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4:59
Today is Tuesday, May 13, 2025.
5:01
We are live from the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital, Pink Viper, sending us these amazing shirts.
5:11
Chris, the founder and CEO of Pit Vipers, I think these are great. Sent these to us.
5:15
These look perfectly on brand for us.
5:17
Yes, they look very on brand. They're fantastic.
5:21
And I'm going to take them off because I can't see very well. Yeah, it is.
5:22
But thank you to Chris for sending them over on the set.
5:26
Anyway, um we got a great show for you guys today, folks.
5:29
We're talking Saudi Arabia.
5:31
Technology has taken over Saudi Arabia.
5:33
All of our hardest hitters, all of the absolute dogs of Silicon Valley have crossed the Atlantic Ocean and our technology to the Middle East. Yes. To Riad. To Riad. Uh so we'll cover that.
5:49
Talk about what's happening, why folks are there. Alex Wang's there. I saw Alex Karp there.
5:55
Bunch of Alex's in tech there out in Saudi Arabia.
5:58
Uh Jensen Wong and Nvidia's announcing stuff.
6:00
Uh different trade deals going down.
6:02
Bunch of interesting things happening.
6:04
Then we're going to talk about Tesla's robo taxi timelines.
6:07
Um what's going on with their robo taxi launch?
6:09
They it seems like they face some setback setback.
6:11
There's an article in the in the information that uh seems to make it all doom and gloom.
6:16
But I didn't like one of the quotes that I saw in there.
6:18
So I want to talk about it. Truth zone. Truth zone.
6:22
Um and there's also some stories about just how big tech is grappling with artificial intelligence generally.
6:25
We've been talking about this a lot. The innovator's dilemma.
6:28
the problems of trying to build a product when you're a massive tech company.
6:32
Even though you have all the resources possible, you're still struggling to get something to work.
6:37
This is why Zuck started doing jiu-jitsu at some point last year. Yeah.
6:42
So you could really they're one of the companies that's doing okay, but you know, the rest are struggling, I think.
6:48
Um but we'll dig into it.
6:48
Uh the art market, we say it's absolutely ripping. Uh there was a big sale.
6:52
wasn't quite where people wanted it, but we'll break it down for you because we know that you need an update on what's happening in the art market.
7:00
And then we are going to hopefully talk to somebody who's out in Saudi Arabia.
7:04
It's going to be like midnight or 10 p. m.
7:05
their time, but hopefully we'll be able to get on a call with somebody in Saudi Arabia breaking down what's exactly happening with all the technology folks who are out there in Saudi Arabia.
7:13
And then we got a great lineup of founders and investors and analysts to take us through the stories of the day. So, let's kick it off.
7:21
Uh first uh Trump has lift lifted sanctions on Syria and touts deals in his Middle East tour. Uh this is from Riyad.
7:32
President Trump has decided to lift sanctions on Syria, giving the country a financial lifeline after a lightning campaign overthrew its decadesl long dictator last late last year.
7:39
I will be ordering the cessation of sanctions against Syria, Trump said during a foreign policy address in Riyad.
7:45
His first stop on a 4-day swing through the Gulf.
7:49
I wonder where else he's going.
7:51
We'll have to figure that out. track him. Cutter. Yeah. Right.
7:52
Probably that'd be surprised.
7:55
I'm assuming they want to give up. Yeah.
7:57
He's got They can't just fly.
7:59
These things don't fly themselves. Yeah.
8:01
And even though it's a gift, it's such a meaningful gift.
8:02
It's such you know, he wants to make sure he wants to, you know, he's not going to take the gift sight unseen.
8:08
Trump is going to break the bottle of champagne over that new plane. Yes.
8:11
That's He's not going to let He's not going to delegate that. No way. No way.
8:13
There are things you delegate and there are things you do not delegate.
8:17
And he's in founder mode on that one.
8:19
He's not in manager mode. That's right. Uh, now it's time.
8:22
Now it's their time to shine.
8:22
We're all uh we're taking them all off.
8:24
The announcement sets the table for Trump to speak with the new Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharah on Wednesday in the Saudi capital, which the White House has built as a quick meet and greet.
8:33
The that like the the structuring of these deals like, oh, I asked him to call me and I he didn't call me.
8:40
I don't think it's not requested that you request a meeting with us. Exact.
8:45
Yeah, that's the that's the key to maybe maybe we should port some of that back to to venture capital.
8:51
If you're pitching a VC, request that they request a meeting with you.
8:55
If you're a founder, you're going out raising your series B.
8:57
Hey, Andre, I would request that you request a meeting with me.
9:01
I would request that you reach out to me cold. Yeah, exactly.
9:03
With a preemptive term sheet.
9:09
I would request that you preempt my round. Yes. Yes.
9:12
Oh, I I I I always think it's good that the way that founders will message rounds.
9:19
It's like that they'll be raising for two months and then they'll be like, "Yeah, we are preempted." Exactly. Exactly. Yes, buddy.
9:27
You've been raising for months. For weeks.
9:30
Like you've been taking meetings with investors, getting a preempting branding.
9:36
I mean, I I know a friend of ours who who said that to me at one point.
9:39
Also, preempting on a preede is hilarious, too, because it's like What are you preempting?
9:43
You were going to bootstrap.
9:46
Oh yeah, we definitely weren't ready for preede.
9:48
Definitely weren't ready for preede. We weren't ready.
9:50
Yeah, they just totally jumping ahead on the value.
9:52
Yeah, we were really going for more of a friends and family, but you know, once somebody, you know, once this preede fund offered 100K, well, yeah, we felt, yeah, maybe we're okay with getting preempt.
10:01
Uh, you know, it's become such a meme to use the preempting thing.
10:05
I feel like the next stage is putting in the press release.
10:07
I mean, like we announced instead of we, you know, we we announced a seed, seed plus, A, B, all of these rounds have kind of shifted around so an A is now the size of a B or whatever.
10:17
Uh, you should just announce, hey, we're announcing a preempted series A and just put that on the newswire. Yeah.
10:23
Or companies should just announce that they're in advance talks. That works, too.
10:30
like just say like, "Yeah, we're call."
10:31
I mean, that's basically that's basically what uh company it seems like if if sometimes a fund raise will leak and it's like, "Okay, this company is advanced talks."
10:42
Other times you can tell it's the company itself. Yeah.
10:44
Just like going to the press and being like, "We are in advanced talks." I love this.
10:50
I love this segment because we were like, "Let's talk about what Trump's doing in the Middle East in two.
10:53
Let's bring it back to early stage technology investing investing because that is because I really don't care that much about the story.
11:01
I really don't I'll dive in a little bit.
11:04
So yeah, there's some interesting stuff here.
11:05
But Trump's remarks capped an eventful first day of his Middle East visit.
11:09
He said 300 billion in investment deals. Let's see here. We love 300 billion.
11:14
Uh with Saudi Arabia with an eye toward doubling the total within four years.
11:19
I believe that the White House was highlighting $600 billion.
11:23
So, where does that even go?
11:23
Is that us investing in them?
11:26
Them investing in us both ways?
11:27
One hand washes the other, I I assume. Who knows?
11:32
Why don't Why don't you figure that out?
11:33
I mean, I I I I think it's primarily in the US.
11:35
That's what what Trump cares about.
11:37
He heaps praise on the kingdom's crown crown prince Muhammad Ben Salman, promising that we will always be friends. Yeah.
11:44
I mean, this is one of those things where like he also encouraged Riyad to move towards normalization with Israel as soon as it's ready.
11:52
Even though war rages in Gaza and Palestinians are no closer to self-ruule.
11:57
Um, the fact that you restrained your yourself on the soundboard when we had the secretary of the army on, you know, this is a really it's a it's a safe show. He would have loved it.
12:06
Business would have public company CEOs, you know, presidential appointees, really the most important decision makers in the world come on and they all get sound effects equally. Yeah. Yeah.
12:16
I really need to adopt an an equal opportunity with a friend.
12:22
You hit those you it's very clear who you're friends with. Yeah.
12:26
Tish yesterday was was you could tell he was just like it really meant a lot to off feeding off the energy. It's great.
12:34
But I think I think it's universal.
12:35
I think everyone loves the soundboard effect.
12:36
So yeah, let's try and space it out today.
12:39
Try and hit everyone equally.
12:40
This article is extremely politically charged.
12:42
Y I'm going to read this next point.
12:46
Still, the main message of the first day is that Trump values the transactional nature of US Gulf relations.
12:51
As long as money pours into the American economy, the US will remain engaged and close to the region.
12:57
He just said, "We will always be friends." Okay.
13:02
He like He just said, "We're boys." Yeah. NBS, we're boys. Yeah.
13:04
And now this journalist wants to say that it's just about the money. I mean, come on. Come on.
13:14
Give him some give him some credit.
13:15
You achieved a modern miracle the Arabian way.
13:18
Trump said of the Gulf's oil rich monarchies.
13:19
The Gulf nations have shown this entire region a path towards safe and orderly society with improving quality of life, flourishing economic growth, expanding personal freedoms, and increasing responsibilities on the world stage.
13:31
Uh Trump's stop in Riad was always build as a glitzy spectacle, but few could have predicted the warmth displayed between the two leaders and the nations they lead.
13:42
Trump's visit to Riyad kicked off with a Saudi F-15 escort as Air Force One touchdown at King Khaled International Airport on Tuesday.
13:51
Drums boomed and horns blared as the crown prince, the country's de facto ruler greeted Trump on a lavender colored carpet rolled out beneath the American plane.
14:02
They really rolled out the lavender carpet for him. There it is.
14:07
They walked into the airport for a private ceremony lined by waving US and Saudi flags to welcome the president and many of his senior officials including secretary of state Marco Rubio and defense secretary Pete Hgsth and former Andre Horowitz partner Shriram Krishnan made it. I hope he got a chance. Got a bunch of photos.
14:25
He's a heavy hitter over there. It's amazing. Heavy heavy hit. Love it. Very cool.
14:29
Um and again you you know I they they clearly understand they understand that that Trump loves showbiz and so the more that you can lean into that y the better you know the relations you'll have with the US. Yep. So Elon Musk is there.
14:44
FIFA president Giani Infantino is there.
14:51
Trump landed in the Middle East transformed by near nearly two years of war which responded with a devast devastating military campaign that has killed tens of thousands of people.
14:59
Um trying to shut it down, trying to bring peace to the Middle East. Yep. It's rough.
15:05
Um anyway, we should go to some of the other announcements that relate to this.
15:10
So, Unusual Wales has a post that uh US and Saudi Arabia agreed to $142 billion in defense sales.
15:15
You have to imagine that that's important to defense tech one way or another.
15:21
Although we haven't seen a lot of stories about this.
15:23
Most of the stories that we've seen out of defense tech have been around Ukraine.
15:26
But I was wondering um if we're going to see, you know, the story of Nuros, the drone company, how uh uh Saurin, great name, uh Monroe Anderson, nominative determinism, he went out to Ukraine.
15:41
He's one of the he's he's literally the world champion in FPV drone flying. Have you seen this? So drone racing. Drone racing.
15:46
So so he's he's incredible pilot.
15:49
Like you you go out and you think, "Oh, he's going to fly the drone."
15:52
And it's like the most intense whipping around a tree. He's crazy.
15:56
Uh so he went out to Ukraine and was helping train drone pilots there to use drones as weapons basically.
16:01
Comes back, builds a company around it.
16:04
It's an incredible story raises from Sequoia.
16:07
Obviously lots of comp lots of competitive dynamics with Anderoll and stuff.
16:11
a lot of questions and a lot of problems they need to solve, but uh still like an incredible story of like going and getting experience on the ground as a young technologist and then going and building the exact thing that like they need.
16:21
Um and then eventually selling it to the Ukrainians.
16:24
Um but we haven't heard those stories as much from Saudi Arabia or the Middle East.
16:29
And I was also wondering with the India Pakistan conflict if there was going to be a Neuros type company that grows up out of India.
16:39
Obviously there's a lot of uh folks from India who work at Anderol or who work in defense tech or or even don't even come to America but want to work in defense tech.
16:48
It' be interesting to see someone who cuts their teeth in the Indian Pakistan conflict then build a company out of that and that something I'm like tracking right now.
16:57
Didn't have that much time to cut their teeth.
16:59
Well, yeah, because it was very very short.
17:04
But still I I I like and and America the whole time was like we're hands off on this.
17:08
Like we're not taking sides.
17:08
But if you look at the actual numbers, America has kind of taken a side in the sense that just in the last year, America has sent $5 billion worth of military equipment to India and zero to Pakistan. Yeah.
17:20
And so like the numbers are pretty clear.
17:22
And when I see $5 billion, I don't see Okay. Yeah.
17:24
Like that's a you know there's a generational company to be built right there for American and for America for India or whatever.
17:33
That probably doesn't make sense.
17:34
But I is there is there someone like an entrepreneur who could go over there and get one contract done for 10 million and then take those learnings from that unique conflict because I'm sure it's different from other conflicts and then build a real company around that.
17:47
Uh that was something I was kind of tracking but and I've heard some folks saying like they want to build like the ender role for India and that'd be interesting to track but haven't seen that actually happen yet.
17:55
Uh anyway, uh back on Saudi Arabia.
17:57
Uh Saudi Arabia brought in a mobile McDonald's for President Trump on his visit. Incredible.
18:05
Uh and it's just like a portable McDonald's.
18:10
Like his reputation wooden siding that looks like not just any old McDonald's.
18:15
It really that looks like top tier McDonald's. Pretty sweet.
18:17
Uh and then Vtorio kind of summed it up all in one post here.
18:23
He says, "Trump, Elon, Sam Alman, Jensen, and Saudi royalty.
18:25
This might be one of the most important events of the decade.
18:29
Trump signs the peace accords.
18:31
Sets up the largest bilateral deal in history.
18:33
Elon brings autonomy, solar grids, orbital access.
18:38
Sam Alman brings AGI and Stargate infrastructure.
18:40
Jensen brings silicon and compute.
18:42
Saudis bring capital, land, and energy.
18:44
This is how post scarcity begins.
18:46
Compute for carbon swaps and desert solar powering.
18:49
AGI fabs instead of oil rigs and starship landing pads on Arabian sand.
18:54
Pedaflop replaces petro dollar and sun replaces oil.
18:57
This is the birth of a post-western, post scarcity, postdemocratic world order.
19:03
Interesting take Victoria.
19:06
Let's hear from Victoria. Let's go.
19:08
Which is the most aggressive take possible out of like, you know, something that they described as like a meet and greet and they're like taking some photos.
19:17
But, you know, I mean, yeah, I think it's directionally correct that there's like this is the beginning of partnerships and and the continuation of partnerships because obviously Saudi Arabia through investments is as has exposure to a lot of these and you know there's been discussions here.
19:31
It's not like all of these deals are going to get signed today.
19:33
Uh but I like that he's putting a point on it like we are entering post scarcity today even even postdemocratic. Yeah. Right. Post democratic. Yeah. Love Vtorio.
19:42
uh thoughtprovoking to say the least.
19:47
There's some other we should talk about the specifically the Nvidia Nvidia deal.
19:51
So I'll I'll pull this up.
19:51
So Humane and Nvidia announced strategic partnership to build AI factories of the future in Saudi Arabia.
19:57
We're hearing the AI factory term again.
19:59
Humane is the AI subsidiary of Saudi Arabia's uh public investment fund PIF.
20:05
Um, so they're making a major investment to build AI factories powered by hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA's most advanced GPUs.
20:13
Over the next 5 years, NVIDIA will work with Humane to train and empower an AI ready workforce. Sounds awesome.
20:18
I When did Jensen start calling data centers AI factories? I don't know.
20:26
And I wonder if that came from him or but it does seem like a more general term like anyone can understand AI factory like everyone's factory data center is very it's like are you just storing data? Yeah. All right.
20:40
Add another one trillion to the market cap. I've seen enough.
20:44
So the projected capacity uh for one of the first factories is 500 megawatts which is not massive by American standards but it's up there.
20:52
uh and that will have several hundred,000 Nvidia GPUs over the next five years.
20:59
The first fla first phase of deployment will be a 18,000 uh cluster 18,000 GPU cluster of Nvidia GB300 Grace Blackwell AI supercomputer with Nvidia Infiniban networking.
21:10
Man, they really like the jargon in here.
21:13
Um and Nvidia popped on the news.
21:15
They're up another 5% today. Back into the 3T club. Let's hear it.
21:22
Let's get some soundboard for them. That's fantastic. That's really good.
21:27
Uh here's a good question.
21:29
This is what we were talking about.
21:30
We were talking about like the the path to the biggest company on Poly Market.
21:33
How how it was a race between Apple and Microsoft.
21:35
And we were like, "Yes, that makes sense."
21:37
But the one company that could just absolutely pop would be Nvidia if it was a wild card. Still, yeah, of course. Of course.
21:42
But but like if Nvidia does a couple more huge deals out of nowhere, all of a sudden it's going to It's so funny because the gap between Nvidia and Microsoft is like $200 billion. Oh, that's it.
21:55
I thought it was like a trillion dollars.
21:57
I don't even know where $200 billion.
21:59
There's just not Oh, they could close that in a weekend. Yeah. Yeah.
22:02
That's just like a one swing.
22:04
Here's a good quote from Jensen.
22:06
Uh Jensen says, "AI like electricity and internet is essential infrastructure for every nation.
22:12
Together with humane, we are building the AI infrastructure for the people and companies of Saudi Arabia to realize the bold vision of the kingdom. So um anyways, big news.
22:20
Uh is at 28% to be the largest company by the end of 2025.
22:28
It's Microsoft at 37%, Apple at 31%, and then Nvidia at 28%.
22:34
And the market caps are uh 3. 33 trillion versus 3. 17 trillion. Wow. Yeah. Doable. Doable for Jensen.
22:41
Couple deals and he makes it happen. Yeah. Interesting.
22:44
I wonder what they'll be training.
22:46
I mean, they've they've done Falcon 9B.
22:47
I haven't heard more about their LLM development.
22:50
Um are they are they okay being a buyer of OpenAI and Enthropic and the other foundation models or do they really want to own their own?
22:56
Um if they're really close with us and they are boys, right? Like you shouldn't care.
23:03
It shouldn't be that big of a deal.
23:04
Should be like, "Yeah, it's fine.
23:05
I don't care if I use an American LLM."
23:08
But we'll see where they go with it. Anyway, we will see.
23:09
Uh, Alex Wang was over there.
23:12
He said, "Good discussion on AI leadership with President Trump and my colleagues from across the AI industry." Shaking hands emoji.
23:17
Thank you to our Saudi hosts as well.
23:19
Seems like he had a great time.
23:21
Uh, and Elon Musk posted a 8-minute interview from the Saudi US investment forum.
23:27
And there were some details that came out of here.
23:32
I don't know if we can play this video.
23:33
Do we have audio for this?
23:33
Imagine the tension between and Sam. Yeah.
23:35
To celebrate a US Saudi and a Saudi US relationship that is 92 years old about how we move from an oilbased economy to an innovationbased economy powered by wonderful technologies that definitely you're one of the pioneers in this industry.
23:57
We just showed to his royal highness some of your Optimus robots. Yeah. And to President Trump. Let's talk about that. Tell me about them. Uh yes.
24:07
Uh so we just uh showed the several of our Tesla Optimus robots to his Highness and President Trump and I think they were very impressed.
24:15
Um in fact, one of our robots did the Trump dance which I thought was pretty cool. YMCA. Yeah. Yeah. To YMCA.
24:22
Um so yeah, our robots can dance.
24:26
They can walk around, they can interact.
24:29
Um, I think we're we're headed to uh a radically different world.
24:36
I think a I think a a good world, an interesting world.
24:38
Um, my prediction actually for humanoid robots is that ultimately there will be um tens of billions.
24:48
Um, I I think everyone will want to have their personal robot.
24:51
You can think of it like uh as though you had your own personal C3PO or R2-D2 or but even better then who wouldn't want to have their own personal C3PO R2-D2?
25:06
That would be pretty great.
25:06
Um and uh I I also think it it unlocks an immense amount of economic potential because when you're you think about like what is the output of an economy it is productivity per capita times population or capita the uh once you have humanoid robots the actual economic output potential is tremendous.
25:32
Uh it's it's really unlimited.
25:34
Um potentially we could have an economy 10 times the size of the current global economy where no one wants for anything.
25:44
Um there's sometimes an AI they talk about.
25:52
I think it's actually going to be universal.
25:53
No one's clapping in the actual audience.
25:55
Yeah, it was kind of low energy. Come on, guys. Where's your soundboard? I was falling asleep.
25:59
Saudi US investment forum stepping up, guys.
26:04
Anyway, uh we should stay on Elon and talk about the Tesla robo taxi stuff, but should Tesla get credit for those tens of billions of humanoid sales today because I don't think that's priced into the stock.
26:17
The market is not quite pricing it.
26:20
It's priced in a figure, right? 38 billion.
26:22
You got to think that that figures priced in for sure.
26:24
But if I'm looking at Tesla, I mean, you know, you're you're like half joking, but there really is Tesla's back over one trillion. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go.
26:36
I never doubted it for a second. We're so back. It's so crazy.
26:38
Even so, you could buy Tesla at $227 a share.
26:47
A month ago, less than a month ago. It's at 335 today.
26:50
All it took was giving up the Doge dream.
26:57
Terrible time to be a technopessimist. It's really awful.
27:01
Anyway, I I I do think the the Tesla the Tesla story is interesting because there are two narratives right now that are kind of rivaling.
27:06
Like you're joking about like are you pricing in all 10 trillion dollars worth of GDP or whatever that they're going to add.
27:11
Um but I do think that there are significant number of investors that are saying I'm investing because of of Optimus and there are a different set of investors that are thinking I'm investing because of robo taxis because these are the two major transformative technologies that if they work will be big new markets, right?
27:29
Um, and Tesla's working on both of them, but there's questions internally about timelines on each of them.
27:36
Optimist obviously seems farther farther out.
27:39
Um, potentially bigger market even.
27:42
Um, and then also there's like reports of like, you know, how far along are each of the technologies?
27:46
How how are the teams actually doing on this stuff?
27:50
Um, but the thing that I keep coming back to and the thing I want to dive into is just there's a lot of negativity around Tesla like missing deadlines or oh the the robots are actually teleoperated or whatever.
27:59
But um I think it's always useful to step back and benchmark against what else is happening in the market because um like the idea of a robot that dances is not science fiction.
28:11
Like we've seen it with Boston Dynamics, we've seen it with Unitry.
28:14
And it seems like the question is not can Elon build a robot that dances that's as good as Unitry or as good as Boston Dynamics.
28:21
Like that seems like pretty commoditized right now.
28:22
He should be able to do that.
28:24
The question is can he dominate the category and really scale up production to a point where the economic flywheel works, it's profitable, and the products are so much better that they're winning winning.
28:36
Uh just like in the heyday of Tesla, the Model 3 was winning like best car of the year by car and driver.
28:42
Like a pretty nonpartisan group that was just like, yeah, on paper for the price, this is an incredible car.
28:49
Goes 0 to 60 in two seconds if it's the Plat and it's like under 100K.
28:52
You could never get that performance for price ever before and it drives itself and stuff.
28:56
So anyway, uh the big discussions about uh the Tesla robo taxi deadline.
29:01
The information says the deadline is nearing and it's the start of a key testing phase that is uncertain.
29:08
And so, uh, in Austin, Texas, there is a deadline that's just weeks away.
29:13
But the company hasn't started testing its cars without a human safety driver as of last month, according to an engineer close to the testing and former employee.
29:20
That's a crucial step required before Tesla can launch the pilot service for customers.
29:24
And so Whimo is going through the uh the approval process for self-driving taxi services obviously all over the place.
29:32
They're in Los Angeles now.
29:34
They've been very successful in San Francisco and there's clearly stages and gates to that roll out where there's a human driver in then you pull the driver out and the car is driving around by itself at low speeds then higher speeds and as you get approved you move forward.
29:47
And so Tesla's been training its most popular model, the Model Y, in Austin since at least last fall, according to internal emails.
29:55
Uh Tesla employees are now testing the robo taxi service cars on supervised rides in which a human safety driver sits behind the wheel.
30:02
Uh testing without a safety driver is the next step, although it's unclear when that will when that will start. Much is at stake.
30:09
Musk is betting Tesla's future on robo taxi ambitions, which will initially rely on existing Tesla vehicles before using cyber cabs, the specialized vehicles without steering wheels.
30:18
It plans to begin manufacturing next year.
30:19
And making the cyber cab, that does not seem complicated because it's basically a Model 3. Yeah.
30:23
Without a steering wheel.
30:26
It's like less parts and it's all the same infrastructure.
30:28
So like I would I would be shocked if they don't hit that goal to make that because it's like paint it gold and you're good to go basically.
30:35
It wasn't like a radical reinvention of what the vehicle is, you know? Yeah.
30:38
I mean the the most exciting thing was the doors go up, right?
30:41
Yes, the butterfly doors are important.
30:44
Yeah, always the doors go up.
30:47
Musk is also betting that Tesla can catch up to Alphabet's Whimo, which already operates a commercial robo taxi service in several US cities, but employs a different approach to training and operating cars, which we'll which we'll talk about.
30:56
So, when Whimo wants to offer its city its service in a new city, it uses data from sensors on a handful of test cars to prepare detailed maps of each city so its vehicles can safely navigate the streets.
31:06
The process took a decade to develop and can take at least a year to complete.
31:09
In Austin, Whimo tested for about 6 months with the safety driver in its vehicles and six months without them.
31:15
Whimo cars don't yet ferry passengers on Interstate 35.
31:19
Uh but they are training on highways in California.
31:21
Tesla, on the other hand, trains its cars mostly on data accumulated from existing Tesla drivers.
31:27
Preparing to launch the service in Austin has forced the company to confront mundane operational problems like rerouting when cars get stuck and providing customer service.
31:34
essentially the struggles of not having a human in the car.
31:38
The engineer said Whimo and other competitors have spent years grappling with these issues.
31:42
Musk told investors this month the launch in Austin could include as few as 10 Model Y vehicles.
31:48
The company's looking to hire a team of people to work remotely using virtual reality headsets to supervise the cars when they encounter problems. So this is TA operation.
31:55
Um very normal and also used in Whimos.
32:01
This is the George Hots contention.
32:01
It's never been confirmed, but he said uh Whimos don't work when the cell phone towers go down.
32:06
So, you know that they're connected to the internet and you know that people are watching them.
32:10
But, uh the the VR headset thing is interesting because I haven't seen that as necessary.
32:15
Uh I I always thought that um when you had a tea operation team working on uh self-driving cars, what you'd see is somebody had a big screen or series of screens and they would be looking at maybe four cars simultaneously and it would have kind of like green, yellow, red.
32:30
And if it's green, it's just cruising down a clear day on a empty street, no problem.
32:33
But then it sees a cone that it doesn't understand. It goes yellow.
32:37
And you can kind of look at it.
32:38
And then red is I'm really confused. I'm stopping the car.
32:43
Now you need to hop in and take over.
32:44
And then and then you're not you're not driving the car in VR.
32:46
You're saying, "Hey, uh, I I've I've double checked as a human and I see no humans there.
32:52
So you can you can go for it, car." Yeah.
32:56
And it's not I mean at the end of the day it's not unreasonable to think that Tesla rolls this out and there is perpetually somebody monitoring every single minute that the car is operational. Why not?
33:08
It's not that expensive and it's not that expensive and obviously doesn't work over the very long term but it's fine as a way as a path to market.
33:14
And so uh the Tesla the Texas Department of Public Safety which oversees the highway has not yet received an emergency plan from Tesla but said it's prepared for the launch.
33:24
Such a plan would help emergency responders engage with cars if they fail to pull over or if they block traffic such as other robo taxi services have done.
33:32
So, it seems like the government's actually catching up to this thing this stuff and and is putting a plan in place to say, "Hey, like we want this and people want this, but we got to figure out what to do if this car freaks out."
33:44
Basically, I saw a video uh somewhat somewhat unrelated, but I saw a video of somebody figured out how to trap a Whimo. A Whimo had was using.
33:51
Oh, you just put a cone on it and stops. Yeah.
33:55
So, so apparently a Whimo was in front of this guy's house and so he went and just took tape and just put four pieces of tape around like the the main sensors and so the car is like on and it's like running but like and I was like I don't support abuse of any type of robot.
34:10
That person's first to go when the when Salvation Day comes. They're cooked. Yeah.
34:17
The Terminator is not going to look kindly on that behavior.
34:19
Um, anyway, robots, uh, full self-driving could take over most of city driving on city streets.
34:27
FSD launched to the public in 2022.
34:29
By last year, more than 2. 5 2.
34:29
4 million cars were using it. That's a lot of data.
34:34
Um, several several autonomy researchers and engineers said Musk's confidence in Tesla's ability to quickly expand its autonomous vehicles to new markets fails to account for the logistics needed to operate ride hailing fleets at scales at scale.
34:46
Yeah, whether they're driven by a human or computer, it also glosses over some of the regional differences such as traffic light and lane design that have slowed other companies as they try to scale.
34:56
And this is the key thing we we we'll go into but this is like the really really important this is a very very important uh underlying strategy to the way Tesla is approaching this versus way map.
35:06
So uh Tesla receives video clips from a from an array of cameras mounted around its cars and processes them at a cluster of supercomputers which it calls dojo.
35:15
A primary goal is reducing the frequency with which a human has to intervene in the car's driving.
35:21
This was called on policy learning versus off policy learning.
35:24
And so you the car is driving itself.
35:26
Whenever the human interacts to take the steering wheel or apply the brakes, that's sent as a negative reward to the to the neural network to say, "Hey, whatever you did there, that was wrong.
35:36
The human didn't like it."
35:36
And so go back and and do more of the driving where the human isn't taking over.
35:40
Uh and and you get a lot of data on that.
35:44
You build a big big transformer network and eventually you get a very strong uh machine learning model essentially.
35:48
So the computer systems handling the data learn differently from humans and sometimes stumble over issues that would be obvious to people.
35:56
The engineer said like this is obvious.
35:58
We've seen this with hallucinations with LLMs.
35:59
The development has at times relied on feedback from Musk and from YouTubers driving the semi-autonomous modes who map out parts of the roads in San Francisco and Florida where the cars struggle.
36:09
Uh Tesla this is citizen citizen journalism AI. Yeah I guess training.
36:16
Uh Tesla's sole reliance on cameras rather than laser and radar based systems in Whimo means its autonomous approach is more prone to mistakes.
36:23
Critics say cameras only is not enough and likely will never be enough says uh Satan Merceri uh the co-founder of the autonomous trucking and logistics companies Locomation and Atlas Robotics.
36:37
Tesla's approach doesn't work period said Missy Cummings an autonomous vehicle researcher at George Mason University.
36:44
Computer vision is simply not enough for this task.
36:46
And I can completely disagree with that.
36:49
Betting against Elon Musk. It's not just that.
36:51
It's betting against it's betting against the way humans do driving.
36:53
Like humans don't have LAR.
36:56
We just have vision and we drive fine.
36:58
And so I've never I've never buy I've never bought this this argument, this line of uh reasoning that that you that you definitely need something more advanced than just a camera because humans are able to drive. 18-year-olds can drive. 16-year-olds can drive.
37:14
Uh, and yes, you need you obviously need to create something that's, you know, human level intelligence and very very capable and you need a huge amount of data, but there's there's nothing like this is such a reputation.
37:27
Director of the Mason Autonomy and Robotics Center. Yeah.
37:30
And and I and I understand where she's coming from.
37:34
She was a naval pilot in the 80s. Yeah.
37:36
I mean, I understand where she's coming from in the sense that like right now LAR and radar based systems and GPS based systems are seeing better results right now, but to just throw out the bitter lesson and disrespect scale is all you need is a really really tall order that's been wrong many many times.
37:53
And so it's it's a very risky position to be in and I don't I don't think it'll pay off well.
38:01
And the whole theory of this scaling laws and the ideas that you want to uh that you want to just get a whole bunch of data and and crunch it down into a huge transformer essentially um has proven correct many many times.
38:14
And it also puts you on a different path to scaling because as if you if you have a system that's more handcoded, more um more customized based on the particular local, every time you go into a new city, you need a new uh you need a new team to spin up new records and scan and whatnot and do all these things. Yeah. Yeah.
38:38
And her broad point is that laserbased LAR systems also make errors like computer vision is making today.
38:46
But it's just that layer of redundancy. Yeah.
38:48
That allows you to avoid the mistakes that pure pure computer vision systems are are making today.
38:53
It's just it's just a very strong statement to say camera only will never be enough. Yeah.
38:59
Because it's literally enough right now in a human.
39:02
And so I just don't I just don't buy this line at all.
39:05
I just think the timeline to actually scale this up is is long.
39:10
It's gonna take a long time.
39:12
But uh but the idea that you will never be able to operate a car safely with just camera is ridiculous to me.
39:17
Anyway, uh her analysis last year of Whimo, Cruz, and Zuks and other testers found that computer vision systems are very brittle and likely play an outsized role in crashes in part because they miss obstacles and and can hallucinate imaginary obstacles.
39:32
This is what I was saying.
39:34
If you add that LAR system, you can add redundancy.
39:37
And so it's just another effectively, you know, check on uh the pure computer vision approach.
39:43
Uh it's difficult to gauge safety of either approach because Whimo's develop deployments are still limited to specific cities and Tesla's system is not yet fully autonomous.
39:52
Federal regulators are examining how Tesla cars handle relatively common traffic occurrences such as sunlare, fog, and airborne dust, which is legitimate.
39:59
Uh Musk has counted counted countered doubters by saying that humans managed to drive with only their eyes. Got them.
40:08
But but acknowledged last month that Tesla's robo taxi services won't work in snow, prompting some followers online to offer to help train Tesla by driving more in poor conditions.
40:18
They're just like I will do as volunteer. Musk.
40:20
Uh Musk also said it's been difficult to train on enough incidents to make sure this the cars can handle them safely because if the Teslas don't get into a lot of crashes, there's not a lot of data there.
40:31
If Elon can add a uh the Tesla camera system to a Lamborghini, that'd be great.
40:40
I'm happy to put 5,000 miles on it in in harsh winter conditions.
40:45
Uh you know, at this point, you know, summer's approaching.
40:48
probably need to take it down to Australia, but doing, you know, a road trip through, uh, you know, the Australian winter sounds great, actually. Yeah.
40:57
I mean, this also this also ignores simulation learning and transfer learning, um, which is obviously something Tesla's invested in a ton and has a very proven proven track record.
41:08
There was a researcher from Nvidia at Sequoa's AI Ascent talking about uh transfer learning and how they're using uh generative AI to generate uh essentially video from the simulated data.
41:20
So they'll create a physics simulation, basically a video game of a robot picking up an orange or something like that.
41:28
That that's a physics simulation.
41:31
Then they'll create a ton of variation in the different physics properties to try and inject a lot of noise into the system basically.
41:37
Um, but then they'll use generative AI to convert that into video feeds that then they can feed back into the system to train on.
41:43
And they've seen a lot of success with that.
41:45
And so, um, I I I'm I'm I'm skeptical that that that this is that big of an issue, but also like you could just put lidar on the cyber cab like it hasn't been built yet and if the price comes down, you throw that on and then and then all of a sudden Yeah.
42:02
Or Tesla there's companies that Yeah.
42:06
Tesla could acquire that would immediately give them a massive EV edge there. So, yeah. Anyways, let's move on. Okay.
42:14
Uh well, there's some other uh commentary around this piece.
42:17
Uh with the robo taxi network, your Tesla will be able to earn money while you're not using it, essentially paying for itself.
42:24
It'll go it'll go to work just like you, says Tesla.
42:26
Um very bullish for buying a Tesla.
42:30
Wild that big public company can tweet like this.
42:33
Don't use periods anymore.
42:35
Oh yeah, I saw um yeah, it's an interesting evolution, but periods are over. Done.
42:42
And then uh Dan Odow uh is another uh account on here pouring some cold water on the robo taxi launch.
42:51
You can almost hear Elon sigh of relief. Sigh of relief.
42:55
He now has his excuse for cancelling Tesla's June robo taxi launch.
43:00
It won't be long until Elon claims Tesla was totally ready, but the pesky regulators stopped him. Mighty convenient.
43:04
Do you think Elon ordered NHTSA to send this letter?
43:06
And so the NHTS TSA said, get him a tin. Get him a tinfoil hat.
43:13
Uh, and then Cole Grinded says, "People say you should sell Tesla because it's hard to build a ride sharing system like Uber and Lyft, but little do they know, Tesla already has over 20 million people using their app.
43:26
Once the robo taxi launches, they'll be able to use the existing Tesla app for their ride sharing service.
43:30
This will allow Tesla to gain new customers through app downloads and cross-selling of other Tesla products.
43:35
Once those members become come online, I would not be selling here. I would be buying.
43:39
He's given some financial advice, folks, but we aren't.
43:42
Um, and then uh Ramy, who's clearly a Tesla fan, his handle is Tesla Explored, says, "Please send me a video of any other company that can drive me in New York in the rain, door without any interventions.
43:53
I didn't need to be in the car.
43:55
I could have easily been in the backseat of my own Tesla robo taxi and the result is that it took me to lunch autonomously. So, he's a fan.
44:00
The level of conviction from the the some of these Tesla fans is huge. Incredible. Huge.
44:09
It's similar to the level of it's even beyond our little corner of tech, right?
44:15
It's an entirely new level.
44:18
But I mean, we see this with other companies like we see this with like ramp fans. Like they go crazy.
44:21
All there's all these YouTubers and people saying defender their life. Exactly. Yeah.
44:26
It happens because I mean they they know that time is money and they want to save both and so they create whole YouTube channels all around just easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, a whole lot more all in one place. They're just obsessed. It's crazy.
44:40
Seen people get time is money save both. Lots of tattoos.
44:42
Lot of lots of ramp tattoos out there for sure.
44:44
Oh, some people start whole live shows, whole podcasts just totally just to promote ramp basically in service in service of ramp in devotion. Yeah.
44:52
They call them like, you know, there's like the Tesla.
44:54
They're like the Ramperati. The Ramperati. Yeah. The Illuminati. Yeah. It's great.
45:01
Uh well, if you're looking long Tesla, short Tesla, whatever your decision is, go over to public. com.
45:07
Investing for those who take it seriously.
45:09
They got multiasset investing industry.
45:10
They're trusted by millions.
45:14
Thank you for the soundboard, Jordy. Thank you to Public.
45:16
Should we talk about the giants of Silicon Valley?
45:18
How they're having a midlife crisis over AI?
45:22
This was an interesting post in the Wall Street Journal because it was uh it kind of all stemmed from an interview with Sarah Guo who's been on the show.
45:28
Uh and so she did a podcast with the Wall Street Journal, bold names, venture capitalist Sarah Guo's surprising bet on unsexy AI, and they did a nice little write up here.
45:39
So they say, uh, one minute you're upending established industries as the younger disruptor.
45:42
The next you're staring into the abyss, eating glass, as as Elon Musk likes to say, watching the disruption at your door.
45:51
Most if not all of the Magnificent 7 are in that position, weirdly trying at the same time to figure out the threat of art artificial intelligence to their kingdoms.
45:59
That dynamic has been on display for the past few weeks.
46:02
Alphabet stock dropped more than 7% after a senior Apple executive disclosed that Google's search traffic on its service on its devices using Safari fell for the first time in 20 years.
46:12
You've they've had Safari around for 20 years as a Google partner. That's crazy. That's so long.
46:20
Google clarified it continues to see overall search growth even from Apple devices, putting Apple in the truth zone.
46:28
Don't knock our stock down, Apple. We're still growing.
46:30
Um, for his part, chief executive Tim Cook is trying to buy time for his company, pushing investors during his latest earnings call to be patient with the iPhone makers delays around AI features. Then there's Facebook.
46:43
Mark Zuckerberg is attempting to bra paint a bright future for his ad dollar juggernaut as something of an AI buddy for the lonely.
46:52
Uh that that was kind of taken out of context from a dwarash interview. Did you see this?
46:55
Dwar said something and they attributed it to Zach.
46:57
It's like every time so bad.
46:59
Anyway, uh even how about an AI buddy?
47:03
Even Musk seems to be sweating things as he returns from his Doge sojourn to Tesla, seeking to counter slide in the electric car maker stock price with promises of deploying driverless cars.
47:13
We're not on the edge of death.
47:15
Not even close, Musk told analysts recently.
47:17
We love to hear it and we saw it in the stock.
47:19
Over a trillion dollars now. Not bad.
47:21
His protest sounded like that Monty Python and the Holy Grail character about to be thrown on a pile of corpses. I'm not dead. I feel happy.
47:30
To be fair, none of these giants are dead yet.
47:32
and they have lots of reasons to feel happy.
47:34
They are wild wildly profitable pillars of corporate America which we love to hear.
47:38
Corporate America and together they represent around seven trillion dollars in market value.
47:45
Yet the crossroads they all stand at collectively and how they react individually look like readymade case studies for 21st century update to the classic business school innovators dilemma.
47:56
On the Tesla note, y people that were shorting Tesla over the last couple months, right?
48:01
Sales of the cars have been abysmal.
48:04
Literally every market is down like double digits. It's like so bad.
48:09
Just getting crushed by every other EV manufacturer.
48:12
They're having to sell cars clearly out. No blackpilling. No black pilling. No black.
48:21
I'm not I'm not I'm No, I'm just I I I just have to that the this is why I'd never be a short seller because you could have looked at all the data for Tesla and said this where is the bottom here?
48:34
I mean it's like where like why is Tesla you know and it's like Elon Musk don't betting against never bet against it's okay not to invest with him but betting against him that is uh rough dangerous and again it's like are these this is what we keep going back to with like the Trump tariff things and stuff it's like are these things stuff he can roll back? Yeah.
48:57
Like okay so what what what's going wrong with Tesla in this theoretical bad scenario?
49:02
Well, like Elon's not spending enough time there, right?
49:05
He's spending too much time at Doge.
49:07
Well, can he quit his job at Doge and go back to be CEO of Tesla? Like, yes. Okay. And is that what he did? Yes.
49:12
And then it's worth about $350 billion somewhere.
49:16
Oh, like the LAR isn't working.
49:18
Like, could he add LAR to his cars? Like, yeah.
49:19
Like, could he map every city? Yes.
49:22
Could he, you know, there's like all these things that people are like, "Oh, he'll never he's not doing this. It's impossible.
49:28
Oh, he's like he's over he's politically he's too rightwing.
49:32
Like, well, could he come out and endorse Gavin Newsome? Like, could he live out? Could he live out? He could. He could.
49:38
Like, anything's possible. It's never too late. Anything's possible. It's never too late.
49:42
Uh, well, let's talk about the art market.
49:45
I wanted to have my dear friend Dylan Abuscado on.
49:47
Potentially the most important topic to talk about the most important story of today and certainly uh potentially the week. Yes, I think so.
49:56
It's it's shaking up Silicon Valley.
49:58
There's a lot of uh there's a lot of venture capitalists, a lot of exited founders, post-exited founders, and a lot of technology journalists who have generational wealth who are at Christies right now bidding on modern art.
50:10
And so they'll want an update.
50:13
So to the studio, welcome to the stream. How you doing?
50:18
Thank you for joining, Dylan.
50:21
Uh Dylan, it's great to have you on the show finally. Long overdue.
50:23
Uh you've given us a lot first time caller.
50:25
lot of great uh a lot of great pointers.
50:27
Uh but uh anyways, I wanted we were we were going to cover the story.
50:32
So, thank you for being uh able to hop on on short notice.
50:36
Do you want to give a quick intro and then we'll dive into the story just so people uh have some context? Yeah, sure.
50:41
Uh I'm Dylan, founder of Crypto the Game, which is an interactive uh crypto survival game.
50:46
Think uh HQ Trivia, where I worked for the Rise and Fall meets uh Survivor or Squid Game or Hunger Games.
50:53
We've had a couple viral seasons.
50:55
Um, and before that I was uh Jord's head of marketing over at Party Running Capital. So, we go way back.
50:59
Um, and yeah, great to be here. Way back. Um, awesome.
51:04
Why don't you give some context on your your uh background uh as an amateur uh but successful art collector as well because I um always been an obsessive collector of things.
51:18
You know, growing up I collected Beanie Babies, Pokemon cards, baseball cards, sports memorabilia. um always collecting.
51:25
Um fast forward to I don't know probably like 2017 2018 um my uh wife and I moved into our first apartment together had very sterile white walls and um decided that I guess like collecting art would be uh a good way to kind of scratch scratch that itch of collecting and and be something that we could do together.
51:46
Um so kind of just started as uh something we could do together.
51:51
I kind of browsed Instagram.
51:54
Uh back then there was like a much more intuitive kind of like explore tab.
51:56
Uh you were surfaced kind of like art if you followed artists.
52:00
Um and pretty much just cold DM this artist also coincidentally named Jordy.
52:05
Jordy Kerwick um whose art immediately spoke to me. Um sent him a DM.
52:08
He didn't have any gallery representation.
52:11
Um he made you know buying a piece and commissioning a painting as easy as like texting with a friend.
52:18
Um, you know, I think the art market historically has been so hard uh to get into for young collectors and there was like zero friction in the way that we went about it.
52:27
I think we got a little lucky in the sense that he eventually like blew up, got kind of like gallery representation, then tier one gallery representation.
52:35
He was breaking records, uh, you know, in similar auctions to what we're about to discuss.
52:40
Um, and kind of because of that, um, I don't know, I almost like made a name for myself in this like Instagram art community.
52:47
Um, and, uh, yeah, I've kind of just like catapulted into into the art collecting scene.
52:56
How's the P&L though on paper?
52:56
I'm sure the the returns are fantastic.
52:58
Have you ever do you ever sell or do you just buy? I don't. No, I just buy. Um, I don't know.
53:05
don't know. I you know the uh everyone always asks kind of because of that like what to buy and how to go about it and my advice is always just to to buy what you love and and buy what speaks to you and it kind of sounds like you know pretty simple advice but anytime I've looked at a piece or like had a recommendation from a friend or a fellow
53:22
collector on a piece that was going to be a great investment or was going to do really well has never worked out and I've always kind of regretted buying and having on my wall and kind of like looking at it um versus the stuff that we do buy and collect and and kind of like do it for the right reasons and have always been kind of like rewarded on paper basically for for those early bets. Yeah. Great. Well, let's talk Yeah. Great.
53:40
Well, let's talk about this story and then I'd love to get your update on kind of the broader art market.
53:45
So, we'll we'll read through it.
53:47
So, uh M the journal covered it this morning, but the Mandre Mandrean sells for 47. 6 million.
53:52
Chrissy's Modern Art sales kickoff a week-long series of art auctions that will gauge the art market's strengths amid broader uh economic uncertainty.
54:01
People are wondering will art values sore or flop or you know in general what the liquidity will be like.
54:08
So so this was at the kind of low end of the estimate the 1922 work composition with large red plain bluish gray yellow black and blue was expected by Christies to sell for between 40 million and 50 million but only one bidder emerged and it sold quickly for $41 million or 47.
54:25
6 with the auction houses fees.
54:29
The work still ranks as the third highest price ever paid for the artist, but the record remains 51 million paid three years ago for Mandreon's composition number two.
54:41
Both examples feature a large red square, which the auction house hoped would help because collectors tend to pay a premium for Mandreon's spare aspects that contained cherry hues, said Alex Roder Christiey's president.
54:54
Red always helps, simple as it is, because it's a people that color.
54:58
Uh, it's a color that people like, said Roder. There you go.
55:03
That's what Dylan's talking about. Never buy brown. Never buy doesn't sell.
55:09
It's also particularly small.
55:09
It's only about like two feet by two feet or something.
55:14
And so I saw on X uh Bornosaur a an NFT profile picture says this tiny Mandreon just sold for 47.
55:21
5 million last night without anyone batting a batting an eye.
55:26
And yet people think AAA natively digital grails are overpriced at 2 to3 million much much higher.
55:34
Kind of saying hey maybe we should pump the pump the the market of the board apes.
55:39
Let's get let's get board apes in the conversation.
55:41
Yeah, let's get it back in the conversation.
55:44
Um, anyways, uh, were you surprised at how this this got priced, Dylan?
55:47
Were you following it at all or or or what?
55:49
I mean, there's a lot of like there's a lot of uncertainty in the overall economy, right?
55:54
So, I mean, you would expect that like art kind of oscillates, but yeah, I mean, do you follow this or like how do you even track the overall art market these days? Yeah, I mean it's exact.
56:06
It is so similar to uh, you know, venture investing.
56:09
I know you kind of joked about it at the top, but um especially when you look at emerging markets and if you buy from their studio in the same way that I did with Jordy Kerwick, it's basically getting into a friend and family round.
56:18
Um at least with kind of like living artists and artists that still have gallery representation.
56:22
If you do um if they do basically sign with an upand cominging gallery, that's the equivalent of a seed round.
56:29
And then by the time they do get that kind of like tier one gigosian level representation is the equivalent to an entry or a you know tier one uh fund like backing them in like a growth stage round.
56:40
Um but uh yeah I think you you referenced that kind of like Mandrean record that was set three years ago.
56:48
Um there were emerging artists everyone basically like at the time of Zer like everything was going crazy.
56:53
Um and we saw that both in you know basically across every single market art not uh withstanding.
56:59
Um so I think the way that I personally judge it is is basically just off of the information that I received.
57:06
Um in 2021 2022 I was reaching out to galleries kind of cold and um being told that there were weight lists and the deal flow was basically like very very hard to come by.
57:17
Um, fast forward to, you know, a few uh a few years from then, uh, you know, galleries were kind of like reaching out to me, you know, hey, I know you were initially interested in this artist a few years ago.
57:29
Here's all this work that's available.
57:31
I'm willing to offer discounts and that immediately signals to me that, you know, times aren't good for galleries.
57:35
But I do think that uh the the best way of predicting like how these auctions are going to go are based on basically how New York Art Week goes.
57:44
And that was um this past week which was kind of headlined by Freeze but they also had TE FAF as well as NATO which is kind of like the more emerging art fair.
57:54
Um and from what I can tell from everyone that I've spoken to that was kind of like on the ground.
57:58
It was a much more optimistic New York art week than years past.
58:01
Um Gigosian sold a $3 million sculpture on the floor.
58:04
Um they sold out you know tons of booths that were sold out kind of like on day one.
58:12
Um, here we have a $3 million sculpture selling on day one. That's great news. Yeah.
58:18
So, I think like that usually sets the tone for how these kind of like auctions go.
58:21
There's been a ton of buzz around uh the Bass House.
58:24
I'm not sure if you guys are familiar with the Bass House, but um it was a commissioned uh We both are, but can you explain it for the fans who might not be? Sure. Yeah.
58:35
Uh it's an architecturally significant home in Texas uh that these two kind of like well-known collectors uh commissioned a very famous architect to design this mid-century modern house in Texas uh specifically designed to house their collection of Rothkco and and Warh Halls and uh you know pretty much every big name.
58:55
Um and uh they are auctioning off the collection which everyone is in in the art market is very surprised by because uh you would think you you know you commission this home to specifically house this collection.
59:05
It should eventually become a museum.
59:06
Um and I think that kind of like bodess well for what they think and what a lot of people think is is going to be a lot of liquidity kind of like heading into these auctions.
59:16
Um, having said all of that, I would say if we had this conversation like a week or two ago, I think it would be a lot more uh pessimistic or concerned, but given the very like recent kind of like positive news and kind of like market turnaround, um, I think there's some buzz kind of heading into heading into tonight.
59:33
Uh, I have a follow-up question.
59:36
Um, I mean, the size seems significant.
59:38
I feel like there's probably a sweet spot for the scale of a particular You mentioned that uh sculpture.
59:45
Uh we're recording not too far from the Broad.
59:48
You walk in, there's this uh massive Jeff Coons balloon animal.
59:53
Uh I I I I walked in when I was in New York once.
59:57
I walked into Jordan Wolfson.
59:58
Uh I don't even know if it's a sculpture, but it's like a performance art piece.
1:00:03
I don't know if you're familiar with Jordan Wolfson, but it's like this crazy interactive like machine that has motors and stuff and at a certain scale it becomes like how do you even collect that unless you have like a museum to put it in.
1:00:15
Uh that's who's buying it is is the institution.
1:00:17
Like I would imagine, you know, the the $3 million sculpture that Gaggoian sold that I mentioned was a Coons and I, you know, the Broad bought their sculpture from Gosian and I would venture to guess that the the bidder who or or the person that bought this $3 million sculpture was an institution looking to build out their collection for the museum. Yeah. Is there a difference?
1:00:37
I mean, yeah, I'm curious, not to not to switch gears too much, but I'm curious.
1:00:42
Is Christy's even slotting in NFTTS this week at all or are they so over it that they're not even because it was a big thing like three years ago, right? Yeah.
1:00:52
I mean, s you got to give Christie the pole.
1:00:54
Yeah, you have to give them some credit for moving quickly and getting NFTTS into these auctions early.
1:01:00
Uh but I'm curious if they're doing that now.
1:01:02
So, this week is kind of like the hero week of every year.
1:01:05
And there's uh there's no way that in like a you know 21st century like masterpiece auction you'll see an NFT but I do think they are still accepting crypto and and selling NFTts.
1:01:16
Uh all the m major auction houses kind of have daily auctions that they're running.
1:01:21
Um you know you probably won't see a people in something as kind of like highly publicized as this week's auctions.
1:01:26
Um but I I definitely think they're still selling digital art for sure. Yeah. Yeah.
1:01:33
There's one NFT that I think belongs in the conversation.
1:01:35
Have you heard of uh this Moxy Marlin Spike NFT?
1:01:41
So he's the founder of Signal and during the NFT boom he wrote a very technical deep dive on kind of some of the flaws with the way NFTTS were structured in that um he he basically designed an NFT that displayed differently on OpenC than in a Phantom wallet than in an Ethereum wallet.
1:02:03
and he was making this commentary around the importance of platforms and the role that a firm like OpenC plays in the art market and how like the the code is not purely onchain because it can be represented differently in different places and and it was kind of this like it was kind of a top signal at the time.
1:02:22
a top signal at the time. He wrote it when NFTs were super hot and obviously he came to it from a very uh engineering mindset perspective and I think that it even though he never sold it and it doesn't have any value and it never like
1:02:35
minted in the traditional sense it is an NFT and it has this historical provenence and this story around it that I think as we look back on the NFT boom we could remember that particular story as an interesting commentary on the entire industry that could actually drive the value up. So, I was
1:02:52
So, I was considering buying it from him for a while, but I didn't I didn't have the guts to throw out an actual price. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know.
1:02:59
Well, I I do think similar to how there's paintings and there's sculptures and there's basically all different forms of, you know, there's mixed media art, like I do think digital art definitely has staying power.
1:03:08
Um, probably just like in the more experimental uh guys that you were talking about.
1:03:14
And then just to quickly touch on like size as being a blocker.
1:03:15
I think once you're talking about these like you know eight nine figure pieces uh it's almost always someone that can house or store either in their in their museum or in their home like a massive piece.
1:03:29
Um but just for like the everyday collector or someone that might be listening to this like um personally speaking um like I have gigantic canvases that are still rolled up that I have absolutely zero wall space for.
1:03:42
But, um, that is like an addiction and a problem.
1:03:44
And I do think that, um, you know, buy for the size that feels right to your home and something that you actually want to hang.
1:03:50
Well, we're moving into a new studio very shortly.
1:03:54
And, uh, we're certainly going to have some wall space.
1:03:55
So, we we'll only charge you a small storage fee.
1:03:58
I'll pump my bags as a Yeah.
1:04:00
family, family, and friends.
1:04:02
Uh, anyways, great to have you on.
1:04:04
Uh, come back on again so much.
1:04:07
We'll talk and let us know how things shake out this week in the art market. Oh, later. Talk to you later. I was just pulling up.
1:04:13
So, OpenC Jared cuz he just has 5 minutes and he's all the way from Saudi Arabia.
1:04:19
Jared, folks, reporting live.
1:04:19
Reporting live from Saudi Arabia.
1:04:23
He's there on the ground.
1:04:27
He better he better be in the traditional in the traditional Oh, we were expecting a a suit.
1:04:32
We were expecting more pageantry. Yeah.
1:04:38
No, no th from me today, boys.
1:04:40
But, uh, I am calling in from an undisclosed location in Saudi. Can you hear me? Yeah. Yeah. You sound great. Sound great. You sound great. Loud and clear. Give us the breakdown. Why are you there? What's going on?
1:04:48
What's the mood on the ground? Yeah.
1:04:50
So, uh, I'm here mostly just to see friends. Okay.
1:04:55
Um, but uh, but beyond that, there was an event today uh where there was a US delegation, President Trump was there, uh, the crown prince Muhammad bin Salman was obviously there and a slew of top tech leaders from the US also came.
1:05:06
We had Jensen Wong, Elon Musk, uh, etc. , etc.
1:05:11
, you know, all the big names.
1:05:11
You can look them up online. Yeah. Can we hear? Yeah. Yeah. And this.
1:05:15
Um, in terms of the big the big headlines, look, you guys can look them up.
1:05:19
Uh, the big ones are 600 million in new uh new committed capital.
1:05:24
Uh, sorry, 600 billion in new Yeah, 600 billion new committed capital.
1:05:29
But I don't want to talk about that at all.
1:05:30
What is the most interesting thing from today is the fact that sanctions on Syria have finally been lifted.
1:05:35
Now, I know between the three of us, every time we get together, it's like, when are we finally going to be able to enter the Syrian market?
1:05:42
Well, boys, that day is today.
1:05:47
Yeah, this is the day everybody's been waiting for.
1:05:48
We should start distributing the show there for sure. Yeah. No, 100%.
1:05:51
A lot of people don't realize, look, Syria, after the civil war started in 2011, um, our companies have just not really been able to serve customers there.
1:06:00
So, the Syrians don't really know the joy of US big tech yet.
1:06:06
and uh you know they miss the whole web 2. 0 mobile development.
1:06:08
Um so most of the groups that are servicing them are uh from the Chinese sphere versus the American sphere and I am beyond excited for the new crop of talented founders that are going to descend on the Syrian country to spread them the joys of American big tech.
1:06:24
So you know uh if anyone is watching and is going to be launching any number of companies in Syria, my DMs are open.
1:06:29
I could not be more excited. Very cool. Wow.
1:06:31
23 million people in Syria.
1:06:36
Go get them future customers. 23 million people.
1:06:38
They've had double digit inflation for like the past decade, which means that they are a prime market for stable coin adoption.
1:06:43
So every stable coin neo bank needs to be descending into Syria and seeing how quickly they can dollarize the entire country.
1:06:49
If anybody is using the Syrian pound in 5 years instead of US dollars on blockchains, we've just massively screwed up as an industry.
1:06:55
So please request for startups. We are looking to fund. That's very cool.
1:06:59
What about artificial intelligence?
1:07:02
Uh Nvidia launched some stuff.
1:07:04
Have you been hearing any rumblings about AI stuff going on?
1:07:07
Yeah, look, the fact that Jensen was here today on the main stage shows that uh we are likely softening some of the restrictions on being able to export GPUs to the kingdom and other parts of the Middle East.
1:07:20
Um I might have the numbers off, but I think there was an announcement that like a purchase order of 18,000 GPUs has just been approved for the kingdom.
1:07:26
Um if you're listening and that sounds small, not enough to build, you know, a hyperscaler, a massive cluster, you're correct.
1:07:34
But this is clearly the first of many.
1:07:36
The entire region is have rapidly searching to turn their uh you know, petrol uh petrol- based capital into you know token based capital in the future.
1:07:45
Um so expect expect continued investment from the region trying to diversify out of uh their kind of one main industry via AI just for extra context.
1:07:56
So, Humane, the AI subsidiary of the PIF, is going to be purchasing hundreds of thousands of advanced GPUs over the next five years.
1:08:05
So, starting with I think the number that that you said 18,000 and and scaling. Yeah.
1:08:08
And the first plant is I think half a gigawatt, right? Something like that.
1:08:13
What's your take on uh why do you think that we started calling data centers AI factories?
1:08:20
Do you have a take there?
1:08:22
Does it just sound cooler?
1:08:22
Yeah, it lowers your cost of capital. Yeah.
1:08:25
And that's that's the most important thing that anybody can be focused on at any given point. Yeah.
1:08:32
What what is the word on energy?
1:08:34
Obviously with AI training, it makes so much sense to put big data centers there.
1:08:39
Um but at the same time, they're trying to get away from the hey, we have a whole ton of free energy because we have so much oil.
1:08:45
Uh there's also a lot of sunlight, so maybe there's solar in the future.
1:08:49
what are the hot energy uh sectors that people are looking at?
1:08:56
Yeah, so a lot of people are uh with regard to energy talking about a potential nuclear deal.
1:08:59
Um while there is an abundance of oil in the kingdom, um burning oil to power power plants is not necessarily the most efficient use of oil.
1:09:10
Um you know, I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but if you look at the amount of oil that is burnt in order to air condition all the buildings in the kingdom, it's like an exorbitant expense.
1:09:18
Um so some some Gulf states uh are slightly more advantage in that they have larger deposits of natural gas versus uh crude or shale um which is just you know it's more more efficient in terms of converting into energy.
1:09:31
And with regard to solar, solar in uh the desert has not really taken off as much.
1:09:36
Um because my understanding is there's a lot of wear and tear that comes from the sand.
1:09:39
Um and that you need to build a series of protections and the elements are not necessarily kind and you know 130 degree Fahrenheit weather as sand rapidly batters them.
1:09:48
So we'll see what happens.
1:09:51
But yeah, obviously um there's been a bunch of companies that are super interesting like Cruso.
1:09:56
I might be mispronouncing that.
1:09:58
They're doing things like capturing excess flare, using that to generate energy at first to do crypto mining and now to run data centers.
1:10:03
So, expect there to be a lot more, as Jordy put it, AI factories coming out of the region.
1:10:08
Um, and there's a massive focus on on renewables and alternative sources as well to power these things.
1:10:13
Um, because people would rather sell their oil versus use them to, you know, uh, spin a water turbine. Yeah, that makes sense.
1:10:21
Uh, do you think you or Jensen go to more conferences?
1:10:26
I really don't go to that many conferences, guys.
1:10:27
You know, I'm about to hit my quota for the year and then I will retreat to a dark room and sit on my laptop for the next nine months.
1:10:34
Yeah, you do it right, though. You do it right.
1:10:35
You go to you go to just the right ones.
1:10:36
I uh we've been just like not not even intentionally, but paying attention to Jensen's travel schedule and uh he's at a new conference pretty much every single day.
1:10:46
But um what's the rest of the mood around crypto broadly?
1:10:50
Is there a push for Saudi Arabia to build a position in Bitcoin, kind of a Bitcoin national reserve from their public investment fund?
1:10:59
Are they into Ethereum, Salana?
1:10:59
Is there is there is there even a thesis from the from the sovereign wealth fund around crypto or is it kind of just general handwaving around, hey, we want crypto to be friendly generally?
1:11:15
Yeah, so the holdings of PIF are public or PIF, the public investment fund of the kingdom.
1:11:19
Um as of now there's no crypto holdings in that uh except via you know funds that they're invested in downstream.
1:11:26
Um in terms of uh if it is going to emerge as a crypto hub that is still yet to be seen crypto is largely legal in Saudi.
1:11:34
What is interesting though is uh when you look at countries that have been super friendly to crypto in the region mainly the UAE right there's a lot in Abu Dhabi there's quite a bit in Dubai.
1:11:42
the customers that they tend to cater are not uh born Emiratis, right?
1:11:49
The number of of Emirati citizens that necessarily will make use of crypto products in terms of giving them access to banking is fairly low, right?
1:11:54
These are nations that are mostly staffed by uh uh immigrants um you know, expats that are choosing to live there.
1:12:01
Um but when you look at Saudi even though crypto is legal here there are some studies that show uh that in terms of Gulf region it has the highest penetration from a individual user adoption space um just how many individuals are holding the coins.
1:12:15
So I think that as uh the regulatory framework fleshes out a little bit and as um you know more and more voices inside of uh the ministry of finance and the central bank here uh grow louder um we should expect to see uh a softening of the rules and then the end state of that is probably a pretty robust uh environment specifically in the kingdom.
1:12:37
Um but re remember the people that can benefit from crypto the most are regions that have you know high levels of inflation, low levels of banking, uh highly mobile first in terms of um you know payment infrastructure and things like that.
1:12:50
And that doesn't necessarily describe all the Gulf States the best.
1:12:53
So you know jury is still out on how much and how quickly penetration will come outside of just like investment speculation which of course you hear rumors about tons of family offices here building massive positions but it's just very hard to validate that. Yeah.
1:13:03
with with w with with the new 300 billion 600 billion investment.
1:13:08
Is that one of those things where the investment was already going to happen and they're tagging it for this press release or what is the structure?
1:13:15
Is there any is there any clarity on like the structure of that deal?
1:13:18
Is that just investment dollars flowing into American investment funds or specific buying of of American goods?
1:13:25
Do you have any clarity on what what what we're going to expect here?
1:13:29
I haven't really broken it down yet, but I I think the right way to think about it is it's going to be a lot of infrastructure investments and a lot of purchasing of American goods. Sure. Right.
1:13:36
So, when Jord's talking about the hundreds of thousands of GPUs that are going to be acquired, that's, you know, the pool of capital that that's that where that's going to be coming from.
1:13:44
Um, but no, I mean, they they specified they want to invest in energy infrastructure.
1:13:47
They want to invest in data centers.
1:13:48
They want to invest in, you know, ports and just anything.
1:13:50
So, I mean, it could even be like more oil rigs in the in the short term as they, you know, they're they're moving away from oil, but, you know, they're obviously still producing a lot of it and American companies have kind of a dominant uh position in the, you know, oil and gas infrastructure market.
1:14:05
So, they might be buying for that. Totally. So, we'll see.
1:14:09
Also, part of that is a massive defense spending bill or a defense spending agreement.
1:14:13
I think it was 143 billion that they committed.
1:14:17
And um you know just socially talking with some of the people from the Ministry of Defense that you ran into at the conference um they were like oh my god have you heard of this company called Seronic?
1:14:25
Have you heard of this company called Andreal?
1:14:27
They're really gung-ho on some of the non-prime upstarts coming out of the states.
1:14:31
And um yeah I I had like three different guys from the Ministry of uh defense be like hey if you meet any founders building interesting new defense companies refer them to us.
1:14:40
We want to potentially pilot them.
1:14:43
We want to potentially invest in them if we want to make a purchase contract.
1:14:45
So yeah, it's an exciting time for sure.
1:14:48
I would like to see somebody with a Daytona SP3 using it as a launchpad for a Roadrunner.
1:14:53
So like you're driving the Daytona, launching the Roadrunner off the back.
1:15:00
Uh I mean in terms of like early stage founders, like how early is too early to start engaging with someone like as senior as like a Ministry of Defense official?
1:15:08
I feel like you need to have a product that can be demoed.
1:15:10
But when we talked to the secretary of the army, uh his message was very much like we want to hear from startups even at the early stage.
1:15:17
We have a proving ground. You can come test here.
1:15:19
We want to work with Silicon Valley.
1:15:20
That seems like it's certainly a vibe shift in America, but it sounds like that's happening over in Saudi Arabia as well. Absolutely.
1:15:28
I mean, I I mainly do not focus on defense, so I don't want to say anything too out of turn, but I think post the Ukraine Russia conflict, people saw how important it is to have the most up-to-date equipment for the battlefield.
1:15:39
Um, so in the same way that a lot of companies immediately went over to Ukraine and Russia or immediately went over to Israel following October 7th, um, there's probably an increased appetite to try new things and see where it goes.
1:15:49
And, uh, if you have a prototype, it's probably better than not having a prototype.
1:15:52
But if you have good contacts, it probably is a good idea to get in touch earlier rather than later.
1:15:57
Yeah, I think oftentimes a conversation start, but no purchase activity can actually happen until the US has actually Yeah.
1:16:03
basically approved it and said, "This works, we'll buy it.
1:16:06
Now you can export it to allies."
1:16:08
Anyways, we don't need to get into what's the mood around the trade war generally?
1:16:14
It feels like we're almost in like post trade war discourse.
1:16:19
It's a distant memory at this point after uh Sunday and Monday, but are people still thinking about tariffs or has the conversation just completely moved on?
1:16:28
Yeah, the the day opened with tariff conversations.
1:16:30
So Scott Bent uh started the day um and it was very calming uh you know he he he got up he talked about the negotiations with his Chinese counterparties.
1:16:40
Um he made some very interesting points around how while uh President Trump and uh Xi had a very strong relationship.
1:16:48
Um some of the people more junior um in the CCP perhaps uh did not share his warm feelings towards our president.
1:16:56
Um so he he mentioned that a lot of uh the talks in Switzerland were about um you know showcasing and building favor with some of the you know uh second and tertiary level folks within the Chinese government.
1:17:09
Um and and came out and was very much uh we don't want to trigger an embargo on Chinese goods.
1:17:14
We don't want to trigger a double embargo.
1:17:15
Um, so the tariff rates came down and and talked about a number of other countries he was going to negotiate with and it was very much a non-escalatory tone and I don't think it's a surprise at all that the uh, you know, US delegation chose to start the day out that way.
1:17:29
Um, so so no tariffs weren't really talked about after that because Besson kind of uh, kept everybody at ease.
1:17:34
We'll see how much that remains and if we continue to uh, lay off and have more 90-day reprieves and more agreements negotiated or if you know tomorrow things ramp back up again.
1:17:44
But for now, I think people were pretty pretty calm. Very cool.
1:17:45
Uh, thank you so much for taking the time.
1:17:47
I know there very clearly thanks for just throwing on the suit just to pop on. Yeah, just for us. Yeah.
1:17:53
Thanks for throwing every uh let me tell you about linear.
1:17:58
Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products.
1:18:02
Let me get some soundboard Jordy.
1:18:03
Meet the system for modern software development.
1:18:05
Streamline issues, projects, and product road map.
1:18:09
The standard for product development.
1:18:09
It is the backbone of the global economy of the global economy of the global economy.
1:18:17
Many people are calling just considering that big tech is you know this really goes on for a long time.
1:18:22
Uh well thank you for supporting Impulse Labs coming in the studios.
1:18:26
Uh he's talking about stoves but also trade tariffs manufacturing.
1:18:30
I want to ask him about what it takes to build a BYD in America and I want to know the history of BYD, what he's learning from that company and I also want to get him to sign up for Numeral because I want him to put his sales tax on autopilot.
1:18:42
I want him to spend less than five per month on sales tax compliance.
1:18:45
But Sam, welcome to the studio. How are you doing, Sam?
1:18:50
Um, hopefully we have Welcome. Welcome. Welcome, Sam. It's great to have you. Good to have you.
1:18:57
How did you uh how'd you sleep last night?
1:19:02
Better than than you have for the last few weeks.
1:19:04
Yeah, it was it was pretty good.
1:19:06
Um I think I got the notification at like midnight on uh on like was it Sunday night or something like that and I was like, "Oh, sweet.
1:19:11
I didn't expect that, but I did."
1:19:14
And that's why I didn't panic.
1:19:16
Um but B and so so for clarification, basically we um I guess Ashley Van scooped this that we do a decent amount of our our manufacturing in China. Yeah.
1:19:26
um at Impulse, which is the highest performance stove you can buy.
1:19:29
And you can go check out his latest video um on on Core Memory um the Core Memory YouTube channel if you want to learn more.
1:19:37
But the fun part about that is um we probably spent a couple weeks being like, "Hey, do we have to pay this 145% tariff on a bunch of the stuff we build?"
1:19:46
Um my immediate calculation was this will stop trade between China and the United States and a bunch of businesses will not like that.
1:19:54
And feedback will land from everyone from Ryan Peterson to Yeah.
1:19:58
someone that makes Brad Stalls to I don't know. Yeah. Everything.
1:20:05
Um so, uh I mean it's only a 90-day pause.
1:20:08
Are you trying to get as much stuff in the country right now?
1:20:12
Are you scrambling to import a year's supply or are you thinking that this is the end of the trade war and we're going to be more or less smooth sailing from here on out?
1:20:21
Yeah, I mean I as much as I would So one big thing with hardware companies is like a year supply is like a gazillion dollars.
1:20:27
So you gota be you gota be you gota be you gota be a little strategic about what to grab when.
1:20:32
Um, we made sure that our suppliers are multinational and have manufacturing sites in Southeast Asia and other places including places that are likely scoped to have deals of, you know, coming together in terms of in terms of like uh favorable treatment on the tariff side, Vietnam, other places in Southeast Asia, Mexico, etc.
1:20:51
And so basically the the the idea is just like make sure that like all the customers that are already paid, we already told them, hey, we're going to cover this crazy even 145% tariff back in the day or a couple weeks ago.
1:21:03
We sent them an email like that.
1:21:05
Obviously, it's a little easier for us to do that now.
1:21:06
Um still still holding still holding to that.
1:21:10
Um but uh but yeah, the I think the big thing is like now at least I've got a some breathing room to think conscientiously about what the next steps are for manufacturing of not just our stuff but you know technologies that we're going to be powering other devices with as well.
1:21:27
I mean I know you're you're I know you're a relatively new company, relatively small.
1:21:30
Um, but did you actually have to pay any tariffs or were you able to kind of like do a little bit before and a little bit? You You did. Okay. So, break. Oh, yeah.
1:21:40
I think we paid the 145% on a couple things actually.
1:21:43
But it's a good we we we the customer the bulk of the customer orders that that are coming in are not subject to that, but like we got um we we've started mass production already.
1:21:56
Um, and we're a bunch kind of the beginning of that ends up being kind of samples.
1:22:00
Um, and like VIP influencer units and other fun things like that.
1:22:04
We've definitely paid it on a handful of those.
1:22:07
Um, the balance of the the balance of even that trunch of units is landing like pretty soon.
1:22:11
So, we mostly avoided all of this. Yeah.
1:22:14
Um, we're kind of lucky that this was an April thing, not a May thing. Nice. To be to be blunt.
1:22:20
Um, but yeah, there was there was a lot of fun on that side where I think if our if our battery pack build hadn't gotten delayed like three weeks, there was actually a small chance that we would have had to decide whether or not to pay a very a very large amount of money uh to get them out of the port.
1:22:40
It's better to be lucky than good, right?
1:22:42
Uh that's the so the calculation.
1:22:44
So I'll give you kind of like what I thought about and what was in my head as this was happening because I don't think I actually panicked at all.
1:22:54
Um I was like this is actually an opportunity to talk frankly about what it's actually like running a hardware startup in 2025 with a large supply chain with a pretty complicated product with with with all these constraints, right? Yeah.
1:23:10
And finally people care about me, right?
1:23:13
Like you know finally this is the ma the main news story of the day.
1:23:16
So I viewed it as like let's turn the lemons into lemonade.
1:23:18
You made the lemon lemons into panic, you coped and it all worked out and I get on odd lots and you know a couple you know.
1:23:26
So so that was the opportunity I saw.
1:23:29
And then the second piece was I was like okay so how long does it take for a boat to go from China to the US?
1:23:34
and and then I was like, "Okay, so by like the first week of May, there's probably going to be some motion on on on something here." Mhm.
1:23:44
Um and so I kind of had that in my head of like there is a shock clock going on before we're going to have to do some sort of relaxation of some sort of thing. Mhm.
1:23:54
Um, and looking at the shapes of the negotiations and kind of the various players that were, you know, swarming around and what I've heard privately from I I probably can't say who and what, but like just just just in a sense of like there were there there were there were there were well-known folks that have complicated supply chains that were not going to want to pay under 145% duties on their stuff.
1:24:18
Uh, we saw that pretty quickly with Apple, right?
1:24:21
uh and Apple was kind of like the largest thing.
1:24:23
They got the exemption pretty early but then there was a lot of other discussion about other companies and at a certain point you know the the noise gets so loud it's deafening.
1:24:31
The climb down from Amazon on the like we won't put the tariffs in the checkout was interesting because it's like I wonder if there was it it kind of felt like maybe there there could have been some negotiation behind the scenes on yeah don't put it in there because we're going to just just come back and kind of thing.
1:24:46
Well, I think they threatened to do it right.
1:24:48
They actually rolled out the UI and then they got slammed by the Trump administration for doing that and seeing it as like, hey, you're you're blaming us, but you shouldn't. Yeah.
1:24:55
Never has a The question the question I have is does the the debacle of the last month or so change your long-term planning in a meaningful way?
1:25:09
meaningful way? because we were talking in some we were talking on the show and off the show yesterday around this idea that okay what did we get out of this right and and it didn't it didn't feel like we got a lot out of the Geneva
1:25:21
negotiations if anything we got rare earth back which was a reaction to uh the initial tariffs uh and deescalation is just generally good market obviously likes it uh but we just kind of like round trip back to where we were and
1:25:37
John made a point which is that okay well if a generation of CEOs like got it into their head the reality of decoupling does it's not happening right now but it could happen but it could and you had a plan during this chaotic period and so I'm sure
1:25:53
during that board meeting you guys thought really seriously about hey if this actually sticks what is our plan maybe that wasn't plan A but at least it's a plan in the plan document now and so uh decoupling concepts of a plan. So,
1:26:07
So, so, so I I actually have this like I I I I I I don't want to get super political, but I do think there's this like Trump tariff cycle like image that that there's a meme there's a meme.
1:26:21
It's called like the Trump tariff cycle. It's like I add tariffs. Yep. I like take them off. Art of the deal. Art of the deal. Yeah. Yeah. Take them away. Art of the deal. Right. Yeah.
1:26:32
Right. Yeah. So, so I I I actually think there's one interesting wrinkle to this, which is um the the Democrats have been often spa like you could argue they've been off in space with like, you know, you you can blame like wokeness or um some of the more like like some of the Elizabeth Warren coded economic ideas in
1:26:53
terms of like, oh, we should just break up all our big tech companies because well, that would be and like there's a bunch of these these sort of like these these sort of ideas that have um let's call it anti-tech or or kind of on the wrong side of a culture war veilance or something like that. Yep. Um Yep.
1:27:08
Um what's been very interesting is or like let's legalize homeless encampments in San Francisco or whatever.
1:27:13
And what's been interesting is systematically um so like Grow SF has like really re and Daniel Lurri and all have really reset San Francisco in a in a positive way because like the they had to get the egg in their face to learn the lesson. Yep.
1:27:30
But I'm actually excited about the Democrats being negatively polarized into a free trade party. Oh, interesting. That's a funny take.
1:27:37
Yeah, because um because you know because reaction. Yeah.
1:27:43
No, no, that makes a ton of sense. That's funny.
1:27:45
Uh I we we have five more minutes.
1:27:48
I want to I want you to walk me through I'm sure you've studied BYD.
1:27:51
I'd love to know kind of uh the history of that company, what your takeaways are.
1:27:57
um and what it takes to build an American BYD in America and what makes BYD what does that even mean an American BYD?
1:28:05
Why is that different than an American like uh Tesla? Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
1:28:12
So, I I spoke to I spoke to an ex Tesla person and I was like I was like, "Would Elon ever build stuff for other people?"
1:28:19
And it's like and I've actually asked this question for for from a number of different folks and I've actually gotten gotten a variety of answers and it's kind of like he'll do it if it's on the main path of like getting something getting to getting to getting to the like vertically integrated goal if that makes if that makes any sense.
1:28:33
But like it's it's unless like unless Tesla was forced by the government to be like you will build tanks or something like that like like that they're not in that business and they're never going to be.
1:28:45
Um, and so if you think of like what what like BYD has in terms of capabilities, it's like it's a car company and a car brand.
1:28:51
You can buy a car from them, but like everything inside that car is also like fractally built by them.
1:28:57
Um, so like the infotainment system, they're the manufacturer of that whereas like Quana um like where whereas like Quana or Pegatron or something like that may make that system for Tesla. Yep.
1:29:10
Um, and this goes down all the way into the battery cells and all this other stuff.
1:29:15
So there's like they're they're like the most vertically integrated company you could ever imagine.
1:29:20
So interesting because you'd think in like a command and control economy you'd be able to force a kuretsu like in Japan even more, right?
1:29:27
You'd be able to force cooperation between a bunch of different companies, but it seems like in China maybe that hasn't happened with BYD. Am I understand?
1:29:33
It's it's it's interesting because um I think it's it's the DNA of the place more than there's like a more than more than the policy side.
1:29:40
But then the flip side of it is so BYD makes stuff for other people and that's like what they do generally.
1:29:46
That's what they historically did.
1:29:47
They just happened to be a nickel cadmium battery manufacturer that just kept acquiring businesses and like bringing them into the fold until they basically had a car business, a lithium-ion battery business and kind of like all of the all of the like IP needed to build any electric device.
1:30:07
So like that's everything from like a smartphone to a car to like your dreams. for stoves or whatever.
1:30:18
And so and so what's really interesting about this is like I can like I could go to a firm like this and I can say hey build me soup to nuts a whole device.
1:30:29
They will commit substantial engineering resources but those engineering resources it's a little bit less like maybe it's it's there's like contract manufacturers in the west and stuff like that but this is like no they'll do it with the BYD parts and the BYD process.
1:30:43
It's it's like they almost have like the best Lego set in in in the world and they're able to leverage all of that IP as just a really high starting point to be able to kind of develop develop all these devices. Yeah.
1:30:57
So, I mean, what does it take to build an American version of that?
1:31:00
Should we be even thinking about that as a goal?
1:31:02
Um, is that is that a different company or is that a you know, a cultural shift in Tesla's strategy?
1:31:10
Where do we go from here?
1:31:12
Yeah, I mean there there'd be one way to do it which would be like Defense Production Act says, "Hey, Tesla build for other people."
1:31:16
But I think that would not go over that would go over like a lead balloon and probably is not a good strategic choice. Yeah.
1:31:20
Um um I do not want to accept that idea.
1:31:23
I don't think it's a great idea for Tesla for a bunch of reasons.
1:31:25
But um but I do think that there's I've been focused on like what parts of the value chain in kind of the electrified device universe. Mhm.
1:31:33
Um and I say that very broadly like this is everything from EVs to stoves to to phones and stuff like that.
1:31:41
Um where where part of the value chain is like not made in the United States really high level of integration both like hardware software etc.
1:31:49
And if you have better components you can make better products.
1:31:54
And this is where we realize that on the the appliance industry just if you go and build appliances in the United States today, you buy electronics from China or Germany and all the guts inside.
1:32:06
It's kind of like you're getting um your graphics card from a Taiwanese manufacturer and your motherboard from another Taiwanese manufacturer.
1:32:12
Have you taken any trips to Germany, by the way?
1:32:16
They've been asleep at the wheel in many ways at I've I've actually never been to a German factory which is saying something that's judgmental against myself and I intend to fix that soon. Yeah.
1:32:27
Um the I think a lot of what's been going on is all of like China's been just incredibly good at the final assembly and like that part of the value chain.
1:32:40
And it turns out that's where a lot of the software defined technology start intersecting is like automated assembly, computer vision, um like like building all kind of like the firmware and software to make stuff work in an integrated way.
1:32:52
And like that's the thing that I think people miss about the car industry.
1:32:55
And this is probably the the thing to say is the the legacy car companies don't build cars like phones whereas Tesla does and China does.
1:33:04
And when and I that's a really broad statement, but it's really like you're building an integrated electronic device, not a bunch of individual boxes designed by different firms that you've like plugged together.
1:33:13
like plugged together. Um, and and you need manufacturers like BYD, like a BYD or like a Tesla that can actually go and span all of these disciplines with the same people being able to the people in these various groups being able to talk to each other versus how like a Ford car or a like one of a major US appliance companies like stove is put together where in some sense there's like a corporate firewall between electronics box A and metal
1:33:45
enclosure B for instance for instance can you talk about like zooming out if in terms of this reindustrialization reshoring uh industrial capacity what's at the top of the priority stock I mean there are a lot of memes about like do we really
1:34:00
want to be doing screwing in iPhones and making those here uh we've talked a lot about DJI it seems like there's a huge gap between Chinese capability and consumer drone manufacturing versus American guess who makes DJI is that ID I won't say. Okay. Um but but uh but Okay.
1:34:14
Um but but uh but then there's also like lower level potentially like higher skilled activities like battery manufacturing, lithium uh you know mineral extraction, all sorts of stuff.
1:34:25
Uh what how should we be thinking about it not just from a consumer perspective but from like a industrial capacity governmental perspective? Yeah.
1:34:33
So actually what's really interesting is if I go take an iPhone and I like part it all out on a table in front of me and I say who's actually doing the core engineering and IP of everything in the iPhone?
1:34:40
It's actually like the US and our Asian allies like pretty much entirely, right?
1:34:47
Because Foxcon's a Taiwanese company.
1:34:48
It's it's it's it's it's Taiwan.
1:34:48
But no, but even all the parts like LG Intech makes the camera, Samsung makes the display, right? Yeah.
1:34:55
A lot of Korean uh tech in there for sure.
1:34:57
A lot of Korean and Japanese technology in there.
1:34:59
So, so, so the point though is where where is China really good?
1:35:03
It's like it's like it's the assembly, the integration, being able to kind of span all of these disciplines.
1:35:08
Um so so if I was to f if I was saying what what I think is really important is um I think I think Noah Smith has a he's my tenant so I have to show him.
1:35:18
Um but uh I think Noah Smith has a good take on this which is basically like the US is missing out on the technologies of the future.
1:35:22
And China actually has explicitly said this where they believe that the tech stack of the future is the electric tech stack.
1:35:29
Basically it's like it's like batteries, power electronics, um motors that it's like you can build a robot, you can build a drone, you can build a car, you can build smartphones and consumer electronics that spans the gamut of like that is the technology stack. Yeah. Yeah.
1:35:47
And in some and it's rare earth magnets, stuff like that.
1:35:49
For some reason, the US just like I think it's basically the '08 recession and like a lack of manufacturing investment afterwards.
1:35:58
Um meant that like we never actually picked up that stuff with one notable exception, which is Tesla. Yeah.
1:36:06
And so and and actually SpaceX as well.
1:36:08
So like Elon did this twice.
1:36:08
We should reverse engineer why.
1:36:11
Um well that's why we're talking to Elon Musk of stoves. We're we're very happy.
1:36:15
Many people have been saying this.
1:36:16
People have also been calling you Noah Smith's landlord after you dropped that he's your tenant. Effect on there.
1:36:23
Uh thank you so much Sam for joining. Yeah.
1:36:29
Before he can even say goodbye. Just sound effect. What were you gonna say? Beep beep. Thank you so much. Great to have you, Sam.
1:36:38
I'm I'm excited for you and the team and keep us updated.
1:36:41
I know there's big news coming. So drop it here first.
1:36:44
We love to have your back on. Talk to you soon. Bye.
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1:37:17
Well, we got Vince from Prime Intellect coming in the studio next.
1:37:19
We're talking about uh bunch of stuff related to uh crypto and AI, GPU mining.
1:37:24
I think this is going to be a very interesting conversation.
1:37:28
We talked uh well, welcome to the stream, Vincent. Love to how you doing? There he is. Perfect. What's going on?
1:37:35
Uh we a couple months ago. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for joining.
1:37:38
A couple months ago, we had Bridget from Founders Fund on uh gave us the highlevel uh overview, but I'd love to get it from you.
1:37:45
Can you just introduce yourself and the company to kind of kick us off? Yes.
1:37:49
So, my name is Vincent and like I'm the founder uh like co-founder and CEO of Prime Direct and basically our goal really is to commoditize um AI and compute more broadly.
1:37:59
compute more broadly. um really also by almost like networking all the computing the world together and making sure like no GPU goes idle but rather can contribute to almost like an interplanetary like compute cluster that can like fund uh for example open source
1:38:16
AI models but also that people can just like use to ultimately save on like uh compute like ultimately the goal really is um realizing that like comput is this like gigantic market which will ultimately power all of those different areas and It's quite inefficient and very distributed. So, a lot of it is
1:38:32
So, a lot of it is ultimately like research challenges to make sure we can like network compute that is like quite distributed throughout the world, but also like verify it, right?
1:38:41
It's like you you can't trust like the thousands or like millions of different like data centers and like the GPU nodes um distributed across the world.
1:38:50
So, there there's basically like a challenge to scale trust, but it's like you can trust one data center or one company, but it's hard to do so at scale.
1:38:56
Um, so basically we're attacking those two problems. Okay.
1:39:00
Uh, why don't you talk about the launch Sunday? Yeah.
1:39:02
You guys, uh, I hadn't seen I hadn't seen a launch like that on a Sunday since the last seemingly few Trump executive orders.
1:39:12
So, you guys kind of realized Sunday Yeah. Super Bowl Sunday.
1:39:14
Why not launch a new model?
1:39:17
But, but break down uh the the launch uh just a couple days ago. Yes.
1:39:22
Yes. So basically um we like kind of like to take a step back almost like did this first uh very large scale distributed pre-training run intellect one which was building on like deep minds distributed low communication training to train basically a model
1:39:37
across the internet across multiple data centers in similar efficiency as in a centralized setting where we um where all the computers network in one data center and now that we switched to this kind of like 01 like post-training like reinforcement learning paradigm. Um it's
1:39:52
Um it's actually kind of like a paradigm that is like perfectly set up for distributed training because most of it is like those rollouts and basically um you can distribute them extremely well like there's basically less needs to communicate every training step.
1:40:05
Um so what we did with like intellect 2 was really scaling to like the larger model size like a 30 uh roughly 30B model that we basically trained distributed across the globe with different people contributing compute and um and we basically built this on top of quen.
1:40:22
So basically the goal was also to like take the best open models out there and improve them further for like actually quite um like small amounts of compute.
1:40:34
It was honestly like more like of a proof of concept where we basically proved four different pieces.
1:40:37
Like on the one side basically um we proved this like verifiable compute piece that basically anyone in the world could join with their compute.
1:40:44
We don't need to trust them.
1:40:45
There's very like efficient basically ways to like um make sure that they're basically like an honest computer contributor.
1:40:53
And then the other piece was really um making like basically distributed reinforcement learning work.
1:41:01
So basically decoupling those like roll generations um from the training itself.
1:41:06
So you basically can train across the globe with like less frequency um of communication.
1:41:11
frequency um of communication. And what we basically proven is that like with quite a um small amount of compute like roughly $100,000 which is not comparable to obviously kind of like the more like close AGI labs we've basically been able to like improve upon quen and it's kind
1:41:26
of like sets the foundation for us to actually scale this much further and ultimately actually have kind of like a repeatable recipe to get like basically improve like the strongest open source models out there continuously for quite like small amounts of capital across different domains. So we made it much
1:41:41
So we made it much better on math and coding but the goal is also to make it much better on like other domains and really like how to do so is like really scaling those like reinforcement learning environments.
1:41:50
I think you had Will Brown on like he joined us to work on this.
1:41:53
Yeah, I was going to ask what was the what was the process like recruiting uh the big dog WB. Absolutely dog.
1:42:00
I mean I I just have to imagine he's such a good poster.
1:42:03
He's such a a great guy to chat with.
1:42:04
I I He could have gone anywhere but he ended up with you guys. Yeah.
1:42:09
with you guys. Yeah. I think it's it's two things like you should ask himself but I think like a lot of talent is gravitating more towards like open source AGI and like to basically build in the open to publish in the open right like to be able to also um like contribute to the frontier of like the most exciting research and in a sense
1:42:27
like I have friends at Mayai and who's you've never heard because they can't publish can't really talk about their work right so like I think there's there's this component but I think then we are basically I think like now like especially in the western hemisphere I think like one of the only places that is really catching up to the frontier
1:42:44
right like there's obviously like Quen and Deepseek and and others in China but I think it's really a fumble by like America I think to basically be the close guy that is like not really almost like standing in for the values of like democracy and freedom to the same extent but I think like he he's obviously extremely passionate about like um open source AGI and kind of like distributed
1:43:04
like reinforcement learning so like he immediately hit the ground running on on basically scaling this much further So we'll have more like yeah like work we are building on top of like this direct jump distributed reinforcement learning like in the next few months already out which should like scale this much further. I remember a couple years ago I
1:43:20
I remember a couple years ago I was using um uh Octane render and they have a distributed rendering network where you can render CGI images on GPUs all over the world and they actually have a a crypto layer uh for render tokens as well.
1:43:37
But this idea of distributed computation makes a ton of sense in that context because each frame is unrelated to the other frame.
1:43:43
So you can if you're rendering a 90 frame sequence that's a few seconds long, you can just send you know each frame to a different machine.
1:43:52
Uh what have you learned from the successes and failures of the render network and what Otoy did with Octane?
1:43:59
Um and and is there any difference between those discrete individual frame generation and something as complex as training a whole model where you know you might you in theory you'd need to load it all into one uh one instance every single time.
1:44:16
Yeah, like great question.
1:44:16
I think there's a few players like them and others that have tried us in the past and I think they've been almost like in some ways I think too narrow and like ambitious, right?
1:44:25
ambitious, right? like rendering like is nice but like it's not like the general purpose like yeah like use case that we now have with AI right so I think there's basically like our goal is really making this much more like general purpose useful for like every single like comput and AI use case and I think that has been one big learnings basically being like most of our team
1:44:45
are AI researchers and they come from the AI world including the people that build for example the verification mechanisms right like the verification in our case has like tiny overhead like 1% like the more like crypton native verification mechanisms have more like a 1 to 10x overhead which then make it completely like unfeasible to compete with centralized clusters. So I think
1:45:02
So I think that has been like a big learning is basically being very pragmatic and close to the um AI researchers.
1:45:08
So that's like the main community we're like building with and engaging with and basically building for right.
1:45:16
So like all of our users are AI developers and ultimately I think the biggest lesson has been is like just creating value for for them from day one. Right.
1:45:25
from day one. Right. is like we launched basically our compute platform like two or three months in with like two or three people and and immediately got like a lot of users and um scaled since then like basically that like any kind of like AI startup or developer can just like basically with our platform almost like like have like a global market on the one side right like we we aggregate all the hyperscalers all the different
1:45:48
data centers even working with like folks like Aaron like later on from um Hydra like and all these guys to basically aggregate and orchestrate like all these different data centers and hyperscalers and I think that has been another lesson
1:46:02
like we are not trying to be like the exclusive maybe marketplace where supply onboards we just aggregated all the supply out there which gave us a huge kind of like wedge maybe to like enter the market. Okay, talk about some of the
1:46:14
Okay, talk about some of the hardware where this is actually running a 30 billion parameter model.
1:46:17
Uh at at floatingoint 16, you're going to need 60 gigs of RAM RAM.
1:46:22
You're probably going to be on H100, not gaming cards.
1:46:24
But uh are you thinking about bringing uh residual cap capacity online in the gaming market or are these like small data center operators that just have a stack of H100s that they're not using and then they're bringing them online? Yes.
1:46:41
Yes. So basically I think what's been exciting is like actually this run was hit genius so H100s and A100s could join and I think maybe even like H100s um and like for future ones like actually for next one we're starting like even 3090s and and like gamer cards can join and I
1:46:55
think what's interesting is you can basically with like uh this ro generation and like basically synthetic data generation you can distribute the tasks like basically based on their like difficulty to different cards right and to different models. So the goal really
1:47:08
to different models. So the goal really is like to have like a fall tolerant like hiogen here is like um pool of compute right so like what's also a big one that we did already in the first run but also in this one is is full tolerance so it's not only that you have
1:47:22
like 8100's joining and the A100s and 3090s but they can also drop out right like they can join for a few hours when they idle and I think that's like the border thesis is like almost like every GPU that is like idling is like a market
1:47:34
failure right like especially in a world where increasingly like my theory is like the the biggest almost like commodity in the world will be compute and like it will be one of like one of the biggest slices of GDP and it's like unfortunate if like half of that is like
1:47:46
sitting idle instead of like curing diseases generating like movies or like some like creating basically technological progress right and I think the goal is to basically just get to like 100% utilization of compute and we're very very far from that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
1:48:00
Well, uh what what are you seeing in like the trend in chip size and scale?
1:48:06
You know, obviously Nvidia's pushing pushing those like DJX uh DGX like rack mounted units, racking everything together with NVLink so you can do even bigger models.
1:48:14
Sarah Brris is scaling up the single chip size to wafer scale.
1:48:18
Uh the the the theme of the last few years seems to have been uh let's not decentralize, let's actually centralize further.
1:48:25
And so uh where does this go?
1:48:28
What is your take on on kind of the ever bigger racks and ever bigger chips for larger compute training?
1:48:32
Yeah, I think we'll see both and I think actually ironically like an Nvidia actually has an incentive to fragment the market like they don't want one buyer.
1:48:43
buyer. They don't want AWS to be the only customer because AWS is building their own chips or like like the big tech clouds basically uh like have their own chips competing with Nvidia right so Nvidia is very happy to give a bunch of chips to core a bunch of chips to cruiser a bunch of chips to lambda and all of these other guys right but then
1:49:00
um so I think we'll see both at the same time like I think like all like we'll have thousands and like millions probably over the next few years like of data centers there will be these gigantic clusters right like Stargate from OpenAI but I Think at the same time like there's increasing amount of like capacity in in the almost like the mid tier of like smaller data centers. Um
1:49:17
Um but then I think like also on the other side like there's a lot of comput like sitting idle everywhere right like soon whatever like autonomous cars, robots like everything else.
1:49:28
So we actually had like some of the biggest like car companies in the world reach out to us or phone manufacturers that they're like oh we're sitting on like hundreds of millions like billions of like phones or cars that are like have idle compute capacity.
1:49:39
And I think we're not there yet, but I think we'll we'll have like we'll have just much more compute everywhere, right?
1:49:44
Like we'll have more like mega clusters, but we'll also have like more mid-tier and small clusters. Mega clusters. Mega clusters. Mega clusters.
1:49:54
Uh I have a question before you leave.
1:49:56
Can you can you give some uh any expectations around DeepSeek R2?
1:50:01
I've seen some crazy rumors flying around online.
1:50:03
Uh, I don't know what's what's real and what's fake news, information warfare.
1:50:08
Curious what you're expecting out of the next release. Yes.
1:50:13
Like I think they'll they'll definitely catch up to the frontier like again I think to some extent I think they'll they'll probably be not as good would be my guess as like um Gemini or OpenAI and but I think there there's obviously this trend where I think like and and all the closed lab cos have admitted it right.
1:50:32
like that open source has catched up like very uncomfortably close to their lead and I think that will continue.
1:50:35
I think the the the closed guys obviously have some um advantages, but I think there's also huge advantages obviously the open source AGI space has.
1:50:44
So I think like the trend will continue that ultimately like the Deep Seeks and the Quans of the World, but hopefully also like players like Llama will like catch up a bit more like obviously they've been a bit disappointing with their like Llama 4 launch, but I think they might also actually uh like catch up again.
1:51:01
And and then obviously I think like our goal is like to be able to basically build on all of these um on all of that progress, right?
1:51:07
It's like basically we kicked off our like largest synthetic data generation run the day deepseek dropped and like generated basically a lot of like verifiable like reasoning data that we could then use for example in this recent model.
1:51:18
So I think the the like what I what I see more is like basically we can like improve open source AI progress like literally day by day week by week like it won't be a thing where we need to wait like four months for like some progress to come but it's more like continuous basically progress.
1:51:34
Well, thank you so much for joining.
1:51:36
This was a fantastic conversation.
1:51:37
Yeah, really enjoyed this.
1:51:39
Uh, and congrats on scooping. Yeah. WB, man. Legend. Truly, truly. Congratulations.
1:51:48
But, uh, come back on again soon.
1:51:48
I know you guys are going to have a bunch of launches uh, coming up and, uh, appreciated your perspective. We'll talk to you soon. Appreciate.
1:51:56
Uh, and if you're looking for distributed compute, go to Prime Intellect.
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1:52:20
Anyway, we got the CEO of Backbone in the studio. Let's bring him in.
1:52:23
Man, uh, excited to have you here. Welcome to the stream. How you doing? Thanks for having me. appreciate it.
1:52:30
I feel like I walked into the middle of an ad read. You did. You did. You did.
1:52:33
Uh we are 100% corporate sponsored.
1:52:36
Uh in independent media is dead.
1:52:38
The future is corporate media and we are leading the charge.
1:52:42
Uh but good to have you here.
1:52:42
Uh can you introduce yourself and explain what Backbone is?
1:52:46
I'm a fan, but some people might not be aware. Sure. Uh my name is Manife.
1:52:51
I'm the CEO and founder of Backbone.
1:52:53
Um Backbone is the leading platform for the future of gaming. Mhm.
1:52:57
The way I describe it to people is that every time there's been a shift in streaming media, it's resulted in some of the biggest consumer businesses.
1:53:03
So like music streaming, you had Spotify and Sonos, and then in TV streaming, you had Netflix and Roku.
1:53:09
And you can think of Backbone as the analog company for streaming games.
1:53:14
Um, we have a number of products.
1:53:16
We sell devices that you can use to connect to your phone or any screen and play games on them.
1:53:21
And then we also make an app that aggregates all the different streaming services like Xbox Game Pass and others.
1:53:27
Uh so you can access them all in one place.
1:53:30
You can buy our products in any major retail store, Walmart, Target, Best Buy, etc.
1:53:36
Uh and we're backed by investors like Index. Cool. And um Sound Ventures. Yeah.
1:53:41
So I got one a couple years ago.
1:53:41
I was not getting a lot of time in front of the PlayStation 5 and so uh would drop my phone into the backbone and stream from the PS5 over the Wi-Fi to the phone with the backbone.
1:53:54
It gives you the whole whole gaming experience. Very fun.
1:53:57
Um what has the relationship been like with the uh the big console providers?
1:54:03
Uh can you break us down the different strategies?
1:54:05
It seems like uh Sony has been very competitive launching something that's kind of like a competitor with the PlayStation.
1:54:11
I forget what they called it, but uh the it it has a screen and and device and does remote play.
1:54:17
Uh Microsoft's taken a much more open uh approach, letting you even stream Xbox games on PS5 and Forza Horizon is on uh on PlayStation now and so uh what what has been the relationship with the different major gaming platforms been like over the last few years? For sure.
1:54:34
So I think uh of course each one has its own strategy.
1:54:39
Microsoft in particular is really interesting because um they're running this campaign now called Xbox Everywhere. Yeah.
1:54:45
Where the idea is that you can turn any device in your life into an Xbox and run games on any screen.
1:54:52
And the way they're doing this is through streaming games from the cloud.
1:54:55
So Microsoft's subscription service, Game Pass, if you subscribe to it, you can basically access the entire Xbox games catalog um on any device that you own.
1:55:03
And of course the devices and software that we're making uh work great with Game Pass and make the experience work really well end to end.
1:55:10
So you can do it on things like smartphones.
1:55:11
Um so I think in Microsoft's case um you know their goal is really to drive more Game Pass subscriptions and just gather more MA and DAO for their service and it's super strategic to you know their overall roadmap with cloud and all that as well.
1:55:26
Why wasn't Google able to pull it off?
1:55:29
I feel like they were early to that party. uh game streaming.
1:55:31
I can't even remember the name of the product, but it never really h hit like major takeoff or do I have it all wrong?
1:55:38
And actually, it's better than ever. I don't even remember.
1:55:41
So, you're talking about Stadia? Yeah, that's right. Stadia. Yeah. Yeah. Is Stadia still around? What's that? Is it still around? No.
1:55:47
No, it was unfortunately. Yeah. Classic Google. Classic.
1:55:52
But but but I mean I mean you would think they have all the resources. They're a hyperscaler.
1:55:56
They have GPUs in the cloud. They can do rendering.
1:55:59
And they're also somewhat platform agnostic, so any game developer could go to Stadia.
1:56:04
It just seems like super additive.
1:56:05
Um, I'm sure you had intimate, you know, interactions with them as Stadia as you were building the company.
1:56:12
Uh, what do you why do you think Stadia didn't take off? For sure.
1:56:16
So, I was at I was at Google when they were working on it.
1:56:18
Um, that's that's actually was was sort of part of the basis for the idea. Yeah.
1:56:22
Um, I went into the office one day and there was a demo that an engineer had built where you could use Google's cloud technology to stream games to like basically a two generations old Android phone.
1:56:34
So, you can run GTA on like a two generations old Android phone. Yeah.
1:56:38
And I picked up this demo and I tried it and I completely lost my mind.
1:56:42
I was like, we've seen disruptions in gaming across every single vertical, right?
1:56:47
business model, audio, content, but this has got to be the single biggest disruption in the history of the games industry, at least that I'm aware of, um, in a long time.
1:56:57
And so that kind of became the basis for the idea behind Backbone.
1:57:00
I basically made, um, a slide deck on why I thought it would be like a really big opportunity for Google and I sent it to the head of product for YouTube gaming.
1:57:09
And then I realized it could go a bit wider.
1:57:11
So I sent it to a bunch of the vice presidents internally and basically a bunch of people ended up reading it and it became one of the most uh viral slide decks internally within the company.
1:57:20
Like 15% of the company read it by my last day.
1:57:23
And so I got to meet with some of the executives that are working on Stadia and other initiatives.
1:57:28
I think there's no doubt that the technology was incredible, but I think other players like Microsoft just had a better go to market strategy and more content. Yeah, that makes sense.
1:57:35
I mean the content's really really key.
1:57:37
Um, switching gears a little bit, how have you seen the industry react to the um, uh, news last week around uh, the app store sort of payment policies.
1:57:49
Uh, I imagine you've been hearing a bunch of chatter.
1:57:54
Yeah, I mean certainly if Fortnite were to return to the app store, it' be pretty big.
1:57:57
Um, I think it's been like it's under it's it was sub it was resubmitted, right?
1:58:03
It hasn't been approved yet.
1:58:05
Normally Apple approves in 90% of apps get approved in 24 hours. We're on like hour 46.
1:58:09
So everyone's saying, "Apple, what's going on? Dragging your feet."
1:58:13
Anyway, um yeah, I mean, I think it's huge.
1:58:16
I mean, it means that if you're able to link out to external payment systems, you're basically going to be able to take in more margin as a game developer.
1:58:26
And uh I think it'll, you know, but how do you expect how do you expect users to actually respond, right?
1:58:31
So, like let's say you download a free game and you're like, "Okay, I want to pay.
1:58:36
I'm willing to pay for this game and you get the option to just subscribe in the app.
1:58:42
Maybe it's at one price or subscribe outside of the app at a lower price, right?
1:58:49
You'd have to offer, I imagine, have to offer some type of incentive to get somebody to want to go to a separate web page, right?
1:58:56
So, I can go outside of the app and I get maybe some So, So, you're splitting the difference.
1:59:02
You're splitting the difference kind of, but then I imagine some users like the fact that their subscriptions are native and they can go into the app store and and churn if they're not using something.
1:59:14
And so, how how do you expect that?
1:59:14
How do you expect developers to actually play it?
1:59:18
Do you and and do you think it's are they really getting back 30% or is it more like, you know, again, splitting the difference?
1:59:25
Um, so I think what we're seeing right now and in Epic's implementation, they posted a tweet online like the Revenue Cat CEO replied to Tim Sweeny's uh tweet and it was asking like how did you implement this?
1:59:37
Did you use an app purchase?
1:59:37
So in Fortnite's case, they show an option to do inapp purchase and they also show, you know, the web flow through Stripe or whatever and that one is, you know, a 20% kind of cash back or something like that.
1:59:49
You get like 20% back in Epic credits. Oh, smart.
1:59:53
So there's like an incentive people might have to incentivize customers to transact through the web and that but giving them back in free credit like points in a game which they're going to value on a cash basis absolute dog you know a dog.
2:00:08
Uh I I want to talk about uh the the actual uh technology roadmap or tech tree to make mobile gaming even better. What's more important?
2:00:21
Uh, better devices, faster chips, more memory, better screens, or just ubiquitous 5G, Starlink, better connectivity, lower latency.
2:00:30
Um, because uh, Call of Duty, you can stream it on your phone.
2:00:35
Probably Xbox, Xbox Game Pass allows you to do that.
2:00:38
There's still a Call of Duty mobile that's optimized for the phone, and I think people probably play that one more on their phone than the streamed one.
2:00:46
And so we're still not in this fully streaming era.
2:00:50
Uh what are the what are the blockers to get us to just one installation of the game everywhere?
2:00:57
Um, so I mean both of those things are bottlenecks and we we often used to get in these like furious debates internally over like which one was going to overtake the other and then we kind of realized after a while it was a bit aimless because we just want the overall basket to succeed and I think you'll see
2:01:10
a lot of like hybridization where you'll have you know games that are relatively like thin clients but like a very significant cloud component to them versus right now we think of this dichotomy of like fully streamed versus native and I think maybe there'll be um some games that flit across the boundary line. I mean, Fortnite is one such
2:01:25
I mean, Fortnite is one such example of that where you there's a pretty heavy cloud component uh to the to the game.
2:01:30
What are you playing right now?
2:01:32
Right now, uh so I don't know if you've heard about Expedition 33. Oh, yeah.
2:01:38
I I I haven't played it, but I heard about it.
2:01:39
I'm just about to get into that. Okay.
2:01:40
That's been popping up on the internet. Yeah.
2:01:42
And that I've been playing a lot of Fortnite. Yeah, that's good.
2:01:46
Um were you what were you surprised about the GTA 6 release date?
2:01:54
It seemed like the market had been pricing in a 2025 release and then all of a sudden it was like nope 2026.
2:02:01
Um I mean it takes these games take forever now.
2:02:04
The production costs of there's some really great articles uh online talking about like how the development costs for these titles have ballooned because of like this need to have really lielike graphics and realistic gameplay. Um so not surprising. No. Uh what about tariffs?
2:02:20
I'm imagine that that was a tumultuous time for you.
2:02:23
Uh obviously sigh of relief uh recently, but what's your outlook and um what did it mean?
2:02:29
Take me through the the emotional journey of the last couple weeks of the company.
2:02:34
Yeah, I mean definitely short-term painful.
2:02:36
It was awkward timing giving given the um Backbone Pro launch which just occurred this past week. Sure.
2:02:44
And this is a huge launch for us.
2:02:46
I mean, we generated, I think, around 700 million media impressions, which is more than, you know, Beats and Aura and Sonos generated for recent product launches.
2:02:55
Um, and so it was a big launch and it was an awkward time because of the tariffs that made the pricing strategy a bit complicated. Mhm.
2:03:04
That being said, we think in the long run, anything that promotes, you know, free trade or reduces tariffs like globally um is beneficial to the company because then we can offer our products in more markets um than we do today at, you know, more of a fair price to consumers.
2:03:20
Yeah, I got to pick up a Backbone Pro.
2:03:22
I'm looking at it right now. I'm adding it to cart.
2:03:24
John has always said the biggest risk to the show is that he just gets sucked into some some It's like my one vice.
2:03:31
Like you'll never find me like passed out drunk, but you will find me like 70 hours into like Metal Gear Solid for the third time.
2:03:40
Anyway, uh this is fantastic. Anything else? Yeah.
2:03:42
No, I'm happy for for you and the team that uh you get a little relief on the ter congrats on the new launch and uh good luck.
2:03:48
I know you guys are shipping in about a week now, so uh I'm sure there's a lot of work to uh get to that point. Head over to backbone.
2:03:55
com, pick one up if you're a gamer. Check it out. Anything else? That's all. Thank you. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great day. Cheers. Bye.
2:04:01
Uh, speaking of sleeping easier, post tariffs, eight. Go to eight. com.
2:04:06
5-year warranty, 30 night risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping. Pod 4 Ultra. I got an 88 last night. 7 hours and 11 minutes. Not too bad. What'd you do, Jordy?
2:04:18
Did I beat you or did you smoke me? 100. 100.
2:04:20
He knows Brian Johnson's coming on the show. He's prepping. Proof of work. He's prepping.
2:04:26
Uh, anyway, we have our next guest coming in. Put it up. Put it up. 100.
2:04:32
See, it's not a screenshot. I'm moving it around. There we go.
2:04:35
Yeah, the new app is beautiful. Go download it.
2:04:40
Uh, anyway, folks, we got Aaron Gin coming in breaking down a new uh Wall Street Journal article you wrote. Aaron, how you doing? He's back. Yeah, doing well, man.
2:04:48
Can you put on those sunglasses, Jordy?
2:04:49
I can't recognize you without them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. These ones. These ones. The Pit Vipers. Unfortunately.
2:04:55
So, so there's some crypto there's some cryptocoin that that people are using Pit Vipers to promote.
2:05:01
So, we got to be careful putting be careful. But they do look great.
2:05:03
But they were sent to us uh from a from the CEO, I think.
2:05:08
From the CEO of Pit Viper. He just likes TVPN.
2:05:09
He said, "Have some Pit Vipers."
2:05:11
It's pretty cool that they like rotate up and down like this. Yeah, pretty cool.
2:05:15
I've never actually worn any of these.
2:05:16
I've been Anyways, it's great.
2:05:19
Uh it's great to have you on. Um always great.
2:05:21
the prime intellect CEO was on earlier and he said that you guys are working on some stuff together which is cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
2:05:26
Like they're handling the higher level like training layer if we're doing the underlying infrastructure uh distributed layer.
2:05:33
Uh but the yeah like going back to about the uh oped that I wrote I've been uh more or less battling encouraging the administration to take a more reasonable approach to the threats that Huawei has against our dominance on AI and uh when the uh I met and know the people who under the B administration that wrote the January 15 ruling that we don't really know by the way like what's going to happen.
2:06:00
We just heard rumors that things are going to change and they're going to be more positive towards Jensen and and Nvidia.
2:06:04
Uh but generally speaking, they wrote this kind of the the precursor framework that people understand is they created a G18 of AI countries which included like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, America, Canada, and some European countries about half of Europe.
2:06:22
And the original Biden ruling, right? These are bureaucrats.
2:06:28
bureaucrats. like there's not there's no it's not it's very vague law area under governance they're basically operating under 1980s missile technology proliferation law that was written back whenever we had Soviet Union but but so they're kind of regulating under that
2:06:42
and the B administration you know a couple days before they're leaving decided that they would create this kind of G18 uh of countries and then a hundish other countries that were going to be basically prohibited or require license and you know absolutely countries tier three. The tier three countries are quite
2:06:59
The tier three countries are quite logical.
2:07:00
They're like Libya, you know, Venezuela, right?
2:07:04
It's like, oh, okay, this makes sense.
2:07:06
But the tier two countries required license was like Greenland, Portugal, you know, Switzerland, Austria, all of Eastern Europe was on the crap list.
2:07:15
All, you know, the president's right now and good in the Gulf region, all that was on the crap list.
2:07:19
And then like kind of re random countries like Mexico.
2:07:22
Mexico makes all of our servers and the original kind of press around this was regulating cheap power.
2:07:29
So it was mostly competitive.
2:07:31
They they didn't believe Mexico gets used to send to China.
2:07:33
They they just thought, "Oh, they have cheap power, so we should just, you know, say, oh, that's bad for America."
2:07:38
And and so I've been advocating for this kind of idea of like this new Monroe doctrine of thinking that uh AI is more of a for operating base of America.
2:07:46
operating base of America. uh due to the neocons and neoliberals we have over 300 operating for operating bases in the world uh where our special forces are you know active and doing things that they don't tell us and so I basically was trying to like kind of you know
2:08:01
think about the AI is kind of something similar where every deployment that is an American deployment is real estate that we own and that running the world growing like growing on our infrastructure is better than growing on Chinese infrastructure and It's either or. And I think that under the B
2:08:17
And I think that under the B administration, there was this view that they couldn't do anything like, oh, they just make iPhones.
2:08:22
Not to be overly dried, but they I think they had a kind of a less view where China was.
2:08:25
And as the data came out with uh more and more advancement on the ascent line under Huawei, more advancement under Deep Seek and Manis, it became very much clear that this actually was a race uh and that they were significantly closer than we thought.
2:08:41
And so the goal then is proliferation.
2:08:43
Uh and that's essentially what the Trump administration uh the commerce department announced uh last week was that they were going to embrace a trusted proliferation model uh which is what I've been advocating for of this deployment of Nvidia gear running on an infrastructure running on our frameworks because it's either us or them.
2:08:59
Uh either the world uses dollars or uses something else like there there's not this kind of secular world where trade happens and it doesn't include a country.
2:09:09
it involves us or involves somebody else and and that's becoming more socialized and more accepted.
2:09:13
Uh and so now they're trying to think of other ways to try to manage proliferation.
2:09:18
Tom Cotton introduced a bill to GP track GPUs.
2:09:20
Not very bullish on that, but you know, like there there are other ways now people are trying to think about doing this rather than just saying, "Hey, Portugal, you have good beaches, but no GPUs for you.
2:09:28
Saudi Arabia, we can sell you F35s.
2:09:30
We can sell you even, you know, ICBMs with no nukes on it, but hey, you can't get the Blackwell series.
2:09:36
That's too risky for for us to do for you.
2:09:38
So, there's a great resetting that's happening as good for America. Yeah. Yeah.
2:09:42
What is your take on the recent Saudi Arabia deal?
2:09:44
Uh 18,000 Nvidia Blackwell chips going in with hundreds of thousands hundreds of thousands on the way.
2:09:53
It seems like it's an affirmation of everything you've been saying, but what's your interpretation?
2:09:59
Yeah, like like I I think that it's one way Huawei's already deployed there.
2:10:01
Uh so I think that that was a wakeup call and there's also a ton of Chinese um cloud companies that are doing deployments in the Gulf region.
2:10:10
Uh but you know it's it's positive because it's again it's it's you have to realize that people are going to get this regardless.
2:10:19
So another good framework because because this is all like leading ed stuff and people get confused about what's actually happening.
2:10:23
They also overly express our actual dominance on a particular area.
2:10:27
But but think of it as like a MiG platform versus Lockheed or Boeing.
2:10:31
Like you're not gonna tell a country, hey, you just can't have a fighter jet.
2:10:36
They're like, we're going to go get some MIGs, right?
2:10:37
Or we're going to go get some I forgot the random the French one, right?
2:10:40
That that dropped, you know, baguettes from the airplane, right?
2:10:43
Whatever that French plane, right?
2:10:44
Whatever that that one is, right?
2:10:46
Uh it like I forgot the name of it, but the the uh so it's it's like that.
2:10:51
It's like it's like it's an either or question.
2:10:54
So we either have a decision to engage with the country or not and then if they don't they're going to go somewhere else.
2:11:01
And with Saudi Arabia, which is a very clear ally of ours, very clear ally of Israel, the leader in the region with Israel, we have to be in a position of they understand this like like the the Gulf region kind of gets real estate and put crap in the in the building.
2:11:16
They kind of like they understand that, right?
2:11:20
And and so this is something they can feel they can be very successful in.
2:11:23
And as well as it gets to kind of the the you know the Jedha Tower Burj Khalifa thing of like we're ahead we're winning the line right like all these like crazy projects that won't happen don't tell yeah but our data centers but but our data centers you know and
2:11:37
obviously Saudi will have fantastic partners and Nvidia and I'm sure many other uh hyperscalers uh for their new factories that's the new we got to stop saying data center AI factories but uh but yes isn't just not is it is it is it correct to call it real estate today or is it something else? Well, well, I think the dynamics
2:11:59
Well, well, I think the dynamics behave like real estate like that's how the actual investors think that's how they get financed.
2:12:05
The execution is different. Yeah. Yeah.
2:12:07
So, so I like the way that this blows out what I believe this is what like the premise of our model why we're part of like over about almost a dozen sovereign sovereign projects.
2:12:17
We're kind of the for for Nvidia, they they advertise us to a lot of their growing data centers internationally as Hydra is the best sovereign AI gotom market uh provider in the world.
2:12:29
So like we're really really good at this and and our operating model is is much more I think I mentioned this last time that think of it as like the airlines industry that that the the commercialization of AI is really resides in the platform and that platform is Jensen. It's not anybody else.
2:12:47
It's Jensen and and that's just like Boeing and you have these kind of like rare birds that that are coming out which is open AI but the the technology motor around open AAI as we come knownly accept is relatively commoditizable so its real value is the brand it's it's the accidental consumer product company as Ben Thompson likes to say. Yep.
2:13:06
So when you have the commercialization happening at the platform of Harvardly or like Boeing, you create lots of billion-dollar companies, you know, American Airlines, etc.
2:13:15
, Emirates, whatever, uh, but you don't really have this kind of parabolic power law outcome like you had with software defined like Google or Airbnb or Twitter or something to that effect.
2:13:27
So when you have a world of works like that, Jensen becomes the play. Jensen is the platform.
2:13:31
You can still create lots of different successful companies that are very large.
2:13:36
But I I'm very skeptical you're going to see this huge outlier into the stratosphere like we saw with other software defined modes.
2:13:43
Rather, it looks more like the airlines industry where there's lots of very successful people, lots of very successful uh you know winners, but there's no clear category leader.
2:13:52
There's no clear like so far ahead that nobody nobody kind of will ever touch it because the fundamental product is a product that gets deployed in a data center that gets run and commercialized and all the value is created there and everything else kind of plugs into it.
2:14:05
It's the fastest way to become a millionaire.
2:14:07
Start as a billionaire and buy an airline. Yeah.
2:14:12
This is a famous thing because like yeah the value doesn't really acrue to the airlines in the way that it does to consumer tech companies.
2:14:17
Of course, uh I want to talk more about uh this this idea that like it is valuable to America to have uh foreign AI models running on American infrastructure.
2:14:28
Uh and maybe we could go back to the F-35.
2:14:35
If we send an F-35 over to another country, they have the ability to use that however they want.
2:14:40
We don't really have control over that.
2:14:42
We don't necessarily have a kill switch.
2:14:43
Um obviously it's good economically because we sold it to them. We get some money. Uh that's nice.
2:14:48
But uh is there is there is there some downstream benefit to well now we're really allied with you because yeah we sold the planes but you're still going to have to remain friendly with us as we resupply and send you more screws and bolts to to manu to to maintain these planes.
2:15:05
Is there a similar analogy in AI factories or data centers where yeah you bought 18,000 Nvidia Blackwells but if you don't keep working with us those are going to die.
2:15:16
you're going to need to replace stuff and you need to keep us an ally. Is that the goal?
2:15:19
Yeah, like that's my goal because I I believe America should win.
2:15:24
I don't I don't believe in a multipolar world.
2:15:25
I believe in a new Monroe doctrine.
2:15:27
I believe that we should resort to the Americas and and some of that will be here.
2:15:33
Some of that will be Mexico.
2:15:34
Some of that will be in El Salvador.
2:15:36
We're already, you know, monetizing El Salvador with prisoners.
2:15:39
So like why not them make fiber optic cables?
2:15:41
Why don't they make fans?
2:15:41
Why don't they like for in this in the service supply chain or textiles?
2:15:44
like Mexico is the cheapest place for us to manufacture.
2:15:47
It's been that way for over a decade, but they don't have the technical capability to do it, which is why you don't see that there.
2:15:51
But but in the new Monroe Doctrine, uh my my thesis is that we reshore critical things to the Americas and then we have these we have these external allies that reinforce that just like the old Monroe Doctrine was America's and we had Britain that enforced it and with us and so the same thing goes with the ring of fire from South Korea down in Singapore that becomes our allies in that region.
2:16:14
We ship America goods there.
2:16:14
They become America enclaves, but they're relatively sovereign.
2:16:18
They're they're identity, their own military and and partnerships like that not only advance, you know, like you said, like sell goods like there's announcement with the Boeing like I mean they already bought Boeing like so it wasn't both Riot Air and Sadia but they they're Boeing platforms.
2:16:35
They don't they don't have as many Airbuses out there because Airbus has a is a just so you know like the it's a very technical thing but their engine design is not really compatible with sand that well.
2:16:42
So that's why they they prefer belly because it's more adaptable high heat.
2:16:46
Um so like either way like that that's an advantage to us because it's a form of soft power that we can allow the proliferation of not only safety for Americans globally but it makes us rich. Like trade is American. It's not secular.
2:17:01
It's not something that just happens like we define it.
2:17:02
The dollar is a platform. Trade is us.
2:17:04
We define we we rule the open notions because we say that it's important for us to trade.
2:17:12
So like I there's kind of like this weird thing happening on the right that there's like these two types of like uh China hawks.
2:17:19
There's like OG China Hawks which is like me who believe that the way you beat China is you win.
2:17:26
Then there's these new China hawks which are like protectionist semi-ocialist and want to withdraw from the world.
2:17:30
want to withdraw from the world. They believe in a multi-point world and and they kind of crept in but they're actually a little they're more on the left side of the spectrum and the tariffs and kind of attitudes around Nvidia you that's when you hear these
2:17:44
things of like we shouldn't sell the world like kind of can wait on us or we don't need their goods we shouldn't trade um versus the original OG China hawks were like no we should trade trade is peaceful it's great it it decompresses issues between countries but it doesn't mean we give away the farm. It just means that we rebalance
2:18:01
It just means that we rebalance and we make it fair.
2:18:03
And and it was kind of this hot minute where like these like new neo channels got in charge and start doing these kind of crazy things with terrorists where we had no freaking idea what was going on.
2:18:13
Like believing that terrorists make us rich is one of the most profoundly illiterate things like I've ever heard from.
2:18:19
I my background is an economist but but like it's it's literally stupid.
2:18:23
The places that have highest terrors in the world are absolutely poor and the places that make Internal Revenue Service Like again, I'm pro that, right?
2:18:31
Because I don't want to pay taxes, but taxes or theft, right?
2:18:33
So the the but I'm I'm willing to engage in some type of fevery if it means that I'm safe when I go to I just came back from Bise, but I'm safe when I go to Bise. I'm okay.
2:18:44
I'm I'm okay engaging in that.
2:18:47
Uh but but America only wins when we have this peaceful economic transaction that occurs with countries that want to adopt more pro-western frameworks.
2:18:54
We should support that because when the world becomes more west, it becomes safer, it becomes more prosperous, people have rights.
2:19:01
We had Sam from Impulse Stoves on on earlier and he was saying that free trade is almost becoming a a liberal policy.
2:19:08
You know, it's a liberal position now to just be like free trade, you know, just because as from a reactionary uh standpoint.
2:19:17
Uh I'm curious if you uh what you're expecting out of the uh Qatar visit which I believe is happening in the next 48 hours. Yeah.
2:19:25
Like I it one is a cutter.
2:19:30
We we've already been talking to the royal family there.
2:19:32
Like they they definitely want to get into GPUs.
2:19:34
They're they're Have you ever been to Cutter by the way?
2:19:36
It's so it's you have you have? Yeah. Briefly.
2:19:39
It's it's absolutely bizarre.
2:19:42
It's a imagine like the largest country club in the world as a country and there's like everything is clean and well done but like in the street and you're walking it's mostly just like servants and there's like no people.
2:19:54
It's like it's very weird.
2:19:54
Um and they have so much money.
2:19:57
It's it's they they they even build like the cutteries, right?
2:20:02
There's only I think 300,000 total citizens and the total number of like the broader servant class is like around 3 million uh in the actual city.
2:20:12
Uh but they're so wealthy they have they they do these um you know sand duning thing uh which I went to go do and they build these homes in the middle of the desert like these massive camps and they just like have these $100,000 uh they just going up and down sand dunes all over the place and there's like these huge encampments like they have so much money. It's awesome.
2:20:29
have so much money. It's awesome. uh and they're they're trying to get into uh power and energy is related to data centers but that but there is a there's a tricky problem which is that they have a habit of of being anti-israeli uh obviously something happened with
2:20:45
Benji and Trump nobody really knows something happened uh you know Benji cannot be the most friendly uh you know person to deal with sure so something happened there but the cutteries like to think of themselves as like the Switzerland of the region in reality they're just more pro Iran and pro pro- al Qaeda. Um and and so that that's a
2:21:03
Um and and so that that's a that's a the the one thing I'll never underestimate is that the ultimate goal of every Trump, you know, conversation is a deal. That's what he loves. He loves deals.
2:21:15
And and so us being particular hawkish on any type of country, I think is kind of not who we voted for.
2:21:22
It's we voted for somebody to make deals for America.
2:21:23
And if that includes a jet, which I don't know if it does or not. I I heard it was.
2:21:27
It was not going to include Yeah. Yeah.
2:21:30
It was a new S747 or something like that. Yeah.
2:21:32
Just it seems like a rumor at this point like no one really knows one way or another what's happening with that.
2:21:36
But it's an interesting story certainly. Yeah.
2:21:37
I I had no problem like he went to go see Kimcha Nun like whatever the No, I completely agree with this. That's a great take. Yeah.
2:21:44
So like I have no problem meeting with people and if that means more I want them to be more pro-Israeli and I want them to they release the last American that's a win for our country. Yep.
2:21:54
And and that that's what I voted I I voted for Trump and I wanted him to do deals.
2:21:58
I wanted him to break the mold, reset relationships, and make it more pro and create more allies, like swing more people to our camp, like regardless of the history, uh figure out how to how to do deals and and build more allies in the American sphere.
2:22:13
Uh I want to talk about the learning curve, uh Huawei versus Nvidia specifically.
2:22:18
Uh is that a dynamic here with uh pushing Nvidia chips abroad?
2:22:24
uh is there is there value from actually advancing the technology staying on the cutting edge just by increasing the volume of shipments and manufacturing?
2:22:35
We've obviously seen this with TSMC on the learning curve.
2:22:37
Um but uh but what is your take on the Huawei Ascend versus Nvidia Hopper Blackwell kind of uh uh fight that's that's unraveling right now?
2:22:48
It Americans need to realize that like like lethography is not like a white technology.
2:22:54
It's not like white people like own it, right? It's a technology math.
2:22:57
It's available to anybody that can work on it. Sure. And their their ability. Yes. It's not TSMC level. Stretch.
2:23:02
They're probably at 5 nmter.
2:23:05
They're more likely at seven, but probably stretch at five. TSMC is at two.
2:23:09
It's about to go to like uh you know 1.
2:23:10
5, I think, or something to that effect.
2:23:13
Um but but the thing you don't ever underestimate is that China from a from a supply chain perspective is it's almost completely sovereign.
2:23:19
Not only do they dominate rare earths, uh, but they have the entire manufacturing infrastructure to make Huawei. Yep.
2:23:24
And and that is a type of competitive advantage that we don't have. Yep.
2:23:28
And and so now again, like it doesn't mean we become central planners and like drift into, you know, Linius or Trosky thinking that like, oh, we should just centrally plan this entire thing. Like that's not my view.
2:23:42
I view comparative advantage. It works.
2:23:44
advantage. It works. like as as Jordy was saying like all of a sudden liberals remember that Adam Smith exists and and you know that TDS has benefits right is it it pushes people to because it's because it's not a philosophy it's a it's a it's a psychosis so yeah yeah so it doesn't have an orientation it's just
2:24:01
not that big y uh but but you know like we we have the ability to to win because we still are the best but but they're just going to take a different approach like they're going to take advantage of their their power they're going to take advantage of the fact they move fast and they're cheap. But a new AI button row
2:24:15
But a new AI button row initiative has already started.
2:24:18
They're already around the world. We know this.
2:24:21
We see them at, you know, different data centers that we work with selling their stuff and it comes as a fully complete solution with deepseek open like a manis models combined with infrastructure combined with support.
2:24:34
Manis has has that kind of distribution already.
2:24:36
No, like Huawei is designing for their their their open source ecosystem.
2:24:41
So Huawei is being the hands of Pete out there building.
2:24:46
I think what Joy's asking is like, have you ever run into a country that's not China?
2:24:50
That's like, yeah, we're we have Huawei Ascend and then we have Deepseek and then we have Manis because Manis came out of nowhere just a couple months ago.
2:24:57
Feels like that would be a very quick ramp to be like it's deployed in another country as a part of the AI belt and road initiative.
2:25:03
Deepse I can believe Manis.
2:25:05
So yeah, give give us the update on that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
2:25:10
It's deploy like DeepS and Manis are everywhere in Europe like they're they're everywhere and again it's open source it it open source works as a distribution strategy they're not open source because they give they kind of carers they don't care about open source they care about defeating us and and and
2:25:25
so the the approach that this is why uh OpenAI made that announcement of we're going to do like this combined deployments of software plus like infrastructure is because that's they're mimicking what China's doing u but but the proliferation of the open source models go look at open router like you can just see the growth in other models. Those other models are Chinese. So, so
2:25:43
Those other models are Chinese.
2:25:43
So, so it it's a it's a race that actually is legitimately an arms race where there's not much of a uh like like what is the ceiling, right?
2:25:54
Like if if we have to kind of think of it as imagine your multiple countries that someone invented a new technology like the nuclear weapon. Mhm.
2:26:02
Like you're the reason why UK, France, Israel, uh USSR, India basic proliferation that happened was because America said no, we're not going to give you any intel even though we promised by by treaty actually that the UK and France would have our intel after Oppenheimer did what he did.
2:26:19
And then that's what started the race is like okay well we can't just have America have it.
2:26:24
have it. we need to have it right and so what is the actual break point at which all of it stops it's like how do you it's like it's like it's a kind of different it's not an economic question right it's it's a question uh and that's why the the Gulf region announcements are really exciting is because
2:26:39
fundamentally that region is going to serve Europe it's probably not going to serve America it's really going to serve Europe because they can say all they want they want to build this many data centers or whatever but that trying to make the EU do anything is is is you know it's trying to convince an OP peace person to stop eating. They rather just
2:26:54
They rather just use ompic.
2:26:55
Like it it it's not going to go anywhere.
2:26:57
Like they they they need some sort of like injection to finally do something.
2:27:01
And the the Middle East region and Gulf region is just really good at this stuff.
2:27:04
They're good at real estate, building power, deploying crap.
2:27:08
And uh and in the airlines world, that market is dominated by Europeans.
2:27:14
Europeans use Emirates and cutter to fly to Asia to fly throughout the region.
2:27:16
I think it's going to be really similar.
2:27:20
So, we're able to dominate Europe through those those relationships.
2:27:21
But, but if we're if we weren't going to do it, my guess is like a year or two, Huawei would have some big announcement of doing with probably Qatar, probably the country I think of first. U maybe Kuwait.
2:27:34
Um, but but yeah, and we still have to lead, but we have to realize that Huawei is going to make inroads and places that we have decided to not and we just have to accept that we can't stop. Yeah.
2:27:45
Yeah, I'm trying to think of another like what um how did the how did the Manis investment from Benchmark sit with you?
2:27:53
Uh a lot of people that are a lot of people have pretty much everybody and Spiruhov are upset about it.
2:27:58
Yeah, everybody's got an opinion on it.
2:28:01
Uh but there's varying uh a lot of new comments actually.
2:28:07
I I think everyone has an opinion but not everyone's willing to share them.
2:28:09
A lot of people have Why not share it?
2:28:13
because of like competitive dynamics and benchmark.
2:28:15
They don't necessarily want to talk if you're competing another firm. Yeah.
2:28:18
And I think that's the right stance generally for the most part. Yeah.
2:28:22
But we I mean no I mean I mean I don't care like we could free change if if if they want to do that that's the prerogative.
2:28:30
If Treasure Department wants to you know go after that investment as I told me they're going to that's their decision like is this a free market free exchange of ideas.
2:28:39
of ideas. I believe your capital is your capital and if you want to deploy it to a Chinese model then would I question your patriotism probably but you know it's your right to do that and and it it doesn't need to go much farther than that but Vanis has serious adoption and we should think of it as I think that's
2:28:56
a maybe benchmark would think about it is like you know one that they're going to create you know a Tik Tok style like relationship that's not real all that stuff is a figment of our imagination think it actually matters to Chinese it doesn't but it's that that's just an excuse the reality is they they want to win. They want to make money. And in They want to make money.
2:29:10
And in some respects, I understand that and we're capitalists here.
2:29:13
Uh and in other respects, it you had to think about it from the the patriotism perspective of like we're not really interested in it's one thing to like maybe even allow GPUs to be sold there, which is going to happen.
2:29:26
And by the way, uh GPUs are all the trade deals include GPUs, man.
2:29:29
Like to think that that we're really that serious about like we don't want them to have infrastructure, right?
2:29:35
It's like it's it's it's total baloney.
2:29:37
like they it's such an easy give for the administration. We're the best.
2:29:41
We want to make a crap ton of money.
2:29:43
Uh we like that Nvidia is rebuilding here. It's an easy give.
2:29:47
It's not it's not it's not even hard to to debate over.
2:29:49
It's like, "Oh, you want that? Sure.
2:29:50
Now give me reduction of fentanyl, right?
2:29:52
Give me um you know uh stop tariffing autoimp imports by 100%."
2:29:57
Like that's the stuff they really care about.
2:29:59
So this is just an easy win.
2:30:01
uh but but there will be a uh like a separation is happening to where China clearly is embracing and winning open source.
2:30:09
They will have comparable advantage uh sorry a a at least a reasonable alternative on Huawei probably in like 12 months which will basically be like an H100ish uh and it'll be cheap, large scale, easy to install, all open source.
2:30:26
Uh so the the next phase if we want to actually win China is what the Trump administration is doing now which is trusted proliferation.
2:30:34
The second phase is like we got to get serious about open source and we have to be we have to be very intentional that the closed model thing is just not going to work.
2:30:42
It's it's it's not a it's not a serious durable mode.
2:30:46
I think most investors would probably agree with that.
2:30:48
Now it's a myriad of models approach.
2:30:50
Y uh and we we have to be in this game.
2:30:53
Otherwise, it doesn't matter if if uh we have the best infrastructure in the world.
2:30:59
If the LLM themselves are all caught behind closed door, we're just never going to reach this traction.
2:31:04
We're just never going to reach this level adoption and there there are so many levels of advantage China has on open source right now.
2:31:12
Uh that we have to What are you What are you expecting from deepseek R2?
2:31:17
We've been we just asked the the prime intellect CEO that he had his own take. What are you expecting?
2:31:23
I think it'll be uh the rumor is like mostly on Huawei.
2:31:27
I haven't validated that.
2:31:29
That's the rumor I keep hearing.
2:31:30
Uh it probably again will be very good.
2:31:32
Uh because this is accessible. This is math. It's open research.
2:31:37
It's uh it's like physics.
2:31:39
It's like it's like thinking that we can control physics.
2:31:40
Like if physics is available to everybody uh to explore and discover, uh I think it'll be very good.
2:31:46
I think I think it's a Quinn 3. 5 was very good.
2:31:49
Y and Maners had an update again.
2:31:52
It it shows that unless we heavily invest with I guess you know Gemini or or or Llama to really like up their game that Europe's going to continue to use that the Middle East continue to use it.
2:32:04
Y um and it just is what it is.
2:32:07
Like we can't stop people from doing this stuff.
2:32:08
Uh it's available to everybody. Yeah.
2:32:11
So I mean walk me through this hypothetical scenario where uh let's just use like Switzerland as an example or something like Switzerland uh wants to control their own AI for their own population. So they build SwissGPT.
2:32:26
com and every Swiss citizen is going there as the front end to their AI experience.
2:32:32
Uh and but that in one scenario you know that is run on airgapped Huawei Ascend data centers running deepseek and manis to actually do the computation but the data is not being excfiltrated.
2:32:46
Uh what is the risk there?
2:32:49
Is it it just that we're losing the power from selling into Swiss Swiss the Switzerland market or or is are we worried about some sort of like Manurion candidate in the weights shifting the minds of the Swiss population or something like that?
2:33:04
Like what what what is the risk of the power occurring in that scenario?
2:33:07
I mean I mean I I don't really worry much about like everyone knows what happens in 1989 like you don't need your tan score happened.
2:33:13
It's not them when Deep Secret has deleted itself.
2:33:18
Like everybody knows, right? It's very obvious.
2:33:20
Uh like, you know, is President Xi, you know, Winnie the Pooh would possibly be like, you know, we don't really know, right?
2:33:28
He did he did disappear for six months after COVID.
2:33:30
So maybe he's Winnie Winnie the Pooh in in a like little outfit.
2:33:33
So uh yeah, like the the the issue with the I what I believe about Sovereign AI is that most of the content internet is American English. Yep.
2:33:44
I think the estimates are like 70%. Yep.
2:33:45
Uh so that's most of the training data.
2:33:48
Although if you look at the proprietary data, what does that mean? I just did it.
2:33:52
70% of the internet is American. Let's go.
2:33:56
We're just excited about that.
2:33:58
The the uh uh so so they they so think like sovereign AI, what is the data that they're going to be training on? Yeah.
2:34:06
And because if the internet is American English, it's our slang.
2:34:10
It's our, you know, it's our the second is Spanish and the third is is Mandarin. Yep.
2:34:13
It's it's actually government documents.
2:34:15
That is how most people are training the governments are training their own subset sovereign AI legal cases. It's law, right?
2:34:23
And none of that crap is going to Amazon.
2:34:26
None of that crap is going like they're they they're going to build that to to their liking.
2:34:32
So then okay, what is the end end use case?
2:34:34
end use case? I one is that it most of this is mutual surge destruction sort of frameworks that if Switzerland doesn't do it then maybe Austria does and if Austria does it they have a leverage of Switzerland so like well I can't have that so I have to do that think of it as um uh you watch show billions
2:34:50
I love that show so Axar Rod right everything he thought about was like both him it's like it's like two lanes of thought it's like him winning and him not being owned by one of his competitors and that's the way GPUs and AI works is It's like I'm thinking of it from the perspective like sure there's
2:35:07
an advantage to my my country like I doing the investment but most of it is just like I want to screw over that other person and in in investing like traders today they're doing GPUs AI stuff not necessarily because necessary has a return today because they're trying to figure out is someone going to screw over me somehow because when you
2:35:26
when you put something into an LLM it's immediately uh uh everywhere right like anything now like private information is even more valuable than ever before because LM make information so accessible and can substantiate content even easier and and so private information becomes significantly more valuable. And so how Switzerland would
2:35:42
And so how Switzerland would deploy that in my view would be basically spying on other people to uh providing an alternative within its own government about like how to actually use LLM internally.
2:35:53
Uh, and so it the the I I think we as Americans need to just kind of stay take a step back and realize that not everything the world does has to make money.
2:36:03
People just kind of do stuff sometimes because they think they should do it.
2:36:07
And and how we as Americans, we don't really get that.
2:36:12
Like it's hard for us to kind of put our hands around. So commercial. U Exactly.
2:36:17
is like like the we're so far away from Reagan where we just uh built crap because we're like Soviet Union could do this to us, so we're just going to do it. Yeah.
2:36:26
We're so far away and we're we're so dominant for so long that we're lazy.
2:36:31
We're we're we're self-absorbed lazy people who think that Pope Leo had, you know, is a Chicago Democrat.
2:36:38
It's a I'm not a Catholic, but he's certainly not.
2:36:41
And like, oh, he said this about immigration.
2:36:43
I'm like, do you know anything about Catholic doctrine?
2:36:46
Like, do you read anything?
2:36:47
Like do you don't like it if it's we and what I mean by that was we define so much international dialogue by America's framework when the world doesn't work that way. Yeah. Yeah.
2:36:56
Uh real quick I want to have a couple couple more questions and then we have a a pretty hard stop here.
2:37:02
But uh who is going to be the American open-source AI frontr runner?
2:37:08
Uh XAI did an open release of Grock one.
2:37:13
Open AI is planning to have some strategy around open source.
2:37:18
Uh do you have any type of do you have any expectations here?
2:37:24
I I don't think it'll be open AI.
2:37:26
I think it's either going to be Zuck, Elon, or somebody else that we just don't know about yet. Yeah. Cool. Uh last one.
2:37:35
Uh, do you expect to be satisfied when a Tik Tok deal gets announced or extremely disappointed because the rumors that we've heard so far are that uh it doesn't necessarily get at the rumors of the inference. What's wrong with that?
2:37:54
The inference is the important part, right?
2:37:56
Yeah, that that's a good question.
2:37:58
Uh, so do I think it's propaganda? Oh, absolutely.
2:38:00
Do I think it matters in terms of the trajectory of our culture? No.
2:38:05
Like like creating blaming Chinese boogeyman but like on the fact that our kids are lazy and stupid is is asinine.
2:38:14
It's it's classic like white guilt sort of ducking Freudian frameworks and like the reason why it's actually you know like your kids will actually be fine.
2:38:23
They're leaning very heavily libertarian, so they're actually good.
2:38:26
This kind of like late millennial, because I'm I'm a midlife millennial, so I'm more Gen Xer.
2:38:34
So this kind of like late millennial and early nextgen, uh, that are very Marxist in their kind of like frameworks and they've been told things about there were objectively lies about our country, about how like life works and success works.
2:38:47
And yeah, I feel bad for them like because they were told things that were not true.
2:38:50
Uh but like saying that oh the reason why you know Chinese kids are doing math is because Tik Tok like encourages math is is is pretty stupid.
2:39:00
Like it's like it's like no just like no my my frustration was uh you know if you're if you're in the middle of an ideological war trade war you know sort of great power conflict we're not you know multi-olar is not possible.
2:39:15
It's just sort of like the US or or nothing.
2:39:22
Uh why would you allow your adversary to own what is effectively like the one of the largest news channels into the US population?
2:39:32
And why would you kind of ignore that, right? Because even even Yeah.
2:39:36
getting uh you know delivering brain brain rot like Americans are going to get brain rot from somewhere, right?
2:39:44
They have an insatable brain.
2:39:44
I'd prefer to be No, I'd prefer to be an American made brain.
2:39:48
No, but the but the you know, you know, the these platforms do influence public opinion and and but anyways, probably a longer conversation.
2:39:58
We'll have you back on when the news gets announced and um always a pleasure, have a good day. God bless, guys. Talk to you soon. Cheers. I want a hat. Jordy will want a hat. Oh, I got you. I got I got you. You get a jacket, too.
2:40:08
You're going to get the full You get the full set.
2:40:12
You're going to get the full set. Thanks, Aaron. Great chatting. I'll talk to you soon. Bye. Find your happy place. Find your happy place.
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2:40:35
And our next guest is Dan Gray.
2:40:35
I have been following him for just a few days, but I wanted to have him on the show.
2:40:44
uh he's put out some fantastic posts about uh venture capital market dynamics and I thought it'd be interesting to have him on the show and pick his brain and have him break down what he's seeing in the venture capital markets.
2:40:54
I want to talk to him about large scale up VCs, the cradown in the angel and seed market, all the fun dynamics. So, welcome to the show.
2:41:00
Dan, if you're there, can you hear me? How you doing?
2:41:06
Longtime listener, first- time caller. Glad to be here. Yeah, great to have you.
2:41:09
Uh can you take me through your Oh, actually first let's kick it off with just an introduction.
2:41:13
H uh how uh uh who are you? What do you do?
2:41:16
Break it down for everyone. Sure.
2:41:17
Yeah, I'm uh you know my my kind of day job is head of insights at Equidam.
2:41:22
We're a startup valuation platform and that's kind of the perspective from which I come at all of this. Yep.
2:41:28
I think what I'm what I'm most known for is like long walls of text on Twitter about the venture industry.
2:41:34
Uh and what was the most recent long wall of text that you put out?
2:41:38
Uh yeah, that was kind of like a summary of the like the la last year or so of of observations.
2:41:46
Um kind like not a very venture capital and ailing asset class addressing a lot of the challenges that we've seen. Yes.
2:41:54
But it moves towards like solutions, you know, better practices, some ideas for how the industry can evolve so everybody comes out of it better, you know, LPs, founders, GPS.
2:42:03
So what are the key cracks?
2:42:06
Why is venture capital ailing?
2:42:09
What are the key problems that you're seeing? What are the indicators?
2:42:10
What are the metrics that you're tracking?
2:42:13
Because a lot of people have been saying, "We're so back. It looks really good. There's big funds. Everyone's doing well.
2:42:18
Everyone's making money." It seems like it.
2:42:19
So, this was kind of an odd take to see, but open to hear the argument obviously. Yeah.
2:42:26
I think kind of what we see at the moment, uh, if you look very broad, big picture is like stagflation. Mhm.
2:42:31
There is, I would say, less activity than before, but prices in concentrated areas are much higher. Mhm.
2:42:39
And for a lot of people, that's a very bad thing.
2:42:41
You know, if you're uh a founders fund and you can win on merit and get into any deal you want, you're doing fine at the moment, that's okay.
2:42:49
If you're Andre Horowitz and you have the scale to to buy into any deal, you're also doing fine.
2:42:54
But a lot of my writing is is actually really aimed at like the middle of the market.
2:42:58
GPS who you know could be doing better maybe if they if like better practices were more accessible to them or if the market was a bit more stable.
2:43:07
And similarly LPS who have a difficult time picking you know if they're not already in like the founders funds and USVS um how they can be guided towards better decisions and better returns.
2:43:19
So yeah, uh is this just affecting new managers who raised funds maybe during ZERP or are you seeing cracks in uh kind of the the legacy firms that have dropped out of the public eye?
2:43:35
They're not as competitive, but they've been in the game for a decade.
2:43:38
They have uh kind of an institutional structure.
2:43:40
Maybe they're not raising multi-billion dollar funds, but they have a model where it's like, "Yeah, $300 million fund.
2:43:45
Every two years we deploy it. It's great business.
2:43:48
all the partners are going to retire wealthy.
2:43:49
Um are is there risk for that type of uh mid-market VC firm?
2:43:56
I think the the ones that are struggling the most at the moment are perhaps the ones that like haven't evolved as quickly as the market has shifted in the last year.
2:44:05
So we've seen this this much talked about bifocation into like what I call venture banks.
2:44:10
So like Andre and Horowits and Thrives etc.
2:44:11
Horowits and Thrives etc. and the kind of traditional model of VC which is you know contrarian investing bit more disciplined you could say on on that front there's a few people a few funds uh kind of stuck in the middle you know and they're a midsize series A firm who's still trying to invest in AI and
2:44:34
they're having a very difficult time right now so you kind of have to pick your lane a little bit these days and lean into the strengths of what those two different lanes offer did you ever read EV have uh Ever Randall's post on uh like the Tiger Global and the uh and the and like the squeezing between uh what was he calling it? He had some
2:44:51
He had some great phrase for it uh playing different games.
2:44:56
Why Tiger is eating your lunch and your deals.
2:44:59
It was kind of talking about how Tiger and the crossover investors came in and they were just commodity capital that you just show up with a deck and get a term sheet the same day and it was very much like venture bank uh versus the uh what uh how did he describe it?
2:45:13
He said the uh he described uh one of the funds as like JC Penney funds which is very uh rude is the dead zone.
2:45:23
the dead zone. So there's Tiffany and co which he said was like benchmark founders fund like the really like uh prestige sequoas of the world low velocity higher irr main advantages signaling building a board of directors but it's expensive capital then you have the Walmart which was Tiger Global higher velocity lower IRRa but they're
2:45:43
built to to accept a lower IRRa although that didn't play out very well for Tiger specifically but in theory these venture banks are kind of playing in this Walmart category but the dead zone was the J C Penney where you're not super differentiated sending a really strong signal to the market that we have picked
2:46:00
the winner they're going to the moon and so get in or get out but you're also not super founder friendly not taking a board seat just dumping cash in a company is that dynamic still real in your mind has it grown or has have things changed yeah I think it's very real it's definitely real and you can see that in a lot of the liquidity
2:46:18
issues today so you have you know the big like venture banks let's call them yeah They're finding more opportunistic liquidity through through secondaries for like the the huge winners that they invest in who have the the strength of brand and the size uh to generate a lot of liquidity in that manner where other VCs would traditionally get liquidity. IPOs and
2:46:37
IPOs and M&A we all know has been very slow. Mhm.
2:46:41
And that that slowdown for a range of reasons, but it's part of because the industry became so bloated and confused for a while.
2:46:47
You know, hopefully as this this bifocation is better understood, those more traditional managers are like teeing up companies for exits uh in in a healthier way.
2:46:59
You know, they better understand the kind of exit metrics you need. Yeah.
2:47:02
As opposed to the the venture bank model.
2:47:04
Do we need to kind of re redefine these terms of venture capital?
2:47:09
Because it used to be there was like angel investors, then venture capitalists that would do series A's and maybe series B's and then there was growth equity, private equity, and then like yes, a hedge fund might take a large position in a late stage firm, but they weren't seen as VCs.
2:47:22
they weren't seen as VCs. Now you can have a VC firm that I I'm pretty sure there's venture capital firms that have never invested in a company at less than a$1 billion dollar valuation because their whole business is maybe we buy secondary or we buy common or we do
2:47:36
growth stage and we're really only trying to be along for the unicorn to a hundred billion dollar ride and we'll do that all day long because there's so little downside and the by the time we're investing the company has durable revenues is growing product market fit. So, we're not even trying to underwrite
2:47:51
So, we're not even trying to underwrite the founder or their ability to explore the idea maze. We're just piling in.
2:47:59
But, we still call that venture capital.
2:48:01
And maybe that's is that a problem or do we need to think about the the market differently?
2:48:05
I think it it's definitely helpful to to think about it as a slightly separate beast.
2:48:09
You know, venture capital in my mind is finding, you know, the non-conensus companies and then you you fund them through into like legibility into growth growth capital and ultimately to an exit. Mhm.
2:48:18
That's how you generate your liquid liquidity.
2:48:22
The new game today is kind of like this financialized version of venture capital where it's not necessarily about like finding great companies and taking them to exit.
2:48:31
It's about like funding through the like the incremental milestones and hitting those incremental metrics to to raise bigger funds, you know, and you do that through pursuing TVPI in a way that like is slightly disconnected to generating value in the traditional sense.
2:48:47
You know, TVPI is a has slightly different drivers, you could say. Yeah.
2:48:53
Do you think that part of the reclassification as somewhat other asset classes into venture capital is driven by a desire to uh mimic the fee structure of a traditional venture capital firm in other in other industries?
2:49:06
So I'm a I basically doing public markets investing and I might be able to get one and 10, but if I call myself a VC firm and I play a little bit differently, I get two and 20 or something like that. it.
2:49:19
Do you think that the branding matters when VC firms go out to LPs and try and raise money? That's a good question.
2:49:26
I'm I'm not really sure about that to be honest.
2:49:28
I mean, I I'd hope LPs were scrutinizing that a little bit more, but perhaps not.
2:49:34
How uh what do you do you look at any data on the health of the sort of retail in the private markets, right?
2:49:40
like the the everyday angel investor.
2:49:42
Are you seeing more or less activity today than in 2021, early 2022?
2:49:51
Uh I would say quite a bit less, probably like a third less at the moment because so much attention is concentrated on AI and I think a lot of angels, frankly, have just resigned themselves.
2:50:03
Like they're not going to get in on that game. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah.
2:50:07
I was thinking I I I was uh I was even going to consider doing a poll uh to anybody with an you know just a poll on X or whatever.
2:50:15
But I think if you ask the average angel investor, would you sell your entire angel investing portfolio for 15 cents on the dollar today?
2:50:25
today? And I bet you that I bet you the honest answer is that like 90% of uh of people would because angel investing is this like weird dynamic where to me I I legitimately feel addicted to angel investing like it like it's it's a weird thing but and I and I
2:50:44
joke about this right it's like all these kids you know these kids that grew up in San Francisco and their and their parents are addicted to angel investing you know just like refreshing their refreshing their email on the first of the month you know waiting waiting for waiting for the update. Um, but it's but
2:50:56
Um, but it's but it's this interesting, you know, dynamic where it's honestly one of, you know, to me it's one of the most interesting ways to spend free time is just like meeting exciting founders, but at the same time liquidity timeline so longit even if you make money, it's like, well, I didn't get to enjoy that in my 30s. Yeah. Like, yeah, totally.
2:51:18
And I have I have buddies that are that are towards, you know, the end of their careers or or maybe even retired that are that are basically like somebody recently said to me, I don't want to make net new angel investments because I don't want to deal with this when I'm like potentially in a retirement, you know, like potentially like, you know, retired to Hawaii, right?
2:51:38
I don't want to be worried about uh, you know, figuring out, oh, when, you know, when should I try to exit, you know, this position?
2:51:45
Uh Dan, can you break down this idea that most venture capitalists don't understand risk management and um only 10% of venture firms are making it to fund four?
2:51:55
What do VCs get wrong about risk management?
2:51:57
What does risk management even mean?
2:51:59
I thought the whole point was to be risk on, swing for the fences, man.
2:52:03
It's a that's a great question.
2:52:05
It's a a real fundamental point as well.
2:52:07
I talk about like the importance of risk management in venture capital and people do give me a slightly crazy look like the point is risk.
2:52:13
Yeah, but if you properly manage risk like in a systematic way, you can take more risky bets.
2:52:20
Like that's kind of the point.
2:52:22
Like if you understand the maths of portfolio construction, how big your checks are going to be, you know, what the outcome is likely to be, how many you have to write, what maximizes your exposure to potential unicorns, you know, what what discipline across the whole portfolio looks like, you can take more risk on an individual investment basis. And yeah.
2:52:41
So what does uh what does a poorly riskmanaged fund look like?
2:52:47
Is it is it just not building concentration in the winners, not leaving money in the fund for proata and followons to kind of ride the winners up as they become outsized winners.
2:52:57
I feel like that was something that we heard from like the last generation of managers.
2:53:02
They got a $50 million fund.
2:53:05
Then everything got marked up in Zerp and all of a sudden they had to make these decisions on huge proata checks out of their main fund where there really was no new data about the company and they were still at a seed level.
2:53:15
But some big firm had come in and preempted a series A or series B.
2:53:20
And so all of a sudden you can't do the normal thing of wow there's so much traction on this company.
2:53:27
I need to really make sure my fund has a significant ownership because I did get a foothold in but I need to build that position.
2:53:33
Is that what's going on or is there something else some another dynamic?
2:53:36
Yeah, that's a part of it.
2:53:38
That's quite a big part of it.
2:53:38
Um I think that like the fundamental thing is the having a right-sized initial portfolio.
2:53:44
The number of investments that you make to begin with.
2:53:45
Yeah, that should be diversified enough and you know the the average might be like 25 today. Maybe it should be 50.
2:53:52
Um how do you even calculate that?
2:53:55
Is that based on like historical trends in like the number of unicorns or something like how are you how are you thinking about that? Yeah, exactly.
2:54:03
There's there's great work done by a few people.
2:54:04
Dave Mccclure from 500 Startups, he has an article on this.
2:54:09
He talks about you know a hundred startups should be the portfolio size for for a seed fund. Wow.
2:54:13
Uh because of the the small percentage that eventually become unicorns or decacorns. Yeah.
2:54:18
And you you fundamentally don't know to begin with which which ones are going to work out.
2:54:26
That's kind of the problem is VCs overconentrate.
2:54:28
And of course, if you're, you know, I' I've spoken to some great GPS about this concept and they always push back because they have 15 companies and they're all doing great.
2:54:37
And that's like fine, good for you. You're in the top 2%.
2:54:39
It's the other 98% that I'm kind of thinking about.
2:54:42
that I'm kind of thinking about. But is that really a way to get to like by definition the don't you to be in the top 2% don't you have to behave like the top 2% and just actually like consider it a skill issue and just make sure well if you're trying to if you're trying to
2:54:57
get you know I can see the argument if you if you're trying to get past fund four which is like the milestone you need to have bangers in the first fund right like even if even if you're not necessarily even if your ownership is not amazing you need to be able to prove that you can get into winners at all to some degree. And so I've seen that
2:55:16
And so I've seen that strategy play out fairly nicely where as long as you're in a handful, you know, just get showing that you can get in is kind of like key proof points even if you're not able to concentrate, you know, five plus% of your of your fund in a in a single company. Yeah.
2:55:34
Do you think do you think LPs are more willing to forgive on mistakes of portfolio construction not sizing into winners easier than missing winners and having like okay yeah you built the portfolio perfectly you got concentrated into your winners properly but you didn't have any of those really sexy companies in the portfolio.
2:55:56
Well, I'd like to think ultimately what matters is, you know, the the end multiple, the IRRa, the performance of the fund.
2:56:03
And everyone, you know, the majority of of emerging managers come out swinging for the fences every single time. They want a 10x fund.
2:56:11
And in doing so, they like are themselves boom or bust.
2:56:15
If they fail and it's less than returning capital, they have no room to learn.
2:56:20
They can't improve for the next fund.
2:56:22
You know, there's there's no step two.
2:56:24
If they are a bit more conservative, a bit more diversified and they return like 2.
2:56:29
5 3x maybe they get a fund too and they learn and they can improve and earn concentration over time.
2:56:35
Isn't there something beautiful about the fact that both startups exhibit a follow a power law and venture capital firms exhibit a power law?
2:56:45
Like there's a there's a kinship here that it's like, hey, we're all either going to be rich or poor here.
2:56:51
There's no median outcome.
2:56:51
You're not just a bank to me.
2:56:53
uh you're not going to be around unless this works out.
2:56:57
You're living under the power law just as much as I am as the entrepreneur.
2:57:02
I would disagree with that to be honest with you.
2:57:04
I I I think it it's a better world for everybody if the VCs are more stable. Okay.
2:57:08
You know, they they they are very powerful. They are boom and bust.
2:57:12
They don't really have to be.
2:57:12
They don't have to be interesting. Interesting.
2:57:17
Well, yeah, this is great. This was great.
2:57:19
Thank you for coming on and sharing.
2:57:21
Uh, next time you have a report, give us a heads up and uh, love to have you back on it.
2:57:24
Yeah, we'll talk to you, Dan. This is great. Thanks so much.
2:57:28
Uh, let's run through some, uh, timeline.
2:57:32
Let's give some updates, whatever else is in the news. What else?
2:57:35
I've got an idea before we jump into the timeline.
2:57:36
Should we talk about Figma? Of course.
2:57:39
Figma tell us about Figma is the design tool of my dreams.
2:57:42
It's a tool that that I have used for my entire career at this point.
2:57:46
Think bigger, build faster. That's great. generic for that.
2:57:51
Um uh how you design, explore your ideas freely and iterate quickly.
2:57:56
We should make we should make an actual like old school style radio ad uh for this.
2:58:03
But um but anyways, Figma uh launched a bunch of new features last week at config.
2:58:07
One of which is very cool.
2:58:09
They allow you to generate marketing uh various types of assets based off of your brand book. It's called Figma Buzz.
2:58:16
Uh so exciting new feature from them alongside sites and and uh kind of the core uh you know design tools that you probably already use and love.
2:58:25
So go check out Figma Buzz and sites and thank you to Figma show.
2:58:31
Uh should we talk about some timeline? Let's do it.
2:58:32
Uh Jason Calcanis of the All-In podcast is uh is taking the movie industry to task.
2:58:40
He says the movie industry is effing clueless. Make a $19 a month. All you can watch.
2:58:45
$10 uh plus $10 for each kid and $49 for a family of five. Watch the money. Pour in. He wants a subscription.
2:58:52
Movies would be huge if you made it a season pass like the ski industry did with the epic pass.
2:58:56
Show old movies too for bonus points.
2:58:58
AMC will slash prices on Wednesday is the news by 50% starting in July.
2:59:02
The goal is to get more people in theaters between weekends.
2:59:06
What's interesting is that I saw a separate article about how uh the modern instantiation of Movie Pass is wildly successful. Have you heard of this?
2:59:16
The I think it's like Well, yeah.
2:59:17
Apparently AMC has a subscription product already. They do.
2:59:19
I think the interesting thing that Jason called out is showing old movies.
2:59:23
I think one of the challenges is that there's so few new movies coming out that people are genuinely, you know, wanting to get up and go see. Yep.
2:59:33
Uh, I don't know if old movies would do it, but um, they do re-releases all the time and they are available and I don't think they build as much hype because I I think there's some weird dynamic in the movie industry where like unless you see Billboard and the hype and like you have you're texting your voice.
2:59:51
I think I think it comes down to scarcity.
2:59:52
The the they need to pull movies off of every off the internet entirely for a year and then just build it up and being like we're bringing it back.
3:00:02
You know, the people, some people will be like, "Well, I have a DVD. I can watch it anytime."
3:00:07
Good luck playing a DVD on your home entertainment system if you got it in the last 5 years. Not going to work.
3:00:10
Um, anyway, staying with the All-In podcast.
3:00:16
Chimath Polyhapatia says, "Not nearly enough.
3:00:18
People are talking about the implications of Clara rolling back some of their AI bets.
3:00:22
Not knowing any of the details, I can guess why.
3:00:24
Replacing determinism of h or humans with probabilistic code is fraught with edge cases and require new ways of software development and process engineering that aren't well solved.
3:00:33
The implications to an entire generation of AI apps will be as severe uh will be severe as more companies come to terms with the difficulty in getting products to work reliably in production with AI in the loop.
3:00:45
Customer service may be the first funeral signpost.
3:00:47
The result will be that many startups need to pivot to simply use AI for narrow use cases and otherwise act deterministically.
3:00:53
So what will what will so what have people funded then? An AI company? No, not really.
3:00:59
Just a really overpriced SAS company at AI valuations. Interesting. What do you think?
3:01:04
Uh I mean I thought the conversation with OWN yesterday from Intercom was super insightful, right?
3:01:13
they are incredibly well positioned to deliver AI to CX teams and and unlock the power of it, but they're not saying there he he wasn't coming on and saying 99% of tickets are solved by AI today.
3:01:28
He believes that, you know, we can get there over time.
3:01:29
And he his hot take was that, you know, AI was, you know, better than humans already at a lot of things, right? It stays on script.
3:01:36
It it uh doesn't get tired. It doesn't get short. it's not temperamental.
3:01:42
All these things that um you know end up creating a better customer experience once the quality is at a certain point.
3:01:49
This idea that like we we overestimate what can be done in a year, underestimate what can be done in a decade.
3:01:54
You got superhuman autocomplete for every single one of your customer service agents.
3:01:59
You got much better ways to navigate a knowledge base effectively and just serve up a better Google search, use it as a knowledge engine.
3:02:09
And so that should drive those.
3:02:10
But, uh, trying to go full CLA mode and saying, you know, we're not hiring anyone.
3:02:16
We're going to be a oneperson company.
3:02:17
Probably a little aggressive. Yeah.
3:02:19
Anyway, Obby Schiffman, uh, founder of friend.
3:02:21
com says, I met my investors LPs and realized I'm just working for college endowments and f family offices.
3:02:29
Activate golden retriever. Yeah, you are. And it's good. It's an opportunity.
3:02:35
It's an amazing blessing.
3:02:35
I mean, we heard about this from Andrew Reid talking about uh when he was pitching Dylan Field at Figma, brought him into the the Brown conference room and said, "Hey, like we work for Brown.
3:02:48
You have an opportunity to run it up for Brown." Yeah.
3:02:50
You have an opportunity to run it up.
3:02:51
Run it up to go long brown. Exactly.
3:02:53
And it's not just college endowments.
3:02:55
It's it's teacher pension funds.
3:02:58
It's, you know, you're supporting firefighters, all these things.
3:03:01
So, uh you're supporting you're you're helping big oil, right?
3:03:07
I mean, that is that is part of the beauty of like the intertwined financial system is that uh losses are born across the entire uh economy so that any one company that blows up doesn't destroy everyone's pension.
3:03:21
Um and but but when there's big winners, everyone kind of benefits if you have a pension or you go to one of these schools like their endowment is enriched and they do more research and science and all sorts of stuff.
3:03:32
And so you you have kind of a uh um uh I mean it's just it's diversification, right?
3:03:37
It's just diversification.
3:03:38
And so, uh, like you you don't hear as many of those stories about, uh, an individual main street investor that lost all their money on a risky startup bet because angel investing is while addictive, it is for, um, high net worth individuals and accredited investors only.
3:03:53
But they still have exposure to the venture markets through LPs. Yeah.
3:03:57
Uh, Prime Video has renewed Beast games for not one but two more seasons.
3:04:02
Y'all are not ready for the big stuff. We have plans, says Mr. Beast. Very interesting.
3:04:09
This was one that was like hotly debated about whether whether whether it was good.
3:04:12
It's hard to track because you can't just you can't just look at the YouTube metrics to understand if Beast Games was truly successful for Amazon Prime.
3:04:18
But we have the data now, season 2 and season 3 confirmed.
3:04:20
They probably wouldn't have done that if it underperformed.
3:04:24
So interesting watching a YouTuber transition to mainstream media or you know bigger platforms.
3:04:28
I mean Amazon Prime's new media but still you know a a huge company, major network.
3:04:35
He's clearly worked out a fantastic deal and we've seen a bunch of this and it feels like it's more of a increasingly uh social media is a proving ground for Hollywood.
3:04:43
Um talk about Pat McAfee, what he did with his podcast, took it to ESPN eventually.
3:04:48
Um I think we're going to be seeing a lot more of this as people uh build uh independently and then ultimately leverage the distribution that comes from something like Amazon Prime. So congrats to Jimmy.
3:04:59
Uh we should have on the show.
3:05:01
Daltton Caldwell says the S&P 500 now has three YC companies.
3:05:04
Door Dash, Airbnb, and Coinbase. Let's hear it for YC.
3:05:08
Can we get the Can we get a size gong or some clapping or something? Just amazing. Congratulations.
3:05:13
I can't wait to go back to the next demo day. Yeah, me either.
3:05:18
Uh it is it is actually crazy how how big that YC has done this because no other incubator is even close, right?
3:05:25
And I'm excited for the update in in 2055.
3:05:27
The S&P 500 is now 60% Y Combinator companies for sure.
3:05:31
Uh certainly uh if you expand that to YC founders running companies probably says 497 to go. 497 to go.
3:05:40
PJ I like it on a conquest. Good job.
3:05:44
Uh and all are consumer tech. Yeah, right.
3:05:47
Everybody says build B2B SAS until you see some of the biggest outcomes. Just wait.
3:05:52
I mean a couple of those payroll companies will be in the S&P 500 pretty soon, I'm pretty sure.
3:05:59
Anyway, all three of uh Aiden says, "Uber would be a lot cooler if it was called American Express."
3:06:04
I I I just love this guy. Seven likes. Low tam. But low tam banger. Yeah.
3:06:09
He also had another post that we didn't get to yesterday that was like uh if if uh if the airlines calling your name personally as you board the flight, it's basically like flying private.
3:06:19
I thought that was funny.
3:06:21
Anyway, shout out to Aiden.
3:06:21
Great great programmer, great hacker.
3:06:23
Uh Airbnb is launching uh they're unveiling their next chapter.
3:06:27
This is going live today.
3:06:29
I don't actually have the update, but Russi found mode.
3:06:32
So, they're launching new services, businesses. Interesting.
3:06:37
Uh there's a redesigned app.
3:06:37
So, remember they condensed a bunch of launches into one. Yep.
3:06:40
uh expanding the experiences for a while, expanding beyond home stays and uh I guess they're going to invest a quarter of a billion dollars into this new sort of business line where you can like it's it seems like an extension of their kind of experiences product. Sure.
3:06:58
Um but uh anyways, hopefully they can um uh hopefully they not can hopefully they don't crush under the weight of competition with Wander.
3:07:08
Yeah, honestly that's that's my only hope series founder mode CEO love him but they're going to be feeling the heat.
3:07:17
They're going to be feeling the heat from Wander for sure.
3:07:18
Uh Adam D'Angelo said at Quora, we recently tested switching from Zoom to Google Meet for a week.
3:07:24
Google Meet is better in many small ways, but bit worse in one big way.
3:07:28
Audio quality, particularly background audio noise cancellation, echoing that kills it.
3:07:32
So, we're staying on Zoom. This is funny.
3:07:34
on Zoom. This is funny. just like hey I did this uh AV test and we're sticking to we're sticking to Zoom and uh Sundar Pachai respond says hey we'll follow up offline as we have an experience as read notes below it works pretty well in my experience we we will debug to
3:07:50
understand the root cause and fix thanks for flagging thank you would love to switch if this is fixed uh and Nathan a buddy of mine says I have the inverse experience zoom is well rubbish in it and he's British or French maybe I don't know he's over in Europe somewhere I the specifics of that rubbish. Anyway, in it Anyway, in it hilarious.
3:08:08
Um anyway, uh Teddy Blank had a coinage once your VC has uh what was it?
3:08:14
The actual coinage was something about once your once your uh company's LinkedIn profile picture is the founder holding a microphone at a conference.
3:08:24
You're cooked with one of the Yeah, with one of those, which I don't think is really true necessarily because a lot of the big CEOs, they wind up doing that anyway. Bezos, Steve Jobs.
3:08:31
I'm sure all these guys have been pictured with lav mics, but uh still funny to see that.
3:08:38
Yeah, if you grow up too much.
3:08:38
So, anyway, shout out Teddy.
3:08:39
Uh, anything else you want to cover?
3:08:41
Should we get out of here? It's 205. Thank you for watching. Any more plugs? Got aurora. com. Go to luc. com.
3:08:49
Should always go to Should always go there.
3:08:51
Uh, but but uh no, I'm excited for the show tomorrow.
3:08:55
We got Brian Johnson calling in as well as Matteo from Eight Sleep.
3:08:58
And uh yeah, go and leave us a fivestar review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
3:09:06
Uh it helps us uh I think it helps us.
3:09:10
I don't know what it does, but if you do leave a review, uh we will uh talk about it on the show and put an ad in it.
3:09:19
Keep tracking the largest company at the end of May.
3:09:21
This is the Super Bowl of big tech.
3:09:23
Microsoft's at 60% right now, but they dropped just recently. Um, down from 80%.
3:09:27
This chart is actually Nvidia is climbing fast.
3:09:34
Apple's climbing as well.
3:09:34
Uh, it's a knockout dragout fight for the largest company at the end of May.
3:09:38
Head over to check it out.
3:09:41
Anyway, thank you for watching. Talk to you soon. See you tomorrow. Goodbye. [Applause]