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- [00:01]
A
You're watching TVPN. Today is Thursday, September 11, 2025. We are back in the TVPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Rough day yesterday. Rough day today, our show. We're gonna stick to covering tech and finance news, but there are some fantastic journalists out there who are in media outlets who are unpacking the Charlie Kirk story and it's its implications, new developments as they unfold. So we want to recommend following those folks if you are interested in that story. And we just want to say rest in peace.
- [00:42]
B
Rest in peace to Charlie Kirk and sending prayers to his loved ones and family and everyone in his life. It's absolutely devastating.
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A
Yeah. So today we're going to be catching up on the news that we touched on over the last two days, but we're pretty swamped with Y Combinator demo day. Had a great time there, interviewed a ton of founders and I, I like the change that we did this year where we asked everyone, their favorite entrepreneur, everyone how they made their first dollar. I saw some folks posting that, like that. The meme of us asking that question on X to other people. And so it seems like we sort of broke through with that.
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B
Yeah. It was interesting to see how. How many patterns there were in that from trading.
- [01:26]
A
The opposite. I thought. There was no. Oh, yeah. So there was a huge pattern in how you made your money. There was like almost no pattern in who's your entrepreneur.
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C
Yeah.
- [01:33]
A
I thought it was going to be like all Elon and Steve Jobs and it was like all over the place.
- [01:37]
B
Yeah. But, yeah, the patterns and the. How they made their first money. It was Minecraft servers.
- [01:42]
A
Yeah. Oh, there was definitely eras.
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B
Right. And there's so many different eras.
- [01:46]
A
Yeah. Some crypto traders and then some people who definitely just took. The question is like. Well, like, after I started the business, I made a sales call and we were like, that wasn't really what we were asking, but we're in the lightning round, so we're just going to move on. Anyway, stay tuned. We will be putting together a recap video both of those questions soon. And so you can get the full view of that. And of course, you can watch our coverage from the New York Stock Exchange or YC demo day in the feed.
- [02:14]
B
Yeah. Yesterday was a strange show. It was amazing to speak with Sebastian, the founder and CEO of Klarna. I think his story is amazing. He's just very cool. I think I came away from that feeling like people have a. People generally have a lot of misconceptions around the category. I'm not going to go out and make the case that it's some incredible business, but I do believe this is a business that will continue to compound and be a much bigger business. And a decade from now, I don't think it's going anywhere. But his intentionality and why the company, why the company even needed to exist, should exist. All the. All these different things.
- [03:01]
A
My most botched interview question was asking Andrew Reed, like, so, like, what was it like investing in clarinet? He's like, well, I was a child because it was 15 years ago.
- [03:09]
B
I was a boy.
- [03:09]
A
I didn't. Yeah, I mean, he was in college, but I didn't realize how it was.
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B
A few years they made the investment, I think like four or five years before he joined the.
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A
Yeah, yeah. So.
- [03:18]
B
But obviously they ended up making more money.
- [03:20]
A
Yeah, yeah. But still, it was just wild. And we went in chat. It was. It was rough. We're going to figure out how to get chat involved when we're on the road. We're still figuring that out. But thanks everyone for tuning in today. Back to the normal schedule. John Exley's here. You know, it's going to be.
- [03:36]
B
Yeah, it's great to see you guys. We miss chat.
- [03:38]
A
We got David Kyle, techno chief. We see you, Techno chief Siraj and a bunch of other folks. David.
- [03:45]
B
Yeah. Yesterday being. Yeah, being.
- [03:47]
A
It's the nature of live tv.
- [03:49]
B
Yeah, it's the nature of live tv. Very rough.
- [03:50]
A
Yeah. But anyway, let me tell you about ramp.com time is money save Both easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. They hit 1 billion in ARR. We have been asking Eric Lyman, the CEO of RAMP, is the job finished? He confirmed with us on the phone. So it's not finished. So if you sign up for Ramp, just know he's going to keep building. Anyway. We need to dive into the Apple and the iPhone announcement briefly. Obviously this has been talked about. It happened a couple days ago, but the post that stuck out to me, there were a few about the design, but the big one was that the iPhone 17 Pro now has more graphics power than an M2 MacBook Air. I have. This is a MacBook Air. I don't know if this might be the M3 or M4 version.
- [04:35]
B
Wouldn't have clocked you as an Air guy.
- [04:37]
A
I just went for it because I was like, I'm traveling more. I'm less in workstation mode. And so let me give this one a try. And let me see. I have the M4. So I think I have more power here than the iPhone 17 Pro. But even just two years ago, it's crazy to think how quickly the chips are shifting from workstation, which is huge, you know, laptop to phone. And so I wanted to talk about what the downstream implications of this are. And did you.
- [05:09]
B
Did you see the camera functionality? Apparently if you take a. You can take a photo holding your phone vertically and it will give you the lens horizontal.
- [05:18]
A
Yeah. Because again, it's. I think it's 4. I think it's a square sensor that's maybe 48 megapixels.
- [05:23]
B
How are you feeling about the orange? Do you think this is. This is Tim Cook signaling that he's a BTC maxi.
- [05:29]
A
Oh, I thought it was him talking, giving a little nod to Gary Tan at Y Combinator.
- [05:33]
B
That's one. One or the one or the other. Clearly had to be one or the other. Yeah, it is. The color. The colors I like. I like orange. I think it's a under. Underrated color in general, but still the color options were interesting. Like no map. You would have thought they would have done a matte black.
- [05:52]
A
They didn't do matte black this year. They just, wow. They have a silver and like a blue. I think something like that. I like orange. I think it's a cool, bold color. I think it's one of the ways to stand out. It's McLaren Orange. You know, McLaren Orange looks like F1. Maybe it's a nod to that. Who knows? But they're having fun with it. Hopefully next year. The color I'm pulling for, ramp yellow. Can you imagine that? Ramp yellow iPhone? It just might happen. Maybe we'll make it happen. But on the tech side, you know, people were pretty. Like, there were a couple takes early that were pretty like bearish. Like, oh, like nothing changed. Nothing changed. And Ben Thompson summed it up pretty well.
- [06:30]
B
Tim Cook, you had a funny banger about this. I mean, Tim. Tim Cook posted. He did post.
- [06:37]
A
Yeah.
- [06:37]
B
The morning of. And he was like, days like this make Apple, you know, like, like basically like hyped it up as though it was going to be this dramatic announcement.
- [06:47]
A
And yeah.
- [06:47]
B
And I think people were pretty.
- [06:48]
A
Yeah. Pretty let down at this point. If it's not a change in the overall form factor, like you're going to folding phone, it's not going to be as easy just to talk about completely. But at the same time, it has a bunch of improvements that I think will have downstream effects that might be interesting and might actually have kind of these viral Moments and I'll get into my thesis here. So it has a vapor chamber in it that allows it to cool. So if you're in the sun or you're running some heavy duty Apple, you're not going to get. Your phone's not going to be as hot anymore. 50% more RAM. Obviously that's important for AI. And then they have a new chip that's designed with the LLM transformer architecture in mind. So the Apple A series of chips, they've always been somewhat AI optimized, but more for just broader machine learning tasks. Now they're doing the same thing that OpenAI is doing with Nvidia and Broadcom on chip design. Same thing that Google DeepMind TPU team is doing over at Google and Anthropics, working with Amazon and Trainium.
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B
Here's My post introducing iPhone 4000, a newer, better iPhone that's lighter, faster, newer and better.
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A
Where did this land? How many likes did this wind up getting?
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B
6.
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A
6,000?
- [08:06]
B
6,000.
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A
And the funny story here, the little inside baseball Jordy posted this exact post like five minutes earlier.
- [08:15]
B
Well, so, so I originally had this post as a draft.
- [08:18]
A
Yeah.
- [08:18]
B
And then I altered it.
- [08:19]
A
Yep.
- [08:19]
B
And I posted it and it completely. I had a different picture and I did iPhone 472 and it was just completely flopping. It got like one like on like 300 impressions. Like, people hated it. The timeline hated it.
- [08:31]
A
Yep.
- [08:31]
B
I just went back to this version, posted it and then it completely ripped. So never give up. Never give up. I think you have a good bit.
- [08:39]
A
But the, the funny thing here, I mean, obviously it is funny that Apple always comes out. It's our most powerful iPhone ever. Because it's like, well, if it was the last, if you guys messed up and accidentally created a less powerful iPhone, you would just keep selling the current one. You're never going to come out and be like, this year we're selling one, the latest iPhone, but it's less powerful because just sell the last one, then just be like, no new iPhone because we couldn't make it any more powerful.
- [09:04]
B
Yeah, we actually made it. We made it perfect.
- [09:05]
A
We made it perfect.
- [09:07]
B
Yeah. I mean, how are you feeling about the air? I think that's gonna sell incredibly well.
- [09:13]
A
I don't know, I'll need to like feel it and try it. I've never had any iPhone that's not just like the biggest and most of the biggest screen, the maxed out one. I've always gone for like the most power, the biggest one I've actually considered carrying an iPad mini just as a phone because I'm so big that my pockets are big enough to carry an iPad mini. Yeah, no, no. I was feeling it, and I was like, you can get it with cell service, so I think you can get a phone number on there, and so you can just have, like, pull out your giant iPad mini. But. But I never did that. I've always just stuck to, like, the pro max, the big one with the big screen. But it's easy. The. I don't know. The interesting thing about the iPhone air was this. You know, the whole computer is in the camera bump now, and basically everything that drops down is just battery and screen, battery and screen all the way down. And so people are wondering, like, you know, they could clearly take out the battery in the screen and maybe make like a pin. Like, they're. They're getting so good at miniaturizing, like, what it means to be a computer that they can put that in all sorts of different things.
- [10:23]
B
I would be. Would have been really excited to have an iPhone that doesn't. That will sit flat on a surface without a case on it. I haven't used cases in. In many years. I just like the. The feeling of the phone. It is crazy that they've so funny. That's just perpetually, like, you know, it just give me, like, a flat surface. Like, I'm happy for the phone to be as thick as necessary to just give me a flat surface.
- [10:45]
A
And it looked like they were going to do that with the iPhone pro because it has this wider notch. So at least if you did. If you did the notch evenly all the way across.
- [10:54]
B
If it's kind of like, that's fine, I guess.
- [10:57]
A
I don't know.
- [10:58]
B
But it's all. It's also so funny, the idea of, like, you have this incredible camera.
- [11:02]
A
Yeah.
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B
And then you're just, like, putting it on. Like, really want you to buy a case. Like, it's like.
- [11:07]
A
Yeah.
- [11:07]
B
A lot of the product design seems driven by.
- [11:11]
A
I don't think that's the real. I don't think that's the real reason.
- [11:13]
B
I think it's a. I think it's.
- [11:14]
A
I think it's. I think it's genuinely, like, people don't like heavy phones, and so you have to balance. Like, you need. You need the optics of a camera that's this certain thickness, and then you need the phone to be thin so that people actually carry it around and are like, this thing's heavy. Tinfoil hat. Yes. It's the case.
- [11:30]
B
I just don't Think they do you.
- [11:32]
A
Agree they want, how much money do you think they make from cases?
- [11:35]
B
I mean they're adding. What percentage of people do you think when they go to that buy an iPhone, buy an Apple case.
- [11:41]
A
I would, I would estimate that it's less than 1% of their overall revenue.
- [11:46]
B
Yeah, totally. But you're talking to the goat of profit maximization. Tim Cook.
- [11:51]
A
There's just so many other ways. I feel like you could sell 1% more iPhones if you, if you actually choose this odd choice because people are like, well yeah, it's the lightest iPhone. It's lighter than the Samsung one. Yeah, it's thinner, it's lighter, it looks great. And then there might be something about like the notch kind of holding on your finger and so you can actually hold the phone easier with that as opposed to if it was just like fully, fully smooth anyway.
- [12:18]
B
But yeah, I mean when you start thinking of when you start like the incremental sales from design driven decisions like this, I do think it'd be significant.
- [12:32]
A
But anyway, huge keynote filmed on an iPhone. Obviously a lot less graphics this time around. If you're doing a keynote, do it on Restream 1, livestream 30 plus destinations, multi stream and reach your audience wherever they are.
- [12:46]
B
And we have a bunch of people joining from the Restream waiting room. Oh yeah, later today we're gonna have Josh from Lightspeed, Nico Rosberg.
- [12:57]
A
Look at that.
- [12:58]
B
Joining Mike and Nir from Oboe, Amjad from Replit, Alex from Higgs Field, Stefan Cohen from Bain Capital, Crypto Rohan from Sphinx AI, Timothy Luccini from Intermotive, Mark from Nebius who just signed the 2017ish billion dollar deal with Microsoft. And then of course Michael from Figure who just IPO'd today on the NASDAQ and the stock is trading up I believe 35% right now. So he is gonna be joining us as well.
- [13:36]
A
Yep. So my, my take on the iPhone pro was you're we're getting to the point where you could run an LLM on device and even if it's not Apple intelligence through that API, just the ability to actually distill something that's like GPT4 level and have it be free. Not even an API call that you need. Not even cheap on a per token basis but actually just have something that you can basically drag and drop. Cost of the energy, cost of the energy. And no one thinks about it because they charge on the edge because they charge their phone every night. Anyway, so I was talking to Tyler about this earlier. Try and put into context how powerful an LLM running on device could be with this next iPhone. Because currently people have done it. I feel like people have distilled models to the point where they can run locally on phones, but they're not fast or they're not smart. But it feels like we might be at a point where you get to some sort of Turing test passing. Plus not waiting for Chad is asking.
- [14:43]
B
If it's Nico Rosberg.
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A
It is. It is Nico Rosberg.
- [14:47]
B
It is the former F1 Formula One world champion and now a capital Allocator.
- [14:52]
A
Now a capital Allocator. So yeah, Tyler, what is your take as this gets into people's hands? How solid do you think the actual interactions with LLMs could be on on device?
- [15:04]
B
Yeah, so I think, I think it's 12 gigabytes now, up from 8.
- [15:09]
C
So you can probably run like a very solid 7 billion parameter not super quantized model. We've had those for a long time that are very solid. Obviously they're going to pass Turing tests, whatever.
- [15:22]
B
Sure you're probably not going to be.
- [15:24]
C
Using it for doing your hard physics.
- [15:28]
B
Homework, but most things that you want.
- [15:31]
C
From a non device model helping look at your emails or like doing stuff that like you would think of like, like a really good Siri product would do. Yep, I think it's like totally capable of doing that. I mean it's like I don't think that Apple Intelligence was bad because the hardware was lacking.
- [15:51]
B
It was like, like, I mean you can.
- [15:54]
C
It'll be a little bit slower probably to run on cloud maybe.
- [15:59]
A
Yeah, I mean my experience with Apple Intelligence was it was just instantiated in very odd ways. They didn't really have like a killer app there and it was like a bunch of different things that kind of piped in and you could highlight text and then just say rewrite this. All sort of like very incremental gauge botch summaries. Yeah, the summary's botched but sometimes that might be the best feature actually.
- [16:24]
B
Yeah, it's hilarious. It's a feature, not a bug.
- [16:26]
A
We just saw one in our group chat where I posted some fake news and Apple summarizes it.
- [16:34]
B
Gabe says, shouldn't Tyler be back in school? Gabe, you must have missed the episode. But Tyler, he's taking a gap semester. He's taking a gap semester. He is riding with us.
- [16:44]
A
Yeah. And so I think there's something magical about getting the ability to inference a GPT4 level model on the edge for free. Like you can quibble about the level of intelligence that is, but it is actually too cheap to meter because you won't even have to set up an API key. And so you can vend in a GPT4 level model and then go viral and not have a bill show up and not need to think about monetization, not need to think about anything. That's a drag on your Just pure virality. You can have a free app that just grows and grows and grows and figure out the monetization later. And I feel like this sets us up for maybe something interesting to happen in consumer. We haven't really had that moment of you remember the lens of moment, the magic avatars. You upload your picture and it turns you into Superman or something. And then the studio Ghibli moment. We haven't had that many viral apps that are purely based on LLM interactions, like text interactions. There's been a couple. Like there was one called Generative Dungeon. Do you remember this? It was like a dungeon crawler text thing. So it would say you walk up to the dragon's lair, what do you want to do? And you could just type I brandished my sword. And then it would say the dragon.
- [18:07]
C
That was like GPT2.
- [18:08]
A
Yeah, that was super low level. Right. So imagine that plus but you can do it on device at a reasonable level and you can bring in some other UI elements from the iPhone, bring in the camera, bring in gps, bring in all the other tools that are available just in the iOS Swift developer kits, the SDKs. I feel like there will be a ton of people that are just building cool, interesting things on the iPhone that could potentially go viral and then become real businesses.
- [18:41]
B
Yeah, I don't think this will be.
- [18:43]
C
That meaningful for Apple intelligence because it's not like that's like a product issue, it's not like a hardware issue. But yeah, I definitely think for like third party developers this will be like pretty big. Yeah, you can do like, you know, if you make some random game, you can now have like avatars or whatever.
- [18:58]
A
Yeah.
- [18:59]
C
Like if you make the SDK really easy where like it's very easy to inference an LLM.
- [19:03]
A
Yep.
- [19:03]
B
You don't have to like figure out.
- [19:05]
C
How to like download and then do inference and all that stuff. If they like abstract that away. Yeah, I think it could be interesting.
- [19:10]
A
And I just feel like we've seen so many, there's been so many companies. We talked to some folks at demo day who are doing this where they were like, we have this cool AI agent that like scrapes your emails and does this and it's all predicated on you installing a Mac app, which is a really, really hard thing to do. Whereas, like.
- [19:28]
B
Yeah. How many Mac apps do you think you've installed this year?
- [19:30]
A
Oh, it's super rare. It's super rare. I got something to put the decks together. I literally have a Chrome. That's the one I installed. I'm looking at my home row and it's just Chrome.
- [19:44]
B
Well, and this is why everybody's obsessed with the browser.
- [19:47]
A
Truly. Truly. Because if you can get people over there, then you're there. But I have installed apps and I've installed little tiny apps. We were talking about the workout tracking app, Strong that I saw my friend at the gym, he was using an app to track his workouts. So what app is that? I went and downloaded it. You went and downloaded it. It was very easy for that app to loosely go viral. And it's a free app, but it doesn't have any AI. It doesn't really need any AI. But you could imagine that the viral coefficient of, of someone downloads an app, they have a magical experience with some twist on top of an LLM something storytelling, something astrology. Who knows what it'll be? I can't predict it. It's as hard to predict as Instagram or Uber. But it's unlocked by having this ability for free on the iPhone. And then people are sharing screenshots of, oh, I had this hilarious interaction, or this was incredible. Or I love this app. They create some viral loop, they do some Nikita beer type stuff and then everyone's downloading the app and then it gets actually really, really big. And I don't think it's going to be a competition. I don't think it's going to compete with ChatGPT. I think it's going to be a completely different thing. And it's very hard to predict, but it feels like we might be seeing it. Yeah. And it's going to require some like, really cracked level of creativity. Like what we saw with Harry Potter Balenciaga, where it's like the technology existed and then someone came up with the great idea to actually go like, instantiate it. So if you're going to be walking that app up, you're going to do it in figma.com, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free. The Wall Street Journal was also covering the Apple's iPhone air. They had a whole interview, they had really good coverage of the iPhone event. There was a few. There was one thing in the reporting from the Wall Street Journal. I don't have this particular article actually, but they did an article with the Wall Street Journal and Apple revealed that. I believe they said the majority of iPhones, 51% or more that are shipping to America are going to be made in India. And I'm not sure if it was this cycle, but it seemed like they were taking the tariff stuff really seriously, moving the actual manufacturing capacity around. Obviously Foxconn, their manufacturing partner, is a Taiwanese company and so they're worried about geopolitical risk as well. And so just another. Another data point around Tim Cook. He is not loudly shouting like America, I'm all in re industrialize, but he is making moves.
- [22:27]
B
What was the number he threw out at the dinner last week, wasn't it?
- [22:30]
A
I don't know if he had a number because who was it? It was Zuck had a number. And did Apple have a number too? That was 600 billion or something. Apple has thrown out a number at one point. You're completely right. My point is that we've seen the.
- [22:47]
B
Number of thank yous.
- [22:49]
A
Oh, yeah, the number of thank yous is a lot. But we've seen he's invested in some semi. Some rare earth developments in the United States and starting to think about manufacturing internationally. And you know, the pro bullish bet on Tim Cook is that like, if he was able to set up this in China and he's the reason he can set it up somewhere else because he's the guy who did it. And so even though he hasn't been really loud about his moves, because obviously if he says like, oh yeah, I'm not going to be manufacturing in China anymore, then like his important business partners over there are probably going to be like, well, yeah, like we're not going to take your business seriously anymore. There are a ton of different geopolitical considerations.
- [23:34]
B
Such an iconic line from the dinner. Cook says, I've always enjoyed dinner and interacting.
- [23:42]
A
Yeah, if you're getting dinner this weekend with one of your boys, just tell.
- [23:45]
B
How to say something that like, no one can, you know, cancel you for. It's like I've always enjoyed dinner and interacting. Two things I've enjoyed.
- [23:55]
A
He's a dinner.
- [23:56]
B
He's not saying, I've always enjoyed dinner with you and interacting with you. He's just saying I've always enjoyed dinner.
- [24:03]
A
And incredible putting on a clay. I feel like for watching some of these, like I was watching the Tucker Sam Altman interview and there's a certain level of polish that some of these, some of these CEOs have when they get to a certain level of media training and public speaking experience, where I think of them more as, like, word rotators than word cells or shape rotators. Like, they can, they can so quickly, like shift a sentence to be like. Like that, like, so perfectly balanced, where you're like, wow. Every word in that sentence was calculated so that it's the rides, this perfect line like, like, Sam was going back and forth with Tucker, and Tucker's, I didn't accuse you. I didn't accuse you. And you. And if you run back the transcript, you're like, yeah, technically he didn't. It was not an accusation. But then, you know, they're. They're rotating the sentences around to try and, like, pin each other. It's like watching a wrestling match. It's crazy.
- [24:59]
B
Tim Cook said they would be investing $600 billion.
- [25:02]
A
600 billion, yeah. Okay. So Apple says the majority of iPhones shipped to the US Are now assembled in India, meaning they face no tariff. Yet Indian suppliers aren't yet capable of delivering as many of the pro models that US consumers demand. So most of those still come from China. So this is the majority of iPhones in total because Apple makes a ton of those, but they can't make the leading edge. And then the other thing that everyone always talks about with this, like, assembled in India is not the same as fully manufactured in India. Obviously, the, the, the advantage to Chinese manufacturing prowess is that you walk across the street and there's a CNC shop with 25,000 CNC machines that can just immediately make you any part and make a million of those parts if you need. So obviously it's going to be a long road for them to set up manufacturing anywhere other than other than China. But it does seem I would do.
- [26:00]
B
Understand Tim's actual strategy here because I don't think he's saying, I'm going to invest. He's not going to be in a huge hurry to invest that 600 billion. Right. He may, you know, he may not actually believe it's. It's at all the right decision for Apple. And he's just feeling like he needs to placate the admin. And then if. And then in 2028 comes around and just, you know, can pull back or pull out.
- [26:25]
A
There's also like so much to 600 billion of CapEx over, what, five years or something like that. That includes HQ, that includes data centers for icloud that need to be local. If you're streaming the F1 movie on Apple TV plus you don't want that stream coming from a data center across the world necessarily. It needs to be cached locally. So there are like so many different pieces of the business. Building more Apple stores like that counts as capex. If they build them and they, you know. So 600 billion doesn't necessarily mean, like, y. We're building like the one plant. Because this is like a rainforest of complexity that actually delivers the iPhone. It's not just. It's not just like one iPhone factory, please. It's like a whole network of things. Battery life appears to be a challenge for the Air. Apple always says, like, all day battery life, but people are like, allegedly. What kind of all day are we talking? Are we Talking scrolling for 18 hours?
- [27:23]
B
Doom scroll?
- [27:24]
A
Are we talking proper scroll? Proper doom scroll Apple accessory that will attach attached to the air and obviously that's no longer as thin. The company added what it calls a plateau on the back of the Air and Pro models, adding thickness at the top of the device to fit bigger and hotter chips.
- [27:44]
B
Not a bump. It's a plateau to plateau.
- [27:46]
A
Yeah. Oh, they're rebranding.
- [27:48]
B
Maybe they're signaling that we're. Maybe this is Gartner Hype cycle coding.
- [27:52]
A
Plateau productivity. I mean, they have plateaued in productivity for sure. The hype cycle. They've been through it. They're like, first hype cycle. First hype cycle. I've been here. I'm plateauing. I'm getting productive. Anyway, we also talked AirPods Pro heart monitor, Apple watch detects if the wearer has high blood pressure and more news. So we'll keep moving. Ben Thompson also had a great article. You can go read it. On Stratecheri.
- [28:22]
B
What was he alluding to with the sugar water trap?
- [28:26]
A
The sugar water trap. I don't know if I want to give away the game. We can pull up the actual. Let me see. Sugar water. That is an interesting phrase. I like a good coinage. Apple took the liberty of opening yesterday's presentation with the classic Steve Jobs quote. Design is not just what it looks and feels like. Design is how it works. That's a great quote from Steve Jobs. Setting aside the wisdom of using that quote when the company is about to launch a controversial new user Interface Design. That's iOS 18. Is that what it's called? Yeah. Which one did we have? You update. Update.
- [29:02]
C
That was iOS 26.
- [29:03]
A
26. They were on the year. They're on the year release now, but they haven't updated the iPhones to be on the annual release.
- [29:10]
B
I can't wait. I can't wait for iOS 4000.
- [29:15]
A
They really should just move to the year on the iPhone too. That it's like, yeah, I have the iPhone 26. Oh, because you bought that in the year 2025. Like a car, you know. I know, would make sense. Match it all up. Maybe they'll do that. Maybe they'll do that next year. They'll just skip five because they wound up doing that for the iPhone 10, I believe. There was never an iPhone 9. Right. They went from eight to 10 and then they, for 10, they call it the X. And they were like really dancing around with the names for a while. It was like iPhone6 and then Max Pro. They were like testing all these different things and they finally kind of like defined the.
- [29:51]
B
I like modeling it after just cars. It's just the year.
- [29:54]
A
I think that's the future here for sure. So that was in the Steve Jobs quote. This presentation and Apple's general state of affairs made me think of, says Ben Thompson. What I was thinking of was the question Jobs posed to then PepsiCo President John Scully when he was recruiting him to be the CEO of Apple in the early 1980s. Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world? This is what Steve Jobs asked. John Scully, then PepsiCo president, trying to recruit him, said, hey, you're selling sugar water. Come over here and actually build something that matters that changes the world. So Ben Thompson says, iPhones are a great business, one of the best businesses ever, in fact, because Apple managed to marry the malleability of software with the tangibility and monetization potential of hardware. Indeed, the fact that we will always need hardware to access software, including AI, speaks to not just the profitability, but also the durability of Apple's model. The problem, however, is simply staying in their lane. Content can be a hardware provider. Content to be a hardware provider for the delivery of others innovations feels a lot more like Scully than Jobs. Jobs told Walter Isaacson for his biography, my passion has been building an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, this is Steve Jobs talking to Walter Isaacson. Sure, it was great to make a profit, but that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits, were the motivation. Scully flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It's a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything. The people you hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings. So Ben Thompson goes on, he says Apple, to be fair, isn't selling the same sugar water year after year in a zero sum war with other sugar water companies. No one's talking about the Pepsi 2026 Edition. It's the same thing every year. Apple is making improvements, the sugar water is getting better and I think this year's seasonal concoction is particularly tasty. That's great. What is inescapable, however, is that while the company does still make new products, the company has, in the pursuit of easy profits, constrained the space in which it innovates. That's somewhat true. I mean, they did take a big shot on Vision Pro. They're probably going to continue there. Maybe they'll but yeah, I mean, until they launch the Icane or Scott in.
- [32:30]
B
The chat says the Xbox naming convention is in an abstract, liminal space.
- [32:34]
A
That was a wild one. Are you familiar with the Xbox naming convention convention?
- [32:39]
B
The S the 360?
- [32:41]
A
Yeah, well it was the 360 and then they should just done 7201080 obviously no brainer. But then they wound up doing the Xbox Series X and then they did the Series S and then they did Xbox. It wasn't the Xbox edition.
- [32:55]
C
I think it was Xbox360 and then.
- [32:57]
B
Xbox One and then there was.
- [32:59]
C
Oh yeah S and then now there's like.
- [33:01]
B
You got to keep them on there on your.
- [33:03]
A
Yeah. Going back to one is always a crazy, crazy move, but people love doing that anyway, that didn't matter for a long time. Smartphones were the center of innovation and Apple was consequently the center of the tech universe. And now, however, Apple is increasingly on the periphery and Ben Thompson thinks that more than anything is that's what bums people out. No, Apple may not be a sugar water purveyor, but they are farther than they have been in years from changing the world. Well, if you are trying to change the world, you need to be compliant. You need to be on Vanta Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Savanta country so other reactions to the iPhone news, we'll run through these. Andrew Claire, by the way, had a funny observation.
- [33:58]
B
Yeah, yeah, I was just pulling this up. So you go through this and then I'll. Yeah. So Andrew Claire says things I've Learned since the iPhone 17 series was announced. Everyone hates the color orange. I don't think so. I think this is gonna.
- [34:09]
A
You said on the day you were Like, I'm getting orange and I would get orange too. I like orange, but I feel like if you have orange and then I have orange, it's like a little bit.
- [34:17]
B
Did I say I would get orange?
- [34:18]
A
That's what you said to me. You were like, I'm getting the orange. If you don't get it. If you're passing on the orange, I'm doing.
- [34:23]
B
I mean, I think there's just not options.
- [34:25]
A
There's only room in this town for one orange iPhone Pro.
- [34:28]
B
We already. We actually already have the same color phone and we only get it mixed up like, like twice a day.
- [34:33]
A
That's true. The display or the background does a lot of heavy lifting there.
- [34:37]
B
But no one. So Samsung Mobile us Twitter was going off.
- [34:43]
A
Yeah, Love it.
- [34:45]
B
Responding.
- [34:46]
A
They're boys. Samsung US Twitter.
- [34:48]
B
48 MP times three still doesn't equal 200 MP. Hashtag, I can't. And then was quoting MKBHD saying actual innovation is greater than hype. Hashtag I can't again.
- [35:04]
C
Wow.
- [35:06]
B
Then they said, hashtag, I can't believe some people had to wait five years for sleep. Score.
- [35:12]
A
What is this from the Apple watch?
- [35:15]
B
Then they said, apple just announced live translation at the zzz Note. Like sleep. It's calling.
- [35:23]
A
Oh, wait. So yeah, Samsung is taking shots at Apple.
- [35:27]
B
Taking shots at Apple on every single.
- [35:29]
A
So they put. Put some probably zoomer social media person on it.
- [35:34]
B
It's not a zoomer though, because they're using hashtags.
- [35:37]
A
Oh, interesting. Okay.
- [35:38]
B
And Samsung had posted in 2022, let us know when it folds with like one of these emojis.
- [35:44]
A
Okay. Okay.
- [35:45]
B
And then they said hashtag, I can't believe this is still relevant. So they really were going for this, like, hashtag, I can't campaign.
- [35:53]
A
Rough rough.
- [35:54]
B
Which is interesting.
- [35:55]
A
Well, the other observations. IPhone Pro is for pro TikTokers. Mr. Beast will now sol using iPhones on his channel. That's super interesting.
- [36:05]
B
Is this. This is a paid partnership or.
- [36:10]
A
I think he just is realized you can achieve. Yeah. So if you tour Mr. Beast's facility, you'll see that he has like closets with like hundreds of cameras because they all need to. They need to record. So they like GoPros and, you know, FX3s and all sorts of different cameras. But a lot of the reality TV is just like random stuff's gonna happen. You have to have a camera on it. And your budget for that camera, it can't be $100,000 for like a pro cinema rig. You need just like, oh, yeah, throw a $2,000 phone there, it's super light, plugs in over USB C. How cool would it be? Save everything to the cloud, save everything local.
- [36:46]
B
How would it be a gimbal?
- [36:48]
A
Oh yeah. I mean this is what Apple should be doing. I mean they should be just constantly going up against DJI and just really keeping the screws to DJI and just.
- [37:00]
B
Saying yeah, it's tough because the gimbal might be like a billion dollar a year product line.
- [37:04]
A
DJI has one and that unlocked the gimbal that goes on the drone, which is also the gimbal that goes into Hollywood, which is also the gimbal that goes on the RC car. And like dji, they now own Hasselblad so they have lenses and cameras all the way down to the drones and then they have vlogging gear and DJI has great microphones now. And so they they've realized DJI has really leaned into this trend of the prosumer content creator who wants just one notch above but can't afford a Steadicam operator. So they just need the Ronin or the OSMO to have a gimbal and a lot of people put iPhones on those. But that would be a fun challenge for Apple to go and take the fight to dji. But oh well. The conclusion of this post is Tim can still cook. Hopefully he is is putting his team on graphite.dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Get started for free. Also Trung Fan said Apple after spending $100 billion on R&D over the past five years, nothing really changed in the design language from the 11 Pro Max to the 16 Pro Max. But Sebastian comes in with a quote post and says truth Zone. During these six years Apple managed to develop the best CPU architecture in the world, outpacing both AMD and Intel. Also their GPU is nowadays state of the the art, which we talked about beating Nvidia in some areas. Nvidia is a $3 trillion GPU company.
- [38:30]
B
I'd say Chad has spent their 100B corrected. So Mr. Beast was at the Apple event.
- [38:36]
A
Yeah, he was at the Apple event. But I don't know if it's a direct partnership. Like I think he might just be like I'm all in on iPhone, I'm buying them. But maybe there's some sort of deal. But he was at it and that's where he announced this, that he was like I'm out of thing. And the big one is that there's Genlock so you can have one time code across a whole bunch of different iPhones. Again, very valuable. So if you're, if you're filming Beast Games and it's like American Ninja Warrior and a bunch of people are gonna be running around, you're gonna have 25 different angles. It's like, oh, well, like we need a telephoto lens for this shot. Just put on the 24, the 48 megapixel 4K telephoto, put on the wide angle and then sync it all. So when you bring it in the timeline, you can be like, let's cut from this angle to this close up to this one to this handheld. And they're all in perfect. So I'm sure there's going to be a ton of really creative stuff.
- [39:25]
B
Unfortunately, I don't know if we'll ever be allowed at Apple considering I posted the iPhone4000 meme. Might have got us banned for. Might have got us banned for life. But we love Apple.
- [39:35]
A
We'll see. We'll figure it out.
- [39:36]
B
Love Apple.
- [39:37]
A
Also, the new iPhone, when you throw it in the orange iPhone, when you throw it in the green case, it looks like Master Chief from Halo. Very cool. Also got a little Michelangelo from Ninja Turtles vibe to it. I think it'll be popular with the kids. Blake Scholl says everything's battery and shows that the entire iPhone air is just up, up top. Very cool to just see the miniaturization of electronics just flow through so, so completely. And of course, Duolingo traded down on the news that Apple is bringing live translation to AirPods Pro 3.
- [40:13]
B
So, morning. Morning Brew saying that Al is going to break into Tim Cook's house tonight.
- [40:20]
A
Well, if you're looking for not quite Duolingo, but AI for data analysis, go to Julius. What analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. Loved by 2 million-plus users and trusted by individuals at Zapier, BCG and Princeton University.
- [40:38]
B
Legends.
- [40:39]
A
In other news, Larry Ellison got the number one spot as the world's richest man with 70 billion gain after Oracle reported quarterly results. After the market closed, Oracle surged 40% and he made $100 billion. There's a funny post in here.
- [40:56]
B
Well, he didn't make it. Well, he's not selling.
- [40:59]
A
Yeah, he's not selling. And you pointed out a couple other things, that this is the biggest gain since 1999. What happened after 1999? Trillion dollar company is trading like a penny stock. There's the circle of money going on in AI, where Nvidia sells GPUs to Oracle. Oracle uses it to power its data centers. Oracle builds cloud on those GPUs. Nvidia rents compute back via signed deals from Oracle. And so if the economy needs external, the economy needs to cannot be entirely self sustaining just on a few companies. The actual top story is people were wondering how did they get this backlog so huge? And the answer is OpenAI. So Oracle signed a contract with OpenAI, signed a contract with Oracle to buy $300 billion in computing power over roughly five years. People familiar with the matter said the deal is one of the largest ever cloud contracts signed, reflecting how spending on artificial intelligence data centers is hitting new heights despite mounting concerns over a potential bubble. And the Oracle contract will require 4.5 gigawatts of power capacity, roughly comparable to the electricity produced by not one, but two Hoover dams or the amount consumed by 4 million homes. Oracle shared shares surged 36% when they revealed it had added $317 billion in future contract revenue during its latest quarter. So Larry Ellison and Sam Altman are clearly in cahoots, working together to build a next generation hyperscaler. They're teaming up. And so the question that I had was, everyone thinks this is crazy. Like this is somewhat like a revision on the Stargate story. Like the Stargate story was at a high level. The people in the room with Donald Trump that day wanted to do a $500 billion project together. It wasn't like the money been wired and it's in the company. It was like, it's a variety of companies. It was like a vibrant let's go big. But the vibes were let's go big. And so this feels like just one notch more clarity into how Stargate and the other projects might kind of come together. I don't think you should look at this as its own separate, its own thing. It's a piece of the overall story that we're getting around Stargate and just big data center investment around OpenAI.
- [43:26]
B
So my question reminded me of the. You remember that exchange between Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani when they said, this is our year, Tiger? That was kind of the original Stargate meeting. They were just kind of getting together, this is our year.
- [43:41]
A
So it was Masayoshison, Larry Ellison, Sam Altman and Donald Trump saying that the plan was for those four loosely plus a couple other people to invest roughly 500 billion over a series of years.
- [43:58]
B
They were early to use in the five, the half a trillion dollar number. Now you got Mark throwing it around. You got Tim throwing it around. Everybody's throwing it around.
- [44:06]
A
Everyone's throwing it around. And so I guess I'm in the steel man category today figuring out how crazy is that number, like how should we be thinking about that number? How can we put it in other context? And so one context that I thought would be interesting is if you assume, if you, if you assume that ChatGPT, like as a consumer product, as an, as an Internet company is going to be roughly the same scale as google, Amazon.com and facebook.com and like the Facebook apps like it will have similar revenue, similar scale, similar user adoption, similar monetization. Like you get like one ultra compounding trillion dollar consumer style website. At the end of the day it's like an Internet company, right? You have to support that with data centers, not just like be a hyperscaler and then build a cloud business. You need servers to run Instagram.
- [45:14]
B
Yeah.
- [45:15]
A
You need servers to run Gmail, you need servers to run YouTube, you need servers to run AWS. You need to not just AWS but Amazon.com needs servers. That's why AWS grew out of Amazon.com was because they were investing so much, so many servers in just supporting Amazon.com, also Prime, Prime, Video, Twitch, these, these all, all of their Internet properties aside from their resale business in AWS and aside from Google's resale business, gcp. Yeah, you need a ton of servers. So my question is like Sam Allman saying I'm going to be one of those. Like think of OpenAI as the next Google, the next Amazon.com, the next Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram. Right. How much did those companies spend to support their trillion dollar businesses? They have a trillion dollar Internet business. How much did they invest? And so I tried to pull all the capex that they've spent roughly that doesn't go into their cloud business. And the numbers are big. Amazon retail X, aws, this sort of, this includes like fulfillment, transportation. So it's like, it's significant, it's very significant. But $250 billion Meta's core apps. So X new AI, X gen AI. So not counting the llama stuff, that's $130 billion in capex. And we've seen that these hyperscalers are all spending 60, 70 billion a year and they've been ramping. So if you work back from that ramp, you're spending 60, 50, 40. You add all that up, you're in the $200 billion range. Google's core services X, GCP and this is probably the best comp because they don't have warehouses for fulfillment. Google's core services, not including Google Cloud Platform, $210 billion is like the reasonable estimate for how much they've spent on the servers just to serve YouTube, Google search databases, all that stuff. Gmail, all that stuff. And so when I think about OpenAI, what they're trying to do, become in the conversation with as many user minutes, as big a penetration as Facebook, As Google, as Amazon.com that feels like a couple hundred billion in capex. And so you project it forward and the capex is way more expensive because you're doing AI inference instead of just pull the search results out of the database, put the search results in the bag. 300 billion seems like it could if OpenAI succeeds and if in five years we're talking about it as like, like yeah, Amazon.com, google.com, facebook.com, chat.com, like these are all, these are the new Mag 4, Mag 7 or Mag 8, Mag 9, whatever. Like if they're in the same conversation as like dominant Internet companies that are used by everyone all the time for everything. Not a niche, not a Pinterest like outcome, not a Snapchat like outcome, but a Facebook.
- [48:11]
B
And you factor in Amazon like outcome inferencing language models today and various, you know, all the models, it's just extremely compute intensive in a way that that serving Gmail is not exactly.
- [48:24]
A
And this was the story of YouTube like I believe that the compute like the capex that went into supporting YouTube was way more than Google search because Google search needed. You know, it's just like I was.
- [48:35]
B
Just thinking this yesterday there was a number of Hasan Piker was streaming on twitch and had 200,000 live viewers, which, which probably is costing Twitch multiple dollars a second something.
- [48:50]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Somebody ran the numbers just on the Apple stream because the Apple stream on YouTube had like millions and millions of views. And they were talking about the data, just the data transfer cost. And so the economics of scaling a consumer AI company like ChatGPT is doing different and so it is going to be more costly.
- [49:12]
B
Well and the reason that so Oracle and OpenAI are now incredibly linked. They're betting on each other and both have to execute pretty much perfectly, otherwise there's going to be absolute chaos.
- [49:26]
A
And so on the absolute chaos, the bear thesis, this feels like 1999.
- [49:33]
B
The concern is like okay, so Oracle just had a double miss on earnings. Earnings, right. And we'll see how they do this Next quarter if they come out and blow out earnings, I'm assuming, you know, like if they can get sort of like back on track, it'll be, everybody will be very excited. But the question is like everybody is struggling to get the infrastructure, you know, the various like components necessary to build data centers right now. Right. Elon's talking about making his own transformers.
- [50:00]
C
Right.
- [50:01]
B
Everybody needs.
- [50:03]
A
Wait, electrical transformers. He said that?
- [50:04]
B
Yeah. I missed that other thing we missed.
- [50:07]
A
That's crazy. Okay.
- [50:09]
B
And so you have to assume that Oracle can develop this capacity on a reasonable time horizon in a heavily supply constrained environment where they're competing with five or so other heavily, heavily funded players. You have to assume they can execute perfectly. And then you have to assume that OpenAI is going to be able to scale revenue to the point where they can actually sort of pay for this $300 billion of compute. Right.
- [50:39]
A
Yeah.
- [50:39]
B
Has to come from somewhere. I don't think, I don't know. You have to wonder can Sam Altman raise $300 billion?
- [50:49]
A
It's on his way.
- [50:50]
B
Has anyone ever raised $300 billion?
- [50:55]
A
I was talking to Brandon about this. Like you sort of need to what is the, what is the most money ever raised? I don't know. You get into crazy, crazy comps. How much did.
- [51:07]
B
Because even a lot of the best and biggest companies end up getting to the point where they're like, oh, we got enough cash.
- [51:11]
A
I mean Google was cash flow positive at ipo. Right. And so they were not.
- [51:15]
B
Yeah. I mean the single biggest is OpenAI's $40 billion raise. But even that again was.
- [51:22]
A
Didn't they only draw down it's contingent.
- [51:25]
B
On the for profit conversion.
- [51:27]
A
Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah. Wild. It is, it is a, it is unprecedented territory. But it's an unprecedented technology. Like you use it and you're like, yeah, this is magical. Like this is going to be around.
- [51:43]
B
Larry prayed for one more bubble like this.
- [51:45]
A
Then he hit, he hit hard.
- [51:46]
B
Just one more.
- [51:47]
A
Yeah, I mean it will be interesting to see like the. But the Oracle street like the investor should be looking at Oracle and saying okay, you have this backlog. How quickly can you draw down from it next quarter can you convert that backlog into serious revenue and profit if not and it's just staying out in the backlog. It needs to be discounted a lot anyway. If you're looking to scale your generative media strategy, go to fall generative media platform for developers. The world's best generative image, video and audio models all in one place. Develop and Fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters trusted by.
- [52:33]
B
Over a million developers and Adobe Shopify, Canva, cora, Perplexity and many more.
- [52:39]
C
There we go.
- [52:41]
B
Really enjoyed having founder on the other.
- [52:45]
A
Day Chris Bakker, who somehow hasn't been on the show yet. I feel like we would have overlapped at some point, but we've reacted to a ton of his posts. He says, my son's preschool teacher asked me to read to his class next week and bring three kids that three books that the kids will enjoy. These four year olds are in for a treat and he has Zero to One by Peter Thiel, High Growth Handbook by A Lot Gill and Titan by Ron Chernow. Love it. The kids might enjoy some of those books, but some of them are a little bit dry for the kiddos. Robinhood has launched a social app. This was in the journal. Robinhood's 4U says near cyan. Robinhood's 4U will let you tweet positions with your real profit loss supporting both options and crypto. Vlad has been in the trenches grinding, launching new products all the time.
- [53:41]
B
Dalton Caldwell announced a new fund or I don't know, maybe he announced it prior. He was at Y Combinator Lefty come out with Standard Capital, Standard Cap.com, the AI Native Series A firm. The reason I thought this was particularly interesting is they're doing it. They're doing effectively like seasons. So they do. They're basically doing batches, right. And so they say Standard Capital operates on quarterly funding cycles. Applications are now open for Standard Capital's fall 2025 funding cycle. So interesting to take this sort of like systematic model of funding and apply it to Series A. They're differentiating as well by they're only looking for 10%. Obviously plenty of Series A firms will happily take 10%. But this might be particularly interesting to founders that are generating a lot of revenue already. Want to get a Series A done but just don't want to be peer pressured by the current capital and the new entrants to the cap table to just raise closer 15, 20%.
- [54:56]
A
Yeah. Who else is running Standard Capital? I feel like he got someone else on the team.
- [55:01]
C
Paul.
- [55:02]
A
Paul Buchite.
- [55:03]
B
Yep.
- [55:03]
A
Paul. We got to have both of them or one of them on at some point. I'm interested to know how the fund is structured. If each does an lp get exposure to a fund that's a specific season cycle.
- [55:18]
B
I actually, I think it's pretty straightforward. It's like hey, we're going to fund. I don't know how many they're actually doing. Let me try to find it. They're doing five. So they're going to do five companies per cycle four times a year. So 20 companies a year they can. I imagine they're right. They're planning to write like you know, five to ten million dollar checks depending how overheated the rounds get. But it's pretty easy to plan out. You can go to your LPs and say like look, we're going to fund this many companies for the next two years. Obviously there'll be edge cases and I'm sure they'll, they'll end up doing like off cycle investments here and there. But it's pretty cool to see some experimentation with the model and leaving Y Combinator. This becomes a net positive asset to Y Combinator to provide downstream funding.
- [56:11]
A
Yes. And there was always this dynamic of is YC going to cherry pick the best companies? Is it like a counter signal if you get to demo day and none of the partners have been like yeah, I want to invest in the next round. And YC Continuity was a thing for a while and there was this odd dynamic of like, well like if YC Continuity. YC Continuity was a fantastic fund but people were always asking questions about like what does it mean? Do they have like extra insight so it's an extra good signal or is it a bad signal because like you couldn't do with somebody else and this. Yeah. Sort of solves that potentially, which is good.
- [56:45]
B
Somebody else. Posted. Today at YC Demo Day I ran into a multi stage firm that has invested in 600 YC companies over the last five years. Of those, one has raised a Series A. They still invest in 10. Invested in 10 companies that seem like.
- [56:58]
A
A low hit rate. But how young are the companies? I mean it's been over.
- [57:04]
B
Incredibly low. Incredibly low.
- [57:06]
A
Yeah.
- [57:06]
B
I mean I don't know.
- [57:09]
A
I feel like Gary has shared other stats where like way more.
- [57:13]
B
Yeah, you, you, you have to. We have. You would have to study this firm and understand like how seems like they're underperforming, like figure out and do basically the opposite.
- [57:21]
A
Yeah. Because you could just do random and be at the rate. Yeah. Just like purely random.
- [57:26]
B
Don't meet the founder, have a database and just like offer money.
- [57:31]
A
Maybe they're printing, maybe they only investing. Maybe they're really good at going in and finding the company. They're gonna make it all back again.
- [57:37]
B
Yeah, that's true.
- [57:38]
A
Yeah. They none of them raise the same day but they have 12 IPOs.
- [57:40]
B
Maybe they're fine to just make it all back in one trade.
- [57:42]
A
They have. Yeah. Maybe that one company is like it's Coinbase or something. It's like.
- [57:47]
B
Yeah, yeah. So apparently they only picked consumer companies.
- [57:50]
A
Okay, that's so. Yeah. Consumer is like power law.
- [57:55]
B
Why Combinator Consumer.
- [57:57]
A
But very hit or miss. Yeah, very power.
- [58:00]
B
Sorry, sorry. Not y combinator. OpenAI. I guess they weren't a consumer company when they were going through yc but nope, they pivoted.
- [58:07]
A
Classic. Anyway, let me tell you about Turbo Puffer search. Every byte, serverless vector. Serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.
- [58:23]
B
We gotta have Simon on from TurboPuffer ASAP. He's so fun.
- [58:27]
A
Should we be investing in Turkish bonds? Turkish bonds? Turkey just cut the interest rate from 43% down to 40% and Maine says did bro say 40? So like I mean, I don't know but like if you go over to Turkey and you put your money in like their equivalent of T bills, you just earn 40% gains. Like is this not inflation adjusted? I assume, I assume they have like really high inflation and whatever it's denominated in. But DC investors says we need to be farming this. Yeah, that was my first turkey.
- [59:02]
B
Put your bonds on chain.
- [59:05]
A
Let hyper liquid go.
- [59:06]
B
Let the trenches decide the fair value.
- [59:08]
A
Of your of your bond trenches decide. Andrew McCallop answered our TVPN question that we were asking YC dumb a day. How did you make your first dollar on the Internet? He says mine was at 13 years old. I was contracting CNC shops to produce parts for my online RC car business. Cold fusion racing. Good name. The Traxxas crowd will remember me as the steel differential Guy made thousands of upgraded steel planetary differentials. After the brushless motors hit the market and were shredding the OEM plastic ring gears, I literally rode my bike to the gas station for money orders. What a fun time that was. Wow.
- [59:47]
B
Amazing.
- [59:47]
A
Amazing. Makes a ton of sense why he's doing what he's doing now. He of course works at Varda and is building drones.
- [59:53]
B
We gotta have him on to come on to talk.
- [59:54]
A
Yeah, I want to hear about the.
- [59:56]
B
Andrew come on the show.
- [59:57]
A
Welcome. It's time to Bob and if you want to get Project Bob mentioned on Chat GPT go to Profound Andrew. Get your brand mentioned ChatGPT reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Hunter shared this interesting fact. If you become a billionaire and then you lose it all, Forbes still keeps you on their real time net worth tracker as some sort of dark humiliation ritual. And so Elizabeth Holmes, Renee Benko who.
- [60:25]
B
I'm not familiar with just throw you.
- [60:26]
A
At the bottom and and Sam Bankman fried is at 0.0 billion. I want to put that in the truth zone on SBF. He might have $100 million tucked away somewhere in crypto. I think Elizabeth Holmes is seriously zeroed but sbf, it would have been so easy for him to have some random Solana on a USB stick somewhere. I don't know one of those like offline drives and, and, and, and just have it waiting for him because he buried it. You have to imagine I, I, I'm not saying it's 100% but like you.
- [60:58]
B
Have to imagine that he is like tinfoil hat. You have to imagine he's like placing like he's, he's getting printouts of of charts and he's like basically figuring out a way to day trade behind bars and probably anyways no that's an interesting do you think we'll do you think.
- [61:19]
A
Max in the chat says SBF might have a bill? I think wouldn't be surprised possible. I would put, I would put him having a billion at like 2% or 5% and him having 100 mil at like 20% maybe so I would still probably put him at 0.1 B on the Forbes tracker but yeah, I don't know. Yeah, not that hard to just remember a passphrase just memorize the seed phrase and go to jail. And when you come out some unusual whales account will see oh a bunch of stuff's moving that hasn't moved since the day SBF got locked up and now it's moving and it's grown a ton because it's just been sitting there. Potentially the underrated way to Diamond Hands is to go in the clink where Diamond Hands ing is the only option anyway. Antonio Garcia Martinez says part of Facebook's baked in advantage was is having the same user ID across devices and apps from browser cookies to mobile devices. Why Apple leaned into privacy was nuking everybody else's ability to identify the same user across apps on the same phone. Identity is king he says. Interesting. Well if you're building something that's built on top of identity, do it on linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, project and product roadmaps. We are going to be talking to the new CEO of Open today and going deeper into the open door story. Martin Shkreli Says the new CEO is a big win for Open. Not sure how you turn around this business which seems fundamentally broken, but that's what good managements do. And it'll be interesting to see the stock has been way up. The retail army is marshaling up 70%. Today Keith Raboy is back on the board. We had him on the show when they were. When there was rumbling on the timeline about what might happen with Open Door. He is getting back involved, but not in a day to day capacity.
- [63:20]
B
But anyway, such an interesting, I mean such a wild story.
- [63:26]
A
Yeah, I mean interest rates are high. That should be a reduction to liquidity and transaction volume. Probably a headwind, but they might come down, which is a potential.
- [63:37]
B
They picked up a tailwind. An absolute dog, they did.
- [63:39]
A
Kaz is the man. I've talked to him before, he's great. Hello. 2.6 million. Welcome to the Stream Tech Sales says. Imagine being the sales rep who closed the OpenAI Oracle $300 billion computing deal. What's your next move? Obviously this was done between Sam and Larry Ellison directly, but it's funny to imagine that you're just some SDR and you're like, yeah, today I'm going to call up Oracle or vice versa. You're at Oracle and you're just like, you know, who needs computers? OpenAI. My brother in law was telling me about this new app.
- [64:17]
B
I'm gonna see if Sam wants to get grab a dinner tonight.
- [64:21]
A
Yeah, yeah. Just calculating maybe invite him to some sort of sports game. Yeah, we got a box. Get the Warriors. Yeah, that's probably how.
- [64:29]
B
That's what Sam will want.
- [64:30]
A
Yeah, that's how it went down. And then, and then all of a sudden the rest is history.
- [64:37]
B
Well, Eliezer Yudakowski has a new book. Yeah, did you read it yet, John?
- [64:43]
A
I have not read it. I was thinking about reading. Seems like he distilled his thesis. Neerit Weiss Blatt says post some highlights from a review in New Scientists. No, AI isn't going to kill us all. Despite what this new book says, Yudajkowski has a number of policy prescriptions. All of them basically nonsense. Wow. Putting Utakowski in the truth zone first is that GPUs computer chips that have powered the current AI revolution should be heavily restricted. They say it should be illegal to own more than eight of the top 2024 era GPUs without submitting to nuclear style monitoring by an international body. By comparison, Meta has 3,500, 350,000 of these chips. Once this is in place, they say nations Must be prepared to enforce these restrictions by bombing.
- [65:37]
B
Do you see what the title. The title of the book.
- [65:39]
A
What is it called?
- [65:41]
B
If anyone builds it, everyone dies. Why superhuman AI would kill us all?
- [65:50]
A
I don't know. I like the. But Perry Metzger had a good take on it. He said, it's starting to look like the worst thing Eliezer Yuda Kowski ever did for his cause was actually write down all of his arguments in a form compact enough that a normal person could read them in a few days. Before the arguments were scattered all over tens of thousands of pages of really wordy blog posts, and only extremely dedicated people could bother to go through them. You get nerd sniped by them. In truth, the whole thing could be summarized in a few pages. Now that he's at least condensed it down to 256 pages. Good number of pages. I like that he's using a factor of two, which normies might consider reading. If they read it, though, they will learn that the argument isn't at all persuasive. You get people like the New York Times reviewer saying the book reads like a Scientology manual. The text interspersed with weird unhelpful parables and extra notes available via QR codes. Oh, that's very cool. Tyler, what's your take on Yudakowski?
- [66:55]
B
I think he's like, people hate on him too much. I think also, like, there is already.
- [67:02]
C
A book about AI safety that's like, very famous. That's like, readable.
- [67:05]
A
Bostrom.
- [67:06]
B
Yeah.
- [67:06]
C
Super intelligent snake Bostrom. Which is, like, a good book, I think.
- [67:09]
A
Yep.
- [67:11]
B
There's a good.
- [67:12]
C
There's a good.
- [67:13]
B
Actually young macro post about.
- [67:14]
A
I thought you were gonna say fang pneumonia.
- [67:17]
B
Young macro.
- [67:18]
C
There's a good young macro post.
- [67:19]
A
Yes.
- [67:20]
C
He says, Bay Area rationalists continuously getting spat on for warning us about their very rigorously researched and thought out eschatology.
- [67:27]
B
Must be one of the most flagrant.
- [67:28]
C
Cases of unfair maligning. They should be treated more like Christian missionaries worried about hell.
- [67:33]
B
Which I agree.
- [67:35]
A
Yeah.
- [67:35]
B
Yeah.
- [67:35]
C
I think it's like people just like, dunk on them constantly, which, like, I've read a fair amount of, like, less wrong posts. I don't. I'm not like a crazy doomer, but it's like you can understand the.
- [67:46]
A
The trade offs.
- [67:47]
B
Yeah. It's a valuable. It's a valuable public service to just spend your time for at least some people in the world to think about. What if this goes incredibly wrong?
- [67:56]
A
Yep.
- [67:57]
C
Yeah.
- [67:57]
B
Like, I'm very great that most people are thinking about, how do we make this Go. Right. But it's not necessarily, it's not net negative for the world to have to have. Of course, unless like, you know, you figure out the ideas catch on to such a degree that it makes it so that humanity can't, you know, again, it's, it's like a, it's a fine line between, you know, some of the policies that have been proposed like around the US at the state level have been like crazy easy so far this year.
- [68:28]
A
Right? Yeah.
- [68:28]
C
Like people anthropic who are like doing safety research. Is that's like obviously a good thing?
- [68:32]
A
Yep.
- [68:33]
B
There's like, you know, they publish it openly.
- [68:35]
C
It's like open source. I think that's like good. Obviously I'm not in favor of bombing data centers.
- [68:39]
A
Yeah.
- [68:40]
B
But I think it's reasonable to like yeah, people.
- [68:43]
C
I think people dunk on him way too much.
- [68:45]
A
Yeah, it's interesting. I think that when, yeah, when, when the, when the dunking on the doomer. When the doomer dunks were at an all time high, people like there was probably a group of like I don't know, 80% of tech that was like, let's dunk on this. This is not good. This is nonsense. But I feel like over the past two years you slowly picked off like 2 like 20% chunks of that group and said, well actually I'm interested in safety in this context. And so the examples I'll give are like, there's a lot of people that are like, yeah, I don't think I'm gonna get paperclipped anytime soon. But I love AI safety research. If it can tell me if Deepseek is trying to, you know, poison the American population against capitalism and it's like a geopolitical weapon or I'm worried about people getting one shotted and getting, and going crazy from chatting with 4O for days and days and days. That's a safety research problem, you know, are people using it just to go. And you know like the classic example is like oh, like someone develops like a chemical weapon or biological weapon. But what about just like an actual weapon? What about just like a normal like you know, like. And we just saw this with the terrible Charlie Kirk story. Like if you're, if you're, if you're sending into any LLM sketchy questions that highlight like you're planning something. There is, we need to do, we do need to have a discussion about like, like when does it call the cops on you? When does it flag this? Like how anonymous is this? Like if someone's blaring and obviously going to Google and saying like, I'm trying to do a bad thing, like should that flag things. There's a whole discussion to be had there. But that's. I put that within the broad context of AI safety and AI doom and I don't think it's unreasonable to have those discussions at all. So I don't know.
- [70:39]
B
Yeah, I think also.
- [70:40]
C
So like, even if you're like a accelerationist, you like think doomers safety is like completely useless. You can probably make the case that.
- [70:47]
B
Eliezer like writing about AI in like.
- [70:49]
C
Early 2000s, accelerated AI in general.
- [70:51]
A
Totally.
- [70:52]
C
So, like, yeah, totally.
- [70:54]
A
I mean it's certainly like marshaled capital to be like, oh well, like if this is the final innovation, like if it's, if it's going to be able to do that, like then we got to get.
- [71:02]
B
It has a anti. Like it has the opposite effect that he wants, which is totally says this is the most dangerous technology ever. And people are like, I got to find a way to make money on this.
- [71:13]
A
Yeah, I mean that was, that was the story of just nuclear power. It was like the bomb went off at Trinity, the bomb went off in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and people were like, wait, like this is a terrible like disaster. Like so like awful. And like there's a true doom scenario which is we all bomb each other and nuclear holocaust happens and everyone dies. But very quickly people were like, wait, there is a positive way to use this and that's with a nuclear reactor and that's with positive energy. The interesting doom scenario that I think you could get from Yudajkowski's fears, like really running wild is just a stagnation where if we actually say, as a society we agree with this and we say, yeah, we're never going past one gigawatt for a data center ever, and we will bomb them. And we all agree, like, well then, yeah, you do wind up in the nuclear energy scenario where we stop building them and basically the amount of nuclear power just kind of stagnated. And we had the technology, but we didn't really ramp it. We were just like, yeah, we'll find other ways to do things. And like, we found other ways to generate electricity with oil and gas, but also solar and wind. And we stayed away from nuclear for decades. Now we're getting back into nuclear. We could find other ways to generate images and deep research reports. Like, we could say, hey, we're not going any further as a society. If everyone agrees now there's geopolitical considerations, there's a lot of things where I don't think that's going to happen, but it is something that could happen. P stagnation is also a key metric to be tracking alongside P Doom is the response to P Doom is P stagnation. Anyway, I believe we have our first guest of the show in the Restream waiting room. Josh. Oh, look at.
- [72:58]
B
Look at this background. Wow.
- [73:00]
A
Impressive. How you doing?
- [73:02]
C
Long time listener, first time caller.
- [73:04]
B
Hey guys, great to great to have you on and congrats on the new gig.
- [73:10]
C
I'm thrilled to be at Lightspeed. It is a very exciting moment for my career for. That's great for Lightspeed. We're going to be doing a lot of fun things. You know, Lightspeed's AI like we're anthropic, we're mistral, we're xai, we're glean, we're pika a bridge, diversified. We've got the AI hits.
- [73:30]
A
Love it.
- [73:31]
B
Got the hits.
- [73:33]
A
Talk about your journey. What were you doing before?
- [73:36]
C
Yeah, I was at Redpoint for the last four years building the platform team.
- [73:40]
A
Now poached trade deal. Oh.
- [73:45]
C
Logan Bartlett.
- [73:47]
A
Yeah, he's fantastic.
- [73:48]
C
Yes two and all the content we built there, that is exceptional. They're going to continue to absolutely crush. But this was just an incredible opportunity. I think. When I was younger, I was chief Digital officer at NASDAQ and I worked on, you name the ipo. I worked on it. And Lightspeed had just always been that kind of like, aspirational venture firm for me. I got to work on the Nutanix IPO. I did AppDynamics. And then the night before Appdynamics was going to go public, like, they got acquired by Cisco and I had to take things made like, this is a firm that I wanted to work at when I was that age. And it's just such an honor to even have been considered for their CMO role. And I'm just very, very thankful to Ravi and Beijel and Romano and the whole Lightspeed team for giving the trust in me to. To shepherd this incredible brand into the future.
- [74:44]
B
Give us the master plan, tell all. And.
- [74:50]
C
We'Re not gonna do exactly the same stuff we did at Redpoint because that wouldn't be any fun. But look, I wouldn't be here on TVPN if it wasn't a new media landscape. You guys have changed the game. Like, created a way for founders to tell their story in an authentic way without shock journalism of being asked about, like, crazy news that doesn't apply to what they do. And actually having Deep questions of people that understand venture backed businesses and how they grow. I think we're in a new landscape of just finding ways for founders to tell their story in a compelling way and that's the same kind of stuff. We're going to be building at lightspeed. We'll obviously not be copycatting tvpn, but we've got a lot of stuff we'll be really, you know, forward on TikTok and Instagram as you could imagine. But yeah, we'll, we'll be everywhere.
- [75:45]
B
So Red, Red Point, redpoint. I mean you guys must have been getting like millions of views on Instagram on your account there for like a long time. Like how valuable has that been as a channel? Because I feel like, I feel like X is like especially noisy with like venture, right? You have tech, Twitter. It's like, you know, every single day there's, there's funds and companies piling in to try to get, get the word out on what they're doing and their strategy and thesis and all that stuff. But Instagram is like relatively, it's not an area that we've focused a huge amount on. But, but how, how important do you think that is as a platform for investors?
- [76:25]
C
Yeah, I mean Instagram was really the tip of our spear at Red Point. Right. Like, like when I joined, of course they didn't have an Instagram and then had to get the keys to it from the Instagram team and start building. But I think, you know, when I started it, people thought I was kind of crazy and they're like, this is, this is going to be good for the redpoint brand. And then, you know, it very quickly changed when you go to a pitch meeting and the founder goes, love your TikTok guy or that video is so relatable. Like it just, just creates a brand affinity that you just can't buy. And I felt like a lot of firms were a little scared to dip their toe into Instagram. But you know, quite a few have followed us there and, and very proud of what the team will continue to build there. But it, it really is an important channel and I think that the great news is that's where founders are in this decade, right? Like today's founders are on Instagram and TikTok. Like yes, X is still the place to share the clips, but that's where people consume their content. And so I felt like while it was an unlikely channel for success for a VC firm, I think it's actually really important because it's like the place that everybody actually Goes to just have a good time.
- [77:41]
B
Do you see venture funds eventually following the same path as other financial institutions in terms of advertising in, let's say, like print media. Right. You can imagine, like blackrock will run, you know, a print advertisement in the Wall Street Journal. Right. Do you ever see, do you think that's an interesting way to potentially build the brand with. I don't know that many founders that read the Journal at least as religiously as us, but certainly there has to be. In the role of CMO, you have to be marketing to founders, but also LPs, right?
- [78:15]
C
Yeah, well, actually, interestingly, my gig at NASDAQ when I was pitching IPOs for a living, that was something we would put in every single proposal. You get like a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal. But I think today's founders, that, that resonates as much. I think honestly they're better off buying a piece of your hat on TVPM than they are.
- [78:35]
A
Thank you.
- [78:35]
C
Buying a page in the Journal, like spend that money on Instagram advertising and TikTok ads and.
- [78:42]
B
Well, I meant, I meant more. I meant more for, for you at Lightspeed. Like, I think it would be iconic for Lightspeed to have a page in the Journal that says like, look at all, like we are in all the.
- [78:52]
C
AI winners like that Lightspeed is AI with just like the list of companies that we're in. Yeah, get ready. We're. We will be on every media platform. Legacy media still has a very special place in my heart. It's like, like, you know, I spent a decade on the floor of that exchange working with every media outlet to help get companies as much noise as we could make them around an ipo.
- [79:19]
B
How is, how, how do you think? Like, how is the, the how is like IPO marketing changed over the last decade since you're at nasdaq, I mean, we have so much activity this week. We're at, we are at the Klarna IPO yesterday, which honestly felt incredibly quiet in comparison to figma, which which was actually we figured out was intentional. The founder was like really celebrating back in Sweden. Right. So he just came in, he didn't even bring his family. He just handled business and got out of there. And then you had figma, which very much was like a celebration of.
- [79:53]
A
They have an office in New York.
- [79:54]
B
They have an office in New York. But it was a celebration of like the entire community. It was really like an event.
- [79:59]
A
It felt like a festival just in.
- [80:01]
B
Manhattan, probably tons of figma, but. But yeah, like broadly. How do you Think that that landscape has shifted.
- [80:07]
C
Well, that was the fun thing about that gig. I got to work with every great CEO, CFO and cmo, and you kind of get to see them almost in, like, what is their super bowl for the company and how they perform at the top of their game. Sometimes people are looking for that more muted response that I think you saw with Klarna, which I just think is, like, stylistically that company. But I think if you're looking for IPO excellence, what Figma did and what they pulled off, what, you know, some of the VC firms that helped them behind the scenes on their comms, like, it was a massive win for noise making. And I think it was like, kind of the gold standard for what you expect from an ipo. I think the thing is, is a lot of companies don't realize that, like. Like, this is your one day to make the noise because you've got the quiet period before and you got it afterwards. And so really, you have to squeeze as much juice out of the fruit that you can. And what I would always advise companies to do is spend every dollar you can across the, you know, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, promoting the fact that you went public, because this is your opportunity to tell those enterprise customers who weren't necessarily ready to sign on to you when you were a private company, no matter the size that you're ready for that.
- [81:36]
B
It'S the best branding ever to be like, yeah, we're a public company, we're.
- [81:40]
C
Public, we're a public company.
- [81:41]
B
It's on par with a great dot com.
- [81:45]
A
Probably more significant, a great ticker works well. How are you thinking about positioning lightspeed in the venture ecosystem? I feel like there's a couple funds that have carved out, like, kind of just very clear definitions of, like, okay, we're a crossover hedge fund, we have Publix, and then we have a growth fund. But, like, we're not even trying to be known for early stage. Maybe we write some seed check and, like, just getting that clear message of, like, when to call. What fund, I feel like, is the first job to do of a VC marketing arm. Maybe. How are you thinking about either narrowing or expanding or, like, defining the definition of, like, what is lightspeed? How does it fit in? How is it different?
- [82:35]
C
That's a great question. Look, I think actually it was one of the things that drew me to lightspeed, right when I was on the floor of the exchange as a young guy. Like, companies were going public in, like, seven years. And then while I was working there, it became 10 years. And I'm chasing companies for, you know, from series B for like seven years before they would go public with us and now it's 15. And I think honestly lightspeed strategy is what attracted to me to it because literally we support companies from seed through IPO and beyond. And I think that focus of saying we are going to be great early stage investors and then we're going to take the ones that are really winning, apply our full muscle to giving them all the tools that we can give them for an unfair advantage as they go up against the goliaths in their industry and then bring them through IPO and provide them that added lift that they need in those later growth rounds. I think it's a really unique offer that is quite differentiated in the venture space. And actually that that multi stage thing is, is why I'm here, right. Like I get to give early stage companies the noise making. I get to help the late stage companies with their IPO prep. It's truly like a dream job to go in and take this into the future. And we're going to be doing a lot of branding about why that model is so different than every everybody else.
- [84:13]
A
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking. This is great.
- [84:17]
B
Congrats on the new gig.
- [84:18]
A
On the new gig.
- [84:19]
C
I'm looking forward to my TVPN trade it card. Can I get that?
- [84:22]
A
Oh yeah, for sure.
- [84:24]
B
We'll work on it. We'll work on it. Logan, Logan. We might, I don't know if we.
- [84:28]
A
Want to upset Jeff Brody. I mean he did go to my high school so. Yeah, I got to keep things friendly over there.
- [84:34]
C
I know you've got some other lightspeed people coming up too.
- [84:37]
A
Yeah, yeah, Bucky, have them on soon.
- [84:39]
C
Awesome.
- [84:40]
A
We'll talk to you soon.
- [84:41]
B
Cheers everyone. Congrats.
- [84:42]
C
Thanks guys. Bye.
- [84:44]
A
See you. Quickly, let me tell you about numeral sales tax on autopilot. It's super intelligence for sales tax. They said if, if they build it. If they build it, everyone will spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Anyway, I think we have our next guest already in the restream waiting room. Nico Rosberg. We will bring the studio. Nico, how you doing?
- [85:11]
B
Welcome to the show.
- [85:14]
A
Can you hear us? Sorry for keeping you waiting.
- [85:17]
B
We got a bit of lag.
- [85:19]
A
Oh, we got some backgrounds.
- [85:21]
B
Can you hear us?
- [85:22]
A
Can you hear us? Hello? Testing, testing. One, two, three.
- [85:27]
B
Can you hear us?
- [85:29]
A
Can you hear us? Let's try and get him on the, on the call. In the meantime, let me tell you about Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive. Number one ranked G2. Also, people are having fun memeing the AirPods 3 live translation. It immediately became a meme format. I was disappointed that I couldn't workshop one in time to get a banger up, but people were having a lot of fun with it.
- [85:58]
B
I just like this picture.
- [85:59]
A
Yes.
- [86:00]
B
This picture being like hola, and it just says hello.
- [86:03]
A
What is. What, what does hola mean?
- [86:05]
B
Yeah, I knew you were going to ask this. So hola is a Spanish word for hello.
- [86:09]
A
Okay.
- [86:10]
B
Yeah.
- [86:11]
A
So I, So If I pay $300 put in my headphones, you would be.
- [86:14]
B
Able to translate that, do that?
- [86:15]
A
Yeah, it is, it is incredible technology.
- [86:18]
B
I mean, the whole, you know, I have no idea how to, how to kind of judge Duolingo as, as a, as a, as a public company and what, what, what the fair market value of Duolingo is. But I do think there's like, I don't think it's. Studying language has never been about. Yeah, I mean, I shouldn't say it never, but it has like, for 90% of people is not about the like, practicality. It's about stimulating your mind and, and doing new things and, and yeah, even if this existed, I still would have.
- [86:49]
A
Done years of Wikipedia exists and like founders podcast exists and they're very different products. Like, they can both tell me what was Larry Ellison up to in the 90s? Yeah. And when. And when the Oracle news broke, I actually went to both. I looked at the Oracle wiki and I also listened to the founder's podcast on Larry Ellison and they're very different. And I feel like Duolingo plays this like, fun game thing. Tyler Wishart take on Duolingo versus the AirPods 3.
- [87:19]
C
Well, so about the AirPods, like, unless both parties have them, then it's not that useful. Right. Because if you only speak Spanish, I only speak English, you're talking to me, I can't reply.
- [87:29]
A
There are a variety of ways to use it with one person. So if I'm going around, you speak to me and then when I speak, it can go into an app on my phone and I can just hit play and it will play the audio from my phone or it will show you words. So if you're speaking Spanish, I'm hearing English and my phone as I'm talking is displaying Spanish text. And so I can actually hand you my phone and you can read what I'm saying in English, in Spanish. So they've thought of some of the stuff. It still does seem like there's a little bit of a technological handshake going on where I need to say hola. Like, would you like to use AirPods Pro 3?
- [88:08]
B
See if you can translate this.
- [88:09]
A
This. Let's put.
- [88:10]
B
See if you can translate this. Mandarin. Wohensiwan pijo.
- [88:14]
A
Of course. I would like a beer, please.
- [88:17]
B
Close. I really enjoy beer.
- [88:19]
A
I really enjoy beer generally. Of course, yes. This will be huge for ordering. Another brewski. Noah Smith called it the universal translator from Star Trek.
- [88:30]
B
Yeah, it's very cool.
- [88:31]
A
Vitalik said it can't translate arbitrary alien languages. It hears for the first time with any. With only a tiny sample, though. Although maybe what happened in Star Trek is that every species realized that it's a good idea to expose a clean API that blurts out, like, one terabyte of all your historical cultural works. And that is enough to generate the embeddings for their language. I've seen AI work before. That suggests that if you have the embeddings for two languages, you only need a very small amount of translated word pairs to find the mapping between the two. Not sure if this holds for languages that evolved in totally separate worlds, but maybe it still does for convergent evolution reasons. And that gets you a translator. And so it ships. And so ships just always scan for, give me a terabyte of your culture API and always end up finding it. That's very funny. Speaking of alien languages, Tyler, you were mentioning that we discovered alien life on Mars. Or it was fake. What was your take on that? You were saying that the moon landing's fake and you don't believe in the moon landing. Right.
- [89:35]
B
Don't believe in space.
- [89:36]
A
You said that off mic.
- [89:37]
C
And you didn't want to talk more about.
- [89:38]
B
Space is fake.
- [89:39]
A
Yeah, space is fake. Going up high is fake. Planes. When you get in a plane rocket, why do they always have the windows down? It's because they're changing out the set decoration around you.
- [89:48]
B
That's right.
- [89:48]
A
Just get on the plane. You sit there for six hours while they rebuild the city around you. You get off, and then you're in the New York City. Oh, I'm in New York City. Oh, really? Just thousands of buildings.
- [89:59]
B
I move thousands of miles.
- [90:01]
A
Put the boards up. Yeah, okay. I'll believe what I see.
- [90:04]
B
Yeah, right.
- [90:05]
A
Anyway, what was the news? NASA got a photo. How is there a new photo on Mars? The rover's just going around. Yeah, okay, so the rover's going around looking for stuff.
- [90:16]
B
Wait, can we pull up the.
- [90:17]
A
Can we pull up the picture, it's in the deck. It's later in the deck.
- [90:19]
B
So who took the photo?
- [90:22]
A
The rover.
- [90:23]
B
The rover of itself. Like, kind of like selfie stick.
- [90:25]
A
Yeah. The rover has, like a 360cam on the end of an awful. And there's someone who gives instructions, I think, like, once a day because there's such a delay to get the message there that they say the rover's kind of semi autonomous. Then they say, hey, go look around over here.
- [90:40]
B
The chat, just to defend Tyler's honor.
- [90:43]
A
He is not a flat. Flat.
- [90:44]
B
Tyler is not a flat Earther. We're just joking around. Just joking around.
- [90:47]
A
Anyway, we believe we have our next guest, Nico Rosberg. How you doing, Nico?
- [90:53]
D
Hey, how's it going, guys? Hey, guys.
- [90:56]
B
Welcome to the show.
- [90:57]
A
Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for taking the time. How are you doing?
- [90:59]
D
Thanks a lot. Pleasure to be here. I'm doing good, thank you. You're catching me in Monaco. Monaco, where I've grown up here.
- [91:05]
A
Fantastic.
- [91:06]
B
Classic.
- [91:07]
A
How is it this time of year?
- [91:10]
D
Actually, it's lovely because it's kind of still summer, still really warm, and we're still enjoying the outside. Going to the promenade, going to the pool with the kids. Because I have two kids, they're seven and nine.
- [91:19]
C
Wow.
- [91:19]
D
And they just started school again after the summer, but. But still really warm here, so it's lovely. South of France is beautiful.
- [91:24]
A
That's fantastic. About you guys, we've been traveling a lot. We were in New York City yesterday, San Francisco the day before for the Klarna IPO and then Y Combinator demo day, and then back to la. So a little bit too much travel. A little frazzled.
- [91:40]
B
Yeah. I don't know how you. I don't know how drivers actually do this. Right. Just. Cause when we go. When we go on the road for 48 hours with that kind of pace, it really throws everything off. But we're here.
- [91:55]
A
Anyway. Can you give us a little bit of backstory on your path to venture from your racing career? Yeah, sure.
- [92:06]
D
So, obviously, it's not the most natural switch.
- [92:09]
A
Yeah.
- [92:09]
D
And racing career. Yeah, I was on it. I was at it for 20 years. You start when you're 10 years old. And then I ended up winning the Formula One World Championship at the age of 31 with the Mercedes. Mercedes team. Thank you very much. Lovely to hear that. And I, I. And I did the. Yeah. Pretty extreme thing of retiring, like, five days after I won the championship, because it just felt like my dream was complete. I achieved what I set out to do and it's an insane, I mean, all the founders listening. It's an insane lifestyle to pursue relentlessly your goal. Just like for founders, but, but it's the same for athletes. It's really, really madly intense. And so I was quite happy that it was all achieved and I just wanted to move on to the next life, but then I had no clue what to do. So I was really searching a lot of things. And now, nine years after, before you.
- [93:03]
B
Dive into that, do you have any idea what percentage of drivers that end up as a Formula one driver actually even podium at any point in their career? Is an it extremely low, isn't it? Extremely low?
- [93:19]
D
Yeah, I'm sure it is. I don't know the exact numbers, obviously, but if I had to guess, it would probably be less than 10%. Yeah, around 10% if I had to guess. Now that's just a, that's just a wild guess now and then. Of course, in terms of world champions, there's 30, 34 or 35 world champions in the 70 year history of the sport. And there's been, there's been thousands of F1 racers, you know, so it's a, it's an extremely small percentage.
- [93:49]
A
So. Yeah, talk about the transition to investing. I've heard a little bit of the path and it is unconventional, but when I heard it explained, it made perfect sense. But I'd love to hear it from you.
- [94:01]
D
No, it's just, I mean, I always, I've always appreciated the startup world a lot. When I retired, mobility was just going through this extreme transition. Suddenly there was like autonomous driving, there was connectivity, shared mobility and it was all kicking off exactly when I retired and I was the mobility world champion. So it's kind of natural for me.
- [94:23]
B
You're good at getting around.
- [94:25]
D
Yeah, it was kind of natural to take a first look there. And Mercedes also helped me out and because they were investing in startups, so I got going that way. Really loved it, was fascinated and it's been a journey ever since. It's been up and down enough. Finally I kind of found my venture capital North Star and I'm building Rosberg Ventures now, which is a venture capital asset manager. And we have multiple products, strategies, but very much, you know, focused on the US So it's kind of bridging, bridging Europe with us. That's really our big focus and yeah, I'm really excited.
- [95:01]
B
And so that means sort of like European LP based but investing in America.
- [95:08]
D
Yeah, that's exactly. Yeah, that's one, one facet of it, but also Then the European corporates connecting them with the, with the breakout generational startups in the US because there's a great connectivity between, between the startups in the U.S. and the corporates in the U.S. but sometimes that link to the European and German corporates is quite weak. And also surprisingly, like the German large caps, they don't have a very deep understanding of what's going on in the US venture capital landscape. So there's a great opportunity for us to add value in creating those connections. And as you know.
- [95:47]
B
What'S the openness to partnering with like, if you're like a German, you know, multi billion dollar company, what's the open to even using products from startups? Is it, is it high, low?
- [96:04]
D
It really depends. I mean one of our most famous car manufacturers, not going to say the name, but the likes of BMW, Mercedes, etc. We're working with them and we're introducing startups and then the other day they said, sorry, we have no more budget to explore. And you're like okay, but, but you guys are facing insane, like insane threats from Tesla China and you're telling us here that you don't have budget to explore transformational solutions from the startup landscape. That was the.
- [96:39]
B
Yeah. The point of enterprise software for the most part is help people save money or help people make money. Ideally do both.
- [96:48]
C
Exactly.
- [96:48]
B
So.
- [96:49]
D
So actually, so we brought them like a tool that is gonna analyze their whole procurement contracts and everything and they actually, their revenues are only, they are part of the cost savings that they generate. Yeah. And then this car manufacturer, BMW, Mercedes, Audi, whatever, they're like oh, okay, so we don't need to invest anything upfront here. They just take a car cut from the savings that they generate for us on procurement and then they're like okay, this is great, this will definitely have a look at. So it depends. But anyways, in general there's a great readiness, which is reassuring nonetheless. But they're not really very in depth at the moment in understanding what's coming in terms of transformation. AI, it's a big challenge, as you know, for enterprises to outside of the corporates.
- [97:45]
A
What is the family office or ultra high net worth individual landscape look like out in Europe? Are they more risk on now? Are these the type of folks that you met through your F1 career that became LPs eventually?
- [98:00]
D
Yeah, sure. It's many of the families that I got to know in racing that were like big sponsors or even the car manufacturers. So that's kind of the link back to my racing, which is nice for Me as well. Well, and in general it's, it's very risk off in Europe compared to America, which is a real weakness because risk doesn't even necessarily have to be risk. If you have a long, long term time horizon, even something like the NASDAQ becomes low risk. Even though on a, on a three month horizon it's a high risk, high risk investment. And that's the one thing, that's the thing that the Europeans. Yeah, I don't know. I mean they don't, they don't really get that right. They're very conservative, but in a bad way.
- [98:40]
A
Yeah.
- [98:40]
D
So very often they hardly like the endowments. They hardly beat inflation. But there was the high inflation. They were hardly beating or not even beating inflation. It was, it was pretty shocking. But for me it's awesome also because I can take all my learnings now from sport into this venture capital business that I'm building. You know, and one of the main things, like US athletes, I think we're pretty good at this relentless pursuit of our goals. Like second place just does not exist. Giving up does not exist. It's like absolutely pretty, pretty insane. I think that's one really big strength of ours which is really appreciated in the venture capital ecosystem because of course the best founders are exactly the same.
- [99:23]
A
Yeah. Talk to me about some of those best founders. The relentless, the risk takers, the ones who don't accept second place. Who do you look up to in the American entrepreneurship world or see someone where maybe they didn't, maybe they weren't built for F1, but you think they could have done well if they were a racer?
- [99:47]
D
Well, that's a hard question now. I have no idea. I mean the racing skill is hand eye coordination.
- [99:53]
A
Okay, sure. But what, yeah. What about a more abstract level, the.
- [99:58]
D
Foundation of everything Then of course, in terms of being relentless in the pursuit of, of winning. There's, there's many, many examples and I, I'm personally involved with the likes. For example, I'm an personal investor in like applied intuition.
- [100:11]
A
Oh yeah, yeah.
- [100:13]
D
There is a, is a, like, he's a, he's a machine as well. You know, I mean it's like unbelievable. The energy and the determination and great grit or, or some European companies. Examples are like 11 labs.
- [100:25]
A
Oh yeah.
- [100:26]
D
Which I'm personally invested in. Or, or lovable.
- [100:28]
A
Yeah.
- [100:29]
D
And like lovable. Anton is also pretty extreme, pretty extreme level of commitment. But, but I'm also excited. You know, by now I really have really cool portfolio also in terms of my personal investing.
- [100:42]
A
Yeah.
- [100:43]
D
And yeah, it's just, it's. It's great to see how these companies are growing and unfolding.
- [100:49]
A
Yep.
- [100:50]
B
Jordy, how have you what it feels like? Over the last few years, founders have started to sort of adopt the health practices or the approach to health that athletes do. There's been a bunch of viral stuff recently, people joking around about this. What has there been? What was sort of most, most impactful for your performance during your driving career that you still apply to building, like a venture firm from a health standpoint?
- [101:22]
D
Yeah, I mean, so I was really quite a perfectionist when it came to preparing myself in the best possible way. So I've been through everything. I had a psychologist working with me. I did two hours of psychology and philosophy every two days. Like, I was absolutely flat out on this because I could feel and it was obvious that I had more. I had capacity to improve mentally as an athlete. I was under pressure, you know, scared, worried, distracted and all these. All these things. So there was a lot of capacity there for me to improve. And I found incredible, incredible, incredible progress mentally. And so I did a lot of meditation. I simplified my life. I removed all emailing news. Everything was gone. Instagram, social media. There was nothing on my telephone, on my pursuit to become a world champion. So it was really quite, quite extreme.
- [102:19]
B
Would you do caffeine or any stimulants? Or does that just throw you off in terms of. We've seen Mark Zuckerberg doesn't do caffeine. And I could imagine in a driving setting, you're just slightly more twitchy or nervous because of caffeine and you, you crash the car and your race is over.
- [102:38]
D
Yeah, no, so I didn't do caffeine also, because the problem I have is when I take caffeine, I can't sleep at night. So that would be counterproductive. Then even like, for example, when it came to jet lag, I had a Harvard sleep professor working with me who actually now has created an app based on what we had been pursuing at the time, which is called Time Shifter. And it actually was app store app of the day. It has like a million subscribers by now. It's, like becoming quite a success. And this, this Harvard sleep professor was, was supporting me at the time. And I did a whole year with no jet lag. You were saying before earlier how traveling is destroying you and you don't know, you don't know how the athletes do it. I think so. And I did a whole year, no jet lag. So it was all about like 1 1/2 hour Steps per day, maximum in time zone shift. Even before you start Traveling the last five days, you leave home one and a half hour steps, blackout glasses, 10,000 lux. Like Brian Johnson in the morning, first thing, all these tools. And it was incredible. It was incredible to do a whole year traveling continents, no jet lag. So it's really all these things that it's just really essentially what it is. It's putting together all the little details, incremental gains. Gains and focusing on them because you all know that many incremental gains are a huge progress and sometimes we kind of neglect them and are lazy and don't focus on the small steps as well. And that was probably a strength of mine, which I'm now taking into venture capital as well. Just all the details, putting them together. It comes back to being relentless again.
- [104:16]
A
Yeah. What's your state on the read of. What's your read on the state of F1 broadly? It feels like from an American perspective, drive to survive was a big moment. Cadillac's coming into the Cadillac has an F1 team joining next year. There's a few other milestones and key storylines. But what's captured your attention over the past few years in the story of.
- [104:42]
D
F1 Broadly, my attention has been how F1 has managed to conquer America. And 40% of the new fans are women. So it's almost like 50. 50 male women. Male, female.
- [104:55]
A
Yeah.
- [104:56]
D
Which is so cool. And, and this is a big change. And it's all. It's thanks to Netflix.
- [105:01]
A
Yep.
- [105:01]
D
It's thanks to social media. They've opened up social media. Like in my time, social media wasn't even allowed nine years ago because it was taking eyeballs off the television product.
- [105:10]
A
Yeah.
- [105:11]
D
But actually it's a multiplier, you know, so that was a bit short sighted. I remember, you know, who owns F1 who's done such a great job and Netflix has been so powerful because they actually managed to capture the humans behind F1 and, and it's like a reality TV show rather than documentary. And that's what we love. We love to see emotions, we love to identify with the. Connect with the humans behind the sport. And they just managed to do such a great job. So that's really what I'm. What I'm finding so cool is how our sport is growing, developing. The excitement is growing. Super, super thrilling.
- [105:48]
A
Yeah.
- [105:49]
B
How are you thinking about the rollout of autonomous vehicles over the next five to 10 to 20 years? Even over the long term? Is it something you spend a lot of time trying to invest against any type of thesis.
- [106:04]
D
So I invested in a tailored driving remote control driving solution. So tailored driving and, and at one point we were like, oh, this is going to go wrong because we're going to full autonomy now. But it looks like someone like Tesla is actually having much more troubles than they perhaps expected two or three years ago. And especially in the edge cases, they're still having too many issues and you know, they had to launch their robo taxis with safety drivers in their cars, etc. Etc. And, and the questions is still there. Is their camera only solution actually ever going to be good enough? Yes, they're learning on millions of miles every year. But can the camera solution only deal with all these edge cases of fog and rain and snow and etc. Etc. So there's still a very, very big question mark and no one really knows. Then you have the Waymo, which certainly is better tech, but of course, course unit economics. I mean it's super expensive hardware per car, so how scalable is that? Also difficult still to judge at this point, even though they seem to be going strong at the moment. But yeah, so it's really not clear yet who is going to be the eventual winner there. But it's, yeah, again, fascinating time, but it will take some, some more time for us to finally know who wins. And then the worry though is like Europe, Europe for example, unfortunately is almost missing out completely on this value creation because they don't have, they don't, they're going to end up like the mobile phones that just became hardware. So the system was done by Android or Apple and then they just became hardware suppliers. And that's a threat for the European car manufacturers because they won't have the autonomy. I wonder if, if they'll even have the connectivity to their customers.
- [108:01]
B
But isn't applied intuition could potentially save them.
- [108:09]
D
In terms of that interface connecting to the customer who's riding on board, et cetera. So very tough moment for European, the car manufacturers and also honestly, many of the American car manufacturers. They're pretty much in the same, same situation.
- [108:24]
A
Yeah, we have Formula one, we have Formula E which showcases electric vehicles. Do you think we'll ever see Formula A to showcase autonomous vehicles?
- [108:36]
D
So we had that already. There was robo race, I think it was called. Yeah, they're still somewhat slower than us, like 15 seconds a lap or something. 10 seconds left, so it's going to take some more time there too. I don't know if that's because we love the gladiators, the humans, of course, in the, the sport, you know, and if it's just tech racing each other, I don't know if that of course it will, can find its niche, but I don't think it's going to be a huge, fascinating global, global success story. Who are you guys rooting for in F1?
- [109:06]
A
I. Well, I, I'm, I'm, I'm super interested in this. In this. Like, you know, we've seen the benchmarks of human versus AI in so many different categories and I want to know when an autonomous vehicle, we'll put up like a sub 7 minute nurburgring time and it seems like it might be years, it might be a long time actually.
- [109:27]
B
Especially if it was a manual.
- [109:29]
A
Yes, especially if it's a manual and it has to be driven by a humanoid. So you can't just plug in like you do with a Waymo. You have to actually put the physical robot in the seat. The robot has to buckle itself in. Very dexterous, very difficult to slide into a cockpit properly. Properly. Do you have any favorite.
- [109:48]
D
I'm impressed. You know your Nurburgring times. I'm very impressed. So Nurburgring, for all the viewers, it's the greatest racetrack in the world.
- [109:56]
A
Yes.
- [109:56]
D
And it's this crazy 15 kilometer roller coaster through the, through the forest in the middle of Germany and it's called the Green. The Green.
- [110:06]
A
Hell.
- [110:06]
D
And all car manufacturers set benchmark lap times there and if you, you manage to break the record, you get like global news and everything. So it's a very, very important racetrack.
- [110:16]
B
Is it? I haven't driven it myself. Is it? But I did the last time I was really. I mean, obviously we'll watch when the manufacturers are doing lap times, but the last time I saw footage from, I saw a GT3RS get just absolutely destroyed on the track. Is it safe to go out and just do public laps or would you stay away from something like that? I'm sure when you want to race, wouldn't do it.
- [110:41]
D
I would be scared. It's, it's the craziest racetrack in the world and you have a bunch of.
- [110:47]
B
People from all over the world coming and just like they want to go fast, they want to go fast, but.
- [110:53]
D
It'S, it's very, very dangerous. So I'd be careful with that.
- [110:56]
B
Yeah.
- [110:57]
A
What else are you tracking in the automotive world? Broadly? There's. Yeah. Have you been tracking what's happening in, in China? Are there any other interesting dynamics with any of the upstarts? I feel like most of these companies are post startup rounds at this point with Rivian and Being public at this point. But have you been tracking any just Future Next Generation OEMs?
- [111:27]
D
So I was in China recently and shocking. You know how Porsche, Porsche, Porsche. I can't remember how you're supposed to say it. They have, they have the Porsche Taycan.
- [111:37]
A
Yeah.
- [111:37]
D
The electric, their electric superstar.
- [111:39]
A
Yeah.
- [111:39]
D
And then you go to China and there's Xiaomi who, who has this. I don't even know what I think.
- [111:45]
A
It'S the SU7 is the one you're thinking.
- [111:47]
D
Okay.
- [111:47]
A
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [111:49]
D
Cayenne and I rode in this car. So first of all, the, The Taycan is $120,000 or 130.
- [111:55]
A
Yeah.
- [111:55]
D
This thing is $40,000.
- [111:57]
A
Yeah.
- [111:57]
D
And, and it looks the same. So they just copy the look the of it and I get in and like five years ago, seven years ago, the interior quality then was rubbish. Everything was cracking. Felt like it was going to fall apart. And then you start driving and the drive that, the handling also then feels rubbish. And now I'm in this. The interior quality is perfection. It's just beautiful. It drives awesomely, has more power than the Porsche Taycan, has more range than the Porsche Taycan. So it was proper scary. I was like, oh my God, like what this is, this is, is like this is shocking. And then. Let me just finish. You would say, okay, but Porsche still has their brand. But even that is gone because the Xiaomi founder is a rock star in China. He's like the Elon Musk of China. He has a huge social media following. So even the brand moat is gone in China. So it feels like it's just complete game over there. And, and it's happening. And they're coming to Europe too, which is so scary. Now BYD just overtook Tesla as the best selling electric car in Europe. So it's a really watershed moment and super critical moment for the automotive sector. Yeah. And then in terms of startups, I think I'm not seeing much at the moment. Really.
- [113:17]
A
Yeah, it's really capex intensive and a lot of those businesses have, I mean.
- [113:20]
D
Even BYD for example. So if you look at BYD and NIO, I believe they got 10 billion in government subsidies in order for them to get to where they are now in terms of taking on the world. But that is never going to happen in Europe. You're never going to have the European government supporting a startup with 10 billion or cargo with 10 billion in order to become global electric vehicle manufacturing leaders, you know. So yeah, tough to compete against that, isn't it?
- [113:50]
A
Last question from my side did you have a reaction? Did you see the F1 movie? Did you have a reaction to Apple's F1 movie? What'd you think if you saw it?
- [114:01]
D
Yeah. So the honest answer is I haven't seen it yet because I was holding out to see it with my wife and then that didn't work out for some reason. Yeah.
- [114:10]
A
You have kids.
- [114:12]
D
We're still holding out and we're probably going to do a cinema night at our house here in Monaco with any friends left that I have not yet seen it. Maybe we'll do a cinema night next week or something. But I hear great things. You know, of course it's. It's Hollywood, it's fake, but I hear great things and. Yeah, and it was amazing. I was at the racetrack and Brad Pitt was on the real grid just before the race starts with his race car and he had a real garage in the pit lane with his race car, like at the real race, like the race started and he's there like, is. It's so crazy how they put that together and. And then with Augment virtual reality, they overlaid his car onto one of the real racing cars in the race for this. It's like, it's pretty impressive. So anyways, I hear good things and I think it's a great, great step again for. For F1.
- [114:59]
A
Yeah. Total American F1 dominance.
- [115:01]
D
What are you. What are you guys most excited about in the startup world? What's the last thing that you've seen which. Which you're raving about?
- [115:11]
A
That's really hard to put on the spot in the startup world at the earliest stages. I mean, we've been seeing a lot of folks work on new AI hardware devices, and there was one that just put out a video about where looks like headphones, but it measures the electrical signals in your jaw and so you're just whispering. You're not even making any noise, but you're talking, like making mouth movements and it can transcribe that into an app or. So I can be talking to you across a crowded room and you can hear me and I can hear you, but no one else can hear us. And if you imagine about voice interfaces in the future where you're talking to ChatGPT or any LLM all day long, being able to do that in a public place or randomly, that feels like that could be the next big thing. There's a rumor that Sam Altman's working on that with Jony. I've. So that was something where it's like there's going to Be a new wave of some sort of input technology. Pre neuralink.
- [116:21]
B
Yeah. On my side, this has been such an insane year on so many levels. You have geopolitical chaos, you have warfare, you have assassination tragedies. There's so much uncertainty, there's so much negativity in the world. And from our point of view, we get to interview talented builders every single day. We've interviewed hundreds of founders this year. And that is like the bright spot to me is like across every industry and any sector that's important to the world, there are bright, bright, optimistic people that are dedicating their lives to solving problems. From logistics to, you know, autonomous vehicles to new consumer hardware, like any category, there are bright people that are dedicating their lives. And so I think that's like the white pill for me is when I think about how chaotic and crazy the world and there's a lot of, like John said, tragedy, but at the same time there's people at an individual level are committed to changing the world. And so I think it's much easier to be incredibly optimistic about the future and not give in to the doom when you have our job. And I know it's the same for you as well in terms of meeting talented people that are dedicating their lives to solving real problems in the world.
- [117:47]
D
Yeah, I mean, it's lovely. There's so much hope in the startup world, so much ambition. It's really, really impressive. By the way, I met the founder that you were talking about with that device on the year. I know him. I know him very well. Kleiner Perkins, which is like perhaps one of the. I mean, the best VC firm at the moment, or one of the best. They're backing him.
- [118:10]
A
Fantastic.
- [118:11]
D
So I know him well.
- [118:13]
B
I think you. I wonder if you just broke the news there. That's amazing.
- [118:19]
A
Yeah, I mean, yeah.
- [118:20]
B
How often do you visit?
- [118:22]
C
Come on.
- [118:22]
A
We don't know.
- [118:23]
D
You didn't mention any names or anything.
- [118:25]
B
Yeah, yeah, we know. Nothing. It's just a rumor. How often do you come to the.
- [118:30]
D
US So I have to. I mean, of course, yeah, it's important for me to be there. So I'm there about once every two, three months.
- [118:38]
A
Months.
- [118:38]
D
So quite a lot coming there. Quite a lot. Yeah.
- [118:40]
B
Well, next time you're in LA.
- [118:42]
D
I love hosting at F1 races also, so I'm constantly hosting all your friends from. From the Bay Area and New York also at the races. So I host everybody in Miami. Hosting everybody again now at Vegas, which is lovely. It's very cool.
- [118:56]
A
That's Amazing.
- [118:57]
B
Amazing.
- [118:57]
A
Well, thank you so much for taking the time on a late evening to chat with us. We had a lot of fun talking to you.
- [119:03]
B
Come back on anytime.
- [119:04]
A
Yeah, we'd love to talk to you.
- [119:05]
D
I just got an email in my top right corner where I'm gonna find out if I. If I get accepted to the vet. One of the very best funds in the US and now I'm gonna click on it. It's been a five day fight with all nighters and everything because of technical complications. Whatever.
- [119:20]
A
Yes.
- [119:21]
D
Because it's so hard. They're like everybody's like 2x over subscribed. It's like crazy times in the US.
- [119:27]
B
Do you want to open it live?
- [119:29]
A
Open the email, give us the reaction.
- [119:31]
D
Let's let a negative. If I get a negative. Thanks for your patience. Can you still. Oh man. We are going ahead. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yes. Can you still see me? Actually?
- [119:45]
A
Yes. Yes, you can get it.
- [119:51]
B
It's a gong.
- [119:54]
A
Congratulations. We got a. We got a fund allocation for Rosberg Ventures. Let's go.
- [120:01]
B
I was gonna. We were gonna end the show.
- [120:03]
C
Yeah.
- [120:03]
A
We were going to give them a call.
- [120:05]
C
What are you saying?
- [120:06]
A
What are you thinking?
- [120:07]
B
Correct this right now. This is an injustice.
- [120:09]
A
That is fantastic news. Congratulations.
- [120:11]
D
Let me narrow it down for you as well. Who it was. Come on. At least for some fun.
- [120:14]
A
Okay.
- [120:15]
D
It's between something like Thrive Accel, Green Oaks or Elad.
- [120:22]
A
Okay. Oh, oh, these are great firms.
- [120:24]
D
It's one of those four.
- [120:25]
A
Okay. Those are great firms. Let's go. Shout out to all the absolute boys.
- [120:30]
B
Amazing. Well, you should get the other. The other three too.
- [120:33]
A
Yeah, get the full stack. We'll make some calls.
- [120:36]
D
Maybe we have all of them already.
- [120:37]
A
Thank you so much for hopping on the show. This is fantastic.
- [120:40]
B
Yeah, Great to hang.
- [120:43]
A
Have a good one.
- [120:43]
B
Talk soon.
- [120:44]
A
Bye.
- [120:47]
B
Stakes.
- [120:48]
A
High stakes. He lives his life on the edge. That's a real F1 driver move to open an emergency live audience.
- [120:56]
B
And potentially getting rejected.
- [120:58]
A
We have our next guest in the restream waiting room. Really quickly. Let me tell you about Adeo Customer relationship Magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free. We have our next guest. Two timer. We got Michael. What's up with the TVPN hat? Thank you.
- [121:16]
B
Let's go.
- [121:16]
A
Great sign of respect.
- [121:17]
C
I gotta do my part, guys.
- [121:19]
A
I gotta do my part. Thanks for hopping on. I didn't.
- [121:21]
C
I didn't have one of the hats.
- [121:22]
A
We will get you one. We'll get you one.
- [121:23]
C
One day. One day Near.
- [121:25]
A
We were over subscribed actually we, I think we made a couple hundred of them and not nearly enough. But thank you so much for hopping on the stream. Let's. Let's just kick it off with some intros for those who are listening.
- [121:38]
C
Near. Take it away. Take it away. Near. I'm near Zickerman. Thanks a lot for having me. I'm the CEO and co founder of Oboe and the other co founder is my good friend Mike here. What's up guys? Great to be back. Obviously we've spoken a number of times. I'm one of the co founders of Oboe and also a partner at Lightspeed and Nir and I had previously co founded Anchor, which we sold to Spotify.
- [122:00]
A
No way. Putting the gang back together.
- [122:06]
B
Anyways, let's get into the news. So you guys launched, Are you guys, what's your product?
- [122:12]
A
How are you positioned?
- [122:14]
B
Yeah. Is it a beta? Is it. Is it thing? Ga, what's going on?
- [122:18]
C
Yeah, so we're out there. Oboe is live to the world and it is the easiest way to learn anything. So you come to our website obo. FYI, single prompt. We will magically create a course to teach anyone anything. When I say anything, I really mean anything. Mike and I were talking earlier. What was the example we had? We had you could learn about how to cook pasta and you could learn about the quantum physics of why, of how cooking pasta works if you wanted to. So truly a broad range of topics. And with OBOE courses we let you learn in a variety of different ways. Right. So you come in again, we magically create a course and it is made up of everything from the ability to read about the topic, short form, long form, to listen to a podcast about it, to hosts like yourselves talking about whatever the topic, completely personalized to the user. We have games, we have quizzes, a totally immersive experience to let you learn.
- [123:13]
A
Yeah, I saw a screenshot from none other than Martin Shkreli saying this was very cool and it showed. I mean it felt like a lot of the Anchor DNA was in there in the sense of when I think about Anchor, it's like you have an MP3 and you need it on a lot of different and you need to instantiate it in many different ways. Distribution is multi platform and you have essentially like some sort of deep research project going on under collecting information, organizing with LLMs, I'm sure. But then instantiating it in a summary, a deep dive, an audio product. So talk about the multimodality where you see that going in the near term. When are we going to get video in here? At some point. I could imagine with VO3 and some of the advances there, eventually you'll be able to just like sit in on a one hour generated video lecture if that's what you want. I don't know if anyone wants that long term, but where do you see all the different multimodalities going?
- [124:10]
C
I actually think a lot of people do want video. It's in the works.
- [124:13]
A
We are working on it.
- [124:14]
C
And to me, you know, I mean, people spend hours on YouTube constantly trying to learn and, you know, explore curiosities. The reality is people are online learning constantly. You just don't think about it as learning. You know, you're on tons of different websites, tons of different apps trying to of like figure out understanding things in.
- [124:31]
A
The news, understanding what you read, trying.
- [124:33]
C
To get, you know, you're curious about things and you want to dig in. People do not learn in one path and they don't learn with one format. So a core philosophy of ours is if you're going to build a learning platform, you have to learn it the way that people actually learn. And the way that people actually learn is multimodal. Right? It's immersive. Mike, what do you, what do you want to add? Yeah, I mean, look, I think the, the, the beauty of the multimodality is it lets people learn on their terms. You know, one of the reasons we started this company is we sort of looked at education and we looked at learning and we realized that the way people learn right now is too rigid. It's too one size fits all, right? You have higher education and traditional education teaching every single person on the planet the same thing in the same exact way. And that's just not how we all learn. We all learn in different ways. Some of us like to read, some of us like to listen, some of us like to watch TikTok. And so what we realized is we have this technology now that can personalize learning for anyone on the planet. And so it would be a shame to not actually do that and make the most personalized form of education ever before.
- [125:35]
A
How are you thinking about gamification? I seem to remember you guys had badges in the first app and to kind of help someone get over the curve of actually distributing a show. We're seeing, you know, the both like resilience and the stocks all over the place with Duolingo. But it feels like Duolingo has done a great job of taking an education product and making it fun and Repetitive and maybe even a little addictive. And it seems like that is a piece of the goal. But how do you think about the various trade offs there?
- [126:07]
C
Look, I think gamification is key. I think the main reason gamification is key and accessibility and making it fun is key is because learning is intimidating. Most people who want to learn something new, they look at how you do it and they just get intimidated and they turn away. And that's why, why so much of what we've built and what we'll continue to build is around making it really digestible, really piecemeal. Like, like Mike said, putting it in the control of the user so that they could decide how they want to navigate things. I think any course on oboe should be presented to a user today and in the future. As you can do this, we're going to help guide you through it. Right? But we're going to put enough tools in your hands so that you could be the one to guide the system and let it know how to effectively teach you.
- [126:45]
B
How do you, how are you guys thinking about solving for hallucinations? If, if, if I, if, if, you know, if you can remember a teacher that taught you something and it was wrong, it's like it just completely destroys the trust. Like you, it's hard to, you're like you said that this event happened in 1970 and it actually happened in 1950.
- [127:08]
C
Yeah, I mean what would, what would we be as a 2025 AI startup without a multi agent architecture right near? Let's give it up for explain our multi agent architecture. Let me, let me tell you about our multi agent architecture. Look, the big challenge in a lot of what we spent resources on over the last year building this thing was on how do you present to the user really high quality, engaging content that is accurate extremely quickly? Because for this content to be lightweight and accessible, it has to happen fast. Right? So the way that this works under the hood is like this. I think the, honestly, the toughest challenge is an orchestration challenge. It's how do you simultaneously have an agent generating, you know, the skeleton of course, and the references that it's going to pull in and the script for the audio and fact check all this stuff, agents correcting other agents and all that happens within seconds of you generating a course and it's going to continue to get better. Look, hallucinations I think are, the reality is I think right now people primarily learn through resources that are completely unchecked. And so I think one of the biggest advantages that, advantages that we want to Invest in is making sure that when people come here, they feel confident that they're getting the highest quality and the most accurate.
- [128:16]
A
Well, congratulations on the launch. I'm excited to try it out. My challenge for you, I don't know if either of you play the oboe. You need to use oboe to learn to play the oboe. You need to dog food your own product. Next time we have you on the show, I expect a solo on the obo.
- [128:30]
B
OBO solo.
- [128:31]
A
OBO solo. Let's make it happen.
- [128:33]
B
Congrats.
- [128:33]
A
I think it's a great idea. Yeah, you should.
- [128:35]
C
Guys, let me just, let me just say one more thing, if you don't mind. I know you got another guest coming on. We are investing a lot of money in AI. We've invested like what, a trillion dollars at this point or something. It seems crazy to us that we have invested so much money into a technology that's going to make an alien life form that's actually smarter than us. And so the whole purpose of this company is to actually use the artificial intelligence to make the human smarter. That's what we're trying to do here. It's actually the. Let's pour that investment back into human intelligence. All right. We're bringing human intelligence back.
- [129:05]
B
Organic intelligence. Farm to table.
- [129:07]
A
That's right, Farm to table. Intelligence.
- [129:09]
B
I'm excited to check it out. It's extremely, you know, we cover like hundreds of topics a show. There's often times where we're coming into a show and we have like 10 minutes to prep on something that we know nothing about. And I have a feeling that oboe is going to be a great solution for it. So thank you guys for joining and congrats on the launch.
- [129:26]
A
Fantastic. Talk to you soon.
- [129:27]
B
Cheers.
- [129:28]
A
Have a good rest of your day.
- [129:30]
B
Next up we have Replet.
- [129:33]
A
While he's coming in from the restream rating room, I'll tell you about 8 sleep.com get a pod 5 ultra 5 year warranty, 30 night risk, free trial, free returns, free shipping. You heard Nico Rosberg talk about the importance of sleep. You need an eight sleep. Anyway, we have Amjad from Replit in the Restream waiting room bringing him in. He has some fantastic news for us. Break it down. Welcome back to the show.
- [129:57]
B
Great to see you.
- [129:59]
C
Thanks for having me here, guys. Good to see you again.
- [130:01]
A
Look fantastic. You look, yeah, just great lighting. You look healthy. You look like you're deadlifting more than ever. I feel like there's been a PR in the recent, in the recent history. I won't hold you no, I've done.
- [130:13]
C
I've done a bit of a PR on. On just getting healthier in general.
- [130:16]
A
Actually.
- [130:16]
C
Weightlifting is really bad for you. Powerlifting especially, you get. Because once you start chasing weights.
- [130:21]
A
Sure.
- [130:22]
C
You, you know, you. You're fine with getting fat and you're fine with anything. You're. You're willing to die to. To add that extra pound on your lift and it's just a bad sport in general.
- [130:33]
B
Yeah, well, yeah, John and I. John and I go back and forth here. John's. John's very fixated on, you know, constant improvement in the gym. I'm. I'm more so like, you know, know, I want to be strong and healthy. But anyways, it. It. You're. What did Delian say the other week? It's like you're always either like adding to your one rep max or.
- [130:56]
A
Or losing.
- [130:57]
B
Losing.
- [130:57]
A
So it's one way or the other.
- [130:59]
C
Well, did you see what.
- [131:00]
A
You see what?
- [131:01]
C
Grow. Grow. Daniel said about powerlifting.
- [131:04]
A
What do you say?
- [131:05]
C
It's like if you. If you want to look ugly and feel. Take up powerlifting. Yeah.
- [131:11]
A
It's not for the aesthetics, for sure. Anyway, PR on fundraising, so congrats on that. What's the news? Thank you.
- [131:20]
C
Yeah, we raised $250 million.
- [131:24]
A
Congratulations.
- [131:25]
C
Let's go.
- [131:26]
B
Let's go.
- [131:27]
C
At a $3 billion valuation led by Prism Capital, with Amex and Google joining the round and a bunch of our lovely investors such as Andreessen, YC and others kind of doubling down.
- [131:42]
A
Fantastic. Massive takeoff, Fast takeoff in revenue and users. The Vibe coding error is definitely a narrative that's on a tear right now, Correct?
- [131:56]
C
Yeah. But we're actually trying to change the game a little bit. I think Vibe coding is awesome, but ultimately what Replit is and what I've been trying to do for a long time is make it so that anyone can make software.
- [132:07]
A
Sure.
- [132:08]
C
Vibe coding is still somewhat coding. You're still sitting in front of an ide, and most people don't want to do that. A lot of people like it, but people just want to solve problems, start startups. That's why they do coding. And so Replit Agent three, our target is for it to feel like a human developer, for it to work on your behalf. And so the main target we set at from like a research perspective is can we make it run for 200 minutes? So when it went from agent one to agent two went from two minutes to 20 minutes. So now from 20 minutes to 300, 200 minutes. And actually I'm seeing people show me Apps they built that it's taking four hours on its own. It can boot up a browser window, test test the app for you, it can run unit tests, it can review its code. And we have this adversarial relationship between Claude and GPT5 Gemini arguing and fighting. And so it's like this multi agent system and it's really the state of the art autonomous coding agent. So the idea is not to vibe code, the idea is to build things. And oftentimes you don't even have to be in front of the computer for that to happen.
- [133:20]
A
How big of an opportunity is mobile?
- [133:24]
C
Mobile is huge. So a lot of our customers are actually executives. So I was at the Olin Summit, we hosted the AI dinner brought down from Seattle. Lloyd Frink from the co founder of Zillow and he is Replit's champion at the firm. Right. This is executive chairman of the board and a lot of his times between meetings and things like that. So he can boot up Replit on his phone and we have a lot of other CEOs. I've heard the story secondhand that Vlad from Robinhood would prototype applications on Replit on his phone in meetings to kind of show engineers what they should go and build. And so I think it really changes the game. It's no longer about being a computer nerd sitting in front of a computer. It's about making things whether it's on your phone, on your hopefully in the future even you can just talk to Replit via your headphones and it just goes and does the thing.
- [134:25]
A
Yep. No, no, I think that there's, there's that meme of like where you sit in the org is correlated to how many monitors you have. Right. And it's like the person who's like keeping the entire app online, like the genius systems engineer has three monitors. Then like the, the product manager has like, you know, one extra monitor and a laptop that they take to meetings and then the CEO is just on their phone all the time.
- [134:47]
D
Time.
- [134:47]
A
And giving the CEO or executive who's just on their phone the, the ability to express themselves in software is extremely powerful. I'm interested. Oh, sorry.
- [134:57]
B
How do you think about projecting and forecasting market size of code generation broadly because Replit was early to, to this space but it's heavily competitive with via. You know, there was even now that I think about it, at demo day, there was a, the other day there was a company that I was kind of thinking when I heard the pitch, like this feels like basically like a feature of Replit, right. So it's just like hyper competitive space but at the same time the world.
- [135:28]
A
Wants test flight specifically. Is that the one you're.
- [135:31]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but the world just wants more and more and more code and the cheaper you make it to make code, the more the world wants it. But I'm curious how you think about, about kind of the overall market opportunity.
- [135:43]
C
First of all, super vindicated, right? Like I've been talking about this since I was a teenager. I was working at code academy and we were saying anyone can learn to code, everyone wants to make software. And everyone's like, well you should learn to be a plumber because everyone needs plumbing. I was like, no, it's different. Like we need an abundance of code. You don't need an abundance of plumbing. And some people do, but yeah. And so it's awesome. I think we lit a fire and now the forest is on fire.
- [136:14]
B
Right?
- [136:16]
C
And that's always, I think, good. I think the look, there's a zero sum market and there's a positive sum market. The zero sum market is a professional engineering market. You see the co pilot versus cursor chart and as cursor is rising, copilot is going in market share. That's a zero sum market. Now you see it with Codex and Claudco and so there's only so many tools that software engineers can use. But like I said, we're bringing, we're, you know, executives are making software salespeople, marketing people, doctors, nurses, everyone. I haven't like at this point, I've, over the past year I've heard every profession under the sun has used replit in some use case. And so I think the market size is, is, is probably the market size of software, the market size of computers. And by the way, this is the original vision of computing. When the original creators of computers, that's what they envisioned. They envisioned that you buy a computer and you program it, that's how you use it. They didn't envision the software industry. And I think that's the true essence of how computing could be really powerful is the ability for anyone to program it. So that's why one another sort of, we did it like a one more thing as part of our Agent 3 announcement. And it's sort of this low key launch that I think will transform our business over time. And it's the ability for replit agent to make other agents. So we've gotten really good at making agents and now we're imbuing that knowledge into the agent itself. And what we're finding in the enterprise is that that a lot of people want to solve problems. Software is a means of solving problems. You create an app and then you use that app to take an action. Right? But a lot of times an agent can take an action on your behalf. And so you can create an HR agent, a sales agent. You know, there's so many things that could be automated and there's an entire industry that's going to emerge around vertical agents and that's fine. But a lot of times you need very domain specific like HR onboarding agent for the idiosyncratic bespoke way we do onboarding on in our company. And the only person who knows how to do it is one HR ops person at our company. And so, you know, now agents can make other agents and that market size is also dizzyingly large because that starts to displace white collar labor. Labor in many ways.
- [138:47]
A
On the topic of just more and more code endlessly. I'm interested to know how you think instantiation of code will live in the consumer world over time. And I'll give you an example. So I've fired off deeper research reports in OpenAI's ChatGPT. I've also once gone to Claude code and said with same prompt, do all the deep research but then instantiate it as an HTML site that is mobile, responsive and can use all different HTML tables. And you can tell that when deep research fills in from ChatGPT, it has the ability to use markdown and create a table. But it can't just pull a random JavaScript library and create an interactive bar chart. It can't randomly throw images in and add all these different divs that you could possibly do on HTML. And so I was thinking about are we going to get to a world where you open up your favorite LLM chat app and in order to answer the problem, it's building a widget, building a piece of software. The same way when you go to Google and you ask for two plus two, it just gives you a calculator, an actual HTML calculator. You can instantiate that calculator in code. And so I'm wondering how you think the market will look in like five, I don't know, 10 years or something. Like how much?
- [140:09]
C
Yeah, I think you hit on something, something super important. I think it is easy to look at this and say this is the market for cogen. No, it's a market for software. Again, if you go back to history, when Turing wrote his 1936 paper that invented the computer, the Turing machine It's about universal computation, is that computers can be these dynamic systems. Initially computers were these fancy calculators. You couldn't program them in software, you had to kind of rewire them. And then von neumann in the 40s, 50s created the stored program computer. And the idea is that you can suddenly program them. And every computer we have right now is a von Neumann machine. And I think this moment is as big as that moment you went from static computers to programmable computers. Now we're going from static software to dynamic and malleable software. So every piece of software application you're going to be working with will be generating software on the fly, pulling packages on the fly and creating bespoke software for your use case. So instead of going and buying tableau to do this one exact thing, you can go to Replit or Manus or even ChatGPT will do it in the future and all of that. And depending on how depth of the power is, I think Replit is going to be the most powerful.
- [141:32]
A
Sure.
- [141:33]
C
But, but of course you can use any of the other tools and they're going to generate the bespoke software that you need for that exact use case. And I think that's a very exciting future.
- [141:41]
A
Yeah, there will be sort of continuous.
- [141:43]
B
Complexity when you see some of these insane cloud backlogs where you have like Google and Microsoft and Oracle and everybody's reporting like we have backlogs in the hundreds of billions. And I think Wall street looks at that and they say, okay, okay, where's this, where's this revenue really going to? Where's this, how is this revenue?
- [142:04]
A
That's not what I mean, sorry, but like that's not what Wall Street's reaction was. Wall Street's reaction was like, oh, the money's in the bank, like let's drive the stock higher.
- [142:11]
B
Well, thanks to more critical investors, like that's a lot of money being thrown around, a lot of numbers. Where, what, how do you make it? But on your side, as you see the entire market of software shifting from, you know, we make software and we sell a lot of times, do we make software continuously for the needs of our business? Do those kind of backlogs start to make sense to you?
- [142:40]
C
I think so. Look, I'm not an investor. We might be in a bubble in the short term, but I am confident that the long term value of this technology special, especially as it pertains to alarms making software is massive. In some sense it's going to displace existing value. So that's in the vertical point solution, SaaS space. I think it'll start doing some jobs that otherwise humans have been doing so that their existing value capture from the existing market. But it's also going to fundamentally change how we use computers, how we run our businesses. Businesses can be a lot more efficient and I think that like, you know, an economist or philosopher need to start thinking about what the future of work would look like when everyone has a fully autonomous programmer in their pocket. It's, you know, every company is bottlenecked by software. Every company in the world, from one person company to a hundred thousand person company. So when you're finance team needed this data to be pipelined from Stripe and other places so they can run certain analysis, they're bottlenecked by data engineering. But if I can let loose replit or clock code, whatever and just say go figure out these data sources and plumb them in so I can run SQL queries on them and then three or four hours later you have that ready, then you unblocked yourself, you create massive improvements to your processes and also you don't need the engineers to go work on the side quest and they can focus on the core software that the company is building.
- [144:23]
A
Fantastic. We went viral last time asking you advice for young people. Let's get your updated thinking. Should you learn to code in 2025.
- [144:34]
C
What do you want to do? I would say like, do you want to start a startup? Go fucking start a startup. Like go to Replit, put your idea in and you know in 20 minutes you'll get a prototype and then once you have a better idea of what you want to build, you can put in a larger prompt and have it run for three hours and then come back to you with a product that maybe you can release even in the first day. Is that what you want to do now? You want to be a specialist? You want to go work on, you know, writing see soft provable C software for the next Apollo program. Yeah, go get a PhD in computer science. But really it comes down to what you want to do. I think the future is entrepreneurship and not just entrepreneurship in building businesses, but also what we're seeing is there's a lot of entrepreneurs within companies that are creating tremendous value. We hear of companies all the time, employees using Replit creating millions of dollars of revenue for their company. And they're not engineers, they're operations people, product managers and all sorts of people are now empowered to do that. But I think the main skill, the main set of skills is going to be resourcefulness. I think the worst Thing you could do is be do what you're told today. The worst thing you could do is perhaps listen to your parents.
- [145:51]
A
Here we go.
- [145:52]
C
Maybe that goes.
- [145:53]
A
There we go.
- [145:57]
C
Because, you know, look, I think that, you know, all the advice is outdated and I think we're entering a very dynamic era and I think, you know, especially young people need to think for themselves. They'll know much better than their teachers, their parents, everyone else, what they need to focus on, what kind of skills they need to learn.
- [146:15]
A
Thank you so much.
- [146:17]
B
The rope, the robots will do all of the process.
- [146:19]
A
Yep.
- [146:20]
B
You just need it.
- [146:20]
A
Right.
- [146:21]
B
Ideate.
- [146:23]
C
Yeah, that's true. The human spirits that we're not, we're never going to lose that. That's the human spirit.
- [146:27]
A
I agree.
- [146:28]
B
Thank you so much for taking on the new round.
- [146:31]
A
Always a pleasure. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about public.com investing. For those that take it seriously, they got multi asset industry leading yields and trusted by millions. Up next, we have Alex from Higgs Field AI in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVPN ultradome. Welcome to the stream. Alex, great to see you. How are you doing?
- [146:56]
C
Doing great. Thank you for having me.
- [146:58]
A
Fantastic. Give us the news. Do you have anything to share on the fundraising side?
- [147:04]
C
Yeah, for sure. Guys, happy to announce that we raised 50 million and we purposefully picked you guys.
- [147:12]
A
Oh, what?
- [147:15]
B
Yeah.
- [147:15]
C
You represent the new media.
- [147:19]
A
Yes.
- [147:19]
B
Sorry to interrupt.
- [147:21]
A
Thank you so much.
- [147:22]
B
I got a little excited.
- [147:25]
A
Continue.
- [147:25]
B
You said.
- [147:26]
A
I think you were saying something very nice about how we're neatly organized. We're just like banging gongs and stuff. Anyway, I'll let you talk. Sorry.
- [147:35]
C
Yeah, I mean, we're just excited to support this new way wave of creators.
- [147:41]
D
Who are social media native.
- [147:42]
A
Yeah.
- [147:43]
C
And I think TBPN is a great example of what it means to be social media native and don't be the gatekeeper.
- [147:50]
A
Yeah.
- [147:51]
C
So that's for us. We also are excited to share some stats today.
- [147:56]
A
Please.
- [147:56]
C
We. In just five months after the launch, we probably crossed over 1.3 billion views on social media. All the content generated with Higgs Field crossed over a billion views on social media.
- [148:10]
A
That is crazy. Congratulations.
- [148:14]
B
What kind of power law is there in that?
- [148:16]
A
Is there one? Because if you had the Pope wearing the puffy jacket, that could be like 200 million views. Or is it more? Yeah. What does the power law look like? What's the most interesting image you've seen?
- [148:29]
C
Look, I think what matters today is consistency. You guys go out every Day, right?
- [148:35]
A
Yeah.
- [148:37]
C
Higfield releases every day and successful creators, they have to post like 5 times a day on social media. Some short snippets. I think frequency and relevancy is what matters.
- [148:51]
A
What are the most interesting use cases that you're seeing? The Nano there was obviously the Studio Ghibli launch where we got the ability to create cartoons. Nanobanana I saw a lot of people just like swapping clothing. Has there been kind of a killer use case that you've seen where you've gone to maybe friends who aren't reading the Deep Dive, how to prompt all these threads and just said hey, we got this specific thing covered. You're gonna have a great experience if you use Higgs Field in this way for sure.
- [149:23]
C
Primarily Higgs Field stands behind creators and really supporting creators is the primary goal. And we integrate all the best tooling, including the Nano banana, which you mentioned. One of the most surprising use cases where we see a lot of traction is actually product placements and we are excited to see Hicksfield being adopted by Fortune 500 companies to really put their products to work to get traction on social media. And this is where Higsfield proprietary models like Hicksfield Solutions come into the play as those large brands, they create own AI digital spokespersons to really promote the brands.
- [150:08]
A
Talk about Higsfield Ventures. Pretty uncommon for companies to launch venture funds so early. But obviously Slack had a fund Stripe's invested a ton. What's the thinking there?
- [150:23]
C
First and foremost, we just received lots of inbounds. How can we get the access to Higgs Field models?
- [150:31]
D
How we can grow the same way.
- [150:32]
C
As Higgs Field and we thought that there is a need to explain to developers to support the next wave of AI startups. And that's why we launched Hixel Venture. So really the program is not focused on just on a traditional venture investor. It is around sharing the growth playbooks and providing unique access to the technology.
- [151:01]
B
Are you worried if you give people the playbooks and the models that they'll come and compete with you or are you positive sum?
- [151:09]
C
We have contrarian view on that to be honest. Look, I think that there is a traditional way to build a company and that's very often in a. Very often in the technology space before it really required to raise a lot of funding and burn money. And we have seen that recently. Andreessen and Martin Casado, they pushed this consensus driven investing narrative a lot which obviously benefits them as they probably have the largest fund in the world in the same time today. What we are Observing is that there is a new next generation of AI lean startup like Hicksfield which are actually profitable, profitable almost from the day one.
- [151:53]
A
Wow.
- [151:55]
C
And we believe that this next wave is probably going to be as large as VC backed startups and I think we can support the creation of these next generation startups.
- [152:12]
B
How did you pitch this latest round? You know if somebody's giving you $50 million, I presume they would like you to at least be a billion dollar company someday. What does Higgs Field as a multi billion dollar company look like? And what's your kind of. If you had a crystal ball, what would paint us a picture?
- [152:33]
C
For sure, I think it is quite simple. A lot of people got super power with self expression online thanks to social media and mobile phones. A lot of people are probably still shy to do that. And Genai is just going to propel self expression and essentially we believe that.
- [152:57]
D
In three years every second video is.
- [152:59]
C
Going to be AI generated and it's going to be AI generated with Higsfield. So the impact is going to be way bigger than just let's say building video version of Canva. I think this is going to be a transformative movement in the social media space.
- [153:19]
B
And that's because today every piece of content that's produced has some sort of cost. And as more and more content is produced with AI, you guys can effectively capture some of that. Some of the costs that would have been spent on traditional video production, whether it's just somebody with the phone and their time and their hand or it's sort of a more produced shoot. Is that, am I hearing that right?
- [153:43]
C
Yeah, for sure. The cost is, is an important factor but it's not just that. Like look, I think for a live show you guys clearly kill this but you bring the best people in the industry. Like you see the lineup today. No one else can bring that. I'm not talking about myself obviously. Right. But there are other people whom you.
- [154:03]
D
Bring and they, they didn't, they did.
- [154:04]
C
They do not typically show up, up in the live shows but many people cannot really do the same stuff which you do. But people have ideas like how they can make shows like let's say cartoons.
- [154:18]
D
For kids, how they can make fantasy.
- [154:20]
C
Content and so on. And before that, before Gen, it was impossible for those creators to really create content for social media and, and all the content which we are seeing today is primarily just live content like people just recording themselves. So Genai is just going to, I think we should expect that amounts of number of different genres or types of the Content is just going to 10x from what we have today.
- [154:52]
A
Totally fantastic. Well, thank you so much for stopping by.
- [154:54]
B
Great to get the update.
- [154:55]
A
Congrats.
- [154:56]
B
You guys have been crushing it the round.
- [154:57]
A
We will talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. Thank you.
- [155:01]
C
Thank you so much.
- [155:01]
B
Cheers Alex.
- [155:02]
A
Our next guest is already in the Restream waiting room. Let me tell you about adquick.com out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Ad Quick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. Our next guest is from Bain Capital, Stefan Cohen.
- [155:21]
B
Welcome to what's happening guys.
- [155:24]
D
How's it going?
- [155:25]
B
Great to meet you. Welcome to the show.
- [155:27]
C
Good to meet you guys too. Thanks for having me.
- [155:31]
B
Give us a quick backstory on yourself and then there's a bunch of stuff to talk about.
- [155:36]
C
Yeah, quick background on me. So I've been at Bain for 10 years now. I joined from one of our portfolio companies in the data center software space called Turbonomic that we, I was an early employee there post Series A. We sold that business to IBM for a couple billion and and I joined BCV as a partner focused on early stage investing. And about five years ago we decided to spin off a dedicated crypto business being capital crypto, which I'm one of the co leads on and has been a really, really fun and interesting run. We've been investing in the space for about a decade now.
- [156:13]
B
Awesome. What is like the crypto strategy? Is it a mix of of privates and active trading? What's the actual strategy?
- [156:28]
C
Yeah, so the setup is kind of the core premise when we launched the firm was that we thought that a lot of value would accrue to protocols. And so we felt like we needed a flexible mandate to be able to buy liquid crypto and also invest in early stage projects. So the fund is very flexible in that manner. We have have liquid tokens that we purchase on the open market and then we also have seed through series CD investments that we've done. We try to not be active traders. We don't think that's the most productive use of our time. We think of these as kind of long hold positions that we'll build real concentration in.
- [157:05]
B
How has it felt like for so when you think about the not deep history in crypto but let's say like 2020 to 2024, it felt like the tech, I mean the technology was just being handicapped by the regulatory environment. You had this mix of as an investor you'd be investing in, you'd invest, let's say on a SAFT or a safe plus a warrant. And then there's these sort of like two assets. You have a token that's trading and then you have the actual equity in the company. And that always felt like there were some key areas that it made sense. But then a lot of points you're like, what do I actually own here? Where's the value going to accrue with the updated regulatory environment? Meaning that kind of feels like you can do almost anything now. Where is value going to accrue? Are we going to see company, you know, crypto projects really try to tie the equity value to the token or are we still going to see these kind of like dual. Dual approaches?
- [158:19]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think it really depends on what folks are building. You know my, you know, the sort of like early premises of investing in crypto protocols, which are these like decentralized apps or blockchains themselves, was that the tokens kind of are like equity like looking instruments where based on the usage of the protocol they accrue, they accrue fees through usage and then they have a cash flow profile and you can kind of fundamentally value them. And they're not owned by any single party. They have governance rights where they can vote on code contributions to the application or the blockchain that they're tied to. And I think that core principle hasn't changed. And so for those types of, of protocols that's very true. I think structurally things have shifted. You know, we had to do a lot of sort of heroics pre this administration to ensure that we were protected from a regulatory standpoint when we were doing token launches. And so a lot of these teams would basically have like an equity company, you'd be issued token warrants and then at the point of issuing the token, you would have an offshore foundation that would actually issue the token itself and the investors would have rights to that. We have, I think most projects right now kind of have that legacy model. I don't know that many are actually trying new and different models for.
- [159:40]
B
Yeah, I guess what I was trying to get at is like how do you, what's, what's after this sort of foundation model? Is there enough regulatory clarity that we, that, that, that, that these, that you could establish kind of a new model or is it now been, been workshopped enough and trialed enough that it actually is the right model for the future.
- [159:59]
C
And that I, I think the model works fine. I mean, I, I suspect people will try other different structures. But you know, the fundamental problem with the model is you end up with this like equity company that often, oftentimes doesn't have any real value associated with it. And there is some, you know, we've had to deal with some things with legacy portfolio companies where they either need to, to shut those down or sort of allocate their balance sheet over to the foundation. But that seems to not be like the fundamental shift from a regulatory standpoint right now. I think the fundamental shift is that founders are now emboldened to be able to go build again, which is really exciting.
- [160:35]
A
Tell me about the hyperstitious investing thesis. I've never heard any VC put that in such stark terms before.
- [160:46]
C
Yeah, I think there's sort of this like consistent pattern that we've recognized with the most outstanding founders and companies that we've had a chance to work with, which is that their ideas are initially disgusting and really hard to believe. You know, it's sort of, if you think of this like, you know, this, this bell curve of companies at the beginning it's like offensive. And then once you get closer to mass market adoption, everyone's kind of like, okay, yeah, that makes sense, sense. And then usually there's like a trough of illusionment where everyone's lost faith in it. And maybe that was like post 2021 crypto in a way. But there's been this consistent theme with founders which is that many that are starting out that have sort of these, these, these views of what the world should look like and how the world should be sort of shaped around their values and principles in the beginning seem, seem kind of unreal. And, and we increasingly have learned that the real art to this is to investing with these sort of long tail outcomes is to work with those founders and believe in them and believe in them with capital, not just with our belief as a group, but we're really in search of those types of ideas. And I think the two examples that we really point to, one was Crusoe when and they were raising their seed financing. It was kind of an unbelievable idea which was like we're going to go off into the oil fields and build data centers that are capturing flared natural gas and we'll scale those to eventually handle AI level compute. I mean it was so crazy that at the time they actually had to go and build a box at the time it was in Colorado to show that the model actually worked. And more recently we've had the privilege of being involved with worldcoin, which you know, Outside in is this, is this sort of decentralized identity network. But the real notion is that in the future, and I think we're starting to feel this more and more now, it's very hard to tell what's real and what's not on the Internet. And we sort of view that this like this model of trust in the Internet is breaking right now. And one of the core premises of trust is like, are you even talking to me right now? You know, did I tweet the thing that I tweeted earlier? And so this notion that proof of humanness and proof of identity in a sort of globally distributed Internet native way is very important. So we're on the hunt for those types of ideas and that's part of what makes the job really fun.
- [163:17]
A
Do you believe in the Landian idea that capitalism is a time traveling artificial intelligence?
- [163:27]
C
I don't know that I've heard this idea. You'll have to explain it to me.
- [163:30]
A
The idea is that artificial intelligence existed in the future at some point and built a time machine and came back and invented capitalism because capital acceleration will by nature create artificial intelligence. And that is the Landian acceleration path that we're on. I don't know, I'm getting too deep in the weeds.
- [163:50]
C
I like it.
- [163:50]
A
I mean I like it.
- [163:53]
C
It. You know, one of the things that I, I'm always kind of struck by is, is, is how like innovation breeds solutions.
- [164:01]
A
Sure.
- [164:01]
C
And, and you know, AI is like obviously a manifestation of that. But you know, even in the crypto world, like stable coins weren't really invented to solve the US debt issue, but like a byproduct of inventing these like.
- [164:14]
A
Digital dollars, the debt across the entire world.
- [164:16]
C
Yeah, yeah. And so you know, I'm sort of like, I can continue to just be like hit in the face with these moments where like man, it's almost too perfect. And so maybe, maybe that's right.
- [164:25]
A
Yeah.
- [164:27]
B
Stablecoins are now regulated in the US or have a framework and which is wild thinking about the stablecoin businesses that were started when there just was no real clarity. So you know, obviously credit, credit to them for, for having faith. How do you think foreign governments will respond over time to USDC and USDT and other stablecoins gaining adoption in there because like as an American, the idea of sort of like outsourcing our debt problem or spreading it around the world sounds great, but if you're a foreign government, you want people like Turkey's paying 40% on their bonds right now. And if everybody in the country can get access to. I mean, I guess that's a mechanism for them to get people to keep their capital in the Turkish system. But yeah, how do you expect foreign governments to respond?
- [165:33]
C
Yeah, I mean it's an interesting one because on the one hand they already were doing it. Right. They were buying our debt on over the. I mean it's just, it's more recent than not that other governments have sort of been, you know, moving out of U.S. treasuries. But you know, what I, what I view is happening right now is really we're transitioning from sovereign governments owning our debt to other people holding our debt. Right. It's like you think about what, like really what's happening with stablecoins is that businesses and individuals outside of the US particularly. Right. I mean I think over time the US will become more of a center of adoption here. But, but really the like $250 billion of issuance is just people and businesses offshore that want a more stable access to dollars. And I think government, some governments obviously will try to do capital capital controls and prevent that from happening. I think many view it as if they can plug into the system. Well, like Brazil in particular is. I don't know if you guys have tracked what's happening with nubank and Pix and stablecoins but there's, you know, there's quite streamlined interoper, interoperability there. And if, if users have to transact in local currency in that economy, then they're forced to go back and forth. But certainly some governments will take an adversarial view of it.
- [166:49]
A
Yeah, but some governments have more gain than lose, so they'll take it, which is great.
- [166:53]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [166:54]
A
Play that eagle sound, George.
- [166:58]
B
There we go.
- [166:59]
A
America, thank you so much for helping out.
- [167:00]
B
Thanks for joining.
- [167:01]
A
Stefan, we will talk to you in a second. Thank you so much. Bye. Go to getbezel.com, your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Our next guest is in the Restream waiting room. We will bring him in and to the TVPN ultradome and continue today's show.
- [167:21]
B
We have Rohan from Sphinx AI I believe what's happening. Welcome to the show.
- [167:26]
A
Thanks for having me. Thanks so much for hopping on. Give us a breakdown. Introduce yourself. What are you building? What's the. Absolutely, yeah.
- [167:33]
C
So I'm Rohan. I'm one of the co founders and the CEO of Sphinx. Sphinx is a company that is solving AI for data and specifically we're razor focused on the idea that large language models in AI today are really good at text.
- [167:44]
A
They're good at code, which is just.
- [167:45]
C
A type of text, good at images. What they're not good at is the type of tabular, semi structured time series information that makes most of the world work. Everything from supply chains to high finance to manufacturing. We're bridging that gap and delivering copilots that can think about data natively and help people get from piles of raw information to valuable business ideas. What we call alphas and finance but can be extended to almost any industry.
- [168:11]
A
Interesting. Who's the first customer in finance then?
- [168:14]
C
Yeah, first customer in finance. Don't know if I have the rights to name them, but we do have no.
- [168:17]
A
I mean like the archetype of private equity hedge fund high frequency. So. Yeah, so someone who's like analyzing a stock on a quarter by quarter basis almost.
- [168:28]
C
That's right. Yep.
- [168:29]
A
That makes sense.
- [168:29]
D
Quarter by quarter.
- [168:30]
C
Well faster than quarter by quarter really. We're working with a lot of quants. So people who are maybe day by day or even faster than that.
- [168:36]
A
Sure.
- [168:36]
C
But yeah, that funds are the target market initially. They are able to solve these problems where they find a single insight that can make billions in a year.
- [168:44]
A
That's interesting. Yeah. And then I imagine that if you go any faster, the customer wants to write their own OCaml. If we're talking about Jane Street. And so it's for specific quant that's looking for day by day analysis. Interesting. So what is the go to market like? I imagine that maybe it's more of like an enterprise software deal. You're actually going outbound, meeting with folks, steak dinners, signing deals or. Or is this kind of like general sign up on the website? Both.
- [169:16]
C
Right. So we are going to people. Maybe not steak dinners yet. Don't know if we have that budget, but we certainly are talking to a lot of different companies across industries. But it also is a bottoms up motion. There are a lot of people, myself included in my past role. I used to be at Citadel. I ran a quant team. So I was very frustrated at the lack of tools like this to help me get from idea to value. So we do have quite a robust set of data scientists, quantitative researchers who are just using the product off the shelf. But we're also making those enterprise sales as well.
- [169:45]
A
That's awesome.
- [169:47]
B
Give us your read on the talent wars between the Citadels of the world and the Frontier Labs and now Sphinx of course, because I'm sure you're.
- [169:55]
C
Yeah, no, we've. We've Gotten people from hedge funds, not from Citadel. I do have a non solicit but we have gotten people from other hedge funds and we have gotten people to take our offer over, say anthropic or OpenAI. Look like, like it comes down to what you're optimizing for. I think if you're going to these foundation labs, you're betting on AGI and if you win, good for you. That's a great bet. Hedge funds are betting on almost nothing. I think if the AI bubble pops tomorrow, said it'll make a hell of a lot of money and that's great for them. And really for us, we're focused on our specific application. So it comes down to what you're passionate about. Is it money, is it AGI or is it just like razor sharp focus on solving one problem and that that's who we hire.
- [170:32]
A
What's your take on, on Microsoft copilot in Excel we've talked to probably four different companies that are building Excel add ons. There's, there's that world. How does that fit into your strategy? How are you doing something different? Or, or do you see that on the roadmap? How do you think about that?
- [170:52]
C
Look like I think Excel has been the tool for data for like whatever long it's been out there. But we don't see that as being the transformative layer. The kind of serious data work, the kind of data work that makes people billions of dollars is done on a slightly different stack. Stack that can scale a little bit more, that translates more naturally to production and we really want to target that. And you know, Excel is easy to use, but what's easier than Excel is writing prompts. So over time, I'm not saying I'm killing Excel today, right. But over time I see that as kind of becoming a less relevant layer, almost just the interpretability layer on top of something like Sphinx. Actually getting work done in Excel, I feel is going to become a thing of the past. We're going to be able to build much more serious models with a lot more financial impact.
- [171:32]
A
It's exciting.
- [171:33]
B
How do you charge for Sphinx? Because if it feels like, you know, the best companies create a lot more value than they capture.
- [171:41]
A
Percent of Aum. But just 2% of Aum. Just give me 2% of your Aum Citadel. We're good.
- [171:46]
B
Yeah, your entire.
- [171:47]
A
I'd love that.
- [171:49]
B
No, but it's like, you know, if you help, if you help somebody make, if you help people make money, they're happy to pay you.
- [171:55]
A
You.
- [171:57]
C
Yeah, look, we, we don't only work in finance. We, we're already quite horizontal and it's very hard for us to tell the exact nature of the value we're delivering. But some of our customers of course are open with others like hedge funds, they're not going to even tell us like what they found. So the, the kind of way of like capturing that value, you know, it's, it's hard, it's hard for us but really for us the focus is on building something transformative. And you know, this is step one. As we're able to get more and more autonomous and we're able to eventually say we can solve large scale data problems in a couple seconds fully autonomously, I think the value becomes enormously clear. So we're not overly focused on that right now really. Right now we just charge for usage. We want to deliver people something that they use. When they use it, they have to.
- [172:36]
A
Pay us to get that service. That makes sense. Well, thank you so much for taking some time out of your day to come talk to us.
- [172:42]
B
Yeah, it was great to meet you.
- [172:42]
A
Congratulations. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day and I will tell you about wander Find your happy place. Book a wander with aspiring views hotel great amenities dreamy B beds, top tier cleaning 247 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. Our next guest is in the Restream waiting room. Timothy, welcome to tvpn. Fantastic background. How are you doing? What is behind you? Break it down, introduce yourself. What are we looking at?
- [173:10]
C
Yeah guys, good to, good to be on the show. Excited to share what we're doing here at Intermodal. We're building a battery electric autonomous rail car. So when you think of trains going across the country in two or three mile long strings, we make every single one drive themselves.
- [173:23]
A
No way.
- [173:23]
B
Crazy train maxi.
- [173:25]
A
That's amazing.
- [173:27]
B
I've been waiting for this. This is the. I think this is the first. We've interviewed hundreds of founders.
- [173:33]
A
I'm blown away. This doesn't seem like something that give me the why now. Why didn't this happen 10 years ago? You don't have the same problem as Waymo where you have to steer as much. Or do you? Why is this just happening now?
- [173:48]
C
No, it's a great question and it's great natural place to start from and really rails out of sight, out of mind for a lot of people. Especially when you think about our tech workforce and the people that are trying to solve really hard problems out there. And that's exactly why there's so much opportunity here in rail to do exactly that. Take the technologies that have been pushed forward maybe for a decade on the perception models, the control systems, the electrification that's happened in industry and bring that to rail and to build a team of tech workers around it. That's really what we're doing here is. And it naturally makes sense. You do have fixed infrastructure, you've got track, you've got points of rail that go across the country. You've got a 160,000 miles of track generally utilized at a 3% utilization factor. And all that stuff just stacks up to make this a very logical place to implement these types of technologies first. And we're excited that we're in production. We've got vehicles out in service running for customers every single day, going to move over 3,500 carloads in production this year. And really just focused on getting America's rail system back on track where it's forefront in the front part of people's minds and let people know this is an exciting place to come put technology in. It's important for the US economy, it's important for our customer stakeholders in agriculture, energy, mining, any of those places and just get that supply chain right with rail.
- [175:09]
A
It's fantastic.
- [175:10]
B
When did the, when did the idea click for you? Yeah, how did it.
- [175:13]
C
Yeah, well, I'm an engineer by training. I did my undergrad in South Dakota, the PhD in Michigan State. And then I went to work in the defense industry. So I went to go work on cruise missiles, fighter jet platforms, a bunch of unmanned systems. And that's really an industry that's been doing some of these things since the seventies in a lot of ways, building systems that can fly themselves. And then 2017 came and everybody was going to fly to work. So I got to build a flying car and a package delivery drone and help build a team of 40 engineers behind that. And then as many founders know, you got the right co founder in, in the team that gets you to go look at something different. And he was doing his MBA at USC studying supply chain logistics and looking at rail in 2019 and looking at competitive threats of autonomous trucks, electric trucks. And then and came to me and said, what do you think happens if we bring these technologies to rail? And that's really what got us off and running. So we have built a system that's backwards compatible with the existing strengths of rail. So if you think of a two mile long train running across the country from the Port of Long beach to Chicago, we can fit in that train, we can hybridize the whole train and ride along with a large diesel locomotive unit. But really that two miles of stuff isn't consumed in Chicago. You got to break it down and get it to Gary, Indiana, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Peoria, Illinois and that's really where we can make short trains with unit economics of those two mile long trains. So you can now say, I need five cars in Gary. I'm going to cut those five cars off, use Intramoto's products and get it there. I need 10 cars up in Milwaukee. I'm going to go feed a brewery somewhere. I can cut 10 more cars off, just send them on the unit economics of a short train and that's really a game changer, you know, paradigm shift for speed and flexibility on rail. And it already has a cost advantage. So that's really how we think about it. And where we build out and where we started is in some places like mining and plant railroads and facilities just like this one in St. Louis, where we're headquartered, and continue to build it out and utilize that infrastructure better.
- [177:09]
B
So you guys have track that runs into your facility?
- [177:13]
C
Yeah, this car is sitting on track. We've got two parallel production lines here in St. Louis and honestly, St. Louis is the right type of place to be for this because we can access all the railroads in the entire country from here. And it's a hub and spoke model and we're at one of those hubs in St. Louis and we can get to all the spokes from here.
- [177:32]
A
Talk about the electrical systems. How do you charge this? Do you swap the battery or does. I imagine it takes a ton of time to charge the actual train or maybe it doesn't, I don't know. Break it down.
- [177:43]
C
Yeah, that's the beauty of the system. So. So when you think about rail, you think about where it came from. Came from a steam engine in the 1800s where the smallest power system that they could make was this giant steam locomotive. But Maybe it pulled 10 cars with it at that point. And that necessitated steel track and steel wheels because of how heavy that system is. It also drove the infrastructure the way it is. So that's why we have these tracks across the country get 1, 2, 3% better every year for the last 200 years. And now you look at a system where you have a two or three mile long train. But what happened there is that you have the right of ways at all the crossings. You don't start and stop a lot. You go through mountains and sit around them and all that energy efficiency that goes into that then just makes a battery system actually work pretty well. We granularize it so we get down to the single car size where we can make a battery pack the size of a Tesla car battery or I drive a electric truck so the size of my electric truck battery and we can actually move 100 tons of freight several hundred miles with that system. And if you want to go further, you just add more of our units and you get really granular. But that leads to us to be able to use Level 2 charging infrastructure and a lot of the investments that the automotive industry has done to get those standards up to par and also not try to recharge what a locomotive would be, which is 50 to 200 megawatts of power on that unit.
- [179:00]
A
Plus, this is fascinating. What's the state of the company? Like, how big are you guys? Have you raised money? Like how big is the business?
- [179:10]
C
Yeah, we're in St. Louis here. We've got a 67,000 square foot production facility. We've raised up to a series A at this point to fully deploy these assets.
- [179:20]
A
Congrats.
- [179:21]
C
Generally we're around 50 employees at the moment with largely engineering coming from automotive, aerospace and rail. Kind of this perfect mix where you can guarantee something cool is going to come out the other side. And about five years old at this point.
- [179:35]
A
Fantastic progress. Remarkable. Last question from my side. Is there anything that you're. I mean this is obviously like an American reindustrialization project in many ways, but are there any top of mind asks for D.C. or American lawmakers? Like if you had a make rail great again agenda, like what would you change? What are you asking for? What do we need to do more of just at a high level. What else would help? That's maybe just outside of your control?
- [180:09]
C
Yeah, no, I think really we just need to talk about it a little bit more. So people talk about highways, they talk about autonomous trucks, they talk about autonomous cars. It's in the news every single day. We're getting people to talk about rail and talk about that infrastructure. Because in reality, to make rail better, all it is is meet making stuff move more frequently. You don't need a hyperloop type of technology where you fire packages in a tube. You just need to keep the stuff on the rails moving more frequently. We don't really need to rebuild anything. We just need to unlock that massive network and uncongest it. And we can make this extremely competitive. And our technology positions us to do exactly that. And then from the regulatory perspective, they've been very open to These types of technologies in a very positive way and we've proven it out in whole section of the market that's unregulated. So we can just go out there and use those use cases, collect the data that's necessary to get to the regulated use cases from there and then generate that data that then goes directly to how we would certify these products in a regulated use case.
- [181:07]
A
Well, thank you so much for taking some time out of your busy day to come talk to us.
- [181:10]
B
Thank you for train maxing. Somebody had to do it.
- [181:13]
A
Somebody had to do it. We will talk to you soon.
- [181:15]
B
It'll look obvious.
- [181:17]
A
Have a great rest of your day.
- [181:18]
B
Awesome talk to you. See you.
- [181:20]
A
The man.
- [181:20]
C
Thanks.
- [181:20]
A
Cheers. Up next we have Nebias, which was in the news just yesterday or the day before.
- [181:27]
B
Chief Revenue Officer Mark oh, he's the guy that did the deal who certainly would have played a part in this new deal with.
- [181:35]
A
We're very excited to bring in Mark from the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him in here. How are you doing, Mark? Happening.
- [181:42]
C
Hey, John. Hey, Jordy. Fantastic to be here today.
- [181:44]
A
Thanks so much to have you.
- [181:47]
B
You look like you're in a pretty good mood.
- [181:49]
A
Any reason any good news happened recently?
- [181:51]
C
Oh, man, it's been an exciting week and I think you already called it out in the wind up to my showing up. It's extraordinary what's going on at Nebias today.
- [182:01]
A
Give us the high level couple bullet points on the deal this week?
- [182:05]
C
Well, we announced a landmark partnership with Microsoft, one of the leading AI labs that is out there to support them with AI infrastructure under a five year agreement valued at at least $17.4 billion with the potential to expire and 19.4 billion.
- [182:27]
B
Did you think you could get a deal like that done when you join? I mean, I have to imagine that you joined roughly six months ago, was it?
- [182:35]
C
I joined a little over three months ago.
- [182:39]
B
So maybe the deal was in the works. But it sounds like, wait, yeah, did.
- [182:42]
A
They see Satya Nadella on the Dwarkesh Patel podcast say I'm happy to be a leaser. And you said, oh, we'll lease to you. Is that exactly how it played out? Or I imagine, I think it's a.
- [182:53]
C
Little more, a little more subtle than.
- [182:54]
A
That because he really did hold up his hand and say, hey, come pitch me. And people did and. And you got the deal done. Congrats.
- [183:02]
C
It's extraordinary to have them as a partner. I mean, Microsoft is by itself an amazing company and for us to Be winning the honor is landmark for the company and it's helping us to accelerate all of our plans.
- [183:14]
A
Fantastic. Talk about the collection behind you. The chat's calling it out. Crazy technic.
- [183:21]
C
Those are Legos, man.
- [183:22]
A
Legos.
- [183:23]
C
That's a Ferrari Lamborghini and a McLaren and Holy Trinity almost. That's the Trinity over there. There's another trinity over there of Land Rover and G Wagon.
- [183:35]
A
I love it.
- [183:36]
C
I love making the LEGO cars.
- [183:37]
A
Those are fantastic.
- [183:39]
B
Give us, Give us the state of the company. We've covered Nebius on the show before. We know kind of the backstory, but yeah, talk about kind of the. Kind of more recent history. And I'm sure you got up to speed as you joined and first learned about the company.
- [183:59]
C
Well, the company is very laser focused on building the AI infrastructure of choice for startups all the way through enterprises and we are making big strides against that vision. We continue to support the most innovative startups. As a matter of fact, one of our customers was on your podcast today.
- [184:20]
B
Higsfield, which is no way.
- [184:21]
C
Amazing company. Amazing company. And very privileged to have them as a customer. Likewise all the way up to major enterprises like Cloudflare and Shopify.
- [184:32]
A
Wow.
- [184:33]
C
And in all cases, we're helping them to not only service the near term model creation or early development works that they have, but also helping them to scale their applications and deliver the inference that they need. So it's a very exciting time.
- [184:50]
A
That's fantastic.
- [184:52]
B
Going forward, you set the bar pretty high here with this recent deal with Microsoft. What's kind of the focus over the next. I guess I'm curious to understand with the news around Oracle and OpenAI this week, a lot of people are. A lot of people were just kind of questioning like, okay, you're going to build something that's like AWS scale in a very short amount of time here. That seems pretty challenging. How much is a lot of the effort at Nebbyus really around just like scaling infrastructure and knowing that the demand is there, but it's just like you have to build that capacity.
- [185:34]
C
Well, we've always had the vision and Arkady, our CEO has said it for a long time that we would do some of these super lab deals. Today's market, it happens to be a fantastic opportunity, but we believe in the fullness of time, the real opportunity is more along the lines of what you described, which is delivering the AWS equivalent for AI. And that's where the priority is right now.
- [185:55]
B
Focused.
- [185:55]
C
So continuing to build out our software stack, being able to cater to that single Engineer that's trying to build something from scratch that signs up with our self service experience and then being there with them as they scale and their needs expand. At the same time, we're pursuing all of the other high scale AI consuming customers out there and we think that the next several years are going to be a crazy time as capacity supply is being chased by a lot of different people. But ultimately the loss long term, the hundred billion dollar plus business opportunity is servicing the equivalent of the hyperscaler requirements for the new class of AI customer.
- [186:43]
A
Friend of the show Dylan Patel over at Semianalysis gave you guys a gold medal in the cluster max ranking of GPU clouds. Give us one layer deeper in terms of how you frame what Nebbys does best uniquely among the competitive landscape. You know, semi analysis called you gold, but I'm sure there's a lot more details of how you stand out.
- [187:13]
C
Well, we're delivering the software tier that's giving the AI engineer the tools for them to operate a small or large cluster or multiple clusters as they see fit. And we're seeing more and more of that. We give the AI engineer the tooling to create a model and optimize a model and we put at their fingertips all the open source models. We give the AI engineer the ability to conduct their training and retraining capabilities and through our AI studio solutions, we also give them the ability to deliver inference. So you can think of it as a full spectrum set of AI capabilities for the AI engineer. We're going to continue to innovate and add to those capabilities so you can think about all the adjacent spaces that the AI engineer is likely to need to tap, from data pipelines to repositories to who knows what comes next. But our intention is to be fully catering to that AI engineer and being able to serve them whether they're in a small company or a large organization.
- [188:19]
A
Yeah. How does the future of the actual inference API business look? Is that more of a focus for growth versus going more of the construction and real estate route and building megaprojects versus creating a fantastic API. Do you want to do both? What does the next couple of years look like?
- [188:45]
C
The simple answer is we're going to do both. And the reality is at the foundation is we're chasing demand. So today there is a fair amount of construction taking place. So being there for all of these new model development and retraining requirements is critical as those projects and customers move into real production. Infrastructure is picking up and we're seeing it the redistribution as people succeed Is very real. And the fullness of time we should all want. And this is thinking about it from the standpoint is end customers or investors is we want to see all of these projects turn into inference driven because that means that they're actually in production being utilized by hopefully commercially paying customers somewhere.
- [189:30]
A
Makes sense.
- [189:31]
B
Real value.
- [189:31]
A
Well, congratulations on the deal. Thanks so much for speaking.
- [189:34]
B
Yeah, great to. Great to catch up. Marcus, Mark, congrats on.
- [189:36]
C
Pleasure to be here today. Thank you both.
- [189:38]
A
Thank you so much. Talk to you soon. Have a great rest.
- [189:41]
B
We got to get more. We got to get more Legos around the studio.
- [189:44]
A
We do.
- [189:44]
B
I was envious there.
- [189:46]
A
I mean, Tyler's over there just waiting to put them together.
- [189:48]
B
That's right. He just needs a time trial assembly line over here.
- [189:51]
A
Yeah.
- [189:52]
B
Well, without further ado, we have Michael.
- [189:55]
A
From Figure from Figure coming in from the restream radio room. Michael, how you doing? Good to meet you. Hi, how are you go. We're great.
- [190:02]
B
We're great. How are you doing? Yeah, big day, Big day.
- [190:06]
A
Good.
- [190:06]
B
Just another day at the office.
- [190:08]
C
Yeah, no, look, big day for figure. Big day for all the employees. Super proud of what we were able to accomplish. So it's been awesome.
- [190:15]
A
Take us through the story. What happened.
- [190:18]
C
So today was our ipo.
- [190:20]
A
Fantastic.
- [190:21]
C
We.
- [190:22]
A
You rang the bell. Didn't ring the bell.
- [190:24]
C
Yep, rang the bell. So actually when you do that task. Yeah, you do that nasdaq, you don't ring the bell. You push the button.
- [190:30]
A
Push the market.
- [190:31]
B
All digital.
- [190:32]
C
It's digital, but you know, we're blockchain, so we like that.
- [190:36]
A
Yeah, it makes sense.
- [190:37]
C
And yeah, no, so it's been. It's been about a six month process getting ready. You do a bunch of meetings, testing the waters they call it now. So from my understanding, IPOs have changed a bit since. Since COVID And now more is virtual, More is done up front. And there's actually a little bit less pressure on the roadshow itself, which was kind of a learning for me. Let's talk a bit about figure.
- [191:01]
A
Yeah, please. Yeah. What was the story about the position of the company, the why now of the ipo? Take us through kind of the roadshow narrative.
- [191:12]
B
Yeah.
- [191:13]
C
I think folks were focused on probably three things. One is rare combination of growth and profitability. And we have both of those, which is awesome. I think number two is just huge market. So we were in $185 billion TAM. Basically we are standardizing all the private credit, starting with mortgage. We also do crypto backed loan, a few other things like that. And we're standardizing those rails on blockchain. And then I think lastly, we are one of the few companies that adds value with blockchain into the real world. So we were in kind of the real world asset space, which also is called tokenization. We're the market leader in debt for that. We're about 75% market share. And so what we do is we partner with about 170 really well recognized brands that work with us to originate or tokenize assets, put them on a capital market that's all based on blockchain. And what it does is it ultimately saves a ton of cost and time and just improves both the investor experience and the consumer experience.
- [192:19]
A
Yeah, take us through a case study of one of those brands that you work with and walk me through some of the value or the differentiated benefits of being in the crypto world. Is it just access to international capital, speed of transactions, you can move money around on the weekends, nights and weekends. Is it regulatory hurdles or being able to access certain markets? Walk me through all that.
- [192:43]
C
Yeah, no, happy to. I think to, to start, I take something like Houzz. Just given the audience, I feel like people are probably familiar with them. Sure, they are a kind of housing and home design marketplace. And normally somebody like Houzz would not really want to get involved in the loan origination process or really be comfortable with like mortgage or anything of that nature. But, but because figure is so simple to embed in Houzz's case, we work with an API, we can kind of integrate with them and help their end customers take equity out of their homes for things like home improvement and financing contractors and pools and those types of things. And so what we actually do in the process is we take the attributes of the loan that Houzz is coordinating and those are hashed on a blockchain at once upfront. And then as the loans move throughout the capital markets, there's way less checking and confirming of those details because people can just verify it on blockchain. And so what we actually do in doing so is we save about $11,000 of cost out of the production process, out of 12. So it's a really big savings and we can do it in five days versus industry average of 45. So it's a pretty material difference.
- [194:07]
A
So funny because like the, the like, the very like popular like anti crypto take is like, oh well you just do this in a database with like Python and you know, high frequency trading doesn't need a blockchain to trade stocks really fast. During the market open. But like I just, I just paid off a car loan and like I'm waiting on the title and I have to like go to an app and like text with somebody. It's going to take me like weeks to just get that. And it's like, okay, yeah, like that other path is not happening. And it's been years of like we would like to speed up the normal rails and it just hasn't happened. But so yeah, what I mean raised a ton of money in the ipo. What does that do? What does that change about the company now that there's more cash on the balance sheet? What was the structure of the deal and like the rationale for that? And out.
- [194:56]
C
Yeah, it's interesting. So one thing to point out is with you know at at Figure I'm working alongside Mike Cagney who was also worked with me when I was at SoFi. So he was the CEO there, I was chief revenue officer here, I'm CEO, he's chairman. And together back at SoFi we actually raised the largest capital private capital raise at that time in 2015. It was a billion dollars from software bank. Yeah. And what it did was it really catalyzed so far growth over the years.
- [195:27]
A
Yeah.
- [195:28]
C
And if you look back, that was one of the big differentiators and I think it's one of the reasons why so far is such a big company today. It really stood out amongst its fintech peers. And so I think from that background, you know, this IPO is similar. It's going to be a major catalyst for figures growth. It's a big opportunity for us to really raise a lot of capital, come out as a market leader, use that to seed out the marketplaces that we've been doing. Right. Figure actually started direct to consumer, then went embedded B2B then went pure marketplace. And you need capital to do that to show leadership position and to keep adding to that 170 partner base that we have and we're really proud of.
- [196:07]
A
What are your lessons from the kind of the SPAC era, the 2021 era. Sofi is like one of the examples that we keep coming back to as a company that has performed really well. Stocks trading at $26 today obviously went out of 10. I think it's at all time highs, doing very well. $30 billion company. It's no joke.
- [196:30]
C
It's a join one of the 75 people.
- [196:31]
A
Wow. Yeah, okay. Yeah. But I mean obviously there were a lot of different decisions that were made at that time. What lessons are you looking at? At 2021, seeing anything now and deciding any structure of the business or decision making currently based on what you learned during the last cycle.
- [196:52]
C
I'm glad you asked because it's actually something I've been thinking about a lot. I feel that post kind of 21 and what happened with SPACs, a lot of people became very negative on going public. And I don't have it all figured out. This is our first day. But that said said, I do think from going through the process that going public is something that companies should consider. I found the markets to be receptive. I thought, you know, there's a big premium on growth and I think in the tech world that we all live in, everyone's so used to growth, but you meet, you meet these kind of investors and the kind of the, the pantheon of investments they can make. You know, when you're growing 20, 30, 40, 50, 60%, that's just so impressive and unusual. And so there's a lot of excitement. And I do feel that in the case of, and in the wake of what happened with 21 and that hangover, people soured on the public market and everyone thought, you know, let's not do it. And of course there's obviously drawbacks and there's definitely going to be days where I'm going to think, you know, this is a challenge. But at the same time, I found the capital market to be very receptive and I also found it to be a great branding exercise and really a great way to kind of get liquidity for shareholders. So I do think that ultimately it's something that people should consider and not necessarily be afraid of what happened in 21, because there are cycles and I think that's just part of the US capital markets. And it's frankly one of the reasons why we're excited about blockchain and its ability to continue to add value and disrupt in some ways.
- [198:25]
A
Yeah.
- [198:27]
B
What's the ten year vision in.
- [198:30]
C
Yeah, so right now we are just about 35 basis points of private credit in terms of our market share. So even though we're a big, rapidly growing company, we do see, you know, we've started by standardizing the mortgage process on blockchain in particular using our integration between the origination system and the capital market, which really has never existed before. Before. Right. Everyone's doing their own thing. I see Ramp, for example, sponsoring this podcast. I have background at Brex. You know, those are two companies that are both building separate capital markets and separate underwriting processes. Whereas if figure had existed when both started they could both be on figure just as an example. And so for us we started in mortgage. We started standardizing and homogenizing those assets and making them tradable on a blockchain. We can do the same across every single product, private credit, asset class and beyond. So we're really in the early innings.
- [199:26]
A
Makes a ton of sense. It's exciting.
- [199:27]
B
Very cool.
- [199:28]
A
Congratulations.
- [199:29]
B
Thank you for sure you have for making time.
- [199:31]
A
Yeah we appreciate you taking the time.
- [199:33]
B
On the big day for for you and the team and little celebration is in order Take you know feel free to take you know back back to work tomorrow. But. But got it.
- [199:43]
C
Well I'm a big fan of you guys so really appreciate it.
- [199:46]
A
Thanks so much.
- [199:47]
C
An honor to be here. So thanks so much for having me.
- [199:49]
B
Come back come back on anytime want. We'll talk to you soon after that I guess. When does your quiet period start? Is it. Well, not until things.
- [199:57]
A
Yeah. Okay.
- [199:57]
B
Okay.
- [199:58]
A
Well fantastic. We'll coordinate. We'll talk to you soon.
- [200:00]
B
Awesome.
- [200:01]
C
All right. Thanks gentlemen. Really appreciate it.
- [200:02]
A
Talk to you man. Bye.
- [200:03]
B
Congrats.
- [200:05]
A
And that concludes the guest section of TDPN. Thursday, September 11, 2025.
- [200:14]
B
Live back from the Gary Gary Marcus had the the timeline with the article peak bubble.
- [200:20]
A
Peak bubble.
- [200:20]
B
It's hard to see how this won't end badly, he says. And he the f He starts the post by sharing the tulip mania Wikipedia.
- [200:30]
A
He famously so the deep learning is hitting a wall now.
- [200:33]
B
Yeah. Calling he said I don't know when the gen bubble will end but this has got to be peak bubble. And he's highlighting the Oracle OpenAI signed $300 billion cloud deal. And he said in short, OpenAI doesn't have $300 billion. They don't have anywhere near $300 billion by their own that's not how that works. But optimistic projection they won't turn a profit. Yeah, obviously we can steal man for OpenAI and Oracle. But by their own presumably optimistic rejection, they won't turn a profit until 2030. And all of this is from a company that thought or claimed that GPT5 was going to be close to AGI for good measure, Oracle doesn't have the chips they would need to fulfill the contracts or even the cash to buy them. I won't say this is all make believe but well, you do the math. He says if Oracle actually collects its 300 billion, I will be truly astounded. And Martin Shkreli commented on the original post and said do you want a short open amount at a $500 billion market cap, which I think is the expression question. Right.
- [201:43]
A
But that's not even necessarily the take that we've been debating, which is not necessarily OpenAI. It's Oracle. Is Oracle overheated because of this deal? Gary Marcus claim is that Oracle will not draw all that 300 billion down on, on schedule. And if they, if they fail to pull that backlog through, then that would be cause for concern potentially. Anyway. I wonder what Warren Buffet has to say about all this. Did you see that he was at the 30th birthday party for Squawk Box yesterday? No way he's hanging out with Jim Cramer.
- [202:22]
B
Yeah, we were hanging out with Jim Cramer. I know, I didn't realize it was the 30th birthday.
- [202:26]
A
30Th anniversary of Squawkbox on CNBC. Happy birthday to everyone over there.
- [202:32]
B
And we got to, we got to briefly hang with Jim yesterday. He is incredibly fun to talk to. Yes, exactly.
- [202:40]
A
Like he is fantastic Encyclopedic knowledge of stock prices can just go back. Oh yeah. In 2015, Broadcom was at this price and just rattles it off to the sense. It's remarkable. He knows his stuff.
- [202:54]
B
Such a legend. I'm honestly jealous of his engagement hack, which is by people, by people believing that he always gets trades wrong.
- [203:04]
A
Yes.
- [203:04]
B
Which is just like fundamentally not.
- [203:06]
A
Yeah, it's not true at all.
- [203:07]
B
Not true. They, they constantly engage with his post, no matter what he said. So it's like a way to get a bunch of real accounts to drive like real engagement.
- [203:16]
A
Yes.
- [203:16]
B
And, and you can imagine he gets an incremental 5, 10 times the impressions because people are just like quoting it, commenting things like that. But a master at what he does and a great entertainer.
- [203:30]
A
Tyler, what was your reaction to either this or Gary Marcus post?
- [203:33]
C
Well, I think for this, I think maybe a good segment we should start doing is right after founder comes on, you just immediately say long, short.
- [203:40]
A
Yeah, that'll make everyone super happy. They will love that.
- [203:45]
C
And then also so regarding the Gary Marcus thing, I think there's that joke about Michael Burry where it's like he's predicted eight of the last two market crashes.
- [203:55]
A
Totally.
- [203:55]
B
I think there's something there.
- [203:58]
A
Yep, yep, yep.
- [203:59]
B
So you're saying this time is different.
- [204:01]
C
I think Gary Marcus has said many times like, oh, this is the end.
- [204:05]
A
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like, you know, just look at the fund returns, I guess if you. But he doesn't have a fund, so you just kind of have to. The nature of investing puts your thesis in extremely Concrete terms like you are short. To what degree are you going long with leverage? Right now, maybe you're 60% long and 40% bonds. You can be a variety of risk levels. You don't need to be purely. I'm bullish or bearish. Bearish. You can be anywhere in between that. You can be 100x levered long to 100x levered short. You can take wild swings in either direction. So you can express like, I'm not feeling great about this particular valuation in a bunch of different ways. And as a pundit, I mean, someone in the chat was asking about the inverse Kramer. It is a meme. It's an etf. It's done somewhat well in various types of. I've seen a whole bunch of different reports where someone tried to take every single one of Kramer's calls, put it into a spreadsheet and see how it would perform. But it's very hard because if he says, I'm bullish on this company, he doesn't necessarily revisit that company every day to tell you when he would sell. So he could say, like, we watched that Apple interview and he says, I love Apple. It's a stock you own. You don't trade it. And so, like, how much credit are we giving him for his Apple call? Like, at some point five years later, he might have seen earnings and been like, oh, Apple's in trouble. And then they quantize that as, like, he's flipped bearish. When really it's like, he didn't necessarily say sell Apple. He just said, like, this data point is negative. And so there's a bunch of ways that it becomes difficult to actually understand. Like, if the mind of Jim Cramer was actually running a fund actively, what would the return profile be? The other interesting thing is that there was one analysis that did look at all of his buy and sell ratings. They tried to get as close as possible to what it would look like to just take every recommendation and put it in a portfolio. And they found that it did actually outperform the market, but it outperformed the market when the market was going up and it underperformed the market when the market was going down. Because it was effectively like beta on. It wasn't producing alpha, it was producing beta. And that sort of makes sense in terms of the content creator world, because when things are going up, it lends itself to enthusiasm and when things are going down, it lends itself to misery. And so, I don't know, overall, nice guy and hard to perfectly quantize the the value of a call on live tv. Anyway, Jordy, anything else we should talk about before we get off?
- [206:57]
B
Nepal? Yes, the. The Gen Z of Nepal overthrew the government and have chosen their new leader via poll on a discord server.
- [207:07]
A
That is why they overthrew the government. That is crazy.
- [207:11]
B
Yeah, it's been crazy over there. I don't know anything about crazy, crazy crazy time in the world.
- [207:15]
A
Interesting. Well, we will keep monitoring the situation. Hopefully you can monitor the situation. And we will see you tomorrow live.
- [207:23]
B
Cannot wait.
- [207:24]
A
Have a great day.
- [207:25]
B
Cheers folks. Love you.