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Today is Thursday, June 26th, 2025.
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We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome.
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The capital of capital, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance.
5:10
Remixed it for you there.
5:10
We got a great show for you today, folks.
5:12
The current thing is the AI talent wars.
5:14
Uh, Meta has poached three OpenAI researchers.
5:19
Then there's also news in the information about what ex OpenAI CTO Merotti is planning to do with thinking machines or Thinky as we like to call them. Thinky.
5:28
Um, they're going to make money. That's the plan. Make money.
5:33
Going to help other businesses make money as well. I'm excited.
5:35
uh Pam is joining uh to break down what's going on in Europe.
5:41
She's our European correspondent, developing nation correspondent, developing technology potential. Lots of potential there. Very excited for that.
5:49
Uh we might revisit what's going on with Bumble.
5:51
Uh we might talk about if you didn't follow the story yesterday, Bumble cut 30% of staff as online dating hits quote an inflection point. We might dig into that.
6:03
Also, Google has a new artificial intelligence which will help researchers understand how our genes work. Very interesting.
6:10
Uh there's new investment platform Republic is planning to let anyone bet on SpaceX.
6:14
They're going to uh apparently put uh secondary shares on chain.
6:19
Um also, we mentioned this yesterday, but China is tracking down to lever up your Fartcoin. Yes. To buy SpaceX.
6:26
That might be the right move. Uh you never know.
6:29
Uh, China is tracking down its rare earth experts and taking away passports and Mike Gallagher is joining from Palanteer and so is Elellaniano from Palunteer and so we will get the Palunteer update which will be a lot of fun.
6:40
Um, also you know we have to tell you about ramp time is money say both easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place.
6:46
Of course the news that was tearing up the timeline was the fact that the social network too is officially in development with Aaron Sorcin returning this time as director. Uh, Yakine says wrong.
6:57
I'm the director and I'm also the main character.
7:01
I thought that was really funny.
7:03
Definitely a main character. Uh Andy two cents.
7:05
mmoney is uh is writing some some you know jokey dialogue here.
7:11
He says, "Sorry I left my aura ring at South Park Commons along with my eightle burner phone and board ape ledger wallet. You absolute del."
7:22
Uh it's pretty funny to reimagine it but interesting.
7:24
We have a little scoop here.
7:25
We actually got our hands on the on on a couple pages of the script.
7:29
It was it was left at the gym. Yes. And we're in Hollywood.
7:33
We're in Hollywood where we are.
7:35
And we're fairly confident it is the it could possibly be.
7:37
This is The Social Network 2 official official dialogue. Yeah. They haven't shot. So they got the script.
7:44
They've been doing table reads.
7:46
Uh we wanted to do a little table read for you today.
7:47
Uh so I'll break it down.
7:50
You'll play Mark Zuckerberg. I'll play Nat Freedman. So, this happens.
7:54
This is taking place in Mark Zuckerberg's office at night in the Meta HQ. Yeah.
7:57
So, a middle a minimalist expanse lit by floating AR displays and whiteboards full of transformer diagrams.
8:04
Mark Zuckerberg is focused yet restless. He stands at a window.
8:06
Nat Friedman is calm but energized.
8:08
He enters and Nat opens the scene.
8:13
You've open source llama, Mark.
8:13
You've open source llama, Mark. 70 billion parameters running in 8K token context windows and word there's a 405 billion monster still in the lab open source isn't unleashed Nat it's a guided evolution we publish the weights so the community can help tame them community a
8:30
sizable slice of fair hop to startups like Mistral how's the village supposed to ride the beast without many of the original wranglers talent moves ideas stay group query attention scaled rotary positional embeddings with NTK aware stretching this isn't incremental. It's It's a step change.
8:46
Meanwhile, Yan's out there talking about non-auto regggressive world model hybrids, saying the next wave won't be tokenby token racers.
8:53
He's ready to retire your thoroughbred, Mark.
8:56
Yan's job is to keep the herd agile.
8:58
Llama is today's workhorse.
9:00
Scout and Maverick are the horizon right now.
9:02
Llama is our public manifesto.
9:05
Your manifesto just made every kid with a decent GPU a potential sorcerer.
9:11
Hugging face downloads are exploding. What's next? Magic carpets. Exactly.
9:16
Open weights let the village scale faster than our walls ever could. Purple Llama covers us.
9:21
Cybersc evalu red team cycles.
9:25
You know Purple Llama isn't bulletproof, Mark.
9:27
Open AI's minting cash behind APIs and you're handing out multilingual long context models for free.
9:33
The Llama 3 community license only restricts firms over 700 million monthly active users.
9:38
Innovation rises bottom up. Ask Ahmed. Ask Joel.
9:44
Democratization is the point.
9:44
You're wagering north of $60 billion in AI capex on that democracy. It's a big bet, Mark. Not a bet. An ecosystem. Scout is multimodal. Maverick is video first.
9:57
Laura, chlora, NFR, quantization.
9:57
Llama derivatives already power agents. Rag stacks. University labs.
10:03
It feeds itself provided the community keeps aligning with you.
10:07
Alignment happens in real time. RLHF, DPO, RL, RL AIF.
10:09
This is an ecosystem, not a monopoly.
10:14
And if that ecosystem births something you can't steer, no one controls progress, Nat, we guide it openly, transparently.
10:22
No secret rooms, just a billion hands shaping what's next.
10:29
Then hold on tight and hope we're ready. We will be.
10:32
We're building it together.
10:35
and scene uh really jumps off the page. Wow. Riveting. Yeah, Hollywood's back. Hollywood's back.
10:42
This might save Hollywood.
10:44
Yeah, I think this will be People said that I'm Oscar bait right here for sure. Totally. Totally.
10:48
So, uh anyways, you know, maybe maybe somebody just left this as a in the, you know, as a prank knowing we'd find it, knowing we'd read it, but it's entirely possible this is, you know, totally real.
10:58
But, you know, they're going to be doing a lot of design work on the next social network movie.
11:04
They're going to need to use Figma over in Hollywood.
11:05
Think bigger, build faster.
11:07
Figma helps design and development teams build products together.
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Get started for free at figma. com and make products.
11:12
You can make products on there now. Check it out.
11:15
Uh so the scoop that we wanted to talk about, Meta has poached three OpenAI researchers, Lucas Bayer, Alexander uh Colesnikov, and Juwi Hua Ji Jai.
11:27
Uh, according to people familiar with the matter, an OpenAI uh, spokesperson confirmed the three have left the company.
11:35
I've never I've never seen somebody abbreviate spokesperson into spokes. Spokes. Oh, spokes. A spokes. A spokes. Okay.
11:43
Yeah, you're a TVPN spokes.
11:45
Uh, Will Brown has a post. He says, uh, wow.
11:48
They snagged the whole Zurich office.
11:50
This has been something that's been percolating.
11:52
the idea that Mark was going on a hiring spree, sending out messages, setting up dinners with AI researchers, it seems like he's done it.
12:01
Uh Tyler Cosgrove has a little bit of background on these folks.
12:04
I pulled up some posts, but what do you have for us, Tyler, to contextualize the trade deal that just went down? Yeah.
12:11
So, so these guys are are really kind of allstars.
12:13
Um so, so they're all at Zurich office.
12:15
They started the OpenAI Zurich office. Um is anyone left? Do you know?
12:20
I believe I don't know but I think it might have been just them three. Okay.
12:24
Because I I know Lucas had there was a tweet where he said he started it like just because he didn't want to move. Okay.
12:29
So I think it was just them.
12:31
Um but yes so they all work on multimodal research there.
12:34
So um they're best known they were all co-authors on um the original vision transformer paper. Okay. So this was in 2020.
12:41
This is basically this paper is like the reason why you can like basically pass in an image to chatbt. Yeah.
12:47
because it it then led to vision transformer then to vision language model which is now just like kind of they're all like multi multimodal now. Yeah.
12:55
VLM is what uh um physical intelligence has been very bullish on right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
13:00
So um I can just give a a little background on on Lucas.
13:04
Um so 2018 he finishes his PhD.
13:08
He goes straight to Google Brain. Okay.
13:11
Um this is where they basically write the the first like you know um vision transformer paper. Okay.
13:16
Uh then from there he he he 2021 2024 he he um co-leads just the entire uh multimodal team there because now they basically realize that okay we can actually get these things to be fully general not just text. Yeah.
13:30
We saw a a Gemini demo of that a couple years ago where it was like a phone looking at a looking at a desk and it would and and the demo person would draw something and then Gemini would be speaking in real time and the idea was that that was not three different models kind of dancing between each other.
13:48
each other. It was all one model and it was a little controversial at the time because it was sped up I believe but uh but it was still incredible technology and you can see that that's something that is going to get better and now is more in real time and we're seeing that with Gemini where you can pull out your phone and and show it the world and it will and and meta is doing this too with the meta ray bands what am I looking at
14:06
right yeah okay yeah I mean it's really big because you know you used to have you would have your text model then you would have like maybe a convolutional neural network just for the images it's very like or you like or you'd like take
14:16
the take the image stuff it Bert to like get some tags around like there's a dog in this image and then the text model only really knows dog and it it's only seeing text but in this case it can it can continue to see what's actually in the image. Got it. Yeah. So okay. So so Got it. Yeah. So okay.
14:30
So so then Lucas um he he's co-leading the multimodal team at DeepMind 2024 and then just this in 2025 this year he joins OpenAI starts the new office. Wow.
14:42
So not even a full year he's been there.
14:44
It's been really short, but yeah, I mean, these are like real killers.
14:45
Like, you know, this is a huge huge move.
14:49
Yeah, I like Lucas cuz he's uh it sounds like he's a legit legend in AI research, but he's also a poster.
14:55
I don't know if you saw this, but uh he was getting back and forth with Yak with Yakine.
14:58
Uh he said, "Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the most he was the reason that Yakine, it's entirely possible terminated."
15:07
Uh, so I I present to you the most surreal exchange I've had on the X on X the everything app.
15:11
And Lucas says, "Uh, sure.
15:13
If you add 10 hours to my days, 10 hours during which the kiddo sleeps because it seems like he has children and is dealing with the kind of work life balance."
15:21
And Yaxine says, "Just perform less good at your job to fit the to fit in the 10 hours with the kiddo.
15:27
That's what I do and I'm sure it will be fine.
15:29
Going from uh P99 to P90 isn't that big of a deal."
15:33
And then an hour later, wait, this might be bad advice. Please hold.
15:36
And then Lucas says, "Oh, dang. Now I see. I got fired today."
15:42
And uh what was nice was that Lucas very graciously said, "I originally kept the screenshot to wait until the wound healed as I'm not one to put salt on a wound, but since he's addressed this himself now, I assume this post is okay.
15:52
Let me know if it's not and I'll delete it."
15:54
So very, very nice of him.
15:56
Also, there's a funny post in here.
15:57
He says, "No, I just found out that I left a 4090 GPU running and completely forgot about it for months." Oopsy daisies.
16:03
I guess this is how you learn.
16:05
Uh, I can say now that I think he can afford I think he can afford $117.
16:08
32 per day on a 4090 uh bill.
16:11
You might even be able to expense that to per week. Per week. Oh, per week.
16:16
Yeah, that's not that bad. Just a flesh wound.
16:21
Anyway, uh AI girl asks, "Does leaving OpenAI get you on the SAM blacklist?"
16:24
It turns out these guys weren't OpenAI's best people because last week uh Sam Alman said the best people haven't left for meta kind of you know saying hey don't leave because you'll be labeled as a non-performer basically.
16:38
Um but the Wall Street Journal has more of that uh uh the Wall Street Journal has more data here.
16:45
Uh the they're joining Meta Super Intelligence Project.
16:48
Uh it's it's no longer reality labs or llama project.
16:53
It's the super intelligence project and we've seen a number of the executives come in but they're obviously staffing up on the research side as well.
16:58
Uh Zuckerberg and we heard last week that Mark or maybe it was earlier this week that Mark is personally texting, calling people, inviting them to dinner, full founder mode, not leaving it up to Meta's massive recruiting team.
17:10
So I think it's the right move. Very motivated. Yeah.
17:14
I mean this feels like a product and a project that doesn't necessarily need, you know, thousands and thousands of people.
17:21
It seems like you need the really the thousandx engineers and you need only a few of them, the 50 people. Yeah.
17:26
And the interesting dynamic is if you're if you're an engineer that joined in the last year, you're getting a pretty meaningful valuation bump, but not going from call it 10 billion to 300.
17:35
And now the other thing that's sort of coinciding with all of the um um you know the sort of like recruiting chaos is that uh OpenAI and Microsoft aren't exactly getting along right now in terms of restructuring their deal.
17:53
So there's a lot up in the air in terms of can this entity transition to a for-profit?
17:57
Is it going to be able to IPO?
18:00
Sure, they provide, you know, different mechanisms for liquidity, but um, you know, Meta has the ability to provide potentially more stability in that, you know, you're getting equity at what is it 1. 7 trillionish.
18:15
Um, but it's highly liquid, unlikely to fluctuate.
18:19
Um, you know, necessarily to the same degree.
18:22
Um and you're getting a lot of resources and that uh you know like OpenAI Meta is spending um tens of billions of dollars on uh on capex to support the the incredible talent.
18:34
incredible talent. It is it is interesting like uh like the the live player dynamic of Zach in founder mode like you can you can you can do the horse race between Sam and Zach all day long but this feels like it this puts the screws much more to what's Amazon
18:53
doing what's Apple doing what's even Microsoft doing on the AI researcher side if this is such an important uh such an important role and we'll we'll go into this with uh with thinking machines and some of the other uh some of the other labs and what they're doing. But uh they're
19:07
But uh they're like if you are Tim Cook, you have to be asking yourself like am I appropriately staffed for the next generation here?
19:13
Um because it's clearly possible for a trillion dollar big tech company to catch up if you get the right people and you build the right things.
19:25
And so, um, it seems like this is this is almost like less this might this feels like it could be less nerve-wracking for Sam who has a dominant consumer app that's growing growing growing and a really solid team in place.
19:41
He's hired a ton of people.
19:43
There's been just as many big, you know, talent moves into OpenAI as have moved into Meta.
19:48
Um, but we haven't seen that on the Apple side.
19:51
There's also more, I'm sure I would imagine, more clarity internally at OpenAI around like we are building a what what could become a a new tech giant.
20:01
It could be the MAG 8, right?
20:03
Um whereas at a meta it's very exciting.
20:07
There's a lot of resources.
20:08
There's a lot of ambition, right?
20:10
This is the super intelligence team.
20:12
But at the same time, it's unclear exactly how AI will fit into the meta ecosystem.
20:17
And it's it's um you know if people want to work on something very specific, you know, working on an app that might uh a year from now have you know a billion plus DAUs and something truly novel uh is certainly going to be appealing to to some type of people.
20:32
Well, if you're trying to build an app with a billion with a billion DAUs, you got to get on linear.
20:37
Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products.
20:40
Meet the system for modern software development.
20:41
Streamline issues, projects, and product road mapaps.
20:44
Uh should we go to the chief OpenAI hater?
20:48
is a linear customer themselves.
20:48
And I'm sure if you ask them, they would say the only reason we are successful is because of linear linear. app.
20:56
It's like the transformer model and linear. Yeah.
21:00
Those two and then you're done. Key ingredients.
21:01
Um Nick is uh is pouring some cold water on OpenAI as he as he's known to do.
21:07
Uh he says Microsoft signals to walk away from negotiations with OpenAI.
21:10
OpenAI plans to convert into a for-profit company to raise capital and potentially IPO, but Micros but needs Microsoft's approval.
21:18
Microsoft has IP rights to all OpenAI models until 2030 and 20% revenue share.
21:23
OpenAI wants to wave this AGI clause and end Microsoft's IP rights and swap 20% revenue share with royalty plus equity.
21:30
Microsoft is not happy with the new offer.
21:31
OpenAI is considering a nuclear option of accusing Microsoft of antitrust, which is funny because having the nuclear option sort of like be leaking out already is kind of rough.
21:43
Part of the uh part of the strategy.
21:45
Austin Allrad says, "Still absolutely insane to me that Microsoft gets 20% of OpenAI revenue off the top. Not 20% of profit.
21:51
20 cents of every dollar OpenAI brings in goes straight to Microsoft."
21:54
It's like something out of Shark Tank.
21:56
That's very Now you can imagine hearing a shark tank pitch and the and you know one of the sharks gives the sharkiest possible extremely sharky here here's the deal.
22:05
Give you you know a million bucks but I want 20 cents of every dollar that comes in. Yeah.
22:13
I mean at the same time like would would OpenAI be where it is today without pulling forward that multi-billion dollar GPU credits and that investment that Microsoft made?
22:24
like Microsoft did take a risky bet.
22:24
Uh Ben Thompson was basically saying that and just that if you're Oh, sorry.
22:30
I you know, I'm sure they have an entire plan around how they would accuse Microsoft of anti-competitive behavior, but overall this was a deal that they did that they agreed to that OpenAI wants to renegotiate now.
22:42
Y and I think that um you know Microsoft made a big Yeah. bet at the time. Yeah.
22:48
and the so Ben Thompson was was was uh digging into this idea of like what is the structure and incentives of Microsoft.
22:56
So, Microsoft is not a venture capital firm.
23:00
And so, do they do they have a shareholder duty to to hold on for another 10x in the stock essentially or should they be comfortable getting out of the stock essentially like like uh like is there a world where they are justified with their shareholders to to renegotiate this and what are their incentives?
23:22
I think SATA has a fiduciary duty to maximize maximize net present value, right?
23:27
The value of this partnership and this investment that they made.
23:31
And so what and and I brought this up, I think, when we were talking a couple weeks ago, which is like they're not an investor that's like worried about their brand as an investor.
23:39
It's not like it's not like, you know, an important portfolio company goes to a VC firm and they're like, "Hey, we want to bring in this new investor and you're going to get diluted a little bit."
23:49
It's like Microsoft is not Yeah.
23:51
Like they're it's not like they're they need to build a brand of being founder friendly.
23:55
This is a multiundred billion dollar company dealing with a multi-trillion dollar company.
24:01
And it's at this point it's not about you know being startup friendly or founder friendly. It's just business. Yeah.
24:08
I guess I I I I would probably lean if I were Satia just off the top of my head like lean into allowing the for-profit conversion and I would want exclusivity over the OpenAI API because I'm in the enterprise business.
24:21
I wouldn't necessarily care too much about the long-term revenue split on the consumer app. I don't know.
24:30
I I I might be willing to trade that for for owning the B2B side.
24:34
We have breaking news from Lucas Lucas Byer. Oh, hey all. Couple quick notes.
24:40
One, yes, we will be joining Meta.
24:42
Two, no, we did not get a hundred million dollar sign on. That's fake news.
24:46
Excited about what's ahead, though.
24:49
We'll share more in due time.
24:50
And he CC's uh his buddies in the Zurich office. That's great. Um and yeah, it's funny.
24:55
He said, "No, it's very easy to say, "No, we did not get a $und00 million sign on that's fake news."
24:59
because he could have just gotten like 101 or 200 50 or could have just been like very you know you know it's like yeah investing we're each vesting you know exactly 100 years you know that's the only thing he denied he denies
25:14
getting exactly he denies that we did not explicitly get a $100 million signon anyways um no matter how much you got I'm sure you should you can afford a luxury watch so you should head over to bezel go to get in you're already in Switzerland It's perfect. Uh, your bezel
25:28
Uh, your bezel concier is a is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch.
25:34
So, Lucas, we'd be happy to introduce you to a bezel concierge to get you set up with some fantastic Swiss watches.
25:41
It's It's so perfect having a watch sponsor.
25:43
Yeah, he might have like today off, tomorrow off, you know, starting at Meta Monday.
25:47
If you're going into Meta, I mean, Sam is not a watch guy, but Bzach is.
25:50
So, you want you don't want to walk into the the skip level meeting uh with Zach, you know?
25:55
I don't know who he's reporting to.
25:58
Maybe maybe Alex, maybe maybe Nat, but you don't want to walk into that that first meeting with Zuck and have bare wrist.
26:07
Certainly not an Apple Watch.
26:07
Like that is straight up rival. No.
26:08
Um, so yeah, you you're going to want a racing machine on the wrist to let Zuck know that you appreciate high herology. This is important.
26:17
Separately, OpenAI was at Hardfork Live. Yeah.
26:20
And uh they were asked by the host about uh Daario saying that 50% of entry level white collar work could disappear in one to five years and if they agreed Sam Alman says no no I don't.
26:35
And then Brad says COO says no we have no evidence of this.
26:42
Daario is a scientist and I hope he takes an evidence-based approach to these types of things.
26:48
Um anyways, he he went on in the clip um to basically say like yes, jobs will change.
26:53
Right now we don't have evidence and um basically reorients around it's going to be important to know how to use these tools really well, but they are rolling out AI at tons of different types of companies from SMBs to large multinational firms.
27:10
I I I also think this is more of like an economics question than an AI research question.
27:16
There's this idea of like what is the so so if if AGI becomes a one forone replacement for a white collar worker then what are you seeing in the labor market you're seeing supply increase dramatically but what is the demand for white collar work like how much stuff do we have to do how much software do we
27:37
have to build how many software products do we have to sell like it we might see that demand for labor is actually 10x And so yes, if you believe this world where we can not only have AGI at white collar worker level and then scale it up to produce I mean how many white collar workers are there? If you say 50% of
27:57
If you say 50% of entry level that's that's tens of millions of people.
28:01
So can you actually run the inference at that level consistently without brownouts or whatever?
28:08
Um and then and then and then will demand for labor stay the same? It could increase by 10.
28:14
It could increase by a hundred.
28:16
Like we might find more things to do in which case you might want both working.
28:20
You might want to have 10 times as many AIs working as humans and you might still want all the humans working.
28:26
This happens all the time.
28:27
Um and so I I I don't know the the fast takeoff thing.
28:30
We can go back and forth on this, but I think we're kind of post this. Yeah.
28:33
Going back to going back to the internet example in the dot era, CEOs were selling that you would be able to run, you know, the same type of rhetoric around you're going to have 10 person team doing a billion dollars in revenue and that ultimately didn't play out exactly that way.
28:50
Well, staying in AI world, Sam Alman is providing some emails and extra context around the Jason Regulo allegations.
28:57
These four emails really bodied mogged bodied Jason Regulo.
29:04
Uh so we were covering a few days ago how there's a company called IIO that had been developing this audio uh type computing device that would allow you to leverage AI speak you know speak with it.
29:18
We what was interesting to me is it was um that they they have some type of technology that they're alleg allegedly developing uh to provide kind of like different layers to audio to kind of give you like this like audio display.
29:32
So cool language interesting to think about.
29:35
Uh Sam basically says they're suing us over the name.
29:37
Uh the name thing I I do um I do kind of understand.
29:43
Um and uh clearly a judge felt that way otherwise I wouldn't have had to scrub everything.
29:48
But the uh initial lawsuit really painted this picture like OpenAI was trying to mine this company for um for uh kind of IP beyond the name in terms of how the product work.
30:02
And do you think either of these names are good? No.
30:03
Um like like my iPhone, I pulled out my iPhone. I pulled out my IO. I'm using my IO. Hand me my IO. Pass me my IO.
30:15
Give me my like, you know, I need to charge my IO. I need to charge my IO.
30:19
Like they're definitely open has a history of naming things strategically. Yes.
30:23
You know, like maybe it breaks through like Google was not Airbnb.
30:27
These names weren't like super logical, but then they became so popular that people people used them. Um I don't know.
30:33
It doesn't jump out to me as like a as like a I think they're going to open be able to come up with a great name.
30:38
They might be able to power for I mean I imagine this is a settlement.
30:40
I I imagine this is anyways we can read through some of the emails.
30:44
If I'm if I'm IO and I and I have uh he he was asking for 10 million uh to invest in the AI meets audio hardware company.
30:51
So it feels like $10 million would allow the uh the the company to kind of like move forward with the next thing.
31:00
He's interested in research and development.
31:02
Like it seems like it's pre-launch.
31:02
So like you could settle say, "Hey, yeah, we we do have a claim on this name a little bit.
31:08
give us a couple million dollars to back off the name and we'll rebrand and then when they come out with their thing they can come up with a different name.
31:15
Uh it just feels like they would be able to Yeah.
31:16
This this this type of act the the lawsuit overall seemed to be about more than just the name.
31:23
It was like a frustration with open eyes behavior but these emails that Sam shares destroyed absolutely destroyed.
31:31
So on March 4th 2025 Jason uh the CEO of IO says, "Hey Sam, I'll keep it brief.
31:37
I'd love the opportunity to pitch you to invest $10 million in my AI meets audio hardware company.
31:41
So the key issue here is that it seems very clear that OpenAI had been working on working people had been talking about Sam Alman's interest in hardware for AI for two or three years since he made the investment humane and he was talking about this for a long time and it's also just super logical that that everyone who's building a consumer app wants to own the next platform. Zuck is going into VR.
32:05
It it it wasn't rocket science to figure out that Sam Alman would be interested in hardware at some point.
32:10
And so like that makes sense.
32:10
But then you know Sam clarifies very very quickly here like thanks for chat with Johnny I he's the one driving this crazy and uh Jason himself understands.
32:22
He goes Rutro uh want to work together.
32:26
I don't want to go up against you man.
32:28
not the right language to uh try to set something up.
32:36
Um anyways, so they go back and forth.
32:38
They're both in lowercase.
32:38
This is this is breaking news.
32:39
They're they're Yeah, Sam's going back and forth on the lower case lower case lower case on lowercase violence.
32:46
Um anyways, um Peter, another member of the team, uh they I guess tried the product on May 6th and you can see from Jason's email that there were um demo fails, a bunch of demo fails in in terms of like basically wasn't working.
33:03
Still trying to figure out a way to partner.
33:05
Um and uh anyways, Peter says the devices, this is May about a month ago.
33:12
Uh very orthogonal to ours and doesn't really work yet.
33:15
Um they offered that we look at the IP, but I doubt there's anything there.
33:20
Again, the device wasn't working reliably, it sounds like.
33:24
So anyways, um more of this will come out in court, but at the moment it seems like maybe something there around the name and some real frustration, but um ultimately won't be uh probably a big deal.
33:38
Well, there's no frustration when you're using Vanta.
33:41
Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously.
33:43
Vantage trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation.
33:49
I feel bad for people that have never gotten a chance to automate their compliance with Vanta. Joy of using Vanta. Um that's right.
33:55
So Turner Novak says huge if true after raising an astonishing two billion at a10 billion valuation from investors including Andre Horowitz less than five months after its founding.
34:06
Mirror Morati has told investors that tiny uh what? Thinking machine labs. Yep.
34:11
TML is developing custom AI that will enable businesses to make more money. Thank goodness. This is amazing news.
34:19
I can't wait to get our paws on this. There's been so Exactly.
34:23
There's been so much yapping in AI about oh changing the world and exponential takeoff, fast takeoff. Interesting.
34:31
It's the first indication of the startup strategy.
34:34
You know, the the uh the media had been taking this angle like Meera just came out and just raised billions without actually talking about what she was doing.
34:44
I mean, yes, she could raise billions without really talk.
34:46
She could get a blank check. Yes.
34:47
But I have to imagine that she would have had some conversations with some of the investors and said, "Here's generally what we're working on." Yes.
34:55
And uh this is a preede, remember? Yes.
34:57
So, it's just about the team.
34:59
What's interesting here is that um there's been this like pervasive narrative that like OpenAI has been hemorrhaging uh like talent and co-founders, right?
35:09
Because Daario was at OpenAI, he started Anthropic.
35:11
Then uh Ilia Elon Elon starts XAI. Uh Ilia starts SSI.
35:19
Meera starts thinking machines.
35:21
And my question was always like okay the narrative has always been like they don't like Sam and that's why they leave.
35:28
But my question is like why don't they all join forces and work together?
35:32
Like why didn't why didn't Meera go to Anthropic?
35:34
Why didn't Ilia go to Anthropic?
35:36
Why didn't Elon just work with Anthropic instead of starting another competitor?
35:40
Everyone always starts like a new competitor.
35:42
But this kind of seems like it reveals the idea that Mera Maratti and Ilia Sutskiver might be very diverged on like the path of where AGI is going.
35:50
Mera wants to make money.
35:53
Mera wants to do other for businesses and Ilia is much more of like this true believer thinking that you know he wants to go straight shot to super intelligence no products.
36:03
So anyway, we will continue to uh cover this story as we learn more about thinking machines, but we have to bring in our European correspondent, Pippa Lamb from Sweet Capital. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? What's going on?
36:17
Hey guys, how's it going? Coming in from Europe. Uh it's great.
36:22
Is your Starlink connection strong?
36:23
I know they don't have uh they don't have broadband out there in the old continent. You know what?
36:29
We're all just trying to get ourselves to the Hague and get some of that defense procurement that uh yes we're now gonna be spending on.
36:36
So uh yeah hopefully the Starlink will make it here. No hopefully hear me. Okay. Hopefully. Uh yeah.
36:43
Give us the breakdown of the latest news uh from NATO. Yeah. So it's it's exciting.
36:47
I mean I think that pretty much all global press has been focused on this morning.
36:55
You know, President Trump and the current US administration has really managed to do, thank you very much, has managed to do the thing that no US leader has actually managed to do before, which is to get Europe and US's allies here is to actually open up their their their wallets and increase their annual commitment to percentage of GDP on defense spending.
37:15
So, you know, this is something that dates back to, I think, 2017.
37:19
I mean obviously certain uh a lot of American presidents have have really pushed for this before.
37:25
This isn't a new ask from the US side.
37:27
Uh but certainly um this is the first time we've really seen some some progress.
37:32
Um I mean to put this in context the US has really paid yeah has paid about twothirds of uh you know the NATO budget for for the recent years.
37:42
So it's really been uh on it upon the upon Europe to really you know increase how much they're contributing and so I think it's certainly a big win for the US but also a big win for national security across across the west and its allies.
37:58
So yeah, definitely definitely good sentiments here in the ground and I think certainly when it comes to if you see how uh if you see how Trump's mood has changed uh from when he uh when he was boarding that helicopter a couple of days ago to some of the comments he was making uh after Secretary General Rutter's uh comments.
38:20
I think that you know the US is in a really interesting position now and so is NATO.
38:26
Did we ever figure out what did the NATO chief he's claims he didn't call Trump all this? No. No. Break this down.
38:34
Um I I don't know if you saw anything.
38:36
I I I couldn't tell what was fake news.
38:37
Uh do you did you have any insight there?
38:40
The NATO So I So I saw the headlines.
38:41
I saw there's an ABC News headlines from yesterday.
38:46
Says NATO secretary general calls Trump quote unquote daddy. Wait. Oh yeah.
38:53
And then the White House put out a video about this.
38:55
I don't know, but then the NATO secretary general, uh, I guess came out and denies it. Yeah.
39:00
The White House, this is on the official page, put out a one minute video.
39:05
Uh, and it just and the and the comment on axe is, "Daddy's home. Hey, hey, hey, daddy. President Donald J.
39:13
Trump attended the NATO summit in the HEG Netherlands."
39:17
And then the secretary general came out and said, "Daddy referred to US leadership, not Trump." Okay. So, yes.
39:25
Um, still the official White House social media never disappoints.
39:28
I have to say that is I always have my expectations and they surpassed it's it's pretty wild.
39:34
I I did re I did go back and watch the the original clip to try and understand the an analogy and effectively Trump was comparing some of uh some of our some of the geopolitical conflicts right now to children uh playing in the playground and then of course Secretary General Rutter then comes and says and sometimes if people are being children then he brings in the daddy analogy and of course in the press conference Trump just jumped on that.
40:01
He said, "Yeah, they called me daddy."
40:03
You know, he it was he just ran with it.
40:05
And uh as we saw on the White House account this morning, I think there's reals, there's, you know, there there's YouTubetubes, they they really went for it.
40:14
So, uh so on on new dispense spending, um there's actually a graphic that is pretty interesting to pull up. Here it is.
40:21
The United States is paying like more than twothirds.
40:23
So, uh in 2023, uh NATO's budget was 1. 3 trillion.
40:27
uh 860 billion of that came from the United States.
40:34
Germany was the next second highest with 68 billion. So less than onetenth.
40:39
Then the UK at 65 billion, France at 56 billion, Italy at 31 billion and then a bunch of other countries in the 10 to five to 8 billion range. Canada's at 30 billion.
40:50
Um and so yeah, this is a big change.
40:53
I guess the the current benchmark is 2% of GDP and this is I guess it is an agreement to to try and get to 5%.
41:02
Now that's going to roll out over the next decade to 2035.
41:08
Um and and I mean the real key takeaway is that now Trump is publicly supporting NATO.
41:14
He's been very against it, but he's in favor.
41:16
Um but and and then there was also some questions about the the shift away from the focus on Russia and Ukraine.
41:22
Trump wants to end the conflict there.
41:24
Uh we can talk about that, but then eventually I want to get into what this means for startups. Yeah.
41:27
I think I think what's also interesting is is I have the same questions as you, right?
41:32
So they put out these headline numbers. It all sounds very good.
41:34
We all agree that there needed to be more of a balance between the US spending versus the rest of NATO.
41:40
And I think what was really encouraging to see in terms of how this is going to impact markets is if you look at comments that came out from the UK this morning from Prime Minister Starmer, he actually said okay well we've got this uh you know target by 2035 we are going to dedicate up to you know five well 5% of of GDP spending on defense.
42:00
But he actually then gave us further information and said that actually if you look at where we see the national security needs now we actually expect to surpass 4% of spending by 2027 or in 2027.
42:12
So that's to me that's that's a great uh you know signal to markets that this isn't some sort of lofty target that they're going to try and hit and push out and sort of you know relabel things as defense or or really kind of be very gradual about how they're deploying and how they're going to procure.
42:29
I see this and I think okay Europe is really serious about this.
42:32
The UK is currently just for perspective at around 2.
42:36
3% uh percent of its its GDP.
42:37
So it's slightly above that 2% benchmark.
42:40
But the fact to go from you know 2.
42:42
3% to 4% by 2027 is is really encouraging.
42:45
And I know certainly on the ground we're already seeing quite a lot of increased interest in European defense plays.
42:52
um some of the existing you I suppose call them incumbents but you know the andrils of the world are getting really excited about this market and less so for from a change on their side but a fact that okay the you know the UK and Europe is potentially finally actually putting its money where its mouth is in terms of how it wants to procure and how it really wants to beef up its national security efforts.
43:16
Yeah, the question will be how does that budget actually get distributed between new players like Helsing which Daniel at Spotify had a nicely timed uh investment into that.
43:28
It's almost like he had a crystal ball or something and then new new kind of uh the new American players the daddy of the Nordic tech scene. Think of him as that.
43:38
Yeah, I'm sure the NATO the NATO chief would probably refer to him that way.
43:41
And then you know Andrew all the way down to you know the the Boeings and the I I mean the four companies that I think are really interesting to study in this in this like as this development plays out are probably Rhymmetal, Helsing, and Palunteer.
43:58
Um and and they all kind of represent very different strategies and and but you could see money flowing to any of them.
44:05
But then there are also um decisions with all of those.
44:09
Obviously Ryan Matal very old company legacy incumbent in Europe and so easier to get across the the a deal done because they have all the infrastructure there.
44:19
Hellsing's kind of the upandcomer and the the hot American company.
44:23
Palunteers uh you know founded by some Germans but ultimately American company. What are you seeing?
44:28
And it's interesting even Rhinel has been on this crazy run. It's $432 a share.
44:31
In 2022, you could have bought it for 30 bucks a share. Wow. And what is it now? And 430. 410x.
44:42
Um, so so yeah, up up tremendously.
44:45
Even even this year is up, you know, 250%. Yeah.
44:47
So, so, so, so what what are you thinking about?
44:50
Uh, I mean, this seems like a massive military budget increase in Europe.
44:54
How serious is the rhetoric around the desire for homegrown defense technology solutions in Europe broadly?
45:06
So I mean I think Jordi as well on your point on Rhin Metal I think you also want to pull up the chart for Saab that's been rallying you know a lot.
45:10
So you're definitely seeing some allocation from institutions into existing incumbents but I think for me and other members of the startup and venture community what we're really asking is how serious is seriously is this going to impact the preipo and private markets.
45:26
And I think what's very interesting here is you also saw Anderil announced a partnership with Ryan Mattal I think about a week ago.
45:32
Um, so you're certainly going to see some, you know, there's there's plenty to go around in terms of the market opportunity and I think the sentiment is really beginning to shift now in terms of, you know, both investors and governments opening their wallets.
45:45
But I do think that, you know, on one hand, I do still tend to agree with this argument that defense primes are really hard businesses.
45:52
There is always going to be, in my view, a monopolistic or olopolistic element to how these markets run.
45:59
It's not that we're going to come out and see, you know, 10 ands all spring up.
46:02
I think ultimately a defense prime doesn't doesn't spring up overnight.
46:06
And as you mentioned, you already have Andre in the US who, by the way, has been very present in Europe and the UK from the very start.
46:13
Um, you also obviously have, you know, are Swedishbacked but German company, uh, Helsing. Yeah.
46:18
And there's some really interesting companies coming out of the UK right now.
46:22
There's one in stealth at the moment which has been getting a lot of interest uh both here on the ground but interestingly a lot of the cap table is is American.
46:29
So I think yeah world two for America undefeated the air horn is always ready. It's always ready. That's great.
46:40
I think so look on one hand I I haven't changed my thesis on defense investing overnight.
46:45
I still think that there is a monopolistic uh advantage that that companies like Andrew will will have here.
46:51
But I do think at the same time this does mark a real change in sentiment and opportunity around European and UK defense.
46:58
And I think there are a few reasons why.
47:01
I think number one if you look at you know pure dollar spend the you know Europe and the UK is just coming from a a much further or earlier starting point.
47:10
So if you look at the multiples in terms of of pure purchasing and and procurement, they're going to far outspend the US because they've been so behind.
47:20
So on a pure kind of procurement dollar basis, you know, Europe has to play catchup.
47:25
So I think that's obviously going to be uh, you know, a tailwind both for, you know, companies like Andreil, but also some of the the local players and I do think that this is is kind of furthering this idea of what's called trusted capital.
47:39
So the opportunity for the US and its allies.
47:42
So certainly, you know, getting in uh so some contracts for a heling or or a local company here in the UK.
47:46
I think the second piece that's really interesting is that the UK in particular uh is you know behind from a manufacturing standpoint.
47:56
So there's going to be a huge uh opportunity for a lot of companies to really onshore here.
48:03
uh and that could be you know American companies who want to build out manufacturing capabilities here in the UK or across mainland Europe and that is also going to result in you know investment dollars spent um and a huge opportunity for for the defense sector.
48:18
I think the counter to this uh and and this goes along with a lot of conversations that I've had with with Brian Chimp from Anderil, who by the way was having a lot of these conversations at Bilderberg in in Stockholm a couple of weeks ago um across the Paris Air Show and and with with leaders here in in the UK and Europe.
48:34
Um and that's that the criticism has to be that Europe has had a template for modern warfare on its doorstep for the last, you know, several years.
48:46
is, you know, Putin first invaded Crimea in 2014.
48:47
There have been so many blueprints for how modern warfare looks um on our doorstep.
48:53
Yet, the governments haven't really got the memo.
48:56
This is really the first time that we're seeing governments come out with real new blueprints for how modern warfare should be conducted.
49:03
Um so you know the the classic example is you know Houthi rebels uh sending over drones and you know the US and its allies having these exquisit exquisite weapon systems to to shoot down these these drones.
49:16
So you know Europe has really been asleep at the wheel when it comes to to some of these more kind of modern warfare or or scrappy warfare strategies.
49:25
And I think that from what it sounds like from conversations here on the ground, the government is actually getting the memo now, which does clear that path for startups to enter with a different product spec.
49:36
Um, I think not to talk up my own book being British, but I do think that the UK is leading the pack here. Sorry.
49:43
here. Sorry. uh you know the UK has just done a strategic uh military defense review and they're actually really taking some interesting steps in terms of how they're reshuffling how they organize the military and uh you know I think some great work's been done uh here on the ground with you know it was
50:02
UK tech week uh a week ago and you know Matt Clifford who is an adviser to to the prime minister talked specifically about how there is going to be an opportunity to have a trillion dollar market cap out of the UK and he actually mentioned that you know defense really could be somewhere that that we could see that happen. So what about uh what
50:18
So what about uh what about British dynamism?
50:21
Is there a ground swell of excitement in on the ground in Europe?
50:26
You have uh some great manufacturers Bentley, Rolls-Royce, Aston Martin, and then you also have ARM.
50:32
So the computing ARM is computing history as well.
50:35
So it does feel like there's still some very um you know uh we just got a new we just got a new head of MI6.
50:42
So the one public facing uh who was a woman actually the first ever chief of MI6 and her role actually at MI6 had previously been Q.
50:50
So I don't know if you follow the James Bond films but her background was is that's not just Hollywood creation.
50:58
I thought that was entirely for the cinema.
50:59
Well I mean I think I think that the world is a cinema genre the greatest cinema of all time.
51:06
uh that would be the adjacent role that she had before and so but but C uh which is is the name that is given to the bureau chief that is the one front-facing f uh uh role of of MI6.
51:16
So, but but she obviously does have a background in in that space.
51:22
And so, I think it is very interesting and and you know, it would be remiss to say that the UK has has got a fantastic R&D um sort of heritage, you know, where whether it be in um you know, AI, obviously, we've talked about this before, Demis uh and and Deep Minds um and a lot of you machine learning talent.
51:40
We've also had, you know, incredible stuff in in robotics and and synthetic biology.
51:46
There's some really fantastic R&D uh centers, you know, outside of London, Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol and uh and actually we we also saw uh some exciting news in the autonomous vehicle space about a week ago with UK company called
52:00
Wave who announced their first uh public road rollout of autonomous vehicles on public roads which is going to be in partnership with Uber uh which is going to be the first time we have like a Whimo equivalent experience um witnessing them on the streets. of of London. So yeah.
52:16
Yeah, I think we're we're gonna have it's it's Alex Kendall from Wave as the CEO.
52:20
I think we're gonna have him on the show soon.
52:21
I'm excited about he's great.
52:23
And and also I think if you look at some of the work that again uh advisor to to Downing Street Matt Clifford has done the the government came out with this AI opportunities plan in at the beginning of the year and in the spending review last week the UK committed to spend I think two billion dollars uh or maybe it's two two billion uh pounds on on AI opportunities and a further uh1 billion uh pounds for area which is an R&D deep tech body.
52:53
So I think certainly you know defense is one angle.
52:56
We're also going to see continued interest you know in autonomous vehicles and robotics and some of these really deep tech sectors that actually the UK has got a very deep history in um that you know hopefully is going to translate into market opportunities for both both local investors but also US investors that want to get some exposure to some of these increased dollars that are going to be spent. Interesting.
53:17
Um, flipping back a bit to the Ukraine situation.
53:22
Um, is it possible that we see like a drone company come out of Ukraine?
53:29
Ukraine has a long heritage of fantastic software developers.
53:32
There's a lot of companies that have had like offshore Ukrainian engineering teams for a long time.
53:39
like the the the populace has clearly been uh very technical, but then you know the the pressure cooker of the war has resulted in just insane industrial capacity.
53:49
I'm pretty sure they make more drones in Ukraine than I think even even China like anywhere in the world they're making the most of them now.
53:56
A lot of them are like handmade and it's it's not fully automated.
53:59
It's not fully productized.
54:01
But um like my my hope would be the the war dies down but then there's this residual capability that comes out of that.
54:08
But have you heard any like rumblings about that or do you think that there's any sort of like peace dividend that could come out of Ukraine?
54:17
I think that what you know as I alluded to before the Ukraine has really been a blueprint for you know how modern warfare is conducted and I think that certainly we've you know definitely been following very closely in Europe what's been happening on the front line uh in the Ukraine.
54:32
I think also, you know, the Americans have also been paying close attention.
54:35
If you look at a lot of the work that Eric Schmidt has been doing, especially since uh the US announced that it, you know, its intention is to pull back some of its commitments to the Ukraine.
54:45
I think you've had private individuals such as as Eric Schmidt, you know, really take the mantle when it comes to how some of these newer sort of more scrappy drone technologies are being built.
54:54
So I certainly think that that is going to provide an opportunity for um you know scaling across procurement on you know other areas of the cont uh the continent.
55:04
I do think that in some ways and I was talking to a defense founder this morning about this there is an opportunity in this middle space.
55:13
So I think that you know traditionally we had these exquisite weapon systems which were really you know the the the luxury well pick your your car of choice the Aston Martin of the V2 spirit. Yeah there we go. Okay.
55:29
And then we had the very kind of scrappy you know you know drones that are being built on the front line.
55:34
And I think what is the really kind of sweet spot right now is going to be trying to fill out some of that that that gap in the middle.
55:41
middle. And certainly, you know, if you look at some of the the products that that Anderil have buil been building and some of the incumbents that I'm uh sorry, I should say new entrance that I'm looking at here in the UK, they're really trying to to trying to fill that
55:55
not not quite the the very early entry sort of technology pieces, but that kind of one up which are more affordable um and you can still use against you know your Houthy rebels or whoever and it's not going to kind of use up your entire budget. But it's also uh you know modern
56:07
But it's also uh you know modern technology.
56:11
Um it's it's you know looking at at technologies like like autonomy uh autonomous vehicles.
56:16
Um so I think that that is a really strong uh entry point for some of the incumbents sorry the the new startups we're seeing now. Yeah.
56:25
It's kind of a an interesting wrinkle to the idea of like when you're ramping up defense budgets as vast as NATO is in this case.
56:34
Um it's it's it's like the budget itself isn't necessarily as big as America, but there's so much new budget coming online that you're almost better equipped to buy autonomous systems as opposed to the United States and the Army modernization effort is reallocating budget.
56:53
No one's saying like, "Oh yeah, let's double like we don't have the money to double it.
56:55
Um and so every dollar that we allocate towards an autonomous we could but but every dollar that we allocate towards an autonomous system, a modern system has to come away from an exquisite system that has a ton of constituents, a ton of people that build it, a ton of the parts come from so many different states and regions and different senators that that Yeah.
57:16
Whereas if you're bringing net new budget online, it's a lot easier to go with the newest and and best technology that's actually equipped for the modern.
57:23
My question is, will we see, you know, a $5 billion company that just makes drones for defense, right?
57:28
Like could a Nuros be something like that?
57:31
Or if you look at history of these contractors, you see that they often are are very the primes are obviously all multi-product, right?
57:42
Um, and so we will have to see how it develops. Very cool.
57:45
I think what's most encouraging though for me is the sentiment has changed.
57:49
So I think there was this hubris right amongst a lot of the I mean US and its allies but particularly in Europe where they just wanted to create these exquisite weapon systems that were really never designed to be used.
58:03
And so I think the biggest shift for me has been kind of like waking up and realizing that this is totally unfit for purpose and actually you kind of look silly by having these exquisite systems that are completely you know you know you can't you can't use them.
58:19
So I think that for me when I start to see it more of a kind of cultural shift in government which is very rare.
58:26
Uh that's when I think you can start to see some of these impacts like trickling into markets and be it in in the later stage or in public markets but then also really kind of at this I'd say series A stage at the moment where you're seeing a lot of interest from from US and European investors. Very cool.
58:43
I mean it's really exciting stuff. We got to track it more.
58:44
Uh I'm excited to talk to some of these founders uh Wave and Helsing. a lot to get them on.
58:50
What other situations are you monitoring?
58:52
There's a lot going on this week.
58:54
Uh we've been we've been uh I don't know if you've been following the the prediction market space, but uh with the with the New York City May uh the primary was interesting.
59:02
Is that is that a is that you paying much attention to that category?
59:07
Do you think there's potentially opportunities for new prediction markets or um are are is poly market and and other players kind of racing away?
59:18
I mean, I haven't been following it so closely beyond, you know, it's impossible to even sitting here in London avoid all the the memes that are coming out about about what's going on in New York.
59:28
I think that, you know, I think Shane uh Coupin is a fantastic operator.
59:32
I don't know how much space there is in in terms of, you know, post deregulation of some of this space.
59:36
You know, you would think that there there are going to be other entrance.
59:40
I think that, you know, Shane's created such uh, you know, in some ways a a head start for himself and and how Poly Market is is is doing that I haven't been spending active time looking at sort of new entrance in that space.
59:55
entrance in that space. But um you know look ultimately I'm a you know our our fund has a heritage of of gaming and so I think certainly whenever there's an interesting consumer trend that is unlocked or there is a regulatory shift
1:00:08
that can I guess impact how a consumer product is is being built then we do pay attention but yeah I've definitely been spend spending way more time on uh some of this uh geo geop yeah what about um any uh you mentioned wave earlier in the autonomous vehicle space with their UK UK launch. Are you expecting uh has
1:00:25
Are you expecting uh has there been any chatter about what Tesla would do around autonomous vehicles in in the UK?
1:00:33
I think they they sold um sort of uh I think they sold around 25 or 30,000 cars in the UK last year.
1:00:40
And so depending it could be an interesting dynamic that we'll we'll see with Whimo here in the US and Tesla where Tesla has um you know a much a much more efficient way to build a network uh where they don't have the same capex requirements as someone like a Whimo and I'm interested to see if um if you know how you see that market unfolding in the UK. It's interesting.
1:01:04
I think that Wave has really been the poster child for autonomous in the UK especially in recent years and its partnership with the with with Uber.
1:01:12
Um they also have launched NSF.
1:01:15
I mean Alex Kendall I'm sure he'll tell you about this when he comes on.
1:01:19
Fantastic founder has been spending a lot of time in San Francisco.
1:01:23
I think an interesting story for me here with the autonomous vehicle space in the UK is that you know much like I was saying earlier the UK has a really strong heritage of deep tech and there was actually initially another competitor uh in autonomous vehicles who was uh sort of incubated out of Cambridge.
1:01:40
I mean so was so was uh so was wave.
1:01:42
I think Alex Kendall took his first VC pitch meeting in his Cambridge dormatory or something.
1:01:47
You know the law is is perfect.
1:01:49
is is perfect. Um but actually this is I I often use uh autonomous vehicles as an example for uh the government because there was actually a frontr runner ahead of wave at the beginning but because it was incubated out of Cambridge University I think it was Cambridge or Oxford I think it was Cambridge not I'm ex Oxford so not to kind of you know hate on my computer but what was
1:02:12
interesting is that there was this technology transfer clause which meant that the cap table got totally messed up by the arrangements in place from from um you know Cambridge University, UK government which basically said for a product of product of this nature um the the the university has to own a certain amount in order to unlock R&D uh you know credits or or you know research uh
1:02:36
spending for this company and actually it's it's a perfect example I use for sort of a the old way of building technology in the UK which was incubated out of these like very old historic universities enter then Alex Kendall who also wants to pursue autonomous vehicles and instead of going to the university or do the sort of traditional incumbent capital providers goes out and raises
1:03:00
venture capital and is able to therefore scale much faster uh build out the technology I mean again these are not overnight you got MASA on board I'm sure that helped right for sure yeah right and so I think for me it's you know maybe just an interesting anecdote which pertains to this sector about you know how you know maybe mentality in Europe is at some of somewhat of an inflection point. And I think that autonomous
1:03:22
And I think that autonomous vehicles, you know, is one of the examples where Alex Kendall was able to go out and raise venture capital and really, you know, prove out some of these more kind of hard problem, you know, the teal flying car, uh, you know, adjacencies in Europe.
1:03:36
Um, so I think look, going forward, let's see.
1:03:39
I think that uh robotics um you know hardware you know deep tech coming out of uh of the UK is not going to go um anywhere.
1:03:48
I think it's going to continue to see a lot of interest from US investors.
1:03:52
Um I think that the fact that that waif have partnered with Uber is also significant.
1:04:00
So the idea is that you know it's not simply going to be you know one company is expected to be able to do everything.
1:04:06
I think that on a distribution and kind of regs perspective, it makes a lot of sense to have been partnered um with Uber and I think Dar was here uh yesterday.
1:04:14
So yeah, so look, I'm I'm Let's see how the the stage four trials go here.
1:04:19
I think it's going to be it's going to be a bit of a culture shock for for the Brits here to see the cars driving.
1:04:25
Well, I think you could have a culture shock.
1:04:27
You put a Whimo in the in the streets of London and say it's driving on the wrong side of the road.
1:04:32
It's all No one would have a problem with that cuz Whimo is a Jaguar. That's a British car.
1:04:35
Oh, so it feels it might feel at home.
1:04:37
But the Wave car is built on the Nissan platform, which is extremely foreign to another.
1:04:42
I did hear rumors though that that the Whimo was going to change to a Chinese supplier. Oh, interesting.
1:04:48
That was Yeah, I was really hoping they went with Bentley. Yes, the Bentley Whimo.
1:04:53
Yes, when he comes on from Wave, we'll tell him, "Hey, let'save.
1:04:58
Let's get Let's rip out Nissan.
1:05:01
Let's get on the Continental GT platform. This is logical. Exactly.
1:05:06
We need some like James Bond approved autonomous on the streets. I I'm a big Whimo maxis.
1:05:12
So, you know, I'm just excited to be able to to translate that to to the times that I'm here in London. But, uh but let's see. Cool. Well, great. This is fantastic.
1:05:21
Have a great We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Bye.
1:05:25
Uh let's go back to the timeline.
1:05:28
Talk about uh investment platform Republic. Uh Mert, Helas.
1:05:33
dev, friend of the show says, "Big news.
1:05:36
Soon you will be able to trade SpaceX on Salana, which will be followed by Cursor, Ramp, XAI, and more.
1:05:44
Internet Capital Markets."
1:05:44
Um maybe they'll be able to trade Numeral one day.
1:05:48
Numeral HQ, sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.
1:05:51
Um anyways, this we can kind of go through the journal article.
1:05:56
Uh investment platform Republic plans to use blockchain technology to sell investors exposure to SpaceX.
1:06:02
another effort in an arms race to give regular traders access to hot startups.
1:06:07
Um, and like vaguely predicted, but felt like it had immense regulatory pressure, but they just I guess they're figuring it out, which is crazy.
1:06:17
So, we are going to have the uh CEO of Republic on the show Friday. Excited about uh Ken.
1:06:23
He is uh an animal, but we can break this down.
1:06:26
So they are planning to sell digital tokens that mirror the performance of SpaceX's private shares in a move largely untested with regulators and untested with uh companies um because um you know historically ill one simple trick no uh you know CEOs liquidity is a feature yeah you don't want your shares to be getting uh constantly marked uh to market right or or imagine what Anderal shares would have It depends.
1:06:58
I I I mean I remember a story about Enron during the do boom.
1:07:04
The shares were absolutely mooning.
1:07:04
Um because they were kind of doing some cooking of the books, but everything looked really good. They were cooking.
1:07:12
They were cooking the books. Kind of cooking.
1:07:14
Uh but but I mean the the stock was truly on like a generational run.
1:07:18
And they had in the elevator when you went into the office, you got in the elevator, the share price was right there in the elevator displayed at all times.
1:07:25
And so you come in and the oh stock's up like I'm happy. I'm working hard today. I'm I'm worth more.
1:07:29
You multiply it by the number of shares you own.
1:07:33
You just know that your net worth just by the time Ken Griffin showed up. Yeah.
1:07:37
Was probably flashing zero. Yeah.
1:07:41
They must have ripped that out of the elevator by then.
1:07:42
But yeah, I mean so yeah.
1:07:44
So they're going to start with SpaceX. Be good or bad.
1:07:45
And they plan to and SpaceX for the most part only goes up.
1:07:50
Sometimes the rockets, you know, blow up on the on the launch pad.
1:07:51
Uh but token buyers won't have access to company's financials and won't own actual stakes and the tokens could draw scrutiny from regulators which um you know we're in a friendly regulatory environment.
1:08:04
Republic says it won't need permission from the companies whose token it is selling because the tokens represent securities sold by Republic. Mhm.
1:08:12
So, um, so is this kind of like a stable coin play where for every token that is sold, they will try and go and buy one share and so they'll be backed one to one or something like that or is it more like a That's what it seems like.
1:08:24
They'll fractionalize it or it'll be, you know, tokens that represent ownership in an LLC, you know, an SPV that owns shares.
1:08:30
What's weird is that you kind of have this like dual float situation where there could be like someone could be willing to pay a massive premium for these tokens that they no longer track the underlying price of the secondary shares.
1:08:44
So if SpaceX is trading at like a $ 350 million billion market cap, but someone wants to get in and they're willing to pay up to a $500 billion market cap, the token could trade.
1:08:55
But that doesn't I mean that doesn't happen with stable coins because no one ever says, "Hey, I'm I'm interested in paying more than a dollar for one stable coin dollar."
1:09:03
You know, these are unstable coins, John. These are unstable.
1:09:07
It'll be interesting to see where they actually trade.
1:09:08
Uh, I mean it should be some sort of price signal, but at the same time, if if the supply is so restricted, I mean, they're saying that they uh the Republic says it's able to offer the tokens in part because of a provision in the 2012 jobs act that lets private US companies issue securities and raise up to $5 million a year from retail investors.
1:09:27
Republic says it would be the issuing company and the tokens are essentially a note that assures token holders they will be paid any increase in the price of SpaceX's common stock if it goes public or is purchased.
1:09:39
Now, SpaceX has $350 billion of of value, right?
1:09:45
And so, if you're thinking about we are going to offer a $5 million slug of that, what will demand for that be like and will that track at all with the with the broader private market.
1:09:57
It's it could it could be completely disconnected. Yeah.
1:10:01
And important context, uh Ken the CEO was uh general counsel over at Angelist for uh in 2014 to 2016.
1:10:09
So he's been in the space for over a decade uh now.
1:10:12
Uh and so anyways, the the the big takeaway here is that one thing is for sure, there will be, I think, an exceptional amount of demand uh for this product.
1:10:25
The question is, will regulators like it? Will companies like it?
1:10:27
uh and it's possible that it'll be no on both fronts but it's possible that uh you know at the same time the sort of over overwhelming consumer demand uh and I think that you know in general uh you know retail investors should be and and are fair can fairly be frustrated y by not having access to companies like SpaceX, Figma, Epic Games, Stripe, Enthropic, Ramp Cursor, and Mercury Canvas.
1:10:56
So these are all companies that they're planning to launch even linear. This is uh Oh, really?
1:11:00
almost looks like a mirror of our partners. Um is ADIO on there?
1:11:04
Customer relationship matching.
1:11:06
Adio is the AR native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company. The next move, John. Um uh Adio. com. UhTbPN. Go check it out.
1:11:15
But the public has a license.
1:11:16
There's a Isn't there a spa that bought SpaceX secondary and trades at like a massive premium to the underlying value? It's not a spack. backsty. Yeah.
1:11:29
And so I mean like there clearly is demand in the public markets for for private market shares and so um there have been a number of platforms and a number of strategies attempted.
1:11:39
Uh this is the first one that's using crypto.
1:11:41
Uh but it'll be extremely exciting to follow what happens with the actual prices of these uh of these assets once they go out.
1:11:52
Um, and yeah, right now the Destiny Tech 100 is trading at $425 million. Okay.
1:12:00
And I'm trying to figure out the book value.
1:12:03
I think it is a fraction of that based on what investors actually mark. Yeah.
1:12:08
And it's because there's such limited demand, such limited liquidity.
1:12:12
Um, there's limited supply. Yeah. Yeah.
1:12:14
Limited supply and so much demand that people are just willing to pay a multiple of of what institutional.
1:12:21
So, it's funny because in this effort to get retail access to uh these, you know, highly sought-after private company shares, Yep.
1:12:28
retail gets kind of hosed by ending up having to pay, you know, massive premium. Yeah.
1:12:35
But if you're an investor who takes it seriously, you got to get on public.
1:12:36
com investing for those who take it seriously.
1:12:39
They got multiasset investing, industryleading yields, and they're trusted by millions.
1:12:42
Um, we have other news from Palunteer.
1:12:46
Uh, oh, George Sulka, uh, founder of Hebia AI.
1:12:52
He's coming on the show soon.
1:12:52
He is thrilled to share his acquisition of Flash Docs, the number one AI company in AI slide deck generation. That's fun.
1:13:01
Flashdocs turns prompts into fully branded presentations in seconds. Goodbye PowerPoint. I need this badly. This is very helpful.
1:13:09
Um, I'm I'm interested to see how he bakes this in because he's been focused on the Wall Street crowd, the hedge funds and the investment banks.
1:13:17
So, uh, could be more of like a B2B product than a generalization product.
1:13:21
Feels that way, but we'll talk to him.
1:13:23
And, you know, I expect some some push back from from, uh, slides crafts people, you know, people that treat, you know, uh, the the making of a great, you know, deck, you know, some something more almost more than an art form. Yes.
1:13:36
Um and so uh interested to see the outputs here and uh we'll we'll talk with them live.
1:13:41
Yes, Palunteer has some news which we'll talk about in a little bit.
1:13:46
They have signed a$und00 million 5-year deal with the nuclear company. Yes.
1:13:51
Um I had never heard of the nuclear company before.
1:13:55
Well, we'll ask Mike Gallagher about it when he hops on the show.
1:13:57
And we have Dan Shipper joining in a minute uh to talk about uh a new product that he's launching under every Oh.
1:14:06
Uh his parent company and media.
1:14:10
Is he running out of home ads for it yet? Not yet, but he should. He really should.
1:14:14
He should launch a launched. com. Great video.
1:14:18
Out of home advertising made easy and measurable.
1:14:19
Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising.
1:14:21
Only adquit combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe.
1:14:26
Um the uh Mark Andre says the term chat chat GPT rapper is tired and really really wrong.
1:14:35
Quoting Andre Carpathy says plus one for context engineering over prompt engineering.
1:14:39
People associate prompts with short tasks.
1:14:41
Short task descriptions you'd give an LLM in your day-to-day use when in every industrial strength LLM app, context engineering is the delicate art and science of filling the context window.
1:14:53
Uh, I like Max Meyer chiming in here.
1:14:56
Kinetic Energy rapper, gasoline rapper, aeronautical lift rapper, everything's a rapper.
1:15:01
Um, should we bring in our next guest? Let's do it. Let's do it.
1:15:09
Welcome to the stream, Dan. How you What's going on? Welcome to the show. Good to see you guys. Can you hear me?
1:15:14
Yeah, we can hear you loud and clear.
1:15:15
It's great to great to have you back.
1:15:16
You're always calling in from exotic places.
1:15:18
Last time it was anthropic dev day. Where are you now?
1:15:20
I am currently in a cabin in upstate New York uh in the Hudson Valley with um Hersh Agarwal, CTO co-founder of the browser company, a good friend of mine, uh and another another friend of ours and uh Hersh's wife and their baby.
1:15:36
So, it's uh it's it's a really fun time. Amazing.
1:15:37
Uh let's get right into it.
1:15:40
What are you launching today? Break it down.
1:15:41
We launched publicly um Kora which is you can think of it like a chief of staff for your email that costs uh $15 a month instead of 150k.
1:15:51
Uh so what Kora does is uh it sits on your email it connects to your Gmail. It screens your email.
1:15:57
So when emails come in, it decides is this important?
1:16:00
Do you need to see it right now? Is it urgent?
1:16:02
Um if it is, it makes it to your inbox.
1:16:04
If not, it automatically archives it.
1:16:05
For anything that's a common request, Kora will uh pre-draft a response for you.
1:16:10
So, you open your email, anything in your inbox has a response.
1:16:13
Um, and then twice a day, we send you what we call a brief, which is a really beautiful summary of everything that's in your inbox that you need to see, but you don't need to respond to.
1:16:22
Um, and so you can basically like do 3 hours of email by just scrolling through in 30 seconds.
1:16:25
Uh, it's very, very cool.
1:16:27
We also have a full-on assistant, so you can chat with it, you can email it, you can tell it all about your preferences, all that kind of stuff.
1:16:33
It's been in beta for about 6 months.
1:16:35
We have about 2500 between 2500 and 3,000 users um active users on it.
1:16:40
Um and uh we are launching it publicly today. So anyone can sign up. It's 15 bucks a month.
1:16:45
It also is bundled with every.
1:16:47
So if you sign up for every 20 bucks a month you get access to Kora Spiral which is our content automation tool, Sparkle which is our file organizer and all the all the writing that we do on every all for that price. You guys are cooking. You got to raise prices. $100 a month.
1:17:00
You got to get those numbers up. I'm thinking about it.
1:17:04
Uh, but now that you said that, I can blame it on you. So, thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
1:17:08
Uh, you can say Jordy complained that the price was too low. Um, very cool.
1:17:12
The the perfect irony of the timing here is right before we got on the show, John was onboarding like an an EA uh type uh uh person who just joined the team.
1:17:23
Um, and literally saying all these things.
1:17:25
So, these kind of emails like just archive them.
1:17:27
These ones I want to see it, but it's not important. You don't have to.
1:17:31
sending the link right now so you can install it on my on my inbox. Yeah.
1:17:34
So, we'll get it I mean I have a bunch of very specific questions because I'm in I'm like the perfect This is a product you've been asking for.
1:17:40
I've been asking for this because Yeah.
1:17:42
I mean I paid for like the top tier of Gemini and like there's this Gemini button but it just it just gives me bullet points for each individual email.
1:17:51
It doesn't do anything at like a higher level abstraction at least that I can tell.
1:17:54
And then when I search if I search for Dan shipper, it will it will search like the JavaScript in some marketing email and find that like there's some token in the URL that has the text ship and then it'll surface that.
1:18:10
And I'm like instead of just the email that's obviously from Dan Shipper, like how does it not know to to rank like the the name of the person higher than like some embedded CSS class or something?
1:18:21
It's always super frustrating.
1:18:22
I've been very very upset about uh the the the Gmail search functionality for a while.
1:18:26
I feel like it's it's it not that it's like degraded.
1:18:30
It's more like the nature of email has scaled where I think every person gets about an order of magnitude more email than they did, you know, a decade ago.
1:18:38
And so the traditional search tools are just completely breaking down.
1:18:42
And then also email marketers, you're getting a couple hundred a day and you're averaging even 20 seconds in email. It's it's a lot. It's a lot.
1:18:49
It's a lot. And yeah, and then also the nature of the way people write emails like the all there's so many of these hacks where people say um like uh they they'll do that thing where they'll say like uh if you're doing like outbound for every for example you'll be like uh
1:19:05
introducing John Dan and John and and it's like wait like this is a sales email like why are you acting like we're why you're making a warm intro or or people will do like re like signing up for every and it's like wait this isn't a re like they're not responding to anything. Like, you just put that in the
1:19:20
Like, you just put that in the title.
1:19:22
And there's a million of those little hacks that I feel like the traditional Gmail workflow has been exploited by kind of black hat emailers, SDRs, SDR, black hat SDRs.
1:19:32
Um, and I feel like it's the perfect it's the perfect thing that you need to hammer with AI.
1:19:39
So, I'm excited for that.
1:19:39
Uh, talk to me about the the the the drafting of responses.
1:19:42
Um I I I was I was talking to the the the fellow on our team about um how you know so like we get a lot of pitches from people that say, "Hey, I have news.
1:19:52
I want to come to the show."
1:19:53
Uh sometimes I want to let people down uh like softly and say, "Hey, this isn't a fit right now, but we want to have you on when there's news or or you know, and I kind of have like a template for that."
1:20:02
Um I'm I'm I'm a little bit hesitant to to send something that has like a an LLM flavor to it.
1:20:07
So, I'd almost rather just have a like a pre-written script, but I would also be okay with some fine-tuning.
1:20:17
Like, how are you thinking about making sure that the voice doesn't feel too llmmy?
1:20:19
So, basically what we do is when you onboard, um, we will look at all like about a thousand of your previous emails and abstract out, okay, what's your job title?
1:20:32
How do you normally talk to people?
1:20:34
What do you normally do in these kinds of situations?
1:20:36
So, for comp emails that you get, so like a pitch, what do you normally say?
1:20:40
And then we create a set of procedures for ourselves so that when we do the draft, we can refer back to okay, you have a procedure for a process for here's how I respond to pitches and that's what we use uh to fill in the draft.
1:20:52
So it's basically we use your historical emails to inform how we how we uh write the draft.
1:20:56
Um to your earlier points though, I think those are I think those are really really important.
1:21:02
Um, one thing that uh I think connects to something you said earlier in the show is um the the idea of of rappers.
1:21:09
So like in a lot of ways this is a rapper on Claude and Gemini, right?
1:21:15
Um and what's really interesting is I think there was this narrative about like a year ago or two years ago that all the incumbents were going to win in AI because all they have to do is bolt on AI.
1:21:23
And you can see like if you go into Gmail like their AI features or their search features like they're still not very good.
1:21:28
Um, and that's because it's so hard when you have a scaled huge user base that is used to things working in a in a particular way and a large organization that's used to building things in a particular way to actually start from a blank slate and get the most out of a new technology.
1:21:44
And um, so I think that's that's one of the things that we and other startups like us can do for email that like a Google can't or it would be much harder for them to do.
1:21:55
And I think you can see that for example in some of the filtering things that you're talking about.
1:21:58
So, one of the problems with the sort of uh black or gray hat um emails that you get is it's a little bit hard to get a specific rule for, okay, this is the kind of email that I don't want to see.
1:22:10
Um it's not going to be from a particular sender.
1:22:13
It's not going to have a particular thing in a subject line. It's kind of a vibe.
1:22:16
And historical email filtering has to be very rulebased.
1:22:20
It has to be it has to be from this center.
1:22:22
It has to have this keyword in the subject line. All that kind of stuff.
1:22:26
and language models changed that and now you can filter emails on vibes and that's what Kora does.
1:22:30
It also has a rules based filter too but it has a vibes filter to be like anything that looks like this get rid of it or make sure I see it.
1:22:36
Um, and that's much more and the funny thing is people have been training, you know, a chief of staff or an EA to detect the vibe of an email, right?
1:22:47
Like like this is the kind of email like it looks salesy, but it's actually really interesting because it came from this person and it's an opportunity that aligns with with with what we're with with with our focus. So, it's interesting. Yeah.
1:23:02
interesting. Yeah. Um and and and I think incumbents it's very hard it's going to be harder for them to do that because it's very expensive um to filter on vibes on vibes for like everybody's email account because there's hundreds of millions or billions of people getting like billions and billions of
1:23:20
billions of emails a day and so startups because you start from a smaller user base you can do the expensive LM inference that um is going to get much cheaper in 5 years but for now it's not affordable unless you have a smaller our user base that's all paying and that's something that we can do which I think is great. How do you think the actual
1:23:35
How do you think the actual email infrastructure and rails evolved?
1:23:41
I like it seems like every six months Google Workspace just sends me an email that's like we're raising prices and I and I always think it's funny because it's like they could theoretically just like continue to raise the price for a very long time without without much push back because like what's what's the alternative at least as a company?
1:23:58
How do you see um how do you see that evolving?
1:24:03
How have you thought about other companies like Hey that actually want to kind of own the the underlying layer the deeper layer?
1:24:09
And that's a good question.
1:24:13
I mean I think one of the beauties of emails of email is that it's decentralized and interoperable.
1:24:18
Um, and so right now we sit on top of Gmail, but we will eventually add support for Outlook and uh other third party like POP or IMAP type services.
1:24:27
And um I think that that's great and I I don't think that you'll see us create our own like hey that's very hard and complicated to make sure that you deliver emails and you don't get stuck in spam and all that kind of stuff.
1:24:39
And I think um we've been focused on building out a layer above that because that's where that's where the new stuff is.
1:24:47
There's there's something completely different about um software that doesn't have to operate on ordered lists.
1:24:52
So, email is just an ordered list of things in the order they came in.
1:24:57
And software doesn't have to do that anymore.
1:24:59
You can rearrange everything based on based on priority, based on vibes.
1:25:02
And um so I think for us, I'd probably rather not get stuck at a layer like of ensuring email deliverability for senders and and and all that kind of stuff and like let Google do what Google's good at for now. Um, but who knows?
1:25:16
I think eventually this will be an email client where you can do all of your email through Kora.
1:25:22
For now, it interoperates with Gmail with superhuman.
1:25:24
Um, so that we don't have to mess with like all those baseline features.
1:25:28
Even like creating an email sending feature where you're like it's it's a compose window.
1:25:32
There's infinite amounts of complexity in there that you can get stuck doing if you're a small startup that we've tried to avoid to like just make something that's so good at one or two things that you'll use it even if it doesn't have everything. Yeah.
1:25:44
How are you how are you building the team?
1:25:47
What what's the ambition with with this product specifically?
1:25:50
You're wearing I know you wear a lot of hats.
1:25:52
So I only wear the every hat. Um yeah. Um yeah.
1:25:55
So there's a super talented team building this that and it would not be possible without them.
1:26:03
So Kieran Classen is the GM of Kora.
1:26:05
Um he's incredibly technical is a Rails guy like very agentpilled like he's running like 15 cloud code instances any at any one time.
1:26:13
Um and uh we just we have our our most viral YouTube video ever is him like talking about how he uses agents.
1:26:20
It has like 50,000 views from a week ago. Um and so he runs Kora.
1:26:26
He he also uh used to be like in his past he was a composer and a pastry chef.
1:26:30
So, he's got this like crazy resume um and he's amazing.
1:26:32
We also have one engineer, his name is Nate, who's also amazing and they're just like I think they're both iterating on what email can be and iterating on um how to actually build software in this new paradigm because there's a whole new way of um building software with agents.
1:26:52
Like I think that they're um they they use this term that I love called compounding engineering, which is like doing the work so that each successive feature you build is easier than the last.
1:27:00
Um and I think that that has allowed them as a super small team to just move really fast and build this beautiful product that is scaling to thousands and thousands of users. Yeah.
1:27:10
Um we also internally um Brandon Gell is our head of studio.
1:27:13
So he he works a lot with them.
1:27:14
And then we have a whole creative team.
1:27:16
So Lucas Crespbow is our um uh creative lead and he did like the video and all the visuals and all that kind of stuff.
1:27:22
So um and I'm helping out with all you know whatever wherever I'm needed.
1:27:26
But I think all of those people are doing an incredible job and I think we want to kill email.
1:27:31
Um I think you should do email very differently.
1:27:32
I think generally um we all have a very anxious attachment to our inbox.
1:27:38
Um and it's quite unhealthy.
1:27:41
And one of the things that I've noticed using Kora is everything is much quieter and that can be really unsettling because you're like where like what if I miss something?
1:27:50
But it has turned out at least for me that mostly it's fine.
1:27:55
And only 10% of the emails or 20% of the emails are things I actually need to see.
1:28:00
And um when I use it, I get to spend much more of my time doing that I actually care about and want to do rather than rather than email.
1:28:08
And um that's a very exciting mission for for us and for this product.
1:28:13
Feel like I developed email anxiety probably when I was like 10 years old whenever I first got an email.
1:28:17
It was like summer break and everyone was just sending emails around and stuff and it's stuck with me ever since. So thanks email.
1:28:26
Uh but thank you for for trying to help fix it.
1:28:27
We're we're excited to try the product and always great to have you on the show. Check it out. Thanks for having me.
1:28:32
Have fun in the in the woods. Cheers. Bye. See you. Bye.
1:28:33
Up next, we have Eleaniano Ununice from Palunteer coming in the studio.
1:28:38
Oh, Tyler's perking up, sitting up straight, looking for some Palunteer merch.
1:28:43
The Palunteer merch king himself in the studio. Head to toe. Head to toe.
1:28:52
Is this Dripped Out Technology Brothers? What? What's going on here?
1:28:54
You know, I was You just kind of gave me an idea.
1:28:57
I should get like, you know, like those Chicago Bulls like, you know, 1990s are coming out.
1:29:02
They got the music and the coach for the Bulls is Phil Jackson and then they start ripping them off.
1:29:05
That's the next that's like the next stage of the Palunteer March store.
1:29:09
So, but anyways, good to see you guys. Good to see you, too.
1:29:12
Uh, how many uh how many pull-ups have you done today? How many were kipping?
1:29:16
How many were non-kipping? You know, it's funny.
1:29:18
I have that tweet right over here. He's got the print out.
1:29:22
This was this was the beginning of our journey as like, you know, I remember I was just sitting there one day and I and I get this clip.
1:29:29
I'm like, who the hell are these guys?
1:29:30
And it was like you guys you had just started out and you guys geeking out about it and uh it was just really awesome to just see how far you guys have come uh since that.
1:29:38
It's been it's been it's been like really crazy growth.
1:29:42
But I actually Well, thank you for printing that out.
1:29:43
That's a sign of great respect.
1:29:45
A sign of great respect in our culture.
1:29:47
And and I actually went to DC.
1:29:48
I did pull-ups with Elellaniano.
1:29:51
I can attest he can do a ton of non-kipping pull-ups. Yeah.
1:29:53
Well, I I so I I I'll admit I didn't go this morning because we were we launched the store and uh I was pretty you know, you're making sure everything's working and uh so but I'm you know I will be at the gym tomorrow, John, and then I will bring the newspapers into the sauna.
1:30:07
Okay, give us the story of the launch, the store, the URL. Where can people go buy?
1:30:14
Well, so first and foremost, uh the URL is store. palanteer.
1:30:17
com, but I think we sold everything out.
1:30:19
Oh, we sold we sold more merch in 3 hours than we did pretty much in any day, maybe in any week than we did last year.
1:30:29
So, the demand is at all-time highs.
1:30:29
Um, and basically this is the third iteration of the store.
1:30:34
You know, when we first launched the store, it was well before I started, it was um kind of, you know, as a company was going to DPO, they launched the store as a way to sort of uh cultivate um people that were interested in the company.
1:30:45
And then they took it offline because it kind of became a cost center. No one really owned it.
1:30:50
it was kind of like made in China.
1:30:52
The process, the shipping and everything was kind of weird.
1:30:54
And so then last year, about a year ago, I was like, "Hey, like we need to do this."
1:31:00
And uh I eventually did it after a lot of internal lobbying and it ended up being a success.
1:31:04
But uh around, you know, really about a month after we launched the the store last year, it just something didn't feel right.
1:31:11
It didn't feel like Palunteer.
1:31:13
It didn't feel like the aesthetic, the website, the merch.
1:31:16
like it was made in like we were buying hats that were blanks that were made in other countries and I was just like Palunteer is a special company.
1:31:23
We do things a special way. We do things our way.
1:31:26
And so I was like we need to just tear this down and rebuild it. So that's what we did.
1:31:29
And uh today about 7 months later of working on it. We launched a store.
1:31:33
Everything's made in the USA.
1:31:34
We're buying literally shirts from scratch.
1:31:37
We're like we're working with the mills and they're milling the cotton and and we're making things all in America.
1:31:42
Really I want a handsewn version from you.
1:31:44
I want I want to I want to see you on on the ground in the factory.
1:31:48
American dynamism, you know, just Yeah. Give us the stats.
1:31:51
How how how much have you sold?
1:31:53
Are we turning into a profit center?
1:31:55
That's what I care about.
1:31:57
How big is the scale of the merch operation?
1:31:59
Can Can we bring the dawn? I don't know.
1:32:01
I I don't know if I'm allowed to like give out details because then it's like like it's like during uh like uh during market hours people might I don't want the lawyers to like send me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Sure. Sure. This is I will say this.
1:32:14
This could this could cause some major price action, you know, if if people realize that it's not just, you know, the ontology business.
1:32:21
They're also in the, you know, uh, onoring peril, which is a, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars.
1:32:28
And well, we're still going to ring the gong for you cuz congratulations on the launch. Fantastic. I appreciate it.
1:32:35
You know, I will say, you know, our, you know, the Palunteer as of its last earnings, it does like what 80% 80 something percent in margins.
1:32:42
Like a really good high-end um, you know, company that does like, you know, a Hermes or a Louis Vuitton, like they're doing like 60% margin.
1:32:49
So, until I can get to like 80% margins, I'm not even going to go to Dave Glazer, the CFO, and even try to like get this in there.
1:32:58
But, uh, for now, for now, the the intent of the store really is just to get the stuff out there, get good stuff out there, and grow the pot that I have to buy and then resell stuff and invest in like really cool like just like really unique like one of 15 items that are going to be four, five figures.
1:33:14
I mean, we're we're going to take this to the next level. Let's go. Let's go. It's amazing.
1:33:17
F uh if you get into bespoke suits, call us. Call us first.
1:33:22
Uh, we're happy to wear the Palunteer monogrammed suit.
1:33:25
And I'm saying this, you're not saying this, of course, because uh I I I can say this as as a newsmaxer, but you moved the mark, you know, if I was just looking at the stock chart, the stock popped this morning.
1:33:38
I'm assuming it's because of the merch store. Yep.
1:33:40
And you've moved the the market cap has moved by about three billion. So, wow. Uh fantastic, fantastic. Congratulations.
1:33:46
No comment from No comment from just say no comment, but you know, it's clear.
1:33:51
It's clear what's going on.
1:33:53
clear the story, but you know, you do have uh you do have a gentleman named Mike Gallagher coming on later, who by the way is probably the biggest merch fan at the like nobody likes Palunteer merch or like I'll get So if you think I go to the gym early, Mike goes to the gym at like 5 a. m. religiously.
1:34:12
He will shoot me messages.
1:34:14
He'll signal me from the gym and being like like what about an XYZ?
1:34:16
And I'm like, bro, like stranger.
1:34:19
And it's like, so he he he really loves merch.
1:34:22
And uh so you'll get a chance to talk to him about maybe some other reasons why the market cap may have moved. Yes. Yes. Yes. I I I Yeah.
1:34:28
I saw him name drop you on a on a podcast he was on and I was like, "Yes, let's go.
1:34:33
Elelliana, he sees the vision. He sees the vision."
1:34:36
So, but no, I'm really um I think I I I don't I don't know.
1:34:40
I' I've thought a lot about the merch store and just sort of like my role at Palunteer and and sort of how I engage the community.
1:34:45
And I think it's it really boils down to, you know, the founders and Dr.
1:34:50
Karp and all these people and all these tremendous engineers have built this like great company.
1:34:54
Um, and we just, you know, we're a company that stands for something.
1:34:57
And so we've really built this community, um, organically.
1:34:58
I didn't build the community. I just cultivate it.
1:35:01
Um, and it just feels really good to serve them and just give them as much gear as possible.
1:35:05
And so, uh, the demand, the the numbers today, I again, I can't share them, but the the numbers today were way above anything I expected to the point where the site almost crashed within 4 minutes.
1:35:15
And I mean, we're talking about the some of the most traffic that we got was from South Korea.
1:35:21
And so, like, we have a that's our third largest market despite, you know, additional shipping.
1:35:26
Let's give it up for the South Koreans. Yeah.
1:35:30
Palunteerians out in South Korea.
1:35:33
No, I thought it was funny. I looked on the website.
1:35:35
the website. all it's all pre-order right now because I think you guys sold out and I was like wait they can't be doing this because of like you know bal you know you know a lot of apparel companies won't do pre-order because like they don't have the balance sheet
1:35:47
to to pre working capital is a real issue uh so the reason for the the reason for um sort of the the eight week so it's eight weeks and the reason for that is actually so when when the whole tariff thing happened all of these people were then looking to do stuff to find um alternatives inside the USA. And so we
1:36:06
And so we were already sort of tracking the whole USA thing.
1:36:10
So our our vendor, you know, they're working I can't they've they've asked me and we want to just kind of keep it secret because they're very special, but basically the the amount of demand that they got for like cotton that was American source and everything like skyrocketed and then we tweaked some designs and stuff.
1:36:24
So that's the reason for the delay.
1:36:26
as we sort of ramp this up and get it like fully, you know, basically like in production.
1:36:30
Um, my hope is that we won't sell out of everything, but we'll actually sell out of a few items.
1:36:36
Like, sure, we're going to have limited drops of different products that are unique, but you know, hopefully the hats and like some core shirts will be available uh 24/7. That's amazing. Thank you so much.
1:36:44
Well, it's great to see you.
1:36:46
Let's get a workout in soon. Yeah, let's do it. Awesome. Thank you, gentlemen.
1:36:50
Have a good rest of your day. Cheers. Talk to you soon. Bye.
1:36:51
And up next, we have Mike Gallagher from Palunteer Technologies.
1:36:54
He's the head of defense and uh he put out some comments about the partnership between Palanteer and the nuclear company.
1:37:02
Uh says this partnership marks the first time Palunteer software will be used to help power the next generation of nuclear energy infrastructure.
1:37:11
So we're excited to bring him and welcome him to the show. Mike, how are you? What's going on? Great to have you. What's going on, guys?
1:37:17
I'm honored to be with you. You guys are famous. You were famous, too. Thank you for joining. I used to be, man. I used to be.
1:37:24
Now I'm just, you know, I'm a hasbc.
1:37:26
You're a techn You're a technology brother. You're one of us. You're one of us.
1:37:31
I mean, that's actually a great place to start.
1:37:32
I I I want to talk about your career and the transition uh that you went through.
1:37:35
Uh there's there's a you know, obviously it's very exciting what you're doing.
1:37:42
Now, there's also this story about like I want you in the government too and I want people like you in the government.
1:37:49
And so is the government uh a place for high-erforming technologists to flourish?
1:37:54
Is there something that needs to change there?
1:37:56
I'm interested in to digging into that.
1:37:58
But why don't you kick it off with kind of like how you tell the story of how you got here to this moment?
1:38:02
Yeah, I I think well obviously, you know, from northeast Wisconsin, Green Bay, and I kind of grew up always interested in the world outside of Wisconsin and the United States.
1:38:14
When I went to college, I studied Arabic in the Middle East.
1:38:15
I became fascinated by what was happening.
1:38:19
I was in undergrad when we invaded Iraq.
1:38:22
I was a senior in high school during 9/11.
1:38:23
And the more I dug into that intellectually, the more I became convinced that I would regret it if I didn't step up and serve.
1:38:29
Um, felt very strongly about service to country, but also on a practical level really wanted to apply the language and regional and cultural skills I was learning in a non-academic context and felt like there was no greater challenge than joining the United States Marine Corps.
1:38:45
So even though I didn't come from a military family, didn't know anything about the military, I just felt like this was the hardest crucible that I could throw myself into, I had a just really an awesome experience.
1:38:56
Couple great deployments, learned a ton, was a counter intelligence, human intelligence officer.
1:39:01
And kind of similarly when when I got out of the Marine Corps and you know, I worked on a presidential campaign.
1:39:06
I worked in the Senate as a Middle East guy.
1:39:08
Never thought about running myself.
1:39:09
I'd moved back home to work for this energy and supply chain management company when a some people reached out to me about running for Congress. I was very young. I was 31.
1:39:20
And I my initial reaction was hell no.
1:39:20
I mean, it was just I was not I didn't know anything about raising money.
1:39:24
You know, I was the guy who like wrote the white paper that someone read before they went on TV.
1:39:28
I wasn't wouldn't be on TV myself.
1:39:30
I kind of thought of myself as like a pure national security professional, not a politician.
1:39:34
I still don't think of myself that way.
1:39:37
Um, but honestly it was the fact that it scared me that like led me to do it.
1:39:41
I felt I felt like anything that force you outside your comfort zone is good for your your development personally and it was I felt like it would be an extension of my military service, a way to continue my work of enhancing American deterrence, albeit from a legislative perspective.
1:39:57
And and I'll swear I'll I'll wrap up after this.
1:39:59
I went into it knowing it was never going to be a career for me.
1:40:03
I was the youngest guy in Congress when I got elected.
1:40:05
I always conceived of it as a season of service.
1:40:09
I think the problem with Congress is that we have too many career politicians.
1:40:12
So I kind of always had in my head I do a decade and when I decided to leave um you know Paliner was a was just a obvious way for me to continue that mission.
1:40:23
I mean, Palunter was one of the rare companies that was unapologetically pro-American military, committed 100% to enhancing deterrence, you know, willing to say that like we're the good guys, you know, the commies are the bad guys.
1:40:38
And um I really felt like, you know, it was a continuation of that theme in my career where something really hard that scared the crap out of me, i. e.
1:40:46
now being surrounded by genius you like 20somes that make me feel stupid and then a continuation of of the mission and I' you know I've kind of dedicated my life to this idea of preventing World War II and I'm seeing kind of how we marry the tech community with the war fighter every day in Palunteer.
1:41:04
So that's the the short version and it's been really exciting.
1:41:08
Uh is that is that a typical flow for elected politicians?
1:41:11
Someone reaches out to them.
1:41:13
Is there kind of like a scouting department?
1:41:14
uh in in our government that's looking for up and cominging talent and then put giving them the ideas because I feel like the story that most people tell is is ah this guy, you know, wants power or wants to, you know, he's on a war path, everyone tells him no and then he runs and and gets elected or kind of sheer force of will.
1:41:32
Um but but which direction does it go more commonly?
1:41:35
Was your path uncommon or is it more the norm?
1:41:38
Well, to be clear, I I don't want to pretend like this was some pure ash Mr.
1:41:44
Smith goes to Washington thing, right?
1:41:46
Like clearly I was driven, ambitious, like had kind of always had a drive my whole life um and wanted to like test myself, but honestly it was not like I didn't think of like the political domain at that point in my life.
1:42:01
I think more often than not people are drawn to politics.
1:42:04
It used to be the case that like you'd go to law school, you'd become a lawyer, you'd run for state or local office, and then that would be a natural kind of like farm team that would lead into Congress, and then you'd run for Senate, and then you'd try and be president one day.
1:42:19
I actually think that's changing a little bit.
1:42:22
Like one actually healthy thing I saw during my time in Congress is we started to get more young veterans, veterans of the kind of 9/11 wars running for office, which created a cool bipartisan group of legislators that were willing to work together on stuff.
1:42:38
I think, you know, I think we're seeing voters like like wanting to have more outsiders, whether it's, you know, business people, traditional or tech bros like, you know, uh that you guys talk to a lot.
1:42:51
Um I think people everyone was a lawyer.
1:42:54
It used to be everyone every single person being a lawyer. Yeah.
1:42:57
Being a lawyer seems miserable to me. No offense lawyers. Um but I I don't know.
1:43:02
And I will say finally I went in with the assumption that the fundamental problem with Congress was the people, right?
1:43:10
The people were either purely mchavelian ambitious or like horribly corrupt and just didn't attract the right people.
1:43:21
Now to be sure there are plenty of people that like would you know could not like they can't leave Congress because they are otherwise unemployable and like you know like they're not like the greatest in the world.
1:43:32
But I was actually pleasantly surprised with the quality, the talent as well as the patriotism.
1:43:38
And I would say most people run for Congress wanting to serve the country, wanting to make a difference, wanting to do right by, you know, the part of the country that they're from.
1:43:48
and they get forced into a system where the incentives really don't reward hard work in the domain that Congress should be focused on, right?
1:43:57
Like there's really no reward for doing the boring work of oversight of the executive branch of caring about the legislative process.
1:44:04
The modern Congress has become so structurally weak that people channel their ambition into building a media platform, social media in particular, and that almost becomes their full-time job.
1:44:16
And that that's really a problem because we need Congress to focus on the nuts and bolts of budgeting, of oversight, of reclaiming its authority from the executive branch.
1:44:27
executive branch. my I came to believe that kind of the the fundamental problem with most things is that we become so unbalanced in terms of the overall power of the federal government and then within the federal government the power is purely concentrated now in the executive branch which is why our our presidential campaigns get so intense
1:44:45
every four years because the stakes are high right everything is done via executive order and has profound consequences for every business I think a healthier balance would be if Congress article one which was envisioned by our framers to be the dominant gr br br br br br br br br br br br br br br br br br br br br branch of government. In
1:45:00
In fact, they were concerned that Congress would grow too powerful.
1:45:02
They never would have envisioned the current state of affairs.
1:45:05
Congress surrendering its power since the 70s and then in bipartisan fashion continuing that trend has had really perverse and unintended consequences for um our politics and it's why they've become so intense.
1:45:15
Why people are turned off by it.
1:45:17
I think in our lifetime, do you think we will see term limits in in Congress at all?
1:45:21
It seems like a lot of smart people, you know, seeing certain actors over the last decade would would feel that that that would be beneficial to the United States.
1:45:33
It's this weird distortion where it feels like people are, you know, you know, in in power for a long time, but not even necessarily thinking in decades or super long term.
1:45:42
They're they're thinking in, you know, election cycles and and kind of creates some distortions.
1:45:49
But I'm curious what you think having been in there.
1:45:50
You know, it's funny, man.
1:45:52
By the way, can I say you have great flow?
1:45:54
I just want to throw that out there.
1:45:55
Both of you, in fact, as as someone who's losing his hair, I just have to admire it and um you know, cherish it, gentlemen.
1:46:05
Should just be news anchors, I guess. Yeah, it's destiny.
1:46:10
Um, it's funny like when I first came in and I got elected in 2016 and we we thought like our freshman class, Democrats and Republicans, we thought we had serious momentum behind a term limits bill.
1:46:25
We had a bipartisan term limits bill.
1:46:26
I remember going to the White House, so this was Trump's first year in office.
1:46:30
a group of six of us, three Republicans, three Democrats, went to the Oval Office to get Trump's support on our term limits bill because our basic theory was unless the president was using the bully pulpit to force congressional leaders to do it, it would never happen.
1:46:44
And so, if memory serves, Trump actually uh tweeted about it endorsing the bill and I remember I did some selfie video, you know, having just complained about members of Congress focusing on social media.
1:46:55
This is probably the apex. You got to dabble.
1:46:58
You got to dabble a little bit. Exactly.
1:47:01
I remember doing some like selfie video coming out of the White House and I genuinely thought in that moment that we had momentum behind a term limits bill.
1:47:08
It's overwhelmingly popular with the American people.
1:47:10
I've I the counterpart the counter arguments which we can discuss I don't think are persuasive.
1:47:16
What was unique about our bill and the reason the reason we thought it might have a chance of passing? Well, two things.
1:47:21
One, we were in that moment the sort of drain the swamp moment.
1:47:22
The reason Trump got elected the first time you know everyone's disgusted with the status quo business as usual.
1:47:27
he had made a pledge late in the campaign that he was going to support term limits.
1:47:31
Um and then uh secondly, we kind of phased it in.
1:47:38
So what was unique about our bill is we applied it to our class and all subsequent that's what I was going to say.
1:47:44
You grandfather in if you're if you're a career politician and you're like I got another 15 years that I was planning on really, you know, running it around here.
1:47:51
you let them phase out and then the new the new guard you put some limits on them and then it totally you grandfather in the grandfathers and they just sort of die off over time and then the new people um so and then and then we made it equal in the House and the Senate 12 years in the House so six terms and then 12 years in the Senate.
1:48:10
So theoretically someone could do 24 years I could do 12 in the House run for Senate and so that seemed generous to us.
1:48:15
Um but it died it died a slow death and then a sudden death.
1:48:17
you know, the the problem is, you know, nobody in leadership wants to bring a a term limits bill to the floor, uh, because they fear it endangers their own power.
1:48:28
Um, so I really do think the paradox, it's like the things we need to do to to enhance the power, the functionality of the modern Congress actually require an overempowered president to make them happen.
1:48:42
Like otherwise, Congress won't do it on its own.
1:48:43
And I was never able to transcend that paradox, if it makes sense. Yeah. Yeah.
1:48:47
I I I want to kind of wrestle with this idea of uh of you know the the the executive branch having power.
1:48:56
There are term limits there.
1:48:57
We've also had a wildly back and forth executive branch with Trump for four years, then Biden, then back to Trump, kind of unprecedented.
1:49:04
We had previously been in, you know, eight-year stretches for a while.
1:49:08
Um and I want to run a theory be uh by you around Iran.
1:49:11
My my working theory is that they're not happy with how things are going right now.
1:49:16
Uh and part of that is because part of how Iran got into this particular situation is that they potentially saw America as not supporting Israel aggressively during the Biden administration.
1:49:31
And more importantly, the idea of a president who would strongly support Israel like Donald Trump would was it was unthinkable that he would get elected again because he was being indicted and he was uh seen as kind of like a joke almost and was deplatformed from social media.
1:49:48
How is this guy have a Pinterest account?
1:49:50
He didn't even have a Pinterest account.
1:49:52
And so he he so so if you're if you're Iran and you're thinking, "Well, America is backing off and doesn't seem to be coming back on the offensive anytime soon, now's the time to start ramping up spending with the Houthis and Hamas and Hezbollah."
1:50:09
And and but then surprise, Trump's in.
1:50:12
Now we have to deal with the consequences of that.
1:50:13
And so in this weird way, America feels almost unpredictable geopolitically.
1:50:18
And maybe that's an advantage if you take it seriously, but maybe it's a risk.
1:50:23
And to your point about wanting to avert avert World War II, I'm wondering about the current structure of the executive branch changing hands every four years.
1:50:34
Is that bullish for avoiding World War II or is it a risk or do we need to just tussle with it more?
1:50:40
Like how do you think about all those different concepts? Yeah.
1:50:43
Well, first of all, great question.
1:50:45
A lot of interesting threads to pull on there.
1:50:46
The first I would say I would go even further back than the Biden administration to when we started to negotiate in earnest with Iran over it over its nuclear program in the second half of the Obama administration.
1:50:59
And really it was it was it was sort of like covert negotiations that then become overt amidst the backdrop of a region that had gone from all this hope around the Arab Spring turned Arab winter, Syrian civil war, coup in Egypt, just chaos everywhere and then Obama was pursuing this nuclear deal with Iran.
1:51:16
Um Obama had sort of a theory about the region.
1:51:19
He he talked about creating a new equilibrium in the Middle East whereby we would sort of distance ourselves from Israel and balance sort of a recognize Iran's enhanced power and role in the region and use Iran to balance against the Sunni Arab Gulf states and Israel.
1:51:37
The only problem is that that that new equilibrium created intense disequilibrium and missed the real story which was the only path to equilibrium in the region is to build off this alignment of interest between Israel and the Sunni Arab Gulf states which are on paper strange bedfellows but are united by the shared threat from Iran.
1:51:58
The long pole in the tent that links all of our traditional allies together is the threat from Iran.
1:52:05
And if unless you want an enhanced American military presence in the region, the only way to forge a semblance of stability is to build off of that.
1:52:12
And that was kind of the genius of the Abraham Accords that Trump would later put in place.
1:52:16
Long story short, the other missed opportunity.
1:52:18
So there was an analytical problem with Obama's approach to Iran.
1:52:21
There was a constitutional problem which relates to what we were talking about before where the Iran deal sure looked a lot like an arms control agreement.
1:52:29
But Obama recognizing because at that time we still had sort of pro-Israel Democrats in the Senate recognizing that the deal was unlikely to get congressional support in the Senate in this case.
1:52:40
He constructed it purely as an executive agreement, an agreement between himself and the Supreme Leader.
1:52:48
There was no congressional buyin.
1:52:50
And so therefore, when Trump got elected, one of the first things he did after extended review was to throw it in the trash.
1:52:56
Biden comes in, tries to resurrect it.
1:52:58
Trump comes back in in his second term and basically he gives the Iranians 60 days to negotiate and then took the action that you just saw.
1:53:07
So that's a long way of me saying there was a misunderstanding of the region and then a misunderstanding that as hard as it is to bring Congress into the process, it actually makes your executive achievements more durable.
1:53:18
and I think improves your negotiating position.
1:53:23
Now, to get to the last part of your question, I do think the president's recent decision was the right one.
1:53:28
I think really going even back before Obama's failed um and flawed agreement with Iran, the Iranians have consistently used the cover of diplomacy to covertly advance their program.
1:53:38
And at some point, we were either going to have to accept a nuclear Iran or take kinetic action to set back their program.
1:53:46
And this is the first time in a long time really since our the invasion of Iraq that we've combined maximum economic pressure with a credible military deterrent.
1:53:54
And so I do think it gives us a chance to effectively eliminate their nuclear program.
1:53:58
That being said, there's a lot of work we need to do in terms of rebuilding our entire defense industrial base so that the munitions we're using in Sentcom don't completely deplete the resources we need in other theaters along the way.
1:54:11
And I'll stop there because I could talk about the Middle East for um 20 minutes and all of your your audience would evaporate. No, this is fascinating.
1:54:17
I'm really enjoying this.
1:54:19
Do you have a follow-up there or I wanted to talk about I I wanted to get a get a a quick read on how you think China has viewed the events of the last couple months and and couple weeks specifically.
1:54:32
Well, I think that so the my most like bullish case for what Trump has just accomplished would be not only has he set back if not eliminated for a decade Iran's nuclear ambitions, he could have just shattered the emerging axis of chaos.
1:54:49
this sort of access between Iran, Russia and China because China sort of views Iran as both a a source of hydrocarbons as well as like a gateway to expand its influence in the Middle East and continually poke the Americans and our allies in the eye.
1:55:07
Um, this is incredibly problematic for China's view of the region.
1:55:12
That being said, the biggest wild card that I just don't know enough about is where Trump is going to go next on China.
1:55:18
There was some reporting yesterday that he was going to allow China access to Iranian oil.
1:55:21
And so I think it's, you know, in Trump 1.
1:55:24
0, there was this tension between some more hawkish members of of the administration on China and then more dovish members at Treasury.
1:55:33
There's a there's sort of a version of this tension going on right now.
1:55:37
And then Trump himself at times wants to make a deal with Xiinping and thinks he's uniquely suited to do it.
1:55:41
At other times, he's like uniquely able and willing to impose costs on China.
1:55:46
I think he deserves credit for actually the biggest shift in US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War in terms of the more hawkish turn on China.
1:55:52
And so there I guess there's there's lingering questions about how we want to approach China.
1:55:59
But I really think this is the serious setback for this this access and chaos, this anti-American access.
1:56:05
Russia, of course, was um getting enormous benefits from Iran in terms of drone technology for its ongoing war uh in Eastern Europe.
1:56:11
I can't help but think that that's going to be increasingly difficult given that Iran is is is is dealing with the aftermath of the attack as well as increasing internal pressure.
1:56:20
And then hats off to the Israelis.
1:56:22
I mean, I think this shows how valuable it is to have lethal allies that not only have extraordinary capabilities of their own, but are willing to take a a a big role in the the regional security architecture and not just rely solely on the United States of America.
1:56:41
And in fact, what we've seen really in terms of the way they've they've gone after Hisbala, the Beeper operation, and then uh their systematic campaign against the nuclear facility is some of the most daring and imaginative intelligence and military work that I think I've ever seen in my lifetime.
1:56:57
And even if one isn't as pro-Israel as I am, I think you'd have to admire uh just how effective their military and intelligence community is. Yeah, that's undeniable.
1:57:08
Uh bit of a random question, but I'm curious if you have any insight here.
1:57:12
There was a lot of wrong.
1:57:12
Um there was uh some interesting price action in Bitcoin.
1:57:19
It's hard to read too much into uh but people were alleging that the Iranian regime was mining bit, you know, a lot of Bitcoin. Fascinating.
1:57:28
You know, maybe maybe it didn't come up for you, but I I I saw somebody posting that he was like, "I'm not buying Bitcoin right now.
1:57:35
It seems obvious that the regime is just like dumping in order to try and fun, you know, basically the recovery effort even.
1:57:42
But if you don't have any insight there, we can move on.
1:57:44
I wanted to, you know, I I'm afraid I don't, but I I do think and I've said this to like all the smart crypto folks like Brian Armstrong and others.
1:57:53
I I think there's um or a Wisconsin colleague of mine, Brian Style, who's one of the leaders in the House on this issue.
1:57:58
You guys should have him on.
1:58:00
He's really smart, young Congressman from Wisconsin. Um yeah, Brian style. He's always in style. He's welcome. Welcome. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.
1:58:08
Uh that I think there's like a an underexplored aspect or argument about like crypto's role in national security, right?
1:58:17
Because the anti-crypto argu anti-crypto argument is always like this is just a way of sanctions evasion and money laundering.
1:58:23
And I think what people don't appreciate is like how this could be a tool to advance America's and our allies national security interests.
1:58:30
And certainly was a case when, you know, people were trying to get out of Ukraine and Afghanistan.
1:58:34
Um, that crypto was enormously valuable in that regard.
1:58:36
It might allow us to do certain things in denied areas and transfer assets that uh are uniquely valuable to our intelligence community.
1:58:45
So, I assume that's a that's an area where like national security nerds like me should pay increasing attention to the utility of crypto, but I hadn't heard that about.
1:58:53
Um, switching gears to the European continent.
1:58:55
Uh, wanted to get your reaction to the the NATO spending news and maybe kind of the backstory.
1:59:02
I'm sure when when you were in Congress, you probably always felt strongly about this kind of thing, but um, any any any reactions there?
1:59:10
Well, listen, I think anytime first of all you this this idea that you know the American president would want our NATO allies to spend more on their own defense is not a new thing.
1:59:24
It is not sort of unique to Trump.
1:59:27
Eisenhower uh the first supreme allied commander of NATO like actually made this argument and expressed frustration with our European allies time.
1:59:37
And so this is like and we've we've had Democratic senators uh try to defund NATO because of their frustrations with NATO.
1:59:44
So this is like a an old argument that is new again.
1:59:48
I think the fact that certain European countries are willing to spend more on their defense is a great thing for deterrence in general.
1:59:54
I would say however I've always been of the view that this obsession with the inputs i. e.
2:00:02
What percent of GDP a NATO member spends on defense is not the right lens of analysis, right?
2:00:08
Like every NATO country could be spending 5% of their GDP on defense, but if they're all buying the wrong crap or buying stuff that isn't interoperable and doesn't actually amount to a coordinated multinational deterrence by denial effort with hard power shifted as far east as possible with the frontline states playing a unique role, then you actually have you haven't actually fighting off a common operational picture.
2:00:37
And shout out to NATO for acquiring Maven smart system made by Palunteer Technologies. No big deal.
2:00:44
Um then you have actually a sports team a sports team doesn't wake up one morning and like say let's all give it 100%.
2:00:51
And that's the only coordination.
2:00:53
It's like you could easily turn this into a jobs program where you say yeah we're going to spend 5% of our GDP on horseback and cavalry.
2:01:00
And it's like you're going to lose, but yes, you're technically going to be spending 5% and you're going to have a massive military, but you're going to get rolled if you're not investing in the right programs.
2:01:08
So, is there any do you think that the European countries are thinking about it correctly?
2:01:14
Because it feels like it feels like to me getting from 2% to 5% is the bigger mental hurdle than the allocation of that 5%.
2:01:22
And yes, we're right to move the conversation to where you're taking it right now, but that feels like uh an easier conversation.
2:01:29
Or maybe I'm wrong there.
2:01:32
I think the closer you are to the threat, the more you're think your thinking is sharp. Right.
2:01:38
So it is my experience that you know Poland, the Baltic states tend to have a clearer view of reality and are making hard decisions in order to invest in their own uh military.
2:01:48
By the way, we've acquired two new NATO.
2:01:50
Acquired is the wrong term.
2:01:52
We we've had two new countries join NATO in recent years that bring phenomenal capabilities to the table.
2:01:58
I think you know traditionally struggled convincing the Germans who are you know the big elephant in the European room uh to make the right investments and to make more investments.
2:02:08
My hope is that that conversation is getting better.
2:02:10
You know, I guess I worry sometimes that kind of to relate it to what you said earlier, they they'll be privileging certain domestic companies even if they don't actually produce capability.
2:02:22
I think it's fair to say obviously I'm biased because I work in an American software company, but we are the best in the world like by 10 orders of magnitude when it comes to software development in this country and that's just not something that Europe does well.
2:02:36
So there could be opportunity for creative collaboration between the Palenters of the world and you know European hardware defense manufacturers.
2:02:48
I'd love to see more of that going forward.
2:02:50
And I've always been a proponent of um you know there's we have a ton of troops uh in in countries like Germany in Western Europe.
2:02:59
um getting them out of garrison, shifting them further on NATO's eastern flank, taking advantage of the invitation that certain frontline states like Poland made, at least in the previous administration, to build new bases and forts that enhance our deterrence posture.
2:03:13
I I think there's a there's a huge opportunity here.
2:03:15
Um and and it may just be the case that Trump's rhetoric, as unpolished as it can be at times, is the thing that's shaking shaking it loose uh right now.
2:03:25
Uh I mean obviously it's it's a bit overdetermined.
2:03:28
I mean you know the other thing shaking it loose is Russia's invasion of Ukraine and it's a massive wakeup call for Europe um that they need to need to invest more and buy the right things.
2:03:39
So, but I do think we have a moment here.
2:03:41
And I think what's critical to our analysis in the US, particularly my own party, the Republican party, is to do a better job, and I didn't quite do this well when I chaired the China Committee in Congress, in teasing out the connection between Russia and China.
2:03:53
And why what happens in one theater affects another theater and that it isn't just a choice between Europe or the Indo-Pacific. We're a global power. We're a sole superpower.
2:04:01
We have an existential challenge in the form of communist China.
2:04:04
We have to pay attention everywhere.
2:04:05
Yes, we have to make hard decisions and prioritize accordingly the Indoacific is a priority theater.
2:04:11
But one of the best ways we can invest more of our own exquisite resources into the Indoacific is to get on the same page with our allies in Europe and ensure that they're buying the right things and that the way we fight together is actually leveraging cutting edge commercial technology, software or hardware. Great. Great.
2:04:29
Should we talk about the the news today?
2:04:31
The announcement, the nuclear the nuclear uh deal that you'd be great.
2:04:36
Can you break down for us?
2:04:36
Uh everything is nuclear. Everything's nuclear. We're going nuclear.
2:04:39
Yeah, I mean I want to know the shape of the partnership.
2:04:43
Anything you can share there.
2:04:44
Uh but then I'd love to go into kind of um what you're particularly excited about in nuclear or or even just energy broadly.
2:04:52
Uh we've seen that the United States energy production per capita has kind of flatlined for a while.
2:05:00
China's increasing energy production very aggressively.
2:05:01
It feels top of mind especially in the backdrop of the foundation model AI race um that we need to be building more energy infrastructure and there's different resources coming online.
2:05:12
Nuclear is probably the most fascinating one that has the ability to scale because we've we've we've we've we've tamed the atom and yet and we can't just seem to copy paste uh you know Diablo Canyon 50 times to to actually get a massive increase in energy production.
2:05:29
There's also stuff happening on the smaller scale.
2:05:30
Uh I want your take on nuclear as a whole in addition to the deal. Yeah.
2:05:35
By the way, I may get pulled to do a TV interview about this the nuclear stuff by it's your fault though because my understanding is I'm just um batting cleanup for Elelliana point and he talked too much but I'm happy to come back at any point.
2:05:50
Um listen I mean we can't obviously we can't uh dominate the like the commanding heights of critical technology and AI if we don't improve our our sort of all the above energy policy.
2:06:02
Um there is no workable energy strategy without a nuclear renaissance in this country.
2:06:07
The Trump administration has put out some really productive EOS.
2:06:10
But now it's incumbent upon the private sector to step up and the nuclear company is that I mean they they're going to leverage our software to build reactors which right now take over a decade to build uh and collapse that timeline down.
2:06:22
And I think we're at the forefront of something really interesting.
2:06:25
Um, China is investing billions of dollars in this space, putting their best and brightest on the problem, and we can't fall further behind.
2:06:33
And oh, by the way, it affects our military deterrence as well because our diplomacy is enhanced with foreign countries when we're able to come to them and say you can, we are a reliable partner for civilian nuclear technology and we help you build and access that technology safely.
2:06:47
technology safely. when what I don't want to see is a replay of what we saw with China and 5G and Huawei where China was going all over the world saying you can have 5G internet cheaply we'll just control the infrastructure um it'll be in a box you know you won't even have to worry about you don't have to worry
2:07:04
about anything you don't have to worry about anything and like in America like whoa don't do that time out but if you're a country that doesn't have resources in Africa or in the global south like you're probably not paying as much attention to the CI concerns and so there's something similar are playing out uh in the nuclear space right now. So, I'm very bullish about this
2:07:20
So, I'm very bullish about this partnership.
2:07:21
Um you know, I I think this is the cusp of something big both for the nuclear company and for Palanteer and we're going to be able to leverage all the lessons we have from working with and old seronic and nontraditional partners with our warp speed manufacturing uh product and apply it in in to the nuclear space. That's fantastic. I'm getting pulled.
2:07:36
I'm getting you on another We'll see.
2:07:40
We have to have you back on soon. Come back on soon. We'll talk to you soon.
2:07:43
Come back for Packers commentary. Great. Cheers. Yeah.
2:07:48
The uh the the nuclear like like like a lot of people still don't understand fully what Palanteer does, but you you have to pull the example from uh Airbus manufacturing.
2:07:56
So Palunteer is that's one of their partners.
2:08:00
If you're making a plane, you need to know how many screws you have, how many wings you have, how many engines you have, and the lead times on all of those, how much they cost, when they depreciate, what the testing regimen is as you integrate them into the plane.
2:08:14
exact same process for building something like a 747 as building a new nuclear power plant.
2:08:18
So, uh, very exciting deal and, uh, I'm excited to see it play out.
2:08:22
But, uh, that was fantastic.
2:08:24
Let's run through a a couple timeline posts and then get out of here.
2:08:28
Uh, we got two ads left and that's why we're leaving early today because we're going to go film some ads for Wander. Find your happy place. Find your happy place.
2:08:37
Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 24/7 concier service.
2:08:43
It's a vacation home, but better.
2:08:45
We're heading to a wander in just a few minutes to film an advertising city of Malibu, the great town of Malibu, California that will be airing on TBNN and then go out on the on the internet.
2:08:56
Uh, and we're also filming an ad for Eight Sleep.
2:08:59
How'd you sleep last night? I got wrecked again. You got wrecked. Wrecked.
2:09:03
I I have a systematic issue with uh the three-year-old. Yeah, it's rough.
2:09:10
Have you Have you Have you tried telling a man up? No.
2:09:15
I mean, I I would be down for my sleep to be disrupted for a decade if it means he sleeps just a little bit better.
2:09:20
But it's certainly the the thing that really hurts is uh losing to you. I got a 78. I got an 86, baby.
2:09:24
Hit me with the Ashen Hall. Moged again.
2:09:27
It's my This is my favorite soundtrack on the whole We're going to need a new sound effect. I love this soundtrack.
2:09:32
No, this is this is the sound of me winning. It's now. It's now.
2:09:35
When there is a John win, I get the Ashton Hall sound effect. That's right. Anyway, go to eight. com/tbpn.
2:09:42
And if you're building, if you're building a company like head over to finn.
2:09:47
ai, AI the number one agent AI agent for customer service.
2:09:50
It is number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bakeoffs and number one ranking on G2 used by KOD, Consensus, Aspire, Lovable, all of your favorite uh software companies and more. So check it out.
2:10:08
Um we got to have on on again. Yeah. Yeah.
2:10:13
Once a day, once or twice a day. Be great. you can coexute.
2:10:15
I think he's a little busy for that.
2:10:17
Um and uh yeah, if you're uh if you're selling to customers, if you're a businessman or woman, you're going to benefit a lot from Finn.
2:10:26
Um well, that is uh pretty much everything.
2:10:29
There's one more piece of news I want to cover.
2:10:31
Uh Baiju over at Aether Flux has a new board member, Dan Gallagher.
2:10:36
He's worked with him for years.
2:10:38
Dan is in a league of his own.
2:10:38
He is a man of integrity and has become a close friend over the years.
2:10:41
He'll help us engage in uh Washington DC and support Aether Flux and America to lead in space solar power.
2:10:48
If you're not familiar with Aether Flux, they are putting solar panels in space and then beaming down the energy that's captured in space via lasers. Very cool. They're beamaxing.
2:10:58
Also, Baiju absolute hitter on his wrist every time he's spotted.
2:11:02
Absolutely criminal because this photo here in the slide deck cuts it out. Cuts it out.
2:11:06
We can't see what he's doing. Photographer.
2:11:08
What was the photographer doing?
2:11:09
What was the this is a this is opportunity journalistic misinformation post here from Scott Bski observed among the most successful people I admire who really worked for it they don't want to network they want to learn they are mining you for information constantly. Yep.
2:11:25
Uh sometimes it looks like networking but they're mining. Yeah.
2:11:30
Zack Weinberg says in fact the networking part is really just a tax you get comfortable paying in order to do the learning. I like that. It's a good point. uh we haven't posted.
2:11:37
But this is the same thing.
2:11:39
It's like don't don't ask for money, ask for advice.
2:11:40
Like if you're genuinely interested in something, you wind up meeting interesting people because that's the only way to get the real answers that aren't baked into the LLM yet.
2:11:47
You got to go to the source.
2:11:49
You got to meet people and you got to ask them for the answers to the pressing questions of the day. Yep.
2:11:54
Anyway, uh we have a post here from Woodrow Oats Montigue.
2:11:56
Uh so done I can't take this anymore.
2:12:00
And there's a Bloomberg hit.
2:12:01
A footwear startup is teaming up with two space companies to design a shoe in orbit as part of a mission to make artificial intelligence and blockchain less expensive and more eco-friendly than it is on Earth.
2:12:15
Orbit's Edge, a company that supports AI and blockchain applications.
2:12:18
and Copernic Space, which offers digital marketplaces for space assets, plan to send a solar and battery powered satellite to space, equipped with a computer that will use AI automation to produce a shoe design for the Cintlay brand.
2:12:34
The mission is expected to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in early 2026.
2:12:39
Um, we should call Delian and do a wellness check. Yeah. See how he's doing.
2:12:44
He's been like, I'm the guy who's manufacturing.
2:12:46
I'm the space manufacturing man.
2:12:47
So much for your monopoly thesis, Delion.
2:12:50
There's another space manufacturing company in they're designing they're using AI and blockchain technology.
2:12:56
I haven't heard I haven't heard talk about AI or blockchain yet at all.
2:13:00
That's just missing from their thesis entirely.
2:13:02
Wow, what a blind spot for Delhi.
2:13:04
It's so funny to feel like you need to send something to space to produce AI slop footwear designs.
2:13:12
Um anyways, uh good luck to them.
2:13:16
Let's end on a let's end on a positive note.
2:13:17
Brad Gersonner, I don't think this was a response to um our the socialist.
2:13:25
No, but he said the answer to socialism is more capitalism and the Invest America Act is more capitalism, Mr. President.
2:13:33
It makes every child a capitalist from birth, sharing in the upside of America.
2:13:36
Worried about what what just happened in NYC? Help is on the way. I love this.
2:13:40
Let's ring the gong for Brad Gerson. Fantastic.
2:13:48
Well, this is the shortest show we've done in a very long time, but fortunately, I'm sure we'll be back with But we're still recording.
2:13:55
We're going to be recording over the next few hours.
2:13:58
Putting up minutes and then that will hit the timeline later.
2:14:00
Anyways, so thank you for tuning in to the show.
2:14:02
As always, leave us a fivestar review on Spotify or leave us a written review on Apple Podcast and we will read that on the show.
2:14:12
So, have a fantastic afternoon. We'll see you tomorrow. See you tomorrow.