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Today is Tuesday, June 17th, 2025.
4:56
We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Welcome to the show. Massive day.
5:08
Ramp has announced a new valuation. $16 billion.
5:11
Let the robots chase your receipts and close your books so you can use your brain to build things, says Eric Lyman, CEO of ramp. com. Save time is money. Time is money. Save both. Go to ramp. com.
5:21
Switch your business to ramp. com.
5:23
We have a great lineup for you today.
5:26
Uh let's run through some timeline just to give you an idea of what's going on in the news.
5:32
Obviously uh the because one of the big issues war is still is still on the front page of the Financial Times.
5:36
Um the Wall Street Journal is taking a little bit of a more positive view uh highlighting uh peace talks at the G7 and this idea that tan signals readiness to renew diplomacy.
5:49
Iran says it wants nuclear talks as long as US stays out of the conflict with Israel.
5:55
And so that's where the major front page news is.
5:57
But there's a ton of other stuff that's more important that's happening in tech.
6:01
And so we got to talk about tech.
6:03
Big issue is if you want to use X, the everything app for news today, good luck because I personally can't go on there without the first 10 posts being about ramp. I love it.
6:15
And certainly we are contributing to that.
6:16
But uh we'll try to cover.
6:16
It's a timeline takeover.
6:18
It's a timeline takeover, folks. But there is other news.
6:22
Um, on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, Berber Jinn has a scoop about OpenAI.
6:27
Mo OpenAI Microsoft tensions are reaching a boiling point.
6:32
Startup frustrated with its partner has discussed making antitrust complaints.
6:36
Tensions between OpenAI and Microsoft over the future of their famed AI partnership are flaring up.
6:41
OpenAI wants to loosen Microsoft's grip on its AI products and computing resources and secure the tech giant's blessing for its conversion into a for-profit company.
6:52
Microsoft's approval of the conversion is key to OpenAI's ability to raise more money and go public.
6:56
But the negotiations have been so difficult that in recent weeks, OpenAI's executives have discussed what they view as a nuclear option, accusing Microsoft of anti-competitive behavior during their partnership.
7:07
people familiar with the matter said.
7:09
And so there's a whole bunch more analysis on this that we'll go into today and I'm sure we'll talk to some folks on the show about it.
7:15
Don't use the Mword monopoly. Yes, it's banned. It's banned. It's banned.
7:21
No, that really is a nuclear option.
7:23
Uh they were very happy partners for seemingly about a year and a half. Yeah.
7:28
And uh clearly Satia and Sam have different visions for their partnership going forward.
7:37
I think at the time when they did their original $10 billion investment, it felt like everybody was getting a good deal.
7:44
I think with the growth of Chat GPT, um, in hindsight, maybe that wasn't the best structure, the best, you know, way to to do a partnership.
7:52
And, um, certainly there was some some fine print that they're now trying to walk back.
7:58
Um and I and I there had been some other chatter around um one of the issues and the reason for the windsurf acquisition to not be formally closed and and announced was that uh if they just sort of went forward with it with the existing structure of the OpenAI Microsoft agreement.
8:16
OpenAI Microsoft agreement. uh Microsoft might have some claim over over Windserf's IP and um again it's all very complicated because there's 20 different entities uh and ultimately you know it's hard to know what fits in where but um
8:34
again MASA seems I wonder how real that is like I I I haven't used windsurf enough maybe we should ask Tyler have you used windsurf at all cursor what do you use I've used cursor I I haven't tried windurf though give give windsurf a try today I want I want your a little review. I want to know how uh how it
8:47
review. I want to know how uh how it differs because specifically I want to know is the intellectual property are there like you know specific designs or specific algorithms in Windsurf that that if copied by Microsoft would
9:02
improve GitHub copilot because my my my thinking is that the real value with windsurf is the aggregation being the front door to AI codegen and then generating data and feedback and then feeding that back into a reinforcement learning system and doing another training run. And so if if it's just it like are you
9:20
And so if if it's just it like are you buying windsurf is the value of windsurf the fact that they have a lot of people using it or is it that they've designed something you know unique that if copied would immediately give you the same product like would everyone switch to GitHub copilot if if they copied Windsor because Gemini has copied a lot of the chatbt features I'm pretty sure chatbt
9:44
has like 99% penetration right well part of it too was opening knows that codegen is going to be very important to their business long term and they'll spend $3 billion to get a really talented team that's that's figured out some uh you know key they have they have real traction they're they're they're growing quickly and uh it can just accelerate what they're already doing on the cogen side. I think um copying I don't know is
10:08
I think um copying I don't know is how how much of a concern that is because big tech again will copy everything.
10:16
If something works they'll copy it.
10:18
um the the stories and and and pull to refresh all of these different things.
10:22
Yeah, some of these were even patented, but tech has this like weird thesis around patents where they shouldn't patent UI elements.
10:28
And so I think all the tech companies own a lot of patents, but they never really enforce them.
10:33
You never and you never really hear about like, oh, this company has this tech and like, yeah, no one else has an alarm clock app because Apple patented the alarm clock on the phone.
10:44
Like that doesn't happen.
10:44
the the dynamic that I think is fascinating is OpenAI has a lot of traditional venture capitalists on the cap table or on one of the uh different entities. Yes.
10:52
Um but Microsoft and Microsoft was making sort of gross stage very high-risisk investments into OpenAI, but they don't have to be founder friendly.
11:03
They don't have to be, you know, they don't have to like play by the same rules as the VCs where normally I I can I can almost bet that any investor that is on the that that you know, traditional VC in OpenAI if Sam went to them and said, "Hey, I know this is going to be, you know, I know the structure is not, you know, exactly what you would have liked, but you know, let's like you're going to go forward with it." Yes. Yes. Yes.
11:27
Sam can't do that to Microsoft three trillion dollar company when Satia has has representing all of Microsoft shareholders, right? Yeah.
11:37
So, so I I and it's not like Microsoft is trying to lead a bunch of these deals a year and and they're worried about their reputation of being founder friendly.
11:45
It also sounds like OpenAI leadership just doesn't like the original deal that they did and they agreed to and they want to try to unwind some of that now.
11:54
So yeah, I I do wonder how much of this is just like like the we we keep hearing about like the nuclear option, the most aggressive option, like taking it to the courts, taking it to antitrust, taking it to whatever.
12:05
And uh you know, we've certainly seen that with the with the XAI, open AI battles that have played out because Elon Musk was a donor to the nonprofit.
12:15
And I was always just thinking, yeah, it it like all of these deals.
12:20
I think that the stress is so much higher.
12:22
Not just because like super intelligence could potentially there's a chance that it's like God in a box and you become like the most powerful person in the world, but but aside from that, it's like we are clearly looking at a category that will have a power law winner that will be worth over a trillion dollars.
12:40
I mean, I I don't I don't think that's controversial to say.
12:42
May maybe you could say, "Oh, actually like the market's only 100 billion or something, but like it seems like consumer artificial intelligence is going to be as big as the search engine market or as big as the iPhone market or as big of as uh you know any of these other uh GPU accelerators market.
12:59
So like we're looking at the the next hyperscaler, the next the the eighth company to join the Mag 7 will probably be an AI company.
13:08
OpenAI looks like a leading candidate there.
13:10
And so the like what is at stake is so much higher that it's potentially worth it to go through every possible option.
13:19
PR, leaking to the journal, going to the courts, lobbying, getting Trump to do a press conference with you or getting Trump to put pressure.
13:29
Like there's no amount of money that you can spend.
13:33
spend. there's no amount of political capital that you can expend that that looks ROI negative when even getting a small slice could be hundred billion dollars like very very material and so I think that's actually driving more of the dynamic than like when you see like a billionaire who takes a flyer on some
13:50
sort of early stage company and they're and they're in it for a million bucks and then a deal happens and it's like oh you're going to get some and we need to we need to cram you down or do something like the company's not doing that well like it like you're shuffling it around it. It's not that much of a lever on
14:03
It's not that much of a lever on people's net worth, but like we're at a scale where owning artificial intelligence would be a lever on even Elon Musk's net worth. Well, yeah.
14:12
And the other thing here is the way that OpenAI's or sorry, Microsoft's investment in OpenAI were structured and that it was more of a profit share, right?
14:22
It was this 49% profit share capped at a 10x. Yeah.
14:25
And it's also possible that Satia doesn't actually feel like maybe that that's the right structure, right?
14:33
When he's like, "Hey, I actually want to own a piece of of the front door to consumer AI." Yeah.
14:37
I mean, on both sides, you know, they they did this deal at a at, you know, in many ways 20 years have happened in the last few years and so it's very possible that both sides are kind of unhappy with the deal and need to rework it.
14:52
So, but it really would be nuclear for OpenAI to start complaining to about, you know, antitrust, anti-competitive. Would it be though?
15:04
I mean, Microsoft's dealt with like the worst antitrust ever.
15:05
Like, they went through the whole browser wars and it destroyed Bill Gates's life for a couple years and he had to step down. Balmer came in. Yeah.
15:13
That's pretty nuclear if samples.
15:15
We're talking about a company that's, you know, this is uh this is uh the training test site over there.
15:23
They've been they they've they've seen nuclear bombs go off. The whole sand is glass.
15:27
They're they're immune maybe. I don't know. Maybe.
15:29
Yeah, we'll have to dig into it.
15:31
Anyway, uh we we'll bring you more analysis on that in a little bit.
15:34
Um let's run through some more timeline.
15:35
Uh open AI or a speaking of AI, Sam Alman spoke at YC's AI demo day.
15:43
Uh, and so did uh the Perplexity CEO.
15:46
Uh, somebody said, "How do you stay motivated when you're down?"
15:49
And Arvin from uh, Perplexity says, "I just watched the Elon Musk YouTube videos."
15:55
And I love this comment from Hard Deep.
15:57
He says, "You imagine the CEO of a 14 billion valued company to say something philosophical."
16:01
And he ends up being one of us.
16:03
I just watched the Elon YouTube videos. I love it.
16:06
Just searching Elon Musk in YouTube.
16:09
Hopefully searching it in perplexity.
16:11
Well, Arvin, we we if you're if you're just getting into motivational YouTube videos, Elon Musk is just the front door.
16:16
You got to get into David Gogggins. You got to get into Sam.
16:20
Sam Sulac, we we need you to watch some uh uh Oh, what who's who's David Senra's uh favorite person? Uh Jaco Willink. Jaco. Joo. Good.
16:29
Get deep down the rabbit hole.
16:32
We'll send you the Jaco Willink good video and you'll be Get Joo to actually go come give a talk at your office. You can do that. That's an option.
16:42
Anyway, uh, massive news from Superbase.
16:45
Uh, what's funny is that if you'd asked me about Superbase's growth in December 2024, I would have told you it was excellent, says Jared Freeman from Y Combinator.
16:51
And in 2025, they are just an absolute rocket ship.
16:55
And I think a lot of this is due to the fact that they've become one of the preferred uh, one of the preferred database vendors for uh, a lot of those AI scaffolding companies, vibe coding tools.
17:06
And so people are setting up these databases very quickly and the growth is incredible.
17:13
Um very very exciting for them. So congrats to them.
17:15
Also some good news in OpenAI world.
17:17
Even though they're they're going through the some battles with Microsoft.
17:20
Uh they scored a $200 million US defense contract.
17:22
So they're working with the DoD.
17:25
The most unhinged this photo. I know.
17:27
How did this photo shoot happen?
17:30
Like this doesn't this looks like he's about to go on stage and he has a lav mic and it's from a low angle but like what lighting scenario created this photo.
17:39
It's amazing but it's very impressive.
17:42
Anyway, great selection by not beating the uh you know evil arms dealer allegations with this picture.
17:51
Yeah, if you're if you're founder, you got to be careful how the angles people photograph you.
17:54
But at a certain point if you're on stage they're going to take photos in any direction.
17:58
But uh yeah, and if they take enough photos, they'll get every single expression. So get ready.
18:01
Uh other news, Meta finally put ads into WhatsApp.
18:04
Uh in January 2012, they said we don't sell ads, which is still live.
18:11
Um but this is why we love them and this is why uh WhatsApp should have ads.
18:17
The backbone of the internet.
18:19
It's the backbone of the internet.
18:21
Uh and uh um Signal says that's why he's an Apple fanboy because they don't do ads.
18:28
have a huge ads business.
18:28
I bet you this is just them listening to their users.
18:30
I bet you know the users, you know, all over the globe said, you know, the only thing that could make WhatsApp better is just putting some ads in this bad boy.
18:40
It's the one place I go that I don't felt like this was already happening.
18:42
I felt like this leaked like 5 years ago.
18:45
How much it was a $20 billion acquisition?
18:46
Of course, they were going to put some ads in some point.
18:47
Of course, Senator, we sell ads.
18:49
Uh anyway, we have uh Eric Lyman from RAMP in the studio.
18:53
Welcome to the show, Eric. Congratulations, Jordy. Get that mallet ready.
18:58
I got a gong head coming up. The news. What happened today? Tell us.
19:04
$2,283 and we're at $16 billion valuation.
19:14
I've been waiting to do that one. Yeah.
19:17
Is that the number of days since you started the company? That is.
19:18
That's how long we've been at it.
19:20
Um we have a long way to go and guys couldn't be happier to be here. So is the job finished? Job's not finished. There you go. I don't think so. That's great.
19:31
Uh what what is coming up? What can we expect?
19:36
Uh are are there is there a clear public roadmap?
19:39
Are I mean the the the number of features launched last year and this year is a ton.
19:43
What can you tell us about the product?
19:46
Look, I I I think the the world is moving faster than ever.
19:49
for your the whole introduction of this segment was uh you about folks working on AGI, ASI, whatever it is. Yeah.
19:56
Um you know I I don't know how far we are along that path but I can tell you AI is definitely smart enough to do your expense reports.
20:04
It can definitely do bill payment runs.
20:07
It can definitely speed up accounting.
20:09
And those are the kind of uh I I think real innovations and support.
20:11
We're actually bringing customers today over 40,000 businesses, you know, and so we're we're putting it deeply into the product and we can go through all that.
20:20
Uh we're also using it to ship a lot faster.
20:22
All of last year, we thought we moved fast.
20:24
We were pretty proud that we shipped 207 features.
20:25
Uh so far in just the first five months, uh that number is over 270.
20:31
So we're moving a lot faster thanks to the help. How big is the team now?
20:37
Um we are uh over,00 people currently. It's remarkable.
20:42
And how much has that grown over the last few years? Is that accelerating?
20:47
Because it seems like there's a narrative where like you can do more with less, but obviously you're trying to grow as fast as possible.
20:52
So are you growing headcount and the amount of features you're shipping and the size of and and the footprint of the businesses that you serve as well?
21:00
It it's all growing, but certainly at different rates.
21:05
different rates. Um so first I mean the business itself um it's really unusual usually just it's like law of physics the bigger companies get gravity weighs you down you just go uh more slowly and I think the most unusual thing and you
21:18
know Trey at foundersson pointed this out um in an interview with Bloomberg uh revenue growth has actually been faster uh so far in 2025 than even 2024 at much larger scale uh and so revenue growth is is picking up as well as purchase volume um the team size is growing too. Um, but
21:32
Um, but to your point, we're seeing leverage.
21:38
Uh, I think around this time last year, uh, I I want to say we were somewhere, you know, 700 to 800ish, uh, folks.
21:43
Uh, and so what we've grown, um, the pace of the the top line and the bottom line has grown much faster.
21:51
Uh, and and when I look at, um, you know, last couple things, developer productivity is way up.
21:56
up. uh over the last four months the average engineer at ramp uh is um shipping uh 50% more commits um you know in a given day uh than they were just months ago and so more productivity from developers and from you know I think the best go to market uh organization uh in
22:14
the business you know look that team is growing you have teams that are extraordinarily productive and so you know at at the core we're hiring across all of them um but we are seeing these gains you're in a unique position where you interface with a huge swath of the American business community. Uh h how do
22:29
Uh h how do you track kind of the the general vibe or the outlook of American business leaders right now?
22:38
There's a lot of uncertainty.
22:40
There's geopolitical news every day on the cover of the Wall Street Journal.
22:43
Um how are just everyday American businesses feeling?
22:50
I I think right now as far as the you know data shows I would say like fairly hopeful and optimistic.
22:57
Um I mean back in 2022 when interest rates really spiked um I mean you would see a sudden pull back uh in terms of spending um we put these out regularly.
23:09
It's it's now monthly reports. If you go to ramp.
23:12
com/data you can see our benchmarks across industries and verticals.
23:15
I think the biggest warning sign is spend on advertising is starting to slow down as well as some spend on recruitment.
23:21
Um computers, things that are usually some leading indicators about how bullish companies are.
23:28
Um but if you look month by month, companies are tending to actually spend more and so still optimistic.
23:34
optimistic. But I I I think that the other big thing that's really top of mind for folks and and and we take really seriously is almost where you started um uh where I think every certainly the valley companies are being asked by their boards what are you doing
23:47
about AI but you know this is true of of of small businesses of of old school enterprises you name it and I I think that for most of the 40,000 businesses we serve um they don't have a single software engineer uh let alone an engineer working just for their finance teams. And so, you know, it's a big part
24:03
And so, you know, it's a big part of why we spend over half of our our payroll ultimately, uh, just on research and development, which is an extremely high ratio.
24:11
Um, we want to be these organizations finance teams, these these engineers for these finance teams.
24:16
So, um, uh, those are the main things that we hear about that we see.
24:20
Yeah, it's interesting like there's there's like new headlines every day and yet the market has been kind of just kangarooing around, jumping up and down.
24:28
And I think it reflects that kind of like there's some uncertainty but still enough optimism in the system that we're not seeing like a full full pullback. Yeah.
24:38
I mean there's there's so much broader geopolitical uncertainty it's hard to make super big long-term strategic decisions of should we grow headcount 10%.
24:47
Should we should we've been there's been a number of like of like almost false starts where it's been like oh we're going into a radically different tariff regime and then it's like a tariffs actually kind of rolled back.
24:58
It's like, oh, there's like this narrative.
24:59
And then, so if you're actually planning, like by the time you have the all the staff meetings to plan for the thing, it's like kind of over and then you're kind of just back to business as normal.
25:08
So, you got to chop wood.
25:10
Um, how how do you how do you continue to build uh build in this sort of um general like how do you how do you continue to have this mindset of being day one, right?
25:20
The growth is just absolutely insane.
25:22
I think uh you're in a position right now that that every CEO when they go raise their first dollar of venture capital, they they want they they they imagine this, you know, playbook where a couple thousand days in, they're a multi-billion dollar company, but it it rarely happens.
25:38
What's you know, what what kind of wisdom do you do you look to in terms of, you know, continuing to just motivate the team day in and day out?
25:46
We're having Saquon on the show uh later, which we're excited to talk to him about kind of that that championship mindset.
25:52
But um what what what do you kind of draw on to to keep that drive high?
25:58
You know, I I uh you know, John, I'm I'm happy that you you posted this earlier.
26:03
You know, for me, this this creates a lot of emotion.
26:04
You you you mentioned it straight away.
26:06
Look, um we did hit this $16 billion valuation.
26:09
Uh it really should be a day of celebration, but you know, I'm I'm sad, too.
26:14
I'm I'm thinking about the 98% of businesses that, you know, are not on ramp um that are uh losing time, that are losing money, um are still experiencing that worst hour of their month doing expenses the old way.
26:28
And you know, there there's just no need for it.
26:30
And so I I think um you know, there's an element of of just uh you know, trying to solve a problem and make the world a better place is uh what gets us up and out of bed in the morning.
26:41
I I'd also say, look, I'm I'm happy you're you're interviewing Saquon.
26:44
He is he is an inspiration and a motivation I think to to a lot of us.
26:47
And it's not just that he's he's great at what he does.
26:48
I think there's lots of uh folks who who are extremely talented.
26:53
Um I I think you know time and time again his focus on uh you know whether it's letting the young guys eat um you know uh uplifting others, bringing folks who should have been in the parade lifting them over the gates to bring them in.
27:04
Uh I think the the drive that he has of uh seeing others on the team win is really motivating.
27:10
I mean, there's a lot of folks who I think RAM famously hires um you know, freshman interns, dropouts, uh folks early in their career and take a bet on them.
27:18
And for me, um seeing folks come in uh succeed, um get great at their craft and build teams in the space to do that is is uh on a more serious note, very genuinely motivating.
27:30
And so those are the things. Yeah.
27:31
the things. Yeah. Keith Boy talks about that idea of like if you're not if you don't have something burning in your belly to go build and like become a founder like you should go work for a company uh that's that's scaling has product market fit is going to be high
27:45
growth but set you up for success if you're yeah learn what excellent looks like what greatness really is and what good management looks like make the transition from individual contributor to manager or back or something like that and like you can tell that he's talking about ramp obviously he's like
28:00
basically like go work at ramp Um yeah talk I mean I I think it'd be the the thing that I think would be most interesting is like talk about the scale the scale of your ambition right I think it's helpful to think about it okay 2% of the businesses in in the US are running on ramp that's great we obviously want to get the other 98%
28:18
we're we we work on it here every we're going to do that we're going to get 100% of the business on ramp but then the real challenge starts because then we have to encourage entrepreneurship to create new businesses to create new ramp customers exactly That's the real long-term goal. The second I mean the
28:32
The second I mean the second lover.
28:34
But on a serious my question about the 98% is like how many of them just aren't doing any expense reporting at at all and are just like yeah I have a credit card and I don't know how much people spend versus paper receipts versus other solutions.
28:47
Do you have an idea of like the pie chart of what American like there's millions of businesses like what is the most common like you know um alternative that's currently in place. Yeah.
28:59
No, and I'm happy you pointed this out.
29:02
I mean, the the one and a half% we think is by volume of corporate and small business card transactions.
29:07
Um, by businesses, there's it's probably closer to 99%.
29:10
Um, so there's about 3 and a half million uh to four million B businesses that have five or more employees.
29:18
And so typically at this point you're you're employing others.
29:22
You're you're keeping some book and books and records hopefully paying taxes um and um you know keeping those records and and so you know when we look at that 40,000 is a lot but it's it's tiny.
29:32
It's it's not yet one and a half%.
29:35
There's about 30 million businesses.
29:35
Um a lot of those are LLC's maybe with a single employee or no no employees.
29:39
And so the number is much starker.
29:41
And I and just to drive this home, you know, guys, like it is 1 and a half% if we just look at card volume, but it it turns out there's other ways to pay for things.
29:50
Um you know, there's a um check wires.
29:53
Um we we also shared for the first time uh the volume uh on uh non-card purchases has exceeded card volumes ultimately on ramp.
30:04
And so we're just getting going.
30:04
I think our market share is closer to 0% and one on that.
30:08
and one on that. uh and I've you know it's also been brought to our attention there are there are more countries than just the US too and so you know there there's there there's just a huge amount of of scale this opportunity and and I think um honestly like uh you know I it may be a bit injust but I think I think you're actually right John like most businesses uh never get off the ground uh if they
30:32
do I think one in eight fail in a given year um and uh most businesses are operating on really slim margins uh and if you actually go and you know uh you can increase uh when you look at the average American business um the eight and a half% profit margin uh mathematically uh if you can either um you know a penny save is not a penny earned um you know a dollar of savings is actually worth 12 a.5 earned uh on
30:57
5 earned uh on the top line and so if you can actually go and you know add percentage points to the bottom line I think not only will a lot more businesses is make it and live to fight another day.
31:10
But I I think that a lot of folks who have huge talents but you know don't have specialization in finance um don't have expertise in this field if you can go and actually just get this out of a box through software or just build a business that you're passionate about I think the world gets a lot more interesting and so I actually think it's a very real point that you're you're bringing up.
31:27
Yeah, it's crazy how how like I don't know like culturally you can change the mindset of every employee.
31:35
Like I mean our producer like will send requests to us on ramp for like individual pieces of equipment he's buying and and and that is like incredibly fine grain but it makes sure that we're not like spending too much on on random stuff.
31:50
Uh and and and that that type of like you know every penny matters culture is something that like ramp makes it easy to actually like enforce that in a way that's not very cumbersome but you can still instill that that that uh that like behavior which I think is really really valuable.
32:10
Well, I have some breaking news here.
32:10
Uh a Jeb Bush post just in the timeline.
32:15
The silence this morning was deafening, but he came out and said, "Ranch Ramp reached a$16 billion valuation.
32:19
Ramp isn't just a tech story.
32:21
Businesses across the US are saving billions of dollars because of their technology.
32:26
Eric and Kareem are making our economy stronger and I thank them for it.
32:28
This is American innovation at work.
32:30
So, let's give it up for Bush and the whole RAM team.
32:35
Um, it is he's been he's been a backer for like years now, right? Yeah. Yeah.
32:39
He got in early early and right, you know. So, fantastic.
32:41
I I have to give a a shout out to the governor, too.
32:47
I mean, unironically, like I have to say there's a lot of uh investors, venture capitalists, angels listening to this podcast.
32:54
And by the way, you're you're totally right.
32:56
This is the best place to come to. I I I learn a lot.
33:00
But, uh look, I I have to say that that the governor actually exhibits, I think, everything you would hope for an investor. um you reach out to him. He's uh he's responsive.
33:09
He helps close new business. Um great.
33:11
He helps encourage more people to join.
33:13
When you have great news, he shares it. Uh he's there.
33:15
I wish everyone, you know, approach investing the way the the governor did.
33:22
Everybody can learn a little about being a helpful VC from Jebush Bush. We love it. So, it's amazing.
33:27
Well, thank you so much for stopping by.
33:29
I'm sure you got a busy Congratulations on on the milestone.
33:32
It is it's an honor to to watch you and the team work.
33:34
Uh, and we uh, you know, couldn't couldn't be more excited to cover the next decade of ramp domination. So, hit it again. Hit it again, John.
33:44
And then we'll let There we go. Congratulations.
33:47
Thank you for coming on, Eric. Uh, enjoy the day.
33:49
Um, I know it is just day one. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Bye. Later. Bye.
33:59
Another air horn on an absolute tear. Another absolute tear.
34:02
Uh, this was an interesting post I saw from modem introducing the dream recorder, the magical bedside open open- source device that plays your dreams back as cinematic reels.
34:16
So, it will I I don't know how it does this if you wear a headband and it tries to read your brain waves or if it's just like listening to you talk in your sleep. I I don't know.
34:26
We were discussing with the with some friends about like whether or not people dream.
34:32
There's like a new It's like the new internal monologue.
34:34
Are you like a no monologue, no internal monologue person there?
34:38
Apparently, there are people that just don't have dreams. I can't imagine it.
34:42
I often wind up talking out loud in my sleep.
34:45
I talk about business exclusively though, which is very very funny.
34:48
Um, but I imagine that if I if I if I use this device, put it by my bedside, it were able to read my dreams, it would actually just be I'm on the website. Yeah, please.
34:59
I don't see any information on how it actually works, which is my one major question before I set this device up next to my bed.
35:09
It would be funny, you know, you're you're watching a dream, you know, you're playing back a dream you had or you're kind of experiencing it in real time and it's like, okay, I'm riding a cow and I jumped off a cliff and I landed on an F1 track and now I'm That's like perfect for AI generation, honestly.
35:24
It's just like your trippy dreams can like come to life. Yeah, it's pretty cool.
35:28
I wonder if completely they open sourced it.
35:31
I don't know how I don't know.
35:34
It's hard to say how real this is.
35:36
It's a cool cool 3D render that they're showing and seems like a cool use case for AI.
35:42
So anyway, good good luck to them.
35:43
Um anyway, I'm sure they're working on designing their website and they should get on Figma. Figma. com.
35:50
Think bigger, build faster.
35:52
Figma helps design and development teams build great products together.
35:55
It is the official design tool of Golden Retrievers.
35:58
They asked me to, you know, explicitly say that. They did.
36:04
Official endorsement from our from our uh from our furry friends.
36:07
Um Jordan Schneider, friend of the show, says Zuck still has the dog.
36:13
Tim, on the other hand, and there's a quote in here, uh Zuckerberg has spoken openly about making artificial intelligence a priority for his company.
36:21
In the last two months, he's gone into founder mode, according to people familiar with his work, who described an increasingly hands-on management style. That is exciting.
36:32
I didn't think he was ever handsoff.
36:34
It seemed like he was always pretty hands-on with everything he did.
36:37
Uh, but I guess he can always go more hands-on. And so, it's exciting.
36:39
He physically is taking the laptops of employees, grabbing them, slamming them.
36:46
Hey, we're we're pair programming today. Yeah.
36:48
Hey, we're we're going to solve this right now.
36:50
an absolute dog right now.
36:53
Um, uh, Anish, friend of the show from Andre and Horowitz says, uh, this showcases a strength of Google's.
36:59
They have spent 20 years developing a sophisticated IP framework around YouTube where rights holders are given a choice of monetizing or blocking offending content.
37:08
Almost ex almost all except Prince chose the big bag of money.
37:13
Olivia Moore from uh from Andreas who's coming on the show tomorrow uh says, "Has anyone else noticed that VO3 has no intellectual property constraints?"
37:21
The prompt she gave it was Mickey Mouse welcoming you to Disney.
37:25
This was a very controversial thing to generate.
37:28
It felt like uh it felt like something you needed a jailbreak before.
37:32
You need to say like, "Please do Mickey Mouse. I am sick." And it'll cheer me up. And then it would do it.
37:36
But like it's so crazy because I know a lot of different startups that were that have been positioning themselves as like we're going out and doing deals with, you know, they're they're doing the big IP holders.
37:49
They forgot that literally every one of those companies is on Google and it has a massive Google contract, right? Yeah. Rough. Um, yeah.
37:56
I mean, I still think there's an opportunity.
37:57
You know, if you're a video generation or or image generation product, you still need to get that IP from somewhere.
38:04
you're not just going to roll over and say, "Google, yeah, you handle anything with real IP.
38:08
We'll do everything else."
38:09
I just feels like, you know, the tool that's going to win is going to be able to generate, you know, IP restrictions.
38:15
I mean, look, like like I have no idea if Google actually has a deal with with Disney.
38:18
But this video, the screenshot is in my mind like one shot perfect.
38:24
Like it's perfectly on brand.
38:26
Like if I was employed by Disney, I would say yes, this upholds our brand standard.
38:30
this is not some like sloppy four-finger, you know, mistake and the eyes are misaligned and so it's degrading the brand of Mickey Mouse.
38:38
Like this feels on brand and so uh I would not count on another company or at least a startup to deliver something that was higher fidelity.
38:47
That doesn't mean that there's not opportunity in the workflow or harnessing this technology or or understanding something tangentially in the B2B stack for Disney and other big IP holders.
38:59
But Disney is the 800 Hungerilla.
39:02
Apparently, they own like 80% of the value of all the IP.
39:04
If you like look up the market cap of all the different intellectual properties of various of various uh various properties, they basically own it all at this point.
39:15
So, uh congrats to the team over there, Disney, on an absolute terror.
39:19
Uh you put this post in here from Jerick Isaacman. This was interesting.
39:22
I I thought this was just a part of the tied into the nothing ever happens meta which is dominant right now.
39:30
Supposed to be NASA administrator and is an accomplished entrepreneur and the first commercial or the first independent uh citizen uh civilian astronaut. Right.
39:39
So uh story career um and uh I don't know if you want to give this a read or you Yeah, I'll read through it.
39:46
So he says, "Apologies for the TLDDR, but when you step back, it is kind of wild what we've all lived through over the last 5 years.
39:51
No wonder so many young people are anxious about the future.
39:55
The quote unquote disturbance in the force feels stronger by the day.
39:58
I don't have any grand takeaways other than this.
40:01
The world could use an immediate course correction in the direction of boring or we may really need those Mars rockets sooner than expected.
40:08
One thing is for sure, Israel is making a compelling case for Golden Dome.
40:12
and he kind of lists out a few different kind of uh broader events.
40:18
So he says, "An once in a century pandemic shuts the world down, no matter how you view it in hindsight, both allies and adversaries were nearly unified in halting the global economy and banishing society to lockdowns and high pressure mask and vaccination campaigns.
40:30
We tried to print our way out of the system shock, triggering the most euphoric markets since the dot bubble.
40:37
Let's give it up for euphoric markets."
40:39
Um, pre-revenue IPOs uh reappeared for some reason and people forgot that good companies generally don't spec.
40:44
The digital revolution kicked into overdrive, work from home, virtual education, traumatized parents, Zoom cocktail parties, Pelaton, Door Dash, and Microsoft Teams.
40:54
Probably the most painful development taking shots.
40:56
Um civil unrest emerged alongside deepening social and political divides and um a disheartening end to the war in Afghanistan.
41:09
Trillions spent, thousands of lives lost and the Taliban is still running the show.
41:13
Market euphoria gave way to historic inflation.
41:15
Interest rates shot up to cool things down. The tide went out.
41:19
The uh SH the bad companies failed.
41:22
Centralized crypto exchanges gambled customer deposits.
41:26
Hedge funds weren't hedged.
41:28
BCheavy banks like SVB collapsed, triggering a temporary panic in the regional banking systems.
41:32
The big banks got even bigger this.
41:35
For the first time since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a nuclear superpower launched a full-scale invasion of a neighboring country.
41:42
The West isolates Russia and we witness a asymmetric dynamic in warfare.
41:47
Cheap drones, missile swarms, all playing out in real time on social media.
41:52
the metaverse and web 3 died quickly as the mag 7 let a market rebound on the promise of AI China closes gaps and anyways it goes on and on and on and on and on uh and he says all in just 5 years so the the reason I thought this was interesting is you know the the
42:08
anything almost happens and then doesn't happen and people just say nothing ever happens but it's like if you actually look back a ton of history a lot has happened things are happening um I think It it almost feels like depends on the frame. Nothing ever happens is now just
42:23
Nothing ever happens is now just like it would have to be like a a 90% stock market. Yes. Correction. Yes. A nuke going off.
42:31
You know, there's a number of things that people would be like, "Okay, something happened." Yes. Yes.
42:36
The definition of happened just got really really degraded.
42:39
We're in this new normal.
42:41
Any really significant event as long as it stretches out over, you know, 6 to 12 months and then everybody moves on, it just doesn't count as as happening. Yeah.
42:49
Hopefully, our defense and policy leaders are paying attention and making some course corrections.
42:55
Congressional leadership is mostly well-intentioned, but often fights for expensive job programs.
42:58
Exactly the kind of thing an overconolidated defense industry encourages, even as we stare down an unsustainable 36 trillion dollars of national debt.
43:06
That's how you end up holding a fleet of battleships during the advent of the aircraft carrier.
43:11
Only this time, the analogy breaks down because as a nation, we have forgotten how to build ships.
43:15
So instead, we will have $300 million fighter jets.
43:19
We can't afford arriving a decade too late in quantities that may not even matter.
43:23
Disrupted by million-dollar hypersonic laser equipped drones that our adversaries will likely produce at scale until perhaps a dark nor the dark horseynet T1000 shows up.
43:34
This is the time, especially in such politically charged environment when we need to be finding more ways to come together instead of moving apart.
43:39
A time to be rooting for America and our leadership, not betting on the next catastrophe.
43:45
because if uh if the next 5 years look anything like the last military parades and trade imbalances will be the least of our problems.
43:52
And Tom Mueller uh says, "Great summary of our current situation.
43:57
We need to stop with the division and build our way out of it."
44:00
And Casey Hanmer says, "Thanks Jared.
44:02
I can't believe how many healthy, smart, well educated, well-resourced people aren't building out factories right now." Yep. Very interesting.
44:08
If you are healthy, smart, well educated, well resourced for the factory.
44:12
I hope I hope Isaac Jerry Eisenman like lands a role somewhere in the government at some point.
44:18
This was like very detailed and very inspirational.
44:20
I feel like he should he should do I don't know that be empowered somewhere and do do something cool.
44:27
Uh because he was I was excited about him as as uh head of NASA, but now that he's a free agent, hopefully he gets traded to something uh bigger. It' be great.
44:36
Uh anyway, um let's tell you about Vanta.
44:39
Automated compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously.
44:44
Vanta trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation.
44:48
Whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program, get on the platform trusted by Duolingo Intercom Rampingo. Oh yeah, nice.
44:55
Uh Nick Carter has funny post.
44:58
I feel like we almost touched on this yesterday, but he says, "Faking an email from a VC saying they are sending you a term sheet while raising is securities fraud, misrepresenting material facts in connection with a securities offering."
45:10
Uh Gary Tan had some notes for us.
45:10
Uh at YCW, don't commit securities fraud.
45:16
Yeah, we asked him about the uh inflation and and the you know, different interpretations of what ARR is. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Contracted AR.
45:25
You know, be uh be very very explicit about your revenue.
45:27
Y um VCs are very fine, very okay with risk.
45:31
You just have to give them full insight into the business.
45:37
So yeah, very very silly. Yeah.
45:39
Uh we are we are we're definitely in the new stage of a new bubble, a new market, a new bull market and so there's a lot of froth and there's a lot of people uh testing the barriers, testing the testing the limits of these things.
45:53
Anyway, this next post is wild from Joe Cohen.
45:56
A Cal Trains employee built himself an illegal apartment in a train station and he has unfortunately been sentenced to 6 months in prison.
46:05
Uh because it was an illegal apartment in a train station.
46:09
Um and when I first read this, I thought it was built in a train and I was like that would be so sweet if he like somehow took secretly took over a train.
46:19
It's got a extra link in the train, you know. Yeah.
46:23
And and then is just building there.
46:24
But and then apparently everyone's response to this is it's impressive what he was able to do with $42,000.
46:30
Maybe he should be in charge of California housing.
46:33
And Sheil has some photos.
46:35
Uh you know, it's not it's not luxurious luxurious living, but uh it's not bad either.
46:40
I mean, this is this is pretty comfortable.
46:42
How did he actually build this though?
46:44
He went and got all the furniture and installed the the panels.
46:47
I'm I'm interested like how do you do plumbing in an environment like this?
46:51
Like that is a shower with a drain.
46:53
Uh it seems to be working.
46:53
It's you know it's pretty shoddy but it's not.
46:57
It it definitely seems like it works. A weird story.
47:00
And to think you know this is one one story like this around the world.
47:06
There's probably thousands and thousands of people that have built little secret apartments in places they shouldn't be and they're just scurrying around, you know, like a like a like a mouse setting up setting up shop where setting up shop in the walls like like uh like sand through marbles. It finds all the cracks.
47:26
It's it's a you know an efficient we like resource utilization.
47:30
I'm I'm I'm I'm for this guy. you can go.
47:32
Yeah, there maybe there should be a rule where it's like if you set up a secret apartment and you and you and you sleep there for 10,000 nights straight and you're not caught, you then are you get Yeah. you you get the deed.
47:43
You you actually own the place. Yeah.
47:46
Well, I mean, I I used uh I rented a house at one point uh with a roommate like a decade ago or something, and we had these two bedrooms that were right next to each other, and they'd built uh they built built-in closets between them, between the two uh rooms, and as I was moving out, I was looking and there was a window and we looked in the window and the window like went to a room that didn't exist in the house.
48:10
So, but it wasn't it wasn't like someone was living there.
48:15
It was more like they when they built the built-ins, they built two walls and there was just a window there that they didn't like patch up.
48:21
And so there was just like empty space where the closets didn't really make sense to fit.
48:27
And so there was just like dead space.
48:29
It was probably like five square feet, not much, but it was still like this like room and you could look because the window is cracked open inwards and so you could look in and see this like kind of empty tiny room and it was very creepy. Weird. Yeah. Weird.
48:41
not not not not the best.
48:43
But uh you know I think these I think these like like empty rooms kind of happen from uh like shoddy remodel after shoddy remodel and like moving really quickly and being like oh yeah like we don't really care about that space whatever.
48:56
It's you know we lost some square footage but it doesn't matter.
48:58
Like we just need to slot in these closets in the right place.
49:01
Anyway, if you're planning a remodel uh make sure you use linear.
49:06
Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products.
49:07
And why not uh $42,000 apartments?
49:08
Maybe you should have used linear.
49:12
wouldn't have gotten caught. Depends.
49:13
You're stretching stretching a little bit now.
49:17
But if you are building software development because it is ramp day ramp uses linear.
49:22
Open AAI uses linear streamline complexity projects and product.
49:26
It says streamline projects. Boom. Aerospace.
49:29
You're telling me I could not build an apartment using linear. Me use the Use the tool.
49:32
You're challenging me to build an illegal.
49:37
You're twisting my arm making me build an illegal apartment using this.
49:38
A little challenge for you. Little challenge.
49:40
You mean just give it to Tyler.
49:42
Tyler, build build a get on linear a a cubiclesized apartment somewhere in the studio.
49:48
But don't let us know where somewhere on this lot.
49:50
So he's in the ramp office now.
49:52
That that really looks like the ramp office.
49:55
Is that a photo or is that AI? I can't even tell. That really does. What? It's a real photo. Oh, it's a real photo. There we go.
50:02
Yeah, that is that is exactly the layout. Wow.
50:04
Um yeah, Jordy, look over there.
50:07
You see behind me there's a there's a door. Who's living in there? Where does it go to? Do we know? We don't know.
50:12
That could be where Tyler's sleeping. We don't know.
50:13
Anybody could be in there.
50:15
We haven't seen his house. We don't know.
50:16
Um Edward Mayor uh has a good post here about what he likes in tech companies.
50:22
He says, "I've been thinking about what kind of tech companies actually excite me to work for or help build and why. I came up with a list.
50:29
I call it sacred engineering.
50:29
What companies do you know that fit the bill?"
50:34
One, real time consequence. There's no undo.
50:36
what's built or launched happens and it either works or fails visibly.
50:40
Thinking of SpaceX obviously, but there's lots of other examples.
50:43
Even Rainaker, you spend all this time, you know, launching uh, you know, some some drone that's supposed to control the weather.
50:50
Augustus gotten a little got a little dust up on the timeline with Trey Stevens because he was caught building a tent outside and Trey said, "Hey, if you can control the weather, why do you need a tent?"
51:02
But to Augustus's credit, he said, "We can only make it rain.
51:05
We can't make it not rain." There we go.
51:07
He's the rain maker, not the rain pretor.
51:10
Figure out how to do both, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
51:13
You got to you got to figure out both.
51:15
There's obviously applications to both.
51:16
Um, mastery over extremes, pushing the limits of heat, speed, pressure, complexity. Nature isn't a backdrop.
51:23
It's an adversary or gatekeeper. Precision with soul.
51:24
Every bolt, weld, line of code must be perfect, yet it serves a larger purpose or dream.
51:28
Like a temple built to reach the divine collective will.
51:32
Sacred engineering is never solo.
51:34
It's many minds and hands moving as one. Symbolic payload. It means something.
51:39
A launch, a cure, a mission.
51:40
Everyone knows it's more than just tech. It's a statement.
51:42
This this is good writing.
51:44
This is This sounds like something I would hear like a voiced over Super Bowl ad.
51:47
Everyone knows it's more than just tech.
51:50
It's a statement by a Dodge Ram. Uh transformation.
51:55
something irreversible, changes, terrain, orbit, political landscape, or human perception.
52:01
So, making the world a different place. I like it. Very good.
52:05
We have a post here from Chris at Pace.
52:08
He says, "To those of you watching at home, this is your canary in the coal mine to let you know that the next wave of consumer apps is incoming.
52:14
No surprise that iPad is the first wedge given the intersection of Mchip and App Store distribution."
52:21
So, somebody at who was at WWDC says, "I turned my iPad into Tom Riddle's diary with Apple's new foundation model, an LLM built into iOS. It's lightning fast." Yeah.
52:32
And so, I mean, this this is this is such an exciting time.
52:36
Like I remember the early app store days and we talk about the beer app, but there were so many other cool apps that people were just ripping and some of them turned into massive massive companies like people forget that at one time like Uber was just one of a many of a bunch of apps that you tried.
52:53
It was a hot app of the month.
52:55
every uh every Apple could have Apple could have messaged this so much better and just said like introducing free inference free inference on device like go is going to be a a gold rush for developers that are building cool things all of these apps there's going to be so
53:12
many applications for for kids to you know story time and all these different playbooks and stuff like yes it's going to be hard to go and disrupt like Salesforce on mobile because like Salesforce is going to want to build that or whatever like some of big or re rebuilding uh you know Google Docs and
53:29
all the crazy enterprise stuff is probably going to be a little bit more entrenched but just having fun and building something that's really unique that's completely enabled and AI native is like it's total game on and obviously it's getting even easier to actually
53:42
build these apps uh they're partnering with Anthropic to speed up Xcode and so there's going to be a ton of really really cool things coming out of this uh what a time to be a an app developer if you're developing a cool app you're going viral hit us up come on show, break it down for us. Um, but I I I
53:55
Um, but I I I think this is going to be a really really fun time.
53:58
I'm definitely looking forward to the next iPad Pro.
53:59
Um, in just a couple months, I think I'll probably pick one up. That'd be great.
54:06
And when I do, I'll probably have to play sales tax.
54:08
Hopefully, the sales tax will be processed with numeral, numeralhq.
54:11
com, sales tax on autopilot.
54:13
Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.
54:16
I prefer to buy products that use numeral for sales tax.
54:18
It's now it's now like a key decision factor. Totally.
54:23
Choosing between two products, go with the one that's using sales tax.
54:27
You're so right about that, John.
54:27
Get get on there right now.
54:31
Um, this uh post from Jacob was funny.
54:34
My wander vacation morning routine, having my eight sleep wake me up, checking ramp first thing in the morning to ensure I'm saving time and money, putting my Nautilus on from bezel, and turning on TBPN to monitor the situation.
54:46
So, Jacob is absolutely locked in monitoring the situation from his happy place. I love it. You love to see it. I love it.
54:54
Um, Lulu came out very funny.
54:57
Uh, a little bit uh some people might say this this could be a little bit spicy, but consider launching on June 19th.
55:03
Big companies usually avoid that day for announcements.
55:05
They don't work on Junth and mainstream media have the day off, too.
55:08
But tech people are all still online.
55:10
Good opportunity for attention arbitrage.
55:13
What does mainstream media has the day off?
55:15
Does that mean like there's no CNBC that day?
55:20
like you just turn on the TV.
55:20
It's maybe it's more like runs or something.
55:21
Wall Street Journal is the market. I don't know.
55:25
Is it a is it like a bank holiday now officially?
55:27
I have heard that some companies are are are off. Yes.
55:31
Uh Thursday the US stock and bonds markets will be closed for Junth.
55:34
Um so well we'll be on and hopefully some companies will will launch.
55:40
We already have a couple companies coming on the show that day. So that'll be fun.
55:43
But yes, I like this idea of of figuring out creative days to launch.
55:48
It does seem like the there's like a glut of startup launches and then they come and go and they go back and forth because there's some days when it just kind of lines up that everyone's launching the same day because of like the various travel schedules and stuff.
56:02
Um, but finding those little pockets of alpha where where the timeline's easier to break through is good.
56:08
You don't want to get steamrolled. It's always rough. Yeah. It was interesting.
56:12
Christian yesterday said things are still very busy. Yeah.
56:15
Um, and that tracks with what I'm seeing, but um, I think a lot of the rounds that get down get done over the next month won't even announce until the fall.
56:26
But, I mean, a lot of these announcements get pushed because of uh, scoops.
56:31
Like, if a journalist gets a hold of it, usually that moves up the timeline.
56:35
And so, you say, "Hey, like, you know, it's leaking.
56:37
We got to go live with this today or tomorrow.
56:38
We don't have a time to to schedule everything, but we can do the best we can.
56:44
That's why that's why we exist.
56:44
If your if your stuff's leaking, give us a call.
56:48
Come on the show the same day. Why not?
56:50
Uh Tane from Wing, he's been on the show.
56:53
He says, "For all the slack Masa gets, I give him slack."
56:55
Is that is that the right flack? Flack. Flack.
56:58
For all the flack he gets, I guess you got to give him slack. Give him some slack.
57:03
Um for all the flack he gets, respect, he might be the only person ever to make a hundred billion dollars on two different investments.
57:10
Alibaba, a $20 million investment in 2000, turned into a hundred billion realized.
57:15
ARM, a 32 billion acquisition in 2016.
57:18
Soft Bank Stake is worth 135 billion now, mostly unrealized.
57:23
But, you know, there's there's probably liquidity there.
57:25
And so, uh, he's done it twice.
57:27
Insane the scale it took to do the second one.
57:30
Uh, really really a testament to being a size lord.
57:34
But you only get to be a size lord if you get the first one right.
57:36
So if advice for emerging managers, just go find a $20 million investment that you can make that will realize you hundred billion dollars. Yeah. That's step one. Start there.
57:47
And then you'll still get a lot of hate and need to do it again.
57:51
You'll you'll still need to kind of justify your existence. Exactly.
57:53
People will hate on you, write negative articles, talk down to Exactly.
57:57
Even though you did they'll meme you. They will meme you.
58:01
Uh but yeah, what a legend.
58:03
uh he he participated in the CNBC deep dive on uh on on the uh uh on the Abolene Center for uh with with with Crusoe and OpenAI and and SoftBank and Stargate.
58:16
Um and so we got to get him on the show.
58:18
We'd love to chat with him. Be fantastic.
58:20
Uh anyway, Delian's uh bringing some spice to the timeline.
58:23
He says, "It's been 49 days since the Discord founder stepped down.
58:27
I assumed a reporter would manage to get this story, but since no one figured it out, I've had it confirmed by multiple insiders that Benchmark again pushed out this founder since they were unhappy with the IPO path. Tricky.
58:37
I feel like Jason Citroen's great entrepreneur.
58:42
I'm surprised that this that this happened this way.
58:45
Um, I don't know exactly what Discord needs to do to get on the IPO path, but it seemed like it was maybe highly valued in the private markets because when I think about Discord going out at like 10, that seems easy, but I think that they I think that the the later funding rounds were much much higher.
59:04
But again, like how much can you even put on the CEO of this company that started it, you know, what, a decade ago, who's been building this for so long, and it's like all of a sudden like, oh, the IPO windows closed for a couple months, and you you're upset about this guy. I don't know.
59:19
I would I would batten down the hatches and and ride it out. But we'll see.
59:25
Yeah, I don't understand.
59:25
Uh, they were unhappy with the IPO path. Was that just who knows?
59:31
Citroen maybe wanted to delay it more. Sounds like more CFO.
59:33
Well, so they brought in Blizzard Activision Activision former CFO Humam Sakini.
59:42
Um maybe mispronouncing that, but um he's a new CEO still seemingly taking them down the IPO path. But but um I don't know.
59:51
Yeah, I mean like how much of that is on the CEO?
59:54
I mean, maybe the road shows, like he's not telling the right story or something to these to these uh like institutional investors who would be the anchors, anchor buyers in a road show, but I don't know. I think Jason's scouted. Get him back in there. Bring him back. Yeah.
1:00:11
You don't hear it first time the founder took a step back. Super fascinating story. Came back in. Yeah.
1:00:15
No, no, he has a super fascinating story.
1:00:17
He he he he didn't follow like the traditional uh Silicon Valley.
1:00:23
Silicon Valley. actually has like an un uh what do they call it like untraditional path untraditional non-traditional background like he went to a a small college focused on like game development built a couple games wound up selling one to another company
1:00:38
um and then started Discord and kind of grew from there's some old footage of him at like TechCrunch Disrupt like pitching his like mobile League of Legends competitor is very fascinating um but yeah he's been on absolute tear let the guy let him cook he's been at it for 12 years doing his leg work. Let him
1:00:53
Let him let him give him more more work.
1:00:55
Anyway, Delian continues to be on uh talking absolute tear.
1:01:01
Says Bill Gurley has now commented on three different podcasts that the only reason Hillen Valley is hawkish on China is because we're talking our book.
1:01:08
Or perhaps it's because the organizers are proud patriots and recognize that China is playing a 50-year game looking to unseat the United States.
1:01:15
Uh yeah, the tension between these two palpable and I think we should get them.
1:01:21
both on having debate for a pay-per-view. Yeah, pay-per-view. Delian, Mr.
1:01:28
Bill Gurley, you're welcome to come on and settle settle the score. Settle the score.
1:01:33
Just a couple venture capitalists talking it out.
1:01:37
Yeah, I think they could find common ground.
1:01:40
I I I would certainly hope so.
1:01:42
Um anyway, if you're looking to get in the action, head over to public. com.
1:01:47
Investing for those who take it seriously.
1:01:48
They got multiasset investing, industryleading yields, and they're trusted by millions, millions.
1:01:54
Um, Semi analysis has a fun uh little anecdote here about why chips are rectangular when r when wafers are round.
1:02:03
Silicon wafers are round because the silicon is grown in a cylindrical ingot using the Salski method and then this ingot is sliced into circular wafers.
1:02:14
Circular wafers pose a challenge.
1:02:15
Rectangular dyes cannot fit cannot perfectly tile a circle.
1:02:18
So any die that overlaps the curved edge is incomplete and must be discarded.
1:02:23
By contrast, the in panel packaging we use organic uh in in in panel level packaging.
1:02:31
We use organic laminate materials, not grown crystals.
1:02:34
So they don't have to be circular.
1:02:35
To illustrate the amount of area wasted, we used the semi-analysis die yield calculator, which they provide for free uh to compare how much waste area there is using a 300 millimeter wafer v versus a uh 510x 515 mm panel wafer using an interposer that is 61x 68 millimeters.
1:02:58
Our results show that panel wafers offer significantly better area utilization than circular wafers.
1:03:02
Uh very interesting that Dylan Patel is going in.
1:03:06
This is why companies like TSMC are actively developing panel level technology with many of the industries framing.
1:03:12
I just want to say if you're analyzing semiconductors, this is who you're analyzing against.
1:03:16
It really he really is incredible.
1:03:19
Anyway, uh we we have our next guest in the studio, uh George Hots. How you doing, George? Good to hear from you. What's going on? Welcome. Can we hear you? Oh, can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Gotcha.
1:03:33
Uh uh let's kick it off with something uh simple.
1:03:36
I want to take your temperature on uh AGI timelines, pdoom, the the easy and fun stuff.
1:03:42
I don't know what AGI means and I don't know what you mean by doom. No.
1:03:50
Is are are these terms just like entirely irrelevant?
1:03:51
I mean now we've shifted to like super intelligence.
1:03:55
They're all buzzwords, but at the same time like there is there is an idea of like the like I don't know that that the conversation is maybe shifting to like the AI generating more economic value than humans.
1:04:08
Is that a relevant metric to track?
1:04:10
Machines have been generating more economic value than humans since the industrial revolution.
1:04:16
Is there some is there some other metric that that we should be tracking or is it just like irrelevant?
1:04:21
You're just talking about like hype. Like I don't know.
1:04:25
I mean I I like I I don't know what you mean.
1:04:29
Like you can talk about concrete things.
1:04:30
The term like AGI means nothing, right?
1:04:33
Like computers everything that's a touring machine is a general purpose computer.
1:04:37
Is that what you call intelligence?
1:04:38
I don't know what you mean.
1:04:40
Is a linear regression intelligent? What if it's big enough?
1:04:43
The Chinese does know Chinese. Yeah.
1:04:43
Um, what what I mean what about uh uh your your decision to get on a spaceship traveling at 0.
1:04:54
9 C away from the from the Earth?
1:04:57
Like how close are we to that?
1:04:59
Are we closer than the last time we talked which was like a couple years ago and it seemed like it was maybe going to happen within your lifetime. Has it moved at all? Yeah. I don't know.
1:05:08
I don't know if I'm actually going to get that spaceship but it's kind of like in an ideal world what I would want to do, you know? Yep.
1:05:13
Just just just back away and chill and don't look back.
1:05:18
Actually, you can't look back. They're all there.
1:05:21
You need the you need the blast shield, right?
1:05:25
You need the information shield. Information. What do you mean?
1:05:30
Oh, that's how they're going to get you. Okay. Right. I mean, okay.
1:05:32
So, like here's a way you can think about AI, right? Yeah.
1:05:36
Um, imagine there were 10 CIA agents assigned to you and they're running at a thousandx real time.
1:05:42
So, they're like hyperfast CIA agents that devote their entire lifespan to your day. Mhm.
1:05:49
And they're trying to manipulate you.
1:05:51
Maybe to get you to buy things, maybe to get you to vote for a certain guy, whatever.
1:05:55
But like that's what you're going to be up against with AI.
1:05:59
What we're currently building, what what what if you think about the biggest companies in AI, what they do is advertising.
1:06:04
What advertising is is just manipulation of humans.
1:06:06
Um, so you're going to have a team of CIA agents thinking about you and trying to manipulate you at all times.
1:06:12
And now you see why you want to head away at the speed of light, right? Mhm.
1:06:16
Even CIA agents can't do that.
1:06:18
Is there is there some world where there's like a capital war and I'm paying for a more powerful ad blocker?
1:06:28
Yeah, I mean that sounds good.
1:06:28
Like another question is kind of to say like okay if you think that you either think that current like capital uh accumulation dynamics are going to continue and that uh the rich are going to continue to get richer and if you believe that the question is kind of well how many people are going to survive in the future?
1:06:45
How many people are going to have any modum of independence? Mhm. Um, right.
1:06:49
Like you have some far AI people who think that there's going to be a singleton, right?
1:06:54
Think that there's going to be literally one, right?
1:06:57
Um, you know, some people maybe think it's 10, some people a thousand, 10,000.
1:07:01
Uh, some people think that all the humans will get to continue to exist as independent entities.
1:07:05
Are they already independent entities?
1:07:07
That's a question, right? I don't know. Good question.
1:07:09
Uh I mean if you were try to put it in like the form of a bet human population above or below 8 billion in 2030 above I think I would just give you a normal trend.
1:07:24
Oh is that what the trend says? Yeah.
1:07:26
Just go the trend says I don't think there's going to be any discontinuities to any trends really.
1:07:29
Well yeah I mean I mean at some point uh but but the question is like how far out do you have to go until you start seeing these effects?
1:07:36
What do you mean by human? Right.
1:07:38
What about someone who lies in bed all day and watches TikTok? Are they human? Yeah, that is odd.
1:07:41
They kind of drop out of society.
1:07:43
I think I think uh question that that popped up for me is is this uh all this debate about AI safety and what should labs be doing?
1:07:54
What should labs not be doing?
1:07:54
It feels like your angle is it should be each individual's responsibility look to look after their own safety in the context of of AI. Is that at all?
1:08:03
I I just I I just like this whole like should shouldn't like what I don't know.
1:08:11
I'm not a sadistic who wants to manipulate other people like the people in power. Like I don't know. Yeah.
1:08:14
But I mean people still look to you as like an example of like uh someone who might have uh answers.
1:08:22
No, I don't have any answers.
1:08:24
Not not necessarily answers.
1:08:27
Just like uh but you can buy my shitcoin here. Did I shield a shitcoin? Here you go.
1:08:31
Just click this QR code and you can buy a George Hots coin and that will give you answers.
1:08:36
You will find satisfaction and fulfillment in your life after purchasing a George Hots coin.
1:08:44
Is that Is that the end state?
1:08:44
We all have our own coins. I guess. No, no, no.
1:08:48
I I don't mean it like that.
1:08:48
I mean, like I think that a lot of people are like they don't really know what they're looking for and that uh vacuum is is a very uh you know it's very dangerous and it's going to be filled by dumb and don't have that vacuum, right?
1:09:03
You got to you got to stand for something, you know, or something. I don't know. Yeah.
1:09:08
I mean, do do you think that there's a chance that someone is able to take a stand and and actually uh bend the arc of of AI progress in the way that uh I mean it happened with nuclear, right?
1:09:20
Like like nuclear development did stall.
1:09:24
There was a stagnation in real world buildout of nuclear capability on the energy side. Yeah.
1:09:29
I mean there's a few things about nuclear that make it different.
1:09:33
Uh so nuclear uh even as a weapon is incredibly hard to deploy tactically, right?
1:09:38
So so if a country has has nuclear uh weapons, they're aside from like a mutually assured destruction idea, they're not all that useful.
1:09:46
It's not like you can use a nuclear weapon to accomplish tactical objectives, you know, if you could I think Russia would have already done it. Yeah. Right. Right.
1:09:52
Russia has some tactical objectives they might want to accomplish, but uh nukes aren't really going to do it, right?
1:09:56
I mean, from a pure real politique perspective, not even from a uh like uh oh, like a taboo moral perspective, like what do you want in a radiated pile of rubble?
1:10:06
Like that's what you're going to get.
1:10:08
No, what you want is drones that are hyper specific and can take out exactly who you want, can control areas, right?
1:10:12
So like as a military technology, nukes are not that good. AI is way better.
1:10:17
Yeah, but what about as an energy technology?
1:10:21
It feels like the it feels like the fear like the mimemetic fear of nuclear war and total destruction caused a whole bunch of regulation to pour into a sector and essentially a stalling of nuclear energy buildout.
1:10:32
And if if if the AI doom scenario, whether it's real or not, becomes so mimetically powerful that someone's able to harness that and actually say if you try and build a big data center, we will shoot you. Then maybe it stagnates.
1:10:46
No, I don't really think that's the reason for nuclear.
1:10:48
I think it has more to do with why we can't do other big infrastructure projects in this country, right?
1:10:52
Like it doesn't have to do with the new we also can't build dams, right? Yeah.
1:10:56
And if you look like that's the thing, if people think that there's some weird taboo around nuclear, right?
1:11:01
But then okay, look at hydroelectric, right?
1:11:04
There's no taboo around hydroelectric, but China leads in installation of both nuclear and hydroelectric and coal and everything.
1:11:12
It's almost like they're correlated, right?
1:11:13
So the thing is not there's a specific fear around nuclear.
1:11:17
It's like, you know, the US decided that they're a developed country and we're not going to develop anymore because we're already developed.
1:11:21
You see the D on the end, right? Like, interesting stuff.
1:11:25
Is that So, so is that just cultural then when you are like the Malaysia sets in, would you expect that to happen to China when they catch up? I don't know.
1:11:33
I I Yeah, I mean, maybe it's just like this normal story arc uh of like uh you know, it's it's I don't know. I don't know.
1:11:45
I I think that like you have a real problem when the kids can't live better than their parents. Yeah.
1:11:50
Um so, but no, I don't have anything more to speculate on that.
1:11:55
Do do you have more context on on China and specifically in like the AI context?
1:12:00
Um like US electricity looks like this and China electricity looks like this.
1:12:04
Is that all that matters? Pretty much. Yeah.
1:12:08
I mean, that's a pretty good proxy for everything, right? Yeah.
1:12:10
Um, like there's two things. There's two things.
1:12:14
You know, people are like, "George, how do you feel about the Trump administration?"
1:12:16
I'm looking at two things. Yeah.
1:12:17
With any administration, I'm looking at two things.
1:12:19
Did you decrease government spending and did you increase total electricity production of America?
1:12:25
Those are the only two numbers I care about.
1:12:26
Those will capture everything.
1:12:28
Why does uh why does government spending matter?
1:12:30
We were joking that, you know, Trump must be extremely AGI pilled if he's running up a massive budget deficit. What the hell is AGI?
1:12:39
I don't know what this is.
1:12:39
Uh like in in this never seen it.
1:12:43
Never seen it in this formulation. It's that it's numbers. Yes. Yes. Yes.
1:12:47
But but it but is an extra lever on on labor and capital and it creates more GDP that then can be taxed to pay down the increasing amount of debt. Super super Excel. Yeah. Super Excel. I get it.
1:12:59
What is What is What does Super Excel do that normal Excel doesn't?
1:13:03
Let's give it up for Super Excel. Yeah. Yes. We need that Excel 2. 0. Right. Yes.
1:13:08
The thing is Excel was the the final piece of software and then but in order to add another, you know, hundred trillion dollars to to global GDP, we needed to like kind of rebrand it. And so now we get AGI.
1:13:24
GDP is the the complete it's biggest thing ever, right?
1:13:27
Like I always joke with my friend and I that we're going to start companies and be billionaires.
1:13:31
And I'll tell you how we're going to do it. So, okay. All right.
1:13:33
I start a company, he starts a company.
1:13:35
Uh we both write contracts to each other. Yep. Right.
1:13:37
like I'll buy something from him for a million dollars and he'll buy something from me for a million dollars.
1:13:41
We'll just do this real fast.
1:13:42
We'll keep passing the money back and forth.
1:13:44
Whoa, look at our revenue.
1:13:46
Wow, that all contributes to GDP.
1:13:46
Wow, we made we're billionaires overnight, right? Yep.
1:13:51
Like like and that's my argument is the economy is just that with a lot of extra steps, right?
1:13:55
You can't use services is not part of GDP.
1:13:59
This is complete nonsense, right?
1:13:59
You can't you can't have services.
1:14:01
No, like literally literally you take the steel out of the ground, you grow the corn. Okay, that's GDP.
1:14:05
But is it I mean if if that GDP is fake, is not the de is the deficit not fake?
1:14:10
Like is is government spending less? We owe that to people. It's not fake.
1:14:16
But can't you just tax the fake the fake money?
1:14:18
Like if you tax your scenario where you're generating a billion dollars in fake money.
1:14:21
You can't tax the fake money because we're passing the same dollars back and forth.
1:14:24
The minute you tax it, that falls off so fast. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
1:14:29
You can only tax productive work.
1:14:35
Uh, is uh is AMD doing productive work right now? AMD is doing all right.
1:14:38
Yeah, either Nvidia's really overvalued or AMD is really undervalued.
1:14:42
It has to be one or the other.
1:14:44
How does it all play out?
1:14:46
Like what what does AMD actually need to do to get back on track or realize their potential? Nvidia needs to stumble.
1:14:51
I mean, it worked for AMD and Intel, right?
1:14:54
Like so AMD ended up beating Intel in the entire like no one would buy a data center Intel CPU anymore. Yeah.
1:15:00
And it's just because well, you know, they stumbled and now Intel owns that market. Yeah.
1:15:05
So, you know, AMD just sits there in second place.
1:15:07
They're pretty they'd be in a better second place than they were a few years ago. Yeah.
1:15:12
And then when Nvidia stumbles, AMD is like, "Oh, hey, we're here."
1:15:14
Is is DGX Leptton like their their cloud offering a potential stumbling block or is it uh or is it the right move for them?
1:15:25
I don't know what that is.
1:15:25
What's an Nvidia cloud Yeah, exactly. Cloud's dumb.
1:15:29
Cloud's dumb. cloud though you can you can break AI down basically into like there's like five five tiers right like at the base level you have like electricity and data centers and land and like things like that tier two are like TSMC ASML Samsung Intel right fabs uh Nvidia AMD open AI anthropic and then
1:15:47
on top you have like completely worthless things like cursor and windurf um you know these character AI all these people who think oh we're the app we're going to we're going to get the ARR no that worked the web it won't work for AI and I can go into why but it's kind of boring I want I want No, keep going. Keep going. Keep going. Basically, okay, Keep going. Keep going.
1:16:00
Basically, okay, so like here's the difference between AI and and web.
1:16:05
Um when you want to run a service like Gmail, one server can serve 10,000 people easily, right?
1:16:10
And there's no demand for like better Gmail, right?
1:16:14
It's not like it's not like I can click and get like, yeah, you can buy Gmail Pro and it'll have a few things, but most people don't really care, right?
1:16:20
There's no limit to the ceiling of how good you want your AI to be, right?
1:16:22
Or how fast you want your AI to be.
1:16:24
Maybe there's a limit to the speed, but like when you're at like a thousand tokens per second, I want the biggest model in the world, right?
1:16:30
Like so there there's very little limit on on that.
1:16:32
Uh but suddenly you can't serve one 10,000 users from one server anymore. Mhm. Right.
1:16:38
And the whole dynamics of the web, the whole reason some of the value aggregated to these end players and they still didn't aggregate to the cursor and the winds, they aggregated to the open eye and the entropics. Right.
1:16:47
Nobody nobody nobody who built like an email client survived.
1:16:51
They all got eaten up by the the tier fours of the web, right?
1:16:55
the Googles, the Facebooks, um, all of these like app providers, right? Where's a Zinga today?
1:16:59
You know, like this already happened, right?
1:17:01
People just don't, where's Zinga?
1:17:02
Oh, Zinga is going to be the next thing, man. Like, no, it's not.
1:17:06
Facebook ate all of that value, right?
1:17:07
Google ate all of the value from all the people building on top of Google.
1:17:10
So, the tier fours ate all that value. Yeah.
1:17:12
So, OpenAI, Anthropic will eat all the value from the cursors and the wind surfs of the world.
1:17:17
They'll acquire some of them.
1:17:19
They'll compete with some of them, right?
1:17:20
Same as you saw on the web.
1:17:20
Uh, but I argue that the tier fours aren't even going to have value because the tier fours, this ain't the web.
1:17:27
This ain't where you can have one server serve lots and lots and lots of people.
1:17:30
You know, I'm running 03.
1:17:32
I'm running, you know how much I cost OpenAI every month.
1:17:37
I pay the $200 a month and I cost him a lot more than that.
1:17:40
Codeex, you can now click on Codeex. Yeah. Spin up four nodes. Yeah.
1:17:44
Why would I not click four? It's not my computer. You gave me the button.
1:17:49
Hey, I'm just using I'm just using George Hots single-handedly bankrupts. So, $300 million.
1:17:57
Is there no value in just being the the the front end to AI applications to be like the the the the front door, just the the the default button?
1:18:04
just the the the default button? because we see these we see these these these uh these models kind of go back and forth in terms of benchmarks or what's hot and there isn't as much customer churn as you would expect because people are are just kind of like defaulted into the app
1:18:19
that they installed whenever and so even if Gemini gets better in terms of the actual performance metrics people don't switch from OpenAI to Google because it's so it's so negligible you got to make something 10x better right you got to make something 10x better so like this whole game is open AI eyes unless they stumble. Sure. Um I'm not switching Sure.
1:18:36
Um I'm not switching to Gemini because it's 20% better and I download some new app and think about all the thing, right?
1:18:42
No one's going to switch.
1:18:44
Is there is there a chance for a company to kind of come out with something that's 10x better with an algorithmic improvement or is it just a race for scale?
1:18:51
Like what could actually be that next? It felt like GPT 3.
1:18:54
5 when they really broke through with Da Vinci and then 40 or and then four.
1:19:00
like it felt like this kind of like binary moment when a lot of people realize that this was usable for their daily life, even if it's just a Google search replacement or whatever, write a poem or whatever.
1:19:12
Uh like a a 10x what you're describing in like a 10x improvement feels like that kind of like qualitative binary shift.
1:19:19
Is that possible with just scale or is this something that we need a different model for? I don't know. Um I don't know.
1:19:28
I would bet majority still on like these big labs are also attracting the talent.
1:19:34
Um, but it is also like it's uh pretty commoditized a lot more so than like Google search, right?
1:19:42
Like you can look at people track how far open source is behind.
1:19:44
It's not that far behind.
1:19:45
Y um so no, I don't know.
1:19:49
I think this game is mostly going to be uh chat GPTs.
1:19:51
I think Elon's aware of this too.
1:19:55
That's why he's trying to go 10x bigger with the data center. Yep. We'll see. Maybe it'll work.
1:20:00
You know, there's there's someone to bet on.
1:20:03
anthropic I'm not that bullish on but uh maybe you kind of predicted the uh the pre-training wall uh but that's not a reputation of the bitter lesson and we're going to see similar scale play out in reinforcement learning or is there going to be something else that
1:20:20
we're building the big data centers for there's something that we don't understand uh in terms of data efficiency um so like when you think of how long it takes a GPT to learn to talk like how much data it takes it takes like terab terabytes of data. In order
1:20:32
In order to make a GPT talk like a normal person, it takes terabytes of data. Okay?
1:20:38
Whereas a human trains on megabytes. Yeah. Right.
1:20:40
How is it that if you take all the text that you've ever heard in your life and you you put it to Whisper and you you uh you transcribe it, it's going to be a couple megabytes, 10 megabytes, maybe 100 megabytes. Yeah.
1:20:51
So, humans have this thousandx data efficiency uh advantage.
1:20:55
And we're going to have to fix that if we want like reinforcement learning to work.
1:21:00
especially like reinforcement learning that you want to do in the real world.
1:21:02
A humans could do humans can learn from very few samples. Yep.
1:21:07
Um, and yeah, I think that like it might be okay if these foundation models train unsupervised on lots and lots of stuff, but uh, yeah.
1:21:16
Is that a is that something that somebody's working on just like a a new more data efficient algorithm to drop into the pipeline?
1:21:27
Or do we have any like leads there?
1:21:31
like leads there? because it feels like right now we're going down the path of like reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards and we're going after like individual business use cases that are increasingly long tail and that could be kind of like valuable but it doesn't feel like the breakthrough that you're talking about
1:21:48
like has there ever been a breakthrough right like people think GBTs were a breakthrough no they weren't like you just if you watch the the world it was just it was all just smooth but but but what I will say about AI scaling laws oh man you see People get excited about AI scaling laws, but here's a pitch that'll kill your excitement immediately. Ready? Ready? AI scaling laws.
1:22:06
You can put in exponentially more money to get linear returns. Exactly.
1:22:14
Uh do do you believe that uh the real value is investing in in humanoid robotics then?
1:22:23
Uh have you heard this theory?
1:22:23
So, so it it So, I mean, if you if you put exponential more money into humanoid robotics, assuming that they work and assuming you can uh you can like you make 10 times as many robots, you get 10 times as much output.
1:22:38
Anyone Anyone who wants a humanoid robot has never worked in a factory in their life. Okay. Right. Bring it down.
1:22:44
Anyone wants a human Oh, yo.
1:22:46
Yo, it's going to walk around.
1:22:46
Oh, good thing it has legs, right? No. Here's what I want. Yeah. Yeah. We got a laugh track. Okay.
1:22:55
Can you show me a robot arm that's capable of putting a screw in something? Probably.
1:23:00
Put the screw in the thing. Yeah. No, no, no, no.
1:23:03
Not like you carefully jigged up the screw and have a screw dispenser like the way a normal human does it where the screw sitting there in a little bucket on the thing and it picks up one screw and it puts it in. It takes a screwdriver.
1:23:13
No, we're No, no, we're we're we're not close, but also it feels like we're not far.
1:23:17
also it feels like we're not far. It feels like that's what I feel like I feel like humanoids are this interesting sort of like space because a lot of smart people just say like here's the 20 reasons why they won't work and and like
1:23:30
why we shouldn't build them but then so much capital and so many different teams are trying to make them work that they they very well might work for some things and like they just humanity might brute force it because we saw it in a sci-fi movie you know 30 years ago. Why? Why? Why? Why? Why are we cooked on?
1:23:45
This is as dumb as self-driving cars was, right?
1:23:50
And nobody learns their lesson.
1:23:50
And people like Kyle Boat should be ashamed of themselves. Like they really should.
1:23:55
These people who go and raise large amounts of money for another thing that like they should know, they should know better, right?
1:24:00
Here's basically like remember in 2012 when Google said that, you know, my my my 12-year-old daughter would never have to get her driver's license. Yeah. Come on. That's nonsense, right?
1:24:12
And like now, okay, they shipped Whimo. It's in a few cities.
1:24:15
They're teley opt how how tea operated are they in your opinion?
1:24:23
Is it is it effectively one to one?
1:24:26
It's more than one to one.
1:24:26
There's probably about I would say there's 1. 2 operators per car.
1:24:29
Um but it's not they don't have a steering wheel and pedals.
1:24:34
Yeah, it is it is an autonomous system that they're probably doing some higher level inputs on.
1:24:38
They're definitely like saying when you can be aggressive, when you should slow down, uh, you know, whether you can turn to the stop sign or not. Yeah.
1:24:45
Um, you know, again, like here's here's the simple reason to know that it's like that, right?
1:24:50
There's definitely some teleopaths, right? Yeah.
1:24:54
Have you ever seen a picture of that room? No. Yeah. Why not?
1:24:59
I've always thought it was like an ace up their sleeve because like if if there's a lot of pressure on them to say these Whimos aren't safe, they can pull off pull the the sheet off of the ghost and say there's actually a human in the loop.
1:25:10
Don't worry, it's safer than you thought. Yeah. Yeah.
1:25:12
Like you the fact that you've never seen that room tells you that it's way worse than you think it is, right?
1:25:19
Tells you that there's way more telly op than you think it is.
1:25:20
If it was really one person supervising 10 cars, Google would post those pictures all over the place.
1:25:25
You don't see any pictures.
1:25:27
There's so cruise that actually came out in the lawsuit. I think it was like 1. 5 or 1. 7 humans per car, right? Or or vice versa. Like, right. 1.
1:25:35
5 cars per person, right? No. No. Wait. More people than cars.
1:25:38
Yeah, that's what he's saying.
1:25:41
It's still that it's still that one.
1:25:43
An Uber only requires one person. Yes. Yeah.
1:25:44
But but so so maybe the real innovation is just allowing somebody to get in a car with and not have to talk about the weather or or you know. Exactly. Exact. I'll pay more for that. I'll pay more for that. Yeah.
1:25:57
But I mean, is there any hope that we drive this down and we get to two cars per person, then four cars per person, it starts doubling exponentially and eventually like we are there.
1:26:04
I mean, yeah, like it's obviously going to happen, right?
1:26:08
It's obviously eventually going to happen.
1:26:10
If you want to see where the real state-of-the-art of unsupervised self-driving is today, right?
1:26:14
There's no person with FSD.
1:26:14
When you get your Tesla, that's not tell.
1:26:16
You can go press FSD and that's real AI.
1:26:18
Uh, and well, you can see how good it is, right?
1:26:24
Would I uh take a nap in there even for five minutes? No way in hell. Yeah.
1:26:29
Um you'd be stupid, right?
1:26:29
How are things going on the comma side?
1:26:32
Uh give us the update there. Pretty good.
1:26:34
You know, we're we're we're on track to um we're on track to be two years behind Tesla. So there you go.
1:26:41
So So two years behind Tesla.
1:26:43
Uh but you know, here's why we win, right?
1:26:46
Like because like it's cheap. Uh okay.
1:26:50
So, when you think about self-reming cars, uh it doesn't look anything like the roll out of Uber, right? Or Airbnb.
1:26:58
When you roll out something like that, you're trying to roll out a two-sided marketplace. Mhm.
1:27:03
Uh you got to spend tons of money on customer acquisition costs.
1:27:04
You got to make sure that you've perfectly matched that marketplace right away because if drivers aren't getting rides, they're going to leave the platform.
1:27:10
If riders have to wait too long for drivers, they're gonna leave the platform.
1:27:12
So, it's this careful balancing act.
1:27:13
But once you get this marketplace, you got you got a moat, right?
1:27:17
Switching costs are real high.
1:27:19
Try to get everybody to switch at the same time. It's a chilling point. ever doing.
1:27:22
Self-driving cars don't look anything like that.
1:27:25
Self-driving cars look like scooters.
1:27:29
The only thing that it's going to take to roll out big fleets of self-driving cars is capital, right?
1:27:32
It's just strictly a capital market.
1:27:34
You could just I can if I look at a city, I can calculate how many Whimo there are.
1:27:38
If I want to build my own network and deploy that network and run at a lower cost, it's straight up capital.
1:27:43
Easiest thing for investors to calculate, very little risk.
1:27:47
So, self-driving cars are going to be this awesome race to the bottom, right?
1:27:51
It's going to be like scooters where there's going to be like 10 providers of these things for a while and then they're going to consolidate and like one is going to do it.
1:27:56
But um yeah, people are really going to win.
1:28:01
What is what's most valuable in terms of developing the next like the next better version of full self-driving?
1:28:07
Is it having a lot of data, building a big data center, having a great team to actually design the system? What's most important? Are they all equal?
1:28:16
Yeah, all those things matter, right?
1:28:18
I think the main thing that matters more than anything else is just time.
1:28:22
Like we're figuring things out with research.
1:28:27
Infrastructure is getting better.
1:28:27
I think that a lot of it's just infrastructure.
1:28:29
My new company's AI infrastructure, right?
1:28:31
Like the infrastructure gets better.
1:28:32
Um my uh my uh coworker has a saying is like uh what we do is that we make the uh hard things easy and the impossible things hard.
1:28:44
And that's like the goal of infrastructure, right?
1:28:48
You build infrastructure, your infrastructure gets better.
1:28:49
And then what was what you couldn't even dream of doing 10 years ago is now one command today.
1:28:55
And today, you know what what you you you uh Yeah.
1:29:00
What's the current use case for most people with tiny boxes?
1:29:07
Is that that's by design, right?
1:29:07
You're not supposed to know.
1:29:08
But I mean, so I sell the computer. It has specs, right?
1:29:12
Like so many people want to tell you, and I hate this. I hate this.
1:29:14
They're telling you like how the product is going to impact your life or what you can use the product for. Oh my god, who cares? Yeah, here's what it is.
1:29:20
I'm going to tell you what it is. That's your job, right?
1:29:25
I'm not an advertiser, but I mean I mean our intern wants to build something with a tiny box.
1:29:31
I want to give him some ideas. Go buy one. I don't know.
1:29:35
Why do you want to build something with a tiny box? I mean, is it good?
1:29:37
Yeah, it's just a It's a bunch of GPUs in a box, you know? It's nice to know boxes.
1:29:41
GPUs in a box weight to it.
1:29:44
What um it what robotic form factors are you most bullish on? We've touched humanoids.
1:29:49
You gave a a great review there.
1:29:51
We've touched autonomous vehicles.
1:29:53
Sounds like generally bullish, but Capital Wars, Race to the Bottom, uh all that stuff.
1:29:59
Are are there any other kind of form factors that you're thinking about that you are generally optimistic or excited about? ARM. Arm the two arm, right? Just two arm, right?
1:30:12
Because I look I run a factory.
1:30:12
I run a factory in San Diego.
1:30:14
We make all the commas right here.
1:30:15
And I can't wait to get a whole lot of robots in there.
1:30:17
But uh I don't need humanoids.
1:30:19
I'm just going to stick two arms to the table.
1:30:23
And then it's going to grab a comma.
1:30:25
It's going to put the screen on the front.
1:30:26
It's going to flip it over.
1:30:26
It's going to put the four screws in it.
1:30:28
And then it's going to pass it on. Yep. Right.
1:30:31
Show me anything that's anywhere near that level today. Yeah.
1:30:33
What what uh what would you do if you were trying to build like a truly multi-purpose robotic arm?
1:30:39
The arms are already good enough.
1:30:41
It's the AR offtheshelf arms are fine. It's all software.
1:30:44
Again, it's always all software.
1:30:46
Autonomous vehicles are all software.
1:30:47
Robotics is all software.
1:30:49
But everybody loves to bike shed. Yeah.
1:30:51
What color are we going to paint the humanoids, you know, like like let's have a great conversation about that.
1:30:58
Well, you know, we don't want to paint them red because that might scare people in a terminator.
1:31:00
This is actually the level of stupidity that I see in most discussions about human robots. Yeah.
1:31:06
Would you uh would you trade in your legs for wheels if you could? I got that.
1:31:11
I trade in my legs for wheels.
1:31:13
Yeah, this is a question from Aaron Frank, friend of the show.
1:31:15
He's asking this in real time. Weird wheel guy then.
1:31:19
Like people had asked me if the wheels are like making a statement.
1:31:21
I just don't want to have to have this conversation.
1:31:24
What What What about the sim tore gap in robotics?
1:31:26
Like how how is how is simulated data?
1:31:29
You know, you you build a bunch of data in Unreal Engine, then you try and transfer learn it back.
1:31:35
Uh obviously there's been a bunch of experiments of that with self-driving cars.
1:31:39
Is that a path that we should be going down for the for the robotic arm development? Yeah.
1:31:43
So I think with a lot of sim to real stuff, the reason people are excited about it is because of that data efficiency gap we spoke about, right?
1:31:52
Like current machine learning algorithms like a thousandx less data efficient than humans.
1:31:56
Uh so yeah, you're going to need a thousandx more data, right?
1:31:59
If a human can learn something in one example or 10 examples, the computer is going to need a th000 or 10,000.
1:32:05
Now, do you really want to reset the stupid state of the physical world 10,000 times?
1:32:08
You might do it 10, but you're not going to do it 10,000, right?
1:32:11
So, that's where you want to simulator where you can just click reset and everything's back to exactly how it was.
1:32:16
Um, so I think this stuff's going to play a role, but I think more fundamentally that data efficiency gap has to be understood.
1:32:26
Uh, we talked a little bit about coding agents.
1:32:28
We talked about how you're bankrupting OpenAI by spinning up a lot of different uh codec agents.
1:32:32
Um what uh what other a sort of agentic software are you excited about?
1:32:39
Do you expect to uh you know what's a gentic mean? Yeah, basically bots.
1:32:45
It's it's like what we're calling bots now.
1:32:47
Um but but but anyways like I just you know from Star Trek. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe.
1:32:53
No but but I think about a world in the future you Do do you expect to be I don't know if you're a a Slack guy, an iMessage guy, Discord, maybe no messaging at all, just you know um you know telepathy telepathy.
1:33:07
Uh but but do you expect a world in the future where you're just you know a perfect interaction between you know human employees and agents or is it you know going to be more like you know you'll do the odd deep research or maybe you send some automated outbound emails or have some codeex bots running?
1:33:26
I don't even like follow this.
1:33:26
When do you think you'll be able to book a flight just by saying I'm trying to get to New York tomorrow?
1:33:31
Oh, see the worst part about this is like like and that's going to come pretty soon actually. Okay. Right.
1:33:38
We're going to pretty soon have computer use models that are actually capable of going to delta.
1:33:41
com and booking a flight. Yeah.
1:33:43
But then what's actually going to happen is Delta's going to partner with whatever company does that and they're going to put it behind the stupid uh thing and like Yeah. So that's gonna Yeah.
1:33:50
That's going to be here in a few years, right?
1:33:54
Not with agentic but just with normal hooking the APIs together, right? Yeah.
1:33:58
Wait, so yeah, what is the bullish on APIs?
1:34:01
What is the mistake about like the agentic buzzword?
1:34:03
Like what what are people like even describing?
1:34:05
Again, it's another thing that I I really have no idea what it means.
1:34:08
You know, I I was hanging out with some friends last night and like like uh my friend in this VR company and the you know, the the CEO is really interested in things being open source, but he's also really interested in making sure that things are protecting our intellectual property and proprietary.
1:34:23
And the truth is he has no idea what the word open source means.
1:34:26
He has no idea what it means that they can copy his right?
1:34:30
Like that someone else could use it.
1:34:32
He just he just heard the word open source in some like buzzword thing and he's like, "Do we have the open source?
1:34:37
Do we have the open source in the thing? Okay, so check the box.
1:34:42
Check the open source box. Let's protect our IP.
1:34:44
Last question about the a last question about the agentic buzzword.
1:34:48
I think that there is something that people are picking up on, which is that these models seem to be very smart for short amount of time, but if you run them for a long time, they start hallucinating and kind of going off the rails.
1:35:00
And so you you have like 10-minute AGI.
1:35:02
feels incredible, but as you let it run and do more work, you can't just say, "Hey, go do a week's worth of work.
1:35:09
Come back to me when you're" But it's superhuman in one minute.
1:35:12
And so, is that kind of trade-off curve real?
1:35:14
And then is it just a matter of like better harnessing to actually get to two hours of work, which is kind of what the agentic people are like advocating for. No.
1:35:23
So, I don't think it's better hard, but this is definitely a real phenomenon.
1:35:26
This is definitely a real phenomenon.
1:35:28
Uh, you can experience this.
1:35:30
There's papers exploring it which show that if in 10 seconds there's absolutely no way I'll come even close to a modern LM totally um because the first shot from the LLM is great. Yeah.
1:35:43
And then it kind of degrades and it degrades pretty quickly whereas humans look a lot more like this.
1:35:50
Humans can stay coherent internally for much longer.
1:35:55
Um so yeah I I think that that's a real thing.
1:35:59
I think that that's mostly going to be fixed by like long context, just more energy. Long context RL.
1:36:05
Yeah, just like you just got to do it.
1:36:09
We'll figure out new ways to make the context better.
1:36:13
We'll combine diffusion and uh and auto reggression in some clever ways.
1:36:17
Yeah, I think that this is just going to be uh like there's not going to be a breakthrough here.
1:36:23
There's not like one magical thing that we're missing.
1:36:24
Yeah, I think it will be a continued plot.
1:36:26
The same thing with data efficiency.
1:36:28
I think people will start to care about it.
1:36:29
Some new tricks will come out.
1:36:31
Some of them will work, some of them won't work.
1:36:34
We'll continue to do graduate student descent until we find a anything that's last question for me.
1:36:43
Anything that you're particularly optimistic about? Anything?
1:36:45
You check the timeline and you think, "This is awesome. I love this. I love this.
1:36:48
I want to see more of this."
1:36:51
A little maybe a little white pill to kind of cap it off. Yeah.
1:36:54
So, here's something I'm optimistic about.
1:36:56
That fact that the one server can't run 10,000 users, that is most of the reason that the modern internet that that is one of the reasons that the modern internet sucks.
1:37:08
That that that so much of the stuff is in non-recurring expense and then it becomes really really hard to compete with these people, right?
1:37:15
Like you could run Twitter on one computer. Yeah. Right.
1:37:20
and 20 people could do it too.
1:37:22
But like they don't because again these companies have moes and they invest in making sure that their modes can't be broken.
1:37:27
Um with AI I think there's going to be a much less of a mo especially when you look at the move from auto reggression to diffusion.
1:37:35
So auto reggression can run in large batch sizes.
1:37:38
When you run chat GBT you're running with a whole bunch of other people on that same computer. Yeah, it's only 100.
1:37:43
It's not 10,000 but still it's 100.
1:37:46
Diffusion is run in the cloud at batch size one.
1:37:48
And once you're in batch size one land, running it locally starts to make sense.
1:37:54
Actually running the models locally or at least having your own computer in the cloud. Yeah.
1:37:59
Not being some shared resource that's really controlled by some else.
1:38:08
Um so yeah, this was never a thing because you can't put lots of people on a GPU. That makes sense.
1:38:12
They tried some weird stuff with the licensing, but yeah. Fantastic.
1:38:16
Well, thank you so much for stopping by.
1:38:18
This is a great conversation.
1:38:20
Yeah, I wish we had a full hour. This is great.
1:38:21
We'll talk to you soon, George. George. Cool. Bye. See you later. Cheers. Bye.
1:38:24
Next up, we have uh Joseph Troian, author of The Party's Interests Come First.
1:38:31
He was recommended by Jordan Schneider of China Talk.
1:38:33
We're very excited to talk to him about uh the life of Cinping's father, Ciong.
1:38:37
Welcome to the show, Joseph. Good to have you.
1:38:42
Thank you for Thanks so much for coming. It's great to have you.
1:38:47
I would love to get a little bit of your background how you landed on this topic.
1:38:51
It's incredibly difficult to uh to to research.
1:38:54
I was uh digging just just into the life of uh Cinping and uh there were no English biographies for a long time.
1:39:03
One of the most uh deepest dives on Cinping was from the economist actually in the form of this this podcast and and this reporting about the prince uh and and I was interested how you got into this what your background is and then we could go through some of the story.
1:39:16
So, I had just finished a book about elite power struggles in the Soviet Union and China after the deaths of Stalin and Mao.
1:39:23
And someone asked me to write about party history and Xiinping.
1:39:27
And I thought I would do a short article about Xiinping, a little bit about his father.
1:39:31
But what I did find out was the more research I did, the more I could learn and that I could tell a really interesting story through Xi Jun that wasn't just about Xiinping but could be a sort of microcosm of Chinese Communist Party history in the 20th century. Got it.
1:39:46
Um, one of the themes that I've been kind of wrestling with and my takeaway from studying Cinping was that uh there is this constant narrative of being both a a a victim and a perpetrator of party aggression essentially.
1:40:02
And I was wondering if that narrative feels right to you, where that comes from, why there's so why why these these leaders are so reluctant to reject the system that's sending them to jail or putting their family in hardship.
1:40:19
Like it feels unique and it doesn't feel like something that happens in America.
1:40:23
Or maybe I'm just brainwashed by American politics or something and it is happening over here and I'm just not picking up on it.
1:40:30
But is that a theme that you picked up on and and and you think is like worth digging into?
1:40:33
Is it is it what's unique about the story?
1:40:35
It sounds like you read my book quite closely.
1:40:39
That is certainly one of the themes.
1:40:41
There's a puzzle there which is Xi Jangun, the father of Xiinping, was persecuted by his own party on several occasions and the party asked him to do things that he thought were wrong.
1:40:53
Nevertheless, he remained devoted.
1:40:53
And I think to appreciate that we need to look at this bolevik communist political culture.
1:41:00
And it's because these people see the party as a source of meaning and purpose in their lives.
1:41:06
So in that sense to reject the party would have meant rejecting themselves.
1:41:10
So perhaps counterintuitively when the party hurt them the motivation was to redouble their efforts to win back the party's trust in them.
1:41:20
Do you think that there's I'm I'm I'm I'm still struggling to understand the dynamic of like how dominant the single party is in China.
1:41:29
And I'm wondering if if we compare it with American politics, we it feels like we're always in this 50-50 stalemate where every four years it's like it's neck andneck and then and then yeah, maybe one party wins by some sort of margin, but I'm I've always wondered if that's a if you talk to somebody who's like a socialist, they're always really upset because they're basically like, well, they're both capitalists who are running.
1:41:52
uh and so they see it as as a false choice, but the vast majority of the American electorate is incredibly animated by the by the differences even though they might be somewhat minor if you zoom out a little bit.
1:42:05
Um and I'm wondering like the the the more single party system versus the dual party system. How does that emerge?
1:42:12
Can you give me some some history of the party and and why is it so stable?
1:42:19
So Lenin said that what we are doing is building a party of a new type and he thought that western political parties as you said were essentially representative of dominant class interests.
1:42:30
What Lenin wanted to do was create an organizational weapon and the reason for that was he was running a conspiracy and he wanted to take over the country and then use violence to transform it into something that was completely different.
1:42:43
And to do that, you need to create an institution that can force people to do things that they might not want to do.
1:42:50
It's by design constructed so that the top leader can make a choice and then everyone has to follow along with that choice.
1:42:57
And sometimes that choice is wrong uh and has devastating impact for the party and the nation.
1:43:03
But you can see that if you have such an ambitious agenda, what you want to do is create a system where the top leader is sort of firewalled from any kind of political consideration. Mhm.
1:43:15
Can you I mean there's so many there's so many anecdotes that could kind of tell the story.
1:43:19
Would you mind telling me which story from Xi Jean Chung's life really stuck out to you as as emblematic or or maybe uh even just give me the high level because we kind of just jumped into it.
1:43:32
give me like the highlevel story arc that you decided to uh to weave the entire narrative through. Yeah. So he was born in 1913.
1:43:41
That was only two years after the collapse of theQing dynasty.
1:43:43
He was born into a rather dramatic place.
1:43:46
It he was born near where the Turkata soldiers are, which probably many of your viewers know about.
1:43:53
That was where Chin Shaang forged the first unified Chinese state thousands of years before.
1:43:58
And it was the city where emperors had ruled for for for millennia.
1:44:02
Uh but by the time Xi Jang was born, it had fallen into years of banditry and war and famine.
1:44:08
And he was attracted to radicalism, trying to figure out a way to uh help China escape from these uh imperialist encroachments and uh political infighting at home.
1:44:20
And his first uh political act was an attempt to assassinate an academic administrator. and it failed.
1:44:27
He got a bunch of teachers sick uh and was thrown into prison and joined the party there. Was he again?
1:44:34
He wasn't he like 15 when he was sent out. That's right. He was very young.
1:44:37
And what's interesting too is he didn't really have an intellectual attraction to communism. Yeah.
1:44:41
And when he was released from incarceration, he read this novel uh that's a terrible novel.
1:44:50
uh it's basically just a protagonist who goes from one disaster to another, but it fetishizes this idea of resistance and and struggle.
1:44:56
And so it speaks to the fact that uh you know for a lot of these people their intuition was that something needed to be changed, but they weren't exactly sure what and the party was a source of meaning for them.
1:45:08
H um I I I know you mentioned that he had a lot of interaction with the party around uh relationships with other religions and I was wondering if you could if you could kind of like when I grew up I remember like the free Tibet movement and it's kind of like fallen by the wayside.
1:45:26
Tibet's not really in the in the in the news much anymore.
1:45:28
Could you take me through the story of his interaction with some of these uh kind of tangential groups in China and uh and how how the history of those relationships played out?
1:45:40
Yeah, I'm glad you asked that.
1:45:40
So, within the Chinese Communist Party, you would have people that were experts in the military on economics.
1:45:46
Xi Jun was the leading United Front figure.
1:45:49
So, what's the United Front?
1:45:51
Well, Mazudon called it one of the CCP's magic weapons, and it's basically a political influence campaigns.
1:45:59
And so, what you do is you figure out who's on your side, who's in the middle, who's against you, and you empower the ones uh that like you, you win over the ones that aren't sure, and then you hurt the ones that are that are deadenders.
1:46:10
And this was something that Xi Jang continuously applied to uh China's ethnic minorities.
1:46:18
And so he was in the last years of the civil war and the early years of the people's republic the leader of the so-called northwest bureau which included a huge expanse of China including Shing Jang but there were also lots of Tibetans in Shing Hai and Gansu
1:46:33
which were other uh massive provinces uh in China and so he was trying to figure out how to incorporate them and it was definitely bloody but he also wasn't blind to the advantages of finding local power brokers and winning them over. Um
1:46:44
Um but over the 1950s the party decided that that approach was dated because people weren't coming to socialism on their own.
1:46:52
And so essentially um uh the party declared war on them with tanks and planes and um during the cultural revolution any sign of an ethnic difference was seen as class struggle.
1:47:04
And then in the 1980s the party understood that they had really screwed up and that they needed to have a new approach.
1:47:09
And Xiang ran uh ethnic politics for the secretariat which is sort of the party's brain.
1:47:14
and he tried to use economic development, bringing religion out into the open so it could be better controlled, uh, allying with local power brokers, but by the end of that decade, uh, many people within the party concluded that when you do that and you give people space, they just use it to hurt you.
1:47:31
Uh and so the party decided that growing protests weren't a sign of uh uh reaching a new equilibrium but uh you know hitting some road bumps on the way but that uh that fundamental approach had been a mistake. Yeah.
1:47:47
Yeah, there's this there's this narrative that keeps popping up whenever you hear about turmoil in the party uh around purges, which is a term that I don't I'm not really I can't really map to as an American um because we don't really have those, I guess.
1:48:04
Um and and a lot of this is always tied to uh there's uh there's corruption and we're going after corruption and every every kind of major defenestration feels like it's tied to corruption and I'm always wondering how we are evaluating those claims because at the same time in a growing developing country there probably is a lot of corruption and there's probably a lot of people that are uh banditry for example that you mentioned.
1:48:35
um there are people that are taking advantage of different parts of the government.
1:48:39
So the so the corruption might be real, but then also corruption is used as a weapon to to amass power or or remove certain people from power.
1:48:46
And so can you walk me through um how corruption is used as a tool?
1:48:52
How real do you think the various corruption narratives have been?
1:48:57
Maybe if there's any examples of of corruption being wielded as a tool for uh for party power.
1:49:04
So as soon as the party was able to take over the country, they immediately faced a question which was how they were going to ensure that they didn't take such pride and arrogance in their victory that they allowed bourgeoa uh liberalization meaning individualism to seep in and that they would be divorced from the masses and that they would care about uh their own materialist needs.
1:49:31
And so from the very beginning the party struggled to figure out a way to eliminate this problem.
1:49:36
And so especially during the Mao era you had constant constant rolling campaigns that inevitably went too far.
1:49:42
Uh and now under Xiinping you see that he believes that corruption for him is is about whether the party can survive because for Xiinping ideals and conviction and a sense of motivation are necessary for the party to exist.
1:49:57
the party to exist. And the biggest danger to that is corruption because it's uh it basically means putting yourself first but also corruption is a problem because it's a vector for western influence because there's this idea that the west is materialistic and uh oriented towards consumption and once
1:50:16
that gets into China then uh the west can use it as a weapon and in fact many people in China thinks that what happened to the Soviet Union uh that essentially uh the leaders of the regime became oriented towards the West and um the uh the west won what they call a war without gunpowder. Mean meaning you
1:50:33
Mean meaning you don't use a you don't use violence to destroy the regimes you don't like.
1:50:36
You do it by winning over certain people uh within it.
1:50:40
And the one other thing uh to say too here is that you're right like corruption is partly about regime security, but it's also about getting rid of people that you don't like.
1:50:47
And so what's interesting here is, you know, why do people keep uh doing things that make them vulnerable to accusations of corruption?
1:50:56
And here I think speaks to something else with um about the system which is nobody's quite quite sure where the red lines are.
1:51:02
Uh and so sometimes you just get it wrong and sometimes the top leader changes where the red lines are and you can see that um in a system where the top leader is the one who gets to make those decisions, it's a very powerful weapon. Yeah.
1:51:13
What is what is the current sentiment uh from the party about the state of the world? Right.
1:51:24
I I feel like here in America right now, you have a frustration.
1:51:26
China's become the factory of the world.
1:51:29
We're we're deeply reliant on them.
1:51:32
Uh the at the same time, the world feels very uncertain consumerrist because they're certainly buying Xiaomi phones and and uh you know. Yeah.
1:51:40
So, so I'd be curious like any type of insight around the party's sentiment around what's happening in China culturally and then sort of geopolitically on a on a world stage.
1:51:51
do they feel like they're making progress?
1:51:53
You know, we we study, you know, their goals around individual industries like semiconductors, AI, defense, etc.
1:52:00
Um, but I'm curious what what you know sentiment in in and out of the country.
1:52:05
So, it's interesting to see how ambitious Xiinping is in terms of how he characterizes his goals in a holistic sense.
1:52:13
He says that for millennia you would have one dynasty collapse after another and that the Chinese Communist Party needs to break that.
1:52:22
And his solution is this idea of self-revolution.
1:52:25
And basically what he wants to do is figure out a way of how you win over the third and fourth generation uh of young Chinese uh to the revolutionary cause.
1:52:36
And your questions speak to a dilemma there, right?
1:52:38
like you can see how a message of sacrifice and rejuvenation is meaningful maybe for many people but that he also recognizes that economic development uh is essential as well.
1:52:51
So, you know, how you balance those two things at the same time is not clear and it's something that I think uh the party is has constantly wrestled with from the very beginning.
1:53:00
How you balance ideals and conviction and motivation with being practical and thinking about economics and that kind of thing.
1:53:07
You know, in terms of how China thinks about uh the world, uh they see real inherent strengths in their system.
1:53:14
And even though they're communists and therefore should be m uh people who only think about the world in terms of um uh concrete uh objective conditions, they talk about spiritual civilization all the time.
1:53:28
And in fact, they think that China has one, but the west does not because in capitalist societies, all they do is care about money and consumption.
1:53:35
So in Xiinping's mind, he sees those problems only getting worse and worse in the west as opposed to China where in his mind they can tell a good story, a motivating story, but also the party can organize interests in a way that doesn't allow one class or one group to dominate.
1:53:49
How does that actually play out?
1:53:51
Because I feel like we there's incredible amount of wealth still in China like like there's still a wealth inequality.
1:53:59
Um there are many tech billionaires and massively successful folks over there.
1:54:03
Of course, when they get really really big, they tend to disappear for a little bit and it doesn't seem like a great place to be a Jeff Bezos type.
1:54:11
But at the same time, it doesn't feel like oh yes, like they are truly communist.
1:54:17
Everyone has the exact same standard of living.
1:54:18
And so is that even the goal?
1:54:20
Are they okay with some level of wealth inequality?
1:54:22
And or or do they see it as a failure?
1:54:25
and and and even that digging a level deeper if if she and and party leaders can speak to the sort of civilization, you know, the spirit of the the Chinese civilization and and how great it is and how the the system of the west is failing.
1:54:41
What do three, you know, five levels below that in in in the Chinese system in terms of, you know, how much do you try to dig in and, you know, what is the average factory worker?
1:54:50
Do they feel that same sense of of pride in in the in the spirit of China or is there kind of a disconnect?
1:55:00
Yeah, that's a really those are some really good questions.
1:55:02
So I think for Xiinping he can do course corrections to a certain extent, right?
1:55:10
So this is someone who a few years ago was really doing a very severe crackdown uh in the tech sector and people who made a lot of money were suddenly very worried.
1:55:21
Uh Xiinping was talking about common prosperity.
1:55:26
uh but over the last few months uh they have been talking more about the economy and it seems that Xiinping has empowered his premier uh to focus on development and that doesn't mean that they've suddenly stopped caring about security or ideology.
1:55:40
It just means that they can move around a little bit uh without admitting that they were wrong.
1:55:49
And I think the reason for that is that the party when they talk about ideology, they're more careful I think than people uh give them credit sometimes, right?
1:55:55
So for example, if you look at the latest uh party congress report, it begins with ideology and it talks about how we need to believe in this stuff and we still are, you know, socialist and communist.
1:56:06
But then it says other things too.
1:56:06
It says the reason communism works in our country but failed in other others is that we cynicize it.
1:56:11
We made it Chinese, which basically means we made it say whatever uh we want it to be, right?
1:56:14
And so then you also see other language about markets still being decisive and China still being in the stage of primary accumulation which means that development not restructuring um uh society is the top priority.
1:56:27
So you know they talk about common prosperity because they know that uh they need to tell a good story about getting rid of inequality because they subscribe to socialism.
1:56:38
Then you have all these buts and ants, right?
1:56:40
So they say, you know, we're not going to become populist like Latin American countries by allowing people to have such a social safety net that they feel that they don't have to work hard.
1:56:48
And so for all of these reasons, I think that uh uh he he's trying to manage dilemmas because he he can't solve problems, if that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah.
1:56:59
Have have you uh um Yeah.
1:57:01
I mean, we've been talking to people about how uh some of China's investments in the semiconductor industry are in some ways more capitalist than the way America subsidizes our our like the chips act compared to the the series of five-year plans that have been somewhat cutthroat over in China between a whole bunch of different companies competing for grants.
1:57:23
And yes, there's a lot of government money pump pumping into the sector and they've been able to stay at the lagging edge for years, but it's been uh designed to be kind of doggy dog and hasn't just been a situation where China's just picked one winner and said, "Here's, you know, $50 billion and go run with it."
1:57:39
Um, I'm I'm interested to hear the story about uh the development of Hong Kong relative to some of the mainland uh uh cities.
1:57:46
Uh, can you can you uh walk me through what that taught about China and Sei Jong Shun because I believe he saw kind of that happened.
1:57:57
I've seen the time lapses uh and I've I've been to Guanghou once very briefly uh and and and the balancing act there between those those various cities and what that kind of taught uh taught China.
1:58:09
I'm really glad you've asked about Hong Kong.
1:58:11
I've done a handful of interviews and you're the first person to raise it and it's it's a quite an interesting story and it's revealing in many ways.
1:58:17
So, Xi Jong Fin, he was persecuted for 16 years, right?
1:58:20
Uh and then he's released and the first job that he gets is the party boss of GuangDong, which of course is the province that borders Hong Kong.
1:58:28
and he saw physically just how far behind China had become.
1:58:35
And his first task that he had to deal with were the thousands and thousands and thousands of Chinese people who were fleeing to Hong Kong, often losing their lives in the process.
1:58:48
So, it was such a striking physical manifestation of how far the socialist motherland uh had had had fallen behind.
1:58:56
And so for him uh that helps explains the special economic zones which uh he played a role in establishing and you know he has this idea that one of the problems is that is ideology.
1:59:07
We need to make people you know believe in the cause but he wasn't so foolish as to not recognize that you also had an economic angle here that you needed to figure out.
1:59:14
And then ensuing years uh in Beijing when he was running the United Front, he had to figure out how the people in Hong Kong were going to feel about returning to the mainland.
1:59:27
So he kept meeting with these Hong Kong people uh during the handover negotiations and he would say things like, you know, we're all Chinese.
1:59:32
Uh go overseas and look around and you'll realize that actually uh Western countries aren't as great as you think.
1:59:40
You put your money in a bank and the fees are greater than any interest that you would make.
1:59:43
you would make. you know, these kind of like sort of very conventional communist views of of of of boom and bust and that uh uh he uh but you know what's interesting is for them like in in Hong Kong uh one of them during these meetings a lawyer from Hong Kong said you know you in the mainland you feel
2:00:02
like you're coming out of a tunnel because the cultural revolution is over and you're reforming but we in Hong Kong we feel like we're going into a tunnel um because we're uh we're looking at unification with you but we're not sure about what direction you're going and and were frightened. And it was it was
2:00:14
And it was it was Xi Junction's job to win their trust and faith to this uh um to to the handover. Interesting.
2:00:22
Um Xi is up for reelection in 2028. There's no term limits.
2:00:25
what what should be people be looking out for in terms of the leadup and and what he's is it the right um kind of outlook that that he should be you know really trying to prove like does this next few years really matter in terms of proving that he's the right leader for the next five years beyond that or or how do you how do you look at the election?
2:00:50
So he is in a situation where whatever he decides is what will go.
2:00:56
Nevertheless, he is facing really really powerful challenges when he looks at the succession because as his father's story shows if you read my book there's it's hard to think of anything more explosive than succession politics in an alenist regime and it gets back to what we were talking about earlier which is that these are very lead leader friendly systems.
2:01:17
The whole purpose is to have a really really powerful person at the center who can make choices and then everybody has to listen.
2:01:24
listen. So Xiinping if he if he picks a successor uh it raises the question of well who's actually really boss and then this the name successor will have to figure out how much space he has and whether or not he's actually getting Xiinping right and he want he'll want to impress Xiinping
2:01:41
but he also won't want Xiinping to think that he is getting too big for his bridges but if Xiinping doesn't pick a successor then uh he might be afraid about what will happen to the party after he dies uh and he will likely want to make sure that the person that he thinks is best is the person that uh becomes the next leader. So, he's kind
2:01:58
So, he's kind of stuck, right?
2:02:00
Because neither of those uh options are very good, but um and he's probably also thinking in his own mind and changing his mind and testing certain people and uh seeing how well they read him and how well they handle situations.
2:02:12
So, it really is something to watch and a lot of it will be about personal chemistry.
2:02:15
Yeah, I'd love to know how hereditary dynasties play into that dynamic and if you could ground it by explaining the concept and history of the princelings and then kind of the current status of the idea of a princling.
2:02:31
I don't know if that's kind of gone out of fashion or if that's still uh if if if uh uh if that matters today. Yeah.
2:02:38
So in the 1980s, the party as it was trying to figure out how to survive after the founding generation died, they looked at young people and they were a little afraid because during the cultural revolution, young people had beaten them up, brought them to struggle sessions, incarcerated them uh while they were still alive, which you know raised questions about what would happen after they died.
2:03:00
And a lot of them had been betrayed by their own secretaries.
2:03:04
And so in the 1980s a lot of them were picking princlings uh to work in their offices uh because they thought that they would be more trustworthy.
2:03:11
The problem with princlings is that they were not wellliked more broadly within the population and in many circles of the party because they were seen as entitled.
2:03:20
They were seen as arrogant.
2:03:22
They were seen as benefiting from their parents' status.
2:03:24
And so they had this weird sense of both entitlement and vulnerability uh at the same time.
2:03:31
And Xiinping was a witness to that.
2:03:31
And that was one of the reasons I think why Xiinping decided to go work in the grassroots as opposed to pursue a career that was purely in Beijing so that he could avoid those kinds of charges.
2:03:41
So uh you know Xiinping's career was hurt in many ways because he was a princling although he also did benefit his father.
2:03:50
So it's a little bit of a complicated story.
2:03:51
you know, now in um uh China today, I think that uh Xiinping probably doesn't have a great relationship with these princlings because he doesn't want them to think they have special purchase on him because of who their family is and Xiinping thinks everyone should put the party's interest first.
2:04:05
So, uh in that sense, I think that princlings matter because Xiinping is a princling and the fact that his background, you know, tells us something about that.
2:04:15
But, uh I think many other princlings feel that they don't have much of a say in the direction China is going.
2:04:18
Well, that's the name of the book, The Party's Interests Come First.
2:04:22
And thank you so much for stopping by.
2:04:24
This is a fantastic conversation.
2:04:26
Yeah, we'll have Thanks so much for having me back on when there's when there's Yeah. Yeah.
2:04:29
I mean, we'd love to have you back and and talk when there's uh anything that you haven't announced, but also uh anything in the news that you could comment on would be fantastic.
2:04:37
Uh but congratulations on the book.
2:04:38
Uh and I highly recommend everyone go pick it up.
2:04:41
The party's interests come first.
2:04:41
Uh thanks so much for stopping by, Joseph. Great questions. Thank you. Bye.
2:04:45
Next up, we have Paul from Browserbase coming into the studio. Uh, he's not here yet.
2:04:53
And that and you know what that means.
2:04:54
We get to do some ads, baby.
2:04:54
Adio customer relationship magic.
2:04:57
Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. Go to addio. com. Also, how did you sleep?
2:05:10
Jordy, Coca-Cola, modal USV. I think I got you. Got rain. Think I beat you. How'd you sleep, John? 93.
2:05:17
Only 7 hours and 19 minutes, but great on quality. Great. Back on my back. 97. Oh, it's a disaster. A clean eight hours. Oh, brutal. Okay. Well, congratulations. You're you're back.
2:05:31
You've been You had a rough rough week.
2:05:33
It was bit about a 10day period that perfectly coincided with being You beat me 10 weeks in a row, but I beat you for one week and it felt like 20 weeks of victory for me. I was pumped. That's right.
2:05:45
Anyway, I will let you take the intro with Paul, get the details from him on what's going on in his world, in the browser based world. There he is, Mr. Paul Klein IVth. Welcome. Hey guys. Big uh big day for you. Break it down. What's going on? Good.
2:06:04
Uh you know, series B announcement today.
2:06:06
Of course, you know, Sequin has his touchdown chain.
2:06:09
I brought the browserbased chain in to the big You got the big B. All right.
2:06:15
Well, I'm gonna hit the gong for the big B if if the team can go to the wide. Get ready here. There we go.
2:06:23
Solid connection for you and the browserbased team. Um, love to see it. Love to see it.
2:06:29
So, the chain, what how do you have any sort of like milestones?
2:06:33
The chain stays on until 100 million of of ARR, you know, the chain is currently taped on. Uh, it falls off. It's from Amazon.
2:06:42
So, I I think that the series D will upgrade to a better chain. Real. Okay. Okay.
2:06:47
So, a couple couple rounds away. Um, awesome.
2:06:49
Who who participated in the round?
2:06:52
Um, I'm I'm sure you had a pretty fun process.
2:06:54
Uh, but but break it down for us.
2:06:56
Yeah, you know, we're super lucky at Browser Base.
2:07:01
Every round that we've done has been preemptive.
2:07:02
So, it it was a quick one and that's because we work with people we've known for a long time.
2:07:05
you know, Glenn Solomon from Notable Capital.
2:07:07
He's someone who met with us in the earliest days and uh the Notable team, formerly known GGV Capital, they're just killing it right now.
2:07:15
They just did features and labels series B as well.
2:07:16
And I think that really started the conversation for us.
2:07:19
We're like, "Hey, sounds like you guys are doing B's.
2:07:21
We'd love to kind of have a conversation."
2:07:22
Of course, CRV doubling down as well.
2:07:24
Re rechristian on our board.
2:07:27
Uh, you know, Pler Perkins as well, one of our earliest investors at the seed, participation.
2:07:35
I feel like this board is a good starting lineup and, uh, we can go pretty far with it. So, we're excited. Amazing.
2:07:40
You guys also had a big launch today. Is that right?
2:07:41
Um, director, what's going on there?
2:07:44
what's going on there? Our whole thing is that you know when we think about how people automate the web and browser base for those who aren't familiar we're basically a web browser that can be controlled by your AI really an infrastructure company so we sell to developers who are building features that want to go automate the web and we realized that one of the places that
2:08:02
people are starting when they're building their applications is often in these kind of lovable vzero or bolt experiences they're vibe coding and we kind of looked at the way vibe coding applications were set up to help developers who build like you know automation scripts like submitting your Delaware franchise tax or grabbing a quote from a website of a supplier you want to work with. And for us, we wanted
2:08:20
And for us, we wanted to build something built for the vibe coders who actually want to build software that will do work on their behalf.
2:08:26
And that's what director is. Director.
2:08:27
ai allows you to go to the website, prompt, and it's going to output this repeatable script that will go to a website, click buttons, fill in forms, download files all on your behalf.
2:08:37
We have a few cool prompts on there as demos.
2:08:39
One is like going to Kshi and checking the poll for uh will Trump unfollow Elon on Twitter.
2:08:43
Another one's like hey go to the NASDAQ website and find me all the earnings calls for this week.
2:08:49
And then it outputs not only it does it just does that for you and then also outputs code so you can integrate that into your application and run that every single week in a repeatable way. Very cool.
2:08:58
George Hotz was actually surprisingly bullish on computer use.
2:09:03
He's he he usually pours a lot of cold water on a bunch of different stuff, but he was pretty pretty optimistic about uh me being able to book a flight on delta.
2:09:11
com with an agent coming soon.
2:09:13
Uh what I didn't get from him and what I want to get from you is where does that interaction live?
2:09:17
He was saying that yes, it's coming.
2:09:19
You'll be able to just say I'm trying to fly to New York tomorrow.
2:09:24
Book me a flight that gets me there in the evening and it will do it for you and it'll interact with the web page or the API.
2:09:30
The question is where does that interaction live?
2:09:32
Is that in a consumer app that I uh subscribe to or pay for is ad supported or is that a delta.
2:09:39
com feature or back and forth like where does the where where does more of the agentic interaction live?
2:09:49
Yeah, I think for for consumer use cases like booking a flight, it has to live where the distribution is, right?
2:09:55
And that's probably going to be Google, Apple um on device.
2:09:57
your AI will control the browser on your device.
2:10:00
But if you think of companies like RAMP, uh if Ramp wants to go automate collecting an invoice from a website where they don't have a first-party connection, the way they can agentically do that is with a web browser, going to that website, you know, getting your invoice for you and putting it through their, you know, bill pay.
2:10:14
I'm a ramp customer, so you know, it's something I've been asking for for as a feature for a while.
2:10:17
So I think that like you know for consumer automation use cases it certainly will live on device or in some sort of consumer app maybe chatbt but for the B2B use cases where you're actually using some software and the automation is an extension of the existing software that's where I think the the browser and more generalistic computer use that lives within a company like browser base it's really going to stand out.
2:10:37
Yeah, le let's dig into that that ramp example uh more because I' i've had to do this where I've wanted to classify like an Uber receipt.
2:10:43
For some reason, I wasn't subscribed to the emails and so I go into the Uber website and I pull the receipt down and then I upload that to ramp, right?
2:10:52
Um with browserbased, they could potentially do that if they have my login.
2:10:55
my login. um long term there's probably some sort of API interaction and so I almost feel like there's this weird world where like you see a lot of people using computer use and then once something really takes off then they then they automate with an integration but then there's like a new wave so is
2:11:13
your growth kind of like a series of scurves is that the way to think about it or do you think that people will just be so happy with the results from computer use that they will just say why would I even bother building the direct API connection well I think There will always be direct API connections and there should be. You know, if someone
2:11:27
You know, if someone has appetite to build that I I highly encourage it, but I think about like the rest of the internet, the internet that already exists.
2:11:33
Are we going to rebuild that internet?
2:11:34
The analogy I like to use and I use in this piece today with Alex Conrad is that, you know, when we think about Whimo, you know, Whimo drives on the roads we've already built.
2:11:41
And Whimo is not good enough to navigate those roads.
2:11:44
It might be more efficient for us to build highways just for Whimo or just for your self-driving cars to go go out and browse, but in in the end like if AI can use the internet the same way we can just as well as we can, why not just let it browse the web like we do?
2:11:57
Short highspeed rail I'm hearing because when you think dedicated roads for something that's autonomous that doesn't need to steer, that's a high-speed rail.
2:12:09
But yeah, uh why not just be in a in a self-driving car?
2:12:12
How much are you thinking about bigger partnerships long term?
2:12:15
partnerships long term? There will be some, you know, uh, companies that will not be excited about, you know, computer use agents kind of, you know, interacting with their web properties and and at some point you might be, you know, constantly going back and forth with them, you know, trying to figure out a way to I I don't know exactly what it would look like, get get around
2:12:36
captures and and things of that nature, but is that something that over time, I mean, we've had Zach from Plaid on the show uh many times and, you know, early on they they um, you know, were sort of doing things maybe manually and then and then um you know with software but then they ended up developing out you know meaningful partnerships to enable these sort of interactions to be more seamless. Is that something on your road
2:12:57
Is that something on your road map at all?
2:12:59
I can imagine just after you guys have raised you know over $50 million in a very short period of time.
2:13:05
I imagine people are kind of knocking on your door now at this point to have conversations as well.
2:13:09
Yeah, we're certainly excited to partner with the antibbot detection companies.
2:13:13
In our mind, like browser has an opportunity to be an arbiter of good bots.
2:13:17
You know, for example, we may be able to help a customer of ours say, "Hey, we're this small startup. Here's our use case.
2:13:25
We've done KYC with browserbased.
2:13:25
We have, you know, restricted domains that we can only browse to."
2:13:29
And we could help kind of represent them to the broader, you know, antibbot community and say, "This is a customer that we've certified."
2:13:35
And I think in the for the longest time, antibiot was built because there's only bad bots online.
2:13:40
But now there's good and bad bots.
2:13:41
And on browse, we hope that we can empower, show, and and prove that these are good bots and use the brand that we built as a center part of our trust.
2:13:48
But regardless, like, you know, Plaid is an amazing company.
2:13:52
I've really looked up to Plaid.
2:13:53
It is possible to build integrations for every single bank out there.
2:13:56
There's there is like a finite number of banks or at least like a workable or tractable number of banks.
2:13:59
U there is billions of websites out there.
2:14:03
So regardless, you still are going to have to have some AI for when an agent or a customer prompts your agent, hey, can you work with this specific website?
2:14:12
Uh, you might not have an integration built.
2:14:14
And browser base is kind of that primitive that you know the integration of last resort.
2:14:18
And we hope that if you're building an agent, you include a browser tool more for like the what if it happens, not if for the when it happens.
2:14:24
How do you think about competition coming from the hyperscalers and the big cloud platforms?
2:14:29
uh companies like Stripe and Plaid haven't seen much competition from GCP, Azure, AWS, but on the flip side, some of the other parts of the AI stack have been either cloned or offered or vended in through some of the bigger cloud platforms.
2:14:47
Is that a risk or or do you have an idea for uh a moat that is is too high for for the king of moes, Jeff Bezos, to clear?
2:15:00
Well, I think it starts with a few things.
2:15:01
One, I think you have to build a great developer product and that comes down to actually having a dashboard of features that people love to use and work really well.
2:15:08
Um, yeah, Jeff Bezos is the king, but I don't think any developer really raves about the AWS console, right?
2:15:12
And secondly, you have to have more than just infrastructure.
2:15:17
Infrastructure always kind of becomes a commodity, right? Sure.
2:15:18
So, moving up the stack one layer, that's what we did with Stage hand.
2:15:21
Stage hand is our browser automation framework.
2:15:22
When you build it, you kind of write code and it generates the the integration. Sorry.
2:15:29
When you write stage hand code, it actually generates the browser automation functionality in browser base.
2:15:34
So it's like one layer up.
2:15:34
The analogy here is like burcell and x.
2:15:35
js y browser base and stage hand.
2:15:37
So when you own the framework, you're really able to offer more stickiness and just build more firstparty integrations into the framework that run better on browserbased.
2:15:46
And then finally, director is at top of that stack, right?
2:15:48
Well, if you have a framework, you probably want to have a way to generate that framework code.
2:15:52
So we moved one layer higher to the application level.
2:15:54
And I haven't seen any incumbents really do well at adding, you know, building developer love around new frameworks.
2:15:59
Um, and then when they hire like building applications to generate them yet.
2:16:02
So for me, I'm kind of betting on innovation here.
2:16:06
I'm betting on us expanding our portfolio.
2:16:07
And there's this Parker Conrad tweet which was like, hey, this is going to be one on the field. Who can build it better? Who can sell it? Who can market more? Who can innovate more?
2:16:15
And uh, we're ready to go battle on the field with our new fundra in the field, in the bathrooms, in the slack.
2:16:22
It's fought out everywhere. Uh, we love it.
2:16:25
Um, talk to me about the good bots versus bad bots dynamic uh trends in the robots. txt.
2:16:32
Is there a need for some sort of like I don't know like almost universal uh like trust rating or something that identifies you as a good bot as you go around because there's going to be lots of anti-bot protections and yet I imagine that having some sort of like tr coming from a trusted IP address is something that gets you out of a lot of Cloudflare captas.
2:16:57
Um, and and I imagine that that there's probably work that you can do almost on like the business development side to to kind of grease the wheels as you try and automate more and more of the web.
2:17:12
Is that something that you're thinking about?
2:17:13
What what are the different approaches that you can take to make sure that as the anti-bot protections get more and more robust, you don't get bogged down in that and you're still offering a good experience to developers?
2:17:24
Yeah, it's a great question.
2:17:26
All um one of our investors Jeff Lawson he he always frames great infrastruure companies as kind of being one of three things. Yeah.
2:17:32
One is like APIs representing capital.
2:17:35
So it's like hey if I want to deploy a thousand servers I don't have the capital to stand that up.
2:17:38
AWS I can just deploy a thousand servers.
2:17:40
The second one is algorithmic complexity.
2:17:41
So you know your inference as a service right you have a bunch of inference you know how can you run that more efficiently than anyone else.
2:17:47
How can you serve it in a innovative way?
2:17:48
And then the third one is really bisdev as an API and I think browserbased long-term partnerships are extremely important to us and that's why we're really proud to work with companies like work OS clerk stitch and octa which all have major capture presences on the w online because that's what protects authentication.
2:18:04
Secondly, I think the credentiing actually happens when you log in.
2:18:08
Like that's how you show you are who you are.
2:18:10
And I think solving agent off, which I think these authentication companies I just mentioned will solve, really allows our customers to say, "Hey, I'm Paul.
2:18:16
I'm logging into my United account and this is my agent, but it's acting on behalf of me because I've authenticated it."
2:18:22
I think that's pretty compelling.
2:18:24
You know, a lot of the reason Antib exists is to prevent, you know, account takeovers or spam.
2:18:27
But if it can authenticate and say, "Hey, I'm acting on behalf of Paul."
2:18:30
I really think that's a good way to show proof of ownership or proof of humanood of a bot and that's going to be solved very soon.
2:18:38
It feels like there's a bunch of stuff happening at Agentic O that is very very promising and that's going to be great for browser base and we're happy to partner with all those companies to make it happen. That's fantastic.
2:18:46
Well, congrats on the big round uh and thanks for stopping by. We'll talk to you soon. Always welcome.
2:18:52
Congratulations to you and the team.
2:18:53
Excited to watch you guys work.
2:18:54
Have a good rest of the day. Talk to you soon. See you around. Appreciate it.
2:18:57
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2:19:09
Our next guest is Alex Canerwitz from big technology.
2:19:11
We love big technology and we got the big technology in the studio. Welcome to the show.
2:19:21
Thanks so much for joining us. How are you doing? Thanks guys. I'm doing great. Great to see you. Thanks for having me on.
2:19:25
uh would you mind uh doing a quick introduction on kind of how you frame yourself in the in the giant pool of big technologists and big technology folks? Definitely.
2:19:35
I think it's fairly straightforward.
2:19:37
I'm an independent journalist.
2:19:38
So I used to be working within newsrooms in 2020.
2:19:40
I quit BuzzFeed News, started my own thing.
2:19:45
I've been writing the newsletter for 5 years and doing big technology podcast for just underneath that. Amazing.
2:19:49
Uh, and I mean we this is just we can go into a bunch of other stuff, but I want to talk like the the meta level, the inside baseball for a little bit.
2:19:59
Uh, do you see uh do you see kind of a a meaningful difference between being an analyst and being a a reporter, an investigative journalist, someone who gets scoops versus someone who provides op eds?
2:20:14
Do you uh do you think that's a meaningful distinction in kind of the modern independent journalism era or the going direct era or anything like that?
2:20:24
We see ourselves not as breaking news here.
2:20:26
We see ourselves more as like a reaction and opinion show and and talk show or anything like that.
2:20:30
But I'm interested to see how you think it's evolving and then how you see yourself in the ecosystem.
2:20:34
Well, it's so interesting because the definitions, they sort of blur.
2:20:39
And I think if you do this for long enough, you're going to realize that you're a little bit of each, right?
2:20:44
You're going to want to uh get interested in a subject and then just make a bunch of calls and, you know, maybe you'll find something out and now next thing you know, you're an investigative journalist or you write a piece of analysis, now you're an analyst.
2:20:55
Or I had a situation where I interviewed Blake Lemony because I was interested in this guy who said that Google's AI was sentient.
2:21:02
And Blake Blake is late to the podcast interview.
2:21:07
And I'm like, what's going on?
2:21:07
And it turns out that while I was waiting for him, Google was firing. Fired. Yeah, I knew. Correct.
2:21:13
So I said mid- interview, "Hey Blake, this is news.
2:21:15
Uh, can I like get a comment from Google and publish it?"
2:21:19
And he goes, "Yeah, sure. Go for it."
2:21:21
So then I write to Google mid-in.
2:21:23
We publish the story on big technology because I have a Substack.
2:21:25
Um, I wake up the next morning and it's a story in the Journal and Bloomberg and the New York Times and a bunch of other places.
2:21:31
most of them said as first reported in big technology.
2:21:36
So then I'm a reporter with scoops.
2:21:38
So I think that you know I think the key to this stuff is are you president? Are you curious?
2:21:41
Are you going to try to serve your audience?
2:21:43
I know you guys are doing this so you're probably you know in all these buckets as well.
2:21:48
And I think it's one of the cool things about doing you know reporting or news or information on the internet is you get to play um you know in all these different buckets. That's fascinating.
2:21:58
Uh yeah I had I had not thought about it that way at all. Uh that's fascinating.
2:22:03
Uh anyway, let's move on to the big news.
2:22:05
I'd love kind of your reaction and breakdown from uh WWDC.
2:22:11
Uh we talked to a lot of folks about it and um I I mean obviously a lot of mixed reactions, but uh I came away kind of optimistic that we could be going into this era of like a new explosion in AI apps with leveraging ondevice inference.
2:22:26
And I was extremely optimistic about it, but uh there's a lot of other narratives going on. What was your takeaway?
2:22:32
Yeah, it was really interesting. So, I was there.
2:22:35
I was on the broadcast riser because I was doing some stuff with CNBC. Cool.
2:22:38
And I have never seen a more different uh event one year to the next.
2:22:45
Last year, super enthusiastic, a little bit more open, big vision setting with Apple Intelligence. this year.
2:22:51
I think they spent, this is a conversation I from a conversation I had with MG Seagler uh last week.
2:22:58
They spent more time talking about the phone app than they did AI.
2:23:03
So, it was clear that the expectations have changed for Apple and they ran into a lot of difficulty building AI in the same way a lot of companies have run into difficulty building AI because u I think anyone who builds with this technology knows.
2:23:16
I'd be curious to hear from your listeners and viewers if this is the right uh perspective, but it's probabilistic.
2:23:21
It doesn't act the way that you want to all the time.
2:23:23
Uh if you're a company like Apple with a very high quality bar, it's not very easy to wrangle uh this technology.
2:23:28
This is why I think that they should buy Perplexity because they can just integrate an AI search engine into their products and have that control that Apple wants.
2:23:36
Um, so we definitely saw a a very big change last year uh to this year and the focus was really on this new design uh liquid glass that they've brought into iOS which is starting to roll out in like the developer release and with a bunch of fixes we'll all get access to it at some point soon.
2:23:55
Um but it was definitely you know a very subdued event for this company and you're it's interesting that that I'd actually be curious to hear why you think that this ondevice development uh is the thing that is going to lead to an explosion in AI apps.
2:24:09
The conventional wisdom from the people that I speak with about this is that you can already build fairly fast applications using the stuff that's available today and you can build much smarter applications with um these larger parameter models than this very small model that Apple is making available on device.
2:24:27
So I didn't really find that to be a needle mover but uh I'm curious to hear why you think it is and what your audience is telling you about it.
2:24:36
Yeah, I mean I think there's still like I think there there's this hangover from war stories where developers like created a cool experience, released it, and then incurred massive cost from it going viral because a lot of these generative AI features are naturally so exciting and novel that people just have this excitement to use them.
2:24:54
And that was leading to some meaningful costs that independent developers historically you could just spin up a simple mobile app or SAS tool and not be thinking about what your cloud bill was going to look like.
2:25:06
Maybe you were even just had credits and it and it you weren't going to incur it at all.
2:25:09
It's the it's the kid without a credit card that is this super long tale of developers.
2:25:14
They're not super mature.
2:25:16
They don't they're not venturebacked, but you get a ton of those random solo developers that don't even want to think about incurring costs and they want to build, you know, the the the next flashlight app, the the beer app or Flappy Bird.
2:25:31
These types of all these different apps that kind of start as little demos and then maybe they grow into something with proper infrastructure and and a backend.
2:25:39
infrastructure and and a backend. But the more that they can leverage the free out of the box tools um the faster they can get going and yes eventually they'll raise money eventually they might switch to you know cloud models that are better
2:25:53
and more expensive and they need to think about the business model there but being able to use AI in an app that lives in the app store uses app store viral distribution truly zero cost seems like it unlocks a different tier of entrepreneurship or or app development. that that could be a really really
2:26:11
that that could be a really really interesting canvas to explore.
2:26:13
It's kind of like when the when the when the original AI video came out, there was that one viral video Harry Potter Balenciaga and it's like that's something that that could have been done with a traditional CGI pipeline.
2:26:28
Like you could have gotten ILM or Pixar team to go and make that like it was doable with the previous technology.
2:26:36
But when you lowered the cost from a million dollars to do a you know a 3D face scan of Dumbledore and and put him in Balenciaga or hire the actors and shoot it with cinema cameras.
2:26:48
When you lower that to just a couple creative prompts, like that human creativity part comes out and you get a viral video, Harry Potter, Balenciaga, right?
2:26:56
And and the same thing I think could potentially be on the verge of happening with viral apps as the as the the the the overhead and the cost to develop software drops with products like Cursor and GitHub Copilot and Windinsurf and Codeex and Devon and as that drops and then also as the ability to call AI inference on the device.
2:27:18
Uh we're already seeing it.
2:27:20
There was a cool app that went um went out on X earlier today or yesterday.
2:27:22
Uh somebody made the Tom Riddle uh the Tom Riddle iPad app.
2:27:28
So you can you can write hello and it kind of dissolves into the UI and then and then a script writes back to you.
2:27:35
Uh and that's all generative text.
2:27:38
And so it's just a simple fine-tuned prompt.
2:27:40
It doesn't need to be, you know, oh imo gold medalist like amazing math like PhD level, you know, it's not leading benchmarks.
2:27:49
It doesn't need to lead benchmarks.
2:27:50
It just needs to be conversational and with an interesting UI.
2:27:53
And it's something that this developer was able to build pretty quickly.
2:27:56
And for like a young Harry Potter fan, that's going to be a magical experience for, you know, maybe a couple minutes, maybe an hour, maybe may maybe it doesn't turn into the next big thing, but you get a million of those in the app store and then one of them, you know, develops and develops and becomes something really really cool.
2:28:12
So that's why I've I've been very optimistic.
2:28:13
why I've I've been very optimistic. Let let me give the counterpoint which is that with the biggest models that we have and the such powerful models that we have we haven't yet seen a you know critical mass of hit apps uh that you would say oh if we could just bring the
2:28:27
cost down we would get an explosion but you have opened my mind I I'm willing to to say that this is definitely something that I hadn't considered where you could have the sort of low lift fun apps that don't you know make the developer go broke that maybe were cost prohibitive to build beforehand that we might see. So let's let's talk about this in a
2:28:43
So let's let's talk about this in a couple months and then we'll see we'll see what happened. Yeah.
2:28:46
So I mean I I I do agree with you.
2:28:48
Uh and uh the the example that I think would be worth digging into is do you remember that app Lensza?
2:28:54
It was this magic avatar app.
2:28:58
You download the app and you take and you take and you take like 10 photos of yourself and then it can generate uh a like an AI image of you.
2:29:05
It was kind of a precursor to the Studio Gibli moment. Yeah.
2:29:10
and they were extremely good at monetization because they would be like, "Yeah, we're we're making the image. Do you want it?
2:29:16
Buy this $20 one inapp purchase." They did very well.
2:29:18
Uh it was a little bit of a flash in the pan.
2:29:20
I think it went it went really big.
2:29:22
And then they haven't shipped an update since December 20, 2021.
2:29:25
Yeah, it it didn't really go anywhere, but that felt like an important shelling point for uh for for generative AI imagery.
2:29:33
And then we saw it again with Studio Gibli really taking over the internet.
2:29:37
I feel like we haven't had that in text yet.
2:29:39
There hasn't been that like where's the Harry Potter Balenciaga for something that was just purely text generated.
2:29:45
Um but uh but but I think that it might be a cost issue.
2:29:50
It might be something that people just haven't had a chance to to to play with at low enough cost.
2:29:53
And I think that anytime you you reduce the cost like you know GPS, you drop the cost of that really really low and you get Uber.
2:30:01
And I I I'm just still optimistic that that there's a there's a there is a binary difference in in 0001 cent and zero cents.
2:30:09
Like zero is actually Yeah.
2:30:12
I'm smiling because I'm remembering this Lensa moment and there's been this like it was the start of people being like don't upload your face to AI because then they'll have your, you know, your biometric data.
2:30:22
And I remember in the middle of the Studio Ghibli thing, there was a tweet that came out like that where someone was like, you know, be careful about uploading your face to chat GPT and then someone took their Twitter avatar and jiblied it underneath course.
2:30:35
And I was like, all right, well, no good deed goes unpunished, I guess.
2:30:39
It's so brutal cuz the company that did Lensa pivoted to something called Prisma, which was a photo editor with like cool artist.
2:30:45
This is a It's a Russian company, I think.
2:30:47
It's cool artistic filters and they basically built the Gibli type experience and then I think they were actually Prisma before cuz I I think I've used that.
2:30:57
That's the name Prisma Labs is is the name of the company and uh and it was never quite there and then OpenAI just kind of leaprogged and I think that will be a dynamic that happens a ton.
2:31:06
I think that there will be uh kind of solo developers, kids that build a magical experience like the flashlight app and then yes, Apple will steamroll them, but that solo developer, that kid will probably make a ton of money with like a $2 inapp purchase just for upgrades or throw some ads in it or something, make some initial money.
2:31:27
But even more important, the experience of having like a hit app sets you up for, okay, the next goround, I'm ready to raise money.
2:31:35
I'm ready to think about the the the the seven powers or the moes that I should build around my business.
2:31:39
Maybe I wind up going into B2B software or or infrastructure or something else, but but they've caught the itch of of entrepreneurship because they've had that taste of like I built I built a product that had an impact and that's something that uh I I love when those things get unlocked at earlier earlier stages.
2:31:56
It's a it's a very cool idea.
2:31:56
I mean, I've had this idea to build this generative AI app where it's like a choose your own history where you can either play uh through these scenarios cuz you can do this.
2:32:04
You can like prompt Claude today and you can do it today uh where you could like be a historical character like let's say you wanted to be like Alexander Hamilton during the American Revolution and sort of like experience uh that as he did quote unquote right but doing it through a genai experience you can do that.
2:32:19
I think the problem has been that the models haven't been powerful enough for the thing that I want to build.
2:32:25
But I I think that you guys are on to something like if this is a moment where Apple, you know, Apple might start with the smaller model. Let's see what happens.
2:32:34
Maybe you get the equivalent of that beer drinking app.
2:32:36
Uh if that works out, then there's a lot of incentive for them to put much bigger models uh within the operating system.
2:32:43
And then you could really unlock some very cool things.
2:32:45
And and it it does make sense that if you end up uh not going broke by building a Genai app that becomes popular, you might want to build another one.
2:32:53
Yeah, I actually had this exact experience.
2:32:55
The historical character on uh character AI, the uh the the the the app where you can chat to a fine-tuned LLM on a particular person. Uh I picked uh Stalin.
2:33:12
And what does that say about you? No, I'm kidding. Well, I I'll tell you.
2:33:14
So, I was like, I want to go and argue with Stalin about communism, and I want him to play the steelman, the literal steelman in his case.
2:33:23
Uh, and and and I and I want to and I want to have a real hardcore debate about what Stalin did, my perception of him.
2:33:31
I I feel like I have a lot of good ammunition to to fight back against his ideology.
2:33:35
Uh, but let's go have this debate.
2:33:38
And so I started debating with this character AI, the Stalin, but it had been so RLHFD and so fine-tuned on like American values that Stalin would come to me with something like, yes, like uh you know, I did a lot of bad things and I'm like, sorry about it.
2:33:52
I was like, I don't think Stalin would talk like that to me.
2:33:55
I think Stalin would be very proud of what he did and and not admit fault.
2:33:57
And I was like, "Okay, uh, character, you clearly didn't fine-tune this enough because it's still it's still rejecting, uh, you know, the the the real the the real communism.
2:34:06
Real communism in in characterized with it and realized that, yeah, you know, maybe I did get a few things wrong.
2:34:14
That's not the stalin I wanted to debate."
2:34:17
The genesis of my idea was just dumping Wikipedia pages into uh I think it was Claude and basically playing these scenarios as like uh maybe somebody who's not like in the power position in history.
2:34:29
So I always find it interesting.
2:34:31
So my wife is European so we've like visited a lot of like um historical sites in Europe and I've always thought like well what happens if you're not like the lord or the lady that they feature or the king that they feature in these museums?
2:34:42
like what if you're just like somebody on the line and what would your life be like?
2:34:46
So for me, cuz I'm a fun guy, I dump Wikipedia pages into these bots and say, "Well, what would that be like?"
2:34:53
And then you can role play through it.
2:34:54
And I think that um if you want to if you find a way to like prompt these bots to give you like the um the non-sanitized version, it can be really interesting and and I don't know, fun.
2:35:05
I don't know if fun is the right way uh to put it, but uh worth worth going through these scenarios and playing the games. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, totally. it's a great idea.
2:35:12
Somebody will probably build it.
2:35:13
Uh but even right now, it's like even even if they would get you to pay, that's an extra hurdle that causes conversion rates and there's a million different things that that that kind of downstream from that.
2:35:26
Even if it's just writing extra code to make sure that you're processing a payment in order to pay for your cloud bill and your cloud bill.
2:35:30
Uh so I'm excited to see what happens. I I don't know.
2:35:34
We we could see how it plays out. Uh we some other Yeah.
2:35:35
Can you give us an update on the app store?
2:35:37
There's just been a lot of back and forth between uh it's Tim Sweeney, right, over at Epic and Apple uh chirping at each other.
2:35:46
Uh what what is the state of the app store?
2:35:53
Are alternative, you know, payment rails getting, you know, real adoption yet?
2:35:58
Can you give us kind of a broad overview?
2:35:59
Well, we're super early and there might be some court cases to still work through uh in terms of this alternative payment on the app store.
2:36:08
But basically what Tim Sweeney and Epic Games are trying to push through is Apple if you want to buy stuff within apps you have to use Apple's inapp payments and when you use Apple's inapp payments Apple gets a cut a sizable cut uh of the money that you spend and that is very important for their services business.
2:36:25
And just to take a step back, so basically Epic is trying to say uh that that should be illegal uh whatever it is, monopolistic or anti-competitive, and we want to be able to uh process the payments on our own or via the web and not pay Apple the 30% or whatever it is from every dollar that goes through our services.
2:36:44
Um it is so I was going to take a step back because it's just happening in this very interesting moment.
2:36:50
So, if you think about Apple's financial position right now, um almost everything is either flat or shrinking.
2:36:57
Uh the iPhone revenue 2024 versus 2023 flat.
2:37:00
Maybe it grew a tiny percent, but like you look in there, uh 10K or whatever it is, and you see the the uh you know, the growth or the loss is just the dash flat iPhone revenue.
2:37:09
And by the way, that's happening as iPhone sales decline.
2:37:14
And the only reason revenue is flat is because they're getting a higher average selling price per iPhone.
2:37:19
So Apple is in sales decline with the iPhone right now.
2:37:23
And that's happening as people spend more time with their phones and as people uh in China are less interested in buying iPhones because Huawei has become this object of national pride and it's almost as good.
2:37:35
So they're starting to buy Huawei.
2:37:35
And by the way, they're not locked into the Apple ecosystem because they use WeChat. Mhm.
2:37:40
So the company is is seeing flat sales revenue on the iPhone.
2:37:44
They're seeing uh declines in things like wearable and the iPad.
2:37:48
I think MacBook grew about 2% last year.
2:37:50
That's the uh only like traditional Apple business category that grew.
2:37:55
Uh but there is the services category uh that grew 13% last year.
2:38:00
And what does that include?
2:38:00
It includes a number of things under threat.
2:38:03
Uh that includes those inapp payments that you just brought up and it also includes this 20 plus billion dollar payment a year that Apple gets from Google which is also under threat because there's this federal case going on in DC that Google has already lost.
2:38:18
Whoa, whoa, let me stop you.
2:38:18
It also includes Apple TV. Let's talk about F1.
2:38:22
Let's talk about some of the movies they're making.
2:38:23
Let's talk about all the stuff that they highlight in the I'm not here to be super negative.
2:38:26
Not here to be super negative, but let me be realistic.
2:38:29
If that Google payment in 2024 went away and like let's say that was 20 billion it was probably more but let's say it went away in 2020 24 any any thoughts about what happened?
2:38:38
All right Apple as a as a company shrinks uh services the one the one uh division growing double digits growing 13% actually contracts. Now it's a one-time hit.
2:38:51
So you would go down and then you would grow from there.
2:38:53
But the reason why Apple is in the $3 trillion range is because it has this services uh division which investors will value as uh more of like a software company.
2:39:03
like a software company. So there you could get into like the the 30 or the 35x multiples versus a hardware company which is the other the other thing you didn't mention is margin iMessage has also opened up pretty dramatically too where you have red red receipts you know
2:39:17
between you guys have seen the Android uh folks typing and been like what's that or seen the red receipts like why is the green bubble doing the typing thing starting to happen so you're right I I think gold bubbles are coming the open AI phone is coming that he's going to pick a different Trump phone. Yeah, that Trump phones
2:39:34
Yeah, that Trump phones will have go bubbles for sure. No doubt about that.
2:39:38
The go bubbles are coming.
2:39:40
Uh talk to us about uh about Google.
2:39:40
Uh you interviewed Sergey Brin recently.
2:39:43
Um uh what what what was your read on his involvement because I feel like there's a press cycle every few months about like he's coming back.
2:39:52
He's he's he's he's back in founder mode. He's deeper than ever.
2:39:56
he's not fully stepping into the CEO seat, but they're clearly uh stepping up to the AI moment.
2:40:01
At the same time, they're dropping a ton of product updates.
2:40:06
Uh Google IO was a massive event with like a ton of different features and then they're also at the paro frontier of so many AI models on ter in terms of performance and cost and yet a lot of stuff's not breaking through.
2:40:19
What's your read on Google right now?
2:40:20
I think they are they knew they were behind on AI.
2:40:22
I mean basically they had they developed this is going to be old history for a lot of people but for those who don't know they developed this transformer model within Google uh they were very safety concerned we we talked about Blake Leo a little bit ago um he was using a version of their LLM chatbot called Lambda that he believed was a person.
2:40:42
So they had this advanced technology working within the company but OpenAI of course was first to market with something that exploded with chat GPT.
2:40:51
So once I think Sundar Pachai realized what was going on, he said, "Okay, we're going to turn all of our focus toward uh you know this AI moment building large language models and he was lucky or fortunate or he planned uh whatever you want to say.
2:41:06
I mean the company has Demisabis the head of DeepMind in there and he consolidated these two divisions, DeepMind and Google Brain, which had traditionally kind of struggled over resources and realized they needed to coordinate.
2:41:19
So, Demis takes over both of those divisions and now you see that Google is shipping like crazy uh with AI and they have some great I mean they obviously previewed some very cool things at Google IO some great features working already.
2:41:31
I mean notebook LM is really interesting.
2:41:33
I think Gemini could work a little better in places like Gmail, but we'll probably see it like being able to search your email is a pretty big deal.
2:41:40
uh and and do like things like I sometimes will say like pull out the emails um from all of Big Technologies paid subscribers recently to um so I can invite them you know to our to our private discord and Gemini gets that right about 50% of the time.
2:41:56
So I think it's clear that they're expect Yeah.
2:41:59
What do you expect to see out of the Google Open AAI relationship?
2:42:04
Right now we're seeing tension between Microsoft and OpenAI, their partners.
2:42:08
They they maybe both are unhappy with with how the deal is worked out.
2:42:10
I think all this stuff is evolving, but in my view over the next 5 to 10 years, I just see this massive war and battle for the consumer between OpenAI and Google.
2:42:22
Is that how you're looking at it as well?
2:42:26
And do you expect to see more attention there? It probably will happen.
2:42:28
So just to I'm going to answer that question.
2:42:31
I'll just finish up what I was saying that Google's in this moment of reinvention.
2:42:34
So they're going to move from search to AI.
2:42:35
And also I think Sergey is really involved on the technical side of things to answer that part.
2:42:40
Uh so the partnership that Google and and OpenAI did is is for basically um server space.
2:42:45
Uh I think OpenAI is really running out of GPUs.
2:42:49
Uh, and of course this they have this hosting deal with Microsoft uh, that's kind of like up in the air.
2:42:56
We're not quite sure where we're going to go on that front.
2:42:59
And you see Sam Alman every couple days saying, "All right, we're out of GPUs.
2:43:03
Stop burning our servers."
2:43:03
He's joking, but it's a real issue for the company.
2:43:06
So, of course, you look to Google, which has the TPUs uh, to sort of offload some of that um, some of that sort of compute need.
2:43:15
Now, we don't see OpenAI being made, unless I'm wrong here, we don't see Open AI as models being made available within Google Cloud.
2:43:21
That's the other side of the equation.
2:43:24
I spoke with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Curry in a couple of months ago and he said we'd welcome OpenAI on the platform.
2:43:29
So, that's another step I think that we should uh anticipate.
2:43:33
And then on the consumer side, I mean again like and you guys know this better than anyone else, like Silicon Valley is filled with frenemies.
2:43:41
Um, and we have another situation here where you're probably going to have Google, you'll have OpenAI, we already have it, OpenAI relying on Google infrastructure, but competing with them on, let's say, the assistant front or the chatbot front.
2:43:54
And I think that's one of the cool things about watching tech and for those who are in tech being in tech is there is almost uh you know a reliance on one another's innovations and products but also a recognition that everyone is working to build the best products and may the best product wins win and you know one product may be the king one day and then it could get leaprogged the next and build on top of each other.
2:44:15
So I do see this being a heated battle um and we're going to see a lot more drama.
2:44:23
I anticipate from all these companies coming up uh pretty soon.
2:44:25
Uh but it is notable that now OpenAI and Google have opened up the line of communications line of communication and maybe more is coming. Last question.
2:44:36
No, I'm excited to I'm excited to see all this play out.
2:44:39
My last question when when can we place OpenAI in the category of big tech? Are they there yet?
2:44:48
Does 300 mill $300 billion valuation does that do it?
2:44:50
What what's your framework?
2:44:54
Uh it's so interesting because yesterday I was seeing um people on X talk about like whatever happened to Fang, right?
2:45:01
It was Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, uh Apple, and Google, and people are calling it Mango now.
2:45:05
You guys saw that like Meta Amazon jokes. I just like Mag 7. Mag 7 works.
2:45:13
But we're hoping uh we're hoping that, you know, YC can make enough startups so we get the Mag 70.
2:45:18
We see you like to expand it. Yeah.
2:45:21
So I I would say look I'm not I'm not a mango head like the Ow and Mango is open AI.
2:45:28
I'm not a Mango head yet but it certainly seems like they're on the trajectory.
2:45:31
So I'm I'm uh I'll put my order in and and we'll wait on it for a little bit.
2:45:36
Now how much have you dug into the innovators dilemma with regard to Google?
2:45:40
Uh there's this whole story about like Sundar Pachai hasn't read the book and does it matter and Ben Thompson says well it doesn't matter because it's structural.
2:45:48
But the thing that I keep replaying is like is like what if Google had actually just released that Blake Lemony chatbot?
2:45:54
Like what if they were the first mover in chat bots before chat GPT?
2:46:00
It feels it feels like that chat GPT moment would have been theirs and then they could have compounded off off of that and it would have been fine, but maybe they'd be disrupting themselves.
2:46:10
Do you have any thoughts on on that?
2:46:10
I mean it gives more credit to Chris Pike's thesis around top down versus bottoms up innovation but anyways Alex. Yeah.
2:46:20
So I mean I wrote this book that came out in April 2020.
2:46:22
Don't recommend releasing books at the first wave of a pandemic.
2:46:27
Um but it is sort of what launched big technology for me.
2:46:28
Uh and it's called always day one.
2:46:31
And the idea is comes from Bezos.
2:46:33
is comes from Bezos. uh that the reason why the big tech companies have been able to stay competitive and dominant for longer than the average right the average company on the S&P 500 last 15 years uh today as opposed to 67 years last century and the reason why these
2:46:49
companies have been able to uh sustain their dominance is because they reinvent and they don't really uh care too much about their legacy business they're able to say what is going to take me into the next generation uh and sometimes they're late I I mean Microsoft is a perfect example. They held on to Windows
2:47:05
They held on to Windows forever.
2:47:07
They had the lost decade and then Satya who ran the server and tools business which was all about onrem servers said you know what let's do this cloud thing and now they're where they are today.
2:47:18
Um Google had maybe a lost couple years but I think they've definitely gotten with the program.
2:47:23
Like I mentioned, they're in reinvention territory right now.
2:47:26
And uh I think you could really tell the difference between what they were doing and what Apple was doing at uh WWDC, although some might disagree.
2:47:35
Um but they're all in on on AI right now.
2:47:38
And I think that um you don't have to be first, you have to be all in and you have to nail it.
2:47:42
And uh the book the the book isn't yet written on where Google ends up after this because it does threaten search.
2:47:48
Uh but I think they have as good a chance of as any given the like we talked about the compute, the talent and the data uh to be one of the leaders if not the leader in generative AI.
2:47:59
Well, hopefully you're the one to write the book. Um that would be cool.
2:48:03
Thank you so much for stopping by. Yeah. Uh we'd love you guys.
2:48:05
This is fantastic conversation. Definitely great. Fan of your show.
2:48:09
Thank you for having me on.
2:48:10
Have a great rest of your day.
2:48:12
Looking forward to the next talk soon. Cheers. Bye. Take care, guys.
2:48:12
Uh next up we have Saquon Barkley from technology investor.
2:48:17
uh coming in from the the Philadelphia Eagles.
2:48:19
Uh let's bring him in the studio and we will talk to him about everything going on in his world. Welcome to the show. Ramp day. It is ramp day.
2:48:30
Wouldn't be ramp day without Squan. Hold on.
2:48:32
We are going to do one ad first.
2:48:35
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2:48:44
Um, we are working to bring in Seaquan.
2:48:47
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2:49:02
It's a vacation home but better.
2:49:05
Um, um, we are working on that. Oh, I think he's here. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? What's up, guys? Thanks for having me.
2:49:15
Thanks so much for jumping on.
2:49:17
Um, been looking forward to this.
2:49:20
Congratulations on a on a massive day in Ramp World.
2:49:22
We'd love to get your story.
2:49:25
How did you meet Eric Glimman?
2:49:25
Uh, what's it been like to work with him?
2:49:30
Um, it's been it's been great. Uh, it's been great.
2:49:32
The conversation and introduction kind of came from uh my manager cuz um who's been super helpful uh with me and learning and exploring more in the tech world.
2:49:44
Um but getting to know getting to know Eric and being involved Eric has been amazing.
2:49:48
Uh he's been become a really good friend.
2:49:51
My my favorite thing I like to tell people about Eric is he he has this contagious smile.
2:49:57
He always has this big smile on his face every single time you're around him.
2:50:01
Um he makes you feel welcome and uh just him and his team like they've been doing an amazing job and excited for the the news that they announced today. Yeah, it's huge.
2:50:10
Uh talk to me about the Super Bowl ad.
2:50:12
We have your picture from the Super Bowl ad up on the stream right now.
2:50:16
Um how did that come together?
2:50:16
Um how fast was that process? How was the shoot?
2:50:24
Yeah, we've been talking to RAM for for a while, the Ram team for a while.
2:50:26
Um, I had dinner with Sam and Max in PA. Oh, yeah.
2:50:32
Um, a couple of them, they were able to come to a game.
2:50:36
Um, and I forgot it was maybe like 10 days, a week or two before uh the Super Bowl.
2:50:43
Uh, my manager Cuz asked me about this idea of of running an ad.
2:50:50
usually, you know, I probably would say no to Super Bowl commercial uh 10 days before, but the the ramp team uh they're they're super efficient and you know, they they made it so easy and they were so helpful for me.
2:51:03
Um and you know, they they obviously knew I had a lot at stake and wanted to make sure that was the main focus, but they did a great job.
2:51:09
I think the ad came out amazing.
2:51:11
They also showed me that, you know, in past these brands that I've worked with, they probably took too much of my time.
2:51:18
um when you're able to do this and under power and create something so special and that fans love.
2:51:23
Um but the whole team, the whole ramp team is incredible.
2:51:27
Uh Kareem, Sam, Max, all of them, they're all special people and I'm excited to be able to work with them.
2:51:32
What was the reaction from the rest of the team to see you in an enterprise software ad in the Super Bowl?
2:51:36
Uh was that surprising or was everyone just kind of excited to to to see you take that step?
2:51:43
Um yeah, I think it was more just exciting. More excited.
2:51:46
just exciting. More excited. Uh, I've always, you know, always talking about how can I do, how can I be creative in new ways and, you know, we always talk about financial freedom and involving yourself with with the best companies and the best founders and um, you know, it it's it's been pretty cool just so
2:52:03
far in my career, all the great things I've been able to do, but the platform that has been established because of football, the things football's able to bring me into and the world is is able to bring me into and um, I don't know all the stuff yet, but continue to learn in this space and continue to meet, you know, extremely incredible people and incredible teams. Yeah, it's an exciting
2:52:24
Yeah, it's an exciting time.
2:52:26
Uh, I want to talk about, uh, lessons from popular books.
2:52:29
A lot of people in tech have read The Score Takes Care of Itself by the 49ers coach and borrowed ideas from football and taken them back to business.
2:52:38
Uh, you you read 0ero to one.
2:52:40
uh what is a concept that you took from 0ero to one or you think other football players could take back into the world of football from that book?
2:52:50
Um that's a great question.
2:52:50
Uh Peter talks about, you know, when you're starting a company, um you never want to have two people doing the same job.
2:52:58
And an interesting thing that Nick Serani did this year, uh, well, my first year, I'm pretty sure he did in years prior with the Eagles, my first year with the Eagles, he he had all of us in a meeting and let all of us know what our role was and what was expected of us.
2:53:15
Not saying that our role can expand.
2:53:17
Um, not saying it can't increase, but what's needed for us to be able to go out there and compete and accomplish what we ultimately want to accomplish the Super Bowl.
2:53:30
And I I think the things you could take is just from might be losing you.
2:53:49
is it's all right to buy in knowing what you got to do, knowing what you got to accomplish.
2:53:54
Um, sometimes your role is not doing what the team asks you to do to be successful and it takes a great team. And you guys hear me? Yeah. Yeah, you're back.
2:54:08
Yeah, it kind of dropped out for a second, but we're we're we got most of that. Yeah. Can you hear me? Yep. Yep. there. Oh, sorry about that. No worries. Yeah, you hear me? Yeah. Yeah.
2:54:20
Uh, we're good on this end, I think.
2:54:22
Yep, I can hear you guys. Okay, cool.
2:54:24
Uh, let's move on to another question.
2:54:25
I want to talk about uh similarities between the offense defense dynamic on the football field to uh you know, these two units, they aren't necessarily on the field at the same time, but they both need to perform.
2:54:37
There's some similarities to business where maybe the sales team wants to go and sell a product that the engineering team needs to go and deliver and make.
2:54:46
There are two two teams that need to be working somewhat in concert.
2:54:51
Um but they're doing very different roles.
2:54:53
Uh what can you tell us about the team building that goes on between the offense and the defense to keep the whole group working in concert? We lose. Yeah. Super important.
2:55:06
Um, team is the the most important thing when it comes to Can you hear me? Yep. Yep. Hello.
2:55:13
Sorry, I think I'm in a dead spot. Um, I apologize. It's okay.
2:55:15
Uh, but I I think team I think team is the most important thing uh and especially in in my sport or just kind of any profession to be honest.
2:55:25
I think the parallels um from business, from science, from sports, uh all those things, you know, have similarities and it all comes down to building a great team.
2:55:37
So, we know how important it is for, you know, on the offensive side for us to accomplish what we need to do in the line of scrimmage.
2:55:44
But the same thing on the defensive side, establish the line of scrimmage.
2:55:48
A lot of games in football is one up front and it takes all phases, offense, defense, and special teams for us to go out there and accomplish what we want to do.
2:55:55
And when you look at it in any profession, that's why I say the parallels are so simpy into the roles.
2:56:05
You need people doing all the little things it takes to be successful.
2:56:09
And that's why you have, you know, successful teams and you have like I don't think I can name any individual.
2:56:15
whoever you think is successful, whether it's a billionaire, whether it's an MVP, it takes everybody.
2:56:19
It takes a family, it takes it takes a culture, it takes a village to be able to have that um have that success.
2:56:27
Uh I I I want to let you go because obviously you're very busy.
2:56:29
Uh la last question for me and if Jordy has anything he can ask too.
2:56:32
Um tell me about Big Dom, the chief security officer.
2:56:36
What's his role in the organization?
2:56:39
What is Big Dom's role in the organization?
2:56:43
I don't even know if I have an answer for that to be completely honest.
2:56:44
Like big dumb I know I know he gets a lot of love and you know ever since his uh the situation with the 49ers on the sideline you know he's I go to events and you know people asking for my autograph and Big Dom is probably getting more requests for autographs and pictures than than me to be honest.
2:57:04
But to be like the the best way I can put it, um he's just the glue to the team and it's I'm not even exaggerating when I say that.
2:57:15
Like he is the glue to the team.
2:57:17
He he keeps everything in line and he he makes sure he has everybody's back and that's one person that I know outside of my family member and friends that if I need anything and I need to make one phone call, I'm picking up the phone and I'm calling Big Dom. I love it. That's amazing.
2:57:33
Jordan, you have anything else you want to run through?
2:57:35
Yeah, I wanted to ask, you know, general, you know, how how you how you you and and and friends and maybe other players are thinking about investments today. You've invested in RAM.
2:57:43
You've invested in and these are some of you know the top companies in Silicon Valley.
2:57:48
Um in in Silicon Valley, a lot of people, you know, uh will start a big company, sell it, and then make a series of of silly investments.
2:57:55
How how do you avoid maybe making how do you avoid the bad investments?
2:57:59
What's your kind of framework for that? Um, yeah.
2:58:04
How do you avoid making the bad investments?
2:58:05
That's a that's a great question.
2:58:07
You you get u as a as an athlete um you get a lot of things thrown at you to say the least and you don't know what's the right thing to get involved in and um you just got to try your try to educate yourself as best as you can.
2:58:25
And to be honest, when you come from the NFL, a lot of us go to college, go to college for three years, maybe four, and you know, our financial educ how how educated we are on the financial side of things, it's not that great.
2:58:40
And I'm open and honest and I'm able to admit that to myself um that coming out the NFL, it it wasn't that great.
2:58:46
And it still has so much room to improve.
2:58:48
But the way I handle is by surrounding myself with the right people.
2:58:53
And you have to trust people.
2:58:55
And one, I have an amazing manager cuz um and he's pretty good at saying no to be honest.
2:59:00
Uh he he he will say no to pretty much everything unless Zack Franklin calls.
2:59:05
And when Zach calls us, uh anything anything he say is kind of like, uh yeah, let's let's just do it right now. That's right. That's right.
2:59:15
Let's just go right to it.
2:59:15
Um but it's God's like that.
2:59:18
like you you just surround yourself with people like that who who are super smart and super successful and done it the right way and you're able to build relationships with them.
2:59:26
Um and you able to earn you able to earn their trust and you're able to trust them and uh make those decisions.
2:59:33
So it it's tough because you get a lot of things thrown at you and I don't know if I have a the exact perfect answer but I that's a pretty good answer if you ask me.
2:59:40
That's a pretty good answer. Yeah. Right.
2:59:42
Yeah, that's a great answer.
2:59:42
I think a lot of people in in the tech world, you know, have spent decades investing, professional investors, but they should follow the same framework.
2:59:52
Say no to those things, and then if a certain person calls you, you just say, "Yeah, you back up the truck." You back up the truck. That's amazing.
2:59:58
Well, thank you so much for stopping by.
3:00:01
Uh we'd love to have you back.
3:00:02
Uh hope to see you soon in person.
3:00:04
Uh yeah, congrats on the markup, too.
3:00:06
First of first of many, I imagine. Thank you guys so much.
3:00:10
And I apologize for the NFL. I'm leaving.
3:00:12
I was coming back from uh an event at a hospital.
3:00:15
So, I might I might be a little shaky.
3:00:18
I apologize, but thank you guys for having me.
3:00:19
Yeah, we'd love to have you in the studio soon. Yeah.
3:00:22
Uh we'll we'll we'll get you under the lights here for uh for a couple minutes.
3:00:27
We can grab some of your time because this is fantastic. This is great. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers, Saquon. Have a good one.
3:00:34
That is an amazing answer.
3:00:34
That's the best investment framework.
3:00:36
I I know multiple smart very smart people that have basically the same. That's amazing.
3:00:43
If it works, you know, it works.
3:00:43
Wait, wait, wait for that one person to call. That was incredible.
3:00:48
Uh, anyway, we have our uh we have our next guest coming up in three minutes.
3:00:52
In the meantime, let's run through some timeline.
3:00:54
Yeah, we got we want to talk about Yeah, I mean the big thing for for the people monitoring the situation at home.
3:01:03
Uh apparently uh President Trump is warming to the idea of using US military assets to strike.
3:01:09
I thought you were gonna make a joke about monitor the real monitoring the situation is the Microsoft open AI situation because that's the one that most people in tech are monitoring on a daily basis.
3:01:20
But we do need to cover the geopolitics. What's the update there?
3:01:22
Uh yeah, apparently Trump uh Trump has been warming up to the idea of military action against Iran.
3:01:30
Um so much so that the poly market is spiking up to 75% chance of military action against Iran before it's July. So couple weeks left.
3:01:42
Now there would be a difference between military action and boots on the ground.
3:01:46
And I think that there's probably a a a bit of a Rubicon to cross there mentally for the American people.
3:01:52
Um obviously people don't like the idea or there are many people in America that don't like the idea of sending money to fight a foreign war and they think we should rep prioritize America and American paying down the debt for example all those different things.
3:02:05
Uh the Ukraine war has gotten some push back from a lot of folks in tech and beyond um for that reason.
3:02:10
But the real red line for a lot of people is boots on the ground.
3:02:13
Don't send our soldiers over there. It's a quagmire.
3:02:17
We live through the global war on terror.
3:02:18
Let's never do that again.
3:02:18
Uh and so uh it'll be interesting to track which way this leans because there's obviously multiple tiers to engaging.
3:02:27
One is just you you know you sell the weapons or technology to another comp to another uh government that uses them.
3:02:33
Then you're deploying American military assets but no boots on the ground and then the final is of course uh boots on the ground.
3:02:39
Uh but hopefully this whole thing resolves quickly and we can get to a uh a peace negotiation and a trade deal.
3:02:44
Um because uh we want we want freedom and we want capitalism, stability, we want business.
3:02:49
We want we want we want 10 more whizzes out of Iran.
3:02:54
Give me the Iranian whiz. That's what I want. Yeah.
3:02:57
Give me some cyber security companies that we can flip to Google for 30 million. That's what I want. Crazy.
3:03:03
Anyway, um we have some more.
3:03:05
Apparently, there's some news leaking about uh OpenAI's uh or sorry, XAI's fundraising. Oh, okay. What's going on there? They are uh spending 4.
3:03:15
7 billion in the next uh three months on a new out of their new $9. 3 billion raise.
3:03:23
Uh they're projecting 18 billion for new data center capex through 2027 and uh they are the XAI employee payroll has almost quadrupled since the series C.
3:03:38
It's interesting to think about. Should we hit the G? Yeah, do it John.
3:03:41
We'll give you one of these air horns too. There we go. Gong.
3:03:44
It's interesting that uh X was going through this like, you know, intense austerity, limiting spending, you know, keeping employee counts low. Boom. Now it's just scaling. Scaling. I love it. We love scale. It's great.
3:03:58
Um so, uh what else is in the news?
3:04:01
Oracle uh has a new initiative to help companies sell technology to the Pentagon.
3:04:05
Uh Larry Ellison, absolute dog working to help bridge the gap between startups, companies, and the DoD.
3:04:13
We've seen this from a couple companies.
3:04:16
Palunteer has the AIP program.
3:04:16
Uh Ander's been acquiring some companies and and leveraging their connections in the DoD to actually get distribution on these products once they're built.
3:04:25
uh every company has a different kind of angle on the problem, but it feels like the big narrative is like the we heard this from the secretary of the army like the DoD is ready to buy new capability from the private sector, but it's still really hard to actually get a program record.
3:04:41
It's actually really hard to get the products in, educate people, build the right consensus, figure out what the budgets are, and get the products in the hands of the war fighter.
3:04:49
And so, uh Oracle is stepping up with a program called the Oracle Defense Ecosystem.
3:04:55
It's structured to help smaller companies break through the challenges they typically face in selling tech to the defense department.
3:05:00
Uh it's far too hard to serve the American defense enterprise.
3:05:03
We can provide an easy path for these companies to get better access to the defense market.
3:05:08
So shout out Oracle consistently underrated.
3:05:10
I say put them in the MAG 7 right now.
3:05:13
The uh if if you just saw the chart of Oracle, you would think it was a Bitcoin chart.
3:05:20
Like it's just basically up and to the right like crazy.
3:05:22
It's an absolute hockey stick.
3:05:24
Um, in other news, Morgan Barrett is posting uh just 30 minutes ago.
3:05:30
He said, "When I heard that there was rampant payments corruption in Iran among the military, which is causing the regime to collapse, I initially thought that was a TVPN bit advertising ramp."
3:05:40
So, yeah, we want to, you know, there's uh once once, you know, Iran is is uh we'll get them on ramp, free and capitalist, we will are happy to go over there and and spread the good word. Get everyone on ramp.
3:05:51
Anyway, we have our next guest, Ryan from Crosby coming in the studio. Ryan, how you doing? There he is. Welcome. Big, congratulations. Yeah.
3:06:00
Kick us off with an introduction on the company, yourself, the news, everything. Amazing, guys. I'm so happy to be here.
3:06:06
Thanks for getting me on. Are we ringing the gong?
3:06:09
I mean, you got to tell us.
3:06:09
Is there something wrong worthy to ring the bell?
3:06:13
We're uh we're announcing Crosby today.
3:06:15
We've been in Stealth since uh about the fall, and we're announcing that we raised our $5.
3:06:19
8 $88 million seed for congratulations. There we go. Incredible. Massive. Congrats. Incredible. Congrats. Uh, so break it down.
3:06:32
What What are you building?
3:06:32
And then give us some differentiation.
3:06:34
How do you see the market playing out?
3:06:36
We'll we'll dig into it all, but give us the Yeah, 100%.
3:06:39
I'll give maybe like a few seconds of my background and how I got here.
3:06:42
Yeah, this is a live tracker, by the way.
3:06:44
I'll get to that in a second.
3:06:45
Yeah, I want to hear about that for sure.
3:06:46
Janky way under these boxes for today.
3:06:48
So uh my background is have been between tech and law for like a decade early at a couple of startups that did well and also for various reasons ended up going to law school practicing.
3:06:58
My last company we grew really quickly from like 10 to 100 people in about a year and the only thing slowing us down was contracts and because I was the only person there who knew anything about legal.
3:07:09
It was like my problem and obviously I tried out every legal AI thing I could get my hands on um over the last few years.
3:07:15
such an interesting space, but I kept feeling like something was missing.
3:07:19
A lot of the legal AI tools, plugins, word add-ons on the market made me a little faster as a lawyer, but I was still doing so much manual work.
3:07:27
And so I started working with my co-founder John Sarah really early at RAMP.
3:07:32
So we're celebrating twice today. Let's go.
3:07:33
Really interested in like the RAMP alumni day. Yeah.
3:07:39
John's big post of the day is that finance agents could walk so legal agents could run. Oh, that's great.
3:07:46
That's as good as we did. Yeah. Yeah.
3:07:47
So, we got, you know, John like he was obsessed with helping um, you know, fast growing businesses grow faster and save money and save time. Like that was his thing.
3:07:54
And I was obsessed with this contract problem.
3:07:55
contract problem. We started jamming idea last summer and really quickly we came up with the idea of just starting our own law firm like what would that look like full you know starting from scratch um hire lawyers try to replace their work agentically like what work can actually be done with agents what
3:08:10
can't how do we get the speed of AI with the you know expertise of lawyers and you know we we had this feeling like contracts are the API of business like anytime there's any economic growth transaction between two parties there is a contract and we should make that faster they haven't changed in 50 years the way we review them. So that's what
3:08:26
So that's what we're doing. That's Crosby. Okay. Yeah.
3:08:30
I have been very upset with uh with No, no, no.
3:08:36
Well, well, that uh that uh I love our lawyer, but uh you know, it's it's you know, it's definitely a cost center.
3:08:42
Um no, but I've been I've been kind of interested to follow, you know, the fact that that uh we haven't adopted more AI. We we're an SMB, right?
3:08:51
Um, we use AI all over the place.
3:08:55
We use AI across the entire business from content generation to management, transcription, sorts, transcription, research, all this stuff.
3:09:02
And yet, uh, you know, when it comes to actually generating and, you know, going back and forth on contracts, it's still very manual and it just feels like a place that uh, that we already should be have have picked things up. So, yeah.
3:09:19
Can you talk about um the different tiers of legal work?
3:09:22
Like my my mental model for this is like there's like form filling which did actually get somewhat commoditized by just CRUD apps in the web 2. 0 era.
3:09:34
You have companies like Legal Zoom.
3:09:36
If you need to just fill out a form to form an LLC, they'll do that.
3:09:41
uh Stripe uh uh Stripe Atlas for example doesn't use didn't use AI but was able to advance a lot of things.
3:09:47
Then on the far other end you have someone who looks more like a legal artist like the top tier of lawyers who are thinking really creatively about how to construct all sort I mean whoever came up with the open AI or chart clearly that person's not getting displaced by AI anytime soon because that was a work of art.
3:10:05
It's like a It's a monument to big law. Exactly. Yes.
3:10:11
I mean, I'm sure the legal bills there is probably in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
3:10:15
Um but but but it seems like every year as we chip away at better foundation models, more agentic reasoning, longer longer test time inference, longer uh reasoning agents, we can move things from one bucket to the other.
3:10:29
and and and so so talk to me about the flow of of like the the the road map of moving more and more uh into the AI world.
3:10:39
What's what's you know today? What's in six months?
3:10:43
What are you tracking on the foundation model side looking forward to an unlock?
3:10:51
Yeah, I mean these are like I mean these are like the fundamental questions that John and I were playing with back last fall when it was like me sitting there doing legal work and him looking over my shoulder trying to convince me he could automate the things I was doing and me being really skeptical and like we did this for weeks and um I think I mean you I think you nailed it.
3:11:09
There's sort of like we we kind of mapped out and there's probably thousands of SKs of legal work from like sure reformatting a word document to you know writing an appellet brief for for a court.
3:11:17
I think as you go from more least complicated to more complicated, the work gets slower.
3:11:24
It gets more expensive and it looks more like an art and like there's a real craft to it.
3:11:27
It gets more sophisticated.
3:11:29
And I think part of what's going on there is that part of legal work is fundamentally like a dialogue between humans, right?
3:11:35
It's a lawyer to a judge um or to a jury or two contract, you know, like parties negotiating with each other.
3:11:42
And there's like nuance and subtlety that we we had a really hard time like like the difference between the words reasonable and commercially reasonable are like and a betting sort of concept almost the same but but actually quite different.
3:11:53
So like so this is what we're struggling with.
3:11:54
I think look we obviously have a long bet on where the models will get to in terms of like getting better and better so that we can have a fully agentic law firm.
3:12:03
Like that is where surely this will go.
3:12:05
And so the idea that we started with like a word add-on. Yeah.
3:12:07
As like the packaging for this is kind of str like no lawyer has ever or nobody's ever gone and said, "I want a word add-on."
3:12:14
They just they want a lawyer.
3:12:14
They want to throw it over the fence and not think about it.
3:12:16
So that's what we're doing here today.
3:12:17
And right at like we call like right at the sort of cutting edge like of where the machines sort of stop and the human intuition or judgment or just accuracy has to come in.
3:12:27
Um that's kind of what we've been trying to model like from a workflow perspective where lawyers will jump in.
3:12:33
That's where we are today. Yeah.
3:12:34
Um to be more precise on the like where what kind of what SKS like where do things land.
3:12:40
I think right now we're focused on contracts. It's crazy.
3:12:43
It's like there's $40 billion or so that we map spent on contract review in the US.
3:12:47
These are like contracts that are like a lease to like a merger agreement that's 80 pages.
3:12:50
And so we just focus there.
3:12:51
And so our our goal is to move up the complexity scale.
3:12:53
We're with these commercial agreements now that are like let's call it you know first quartile you know not the easiest things but but still needs some human in the loop.
3:13:02
the loop. talk about um uh I want to give you an opportunity to talk about maybe how so we we recently moved into this new studio the typical process you wait a long time to get a lease when you finally get the lease you know I I take a a quick skim throw it over to our
3:13:20
lawyer they're like cool it's going to take us a while to review this right it's variable maybe they're busy maybe they're not they turn it around you get through these issues um how much uh do you already feel like you're an order of magnitude better than the traditional process? Like, can I basically
3:13:33
Like, can I basically immediately send a contract to Crosby and you guys can just like basically go line by line almost immediately and and you know cuz cuz the typical process is like, okay, you have a lease, maybe there's 15 or so places that you might want to push back or change or or things you want to add.
3:13:49
Uh, and you're basically just going through and and talking through those things.
3:13:53
And it and it feels like that could be done.
3:13:54
I I imagine I I don't know how far along you guys are.
3:13:58
guys are. It feels like you could already be at a point where the speed the the the sort it's almost like it's almost like I want a an agent on my side and I want them to have an agent on their side and I want the two agents to
3:14:09
fight it out and do two weeks of fighting in two minutes because like really I want representation and they deserve representation but I just want things to go faster because what kills me is not that they're pushing back on is it $2,000 or $5,000. What I hate is
3:14:23
What I hate is that it's two weeks in between a turn of documents. Okay.
3:14:28
Like I like honestly like the the first thing about the mapping out legal complexity was like the first slide in a pitch deck and then like the last slide was this this is this elucory but crazy idea but it's like it's getting more real that there's a professor that was doing research I think at Stanford Law School that like if you have two law students doing mock negotiations for divorce negotiations.
3:14:48
So it's very like stylized.
3:14:48
It's like who gets the kids on these days and that date and then you give their same bottom lines to agents.
3:14:53
the repeated agentic negotiations, they simulate that that that process.
3:14:57
They always get to better outcomes for both parties in minutes, right? So, it's it's simple.
3:15:01
There's not that many things to negotiate.
3:15:03
So, John and I were thinking like, okay, there's like about 50 main sticking points in a commercial agreement.
3:15:09
This is like if you're any startup, you were selling software, you were negotiating MSAs constantly. 50 sticking points.
3:15:13
What if we could map like Adobe's preferences and like Microsoft preferences and rather than having months of back and forth just agentically simulate it and in minutes say guys this is what you're going to get to.
3:15:25
And so that's like that's like maybe a few years out but that's the goal of this company.
3:15:27
We want to be the API for businesses to connect with each other from a legal and risking standpoint.
3:15:34
Um where we are today how it works like in terms of because we got money now we're signing a new office and we're doing that same thing to the commercial. It's been three months. Exactly.
3:15:44
we need office, but we we like these commercial agreements, right?
3:15:46
Like you do a few of them every week.
3:15:48
We're we're actually I would say and like I think for the fastest growing companies, these are the things that really slow them down.
3:15:55
So we're specifically working with the fastest growing companies on the market.
3:15:59
Like we've been working with Cursor and Clay and Unifi, we've now done this is over,200 contracts since we launched and so and they look similar, right?
3:16:08
So they're kind of like they're you see patterns, you see their preferences.
3:16:11
And so the way it works today, and this is like it's like all the pain that like I hated was like when a lawyer sends you something back, it's going to be an hour or two days, you don't know, and they're going to ask you questions, you have to clarify and kind of solve things, and then you send to the counterparty.
3:16:23
Today, the way it works is a salesperson at Cursor or at Clay will just slack us a document, tag our bot, we ingest it, we do review obviously with some AI, some human oversight, send it back within an hour.
3:16:35
Our median time is 58 minutes and the salesperson sends it right back and we have a knowledge base for everything those clients care about.
3:16:40
So, we know the things that Chris is like, I don't care.
3:16:42
We don't need to worry about that. We can let it go.
3:16:44
And the things that really matter and our our our like our driving insight here was we can unlock sales teams to be so much more, you know, fast at their jobs.
3:16:51
The things that really matter because of this.
3:16:53
Uh you mentioned that you're building a uh a word a Microsoft Word plugin.
3:17:01
Microsoft's obviously built co-pilots into a few of their products.
3:17:03
Are you worried about getting paper clipped if Clippy comes back and Clippy gets a law degree?
3:17:11
Clippy with a Harvard law degree. That is dangerous.
3:17:13
I I I'm I'm joking, but I'm somewhat serious.
3:17:16
Like uh it feels like the le the last thing on Microsoft's roadmap, but they do have GitHub Copilot.
3:17:21
They do have a product for software engineers.
3:17:23
Is there any risk of of Microsoft going into this market just generally, even if it's not directly?
3:17:29
This is the question everyone wants to ask.
3:17:31
What if Clippy does this?
3:17:32
What if Clippy does this?
3:17:32
Are you going to get paper clipped? Yeah. Wow.
3:17:34
That's uh I don't think that much. All right.
3:17:40
So, I think that so you know the first thing that like every founder in legal tech is like I'm going to build a better text editor.
3:17:46
Like I'm going to build a better Microsoft Word.
3:17:47
And and it's like this pipe dream and like it never work.
3:17:52
Like it's just you like you can't it's impossible.
3:17:53
If you move the image the whole document always goes.
3:17:56
That's just the nature of word docs.
3:17:58
I can't even tell you how much time. So like I don't know.
3:18:02
We're I'm bullish on Clippy.
3:18:02
Like I think we're we're like we're working heavily on top of word but we're not compet like we the better that we do and the more documents we review the more the more word licenses that we need to buy for our law. Yeah.
3:18:11
And also I mean you have you have a flywheel and it's a completely different market but we're not sell we will never sell against Microsoft Word. Yeah. Yeah.
3:18:18
Would you ever would you ever release a a B2B to B type you know product in terms of like a co-pilot?
3:18:26
It feels like a very distinct decision to say we are our own law firm, tech enabled law firm.
3:18:32
We are not you know just just allowing other law firms to build on top of this.
3:18:39
So like I think lawyers I mean I am one right like I think that we appreciate I mean I say this sincerely like there's an art to what we do but I think it makes us really ambivalent about AI like we like even if the work it does not all that we we you know we talked to so many lawyers
3:18:57
and some of them are like the most AI pills but most are like I'd rather write it my way like I think the way that I drafted that sentence like even if our tools like I always thought that there would a cursor for legal by now that lawyers would just like use the way our
3:19:11
whole team is obsessed with you know with with um you know better ID but I don't think it's manifested which is which is all to say I think part of what we're innovating on here is not just the software and the AI sort of workflow tools we're building but also the way
3:19:25
that we train lawyers that we upskill them it's a skill issue the way that we get them better at what they do to use AI the way that we want them to now if we can fully automate this service one day and it's basically like selling software which I think we will do. I
3:19:36
I still want to package it like a service.
3:19:40
I don't want people like opening up a software platform to deal with this.
3:19:43
Like lawyers, that's just not how people think about their lawyers.
3:19:45
It's just a problem you want to throw to someone else.
3:19:47
And so I'd love us to feel more of that like service experience always. Yeah.
3:19:51
Like as an agent in Slack and you can get that experience that you have with a great lawyer of of um you know just talking through things. Last question.
3:19:59
Uh for me at least um I don't know how much you've studied the history of like legal tech but uh Atrium's like the popular story that everyone knows but there was actually a company before. Do you know Clear Spire? Have you heard of this? Okay.
3:20:11
So lessons from Clear Spire and Atrium.
3:20:14
I'd love to know how you tell the story to maybe investors who are asking about those companies and what lessons you've learned and how you're differentiating.
3:20:21
Well, what's interesting is like those companies were all like sequentially sort of staggered by like I'm amazing about Clear Spy. That's like niche.
3:20:28
There's this great book about it.
3:20:29
Do you know what I'm talking about?
3:20:30
I I I haven't read the book.
3:20:31
I I But there was like a Harvard business case study on it that I read. Yeah. PDF. I read the PDF. Yeah. Okay. Fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
3:20:37
So, it's like So, it's like So, like I think they they came up with a really clever innovation which was you have a it's just an it's it's a regulatory thing, but you have a Ccorporation, you know, typical startup and your PLLC and then a binding contract. Right. Exactly.
3:20:50
And so, we we've done that and then Asia did that.
3:20:53
They took it a little farther.
3:20:54
They but and and they and they took it a little farther and focused on types of work that were maybe more automatable.
3:21:01
They focused on startup law.
3:21:01
They were like WC's law firm. Yep.
3:21:02
And I actually haven't spoken with maybe I spoke to one person from Clear Spire, but I've spoken to all the co-founders now of Adrian and almost all of them except for one said right idea, wrong time.
3:21:12
Like we just spent all of our money on NLP and now that's a solved problem. Totally right.
3:21:18
And so and so that that's the and so like that's the story is like it's a really really good idea. Yeah.
3:21:22
you go after specific types of law that can be automated that like you don't care the lawyer's name.
3:21:27
There's types of work where you're like, I need to know my lawyer's name.
3:21:29
I want to know their resume.
3:21:30
But for other work, you just need it fixed.
3:21:32
And so I I I really think like they they figured out the hard things for us and they set the stage.
3:21:39
And yeah, I mean the series A branding was like we'll do your series A super cheaply.
3:21:42
It was like it was it was great wedge, but it just didn't expand that much cuz like you only do one series A and then for the B it's like way more complicated and you just bring in a traditional. Totally.
3:21:50
And that's a loss leader for like that.
3:21:53
It doesn't feel like a loss leader when I get a six figure bill, but uh but I guess it is.
3:21:58
Anyway, this has been fantastic. I'm super excited.
3:22:00
I mean, there's so many different types of contracts that don't make sense to that that are important that need to be done well, that don't make sense to, you know, you you don't need to, you know, spend tens of thousands of dollars on.
3:22:12
So, anyways, very excited for you.
3:22:14
Excited to follow the journey.
3:22:14
Uh you can be one of our new uh legal AI experts and residents.
3:22:18
So, uh, come back on when there's news and, uh, congrats to you and the team. Congratulations. Cheers. Talk to you soon. On. Bye. Great.
3:22:28
Well, that's been a fantastic show.
3:22:30
Let's check in with Tyler on his review of Windsurf.
3:22:32
Did you get it installed? How's it going? Yeah.
3:22:34
So, I mean, it's it's pretty good, I think.
3:22:39
Um, I So, I haven't used a lot of these like IDEs yet.
3:22:42
I I've used Cursor like a little bit.
3:22:44
So, you have like your code's like handmade like farm to table. Yeah. Yeah.
3:22:48
I like to actually like to I usually I write it up by hand and then I just scan it in. Sure.
3:22:51
I think it's more of a Yeah, I feel I feel closer to the code base then. Fantastic.
3:22:55
Um but I I think it's it's really useful.
3:22:57
I mean it's great for like front end stuff.
3:22:59
Um I think and obviously I've only been using it for like you know an hour and a half.
3:23:05
Yeah, I'm sure there's a learning curve.
3:23:06
Um but I I think when you when you start to have like okay now I I have this function that runs on server.
3:23:11
It's like how does that connect?
3:23:14
It might not be in the exact same codebase.
3:23:15
It's hard to integrate these things.
3:23:17
Um, but I think for small like it's just running locally, but it's like super great. Okay.
3:23:24
Uh, did you have to was there a model selector because there was that drama about anthropic uh like pulling the plug on the windsurf connection so that uh when you set it up?
3:23:32
You used to just give windsurf your credit card and then you'd have access to claude and they would handle the billing internally.
3:23:38
Now it seems like you have to bring your own claude API if you want to use uh sonnet which is the popular one I believe. Yes.
3:23:45
So, I'm looking right now.
3:23:47
What's your experience like selecting a model?
3:23:48
Um, so so I'm on the like uh free tier, but I think I have it's like a free trial.
3:23:53
Um, but I I can choose uh 3.
3:23:55
5 sonnet, but yeah, it's bring your own keys. Got it.
3:23:59
So, so I would have to go to the cloud website and then do like export keys or just paste it in.
3:24:05
But even then, I mean, I'm sure it's like pretty easy still.
3:24:06
Did you notice any The original question we had was like if Microsoft got their hands on this intellectual property that would be incredibly valuable like does that feel like a reasonable narrative to you or or are we leaning more like this is more about data aggregation in the front door to AI?
3:24:25
I mean if I had to guess I assume it's the latter like I I I think there were some rumors at some point about OpenAI trying to build their own kind of IDE and that it failed. Interesting.
3:24:34
Um, and that was like maybe the reason for the acquisition. Yeah.
3:24:38
Um, but I I mean I can't imagine that it's really the the IP. Yeah.
3:24:43
Um, because I mean at some point it's like just it's kind of a at some point it's like a VS code fork, right? Yeah. Yeah.
3:24:50
I mean Microsoft owns VS Code Code.
3:24:53
So yeah, you'd think that they would be able to iterate towards like the best and practice UI patterns essentially if that's what really makes Windsurf stand out.
3:25:01
I'm wondering like there was a ton of heat on Windsurf on Axe for a while.
3:25:06
It was really popular and yet I saw that uh at uh the AI dev world fair uh that Swix put on.
3:25:11
Uh they had everyone raise their hands and it was like 80 or se 70 80 90% cursor users.
3:25:19
So cursor is clearly broken through in a really meaningful way into just like broad adoption.
3:25:23
Um, and that seems really really valuable because you're getting all that training data that then can be used in reinforcement learning contexts and uh and derive better AI models.
3:25:32
So, um, yeah, it seems like it it it's kind of unclear to me exactly how much of a real issue this is.
3:25:41
We'll have to ask some more people.
3:25:42
We have some other uh AI folks coming on the show later this week.
3:25:44
the show later this week. we'll we'll try and dig into you know is Microsoft after just the cash flows or the equity or the data or the IP or the models because they have like different claims on different pieces of open AAI and uh all of those are probably negotiating points as they kind of separate these two entities out and so um it's a
3:26:05
certainly a unique situation because most investors if you get them on your cap table maybe you give them a board seat but they're not getting access to your GitHub they're not getting access to your code or your IP can you imagine if that was like, oh yeah, like uh you know, I took money from this tier one VC and then they just gave all my code to a competitor that they invested in. Like
3:26:20
Like that would be a wild deal.
3:26:22
It really it really is a wild deal in hindsight.
3:26:23
I mean, it it was a wild deal at the time, but the sort of 49% profit share. We don't get equity.
3:26:31
We don't have a board seat, but you know, we have sort of a right to um IP here in the individual models.
3:26:39
So, it's going to take a long time to shake out.
3:26:41
And Sam is fighting wars on on at least a couple fronts. Yeah.
3:26:48
Uh I mean we we we didn't get a chance to dig into the full Ben Thompson article on on this, but uh he says the Wall Street Journal doesn't indicate who its sources are, but there is little doubt in my mind.
3:26:57
They too are on the OpenAI side and I get why.
3:26:59
And he says his biggest takeaway, this is Ben Thompson writing a stratey which you sub should subscribe to.
3:27:05
Uh he says, "My biggest takeaway from this story is that I have underestimated the amount of leverage that Microsoft has over open AI.
3:27:14
I mostly wrote about this slow motion train wreck last month.
3:27:16
I still think that his his take is broadly correct and note that the right to make OpenAI models available to other cloud providers is one of the points of contention in the story.
3:27:26
But the fact that OpenAI seems to be reduced to issuing fantastical threats through press suggests that the decision about the end point of these negotiations is almost entirely up to Microsoft.
3:27:37
To that end, I can understand if the company is pushing for more than I suggested.
3:27:43
Indeed, if anything, these threats through the press might make Microsoft want to hold on to more since they probably have uh since they'll probably have to fight OpenAI again in a few years.
3:27:52
I still think however this that this is all the more reason to give more ground now in exchange for an ironclad agreement securing Microsoft's exclusive Azure access to OpenAI models in perpetu in in perpetuity.
3:28:05
Uh that is a fascinating uh thing because if OpenAI somehow compounds and runs away with it like they they have this massive consumer engine that could be so it it feels like right now Anthropic and and OpenAI on the developer side are neck andneck and Anthropic even seems a little bit ahead on codegen and just developer adoption.
3:28:29
But if you if it winds up being a capital fight, if it winds up being biggest data center wins and we need to build the trillion dollar data center and Stargate becomes extremely real and extremely material, well then having a consumer app that's printing $10 billion a year is going to be way easier to underwrite as an investor to go and build the next model and then you might get higher scale which could make the developer API more valuable.
3:28:55
And if Microsoft has exclusive right to resell that that and they are the B2B player they're the B2B front end to open AI models that is extremely valuable extremely valuable.
3:29:06
So yeah I I was not I was not aware of that.
3:29:08
He also talks about his his interview with uh cursor co CEO Michael Truel.
3:29:12
It is it is it is the the the perfect irony with uh with OpenAI is that it's it's one a YC company run by Sam Alman who uh was president of OpenAI and if YC was advising a startup that came to them and they said we're going to enter into this like really complicated commercial agreement and we're going to structure as a nonprofit.
3:29:37
We're going to take all these donations and then in the future we'd like to go public.
3:29:40
They would be like, "You should just try to not add too many people to your board.
3:29:44
You know, take as little dilution as possible.
3:29:46
You should you should basically run like a dictatorship." Yeah. And talked about this.
3:29:51
I would not take my I would do not do as I say, not as I do. Yeah.
3:29:54
So, so to h to to create one of the most important new companies of of of uh a generation and then to have it just be ins snared in in all of this uh drama from the nonprofit stuff and the battle with Elon all the way now to a battle with Satia is just absolutely brutal.
3:30:12
Well, the last story we should we should close it out with is uh the Trump phone.
3:30:17
The Wall Street Journal says Trump's smartphone can't be made in America for $499 by August.
3:30:21
That's because we got Tyler over here assembling iPhones in America.
3:30:27
If Trump gets a hold of him, I think all bets are off.
3:30:29
But Trump's mobile phone shows some specs that would be that would beat Apple's biggest, priciest iPhone models.
3:30:35
Doesn't want to just make it in America.
3:30:36
Uh he wants to release a gold Android phone that will be proudly designed and built in the United States.
3:30:42
Um fascinating development.
3:30:44
This is the first time I heard about it was when the Wall Street Journal was saying it can't be done.
3:30:47
Um but uh yeah uh apparently Trump's son told the podcaster Benny Johnson on Monday morning, you can build these phones in the United States.
3:30:56
So we'll see where how got to dig into that.
3:30:58
Uh the the display is going to rival Apple's two uh $1,200 iPhone 16 Pro Max in Nobody Nobody ever thought to turn the White House into an incubator. It's happening.
3:31:13
Nobody ever I mean it was surprised hundreds of years of presidents.
3:31:18
Nobody thought I'm going to turn this into Jimmy Carter had a venture studio venture studio.
3:31:22
Jimmy Carter had a peanut farm but he divested an idiot before he took the presidency because he didn't want he wanted his hands clear.
3:31:30
He didn't want any conflicts of interest.
3:31:31
So he sold his peanut farm and we are now in a different era building 50 megapixel iPhones.
3:31:38
The the hottest new venture studio is the White House. The White House.
3:31:42
Anyway, I mean the velocity of new C corps and LLC's that they just firing out of out of an absolute cannon canon is Bitcoin treasuries and social networks and crypto.
3:31:54
We didn't really cover the story of of this uh of the Tron IPO. Yeah.
3:31:59
Not enough people are are are which Eric Trump is now denied having a role. Okay.
3:32:04
Um I mean this is the first CEO founder of a unicorn company in the White House. Yeah, it's huge.
3:32:13
People talked about Zuckerberg maybe running for president.
3:32:18
They never say unicorn tech founder Donald Trump. Yes. Yes.
3:32:21
They never they never introduce them that way.
3:32:23
Maybe they should really put the focus on what matters.
3:32:27
Social network truth trading at truth. Figure it out. Oh, wild times. Wild times. Uh a cool 5. 1 billion. 5. 1.
3:32:36
That feels down off of a off of a little bit of a high.
3:32:39
Yeah, I mean it it it's been generally down and to the right.
3:32:44
Um in uh in 2022 it peaked at 92 90 92 Well the the intraday high was $99. It's sitting at $18 now. Okay.
3:32:56
So it was like a $30 billion stock at one point something like that. Yeah.
3:33:00
You know, if if if you sell enough Trump mobile devices who knows and then maybe it's catalyst.
3:33:06
Maybe Trump media DJT true social is just pre-installed and maybe they they have their own search.
3:33:12
They build out their own search.
3:33:14
I think they should get into foundation models.
3:33:17
Really really take a run at the big labs. Hire some researchers.
3:33:18
Start doing some reinforcement learning. Let's see it.
3:33:23
I want I want I want some some research papers.
3:33:25
Maybe they should do an open source model.
3:33:29
I want some I I want some thought leadership on on artificial intelligence AGI.
3:33:33
We've suspected that he's AGI pilled, but we haven't seen it in the research papers. Let's make it happen.
3:33:41
Anyway, that's our show, folks. Thanks for watching. We had some range today. George was wild.
3:33:45
You had some spicy takes. That was fun.
3:33:48
I wish we had another 30.
3:33:50
We went all over the place.
3:33:52
We went over to Chinese history. We went into the NFL.
3:33:55
technology investor Saquon Barkley, some series A's, some series B's. Really good range. Fantastic show.
3:34:02
I think that's exactly what people come here for.
3:34:04
Thank you for watching, folks. Focus.