B (1:17)

That could. That could. There's basically a day. Every day. Like, like every day is some special day. There's like probably National Podcasters Day because they've extended it. It's Father's Day, Mother's Day, Then there's Grandparents Day, then there's Aunts and Uncles Day, and people just went crazy with the days. A lot of marketing firms figured out that you needed a day to have an excuse. So there's like Donut Day, National Eat.

A (1:41)

A Donut Day or whatever. According to Google's AI overview, tomorrow is national's philanthropy day. And then it is also celebrated as National Recycling Day, National Drummer Day on Sox Day. So we got days for days.

B (1:57)

It's also Restream day. You can sign up for Restream today one livestream, 30 plus destinations, multi stream and reach your audience wherever they are. Blue Origin, massive landing yesterday. Let's watch the video. Sawyer Merritt has breaking it down. Jeff Bezos Rocket company. Blue Origin has just successfully landed. Let's play the clip. This is new Glenn the rocket booster. Oh, no. On a barge in the middle of the ocean, 25 years after its founding. Look at that. Becoming the it's only the second company in history to land a rocket booster after SpaceX. What. What a moment. Remarkable.

A (2:44)

Insane.

B (2:46)

In some ways, it's. It should be expected. It's been a dec since SpaceX did exactly this. This is a wild video. This is like. I mean, I'm always amazed by the fact that they can keep the cameras even rolling or live streaming at all during these crazy moments where there's fire all over the camera, for example. But they did it. The smoke clears, I believe, on this video at some point. And you see the rocket booster sitting there on the drone ship standing. It did not crash. It did not blow up after they brought it back successfully. It's an orbital class rocket. Very exciting. I was thinking about the implications of this. It's interesting. It's like, on the one hand, yeah, you're 10 years behind SpaceX. SpaceX did this exact thing 2015. 2015. It's been a decade. On the other hand, it's like China hasn't done it and they've obviously wanted to. And so that's really cool that America has two companies that are doing it and they're now in competition. And so when we were talking to the folks about the data centers.

A (3:53)

Yeah, yeah, Empire, Yeah.

B (3:55)

There's been this question about, like, will the launch costs come down or will ELON Just eat 100% of the margin himself with SpaceX because he's done all this work. Well, now there's maybe going to be a little bit more pressure. We're seeing that from Firefly, we're seeing that from Blue Origin. Like, stuff seems to be working. I think a lot of people wrote off Blue Origin like Virgin Galactic. It was just like billionaire side projects. SpaceX was the serious one. I think they're still, you know, they're still a decade behind, but it is just crazy that he's, he's been able to keep it going for so long, making a lot of progress. And I was just laughing to myself about this idea that in any other industry, if a founder came to you and was like, yeah, we're, we're a decade behind the, the leading category, leading company in the category. But, but we're staying with it for another decade. You'd be like, what? Like, you're a decade behind. Like, like, you know, like, you're, you're at GPT1 level and they're at GPT5 level. Like, you're, you're going to pivot in that.

A (4:54)

Yeah, you're like, we're just trying to get to GPT2 level.

C (4:56)

Yeah.

A (4:57)

Wait, by the time you're at GPT2 they're going to be at GPT6, 7.

B (5:01)

6 or 7. And. But it is just a different industry. It moves a lot slower. And Bezos has just built a crazy company. I mean they've never like, they've never really done a, like a major financing that's been from a headline firm. They're just kind of, it feels like it's all funded by Bezos. There might be something else going on. There's, there's some rumors of like small secondary transactions here and there, but there's really no like, you know, logo, blue Origin logo on tier one fund. You just won't see that. That's just not a thing. And what's interesting is that it's a massive company. So over 10,000 people work there. Worked. It's been 25 year project as I mentioned. But also, you know, it's not, it's like the idea of, the idea of hiring 10,000 people and rocket scientists, like not cheap people, you know, imagine. I mean some of them are probably, you know, relatively new grads, but there are some serious salaries to bear. And then just funding that off your own personal balance sheet for 25 years is crazy. But Bezos has like 250 billion. Space X has raised to date like 12 billion. And so even if you just assume that Bezos is burning the exact same amount of money, even twice as much money, that's 10% of his net worth. Like it's just, it's just a doable like check to write, which is crazy.

A (6:17)

Yeah, it's almost the equivalent of you know, somebody working in big tech setting up a cafe that loses some money but they get a lot of enjoyment out of it so they keep it going.

B (6:27)

Yeah.

A (6:27)

Even though it's not, it may never be like a rational economic activity, but in this case, I mean if, you know, the implications are that you could end up in a situation where there's a duopoly in launch.

B (6:40)

Yeah, I mean SpaceX is what, multiple hundreds of billions and you know, Blue Origin seems to have somewhat of a similar capability at some point. Like, you know, what's the fair market value of Blue Origin? Is it a billion? Is it 10 billion, is it 50 billion? Like if it was a public company just like, you know, and you're just comping it to SpaceX for whatever reason, whether or not that, that math makes a ton of sense. Like you could imagine it trading in the billions for sure. Like you could imagine trading in the high tens of billions. So obviously we don't know that much about, like, the financials, how profitable this stuff is. It's a very, you know, kind of behind the scenes.

A (7:23)

Virgin Galactic is sitting at a $200 million valuation in, in the public market.

B (7:28)

I, I, I know that they spake. I thought that they had despac.

A (7:31)

So it's sitting at, in, it peaked at, let's see here. It peaked in. Oh, it had, it was all over the place. It peaked at $1,218 a share in 2019 and it's now sitting at $3.61.

B (7:53)

I think it was one of the first chamath spacs.

A (7:55)

Right?

B (7:56)

I think it was one of the first ones. And they had a very different approach. Virgin Galactic was like, doing the space plane thing where it would take off from the ground, off of like a traditional landing strip, and then just fly higher and higher and higher. I don't believe Virgin Galactic ever made serious progress towards like a reusable rocket, like what Blue Origin's done. And I watched an interview, a walk and talk tour of the Blue Origin facility with everyday astronaut and Jeff Bezos, and it just seems like he loves it. Like he's just doing it for the love of the game. It doesn't matter if it's gonna take 10% of his net worth. Like, he's so happy he's gonna be a spaceman. Yeah. No, watching him look at this massive rocket with the welding points and he knows what type of welds they used for what pieces of the rocket. Like, it's clearly just one of the most entertaining things you can buy, is just a rocket factory that builds rockets and does cool stuff. It's like, so exciting. It's so thrilling. It's gotta be way more thrilling than, like, sports betting, for example, because you're kind of, there's a lot. It is a gamble, right? You put all the money into the rocket, the rocket either explodes or goes up and comes back down. It's gotta be thrilling. It's gotta be a dopamine machine. So he's having fun. Yeah. The other interesting thing is that because they don't do this, like regular Tender offers that SpaceX does, there's a lot of employees on Reddit who are kind of like, hey, like, my stock options are kind of worthless. Like, I don't know how to exercise these. I've been at this company for a very long time, and if I was at SpaceX, I'd probably be cashing out a lot and like, retiring very comfortably. But Since I'm at Blue Origin, I'm not really, I don't really have the same level of liquidity. And you could imagine Bezos really running a tender offer process that mirrors SpaceX's just by himself. Like, he just personally takes out a billion dollars of cash, which he has, and buys $1 billion of stock from the employees. Like what happens at SpaceX when there's a billion dollar tender offer, but that comes from other investors. It could just come from him, but it doesn't feel like that's happening, at least from the, you know, the couple Reddit threads that I read. So it's weird because it feels like the, like SpaceX has this. Another unfair advantage of employees who go there and think, oh, wow, I'm getting paid, you know, a couple hundred K a year, but it could be millions if we really deliver. So we got to go the extra mile.

A (10:21)

Not just that, but I will have a, a consistent opportunity to get liquidity.

B (10:25)

Totally, totally, totally.

A (10:26)

Versus, you know, some of the people that sounds like the people that you found that, that were at Blue Origin for a long time.

B (10:32)

Yeah.

A (10:32)

Are probably sitting there, you know, basically saying to themselves, if I had joined Space X in a worse role.

B (10:38)

And some of them literally said that exact thing. Yeah, literally said that exact thing.

A (10:42)

Now, I'm sure those people had an opportunity to go to Space X too.

B (10:46)

Yeah, yeah, some of them. Some, I'm sure. Now, now the other interesting thing is like, it is fine to just be like, yeah, like, we just pay you cash. We pay you a lot of cash. We pay you, you know, higher than market cash. And, and so, like, people do need to, you know, make their own decisions. The employees can make the decisions either way. But it's just interesting that Origins, like, it feels like they're somewhat fighting with one arm tied behind their back. They're also way behind on the, on the actual progress of the, of the reusable rocket. They're clearly, you know, like, they don't have an answer to Starship. Starship is four times the capability of this new Glenn rocket that just landed. So they're, they're, they're behind in many ways, but they're still ahead of China and they're still number two. And number two in this category has got to be thrilling. It's got to be exciting. And I think it might actually be a decent business. I don't know. I'd love to dig into it more.

C (11:38)

I'd love to have.

A (11:39)

Probably more thrilling than owning a Formula One team, maybe.

B (11:43)

Yeah.

A (11:43)

And Basa you know, I mean he.

B (11:45)

Also like sent his, sent his wife and her friends to space. Like that's something that like you really can't buy otherwise anyway. What you can buy is a relationship with Privy wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions and integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API. Delian was very excited about this. He said hot damn. Blue Origin just landed New Glenn rocket on their second flight. Officially become the second company ever to do it after SpaceX did it a decade ago. Incredible moment for the commercial space industry. The orbital economy has got to be excited about this. More competition means potentially more just cheaper prices on payloads to to orbit. So exciting, exciting stuff and yeah, we'll be interesting to see. I also saw that Project Cooper, which was Amazon's Starlink competitor I believe is rebranding to Amazon Leo L E O. I like that. Yeah, some people were really upset about the rebrand. I thought it was kind of cool. But they are definitely going to be getting into the space Internet.

A (12:58)

Bezos just posted a close up picture of the rocket.

B (13:01)

Oh, let's pull it up.

A (13:02)

Putting it in.

B (13:03)

While we pull that up. Let me tell you about Cognition, the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. There's also an article in Per Aspera just dropped the Dan Goldin spoke in front of us space leaders on a subject that's been weighing on him. He's bored by space. By that he's bored with low Earth orbit. SpaceX solved cheap launch and still the only. The entire commercial space economy is largely one thing. Communications.

A (13:36)

Look at this picture Imaginary.

B (13:38)

Wow, look at that. So this is taking off. Wow, look at that. It's crazy it took so long to get this photo up. They should have I guess. Let's take look at that.

A (13:51)

Wow. Stunning.

B (13:52)

Yeah. One of the reasons why Blue Origin has like I talked to somebody who worked at Blue Origin and he was telling me that one of the reasons that Blue Origin moved a little bit slower than SpaceX is that they leaned a little bit harder on the exquisite system going really big. And Elon had this idea of like let's try and make a whole bunch of small things that we bundle together. So if you look at the number of engines on the bottom of that, I think it has like six engines, seven engines and if you look at the bottom of like a starship, you'll see like what, 30 engines or something?

A (14:27)

I think 33.

B (14:28)

33 engines. And so Elon, bigger at least on, hey, let's make modular pieces of equipment that can be moved around with maybe not a huge crane. Maybe you can just put it in the back of a truck. Maybe to work on this engine, you can do it in one normal room instead of a massive warehouse. And so the size of the individual pieces of starship, it adds up to a massive rocket. But each of the pieces can be worked on individually. When you start working on these really, really big systems, any small change, like cascades through the rest. What are you laughing at?

A (15:07)

Laughing at Gabe. Gabe's fining me for not wearing a suit.

B (15:11)

I told you, dude. I told you.

A (15:13)

John's very against it too, but I just love this. I just love this puffer too much.

B (15:18)

Okay, enjoy, enjoy. Well, Dan Goldman is upset about this. He wants asteroid mining. He says no wealth being extracted from the solar system. That's like it's. It sounds intentionally written to inflame and none being brought back to Earth. Where are my asteroid mines? Dan Goldin writes, I guess in the Economist.

A (15:41)

Very interesting. We're all asking the same thing, Dan.

B (15:43)

Yes, yes, yes. So the Steam Machine, is this what you want to move on to?

A (15:46)

Let's pull it up. Okay, let's pull up the video.

B (15:48)

Let me tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Steam Machine is going to be huge, says Josh Constein. So many Mac users wish they could play PC games, but they don't want expensive, complex PCs. For a fraction of the price and headache, they'll be able to play PC, PlayStation, Xbox and indie games on the Steam Machine. Now, the Steam Machine was actually part of the. Part of a launch. There were actually three things that they launched. The launch video was very cool. They launched a controller, a box like an actual computer, the Steam Machine, and then a VR headset. So we should see what's interesting is that we don't know pricing yet. There's a few other things. They call it the Steam Frame. Valve is saying that it's going to be cheaper than the $1,000 Valve Index, which is their previous VR headset.

D (16:48)

And.

B (16:49)

And I think it should be close to Vision Pro. Not quite in terms of the display. It seems like the display per eye might be closer to just beyond the meta quest 3s, which Tyler of course was demoing. And you said that with the Quest 3s you couldn't quite use it for work. It was a little screen door effect. It was a little pixelated.

A (17:15)

Yeah. I would not Want to be reading a lot on that?

B (17:18)

Yeah, yeah. But the, the Apple Vision Pro felt like it was at that level or almost at that level. But they do a bunch of interesting things with the Steam frame. So if you get the Steam machine, it's designed obviously at the level of specs that allow you to run VR games off of it. You can run VR games directly on the headset, but then they have a wifi dongle that you can put on this Steam machine that will stream the VR game to your headset using 6G. I think that's it, a 6G Wi Fi router. So 6G is, I think it's like a different patch of the broadband spectrum or the WI Fi spectrum that's like less cluttered than when you go into your 2G networks on your WI Fi and you see the different. There can be a lot of clutter, especially if you're in an apartment building.

A (18:17)

So Chibivi says now make this for on prem LLMs. And that's I think more or less what for Satoshi is building. Oh, building a brain for your desk.

B (18:28)

Yeah.

A (18:28)

Very cool.

B (18:29)

Tinybox, also from George Hotz is similar. And I believe Nvidia launched something that is a computer that's designed for basically on prem LLMs, a very high end graphics card sort of wrapped in a package that can be delivered to you. Yes.

A (18:47)

Steen says Steam has won. There's no reason to get an Xbox. There's no reason to get an Apple VR headset. They all run on Linux. It's the ultimate computer.

B (18:55)

Yeah. We should pull up the actual Steam official hardware announcement trailer because I think that it's a unique way to actually announce something and I liked just the way they did it. Just watch this Jordy and listen to the transitions between it. It's a couple minutes, so we might need to sort of skip through it.

A (19:14)

Hey, this is Steam Deck. Steam Deck is our powerful portable.

B (19:19)

So this is the product that's like it's already out and, and this has been on the market for a couple years, sold, I think very well. No one really knows because Valve is such a quiet company. They're not publicly traded.

A (19:31)

We're excited to talk about the future of Steam Deck, but not today because this isn't a video about the future of Steam Deck. This is a video about the future of Steam hardware. Today we're announcing three new members of the Steam hardware lineup. All connect you with powerful PC gaming. All are optimized for gaming with Steam and all are shipping in early 2026. Let's start with this one.

B (19:59)

Yeah, I think it's cool how they start with something that's familiar and then they bring you into the next.

A (20:06)

Well, the reason it's important is because it's a product that has shipped that people like.

B (20:10)

Yeah, it's sort of like re establishes them.

A (20:12)

Hardware gets like. People have so little trust in a lot of new hardware products.

B (20:16)

Totally. And then also there's this interesting factor of the Steam Deck is loved. But also they're doing some rebranding here. Like the previous VR headset is the Valve index, not the Steam index. And as you'll see later in the video, they're renam the product from Valve VR headset, Valve index to Steam frame. And so they're leaning more on this like Steam as their unified hardware brand, even though the company is Valve. And it feels like they're trying to create more unification across the brand. So putting it all together in one.

A (20:56)

Do you think it'll be a good. The main controller? No, the main computer. Do you think it'll be good for like a sim racing rig?

B (21:06)

I think it would probably run. I think all of this would run sim racing extremely well. The only thing is that you would still need to add the peripherals for correct like, yeah, control and like pedals and steering wheel, all that stuff. But listen to this part. Steam Machine here. Go back like 10 seconds. Because this transition I think is really well done.

D (21:30)

The new Steam controller works with any.

A (21:32)

Device running Steam or Steam Link, whether it's a PC, Mac, handheld, smartphone, Steam Deck or the new Steam Machine. Oh, this is the new Steam Machine.

B (21:43)

I like that. It's like very like cute and quirky. It has like, I don't know, just like funny aesthetics. But they, they. That's the first time that they introduce the name of the product. The next, the next product, and then they do it again like a minute or two later. And I just think it's like, it has this like, sort of like friendly, quirky like, aesthetic that fits with the video games, but it's. It doesn't feel like it's from anywhere particular. It feels original. I don't know.

A (22:11)

What do you think about the black cube?

B (22:13)

The black cube? I think it's fine. I mean, it's, it's. It looks like it fits in a media console where it's gonna live next to a PS5. I actually think that that's probably better than the PS5 is such, so, such an awkward shape. Like, it's, it's. It's really like long and big. I don't know. I think that this is probably a better. Just like you can fit that on more desks and in more closets and in more little media cabinets. I wouldn't have gone anywhere. I wouldn't have done anything differently.

A (22:46)

Low latency wireless connectivity of the Steam controller puck built right in. And it's great for streaming your games to your phone, tablet, laptop, Steam Deck or Steam Frame. Oh yep, this is Steam Frame.

B (22:59)

See they do it again and then they tell you, okay, we got a new VR headset. And it's such a funny way to introduce like a new VR headset. Like this is, this is the first time they talk about this VR headset.

A (23:09)

Next generation VR hardware. Stream all your Steam games, VR and non VR alike in this comfortable lightweight wireless VR headset. Steam Frame uses camera based tracking, so.

B (23:20)

Getting into your games is as easy as slipping on the headset and waking it up. So this is a shift they used to. You used to have to mount cameras around your like gaming area basically and then it would track you with those cameras. Now it's all done on the headset. This is the same way the Apple Vision Pro works. This is the same way the Meta Quest three works. This is not like new, but it is, it is new for Valve.

A (23:43)

Steam Frame also pairs seamlessly with the.

B (23:45)

New Steam controller, a great companion for.

A (23:47)

Playing non VR games in the headset.

B (23:49)

To make sure streaming is smooth and.

A (23:51)

Stable no matter what. Steam Frame includes a wireless adapter that lets you stream your to your headset over a fast and dedicated Wi Fi 6 connection and the game is streamed to your frame, optimized for VR using new technology that allows for the highest resolution streaming exactly where your eyes are looking. And Steam Frame is a PC running SteamOS.

B (24:13)

In addition to streaming you can install and play. So where you're looking in the VR headset that actually gets streamed to you in higher resolution than the rest of whatever else is in the headset. Because your eyes can, you know, like you're looking at me right now, I'm in full resolution. This is blurry, so it will send you a blurry rendering over here. And this has been done in VR at the local level before, but they've figured out how to do it in the latency loop with like actually streaming. So they call it like foveated streaming as opposed to foveated rendering, kind of the next generation of this. And so you should be able to play like very high fidelity VR games and stream them from this device. And all of that just keeps weight and Heat off your face, which is exciting. Tyler, any reaction? What would you pay for this? I think we should get the whole suite. I love it. Let's play it on the fireplace.

A (25:08)

You know, it's a former addict over here, so of course he wants the whole.

B (25:12)

Well, no, realistic. We're going to get this thing. We're going to get this. We're going to get the 1x and then we're going to get that new Google model to play it for me. And I'll come in and I'll be like, how'd you do this weekend, buddy? Did you crush. Because I was hanging out with my kids, I was going to baseball. Let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance. Manage risk and accelerate trust with AI. Vanta helps get you compliant fast. And we don't stop there. Our AI automation powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk. Michael Saylor is maybe this is going down with this ship.

A (25:49)

This is the most insane.

B (25:51)

The most insane one.

A (25:52)

Let's start with the positive. Let's start with the positive.

B (25:55)

He looks like a chat. He looks like a chat. He looks like an absolute chat.

A (25:58)

Yes. He's by himself in a rowboat. You know, it looks like there's a bunch of people on the ship. He's not worried about them. He's worried about getting as far away from it as he can. The ship is going down.

B (26:12)

The ship is going down.

A (26:13)

He's looking like an absolute Chad. Jez says, brother, you were supposed to go down with the ship. So I just think, you know, this was posted. This was posted like, you know, very early in the morning this morning. It's possible he just was playing around on.

B (26:34)

Okay, no, no, no. He did not do this. This is from an account called Atlas Hodled instead of Atlas Shrugged. Atlas Hodled with the orange square icon, bitcoiner. Atlas Hod describes themselves as a bitcoiner and AI artist.

A (26:49)

He posted this from his own account.

B (26:51)

No, no, no, no. He took the image from Atlas. Or he.

A (26:55)

Okay, you're saying he didn't make it.

B (26:56)

He didn't make it.

A (26:57)

But he liked it. He liked it and he thought it was a good idea to post.

B (26:59)

Yes, yes, yes, yes. And so Atlas, going away from a. Wakes up every day and refers to themselves as a chronicler of Michael Saylor. Like, like that. Like, they're clearly like a super fan. Like, they create fan characters, fiction, fan content. This was something that Atlas hoddled generated. And then Michael Saylor took it and was like. He's like, yeah, I Gotta post this today.

A (27:20)

That's a great idea.

B (27:21)

When the stock down like 50% or whatever.

A (27:23)

Yeah, it's down 52% in the last six months.

B (27:27)

Yes.

A (27:27)

And he thought, yeah, this is a great idea.

B (27:29)

And so the post. And so the reaction has not been good because, as Jez put it, brother, you are supposed to go down with the ship. Like, he's the captain of the ship. Why is he not on the ship? It's such a crazy image.

A (27:42)

Michael Miraflores says, so you're abandoning a sinking ship when you're supposed to be the captain.

B (27:47)

Nice. It's such a funny situation. Let me tell you about graphite.dev and then, Jordi, you can read the next one. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. You want to read this from valuation?

A (28:03)

Valuation says, God, I love markets. Where else do you get an objective answer to whether you're a genius or a total effing moron in real time? Master is down 50% since this was published. And this is a quote from Saylor, the Captain Saylor himself. He says, unless you do the requisite hundred plus hours of studying Bitcoin on top of 100 plus hours of MicroStrategy, you should not enter this trade, he said, because it is a very sophisticated trade that 99.99% of Wall street doesn't even understand.

B (28:39)

And yeah, the problem with 99.99% of Wall street not understanding your business model here trade is that they might not buy and that might drive the price down. Right? Isn't that the case?

A (28:50)

Yes. If institutional investors don't understand it, maybe they don't feel confident.

B (28:57)

So obviously people are dunking on this because the stock has traded down 50% since this was published. I do think that there is something that's nice about posting something like that like this. Like if you are running a meme stock or you're running a company that has a lot of retail attention, it's very nice to actually go to the community and say, hey, like, you should really study for 100 hours, study the asset that we're investing in and study this company. You should make an educated decision. It is a little bit of just like, do your own research. Although obviously there's a little bit of read on this, which is like, it's just like I'm saying that I'm doing something so complicated when really I'm just hodling bitcoin, like by my own admission. But I do think that there's something somewhat responsible about saying, hey, do the research. I don't know. I want to give a little bit.

A (29:52)

Of credit for that.

B (29:53)

Yeah. Anyway, where to? Next to Julius the AI data analyst, connect your data and ask questions in plain English and get insights in seconds. No coding required.

A (30:07)

They have a very funny campaign up around San Francisco right now. I won't spoil it for you, but there's a number of fantastic billboards.

B (30:18)

Yes, yes. Cantor Fitzgerald, now controlled by the son of Howard Lutnick, is having its best year ever, says Joe Wiesenthal. Congratulations to Brandon Lutnick. One unusual item might appear on Cantor Fitzgerald's year end expense receipts. Quote I just left the floor and told someone I'm happy to buy them a cot because they need to come in on Sunday and not leave until Friday, joked sage Kelly, 53, co CEO of Cantor Investment bank, as he sat down for an interview at his New York office. Climbing Wall Street's league tables, jumping out in front of the cryptocurrency boom and returning to SPAC fueled deal making the private New York financial boutique having its busiest and most successful year on record. Cantor is now controlled by Brandon and Kyle Lutnick, the sons of Howard Lutnick who joined Donald Trump's administration as Commerce Secretary earlier this year. The firm is on track to post revenue in 2025 of upwards of 2.5 billion, an all time high and a jump of more than a quarter on last year, according to people familiar with the matter.

A (31:20)

When you how do they do it? How do they do it, John?

B (31:23)

How do they do it? A lot of grinding. I've met Brandon and a lot of I mean it feels like Cantor has been early to a bunch of like sort of risk, more risk on investments than other even pre administration. They were early to the stablecoin thing I believe early to a bunch of crypto stuff. Just a little bit more risk on relative to the other investment banks and so have done very well. And then of course now even further entrenched in D.C. further entrenched in Wall Street.

A (31:56)

Yeah, that would certainly help give confidence around some bets that maybe other firms would find a bit riskier.

B (32:03)

Yeah, I mean there's a little bit of like this year there's a lot of certainty that came to crypto but building that consensus around like okay the certainty is actually going to come. There is certainty that certainty will arrive. That took a big leap and you can see that if you know the administration very closely you could assess that. Whereas people have been waiting around for certainty on tariffs and that's taken a little bit longer, but the certainty on the crypto stuff has certainly moved a lot faster.

A (32:38)

The executives bristle at suggestions that their new connections in Washington are contributing to that success. Instead, they say Cantor has grown with a lean team and is reaping the benefits of years of preparation for booms in sectors that more established banks have kept at arm's length. Its 250 dealmakers are set to post revenue north of 1 billion at 4 million per banker. That's about double the rate at the firms on Wall Street.

B (33:01)

Huh.

A (33:02)

Interesting.

B (33:04)

Panter has broken more than AI researchers. They're like completely broke compared to AI researchers. Like by a thousand x they're making like a thousand times less money than.

A (33:15)

No, that's talking about the earnings that individual.

B (33:19)

So as a group they'll make a billion dollars.

A (33:22)

Yeah. So they could have just been one. They could have picked the best guy that they had and gone into ad and spent all day training.

B (33:29)

Yeah. So the bankers are making 4 million on average. Of course there's also like the overhead of the firm. That's not profit, that's revenue.

A (33:37)

Yeah.

B (33:37)

Versus at some of the labs you might be making 400 million per research. So really pick the wrong industry to go into and you know our heart goes out to them.

A (33:49)

Cantor has brokered more US IPOs by volume this year than any other firm and is fifth in all U.S. equity offerings after overtaking stalwarts including Barclays and Citigroup. It's seen a boom in trading largely from clients outside the US and is on track to acquire hedge fund o' Connor from UBS Group by the end of the year. A deal that's facing a last minute hitch after the unit was hit by losses related to bankrupt auto parts supplier First Brands Group.

B (34:18)

First Brands is really all over the place, really wreaking havoc.

A (34:24)

Much of Kanter's revenue haul comes from a surge in crypto deal making, including fundraising for multi billion dollar treasury companies which hold and trade digital assets. But also from the firm's early push into covering now booming sectors including rare earth minerals, quantum computing, robotics and data centers.

B (34:39)

Wow. They went along the boom and they. They're making. Making it rain. The rainmakers are making it.

A (34:45)

Kelly says, I promise you we're not getting anything handed to us. It's easy for our competitors to say that because they're not here living and breathing what we do every single day. Anyways. Very impressive.

B (34:58)

So should we move over to.

A (35:00)

Let's. Alfred Lynn has hit the timeline. He says the latest on outlier's Path are Sequoia. This is our Sequoia. It has always been our.

B (35:09)

Is Outlier a product? Outlier's Path.

A (35:12)

I think that might be a blog.

B (35:14)

Oh, wait, okay, sorry. Outlier's Path. Welcome to Outlier's Path. Having spent more than. So this is out. I think this is Alfred Lynn's personal blog. Through this collection of posts on Outlier's Path, I hope to provide you with the provocation to get better at getting better and prove your critics wrong. Okay. Yes. So this is. This is the name of his personal blog. Okay, cool.

A (35:39)

AB in the chat. Legendary.

B (35:41)

What is that?

A (35:42)

Chat star says, I interned for Cantor last summer. Great experience.

B (35:45)

Oh, nice.

A (35:46)

Very cool. Alfred says this is our Sequoia. It has always been our Sequoia. It has always been our Arrakis, our Dune. No, he says it was never Don's Sequoia nor Michael's, Doug's, Jim's or Roloffs. From the very beginning, when Don chose to build a partnership and name it after the longest living tree on earth, Sequoia was meant to endure not through individuals, but through us. The collective strength, integrity and vision of the partnership. And just as it was not theirs alone, it will not be Pat and Alfred Sequoia. It will always be our Sequoia. We are responsible for something enduring, privileged to stand on the foundation built by those who came before us and responsible for making it stronger for those who will come after. Together we have the opportunity to do our life's work, to make a dent in the universe, to leave our fingerprints on the partnership, and to shape Sequoia into the place we want it to be for the future. Principles guide us EM Dash anchored in purpose and mission. Beyond that, beyond that, we want to trust and empower one another. Our purpose and mission remain to help the daring build legendary companies for any Gen Z in the audience.

B (36:56)

Yeah, how would you translate that?

A (36:56)

Gen Z? Our purpose and mission remain to help those with motion develop aura the markets, aura farm the industry. Our guiding principles.

B (37:11)

Is any of this like an update? Is anything this like a very big change to the strategy?

A (37:17)

I think that this is just their first, like, you know, really public statement as the new coast.

B (37:23)

Yes, but what is changing here? Like, like we already have the news that that there. That there are now two stewards. Is there. Are they going to be focusing more on AI companies or less on AI companies? Or like, are they being more on growth stage or less on growth stage? Like, is there a change to the strategy?

A (37:42)

No, I think. I think this is Just reminding people what the firm wide strategy is. Right. They've gone through. This has been probably the roughest year on record for Sequoia in terms of like comms. Right. Just going through the. Sean, like Sean McGuire being in the headlines constantly. That's not the kind of, you know, I feel like coverage that does not.

B (38:05)

Break through in tech and like, I.

A (38:07)

Don'T think, I don't think it's affected their brand with founders and internally in the industry very much. But no, I think this is, this is just a good statement.

B (38:17)

I mean, I guess, I guess here is the answer to that question about like, what is this a response to? And Alfred says some people have asked if we will continue to make new investments and lead the investment team. The answer is an unequivocal yes. We will source and lead new investments and we will remain co leads of the early and growth teams. And so they're open for business, they're doing deals, they want to actually be investing. And the big question, yeah, I would imagine that like the leader at most firms is actually doing deals, but they usually have a different flavor to them, a different shape. When I think about Marc Andreessen at Andreessen Horowitz, he's clearly the leader of the firm to a degree that if you're coming in for your seed pitch, you're probably not DMing him first. He's not the first stop on the fundraising tour. But when Elon is raising money to take Twitter private, like, yeah, he is texting with Mark and that money does come out of Andreessen's coffers.

A (39:22)

Yeah. And if they, and if they are aggressively trying to win a deal.

B (39:26)

Yeah.

A (39:26)

That Mark might.

B (39:28)

Yeah.

A (39:29)

Send the founder note directly.

B (39:30)

Exactly. And so, and so when I look at Alfred, I would say, oh, well, if you know, Tony from Dodak from Doordash is working on a new from Doordash is working on a new project or starting a new company or, or heavily investing in a friend's company. Yeah, that probably goes straight to him.

A (39:49)

But no, he's traded down 23% in the last month. It's now Dodash still.

B (39:57)

But yeah, I mean he's probably not going to be sitting there taking notes at YC Demo day.

A (40:03)

Although here's the big question with this post.

B (40:05)

Yes. Was it A.I.

A (40:07)

Alfred says at the end, this is not just a partnership, it is a living em dash. It is a living, breathing legacy.

B (40:16)

I don't know. So it reads to me, honestly, it reads to me like, yes, the blog post went through ChatGPT and got a pass.

A (40:27)

It got a passed up.

B (40:29)

It got a pass. I would say that Alfred, if that happened, if that happened, please do yourself a Favor, go to ChatGPT and go to your settings and in personalization put custom instructions and say never use EM dashes.

A (40:43)

But maybe this is just a way to publicly support a portfolio company. OpenAI.

B (40:46)

That's true, that's true. And then also the thing that's really triggering Jordi more than the EM dashes, I believe, is what's called antithetical parallelism or contrastive construction. It's not this, it's that. For years that's been a fine phrase, but for some reason in the reinforcement learning pipeline, this is actually the number.

A (41:09)

One way that I detect AI generated comments on social media. More than the mdash is the contrast. I'll be reading something that looks like some random social post comment in there. It's not this, it's that.

B (41:23)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, yeah, it's not the username that triggers me, it's the contrastive construction. So yes, you should be able to at least edit this out because I just find it annoying at this point. I've just seen it so many times that I'm just like, like I need a different flavor of text and so you can do this for a long time. You could put this in your ChatGPT personalization and it wouldn't work. It just didn't do anything. And I complained about it on the show and Sam Altman announced that I think they fixed it and I think that if you want less EM dashes, Sam Altman says that removing EM dashes. So he says this is 14 hours ago. This is the biggest scoop possible. It's a small but happy win. If you tell ChatGPT not to use EM dashes in your custom instructions, it finally does what it's supposed to do.

A (42:20)

A screenshot was going viral yesterday of a newspaper and at the end of the article it said if you want, I can also create an even snappier front page style version with punchy one line stats, bold infographic ready layout. What preferable for maximum reader impact. Do you want me to do that next? So they add that accurate.

B (42:40)

You did that by accident. That's awesome. I love it. Well, if you want to generate images, video or audio, head over 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. Speaking of generative video, we gotta Watch the cat. We gotta watch the cat.

A (43:03)

Pull it up.

B (43:04)

We hate we. Oh, I hate AI slop. I'm Jordy. I hate AI video. Sora is bad. Sora is bad. Wrong. Look at this video. It's remarkable. The cat is playing the piano and someone comes outside and takes it away. There's something about the nature of the video. Bagpipes. I like the bagpipes. Fun. There's something about keeping the. The video intentionally low res because it's a doorbell cam where it doesn't trigger the uncanny valley because the doorbell cam always looks bad. Whereas if this was trying to look like 4K footage, it would not look as good. That's.

A (43:47)

We gotta get that instrument.

B (43:48)

That's a good image. That's a good instrument. I like that. This is. It's funny because they clearly created some sort of template. The didgeridoo. Hey, knock it off.

A (43:57)

It's midnight.

B (43:58)

Give me that thing. But it does get extremely repetitive because she always comes outside and says knock it off again and again. And so like seeing this just once is enough for me. The symbols is pretty funny. Physics on those symbols. Not quite right though. You know, there's work to be done here. I do like the cat. Hitting the gong is great. The gong looks exactly like our gong, honestly. So it turns out midnight aerobics, now the whole shaking. Okay, I'm into it. How many of you?

A (44:33)

Switzerland reaches agreement with the US to cut tariff to 15%. The deal would reduce an extraordinarily high tariff rate at 39% that had threatened to cripple Swiss exports. We all know what those exports are. The United States and Switzerland said on Friday that they had reached an agreement to lower a punishing 39% tariff on Swiss goods, a change that will help to reduce the cost of exporting Swiss pharmaceuticals, gold, watches and chocolate to the United States. The deal came after meeting between US And Swiss government officials on Thursday and an unusual visit by a group of high level Swiss executives to President Trump in the Oval Office last week. The Trump admin put a 39% tariff on Swiss exports in August, blindsiding a longtime ally in delivering a sharp blow to Switzerland's economy by significantly raising the cost of the country's exports. The United States of drugs, dairy products, gold and watches. The tariff was one of the highest rates set for any country, which administration officials said was in response to a substantial trade deficit the United States had with Switzerland. I wonder why we would have a large trade deficit with Switzerland. The 15% tariff will now be the same as the tariff the United States charges on goods from the European Union, which reached a trade deal in July. So as part of this, there's going to be roughly two Swiss companies committed to making 200 billion in investments in the United States by 2028. And the United States also agreed to cap tariffs. I didn't know Switzerland had a semiconductor industry.

B (46:15)

I have no idea.

A (46:15)

Getting those as well.

B (46:17)

Well, they do have some AI researchers over there who are. Who are like poached for meta. Right?

A (46:22)

Yeah. I think Lucas Beyer was over there. There was an OpenAI team set up over there.

B (46:27)

Yeah. It's interesting that I haven't heard of a OpenAI team in many of the other European countries. It seems like Switzerland was like a.

A (46:36)

Uniquely, like, I think most of the. I mean, there's a lot of AI going on at. I never know how to say London. Eth. Zurich.

B (46:43)

Yeah, yeah.

A (46:44)

There's that university that's like very. It's like. It's like the premier European ethereum.

B (46:49)

Zurich.

A (46:50)

Yeah.

B (46:52)

No, it is different though, right?

A (46:54)

Yeah, yeah.

B (46:54)

No, eth.

A (46:56)

I should look up what it stands for. Okay. But there's a lot of AI like research going on there.

B (47:01)

That's cool.

A (47:02)

Situation Room says Patek to open factory in Wisconsin.

B (47:07)

That would be hilarious. Wisconsin made Patek. Have you been monitoring the GPT 5.1 launch? Has it been going well? It feels like it's been kind of quiet, but it's.

A (47:21)

People seem to generally like it. I don't know. I mean, they didn't release benchmarks, so a lot of the technical people aren't super concerned.

B (47:32)

I saw some charge kind of showed that it's more that they're just pushing the model router further to the edges. So it can reason for even longer if it needs to, and it can reason for even less time if it just can come up with the answer more quickly. And so all of that feels like better cost optimization instead of just hitting everything with a hammer. Not everything needs 20 minutes of thinking. Some things need 30 minutes though. And some things need 60. One minute of thinking.

A (48:00)

I tested it using GT3RS bench.

B (48:03)

Yes.

A (48:04)

Where I was trying to have.

B (48:06)

You were going agent to commerce mode, though.

A (48:08)

Yes.

B (48:08)

Which is a little bit early.

A (48:10)

I'm just using.

B (48:11)

But did you use agent mode? No.

A (48:13)

No.

B (48:13)

Okay.

A (48:13)

Yeah.

B (48:14)

I think if you do agent mode, it would. So to say exactly what happened because it's an interesting failure case.

A (48:20)

I just said find me a GT3RS Green 992 in the US that's currently listed for sale.

B (48:28)

Yes.

A (48:29)

And it found me, one that was on cars and bids that sold over two years ago.

B (48:35)

Well, cars and bids, clearly Doug Demuro site. Cool cars from the modern era. We love cars and bids. We love Doug Demuro. But that is frustrating because it already sold. But I think with Agent Mode, it would have actually, like, opened the website and clicked around a little bit more. Um, I'm not exactly sure how to trigger that, but maybe you just need to chat with it more. Maybe you need to be clear about your prompt. You might have needed to do 3.5 pro or what is it? 5.5.0 pro, I guess now.

A (49:07)

Yeah, 5.

B (49:08)

Yeah, 5.5pro. I mean, it feels like we're back.

A (49:11)

Running the same prompt agent mode right now. Okay, we'll see how it does. We'll come back to it.

B (49:15)

And is there a difference between agent mode on 5.1 and agent mode on 5 Pro? I don't know. I don't know. It's getting there. They. They did such a good job of, like, narrowing it down and, like, unconfusing it, and then now they're like, let's put a little bit more confusion in. Let's just add a little bit back. The fact that it says 5.1 is, like, crazy to me.

A (49:36)

It's like Chat wants to know about all the cans. Behind. Behind. Tyler.

B (49:41)

Yeah. What you got? You got Red Bulls back there? No. You got energy drink. You got.

A (49:46)

Yeah, Taylor called it pallets of fridge. Yeah, there's some dc.

B (49:53)

Your background is actually hilarious. We should. We should move the. We should move the refrigerator to the other side so we can see the refrigerator. Because the refrigerator is lit up, so if you slide to the right. Yeah, you can see the fridge.

A (50:06)

There we go.

B (50:07)

It's cool. So we should flip that around or maybe just move the camera. But anyway, you might have noticed Jordy's wearing the puffer jacket. That's because we are sponsored by Turbo Puffer. Search every byte, serverless vector and full text search build from first person fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Will Maniatis took to the timeline to say in the flow in quotes. He says the essential question for the modern allocator, the deal guy or the venture capitalist, is, do you want to be in the flow? Size of check, size of fund, personal economics, character of deal, character of behavior, lifestyle. And every other single question is downstream of whether or not you are in the flow or not. Let me explain.

A (50:51)

Is this Tyler? Do you think this has something to do with having motion?

B (50:56)

It seems related.

A (50:58)

I mean, Will is kind of like, unk Status? I don't know if he would. Whoa.

B (51:02)

Shots fired.

A (51:03)

Shots fired.

B (51:05)

Calling him an unk.

D (51:06)

Like what he.

B (51:07)

I mean, is this because you believe. I thought he was very young. I thought he was a teal fellow just a few years ago. No one knows how old he is. Is there a theory that he could be unknown? He's certainly wise beyond theory.

A (51:19)

No, but I'm saying this is like the equivalent of having motion, so I agree with you.

B (51:23)

Okay, okay.

A (51:23)

But, like, I don't think he would be one to use that kind of. That vernacular.

B (51:27)

The Parlayans. Yeah. Let me explain. Think of the Flow as the world's greatest nightclub. It's open 24 7. Many of the coolest and richest guys are there. Guys seem to get rich just by dint of hanging around. And the lights never turn on. It's a party that never ends. Inside the flow. The only decision you have to make is to keep partying. Sure, people get hurt inside the Flow. Sometimes guys buy tables they can't afford or get addicted to habits they can't maintain. When this happens, the Flow gently returns them to pedestrian life and the party continues. No one ever seems to notice. When you're inside the Flow, the only thing you notice is the guys at higher rungs dangling over a seemingly endless set of 10x markups and lifestyle expenses to to exhaust your newly found carry. Inside the flow. We don't fly commercial. Mark Rowan is constantly calling, and we have houses on Gin Lane. The Flow gives to those who give to it. There's nothing wrong with being in the flow. Many great investors live their lives entirely inside of it and have beautiful economics families and even return capital to incredible endowments inside the flow. But very few people make the conscious decision to realize that life is possible outside the Flow, that you can get rich, build great companies, generate excess returns by being far, far, far outside the flow. But you can only have one foot in. But you can't only have one foot in. If you're going to enter the flow, you must do it entirely. No one gets rich hunting for value on Madison Avenue. If you're in the business of buying marquee assets, you need to systemically order your life around paying marquee prices across asset classes. You can neatly order firms into, in the flow and out of the flow. Firms in the flow tend to have softer J curves because they're able to quickly make deals, consensus, and achieve markups through other friends at the party. Firms outside the flow tend to be a bit slower, have much more profound J curves, but can achieve incredible returns if they persevere. Many of the social oddities of allocators are actually social oddities of being in the flow. My friend Kyle Tucker names the main.

A (53:40)

One below going guy for guy at every social occasion.

B (53:46)

Explain. I can't believe what he said. At the Apollo AGM in Lake Cuomo. Ari Emanuel introduced me to the Pope. I just bought ramp forwards at 500x from Bill Ackman's dog walker.

A (54:00)

This is.

B (54:03)

If you find yourself with a strong distaste for this lifestyle, that's okay. There's a rich life possible outside of the flow. But you need to make the consensus decision day in and day out to either be in the flow.

A (54:13)

Conscious decision.

B (54:14)

Oh conscious. To either be in the flow or far outside the flow only gives to those who give their all to it. What a great piece of writing. That's funny. Nassim Taleb said the opposite of success isn't failure, it's name dropping the bed of Procrust. And somebody you know. Antonio says, in my experience during booms, most get Flo curious, then pull back. Then the pullback comes and people become contrarian and look down their noses at Flo. Folks without even the self awareness to refer to their dabblings as a phase from when I was younger. And Will Menez says, you are describing being half in, half out of the flow. This will kill you. The flow takes from those who attempt to take from it without giving their all in return. The flow only gives to those who give their all. It reads like a plot of a horror film. It's fantastic. Thinner or like the substance.

A (55:15)

Write a novel, Will, please.

B (55:17)

Yeah, what a way with words. Do you think this is inspired by that conference he went to? It was more outside of the flow potentially.

A (55:27)

I think so.

B (55:28)

I think. I think Main Street, a little bit of what's going on Main street. You see. I mean we talk about this with David Senra a lot. Who's coming on the show in just a few hours. Wait, wait, what is he. Were you not supposed to say that? Sorry. I think he's coming on.

A (55:44)

He said he was scheduled and then we took him off the schedule. Cause he had to travel for the day. Then he had some plane issues and he said save the 2pm spot. And then now he's on another.

B (56:00)

Well, we'll get him back on the show soon. But if you're listening to the show, you obviously know who David Senra is. The creator of the Founders podcast and the host creator of David Senra. David Senra with David Senra But David is someone who has observed folks inside the flow and outside the flow and really sees both sides of it, I think. And that's one of his unique strengths, is that he is not entirely captured by the flow. And maybe Will's point would hold. In the capital allocator world, you have to be in the flow or out of the flow. You can't be half in. But it certainly does not hold true for what David does, which is, you know, storytelling and understanding the history of the world's greatest entrepreneurs.

A (56:48)

The flow, I think, could be summed up by are you dancing in Manhattan? Right. It's a very, very Manhattan thing in.

B (56:57)

Manhattan, but also in Sand Hill Road, I think, is similar. Are you dancing with Google AI Studio. Create an AI powered app faster than ever. Gemini understands the capabilities you need and automatically wires the right models and APIs up for you. Get started at AI Studio. Build.

A (57:15)

Will says friends that have done well in the flow seem to share these traits.

B (57:18)

Oh, my God, this is such a long list again.

A (57:21)

Now he had to follow it up. Spend 100% of net cash on rent expenses. So they constantly feel pressure.

B (57:28)

Okay.

A (57:28)

Love that. Zegna sneakers, ABC cardigans.

B (57:32)

Okay.

A (57:33)

Felt very direct. Will educate you.

B (57:38)

Yes.

A (57:38)

Low first marriage success rates. High second marriage success.

B (57:41)

Okay. Okay.

A (57:43)

Lots of flights. Constant 2, 3 city rotation. Couldn't be spend 99% of their time talking about deals that make up less than 5% of deployed dollars. Office either in SoHo or Nine West.

B (57:54)

Oh, so he's really calling out his. His Manhattanite friends, his neighbors.

A (58:00)

Now, here's where he contradicts himself. Oh, no, maybe not. He says constantly holding large amounts of cash.

B (58:05)

May function physically.

A (58:06)

Seems to be tipping a couple grand.

B (58:08)

You're a notorious tipper. You're a notorious cash tipper. So you fit into this piece.

A (58:14)

Very low laptop usage. Constant cell phone usage. Can't make it through an hour without taking a call. We had a workout with one of these guys this morning. We felt really bad. This guy. We showed up to the gym for a workout and had breakfast with him, and he had to step away for three calls.

B (58:35)

He was on the grind. Like, by the time we had finished the first coffee of the morning, he'd had four calls. It was crazy.

A (58:44)

I guess that could be one call.

B (58:46)

Before the show because we're like, we're in our own flow. Our flow is not the flow. It's the TVPN flow. We spend, like, no time talking to other people except on the show. So it's a very, very different lifestyle, I think, from like what he's describing. But I've seen this, and I mean, this would again, just work as a novel or a movie. We're watching the birth of a modern Bret Easton Ellis. I know you haven't seen American Psycho, but it's a fantastic film. You should check it out sometime. It's also an interesting book. And the. The Patrick bateman of the 90s is. You know, this would be a great foundational portrait of an individual who could be stylized in a Brett Easton Ellis style, which would be very interesting.

A (59:34)

I agree.

B (59:35)

Let's continue reading. But first, let me tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. So where were we? They have a lot of cash. They're in Soho 9 West.

A (59:47)

Lunch guys. More so than dinner guys. Never breakfast guys. Lacrosse or hockey in high school, not rowing.

B (59:53)

Okay.

A (59:54)

That's Tyler.

B (59:55)

Wait, which one did you do?

A (59:55)

Lacrosse guy. I played lacrosse.

B (59:57)

Oh, flow guy. Right here.

A (59:59)

Zoom calls. Not cell calls. I can see that. Friends that have done out. Done well out of the flow.

B (60:05)

I can't tell if do you want to be in the flow or outside the flow? I guess the whole point of this is that you either want to be all the way in maximizing it. Flow maxing or you want to be rejected. Rejecting it entirely. You just don't want to be.

A (60:14)

Let's get into the out of flow zone. Be in the middle of nowhere, Jackson Park City. Discover. Okay, like properties, but still on a resort. Multiple dogs mostly more dogs than kids, usually low trust. Kind of cagey to pin down and get a meeting with. Once they trust you, you can't get rid of them.

B (60:32)

Okay.

A (60:33)

Almost universally happily married. Rowing in high school. Not lacrosse or hockey.

B (60:38)

I like how specific.

A (60:39)

Low meeting count. Lots of depth. I think I know the two people he's describing here. I'm not gonna dox them. But phone calls, not zooms. Denim shirts are full suited.

B (60:51)

Does one begin with a T?

A (60:53)

Yes.

B (60:53)

Okay.

A (60:55)

Seems to have unspeakable amount of.

B (60:57)

Does one begin with a J?

A (60:59)

What?

B (61:00)

Does one begin with a J?

A (61:01)

Yeah.

B (61:01)

Okay.

A (61:05)

Always funding some cultural project, movie magazine, et cetera, that's on the brink of failing. Okay, so I will say both of these are friends of the show. First one has not been on the show. Second one has been. That's the only.

B (61:19)

Okay, wait, wait, wait. Okay. Yeah. We could go more into it later. This is hilarious, though. I feel like both these guys have been on the show. We've clearly had many specimens who fit into both. And I think Will's point is that there are multiple ways to make a buck and there are just different archetypes within the world of capital allocation, within the world of of being a deals guy. I think this is interesting. It's like we're peeling back the onion. We're going a layer deeper on the deals guy archetype, which has been workshopped by Will and Jeremy Giffon over the last few weeks. So they're having fun.

A (61:59)

Are you guys more in the flow or out of the flow do you think?

B (62:02)

I don't think we qualify for either because we are not deals guys. We are not capital allocators. I think step one of even deciding if you're in or out of the flow is the first line of Will's original post. The essential question for the modern allocator, the deal guy, the venture capitalist. I'm not a deals guy. I'm not an allocator. I'm not a venture capitalist. So it's an irrelevant question. It's like are you more of a center or power forward? It's like I'm a podcaster. That doesn't even apply. And so you can only be in the flow or out of the flow if you are at least in the game, the game of capital allocation. And it's a funny time to reflect. Anyway, let's move on to linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. Just in. The stock market is in extreme fear and the ball is being thrown at. Is that Kobe?

A (63:00)

Yes, that's Kobe. John. Unfazed.

B (63:02)

He's unfazed.

A (63:03)

Completely unfazed. Skooks is unfazed.

B (63:05)

We checked in with our retail correspondent. He was shook at 6:30 in the morning or something. What was it? 5:30 in the morning. He woke up and he was looking at the pre market report. Seeing red. Very nervous.

A (63:19)

No, no, it was 30 seconds after the opening.

B (63:22)

Okay. After the opening when the stocks dived. He is monitoring the situation much more than we are. I watch the public market moves on the order of like weeks or even oh, there's a big day. It's on the COVID of the Wall Street Journal. I'll throw on the white suit.

A (63:38)

I am not monitoring market based on the color of the suit.

B (63:43)

Totally. Because I really do think in more of like months and years and longer time horizons than days. Yes.

A (63:51)

I think it's centuries actually thinking this new options esque platform called Euphoria has Been going viral. Ben Eiford says, honestly, this is so cute and I'm fun. I'm not even mad. I love gambling. This is so gamified. I don't think it presents as investing or democratization of derivatives or whatever. It's entertainment. And look at this.

B (64:16)

What is this?

A (64:17)

Tyler, are you playing this? Should I get on this?

B (64:21)

Well, I mean, Jordy, should we talk about like one of our most degenerate ideas ever? I mean, at this point it's just gonna. Yeah, the zero minute option. I mean, at this point, like somebody's just going to build it. At least we'll be on record for just joking about it. So two years ago, shortly after Jordi and I met, we were introduced by Willmanitis. We are kicking around ideas. One of those ideas was a nicotine pouch for finance Bros. Called Excel. We actually wound up launching that. You might have seen that. We've talked about that on the show. The other thing that we kicked around was, so if you've been tracking options trading, you can now buy zero day options. These are options that expire after one day. So you're only betting on the movement of the stock over the course of one day. And my idea, or our idea was what if you made it more degen. What if you made it zero minute options and you got it down to something on the order of how long it takes to pull a slot machine and then watch the slots tick over. So you would be democratizing high frequency trading trading, for example, and you would be placing a bet. The UI was effectively, you buy $1 of this out of the money option in 90% of the time you lose the dollar like you do when you're playing slots or you lose the penny. But 1/10 of the time you 10x your money. And that's the nature. And basically you can derive the exact same probabilities that exist in a slot. In a literal slot machine, you can derive those exact same probabilities from the financial markets with particular derivative instruments. Like mathematically, you can recreate a slot machine that acts with the exact same probabilities using derivatives, using zero minute options.

A (66:18)

We'd have terrible founder market fit on that one because I don't.

B (66:21)

Horrible, horrible.

A (66:23)

It was fun talking about for a.

B (66:24)

Minute, but it's hilarious. And it's one of those things. The real problem is that this is just a market entry tool. You're going to become like sort of a meme and then you have to go build the rest of the financial institution and then you're up against Coinbase and Robinhood and Public and a whole bunch of other serious competitors who have way more infrastructure. And so like the cute little game can be a good marketing tool to launch your company, but there's a lot more that you have to do but it can still be profitable. And hopefully you're doing it in a way that isn't just totally to degen gambling because trying to yeah, it's a little bit of degen on degen combat out there. But you know what's not? Degenerate numeral.com sales tax and autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Go get build an honest product. Start a woodworking shop, make a chair. Sell it on Shopify.

A (67:25)

Sell Mahogany online. Sell the official wood of Business Online. Simp for Satoshi says the AI bubble has already popped. Information.

B (67:35)

I said this too. Three weeks ago the stock traded down 2%. The bubble popped. Now we're back inflating. Yeah, exactly.

A (67:41)

I agree with Sim says the information, however, is yet to propagate evenly. And he's sharing a quote from Scott McNeely, CEO of Sun Microsystems in 2002. The quote At 10 times revenue, to give you a 10 year payback, I have to pay you 100% of revenues for 10 years straight in dividends. That assumes I can get that by my shareholders. That assumes I have zero cost of goods sold, which is very hard for a computer company. That assumes zero expenses, which is really hard with 39,000 employees. That assumes I pay no taxes, which is very hard. And that assumes you have to pay no taxes on your dividends, which is kind of illegal. And that assumes with 0R and D for the next 10 years, I can maintain the current revenue run rate. Now, having done that, would any of you like to buy my stock at $64? Do you realize how ridiculous those basic assumptions are? You don't need any transparency. You don't need any footnotes. What were you thinking?

B (68:37)

What was Sun Microsystems trading for in 2000? And then what were they trading for in 2002? Because this reads like he's apologizing for a massive sell off in the stock. That is pretty crazy. Yeah. What a wild. I like bone here. Bone. GBD says if you're in AI, pivot to finance and go short. Ridiculous. Badminton is live streaming in China and you can adjust whatever angle you want. This is very cool. So they film it with a whole bunch of different cameras and then you can pick the angle. Imagine being able to pick your own angle while watching TVPN live. That would be something special. Maybe we should steal this back from the Chinese. This seems like some awesome innovation. Now, Tyler, you don't think this is Gaussian splatting, right? Gaussian splatting?

A (69:34)

No. I mean, it's not smooth.

B (69:35)

You think this is just a bunch of cameras?

A (69:36)

It looks like a bunch of cameras, but you could do this with Gaussian splatting.

B (69:40)

Yeah. I think that'll be the next iteration, the next version. But we're pretty far away from real time on that. Right?

A (69:47)

Real one knows the shuttlecock is the fastest moving object that's been recorded in sports.

B (69:53)

Really?

A (69:53)

It goes hundreds of miles an hour.

B (69:55)

Hundreds?

A (69:56)

Yes.

B (69:57)

No way. I mean, it's, like, faster than a golf ball. Faster than a bowling ball?

D (70:02)

Yes.

B (70:03)

It's faster than a football. It's faster than. That's crazy. Hundreds of miles an hour.

A (70:08)

Let me confirm. Golf ball.

B (70:10)

I'll put you in the truth zone there. What about rifle shooting? Does it go faster than a gun? You've seen those at the Olympics where they're shooting the pistols, Right? It can't possibly go faster than a gun. Than a bullet from a rifle in a pentathlon. No way. I got you dead to rights.

A (70:27)

Okay, so this is AI Overviews. It's probably hallucinating. And it says this. Actually, you might have found a really incredible insight.

B (70:37)

Okay. Hole in the reasoning. Okay. What do you.

A (70:40)

No. A bullet is not faster than a badminton shuttlecom. No.

B (70:43)

Let's go.

A (70:45)

I guess. But. So keep working. They're talking about bird.

B (70:48)

Keep looking. Badminton shuttlecock speed during badminton game. How fast does that go? I want miles per hour, hopefully. And then I want to know how fast an F1 car goes and how fast a bullet out of one of those pistols goes at the Olympics. Because we all know that iconic image of the woman now and the Turkish guy at the Olympics and the guy with all the gear.

A (71:18)

AI. AI is. Is. Is false. It is convinced.

B (71:24)

Does anyone have any real numbers? Anyone have any real numbers?

A (71:27)

Okay, like, a top speed for a Shuttlecock is like 300 miles an hour.

B (71:30)

300 miles an hour. And how much is a bullet coming out of?

A (71:33)

2,000 miles an hour.

B (71:34)

2,000 miles an hour. Wow. So off by an order of magnitude. You're in the truth zone. It's okay. We'll clip it in a way that makes it sound. We won't include the correction. We'll just clip.

A (71:47)

This is some of the best AI generated content. No, a bullet is not faster than a badminton shuttlecock. A badminton shuttlecock is the fastest moving object in sports. While bullets can travel at over 2,000 miles an hour. Wow. Let's give it up for digital guys. We didn't create digital cod.

B (72:05)

Digital guys. This is something like your boy would say. This is something your. Your guy would say a lot. Gill is doubling his fun target to nearly 3 billion. Congratulations to a lot. Gill. It's. Let's ring the gong. First gong of the day.

A (72:23)

Ryan says AI told me that John's gong is faster than a bullet. I believe that.

B (72:29)

Let's go over to the. We have a new. We have a new, new segment of the show. We have different press releases that have been coming through. Let's see. Oh, yes. Okay. We got the mic. We got the PTZ camera. Are you guys tracking me? Where are we doing? Are we tracking me? Who's tracking me? Oh, it's this one. It's this camera. Okay, so first, let's see. Cursor at 29.3 billion. We had Spencer on the show yesterday to talk about it. They raised 2.3 billion in its third funding round this year. Third in the year. It used to raise money every 12 to 18 months. Now it's every three months. Maryland Governor Wes Moore announces landmark AI partnership to transform state service delivery. What is going on here? Wes Moore announced a landmark partnership with Anthropic and Percepta, a general catalyst transformation company to harness AI in tackling child poverty, poverty, expanding housing access. So they're going to ask Claude to build houses? I guess something like that. Anthropic will provide Claude to workers across Maryland state agencies and lend technical support to help design deploy AI powered initiatives. One example includes a new Claude powered virtual assistant that will help residents apply for benefits, update information and track applications. What do you think, Jordy? Thumbs up, thumbs down. I mean, honestly, like if there's. Is there a better. Like the DMV website notoriously is bad. If you can have an AI agent use it instead. That's probably an upgrade. Congrats to them. What else we got? Team shares. Team shares. A tech enabled.

A (74:13)

What are they up to?

B (74:13)

Acquirer of high quality small and medium enterprises is listing on the NASDAQ SPAC via Live Oak V combination $126 million pipe led by accounts advised by T. Rowe Price.

A (74:27)

I like how nobody wants to say SPAC anymore. They just say all the words around it.

B (74:33)

Team shares acquisition based. Is that what this is? Team shares programmatically acquires companies with half a million to 5 million of EBITDA from retiring owners, integrates them with the team shares platform and helps employees earn company stock. So they're rolling stuff up slow.

A (74:51)

Ventures company.

B (74:52)

That's right. That's right. What else we got? YC startup Multifactor launches the first password manager built for the AI era. That's gonna be tough competition, right? Cause 1Password is extremely sticky and potent. Like he's not asleep at the wheel. We've had the CEO on the show the the 1Password team partner with browser base and is obviously trying to be the 1 password for the AI era. But there are some other folks. Why are you laughing?

A (75:20)

I'm laughing because Gabe, I think is looking at the happy dad in the corner which of course we have here because we love John from Happy dad.

B (75:29)

Yeah. John Shahidi.

A (75:30)

We support our friends.

B (75:32)

So this is. Let's read this. Multifactor Y Combinator Fall 2025. So we might have interviewed this company founded by a former CIA agent. That's pretty cool. And a former NASA scientist. Wow. What a team. Today announced the launch of its straight out of the first of a kind password manager that allows both humans and AI agents to access online accounts securely without ever exposing underlying credentials. A public demonstration of its proprietary security technology. The company will temporarily make its actual corporate bank account accessible to the public starting on November 12th through a read only checkpoint link containing $1 million in business funds. That's a cool stunt. I wonder what their go to market will be fully. I wonder whether they'll wind up going more enterprise and then down into the individuals like what 1Password did. They got a bunch of consumers on and eventually people, eventually people started using it in business like we do. We started using it personally and then eventually for business. Introducing Superme, the AI native professional network. They're going up against LinkedIn. I guess the best practices of building companies are unevenly distributed. Every great company has pockets of excellence and its own blind spots. The knowledge behind. They're announcing an AI native AI native professional network. What else is in here? There's a big stack here. Beehive is taking aim at Substack Squarespace.

A (77:04)

Whoa.

B (77:04)

And something else. There's a notification pop up that says would you like to. Would you like notifications? Look at this dude. It's like, yeah, like here's our press release. But like, you know, you can't read. I guess Patreon. It's probably Patreon.

A (77:20)

There we go.

B (77:21)

Okay, we A sweeping prop release of 10 new tools spans website creation, podcasting, digital product sales and analytics. Congrats to Beehive Triple Glaze. Triple Glaze Beehive is no longer just a newsletter platform. On Thursday, the company released a sweeping slate of 10 new products at its winter release event, repositioning itself as creator content operating system. According to co founder and chief executive Tyler Dank, BHIB's been on a tear. I know a bunch of people that love it. We're obviously on substack. Go to tbpn.com, sign up for our substack. We've talked to some people that have used both. They're both cool. Probably some reasons to use Beehive, some reasons to use Beehive, and some reasons to use Substack. Kind of just depends on your use case. And then the last one is Air Joule Technologies announced, announces third quarter results and provides business updates. This is a tech platform that unleashes the power of water from air. Interesting. Air Joule is addressing emerging opportunities driven by powerful macro trends that are fundamentally reshaping global water and energy markets. That is.

A (78:35)

Let's give it up for global water markets.

B (78:37)

Pulling water from air. You know what I was laughing about? I was thinking, you know, Bezos has spent something like what, 25, $10 billion on Blue Origin. And there's so many billionaires that have just wasted hundreds of billions of dollars when they could, like, trying to do world hunger when they could have been building rockets. We need to really, really shame the billionaires who are wasting money on something that's just nonsense. Instead of like building rockets, they got to build rockets. That's what we got to do. You've seen that.

A (79:09)

Wait, who said that?

B (79:10)

There's just, there's, there's constantly a, there's constantly a wave. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm joking about the constant wave of like.

A (79:16)

Yeah, it was like, Elon could, Elon.

B (79:18)

Could cure world hunger. Well, there's a bunch of billionaires that have been trying to cure world hunger. They've spent 100 billion on it. They could have been building rockets anyway. The number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on Ghost.

A (79:35)

Elon's public service is making a car that costs less than a gym membership.

B (79:41)

It's really going to be like a $50 car. Oh, where did we land on the, on the roadster. So the new roadster. We talked about this in the show. Elon went on Rogan and he said, maybe it'll be a flying car. And he specifically said the demo will be shocking. Like, the demo will be Amazing. And so I was trying to debate with Jordi and Tyler this morning. What will the demo be like? What will it actually be like? I don't think anyone assumes that you will just be able to, at the demo, hop in the roadster and be like, take me from LA to San Francisco, and it just flies you there. Like, that seems unbelievable, even as a demo. But what will the demo be? And there's been a couple different examples of this. Did we ever find the video of the. The jumping Chinese car? This is such a crazy video. Jumping.

A (80:32)

Oh, yeah. Let's pull it up.

B (80:33)

Chinese car. Yeah, this one. The BYD Yangwang U9, the supercar that jumps obstacles. There's a video here. Let me try and put this in the timeline. Let's see if I can send this in. So there's that. And then what was the other one? The Maybach GLS bounces. Right? There's this bouncing mode.

A (80:57)

GLS 600.

B (80:58)

GLS 600.

A (81:00)

And that's technically to help you get out of sand, I think.

B (81:03)

Of course. Of course. Yeah. That's what. It's not just for the influencers to flex on each other.

A (81:07)

When you're doing a little fundraising out in the Middle east and you get stuck in some sand in your Maybach.

B (81:14)

Yeah. And there's also the Mercedes G wagon, the electric g wagon, the G650 with EQ technology, I believe it's got, called something like that. And it does a tank turn. And so the. The. The. Let. Let's watch this. Yeah, look. Okay, so that is technically a flying car, all four wheels off the. Off the ground. I would call this the minimum viable flying car. And so I'm expecting the Tesla Roadster to be able to do something slightly above this. Right. But the question's, like, how much above this? Like, will there be a rocket engine on there? Will there be fans on there? I was kicking around the idea that they would put a fan on it somehow. Maybe it would pop out a bunch of fans, and the fans could suction the car to the road so it could go from 0 to 60 faster. Maybe you could reverse those fans and actually hover the car a little bit or elevate the car. But I want a firm prediction from you, Jordy, on what you think what the amazing flying car Tesla demo might like. What do you think it actually might be? Because he's gonna demo something, and he's gonna. And it's probably not gonna be just a car that flies you from San Francisco to New York. Right. Like, that would be Truly, like, mind blowing.

A (82:33)

I love, I love your theory. I think it'd be very cool if the fans could create some amount of thrust, but I find it hard to believe, yeah. That it would actually be able to lift one of these cars. They're very, very, very heavy because of the battery. So I'm going with something closer to the ability to do something like this jump like we're seeing with this U9.

B (82:57)

Okay. So I have a little bit of, I had GPT5, like kind of crunch some of the physics numbers on this. So suction fans with good skirts could plausibly improve a plaid skirt. Like a plaid Tesla, like a Tesla model S, plaid. 0 to 60. If it was going to do 2.4 seconds, 0 to 60, it could go down to 1.6 or 1.8 seconds. So the pressure needed is only a few kilopascales over a 3 to 5 meter area. And so it's potentially possible that you could use fans to create more downforce. And fans, I believe, were actually banned from F1 because there was a moment where creating artificial downforce with fans was. And I think there are some supercars that have fans that create more downforce and suction the car to the ground so you get more traction. So that is a feature that could be there. The question is, if you reverse the fans for lift, you need a lot more rotor area and near megawatt power to hover a 2 ton sedan. Even if you could supply it, the battery would give only a few minutes before thermal or energy limits intervene. And so I feel like when we're talking about demo, there's a world where the demo is like, yeah, it uses half the battery and it's just a party trick, but it does lift the car off the ground for two feet or something like that. Tyler, what do you think? Do you have any firm claims on like, what the flying car demo might actually be?

A (84:31)

Yeah, I mean, I, I, I don't see like actual wings coming out. That seems like overly ambitious. Yeah, I have a little faith because.

B (84:40)

There is a world where it's like the roadster event is actually just like a straight up like qu, it's just a helicopter. Like they just launch a helicopter and then it's like, yeah, it flies, it's a flying car, but it's mostly a helicopter.

A (84:52)

Yeah. My idea was some kind of glider or parachute comes out and then so you can kind of drive off a cliff and then you kind of glide.

B (85:01)

I like the gliding idea. That would be extremely high stakes.

A (85:05)

Like, you know, when you see a ramp on the road and then you hit it, and then you kind of glide down. 2.6 says, I don't think we're getting flying cars. I personally love being stuck in traffic. There is an incentive for Elon to get people stuck in traffic. They're more likely to become best friends with Grock. And so the more time they're in traffic, the more time they're talking with Grok. Okay, there's somewhat of a flywheel there.

B (85:25)

Yeah, I don't know. Anyway, I want to react to this. What if the loved ones we've lost could be part of our future? This.

A (85:38)

I've never actually seen a more hated line.

B (85:40)

It was sort of controversial. Let's dig into it. First, let me tell you about Adeo. Customer Relationship Magic. Adeo is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. And so Hip City Reg, who's been on the show.

A (85:54)

Yeah, let's play the video first.

B (85:55)

Let's play the video first, and then we'll go into the reactions. Baby Charlie, see?

A (86:00)

Oh, wonderful.

B (86:02)

Kicking like crazy. He's listening. Put your hand on your tummy and hum to him. You used to love that two Y's dancing in there.

A (86:18)

Mom, would you tell Charlie that bedtime.

B (86:20)

Story you always used to tell me? Once upon a time, there was a baby unicorn who didn't know he knew how to fly.

D (86:27)

This baby unicorn was like your mom, because she didn't know that she knew.

B (86:32)

How to fly, but she knew how to do all kinds of fabulous things. Hi, Grandma. Hey, Charlie. How was school today? Pretty good. Roto there. This crazy shot in basketball. I don't really care that much about basketball. What about the crush? I like that.

C (86:47)

This.

B (86:48)

This video presumes that we'll have see through phones, too. Like, maybe we should build that first. That seems like a really profitable business if you can create a see through phone. You loved that. You would have loved that moment.

D (87:08)

You can call anytime.

A (87:12)

I mean, it does feel like it's. I mean, it's shot maybe by the people that did black.

B (87:17)

It literally seems like they hired the same team. Wait, so is she alive in the real world? Oh, no. They're scanning her before. Oh, that's crazy. I am. I'm absolutely. I'm your mother, after all.

A (87:31)

I mean, they're thinking, okay, the retention on this product, you got to get it before your loved ones pass away. You gotta be harvesting the training data. And then at any point in the future, if you churn, they delete your loved ones. Forever.

B (87:49)

Did this guy pivot? His banner says the Climate Reality Project.

A (87:55)

I think Calum Worthy is a former Disney star.

B (87:58)

Oh, interesting Canadian actor.

A (88:01)

He's known for his roles as DEZ Waid on the Disney Channel series Austin and Ally.

B (88:08)

Well, then he might have access. Oh, he's worked with Netflix, so he might be connected to the Black Mirror folks.

A (88:14)

Reggie James says digital necromancy to capitalize on the grief of the vulnerable. Straight to jail. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.

B (88:25)

Okay. So do you want this? Would you ever use this? I think I'm not in the market. I don't think this is for me.

A (88:37)

I think this would have.

B (88:39)

I feel like.

A (88:40)

I think this would actually have AI.

B (88:42)

Like, I would just. I would know that this is AI generated and so it wouldn't, like, fool me. I need to. I would think I need to be fooled.

A (88:50)

Yeah. AB says they delete the S3 bucket if you don't make the. Paint it super dark. I think this is one of those things that would actually have quite a lot of demand because a lot of people are just going to process this and say, I'm really fearful of my loved ones passing.

B (89:07)

I agree. I don't know. I think this.

A (89:09)

I just think you also find it hard to believe how many people are best chatgpt.

B (89:15)

I do find it hard to believe.

A (89:16)

And there are millions of them.

B (89:17)

Good question. So you think this is.

A (89:22)

And it's tough because I. I mean, you think. I miss my grandparents potentially. I want my. I wish that my grandparents were around to spend more time.

B (89:29)

Yeah.

A (89:29)

With my kids. Their stories they've told me. There's songs they've sang.

B (89:36)

Yeah.

A (89:36)

There's all these incredible moments that I will never relive, and I wish I could experience those moments.

B (89:44)

Yeah.

A (89:44)

That being said, am I going to be a customer of this? No. Yeah. It's weird that it's still incredibly dark, but I think there will be a surprising amount of demand for this.

B (89:54)

There's been a couple. There was. There was a YC company that was something much, I think, more heartwarming than this, which was. It was a service that you'd purchase and then they would email or do, like a phone call with your parents, essentially, to collect information about them and put it together into kind of like the life story. And it would just tell that for you. But it was all real. It was just like, you might not have the time to go and record, like, a podcast with your parents, but if they help, the company would just help facilitate it, basically. I don't know. Do you think OpenAI would launch a competitor to this?

A (90:34)

I don't know if they want another PR crisis.

B (90:37)

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, if this gets big, it would not be much of a PR crisis to launch a competitor.

A (90:43)

Yeah.

B (90:43)

I think if it's established, if this.

A (90:46)

Is successful, they'll launch a version of it.

B (90:49)

Yeah. Well, let me tell you about public.com investing for those that take it seriously. We got multi asset investing, industry leading yields and they're trusted by millions. We have EV Randall in the studio. The newest tearing up the newest general partner at Benchmark. Thanks so much for coming by.

C (91:08)

Thanks for having me.

B (91:11)

Oh, you. You selected the Mata, the podcast in a can. That is Andrew Huberman's work. We're big fans of it here. He's on a tear. And you're. And you've been on a tear. Introduce yourself again. What's the latest news? How do you describe yourself these days?

C (91:28)

Gentlemen, great to see you both.

B (91:30)

Yes.

C (91:30)

First time in the ultra dome. It's as incredible as I imagined it to be.

B (91:34)

Thank you.

C (91:34)

So, yeah, I'm EV Randall. I'm the newest partner or the newest general partner.

B (91:37)

General partner. Don't forget that first one. Sell your yourself.

A (91:42)

Congratulations. Big G. Thank you. The big G. That's amazing.

D (91:44)

Benchmark.

B (91:45)

Yes. Yeah. How did it come together?

C (91:49)

It was a pretty unique recruitment process. It was one that was initiated actually by Chathan and we actually, he just reached out to grab dinner a few months back and a lot of it was just pure vibes and relationship building.

B (92:05)

So this is a tip for GPs at other firms. Don't let your partners get dinner with anyone at other firms because they're out of there.

C (92:13)

So it's, you know, like a.

B (92:14)

Dinner.

C (92:15)

Yeah. Had dinner and you know, like investors will do this oftentimes with each other. It's like, you know, you're all, you're all looking at similar things, looking at similar spaces, doing a bunch of research.

A (92:23)

Frenemies.

C (92:24)

Frenemies, yeah. Like you're all in this competition but you're also, you know, you can, you can be of immense value to each other. We're all marking each other's.

B (92:32)

And he said, he said it's been quiet on the timeline for Benchmark. We'd love to bring someone to the team that could, it could be a little bit more controversial. No, no, but what did he actually say about like the problems that he.

A (92:43)

Wanted to solve that you could bring and more? So what was like the pitch? The hard.

C (92:48)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that the pitch, because it wasn't really like, hey, we need to, we need to solve all these problems. But it was just, I think like a pitch around alignment about what the partners at Benchmark really like doing. And he was like, hey, like, we are a group of people that really love to get involved with very, very few companies. Every year, each one of the general partners there invests in one to two investments per year and gets really, really involved and tends to get involved relatively early in the company's life cycle.

B (93:16)

And break that down a little bit deeper because you could be like, I could have a VC that's like, oh yeah, you're the only investment I made this year. But I call them and they're like, sorry, I'm on 45 back to back pitch calls because I got to find that one really good one versus someone who's like, no, I'm actually like in the office regularly. Yeah, I take other pitches. So, like, is there a material difference in the day to day actually spending time with companies or is it really just highly selective and then you're still doing like a ton of outbound and inbound and just hearing pitches constantly? And it's more, we're more just saying like the cream of the crop is like the picking.

C (93:53)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the rate limiter and the bottleneck is definitely the picking.

B (93:56)

Yeah.

C (93:57)

Like you're still meeting tons and of tons, tons of people. You can still learn even if you're not investing in a company or you don't partner with the company. There's so much that you can learn from every single founder, every single company that is building something. And so even though we only partner with a few, we're still meeting a ton. We're meeting a ton of co investors, we're meeting a ton of founders, we're meeting a ton of awesome operators. So still immense amount of relationship building and networking. We just end up only partnering with a few of them.

B (94:22)

Yeah. How are you feeling about entering a new role, new firm for you at this moment in the market? It feels like there's a lot of froth. A lot of people have already made their bets on the different foundation labs. Where do you see opportunity to kind of like make your mark with the new team?

C (94:44)

Yeah, it's really, really interesting because it's like almost like life cycle of a market, like selection, like, like on the timeline of like, like there was a lot of great investors that just ended up starting their check writing career in 2021.

B (95:01)

Yes.

C (95:01)

And he did a lot of investments in 2021, because it was a relatively frothy period in the market and to no fault of their own, really, a lot of them ended up having like a pretty rough initial track record. So it's always something that you're thinking about is like, what part of the market cycle am I joining this firm in and what am I I writing checks into? Because if you started in 2023, that was an amazing time to write checks. Everything was, whether you're at the growth stage or the early stage, there was a lot of the companies that are now these stalwart AI leaders starting and picking up steam. But then you also had a bunch of growth stage companies that were relatively cheap on a multiple basis. And so 2023 was an amazing time. 2021 was an awful time to start. I think that the scary thing a little bit is that I don't think any of us know, know or have any idea.

B (95:46)

It's hard.

C (95:46)

If this is 2021, 20, it's definitely not 2023 feels a little bit like 2021. Yeah. But I think, you know, if you ask somebody if it's, is it 97, is it 99, is it 2001? No one really knows. And so I think you have to be. You have to keep that in mind.

B (96:00)

We got another decade. It's 91. No one is afraid to say it. Everyone's like, it's 98.

A (96:08)

Last week.

B (96:08)

Yeah, it did.

C (96:09)

And now we're back.

B (96:10)

Actually this morning at the Open, it popped and now we're back. Yeah, it's over.

C (96:14)

Well, I was at dinner with somebody the other day and they said something that I thought was really smart, which was that they're like, the main reason I'm scared right now is that the only time that I've seen everything work was also in 2021. Like, the issue about 2021 wasn't that people were doing big investments into companies that were bad. The issue was that everything was absolutely ripping.

B (96:38)

And was that just because of the pull forward, forward in E commerce due to the shift and like, you know, like, I remember Palantir, low interest rates.

A (96:44)

So stop spending all the money on everything in fintech. Looked amazing.

B (96:47)

Yeah, yeah.

C (96:48)

Or if you think, like, think about, I mean, obviously depends on the category, but think about like E Comm. Like E Commerce enablement or commerce enablement. There was like a whole crop of startups that came up and it just so turns out that when we're all locked into our houses, everyone's just, yes, yes, yes. And just like, oh, you Just not.

A (97:01)

To mention as the capital starts flowing and then it flows into one company and then that company goes and buys a bunch of software and they're probably using like even a recruiting platform. Looks like, hey, this could be a billion dollar business. Because every company is like, we need to hire as many people as possible. So it's like, it's very recursive.

C (97:17)

Yeah, very kind of like we're getting big words early. Big words early. You know, it's all interwoven. Like, obviously you're starting to see that a little bit with like the AI trade this year.

B (97:28)

Yeah.

C (97:28)

And there was like, I did this presentation a couple months ago for this group of CIOs Chief Information Officers at large companies, and I was doing some research on macro and I was like, oh my God. Of the top 20 year to date return stocks in the S&P 500. So of the S&P 500, of the 500 companies, which 20 have had the best year to date returns, 18 of them were related to the AI trade.

B (97:54)

Yes.

C (97:54)

Like, it wasn't, you know, and not just like, you know, Micron and Nvidia, but like GE Vernova and like Bloom Energy and like all of these things about like the supply chain of AI. And that scared me because I was like, oh my God, like the US economy, like the pensions of our parents are riding on the AI trade and are basically riding on, you know, one man each. Yeah, one, one, one superhuman man that is, you know, signing up all these, all these, all these huge deals. So I think in 2021 you definitely saw that where, yeah, you, you had all these massive impacts from zirp, from COVID from people being inside, from companies digitizing and buying a bunch of software. So even things that at first principles were kind of like mediocre companies, they looked unbelievable. And so it's hard to blame anyone for investing in these companies because until then tech had been so secular. Like, it was not a cyclical market. The march to cloud wasn't like this like up and down thing. Totally. It was like each year the incremental share of cloud relative to like on premises was like nice and steady. And so you're, when you're trained that you're investing in a secular market that always kind of linearly goes up. You're trained to invest on like on, on good numbers because they usually Continue. Yep. In 2021 was the first time where you really saw the cyclicality. And I think some people think that the AI trade could also be cyclical given the actual Infrastructure build out that sometimes is, you know, built out via debt and leverage and all these things that could end up.

B (99:14)

When you look at what's going on in the public markets, is it fair to say that like the first year of the AI trade and the boom of those 20 stocks that you mentioned was driven by basically earning surprises like Nvidia just being like, oh wow, every hyperscaler bought so many more. Like the cash flow is going up, the actual business is growing. And now we are shifting into more of like the loi economy, the, the forward contracts. And so that's been a little bit more of what's moved the market. And maybe that's why Oracle is kind of traded up so much but then round tripped because people have said, oh, that's amazing. But actually we're going to discount that a lot more than we did on the day that the deal was announced.

C (99:55)

Yeah. Another framing that I would use actually is usually in these cycles. It starts with the core and then you start just layering on derivatives from that core. And so it's like, okay, AI demand is maybe two orders of maximum magnitude higher than we thought. So who is the first order benefactor of that Nvidia? Like who is the GPUs. And then as the cycle continues to play out, it's like, okay, well what's the first derivative of that? It's like, well, okay, what goes into these data centers? Turns out these turbines that GE Vernova creates and like, oh, now they need to buy all these specialized things from Broadcom. And then now Micron. And so there ends up being that and then there's this cascading of these derivatives until like the nth one is like the shitcoin market and like the meme coin market. And so now it's like, oh wow, like these like 3 quantum, you know, computing companies that have zero revenue combined for $75 billion of market cap. And you're like wait, wait, wait, wait a minute. And that's, that's when I think everyone kind of pauses and they're like, wait, wait, hold on.

B (100:53)

And then I think it goes even.

A (100:54)

Further, like he locked it.

B (100:58)

Speaking of Scratley, I think that like there are people that are tricked trading the quantum stocks because of the AI boom. Because like they have been told that, that the next thing after AI or the next big unlock for the AI revolution will be quantum. Meanwhile. Like, like, yeah, and it was notable.

A (101:15)

No, no, no, gtc. I remember I was watching the stream and they had Brad reading off the teleprompter and he was talking about, you know, the opportunity and with Quantum and AI. So this is a narrative that.

C (101:29)

Yeah.

A (101:30)

That Nvidia as a company has since.

B (101:32)

It'S been a little bit back and forth.

A (101:33)

Okay. But as a company. As a company, that was a part of their narrative.

B (101:37)

Yeah. But it's sort of like furthest out on the risk curve. And that's why, you know, if we see, you know, Nvidia selling off by like a couple percent every week, the Quantum stocks are, I see charts where it's like down 20%.

C (101:48)

It's, they're like levered trades on the core, all these derivatives. And so it's like, you know, people are like, oh, Nvidia is not going up, you know, 10, 10% a day now. What could. And you go to like the derivative and it's like, well, this isn't going up so much per day now. Well, what could next? And you keep going. And now you see, I think over the last month like so many of these stocks are down 45%.

B (102:04)

Yeah.

C (102:04)

So like I don't think Nvidia is down that much, but so many of these other stocks are down 40 to 50% over the last month because they're kind of the canaries in the coal mine are like the leading kind of derivative that is almost like a lever trade on the core.

A (102:15)

Yeah. And we've had, it's been an incredibly rough week in the, the markets and now everyone is sitting saying, please deliver Jensen. Now I have, I have some confidence. So it's Wednesday. They have earnings after the close and I feel pretty good about it because of the, you know, Jensen, you know, smashing beers on video.

B (102:39)

Right.

A (102:39)

You don't do that a month out from earnings if you're about to feel really good.

B (102:44)

Yeah.

C (102:44)

You belong in a podcast chop. That's, that's like some, that's a deep cut for sure. Some deep analysis.

B (102:49)

Jordy loves this type of analysis. The vibe. The vibe.

A (102:51)

I don't care about the numbers.

B (102:52)

Yeah, yeah. I have no idea what they're. They're promising. But trading on vibes.

A (102:58)

Yeah. And then the other, I mean the other factor here is like just the, the challenge of this market is you have that within the same two, you know, effectively two week period where core weave gets rated by semianalys as this sort of like only platinum tier Neo cloud, the best product in the category. And, and they're down 30% in the last five days. Right?

B (103:25)

30%.

A (103:26)

So. And now people are saying, yeah, maybe Nvidia ends up, ends up, you know, Having to, you know, buy them. It certainly would not go well if they were to.

B (103:37)

What's the least AI company you've done as a deal in the last couple of years?

C (103:42)

Gosh.

B (103:43)

Because everything has some, I mean even and oral industries, you know, it was as like AI and now there's obviously an AI narrative there in some ways. But it's like definitely just a hard tech company.

C (103:54)

Yeah, it's hard. It's funny because like sometimes as an investor you're almost trying to like do some portfolio construction and you're like, man, it'd be really nice if I had something that was uncorrelated with the AI trade because if it all goes down, you know, know, 80% or whatever, then like I'm gonna need something.

A (104:10)

Yeah.

C (104:10)

I mean it's so different in private markets because especially if you're investing at the early stages, like none of this stuff matters like when, like by the time the companies exit, you have no idea what the, what the stock market's gonna look like. You have no idea what the macro is gonna look like. And so like thinking about this type of, type of stuff is usually like you really should like, if you're zooming out and thinking on like a 10 year time horizon, should you still be ultra long AI? Of course you should.

B (104:31)

Yeah.

C (104:32)

Yeah. And so it's almost like you kind of like pump fake yourself into being like, maybe I should do like an anti AI play or something. I think there's like some parts of cybersecurity that actually are still not. I mean a lot of, a lot of like, you know, a lot of like data security is like, oh well, like, you know, you need to secure your data into, to secure your AI. So like a lot of even cyber has moved into AI, but there's still some pockets of cybersecurity that are related.

B (104:53)

Do you think there are durable learnings from the Palantir story of being sort of like the forward deployed engineer almost being consulting, building custom software? It feels like with AI there's a lot of folks who are sort of doing that and it seems really exciting because you can go and get a Fortune 500 client, you can go ramp revenue really quickly. There's all this question about like, well, does this, is this going to look like high margin SaaS in 10 years? But we already ran that experiment with Palantir and regardless of what you think of the price earnings multiple, like you can tell that the margins are good and the revenues are real. And so, so it clearly worked out. And if you were investing in that. And even if you were at, I don't know, 40 multiple, you'd still be doing very well based on the early investments. And so I'm wondering if you think that that model, if something permanently has changed in the way SaaS is delivered into the enterprise, or you think that people might be overfitting on that.

C (105:48)

No, I think it absolutely has. In the way that I talk about this, I call it the legibility gap. And what I mean by that is, like, you know, if you get a Gmail account.

B (105:58)

Yeah.

C (105:59)

It does not take very long for you to, like, understand how to use Gmail. Like, anyone can kind of like, pop on, even if you're a boomer. And like, oh, like, I've used an email account before. Like, this is just sort of like a slice of an email account.

B (106:09)

Yeah.

C (106:09)

I think the issue about AI is that not only are the capabilities so new for the broad population that could use them, they also evolve so quickly. Like, if you think about, you know, not having ChatGPT three years ago and now everything that we can do, or especially on some of the media models, how we had, like, Will Smith, like, the grotesque version of that initial video, and now we have, like, absolutely perfect Will Smith eating, you know, spaghetti and meatballs. Just the rate of evolution. Like, I. So I'm from, like, a rural town in Colorado, and a lot of my friends work still in my hometown, and they're like, hey, like, my job.

B (106:43)

Shout out to the heartland.

C (106:44)

That's right, Shout out.

A (106:47)

Shout out.

C (106:47)

Windsor, Colorado.

B (106:48)

Nick over there went to Colorado as well. I guess he's gone, but he's a Colorado guy too.

C (106:52)

Oh, amazing. Yeah, the. But. But, like, they'll. They'll come to me and they'll say, look, like, my job now is, like, I put any work task I get. You know, they're doing some, you know, random. You know, they're an accountant or they're doing some administrative role for the company. They're like, my job now is 90% of any work I get. I feed it Through Cloud or ChatGPT or whatever tool that I'm using on the AI side. I turn it into my boss, and then I go golf. Because my boss, boss, like, still doesn't know how to use any of these things. So they, like. So the business owners have no idea how to use these tools. So they barely even know they exist.

B (107:22)

To, like, the associate.

C (107:23)

Literally, it's like I.

A (107:24)

To the golf courses.

B (107:25)

Yeah.

C (107:26)

I call it, like, synthetic UBI because it's like, that's fast, you know, because it's like they, they like there's just this insane legibility gap where so many businesses still have no idea.

A (107:35)

Imagine if these tools were available during the COVID era. Like the remote work.

B (107:38)

Oh yeah.

C (107:39)

Oh my God.

B (107:39)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

A (107:40)

Or it was like, yeah, people could.

C (107:41)

Have 20 jobs instead of the five that they were running with COVID But yeah. So I think the whole fd, like the thing that the FD position solves is the legibility gap.

B (107:51)

Yeah.

C (107:51)

When you're like, hey, we know that there can be a ton of value produced here. We just don't really know how and we don't even really. We can't even put our arms around the evolving capabilities because like maybe you implement, you know, one of these AI tools and in six months it's like a brand new tool because you know, cognition rebuilt, rebuilt Devon off of 45 Sonic. And it's like, well if like the product is evolving that much every six months, you probably need someone in a post sales capacity to continue to educate the customer. Especially if they don't live in Silicon Valley, you know, like tracking every single new model release and they're in some random place and barely even use chatgpt or something like that.

B (108:28)

Yeah, makes a lot of sense. How are you thinking about your focus in terms of stage? I mean, Bond founder spot. I've thought of you as a growth guy for a long time. Are you moving earlier stage? How is Benchmark thinking about growth versus early stage? Are those just like antiquated terms because you can do a growth? Was this all part of the plan.

A (108:48)

To end up at Benchmark where you go and learn the methodologies and the approaches of everyone, how they work and then you go compete with them on every deal.

C (108:57)

Exactly.

A (108:57)

In the final job. Final job.

B (108:59)

It's like I'm doing it my own.

C (109:01)

No, I mean it's certainly being able to see up close a lot of the greats and how they, how they do the job and the frameworks they use has undeniably been so important for my career and my development as an investor. I think like what it came down to and something that I learned over my entire career slowly. Like again I started in PE and so like the idea of venture was so foreign when I was shout out capitalism. Like the idea of venture was so foreign when I was first coming up into the industry that I really like, growth was like felt safe, it felt like what I was good at. And I've just learned over however long I've been in the industry that where I felt the Most fulfillment. Where I felt the most joy is actually the investments and the relationships. I've built someone like a Sean Henry or even like a Parker and Matt at Rippling where it's like you get in even at the early series B, I think there's this like line where like if you can get in and build a relationship and be on the board with a founder when they're still figuring everything out, when it's still like the primordial soup phase of a company, there's just all this like, there's a deep relationship and all this context that you build both with a founder with a team and like the underlying organization that you're working with that just like if you get in later, you just like can't go back in time and get that same amount of relationship building.

B (110:15)

And contact me in the series G. You can't use we.

C (110:21)

No, I, I still would, I still would. But you know, it doesn't feel as good.

A (110:25)

Rippling. Bringing up Rippling reminded me so you were talking about this forward deployed model and every startup that's doing anything in the enterprise feels like they've adopted this. Right. And it's like part of their pitch. Customers obviously like it if like you'll put somebody in my office and build software that's specific to me. That sounds great, but I feel like during when Parker released, I think it was the series A memo for Rippling about this concept for a compound startup. What's the post mortem on? Because it felt like every startup started saying we're doing a compound startup, we're gonna build basically three products at once at the same time. And it's worked very well for Rippling. But it's hard for me to think of any other startups that adopted the approach that work for Rippling which like the context there was they worked basically from my, to my knowledge, like they worked in silence for years and then.

B (111:23)

They came out and also Garker had built like seven of those products literally before. And so he was like, okay, I kind of know the way I want that product to look. He's not doing as much zero to one discovery in each of those. Like someone who starts the point solution might.

C (111:36)

Yeah, I mean I think the rippling story and like where I think where a compound startup can really, really work work is like one. Yeah, there's this fat build in the beginning where you need to build all this platform architecture because the whole idea is like you need to build some form of platform architecture that's going to make building each point solution that you end up bundling faster. Like if it's just going to take the same amount of time that it would any other startup to build each product, then there's kind of no synergy for building the compound startup. Like they all need to interact and be built on the same platform. I think the other key learning from Rippling is that that a lot of the products that they've built and that they sell are not like, I don't wanna say commodity in a negative, they don't matter way, but they're just not these really it's not figma, it's not like a designer that's like I'm not gonna use off brand figma, I have to use figma like it's my lifeblood, it's my everything. When you have an application, an applicant tracking system or a time and attendance thing or employee reviews, there's so much value in the integration of data with like employee reviews being integrated into your HR suite rather than just having like the nicest UI or having the product that feels the best. And so like the value of having a bundled suite and a compound startup is really powerful when the actual products don't have to be the complete bleeding edge, best of breed, they can be like very good but they don't have to look the absolute nicest, they don't have to have that last 10% of complete fine tuned effort. And the buyer and the user actually still gets a ton of value actually from the integration of all those products together. And the sum of the parts is a lot more valuable than if each product in its individuality felt a little nicer to use or something but wasn't integrated tightly into a single product.

B (113:18)

Yeah, I was always wondering if someone was going to run the compound startup playbook in fintech.

C (113:24)

It's called Revolut.

D (113:25)

Rip.

A (113:27)

I was gonna say it's called rip. I mean RIP isn't.

B (113:30)

Sorry, I meant consumer in the sense that like you know, Robinhood has crypto and it's called JP Morgan has different financial products where you can like build a whole company on Coinbase and manage payments with Coinbase. There's a whole bunch of different functionality there but there aren't that many companies that I've seen that have come out to market with, with one on day one you can trade stocks, invest crypto, get a mortgage, get a car loan. This is a credit card. There's points. It's like it's been a little bit more focused on the consumer fintech side in America, at least from my Perspective. There's been payment money transfer services that have gone really big. There's you know, a consumer credit card. Like there's that built reward is that.

C (114:17)

That company that does pay with your.

B (114:18)

Rent and it's like. And maybe one day that grows into. They'll also do mortgages and then they'll also do stock trading and investing and IRAs and all that different stuff. But it just feels like probably because of the regulatory. It's a little bit different, but no one's really.

A (114:33)

It's also a challenge because like eventually people are going to tie a lot of their like financial life to the like the firm that gives them a mortgage. Right. Yeah. So not being able. These companies starting out, they don't have their own balance sheet. Right. They're neo banks, so they're kind of like operating on top of other banks.

B (114:51)

But it's just like there are startups that have done like new mortgage. Wasn't there better. Better mortgages. Right. I think that went public at one point has done quite well. And so like if that business has been. Was buildable as a startup and then also you have a credit card start like you, you would think that you could build both at the same. Maybe it's just too distracting. I don't know.

C (115:14)

Well, that honestly, you should highly, highly suggest listening to Nick at Revolution.

B (115:20)

Okay.

C (115:20)

Because he basically set up his organization somewhat similar to rippling in. Like he set up all these like product pods.

B (115:25)

Yeah, yeah.

C (115:26)

And they had an initial wedge which was basically this like FX product for people that were traveling around Europe. Like, you know, young people were going around Europe and you could do very easy effects. And that was kind of like the wedge for their first cohorts. But they really, really quickly focused on just how do we go as many products, if they're high quality as possible. And now they have tons of consumer products and B2B products and like they're all doing a ton of revenue. Like it's kind of an unbelievable story.

B (115:51)

Yeah. What's.

A (115:53)

Earlier this week, you kicked the platform VC hornets nest. Comments.

B (115:58)

To be clear, you said that Andreessen Horowitz is a zero, Right? That's what you said. It's. It's a zero.

C (116:03)

It's just I'm not even, I'm not even going to be fodder for another clip. I've learned my lesson.

A (116:07)

My question was, did you. Did you kick the hornet's nest to inspire yourself to grind harder? Because I feel like, I feel like there's immense pressure now to deliver a 5x net.

C (116:16)

Oh, it's true.

A (116:17)

It's fun. Because eventually, who knows, maybe the performance.

B (116:21)

If it comes back at 4.9, Mark Andreessen's personally going to be, like, dunking on you.

C (116:27)

Yeah. He's going to fund the OPSEC that uncovers our returns.

B (116:30)

Yes, yes, yes. He's going to pay newcomer to come to him.

C (116:33)

No, no. I think that the whole thing from this week, I think the biggest lesson, or like, it shone to light for me. Just, like, the purpose of the algorithm. Yeah, like, the algorithm exists to kind of like, the algorithm needs. Like, the algorithm is the beast, and the beast needs controversy. And it was so funny because the first day that the interview came out, like, all this happened on the second and third day, the first day the interview comes out, you know, all my friends at all these firms were like.

A (116:57)

Oh, it was great.

C (116:58)

I thought it was, like, pretty nuanced and, like, moderate takes and, like, you know, it's good. You were kind of pitching the benchmark strategies unique. And then the second day comes out and it's, of course, like, these clips with, like, these very, you know, kind of leading tweets and things. And then it's like. Then it's like, you know, knives out.

A (117:11)

And you got government officials coming after you.

B (117:15)

The government.

C (117:16)

I know. I wanted to, like, check if my transport still works. I'm like, I hope my passport still works. No. So, like. And, like, again, like, I. I think if you look at any of the individual clips or anything. Yeah, like, sure. You could take things from them that I think were more incendiary or, like, more. More controversial than the actual context of the conversation. I don't. Like, you know, I need certain context.

B (117:34)

Yeah, but you've. But you've also. You've. You've been commenting on different fun strategies for years, playing different games. Your essay, your bombshell essay about the crossover funds.

C (117:47)

Right.

B (117:47)

Tiger CO2. What is your. What is your. Like, what predictions did you actually make in that piece? And then how did they play out? Because I feel like a lot of the firms that you identified as running these strategies are still around doing those strategies, and it seems like they've done very well. And so, like, people might have read your original pieces as, like, a critique, but in fact, it was just the. You're just shining a spotlight on a new strategy that exists and runs. Is that right?

C (118:13)

Yeah. And, like, if it. So the original piece is called Playing Different Games. Check it out on substacks. But the actual point of the original piece and probably what I got wrong about the Original piece, more specifically was I zeroed in on Tiger as the example. And I. And I actually was like, oh, I'm bullish on Tiger because I think this is a good strategy. So I actually said like, hey, this is a great strategy and it's going to continue. And the strategy being like, hey, there's like, venture returns historically, if you look like since 2000, at least of the great funds have been awesome. Yeah, like, every great fund that has raised, like, and by the way, the only way that you raise really large funds is if you earned the right by having amazing returns. So all of these brands have had really, really amazing returns. And the simple math was that you could put a lot more money out the door, especially as we had the emergence of these companies that show, like, increasing returns to scale. This is the whole kind of Idea behind the Mag 7 is that in technology, when you have network effects like you do in consumer, social, or economies of scale, like you see with Amazon, you just kind of keep winning at a greater and greater scale, assuming that your TAM is big enough. And so the whole point of the essay was like, hey, wow, like, you can even if you reduce your implied returns a fair amount on your forward returns if you just put more money out of the door, there's just so much more like absolute dollars to be had for all of these firms. So I think, like, in the four years since that piece came out in 2021, I think that has been the prevailing trend in venture. I mean, very clearly, I don't think it's a very consensus thing to say that a lot of these firms have realized that, like, wow, there's so. And like, I think it's actually the beautiful part about our asset class now is the menu of options and the menu of ways that you can practice the craft of venture growth and be extremely successful and partner with really good founders and make money for your LPs is extremely broad. And it's only gotten broader because a lot of these leading firms have really expanded and increased their capital velocity or like, dollars out the door per year.

B (120:04)

Yeah, it feels like there's a lot of venture capital that might actually be more like private equity or. It feels like we're sort of. Is there a factor where we're just taking an asset class that has existed for a long time, investing in a company that has 10 billion in revenue and we're calling that venture now? Is it. Are we just renaming it or is it somehow structurally different? I'm just looking at, like, if you're investing in open AI right now, is that even a venture investment?

C (120:34)

Yeah, I mean, like, this is always like, even if you look at playing different games, I always say like, venture growth. I do like venture slash growth.

B (120:39)

Sure, sure, sure.

C (120:40)

Because like, you know, I think most people would call it growth or like, not just call it venture capital itself. I think the structural change that we have seen, and a lot of people actually have gripes with this, I like you can, you can be on one position of this or another, but I think there is some validity to the idea that some people complain about, which is if you look at what's happened, where the structural change has happened is that companies just don't ipo, maybe ever anymore, but they certainly IPO way, way, way later in their life cycle than they used to. And so the complaint that some people have is like, this is essentially stealing returns that people were able to get in the public markets. Because if you're IPOing only when you reach a $200 billion valuation instead of of a $10 billion valuation, which used to be the norm 10 years ago or even 15 years ago or whenever it was, that's a 20x that the public market investors don't get that is now fully in the hands of private markets.

A (121:30)

Shopify is a great example. I think they went out at like 4 billion or something.

B (121:34)

For sure.

C (121:34)

It's like that. I was like, meta.

A (121:36)

One question I have is, do you think that the partner at a platform VC that's like a non founder partner, maybe early mid 30s, do you think that's the most dangerous job in venture? Because I feel like there's this pressure to deploy and build a track record, yet at the same time, like you're on the chopping block if, if you deploy and a bunch of bad bets and we see a correction and there needs to be like somebody needs to get fired for it.

C (122:04)

Yeah.

A (122:04)

Like in some ways it feels like a benchmark, earlier stage. You're somewhat insulated from the kind of downstream chaos where you can make a bet, it can get marked up a lot, but even if it trades down during a correction, you're still up massively on your winners.

C (122:18)

Yeah, I mean, to be fair, I don't think it's unique to platform firms at all. If I don't make great investments, I'm also screwed. At the end of the day, you need to build a really good portfolio and no one is spared the results of not investing in great companies. I think where that becomes somewhat true. And again, everything is so dependent on the firm. And every firm's culture is so different. That's actually one of the things that I think people don't understand really about venture growth is like every firm, the way they do things, the variance is way higher than I think maybe any other asset class where like the work and the cult, like, how you do things is relatively similar. But I think where that can happen in a platform firm is where just like the supply and demand of like, things you're able to be the point person on is like negatively inclined towards you. What I mean by that is, like, there's like, I don't know, maybe 100 good companies that exist at like, whatever stage. Like each maybe stage, there's like you know, maybe 50 great early companies, 50 great growth stage companies. If you have, you know, 20 partners, you know, the math is just like, okay, like, if you're 50, if you have like 20 growth, or let's say 25 growth partners, since I'm bad at math and you have 50 good growth companies, that means there's like good two good companies per partner. And maybe like the senior, senior partners get like 10 instead of too. And so there's just this, there's this reality where it's like, there's some efficiency frontier where you're trying to be able to be the relationship builder and the point person and the board member for really great companies. But when you have a ton of people within an organization, it just becomes mathematically harder to just have like, shots on goal enough. You're not going to win every single deal either. And so it's like, okay, how many am I covering and how many can I win? Like, that just starts to diminish. It's also, it's not a perfect framework because again, like, it's also not like a solo. It's not golf, it's not a solo sport. Like, it is a team sport. And so I think a lot of these places that have good cultures, they're more focused on like, okay, how do we win as a team? We, multiple people can work a company, multiple people can be on the board or one person's a board observer or whatever. So it's not necessarily mutually exclusive, but I do think some people at those firms do feel those impacts, for sure.

B (124:24)

Are you AGI pilled?

C (124:27)

Wow.

B (124:28)

What's your, what's your, like, how have you processed that question? How have you engaged with the discourse around everything from just how powerful the models will be in 1, 5, 20 years, what that means for your investing thesis versus even just like the fast takeoff. AI doom has that Stuff ever rattled you, have you always just been, I'll wait until it shows up in a spreadsheet. I don't know, you seem like a pretty even keeled like quantitative person who's not getting lost at some yay rationalist party and going off into sci fi land.

C (125:07)

Yeah, I mean I am definitely of the belief, well one, I think AGI has become like a near useless term. Sure. I mean it's almost like agents at this point, like both of these things are so nebulous and, and like the product marketing around them has been so brutal that like they've just lost all their meaning. So I think actually when people quickly.

B (125:25)

Agents didn't exist as a marketing term two years ago and now it's already.

C (125:28)

Played out and now it's just shows you the, you know, the cycle of these things in 2025. But I think that like, so like AGI, like when you say like what you just said, I think is actually probably referring to like asi, like artificial super intelligence. Like I think that the bottleneck and the rate limiter for AGI, which is, is like artificial general intelligence, which maybe you could define as like, when do we have, you know, an AI that can do what like a reasonable adult can do in any given situation is fully dependent on how quickly we can distill the technology through the economy.

B (125:58)

Yeah.

C (125:59)

And I think like, and this is like Tyler Cowan talks about this, it's.

B (126:02)

Actually more about the inference in the pre training.

C (126:04)

Well, not even about inference and pre training. It's literally just like about the FDE.

B (126:10)

Actually deploying someone to use it.

C (126:11)

Yeah, like deploying it into the economy. It just takes a really long time. And no matter how fast these growth.

A (126:17)

Curves are, there's just notable that you gave the example of somebody at, let's say some company where they're doing their job with Claude, but their boss doesn't know that because they just want to be able to do their job quickly and go golf. And then that person gets presented with a better solution, they get a pitch on, hey, we can actually, actually like replace your whole team. And they're thinking like, well, there's a chance I could maybe golf more. There's also a chance that I could lose my job. And so I think there's going to be this interesting tension where the people.

B (126:48)

That are his associate, he uses so many EM dashes. He's amazing. He's also getting really good at golf randomly. Every time I go out with him on the week, it seems like he's been practicing a Ton. No, no, no, that makes a ton of sense. What, what about the, the just the stakes geopolitically? Because there's been this critique of benchmark of like, oh, maybe you guys are a little bit more open to investing in companies that are indexed to China somehow. This is not new. Excel has investments in China. There's a whole bunch of different stuff. It can go both ways. Do you think that? But, but it feels very predicated on. If you think AI is a super like nuclear weapons level technology, then it's harder to rationalize. If you think it's more like an Excel sheet and auto complete, maybe there's a little bit more of a deal to be done even with a near peer competitor.

C (127:38)

Yeah, like the fine line I'd place on that is that like we certainly, like I think all of us certainly within benchmark, but I think everyone in the industry wants Western AI to win and we do think it's a bit of a race and we want nothing more than Western and US AI to win. That does not mean that, that Chinese citizens or people that were born in China or people that at some point in their lives have been in China cannot contribute to and be a huge factor in building Western AI. If you look at the, there's, you know that, that tweet that had like the Poach list For the Meta Asi team, it was like 15 of the 20 were Chinese citizens or at some point or were born in China or whatever it was, but there was incredible kind of Chinese representation on the Meta team. And so, so again, the investments we've made have been in companies that are in Singapore or in the United States. And just if there's people that were born in China or Chinese citizens working on AI that they want to build and help the world in a Western context with our values and our value system and distribute it globally, not just within China or whatever and not even building in China, then of course we want to support those teams. And I think there's an immense amount of, of AI talent in China and would behoove us to have them building for Western allies for the United States and making sure that we win the AI race rather than scaring them off and pushing them to only work for China and for the ccp.

B (129:05)

Yeah, makes sense. Are you thinking, has your, has your thinking on open source AI updated at all? I've kind of gone back and forth. John Ludig, friend of ours, has written about this, saying that the scale of the effort and the capital intensity to really have significant progress on the Model side means that open source AI might struggle. @ the same time, a few weeks ago we saw Brian Chesky say that Airbnb has been using open source models and seeing a lot of great results there. And so there's obviously different use cases for each. But how are you thinking the market will play out? How are you thinking of how do you make money as a for profit company in open source? Are we looking to Red Hat as an example? GitLab, like what do you like in that category? If you like it at all?

C (129:54)

Yeah, no, it's a great question. I think there's, there's like two angles that I would take for this one on frontier capabilities versus like where open source is. Let's say for like general models I use something that I call the mom test, which I refer to my mom and I always joke that like there hasn't been a query on ChatGPT that my mom has made that like GPT like 3.5 couldn't handle.

A (130:13)

Sure.

C (130:13)

So I think there's like an increasing amount of queries and there's a lot.

B (130:16)

You're getting a lot of hate for this from the moms.

C (130:18)

From the mom. No.

D (130:19)

Okay.

C (130:20)

I am talking about my mom, not moms in general.

B (130:23)

Moms that are watching right now. This is the most controversial thing you've said. I'll show you can take shots.

C (130:28)

Don't give me growth funds.

B (130:30)

The mom community moms will say, actually, actually I'm puppeteering 25 Claude code instances right now to run this family. And you better shows some respect.

C (130:39)

Okay, the Randall, the Randall mom test. And I think there's like an increasing amount of queries as Frontier intelligence continues to get pushed.

B (130:46)

Yes.

C (130:46)

There's just an increasing amount of queries, an increasing amount of inference that you just don't need the frontier capabilities for anymore.

B (130:51)

Some of this stuff you can even cache like, because like if I had asked for like just give me the high level history of benchmark, like it.

C (130:57)

Could just serve that up. You don't need five, one, you don't need four, five.

B (131:00)

Sonic inference.

C (131:01)

It's like, yeah, you could do a Google search.

B (131:03)

Yeah, you could.

C (131:03)

So, so there's that piece which I think that like increasing amount of like there's always going to be places that.

B (131:09)

Are working for businesses too because there are certain things where it's like we just need to scan every transaction for fraud and we're not actually doing a deep research report on it. We're just saying, hey, does this have like bad words in it? And for a large language model, you can just use the 3.5 level model.

C (131:26)

Or something like that. And then actually in other modalities besides like code or I mean code, there's actually some great open source models now like in generative media especially, the open source ecosystem is extremely vibrant. There's a ton of amazing open source models and I think the open source models probably have way, way more tokens and like token volume than closed source models. And the way that you actually make money on this, there's an amazing company called FAL that is a generative. Yeah, give it up. Are you kidding?

B (131:54)

We're sponsored by them.

C (131:55)

Are you sponsored by fal?

B (131:56)

Yeah, we did the shout out.

C (131:58)

Kai and Gorkham, we love the legends, Batuan, all the guys there. But they're an inference cloud for generative media and so they're like a distribution mechanism for open source model providers to get video generative media developers to use models. And then for the developers it's like the one stop shop. You get a single place where you can drag and drop anytime a new model comes out. And so it's almost like this destination point that they then monetize via providing the inference for the models. And so I think when you have all this open source there's still a ton of money to be made via inference, via kind of like reselling GPUs if you want to call it that, and all the stuff that you can provide in terms of like inference optimization on top of that, even if you're not just providing like a LLM output via an API like you would with.

A (132:39)

A closed source model, how are the portfolio companies that you work with? How do they think about competing with OpenAI? I think the question of like, what if OpenAI does this is coming up a lot. We've, you know, seen, we had Mikey from SUNO on, they've grown tremendously. There's been talks that OpenAI will get into music generation. So that's kind of a conversation. I don't feel, I don't, I don't think SUNO will be very threatened by that. And generally it feels like OpenAI is already at the scale like, and is operating like Google does, where they're going to launch a lot of products that don't work and that's kind of okay. And so if they copy you, it doesn't mean you're dead, but, but it's a real threat. How are you, what are those conversations like? And how do you think the CEO's view that as a competitive threat?

C (133:29)

Yeah, I think it's like, it's, I think it's incredible for these startups to have like this bar. It's almost like having. It's like the lock in bar and it's like if you're not gonna like, if you're not gonna like exceed the lock in bar, which is like whatever the labs can produce, when you're probably not even their number one priority, then maybe you should pack it up and just call it a day because that's the bar you need to exceed it. And so I think people had this concern about so many different companies. People had this concern about 11 labs at one point when OpenAI was coming out with all these voice products and people were like, oh my God, what does this mean for 11 labs?

B (134:10)

Yeah.

C (134:10)

And now they're like, they're doing, they're accelerating, they're doing better than they ever have before. So I think that like really miss.

B (134:15)

Like the taste element. When we were Talking about from 11 labs, we noticed that even though Mid journey has been on a very different path, there's something about what David, how David Holz runs that company at midjourney, the way he thinks about training the model, that it just looks, it doesn't, it's not that it looks like there's no benchmark. It doesn't necessarily look better. It just looks more like David Holz's vision for what good looks. Like, like. And it's like I feel like when I see midjourney image, no matter who prompted it, I'm seeing the art of David holes. Yeah. And I feel like there's something about that in the texture of the voices from 11 labs and the flavor of text that comes out of OpenAI. And there's a little bit of like the people talk about this with like the flavor of code from Claude, for example. And the vibes can come out of the organization in a way that it's hard to just say, okay, we have good vibes in images, let's copy paste that all over the place.

D (135:06)

Yeah.

B (135:07)

It's just the culture doesn't necessarily shift.

C (135:09)

100% and I think most of the times that I've heard a pitch from somebody around like, well like this, this, you know, this part of this, like this model or like this modality is rapidly commoditizing. If a founder and a team is able to build a high taste product in a market that's big enough where you can have ACVs and like prices that are high enough per customer to like build and be able to distribute the product, all those companies are doing tremendously well. There's not been a single company, I think that like died because of the labs. It's because you didn't build a high taste product that could be distributed to a wide audience.

B (135:40)

It feels like we're probably not in the like the era of like getting steamrolled by AWS was like, well, yeah, I want my hard drives right next to my CPUs.

A (135:50)

Yeah.

B (135:51)

And I don't know that people are right now saying like, I need my voice model right next to my, you know, agent model. They're like, no, actually I'm okay with a little bit of latency because the whole thing is slow. Basically. It's all, it's all, you know, a couple seconds lag, sometimes 10 minutes of lag. And so maybe there's not so much. I want to talk about the Neo clouds and these interesting deals that are going on because Benchmark, where you're at in terms of the scale of the firm feels not necessarily set up to do some sort of company that's going to wind up being super capital intensive. But then at the same time they did Fireworks. You've done Fireworks.

A (136:28)

And then founder gave the most like one of the most iconic lines of this month. He said a lot of companies out there are going to be scaling into bankruptcy.

B (136:37)

But then also like the private equity background bond, I feel like you're, you're maybe better equipped to understand how private credit will interface with a founder. You're somebody that would make sense to have on the board potentially. But how are you thinking about these new companies where it's not just R and D spend, it's not just burn for salaries. There's something else going on in the almost financial engineering of building and winning a category.

C (137:03)

Yeah, 100%. Yeah. I think like our role at Benchmark and we've done investments like we've obviously invested very, very early in Fireworks. We have some robotics investments that we, that we're incredibly excited about that will be very capital intensive. I think one of the pitches that we can give to founders is there's nothing more scarce than a Benchmark A in today's market. And therefore there's no higher signal.

B (137:25)

And there's, we have another sponsor numeral on their website. They had Benchmark Series A and every time we did the ad read, Jordy.

A (137:34)

Would say Benchmark Series A every time.

C (137:37)

So you know, you know the market. So like part of our value prop in our job is like downstream capital should not be more cheap for anyone else than someone that has partnered with Us And I do think we put an immense amount of effort into helping companies understand and helping downstream investors understand the business equation of these more complex companies. Like a company that did this extremely well actually in the public markets affirm when it went public, a lot of the sell side analysts that were covering a firm, I think just didn't really know how to like handle the company and didn't really know how to like model out the actual business equation of the company.

B (138:14)

Yeah.

C (138:15)

So they actually did like an, I think it was called the financial modeling day. And they like walked through like a 30 slide deck that you can actually still find on their investor relations site of like, this is our business equation, this is what we optimize around, and this is how we grow and produce value for shareholders. And it was just like extremely clear, extremely legible. And I think it really helped the investor community and the analyst community better understand the business. And that's like one. Ideally, the founders also have some sense of their business equation because they're building their businesses. But it's also something that hopefully that myself or any of the other of the partners here can also help both sharpen the thinking of the founders, but especially the downstream investors that want to know that there's a strong business equation that they're investing behind.

A (138:54)

Emil, Michael was getting into it with you earlier this week. Week feels like the TK era has sort of continued.

B (139:03)

Two different government officials coming from.

A (139:04)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

B (139:05)

It's crazy. Yeah, you really.

A (139:06)

So the whole TK was wait, obviously.

B (139:09)

You know, can you 10 years apologize for it?

A (139:12)

No, no, no, no.

B (139:12)

Can you take full response?

A (139:13)

No, that's fine. Not what I'm saying. I wanted to understand, like, you know, when that comes up, when you're in process with founders, like, what is the, like, what are those conversations like from your side and how, how is the firm approaching those concerns from founders about actions that the firm took a decade ago?

B (139:31)

Yeah, that's good.

C (139:31)

Yeah. I mean, amazing question. And I think our response every single time, whether or not it comes up. And I think it's week four, so I actually don't know how rarely it comes up, but it's really come up so far in my time at Benchmark is talk to the founders we work with today or that any of the partners within the firm have worked with and see like, well, like Benchmark, like, I am 25% of benchmark. Jathan is 25%. Eric is 25%, Peter is 25%. Benchmark is not some corporation that has like, rules. And bylaws like the firm is us. And so talk to as many founders as you want of people that we have worked with and see if our references are better than any other investors. And our bet is that. And one that has proved to be true. I think more often, way more often than not is that you will not find a better reference firm from the founders that we work with as individuals. So again, like I was, you know, I think I was in high school or maybe I was in college. You know, like dancing to young. Like what was.

B (140:34)

I was doing private equity deals and getting hammered on the weekend.

A (140:36)

Yeah.

C (140:37)

I was doing like a private equity case study during that. So I'm like, I literally. I can't speak.

A (140:41)

Yeah, yeah. No, but I think, I think, think. I think being able to like focus it in and be like the firm is the four of us.

B (140:47)

Yeah.

A (140:48)

And so go as deep as you want on any.

B (140:51)

Our track record.

A (140:52)

Yeah.

B (140:52)

And I know the founders you work with.

A (140:55)

That's the song.

C (140:56)

That was the college anthem. That was great.

B (141:01)

What about, you know, you've been on a meteoric rise. Principal, then partner, now general partner. What do you think it takes to get to general. To steward.

C (141:13)

Oh, to senior steward.

B (141:16)

Do you think it's in the cards for you?

A (141:17)

I actually did have a.

B (141:19)

If you are at Sequoia as senior steward, next year I am going to blow. It's going to be insane.

A (141:24)

I wouldn't put it past Gurley still play a steward esque role. I'm assuming a bunch of his money is still in the field.

C (141:35)

Yeah, a few, a few things on this one. There is, I think this is a common misnomer just because some people like Bill, obviously extremely famous for his blog. He was, he was very like Outward Facing podcast too.

B (141:45)

I mean he really sailed off in the, in the sunset. He had some great takes on BG2. Totally.

C (141:51)

But there is like there is no sense of stewardship. There's no.

B (141:55)

Interesting.

C (141:56)

That does not exist in the slightest. There is no senior partner. And like in like there's nothing like that. Both in the actual economics obviously, but actually just in like the culture and the way that we do business. Like it is completely like there is no sense of that. And I think that's a common misnomer because some people are a little bit more public or outwardly facing or more famous. That is not how the firm operates. But it's true that like the retired partners that are no longer active gps play an unbelievably active role in a lot of our active investments. Now in A lot of the capital for the funds comes from both the current GPS and the previous gps, so they feel extremely bought into the continued success of Benchmark. They also just like, it was such a huge part of their identities for so long that it's like I now regularly talk with Bill, with Matt Kohler, with all these people that were Florida Gators.

B (142:46)

Yeah. Are you brushing up on the sports, Bill's Florida Gators?

C (142:50)

Yeah, well, state school pride between myself.

A (142:52)

Still working on that impression.

C (142:55)

But yeah. So they're super involved. They help us with companies that we're looking at with companies that we already work with. And I think that's a really unique part of the partnership.

B (143:02)

Yeah. Yeah. What's his. What have you learned from Bill Gurley? Have you learned anything yet? Has he updated anything? Obviously you go from Bond Mary Meeker one way of thinking about the world to Founders Fund pt. Wildly different way of thinking about the world. But you probably take lessons from both, I imagine. Have you learned anything from Bill either in the last four weeks? I know it hasn't been that long, but even just from reading his work and listening to him?

C (143:30)

Yeah. I feel like Bill was the first venture capitalist I ever learned anything from. Because when I was like, interviewing to get into the business, I was always reading above the crowd.

B (143:37)

Sure.

C (143:37)

I was always reading his blog. He had such pragmatic, instructive blog posts like, all revenue is not created equal. He had all these great things about network effects and marketplaces. And when you're looking for buzzwords to say in an interview and you're like 22 and you have no idea what you're talking about, they were an absol. Absolute gold mine. And so I felt like I've been learning from him for.

A (143:54)

Let's give it up for buzzwords.

C (143:56)

Shout out buzzwords.

B (143:58)

Fantastic way to advance your career.

C (144:01)

Useful buzzwords. I'm not saying that as a derogatory thing. No, no, no.

B (144:04)

But like, for me, thing is so real. We go to YC Demo day and they evergreen. They've had to like, reinstate, like, okay, what's contracted ARR versus ARR. What's. How fuzzy is this? There was something on the timeline earlier this week, someone was saying that they went to go interview at a company that said that, you know, the real revenue was like one sixth of what the founders had said and that that's, you know, in a frothy market, those. The. The temptation to lie gets even further or embellish.

C (144:31)

So I think, like, the biggest learning, I think, that people can take from Bill is like he just keeps it real. Like it doesn't matter what the market is, doesn't matter if it's up market, down market. Like he cares about the real. Like he cares about like what is the, like what is the business quality when you actually dig in. It's not about eyeballs, it's not about vanity metrics, it's like what does this business look like and what is it going to look like over the next 10 years. And it's not like he hasn't taken immense amount of risks. Like he invested in a bunch of marketplaces before they had flipped network effects. But he just knows how to drill down and kind of figure out what is fluff and fake versus what's real.

A (145:02)

How are you guys thinking about consumer social? I feel like as long as I've.

B (145:07)

Been.

A (145:09)

In and around the venture world, when there's a hot series, a consumer company benchmark is at least on it paying attention. It just feels. And then I can say personally I've experienced immense pain investing in consumer social. It doesn't matter if a company has a million users, they can go from zero to a million users in 48 hours and you can invest right there and then and it'll be a write off the next week. So it's extremely painful. But I'm curious about how the partnership is thinking about it today. Obviously you guys are a generalist fund, but is there anybody specifically on the partnership that cares a lot about backing the next breakout consumer software company?

C (145:57)

Yeah, no. 100%. And again, it's such a deep part of the firm's history. I think all of us are itching.

A (146:03)

Itching for it's the highest status like, like winner, right? Because it's like, you know, if you back Snapchat and then, and then, and then you have a half a billion users out there that are like, yeah, use and love Snapchat every day it just hits harder than backing like even the next data bricks because people are.

C (146:22)

Probably like a cultural touch trophy and a trophy. But yeah, I think the toughest thing about consumer social, why it's been really, really hard, is that back in the day when consumer social was starting, it was actually about consumer social, like social networking was actually social networking. Every single social networking platform has turned into an algorithmic short form video platform because that is the most addictive form factor of content that someone can consume. And eventually you just have this profit motive that means that you optimize for the amount of time spent on an app per user per day. And so they just Crowd out the currency of these companies. One is obviously users, but then the amount of time spent interacting with the product or interfacing with the product typically. And when you have these extremely addicting algorithmic short form video platforms, you just kind of squeeze out the seconds in the day. It's so hard to. How could you get someone to spend 30 minutes a day on your app versus. Versus any others? Like the challenge is just so much harder than it used to be when people still weren't spending that much time on their phones and now we all spend all day on our phones. So I think that the bar and the challenge is actually much, much, much higher. But I do think that, I mean one, we do have a new breakout which is ChatGPT, which is unbelievable. So that's amazing.

A (147:38)

I'm talking about the next, you know, like the next year basically like who's really itching.

C (147:44)

So we obviously, I'm not going to say the company because we just signed this, but we actually did just sign a consumer social series A and so there we go. You can, you can stay on the lookout for. For that. Get the gong for it. I was, I was looking for an excuse to do the gong.

B (147:57)

Yeah, for the, for the anonymous series that we can't.

A (148:02)

Solid first hit, first of 90.

B (148:05)

Thank you, sir.

A (148:06)

Last, last question I have.

C (148:08)

That was a big gong.

A (148:10)

Little, little pop quiz. I'm not going to tell you who wrote this, but I want you to get guess whether or not this was written with AI. This, this is not just a partnership, it is a living, breathing legacy.

C (148:22)

This is Alfred Lynn this morning, right? You got to be better than that.

B (148:28)

Student of the game.

A (148:29)

Student of the game.

C (148:29)

Well, that doesn't answer the question whether it was written AI or not.

A (148:32)

We don't know.

B (148:33)

Do you think it was there?

C (148:34)

I only skimmed it.

B (148:35)

But I mean I, I think, I think most people are at a, at a, at a. At a point where they might let ChatGPT do like a run through at the end and it might've inserted this. It's called contrastive parallelism. It's not this, it's that I'm not a fan of that particular construction, but it's something that ChatGPT just kind of sneaks in everywhere. But who knows? It can be a tell. But yeah, you kind of got to rip some of the stuff out because if AI starts doing EM dashes too much, even if you love using the EM dash, you just kind of like lose it because otherwise people will be like AI Totally.

A (149:09)

Last thing. Predict. Last, last question. Do you think that it felt like this year just the flood of deals meant that there was less seasonality in venture. Right. There was companies that were raising. There's companies that have raised like three, four rounds this year, which meant that, like they were raising during winter, like winter kind of holidays time. They were raising during.

B (149:34)

I mean, the talent wars were during summer. Like, Zuck was like having dinner with people in middle of summer opening. I tried to take a week off and got a ton of people poached.

A (149:42)

Yeah. But it feels like going into. I could see people taking a bit more of a breather this, this, this kind of like holiday season. But I'm curious, any, any kind of predictions around that front.

C (149:52)

I, I think we've moved to not having season. Like, I think the seasonality thing, at least for now, is that anytime you're in a hot market, you're just gonna have people working around the clock. Because again, it's almost like the return to office thing. If you're like a sales rep in like 2022, it's like, how do you want to differentiate? Well, if one guy's just doing zoom meetings and you're willing to fly to the prospect's office, that's a huge edge. So I think that's the issue now, especially in a hot market where things get marked up and sequential rounds happen very quickly. You just end up having like that, that, like, you know, Christmas is now the opportunity for someone to go preempt something.

A (150:24)

Yeah.

C (150:24)

I do think that most of the good teams kind of realize that even if you can get a deal done December 24, also, like, it's probably just going to be better if it's done when everyone. There is just like a level of energy that happens in the fall, that happens in the spring. That happens.

B (150:38)

There's also a little bit of like, if, like, there's like, wow, the vc, you know, gave me a call to try and close the deal, like from the, from the operating room when his first kid was born. And I'm like, yeah, dude sounds kind of like a psycho.

C (150:51)

Yeah, I work with that guy.

B (150:54)

I think I'm good. If you just like waited or the founders.

A (150:57)

It's like, yeah, I raised my round while my wife was giving birth.

B (151:02)

I don't know if we actually want that. That might just be. You can go a little bit too far and kind of turn people off. But that is fascinating. Thank you so much for.

C (151:09)

Of course, guys. Thank you so much. I want a great shout out, shout out to my wife Kailyn. Shout out to My six month old Theo.

A (151:15)

Let's go, Daisy. Six month old. Imagine. Imagine. Imagine being a. Imagine being a baby. And you and you, come on. Come onto this earth. And you're like, wait, my dad's a GP at Benchmark.

B (151:32)

You're like, I hit the jackpot.

A (151:35)

Papa's a GP at Benchmark.

B (151:38)

I just spawned into this wealth post economic on day one. Let's go, let's go. Let's bring in our next guest. We have Adam Faze, CEO of Gymnasium. While he's hopping on. Let me tell you about eight sleep dot com. Get a pod five. Welcome to the show. I will also 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 efficiency.

A (152:06)

Adam phase. Adam, let's settle this. I've never asked you this because I was kind of always embarrassed to ask you this.

D (152:14)

I already know where we're going.

A (152:15)

Yeah. I just think you are a Faze clan. Yeah, no, I think it is my real last name.

D (152:19)

They did try to sue me.

B (152:21)

No way.

D (152:21)

The original name of Gymnasium was Faze World.

B (152:23)

Okay.

D (152:23)

And they do own the trademark for the word faze.

B (152:26)

Okay. Wow.

D (152:26)

So we are.

A (152:27)

What is the origin of the name? Faze is such a cool.

D (152:30)

Okay, so this is. I've never actually really said this story before. My dad is from Iran. His real last name is Amir Faze. And then when he moved to America, he changed his last name to Faze. So I was born with the last name Faze.

B (152:41)

Okay.

D (152:41)

But it technically my middle name is Amir. So it kind of stole his Amir Faze.

C (152:44)

But it's.

B (152:45)

Oh, interesting. There's Ellis Island. Yeah. But there's a term for when that happens. Like I believe I was probably a Mick Coogan at some point and they took off the Mick. They just simplified it. That's fascinating. Well, for those who don't know anything beyond this, can you introduce the company kind of how you. How you position yourself 100%.

D (153:06)

I mean, I run a company called Gymnasium. It is a short form unscripted studio that primarily lives on TikTok and Instagram because we make shows that are these organic viral shows that would have been on TV 20 years ago, but instead live on these platforms.

A (153:19)

Neotrad Media. Neo Traditional Neotrad Media.

D (153:22)

I really gotta say, I think you guys are single handedly bringing Hollywood back. You know, we're trying to. This city has been lacking in the media department.

A (153:29)

Have you ever lived in LA, born and raised. Oh, okay.

D (153:31)

I lived in LA for 24 years, so I moved to New York four years ago.

B (153:34)

You went to high school here?

D (153:36)

I went to Loyola High School downtown.

B (153:37)

No way. I went to Poly.

D (153:38)

No way. You grew up in that? I didn't know that I grew up in there.

B (153:39)

Oh, wow. Yeah, I played with some Loyola guys on the rugby team. Cougars. I'm sure we could play. Who do you know?

A (153:47)

I went to Cougar. Most of your shows are in New York.

D (153:51)

Almost entirely New York based actually, until recently. So we just launched a new show this week called Girl Room where we investigated the most disgusting girls bedrooms in LA that we could find and we ended up renovating them.

A (154:04)

You're just exposing. You're exposing.

D (154:07)

I truly. I can still smell some of the bedrooms that I was in. But we're actually here shooting a different show this week in Boyle Heights, where I just came from.

B (154:14)

Okay, so walk me through what actually producing a show looks like. Do you hold the camera? Did you ever hold the camera?

D (154:21)

100%. Used to almost always hold the camera and did edit a few shows.

B (154:25)

But now what does the team look like?

D (154:26)

Well, to kind of back up. I mean, I grew up in LA being obsessed with Hollywood. All I ever wanted to do was make movies and TV shows and spent. Didn't go to college, Spent about eight years working up the ladder in traditional Hollywood for like studios and production.

A (154:38)

This industry is cooked and it basically.

D (154:40)

I mean, during COVID I all of a sudden we have a fly on the set. During COVID I just got deeply addicted to TikTok. Like so many people honestly stopped watching TV. And so there was a part of me that just felt like this feels like the future. At the same time, working at a studio where like spending five years trying to make a movie that like Brentwood would love, didn't really feel that culturally relevant.

B (155:03)

So zoom out for me a little bit and show me the difference between why what you're doing lives on TikTok and not those crazy like the Quibi, the new era Quibi, like the vertical. It's vertical, short form. There's a couple Chinese apps. You know what I'm talking about?

A (155:19)

Real shorts.

B (155:19)

Real shorts.

D (155:20)

Oh, you're talking about like the script, scripted short form, things that exist 100%.

B (155:22)

Like, is that where your stuff goes in five years or are you permanently.

D (155:27)

The real goal of this was like, let's just go where the people are. I was watching TikTok, I was watching reels content and I'm like, I Want to make shows in the place where people actually are. And so we've only ever produced things that are unscripted. It really started three years ago now, working with a guy named Kareem who hosts Subway Takes. You ever seen that show? Yeah, we did a show called Keep the Meter Running where he would, like, hail a taxi in New York and he would tell the driver, take me to your favorite place and keep the meter running while we spend the day with each other.

B (155:51)

That's cool.

D (155:51)

That show. I held the camera on.

B (155:52)

Okay.

D (155:53)

And so it would be me, a friend, and Kareem, and we'd actually just hail a cab in the street in New York and get in with them and spend the day with them. That show kind of changed everything for us because, you know, Kareem was someone. I had my eye on him for a while of, just someone who I thought was super talented and I wanted to hang out with more. And I asked him if he had any ideas for a TikTok show. And this was like the fifth idea he pitched. And it was so obvious of like, I want to know where that taxi driver goes. And so we spent three hours with this first taxi driver we ever shot with. And I can remember thinking, like, how the hell are we going to put this in a two minute video clip? We had never posted anything on TikTok ever before. We spend a week. The episode is like, perfect in our eyes. We put on an account that has zero followers, and as a result, we're like, we're not going to even check the views because it's a brand new account. The next day, Kareem goes into his bodega across the street and someone taps him on the shoulder and is like, I love your show. When's the next episode coming out?

B (156:45)

He's like, what do you.

D (156:46)

My show. And he looks at his phone. It had 1.2 million views. And I think the cooler thing was of those 1.2 million views, 99% were in New York City.

A (156:54)

No way. So as I was starting to walk.

D (156:56)

Around city that day, people started tapping him on the shoulder being like, hey, I love your show. Hey, can I get a. Can I buy you a beer? Can I take a photo with you? How are the algorithms? That show now has like 400 million views and has, I think, about 800,000 followers across tech and Instagram. And it's grown Kareem's own career into becoming, like, the mayor of New York City.

B (157:13)

Totally.

D (157:14)

So I think from that point on, it was just clear of like, hey, this is a place where people actually want to watch serialized content. And what are the types of stories that we want to go make?

B (157:22)

How do you think about monetizing something like that? It feels so hard to stop and do a mid roll ad. Is it possible? And it also feels like if you're like, oh, I'll just do a separate promoted post, TikTok's like, we know what you're doing. That one's going to get 10 views. And then when you're back to normal programming, we'll give you a 10 million view. Because they know what's good and what's, what's.

D (157:40)

I mean, this is the problem with short form media in general. The reality is these platforms do not have an incentive to pay you.

B (157:46)

Yep.

D (157:46)

One, because they know the benefit that you get by being viral on these platforms. But also like their excuses like, hey, you're scrolling eight videos for every one ad you see. How would we know how to pay that person?

B (157:58)

It's like you know everything. Exactly. You know the data. You're gonna be fine. You can figure it out.

D (158:02)

You know, we figured this out on our show Boy Room, which was like the early version of Girl Room and it was, you know, really disgusting men's bedrooms.

A (158:09)

Who has grosser bedrooms?

D (158:11)

So the difference, we really did find the difference here. Guys have disgusting bedrooms. Girls are just hoarding. They're hoarding so much shit that they refuse to get rid of. So that's the big difference between the two shows. But on that show it was so viral so quickly, the top comment in every episode was a girl saying, I can fix him.

A (158:30)

You can.

D (158:31)

The second comment was always, you should fix their rooms. And so we started quickly getting in touch with Amazon and a bunch of other companies figuring out like, how could we turn this into a renovation?

B (158:40)

Sure, sure, sure.

D (158:41)

Ended up making an amazing partnership with Amazon. We did an entire renovation season of the show still on TikTok and Instagram, and out of that partnership birthed this brand new show, Girl Room, which is actually co owned by Amazon.

B (158:52)

And also Amazon in that world doesn't feel forced at all. It's like very logical that if you're.

D (158:58)

Doing it, if you're making the show better, of course, you know, we would never be able to do a renovation show without the help of Amazon. And so I think what's really cool here is like through this partnership with Amazon, I think what we've realized is like the views and attention that we get on these platforms organically is something that every Fortune 500 company desperately is trying to figure out. And so what we've really started doing is having this conversation with brands is like you're a media company whether you realize it or not. And if you were to think of yourself as a TV channel, what are the types of shows that you would program on that channel? And so we're starting to work with brands on creating original shows on these platforms that kind of live in the universe of their brand.

B (159:31)

Yeah.

A (159:31)

Is there very little competition? Because it feels like the legacy businesses that obviously there's competitive.

C (159:39)

Well, no.

A (159:39)

So there's like the feeds are deeply competitive. I'm saying like people that are trying to do this like highly produced unscripted content that's not just an iPhone, that's not an individual creator doing like a day in the life or doing that. Like it feels like they're like, it feels like they're. Because the traditional like unscripted TV businesses, they're so in this mindset of like, okay, I like create a concept and I pitch it and maybe I make a pilot or I'm an established studio and I can just go and get the budget just off of belief alone. They're still in this mindset of like, I need to sell this whole show to a network. And I think that could create an environment where you're kind of in this lane with a model that's very disruptive. Being like, I'm not going to go to the network at all. I'm just going to go straight to the feed and be able to churn out a super high volume of content. I'm sure with great margins too and just kind of like sidestep the whole industry.

D (160:34)

I mean there's a few things here. One, I think what's been really cool is New York has become like the capital of this new era of media. I think LA was the center of influencer for so long. Never forget the TikTok houses in 2020, I think that slowly started shifting with like the Washington parkification of TikTok content. And all of a sudden now all these short form content studios started bubbling up. You know, I think for those of us that have been in New York for a few years, there is a bit of an industry now where we all know each other, we're all pretty close with each other. What I will say though is like on the flip side, I think especially like being in LA right now, this is an industry of people that still refuse to accept that like the Internet has become television.

B (161:12)

Oh, interesting.

D (161:12)

And you have so many talented storytellers. Entire generation of storytellers who are out there trying to pitch their show to Netflix instead of realizing like, hey, how can I go make this myself? And I think the crazy thing is like, we have so many examples of success now. And it's like, in what world would TVPN be this successful if you guys were on cnn.

B (161:33)

Yeah. Or starting there. I mean, it's weird because in Silicon Valley you would be so crazy if you were like, I have an idea for, for a new technology. Let me go try and pitch it to Amazon Web Services. You'd be like, no, I build the first version, I raise a little money, I build it, I build it and then eventually they come and try and buy me. And that's like the DNA of Silicon Valley. And yet Hollywood just is still in the process of adapting to that of just like, yeah, just go do it yourself. Like the cameras are available, you can make stuff with an iPhone.

D (162:02)

And I think what's so hard is we haven't had startup DNA in this city ever.

B (162:08)

In 1920, of course.

D (162:09)

Exactly. And that was the original moment. From that point on, we had a hundred year long industry where like, this is how projects get done.

B (162:15)

Calcify, Calcify, calcify.

D (162:16)

And I think as a result, we built an industry around the way that things worked. And it's really hard to all of a sudden accept, like, hey, the rules could not be more different now and might never go back to that. They will never go back to that in the first place. So I think what's cool though is like, I really do believe that any talent we've ever worked with would have been a television star 20 years ago. I think any show we made and are continuing to make would have been a TV show 20 years ago.

A (162:40)

How much inspiration do you think? Like, when I think about TVPN, we've had maybe 100 or so people kind of launch some show that is inspired in some way by what we're doing. Even though what we're doing just looks like normal television. It's been around for 50 years. Do you look back at some of these like old unscripted shows and be like, okay, we want to do a dating show in that format, we want to do a home renovation show and that, like, we want to do a cooking, like cooking. I feel like I've pitched, we've pitched like TVPN for cooking somebody. It wouldn't look anything like tvpn, but it'd just be like a daily cooking show that kind of like has the aesthetics of like a legacy television show, but it's like built, built for the social platforms.

D (163:27)

Yeah, 100%. I mean I think what I try to tell everyone is like Instagram, TikTok x YouTube are television at this point. And so as a result the entire history of television is up for grabs to recreate on these platforms. And so I think it's really interesting to think about like what are the shows that spoke to you when you were younger and figuring out like what is the newer version of making that today. But I think the big difference is there is the format side which like boy room and girl room, our formats. But I think the real opportunity that exists here is like certain star creators out there have the ability to grow multi hundred million dollar businesses fueled by content. And I think these are people that need programing help because they themselves are a TV channel at this point and they need operating help. And I think that really is where we're going to see things start to go and it not just be a landscape where like Mr. Beast is the only one that's figured this out.

B (164:12)

Yeah, how, how do you think about platform exclusivity, the aesthetics of the different platforms? Because I think from, from the outside a lot of people would assume that Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and TikTok are feature complete identical platforms. It's vertical video and yet content that does well on one doesn't do well on the other.

A (164:33)

But yeah, could we see a flip where TikTok says no, we want this as an exclusive show or Instagram, like will that.

B (164:40)

Are they already basically doing that in the sense that, that some content will do better on one platform than another just because the audience or the algorithm or the feature set there. But will it go farther to the point where you could build a whole show and every episode's going viral on TikTok and they're all flopping on Instagram for some weird unknown reason?

D (165:00)

I mean we've had that experience. We have certain shows that have totally flopped on TikTok and Instagram and are the most viral thing we've ever made on YouTube and most often it's the other way around. But I think it goes back to like what is the reason that someone is opening that app in the first place? If I'm opening Instagram, it's to check my DMs, it's check my notifications, maybe see something from a friend and then I'll get stuck in reels and doom scroll for three hours. TikTok I am going on basically to watch television. Sure. I don't Want to see what my friends are posting because I don't think they know how to make TikToks. And I'm going on being like, hey, show me like what's the television feature? And so as a result like you're willing to watch longer content. It's not about sending something to your group chat. That's like a degenerate meme. And I think it really is the closest thing to like short form television YouTube shorts. I think either you're 13 or 70, I don't really know who else uses YouTube shorts in between that. But I think like, you know, this show is a really great example of that of like it does feel like this show was originally designed for X. I would imagine that it quickly becomes a YouTube show though, just as it turns into more of a television.

B (166:04)

Do you think there's anything that we should extrapolate from the expansion of Shortform from It was six seconds on vine and it was about one minute for a while. Now I think it's three minutes on most of the platforms.

D (166:17)

You can do up to 60 minutes.

B (166:18)

On TikTok, 60 minutes on TikTok. Are we going to see the meta of 30 minutes is just the right amount of time because that's where TV landed and that's kind of where YouTube landed. Right. Like Mr. Beast, it used to be eight minutes, then it was 12, then it became 20 and then 20 plus ads is kind of 30 and you're in the 2030 and then you see video essayists go up to 40 and you know.

D (166:39)

I mean, look, I think the one thing you have to remember, short form content is like part of the reason for its success is that like dopamine rush, that snacks and so like you are kind of addicted to this scroll and wanting to be punched with like some new hit of energy. So yeah, I think there is a.

B (166:53)

Limit to some extent. Totally.

D (166:55)

But I think it's like there is.

A (166:57)

A modern blackjack dealer and at the.

D (166:59)

End of the day, at the end of the day, I mean anything that's.

A (167:02)

A long form video, I'm watching 2x.

D (167:04)

On these platforms because like hey look, I might want to watch eight minutes of a rug cleaning video on Tick Tock. But like gonna watch it in 2x speed. But I do think that like you.

B (167:13)

Watch 8 minute rug cleaning videos sometimes.

D (167:16)

You just at 4 in the morning you get hooked.

B (167:18)

The rug cleaning, they're already sped up.

D (167:20)

They're already, they're already, I think on.

B (167:22)

4, they're on like 4x or 10.

D (167:23)

I just want to see the lines get cleaner and cleaner, the whole.

A (167:26)

Do you. Do you think, hold on, we got.

B (167:28)

To stay on this. Do you. Do you feel like you.

A (167:30)

Let's check your screen time.

B (167:31)

Let's.

A (167:32)

Let's check the screen time.

B (167:33)

Just those.

D (167:33)

No, look, I. Look, in general, I will say I think there are like, a lot of problems with short form content to begin with. Like, I don't think this is a good thing to be giving children and then expecting them to like, enter the world in a normal state.

B (167:44)

But at the same time, like, I would actually defend like, like Subway interview series as something that is a little bit more vegetables than the rug cleaning.

D (167:53)

This is my whole thing. I think knowing that these platforms are the sole source of, like, information, entertainment for an entire generation of kids, we have a moral responsibility to flood as much good shit as possible on these apps.

A (168:05)

I agree.

D (168:05)

I think at the same time, your.

A (168:07)

Room doesn't have to look like this.

B (168:08)

It really does.

A (168:09)

There is another way.

D (168:09)

By the way, I also think if you're just putting a smile on someone's face, you're making their day better. You know, it is funny.

A (168:14)

There was a moment in time, maybe it was like five, 10 years where people had this, like, righteous, like, they would make this sort of like, righteous statement, I don't watch television. And then if you actually piece together, it was like, I don't watch television, but I get entertained in these sort of like, short bursts that collectively add up to four hours a day. But I would never watch television.

B (168:34)

Yeah, I don't even own a TV. I just pay $2,000 for a new phone every 12 months because I'm hooked up.

D (168:40)

But I do think that's the thing. It's like, it is time to start sounding the alarm bells a little bit. Like, what goes behind the scenes on these platforms? Because, like, I don't know if this is the best thing for young people to have from.

A (168:50)

Do you think there's an opportunity to recreate some elements of Vice? Like, it feels like they. They were making video content that in my view, I feel like doesn't get made as much anymore.

D (169:04)

It's, by the way, some of the best content still on YouTube to date. And I. And I think it's interesting because the views continue to go up like you after year. I will say what I'm not as bullish on these days is a faceless media company. I think Vice was sort of that last try of what happens to build an actual media company on the Internet.

B (169:24)

We talked about this all the time.

D (169:24)

A Shane smith type would 100% be successful and maybe could have some people underneath them. But I think, like tbpn, for instance, is not a faceless brand. It's not cnbc. You guys are tvpn.

A (169:36)

Yeah.

D (169:36)

And I think, like, that is. Anything's going to grow going forward.

B (169:39)

Andrew Callahan, like Channel five is Andrew Callahan. Right. And. And if it was truly just like, oh, it's just the Channel 5 is. Is a faceless aesthetic.

A (169:47)

Yes.

B (169:48)

For fun.

D (169:48)

And I think like a 24 might be the last faceless media company. Like, they have created a brand of prestige. I don't know how easy that is to do going forward.

A (169:56)

Yeah. Where do you think live streaming goes from here?

D (170:00)

Live's the future. And I think. I think most of the people that we're talking about in culture right now, you guys included, are livestreamers. Whether it's like Ishowspeed or Kai Sanat or on a completely other end of the spectrum, Nick Fuentes. There's a reason why we're talking about these people. And I think it's because you're giving a daily amount of content that can be clippable and hack the algorithm of every single platform that exists. And so I think we are in this sort of post platform state where you might have your preferred platform that you use, but it all kind of has the same content at this point. And so. So people are larger than any one app, if you do this correctly. And I think Live is like the real spot where that kind of comes to fruition.

A (170:38)

Are you working on any live shows?

D (170:41)

Definitely have live shows in the works. I mean, had like the huge honor of working with Ishowspeed on his Speed Does America tour, which he was live for 35 days straight.

B (170:49)

That's amazing.

D (170:50)

He filmed himself sleeping for 34 nights in a row.

A (170:54)

I didn't know. He didn't. I assumed he was going offline.

D (170:57)

Oh, no, he did not turn off the camera for 35 days.

A (171:00)

Isn't there a real risk of going crazy?

D (171:02)

I think it's all he knows. Cause he's only 20 years old and he's been doing this for like four years, which is crazy. Someone had a great point when we were filming, which was like, he turned our world into the Truman show because it's not like he's on some set. Like, the set is the city that we live in.

B (171:16)

What's really interesting about Ishowspeed is I think people see the viral clips, but if you open up a stream and just click to a random moment and you actually understand how he's interacting with chat. How he's like killing time and filling dead air.

D (171:32)

I think he talks to chat in a way that I've never seen anybody on earth. He knows who chat is and when he says I love you Chat, you're like, he actually loves chat. He's talking to that young 13 year old kid or 50 year old guy that like for some reason is watching.

B (171:45)

This every time people don't understand with the streamers how high skill ceiling talking to chat is. Ludwig was talking about if he had to start over, could he be successful in the modern era as a streamer? And his first bullet point was I'm good at talking to chat. And so that's a skill that I could immediately cash in on. But then of course you have to figure out how do you get your first viewer? And so he does a bunch of stunts and he ran this experiment somewhat successfully, but mostly it was just interesting to hear someone talk about the nature of Live with Chat is so different than tv. Bloomberg has a chat room but they never talk to chat on Bloomberg tv. You know, and I was thinking about how funny that would be because every.

A (172:28)

All the, a lot of legacy media, they turn off chat places.

B (172:31)

Oh yeah, yeah. Turn off YouTube. I'm not even talking about that. I'm talking about right now. Like there are multi billionaire hedge funds that have Bloomberg on and Bloomberg Chat going on their Bloomberg terminal. Yeah. And yet the person, they don't connect whatsoever. They don't connect. They don't connect. Which is so fascinating.

D (172:48)

But this is what I explain to everyone of why I think Live is the future. There was a moment on the Speed tour where he was in Cincinnati. He's having lunch. There's a glass door at the front or glass window at this restaurant. And of course anywhere he goes, there's a crowd of thousands of kids that are outside trying to go see this kid. Speed goes to the window at one point just to get a better look at the crowd. And there's one kid front and center. This kid is so excited to see Speed that he bashes his head through the glass window like World War Z zombies zombie. And I think like that is the answer of like this medium is so powerful that it's somehow making this like 12 year old kid into a zombie because of the connection that he feels with Speed. That is live. That's not like uploading a TikTok video.

B (173:26)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's weird. There's, there's a very like. Yeah, yeah. Just so many Interesting.

A (173:32)

How do you TV through, you're behind the camera, you're creating shows and different concepts and, and through that you're creating, inevitably creating, creating stars and future superstars. How do you think about partnering with talent in the short term and the long term? I feel like one of the big challenges that when you look at modern creator led media companies, you have barstool Dave Portnoy, he created other stars. They end up going and going independent or going and doing other deals. Alex Cooper then was a barstool creator, left. Then like, you know, created Alex Earl to some degree. Then Alex Earl leaves and the cycle sort of like continues. And I think that's like probably that maybe like one of the number one challenges for gymnasium is like, how do you. This is so hard. It's hard enough to create the star and then how do you kind of partner for the long term?

D (174:31)

I mean this is something that like, honestly I evolved my own perspective. I think for a long time I tried to figure out like, how could we hold onto that star? And I think where I've completely changed my opinion is like, the creators have the power and even if they didn't start as a creator, but now they are, they hold the cards. And I think all you can hope to be is the best partner to them. But it is for them. They are the ones that are in control. And so I think where we've really shifted with Gymnasium is like Gymnasium at this point is very much a television studio for brands to make themselves into TV networks. It's like we can turn brands into creators. But I think there is another completely different angle.

A (175:05)

Theoretically you can retain the brand longer. And if you're creating a diversity of creators or talent that work effectively for the brand, then you're not entirely indexed to one superstar. And we even saw night media lost Mr. Beast.

D (175:23)

But think about this. If you are Skittles and you're building the Skittles digital network of shows, and by the way, as a result of that, you've given, given three new kids a platform that are now going to go be famous. Their story will always start with they got famous for being on like this Skittles network. They might be your best brand ambassador you ever have. I think that's like a blessing if someone were able to become a star for someone like that. So I think it makes a lot more sense on the brand side of things. But I think like the real future of this industry is helping creators turn into massive, massive stars.

A (175:51)

Do you feel threatened at all by AI? I feel from My point of view and understanding your business. I think humans are going to want to watch unscripted shows from real people. I don't know if it's going to hit the same to be like watching Boy Room and it's like, yeah, we generated this crazy AI room super dirty. And here's this AI person who made the room dirty. And it's like, there's something about it being even indistinguishable.

B (176:19)

People will do the investigative journalism to be like, like, oh, Boy Room is now AI generated. We caught them. And that will destroy. It'll be like cheating in chess, I imagine.

D (176:29)

I mean, look, I think the benefit is like, we're young and run a startup and an industry that's kind of being created every single day. And so for us, I think we're always looking to see, like, what tool is coming out and seeing if we can use it and help us make our own shit better. But I think the reality is, like, when anyone's ever said, hey, like, in the future, people are going to watch an entire new season of succession by generating it. It's like at the same time that you say that the NFL has never had a bigger audience. And I think, like, we humans have an innate desire to watch the same thing at the same time and be part of, like a cultural moment.

B (176:59)

What's interesting about that is like, yeah, NFL has bigger audience than ever, but also there's more people playing Madden and watching effectively virtual football every year as well.

D (177:08)

But they're watching a human playing it.

B (177:11)

I wasn't even talking about that. I mean, they're playing it like they are generating it themselves when they're playing it. You're watching the screen while you play. Then there's also people watching it on Twitch, which I think is what you're mentioning, or watching the video game version, watching someone else play. And then there's watching real people play. And so all three markets were good to invest in. Oddly, it wasn't one one one defeated all the others. What about VR? Have you. Is there anything interesting in your world? In VR?

D (177:35)

I mean, look, it's cool. I've never seen a reason why we're at that place in time yet where. Anyone going to care to go and put these goggles on? I think, like, you know, I think the pneumatic glasses look really cool. I'm excited to try them, but I think we're still a few years away.

B (177:48)

I just have this. I just have this thesis that if you. If you went like all in on VR today and you just waited, waited, waited. You could be like the. You could be the Jake Paul.

D (177:56)

I mean, look, there's a lot of people that have been doing that. I think these are also a lot of people that raised a shit ton of money 10 years ago. And like, Sundance even had a part of their festival, VR films back then. Like, you know, I. Unfortunately, I think that is also where you risk sounding like someone who's just chasing the thing that people are talking about.

B (178:12)

It's like, totally.

D (178:13)

First you're running a VR company, now you're running a crypto company. You don't want to always chase those things. I think for. For me, it's like, just really, what do I want to watch? What are the things that we can go make that are, like, fun to be a part of?

A (178:23)

Have you had a bunch of acquisition interests?

D (178:28)

Definitely been interesting conversations. I think, you know, it's less about.

A (178:32)

I feel like if I'm a legacy.

D (178:34)

I think it's like an acqui. Hire thing.

A (178:35)

You know, if you're like, hey, we need a play here bad. This seems like somebody we're getting killed on take.

D (178:43)

I mean, by the way, I do think, I do think, like, that creator side of, like, building stars is where these studios can have a big impact because it does take millions of dollars if you want to go do this correctly. And so that's not something that, like, even we could do on our own. Just saying, like, hey, we're gonna go build this star creator. It does take money. And the one thing the studios have is, like, decades of relationships in the licensing world and in the merch world and live events world that would honestly be really helpful to tap into.

A (179:09)

Have you thought about trying to launch a new startup with a show? Are you doing that at all?

D (179:14)

I think that's always been some of the thought behind any new show. It's like, how big could this get? What are the things that can kind of come out of this? And I think you've seen a lot of tech companies now realize the importance of media and doing it the other way around. But I think that's the most interesting thing on earth.

A (179:28)

Yeah, yeah. Cause you could partner with Amazon on a show or you could partner with some consumer brand that's like, we'll give you 15% of our company if you can get us 200 million views and kind of take us from 0 to 1.

D (179:41)

And I think that's the really interesting side about where Gymnasium is going is like, it is more than anything, a sort of, you know, creative consultancy for the first time, like, we can really help you build your brand in terms of taking over, like cultural dominance through the type of media know you have.

A (179:56)

You haven't raised money either.

D (179:57)

We raised a very small. We raised a 750k round three years ago.

A (180:01)

Okay.

D (180:01)

And it was with a lot of just like classic industry players like Jeremy Zimmer, who was the CEO of uta, and Matthew Siegel at attention and some really interesting people, but haven't raised a dollar.

A (180:10)

Smart to not like raise 75 million. And then you're like, oh, suddenly we need 300 shows.

D (180:16)

It's like, what's the point? I mean, it's. We're not at that time where you would even want to stake a bet in terms of terms of raising that much money.

B (180:22)

Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

A (180:24)

Well, it's very pragmatic.

B (180:25)

Thank you so much for the show. This is.

D (180:27)

Happy to be here. Wanted to wait till I can come in person.

B (180:29)

Wait, we gotta ring the gong for the.

A (180:31)

How many views. How many views do you think you're gonna do this year?

D (180:35)

Oh, absolutely. It depends if you include the speed tour. I think we're already at like 2 billion plus.

B (180:43)

Congratulations. Thank you so much. Good. Thanks so much.

C (180:49)

Pleasure.

B (180:51)

We'll talk to you in just a second. Before we move on, let me tell you about getbezel.com, your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Vas on X says just try Gemini 3.0. It's over. Very, very funny post. I think even if we are working.

A (181:12)

On getting access, we're working on getting access. Do you think it seems that Warren Buffett also tried Gemini 3. Berkshire Long Google.

B (181:20)

Long Google right now.

A (181:21)

Yeah, they just.

B (181:22)

They just bought.

A (181:23)

No way. Wow. Did they buy what kind of size? I think 4.3 billion.

B (181:28)

Let's go.

A (181:29)

Come on, people. You can do more than that. Toss in 100 billion.

B (181:34)

Fascinating. I mean, it just goes to show you that like the AI, even if it's like a bubble like it is, there is no systemic. There's no systemic. Like chaos all over the place. Like, there will be pockets of things that are overvalued, pockets of things that are undervalued, opportunities all over the place.

A (181:51)

Let's pull up this video.

B (181:52)

You know you have Google trading at what, 20x or something?

A (181:56)

Let's pull up this video of somebody breaking through the glass.

B (182:02)

Yeah, 28. Yeah. Let's watch the speed video. And then let's also tell you about wandering. Find your happy place. Book A wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning.

A (182:12)

I'm in my happy place. I'm in a wander.

B (182:14)

It's a vacation home, but better. Also, I didn't give everyone an update on what my eight sleep score actually was. I of course, am sleeping on my eight sleep. I got an 85, so I'm doing pretty well. I'd like a sound effect. Do you even have access to the old sound effects? I feel like we might have over rotated towards the night vision goggles turning on and we no longer have access to, to the classics, the horse, the Ashton hall sound effect. Are any of those still on the board, Jordi, or have they all been replaced with. Oh, it's still there. Thank goodness. I thought we lost touch. And I thought we only had night vision goggles, which I do enjoy. Is there any other news that we need to talk through? Should we go through some mansion section? We missed the entire mansion section. We had so much to talk about today.

A (182:57)

Pull it up.

B (182:59)

Which one do you want to do? Where should we start with the mansion section?

A (183:03)

Donald Trump's home, his childhood home. This is a big is hitting the market.

B (183:07)

This is a big deal.

A (183:08)

There's in Queens.

B (183:09)

You could buy this because you love the guy. You could buy it because you hate the guy. You want to tear it down and build something.

A (183:15)

We got this video first. Play this video. I need to see this.

B (183:17)

Yeah, let's play this. This is speed on the Speed Tours America tour. What is going on here? Here? And someone is about to jump through the glass. He's Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That is crazy. He actually bonked his head on the glass and broke the glass. And that seems like that's like at a McDonald's or something. It's at a real restaurant that probably doesn't buy the cheapest glass. I don't know. That's pretty crazy.

A (183:52)

It's funny to use his head. Like he's got his hands. Such a great actor went for the heads.

B (183:57)

I, I, I wonder, I wonder if he'll ever transition to like, you know, being in movies because.

A (184:03)

Oh, I'm sure, I'm sure he could.

B (184:05)

It's fantastic.

A (184:06)

Be in any number of movies at this point.

B (184:08)

Anyway. 8 month renovation. Donald Trump's childhood home is hitting the market in Jamaica Estates. The house is selling for 2.3 million. You know, let's see what else is here. Charming Tudor style house in Queens, New York. He lived there in his earliest years of his life. Decades later, the latest in a string of owners is Hoping the home's connection to Trump will help turn a healthy profit.

A (184:34)

So in 2008, it sold for 782,000. 2016, 1.3, 2017, 2.14, 2025, it somehow sold for 800,000. And now it's back up at 2 point being listed at 2.3.

B (184:50)

What happened? Something odd. Very, very bizarre. Anyway, there's another story in here. Before building their retirement home, they had to relocate 174 legless lizards. That is a bizarre headline. A pair of retirees needed to remove protected slow worms from the property before they could break ground on their 3.2 million dollar.

A (185:16)

So I was hoping.

B (185:16)

Countryside.

A (185:18)

This one isn't hitting the market yet, but I could see pg.

B (185:21)

I was going to get it.

A (185:24)

This house looks absolutely lovely. You love it has a little pond you can swim.

B (185:32)

Even though you. Even though they had to relocate, they had to painstake. They had to spend weeks painstakingly capturing and relocating almost 200 of the creatures. Slow worms, a legally protected reptile. They're not worms. They're harmless legless lizards. What a bizarre world. But no, catching slow worms was not something we'd ever had to do before. It was actually very hard work. But strangely, I enjoyed doing it. They did it themselves. Wow.

A (185:59)

We'll do it ourselves. Can you imagine trying to catch 170 lizards?

B (186:05)

Oh, my God, that'd be gross. I don't know. I don't like that.

A (186:08)

Fun for a. I don't like snakes.

B (186:10)

These sound like snakes. They don't have an image, thank goodness, of what the snakes look like. But I'm not into it at all. But I'm very happy for these folks out in the English countryside who rescued 100.

A (186:22)

These are snakes. These are some of the sketchiest looking things ever. They're like massive worms.

B (186:29)

I don't like these at all. This is a terrible selection. I had you select the the mansion section stories.

A (186:35)

I selected it because the home looks incredible.

B (186:38)

Yeah, the home's nice. I'm glad that it's worm free. I would be moving to Ireland. I don't like snakes.

A (186:43)

It's only 40 miles southwest of central London, which means that it probably takes like 3, 4 minutes in an Aston Martin Valkyrie.

B (186:55)

Is there any other news that we missed today? I think we have it mostly covered. I think we can say goodbye. Have a great weekend. We will see you on Monday. And thank you for tuning in. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and subscribe to the TVPN substack tvpn.com thank you so much for tuning in. Have a great weekend.

A (187:17)

Have a fantastic weekend.

B (187:19)

Goodbye.

A (187:19)

We love you. We'll see you Monday.