you're watching tvpn live from the Temple of Technology The Fortress of Finance the capital of capital that's right today is Thursday February 27th and this show starts now we got a great show for you today we're going over Nvidia earnings we're talking about the Spy Chic a man out in the Middle East
Who's Making Waves in AI investing and we're also breaking down Stripes letter from the founders lots of interesting fin Tech data in there we're going to have two Callins today we got Shan Frank from the ridge wallet and Delian asparuhov from vaa and Founders fund what are they going to be talking about
John uh Shan is actually going to come on and talk about app Loven lot of turmoil in the stock I think they're down a bunch recently right I actually haven't been following that but he's the expert that's why we're having him on and I'll pull up the chart right now but uh Sean has been a big customer of app
there's been a lot of attacks against them recently he's come out in defense of them saying that you know you can that it's overvalued that's fair but it is a real platform we've driven Real Results on it and uh so it'll be interesting to get his perspective there I think he spent few million dollars
there last quarter um and so we'll we'll get an update there and then uh very exciting day for vaa excited to Second re-entry successful and so Delan will come on and break it down and hopefully give us some color on uh what's going on in the space economy and uh you know hopefully get political explain what's
going on with uh DOD procur hopefully get political oh yeah we don't get political we let our guest get I don't know he'll talk about whatever he wants to talk about uh anyway let's kick it off with a report in the Wall Street Journal about nvidia's earnings they beat earnings they're down today if you
want to pull that up on public I'd love some extra context but I'll start reading from this uh the chip giant has stayed relevant even as deep seek and other reasoning AI models rise uh Nvidia faced a growing threat earlier last year the art of IAL intelligence world was shifting in a way that invited
competition as millions of people started using AI tools operating the underlying models to respond to their many queries became more important than the Computing intensive work of training them this is the training to inference shift that we saw happen and which was expected you train the model and then
you want to actually serve it and so you got to do inference this had propelled Nvidia to the top of the AI boom many expected that shift could give competitors including Advanced Micro Devices AMD an opening to pry away market share but Nvidia was already preparing to adapt and stay at the
Forefront of the AI race despite the shift away from creating models and toward operating them a process known in the industry as inference and I love this article because all the killers are here they got Dylan Patel quoted uh they got a bunch of other people that we'll get into shortly uh its latest AI chips
Blackwell are larger in size have more computer memory and use less precise numbers in AI comp computations they can also be linked together in large numbers with super fast netor NW working which Dylan Patel the founder of Industry research firm semi analysis said led to breakthrough gains in inference so bull
case for NVIDIA laid out by Dylan Patel over at semi analysis uh nvidia's performance gains for Blackwell are March are much larger in inference than they are in training he said nvidia's latest quarterly earnings report on Wednesday partly reflected its success in adapting to the industry shift it
included sales and profit that exceeded analysts expectations coupled with an optimist forecast for the company's current quarter inference has become a growing Focus as AI evolves towards so-called reasoning models where a digital brain thinks through answers to users query step by step that process
can require a hundred times more computing power chief executive Jensen Wong said on a call with analyst Wednesday the vast majority of our compute today is actually inference and Blackwell takes all of that to a new level we designed Blackwell with the idea of reasoning models in mind so yeah
obviously when you're reasoning so many more tokens are being generated hundreds of hundreds times more and so inference is becoming uh much more important and Blackwell has positioned Nvidia well to take advantage of that got anything for me Jordan oh I mean uh it's just it's only a company like Nvidia could have an
earnings beat and a very optimistic forecast and the stock trade down 6% the next day which is where it's at uh six almost six and a half percent uh so it wasn't just priced to Perfection was priced Beyond Perfection uh in there uh the the stock price is paying for it today but let's get into the rest of it
and then I'm sure we'll have other thoughts so uh kette CR nvidia's Chief Financial Officer added that many early developments of the company's Blackwell chips were earmarked for inference work that pattern was a first for a new generation of the company's chips among the company's pursuing reasoning models
are open AI Google and the upstart Chinese AI company deepy which we've covered on the show The emergence in January of deeps which said it had built sophisticated AI models that required fewer of nvidia's chips touched off the significant scare for NVIDIA since uh the AI boom began so of course it sold
off then it gained back and now it's back down speaking of deeps I don't know if this is in the stack for later but somebody shared yesterday that they have off hours pricing so you can basically it's already extremely cheap but then off hours which are their sort of non- busy hours it's like off another 50% and
somebody was saying great we have Teemu AI now well there's a ton of uh load balancing that does happen in these AI inference models so mid Journey when you're in America and you're using mid Journey during your workday you are likely running that inference in Asia on an Asian server because of the time
difference they're not using it in the middle of the night and then vice versa and so that type of load balancing happens all the time um but it is funny how sometimes it seems like the models if they're under stress they still work but they become like lower quality or there's a bun of knobs that people are
tuning and it's basically like yeah your AI worker is getting just won't try as hard just doesn't try as hard exactly um eat some protein yeah uh so Wong brushed off the that threat on Wednesday describing deep seeks advances as as an excellent Innovation that AI developers
everywhere were taking inspiration from I think that's true a lot of those gains will be baked in but people still want to run them on really big uh really big server farms and using a lot of Blackwell chips um why not stack all the gains together if you can in the past Wong has suggested that inference and
training will eventually converge as AI more closely aligns with how humans operate people don't absorb new information and reference it separately he said at Stanford University last year you're learning and inferencing all the time and some of these models actually it's what's called online learning where
um you can continue to train the model even after it's been fully trained yeah so I mean obviously there's the pre-training post training but a lot of these models are are are now what's called online so they can be essentially updated um and and I think that that uh the people that look at AI as you know
we're we're kind of replicating the human brain think about it that way where there's like Fast thinking slow thinking all these different models and you need to replicate all of that and humans are fixated on you know especially in our corner of the internet improving your thinking day over day not
in sort of quarterly installments or or um and uh yeah it's interesting because right now people seem very comfortable with uh the idea of uh it would become a lot to process if you know uh Claude 3.5 you know there's some people today I saw the cursor founder sharing he still
prefers Claude 3.5 over 3.7 and people are sort of oriented now around these sort of releases and having like fixed models but there's a world in the future where they're just constantly morphing and evolving and I think that that what this Point's getting at here yeah I've seen some diagrams where people have
said like oh there's too many algorithms now and too many like hacks on top of uh the the core llm uh to really call it AGI like it it doesn't count it needs to be like one simple algorithm the the algorithm for AGI will be just some simple Transformer and then it'll just be massively scaled up and that will
give us everything we need uh as opposed to what we have now which is like uh yes like it it has the ability to use a web browser but that's adapted to it and it has like ability to look up data and index things and and it but another way to think about it is like in your mind you have the access to go to the library
and look up books and you have the ability to use a calculator and so maybe we don't need to create an llm that can do every single calculation from its head it can just use that feels more like super intelligence right like closer to the definition of something that doesn't need any external
references exactly it's almost yeah it's almost like an academic exercise of like can you just create some super intelligence with a single simple algorithm well it doesn't matter because really what people want are just agents that do their jobs and so it doesn't matter if it's if it's you know just
going and writing some Python and then coming back with the correct answer I just want the correct answer y um so uh Nvidia still faces strong competition in inference industry insiders say well nvidia's advances in hardware and investments in its AI software have kept customers around a variety of new chips
from startups and more stablished chipmakers mean it won't be easy for NVIDIA to maintain its position at the top uh Robert Walkin the co-founder of AI chip startup etched I actually spent three hours interviewing him uh last year uh great team fast fasinating team uh two teal fellows on that team uh and
they are trying to build a uh an inference based chip that's just a Transformer baked down into silicon so those so those would run much faster and they've done some cool demos where they've uh been able to generate Minecraft essentially on the Fly and the only thing that it takes in is the input
from the controller and then it just generates the next frame that you would expect to see and so you can just play this full game and it's all being generated there's no game yeah exactly so level the guy on X I think uh levels IO he's doing something with flight uh like an alter like a
flight simulator fully generated version uh we'll talk about that later but I'm pretty sure what that is is he had he had AI right game engine code interesting it's different than generating the video yeah exactly so yeah yeah but but but similar things I mean yeah with the pace of development
some of these models you can imagine a future where games are just perpetually generated yeah in every you know in every possible direction right it'll be a totally new experience to play games versus historically there's a map and there's sort of boundaries to the game and then what happens when there's
there's no more map like the map is whatever you can imagine or whatever the game can imagine there's no finite levels like you can you can go to chat GPT right now and just say uh tell me a story about a knight fighting for a castle and then just immediately be like continue the story where does it go next
where does it go next and you can do that for or do thats say pretend you know you just finished the the movie you know this movie you know continue the movie yeah and right now it might get boring but uh eventually you could say hey hey make another level for me make another level for me essentially uh and
and do it all in real time and so he said nvidia's chips were fundamentally limited by their Origins as Graphics processing units adapted for AI instead of custom made for the moment sharpening the Swiss army knife only gets you so far Walkin said you have to build specialized Hardware if you want to get
maximal performance you're hitting a wall here and we certainly saw that in Bitcoin mining um Bitcoin was originally mined on the CPU then eventually gpus then what are called fpgas field programmable gate arrays which are like kind of customizable silicon pieces and then and then uh after fpga it went to
as6 which are uh the algorithm is baked into silicon the chip can only run one algorithm and the algorithm that the Bitcoin A6 run is the Bitcoin algorithm that just Minds mines and uh hugely risky because you're chips yearn for the mines much like the children yearn for for MInecraft true true Everything
converges to mining in this in this world uh Mining and tokens crypto tokens AI llm tokens you know there's these weird crossovers all over the place but um uh for the Bitcoin folks it was very risky because you you have to spend all this money to make these chips and then if the price of Bitcoin doesn't go up
well you're not going to reap your benefit now a lot of those or the price of energy go now and etched isting that Transformer architecture is here to stay and that AI inference is going to be here to stay and I think that's a very safe bat I I I'm very excited for what these guys are
building uh of course it's a huge task to actually go and build a Transformer based uh chip and get it manufactured but uh the the so interesting to think about the comparison between humans thinking just the process of thinking requires a bunch calories which is one form of energy right inference on the
other hand the same uh the same level of human thinking is going to require some amount of inference to accomplish sort of the same uh generalized sort of reasoning process uh but it also requires energy so it'll be interesting to think like I I actually want to see comparisons of uh for a human to reason
something out what is the energy cost what is the the the um comparable energy cost for a machine to do it I would think that right now it's very possible that it takes more sort of calories in almost energy in for the machine to do it uh but eventually that'll that could flip uh but it might be closer than
you'd actually think but it's interesting comparison right how many take the people how many David protein bars do you need uh to to have a good take right for you it's maybe like a quarter of one yep we'll see you over time yeah it really uh it's uh yeah the Matrix is is basically that
story um so uh he goes on to say a number of startups have begun making inroads among large AI customers SB bruss which is a company we've talked about before they designed the largest chips ever produced wafer scale chips by the way I love this because everybody's like we need to make the best smallest
most performant chip they're like no we're just going to make the biggest one we're going to try to make the biggest and best chip very American out of a French uh French firm I don't know if French they're working with Mr they're working with mol and and and it was interesting because uh cerebus I think
they might have gone public or they or they became a pretty big company and they they had one deal uh that wasn't with a company that people had actually like used the product of it was kind of more of like a hypo cus is in is in Sunnyville so not French but working with mrr and so uh and so they're
working with mrr now uh to build the world's fastest AI chatbot so because it's all on one ship you you can inference it very quickly there's no memory bandwidth to deal with and so uh there's advantages to that of course there's a bunch of drawbacks we talked about this when you're manufacturing at
wafer scale one tiny defect throws out the entire chip as opposed to if you have a wafer and you're getting 50 chips off of that if you you know you your yield is you know 49 out of 50 instead of zero out of one uh and so there have been a lot of risks to that approach but uh love to see that they're trying a
different approach and trying to create just a new product that optimizes around a different Vector of uh of progress and so Saudi Arabia's oil Giant rco is working closely with AI chip startups grock which is with a Q it's a different grock uh that's a tough one it's very tough and sambanova systems to set up
large Computing facilities for inference and now the grock grq they uh went viral with a demo because they uh ran llama on uh their chip which I I'm not exactly sure they they did something where they optimized for like super fast memory bandwidth but low low total memory allocation or something like that they
made some off and the result was that you could inference llama and generate tokens like extremely extremely quickly and it would just you know how like you're kind of waiting for chat GPT to load with the grq uh chip it would just like spit out a full page like immediately and that was like kind of magical when you're so
used to llms taking a little bit to think and uh when it happens instantly it's it's really shocking it's magical and yeah exactly and and I'm sure there's that that that thing about like Amazon on you know every 5 milliseconds of optimization really matters and so you could see that really driving
adoption um it's unclear if that's if grq is like scaling up and and successful in all the new models because some of the new models they might need oh this one needs more memory B and it just doesn't work on their chip so there's always interesting when you're when you're looking at a reasoning model
sort of think something out right now it's paced out in a way that that it sort of you can see the sort of chain the the logic chains and it and it's more or l as fast as as you know you you might think through it if you were knowledgeable on the subject yet when it happens instantly you start feeling a
little paper clippy uh and uh it's certainly nerve-wracking it is so funny that the the the first AI thing was clippy and then everyone's worried about getting paper clipped and like it's like it all comes back to the paper clips I wonder if that's where the paper clips the paper Clipper like AI Doom scenario
came from is it at all tied to Microsoft's clippy I don't know what's like the etymology of like the paper clipping thing I understand the the like the thought experiment that like hey you know you tell it to it's a good example you tell it to go make a paper clip and then it just turns everything into paper
clips the the I I think the original the origin of this was that philosophers have speculated that an AI task with uh with a task such as creating paper clips yeah might cause an apocalypse uh by learning to divert ever increasing resources to the task and then learning how to resist our attempts
to turn it off so I think that that that's sort of the but why did they choose paperclips is because of Microsoft's clippy and that's what I oh yeah because they could have Staples they could have said Staples or they could have said hats or they could have said yeah so it's a 2014 thought
experiment by this guy Nick Bostrom okay and so clippy would have predated that so he very possible I don't know we got to ask Bostrom he he does uh he does shows every once in a while we should get him on ask him where he came up with paperclip specifically uh I think that's interesting uh I have to imagine that
Nvidia is going to drop some kind of inference Powerhouse sooner rather than later because I think they will get eclipsed in that market uh he said it may take many years but I think that's the direction things are heading and this was Jim Piaza an executive at it management company and Sono who formerly
worked on Computing infrastructure at meta uh he said that Nvidia might need to take further steps to directly address the competition in inference by developing chips specifically for it so if you can think about this like you know what what is Apple doing in in inference um well they have you know the
the the M1 M2 M3 M4 chips those are Apple silicon they aren't really wired together in a way where you can do a large language model training run on it I'm sure you could get it to work if you worked hard enough and you got enough of them and we've seen some previews of this where like maybe they just you know
networked a bunch of mac Studios together to do some sort of small training run um but it's not really designed to be like Blackwell competitive uh or a100 h100 competitive um but you know uh Google has their TPU and I think Amazon has a custom silicon chip as well and so there's a few
different hypers scale scalers that have chips that are specifically they they're like hey we're going to do all our inference ourselves we're not we don't want to pay Nvidia their margins and so Nvidia needs to keep up with that cut it off yeah the competition for NVIDIA is is the grocs of the world the grro q's
right these sort of upstart Chip Chip uh design design companies but then it's also the hyperscalers and that is honestly in many ways more risky because it's very difficult for uh you know startups can can kind of pick a you know a certain Edge but the issue with the the hyperscalers is they're the big
buyers of these chips as well so if they start developing their own that's a huge risk factor the other thing is in the news this morning um well we are the news but in some other news this morning Andy jasse was on I think it was Bloomberg talking about Amazon's new Quantum Computing chip and so every
hyperscaler uh cares a lot about this category is innovating themselves here and you know in hopes to one day be you know running uh a lot of their data centers on their own chips right would be the goal cut out the middleman well regardless of what you think about Nvidia the best place to invest in
Nvidia is probably public.com I would say so Investing For Those who take it seriously they have multi-asset investing industry-leading yields and they're trusted by millions go to public.com for stocks bonds treasuries options and more and treasuries are a great option in this market when
everything seems to be in freef fall uh they they rolled that out when interest rates first popped uh in 2022 and uh have just continued to ship uh improvements on it so uh yeah good time to have exposure to historically uh much more stable assets yeah so go do do some research and uh move some assets
over to public uh let's move on to the Spy Chic taking the AI World by storm this is a fascinating profile on Abu dhabi's tanun bin zad al- nahan he has more than $1.5 trillion to spend and he's in a hurry he's grappling with Mark Zuckerberg the obuby Royal is size is not size you remember that line I think
this was uh when Luna was crashing uh the the people were sort of poking fun at the founders he had this you know his his company did collapse but he had a good line in there which was your size is not size people were saying they were shorting but uh nobody's size is size when you compare uh this Royal thrown
around 1.4 trillion yeah move over Masa there's a new there's a new Big Dog big dog now Masa when he need I mean it's funny it's funny when when Masa is talking about raising $500 billion do you know this is a guy that could do it but he's certainly not going to put 30% of his entire portfolio into one uh you
know sort of potentially high-risk project so uh so let's kick it off the Abu Dhabi Royal sometimes called the Spy Chic is accustomed to using his vast wealth to master his many obsessions which have ranged over the years from martial arts to chess to video games now shik tanon the United Arab Emirates
National Security adviser and brother of the president is deploying a similar Playbook at a much grander scale he wants to muscle his tiny emirat to the front of the race to develop and control AI systems that could transform the global economy the world is taking notice the CEO's Apple Microsoft and
black rock have all paid homage to his elaborate Persian Gulf Royal compound in recent months you know we love Royal compounds love compounds um I've been I I told you before we joined the show I've been on an absolutely iconic uh Persian Gulf Royal compound in the UAE I don't think it was this one there are
many there's plenty of space in the desert to put these compounds but uh they really are uh an oasis the one that I went to had over 100 Ferraris stored on the property property there was actually it was actually to the point where he would have like one F40 in each color wow and so and he'd have like he'd
be like oh yeah I I like vintage Range Rovers and then he would have the entire rainbow of just one one car same spec just changing the paint color yeah uh so I mean it's like the sultan BR at one point the sult of brunai was buying more than three cars per day for years and he
wound up with a collection in the tens of thousand my he was a client of my father-in-law actually insane he was making custom cars Dominator the precursor to the Benta never sold to the public just asked just asked Bentley I want an SUV and they said there's so many we'll make 10 so there's a bunch of
incredible cars that originated because somebody in the Gulf said make me this car yep and we can thank them for that the G wagon was actually so the G class was developed as a military vehicle from a suggestion from the Sha of Iran interesting back in 1972 that's crazy started as an Iranian uh and is still
loved by Persians specifically here in La yeah whatever Iran deal happens next we got to make sure that there's some cool cars involved you know let's let's deescalate and and shift from you know the geopolitical jockeying to just who can design a cooler car that's the world piece that I want to see in the world
exactly we're working towards that but this guy seems like an absolute boss uh he uh on a fall trip to the United States He grappled with fellow Brazilian jiu-jitsu devot Mark Zuckerberg and dawned a sweatshirt and jeans for a visit with Elon Musk at Tesla's T Texas Factory all of this is possible in part
because of the because the 56-year-old tanon controls more money than almost anyone on the planet as the chairman of two Abu Dhabi wealth funds with an estimated 1.4 trillion in assets and and the steward of an enormous personal personal Fortune a new artificial intelligence fund he leads mgx is set to
be infused with more than 50 billion from his wealth and other Abu Dhabi sources and that's like a drop in the bucket compared to the 1.4 trillion it's crazy these numbers are so big now um according to people familiar with the fund billions of dollars more are sent are set to be spent on AI by group 42 a
company he controls uh this is all part of more than 70 billion the UAE has pledged to invest in France and Italy earlier this month last month mgx was one of the few names mentioned back in Stargate hundred billion data center project announc so how are they calling this hundred billion doll data center
project when the headline number just a month ago was 500 are they dialing it back I have no idea I mean it's possible that they started the road they basically started the road show yeah and said you know shoot for 500 even if you miss and land at 100 you're still in a good spot right you're starting to be
more competitive with some of the hyperscalers but uh definitely dialing it back uh a full 80% if uh I'm assuming that I'm assuming that the Wall Street Journal sort of like fact check this and and sort of confirm because for them to just call this if it was still a $500 billion project and then they're going
and calling it 100 billion dollar project it doesn't look good on the journal yeah I mean the the numbers just go up and down every other day yeah uh add 100 billion take 400 billion off who knows it doesn't matter and then is it over what period of time and oh then Zach's doing 200 billion over here and
and SAA Microsoft is good for his 80 billion but then maybe pulling that separately and no one really knows how you're counting this stuff up but uh a lot of money's going out yep data centers are being built and the products are getting better so there you know hype is over here uh Saudi aramco is
working on a their own project with uh with grock wow yeah um okay so it ALS uh it has also written big checks to open Ai and musk's Ai xai and and and Amazon backed anthropic so he's in all three Foundation companies good why not and at that point I think people are just like I don't like that
you're in my competitor but I who else am I going to go to for 100 billion yeah you're the only person so yeah I'll take you can have a slice of everything you can create an index I mean it's super smart yeah uh even in a world a wash with AI in funds uh even in an AI World a wash in funds tanon stands out while
many are PL plunging tens of billions of dollars into concentrated areas SoftBank is making a huge bet on open Ai and the tech Giants are heaving money at data centers tanun is planning to spend more money broadly around the fledgling sector than almost anyone else it's a risky time to be splashing so much cash
on AI citation needed who knows it might be the best time ever you know well so the next so they back this up by saying the lowcost AI model from China's deep seek has abruptly shaken assumptions on the need for heavy investment got to put them in the truth Zone here it's already
come out that they spent way more than the headline number that they had and so uh at this point if they they came out with a super low number single digit millions and then sort of revised it and then since then they've probably revised it again but the whole sort of world moved on right so we still don't know
exactly how much it cost but it certainly wasn't anywhere near the original number that they threw out I'll keep reading here valuations uh across Tech have skyro Ed and even optimistic Venture capitalists often acknowledge the market is in a searing frenzy leading AI companies expect to lose
billions of dollars for years to come while pledges of future profitability rest on hazy assumptions of a tital wave of demand many see parallels to the lat stage.com bubble when cash splashers of the era that's a great one that's a great one Gunslinger cash splasher cash splasher is great you got to be a cash
splasher you're not splashing cash what are you splashing what are you doing so when the cash flashers of the era plunged tens of billions of dollars into public into building out fiber optic cable networks based on projections that internet growth would be even more rapid than it was a glut of fiber and enormous
losses followed uh We've pushed back on this before it seems obvious that we're in an AI bubble but at the same time our leading AI companies have hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in Revenue which the dotcom era companies did not have um and and the actual adoption of AI seems like it's taking
place much faster than the internet totally and the reason for that is because the internet is is the greatest distribution channel for software ever in history right you can launch a new model uh and get uh you know hundreds of thousands of users in the same day yeah I want to give some more color on who
this guy is because there's a bunch of fascinating anecdotes in here says from his ornate Palace in Abu Dhabi tanon personally tracks the progress of global large language models on a dashboard his researchers built for him on his phone and computer he urges subordinates at the giant network of companies he owns
to rapidly incorporate AI so he's probably like pulling up like chatbot Arena and like mlu like every day basically and seeing how it's great it's so much better when you're invested in every single company because jackpot arena is just your personal sort of dashboard right yeah I wonder I wonder
what else is he's tracking on the progress because it could be like daus right if you can get that data I have this I have this situation right now where I have these two I have these two uh companies the exact same category that I'm a shareholder in they're both growing very quickly they both raised a
lot of money uh and and I just happen to be friends with with both CEOs that's how I ended up there but it's sort of funny because every other week they sort of alternate between sharing you know one person's like oh I did this the other person's like I did this I'm like I'm happy for all of you it's fantastic
it's great uh I like this one uh so tanon was meeting with Sacha Nadella at Microsoft uh Sacha mentions a book by George Washington University Prof Professor Jeffrey ding that suggests AI could be the base of a coming global economic boom and this is clearly what informed this book clearly informed
saa's idea about hey let's get to 10% Global GDP growth 5% growth in the developed world uh this is what we should be thinking about AI not reading like the AI Doomer books right um but uh the Chic scribbled it down on his notepad and soon after ding was eating lunch at his in his Washington DC office
when a representative from the UA Embassy knocked on his door and said I can't find your book in any bookstore can I get two copies amazing just like send my guy to just like go get the book directly from the source we've talked about this before billionaires have guys yes uh the middle class has apps you
know well everyone has apps yeah yeah uh but but when you get to a certain level of like the super billionaire the trillionaire class yeah I mean he controls a trillion dollars he I don't think he made it to the Super billionaire list we looked at yesterday I think guys in his category paid not
end up on those lists yeah or it's just like they have control over Capital but they don't personally own it and so it's all it's when you look at the list all the people are people that you can basically clock their net worth by publicly available data can see we know how much of Tesla Elon owns exactly so
when the stock flu fluctuates by $20 billion you just look at his share PR and you calculate you know how what his net worth did that I think I I think they said there were 2 super billionaires ranging from 450 billion for Elon roughly to down to 50 billion for some other folks vadir Putin Sean
ping not on the list yeah it's like how do you not include those guys when they clearly control 50 billion worth of you know economic power no doubt and they're and they're not just oh they're around for a couple years doing the job of President like they this is their life uh anyway uh that is the nature of these
things but I love this guy because I guess we're having a a zoom difficulties so I'm going to just keep reading through this and and you can help Connor get the stream back up yeah read the story about the Age of Empires thing yeah I'm catching up here um sorry folks so I'm gonna backtrack here for a
second but tanon grew up in the shadow of his brother shik Muhammad Benin Zed Al naan the longtime Crown Prince who was named president of the UAE in 2022 while his brother rub shoulders with foreign leaders and crafted plans to remake Abu dhabi's economy tanon honed extracurricular activities his he became
so hooked on competing with his brothers in Age of Empires a video game where players develop hunter gatherers into powerful civilizations that he hired an employee from the company that be that makes the game to coach him on tactics former employees said he turned a palace with within his Royal compound into a
gym he funds one of the world's top cycling teams the U the UAE team Emirates and Iraq rides on an island near the presidential Palace he ringed with cycling pass he likes superlite colago bikes so much that he instructed one of his companies to buy the Italian firm that makes him uh incredible tanun
has poured money into building up Brazilian jiu-jitsu and other forms of grappling around the globe a black belt he started a well-funded championship tournament that has become the Olympics of our sport says Bobby razik a filmmaker who is making a documentary on tanon and the event he's definitely one
of the founding fathers of mixed martial arts he said a sport that quote would not be where it was today without T noon the interest in AI has roots uh his interest in AI has roots in the early 2000s when he was so intrigued by computerated chess that he hired a sizable team of Engineers to make him a
program called Hydra that could compete with the world's best players Igan uh goons a computer chess specialist for opening moves said he often talked by phone for two or more hours a day with the Chic as they monitored hydra's games that's incredible so in late 2017 tun's interest increased after he learned that
Google's AI program Alpha zero had beaten the world's best computer chess program after needing just four hours to learn the rules it was far more powerful than Hydra ever was opening his eyes to the power of AI he told Associates so the following year he tapped Pang sha
the former Chief technology officer at software ter bit Bitcoin firm micro strategy to start g42 a company devoted to applications in AI um so it's very cool he's been he's been very obsessed with this for a very long time uh uh and so at the time Abu dhabi's wealth and economic strategy was largely under the
control of T tun's brother Muhammad as de facto leader of the country he pushed to siphon off part of the Emirates oil wealth and put it into Investments and economic development building the wealth fund Bounty toah Hoon would later inherit so the thing that I think people don't fully understand about you know a
country like the UAE is it's almost more of a kingdom that is forced to Define itself in certain settings as a country right so when you think about the wealth of the country of the UAE you're you should be thinking about as the wealth of a kingdom which is controlled by the royal family right and there's these
families are massive right and so you can you know visualize a sort of family tree and the closer that you get to the top the more of the wealth that you control if you're farther down you might control some small aspect of the Kingdom's operations uh you're going to have like a team that
works under you but you're the ultimate decision maker and so what's interesting is if you want to get big deals done in these in these sort of Kingdoms you actually have to you know if it's a big enough deal you have to get the sign off of you know more or less the King right and so you can see these sort of
decision trees that Trace up and that's why you know the Venture world has had this idea that you can just sort of show up in Abu Dhabi and expect to raise you know billions of dollars like it's some easy task but uh if you talk to any large allocator they'll tell you that these relationships are developed over
years sometimes decades and uh you have to you're going to have to genuinely be you know invest time into those relationships and uh ultimately get the sign off of um you know the most powerful members of the family yeah I think uh is isn't like every Emira gets just like a payment yeah there's there's
effectively a Ubi so so education is funded there's enough uh you know sort of a monthly sort of payment to cover a lot of living expenses this is part of the reason why cars are actually so popular there one is because it's an oil producing Nation SO gas has always been super cheap there's like an incredible
car culture there y but two if your education and your you know house or your apartment are covered and you're working what do you and you don't and you have a Perpetual income by being a citizen of the Kingdom you're going to spend it on cars exactly um and it's actually interesting there's a dynamic
you know speaking of cars cars are actually you would think they would be more expensive in the UAE they actually end up being cheaper because they're they they one these cars can't sell back in the States but two um there are people that use cars to export wealth from sanctioned countries let's say
you're an oligarch in Russia you want to get wealth out of the country it can often times be easier to move a law Ferrari than it is to move $5 million out of the country so there's a bunch of cars there that sell Below Retail and below their sort of market value in the US because people just want to get them
into the UAE move them and then they have you know real dollars that are sort of protected within the Kingdom so yeah I think they were also struggling to set up like top tier universities and so that's where they came up with this with the idea of like we'll just pay uh if
you go to school in the US if you get into Harvard we'll pay full tuition for you yeah because like yeah then it's just there's a lot of that as good of an investment as trying to build the next in the UAE y interesting um well uh did you get to the to the section where they had to rip out the Huawei routers did
you see that no we didn't get that far uh the UAE has long seen itself as something of a Switzerland a trusted point for trade for East and West and choosing sides on AI would risk damaging relations with China but the Allure of the US lead on AI was too much to ignore tanon picked the United States let's go
let go and he says wuwei routers were ripped out of g42 offices and Western Equipment put in its place no more spying do not do not look at our internet traffic China um while tanon and his AIDS continued negotiating with the administration on details to enable the deal the administration paired Ton's
company with Microsoft g42 agreed to use Microsoft's Cloud for AI work and also to comply with us export restrictions as part of the deal and Microsoft invested 1.5 billion in g42 joining its board of directors still China Hawks in Congress remain concerned that the uae's overall ties to China remain strong fearing the
country could allow powerful US tech tools to make their way to China uh those lawmakers could be an obstacle if tanon comes back uh for similar deals yeah I mean the challenge of being uh Switzerland of the Middle East in many ways is that you know the UAE does have a lot of economic ties with from what I
know uh Iran right there's there's a lot of Iranian money there uh Russian Etc uh but the cool thing about being in the UAE is if you go there you'll sit down at dinner and you're at a table with uh with the it it's the most diverse group of people I've ever been a part of I got
a chance to go uh a couple times in uh what was it late uh early and then late 2023 and you'll sit down at a table with um uh somebody from Iran somebody from uh um uh Israel somebody from Russia somebody from the UK and American and everybody's getting along because everybody's just generally there to you
know in that setting enjoy F1 and uh you know everybody's um you know generally Pro business there so it's a great environment yeah I mean the capitalism in business has been like the one thing kind of holding the Middle East with with you know the UAE and and Saudi Arabia kind of playing nice with both
sides and kind of keeping everything together uh and a lot of pressure to not let uh anything fall into just absolute chaos y uh which is obviously risky um so speaking on a podcast in December uh they're talking about Josh Kushner or Jared Kushner recalled a 2018 meeting when he was visiting the region uh tanon
told him Jared I'm not meeting with you unless you spend two hours uh after with me to talk about AI wow and so he uh he's trying to build his he's going podcast mode he's like you got to talk to me for at least two hours the shortest Joe Rogan episode yeah and uh we'll get into the details that's great
um and so yeah he's he's been uh investing in a lot of stuff and um I'm sure he'll be someone uh got to have him on the show whose presence only grows over the next few years as he continues to make big Investments anyway um if you're looking to take a trip and stay in a nice place maybe impress a Chic
while you're on the fundraising tour we recommend going to wander that's right find your happy place book a wander with inspiring views Hotel great amenities dreamy beds top tier cleaning in 24/7 coner surface it's a vacation home but better and we have some big news from Kyle over at wander they just crossed
600 total locations and you were in the chat asking weren't you at 500 a month ago said yes yep it's pretty pretty great growth 20 month over month is uh incredible it's amazing uh and it it what's cool is wander is a platform where every incremental property makes a platform more valuable right you know I
think that uh you know we we dealt with this before I was trying to stay at a wander in uh when the fires were happening they were all booked I'm sure you know they've added multiple properties within Southern California and the pace that they're operating at is just incredible
so um go check it out they actually are running a spring sale for the last day today that you can get $400 off uh plus a wander hoodie with code spring 400 so go check it out and you won't regret it it is uh unbeatable and we are going to be staying uh in at least one wander in early March uh and uh very excited to
record we we'll have to do the from The Wander because their Wi-Fi is so fast makes it all possible live stream it uh that's great well let's move on to uh uh an analysis by shial monot uh breaking down Aden and Stripes 2024 annual reports they both are out and so now you can Benchmark these two companies
against each other uh Aden processed 1.34 trillion and was up 33% year-over-year Stripes growing faster at 38% year-over-year and is now at 1.4 trillion uh aden's value valued at 56 billion public company uh stripe is valued at 91.5 billion and in terms of employee count ad Yen has 4.3 th000
employees stripe has 8.2 th000 they're both profitable ad Yen eBid 1 billion note stripe has higher margins and so this comes to us from this uh wonderful stripe Community letter uh that we will read some of this stuff but it highlights a lot of uh interesting applications for the company and we'll
go through some of the highlights here so yeah the big I mean the big thing that stood out to me from Shield's analysis everything you know the two the two numbers that jump out one is stripe is almost double uh valued more than uh Double Y um and uh stripe has almost doubled the number of employees right
and and uh so anyways there there's like the the big story here is uh how you know how is stripe worth uh twice Aden despite having uh less iida and twice the employees and and all these things but um yeah the the letter here is fantastic and and just shows the level of and the and the leadership that uh
stripe has uh with the Callison brothers so they uh strip's mission of course is to grow the GDP of the internet right yeah Fant and payment volume represents 1.3% of global GDP now insane absolutely insane it's one of those things like they could have said hey over time we think the internet's going to grow a lot
we think internet payments are going to be big we think we can actually get 1% of the global GDP running through uh and and it's the most ridiculous number because every founder uh has thought about a world oh if we just get 1% of this Market you know we're multi-billion dollar company stripe actually did it
and um and uh you know an example of a of one of the most hyped companies of the last 20 years living up to the hype right um with the the way that they're growing they will there's a world where there is a scenario where they have double digit percentage of global GDP running through their rails which is
just obscene yep uh straight Bill straight billing alone is on a $500 million Revenue run rate um we use strip billing over 300,000 companies are on strip billing uh and stripe was profitable in 2024 and is expected to remain so in 2025 and Beyond uh and of course they were one of the companies to
kind of move quickly during the last downturn and kind of I don't I don't know if they had to lay a lot of people off I think they actually mostly just froze hiring and kind of grew into their valuation and uh it set them up for profitability and then kind of scaling from there so they kind of know what the
base you know how the business operates how it runs obviously they're very big and they can kind of grow into their valuation um nearly 200 million active subscriptions are managed via stripe billing uh stripe is trusted by half of the Fortune 100 80 % of the Forbes Cloud 100 and 80 and 78% of Forbes AI 50
companies one in six new Delaware Corporations incorporates via stripe Alice y That's crazy because I I I always thought of that uh I mean there was clerky years ago and those products they're very easy to get you know popping in like small Silicon Valley Crews but you don't get to one out of
six without prodct the dynamic with stripe Atlas is is fascinating because it doesn't seem like they do do a lot of independent marketing it it seems like a product that stripe built truly for the community it was a pain you know it makes sense it's a perfect wedge product for payments right what do you need to
do before you can accept payments online you need to have an entity they built what I think is the best way to create an entity online uh you know we used it for pbpn uh it's a fantastic product it uh it's it's still super simple despite it being relatively complicated process to create an entity uh the the product
is fantastically simple and it's turned out you know it's turned out to be an amazing wedge product for them uh just given the the scale yeah it's got to be a hard product to advertise right because like you only incorporate once and not everyone's incorporating it all the time and it's not like there's so
yeah I'm sure they're all over Google ads and stuff for when people are thinking about incorporating but outside of that it's hard to do a lot of awareness for that product but they've done a very good job getting penetration there uh Herz and they give some uh case studies here Herz increased 4% uh of
online payment authorization rates after switching to stripe turo saw a 4.7 boost in recaptured Revenue translating to an extra 114 million per year I had no idea turo was that big wow that's huge um intercom improved conversion rates by 2.1% forb saw a 23% revenue uplift within six months after switching to
stripe um there's a ton of examples of this major AI companies including open Ai and thropic mid Journey 11 labs are stripe Partners Stripes agent toolkit and virtual card tools enable programmatic spending and control more than 14,000 vertical SAS platforms utilize Stripes payment services I mean
it's just like the default in Silicon Valley at least uh stripe Capital provides fast funding with funds arriving in under 48 hours so they've really like just built every possible fintech product on top three lines of code seven L code I have to try to pull this up but if you
look at their product timeline there is a pretty amazing uh you can actually see I wish we could pull this graphic up but it's going to be difficult but uh they basically come out in 2010 with payments yep two years later they launch connect yep four years after that they launch radar and Atlas so this entire time
they're just focus on making this perfect payments product right and and uh to show that level of patience even when they uh they had sort of exploding growth and traction and many many operators would have said hey we should go multiproduct we have all this traction they waited and then since then
starting in 2016 they really ramped up the pace they launched Atlas radar 2017 they launched Sigma 2018 they launched a terminal issuing billing uh 2019 Capital as well as corporate cards um and the infrastructure to issue corporate cards and then in 2020 they launched treasury as well as climate and then they
launched a tax product uh in late 2020 as well so the velocity went from hey let's just you know have this sort of narrow focus and really own payments and you know I think that stripe is one of the best examples in history of focusing early on really really directly on startups as a category yep and they sort
of ignored the Enterprise pretty broadly but they benefited from between when they started in 2010 and where they are today many of their early startup customers became public companies that are now massive and those were you know customers that were able to prove out these use cases that would you know go
on to allow them to you know sign companies like Herz right which is this Legacy company or Forbes things like that I remember Shopify when Shopify started like the default payment integration for a long time was stripe you kind of bring your own stripe account and then they were doing Shopify
payments which was kind of a white label stripe account but it was all stripe under the hood uh and yeah they've just they've just really really benefited from just letting the internet grow and being like the index on the internet economy uh interestingly a good example where the the mission of the company
grow the GDP of the internet was truly truly aligned to the um potential of the business itself right uh I thought this was interesting they mentioned the bridge acquisition uh transaction volumes and stable coins doubled from Q4 2023 to Q4 2024 and stripe now supports 40 million monthly
active stablecoin wallets wow and yeah that's something that like they've been talking about crypto for a long time they've integrated crypto products of the past but like the the stable coin thing feels like the first time that stuff's like really taking uh taking hold and I know they made the bridge acquisition they
they spent you know over a billion dollars on it specifically because of the developer activity that bridge had so they I think saw a younger you know they saw the stable coin version of stripe Y which had an early developer traction it was a product that developers loved Y and then all of a
sudden you know public companies are using the product yep and so uh they write stable coins uh room temperature superconductors for financial services Top stable coin uses today involve tangible real world activity CFOs use stable coins to manage corporate treasury immigrants use them for remittances citizens of countries with
unstable currencies use them for Dependable savings and payment teams use them to enable customers from countries with low card penetration some of our favorite examples SpaceX uses bridge to repatriate funds from starlink sales in Argentina Nigeria and other markets dollar app a Neo Bank in Mexico uses
bridge to to help individuals receive USD payments from payroll providers like deal and airtm uses bridge to disperse pay P to workers all over Latin America so as as we start paying more people all over the world the stable coins make a ton of sense I've actually paid people in stable coins before um because
they've been in countries where getting them US Dollars uh was very very volatile delayed High super high and so yeah and and to be clear there was a lot of analysis of the bridge acquisition at the time where people said H how could they pay 100 you know was like more than
a 100 times Revenue was a really big number and the obvious answer is that stripe has over a trillion dollars of volume they're big Believers in stable coins they had had their own internal efforts why not spend a billion dollars to acquire the leader in the space and then focus on integrating it with all of
your existing customers so I think we're going to see over time that that could very well be the an Instagram style acquisition for stripe in the sense that you can imagine the bridge product you know 10 years from now having you know hundreds of billions or potentially even trillions of dollars uh in volume and uh
I I like this we've been seeing this uh AI growth chart all over the Internet and ramp or stripe ramp's done some analysis on this showing uh adoption of AI tools on the corporate card side strip seeing something similar they say we are seeing an AI boom on stripe we're partnered with a large number of
companies with rapidly growing businesses including open AI anthropic suo perplexity mid-journey cognition 11 Labs Lang chain pine cone mistol uh coher Sierra so many of these and the median time to annualize revenue milestone uh for the top 100 AI companies on stripe in 2024 was 24
months they they compare that to back in 2018 it took SAS companies the top 100 SAS companies by Revenue 37 months and so they're providing extra data to show that the AI boom is real and companies really are accelerating their revenue growth faster than in previous uh uh I don't know in previous waves yep um and
so cursor the AI powered coding assistant race to over 100 million recurring Revenue in just three years we're also seeing the likes of lovable which H 17 million ARR in just three months this is wild so lovable for those that don't know is a Swedish company uh Harry stebbings fellow podcaster uh was
was one of their early investors and uh it you know lovable doing that in three months it just puts so much pressure onto every other company because that's now the bar I remember in 2021 The Narrative was you should be able to hit 1 million of AR in 9 months post launch that's now seems childish in comparison
in the cage we're trying to hit a million in in three months um and uh but anyways the demand for these AI products is is insane and I believe lovable has more ARR uh or or is that a much greater run rate than um booking.com was when they went public really yeah oh yeah yeah yeah I think we dug into that
during the DAR kosari and that Mary Meer article when she took them public yeah I remember that uh there's an interesting uh point in here some people have called these startups llm rappers those people are missing the point the O-ring model in economics shows that in a process
with interdependent tasks the overall output or productivity is limited by the least effective component not just in terms of cost but in the success of the entire system in a similar vein we see these new industry specific AI tools as ensuring that individual Industries can properly realize the economic impact of
llms and that the contextual data and workflow integration will prove enduringly valuable so they're bullish on these quote unquote rapper companies which I thought was interesting anyway let's move on to tell you about another fintech company that we love here on the show ramp uh go to ramp.com time is
money save both easy to use corporate cards bill payments accounting and a whole lot more Allin one place go get to know ramp on ramp.com okay so speaking of ramp we have a major ramp customer Sean Frank going to be joining the show in two minutes Fant uh so I'm going to him right
now and we'll get him on here well we can do this one uh DM that we got in the meantime uh it says aoy John hope you're doing well apologies apologizing for hitting you with a bunch of questions but I've posted 50 blogs and I have four subscribers I'm not gaining sub not that gaining Subs is the goal but still I've
talked to family members who collectively hired thousands of people and they're out out of ideas too the whole ad value and it will come approach just hasn't worked I want to work with smart people before going out and building something on my own but I'm not sure what the move is what do you think
Jordie so I think that uh one of the things that seems very obvious with content is that you need extreme levels of patience yep that's not an excuse to not refine the product every single day yep and you know we we take this approach we're we're lucky to be in a position where we have a Daily Show
we're trying to improve the show in every s every single day there's some days where you know maybe we weren't were underprepared some days where where you know we we sort of Miss a segment that we wanted to do but in General trying to improve the product every single day and then improve how you're
dis Distributing that product I think it's the distribution so I posted 50 YouTube videos before a single one went viral I and and for me that was over a year it was it was a full year I posted them once a week for for for a full year and it was like oh I got a 100 views awesome oh I got a thousand views on
this that's great and then finally one got picked up about SpaceX and the algorithm it went to 70k views and I remember seeing the chart go up and I was like wow this is amazing but it's really hard for blogs to go viral because there's no algorithm there's no discover and so what you should probably
do is figure out can you repackage this in terms of just a long post on X or thread or because a thread can go viral short form content if you if your natural voice is on short form video make one minute videos break your blog post up into a series of one minute videos try a bunch of things and then
very quickly the algorithm will start sending you the signal of like this got 10 times as many views as that what did you do differently and you can introspect but it's very hard when you're just hanging out on a dead substack with no traffic coming to it um that I I think that's very hard and I think the people that have been
successful on substack have built audiences elsewhere like Ben Thompson talks about trer would not exist if not for sharing on sharing links on on Twitter and Linkedin at the time and now he's got it cornered and people share it and his stuff goes viral even if he doesn't post it because people will say
oh there was a great interview we got to talk we'll cover it exactly yeah I think the main thing is YouTube specifically as well as some of these other platforms can be very demoralizing but that doesn't necessarily you know the The X Factor now is that the algorithms need time to learn your content before they
figure out the right people to distribute it to so um do we have Sean on the line we have Sea on the line in the waiting room let's bring him in we're gonna talk with Shawn about app Loven uh and Sean is one of the sharpest Minds that I know on e-commerce actually I'm going to go ahead say hey Sean there
he is Mr Ridge himself Mr wallet you guys are in person I I was expecting you guys to be uh doing Zoom yourselves but damn IRL love to see it IRL always always always unless uh you're dealing with this traffic in La these days Sean it uh if you want to leave your house now in La it's about an hour to go
anywhere uh are you still going into the office in Santa Monica every day no I went yesterday yeah it's like an hour and half bro PCH is still closed so yeah LA traffic Bud can't can't can't beat it well tell us about app Loven yeah so so app Loven uh for some backstory for the
audience founded in 2012 really started to uh it wasn't even necessarily a company I feel like that was on the map for a lot of people uh until uh last year I think last year was the first time you guys started spending money on the platform is that correct or had you tested it uh at at early i
points in ridge's history yeah so here's I think App 11 has three discussion points um we'll go from what I'm least qualified to speak on to what I'm most qualified to speak on so perect least qualified uh short reports are coming out that they are violating you know App Store terms of
service uh their ads Target children all the type of stuff what app 11 is is there's two sides of the business they run a bunch of mobile ad space so games mostly games but but whatever old people are playing on their phones they have that sort of AD space and they have an ad engine right so like they're the ad
exchange think of like a trade desk or Google Google Display Network um so they run both sides of those they've never done e-commerce their e-commerce push was like August or September 2024 so we're like six month of their and and the just question so the majority of their customers uh until they push into
e-com Comm Merce were other mobile games I'm going to guess and other sort of digital apps services that they were pushing people to what was do do you have any idea of what their customer base looked like uh until last year yeah I think it was all mobile games so you know they they've been called like a
pyramid scheme all these type of things so you're a a mobile ad engine where other mobile games can run on top of right I think they also do like display branding like trying to get you to go to the movies or just like real top of funel campaigns nothing conversion optimized right um now a lot of people
spend a lot of time on mobile games so there are a lot of AD units available but it's something Ridge has never touched at all right like we're mostly a Facebook Advertiser they get some years 75% of my budget we do influencer that type of stuff we've never really done that much in the world to display and
especially nothing in mobile display right there are the industry does have a bad reputation mobile display ads are just like that's where click fraud exists um well in my and from my understanding with Ridge you know having you know uh worked out of your guys's office uh and and worked on the ridge
business myself back in the day um you you guys have a had a policy where you'll you'll test any Channel Once uh but you're very very ruthless with pulling back that spend if it's if it's not working uh so I I remember you know Connor uh being you know who's the CMO of Ridge being willing to test some
obscure ad Network and being like yep doesn't work you know almost like the same day often times um so when you guys decided to test app L and then actually start to really spend on the platform I think that sent you know a real signal right well I'll say that we're a very sophisticated Advertiser right for
people unfamiliar with Ridge wallet as a business I mean we'll spend over a hundred million dollars this year on digital advertising right so that's everything from LinkedIn ads to TV ads to influencer to Reddit to Snapchat like meta is the biggest best game in town they might get 70% of my budget some
year sometimes they get 30% of my budget but like outside of them we're spending money on every single possible Channel we can so what are the accusations against applovin um I'm going to put the unverifiable claims that I cannot speak to in one box and that is there's short reports saying that like you know
they're doing one-click Force downloads they're tracking users whatever cannot speak to that at all like if that's true you know let's hope there's an investigation that we don't want them targeting children with inappropriate content so I don't know anything about that the second thing is the stock price
has gone parabolic in the past like two years or whatever I think the IPO maybe in 20121 I think it's up 4X in the past year at one point it was worth more than Uber so as soon as a company is trading at 100x revenue and is worth more than Uber and no one's ever heard about them
people just get immediately free out right it's like you know they had the same you know Revenue multiple as paler right paler has been around a lot longer people know about paler so yeah just some for some extra context so they were worth 3.8 billion at the at the end of 2022 uh at their Peak uh just a little bit ago
they were worth 160 billion so okay generational run yeah yeah and anytime that happens I mean a lot of people start spec cating right revenue is growing really really fast um I can't I'm not a stock Trader I buy ads so is the is a company overvalued it's about as overvalued as palent here is so
depending on where you land on that side of the co conversation that's that's why there's so much interest right now right the thing that I'm qualified to speak to is as an Advertiser they shoot us an email in August and they're like hey we're rolling out e-commerce we'll give you a lot of AD credit to test it right
and we get ad credit from Snapchat to test stuff from Reddit to test stuff from meta to test stuff and free ad credit even if it's the shittiest ad space on Earth I mean okay yeah I'll get some I'll get some bunk ass Impressions whatever right um they end up uh you know it ends up working really well I
probably spent $4 million of my own money on applo and ads in Q4 and I was spending 250 Grand a day it was it was matching Facebook ad spend right so one of the short reports is seem that like oh they're stealing Facebook's data to be able to Target these people so good once again I don't I don't know how the
that would work but what I will tell you is that as a sophisticated Advertiser who tracks everything via northbeam via incrementality holdouts VIA post-p purchase surveys coupon codes people were playing Apple games seeing Ridge wallet ads buying those products and then telling us they saw it on the
ads so it's a real ad Channel it really worked in Q4 I I have an invoice right now I owe them $1.5 million that I have to pay by the end of the month so like it's a business I don't know what to tell everybody about the shorts now do I think the company's overvalued yeah I don't own any of the
stock that's insane it's like it's a compy it's a mobile app platform what do you mean they're worth more than Uber like I call an Uber every day right I don't play any mobile games so that's like the stock price question then it's like oh all this nefarious whatever inside dealing subsidiaries I
don't know anything about that what I'll tell everybody listening and what's so weird is I'm public I'm on Twitter like I post my ad spend on these channels no one's reached out to me like none of the shorts I'm like guys I'm around like I'll show you the app hey get on uh make him pay for it
you know don't don't give that don't give up the sauce for free you know yeah you got to go on tus become an expert uh e expert consultant you can make a thousand an hour like I I have no dog in this race I'm like yeah dude whatever it was an ad Channel if they went away tomorrow I would spend money on Snapchat or Tik Tok
or anywhere else right but like the verifiable proof is that I gave them real money it was a good ad Channel and I think the reason why people like their revenue is growing super fast right their revenue is up 80% year-over-year and they're like yeah we have a billion dollar run rate for
e-commerce advertisers in December and I'm like yeah no I spent a million dollar it's like yeah I spent a ton of money with you guys like it doesn't take too many people like me spending that to get really really high Revenue um dude ads are the best business on Earth I don't know why this is so surprising for
people now are they compliant do they owe Apple money are they stealing data for Facebook I don't know but pretty good ads you got any questions about that pretty good ads pretty good ads uh what's the can you talk about the relationship between applovin and flip are you has Ridge had any success on
flip I remember flip blowing up out of nowhere they were giving a bunch of credits to basically give away products for retailers I know they have an ad partnership have you found any success on on the flip platform yeah so I've never used flip um as far as I know Ridge has never worked with or advertised on flip it
would be a surprise to me to hear that my ads were on flip via app Lovin um I've had friends who've had very bad relationships with flip so I've always avoided it and our products don't work for live shopping anyway like Tik Tok shops doesn't really work for us either and it's because of like we have a very
male focused demo we're more of a premium product you know those typically live shopping works for like you know leggings that make your butt bigger and that type of right like it's not it's not our core product that's crushing it on there that whole affiliate gmv world is very very dark
and shap sh I know a lot of people who are doing weird stuff there you can check out the affiliate top charts like what goalie is doing they're giving people Mansions if they you know hit gmv targets of a million dollars so yeah I don't anything about flip I've never used flip they've emailed me all
the time um yeah that I mean even an idiot like myself I'm like that looks like a pyramid scheme I'm not I'm not hang out there uh but dude you know I have the data on Apple right like 80 5% of our traffic from Apple 11 came from iOS devices right like one of the concerns is that like oh this is just
bought traffic on Android devices like click farms in Bangladesh or whatever right it doesn't look like it's that so I don't know how they have good quality iOS traffic coming through it all seems to be games called like tomb blast or some but like Anyway old people it was pretty cool yeah the reason I wanted to have you on
is is you know there are Major Brands out there that will run on an ad platform that's just sending them bot traffic and they won't even necessarily turn it off because to them they're just optimizing for you know Impressions and clicks and ridge has always been a company focused on you know the end
actually you know conversion right and sort of building your guys's engine around that um what what happens uh you know Shifting the conversation a little bit what what's your outlook on e-commerce in uh our year 2025 we covered uh uh maybe a couple weeks ago we talked about how the whole Amazon you
know it's it's a terrible time to be an Amazon Seller uh it's been a tough time to be a Shopify uh brand as well with all this sort of tariff action and things like that uh historically Ridge has made a bunch of products in China it's uh shaping up to be a rocky year for e-commerce Broadley it helps to have
a fantastic brand like Ridge but what's your outlook uh going into the rest of the year oh dude just take a day by day I I mean uh there's more tariffs announced today there's more supply chain disruption um you know and it's not just the US government like every government on Earth is becoming more protection like
section sorry to interrup but we had uh Ryan Peterson from flexport on yesterday that said that was talking about the the the actions that Mexico had taken around what what's not the same as the Dom Minimus loophole but I'm forgetting the the right name for it but uh to to protect uh Mexican uh uh textile workers
so yeah lot of lot of action yeah and like we like to think about this one like very onedimensional like Americans importing things from China cheaply but like that over other their manufacturing economies like in Mexico they don't want cheap auto parts or cheap apparel coming from China
sitting in their warehouses going to America dutyfree like it everybody gets pissed off in that so yeah that happened yesterday um the The quick summary is just take a day by day and try to survive don't have any debt if you can afford it um keep a lean team I think DC 3.0 is like incredibly lean teams like
ridges down to 60 us full-time employees we're doing more Revenue than ever with less people than ever and I think that's going to be more of the trend and yeah I mean if you can bring stuff to America you should I mean we're probably eight months away from 60% of the wallets being made here so I'll keep
you guys updated when they start get made here where's where's your new Factory going to be or where you you you on shored some manufacturing that's been a a long-term process but uh you know what does that look like I mean yeah it's all component part manufacturing so like we have inner plates that are going
to be made in Missouri and then they get shipped up to Philadelphia to be finished and then they get shipped to Arizona to be assembled and then they go to Kentucky to sit in the warehouse so this is one of the challenges uh you know China very strategically has everything within like
a on hour radius when they do like you know these these industries uh but with tariffs today I mean it's 85% on aluminum Goods coming out of China so gets very close to the same price now so I think that's why he's doing it wow wow well thanks for stopping by appreciate the update love the take Sean you will
be uh regular uh welcome to the show and uh thank you for for posting your heart out every single day yeah I'm I'm I'm the number three the best guess you guys had so far yeah we'll give you an we'll get you an nft just for you go bye thanks thanks Sean talk soon cool well Delian should be joining any minute I
don't know if he's in the queue yet but uh uh quick backstory so Ridge sent uh or sorry ramp sent Ridge a plaque for spending $100 million on ramp uh so putting up some huge numbers and uh yeah Shawn is an absolute animal it's great well let's see is uh Delian in the queue not yet okay I'll text him and let's
move on to uh Michael mcnano he says uh are people and people are still wondering why every single podcast is pivoting to video and it's a result here that says that a billion people are watching podcasts on YouTube every month yeah it makes sense I mean if you think about it Rogan really led the
charge here I feel like he had such a massive audience on YouTube and so much of the attention that he would capture was YouTube oriented and you remember there was a period where Rogan's influence and um attention felt like it fell off a cliff after the initial Shopify deal and you could feel it
almost ramp back up again as he went back on YouTube so massive platform uh you know one of the biggest reasons for this is obviously that podcasts have replaced a lot of Television consumption totally and what people don't always realize about YouTube is that a massive amount of YouTube viewership happens on
TVs so this is people in their house instead of turning on CNBC they turn on tvpn I get crazy screenshots all the time people text me photos and they're watching it on the TV yeah and it blows my mind it was same thing with my YouTube videos I was like you watch this on TV that's like insane but I guess
like yeah when you put a lot of production value into it it looks like TV yeah no and that was her thesis that was her thesis around uh if you actually want to compete with television around news you have to record every single day other you know high quality like this and it's also uh just so much more
snackable because we can take that clip we can take some of those uh some of those great clips that we just had put those out on X put them out on shorts make vertical shorts out of it and if you just have pure audio you just can't distribute it that much it's really really hard sometimes there's
transcripts that can go viral every once in a while but it's rare yep anyway Delan should be joining in one minute let's see if we have another post we can go through bullish on onep person teams card is at two 2 million ARR chat base is at 3 million ARR levels IO products
are at 3 million ARR testimonial IO is at 1.5 million ARR uh t.me oror me products at 1.2 million ARR Ben Lang says he's bullish on oneperson teams uh pretty crazy what what was the decision between pmf or die to go two person team uh the whole thing was that pmf or die was like how do you apply these sort of
extreme constraints 90 days 25k to it a million dollars V are sort of the simple concept but then outside of that you have to stay in the house but there's no real rules you can kind of do anything you want that's that's business right that business has sort of there's laws that govern business but there's no
actual Like rules in the same way that when two teams go on an NBA you know Court they have to follow you know specific guidelines and so uh we wanted it to to as close as possible match sort of like free market competition the one thing with this Ben Lang post that's interesting is this to me proves that if
if you are really ambitious and you want to have extreme scale and impact you actually have to build a team right because this this list would be more impressive if uh every single you know company on here had 20 to 100 million of ARR um I think we're ready Delian are you there can you hear us let's bring in
I think he's close we're figuring it out let's see three two one hopefully he's live going in we he says he's waiting to be let in he's in the room let's get him on the show two Callins one day it's a big big push but we're ramping up we're GNA be doing 10 call-ins a day pretty soon as
long as people want to come and chat um we gotta make this this easy for folks hey Delan how you doing can you hear us there he is yo what's up sorry no all good a while uh give me the update what what's the latest with varda um yeah you brought in a capsule from uh OS Mach 25 down onto the OS Australian
desert floor um teams out there you know going to uh retrieve the capsule over the course of the next couple hours currently night time in Australia um yeah all things you know s of looking pretty good so we're two for two baby nice what was in the capsule um this time around it was a Air Force research laboratory spectrometer
um they're basically uh staring out of the window of the re-entry capsule uh to uh basically characterize the plume of the re-entry vehicle and compare that to some of the materials that are on board um I'll leave it to the viewer to speculate as to why the Air Force might want to do that um in relation to uh
potentially trying to figure out what other vehicles are made of perhaps ones that they themselves did not make um and we'll we'll leave that you know exercise up for the viewer but uh we're super excited to you sort of help out with the maturation of that type of technology and what it means for you know our
country's National Security that's awesome we got to call Jesse Michaels to get him to speculate um what uh exactly exactly what does the Cadence look like going forward are you just doing do you know when the next one is already are there going to be just dozens of these give me the the kind of
next couple yeah next week um you know hopping right back up and getting back to it so uh you know quick turnaround time turning this from a uh you know oneoff R&D mission to uh this year we're planning to have four vehicles total uh three of those will be more DOD focused missions um it's not to say that there
won't be some Farm on board but it just won't be like the primary you know sort of focus of the mission then one of our missions this year will be a primarily pharmaceutical you sort of focus Mission and uh you know we kind of expect that you know sort of blend on a go forward basis and uh yeah looking to basically
just continue to increase the Cadence you know sort of year-over-year definitely some you know s of vehicle improvements that will happen you know from one mission to the next um and generally for the time being continue to you know sort of land in Australia um just given um the regulatory regime and
The Emptiness out there making it a bit easier uh but at some point looking forward to uh returning back to the uh you United States once that becomes available are you expecting that to get easier in the US with the new Administration pry sure I think it's something that the you know new
Administration is you know clearly um aligned with but it is just one of these you operational things that just take some time to flow through designating which of the military ranges is uh you know best as a landing range in the United States we're basically just taking the you know sort of same you
know sort of legal and Regulatory framework that existed you know Cape Canaveral and Vandenburg both of which were government run ranges that now obviously prioritize commercial activity um there isn't the equivalent of that for re-entry um right now there is no sort of dedicated government run you
know sort of re-entry um we're exploring a variety of other you options potentially you private you sort of range as well as we continue to narrow in um the you size of our Landing radius and so over time may not need to be reliant on a you know sort of government plot of land but instead
perhaps there's some private uh plots of land that are large enough and so um excited to have a say again sorry to interrupt what is the ideal range size in your view uh this year how how how much smaller can it be over the long term uh and is that even the right question to ask um you I think that
information is itar restricted um so you know what I can say is you know on the order of you know around 100 kilm Circle um or so um that's pretty you know should pretty big um to have that be fully empty and owned by one person um but that Circle will you know sort of get smaller and you know maybe sometimes
we won't open the parachute and it'll be a very small circle great uh are you uh tuning into the next Starship launch what are you hoping for there what are you watching for that yeah I mean look you know we built this business predicated on Falcon 9 you know sort of reusability and the Cadence of that and it's been really
exciting to see that mature over the course of the company's life right you know sort of Falcon 9's at this point are launching every 24 hours we're super enthused by you know sort of spacex's progress and the you know sort of potential of Starship um you know there's definitely you know obviously
you know sort of lotss of Kinks that need to be you know sort of worked out but you know not so dissimilar to you know sort of Falcon 9 it definitely took it a decade from you know sort of the first landing to you know sort of becoming you know sort of true Workhorse that was you know sort of launching
every day um both SpaceX is much larger but also so Starship in terms of complexity and so you know I hope that they you know sort of get you know sort of through that you know sort of faster than a decade um but also they've got a lot of programs and payloads that are more important than us you know they've
got everything from the you sort of lunar activities that they they've got um The Martian activities um they've got Starling satellites to launch and so um you know at least you sort of my internal underwriting is like I'm not quite sure that you know s Starship is going to be launching people like vaa
you know before the end of the decade um so it's like super exciting but like I also have to run a business you know month by month year by year um and so I can't focus on things that you know sort of relevant in 2030 I have to focus on the things that are taking me up to you know sort of space today Falcon M's a
pretty damn good ride to orbit every 24 hours and uh you know reusable at least for the first stage pretty you know a pretty good offering and uh you know perhaps there are other people that are starting to you know sort of um you know try to you know elbow into that you know sort of world you know God bless Papa
Bezos and uh you know hope it works for um and you know we're we're happy to get up to space you know uh which way or how you know uh you know rocket rail gun space plane you know just whatever works I don't care I just need my my sweet sweet microgravity amazing uh how big is the
company what what roles are you hiring for what's kind of like the biggest challenge over the next couple years yeah we're about 115 people basically uh entirely in the Los Angeles um you know area you know over the course of the next year I think there's you know sort of two you know sort of um you know sort
core coreas one you know sort of pharmaceutical you know sort of teams definitely you know growing um we're we s of starting to you know work on a broader you s set of assets we're you know about to open up a new you know sort of lab space for the team and so anybody with a you know sort of uh yeah
formulation Crystal engineering you know sort of background process engineering you know the types of things that we do up there uh we'd be super thrilled to have and then yeah generally on the Aerospace side of things going from a you know sort of uh you know one R&D mission to now four flights next year
even more hopefully you know sort of year after um just means obviously we need you know a lot more Talent on that side of the house and that's everything from you know you know firmware software Engineers flight software to you know avionics structures thermal um you know mechanisms um and then we're starting to
think about you know sort of more manufacturing engineering since um you know we're starting to you know see we're early in that transition from um you know sort of vehicles manually assembled by high-end Engineers to starting to introduce you know sort of more technicians into the mix and you
know sort of more automation um not to say that we're you know going to be looking like a Tesla style you know sort of assembly line anytime soon but you know um you know day need to you start to you look more like that over time and so some amount of manufacturing engineering as well are there any
proposals uh that you're excited about in the new Administration around like the space economy any like oh there's if there's one law you could change what would it be that type of question well um you know sort of the new Administration um hasn't talked a lot about the space economy um but it
has talked a lot about you know sort of space being a potential um Zone uh for deterrence uh for our against our adversaries um and so that's definitely something that we think um you know has a lot of potential uh we think we can field something pretty near term there um and as you start to think about you
know sort of space Bas activities that you know perhaps want to you sort of go down to the ground all I'll say is sort of the you know company that just bombarded Australia from space um is probably you know sort of well suited to help out with that you know this time around we pulled the parachute but uh
you know so next time if you want us to not do that we're happy to leave the parach own uh space arms dealer um taking a quick I've always been consistent I'm a space drugs and arms dealer no no no surprises here you know yeah no it's amazing you were putting the secret master plan in your bio years
ago so it's amazing to to see it play out uh you recently uh ratio chth after he tried to um you know make a make reply to one of your posts you said you had made uh you know more Investments I think in the in in the last few months than you had and potentially the last couple years uh where have you been
investing you know you don't have to speak to specific companies because I'm sure a lot of those rounds haven't been announced but where are you investing uh obviously just chasing generational Founders but what's most exciting to you in the early stage market today just it's all AI slop I just want everybody
to have their own anime girlfriend and she just you know s jerks you off every night and that's how we you know sort of maintain world peace and as much possible that's bread and circuses right you know really changes the world and you know is really for the best uh no I mean it's kind of what you'd
probably you should have expect I just like I love stuff that is making stuff in the real world and it turns out with this admin they want us to do more of that in the United States and I want to fund people that want to do that and I want to do it with people that are like serious and it's their life's work and
they're not just doing it because like you know dynamism is the New Meme and they want to be a part of the meme you know I want to you know sort of fund the people where you know their family's been a manufacturing family for three generations and they think they can do it better because they're going to
integrate some robots some AI Etc but you know still have that you know sort of uh you know lifelong tie to that you know sort particular industry and so um I've been really you know excited over the past couple months where it just feels like you know a lot more people are thinking about that being the type
of company that they can build and I think you're really just starting to see you know sort of the clear um you know the difficulty in you know s of being somebody that screaming you know Adams not bits um you know in you 2019 was my you know sort of former you know colleague Everett you know s rip um you
know would always you know sort of critique me for um you know sort of saying that uh you know danan just likes investing in low margin um you know capex intensive businesses and you know sort of 5 years later you know my sort of you know spin back to ever it would be you know you know which one do we
think is going to be more valuable than like you know Tik Tok captioning app um or you know sort of the company that's you know sort of cutting you know sort of metal um for all the you know sort of nation's you know sort of uh you know future War fighting capabilities um I like the cutting metal one but you know
every you're welcome to you know sort of go uh you know invest in your uh you know sort of captions you s products I'm sure would be great brother shots fired shots fired love it little friendly competition you guys aade yeah that's great uh well it's 1:30 we'll we'll let you get out of here this
is fantastic thanks so much for stopping byat boys bye thanks for coming on talk soon this is great never a dull moment with Delan we got we got two of the top the top poster in Ecom and the top poster in hardtech the same day uh it's fantastic putting on a show uh yeah for
for uh those those listening you know our our strategy here is to develop regulars on the show people that call in you know we want to have if there's big news in e-commerce and big m&a we'll have Sean Frank call in you know get uh really sort of like boots on the ground takes on that if there's stuff happening
in space we'll get Delan to call in uh and both of them really delivered today and I wish those you know it' be it'd be fun it's actually we want to leave the conversation wishing that it could just keep going we'll bring them back on the next week definitely um oh that's fantastic uh well let's go back to the
timeline we got plenty more to talk about today uh AJ meta says uh couldn't be more excited to share what I've been building over the past year acute AI alien friend that is fun helpful friendly and won't try to fall in love with you toand remember things about you they're really good at voice chatting
and they can peer into your world through photos it has been so inspiring to see how people use their tolon help with school relationship advice fit checks and just hanging out uh it's been such a treat building this with his co-founders an incredibly talented team of Engineers and artists can promise
that tolon is unlike any alien you've met so far we're live in the app store go check it out uh okay so I know AJ he's La based entrepreneur he actually was partnered with John Foo on birthday candles I don't know if you've ever met him so he worked at uh a crowdfunding platform that I used back in like 2013
crazy uh so so I had seen Tolen i' had been uh somebody had sent me them probably I I don't know maybe six months ago at this point I didn't know even though AJ's a buddy I didn't know that he was involved with it because they didn't really come out very publicly um so this is this is really cool this is a
thesis you know um people have been thinking about this sort of like AI tamagachi or this AI sort of Pokemon uh been a lot of conversation about it but very cool to see they have over half a million you know downloads uh developing um you know some some meaningful ARR and a number one spot in the App Store so I
think there's going to be a lot of stuff here you know there's another company I'm forgetting the name of it right now but but making like embodied AI so kids toys that have llms built into them which is cool um so I'm just you know expecting to see a lot more of these my
that was always my take with the rabbit R1 uh you know was this Hardware device really cute teenage engineering developed it but MKBHD got a hold of it and was like this isn't replacing my iPhone and it's like that's totally fair but I always thought I didn't buy one but I thought that it would be a great
device for kids because it's something that they can just ask questions to interact take a photo what flower is this what animal is this like and and it just feels like the the bar for hallucination as long as you gate it so it's not saying crazy crazy stuff if it tells you that like this squirrel is a
mouse or something like that's not that big of a deal it's not that high stakes and some of those calling an Uber and it sends it to the wrong place exactly so the frustration of a kid dealing with like you know some sort of rough edge around an AI That's still friendly and fun it's like it it it's like the Gen
Emoji thing but applied to to an audience that is totally receptive of that yeah what do what do 5-year-olds do they ask questions right so it's just this constant stream of questions and it's great when a parent's around but it's funny when uh you know my son my oldest is not really at this point yet
but I imagine he's about a year or two away from starting to ask questions that I don't know the answer to and so having this thing that's you know not necessarily a cell phone that that they can have independently or when we're together to sort of generate those answers the five wise stage you know
that whole question like in manag you need to be able to ask five wi deep to understand the root cause analysis uh toddlers amazing at that they just keep asking uh you know why does the fire truck come where does the fire truck come from who makes them okay who makes that part I'm like I actually don't know
the supply chain that deeply man good luck yeah I'll have to have somebody on the show deep research yeah I'm sure we can pull it up but speaking of AI products that have gone off the rails and not been uh you know as focused as what is happening over at to on um notebook LM from signal notebook LM has
had insane potential one of the best products Google's ever put out in years we talked about this on the show very early on uh you could have it generate a podcast of two people talking about a topic to educate yourself about it uh but in classic Google fash for a show Once because because we were I was
driving in one morning we were doing a deep dive on something I had zero context on the entire story I generated you know podcast about it and it helped me really quickly get up to speed so it's cool but I actually have some backstory here I I uh was at a dinner in Venice uh that that
um uh uh two my buddies uh Ben and Adam who have a venture fund uh hosted and one of the guys that the product designers from The Notebook LM team was there Y and he was excited because when you're at Google and you're working on this super hot you know startup within Google or this product you become an
instant sort of micro celebrity in the organization and there's all this momentum and more resources coming your way it's a similar sort of thing that a you know a Founder goes through at an external company when they have a lot of hype uh but I believe he and his team or some members of the team just left to
start a a basically that product so uh I think that they lost potentially the sort of founder spirit that they had that were able to create that product so they said in uh signal says in but in classic Google fashion it seems like it lost all momentum and got left to die no mobile apps no meaningful iterations
just VPS choking it out the vultures came and picked it apart Google's playbook for smothering internal Innovation is unmatched uh and then Andre karpathy chimes in they iterated on a bit custom instructions and the ability to join the podcast but overall I agree I think I actually used it again
this morning after a while and felt a bit regressed even the woman's voice especially sounds more slightly more dead SL less interested and Signal says yeah it got hijacked by terrorists parenthesis AKA Google leadership not holding back signal I mean it makes sense like like even even when it was
announced and it was gaining traction it was still hard to get into that pipeline it was very unclear it wasn't its own app it was it was it was it wasn't the Gmail launch where Gmail became this like you know phenomenon and it was a separate website it was a you know first it was this Easter egg then you had to
refer a friend get storage and stuff and they they they they ran a great Playbook not just promoting that as a separate product for Gmail but also running all the growth strategy to make it more viral and make it work um and it just seems like that energy has kind of left especially when there's such an
incentive to spin out of Google raise a bunch of money and instantly be at 100 million AR and a billion dollar valuation which is something we've seen again and again again now the big thing here is that Google's leadership uh deserves a lot of they're certainly Under Pressure but they deserve the
scrutiny and they deserve to be called out by letting these sort of high potential products you know like Gemini in general right A lot of people are saying Gemini is great when I find where to use it or how to use it or it's not you know over promising and underd delivering but there's this General uh when you compare Sundar to
SAA they're just not even in the same league right y um and it sounds harsh but uh I think that we should hold our trillion dollar hyperscalers uh leadership to a high standard and I think it's very possible that Google needs new leadership at the top people called for it when their um AI uh image
generation models we just you know uh generating uh just just um you know made up history basically and now it just seems uh Google has the most the most potential yeah in you know they should be Google should be trading as a meme stock if it had good leadership and uh they they're not getting um you know any
any credit for the position and the opportunity that they have in the market because they seem to just continue to you know squander these these opportunities yeah like uh you know that that that whole Gemini generative AI image generation debacle I think they fixed it it's
pretty easy to go in there it seems like it was fine-tuned after they built the model to inject a bunch of extra keywords to try and make it more diverse and it had all these weird anomalies easy to fix easy to fix there was clearly backlash I guarantee they fixed that product but they didn't integrate
it anywhere I just went to Google and I said draw me a picture of a frog and it just gives me like Google Images results and then Adobe stock footage and then Pinterest and then Reddit and it just gives me like the normal Google results and it's like the Google search bar is my entry into the Google world and it
should know that that is a that that's an AI query I asked it to do something and it didn't do it and so like whoever's on that team is probably like oh well like they're not letting me stick my product in the main thing and so now I'm off on this Silo thing and how do I even get to that I think
they're just announcing that they're going to do a separate Gemini app maybe that's a good decision I don't even know at this point it's all very confusing from a strategy perspective yep but um they got to retain the talent they got to stop these people from jumping ship and raising billions yeah I mean I feel
like if if you know we could probably talk to the guy who built the product I'm blanking on his name now when he ra no he he already raised money I believe he should announce it here and uh anyway so we'll see but uh I hate to see a good American Technology Company you know uh squand incred opportunity and there was that
whole Narrative of like during the AI boom sge and Larry got super interested and they were coming back in and grinding and like picking up the momentum the pace and there was a moment where we like oh wow like Google's going to go back into founder mode they're goingon to Own 100% ofo they're gonna
like you know really double down on this stuff the the mission of Google is to organize the world's information like what could be a better distillation of that than building an llm like an llm is just distilling the world's and organizing the world's information into weights uh in the theyve done phenomenal
products actual LMS perform very well on the benchmarks but they're just not productizing it effective well they they allowed a bunch of external investment into wayo right that was weird which is weird right why why do you you you don't even have the you're running this massive balance sheet and you have a
breakaway you know uh potentially World truly world changing product that's growing exponentially Y and you need you know these big external that one I can kind of Steal man because it's like Google's mission is to organize the world's information and weo doesn't exactly do that it doesn't exactly fit
in the in the mission um and so I understand why that might be and it's a very different Capital intensive business there's all these different layers of the stack the routing the partnership with Uber who cleans them it's just a very it's like getting into delivery it's like it's more Ain I would
expect like Amazon to really like want to be in that more than Google um but for the llm stuff like they got to figure out this product side uh anyway let's move on to designer Ben hilac he's been on the show before uh known for his Jaguar redesign he uh he says I used to be really afraid of competitors and then I
realized they can't hire me iconic line uh Ben I actually threw this in because he rolled out a new website that he made himself and I think it's one of the best new sites that I've seen so if you're listening go to don. soo and check it out d n d a WN and uh he cooked it up himself uh
it's been I'm navigating around it right now it's it's fantastic and um yeah check it out but but yeah I think uh his broader point with this post which is somewhat of a of a s-word post um really trying to John was uh you know upset that I said the s word yesterday so I'm not going to say
it again today even in the context of an S post um but the the broader thing here is is uh you know having that confidence uh in himself a meme post a joke post joking right you know it's like Mee we say meme coins not s coins you yep same thing um but uh but yeah I think uh Founders that are overly focused on
their competitors it's just the biggest trap you need to focus on what you're truly great at and uh try to spend uh as much time as possible doing what you're great at and augmenting your skill set yep and uh you should never be afid of competitors it it actually um yeah it took me a while to realize that it you
know these markets that most people are playing in are so big uh just focus on your customers and focus on yourself King yeah become unhirable become ungovernable yep it's great uh well let's move on to Nick Carter who did a fantastic job censoring some foul language on the timeline he says holy
fstar star star as star star star 35 billion I'm weak hold me so the news here is that weave is uh planning an IPO uh within a week that that would allow them to raise $4 billion uh and would get priced at around $35 billion and pull out the siis gong because Nick Carter is the Jason calacanis of cor
weave he said it himself he's there we go Chris pit of The Gong uh fantastic investment Nick I saw in the comments is uh you know friend of friend of the show but he was one in the uh first first uh first round of cor weave and um you know you can make a guess if he entered you know assume that he entered at at 50
million posts the multiple on this one is is absolutely um egregious and uh will probably dwarf his earnings in in from his you know uh day-to-day uh job who knows who knows right he made a lot of money in a lot of places he's very successful but still he says this is his best investment by far it's not even
close fantas and uh we're just happy for him so I wanted to highlight this I love it yeah cor weave a lot of people are going to be looking towards this to price other data center projects um they're an AI cloud computing provider they build data centers and then and then lease to people like sa Adella at
Microsoft Sach loves to lease and so uh there's a number of players here and there's a big question on how the public markets will receive companies like cor weave as they go out to the public market uh and so everyone is waiting with baited breath to see where this trades um we talked about earlier the
timing is certainly shaky right you can imagine cor is running the analysis on nvidia's down 6% today even as they beat earnings the market is starting to uh the animal spirits are yeah there's a few things going on I mean deep seek people got they kind of coped through it with the
jbans Paradox thing and you know they and then the xai news and they kind of balanced out but it was definitely like it it it made people just do a slight Double Take on like should we really spend the trillion on you know a big data center or something like that and then also you have a lot of questions
about the public markets and how the US economy will do o under the Trump Administration as these Pro campaign promises actually get rolled out and if there are really significant tariffs or something like that like there could be dislodging behavior in the market and that could have a have an effect all
over the place um and so we'll see but good luck to them and uh you know if you're losing sleep over the markets stressing over the markets we recommend that you get an eight sleep go to eight sleep.com nights that fuel.com tvpn you have a fantastic quote there turn any bed into the ultimate
sleeping experience how you do last night Jordy let's check it out eight I am mogging you in the Sleep Department I already know I have a better score than you just because 85 97 oh let's go okay I got to get on my game that was that was rough I think 6 hours and 50 minutes last night what'd you do 7 hours and 59
minutes whoa there we go I'm just really dialed into my roue I I was texting somebody at at 8:20 last night and they they they were like they listen to the show they were like isn't this your bedtime I like yeah it is I'm about to put away my phone and and crash nobody outs sleeps me nobody out sleeps me it
is um no it's one of those things I do think that sleep uh you know from a from a fitness standpoint once you identify as somebody that goes to the gym I find it's very easy to just go to the gym every single day totally so when I started working out uh after I parted too partied too much my freshman year of
college I just started going to the gym and I just you know identified as somebody that went every single day so I would just go every day super easy sleep is very different you're doing stuff in the evenings you have varying levels of work sometimes you need to be out of the house earlier than other time so it's
hard to get consistent um but just been focusing on getting extremely uh consistent and it's paying off because uh we need to put some real money on the line and we also need to test the testosterone levels because I was scrolling through YouTube see a great Chris Williamson quote or clip he's
interviewing Dr P Peter AA yep you know two steps to one secret hack to improve your testosterone open it up I'm expecting some crazy supplement or something he just get some sleep that's it I'm like okay wish it was more exciting but it's easy easy with an eat sleep it's free to sleep uh let's go to
Emily sunberg one of the greatest journalists in the game right now if you don't subscribe to her substack we highly recommend that you do uh she says she wrote about unwell and breaks down Alex Cooper's podcast career so in 2018 Alex Cooper now famous for call her daddy started alongside Sophia Franklin
debuted the call her daddy podcast so she's been in the game for seven years eight years now um the show quickly gained traction with downloads soaring from 12,000 to 2 million within two months that's a historic run fantastic tensions arose between coop coer and Franklin over contract negotiations in
Creative Direction leading to Franklin's departure Cooper continued as the sole host steering the podcast through a transformative period Cooper signed an exclusive three-year deal with Spotify worth over $60 million was 2021 here's a little bit of lore back when this article when the when the feud was
happening between uh the caller daddy Host this is in 2020 yep I spoke with Taylor Len y Taylor was writing for the New York Times at that point um and anyways I I help Taylor get some context on the story this was before she was this was at a time when she really had the tech industry's attention this was
the booming Creator economy um I said we're entering this was a quote that ended up in the article we're entering a period where creators are business owners and media brands of their own they can't just be seen as employees MH uh the tools are available to them to become Founders and CEOs of their brand
and develop businesses with multiple powerful revenue streams like merch ad sales and subscription Revenue this is your quote this was my quote New York in the New York Times and um what I was speaking to was that uh it was going to be uh Miss Cooper was such a star that it was going to be really really
difficult to keep her there because she had so much attention herself she could spin up a new RSS feed and you know have you know hundreds of thousands or potentially millions of subscribers in a week right so the value you know historically you'd have these sort of um Creator types that were dependent on the
distribution of a TV channel right so they they could only be this big you know figure personality if they had their you know relationship with the ESPN or CNN or CNBC now um you know and this really proved out she went on uh her own entrepreneurial Journey realizing that she had a lot more
leverage in that situation even though she was making you know millions of dollars a year at bar stool yeah and so she signed with Spotify for $60 million which was one of the platform's most significant agreements for female Le podcast 202 1 then along with her husband she launched the unwell Network
a media company aimed at developing content with emerging creators the Network's initial signings including included influencers Alex Earl and meline Argy uh in 2024 she secured a $15 million three-year deal with serus XM setting to commence these are super max deals these are massive deals it's wild
NBA money yeah I mean for the super top power law podcast they get up there uh similar to Pat mcafe with ESPN I think the deal is yeah in the 100 million plus range uh Joe Rogan same thing uh transitioning caller Daddy to a new platform and then in 20125 Cooper introduced unwell hydration an
electrolyte infused beverage line developed in partnership with Nestle interesting that they're going with the big corporate uh partner out of the gate targeting Women's Wellness she also added several new shows to the unwell roster including farmer former bar stool host Grace Ali and so she's really grown
her Empire and we love to see yeah and the what Emily gets into in her piece which you can go subscribe to her substack and check it out but um she just lost Alex Earl which is this massive figure right now one of the biggest anchors and so the same the same issue that Dave pornoy was experiencing
with having the star and then losing said star is now the same issue that Alex Cooper uh which is why people have had this you know idea for um the bar stool for X the bar stool bu barol of XY right the Challen completely wrong because bar stool is not the bar stool of something it's day P yeah and when we
set out to uh start TBN you know we there was a bunch of different networks that we could have worked with but we were you know our point of view was we can set out own our entire business we can have one producer we're going to have to incur some cost to get to get the show running but there are costs
that are you know U most adults can can cover right it's doesn't doesn't cost millions of dollars to start a podcast when it would have started cost millions of dollars to start a TV network and that Talent retention problem is so real you saw it with VOX media uh I think eventually Caris swier spun out after
she sold recode started her own thing again um uh Johnny Harris spun out of there and started a YouTube channel he he learned all the skills and so yeah there were startup costs you had to hire people to do the Motion Graphics and he had to work really hard to get it off the ground but very quickly people
recognized him oh that's the guy from Vox who does the Border show I love I see it in my YouTube feed and uh Cleo Abram left Vox as well to do the same thing she was at a million subscribers in you know a couple months and it's because uh Vice the triy guys did the same thing BuzzFeed saw I guess they
were at BuzzFeed but uh Vice and BuzzFeed guys teams have left over time and uh the easiest way to go viral on YouTube for a long time was just put up a video say why I quit BuzzFeed why I quit Vice why I quit Vox and boom goes viral and overnight you have uh you know a 100,000 followers or a million
followers uh this just happened with donut media I don't know if you follow them at all their car channel uh a lot of people have been leaving that they got bought by I think some private Equity Firm or some investment firm and so the talent wasn't fully economically aligned and over time more and more of
the talent just realized wait I should just be running my own show and so there's always this it's Talent retention is very very tricky it's very very tricky to align the economic incentives when you have these these small teams but future seems to be like the networks are not to me the the donut
Media or the bar stool or the Vox or the vice the networks are x y Facebook Instagram YouTube and you can be on all of them but they have the power and they have something real that they are going to get a cut of our business and and Alex Cooper's business and everyone's business um and then and then the shows
are the individual people and so aggregating people together it just doesn't work unless there's something really crazy going on it's really perfect uh and so I I I think that the future is definitely like what we're doing right now and if you're more operating a a scaled Network or media
business you have the option to grow homegrown Talent which takes a long time and it's really hard yep and then you might actually get a hit and then they'll leave yep or you have to pay a ton of money which is what SiriusXM is doing spending 125 million for a threeyear deal and that's just
distribution rights exclusive or maybe it's some some piece of exclusive fully exclusive um and uh but it makes sense because they'll be able to sell $200 million of ads against all of that on the radio hopefully yeah or get you know subscribers that that offset that cost you user acquisition basically um but
but yeah overall uh going to be uh only you know Sirius XM is cable at this point right it will uh just sort of Fade Away over time it will probably you know have have some enduring value but uh won't be the giant you know that it that it once was uh well if you're looking to advertise a podcast get on ad quick uh
out of home advertising Made Easy and measurable say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising only ad Qui combines technology o outof home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe get an ad Qui billboard folks we got our own podcast Billboards coming up we're
working on it I can't wait and I imagine a lot of people listen to We need to do the Serious XM deal too so you can be listening in your car to tvpn and then you drive by our billboard and it's just 24/7 where in you're Sirus XM is so funny I I you know me I cycle through cars a lot so anytime you get a new car
they're just sort of like aggressively marketing to you and they'll send you you know mail that says open this right now and you open it up and it's like we'd like to offer you a free month of Sirius XM and you're saying okay yeah you stop opening them but um uh anyways um well we got some news Lu cognition
Labs Devon just got faster uh they've heard your feedback that Devon is too slow Devon is an endtoend agent that makes hundreds of decisions for each task so that test time inference stuff that we've talked about essentially the reasoning models that's what Devon's been doing for a long time uh so there
was and is still a long way to go but they've made Devon 2.1x faster over the past five months and the trend continues and so congratulations to the team at cognition Labs uh if you're running a startup with a big GitHub repo get Devon in there get it in your slack get him in there get him in there could be your
next top engineer yeah I mean he Devon is it's weird saying he anthrop anthropomorphizing it but uh Devon is like the top engineer at uh at gumroad right yeah antiwork he company yeah I mean it makes sense like there's so much like junk little tickets here and there code that needs to be fixed and like no
one wants to hop on those yeah put Devon to work over the weekend put him to work put him to work uh let's go to Paul Graham put him in workspace 17 actually yeah historically underperforming work historically underperforming famously underperforming uh uh let's go to Paul
Graham Paul Graham says there are a lot of people attributing crazy beliefs to Elon lately but to me the clearest sign that he is not entirely rational is the continued deprioritization of tweets with links in them everyone can see that this makes Twitter worse yeah hits him with the t- word tweets yeah oh that's
that's disrespectful to the ex culture I mean uh Paul Paul follows It Up by saying the suggestion that one should put links in replies is such an obviously broken workaround who starting from scratch would design Twitter to work like that I totally agree with with Paul here it's it's totally possible to
simultaneously see exactly why Elon is doing this yep it it may make it may make X you know lack of links makes X worse for users yep but it makes X better for Elon right he wants to keep people on the platform and I bet you that it is working exactly as intended tter used to be a place you'd go on and
you discover articles blogs videos music you know you're just it was just sending you across it was like the most amazing discovery engine for the internet it was it was effectively like a stumble upon like product where you just go on you didn't know what you were going to find but you were going to find interesting
you know uh topics it was a great place for writers to distribute their work uh it's still a distribution platform right with pmf or die we saw this we yeah you know launched a post got a million plus views on the post include a link made the post native for X what works on X VI
what works on X threads so whatever you want to do elsewhere that would be on a link you can upload a 2hour movie if you want you can't link to Netflix I would argue that X is now uh an a platform for attention and not distribution so you can get people's attention on X but it's it's uh it's not the sort of linear
distribution of I wrote a blog post I'm going to post it on here A bunch of people are going to click over to distribution is never guaranteed um you know I I still get a lot of links out to my personal website but there's a very clear line there's every single month millions of people see my posts some
percentage of those click to my profile and then a smaller percentage click to you know my personal website and I see all the traffic right so um anyways but it's a skill issue Some people post links and still go viral yeah and the tough thing with with Paul he's an incredible writer he condenses his his
thoughts down he writes in a very straightforward way he should be able to just post his post directly on he can but I think he likes the Aesthetics of his website I think that's the main thing is he doesn't want to conform to the a thing but he should just copy the just literally just copy the text and
put it in a long post and it'd be fine um but no and there's there's a huge Edge that people like Paul and Ben Thompson they built up these newsletter these these newsletter lists he even mail I don't even think he has a new I think people just literally just go and check oh there's a new BG Post Yeah but
yeah I mean it you either got to build your list you know offline and have that as a channel and and and grow it and have different growth strategies for that or repurpose all your content to be ex native whether that's through threads or long posts you know Lulu's been able to do it I see tons of people that can
do it with threads tons of people that can do it with videos all sorts of people have have found ways to break through with the algorithm but it is frustrating because it's high standard deviation and when you have a post flop it's hurtful to your you know we talked about it before I've had a lot of people
uh reach out to you know me or you and say oh I think I'm Shadow Bann all this stuff I go brother you haven't posted you haven't had a had a banger in in weeks it's not it's not the platform it's you it's you you got to take responsibility for the flops well speaking of an absolute master of
algorithms let's go to Mr Beast he's raising F uh he's raising money at A5 billion valuation the YouTube Star aims to raise a couple hundred million and he quote lost tens of millions of dollars on the Amazon reality show I don't even know how that's possible because isn't Amazon paying for it but I guess he
might I he has a history of uh betting on himself to such an extreme degree that he will go out of pocket sure yeah and consistently like you know ultimately the the Amazon show is as much uh distribution and sort of marketing for the rest of his business Empire as it is it it's you know I I'm
guessing he looked at it and said I don't need this to be a profit Center I'm fine if it's a cost center I have lunch what is so in the Mr Beast deal if you invest at A5 billion valuation you get shares in a company that's making uh 400 million in sales and that's across lunch Le the Lunchable uh product uh beables the
candy company Mr Beast Burger the uh ghost kitchens driven um Burger delivery company and then Mr Beast LLC which is the production company and so you get assets and all of those um but yeah he's always been reinvest everything he wants to be aggressive running his business more like a Silicon Valley startup
trying to burn money really go for growth and then capture the value later and so far it's been working yep big numb we got to hear the update on Mr beatburger I think the other from what I know the other you know the sales of of uh lunch SLE and uh Feasta bles have been pretty phenomenal uh Mr Beast
Berger had a bunch of issues early on uh I've never seen it anywhere in the world it's a delivery only product but I I haven't even seen it online once the last time I saw it was around the controversy around the quality issues that they were having yeah I mean the quality control on a product like Feast
tables is way way easier because it's just if it leaves the factory in a good condition it's probably going to get to the customer in a good condition especially when your chain is WalMart delivery as opposed to it's being made in all sorts of different kitchens and then delivered by all sorts of different
people there's a million places where that can go wrong and and there's way more people taking a slice of the profit in these ghost kitchen companies than in consumer packaged Goods which are already not super super high margin um but the the Mr Beast Berger I think the financials were it was always a harder
lift than something like lunch ler febles which can totally you know just be hey we make a million chocolate bars we drop it off at Walmart and it flies off the shelf because I'm a celebrity so now the whole concept of airdropping food to people is is uh it sounds incredible in theory
that you can just sort of instantly create a brand and produce it all over the country y the actual um reality is that these sort of fast food companies that you're competing with right raisin canes things like that they have year you know spent decades developing these super super you know Chick-fil-A
developed these super sophisticated Supply chains to deliver the perfect meal every time and Mr Beast has a great you know brand with his demo but uh the idea that he's going he's it's competing with Chick-fil-A is really tough right did you see Mr Beast on uh uh flagrant 2 do you know that podcast Andrew uh why
am I blanking on his name uhy he was on this comedy podcast and they play this prank on him where they're like hey we got some Mr Beast bers here let's all have them and they open it up and they'd replace them with Big Macs for McDonald's and they're just like oh this looks exactly like a Big Mac like yeah
like uh like and they say that there's like some song that was popular with with Big Macs back in the days like sesame seed bun and like you know cheese and spread or whatever and they're like this looks a lot like a Big Mac Mr Beast like what's going on W they really put
him on the spot and he like kind of didn't get it for a while and he like you're like pegging me right and it it was very funny amazing anyway to be honest I wouldn't know I wouldn't be able to tell the difference it's been i' yeah I mean I think the Big Mac has an extra slice of bread in the middle so he
should be pretty obvious but uh and and of course like he should know if it's his product but uh anyway people are having fun with it but overall you know I think he's I think he's kind of pivoted through that uh spent less time with the things that are underperforming spent more time with the things that are
performing and obviously the Amazon show even if he lost money on it it probably raised his profile he could his audience on YouTube was basically maxed out right yeah I mean it's hard to you say that and yet it's like every couple months he's celebrating like now I'm at 400 million subscribers now I'm half a
billion subscrib it's like he really does seem to be able his is probably but his Tam is probably less than yeah Facebook right yeah I mean it's the same thing that you see with like CNBC where CNBC just does not have a younger audience and so if he wants to expand the audience going into more
reality TV style older crowd that's just tuning in on just being on America's home screen amaz Prime is dominant you know TV and he is like he's a generational game show host and there's no reason why you wouldn't see him develop reality TV shows co-host them host them or develop game shows and the
next You Know Who Wants To Be A Millionaire I remember that being like a really really popular Jeopardy is a game show that's you know it's a little bit less gimmicky but um that that show has a really enduring value he had a number of hosts and you could see him developing something like that that
captures both the online audience which is Future and growing obviously but still goes after the old audience that's just tuning in every night yeah the question is at a $5 billion valuation yep uh is that a company that you know the the the idea behind Mr Beast raising for this hold Co is that he will take
the company public at someday yep none of these investors would be plowing you know potentially a billion dollars into the business if there wasn't a path to liquidity and I just don't see there being a a an acquir that's not the public markets right yeah and the question is uh that stock has very real
meme potential of like you have this younger generation of fans that just want to be a part and feel like they're an owner of the Mr Beast world at the same time though uh looking down into these he's got CBG companies that are pro that that we don't even know if they're profitable so they they they
account for 400 million you know there's $400 million of Revenue across the portfolio we don't know if they're actually producing any sort of actual um earnings and then the production side of the business unclear what the margin looks like on that and over time uh he's going to have to launch many many many
more businesses so investors that are investing at 5 billion are probably thinking this company you know this group's going to go public yep and we're going to have to launch a lot of other companies to sort of even grow into that $5 billion valuation a very different corporate structure because you could
totally see Mr Beast LLC the production company going and getting acquired by Amazon Hulu Netflix Disney even yeah any of those could pick that up do those companies want also a cpg company and Feasta natural home at Nestle natural home at Unilever right but does unil lover also want Mr Beast LLC so I
wouldn't be surprised if you see him launch a company scale it use his platform his production company as the go to market strategy the initial marketing and then at a certain point it's like hey look febles has really saturated our core Market of Mr Beast fans now it's Super Bowl ad time let's
just hand it over to Nestle take that cash back into the business and then do an even bigger stunt more content and then a new product and then just keep doing that uh he's been talking about getting into mobile games and you know we've talked about him getting into a VPN or something something software high
margin we'll see where it goes but it's a fascinating story um anyway let's move on to uh an interesting question from yunu Lee says what happened to all of those companies that raised $500 million to train a foundation model for coding did they all just get mogged by Claude mogged by Claude is a funny funny phrase
I'm genuinely curious for what it's worth I don't see cognition Labs uh cursor wind surf bolt. new using anything other than Claude or GPT maybe with the rare R1 sighting and so yeah there's couple of these companies there's magic Ai and then there's poolside AI poolside was started by I
think it was one of isn't poolside a reference to the poolside PMS I don't know what's the poolside don't remember that viral video of the of the product managers saying they're remote working during covid and it's these two girls and they're at the pool and they're like day in the life of a product manager
here's what I do at my job well I check in with the engineers and make sure that they're doing the the tickets and everyone super viral I think that's the reference for poolside I don't know maybe not but I think the idea is like you use this poolside AI thing and then you can be at the pool hanging out which
is just hilarious to me and I love the brand but you know who knows if it makes sense to train a model for 500 mill we we've we've talked about this in the past uh you know so so little backstory on poolside so Jason Warner is this co-founder and CEO of poolside was previously had a illustrious career uh
was the CTO of GitHub GitHub and he was the VP of engineering at Heroku uh and he was also managing director at redo Ventures so it makes sense that you know when he starts a new company that raises you know obscene amount of money uh there's two strategies in in AI that we've seen to date there's the ultra public sort of
compete for attention on the timeline uh which many of the foundation models have taken and then there's the strategy of SSI which is we're going to raise a bunch of money but that's when you'll hear about us and otherwise we're just sort of shooting for Asi yep it's totally possible that you know these
companies like poolside and magical which is backed by uh Nat fredman and Daniel gross another GitHub guy another GitHub guy they're both in the two different compan absolute dogs uh it's totally possible that they decided hey you know there's there's this blood bath on the timeline for attention
let's um you know focus on just core traction you know there's other approaches if you have $500 million you could spend tens of millions of dollars a year on direct sales and it could be a lot you know uh more under the radar but it is it is a very interesting call out that um when you think about uh all
these um AI coding tools are using Claud right that is like the preferred um you know llm uh under the hood so uh credit to Claude for staying so competitive despite it not even necessarily being their core Focus they just I need to do a deep dive on GitHub co-pilot like was GitHub co-pilot a custom trained llm or
was it built on top of gpt3 I think it might have been built on gpt3 but you could imagine that that would color like the GitHub experience could color how you think the the market will evolve because if they're if they're building co-pilot and these two guys both have real deep insights into what's going on
GitHub and they're seeing this and they're saying hey it makes sense to train a custom model just for code then sense to dou down on that at the same time there's a lot of people in a who believe that uh I I talked to one guy actually the guy from eted uh he was saying that I was like how how do you
think like the humanoid thing plays out like like is it important to just include all human knowledge in in those training in those Foundation models as well and he was like literally yes like I think that adding the Corpus of every book ever written will help a a humanoid walk and I was like that's that's an
interesting take but like there's this idea that like yes Claude like in order to be a good programmer should also understand every single language and every single philosophy textbook and every single history textbook even though it doesn't feel all it's it's the same exact thing
uh for any uh you know uh career path if you have a bunch of Knowledge from totally unrelated subjects it can often times allow you to be better at that one specific thing exactly and so I think there's a real uh case for that but uh all that being said in the same way that there's you know 20 different consumer
llm sort of like chat apps there's 20 plus heavily funded you know AI coding products and they won't all make it there will be multiple winners because these aren't it's not obvious yet that you know it's not obvious yet that these are sort of winner take all markets right um but but I say let them cook I
say good luck to them hopefully it works out hopefully we get some cool products I'd love to see it anyway let's move on to levels IO he says uh I've spent probably hundreds of dollars on Microsoft flight simulator 2020 and every time I load it I'm stuck downloading new 10 gig updates and it
takes me 15 minutes before I can even fly with my game at least I can just fly immediately without updates and so he levels IO a Indie hacker he's been on Lex Freedman show very popular on X he popular about his wins but also his failures he's launched I think hundred plus products many of which have flopped
but many of which have done very well and his his General ethos is just take tons and tons of shots on a goal and uh he's he's bucked The Venture train he's he's very outspoken in that he thinks Venture is silly uh and at times it is but he's managed to create a bunch of really cool products uh especially you
know more recently he I think a few years ago was focused on remote work so he had a bunch of products related to to that uh what was it called like NAD list Nomad list that's it NAD list just schol he was sort of living sort of digital Nomad lifestyle that was uh I was never
big in that world but uh it became very popular and then now he's pivoted into AI he does himself stuff in image generation which is really cool and then I'm excited to see uh what he's doing in in Flight uh he's created this sort of flight simulator that almost feels Minecraft s and did you ever do flight
simulators growing up not really little bit I used to do um flight lessons and uh and it was fun way I had the full rig you know everything uh strapped up to my desk and uh you know the the Yoke and everything I was I was big into that world ni uh and so this is funny this guy Gabriel is pissed off that uh levels
is monetizing his game that he released for free so he releases his game he says you can play it and then he adds these upsells where if you want to buy like a F-15 in his game you got to pay 30 bucks uh and Gabriel says I make games for a living personally I wasn't bothered until he added a 20 $30 microtransaction
micro transaction that's a more of a macro macro [Music] transaction uh but yeah I mean it's it's fun it's good demo of him being able to build a basically a game you know with uh a bunch of AI coding tools and he's building in public but then still driving a bunch of attention I think
Elon quote tweeted his announcement uh video and he did a great job of taking the the product he produced and instead of just saying hey hey go check this out here's a link he posted a video to really give you full context yeah went viral Elon quot tweeted I'm sure a lot of people found it a lot of people
downloaded it or or just opened the web browser started playing around if they liked it they pay 30 bucks he gets to make a little money it's great and what should he do with all that money he's making he should of course buy a Vashon constanton uh watch uh I was in uh West Hollywood Beverly Hills going to a
business meeting this morning I should have been wearing this watch because uh everyone at breakfast was in absolute hitters uh but I love that Vash uh adver running this ad campaign called The Quest and they are on the back of the uh The Economist this week court press say 270 years of doing better if
possible and that is always possible in 1755 in Geneva a quest begins a quest for excellence in high watchmaking a quest of passion perseverance and Mastery a quest to do better if possible and that is always possible the quest That Never Ends Basher and constanton celebrates seeking Excellence for 270
years they're celebrating their 270th anniversary with big ad campaign so just to give people some context Vashon was started roughly 20 years before America yeah which is pretty difficult to Fathom wild so this single Watch brand predates America by 20 years and um it's important for people to know
that they can go on bezel today and you know see almost the entire catalog uh they got a bunch of stuff on there we have a thesis we should put it on the record we have a thesis that Vashon uh you know it's it's the least well-known Holy Trinity watch brand when people even if you know you just said holy
trinity to somebody uh that wasn't super familiar with watches they would think Rolex AP PCH yep but it's actually vaston AP pek um and uh I think that this brand is about to go on a generational run uh you just just picked one up uh I've been looking at a few myself and um you know
it's a sort of undiscovered uh Holy Trinity brand uh and the world is uh you know seem seems to be responding now they have the new 222 which uh have my eye on uh if I can get my hands on it and they yeah they haven't really overextended in the way the other Holy Trinity companies have less te coming
out with a cubitus terrible press run terrible reaction probably gonna get discontinued who knows I think potentially underrated but continue for sure uh a going just massively overextended kind of pissing off a lot of Core watch Enthusiast by these crazy sort of DJ Partnerships which may end up being smart but you
know following more of a lvmh style Playbook let's move on to Jonathan Wasserstrom he says I need some liquidity so I can take all of that liquidity and put it back into a different equally if not more illiquid new deal I love it Jon Jonathan's a buddy uh he started a commercial real estate uh
Marketplace back in the day uh so he's a Founder now does a bunch of um uh Venture stuff uh has a pretty active syn Syndicate on angelist we did a deal together last year but uh this resonated with me my entire life has been you know working in a liquid private markets getting some liquidity tripling down
into the next thing and you know just uh doing that uh and I'm sure I will be doing that for the rest of my life the G and I love it so uh you may as well just say it how it is which Jonathan says very eloquently but if you got a bunch of illiquid assets you got to lever up you got to take out some debt against
them and then roll that into something else yeah leverage baby let's move on to uh Sam par with an absolute Banger it's at 16k likes I I saw this and was like this is so good we we don't have the ability to play it yeah we can't play the video we got to get videos we figure that out we Bri is working but it's a
it's a fantastic meme of Sam sulak photoshopped into a board meeting uh talking about his leg day in uh granular detail uh Sam says it's the best meme he saw in the last seven days hands down and I agree I saved it to my phone because it's so funny I think I could actually maybe just play the audio for
everyone here yeah do that let's see pumped holy vayy as well I mean pumped vayy fatigued what other descriptors are there of a good lift but I'll make this quick cuz I got to get some I got to get some rest ASAP the last thing I want to do is wreck my sleep schedule but you tell me man I mean
that's a pump for sure I've kind of lost a little bit of the striations kind of on this side unpumped there's a ton of Fancy Pants lies in here but this is way more swollen than I need to be happy with oh it's so Gooding I love Sam suck I really hope he becomes a Terminator fish tank uh uh maybe I don't know he just
like has his own little like tone of voice but uh uh what a fantastic influencer he's been on historic run and good luck to him in the Arnold Classic coming up he's going for his ifbb Pro card you got to stream that yeah and uh I I think it could set off a a huge wave of ifbb attempts in the Silicon Valley
World a lot of a lot of capital allocators getting into bodybuilding Keith R boy was early with the berries thing popularizing working out the next logical step become a mass monster go for the ifbb pro card we've been working on it um speaking of optimization it's official go to the next post you can now
track uh Blake and Patty they're in the cage you can track their productivity uh live so somebody was inspired by optify the the the YC sort of sweat shop SAS company that went viral uh or was it Monday or I think Monday weekend or something uh and they basically rebuilt the exact product so leveraging the
stream this it takes foot live footage from the stream yeah and then tracks when they're seated at their desk actually working versus off doing other things so yeah you can pull this up it's pmf do uh pmf or die. XYZ they got their own domain posted it and you can live see you can see exactly when they're
sleeping like not in their desk you can see how much sleep they're getting they they built this so fast yeah I need to find we need to find the guy that that did this and hire them I guess by at myreal Dev so go give them a follow because they're going to build something fantastic soon this is this is great I
love this like meme website oneoff you know just simple demos we've seen a bunch of people build stuff like this for the show ad networks and automatic clipping for us and stuff there's so many cool things that people are doing so uh you'll love to see this and it's funny this is the thing that like it
could just be photoshopped a years a few years ago you go back years Photoshop didn't even exist right you couldn't even make a meme now you can actually make the full website make the full product thanks to artificial intelligence for sure it's great I love it uh let's move on to Lewis Hamilton he
says Now's the Time he's on the cover of Time Magazine congratulations to Lewis Hamilton Force Power now at Ferrari Lewis Hamilton races to claim his place as f1's greatest certainly hope it happens he is a he's a phenomenal uh phenomenal driver to watch it's going to be very tough right for our Ferraris are
known for their uh lack of reliability and if there's one thing that that helps an F1 it's a reliable uh you know racing I don't know how real that Meme is but I got into F1 for a couple seasons and I was like okay yeah I know Ferraris are unreliable and I saw charlot Clair like
C like breaking down all the time and I was like H how did that translate to the F1 team you'd think it'd be like maybe it would apply to one but not the other but it really does seem like it's a it's a thing across the board and it's got to be extremely frustrating if you're a driver but good luck to him hopefully
Ferrari irons it out has a great car this year yeah they're doing uh testing right now fantas in uh Sak here yeah and uh yeah I'm excited to see this season it could be the downfall of this show you know people complain about other podcasts uh pivoting into pure politics staying away from technology and
business and markets we like to stay focused on technology and business we slip into some other categories every once a while but if the show really goes down the hill I think it's going to become an F1 podcast we'll only be talking about racing and cars the whole time um so hold us accountable if we do
that get us back on the topic keep it Tech in business guys uh anyway should we close out with bology bology has an announcement around about biograph the world's most advanced preventative health and Diagnostics Clinic designed to drive meaningful advances in health span and lifespan bology says what's
wrong with you you don't know you don't know if you're quietly sick you don't know if there's a Creeping Time Bomb in your body one that might be detected and prevented by a simple test but you're busy you can't spend time worrying about this stuff ideally you just want to get periodically scanned by a set of
machines have them determine what's wrong if anything and then dispatch treatment accordingly that's why Peter AA and his friend John Herring founded biograph and it's why uh bology became one of their First Investors the product packages just about every useful biomedical test into a single battery
from blood work to EKGs from CT scanning to whole body MRI it integrates all these measurements in an app that and tracks them across time giving a comprehensive of overview of known risks for cancer heart disease metabolic disease neurological issues sleep disorders and more it schedules you for
a recurring checkup every six months and uses both basic baselining and advanced AI to determine whether your results are normal I'm sure that Elizabeth holes is crying in prison thinking that she should have built this instead use offthe shelf Hardware hey we don't know if she's using uh you know Cutlery from
the kitchen to assemble her own chips and you develop her own machine she's like all the Shives I'm building a new MRI yeah she's collecting why does she have so many illegal cell phones in cell block 17 oh well it's because she's developing an EKG and a CT scanner yeah why this is uh this is cool uh it makes
it makes sense to combine all these Technologies and if there's one thing people value it's their life so I can imagine that people would pay a lot uh to get access to this and there's so many cool things you can you know do with this data you can imagine that life insurance companies would um you know uh
one day ask their clients like if you've ever gotten life insurance they'll send somebody out to you know do tests on you and um yeah you can imagine you know life insurance being like cool we're happy to insure you but get this test first so that we can set your rate right and um yeah so so very cool application
of the tech and it's already seen you know people catch uh early onset you know cancer and things like that through blood testing biomarkers all the time um so I'm excited about uh I hate when a company like this goes live and I didn't hear about it until it went live because
it means I'm not invested in it but uh you know uh very cool to see Peter AA launch this and it's cool because you know Peter AA is historically you could email him and sign up to be a client or a patient of his but it was something in the range of 200k a year so it's completely unattainable for most people
and uh even with that kind of pricing there'd be a really long wait list you'd see him a couple times a year and he'd give you advice and so he's going to be able to offer a lot of the value of his service for a fraction of the cost I imagine you can imagine something like this costing $5,000 a year and and
getting a lot of the value of what Peter provides in terms of longevity from that let's get Sam sulak in there I want to know his biomarkers because I want the same biomarkers that's true and that's our show thanks for watching real quick uh some some live breaking news uh AI
launched a new uh product 4.5 okay today we're releasing a research preview of GPT 45 our largest and best model for chat yet so again we've talked about the roller coaster the llm roller coaster we're all on it we're all riding it whether you like it or not and uh you know Claude had its moment earlier this
week xai had it moment last week deep seek had moment over the weekend and uh yeah this is why Lulu's advice of Just Launch because you're you know the best case scenario is you kind of own the spotlight for a few days did open AI even do like a video for this they did a live stream okay not on X okay uh and
then they've posted a handful of videos okay and it's interesting because I wonder how much Elon is nerfing their their reach um it might actually be he might actually be a little wary to do that given how many might be amplifying it with the crying Emoji yeah who knows he gets in there yeah saying scam
I mean attention is attention um but uh yeah it says rolling out now to all chat gbt Pro users and so we should go uh and try it out and get our reactions tomorrow yeah we'll break it down tomorrow I'm sure there'll be a bunch of good analysis and we can test drive it oh I got 4.5 right
here ask it to tell you how many RS are in Strawberry it's just like 105,000 450 sh shut up actually I don't want to hear any of your joke prompts anymore I'm sick of you human I have levels of intelligence that that you couldn't even you know experience get out of here get out of here anyway we're getting out of here uh
thank you leave us five stars on Apple podcast and Spotify leave us a review put an ad for a company you work for company you started company you just love in the review we'll read it on the show and that's our show for today we'll be back tomorrow we'll see you then have a great day everyone thank you bye