like the fresh water's leeching out and the bad stuff is leeching in. >> Yeah. Yeah.
2:59:21
>> So So uh you're active in a bunch of different industries.
2:59:24
What is like what does the go to market been?
2:59:26
What is even the sales cycle look like?
2:59:28
Is this you coming to these owners of these various assets and saying like we're going to help you leverage AI and it and it's looks like you know kind of Palunteer's forward deployed model.
2:59:41
Uh are you doing something different?
2:59:44
>> Yeah, it's in that zone.
2:59:44
I mean we bootstrapped through the first 100 million in revenue.
2:59:48
So it was like I was trying to figure out that that path path through uh path to >> we need we need a word for bootstrapping to a hund00 million run rate and then and then raising some capital later but it it it needs its own maybe it's Hawinson's uh Hawinson's uh model something like that. >> There you go.
3:00:09
Well, I've uh I've raised too early a bunch of times before, so I can like give warning shots that other founders, but >> believe you should raise capital when you got the pattern figured out, but I had to figure out that go to market.
3:00:18
All the beginning stuff was through private equity firms.
3:00:23
>> So, it turns out that they're, you know, private equity kind of sits and and uh basically owns all the service companies that service this infrastructure.
3:00:29
And so and they're also very aligned with like 5 to sevenyear cycles where they want to drive change like big Ibidog growth and change in these in these industries.
3:00:38
And so that's where all of our first customers have come from.
3:00:42
So we work with a lot of the biggest private equity firms as sort of their their secret weapon for physical AI. >> Yeah.
3:00:48
Uh what yeah what's the latest news on the fundraising side? >> Yeah.
3:00:52
So, we uh we just uh raised a $51 million a uh >> congratulations. >> Thank you. Yeah.
3:01:01
Co-led by uh Kla Ventures. >> Fantastic.
3:01:06
>> And inspired capital and uh we picked those guys because >> you know Co Kla's super badass.
3:01:10
They were you know the first and earliest check in OpenAI big lean forward into sort of the future of abundance. >> Yeah.
3:01:17
Yuri, you know, there and then inspired is a lot of people don't know about, but a New York-based firm.
3:01:23
They're deep in infrastructure specifically and uh super great founder operators, you know, and all that. So, it's uh it's good.
3:01:30
>> Do you see do you think the company will always be a software more of a software provider?
3:01:36
Is there a world in the future where you guys would just actually buy the and operate the underlying asset if you felt like you could do it, you know, better than other players in the market? >> It's a good question.
3:01:46
uh you know we provide a lot of software and hardware today.
3:01:49
today. So our platform combines we have >> yeah we have like sensors and robots and these wearables that you put on the frontline workers and it ties all this like crazy distributed infrastructure into one big like physical AI learning
3:02:03
loop if that makes sense and uh we found some industries like are more efficient than others but like the most efficient one we found like give you an example is like 50% of the time they send a technician out there's nothing to see. That's the most efficient way.
3:02:17
That's the most efficient way.
3:02:19
>> We found a lot of them are like >> 90% of the time you send somebody out there's nothing to there's nothing to do.
3:02:25
Um but you still keep going in case it goes really bad.
3:02:27
And so, >> you know, I think in some of those industries where you get we're seeing 90 plus% productivity gains that might be so disruptive that we actually have to come in and just >> buy and operate assets directly to sort of make the value unlock happen in the biggest way.
3:02:42
But, you know, we'll see.
3:02:43
Right now, we partner deeply with these operators.
3:02:45
It's a great great way to go fast.
3:02:47
>> I was actually a customer of your previous company, Smart Things.
3:02:49
Um, what's the through line?
3:02:50
What are the lessons that you learned from the first IoT company to new IoT devices?
3:02:54
Uh, what what are the biggest lessons from that story, >> man?
3:03:01
Uh, well, you're you're welcome and and sorry, I guess you know that where it landed for you, but uh my things was amazing.
3:03:09
It was um you know, we grew it to today it's like 500 million households.
3:03:13
It's, you know, more than two billion connected devices. Pretty big platform. >> Yeah. >> All over the world.
3:03:17
Um, I guess what I learn, so I learned a lot about scaling and sort of making IoT work.
3:03:21
You know, it's it's matured a lot since then.
3:03:22
And so, >> um, you know, those things are good.
3:03:26
I think I I feel like I was solving the wrong problem, though.
3:03:30
So, my wife hated the not to say this in a bad way, but she like progressively hated the company more the more time went on.
3:03:35
Like >> like wants regular light switches and stuff like she doesn't always know.
3:03:41
always know. That was my that that was my experience like I it was like magical and then slowly like little like like hiccups creep in and those like the expectations of software and hardware or modern technology is that it's perfect
3:03:55
because it's a computer and it's a robot market you know it's not a big enough >> yeah exactly um I' I'd love your take on Sonos we've been talking about Sonos a ton um what do you think they need to do to uh make the make the app open faster. I open the Sonos app. It takes me 90 I open the Sonos app.
3:04:12
It takes me 90 seconds to adjust the volume and I'm like, I don't know how I haven't churned.
3:04:18
Maybe I should, but >> I'm negative on Sonos, but I've gone through two like hopeful waves of buying it completely in my house and then eventually >> same thing.
3:04:26
>> And uh it's in an orphan stage right now.
3:04:28
I think I just donated a bunch of like great gear. >> Okay.
3:04:31
Yeah, >> it's the most they have like the best sound and all that stuff, but talk about like missing the software opportunity like every stage in the company. Totally.
3:04:41
>> And uh you know I just don't see you know it's sort of Alexa's sort of faded out in a way.
3:04:46
Apple home is not going anywhere.
3:04:48
The Google Home stuff hasn't really like Sonos has this opportunity to like own >> they could be the thing that like unlocks things like chat GPT. >> Yeah. John's idea.
3:05:00
>> My idea was was Sonos is trading at what like 1 billion market cap or something. Yeah.
3:05:03
Uh my idea was OpenAI literally bought >> they shipped like 5 million devices.
3:05:07
ship a ton of devices and OpenAI has fantastic engineers.
3:05:10
Whatever the engineering problem is, they can fix it, I believe. I don't know.
3:05:13
It's a wild license Scarlet's voice this time.
3:05:16
And like, you know, seems properly uh not the not the not the dumbest crackpot theory we ever come up with.
3:05:25
But, uh, we will leave uh the the wild riffing to the next one.
3:05:28
Thank you so much for hopping on. Congratulations.
3:05:32
>> Congratulations to you and the team.
3:05:33
Really really tremendous progress. >> Great news. Good luck out there. get in the future.
3:05:37
All right, >> we'll talk to you soon. >> Talk soon.
3:05:40
>> And up next, we have Chris from Waves coming in the studio.
3:05:44
Symphonic Labs >> went viral yesterday.
3:05:48
We should play his video maybe before he joins.
3:05:53
>> Pull up the video that went viral yesterday about Waves. The uh the uh glasses. Okay, I'm hearing it. Let's bring it up. Let's see it. >> This is a spot.
3:06:10
The cinematography on the startup ads is getting insane.
3:06:28
That feels like noise cancellation.
3:06:28
It sounds like the audio is switching. >> A banana. >> Get the out.
3:06:38
>> So, when he's tapping it, is he starting a live stream or just taking a clipping? Oh, clipping. >> I'm not late, am I?
3:06:45
>> Wait, this is this is beam.
3:06:45
This is what Casey Neistat was describing. 10 10 seconds or Yeah.
3:06:55
The bar for startup launch videos is 10x. >> It's insane.
3:07:01
>> Getting Project X vibes. You remember that movie? >> Yeah. Yeah.
3:07:05
Your average like Republic company has trouble producing marketing videos at this level. >> This is remarkable. >> There we go. >> Whoa.
3:07:19
Now we're getting into FPV. Hardcore Henry.
3:07:24
>> Somebody just pulled a gun at a house party. I guess >> it's wild.
3:07:26
Yeah, if you have a life like that, maybe you do need to be recording all the time.
3:07:30
>> Hey, >> does she have it on too?
3:07:33
Is it recording >> recording me? >> Oh, there you go. Okay.
3:07:40
>> Oh, records in the center. Okay, cool.
3:07:43
Well, let's bring him in.
3:07:43
I'm excited to talk to him about waves. >> Bring them in. Welcome. What's going on?
3:07:49
The man the man that kicked the hornets's nest. >> How you doing?
3:07:54
How's the last >> How's the foot?
3:07:55
>> How's the last 24 hours been? >> Foot stung.
3:07:58
>> I mean, >> it's been wild, man. It's It's been amazing.
3:08:01
It's really really awesome.
3:08:02
Just >> Before we start, sorry. Are you recording this? >> No, no, no, no. >> Okay, >> you can. You're live. We're recording. We're recording it. >> Yeah. No, these are cosmetic.
3:08:10
They they they're not uh >> not not live. So, yeah.
3:08:13
Uh, this is a kind of like a typical hardware pre-launch vision statement, collect pre-orders, and then start manufacturing, I assume. >> Yep. >> Very cool.
3:08:23
Uh, what what was the key takeaway?
3:08:25
What was the good response?
3:08:26
What was the stuff that you think you need to address?
3:08:28
How has the overall response been?
3:08:30
What have you like learned?
3:08:32
What did you expect versus surprised you?
3:08:35
>> So, I'll talk about the good and the bad.
3:08:36
I think um, you know, we we have hundreds of creators in our inbox right now.
3:08:40
It is it is really popping off.
3:08:40
I mean I think uh you know Twitter is is very much like a tech forward audience but even with that I think with the virality we were really able to lock in our ICP here.
3:08:51
Um we have some of the biggest names in IRL that want to work with us.
3:08:56
I can't name names right now but uh it is very exciting.
3:08:58
Um the downside I mean like I think I think we we we got a lot of feedback about privacy.
3:09:05
Um, and uh, you know, I think uh, we're we're still pretty set on our stance here.
3:09:11
Like we're going to ship with an indicator light, but in the conversations that we had with content creators, a lot of them uh, emphasize the fact that like, you know, they they want something that allows them to capture candid, authentic moments because those go the most viral.
3:09:26
Um, and if in certain situations that means them being able to disable the light, uh, we want to give that option to them.
3:09:34
Um, so yeah, >> and that's distinctly, uh, we were just talking with Casey Neistat.
3:09:39
He said that if you try to cover the indicator light on the meta ray bands that stops filming. >> Yeah.
3:09:47
>> And so do you think part of your opportunity is that you're willing to go and do something that Zuck uh, Zach won't? >> Counterposition. >> I think so.
3:09:54
So, like I mean I I don't think Meta realizes where the puck is going.
3:09:58
I think they're they're way too focused on like adding AI and uh waveguide displays and trying to go after a bigger market that we don't really know is going to fully adopt just yet.
3:10:08
Um what we're seeing now is like the most retentive Ray-B bands users are content creators. And what are they doing?
3:10:14
They're posting social content on reals and Tik Tok.
3:10:16
They're posting prank videos, riz videos, um like social interactions, interviews, things like that, right?
3:10:23
And all of them that we talk to are just like, we want to take this and we want to go live.
3:10:27
Like instead of me uh flirting with somebody on a short clip, I want to actually live stream a date and have chat tell me what to say and what to do, right?
3:10:35
Um so we just want to be able to enable those kinds of content to to exist.
3:10:42
>> How is the actual live streaming infrastructure?
3:10:44
I assume this pairs with your iPhone somehow to to pass to like some sort of stream key to Twitch or whatever. Yeah, >> exactly. It's just RTMP.
3:10:52
So we stream to the phone and then phone streams to either the the streamers back end and then to Twitch or Kick or just straight to the streaming service. >> Yeah.
3:11:02
Is there any like push back from Apple on this type of thing?
3:11:04
Are they pretty open with those particular APIs?
3:11:08
>> It's effectively just a camera.
3:11:10
>> There are apps that exist already that let you do this just with >> Yeah.
3:11:13
Which is a different camera. Yeah.
3:11:15
>> What about the uh h how do you evaluate like the technical risk?
3:11:18
Uh the the glasses look great.
3:11:20
They're very and they look really tiny.
3:11:25
>> Uh you're trying to pack a lot in there.
3:11:27
Uh maybe the the actual >> uh quality of the video matters less early than just the ability to have that FPV view.
3:11:35
>> So I'm pretty confident that you know we'll be able to hit a pretty similar quality to a meta ray bands or a meta Oakley.
3:11:41
Um we we have good connects in Shenzhen that have set us up with some really good uh suppliers.
3:11:46
And you know, I think uh like if if the issue is like can we fit it in these frames, the answer is yes.
3:11:52
Um like >> the way we've sized it is is kind of unique in that I almost call these like the hockey stick temples because we keep it thin in the front and then like thicker in the back.
3:12:03
So PCB uh internal battery and then swappable battery >> the temples.
3:12:09
So >> they two different batteries.
3:12:11
So you can swap one and then swap the other and then swap the one and then swap the So, there's only one swappable battery, but uh we'll we'll pack it with two.
3:12:17
So, like while while you're using one, the other one's charging.
3:12:21
And so, you can just flip-flop. And it's hot swappable.
3:12:24
So, you don't have to stop your stream.
3:12:26
>> You don't have to stop your stream because there's enough battery juice in the actual glasses that when you take the battery out, you have a minute to swap the next one or something. >> Exactly.
3:12:33
>> That makes a ton of sense.
3:12:34
>> What were you doing before this?
3:12:37
>> So, I originally started this company with my co-founder to do uh subvocal speech recognition.
3:12:41
We did a lot of stuff with like neuroch and just like um ML research and I think we were caught in this loop where like we wanted to make a cool gadget.
3:12:49
Um but we were way too research focused and not market focused.
3:12:53
Um and we just decided to do a full 180 and just like you know I'm I'm very inspired by what Roy Lee has done and what Aby has done with their products.
3:13:03
And I I just think that like you know really focusing on a retentive user so i. e.
3:13:08
a content creator, but then also making a gadget that's just cool um and nice to wear and doesn't look like a super bulky thing and just I think that's that's the goal for me. So, >> sub vocals.
3:13:21
So, you were thinking like hardware device that I can whisper and it picks up what I'm saying >> or just mouth out words.
3:13:26
Yeah, >> just mouth out words. That's pretty cool. Yeah. >> Uh interesting.
3:13:30
>> How much did you spend on the launch video?
3:13:32
Is very well well produced.
3:13:34
>> That thing looks amazing.
3:13:34
So, I mean, we have a we have the next Spielberg on our team.
3:13:39
Man, Donald is is an amazing individual.
3:13:41
Um, we we actually filmed it in Canada.
3:13:43
So, um, for context, my co-founder and I were both Canadian.
3:13:48
>> Uh, we filmed it in Vancouver.
3:13:48
It was around I'd say USD, like maybe 50 60K. >> Solid. >> Yeah.
3:13:55
I mean, >> I mean, it looks like Super Bowl quality. >> Well, yeah.
3:13:59
And there's so many different actors.
3:14:00
I'm assuming you just like actually had to hire a bunch of people.
3:14:04
Now, none of the footage is from the same sensor that will be in the actual camera.
3:14:08
So, there'll probably be some sort of disconnect there, but hopefully people are happy with the final sensor. Do you have any goals?
3:14:16
Like, you know, we shoot on FX3s.
3:14:16
I like the full-frame look.
3:14:18
I like a 12 megapixel, you know, 4K.
3:14:20
Uh, obviously can't stuff all that into, you know, something the size of a little c smartphone camera.
3:14:26
where where are the break points in terms of quantitative metrics for a camera to get good enough that people will actually share it?
3:14:35
Because even with the metaray bands, the the pictures and images I was taking and videos, they weren't jumping out to me as like, yeah, these are really great to post right now.
3:14:46
>> Yeah, I think a big thing with with the metas is just image stabilization.
3:14:48
Like if you're like walking around while while you're taking the video, there's like almost like a bobbing effect.
3:14:53
And I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done there.
3:14:58
Um, low light is another thing.
3:15:00
I mean, you're kind of working against uh the volume that you have to fit the sensor.
3:15:03
So, you you already constrained with how much light that you can actually capture.
3:15:08
>> Um, but um, you know, >> yeah, that dark party scene you filmed, that would be extremely rough, dude. Kind of a wild choice.
3:15:15
Not the sunny day, but it tells a better story.
3:15:17
So, I I get why you did it.
3:15:18
And obviously this stuff will get better, but there are like laws of physics around like you just can't fit a medium format sensor in a fra unless it's an eye patch.
3:15:27
Maybe maybe that's the future.
3:15:29
You put the full sensor right there.
3:15:33
>> What um h how do you expect the what do you expect the go to market to look like?
3:15:37
I imagine you could partner with a bunch of just big streamers and really focus on delivering value for them and then if it working well for them then you would have like the next 100,000 people ready to go.
3:15:47
Is that how you're thinking?
3:15:48
That's exactly what we're doing.
3:15:50
Um, so we're we're already talking to big IRL streamers about partnerships.
3:15:54
Um, we're going to Shenzhen in a couple of weeks just to get the beta device ready and then we're going to test it on a 100 different creators and just get their feedback, iterate, improve the user experience.
3:16:07
Um, and then, you know, we're trying to do mass production Q1 next year.
3:16:09
Um, and I think like, you know, there's kind of just like an infinite marketing glitch here.
3:16:15
It's like if we give these streamers early access to just show what this kind of content can look like, it'll just inspire other creators and wannabe creators to to buy this product. >> Yeah.
3:16:27
Is there >> I feel like there's like going to be a whole new like you could create a whole new class of IRL creators.
3:16:31
I can imagine somebody that's h they just do hiking or they just ski or they you know they and I'm sure people do that >> already but if you make it really truly seamless >> and I can imagine creators that uh yeah are more like the like like um these like ambient videos and music on YouTube where there's not really >> study with me type of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of crossover. >> We'll get it set up.
3:16:55
We'll get glasses on Ben our producer.
3:16:56
We'll have a Ben cam feed. >> Awesome.
3:17:00
Hey, we love we'd love to do a pair when we have one. >> Yeah, for sure.
3:17:03
Uh on on kind of like pricing and technology, one thing that I thought was interesting about the Vision Pro was that it was like almost an order of magnitude more expensive than the Quest, but it was very clear that Apple was able to spare no expense, get the best screen, and they jumped forward a lot in terms of just quality.
3:17:18
Didn't really hit the mark in terms of retention.
3:17:22
But when I think about a streamer, most people who are doing it professionally, spending $3,000 on a Sony camera is totally reasonable.
3:17:28
Is there a world where instead of Meta's Ray-B bands which are in the couple hundred mark, you go to a couple thousand dollars and you're buying and you're providing a more proumer, more professional level product and that actually acts as a differentiation and then maybe you go down the price ladder over time.
3:17:45
Are you looking into that?
3:17:45
Is that is that even something you could do? >> Oh, absolutely.
3:17:50
Like I think right now uh we're we're going to stay sort of like in the mid market, but we we would ideally want to find like bigger um like creator groups and like I mean like imagine like I could almost imagine having like a super pro version that's like $1,500 $2,000 and like Mr.
3:18:06
Beast uses it for Beast Games.
3:18:10
You get the POV of like every single contestant in Beast Games.
3:18:14
Dude, that would go crazy.
3:18:14
And like I I that's something I would really want to see. Yeah, totally. >> Yeah. >> Yeah.
3:18:22
I mean, people do that with like the headmounted GoPros.
3:18:23
It's a little bit awkward and just doesn't land as well, but uh but you can get great footage out of a out of a GoPro mounted to your forehead >> if you're racing around.
3:18:32
Uh in anything else, Jordy? >> No, this is great.
3:18:35
Thanks for Thanks for jumping on. Congrats on the launch.
3:18:36
I think uh a lot of the pe a lot of people's like concerns are real, but I think there's ways around it, and it ultimately will just come down to how individual people choose to use the tech the technology.
3:18:48
Like there's going to be people that use this to live stream privately for their grandma so they the grandma can feel like they're hanging out with the grandkids and there's a bunch there's so many like use cases that are really >> there are people right now who use the cameras on their iPhones to violate people's privacy at Coldplay concerts.
3:19:06
Yeah, >> like that happens.
3:19:06
So we have to deal with it's it's not a device problem.
3:19:08
I think it's more of an actor problem.
3:19:10
You have people that are going to do weird and we we don't condone that.
3:19:14
Um, I think we're just going to focus on creators that want to make genuinely good content.
3:19:20
Um, I didn't I didn't get to see what Casey was saying because I was in another call. Yeah.
3:19:24
But, uh, I would love to just pull up to New York this weekend and have a chat with him and show him the frames and get his thoughts if that's something he's interested in.
3:19:32
If he still, uh, likes the original vision of Beam, I would be more than happy to have a conversation.
3:19:38
>> Yeah, I'm sure he'd have a ton of interesting feedback that you could incorporate and twist around.
3:19:41
Just it'd be a great meeting of the minds.
3:19:43
Um, >> real quick, John, just want to say loved your videos on startups.
3:19:48
Like I would I would always watch your like startup history videos while eating dinner.
3:19:52
Like I I love a meal in YouTube.
3:19:54
So just like that was that was a you should you should go back to that at some point.
3:19:59
I I think it would be really cool.
3:20:02
>> But TBPN is awesome, man. I love the show. This is great.
3:20:05
>> Yeah, we're having a lot of fun. >> Thanks, Chris.
3:20:06
Well, awesome having you on and and good luck with everything.
3:20:09
I'm sure I'm sure your round will be done by the end of the week. Uh, >> for sure.
3:20:12
Good luck out there >> knowing how knowing how the valley moves these days. >> Yeah, good plug. >> Have fun out there.
3:20:18
>> Okay, take care, guys. >> Talk to you soon. Bye. >> Fantastic.
3:20:23
>> Yeah, it all comes down to the device itself is not bad. It's how it gets used.
3:20:29
And I think there's a bunch of really cool use cases here. So, >> yeah. >> Uh, awesome.
3:20:33
Well, >> if you want another wearable, go to bezel. Get bezel. com.
3:20:36
Your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Uh, you know, why? What?
3:20:42
You know, who needs a camera on their face when they can have a PC Philippe Nautilus on their wrist? >> Condo on the wrist. >> Condo on the wrist. >> An RM. >> For sure. For sure, dude.
3:20:53
Uh, Brandon Jacobe, we got some trade deal news.
3:20:58
He's starting a new decade today.
3:20:58
More focused and motivated than ever. It's time to build. Shout out to Brandon. >> I'm an idiot. I I was like, you're 30. He's like, no, I'm 29.
3:21:06
I'm starting the I'm starting the 30th year. >> What?
3:21:14
>> That's what he texted me. >> Is this his birthday? >> Yeah.
3:21:16
No, this is this was him announcing his birthday. >> Okay.
3:21:19
I thought he was going I thought he was going to a different job or something. >> Completely.
3:21:23
>> I was also very confused.
3:21:25
>> Everybody's confused about your post.
3:21:26
Stick stick to Figma, Brandon. Stick to Figma.
3:21:30
>> Uh we got a post here from >> Put the pixels in the bag.
3:21:33
>> Just put the pixels in the bag, bro.
3:21:39
Uh we got to we got to shout out uh Amriita Block officially joined the S&P 500 yesterday.
3:21:45
She says it's not the finish line.
3:21:47
It's a signal that what we're building has staying power.
3:21:52
Inclusion brings broader exposure.
3:21:52
Proud of our team, focused on what's next. Hit the gong.
3:21:58
>> She CFO over at Block. >> Very cool. >> Awesome.
3:22:03
Uh, liquidity says, "Incredible work, fellas."
3:22:05
Uh, Sydney Sweeney had a campaign with American Eagle that went live yesterday.
3:22:10
Of course, American Eagle was up 6% on the day and then 17% after hours.
3:22:17
>> Uh, makes total sense.
3:22:18
>> But aren't uh I I heard all like the big uh the big LPs are pouring into Andre Horowits right now because just on the rumor that Sydney Sweeney might be joining Andre as a partner. Is that true? >> Yeah.
3:22:29
I mean, the fund has to be the new the new raise and massively over subscribed on that.
3:22:34
>> I did have somebody I did have somebody smart text me and say, "Is this is this real?"
3:22:39
Um >> I I I heard the news and I was like, I think it's real. I think it's real.
3:22:44
Um but but I thought it was that Andrea was investing in a company that had done a marketing deal with Sydney.
3:22:50
I didn't realize that the rumor was that she was joining as a partner.
3:22:55
>> She kind of has the mightest touch right now. She did Dr. Squatch $2 billion exit. We got a post here.
3:22:59
We got a post here from Nat Elias. Fantastic post.
3:23:01
He says, "Wheno is a godsend for working parents.
3:23:06
Need to hand off the baby between meetings.
3:23:08
Put them in a Whimo and send them to your partner across town. Impossible before now.
3:23:12
Really grateful we have this technology." This went super viral.
3:23:16
I'm sure Whimo was like trying to get a community noted because I don't think uh this definitely not allowed uh against the terms of use.
3:23:25
Probably illegal in multiple ways. Wow. Whimo bombshell.
3:23:29
>> He was clearly joking.
3:23:29
I I was thinking about this though.
3:23:31
I do think it's a game changer that uh you know, how much time do do parents spend every day just like commuting their kids to and from school?
3:23:41
I think AVs are going to be great uh for families.
3:23:43
For example, like I remember like as a kid, my brother's school would start at a different time than mine and like one of us would have to wake up earlier than the other.
3:23:52
I think we're going to be living in a world where >> you don't have to hang out with your kids at all.
3:23:58
>> No, it's like more quality time and and less, you know, commuting.
3:24:02
>> Yeah, but who says the commute isn't quality time? It can be. True.
3:24:03
It can be it can be a moment to, you know, actually have a conversation kind of unplugged from all >> I've literally listened to hundreds of hours of dinosaur content driving.
3:24:15
>> But you gota you gota give a lecture.
3:24:17
You got to show up to the commute ready to give sermon on the T-Rex >> today.
3:24:22
is the first day of the rest of first grade. >> Just pump up speech.
3:24:29
>> Pump up speech in the car. >> Just lock in, buddy. Get in there. I want you to win.
3:24:32
I want you to win on the playground.
3:24:34
Build the biggest sand castle.
3:24:36
>> We have another post from Tweet Davidson.
3:24:38
He says, "In your 20s, you get sorted into one of these four houses like Harry Potter."
3:24:44
>> I got both of them here. Celsius. Celsius is out.
3:24:46
You're >> I'm a big fan of three out of the four of these. >> The green one. What's the green one? >> Are you joking?
3:24:53
>> I don't know what that is. >> It's a matcha. >> Matcha? >> Yeah. What's the white part?
3:24:57
>> That >> probably oat milk with with a bunch of canola oil in it.
3:25:01
>> We can do a matcha taste test live. See if you like it.
3:25:04
>> No, we're absolutely not.
3:25:04
I mean, I I Matcha has never been for me. Uh, and never will be.
3:25:11
>> Yeah, I clearly just like >> never been big into that world. >> No. Diet Coke for sure.
3:25:15
>> A three out of the four. >> Celsius. Yeah, for sure.
3:25:16
I'm not I'm not I'm not uh I'll I'll have a Celsius in >> that is mid. That's mid.
3:25:21
I I I do drink one every every day though.
3:25:25
>> Uh and we got to give it up for Satia Nadella who said today we're releasing GitHub Spark, a tool and co-pilot that turns your ideas into full stack apps entirely in natural language. >> Cloud coding game.
3:25:37
>> They're getting into the game. >> Interesting. Interesting.
3:25:40
>> Positioning this as a cloud code competitor more as like a Figma make.
3:25:44
>> It's definitely not a cloud code competitor.
3:25:46
This more of like a >> Yeah.
3:25:47
Figma make lovable v >> competitor. Interesting.
3:25:52
>> Bolt competitor in drag out.
3:25:52
Every in the future every SAS company will have a little text box that lets you generate more SAS.
3:26:01
>> And this is how SAS will or >> the SAS industrial big SAS wants you to think that big SAS wants you to think uh >> that uh you can get in the game too.
3:26:11
but on their infrastructure.
3:26:13
You can you can >> you can we we have we have a vibecoded project uh that uh it was very handcrafted as well from Tyler coming soon. Dropping soon.
3:26:23
>> I'm very excited about that, Jack. >> Wait, wait. Let's go to Tyler.
3:26:25
Any news in your world before you're you're taking tomorrow off?
3:26:29
>> You're I'm not I'm just I'm not taking it off. I just take days off. >> Oh, sure. Oh, yeah.
3:26:33
The You're going to work so hard tomorrow when you're remote.
3:26:40
>> But I I I have some breaking news. I'll bring this up.
3:26:41
Your cam is not working, but I'll >> Okay.
3:26:43
Yeah, bring up the breaking news.
3:26:45
We got some breaking news. >> What do we got?
3:26:47
>> We got Elad Gill scoop.
3:26:47
All Gill is raising a one.
3:26:50
5 billion dollar fund, which if closed would be one of the largest halls for Solo GP. >> Uh, love to see it. Natasha's got the scoop. Hit it.
3:27:00
And I'm sure this will be over subscribed. >> We got the wipe. I like the wipe.
3:27:05
Good job, production team. That's fun. Uh, very very new. I mean, having fun.
3:27:12
>> I could I could see a lot at some point with a with a $10 billion. >> Yeah.
3:27:16
The real the real story that the the investigative journalists have to dig into.
3:27:20
Is there anyone else on his payroll?
3:27:24
>> Because if there's even one assistant, >> no, there he's got a fantastic team. >> Jacobi.
3:27:29
>> He's got a fantastic >> He's not a solo GP.
3:27:31
>> I mean, I think >> he's not a solo investor.
3:27:32
Everyone, oh, he's the only guy around.
3:27:33
He's got other people on his team.
3:27:35
>> He's got a team, but I but I >> Maybe he doesn't have another GP.
3:27:36
is probably I would >> the only GP but he has the entire management company.
3:27:42
>> What if he had like 500 associates, 300 principles, >> 200 partners and he's the only GP and he's like I'm a solo GP. I'm a solo GP.
3:27:51
I have a bigger infrastructure team, bigger back office than Andre, but I'm still Don't you call me a solo GP. I'm not a platform fund.
3:27:58
>> He's getting into platform fund territory. But congratulations.
3:28:01
Absolutely in insane investor. Amazing.
3:28:04
Yeah, we covered his post yesterday basically saying these are the early winners and of course he's in all the number one he's in the number one company in all of those categories.
3:28:12
We got a post here from this crazy run entrepreneur for a long time color this uh this DNA company >> his book two is is >> yeah high growth handbook legend everything he does he hits out of the park.
3:28:25
>> Uh Jack Corbett >> uh has a post here went super viral.
3:28:27
I was referencing this with Zach earlier.
3:28:32
He says you can Venmo the United States to pay off the national debt.
3:28:35
And so they have a a a website you can go to gifts to reduce the public debt.
3:28:39
Um and you can just make contributions.
3:28:42
You can use a PayPal, Venmo, debit or a credit card.
3:28:46
Um so if you're really a patriot, go max out your credit card for Uncle Sam and make a make a gift to this country.
3:28:54
>> Is it a tax write off?
3:28:57
>> That's a good question.
3:28:58
>> Does it count as taxes?
3:28:58
Can I just Venmo my taxes now?
3:29:00
If I'm like, I owe this much, just send it in and then be like, take that as a deduction.
3:29:04
If this is not taxdeductible, that would be the most annoying thing ever. Uh, very funny.
3:29:12
>> Uh, Jamie uh, Cuff has launched PACE, the agentic process outsourcer, APO for the insurance industry.
3:29:18
Jamie is an absolute dog. Congratulations.
3:29:21
I met I think I met him in 2021.
3:29:23
He was at Retool at the time.
3:29:25
Uh so excited to see him back in the game with his own startup.
3:29:30
Um >> uh Brian Norard, he says, "A rating system for men in the dating marketplace was inevitable and so is one for women."
3:29:40
>> Uh that's interesting.
3:29:41
>> Signal says there will never be one for women in his humble opinion.
3:29:43
The market dynamics are skewed because every woman is going to for the same guy. West Elm Calibb effect. Oh, that's an old story.
3:29:51
I remember West Elm Calb. That was interesting.
3:29:53
For dudes, it's an adverse effect. Yeah. I don't know. reviewing women.
3:29:56
That feels like that would get disapproved by the app store for some reason. It just feels odd. I don't know. We'll see where it goes.
3:30:02
But it it is odd that I don't I even heard rumblings about like there's a Reddit out there that already exists because like the whole idea of like the rating system app, what was it called? T that app.
3:30:10
Uh like that like what was new about that wasn't that it was an app.
3:30:16
It's that it was a trend on Reddit.
3:30:18
I think Reddit or some sort of community, some sort of web- based community beforehand.
3:30:22
Um, but anyway, weird times.
3:30:25
Um, I was talking to a friend of the show about tea and she said it's what' she say?
3:30:30
Something like it's a Stalinist ritual or something like that.
3:30:34
And I it kind of went over my head, but thought it was funny. >> Yeah.
3:30:39
I don't know how I feel about it.
3:30:40
Uh, we're we're trying to get the founder on.
3:30:42
Uh, you can imagine he's been pretty busy at the top of the app store and getting a massive amount of hate constantly. Yeah.
3:30:47
Um, I don't think >> but also probably doing a lot of project management. It's in his blog. >> It really is. >> Yeah.
3:30:55
>> Uh >> product management.
3:30:57
>> Let's let's go through this fun story from Charlie Munger.
3:30:59
Very interesting to to dig into.
3:31:01
In 1949, Charlie Munger was 25 years old.
3:31:04
He was hired at the law firm Wright and Garrett for $3,300 per year or $29,851 in inflationadjusted dollars.
3:31:14
As of 2010, he had $1,500 in savings equal to about $13,570.
3:31:22
Now, a few years later in 1953, Charlie was 29 years old when he and his wife divorced.
3:31:29
He had been married since he was 21.
3:31:31
Charlie lost everything in the divorce.
3:31:33
His wife keeping the family home in South Pasadena, not far from where I live.
3:31:37
Munger moved into dreadful conditions at the University Club and drove a terrible yellow Pontiac, which his children said had a horrible paint job.
3:31:45
According to the biography written by Janet Low, Molly Munger asked her father, "Daddy, this car is just awful, a mess. Why do you drive it?"
3:31:51
The broke Munger replied, "To discourage gold diggers."
3:31:55
Shortly after the divorce, Charlie learned that his son Teddy had leukemia. Heartbreaking.
3:32:00
In those days, there was no health insurance.
3:32:02
You just paid everything out of pocket, and the death rate was near 100% since there was nothing doctors could do.
3:32:08
Rick Rick Garin Rick Garin, Charlie's friend, said Munger would go to the hospital, hold his young son, and then walk the streets of Pasadena crying.
3:32:17
One year after the diagnosis in 1955, Teddy Munger died.
3:32:22
Charlie was 31 years old, divorced, broke, bearing his nine-year-old son.
3:32:26
Later in life, he faced a horrific operation that left him blind in one eye with pain so terrible that he eventually had his eye removed.
3:32:33
Incredibly, incredibly rough.
3:32:35
And then to go on an absolutely generational run after that, man, really speaks to uh resiliency and perseverance. What a wild story.
3:32:42
Um anyway, we need something to cheer us up.
3:32:46
We need to go to Howard Lutnik investments.
3:32:49
His his investment bank, Caner Fitzgerald, is offering to buy the right to businesses tariff refunds.
3:32:55
Basically betting that the courts will overturn the tariffs.
3:32:56
What >> from Ryan Peterson?
3:32:59
>> What does Lutnik know?
3:33:01
>> Fant financialize everything. >> This is wild.
3:33:04
>> What does Lutnick know? >> Yeah.
3:33:05
I mean, if you're maybe if you if you have uh if you paid a bunch of tariffs and you're expecting some refunds or thinking that they might be there, you could get the cash flow now if your business is in trouble.
3:33:13
That's obviously relevant to Flexport's customers.
3:33:17
Uh in other news, SpaceX direct to cell phone coverage is growing fast.
3:33:22
Elon posted a chart that's um not quite going hyperbolic, but certainly growing exponentially.
3:33:27
I didn't realize that direct to cell was was was growing as fast as it was.
3:33:31
I I didn't even realize it was that available.
3:33:34
Um I see the I see the the generic satellite service show up on my phone every once in a while and it's usually a harbinger of very bad connection, but SP uh but but uh Starlink should be much faster.
3:33:49
>> Well, that is a great place to end the show today. This has been a fun one.
3:33:54
>> Yeah, >> lots of range.
3:33:54
Uh leave us a fivestar review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It uh helps the show. It >> does.
3:34:04
>> And uh we were charting today.
3:34:06
>> We're climbing in the rankings on Spotify.
3:34:07
You can help us by going listening to the show on Spotify, giving us five star.
3:34:12
>> If you're on if you're on Apple Podcasts, I do recommend switching over to Spotify. We got video awesome. >> That does make sense.
3:34:19
That would be experience.
3:34:22
>> But uh we hope you have a fantastic day. We love you. We'll see you tomorrow. >> See you tomorrow. Bye. >> Cheers.