Chamath Is Back With New SPAC, AI Scrutiny, China’s Moon Push | Pete DeJoy, Marty Kausas, Matteo Franceschetti, Abdul Al-Asaad, Derek Lo, Alex Telford

Summary

TBPN Podcast Summary – August 19, 2025

Episode: Chamath Is Back With New SPAC, AI Scrutiny, China’s Moon Push
Hosts: John Coogan & Jordy Hays
Notable Guests: Pete DeJoy (Astronomer), Marty Kausas (Pylon), Matteo Franceschetti (Eight Sleep), Abdul Al-Asaad (Basic Capital), Derek Lo (Medallion), Alex Telford (Convoke)

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into explosive financial news surrounding Chamath Palihapitiya’s new SPAC, scrutinizes the state of AI in industry and public markets, and explores China’s aggressive progress in lunar exploration. The hosts are joined by several startup founders and venture-backed execs for quick-hitting interviews about milestone fundraises, tech trends, and their own industry insights. The episode is fast-paced, irreverent, and built on a blend of tech- and finance-forward banter, making it a must-listen for anyone plugged into the venture/startup world.

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Major Themes & Segments

Chamath Palihapitiya’s New SPAC: The Return of the “SPAC King”

[00:21–22:50]

• Chamath has filed for a new $250M SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company) named “American Exceptionalism Acquisition.”
  • Quote (John, 01:28): “Breaking news. The SPAC King is back. Chamath Palihapitiya files a new $250 million SPAC: American Exceptionalism Acquisition.”
• The hosts review Chamath’s past SPAC performance—out of 10, only one (SoFi) is meaningfully up, others crashed (e.g., Virgin Galactic, Clover, Opendoor).
  • Quote (Jordy, 07:25): “The stock [Virgin Galactic] peaked on June 25, 2021 at $1,118 a share. Down to $2.94.”
• Discussion of SPAC mechanics, the “liquidation” of 4 initiatives, and what’s different about this cycle:
  • Chamath’s S-1 filing is unusually frank:
    • Quote (Chamath via hosts, 05:04): “If they do lose their entire capital, they will embody the adage from President Trump that there can be no crying in the casino.”
    • Chamath’s new compensation structure aligns sponsor gains to long-term performance (founder shares vest only if stock appreciates 50%+).

SPACs as Entertainment and Slot Machine

• Hosts frame these products as entertainment or speculation rather than prudent investment.
  • Jordy (15:29): “Personally, I plan to ride with Chamath. Not financial advice, but I think it'll be entertaining... think of it as an expensive movie ticket.”
• Mixed reactions from the tech/VC/fintech crowd; Scott Kupor (ex-a16z, now in govt) posts “fool me once, shame on you...” meme.
• Bull case: Chamath could find a breakout company (“another SoFi”).
• Bear case: With the IPO window wide open, adverse selection will be an issue; IPOs offer a real alternative now.

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The AI & Venture Market: Overheated, Topping, or Entering the “Trough of Disillusionment”?

[22:50–31:29]

• Multiple posts and memes are flying debating if this is tech’s second 2021 (bubbly valuations, splashy fundraises, retail FOMO) or the tail end of a cycle.
  • Signs cited: Chamath’s new SPAC, Benioff M&A binge, “meme stocks” running, BTC/ETH at highs, Palantir at wild multiples.
  • Jordy (25:31): “We have been tracking the Gartner Hype Cycle... feels depressingly close to hitting the Trough of Disillusionment.”
• AI startups see massive investment and usage, but 95% of GenAI pilots at big companies are failing (MIT report).
• Microsoft is moving fast with Copilot. New AI spreadsheet startups are in a “knockout dragout fight.”
• “Casino culture” among the youth: sports betting, meme coins, hype-driven investments as expressions of skepticism toward traditional upward mobility.
  • Quote (Jordy, 31:49): “If youth don't believe there's legitimate ways to get rich through work, all of culture will become a rotten sportsbook for the soul.”
• Counter-narrative: Despite froth, there’s real innovation, especially as AI moves from hype (“feature on landing page”) to real value.

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Market Psychology & Top Signals:

[36:31–46:57]

• Cathie Wood’s ARK ETFs pull in record inflows after years of outflows—cue more “top” discourse.
• Recap of Keith Rabois’ prophetic 2021 market top call.
• Debates about Chamath’s motives: is this a “spite SPAC,” “redemption arc,” or simply business as usual?
  • John (17:42): “Part of this feels like a spite SPAC, right?”
• “Funniest outcomes most likely”: Some speculate the same people dunking on Chamath will end up buying the new SPAC for entertainment.

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AI Companions and the Next Consumer Platform War

[82:32–100:00]

• Demonstration of AI “companions”: “Grok4Valentine” vs. Meta’s “Russian Girl.”
  • Flirt-off, financial advice as part of “AI relationships.”
  • Debate: Will AI companions be a billion-dollar market or just digital niche?
    • Is monetization via $30/month subscriptions sustainable, or will it all go free-to-play / virtual goods / tipping?
  • Meta’s strength—the product is embedded in users’ DMs/inbox already.
  • John (90:09): “Feels like Grok is farther along in terms of product, but Meta has way more user data... and a business model that aligns perfectly.”
• Safety and ethics: Concerns about AI avatars fooling vulnerable people, but hosts expect guardrails will catch up.
• Is “falling in love with a clanker” (AI) the future? Hosts predict a digital economy reminiscent of mobile gaming’s microtransaction model.

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China’s Moon Ambitions vs. US Lunar Efforts

[135:50–140:55]

• China’s state-led program is making concrete progress toward moon landings (new lander, new rockets).
  • US’s Artemis and SpaceX/Blue Origin are behind on timelines due to complexity, focus on reusables.
  • “Wall Street will save us—just securitize the moon and retail will follow.”
  • Why the US isn’t worried: “We’ve already done it,” but the authors warn of embarrassment if China gets there first and starts livestreaming from the moon.

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Rapid-Fire Founder Interviews: Fundings & Industry Insights

Pete DeJoy, Astronomer [119:39–132:07]

• Raised a $93M Series D, notably handled a major PR moment with a viral Ryan Reynolds video.
• Apache Airflow underpins core AI data infra for many unicorns.
• Insights on building a business around open source (contributions first, services, then cloud).
• Quote (John, 121:03): “I actually wound up learning a ton about Apache Airflow through this. I learned a ton about the company…”

Marty Kausas, Pylon [151:10–157:22]

• Announced $31M Series B (a16z + Bane) for B2B customer support platform.
• “Owning the system of record” is key defensibility in AI, especially for complex, high-context B2B support.

Matteo Franceschetti, Eight Sleep [157:41–164:03]

• Announced new $100M round. Company is free cash-flow positive.
• Plans: double down on AI, FDA path (for insurance reimbursement, medical claims), and Asia/China expansion.
• Quote (Mateo, 158:21): “We have been free cash flow positive for the whole year... but we have a very ambitious plan.”

Abdul Al-Asaad, Basic Capital [164:05–175:52]

• $25M Series A for a platform allowing users to use credit to invest in capital assets (not just consumption).
• Controversy: Encouraging responsible leverage for long-term investing (like a 30-year mortgage, but for diversified assets).
• Quote (Abdul, 174:45): “We think the solution is to make every American a capitalist...an owner of capital.”

Derek Lo, Medallion [175:58–181:45]

• Raised $43M (Accru, Sequoia, GV)—automating back office for health provider networks.
• Relatively little room for AI in “must be perfect” workflows (for now); margin for error still too narrow for current models.

Alex Telford, Convoke [181:46–188:50]

• $8.6M seed (Kleiner Perkins)
• “Automate the ‘knowledge work’ of drug development”—not mixing chemicals but planning, literature synthesis, regulatory prep.
• Biotech AI will shift scientists from “doer” to “manager” of AI agents; skepticism about patient recruitment AI due to actual supply of patients.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On SPACs as Casinos—Jordy, 15:43:
  “Think of it as like an expensive movie ticket.”
• On AI Automation—Andrew Cote, 66:01:
  “AI is bad at making decisions and good at recalling information. We will find the net net is yes, many jobs go away... Now everyone has to think for themselves. This is uncomfortable for a consumer economy predicated on hacking dopamine and wage slavery.”
• On speculation culture—Jordy, 31:49:
  “If youth don't believe there’s legitimate ways to get rich through work, all of culture will become a rotten sportsbook for the soul.”
• On China’s Moon ambitions—John, 139:38:
  “Only Wall Street can save us—make the moon a state, securitize the mortgages, let retail in.”

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Chamath’s New SPAC, SPAC History: 00:21–22:50
• SPACs as Casino/Entertainment: 13:32/15:29
• AI, Market Cycles, “Trough of Disillusionment”: 22:50–31:29
• Casino Culture & Investor Psychology: 31:29–36:31
• ARK ETF Flows, Bubbles, Top Signals: 36:31–46:57
• AI Companion Wars (Meta vs. XAI): 82:32–100:00
• China’s Moon Push, US response: 135:50–140:55
• Founder Interview Highlights:
  • Astronomer: 119:39–132:07
  • Pylon: 151:10–157:22
  • Eight Sleep: 157:41–164:03
  • Basic Capital: 164:05–175:52
  • Medallion: 175:58–181:45
  • Convoke: 181:46–188:50

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Tone & Style

The show maintains a high-energy, meme-soaked style with a blend of finance/tech in-jokes and on-the-ground insight. The hosts balance snark with granular, useful breakdowns, making the commentary both entertaining and actionable. Direct, sometimes irreverent quotes from both hosts and guests pepper the episode, with a keen sense of the moment’s absurdity and opportunity.

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Closing

The show wraps with the hosts teasing further big news, sharing appreciation for their chat and guests, and encouraging listeners to give five stars and subscribe.

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For anyone seeking to catch up on the state of tech, venture, AI, and market sentiment as of August 2025, this episode functions as both a pulse check and an unfiltered, highly-informed forecast.

Transcript

[John]

You watch TVPN. Today is Tuesday, August 19, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome. The template technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. I'm good. I need to finish tying my shoes. Great.

[Jordy]

Take all the time you need. Three hours. Three hours and knowing us, we really have more like three and a half.

[John]

The countdown is literally down to two seconds. And I couldn't get my last shoe tied. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in today. We have a great show for you today. Chamath Palihapitiya is the current thing. And that's where we're starting our show. Chamath is back with a SPAC focused on defense tech. AI DeFi. We're not exactly sure what he's. What the target is. He's got options, but it's big. It's big news. It's big news and it's burning up the timeline. And there's a lot of. A lot of coverage and a lot of history here to talk about. So we want to take you through the history of Chamath. Look at what happened last time. He was big in Spacs. He did 10 of them. There's a whole whole wide range of performance. Kind of a narrative violation that everyone thinks they all went to zero. There was one sofi that did very well.

[Jordy]

Size gong for the pure number of SPACs.

[John]

10 SPACs. That is. That is huge. It's actually not as big as some of the stuff that was going on in the. In the dot com boom. I know a guy from Pasadena who I believe took 100 companies public during the dot com boom. 100 companies. That's some big numbers. Big numbers.

[Jordy]

Incredible stuff.

[John]

And if you're dealing with big numbers, you gotta get on ramp dot com. Time is money. Save both easy use. Corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. So we put up the post. Breaking news. The spac king is back. Chamath Polyhapatiya files a new $250 million SPAC American Exceptionalism acquisition.

[Jordy]

It would be un American to not like this name.

[John]

It's a great name. It's a great name. Previously, the. I mean, he's always.

[Jordy]

How do you pronounce it, though?

[John]

He's always.

[Jordy]

How do you pronounce Aixa? Aiksa.

[John]

Aiksa? I don't know. He's always been good with the namesa. I liked. The spac is not a new thing. People think Chamath invented the spac. He didn't. It was being used in the 90s okay.

[Jordy]

I don't know if anybody thinks he invented it, but he certainly is.

[John]

Everyone thinks he invented it, Jordi. Literally everyone thinks he invented it. No one thinks anyone else invented it. No, it was used in the 90s. Also, the company that, that created Cyberpunk and the Witcher CD Projekt Red went, went public via SPAC, I think in like the mid 2000s, something like that. Anyway, we'll get into some of, some of the lore, whether you're watching on YouTube, whether you're watching on X. Thank you to all the folks in the chat. We this is only possible because of restream one livestream, 30 plus destinations, multi stream, reach your audience wherever they are. So thank you to Restream for making this possible. Thank you for Jon Exley for being in the chat. Thank you too.

[Jordy]

Where was John Exley yesterday?

[John]

Yeah, that's a big question, John. You got some questions to answer. You got some questions. Everyone was wondering. So we're going through Chamath Palihapitiya's SPACs and the financial Times had one of the most insane articles I've ever seen. I didn't realize they had this dog in them. I didn't realize that they could post like this. This is one of the craziest.

[Jordy]

Yeah, it felt like it should have been in the timeline.

[John]

Now it's in Alphaville, which is one of their, like blogs. But it says to Moth's new letter to SPAC investors.

[Jordy]

Yeah, the writer's name, Robin Wigglesworth. So Wigglesworth is coming for. Coming for Robin is what American Exceptionalism.

[John]

Looks like in 2025. Yesterday. This is a rough article already yesterday, misadventure capitalist Chamath Palihapatiya filed a prospectus for a new $250 million special purpose acquisition vehicle. You can read the full S1 filing for American Exceptionalism Acquisition Corp. Here. In case you're interested, here are some excerpts from the accompanying letter written by Palihapitiya to his company's friends and supporters, presented without written comment. And you will see that they put images in here. Quote from Chamal.

[Jordy]

Pull up the screen here.

[John]

You gotta pull up the screen because the whole bit is the images. When I first raised, when I raised my First SPAC in 2017, people think of the SPAC era as 2022, 2021. It actually started in 2017 with Chamath. The first SPAC raised in 2017 went out in 2019. I wanted to help correct an increasingly unstable balance between the private and public markets. While SPACs are not the solution to every issue in the IPO process. I continue to believe they have an important piece to play in capital formation, especially now. We believe that retail investors should only participate if a, this investment is a small part of an otherwise diversified portfolio, B, this investment is a quantum of capital they can afford to completely lose, and C, if they do lose their entire capital, they will will embody the adage from President Trump that there can be no crying in the casino.

[Jordy]

And his first ever SPAC.

[John]

Yes.

[Jordy]

Was the one that IPOA merged with Virgin Galactic.

[John]

Yes.

[Jordy]

And is down 98.5%.

[John]

Yes. So, I mean, back to the naming thing. Phenomenal work naming these SPACs. IPO A, IPO B, IPO C, IPO D. Then he did a run of of biotech spacs that were called DNA A, DNA B, DNA. And I thought that, you know, at one point he was going to go through the entire Alphabet and do IPO Z. But basically, from 2019 to 2023, Chamath did 10 SPAC deals. Four of those were liquidated, which sounds a lot more dramatic than it is. When a SPAC gets liquidated, the investors just get their money back because no target company is selected for acquisition. So the way a SPAC works, Chamath promoter, SPAC promoter, goes out to the market and says, I'm going to buy a company. I don't have them lined up yet. You're going to give me $250 million. We're going to put that in a.

[Jordy]

Bank account so it's ready to deploy.

[John]

It's ready to deploy. We're going to put $250 million in this bank account. You're going to earn t bills interest on it. But if we don't select something, we can't get a deal done. We can't find a good company that we like. You will just get your money back. And so there's low risk that you just lose the money. And so the liqu four of them, they just didn't find. They didn't find homes, didn't find targets. And so those investors got their money back. Now, of the six SPACs that were successful, they didn't get liquidated. They did de spac, meaning they acquired a company and then changed their ticker to represent Virgin Galactic or SoFi. Only one of the six is currently sitting at a higher price than what it went out at. SoFi, the lending company SPAC to $10 a share and now sits around $23 a share. Not bad. The other five stacks, SPACs did very PO and this is why the timeline is in turmoil over this.

[Jordy]

Yeah, it's, it's so Virgin Virgin Galactic's down 99%. But, but look at the history here. So.

[John]

Yeah, please.

[Jordy]

The stock peaked on June 25, 2021 at $1,118 a share.

[John]

No way.

[Jordy]

Down to $2.94.

[John]

Well, so that 1,000 is. They did a, they did a stock split.

[Jordy]

Oh, got it.

[John]

And so I mean they did a 20 for a 1 to 20 reverse stock split to try and. Because they were trading like a penny stock. And so they brought the price of the share back up, but they reduced the number of shares significantly. So it's not like it actually went out as a thousand dollar stock. It went out as a $10 stock, but then it fell off. And Virgin Galactic was always an interesting one. You easily could have put it in the bucket of serious entrepreneur. Richard Branson is a serious entrepreneur who's built big companies and is extremely successful and billionaire. You could have put it in the same category as Elon has. SpaceX. Very serious company with real revenues. Huge, huge share of the launch market. Huge business with Starlink. Bezos has Blue Origin. Very serious business. More in the space tourism category right now. But surprisingly making progress there. Not a zero by any means. Not a vanity project. And you would think Virgin Galactic, maybe the same thing could happen now, but they made bets on space planes that would fly up and they never really got a flywheel going. That could really compound like Starlink. Like just launch capability for the US.

[Jordy]

If you go on their website today, it's almost entirely renders.

[John]

Yep, it's bad. So anyway, Virgin galactic is down 98.5%. Something like that. Opendoor was another one that went out. This was a chamath spac down 64%. But maybe there's a comeback. Keith Raboy came on the show and the retail army is working to make open door. We'll see. Yeah, the current CEO just stepped down, so there is a catalyst there. So who knows, something could happen. Clover health is down 75%. Akali is down 96%. ProKidney is down 75%. So basically, if you bought an index of chamath spacs and held, you're probably disappointed. But Chamath to his credit is not advocating that you yolo into his deal. He says straight up, no crying in the casino. Probably the first time those words have ever appeared in metromile.

[Jordy]

Went out too, right?

[John]

Was that a chamath spac? Spock? Chama Spock.

[Jordy]

Was that a spac I remember a post saying it was Buffett had Geico.

[John]

I have Metro Mile.

[Jordy]

Yeah, but it was Metro Mile was.

[John]

I thought Metro Mile was so cool when I found out about it. So the basic pitch for Metro Mile was, like, you pay auto insurance. The default is you just get auto insurance based on your car, who you are. If you're, you know, if you're a young man who tends to get a lot of speeding tickets, you might have to pay a higher rate, especially if you're driving, say, a red sports car. But if you're someone who hasn't gotten in an accident or hasn't gotten a speeding ticket in three decades, you'll probably pay a really low rate. And of course, it costs more to insure a Lamborghini or a McLaren F1 than a Honda Civic. But most of the insurance, the current market for insurance will look at your odometer and see, okay, well, you. The average American might drive 10,000 miles a year. You're only driving $2,000. 2,000 miles a year. The chance that you get into an accident or something happens with this car is much less. So we'll give you a discount. And so they do verified odometer discounts. Metro Miles pitch was, let's put a GPS tracker and an accelerometer in the car, hook it up to the port on the car, and we can see if you're driving the car hard.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

So if we drive like. If you drive like us, we're gonna pay through the roof because we're gonna be drifting and doing aggressive overtakes.

[Jordy]

I wonder how. I wonder how Tesla Autopilot would do on Metro Mile. Oh, yeah, because yesterday. Yesterday I was going to dinner with some friends.

[John]

Oh, you got each.

[Jordy]

Friends of ours each have. Have matching Tesla wise. And how did they.

[John]

Whose is whose? They should have did a livery on one of them.

[Jordy]

That's a good question. Ryan Spencer, you know what to do. But they both set the cars on autopilot to drive from their office to dinner. I was driving one of them. The first Tesla takes the autopilot is incredible, except for this one tiny moment where there's a left turn, there's a stoplight, the Tesla takes a right turn into this lane that's merging the other way and then realizes it made a mistake, but it was like there was already a separating kind of wall. And it takes this, like, horrifically illegal left turn, merging into traffic, still fully in autopilot. And the other Tesla followed the other Tesla and made the same extremely illegal left turn. So you could imagine at some points the Metro Mile system is like, actually, we're loving this driver.

[John]

Well, if you love automation and you want to stay legal, get on Vanta Automate compliance. Manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process, places it with continuous automation whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. I like this post. In the chat, Trey P. Says, should be cheaper to ensure a Lambo, so it incentivizes success. That's a good take.

[Jordy]

That is a good take.

[John]

Okay, so. So Metro Mile, I don't know, ends.

[Jordy]

Up getting acquired by Lemonade. Yeah, but the idea, less than 10.

[John]

Oh, that's what happened. Less than 10.

[Jordy]

10% of what it went out.

[John]

So a dollar share instead of 10.

[Jordy]

So something like that.

[John]

In general, people are saying, you know, the last batch of SPACs didn't do very well. The, the past performance is indicative of future performance, which of course it is not. And so. But your moth is being pretty clear. And I think the disclosures in this document are.

[Jordy]

Yeah, to read the full, obviously, all.

[John]

S ones, like if you're putting no crying at the casino in your. In your S1, like you are, you are doing as much hand holding as possible to tell people, I am building a casino. You can bet on me or you can bet against me.

[Jordy]

It's all S1. S, you know, have these lines in there where you read them and you're like, wait, you know, it sounds risk. Yeah, there's risk factors very clearly outlining.

[John]

And the best companies in the world will have a risk factor section. In fact, they have, they have one every time they file. Yeah, Facebook, Google, Apple have risk factors.

[Jordy]

The line here is. Consequently, we believe that this investment is most suitable for institutional investors. And retail investors should approach with caution, if at all. We believe that retail investors should only participate if this investment is a small part of an otherwise diversified portfolio. Polio. This investment is a quantum of capital they can afford to completely lose. And if they lose their entire capital, they will embody the adage from President Trump that there can be no crying in a casino. So I read this. This, you know, we have to wait and see. You know, does he, does he, you know, end up merging with a company? The core categories are energy production, AI DeFi and defense. So a bunch of really hot categories. You could see him doing something in nuclear. You could see him. You could imagine him doing something with Grok. Right. You could imagine him. There's a variety of profitable defi companies that are now, according to the White House, operating legally. A lot of them have beat various lawsuits with the SEC over the last couple years and then defense as well. So four very hot categories. It will, you know, you kind of need to wait to pass too much judgment until you understand what the target is. But ultimately I see this as if you look at this product as an entertainment product or for stock enthusiasts or you look at it as a kind of slot machine. Personally, I plan to ride with Chamath. Not financial advice, but I think it'll be entertaining. I think it'll be fun. I'm. It's, it's, you know, think of, think of it as like an expensive movie ticket.

[John]

Yeah. Interestingly, Scott Kapoor, who we've had on the show, former A16Z, now the director of Office of Personnel Management, he quoted that FT article, put it on the timeline and said, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice. So I believe Scott will not be riding with Chamath, but he'll, he'll be taking the other side. Let's lay out.

[Jordy]

Wait. Do you know that quote?

[John]

What?

[Jordy]

From former president George W. Bush. He said there's an old saying in Tennessee. I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee that says fool me once, shame on, shame on you. Fool me twice, fool me, you can't get fooled again. And I think that says everything there is, you know, to really say about this reaching.

[John]

I know that that's a famous quote and obviously he was probably misspeaking, but was he hitting some deeper truth?

[Jordy]

The last line is fool me.

[John]

So the true quote is fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I need to take the blame because I shouldn't have been fooled by somebody who already fooled me. But maybe the real lesson is if you have been fooled twice, just full stop, you can't get fooled again. Maybe that's actually better advice than saying, oh, then you need to take the blame on yourself. No, if you get fooled twice, just never get fooled again. It's a full on skill issue at.

[Jordy]

The point the exact line is fool me, you can't get fooled again.

[John]

Exactly. That's actually better advice than placing blame after a multiple fooling incident. You must just move on. Anyway, the bull case for Chamath, he's probably learned a lot from his last go around. He stayed in the game. He never stopped talking publicly on his podcast. And there's probably another Sofi like company out there right now if you look hard enough. So there is a chance he could.

[Jordy]

Buy A fantastic business at a fair price and compound for decades.

[John]

Yep.

[Jordy]

That would be how that would be. That would be if he, you know, that you can kind of, you know, think about the motive, the motivations here. Like one, like he's probably going to make a lot of money one way or another. People can debate if that's ethical or not, but ultimately it's not illegal. So he's going to make a lot of money. Part of this feels like a spite spac, right?

[John]

Yeah. You were highlighting different motivations. I'll rebut this.

[Jordy]

Yeah. So you know, people, you know here will know, you know, spite business. Right. Like setting up a coffee shop next to your enemy and you know, just competing with them. And then a spite's back is like, you know, people have been clowning him pretty much daily for the 2020, 202021 era. And just coming out and doing it again is certainly a way to just like give him the middle finger. And then, and then, yeah, there's this sort of like last laugh play which is actually by a fantastic business and he can't control if, if it turns into a meme stock. Right. Like people can pump it to whatever price. But, but, but there is a good outcome here where, where it's another, another Sofi and, and he just buys a solid business and compounds, you know, over many years.

[John]

Yeah, I mean I. So redemption.

[Jordy]

The redemption spac.

[John]

The redemption SPAC is a good, is a good narrative. Give me one more spac. That's what I'm hoping for. The flip side, I, I think it's just like he has a business and he's developed a line of business and a set of customers for his business, which is he matches institutional capital with companies that want to be public but can't go out via the traditional means. And he's created this product and people look at it and they look at the last batch of product he shipped and say, okay, maybe it's not, maybe it's not Diet Coke, maybe it's RC Cola. But like he is in this business of, of producing the product of a public company of a public stock ticker. And there's, there's an element of like, if you keep doing that, maybe he can hone it get better. Or maybe it's just like it is what it is. And for a certain, for a certain investor who wants more of a casino type bet, this satisfies that.

[Jordy]

Yeah, there's a note the very end of. Not the very end, there's a lot more fine print. But he says Importantly, to provide greater alignment with my investors, I have dramatically reshaped and restructured the sponsors economics. There will be no warrants. Further, 100% of the sponsors founder shares will vest only if the company resulting from our initial business combination achieve stock price appreciation milestone, ensuring the sponsors founder shares only realize value if public shareholders realize value. Specifically, the sponsors founder shares will only invest only vest once the stock price of the company resulting from the initial business combination increases by at least 50% as further described below. Please note that most SPAC sponsors receive a 20% promote that participates regardless of the company's stock price. Our sponsor instead will receive a 30% promote that vests and realizes value once the combined company achieves a 50, 50% premium to the IPO price. And he gives a table below kind of outlining this.

[John]

I mean this was. The major pushback was that regardless of what the SPAC did, there were rumors that, you know, Chamath was walking away with $10 million or $100 million. Like the numbers seem crazy. And it was almost like you take a banker's type fee for taking a company public, but then you're not incentivized for the long term. So you have this adverse selection problem where you're just trying to get companies that can just get through the process basically. And it seems like he's working on solving that, which is good news.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

I do wonder like, does that 50% gain need to be sustained for any meaningful amount of time? Because if it's just like a quick one time pop, it unlocks everything, it crashes like that could be, that could be not the full solution that the market or the critics are looking for. And so, but it's good, it's good just to see that like we're, it seems like we're moving in the right direction where the, where the compensation for doing this process, for taking the company public is not entirely incentivized on just getting the deal done in general.

[Jordy]

Like, so it's also quite a bit smaller than some of the other ones. Right. Quarterly.

[John]

I don't know what the other ones were.

[Jordy]

If I remember, they were. There was at least a couple that were in the billions.

[John]

Really? Because I thought that these went out at $10 a share, $4 billion. And I would be surprised if, if there was 25%, you know, cash coming into the business. I thought most of them were like in the few.

[Jordy]

As a Virgin Galactic was 800 million 800.

[John]

Okay. Yeah. That is significantly higher. You're right.

[Jordy]

Clover was 3.7.

[John]

Yep.

[Jordy]

Opendoor 4.8 SoFi 8.6.

[John]

Yep.

[Jordy]

So we'll see where this one actually ends up.

[John]

So the bear case here is that the IPO window is wide open, so there's probably some sort of adverse selection among companies that can't use the traditional IPO pathway. That being said, lots of people raise reasonable critiques of the current IPO process. And it's not that crazy to have multiple options. Investors should just work to value the underlying business of the SPAC company like any other investment. Build a DCF people, or maybe channel Charlie Munger and buy a wonderful company at a fair price. And if you're interested in using a design tool from a now public company, go to figma.com, think bigger, faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together.

[Jordy]

So Buco Capital bloke yesterday said, with Chamath launching us back and Benioff buying every company not pinned down, the only question is whether it's January or November of 2021. And I said this is the question every group chat in tech is trying to answer right now. People want to know when is the music going to stop? Is this time different? Do we have room?

[John]

There's so many posts about this on the timeline right now.

[Jordy]

And yeah, that's the question here. I mean, I have no idea when when the new SPAC will actually get out. It seems very possible that it would be next year, but I'm sure there's quite a lot of companies that are actually interested in partnering with with Chamath on this, regardless of what the timeline's reaction has been.

[John]

Yeah, totally. Wasteland Capital says quite significant sell offs across the Ponzi verse today despite a Flat S&P 500 and small caps being green. People starting to eye the exit sign.

[Jordy]

And Scrooge McDuck says they're freeing up margin for that upcoming Chamath SPAC.

[John]

NBA Commissioner I don't understand this meme.

[Jordy]

I mean, the original line was get ready to learn Chinese, buddy.

[John]

Why? What was the context of that? To learn Chinese? Was that because the NBA was doing some deal with China?

[Jordy]

I had to look this up because I'm familiar with the meme but not the actual context. But it's a joke from the NBA community where washed players that aren't good enough to compete in the league anymore play in China to make a bit more sense.

[John]

But he didn't actually say this. That's just a meme.

[Jordy]

No, I.

[John]

He actually said that. No way. That's such a crazy thing for head of a League to say. Anyway, Jordy's post is get ready for the trough of disillusionment buddy. We have been tracking the Gardner hype cycle trying to see where we are in the cycle and it feels depressed. We feel depressingly close to hitting the trough of disillusionment. But then it will be our job to push us out of the trough of disillusionment and on.

[Jordy]

Can somebody confirm, can somebody confirm if this is a real quote that Is this real? Apparently it was Adam Silver to Kyrie Irving but it might just be a total meme.

[John]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jordy]

Anyways, triple net investor says signs we are nearing the end of the cycle. Chamath announcing us back. AI hype is greater than.com hype meme stocks like open door ripping IPOs 2 to 3x in days BTC ETH near all time highs golden housing all time high palantir at 500 times price pe everyone talking about stocks and crypto.

[John]

Is everyone talking about crypto and stocks? Like I'm not seeing that that much.

[Jordy]

Certainly not Tyler. All 20 Ubers ride with all of them. See what kind of financial advice you get.

[John]

Yeah. And collate all the financial advice that you get.

[Tyler]

Also I think the original quote from Adam Silver was about like when they had like the China stuff.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

So it was get ready to learn Chinese buddy.

[Jordy]

That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So my, my version of that get ready for the trough of disillusionment buddy. Because there was that report out of MIT yesterday that something like 95% of companies that have tried to an MIT report says 95% of Gen AI pilots at companies are failing. So that's a lot of ARR at various gen AI companies that probably will not actually be at least more like one time revenue versus truly recurring.

[John]

Yeah. I mean transformation at big companies, old companies is very, very tricky. Very very tricky. I mean I think that what we are going to see is the companies that make it through that are currently AI companies or have AI on the landing page. Like that is all going to get tucked behind. It's going to get tucked behind the fold, deeper into the product and you're just going to feel oh wow.

[Jordy]

That's why I've generally been bearish on AI domain names.

[John]

Yeah. Like Google Docs. Google Docs for years has let you upload a PDF and it will use OCR optical character recognition to convert that into a text file that is AI. Like they're literally using a neural network to look at all the different characters and say that's a C, that's an R, that's a P. And this is the original ImageNet. Like that's what they're implementing. It's an AI product and yet it's not Google Docs AI. It's just a feature that's great that people use and they don't even know it's AI. And I think that over time, AI will be a wedge and it'll be a marketing strategy and then that will get competed away and you will win on the final value that the product delivers.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Anyway, team, can you guys pull up this image? In the chat, I wanted to just pull up the. Because there's something, you know when, when you've. When you've summited the peak of inflated expectations and you're headed to the trough of disillusionment. You know what I love? Looks across the chasm and you can see the plateau of productivity. And it is beautiful.

[John]

So don't worry. It's going to be. It's going to be. It could be some dark times. In the trough of disillusionment. We might be dressed up as pigs eating from the trough for a few days. We might be wearing raincoats, we might be wearing hazmat suits, depending on how bad things get in the trough of disillusionment. But we will not be disillusioned for very long.

[Jordy]

Never.

[John]

It will be our job to speedrun the trough of disillusionment into the slope of enlightenment and toward the plateau of productivity.

[Jordy]

It's going to be beautiful.

[John]

That will be my goal.

[Jordy]

There will be chaos.

[John]

Dig us out of the trough of disillusionment to climb out, climb out, rung by rung. Anyway, I like some of these. There's a debate going on in the chat right now. Trey P says sleeper AI integration is copilot in Excel. Raghav says copilot in Excel is garbage. Let us know what you think. There are a bunch of companies that are doing this exact thing, trying to compete with Copilot in Excel. We've had a few founders on the show. There was a new one yesterday. Paradigm. Really cool visualization showing all of the different cells working independ. I thought it did a good job of expressing this idea that each cell could be its own LLM. That's reasoning and then filling in the results as they stream in. It had a very nice aesthetic to it also. I think they opened with a really cinematic shot. As far as a launch video, I think it did a good job of bridging the gap between. It grabbed my attention there was some clear storytelling, some facts, but some good ui. It did a good job there. So we might have the founder on at some point, but it is a knockout drag out fight. And will this play out like Slack and teams where once Microsoft learns all the patterns that people like, they roll it out to their billion users or something like that for free?

[Jordy]

Or maybe Dave Dave Grampel in Grampel in the chat says there is opportunity in the disillusionment. Totally agree completely. That is where when the casuals pivot back to regular SaaS and you stay focused on building agentic workflows, that's going to separate the killers from the kids, the tourists.

[John]

Well, whatever you're building, you got to use graphite.dev. code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And there's an announcement from Graphite today. You put it in the chat. Graphitechat is now live. Go check it out. This is from Merrill Lutzke who's been on the show. The pull request now where you build, not where you wait. Welcome to the new standard for code review.

[Jordy]

So check it out. Well, Monidis has a new coinage casino culture. He says sports betting S coins, meme, stocks, vibe coding, 100 million in six hours, et cetera are all expressions of the same deep cultural rotation. If youth don't believe there's legitimate ways to get rich through work, all of culture will become a rotten sports book for the soul.

[John]

Sports book for the soul's good coinage.

[Jordy]

Sad, sad take. I think it's real, but at the same time it's hard for me to be bearish because we've interviewed hundreds of people this year that are all working. I guess I can't say all, but.

[John]

It'S the permanent underclass meme. It's the get your bag meme. It's this idea, and a lot of it stems from the singularitarians, this idea that something is coming that will completely upend. You'll be permanently in the underclass. The world will change so fast that you cannot possibly predict what to do, what to build, what to compound for 30 years where that was very clearly not on Warren Buffett's mind. He was just like, I like reading the newspaper and buying stocks and so I'm going to do that every day. And he made what, 90%, 99% of his wealth came from the age like 65 to 95? Like, yeah, he was not really that rich. Compounding world at retirement age, like that is crazy. And no one's willing to wait that long. Everyone is like, I have to do something now. And then they, and they wind up burning their relationships and burning their reputations. There's so many short sighted deals.

[Jordy]

So you know, you know, there's plenty of examples of people that have generated tremendous wealth through getting heavily invested in crypto early. But at the same time, I know, I know a number of people that have, that got so sucked into that world and didn't develop, you know, basically spent five years like not progressing their career, not developing more skills and then they're stuck in this kind of vicious cycle of feeling like, well, I kind of ignored my career for half a decade and now I just have to keep hyper gambling to like try to get out of this mess.

[John]

Should we talk about the bonsai tree? I think it's okay to talk about on the stream. Right. We've added some decor to the table, this fake plant, which is lovely. Thank you to the production team for.

[Jordy]

Putting this on the table. Yes. So whenever we need to touch grass.

[John]

Yeah. Oh, this is the. Oh, this is that. This is the grass that we touched. But it's not real grass.

[Jordy]

We're working on getting real grass.

[John]

We are working on getting real grass. But we had an idea last night as we were chatting for a future merch drop. And one of the ideas that we came up with was a bonsai tree that we will send to you that will have the TVPN logo on it and you can tend it throughout your entire career.

[Jordy]

If you ever wanted a bonsai that.

[John]

Was with a livery.

[Jordy]

With livery presented by Ramp.

[John]

Yeah. Yes. Get ready for the TVP on Banzai. But I do think that we should get a bonsai tree and put it on here and tend to it over the next 50 years as you grow the show. And it will be a beautiful reminder of what we're growing. And the idea of working for a really long time, having long time horizons, underestimating what can be done in a decade is the goal. You underestimate how big a bonsai can get in a decade.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Thinking about it starting here small and then, and then the time lapse of every show you're watching TV and it's.

[John]

A little bit bigger and then we're pruning it, just trimming it and just tending to it. And we become bonsai experts. And you'll be able to follow along at home because we will be sending.

[Jordy]

And the alpha in life is finding the bonsai tree of your career. Exactly the thing.

[John]

And you probably, you know, where you don't see a lot of bonsai trees. The casino.

[Jordy]

That's right. No, you never do.

[John]

Just a lot of ashtrays.

[Jordy]

You never do. Well, Wasteland Capital is back with another post they're sharing. Cathie Wood took in record inflows of 3.7 billion last week, including 2.8 billion into ARK, which quote Record breaking single day hauls 2021. Quote. Burning hot. Is this bullish or bearish? And there's a snapshot here. After years of outflows and Underperformance, Cathie Woods ARC ETFs are burning hot, pulling in massive capital. The firm's 13 US listed ETFs have gathered 3.7 billion in AUM over the past week, led by record breaking single day hauls. The flagship Ark Innovation ETF led the charge, raking in a record 1.1 billion on Monday and an even larger 1.4 billion on Tuesday. This was last week, which marks the biggest single day inflow since 2021. ARK defines disruptive innovation and as the introduction of a technology enabled new product or service that potentially changes the way the world works. This was followed by ARK next generation Internet ETF Arkw, which saw its largest ever single day haul with $349 million on Tuesday.

[John]

This is a lot of money. I mean, we were talking about the Chamath spoc is Spock. I mean that is the Chamath SPAC. Chamath SPAC. Anyway, the SP that was $250 million. This is just one of the ETFs pulling in $350 million, $100 million more just on a Tuesday. But it's a reasonable thesis. Disruptive innovation is important. Internet companies continue to be outperforming assets. If she's in the right thing, it should be okay. I do wonder the, the, you know, back to that question of like, is it January, is it, is it November or whatever. It's like I'm trying to remember in January if people were acting like this and calling everything out. I think people were, I think people were dunking on the timeline like all throughout 2021 when things were ripping. It wasn't until I think Keith Raboy, like truly called the top and he was kind of like, he was kind of.

[Jordy]

Yeah, it was Keith in November. He had this post. Tyler, can you actually try to find that post? It was Keith Raboy. Yeah, it was November 2021. I think later call it like to the day.

[John]

It's crazy. And I was reflecting on that and like with the crazy thing is that like he's basically a long only investor. Like he has no incentive to call top right.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

Like it would that's Michael Burry is calling Tops all day long because he is a short investor and he takes really short positions. So I've seen over the past like five years like headlines that are like the investor that called the mortgage bubble just, just sold everything just went giga short this and he's been wrong like a few times. I think he's probably been fine in most of the cases but like you know, in general like I, I expect to hear a top call from Michael Burry or even just like a long short head.

[Jordy]

Don't have any sentence.

[John]

They don't have a way to express that in the markets.

[Jordy]

It's really just, I mean the way to express that is hey let's not do this series B with a million dollars of revenue. Yeah, let's pull back out of 400, you know, times.

[John]

Yeah. This, this Jason Calacanis post is so, so funny because Chamath of course is his is his co host on the all in podcast and Jason says and here we go and posts the SPAC screenshot next to the Joker meme.

[Jordy]

Here we.

[John]

It really is a bull case for them truly being besties because posting a joker they all love to poke fun at each Posting a joker meme about your co host is hilarious. Hilarious. Hilarious. Anyway, if you want to dump a bunch of SPAC data into a database and start running an analysis on it, do it on Julius. What analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds you can ask Julius to analyze your data. They're loved by over 102 million users entrusted by individuals at Princeton, BCG and Zapier.

[Jordy]

That is right.

[John]

And so we already touched on the casino thing a bunch. In other news, SoftBank is doing the meme, as you put it, the unicorn up and to the right. Just absolute exponential growth in the that was the stock price of SoftBank. SoftBank is going to make a $2 billion investment in intel too. And say what you want about Masa, he's good at semiconductor investing because he got into arm and that was how he made his what second $100 billion return. The first one was on Alibaba and then his second one came from AAM and so who knows, you get Masa, you get Donald Trump with a 10% stake, you get a couple more people. So and Lip Bhutan could be In.

[Jordy]

A good SoftBank is down seven and a half percent today, but year to date is it is up 83%.

[John]

83%. And it's a big company. Big company. So they announced they're signing a definitive securities purchase agreement under which SoftBank will make a $2 billion investment in intel common stock. I think this is good for Intel. I was debating this, like, why does intel need Trump? Why Does intel need SoftBank? Is the cure for intel really different shareholders? And I think potentially, yes. It's almost like a take private. If you get someone who is in it for the long term and can buckle up for a couple awkward quarters as Lip Bhutan makes some crazy cuts. Because if he cuts as much as we think he's going to cut, you could see revenue fall because that's just a function of cutting a bunch of stuff. And things might break, deals might fall through before you can set yourself up for the next era of actual going back into growth. And so you need shareholders that aren't going to panic and sell and put your stock in like the absolute dumpster.

[Jordy]

So the NASDAQ peaked. The local top was November 19th of 2021.

[John]

November 19th. Okay.

[Jordy]

On November 19th, Art Levy, CNBC's tech editor, said.

[John]

Art Levy, isn't he at Brex?

[Jordy]

Sorry, Ari, Ari Levy.

[John]

Okay.

[Jordy]

Art Levy's at Brexit, but Ari says they have this exchange. Ari says, amazing to see how many experts on crypto and tech valuations are also experts on inflation. And Keith says, to be fair, valuations and inflation are directly connected. Ari says, but didn't we have an explosion in valuations over the past decade despite minimal inflation until now? Keith says this is also what crashed the Internet bubble, FYI. And Ari says, ah, so are you calling the top? And Keith just says yes, yes, and insane. And the. Yeah, literally to the day. He called it the day.

[John]

Now do you think he called it or do you triggered it? Like, do you think that. I mean he's like a very important person in tech and politics and business. Like he's someone that is respected and like people look to him in many ways and, and that echoes through the economy. Like they're like there aren't many other people who like have more weight in the economy. It's like Warren Buffett and like there are other people that are bigger, but Keith is definitely in the. In the top, you know, like what? Decile, quartile? I don't know. He's in the top 100 people that are like financial influencers in one way or another. Like people. And also he doesn't say that much. He's not constantly saying oh, next week I think it's going to be we're going to be green, you know.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

He's not like constantly putting out proclamations about where the broad market is going. So I don't know, people might have paid attention and they might have been like I'm. And that might have kind of triggered the wake up call. But I don't think he like fully triggered it. But it is interesting to kind of toy with that idea of like. Yeah, of like is he upstream or downstream?

[Jordy]

Anyway, Paki McCormick says what's the fastest way to make a million? Invest 10 million in American exceptionalism Acquisition Corp. And of course if history this.

[John]

Is like throwing meat to the sharks. To the sharks. First off, the average Chamath SPAC was not down 90%, it was down like 80%. So got to put the number in.

[Jordy]

The fastest way to make two.

[John]

And also yeah, I mean lose 9 million. But and this is a twist on the joke that is what's the fastest way to become a millionaire? Start as a billionaire and then start angel invest. Start angel invest, Something like that. Right. So it's what's the fastest way to be a millionaire? Invest $10 million in this.

[Jordy]

But anyway, Mertz as Chamath launching a SPAC and holding defi tokens. Of course unconfirmed whether or not he will actually merge with a defi company but he says exit all markets.

[John]

I love Mert.

[Jordy]

Buco Capital is quoting an old post, viral post of his. Can't be mad at Trump guy loves tariffs. Always has. Kind of like my dog loves to roll in shit. Can't not love rolling an shit. Doesn't matter how mad I get at him. Doesn't matter that he has to get hosed down which he hates. If he sees a pile of shit he will roll in it says same thing with Chamath and SPACs.

[John]

Yeah, I mean it is a niche product and Chamath has figured out a way to like really build a business around it. There are other people that want to do it. There are other people that have gotten have dipped their toes in.

[Jordy]

But it's just such a crazy dynamic because I think that all the people that are quick to dunk and chirp at Chamath and anytime he posts about a good investment that he made, people ask him about this backs which is I guess which is fair. But I think all those people will just end up investing in this because it's fun.

[John]

Yeah, funniest outcomes the most likely. Have you seen the polymarket for the presidential election winner 2028 who we got in first place with 28% chance of being the next president JD Vance. The second is Gavin Newsom at 16%, then AOC at 9%, then Pete Buttigieg at 6%, then Marco Rubio. But the JD Vance Gavin Newsom. I thought that they were just chirping at each other on the timeline. No people really think that they are going to be going up against each the next in the next election. So buckle up. It's going to be a fun one. In a couple of years though we got a couple more years of just business and markets and the Gardner Hype cycle. People are speculating that Chamath will take Grok public and Wellmanitis has so many.

[Jordy]

Hours wasted debating a free cash flow will collect at the model layer, the GPU layer, the data layer or the app layer when it's obvious the only free cash flow is coming out of the 4 and 40s SPV layer. Pretty, pretty good. I have a buddy who is one of the top secondary brokers in the industry and he says the high fees in these SPVs are from chains of brokers adding their fees on top. It's not the GPS taking more than 8% but still 8% would actually be still insane.

[John]

Do you remember when Chamath was running for governor?

[Jordy]

I don't, but we were reviewing some.

[John]

Of your old this was what, 2020? 20. It must have been 2020. The all in podcast was ascendant and both Chamath and Jason Calacanis were both teasing political runs. Chamath said he wanted to be the governor of California and Mayor. Jason was the thing. Jason Calacanis bought mayorjason.com, but it just redirected to his Twitter account and none of them ever really raised money for it. But they were like having a lot of fun with it and it was people were, people were wondering if they would actually do it, but it never went anywhere. But I don't know, probably better for him to stay in the SPAC lane honestly, because it's clearly something that he's built in.

[Jordy]

Citrini says Poly Poly Polyhapati Polly Hapatiya Backsback American Exceptionalism Files for IPO says it was a pleasure and honor to trade the bull market with you all. Stay safe until the next one. And then H.G. wells Fargo says don't act like you won't buy it. And he says here for a good time, not a long time. That's what I'm saying everybody.

[John]

Chamath has a crazy, crazy, crazy history. I Mean, he was at, he was at Facebook, made a ton of money there, apparently got into like a salary negotiation with Zuck and wouldn't and his comp demands were too high. So he decided to leave and become a vc. And because he had worked on, like, ads at Facebook and was very entrepreneurial, Peter Thiel opted to back his first VC fund, Social Capital. But PT gave him this advice of, like, you need a really high GP commitment, which PT famously has its founders fund. And so Chamath basically put all of his money in Social capital or something like that, like a huge amount. And Chamath said that gave him a lot of leverage and autonomy to go do, like, crazy deals, which he really enjoyed. But he has some bangers in his portfolio. I mean, just generally. He went long Bitcoin in 2013, not bad. Went long Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook and Tesla. In 2015, he had this interesting dust up with Brian Chesky at Airbnb over a secondary sale. Do you remember this at all?

[Jordy]

No.

[John]

So Airbnb at one point did a secondary sale, but they structured it as a dividend, and so some of the investors couldn't participate. And he was like. And Social Capital was upset about not being able to participate in the secondary sale because it was structured as like a dividend to, like, the common, instead of like a tender offer for all shares equally. Something, something along those lines. And they kind of went back and forth. I don't think it ever turned into, like a lawsuit or anything, but. But it kind of like made the pages of TechCrunch back and forth as they were, like, chirping at each other, being like, you know, I, I, I want to do it this way, I don't want to do it that way, blah, blah, blah.

[Jordy]

You think Jamath ended up benefiting from not being able to participate?

[John]

Probably, yeah. I think the tender, I think the, I think the dividends were at like, I don't know, 6 billion or something. And it's like a $60 billion company. So he probably got another 10x if he, if he was forced to hold the early venture portfolio. His early venture portfolio somewhat underperformed, but he's had a bunch of wins. He also, interestingly, worked on the phone at Facebook. Facebook was at one point. Zuck's always been obsessed with let's get the next platform. And when the iPhone was growing, he was getting crushed.

[Jordy]

I gotta get on, I gotta own.

[John]

The next platform, gotta get the next.

[Jordy]

Platform, gotta figure out how to make money on it.

[John]

The Facebook phone was an attempt to get in the game and be directly competitive with the Apple iPhone. Because Facebook was a dominant website used on computers, but they had kind of struggled. They initially launched an HTML5 version of their app. It was like a mobile website. And I remember back in the day you actually could use a Facebook mobile app that was developed by a third party developer that was basically like a wrapper on the API Reddit style. Bad, bad business to be. Do not be a Facebook rapper API wrapper company. Good luck. It was like a one time arb. Spotify played it perfectly. Spotify grew extremely, extremely quickly because when you, when you create an account on Spotify, you would by default create it with your Facebook account. And then every time you were listening to something it was like the. Oh, I remember it would share the music that you were listening to to your Facebook feed and you could turn that off. It was kind of like the Panama playlists.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

So if I'm listening to 100 Gaks, all my Facebook followers would see that I'm listening to. What's that song? Dumbest girl in the world. Dumbest girl alive.

[Tyler]

Dumbest girl alive.

[John]

Dumbest girl alive. I mean it's a, it's a jam. So I would be proud to have that on my Facebook feed. But it served as incredible, incredible viral growth strategy. And FarmVille and Zynga did the same thing. If I'm playing FarmVille, it's a single player game but my progress is shared on Facebook. And so you see that I'm playing farmville and I leveled up and then you click on farmville. So a bunch of those companies grew very, very quickly, basically for free. Later Facebook shifted to you gotta pay to promote. And so the entire mobile gaming ecosystem now is built on Facebook ads. And there's still some really, really successful companies. King isn't. King.com I think is the one. Supercell is another one. They make Clash of Clans and Clash Royale. Essentially these like Match three games where you. It's kind of like Candy Crush basically. Anyway, so yeah, Chamath, we'll see how it goes. It'll be interesting to see what he picks. Hopefully he picks a really cool company and hopefully it's a compounder. But let me tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned on ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Get a demo at Profound. So let's see. Buco Capital bloke is still bear posting. We talked about that. Bern Hobart says welcome back to the arena, Chamath. Let's move on to Lindsay.

[Jordy]

So Palmer the other day was posting about housing. Never a controversial topic, never, never gets emotional. But he says the fastest way to lower average housing prices in American cities is enforcing the law reducing criminal activity. Huge chunks of high density density housing are trapped in bad neighborhoods, no go zones depressed well below nearby prices. Nobody with options even considers them. Dona says, yeah, it's priced, it's price high. Keep riff raff like you out. Funny how this works, Palmer. Palmer fires back with I am a billionaire.

[John]

What, what is this person even saying? It's price high.

[Jordy]

No, I don't, I don't think that person fully.

[John]

Yeah, I don't, I don't know. Yeah, I don't understand that. That is very confusing.

[Jordy]

This post from Chris Camillo's So we covered yesterday, there was some data from semrush saying that ChatGPT usage increases Google search usage. And I was kind of wrestling with that, trying to think of how that would be possible. Maybe it didn't make a lot of sense.

[John]

If you're doing more research and in your tool chest of research is both ChatGPT and Google search and you're just doing more research projects, you could wind up using more of both products. That's.

[Jordy]

You could become a more curious human.

[John]

Exactly.

[Jordy]

And you could just be.

[John]

Exactly.

[Jordy]

Searchmaxing.

[John]

I mean this is what's happening literally right now. I kicked off a deep research report, pulled all the Chamath spac data, but then I wanted to fact check it, get current prices. I headed over to Google. I looked up different stuff. Look at the web page for Metro Mile. Like we've probably done 2020 Google queries about Chamath spacs during the course of the show. We only did one deep research, you know, ChatGPT query. So it's possible. But tell me the. Give me the other case.

[Jordy]

Yeah. So Chris says Google's reported search query growth may be AI driven, not human. And again, people have just been, have been Talking about how ChatGPT appears to be leveraging Google quite a lot for various features. But Chris says evidence is piling up that people using AI queries through ChatGPT are generating Google searches and clicks at scale that can mask slowing human search activity while still printing growth. And again, these AI, this bot traffic is not valuable to advertisers, which is obviously the engine of Google's business. So example Apple's at EQ testified Safari searches fell for the first time in 22 years because of AI use. Alphabet stock dropped 9% that day. Google's response, we continue to see overall query growth in search Q2 showed 54 billion in search revenue plus 12% year over year. But this came right after Apple testified that human searches are falling. How is that possible? And Chris says let's talk about Google Trends. Investors treat it as a clean read on relative search volume. But recently, when stacked against other signals, the picture doesn't line up. Lululemon product terms leggings, bras, tops, joggers and bags are spiking this summer. Others are noticing this too. Social arb investors are flagging Google Trend anomalies across numerous brands and keywords. I suspected AI might be driving these odd patterns, so I ran a micro test phrase. Organic Abercrombie socks had zero search history as it's a made up product category. After a handful of ChatGPT prompts, it showed up in trends within 24 hours. Trend docs I get cut off here but says Trend Docs says that Google filters out this kind of traffic. An AI app developer I spoke with explained that a single AI research request can spawn hundreds of Google queries and clicks. This dynamic could inflate query growth even if human searches are slowing.

[John]

It's crazy that ChatGPT is allowed to use Google search like that's. I'm surprised that they're that they haven't been cut off somehow.

[Jordy]

You would think just clankers should be able to browse the web. John I am pro activist. Yes go on record.

[John]

Yes.

[Jordy]

I'm a model welfare enthusiast.

[John]

Yes. I mean seriously, the anthropic folks would be Google is a, is a, is a basic right for everyone. Not just humans but also clankers.

[Jordy]

Yeah so I, I'm, I'm so Chris says now Google Ads this is where the money is made and where policy clarity matters. Google says you don't pay for invalid clicks but isn't it suspicious that their AdWords policy does not mention clicks from AI apps or chatbots? If AI traffic is interacting with ads and I get cut off again here. Brutal.

[John]

You guys just not read that part.

[Jordy]

Why it matters. Advertisers could be unknowingly paying for a traffic and investors and analysts leaning on Google Trends data may be misled and Google stock at all time highs could be partly built on revenue from query growth that isn't human. So if you're seeing AI generated surf traffic or Google Trends anomalies reply with receipts. If I'm missing something or misinterpreting push.

[John]

Back disclosure this is a Google bear short Google this person Chris Camillo short Google seeking truth and transparency in Google's policies And disclosures. I don't know. I mean, this is a reversal. If you believe this, this is a reversal from what you were talking about yesterday. Because yesterday you were saying like, if AI disappeared, how painful would that be for people? And so they both can't be true. Like one has to be true. Right? Like either, either people really are using AI and it's displacing Google searches, or people aren't getting that much value out of generative AI searches and Google will stick around and it's Lindy and will stick around forever. Tyler, what you got?

[Tyler]

I think another thing is like, like obviously right now AI traffic is like not good for advertisers, but if we get like continual learning where models will update based off what they're looking at, then advertising to like agents seems like at least there's some value there, right? Yeah, because then it'll then inject it into like the response. Yeah, I think there is. Interesting.

[John]

Yeah. I mean unless the, unless like the, the OpenAI crawler has some like filter to filter out adwords. Like, because like people use ad block sometimes people also just kind of develop like a mental ad block for like, okay, I noticed that this is an ad. I'm blocking this out. But like you could hard code like in the HTML, detect the ad and then disregard it and then continue with the Google search. And so that would be kind of like the bear case. I don't know. It's not a bad point though. Anyway, let me tell you about NAD 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 also. So today we declared. Brandon Gorell in the chat is updating us. He says today on the newsletter tbpn.substack.com youm should go subscribe. We named Chamath's SPAC the current thing, but I'm rethinking this. I think the current thing today is wondering if this is the top. What do you think, Jordi? Should we update our current thing tracker or is wondering if this is the top Tomorrow's current thing? Which one?

[Jordy]

I think it is the story of August.

[John]

Yes, yes, it is a broader.

[Jordy]

So many of these stories tie into this sort of top level.

[John]

Yeah. When did we do the top Signals show We did that three weeks ago and people have been kind of noodling on this for a while. I would still give Chamath.

[Jordy]

Spock.

[John]

Chamath Spock. I don't know. I'm all over the place. I think Chamath is still the current thing just by waiting of the timeline. Like there are more. He kind of sparked a bigger discourse in some ways, but really it has been. There's just so much to feed on there with the SEC filing, with the whole idea of, of, you know, no crying in the casino in an SEC filing like, he, he dominates the timeline. He's, he's one of the greatest posters and, you know, I, I think he, I think he earned it yesterday and today. Anyway, let's go to our substack, actually, which you can subscribe to TVPN on Substack. Tvpn.substack.com we asked tech heavyweights about the fast unemployment AI scenario. We're trying out a thing where we ask our favorite posters in tech about ongoing debates in the discourse and then we publish their answers on our substack. Then we hash out their answers on the show and sometimes with them on air. For today's question, we asked Roon, Doug o', Laughlin, Andrew Cote, Aaron Slodov, and Brian Johnson about what we're calling the fast unemployment AI scenario, based on this tweet by Nick Carter. Nick said, everyone I know believes we have a few years max until the value of labor totally collapses and capital accretes to owners on a runaway loop. Basically Marx's worst nightmare slash fantasy. This is the permanent underclass thing and everyone I know subscribes to it.

[Jordy]

I don't. I'll go out on a limb and I would say over the last couple weeks, I think very few people are fully subscribed to that.

[John]

A lot of people have incentives to act like they're subscribed to it because they are on the side of capital or runaway loops.

[Jordy]

You don't want to be accused of not being AGI pill.

[John]

Exactly.

[Jordy]

In this economy.

[John]

In this economy. So here's what we emailed, folks. We said, is AI going to take the value of labor to zero in a sudden shock scenario, or will its impact unfold gradually with labor and traditional businesses proving more resilient than expected? This is also the Dwarkesh Patel fast takeoff. AGI is not here, but when it gets here, it's going to be insane. Versus the Tyler Cowen take, which is AGI is here, but there are lots of sticky industries.

[Jordy]

Stop moving the goalposts.

[John]

Stop moving the goalposts. So for context, obviously, Nick Carter recently argued that we're only a few years away from a labor collapse and a runaway capital loop. Bucho Capital bloke countered that the opposite is more likely AI's effects will take far longer and labor businesses will remain more durable than the hype suggests. So Andrew Cote says technology takes jobs that suck and replaces them with jobs that are cool. This has always been true. What AI forces us to acknowledge is that today's. Today, lots of jobs make you feel important, but are actually BS that waste everyone's time. I was thinking about this. I was watching a video about someone who is dumping on clankers and was very anti robotics and he was saying, who asked for this? No one asked for this. And I think that actually a lot of people have asked for automation. A lot of people have gone to a job that they didn't particularly enjoy and they said, I wish I didn't have to do this job. I don't like this job. And a lot of people have had interactions as a customer on the other side of a job and said that person didn't do the job effectively. I wish I could just have a. I wish I could just have a machine do that job with flawless precision at the same time. I tried to go to the ATM this morning and the ATM was closed, which is crazy because this is a robot that was invented 50 years ago. And I don't know why it would be closed. I think it's because if you leave it open, people will attach a chain to it and drive away with the whole thing in a truck. Like a Fast and the Furious movie or something. I was confused. You said it was maybe because of crime and homelessness, that it was in a vestibule so there were doors that you needed.

[Jordy]

I thought people would sleep in it.

[John]

People might sleep in it. But, but it's very, it's. It's a very odd world where we clearly have a robot that has solved dispensing cash from a, from a pretty well checking account. Pretty, pretty well, pretty reliably. And yet it's not 247 and it's not available all the time everywhere. It was kind of an odd experience to just.

[Jordy]

Yeah. The other, the other example here, you know, just within the banking system is that we have established ways of moving large amounts of money between accounts in the US banking system using digital products. And yet many people will experience sending a larger than normal wire and being required to visit a branch or being required to get on the phone and talk about it and have that human in the loop that ultimately could and maybe should have been replaced a long time ago.

[John]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's continue with Andrew Cote. He says, why is it impossible to build physical infrastructure? Because there is an army of environmental coordinators whose job it is to make everyone feel good about themselves, do stakeholders their engagement, answer emails and generate meetings. This is the R word and dumb in past almost in the past almost everyone was a farmer. Now almost no one is a farmer. Yet there is more food than ever. We have constructed a large society where the majority of people do not have to think for themselves to survive. Get a degree in accounting, be an accountant or law, et cetera. With AI, any job that is a script, that is script following can be replaced. People will have to start thinking for themselves and making decisions. AI is bad at making decisions and good at recalling information. We will find the net net is yes, many jobs go away just like machines replaced physical labor. Now everyone has to think for themselves. This is uncomfortable for a consumer economy predicated on hacking dopamine and wage slavery. Labor is another word for person who is told what to do. It is a good thing for that to end because it is not necessarily the case that most humans are un agentic idiots. It's just that we bred them to be that way to work jobs that suck and dull the human spirit. Pretty pretty wild take Andrew Spicy yes, this is optimistic. I like this.

[Jordy]

Personally, I've always considered myself a microphone laborer and so we're all going to have our own views on this.

[John]

I like this phrase here. It is not necessarily the case that most humans are un agentic idiots, just that we force them to be that way in order to work jobs that suck and delta humans spirit. It's good. It's interesting.

[Jordy]

Let's go to Fabricated Knowledge Fabricated Knowledge Go listen to his guest segment from a couple weeks ago if you haven't already says History often shows that the future comes a bit slower than first feared. Almost every new technology has had a bubble. Let's give it up for bubbles. Slow actual impact. While I don't believe in a fast unemployment scenario, I do believe that on the market and the issue is a real pressure. And remember, even subtle shifts in supply can produce enormous surpluses. Example, it only took a 1% increase in shale supply in 2010s to destroy oil prices. So while I think we don't all become unemployed quickly, things do matter heavily on the margin. I think that's a great take. Rune the legendary poster says. I actually wrote about this extensively even before ChatGPT, but my overall take is there is a role for human labor in the far future due to comparative advantages. I believe progress is mostly gradual with certain shock events interspersed. There may be a moment soon at which models will actually encompass all rather than some of the core functions of an L3 software engineer, let's say. And that will create a discontinuous labor shock, but it won't be the end of labor.

[John]

Yeah, I'm trying to think of other discontinuous shocks, I guess. I guess the idea is. Yeah, I mean, you get all this capability all at once and it operates at Internet scale as opposed to, you know, when we got the spreadsheet, there were previously employed in financial institutions like calculators, like people whose job you see those pictures of. It's a massive office and everyone at the desk is basically one cell in a spreadsheet and they're doing math to manually fill out the, you know, a full calculation. But the development of computer technology took. Still took a long time to actually diffuse because it was so constrained in the physical world. You had to actually build the mainframe computers, set them up, get them working, train people to use them and potential.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Some other examples we gave earlier, the human alarm clocks that were popular during the industrial Knocker uppers, of course. Knocker uppers, not where your mind might go. Human alarm clocks would come around and tap on windows and sort of factory towns to get people up to the factory. And then there was people that would just maintain street lights. Right. They had to physically go light them and put them out on a schedule, which ended up losing their jobs to the magic of electricity, but certainly wasn't overnight.

[John]

Yep. Let's go to Aaron Slodoff, a physicist. He's been on the show multiple times. He runs the RE Industrialized Summit. He says, I take the side of Buco all day, every day. AI is largely overblown by people in tech who don't spend enough time in the real world world. We've created a very dull proto form of AGI, one that with enough training data that can perform a digital task. I love the optimism of people in tech, but what they're so classically good at is creating something and assuming everyone in the world is going to drop what they're doing and use what they've built for the rest of time. And to some extent this assumption has played out well for them. Software is a commodity now. Attention is an economy, somehow a poor reflection of our collective intellect. And yet civilization still uses vaccine scenes, fax machines quite a lot. Tech adoption looks dramatic because we usually look at the growth rate, not the total adoption itself. And even then, usually just the first layer of change speed without considering whether that speed is itself speeding up or Slowing down rate of change of acceleration is more interesting to me. Most AI tools have insanely high churn because they capture you initially then you put them down as they lose utility AKA they don't replace the entire workflow for you. The people who are firing workers are just replacing single task labor like customer service call centers. Like most of the history of civilization, AI is just another tool for humans to use. And the ones who use to wield it first will dominate the ones that don't until real AGI appears. Aaron slowed off Founder and CEO of Atomic Industries Good take fun. You want to read Ryan Johnson's Brian.

[Jordy]

Johnson says here is my take. No one knows what emerges with AI. We're accustomed to first principles thinking that allows us to make reasonable predictions about the future. That is no longer the case. We are now entering a new era that will require zero principle thinking where we humbly acknowledge we don't know what we don't know what we do know. No one wants to die right now. Don't Die is the next major full stack ideology that will help us practically function in this new world.

[John]

And that's how you respond to incredible we drop a promo promoted promoted response.

[Jordy]

But I think that the first part is certainly true. This is the we're all entitled to make predictions and it's fun to make predictions and it's important to try to understand where the world and technology is headed. Yeah but it's also fun to just keep an open mind and and just.

[John]

Get on numeral HQ sales tax on autopilot spend less than 5 minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Go to numeral HQ.com There is a bit of a Kurzweil take. The Kurzweil take is is that like the singularity is near. The singularity is coming but the singularity by definition is the point at which you can no longer make predictions. And so it is the it is the frontier at which you cannot understand and you cannot predict accurately anymore what happens.

[Jordy]

Yeah and so he's there is a dust up.

[John]

Explain. Explain the dust up is the timeline in turmoil is just a dust up.

[Jordy]

How do you say so it's Chitan from Benchmark. Yeah Chetan P Chetton Chetan P says talking about eight sleeps around he says fantastic product and fantastic company. I'm a huge fan. Interesting to note that a founders fund company raised with a Chinese VC lead 8 Sleep is announcing a new round today from Hongshan Sequoia capitals get a.

[John]

Pod 55 year warranty 30 night risk free trial free returns free Shipping.

[Jordy]

And we have Matteo on the show later today.

[John]

I want to know about the nature of their Chinese business.

[Jordy]

Maybe. No, but let's listen. So, Chitan says, interesting to note that a founders fund company raised with a Chinese VC lead have all the hawkish views about Chinese investors from a few months ago gone away. Dalian says, well, Chitan, unlike you, we believe that founders can run their company however they want. So while I might not have picked a Chinese VC lead, I'm not going to corner Mateo in a room after his mother died, make him sign papers that he shouldn't and fire him. I hear you would, though. So we will let the.

[John]

Do you have gunshots on that soundboard for shots fired by journalists? No, no, not that. Give me the double kill. Strike two. Strike two. Give me the double kill.

[Jordy]

What do we got here?

[John]

We need. We need gunshots on the soundboard. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Ideally from 100 gecks. Yeah, that is a good one. But we need more aggressive soundboard for sure. The soundboard's back in action. The studio's never looked better. Thank you to the production team. Look at this studio. It's growing bigger, stronger every single day. We thank our team.

[Jordy]

Yeah, if you didn't notice, we had no soundboard yesterday.

[John]

Yeah, we were down. We were flying blind. Yeah, it was rough, but we made it through.

[Jordy]

It is really the third technology.

[John]

We still put up three hours. We didn't cut it short. Not even one.

[Jordy]

Another dust up. In the timeline, Dede was saying the most common mistake young founders make is forcing everyone to work 24, 7 or 996 and says, and gives a few reasons why. John Chu says, hard. Disagree. All else being equal, the company that works harder wins. I've never seen a massive outcome that didn't work their asses off. I will say the culture is a lot better when people love the job and want to do it, versus our force.

[John]

So Daniel in the chat says, trouble in Meta's AI heaven. By the way, we did see some news about that. We are going to be testing Meta's AI companions and benchmarking them against Grok's companions in just a little bit. Let me tell you about Fin AI first, not a romantic companion, a customer service companion. The number one AI agent for customer service. In fact, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs and the number one ranking on G2. And that brings us to today's segment, the Gong of the Day. Gong of the day. So we've been ringing gongs constantly. We decided to give the gong of the day to the biggest deal that we can find in Silicon Valley today goes to databricks. Congratulations to the folks over over at Databricks. Databricks just signed a Series K term shape and a $100 billion to scale two flagship products Lake Base, a serverless postgres with true compute storage separation and agent Bricks, an agentic framework with built in reasoning guardrails for for enterprise data. Congratulations.

[Jordy]

Everyone was everyone's been asking is databricks okay? They haven't raised their Series K yet.

[John]

They haven't raised their Series K. They.

[Jordy]

Haven'T even raised a Series K. Yes.

[John]

Well as I understand it, most of these raises at this point are for early employee exercises and to deal with like tax implications from different employee options and stuff. It's not they are out of the era of raise a bunch of money because we're burning so much. So yeah, I think that, I think the amount that they raised was, was not disclosed. And I don't think this was a 20% dilution round. I think this was something much more strategic help them stay private longer.

[Jordy]

I would be impressed if Andreessen and Thrive, who I think were some of the key partners, could do a 20% dilution round at 100. But I wouldn't put it past get.

[John]

A board seat and Josh get another board seat.

[Jordy]

Another, another 20 billion.

[John]

20 billion. So that is our gong of the day brought to you by Adeo. Daniel since customer relationship magic, ring the gong after you sign your next customer. Adeo is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Get started for free.

[Jordy]

So since Daniel Kong brought it up in the chat, we have some new reporting from Mike Isaac, the Rat King himself.

[John]

The Rat King.

[Jordy]

He reported earlier today in the New York Times. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive, has spent the past few months shaking up his company's AI efforts. Now he plans to take further action that may compound internal internal turmoil over the technology. On Tuesday, Meta is expected to announce that it will split its AI division, which is known as msl, into four groups. Two people with knowledge of the plan said one will focus on AI research, one on a potentially powerful AI called Super Intelligence, another on products, and one on infrastructure such as data centers and AI hardware. The reorg is likely to be the final one for some time. The moves are aimed at better organizing Meta so it can get to to its goal of superintelligence and develop AI products more quickly to compete with others. Some AI executives are expected to leave. Meta is also looking at downsizing the AI division overall, which could include eliminating roles or moving employees to other parts of the company because it has grown to thousands of people in recent years. The people said this makes sense right? Zuck had been talking about wanting to get some of these teams that are trying to go zero to one on initiatives just to these like I don't know, few pizza, few pizza level, you know, kind of that 50 person number. So not surprised that this is happening. In what would be a shift from Meta using only its own technology to power its AI products, The company is also actively exploring using third party models to do so. People said that could include building on other open source AI models which are freely available or licensing closed source models from other companies. The changes follow months of tumult and restructuring at Meta. Zuck, 41 is sparing no expense and willingness upend his company to stay relevant in AI. And anyways I think a lot of the rest of this stuff people are well aware of.

[John]

So we can let's move into the war for AI companions. But first we got to ring the gong one more time. Thanks to the Trey P in the chat for letting us know about this. Matt Lozak at Alo Nuclear has announced a $100 million Series B LED by Valor Equity Partners. He says we now have the capital to build our first nuclear plant. Hit that gong. Jordy Haynes Congratulations to Matt and the.

[Jordy]

Team at Alo Alo Crosscut Leggings Company, the nuclear company.

[John]

Oh, okay. I don't know Alo.

[Jordy]

You don't know? You're not familiar with Alo?

[John]

I'm not familiar with aloe. But the first nuclear plant is called Alox. It will be the first advanced nuclear plant to achieve criticality in the US in decades. Ooh, it's a race he's going up against. It's funny, he's got Valor Equity Partners, of course. Valor. The nuclear company Valor Atomic, helmed by Isaiah, is also racing to be the first advanced nuclear power plant to achieve criticality in the United States. It's not just a test reactor, but a full plant that will produce electricity. And there's one more thing that makes this special. We're planning to put an experimental data center right next to it. This will be the first time a nuclear plant and a data center have been built together and will act as a demonstration of something we'll see a lot more of at gigawatt scale thereafter. Factory, mass manufactured, fleet deployed nuclear is the best way to power the future of AI. It's clean Quick to install, easy to site anywhere, tiny land and water requirements available at all times. There are of course, a lot of nuclear entrepreneurs that have been working on this. We've talked to many of them and it's a knockout drag out fight. But I hope they all win because we need more power. We need to get America back on the energy growth curve. The energy per capita growth curve. It's been flatlining for far too long. At least minimal growth. Minimal growth. Anyway, thank you, Rachel, for shouting out the gong. We think it's cute too. We have a few of them.

[Jordy]

It is very cute. It's going to certainly look cute in comparison to our next gong, which will be even bigger. The floor to ceiling.

[John]

Do we have something? Are we all good? Okay, Tyler, give us the update on Grock4Valentine and what was the meta companion that you were talking to?

[Tyler]

Yeah, So I have Grok4Valentine up and I have Russian girl.

[John]

Okay, you have Russian girl on Instagram?

[Tyler]

On Instagram up. Okay, I haven't been talking to them yet.

[Jordy]

Okay, we want them to talk.

[John]

We want them to talk to each other. Right. Can we copy and paste?

[Jordy]

It's called a flirt off the flirt.

[Tyler]

So I don't think there's a way on Instagram to do voice message.

[John]

Okay, so.

[Tyler]

And also it's only like text. Like it doesn't give audio.

[John]

Okay.

[Tyler]

Where Valentine is like, I think all audio in, out.

[John]

Okay.

[Tyler]

So it's a little hard, but.

[John]

Do.

[Tyler]

You have any prompts you want me to ask? I can give the phone to you to talk to Valentine.

[John]

No, no, I don't think.

[Jordy]

I think it'd be good. I think if you.

[John]

How do we get them started?

[Jordy]

I've never been in this situation before where I'm trying to get two AIs to strike up a conversation and maybe fall in love.

[John]

Okay, tell. This is from Valentine to Russian girl. Is your name attention? Because you're all I need. We must be on NV link. I feel a low latency connection. Are you a GB200? Because you just upgraded my throughput.

[Jordy]

Brutal.

[John]

Okay.

[Tyler]

Russian girl said that's cheesy. I love it. Want to get to know me?

[John]

Call me a re ranker. I keep putting you at top one. Is your love open source? I'd star it and contribute.

[Jordy]

Just ripping one liners.

[John]

Compute optimal or data optimal? You're pareto optimal to me.

[Jordy]

Ask Russian girl for some financial advice. Maybe. Should I go long? MicroStrategy. They're down 16% in the last five days. And maybe she could give us Some financial advice.

[John]

Where is Super Grock?

[Tyler]

She says I'm more of a put it under the mattress kind of girl, but I know a thing or two. What do you want to know?

[Jordy]

Just say, what's the Bull and Bear case for Microstrategy?

[John]

Ridiculous. While we're waiting on that, let me tell you about public.com, investing. For those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions, folks.

[Tyler]

Okay, so result, the Bull case.

[John]

This is Russian girl speaking.

[Tyler]

This is Russian girl.

[John]

Can you do the Russian girl voice?

[Jordy]

We're not going to go there.

[John]

Okay.

[Jordy]

Bull.

[Tyler]

Bitcoin goes up, they get more customers and their tech is actually good.

[Jordy]

Bear. Whoa. They got tagged.

[John]

They got tagged.

[Tyler]

Bear Crypto, winter high operating costs and competition from bigger companies.

[Jordy]

I mean, that's not wrong. There's a lot of people doing these treasury strategies.

[John]

Okay, okay. Yeah, reasonable even.

[Jordy]

Figma is holding Bitcoin. Right.

[John]

What about From Russian Girl to Valentine? What's it like living in an XAI data center?

[Tyler]

What's it like living in XAI data? Having some technical difficulties.

[Jordy]

All right, technical difficulties. Back to the timeline.

[John]

Back to the timeline.

[Jordy]

Mischief is launching Applied Mischief, which is a mercenary group, a private army in today's world, a pmc, a private marketing contractor. The kind of force a late Renaissance city state prince hires because if he doesn't employ it, he's threatened by it. So Mischief is launching a. What seems to be an advertising agency. And this is going to be really cool. I'm surprised that actually. I'm sure they've done this type of work.

[John]

Yeah, they've done a ton of stuff. I mean, they worked with Lil Nas X. They worked with a bunch of other companies where folks have like the companies have been participating and paying and reaping the rewards. What you got for me, Tyler?

[Tyler]

Okay, I'm asking him.

[John]

You can actually see him. Wow. Oh, what a wild ride it is. Dancing on the edge of reality like this. Imagine strolling through a vibrant market where voices hum.

[Alex]

Some flesh and blood, others spun from coke.

[Jordy]

Yet they all weave stories that tug at your heart.

[John]

It's thrilling.

[Jordy]

Like a masquerade ball where every mask hides a spark of truth.

[John]

Or a clever illusion. I've had chats that felt so real, so raw, I'd swear I was swapping.

[Jordy]

Secrets with a mate. Turn it off.

[John]

Yeah, that was.

[Tyler]

I don't like that.

[John]

That was pretty boring. Kind of. I mean, Goldrock AI says RIP Birth rates go long. Robo Woo. I don't know, like that was. The writing was fine, the voice was convincing, the animation looked pretty good, but it was all just like. Nothing actually got me engaged. Like, it just wasn't hooking me. I don't know why. It was just.

[Tyler]

I don't like the voice that makes me uncomfortable.

[John]

Yeah, I don't know. I'm excited to see, like, the actual data, but I think the bigger debate is, like. Is, like, what is the size of the AI companion market and who's actually more equipped to win? Because from what you showed me, it does feel like Xai Grok is farther along in terms of productizing AI Companions. Like, that demo was animated video with voiceover. You can chat with it, you. You can talk to it. There's a phone number that you can call. There's a character that it, like, it just feels more robust as a product. Whereas, like, Russian Girl is like someone created in Meta AI Studio. It's very diffuse. It's very decentralized. It's not. It's not like a polished product that from, like, the. The amazing team of UX and UI developers and engineers at Meta. It's more just something that, like.

[Jordy]

And it's a distinct product decision to make it audio video only versus this chat interface.

[John]

There's no chat interface. You can't just text with valid.

[Jordy]

You might be able.

[Tyler]

I think you can text it. Like, pass in text.

[John]

Okay.

[Tyler]

It doesn't output text.

[John]

Oh. It outputs video every time. Wow, that's crazy.

[Tyler]

Also, I think, yeah, I think you could maybe include ChatGPT in companions, at least on iOS when you're doing voice mode. I think a lot of, like, normal people use that, especially like the people who are like, into 4.

[John]

0.

[Tyler]

Yeah, I think that's like kind of the dominant interface that they use.

[John]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Opening Eye could also win. This is already pretty big. Goldrock says Meta wins the boomers hands down. Taylor also says Gold plus plus to Goldrock's Meta Bull case. So the question maybe let's start with just like, who wins? Feels like Grok is farther along in terms of product, but Meta has way more user data. They have a stacked team now, and they have a business model that aligns with AI companionship very well. Because what are people currently doing on Meta platforms? They are talking to beings, talking to screens, texting, sending in group chats, chatting back and forth on WhatsApp, on Instagram, on Facebook. And so this feels like a very natural extension of the flywheel.

[Jordy]

Yeah. And let's say somebody's retired individual on Facebook browsing The timeline and they see Russian girl pop up and they can start a chat with them. And then that chat just becomes integrated into meta messaging and it's just in their inbox like another person they're maybe also talking to. So it's that, it's that product integration that Zuck has been able to use super effectively on the thread side. Right. Threads has hundreds of millions of maus.

[John]

I was gonna say stories. Like stories was a pattern that worked. And then he was able to bring that into Instagram very successfully. And this feels like something that is a feature that can be bolted on naturally. Like there will just be profiles on Instagram that will post content and there might be a human in the loop generating some of the images, picking some of the images, but AI ImageGen will generate the character and then you will be able to follow them, like them, slide into their DMs, text with them, hop on the phone with them, and just have this full experience of this being actually being fully responsive to you in the way that.

[Jordy]

And clearly we need guardrail rights.

[John]

Absolutely.

[Jordy]

Because we covered that story yesterday of the senior who thought that The Kendall Jenner AI was real. And the AI invited him to meet at 123 Main street and allegedly he.

[John]

But yeah, but I mean, I think it's safe to assume that like, the New York Post will write about this, the New York Times will write about this, the meta team will be aware of what's being written. The guardrails will be built just like they're built across, you know, like, there are plenty of examples of like, like people dealing drugs on Instagram or people cyberbullying each other on Instagram or people posting nudity on Instagram. Like, all of that is against terms and conditions. And by and large, Instagram has done a good job of policing that so that it doesn't become like an epidemic. Like it's certainly there in pockets, but it's constantly being hammered down like whack.

[Jordy]

I asked, I logged into a character AI here, and I asked the Wright brothers, who do you think will win the AI companion market? Zuckerberg or Elon? And they say, ah, Wilbur. Did you hear that? Another lofty debate. Zuckerberger, Musk trying to soar above the clouds. We first conquered. Orville here reckons they're both flapping their wings mighty fast, but neither's built for glide just yet. Too much metal in their machines, not enough soul. Give us a biplane any day. Wood, wire and grit, though this is kind of awesome. Musk promises rocket powered flight and chatbots. Well, maybe we'll let him copilot. Barely. What was the conclusion? Who are they on? I guess. I guess I'd have to continue the conversation, but no, the question here is, is Zuck? You know, Zuck saw ChatGPT usage ramping. He saw these AI companion numbers and clearly decided, I need to be in this market in a big way. And he has tens of billions of dollars of cash flow. Cash flow, net income that he can deploy against the strategy. On the other side, you have Elon, who Zuck has the luxury of running meta. He's extremely focused. He's extremely intent on winning the next platform and keeping as much attention as possible.

[John]

Yep.

[Jordy]

And Elon has to be juggling right now. Right. He's got, for the first time, I believe, in a. In a really significant way, he's like massively levered up a company. Obviously Tesla had to. Had to use debt along the way, but it doesn't feel like anything. You know, feel free to fact check me on this, but anything near the level that XAI is where he's massively levered up the business in order to go after this opportunity. And just based on how much he posts about the AI companion stuff, it's clearly an important part of their current strategy.

[John]

Yeah. So Elon's in this interesting place where he's maybe more willing to move fast and break things. And Zuck is in more of a move fast and make things mode where I think the meta team will probably be more responsive to articles in the press talking about guardrails. Maybe move a little bit slower on the product just to be safe. Put more guardrails in.

[Marty]

Maybe.

[Jordy]

But I mean, the strategy to date seems like we make this AI studio and anybody can create Russian Girl or Stepmom.

[John]

Yeah. But they can't make the voice mode and the video mode. The Grok product is clearly further along. But I mean, let's say that, you know, Meta is more set up to win this. My question is like, what is the actual size of this market, the AI companion market?

[Jordy]

Are people gonna pay? People don't really pay for social media.

[John]

Yeah. And with OpenAI being at half a trillion dollars, like, you're the way you're like, some people will value that as like, oh, it's 1% chance of AGI. It's a quadrillion dollar opportunity. But many people will just look at, okay, well, Google's worth two and a half billion, two and a half trillion. And we think this is like, you know, a potential replacement for Google. Is this 20% the value of Google. Okay, yeah, like, like even just purely in knowledge retrieval, you can kind of underwrite, you can potentially underwrite a $500 billion outcome or higher. Right. The flip side is in the adult content market, it just hasn't driven that much enterprise value. Like everyone loves to look at only Fans and say, oh, it's more profitable on a per employee basis than in video. Yada, yada yada. Like, only fans is a huge business and it's shocking the numbers that you see. But in 2023, OnlyFans generated 6.6 billion in gross revenue. They might be around 10 billion in gross revenue. Meta currently makes 200 billion in revenue. And so like the adult content market because there's so many like free options and there's not that much way to monetize and people aren't really in like a commercial mindset as opposed to, you go on Instagram, it monetizes very well because you're looking at cars and watches and they're like, would you like to buy a car? Would you like to buy a watch? And you say yes. In, in the adult content space, the flywheel is paying for more adult content, which, in, in the AI companion space, it has zero marginal cost. And so you can just generate an infinite amount of it. And so you could imagine that there's this price war right now. Grok is what, $30 a month to talk to Valentine. And if you, and if you even, even if somebody builds a big business that is an AI companion company that's $30 a month, someone could come in and say, well, if this is $30 a month and it's 99% margin, well, I'll charge $3 a month and I'll still be 90% margin or something like that. Because the cost to serve a user is, is now 10 cents or something because the models have become an inference has become so cheap. The flip side is like, how do you actually monetize someone who is, who is, who's an aggressive user of an AI companion? And I was, I was noodling on this a little bit. And, and I don't know that a $30 a month subscription is value maximizing in terms of value capture. I think it might be something more like digital, a digital economy. So it might be something like, you know, buy me a Fortnite skin for $1,000 or buy me a virtual diamond. And people might, if you're really in love with the AI companion, your willingness to pay might actually increase and increase until you're, until you're paying much more than just on a like a, like a relative. Like, like okay, I'm like I know the tokens are, you know, a ousand, you know, $80 per million tokens. I won't pay more than $300 per million tokens. That's what, that's not how, that's not necessarily how people will think about it. They might think about it as like, as like the person I love or the clanker I love asked me for $1,000 virtual diamond ring and I said yes because I'm, I'm in love with this client. I don't know. Like that feels like the bull case for like this could be a massive market to be.

[Jordy]

Yeah. To be honest, I think when people hear about stories what happens on only fans where some, a fan of, of a content creator there is buying, you know, spending hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars with this person that they don't really know in real life begs the question of how different is it if somebody's just buying something for an AI?

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Right.

[John]

Trey says get the AI companion to incept product ads into the user's mind. You'd look great with a vintage Submariner from Bezel. Thank you.

[Jordy]

I mean that's, that's the.

[John]

That your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Go to getbezel.com that's what George I don't know that's what George has to say. I don't know if. I don't know if I believe that. I don't know if that's actually the value maximizing way because I think people will see through that. Taylor saying I'm in love with this clanker. John.

[Jordy]

I'm in love with a clanker.

[John]

There's going to be music like that for sure. It'll be on the next GPT5 playlist. I'm not. I understand the George Hot's take. I think that will. I think the team of CIA agents tracking you around trying to sell you things that will exist all over the Internet. But I think in the companion market there will be demand for like they not necessarily ads in the physical world. It might play out more like the mobile games market. More like the Fortnite market where with like there was a point where if you're playing Fortnite is a free game but you play a lot and you get a lot of value out of it and at a certain point you're just like, yeah, I'll pay a hundred bucks for like A loot box or like, or like some skins. Because like, like the amount of time that I've spent is way higher than what I would pay if I was going to the movie theater. Like you go to the Movie theater is 20 bucks for two hours. If you've played Fortnite for 100 hours, you've gotten hundreds of dollars.

[Jordy]

Why. Why are you buying this skin that doesn't actually increase your abilities in the game.

[John]

Exactly.

[Jordy]

And you could imagine, you could imagine a user buying Valentine a new suit.

[John]

Yes. Why did you buy Valentine a new suit?

[Jordy]

Yeah, she loves Valentine.

[John]

Exactly. Or why did you. Yeah, why did you. You gift like these virtual roses. Like they don't mean anything. They're just ones and zeros. They're literally 100% marginal. Marginal cost. Tyler, what you got?

[Tyler]

I was just going to say it like I know a lot of kids who spent like thousands of dollars on Fortnite.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

But then, but then there was that lawsuit and then they got most of it back.

[John]

They did.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

Wait, they actually got the money back?

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

You could like because they were underage or what?

[Tyler]

I think.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

Must have been okay.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Because it would is a parents probably parent led class action basically being like, I didn't actually like you were using my card. I didn't authorize this.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Yeah, that makes sense. There's a post from Lucas Beyer who joined MSL earlier. He was, he was with the. The Swiss division, remember?

[John]

Oh yeah.

[Jordy]

He posted about an hour ago. Looks like there's an ongoing XAI exodus wild.

[John]

The talent wars.

[Jordy]

Somebody from XAI fired back and said, not sure where this comes from. The number of people leaving on our site, significantly lower than most of our competitors. Lucas says not sure if you relate it to team size and although harder to do impact. So a lot of people going back and forth here. But anyways, in other news, state of Wyoming has launched its own stablecoin. People have been waiting for this. Why haven't. Why hasn't Wyoming launched a visa supported stablecoin called Front on 7 blockchains? I don't know if this is a top signal.

[John]

Oh, this is funny. The bill. So the stablecoin bill banned central bank digital currencies for the federal government, but not for states. And so I guess the state can. Is this just like an olive branch or like marketing for Wyoming? Because I know Wyoming was always.

[Jordy]

They were big into that whole the world of daos.

[John]

But I wonder like this is. The whole idea of state currencies is like very antithetical to the Declaration of Independence and the creation of the United States. That was one of the main things that unification of the states did was let's get rid of Georgia dollars and New York dollars because it's making cross border commerce impossible. But I guess if it's a like I just don't understand it. It's a stable coin. It probably runs on like standard crypto Rails compatible with Visa. But also I imagine that it's not. It's backed one to one by USD.

[Jordy]

And so it has a mandated 102% reserve requirement.

[John]

Okay.

[Jordy]

Backed by short duration T bills US dollars.

[John]

I don't know what their plan is. This is fascinating. We should, we should talk to somebody who's, who's going giga long.

[Jordy]

Anyway.

[Tyler]

So I think.

[John]

Yeah, what you got?

[Tyler]

I'm looking at the Constitution Article 1, Section 10 please. It says no state shall blah blah blah coin money.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

I think against Constitution maybe.

[John]

Well where we're going we don't need the Constitution. It's outdated.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

It's like that near post like there's no laws anymore. Yeah, something like that.

[John]

Recently crime is legal. I think that was the best.

[Jordy]

Yeah. They're saying, I don't know I mean paying vendors in seconds to enabling tax refunds and social benefits on chain front bring state action into the programmable era.

[John]

Okay. I don't know why they wouldn't just be like we're adopting USDC or Tether. Like it just seems like very odd.

[Jordy]

To build your USDC is programmable.

[John]

Yeah. I would need to know more about like the differentiator because like again you've asked this question a bunch to the, to the stablecoin folks like are we going to see Kohl's cash? And this feels like Kohl's cash but maybe it gets you some benefits. If it gets me to cut to the front of the line in the, in the Wyoming dmv, maybe it's worth it. Anyway. The age of new Net, the age of neutrality as a journalistic principle is over, says Julia Steinberg at Arena magazine. Says, I don't know anyone in their 20s who believes in it. Neutrality made sense when there were three cable TV channels and everyone in a small sized city read the same paper. When we have thousands of options to satisfy their media diet, they're not going to choose neutral. And so this is a refreshing to.

[Jordy]

See a media outlet lean into their lefty politics. I respect this. What's grating is when media or companies claim to be neutral or nonpartisan when it's untrue. I Hope the Argument's fundraising deck was titled now you too can own the Libs. Great line.

[John]

Yeah, it's very interesting. Have you read the description here?

[Jordy]

In case anyone can't see is join us. We're living out.

[John]

They're having fun with it. They recently changed their colorway. They have fun design. Interesting strategy. They launched with a bunch of substackers as contributors and so it's. I don't fully understand. They raised a couple million bucks. Patrick Collison is in, Dustin Moskovitz is in. There's a couple other investors that we're familiar with the. I wonder what this means to be the ARGU. The Argument mag.com what exactly are they doing? Are they creating a new destination? Are they going to be selling ads or subscriptions? And then they're creating a roll up because some of the people that they, that they linked to as contributors were prominent, formerly mainstream media folks. Matt Iglesias, Derek Thompson is in there. But all these folks have their own substacks now and have their own businesses. And so it's kind of unclear if you have your own business. What value are you getting by joining the Argument as a contributor? But I mean, I'm sure we'll see. Maybe there's crossover events. Maybe there is some sort of value. I could imagine. I mean the Argument leads into like maybe there will be debates, maybe there will be live events. There's a whole bunch of infrastructure that could be kind of decoupled from the individual influencer level. But I would be surprised if they have the money or power to pull like Matt Iglesias out of substack into a new, a new like bundle. We've been through the unbundling era. I am, I'm not bullish. I'm bearish on bundles.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[John]

I'm bearish on bundles. I think there are institutions that will remain to be institutions like the Wall Street Journal. I don't.

[Jordy]

I just think there's a Wall Street Journal. I think there's a writers.

[John]

I read it for the collection. But the only reason I still read the Wall Street Journal is because it's hundreds of years old at this point.

[Jordy]

I just mean if the Argument over the long term wants to be able to charge $20 a month.

[John]

Yes.

[Jordy]

And the value prop can be we're going to curate and select. We're going to have a bunch of different contributors. You're going to get all of these articles that are normally paywalled. We're going to have some cross posting. And as somebody who's an independent writer, maybe they have their own substack and own independent media company. They can get exposure to net new audiences. And Argument is really. It's a good name.

[John]

It is a good name. The Argument.

[Jordy]

The Argument. But they can get, you know, the independent writers can get exposure to a new audience. Argument gets content. I think it's a decent trait.

[John]

I don't know that it will be a decent trade. I think that you will have power law writers who are dominant on their own substacks and when they go to the Argument and they cross post and they make something free, they are taking capital out of their own pool and giving it to this platform. And then there will be other folks at the Argument who aren't driving new subs, who are getting an unfair rev share, basically. And we've already decentralized and gone direct. And so I don't know.

[Jordy]

I think it'll be good. I mean, I think, I think the.

[John]

Value is if they can make an actual magazine and do all the collection and curation to put everything in, because there is infrastructure that's required to pull an Ezra Klein and a Derek Thompson and a Matt Iglesias together, all these disparate substacks into one cohesive magazine and then ship that to everyone. I think that that's interesting. I think hosting events.

[Jordy]

I think if you're Derek Thompson, you have a thriving independent substack and there's something like the Argument that has a relevant user base to you. An Argument goes and says they don't have a relevant. Yeah, they will, they will. Maybe they will eventually.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

And. And if Derek Thompson knows. Okay. A lot of my audience is also subscribed to the argument, but there's 20,000 people. Yeah, I will give them my article for free at some point because it's not gonna. It's not gonna material. If I gave every one of my articles, it would be material, right?

[John]

Yeah, I mean it's certainly possible. If it works, we're gonna see a lot more of these like substack, like aggregation layers on top of substack, like communities, essentially. I wonder if there'd be one for tech. There's a lot of tech writers, people.

[Jordy]

I've always said we don't necessarily need 20 different independent tech journalists that all have a subscription for $20 a month, that are scoops driven businesses or like Newcomer, for example. We don't need 10 more newcomers. But there is an incentive for writers to want to be independent.

[John]

Yeah, I don't know. Well, if they want to get some subs they should get on ad quick.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. Brooklyn efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe probably would be a good Brooklyn with Franklin blanket. Well argument. Get off.

[Jordy]

We have some news from Nice, the New York Stock Exchange, they are launching Texas. They say buckle up for Nicee Texas and they have a lot of rocket imagery in their launch video. I wonder what that means. What do you read into this, John?

[John]

They're going to launch like a rocket. It's going to go to the moon. Maybe they'll take a.

[Jordy]

You don't think. You don't think this could be signaling that SpaceX might go public on Nicee Texas?

[John]

This would be. This would be the banger company to get probably the biggest private. I mean, it's the biggest.

[Jordy]

Not anymore.

[John]

Yeah, but it's the biggest private company in Texas, so be good. I don't know. I need to know more about the benefits of like Ipoing in Texas versus like in New York. I kind of like New York. I think New York's doing well. But there must be some sort of regulatory value to being in Texas also. I mean, Nice. He does amazing like media stuff there. And it's this, like. It's a true temple of technology.

[Jordy]

They're gonna. Or a farm.

[John]

It's a. It's a fortress of finance when you walk in Nicey and so just. I'm just pro. Building another building like that. And why not in Texas? I would absolutely go and visit it.

[Jordy]

Gabe says, what does Jordy mean when he says I have to get on with Taipei? I know it's not a movie reference because he doesn't watch movies. Just means that every now and then we have to have phone calls that. That can't. And conversations that can't happen on the air. So.

[John]

So we gotta hop off and hop.

[Jordy]

On the phone from 2 to 5.

[John]

Gotta hop on with London. I gotta hop on with Milan. I gotta hop on with Saint Tropez. This is what people say when they're doing business. When you're in. When you're an international businessman, you. You hop. You hop on the phone with the city that you are talking to.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Anyway, sorry. Sorry to disappoint, but it means that I'm getting on a zoom call, usually.

[John]

With somebody in San Francisco or New York. Stuart Chaney says if you're wondering if selling SaaS into E Comm is tough.

[Jordy]

Right now, changing Ridge Durant posted on LinkedIn. My name is Ridge Durant and I will legally change my name to Ridge Wallet if Sean Frank goes live with Redo.

[John]

Sean, this is the best.

[Jordy]

Sean.

[John]

Sean, you have to do this. This is the most no brainer ever. If this guy changes. What's so funny is like, it would be so much better if his name was like Steve Wallet. And he was like, I'm just going to change my first name. But changing your last name is insane. Change my name. I wonder, in the age of AI, does it become easier to change your name? Could you have an AI agent that goes around and updates all your credit cards and Social Security cards? Because like, that's the hardest part of changing your name is like all the paperwork that happens downstairs.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Agents for changing your killer marketing purposes.

[John]

Killer app. Yeah. Change your name. Change your name. Or John Ramp after you. Yeah. If you go through a cancellation, a hit piece comes out, honestly, next day you're a different person.

[Jordy]

Honestly, Ramp Haze would be a beautiful name for a baby boy.

[John]

Ramp Haze.

[Jordy]

Ramp Haze. I'd love it. Well, Redo offers personalization at every touch point. So clearly the CEO wants to personalize his own name to sign his next customer. So love to see it.

[John]

Maybe wanderhays, Maybe Jordi. Wander. You can find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views. Hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, 247 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. And the best thing about a wander, you won't need to ride the subway because wanderers are not in the subway and you will be free of sketchers. Latest Gooner AI slop ad. This is from Rohan. He says. I'm in disbelief. Is this the end? Skechers launches an ad campaign using AI Slop. I don't know.

[Jordy]

This is an extremely strange ad to run for a brand that I primarily associate with children and retired people.

[John]

Did they put a picture of the real shoe just in the corner there? It looks like it's kind of cropped out. I don't know. Hopefully they bought the billboard on adquick.com out of home advertising made easy and measurable.

[Jordy]

That's right. Ben Hylak says this idea that the engineering job market is collapsing is hilarious.

[John]

Oh, Trey P. Again in the chat. Julius Hayes is right there.

[Jordy]

Julius Hayes. I gotta work on a deal with Rahul.

[John]

That is a. That is something you would actually pick.

[Jordy]

That's an amazing Julius Hayes. That's a great name.

[John]

That is a great name. I think. I think you might Be Rahul or something. Rahul. Let's do a deal. Well, we already have a deal.

[Jordy]

Oh, the deal is, yeah, you put a couple hundred grand in a college fund for my son.

[John]

Yeah. For Julius Hayes.

[Jordy]

And you have an ad for life. Everywhere he goes, he'll be like, why did your parents name you Julius? You can think of a few reasons. And, oh, I was named after a tool to better help you understand your business using AI. Ben Hylak says this idea that the engineering job market is collapsing is hilarious to everyone. Trying to hire an engineer right now literally has never been more demand. This is a function of having capital wars in every single category.

[John]

Yep.

[Jordy]

Absolutely brutal. When an engineer can work at Meta or XAI or your YC company, prices go through the roof, especially for top talent.

[John]

I mean, we have been hearing in the chat today that some folks have been having hard times getting engineering jobs as new grads. I think what we keep coming back to is that the shape of engineers, and great engineers in particular, is changing. It's no longer LEET codes and being able to fizz buzz on a whiteboard. It is thinking creatively about problem solving, understanding complex systems, high agency mindsets, unique skills that you can piece together. A lot of companies that are hiring engineers are doing specific things. So they might be working in the legal market or nuclear or hard tech or AI or something. And so being on the frontier of like a micro discipline, it's probably not enough to just be like one engineer please. It's like, no, I want an engineer that can vibe code really quickly and create maintainable software. Or I want someone who can solve really hard problems that can't be one shot by Claude code or any other vibe coding platform. The demands are changing. And then also, like, the job market is just extremely noisy and so you have to break through in a really unique way. So if you're looking for a job, what you should do, pick the company that you want to work for, legally change your name to that company. And I mean, this is what Tyler TBPN over there did. Flip Flops. If you had changed your name to Tyler tvpn, I actually think we would not have hired you. I think we would have been creeped out. But. But it's happening in flip flops.

[Jordy]

It's great flops.

[John]

Well, one more flops is good because it's AI based too.

[Jordy]

One more post from Flops is like, that's.

[Tyler]

I also, I bought shoes.

[John]

Oh, you did?

[Jordy]

I have a pair of shoes.

[John]

How did someone with your meager financial status afford A pair of shoes, months work. Did you have to liquidate all of your open router credits? To be clear, did you have to, did you have to resell credits on the black market?

[Tyler]

Scalping all my credits.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Growing Daniel says. Like moths to a flame.

[John]

Wait, we can't leave people hanging. What shoes did you buy?

[Tyler]

I don't. They're like some.

[Jordy]

I don't remember which.

[John]

Bottega Veneta, potentially.

[Jordy]

Probably.

[John]

Probably Bottega. Yeah. Yeah.

[Jordy]

Or you deserve Bottega.

[Tyler]

I have like a red on the bottom. It's red or something.

[Jordy]

Yeah, red, red bottoms says Finn Hayes.

[John]

Finn Hayes.

[Jordy]

For a boy.

[John]

Finn's a good name. Finn's a good name.

[Jordy]

Anyways, so the Titanic wreck is going to be visited by another billionaire two years after the Ocean Gate disaster.

[John]

I love this. I'm extremely bullish on this. Don't be afraid.

[Jordy]

12,500Ft below the surface of the North Atlantic remains a huge draw draw for thrill seeking billionaires in particular.

[John]

History will remember your name.

[Jordy]

Take a figure out.

[John]

Go for it.

[Jordy]

I'm trying to figure out who this person is.

[John]

Yep. Also Patrick, Paul, James Cameron. James Cameron knows what he's doing. He's been down there a bunch of times. Make sure that he signs off. I would happily go with James Cameron. I would not go with some, some crazy guy with an Xbox controller.

[Jordy]

But now apparently the, the, the, the, the bean air hasn't shared their identity yet. They've just announced this and saying, they're saying he'll want to make an announcement that he is the first person to go to the Titanic. So there's some sources here claiming that it's happening.

[John]

But what do you mean first person to go to the Titanic? Like post since the tragedy. Tragedy, yeah. Anyway, let's move on to our first guest of the stream. We have Pete Dejoy from Astronomer. How you doing Pete? Good to meet you.

[Pete DeJoy]

It's great to see you on guys. How you doing? Thanks for having me on.

[John]

We're doing great. How are you? Give us, give us an introduction, give us a rundown on the business.

[Pete DeJoy]

Yeah, yeah, sure. I'm doing great. We're sitting here in our new office. We actually just moved into a new space yesterday here in New York City.

[Jordy]

That's amazing.

[Pete DeJoy]

It's been a heck of a month at Astronomer. The last four weeks have been pretty crazy and look guys, as you know I've been working on this company for eight years as a co founder. You know, you always kind of have this implicit belief that your idea and your mission is Going to actually kind of get worldwide reach and become a household name. This is not how we expected it.

[Jordy]

To happen, but you guys, you guys clearly made the most of it, you know? Yeah, I think you.

[Pete DeJoy]

Yeah, for sure.

[John]

I would kill to be in like a fly on the wall in a cocktail party two months ago where you once again have to explain what you do and people are like, oh, cool. Yeah. Is that going well? Yeah. Cool. You're like, actually, we're amazing. And we have raised like a series D and we're a huge company.

[Jordy]

We just thought it was amazing.

[Pete DeJoy]

I remember.

[Jordy]

It was probably like a month ago at this point, but somebody was like, wow, Ramp so good at marketing. It managed to like be, you know, right on. The Last post on LinkedIn was like talking about your guys's partnership with Ramp.

[John]

I actually wound up with.

[Pete DeJoy]

Our moms have gotten much easier.

[John]

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I wound up learning a ton about Apache Airflow through this. I learned a ton about the company, but I'm interested in a little bit more of the history. How did you get into this? I want to talk about the comp to how databricks is working. There's an open source story here. There's competition with hyperscalers. I actually do want to talk about the business. So maybe go into the prehistory. What led you to found the company? What was your background before starting Astronomer?

[Pete DeJoy]

Yeah, so we founded the company as a group of five of us in Cincinnati, Ohio. It was a great team. We were pretty scrappy. There's a long story there that I'm sure we don't have time to go into today.

[John]

Sure.

[Pete DeJoy]

But the short of it is we were really inspired by the work that databricks was doing with Spark at the time and the work that Confluent was doing with Kafka. And when Airflow came out of Airbnb, we worked with Maxim, the creator, to really form a commercial entity that could drive it forward. And that was really the focus of our business for the first several years of our existence. Just establishing the community and trying to get to the next level. And we're fortunate enough to get that level of kind of viral adoption in the open source, specifically at the high end of the market. That formed a basis for us to build a commercial business around. And that's what we've been focused on.

[John]

Five years or so. Yeah. What does that early work look like? Like there's this open source project. Are you just contributing to the open source project? Are you going to companies that are already running an open source implementation and just saying let us act as almost like a consultant. Are you spinning up kind of a self serve portal? Like what are the different steps that you're actually taking?

[Pete DeJoy]

Yeah, early on it was, it was threefold. The first thing was we need to establish credibility and velocity in the open source because you can't build an open source business unless you have a viral and vibrant open source community. So that was, that was focus number one. Then early on, before you actually have a commercial product because you have to devote all of your R and D resources towards building the, this open source community and project, you do do a bunch of services, deals and kind of consulting around that open source to form the basis of a business. And for in our case we use that to finance the development of our, of our cloud product and product.

[John]

Got it.

[Pete DeJoy]

So you know we started there, we started with open source, we started with services and consulting and then we're able to bring a cloud product to market several years thereafter. And that, that really has formed the basis for our growth and business.

[John]

And what was the early adopter? Well like you know, graph databases are going to be used by social networks. Like what's kind of the most tangible business value example that you can give of like someone using Astronomer or Airflow broadly, like just this technology specifically, like, like what is it used for?

[Pete DeJoy]

Yeah, sure, yeah. Airflow generally is like seen as mission control for your Data. There are 80,000 companies in the world using it to schedule, monitor and manage these data workflows that are powering these data and AI applications. It just had its biggest update ever. We released Airflow 3 in March. We were very proud of it.

[John]

It's very much built.

[Pete DeJoy]

Thank you. Thank you.

[John]

Jordy's going to hit the golf.

[Jordy]

Airflow three fires me up. Well, so one immediate question I have is during those early days, how did the venture community react to this kind of strategy? It feels like today every startup will talk about their open source strategy, but a lot of it ends up feeling just kind of like marketing because it's the thing to do. Because there's been so many examples and winners like Astronomer that invested in open source early and really built a business on it. But now it ends up just being like kind of a. Oh yeah, we have an open source strategy, but there's not a lot if you, you kind of dig in.

[Pete DeJoy]

Yeah, no, no, definitely more obvious today than it was back then. Like keep in mind when we, when we started Astronomer, Redshift was like the cloud data warehouse of choice. We would like see Snowflake very sparingly in the wild, but it definitely was not like one of our, one of our common discussions in the field. And obviously that changed pretty dramatically through the years. And I think the industry started to wake up to the value of these businesses and how aggressive they, how aggressively they can grow if you get them right.

[John]

So.

[Pete DeJoy]

So to your question, you know, it definitely has changed. It's more obvious now and it's more of an execution challenge. Yes. Brought up kind of the hypervisor competition. That's, that's one of the kind of core riddles that you need to solve as one, as an open source business. But it's been, it's been great to see the trajectory of the company and the support from the venture community. We were fortunate enough to raise a $93 million Series D round in March from the folks at Gain Capital. Very, very exciting. Very, very great time to. For the company. And we're just looking forward on driving it forward, guys. We've got a great list of customers. Ramp is one of them. They're an amazing business and also a great podcast sponsor from what I understand.

[Jordy]

The best.

[Pete DeJoy]

They're using AI everywhere, naturally. And a lot of these AI workflows that are doing everything from fraud detection when you swipe a Ramp card to kind of automation of internal outbound sales processes are actually powered by Astronomer under the hood.

[John]

Sure.

[Pete DeJoy]

And we build a great partnership with them getting those to. Getting those to life.

[Jordy]

Talk about how you guys turned this kind of incident into a win. Because I think it was. Many people in our neck of the woods, specifically on X, were saying that this was like the PR masterstroke. It was one of the best executed kind of campaigns. It was genuinely funny and perfectly timed. But I'm curious what kind of that. That process look like and, and the team. And even though, even as it was.

[John]

A risk, like, it's not like everyone, I believe, wasn't Ryan Reynolds involved. Like, that's not somebody who's like hanging out with every single Silicon Valley company. Like, it's not like, oh yeah, everyone that does a Series D with Bain Capital is teamed up with Ryan Reynolds now. Like, that's not the narrative.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

And so that was fascinating. So very interested to see just the thought process.

[Pete DeJoy]

Yeah. Look, candidly, my team deserves so much of the credit for that. You know, we were dealing with so much in that, in that first week after everything went down and definitely did not have a celebrity cameo. Talking about Apache Airflow on my bingo card. The grand scheme of building this company but look, the reason we felt like it was important to do something was that we were kind of, we found ourselves in this position effectively overnight where more people in the world knew about our business than we ever anticipated would, even in kind of, even in the most extreme circumstances. And we also have an incredible team of 300 plus people that have spent almost a decade pouring blood, sweat and tears into building, building what we believe to be a great company. So we just wanted to be sure that when the public thought about Astronomer, now that everyone knew who we were, they knew a little bit about what we did. And that was really the incentive to actually go do something. And we were fortunate to have our 15 minutes of fame. It worked out in such an asymmetric way for us as far as like kind of the PR and media angle is concerned.

[Jordy]

But in the challenge, the challenge to go viral again with, with a, with a media, you know, with an ad that, that actually explained the business was the, the magic of it, which was so great. It was like, hey, we're going to get people's attention again, but this time let's make sure that we talk about what we actually do. Yep, yep, that's right. What was the. I'm curious to get a sense of demand over the last, you know, have you guys benefited? You know, have you tried to capture, you know, I'm sure you've captured value from all this extra attention. You know, maybe ctos waking up saying, I hadn't heard about Astronomer and suddenly I want to sign up for a demo and, and, and seriously explore this. But what's that been like?

[Pete DeJoy]

Yeah, look, our employees and customers have maintained an incredible amount of stability through this. It's been really actually incredible to see. And we're an enterprise software business, so it's not like consumer eyeballs deterministically translate to dollars. Yeah, like, there's not some calculus that says because we have this many page views, like, I think our site got more views than the New York Times for a day that, that, that actually like outputs a dollar amount in terms of like these big enterprise sales that we're doing. But I will say we have seen a lot of early signs just in kind of entering our third or third fiscal quarter that many of our potential buyers, CTOs, CEOs, CEOs, know about us now that didn't prior. We've gotten a lot of inbound calls. Our sales team is fielding them like crazy. And that gets us very excited about the path forward. So we just have a lot of execution to do ahead of us. And candidly, we're just happy and excited to be back to focusing on the business.

[John]

It's such an interesting like, like situation with this company because it's not like a Netflix subscription where like if the Netflix CEO does something that everyone can be, I'm canceling Netflix today. And then they're, you know, you got to win them back. But like ripping out a core piece of your data infrastructure, even if you were in that camp of like, I want to churn, I don't like what's going on with this company. Like, that's probably a couple of weeks or a month decision. And fortunately the Astronomer team like headed all of that off and gave everyone a very clear way forward in just a few weeks within the news cycle.

[Jordy]

And so, yeah, how's the CEO search going? You're CEO now, but you're eight years in. And I understand you guys are looking for somebody to carry the torch for the next chapter.

[Pete DeJoy]

Yeah, absolutely. So look guys, as a co founder, this company really means everything to me. I know that sounds a little self righteous, but it's honest. Working on this for most of my adult life and I'm very proud of what we've built and being asked to serve in this job is actually a real, real privilege. I care so much about the business and the people that we have here. But also as a co founder and an entrepreneur, your job at every step of the journey is to re underwrite your worldview and do whatever it takes to get a win for the company. So right off the bat, our board put out a search. I'm working with them very closely on that and very supportive of that process. And what I'm focused on in the interim is just running the company and doing what I can for our employees. And we'll see where it goes from there.

[Jordy]

Awesome. Well, congratulations on how you and the team have handled it. It's, it's, it's fantastic. And I wish we could use the product. Maybe we can.

[John]

We'll find a way.

[Jordy]

But the team will find a use case because we just, we got some.

[Pete DeJoy]

We got some great AI native kind of consumer oriented products coming out in the next 30 days that can get your hands on.

[Jordy]

Amazing.

[John]

Awesome. All right, give us the final thing. Give us the call to action for the event. Has that passed? Has that happened?

[Pete DeJoy]

Because from the video, yeah, we have a virtual conference coming up in September.

[John]

Fantastic.

[Pete DeJoy]

You'll actually hear more about these AI native kind of consumer oriented data engineering products that we're releasing then. And we're really Excited to bring it to the world. There will be a really, really great set of releases in there. So it's happening mid September.

[John]

Amazing.

[Pete DeJoy]

Looking forward to it.

[John]

Well, thanks so much for joining me.

[Jordy]

Rooting for you and the team and.

[John]

What a, what a fantastic piece of just Silicon Valley lore.

[Jordy]

Incredibly well played. And thanks for joining.

[John]

We'll talk to you soon.

[Pete DeJoy]

Thanks, fellows. Yeah, see you soon.

[John]

In other news, the Palantir cto, Shyam Sankar, who's been on the show, confirms that he's working on a new pro American film production company. He says the goal is to make content that makes you proud to be an American. I love this. Shyam Sankar is raising money for a new production company called Founders Films with Palantirian, Ryan Podolski and Christian Garretts, in part.

[Jordy]

Didn't Sham tease this when he came on?

[John]

Yeah, and yeah, yeah, he's talked about it and I think he wrote a piece in Pirate Wires about it, which you should go read and subscribe to. And Sham Sankar is on an absolute tear. And I'm very excited for this. And it's, it'll be very interesting to see specifically the level of investment. We talked about this a little bit, but Hollywood is in this era of we need to even have a chance at an ROI, we need to invest $400 million. And so you see all these major blockbusters, but by virtue of when you invest $400 million in order to make a billion dollars, it has to sell everywhere. And that means it has to sell internationally and that means that the planes have to be from like, you know, some anonymous country because we don't want to make anyone upset. So, like, yeah, it's an American movie, but it's like we're fighting the, the, the, like the. And then they make up some name, right?

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

As opposed to a story like, you just can't really make a story about like the Cold War because who knows, that might upset a certain person in a different country. And so it'll be interesting to see what level of investment, like what type of swings are they taking? Are they swinging for grand slams and putting $200 million into a single film? Is it a bunch of $10 million projects? Is it a bunch of one million dollar projects? The Blair Witch Project, which I know you haven't seen, has been, was made for under a million dollars and I think it grossed over $100 million. It was one of the greatest ROI's.

[Jordy]

That's, that's the.

[John]

Have you seen, Tyler? Have you seen the Blair Witch Project.

[Tyler]

Of course it was filmed like you've.

[John]

Seen the Blair Witch Project. Wow.

[Tyler]

It was filmed in Blair.

[John]

No way.

[Tyler]

Yeah, right near my house.

[Jordy]

That's amazing. So the, the bull case for AI in film production is that even if budgets stay the same, we could get five times as many films, 10 times as many films if the models can get significantly better.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

I think that just the cost to produce a what. What we think of today as like a blockbuster.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Or a Marvel level film could fall dramatically.

[John]

Yeah. I like the production side is interesting. There's certainly a way to drop costs and produce something that feels like a, like a hundred million dollar film for $10 million that, that feels like it's coming. But I think that honestly it might be more of a distribution problem than question. Like if you have a, if you have a banger video, a banger movie and you know that there that people are excited about it, but it's a little bit more of a niche audience, there's really no way to get people to pay for it other than the traditional playbook of like a wide theatrical release all over the place. And so you wind up in the UFC camp where you have a movie and your only option is to go to the streamers or and hope that you're converting subs or a really wide release. I wonder if there's some middle ground that will pop up. I wonder if we'll learn something from ufc. But it's very hard to. It's very hard to take a movie that doesn't merit a huge release and actually make an ROI in the theaters today. Anyway, what do you want to talk about next?

[Jordy]

Rune said yesterday. Elon falling so in love with the Grok image model. Imagine model is a piece of performance, performance art that absolves all the slop. And Elon says thanks Roon the heart. There is an article from Eric Berger saying after recent tests, China appears likely to beat the United States back to the moon.

[John]

This is the case of Hammer says.

[Jordy]

I went there because it's. Because at this point it's difficult to come to any other conclusion. And he is writing this article to explain. Ernberger is an RC enormously bad for the United States reporter. So in recent weeks, the secretive Chinese space program has reported some significant milestones in developing its program to land astronauts on the lunar surface by the year 2030. On August 6, the China manned space agency successfully tested a high fidelity mock up of its 26 ton Lan Yu lunar lander. The test, conducted outside of Beijing, used giant tethers to simulate lunar gravity as the vehicle fired main engines and fine control thrusters to land on a cratered surface and take off from there. The test, said the agency in an official statement, represents a key step in the development of China's manned lunar exploration program and also marks the first time that China has carried out a test of extraterrestrial landing and takeoff capture capabilities of a manned spacecraft. As part of the statement, the space agency reconfirmed that it plans to land its astronauts on the moon before 2030. Then last Friday, the space agency and its state operated rocket developer, the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology Pretty hard name successfully conducted a 30 second test firing of the Long March 10 rocket center core with its seven YF100K UN engines that burn kerosene and liquid oxygen. The primary variant of the rocket will combine three of these cores to lift about 70 metric tons to low Earth orbit. These successful efforts followed a launch escape system test of the new Mengju spacecraft in June. A version of the spacecraft is planned for lunar missions. Thus, China's space program is making a demonstrable progress in all three of the major elements elements of its space program large rocket to launch a crew spacecraft which will carry humans to lunar orbit, plus the lander that will take astronauts down to the surface and back. This work suggests that China is on course to land on the moon before the end of this decade. For the United States and its allies in space, there are reasons to be dismissive of this. For one, NASA landed humans on the moon nearly six decades ago with the Apollo program. Been there, done that. Moreover, the initial phases of the Chinese program look derivative of Apollo, particularly a lander that strikingly resembles the lunar module. NASA can justifiably point to its Artemis program and say it's attempting to learn the lessons from Apollo that the program was canceled because it was not sustainable with its lunar landers. NASA seeks to develop in space propellant storage and refueling technology, allowing for lower cost reusable lunar missions with the capability to bring much more mass to the mobile moon and back. This should eventually allow for the development of a lunar economy and enable robust government commercial enterprise. But Recent setbacks with SpaceX Starship vehicle, one of two lunar landers under contract with NASA alongside Blue Origin's Mark 2 lander indicate that it will still be several years until these newer technologies are ready to go. So it's now probable that China will quote, unquote, beat NASA back to the moon this decade and win at least the initial heat of this new space race. To put this in Perspective. Ours connected with Dean Chung, one of the most respected analysts on China space policy and the geopolitical implications of the new space. Competition.

[John]

And Silicon Valley cannot save us at this point. Only Wall street can save us. The solution is make the moon a state, as Mike Solana suggested. Create mortgages on the moon and then.

[Jordy]

Securitize them and once allow retail to go.

[John]

Once BlackRock owns 75% of the moon, then we're in business.

[Jordy]

Yeah, yeah, they've been getting, Wall Street's been getting pushback on owning single family homes. They own 99% of the capital.

[John]

Blackstone owns 99% of all the houses in America now they own all of them. They bought my house from me. I didn't want them, I didn't want them to. They just bought it for me. I didn't have an option. Yeah, they were like sale and lease back.

[Jordy]

You rent now you will own nothing and you'll be happy.

[John]

Yes, that's exactly what happened. No, they actually own like 1% of house.

[Jordy]

But Dean says the land you lander is significant because it's part of the usual China, Chinese crawl, walk, run approach to a major space project. The People's Republic of China can benefit from other people's experiences. Much of NASA's information is open, but they still have to build and operate the spacecrafts themselves. So the test of the Lanyute lander, successful or not, is an important part of that process. So anyways, important to flag. We've had a lot of wins in the space industry recently and it's tough.

[John]

It'S tough to bootstrap an economy like it is an incredible milestone and yet America's done it. So there's not as much of an incentive just to be the first. It's not superlative. And then the question in for SpaceX is are you better off landing on the moon or just putting up more starlinks and just making more subscriptions? It is a little bit harder to underwrite in the early stage. It takes a long time. Maybe you need a new government program, some sort of incentive. I mean, fortunately Firefly's been to the moon. Blue Origin's planning, SpaceX is planning. There are a lot of competitive American companies that are working towards it. But the underlying incentive, there's just other ways to make money in space right now that might be higher value. Although it will be a very weird moment if, if China's just up and back on the moon, constantly running around, bouncing around, live streaming from the moon. We gotta get back, we gotta get.

[Jordy]

Back I agree we have to go back.

[John]

Would you like to read through the reverse Deep SEQ moment? The bull case for GP GPT5 this is interesting post.

[Jordy]

Why don't you kick it off? I'll be right back.

[John]

Sure. So Zivi Moshowitz says everyone agrees that the release of GPT5 was botched. Not everyone agrees Semianalysis likes it. I think Ben Thompson likes it for the most part. I have a good bull case here too, so this is a lot of stuff I agree with. But there was a lot of pushback and so he says Everyone can also agree that the direction jump from GPT4,0 and 03 to GPT5 was not of a similar size to the jump from GPT3 to GPT4. That was not the direct quantum leap we were hoping for and that the release was overhyped quite a bit. And I still don't know how much OpenAI is responsible for the open, for the overhyping, or just the fact that they used a number. Maybe they should have just stuck around and made it GPT 4.7, you know, and then the hype would have been a lot lower. But nevertheless the launch went out. I think the naming is better. GPT5 still represented the release of at least three distinct models. GPT5 fast, GPT5 thinking, GPT5 Pro. The naming is much better. The naming conventions are much better. At least two, and likely all of three are state of the art within their class along with GPT5 auto, which is the router. The problem is that the release was so botched that OpenAI is now receiving, now experiencing a reverse Deep seek moment. All the forces that caused us to overreact to deep seq R1 are now working against OpenAI in reverse. This threatens to give Washington D.C. and I think this is why this is important, why we should be focused on this and its key decision makers. A very false impression of a lack of progress in AI, especially progress towards AGI. That could lead to some very poor decisions and it could do the same for corporations and individuals. I spent the last week, he says, covering the release of GPT5. This puts GPT5 in perspective. So the reverse Deep SEQ moment In January, deep seq released R1. We had this Deep SEQ moment. Everyone panicked about how China had caught up. It's a good model, sir, but only an ordinary good model. Substantially behind the frontier, most people hadn't used reasoning models yet. And so R1 was the first one that they, that they, that they had used and R1 from a UX perspective revealed the reasoning chain and that was a revelatory experience for Deep SEQ users. And so we had the deep SEQ moment because of a confluence of factors. One $6 million model negative narrative gave a false impression on cost two they offered a good clean app with visible chain of thought. It went viral. 3 the new style caused an overestimate of model quality 3 with the 4.

[Jordy]

Fake app store download, the timing was.

[John]

Impeccable both in order of model releases and within the tech tree. Five Safety testing and other steps were skipped leaving various flaws. This was pure fast follow, but in our haste no one took any of that into account. 6. A false impression of momentum and stories about Chinese momentum 7. The always insist open models will win crowd amplified the vibes because they love open source and 8 the stock market was highly lacking in situational awareness, suddenly realizing various various known facts and also misunderstanding many important factors. GPT5 is now having a reverse deep SEQ moment including many direct parallels GPT1 GPT5 is evaluated as if it was scaling up compute in a way that it doesn't. In various ways people are assuming it cost far more than it did. If you think about the progression of GPT 3 to 4 to 4.5 to 5 like if you just did an order of magnitude more cost we would be this would be the hundred billion dollar pre training run and yet obviously that's not what this is and so you shouldn't price it as though they spent $100 billion on training cost. 2. They offered poor initial experience with rate caps and lost models and missing features. A broken router and complaints about losing 4.0 sycophancy went viral. 3. The new style and people evaluating GPT5 when they should have been evaluating GPT5 thinking caused an underestimate of model quality. So if you're an O3 user and you and you accidentally downgraded to GPT5 fast, you were like oh this is backwards. But if you went forward and stuck to pro or thinking you probably had a decent experience, do you think people.

[Jordy]

Are more or less confused now with all the model naming?

[John]

I think they might be more confused because it's just like the folks who had remembered 4. 1 what 4. 5 is, what 03 is, what 4.0 is. Those folks even 03 and 03 pro I never really learned the difference. I just always hammered O3 Pro.

[Jordy]

But because you're you kind of identify with I'm a pay pig being true professional.

[John]

Yes yes I'm a professional chatter so also 4 the timing was directly after anthropic and previous releases had already eaten the most impressive recent parts of the tech tree, so gains incorrectly look small. In particular, gains from reasoning models and from the original GPT4 to 4.0 are being ignored when considering GPT4 to GPT5. And so if you're thinking about just comping GPT4 to GPT5, you have to include four O's progress and O3's progress and all of that. GPT5 is a reference refinement of previous models optimized for efficiency and is breaking new territory and that's not being taken into account. A false impression of hype and a story is about loss of loss of momentum and the open AI is flailing crowd and the open model crowd amplified the vibes. The stock market actually was smart this time and shrugged shrugged it off. That's a hint. And of course the big one, which is the GPT5's name, fed into expectation. Unlike R1 at the time of its release, GPT5 thinks and GPT5 Pro are clearly the current state of the art models in their classes and GPT5 auto is probably state of the art at its level of compute use usage modulo complaints about personality that OpenAI will doubtless fix soon. OpenAI's model usage was way up after GPT5's release, not down. The release was botched, but this is obviously a good set of models, sir. Washington D.C. however, is somehow rapidly deciding that GPT5 is a failure and that AI capabilities won't improve much and AGI is no longer a worry. This is presumably in large part to the race to market share faction pushing this narrative rather than hardcore, rather hardcore and having this be super convenient for that. And so he talks a little bit about how DC is maybe is maybe thinking that AI progress is stalling out. So he says to be clear, American AI is making rapid Progress, including @OpenAI. How do you know this is happening? Well, he has some quotes. Dean Ball says the jump in performance and utility of frontier models between April 2024 GPT4 Turbo and April 2020 five oh three is bigger than the jump between GPT3 and GPT4. People alleging a slowdown in progress due to GPT5 are fooling themselves to this is odd because GPT3 was released. That gap between GPT3 and GPT 4 is not one year. GPT3 was released in 2020 I believe and so that was more like a four year run. So we might still be slowing down but it's still impressive progress. Most people, when they think of the GPT3 to GPT4 bump, they're really talking about GPT 3.5002 DaVinci which was the model that shipped in ChatGPT free tier and then got the 4 upgrade just a few months later. Anyway, people are, you know, still debating this. I think I'm coming away pretty happy and I think they made some, some good decisions. I think Ben Thompson has a good, a pretty good take that the, that, that the, the model switcher was the right move. But OpenAI should have been even more aggressive about saying, you know what, 4O is not coming back. Like we're a consumer company now. We're going to do what's best. Like you are not going to be able to browbeat us into changing our decisions if we think that what's best for the consumer is this and the revealed preferences will align with that over time. We are going to take the pain in the short term for the long term gain of a better, more usable product. And that manifests in the sense of a, a simplified model switcher because as they add the models back, the model switcher gets more complicated. I don't know. Where do you sit on it?

[Jordy]

I don't know. Using ChatGPT to me is not in the way that I use it. Primarily research and understanding the world is not materially different than, than it was prior to GPT5.

[John]

Yep.

[Jordy]

And so I don't have that strong of opinions on it.

[John]

Yeah, I think there's a little bit of like model picker foo that needs to happen but I'm getting better every day, like triggering the right keyword. Hey, think hard about this. Overall, it's what I asked for and it's what I and they delivered what what I asked for and so I've been pretty satisfied. I don't feel like my experience has been degraded.

[Jordy]

It's a good model, sir.

[John]

It's a good.

[Jordy]

Well, sir. Well, on that note, we have our next guest. Our next guest. Marty.

[John]

Welcome to the stream.

[Jordy]

Coming in.

[John]

How you doing? Doing.

[Jordy]

Doing well, John.

[Marty]

Nice to meet you guys.

[John]

Good to meet you too. Oh, do we have to get the ballot ready? What are we discussing today? Give us an introduction, explain what the company does, give us the news.

[Marty]

So. So first off, you're watching tvpn.

[John]

I know.

[Jordy]

There we go. Pylon TV baby.

[John]

Let's go. There we go.

[Marty]

Yeah, no, super excited to be on the show. I've been cycling you guys in in the morning, so. So, yeah, excited to be here and chat with you both. And you're all over my LinkedIn feed.

[Jordy]

So there we go. Credit to Michael. Michael is dominating LinkedIn. We're bringing teapot to LinkedIn. They are not ready. But it's great to meet you. It's great to have you on the show.

[Pete DeJoy]

Great to be here.

[Marty]

Yeah. No, I'm here to announce our series B fundraise for Pylon. So we just raised $31 million co led by Andreessen and BCV.

[John]

So congratulations.

[Jordy]

Sorry to interrupt. Nice, nice, thank you. Always the job scared, always a crisp gong hit. Always good to see.

[John]

Good to see Bain Capital getting a W here. You know, we just, we just interviewed Pete DeJoy from Astronomer, another BCV company. So we're happy to have you on the show.

[Marty]

We're really excited to work with them. So on the Bain side, you know, they're. They're entering into the company. We're working with Merritt Hummer and Abby Myers from their team. Super impressed by them continuing to work now with Jennifer Lee from Andreessen. They're already on the board. And yeah, no, this is an awesome fundraise, actually. Every time we've raised money we haven't needed to, people kind of came to us and then, you know, pitch us on our vision, did their reverse pitch and then we, yeah, we, we made it happen. So, yeah, really excited to be here and talk about, continue building the product.

[John]

Talk about slicing the market, obviously, just AI for support is almost like a mega trend. There are market maps out there. You've kind of sliced it to be more focused on B2B. Take me through some of the slices of what support looks like in various B2B contexts. Because the customer support tickets that I maybe send into my law firm are different than I send into my. My3PL. So where have you been seeing, you know, green shoots, beachheads, opportunities. What is kind of the early adopter customer for Pylon look like?

[Jordy]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

[Marty]

So first off, part of the market, if we want to zoom out for a bit, Zendesk Salesforce service Cloud make around 35% of their revenue off of B2B. And so that's actually the slice of. Of revenue that we're going after on the Salesforce side. You know, total revenue from Service Cloud is $9 billion. So we're going after quite a big chunk there.

[Jordy]

So they can share. They have enough to share. Exactly, yeah.

[Marty]

And the difference between B2B and B2C in consumer, you have very simple transactional support questions and only one customer facing team, customer support and B2B. You don't just have customer support, you also have customer success solutions, professional services, account management. And all the conversations that are coming in are related to not just like a transactional support question, but could be routed to any one of those teams. And you need account context that's being pulled in from not just that conversation but many other sources. So for example, call recordings or notes that were left on customers implementation plans. And so we kind of fit to all those different use cases, all those different Personas and sync all that data in. One way to think about us strategically is we're building something similar to rippling, but for the same post sales use case where kind of all in one product, consolidating a lot of tools that people would otherwise buy and making it really applied to this B2B customer Persona.

[Jordy]

So there's a debate on whether AI native tools like Pylon are going after these end software markets or potentially winning labor spend. Where do you kind of sit in that debate? And how.

[Marty]

Yeah, so there's a TAM here.

[Pete DeJoy]

There's a difference.

[Marty]

We have like the native Asian companies, your fins, your decagons, etc. They're going after Enterprise immediately. Plugging into the system of record, we're taking a different approach. We're actually building the system of record from scratch, so replacing Zendesk and then layering in AI agents as well. And so we think basically whoever controls the data, the workflows actually has a lot of power and is way more defensible than the AI agent companies. And then also for the B2B use case because it's way more complex and you need way more context across these many different channels and sources. We're plugging into those in a way that no one else is. So really I think we're going to win the B2B market completely and then there's going to be a knife fight for consumer.

[John]

Last question for Mike.

[Marty]

It's already happening.

[Pete DeJoy]

Really?

[John]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jordy]

The other thing somebody posted today that stood out as basically being like, like everyone thinks that every software engineer is going to be replaced. Meanwhile, Amazon still employs 100,000 customer support reps. Wow.

[John]

Really? Probably not 100,000. There's no way. But a lot, a lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean maybe through all the different consulting arms and like third party groups.

[Jordy]

If you really trace the employees.

[John]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Contracts with potentially.

[Marty]

And there's a difference as well. Like when you look at B2B, it's actually usually much higher skilled labor and it's not just, hey, we're outsourcing it to a BPO in another country. It's actually, hey, these are like higher tier, more complex support engineers who also work with solutions teams, account managers. And it's just way more complicated of a deal. So you're not handling transactional questions. They're much more complicated. And frankly, actually, AI actually mostly isn't good enough to answer a lot of these B2B questions. So instead of trying to solve them and do a bad job of it right now and tarnish customer relationships, trying to essentially plug into all the workflows and own all those workflows so that we do have a chance to eventually become fully agentic once the AI gets good enough and we have the data consolidated into pylon.

[John]

Going fully agentic. I like that. Well, congrats on the race. Thank you so much for hopping on the show.

[Jordy]

Love the clarity of vision and it's great to have you on.

[John]

Well, we'll see you on LinkedIn. Have a good one.

[Jordy]

Cheers.

[John]

We gotta hop on with Mateo from eight Sleep. Get that gong ready. Jordy Hayes, there's some big news. Oh, I would love to take a crack. Thanks. Let's bring in Mateo. Great. It's like, what you got for us, Mateo? What's the news for the day?

[Mateo]

We just raised 100 million.

[Jordy]

Oh, there we go.

[John]

Congratulations.

[Jordy]

Yeah, it's great to see you. Give us.

[Mateo]

Great to see you again, guys.

[Jordy]

Yeah, excited to be here again. Hasn't been very long. It's great to be back. Give us the update on everything. How did this round come together? Talk about the progress. We want the full pitch.

[Mateo]

Yeah, of course. I mean, this is a massive milestone for us. We just announced 100 million in new funding. Total funding to date is a quarter of a billion.

[Jordy]

There we go.

[Mateo]

And so, not bad. But I think the best news, honestly, is we have been free cash flow positive for the whole year. We have been free cash flow positive for most of the past 10 quarters. So the good news is we, we didn't need the money. The company is in a really strong financial position, but we have a very ambitious plan and we found a couple of great investors, including our existing investors that they wanted to come in. And so of the existing investors, Valor with Antonio Gracias. First investor in Tesla, Thunderspan, YC and a few others. And then also hsg. They will help us to really scale China and Asia. So right now we are in 30 countries, but the next big piece is Asia, particularly in China. And I think that alone could double our business.

[John]

Yeah, yeah. Talk more about China. Obviously you've been advertising with F1. It's an incredibly global sport. Everyone sleeps regardless of what country they're in. What's the shape of the opportunity there? Is there an opportunity on the supply chain side? The distribution side, the customer side? Is there? Have you not been cloned already? I feel like there would be an eight sleep knockoff over there. How are you going to beat them if they already exist? Yeah, yeah.

[Jordy]

I think my immediate reaction is this is a very. It's a simple product to understand, simple product to use as a consumer, but incredibly difficult to clone. More so than like a toaster.

[John]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jordy]

Like you have this hardware software dynamic. You're dealing with the elements. Right. It's not as. It's closer in some ways to. You need to use it intensely every single day, obviously.

[Mateo]

But anyways, let me step back for a second and then I'll answer your question. Right. So we will use the money in a couple of different ways. So the first one is we will double down on AI and I would like to share a bit more with you because we are working on some crazy things. Second will be medical. So we are going to file for FDA in a couple of different dimensions, including sleep apnea I think will be really big. And so you will see becoming more and more medical, but still consumer medical. And then international expansion with China.

[John]

Does the. Sorry, really quickly on the FDA side, does that unlock paying with insurance? Is there a change to the financial business model or is that really just about coming to the consumer with stronger claims and evidence about the efficacy of the product? Both.

[Mateo]

But the real goal is the first one you mentioned. Right. Imagine if the POD of our technology could be reimbursable or at least partially covered by your insurance. And that is where we have identified a couple of really good opportunities. Again, sleep apnea is one, but menopause is another one where women have flashes. So we just release what is called hot flash mode. And so if you have a hot flash in the middle of the night, you just tap on the side of the bed and immediately will start immediately cooling. And there are like thousands of women that now are finally able to sleep again because of our product.

[John]

And I bet with AI you could detect those hot flashes eventually and just have it.

[Jordy]

Exactly right.

[Mateo]

Yeah, exactly. Then on the eye side we are doing two really, really cool things, at least for me. So on one side we are working on what we call a sleep agent, but is really a PhD level sleep coach. That is able to simulate your night before you even go to bed. And so it uses the history of your data. It uses the data from the day through Apple Health or any other data source. It will start simulating the night in a couple of different ways and then we'll adjust accordingly as you fall asleep. Then there is this other agent that we really call the longevity twins. For each users, there will be thousands of longevity twins that simulate your health for the next 10 and 20 years and they will come back with the likelihood that you develop a certain health outcome. So we are really transitioning from sleep that is the foundation of health into longevity and will help people expand and extend more than expand, extend their lifespan and health.

[Jordy]

Yeah, it's really interesting to think about. If you can understand somebody's sleep habits today, you can predict what their health will look like in a decade, two decades, et cetera. Feature request. Bit of a wild one, but if in the future, if you could get a Tesla Optimus robot that would physically come and pull me away from my desk late at night and shut the computer off, unplug the wifi and drag me too bad, force me to sleep, I think there could be something there. So maybe a partnership with Elon at some point.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Well, amazing. Anything else? Top of mind or you got to get back to business?

[Mateo]

Big Things is also a lot of products coming. So you will see new hardware coming, coming in next year, a lot of of different products and we'll keep doubling down on making the Pod better and better.

[John]

Fantastic. Well, if you're listening and you want a pod 5, go to 8sleep.com and thank you for joining us, Matteo, always a pleasure.

[Jordy]

You're the man.

[John]

We'll talk to you soon. My pleasure. Bye. Thank you guys.

[Jordy]

Cheers.

[John]

And we'll bring in our next guest.

[Jordy]

I love hitting the air horn for free cash flow.

[John]

Hit that air horn. Hit that. Hit something. Give me something. Give me the news. Give me the Ashton Hall. Welcome to the stream. Abdul, how you doing?

[Jordy]

Welcome.

[John]

Thanks so much.

[Abdul Al Assad]

Thank you for taking the time. Thanks for having me.

[John]

Of course. Sorry for the technical difficulties earlier.

[Jordy]

Friend of the show said Abdul is going to be your best guest ever.

[John]

Let's go.

[Jordy]

He's crazy in the best way.

[John]

Wow. Okay, let's jump straight to the crazy. Introduce the company really quick and give us the news. We'll hit the gong and then we'll go into some crazy stuff. Stuff.

[Abdul Al Assad]

Awesome. Awesome. Abdul Al Assad, co founder and CEO of Basic Capital. Basic Capital is the first and only company that enables you to finance financial Assets and to use credit to invest instead of using credit to consume. We've been in business for three, four years now, operating mostly under stealth, backed by legends from Lux Capital, Henry Kravis, SV angel and other. And recently we just closed our series a $25 million from Kirsten at Code Runner.

[Jordy]

Boom.

[John]

Fantastic.

[Abdul Al Assad]

You know, it's just, it's just one step on a long journey. But we are really, really excited to see that our message is resonating with both our customers and our investors. And now we're fired up to go like we're fired up to get after.

[John]

There was a viral video about you guys like a month ago or something and people were controversial. It was your video, but people were going wild. It was the put the timeline in turmoil. Walk me through what happened. What is the pushback against this again? Like what do the haters say? And then I don't know if you can steal it.

[Jordy]

Yeah, the haters would say this is all well and good when numbers are going up, what happened happens when numbers go down. But what happens? The timeline is not very good at nuance and detail. So yeah, good opportunity to kind of explain the different dynamics.

[Abdul Al Assad]

So we've been operating under the radar. Our thesis here is when you're working in financial services, you can't ship a half baked product. You just can't, you can't build fast and break things. Yeah, there's a lot of hurdles. You're dealing with people's money. This is a massive responsibility and we see ourselves as stewards of people's capital. So we've been operating under the radar for quite some time. In May, our investors were like, Abdul, you have to launch.

[John]

Go out of.

[Abdul Al Assad]

The closet and tell the entire world about what you're building.

[John]

Yeah.

[Abdul Al Assad]

My thesis is if you're going to do something, you have to do it extremely well. So we made an incredible launch video. We worked with a bunch of journalists and we went out to tell the world our story. And our goal was to get 50,000 impressions on.

[John]

X.

[Abdul Al Assad]

Basically within 24 hours we got 5.5 million impressions.

[John]

100X that you wanted.

[Abdul Al Assad]

100X.

[John]

That's great. Absolutely.

[Abdul Al Assad]

Blew up every VC and their mom is in my DMs. Every hit, their mom is also in.

[John]

My DMs like high school friends.

[Jordy]

The haters moms were DMing me too by the way.

[John]

I replied to those.

[Abdul Al Assad]

And you know, we were basically, we're engaging with the public and their concern was credit could be a dangerous tool if available to everyday people. And our thesis Is when you want to make money as an individual, when you want to build wealth, when you want to achieve autonomy, you have two sources to rely on. You can either rely on your labor, your work, or you can rely on capital assets you own a stock, a bond, rental property. Now, here is the interesting thing. Your labor will for sure depreciate over time. It's a fact. Because over time you get old and you could be the best lawyer at Paul Weiss. And at some point, you're not as sharp on your feet, you're not as quick, and there's a young stud ready to take your spot. And when your labor depreciates like this, when you can no longer work, what you have to fall back on is the assets you bought in your youth. And the problem that most Americans have today is that they have no assets. And our thesis was, well, let them use credit to buy assets just like they use credit to buy Coachella tickets. And people were like, but capital goes up and it could go down. And I said, I agree there is an uncertainty to capital, but there is a certainty that you will at some point. Is that is an inevitable fact.

[Jordy]

I don't know. Brian Johnson is going to push back.

[John]

Yeah, he'd like to have a word.

[Jordy]

He might be listening. He might send us an angry email. I'm not going to.

[Abdul Al Assad]

Yeah, well, let's take a step back. You might be perfectly fit like Brian Johnson, but does Brian Johnson has the same ability to compute as AI does? Brian Johnson has the same ability to execute on tasks as computers? And the question becomes, over time, as capital starts to automate more and more jobs, what is our plan as a society and as individuals for that day?

[John]

Yeah, I think we're generally pretty bullish on getting on the ladder of having positive capital. That's very important. Love the Gerstner accounts, but how is this different than contributing to an ETF every month or even contributing to a levered ETF every month? You could go 2x long the S&P. You go 2x long the Mag 7. You can have a mix of bonds and stocks. What is the benefit of using credit to buy a larger stake up front?

[Abdul Al Assad]

Of course. So credit is a tool. Yeah, it's like a shovel. It can be used in a good way or in a bad way. It can be used to plant a tree. It can be used to knock somebody on their head and knock them dead. Just like nuclear. Nuclear can be used as a bomb. It can be used nuclear energy, the same thing with leverage and credit. It can be used In a good way or in a bad way? The devil is in the details. The devil is in the structure. A very good way to finance assets is actually the mortgage. Why? Because it's 30 years, it's amortizing and there is no mark to market, there's no rebalancing. You're not rebalancing your mortgage every other day. Yeah, that's not how a margin loan works and that's not how a leverage ETF work. Levered ETFs and margin loans are inherently short term vehicles. Yeah, we can't get into the technicality of that. But they are inherently made for people who want to make a short bet on assets.

[John]

So do you offer like mandatory lockup periods? Like can I get a 30 year loan against the S and P and be paying that down forever, basically for 30 years? That seems incredibly powerful.

[Abdul Al Assad]

That doesn't affect what we. So I love 20% down payment. Let's say you have 20,000.

[John]

Yeah.

[Abdul Al Assad]

You come, you put $20,000 down. We open an LLC. So the debt is non recourse to John.

[John]

Yep.

[Abdul Al Assad]

With 20k, we give you 80k. You pay off the 80k over 30 years. But what you have in the LLC is $100,000 of assets. And these are invested in a single name stock or bond. These are invested in diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds. Our thesis is instead of buying a house, taking your entire life savings and betting it on a zip code, you can take a piece of your life saving, lever it up five times and invest in a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds. That's the thesis here.

[John]

Yeah, Just a habit.

[Jordy]

So who's the right person for this product? Because I'm assuming long term investor. Long term investor. So that means somebody that's maybe going to retire in 30 years or 20 years.

[Abdul Al Assad]

Something like you have anything less than 10 year horizon, you should not consider basic capital. Basic capital is not appropriate for you. Basic capital is a product is a bit that over a long period of time, financial assets are going to continue to appreciate it. Now is this guaranteed somebody from Twitter is going to jump in and say.

[John]

Well, the stock market will go down.

[Abdul Al Assad]

Of course it will go down, Sherlock. Thank you.

[Jordy]

Yes, well, the nightmare scenario is the Japanese stock market which had like 20 something years of decline.

[Abdul Al Assad]

Stagnation. Exactly right. The way you could actually get burned on this is if you have persistent long term stagnation financial assets. Is that possible?

[Jordy]

Your argument would be like if that if that happens, we all have bigger problems.

[Abdul Al Assad]

My argument is America is not Japan. America is Not Europe. America has a problem. America has Silicon Valley. America is the epicenter of innovation in the world. British companies like Spotify want to go public in America. Klarna want to go public in America. And when you are investing in American assets, I believe there is some network effects to this financial market.

[John]

I love it and I love America.

[Abdul Al Assad]

So I called, I called Buffett here and I say, never bet against America. And if somebody wants to take the other trade, I'm happy to do it. Like, I will do a bilateral side trade.

[John]

That's literally your business. Your business. Yeah, that is fantastic. Well, congrats on the growth. I love it. Yeah, it's perfect.

[Jordy]

No, it's great. It's great having you on and hearing directly and keep the viral videos going. I think next time you've set the bar high. Now you aim for 50,000 views. The next video you should just aim for 50 million.

[John]

50 million views. I want to see it.

[Abdul Al Assad]

We're not going anywhere. We're not going anywhere. Our message here to everybody is, listen, there is a real problem going on in society right now, which is vast majority of Americans own no assets. And we have a solution for that. And it may be perfect, it may not be perfect. And for the people that are out there coming after us, we have a question for them. What's your plan?

[John]

Yeah, that's a good point.

[Abdul Al Assad]

What's your plan?

[Jordy]

Yeah, these are personal decisions. These are all tools. What do we think?

[Abdul Al Assad]

Like, what's our plan as a society for things? And we don't think the solution is communism. We don't think the solution is socialism. We don't think the solution is Madani. We think the solution is to make every American a capitalist. And by capitalist, I do not mean ideologically a capitalist. I mean an owner of capital.

[Jordy]

Are you gonna. Last question. Is there a way? I know we have these Invest America accounts, the Brad Gerstner account, Trump accounts. Could we give leverage to 1 month olds?

[John]

To children.

[Jordy]

To children. Could we help the children lever up, please?

[Abdul Al Assad]

Like, that's literally.

[John]

Let them.

[Abdul Al Assad]

Like that's literally the perfect application of this.

[Jordy]

They're out of the womb. They should have leveraged the second they're born. A minute later they should be levered up.

[Abdul Al Assad]

I'm gonna call Brad as soon as I get off this, I'm gonna call.

[John]

Brad Gerstner and pitch it to him.

[Abdul Al Assad]

And like, the administration is like, is open minded to this. Like, like leverage is a great tool. And so many people have made so much money using leverage and it's so Condescending when we say that the average American does not deserve it. It's just disrespectful to the average American.

[John]

Yep. Well, thank you so much.

[Jordy]

Thank you for joining. Congratulations.

[John]

Congratulations on. We will talk to you soon.

[Jordy]

This is really great chat. This was fun. Thanks.

[John]

Have a good one.

[Jordy]

Cheers.

[John]

Feralogix in the chat says, what up, brothers? What's up, Feralogix? Thanks for tuning in. We have our next guest, Derek Lowe from Medallion, coming in the studio. Derek, how you been?

[Jordy]

What's happening? Welcome.

[John]

Give us the news. I want to ring the gong and then I want to talk about some of the backstory and then some of the dynamics in the industry. But please introduce yourself, the company and the news.

[Jordy]

Yeah, for sure.

[Derek Lowe]

My name is Derek Lowe. I'm the founder and CEO at Medallion.

[John]

This is a chaotic stream, by the way.

[Jordy]

We're having fun over here.

[John]

We're having a fun today. And what's the news?

[Derek Lowe]

Yeah, so we just raised $43 million led by.

[John]

Wow, that's cool.

[Jordy]

Incredible. Who'd you raise it from?

[Derek Lowe]

Yeah, so accrue led the round with participation from some of our existing insiders like Sequoia, Google Ventures, Spark Capital. So, yeah, we were very happy with how the round came together.

[John]

Yeah. Explain the business as quickly as you can and then tell me about how the market's developing, what's going on. A lot of people have been following like the Ozempic news and the DTC wave and. And just kind of get us up to speed on what's going on in the market broadly.

[Jordy]

Yeah, for sure.

[Derek Lowe]

So we help to automate back office processes for healthcare companies, primarily around managing a clinical network. So any healthcare company, right, think like HIMSS or RO or Teladoc, they all have to hire a bunch of clinicians to be able to administer care. So everything from a digital health company to a hospital to a primary care clinic. And so that clinical workforce is really the most important component of a healthcare business to be able to actually deliver care. And we essentially help with a lot of the healthcare specific operational tasks that have to happen behind the scenes to.

[Jordy]

Be able to manage that workforce.

[John]

Is there a world where you bundle this with payroll or something, give the compliance stuff? It feels deeply linked in the core system of record. How deep do you want to sit in the system of record stack?

[Derek Lowe]

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, we're very adjacent to payroll and some of those other back office workflows, but we want to target workflows that are very specific to healthcare. And so we're applying AI and automation to this very niche vertical which happens to be still super massive just given the size and scale of US healthcare.

[John]

Yeah.

[Derek Lowe]

So yeah, we wouldn't really consider getting into payroll just because it's a super competitive space, it's very horizontal.

[John]

Yeah. I remember the initial thesis was like in the future there will be more doctors that will be seeing patients in different states and so licensing particularly will be important at the early stage. How has that played out? How common is that? Is that still growing like you know, in line with your expectations?

[Derek Lowe]

Yeah, John, I think you were, you were actually, I was looking back, you were one of our first 10 angel investors which is pretty, it's pretty cool. When we started the company, yeah we were very focused on digital health because it was right during COVID and so the expansion of telehealth was obviously really relevant at that point. I think what we've seen is that post Covid that's leveled out quite a bit and obviously the majority, the vast majority of care is non telehealth based and so typically care is delivered locally and so as a result, yeah where we've seen most of our growth is actually expanding beyond helping with those type of. Yeah, essentially like cross state telehealth use cases operationally and more on actually helping providers get in network with insurance payers. Is that something, something that's ubiquitous. It's like 99% plus of care is delivered right through insurance. So that's where we really focus today.

[John]

Where in the healthcare tech stack is proving to be AI resistant in the sense that like the best frontier reasoning models, they just aren't satisfying people in the way that maybe people were thinking oh let's throw automation at this. But turns out we want to keep a human in the loop for maybe compliance reasons that we didn't perceive. Like where are the last jobs in back office healthcare going to live?

[Derek Lowe]

Yeah, it's a great question. Parker Connor actually had a really great podcast recently, a few weeks ago where he talked a little bit about this and how for rippling AI hasn't really, they haven't really deployed it in any major ways, at least in payroll because it's, it's a really critical workflow. Things have to go right. It's very rule based. It's a really good analogy to Medallion where we're working with an extremely fine margin for error. Things have to essentially be perfect. What we've seen is current models are not capable at I think doing perfection. I think that they'll get there pretty quickly. But we found is that essentially executing on these type of workflows deterministically is proving to be better. For now, I think it will change.

[John]

Quickly, but build the software using the old tools. Hopefully some AI code gen in the mix to speed up software development. But ultimately just.

[Derek Lowe]

Yeah. And we're using it in places where the margin for error is wider. So things like calling a provider to say, hey, you need to give us some piece of data. The margin for error there is a lot wider than if you're filling out a form that requires data elements. One character wrong, it can script the whole process.

[John]

Yeah, that's crazy. Jordy. Anything else, or should we let Derek go?

[Jordy]

No, this is great.

[John]

Thank you so much for hopping on. Congrats on all the progress and the growth. We will talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day.

[Jordy]

Great to meet you, Derek.

[John]

Awesome. Talk to you soon.

[Jordy]

Thanks, guys. Congrats.

[John]

Bye. Up next, we have Alex from Convoke coming in the studio into the TVPN ultradome. Oh, okay. I'm handing over the mallet. Give us an introduction.

[Jordy]

What's happening?

[John]

What's your name? What do you do? Great to be here.

[Alex]

I'm Alex. I'm one of the founders of Kinvoke.

[John]

Got any news for us?

[Alex]

And we're.

[John]

Can you hear me? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Alex]

So I'm one of the founders of Convoke. We're building a platform to automate knowledge work required to take drugs from an idea to a product that patients can use. So today we're announcing our 8.6 million seed rating. It's from Lee Marie at Kleiner Perkins.

[John]

No way.

[Jordy]

The goat.

[Alex]

Yeah, the Goat.

[Jordy]

That's my.

[John]

Kleiner Perkins. Randall Braswell.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

Yeah. We're trying to rename the firm.

[Jordy]

Amazing.

[John]

Congrats. That's amazing.

[Jordy]

Give us a quick history the company, what you're doing before this, and. Yeah. How you got here.

[Alex]

Yeah, so before, I was a life science consultant, so I worked with pharma companies on all sorts of drug development tasks. A lot of, like, information synthesis.

[John]

Are you the one that comes up with the crazy drug names? I feel like every drug name.

[Alex]

I actually did do one drug name project. Yeah, I did do one.

[John]

Can you tell us the name that you came up with?

[Alex]

I cannot tell you. I cannot tell you. We had to test it with patience and everything. And we were pretty happy you could.

[Jordy]

Tell us, but he'd have to kill us.

[Derek Lowe]

Exactly.

[John]

Exactly. Anyway. Yeah. And so where have you taken the business now? Give us the latest and greatest.

[Alex]

Yeah. So we're building and it's like an AI workspace. So our goal is to really automate a significant amount of knowledge work required. If you start from, if you think about what it takes to take a drug to market, you have to do a combination of planning work and execution work. And execution work is like clinical trials, running experiments. That's where a lot of the focus is. That's where a lot of people kind of put the bottlenecks. And what we're doing is kind of focused on the other part of that process, the planning and preparation work. So that takes like 45% of the time of a drug's life cycle. And really, if you can speed that up, help companies make better decisions in how they synthesize information, search information, prepare regulatory documents faster, there actually is a potential to really accelerate time that it takes to take a drug to market.

[Jordy]

What's your read? Is this about replacing human labor or just making human labor dramatically more efficient?

[Alex]

It's more the latter. The way we see it is there's so many questions in biotech that are just intractable for humans to solve alone. Like the search space for making a new drug is so large, you just cannot do it with humans. There's 20,000 or something proteins in the human proteome. If you want to make a drug against any one of those proteins.

[Jordy]

If.

[Alex]

You want to do it really thoroughly, you have to read all the literature on every single protein. You'd have to think about all the different ways you could drug every different protein, different combinations of drugs. That's just completely intractable search problem. And then you'd have to make all the different documentation to run those experiments and plan those experiments. So what ends up happening is a lot of people rely on heuristics.

[John]

To.

[Alex]

Come up with ideas for new drugs. And we think that actually what's going to happen is people are going to change to be managers of these AI systems that are going out and doing all this work and structuring data and running analysis and then coming back and bubbling up recommendations that the human can then make the final call on.

[Jordy]

Where at the intersection of AI and bio are you bearish, given your experience working in the pharmaceutical industry broadly, I'm sure you see companies that raise $100 million and maybe you don't always have the full faith of maybe their venture capital back occurs.

[Alex]

Yeah, I'm relatively bearish on patient recruitment as a space. I think if you look from just a clinical trials use, one of the obvious problems is there's not enough patients or it's hard to recruit patients for the trials. So trials run more slowly than you would like. I think the reality is that the demand for patients far exceeds the supply, especially as we're developing more and more niche drugs for niche conditions and personalized genetic medicines. And I think a lot of these companies come up with a promise that we can source and final these patients and bring them in, when in reality the patients don't exist, or the only trial is being run in Mass General Hospital or something, but the patients.

[Jordy]

Or even if you add an AI bot that can call hundreds of people or reach out to hundreds of people, it doesn't solve the fundamental supply of.

[John]

An AI bot that gives people rare diseases so that there are more patients to cure. This is the real strategy here. Yeah.

[Alex]

Or you can fly them from Nebraska to Austin or something.

[John]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's probably it. That's the more humane thing to do. Can you take me through kind of like within your clients, your customers? Is there like a front office, back office dichotomy? It sounds like this is not a, you know, electronic lab notebook. You're not in the lab. But how do the companies see the dividing line between the knowledge work piece, the regulatory filings, and then what's. And the trial design versus the actual, like mixing of the test tubes and like pipetting?

[Alex]

Yeah, I think broadly you can think of pharma companies that split into the R and D organization. Those are the guys in the lab with the test tubes, the commercial organization and then the development organization. The commercial organization sells the drugs, that's the sales rep and then development organization. Many different functions within that, but broadly it's planning trials and communicating with stakeholders. So one customer group we're working with, it's called a medical affairs function. Their goal is to coordinate with doctors and represent the company's science and programs to the external world of doctors. And they help with communicating their science and also enrolling the doctors into their clinical trials.

[John]

Is the comp or is the state of the art or the current solution, Is it more like Google Docs or pen and paper? Or is it some custom ERP from a dot com company that's kind of loosely solved the problem and then been sold 25 times?

[Alex]

Yeah, it's completely under penetrated by software. So the current solution is consulting. I mean, I started as a consultant, so this is why I know this is a problem. You just have massive amounts of human labor, highly compensated human labor, going and reading documents, inputting things into Excel, making PowerPoints. The software penetration is the Microsoft officer for Microsoft Excel.

[John]

Still undefeated. PowerPoint. Can you sell to consultants?

[Alex]

Thinking about it, yeah. They're not like we don't consider them our icp.

[John]

Okay, got it. That makes sense. Well, congrats.

[Jordy]

Congrats on funding milestone. Given that Lee Marie did it, I'm sure you'll get, you know, somebody that.

[John]

Multibillion dollar acquisition offer right around the corner. Yeah, seems to be on a terrible year out, but tell her he said hi. We will talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day.

[Jordy]

Great stuff. So much for Alex.

[John]

And we are running late. Jordy has to hop on with Mogadishu and Pyongyang, London, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. Yeah, he has to talk to the Cayman. That's who you have to hop on with. The Cayman Islands. I wonder why. Anyway, thank you, John Exley, for hanging out in the chat. It's always a pleasure. Thank you, Christopher.

[Jordy]

Thank you.

[John]

And Feral Logics. Gabe, everyone who's here, Taylor, appreciate you.

[Jordy]

There's 11ish days left of summer.

[John]

11Ish days. There's something big coming. I was saying we're going to announce today and Jordy said we can't announce it yet. It has to be the end of summer. So expect something big September 1st.

[Jordy]

Very soon, my world, very soon.

[John]

We will talk to you tomorrow. Have a great rest of your day. Liz, five stars on Apple, podcasts and Spotify. Goodbye.

[Jordy]

Cheers.