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- [00:00]
Tyler
You're watching CVPN.
- [00:02]
John
Today is Friday, January 23rd.
- [00:05]
Tyler
It's Casual Friday because I got the semi analysis. There we go.
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John
Jacket on. Zoom in on this. Thank you.
- [00:11]
Tyler
Normally, Normally I'm the casual guy.
- [00:14]
John
I thought I'd let Dylan Patel thank you to Doug. Get to experience it over at Semianalysis. This is fantastic. It's extremely comfortable and I look like I'm ready to go to our data center.
- [00:25]
Tyler
It's built for Abilene.
- [00:26]
John
I feel like this is built for Abilene. You throw this on, you're ready to go. See what the hyperscalers are up to, maybe wire up some GPU racks, do whatever you need to do.
- [00:35]
Tyler
Incredible.
- [00:36]
John
I love it. So thank you to everyone over at Semianalysis. We have another gift that came in the mail from a friend of mine, Alex Moore, over at the ARC phone case.
- [00:45]
Tyler
Arc Pulse thing.
- [00:48]
John
It's got. It's a phone case. It's so heavy. Feel how heavy this is. It's a fantastic presentation. It has a certificate of authenticity in metal. The Arc Pulse exclusive edition. Titanium Opal Damascus.
- [01:07]
Tyler
The new iPhone has really been testing my case free lifestyle that I've been running for.
- [01:13]
John
Yes.
- [01:14]
Tyler
So many years.
- [01:15]
John
Bullish for cases. My phone's only a couple weeks old, maybe months old, and it's just like completely destroyed on all the corners. It's really bad, so. Born from a fascination with precision engineering and material mastery, the Arc Pulse Titanium Opal Damascus unites advanced metallurgy with sculptural intent. Every case is forged from over 100 individual layers of titanium, purged with argon gas, bonded at temperatures exceeding 3000 Celsius. So thank you to everyone over at ARC with this fantastic case that has been delivered with its own case. Series of cases. It's sort of a Russian nesting doll situation.
- [01:55]
Tyler
Yes.
- [01:55]
John
Do you have news or can I tell everyone about ramp.com, time is money save both easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
- [02:03]
Tyler
Couldn't have said it better myself. What would you want to chat about? What did you write about today, Jon?
- [02:07]
John
I wanted to dig into the question that we had with Joe Wiesenthal yesterday. What does China actually import? Obviously this was off the back of Davos. Vice Premier Haley Fang highlighted China's determination to become the world's market. The hey, we're the world's factory, but we also can buy stuff. Send us your stuff. We'll buy it. But what are they going to buy? So he said boosting domestic demand was now on top of their economic agenda. This is in their 15th five year plan, something like that. And we were going back and forth like what are they actually importing? We were saying semiconductors, but obviously there's chip deals and GPU bands. Now interestingly, China, like the number one trade deficit for China is semiconductors and it has been since 2005. So they want to buy semiconductors. Obviously US trade policy oscillates, but semiconductors are the single biggest deficit for China in 2020. Even before the AI boom, China imported 350 billion worth of semiconductors, which was more than the value of the crude oil it imported that year. And it's been the largest of importer, the largest importer of chips since 2005 and accounts for huge chunks of revenue for Qualcomm. It's over 50% of Qualcomm's revenue, I think, and over 25% for Intel. So everything that you get from China, if it's an electronics product, it's some gadget, it has a chip in there that's probably going to be made in the west, you know, fabbed in Taiwan or made in Intel. Fab sent over to China, assembled, but.
- [03:37]
Tyler
Then sent back out.
- [03:38]
John
And then sent back out. Exactly. So they aren't imported there. Energy is a big driver of the trade deficit with China. China imports 74% of its oil supply and 42% of its gas supply. Soybeans, which you mentioned, and iron ore are also big categories. The iron ore obviously goes into a lot of again, the factory, the world's factory.
- [03:58]
Tyler
Why can't China make enough soybeans in China?
- [04:01]
John
I don't know.
- [04:02]
Tyler
It must be climate related. They love making stuff.
- [04:05]
John
Yeah, I don't know. That's a good question. We should dig into that. But luxury was what you said and you were right. Luxury is a clear net import category for China. Estimates are around 100 billion annually. Now, it's not the biggest driver of their trade deficit or trade surplus, but it is. And it's also not critically important in the way chips or oil or soybeans or iron ore are. But it is an important story. And almost all of Chinese luxury good imports are from European conglomerates. You got to think LVMH and Kering. It's not strategically important really. And the foreign luxury market in China. So European conglomerates sending their goods to China, it actually completely fell off a cliff in 2024. Imports went down about 20% based on more international shopping that was happening. Travel and domestic boom. So domestic Chinese luxury brands are on the rise. Lao P is now drawing from the same customer base as Louis Vuitton, Hermes, Cartier, Bulgari and Tiffany. Gucci is closing stores. I think around 18 stores are closing. While the local champion Songmont is seeing significant growth in their handbag business. So China does want to be the world's market, but they're also buying domestic a lot. The other dynamic that changed recently in the east versus west brand dynamic has been the acquisition of successful brands by Chinese companies with more competitive supply chains. So Morris Garages store started in the 1920s and became synonymous with affordable British sports cars under the badge mg. Are you familiar with mg?
- [05:48]
Tyler
Not super familiar.
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John
We gotta pull up some videos of old MGs to show you. My family actually had one when I was a kid, a really old one. Are you familiar with mg?
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Tyler
I think my grandparents also had one.
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John
Yeah, no, it was like a cool, it was a really, really cool, like British, not luxury, not high end, but a true driver's car. So we'll pull up one of these videos while I tell you about the brand. It's changed hands a ton. British Aerospace owned it at one point, so did BMW. But the MG business just collapsed because Britain had a lot of sports car manufacturers. They had Jaguar and Land Rover and Aston Martin and there's a whole bunch of other companies. But the MGs, the old MGs, they still look great. Here's a video of one of them. Jordy, give me your review. Would you pick one of these up? I like the soundtrack too. This is a good song for an old retro video about an mg. These were iconic back in the day.
- [06:46]
Tyler
Yeah, I like it. It's got a nice silhouette.
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John
Yeah, certainly a throwback, sort of a Porsche Speedster style. I like it. But eventually the company failed 2005 and the brand was sold off to Nanjing Automobile Group, which was rolled into SAIC Motor, which is China's largest state owned automobile manufacturer. And so the acquisition, it actually worked. And sales of new MG Motor models have picked back up since 2019, MG has been China's most exported car with more than 88% of sales happening internationally. So they bought the brand. They.
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Tyler
Any idea where?
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John
Europe, Canada, Basically everywhere except the United States. They sell them in England. So the MG brand is still well better known in Britain and with the new models they're selling pretty well. We can pull up a video of the newer MGs because they have a sports sedan. They actually have, I think like sort of minivan as well. But here's a review of the sports sedan. See the quad exhaust, all of the world has never seen. Look at this, look at this. They have this crazy like tail fin that comes out. They have a lot of like fun gimmicks on here. But there's the MG brand, still alive and well thanks to China. One of the best looking MG cars on the market.
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Jordy
At the front you can see the.
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John
LED headlights with the striking DRLs, 19 inch alloys. Sleek fastback profile with aerodynamic lines that run down this 4.9 meter long car.
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Turin
And frameless doors.
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John
At the back we have white hips with flowing LEDs with not two but four exhaust tips. And surprise, they actually work because this Chinese car is not electric. Finally. I know. And after all that sportiness outside in here you find.
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Tyler
Yeah, it does. The, the rear end's nice.
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John
375 liters of hatchback design. So it's super easy to load and unload stuff.
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Tyler
So.
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John
So this car is not just sporty, it's also daily friendly. They also have a sports car that we can pull up that has some very interesting features. It has some scissor doors. It's electric. There's a reveal video that we can play here. Look at this. This is the mg. It's like Sportster, Speedster, something like that. Cyberster. Cyberster. That's what it's called, the Cyberster.
- [09:13]
Tyler
Look at those doors.
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John
That's kind of. It kind of rips. It looks.
- [09:17]
Tyler
Tyler, I mean we've been wanting you for your next car.
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John
You need the doors to go up.
- [09:22]
Tyler
To kind of like establish dominance in the. I don't know if I can rep the Chinese. No. Yeah.
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John
It just feels. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's play the review of the Cyberster from Forest Auto Reviews. I really like this creator. He does one minute vertical video reviews of cars from start to finish. So essentially compressing like normally a 20 minute. And this is an electric drop top sports car. He just goes through everything.
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Jordy
The electric thing aside, this thing is gorgeous. You have these awesome lights.
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John
I get these gorgeous body lines.
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Max Sparrow
But I think my favorite part has.
- [09:54]
John
To be the way the door opens. I just come over here, push this button and it just pops right up.
- [09:58]
Max Sparrow
So cool.
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Jordy
But don't worry because if it's going.
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John
To hit something, it's hard to get those doors. BMW i8, that's the only option in America, really.
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Tyler
They really are cooking here.
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John
They are paddle shifters in an electric car. It just changes your drive mode. But you could imagine with an update you can do the like synthetic dct. Yeah, digital DCT which has been very popular in the storage space down there.
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Max Sparrow
Storage space under here.
- [10:22]
John
Tons of storage back there. More. He really gives you, like, a full tour of the car in just 60 seconds.
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Jordy
Back here.
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John
In the back, you get literal arrows.
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Jordy
As your tail lights.
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John
This can do 323 miles on just one charge. It does 544 horsepower. And because it's all wheel drive, if.
- [10:34]
Tyler
I push, you cannot buy these in the US no.
- [10:37]
John
3.1 seconds, and then he rips away. Boom. Loses some traction, back to a safe stop. You get Brembo brakes.
- [10:44]
Jordy
And if this were sold in America, it'd be $41,500.
- [10:48]
John
That's not bad, right? Like, that's a kind of a steal. Anyway, quickly, let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. So this trend has been going on with American or, you know, storied brands. European automobile manufacturers selling to Chinese companies. Volvo changed hands from Ford to China's Zhejiang Zhilei Holdings Group in 2010. The deal valued Volvo at 1.8 billion. And it also basically worked out. Sales have grown from half a million vehicles in 2015 to over 700,000 vehicles in 2023. And when I told you this, you were like, what, Volvo? I couldn't believe it either. Geely also bought Lotus, the maker of the Lotus Elise, the Avija. There's a bunch of sort of, like, more affordable sports cars, ultralight sort of tossable cars. And so Lotus is also another British sports car manufacturer to wind up in China. And so the basic trend is like, China excels at developing efficient supply chains, streamlined manufacturing operations. And it doesn't stop with cars. They're doing it with TVs now. So on Tuesday, Sony announced that they would be spinning off its home entertainment business, which includes the TV brand Bravia, and to their Chinese rival, TCL Electronics Holdings. Sony's selling a 51% stake to TCL. While the brand will remain Sony, the display technology will be tcl. And so Sony's been falling behind Samsung, tcl, lg, Xiaomi in terms of TV shipments for a while, but the brand still holds a ton of value. Like Sony, TVs were the best a decade ago, and still today, people like the software a little bit more.
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Turin
And.
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John
And the Sony brand, it still has the aura of The Walkman, the PlayStation. It's just beloved electronics. And you see the Sony logo, and it's just way more familiar than tcl.
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Tyler
You think Japanese excellence.
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John
Yes, you do. And so Sony has been falling behind on the manufacturing front. TCL has been basically delivering a much stronger value prop on a price to quality basis. And the panel technology is, is loved and very competitive. But there's just more faith in the Sony name. So the Chinese manufacturers effectively pulling forward heritage and brand legacy by buying the name. And this feels like a trend that will continue for a while. China's fantastic at quickly grinding down manufacturing learning curves, developing high quality products at affordable prices, but creating an iconic brand, it just takes decades. And so it's better to buy than build. Like this is the one thing you buy instead of build. And so Western companies, after getting beat up on margins, seeing their market share slowly shrink. I think the Sony TV market share was like dropping to less than 1%, while I believe Xiaomi's at like 6%. I didn't even know Xiaomi makes TVs. I thought they used phones and cars. Apparently they make everything.
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Tyler
It is such an interesting dynamic because you have like, you know, Western brands and manufacturers that have just been saying like, yes, China's out competing us on manufacturing by like 2x. We're getting destroyed. We need, we basically need tariffs and things like that to protect, to protect market share, etc. Yeah, but the one thing that they'll never have is brands. It just takes so long.
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John
Yeah.
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Tyler
MG building up the Volvo brand is not just like an advertising budget. It's time. And it's their safety record and all these things that go into that. Of course, if you're out, if you out compete just on manufacturing long enough and then you get these opportunities to actually buy the top brands, eventually you can actually own the full stack.
- [14:29]
John
Yeah, yeah. So we gotta look at one more MG their Hypercar. It's a concept car, probably will never ship. But I want your review on whether or not you would step into this and take it for a spin. This is the MG Hypercar or supercar. This is from Supercar Blondie. And Supercar Blondie has an uncanny ability to get access to every concept car ever made. I'm constantly seeing Supercar Blondie content about cars that feel like they barely exist.
- [14:57]
Tyler
Or are so single seater.
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John
Single seater. Like this is like a competitor to the Valkyrie or something.
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Tyler
Valkyrie's. Valkyrie's.
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John
Valkyrie's two seats. But yeah, it's like a crazy. I mean this is probably just for show during a big conference. Something to turn heads and draw eyes, but pretty remarkable to see this from mg, the company that made these open top roadsters in the 1920s.
- [15:26]
Tyler
Yeah, I mean it just Looks like, looks pretty close to a speed tail.
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John
It does look like a McLaren Speed.
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Tyler
Tail, which is also the center seat.
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John
Also McLaren Speedtail Inductive Charging. Have you seen this?
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Tyler
No.
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John
So there's a pad that when you drive over it, it will charge the battery.
- [15:45]
Tyler
So that's alternative to like a regular trickle charger.
- [15:48]
John
Yeah. So you don't. So it is still a trickle charger for eight hours, but you don't need to plug it in. And I think that's also happening with the new Porsche SUV ev, maybe the Cayenne ev.
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Tyler
Ferrari should pick that up. Ferrari loves to put their trickle charger.
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John
Tesla should pick it up. Tesla's the obvious one.
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Tyler
No, but Ferrari is notorious for being like, oh, that thing you need to use every time you drive your car, we're gonna put it buried in the trunk you're gonna need to crawl in.
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John
Yeah, I mean the, the Tesla charging. Remember the robotic arm, the snake that was going to. Do you remember this? Tesla was at one point teasing. This might have been like a decade ago, but they were teasing basically a robotic snake like arm that could go and plug in the car like autonomously. So you would just pull in and then at some point it would just go and plug in and they never shipped it. You're looking at me like I'm crazy.
- [16:40]
Tyler
I've never heard of that.
- [16:41]
John
You've never heard of that?
- [16:42]
Tyler
I think they should also do the look it up. You know, there's the Chinese EV where the battery expanded, explos at the center. That thing is crazy.
- [16:47]
John
Yeah, yeah. It's just.
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Jordy
If you pull up next.
- [16:51]
Tyler
To your ops, your enemies, you just hit them in the shins with your battery.
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John
Yeah, yeah. Jordy, I want you to try and pull some of that up. But first I'm going to tell you about TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles and object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Do we have any luck? John Arnold says, I don't know if Chinese manufacturers will ever make money. But I came away not wanting to invest in any manufacturing business in the rest of the world. And Ian Roundtree says, I'm going to keep investing in American manufacturing. So people are still pushing it. There's also big news. Anduril is bringing a 1 million square foot union built campus along with 5,500 jobs to the city of Long Beach. The office of Mayor Rex Richardson, the Long beach mayor, posted this. Over the next three years, Andrew will be building this. This is the largest private investment in Long Beach History. And it's a major vote of confidence in Long Beach's leadership in aerospace and advanced manufacturing. It's accelerated by 28 and grow. Long beach in action. Great work, Lex. Love to see it. Says Grant Daniel. It's fantastic. And what a banger. Thousand likes on this. Everyone's happy that the new anduril campus in Long Beach.
- [18:09]
Tyler
Anyway, I have this pulled up on futurism. China unveils EV that can violently eject its battery.
- [18:16]
John
Okay.
- [18:17]
Tyler
In case of a fire.
- [18:18]
John
Okay. Send that to the team. I'll tell everyone about public.com investing for those that take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with amazing customer service.
- [18:28]
Tyler
Okay. If you scroll down this video and we can see this in action and see what kind of situation.
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John
Yeah. This is so wild. I remember when this video went viral. It's like, what is the point? Oh, it's because if it crashes and it's gonna burn, it'll shoot it out. But, oh, that just seems like so, so dangerous. But at the same time, people, people, you know, watch these videos and they think like, oh, this is like widespread Chinese best practice. When really, like, this is probably like their Gundo equivalent, you know, just like a couple dudes.
- [19:01]
Tyler
It is interesting that they're like, we don't just need to get it 10ft away, we need to get it 30ft away.
- [19:07]
John
Yeah, yeah, because you could just like gracefully drop it out or something or like, or like slide it out sort of slowly with a little pusher. But they have to like shoot it out like a cannon. It's amazing. Anyway, Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. Next level vibe coding. State of the art reasoning and deep multimodal understanding. And speaking of Google, I think we gotta watch the video about AI industry news. Every two weeks, one of these models is destroying someone else's model. And we found a fantastically funny video on Instagram reels that we will play for you today, folks. So let's play the comedy game Destroyed Pinterest in ChatGPT. ChatGPT destroyed Perplexity and Google AI. LinkedIn AI just ruined WhatsApp. AI meta AI.
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Tyler
IRCTC AI just destroyed Uber Ola AI.
- [20:07]
Turin
Wow.
- [20:08]
Tyler
Wow.
- [20:10]
John
So good. What is that last one? IRCTC AI.
- [20:15]
Tyler
He's just making stuff.
- [20:16]
John
He's just making up acronyms at this point. But it really is so true that like there's just a time honored clickbait title of like destroyed in all caps. I used to do it on my YouTube videos. Always went viral. It's been proven. I was taking credit for inventing that format on YouTube. Brandon Gorell put me in the truth zone and said that I did not in fact create that. That was created long before the buzzfeed, the buzzfeed era and is potentially time honored.
- [20:45]
Tyler
Anyway, don't worry, I will drop the video link in the YouTube channel.
- [20:50]
John
Yes, please do. And while you I will pull up the Linear lineup and tell you who we have on the show today, folks, because we have a great lightning round coming up. We have Turin from base 10, Bryce from nominal, Max Sparrow, the AI slop janitor from Pangram, and then Russ closing out with LiveKit. Some fantastic funding rounds coming up. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces are using Linear with agents and you should be too.
- [21:21]
Tyler
So that's right. What's going on with TikTok?
- [21:24]
John
TikTok is. It's sort of the reverse, honestly. It's very interesting. You have this dynamic of like the American companies or the Western companies, MG and Sony selling to Chinese because they have great manufacturing. And then TikTok, you know, we want America wants control over the algorithm, over the data security. And so you have a Chinese company that's now going to be operating in the US and the Wall Street Journal has a piece here on it. First, I will tell you about Lambda Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. So the agreement was negotiated to comply with a 2024 law requiring the company to do a deal to address US national security concerns. Of course it was total, like will they, won't they? For all of 2024 with TikTok and then also in 2025, we were constantly tracking like when will this happen? It took years and years and years. Like the actual TikTok should divest discourse is now like three or four years old. Lots of people have been working on this for a long time, but Rome wasn't built in the day and TikTok was not divested in a day. But TikTok officially established a joint venture that would allow it to keep operating in the United States, the company said Thursday, resolving a years long fight to address Washington's national security concerns. Under the terms of the deal negotiated by the Trump administration, the popular video sharing app will be operated by a new U.S. entity controlled by investors seen as friendly to the U.S. its data management and algorithm training on American users will be overseen by Oracle, the cloud computing giant that has safeguarded its data for the US for years and has close ties to the Trump administration. The deal was negotiated to comply with a law passed by 2024. President Trump delayed the implementation of the law a year ago after starting his second term to keep TikTok operating in the United States. He signed a series of executive orders to extend the deadline for completing a deal until it was met Thursday, Trump said in a social media post, I'm so happy to have helped in saving TikTok, he sang. He thanked Chinese leader Xi Jinping for working with us and ultimately approving the deal with a capital D. He could have gone the other way, but didn't and is appreciated for his decision. Trump and TikTok's investors and allies pushed the deal through despite lingering concerns among lawmakers and security hawks that China could still influence the new entity through TikTok's.
- [23:47]
Tyler
Parent, ByteDance, which is so it makes sense that this took so long. It sounds really simple, just divest. But in reality you have to effectively rebuild an entire app, right? Yeah, it's got to be. It's got to be. It's going to be like a new app, figuring out the logistics of that. There's also just a ton of hair on the deal, right? There's a huge revenue share that's going back to bytedance in perpetuity that is obviously reflected in the valuation. And so and then the other, the other factor is like if you have a US TikTok now and then you have normal TikTok. If I'm on the US TikTok, am I sharing content to international TikTok? If I'm on the international TikTok, is it sharing my content back into the US app? How does that all work out? And so there's a lot of stuff that still needs to be handled. I would say most of the social media app, pretty much every social media app that you use, if you just cut off all international content creators, the experience on the app would get worse. So there needs to be some content still flowing back and forth, forth. But figuring out how exactly that works is still in process.
- [24:53]
John
Yeah, TikTok CEO Sho Chu said in an internal note to employees. The majority American owned joint venture will operate under defined safeguards that protect national security through comprehensive data protections, algorithm security, content moderation and software assurances for US users. There was a the whole TikTok debate really erupted when TikTok CEO Sho Chiu was in front of Congress and was not really acting like he was the boss. Basically that was the main criticism. It felt like he didn't have full control over the entity because of course, it's a subsidiary of ByteDance. And some of the US lawmakers were pressing him on how much control he actually has. Did they send the right person to the congressional hearing. But it seems like he's held on and he's done well. He's also Singaporean, by the way, so, you know, easier to, you know, be a part of the new US TikTok organization and allay any concerns of Chinese control, which is certainly at the heart of the, of the administration's goals here. So who's in the deal? You got Oracle, you got private equity firm Silver Lake, you got Abu Dhabi based MGX. They will each own 15% of the new entity, while TikTok investors own will own about 30%. Other notable investors include JD Vance's former Revolution, former firm Revolution, and tech executive Michael Dell's family investment office. Dell's getting in the deal. Vance spent a brief stint at the firm founded by AOL co founder Steve Case during his time as a venture investor, which preceded his 2022 Senate campaign. I didn't realize that JD had been at, at Revolution. I know he was. He had a separate venture firm, but I didn't know that he was hanging out with Steve Case, the former co founder of aol. Vance has said previously that the deal values the new entity at about 14 billion. A lot of people thought that that was really, really low given TikTok's immense growth. But there is another side of this, which is that TikTok I don't believe was ever monetizing or as profitable as its competitors YouTube and Instagram. And Mark Zuckerberg and the Google team were not like exactly slow to move and launch competitive products. And so a lot of the. You see this continuously where Snapchat comes out, Stories is on a tear and you're looking at the Snapchat growth curve and you're like, this is going to kill. This is going to kill Facebook. It's going to be the next Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg needs to acquire it. He puts in an offer, gets declined and it looks like it's over. But then the Instagram team moved really quickly. They launched Stories and that effectively you can see in the chart Stories, launches on Instagram and people stop moving on to Snapchat. And so a lot of people went back who were on Snapchat, they went back to Instagram and Instagram continued to grow and Snapchat didn't flatline. But it like definitely put a dent in their Growth. And I think the same thing is true for TikTok. Like TikTok, a lot of people who just want that format, vertical video, endless scrolling slop, they can get that now we got American made troughs all over the place, everywhere the eyes can see. So the investors are paying the US government a multi billion dollar fee for arranging the deal, a concept Trump previously called a tremendous fee policy. Plus, interesting. TikTok said it had 200 million users in the US up from its 2024 estimate of about 170 million users. So decent growth. But I don't know, I mean 200 million in the US is a lot like that's pretty much everyone.
- [28:42]
Tyler
Yeah. I guess the question is, will they ever get the rest of the US in the way that YouTube you could assume has like effectively.
- [28:49]
John
You think they have like 300 mil?
- [28:50]
Tyler
Yeah, I would assume that. I don't know.
- [28:53]
John
There's a lot of Philistines out there. There's a lot of Luddites who are just like, nah, I want, I want DVDs, I want VHS tapes anyway. Trump touted his popularity on TikTok earlier Thursday, posting on Truth Social that his posts on the platform TikTok get more engagement than posts on TikTok competitor Instagram, which is owned by Meta Platforms TikTok. Trump said that TikTok helped him win.
- [29:17]
Tyler
I mean that's always been, for what it's worth, that's always been the case. Right. Like TikTok has always had allegations that they were botting like as a platform effectively. People would go on there and they'd be like getting a tremendous amount of followers, tremendous amount of just engagement, broadly, far more than they would have on Instagram with the same content. And some people would say, oh, that's because the TikTok algorithm is so good. But. And there certainly are a bunch of very real people on TikTok. I don't mean to say that it's all bought it, but the experience of using TikTok, a lot of creators will just naturally have six times as many TikTok followers as they do Instagram followers.
- [29:59]
John
Yeah, it does seem like the algorithm is set up to serve you more content in a 10 minute session because you're more quickly scrolling. And then there's also accounting issues. Like on some platforms, if you just scroll past something for even one second, that counts as a view. On other platforms it might take 3 seconds. On other views. Other platforms maybe 10 seconds a minute you might need to watch the full thing. So there's always like accounting abnormalities. There Anyway, if you want to stream on TikTok because it's American owned now, you want to bring, you know, some Oracle focused content to TikTok on live.
- [30:33]
Tyler
Stream SaaS focused content.
- [30:34]
John
Get on Restream 1 livestream 30 plus destinations. If you want a multi stream, go to restream.com.
- [30:41]
Tyler
This might hit you like a sack of bricks.
- [30:45]
John
Yep.
- [30:46]
Tyler
But breaking news. JD Vance is younger than Future.
- [30:52]
John
That's a crazy stat. 22.
- [30:54]
Tyler
Future is straight up an elder.
- [30:56]
John
Now he's an unk.
- [30:57]
Tyler
No, he's beyond.
- [30:58]
John
Oh yeah, he's an elder, I suppose. Yeah, you're right. Not quite an og, but oh no, it goes then og, then elder.
- [31:07]
Tyler
Right?
- [31:07]
John
Yeah.
- [31:08]
Tyler
Right.
- [31:08]
John
Gen Z are arriving to college unable to even read a sentence, says Fortune. Reposted by Tyler Wales.
- [31:16]
Tyler
See if I can read this. See if you can read this. See if you can read this.
- [31:20]
John
Try and read this. Wow. He can't do it. Slopped.
- [31:26]
Tyler
Slopped. I need like some subway surfers or something. Yeah, I'm gonna need some subway surfers to read this next sentence Anyway.
- [31:34]
John
Gusto, the unified platform for payroll, benefits and hr built to evolve with modern small and medium sized businesses. Get on Gusto. We have some drama that's continuing to unfold in the. In the payroll space. The Justice Department opens a criminal probe into Silicon Valley spy allegations. Subpoenas seek information on allegations that deal, valued around $17 billion, recruited a spy inside a rival company. This is a huge story last year and then it's been pretty quiet and both companies have just kind of been chugging along, spending a lot on legal. Yeah. So the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation. Grand jury subpoenas were sent out in recent weeks by Craig Massachian Masakian, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California. The documents show they seek information related to a spying operation that Deal allegedly ran inside a rival company. Ripley. An Ireland based Rippling employee. In case you've forgotten, Keith o' Brien alleged in an affidavit filed in April that Deal CEO Alex recruited him and gave him instructions for what information to take from Rippling. O' Brien alleged that other executives were involved in the spying plot, including his father, who is Deal's executive chairman and chief strategy officer. A spokeswoman for Deal said the company isn't aware of a criminal investigation, but is willing to cooperate with authorities. That's an interesting statement. The Wall Street Journal is reporting this and you find out from a Wall Street Journal reporter. That's wild. So the company has previously said, we deny any legal wrongdoing and look forward to asserting our counterclaims. So Deal says we didn't do anything wrong. Of course, the affidavit from Keith o' Brien is extremely dramatic. There's that whole, like, you know, oh, send that watch to London. We're gonna be like James Bond. Like, it's a. It's a really dramatic read. And you can go back and watch some old TVPN episodes if you want to hear our full take on that.
- [33:30]
Tyler
Yeah, it's interesting. They're not. They're. They're. Yeah, Yeah. I wonder, I wonder what, what information is actually available kind of publicly on this? Because, like, obviously in a situation like this, you have both sides that are kind of like feeding the media their side of the story.
- [33:46]
John
But we do know facts of the facts here. Like, the Justice Department did open this because the Wall Street Journal confirmed that the Justice Department opened the investigation. So.
- [33:57]
Tyler
Yeah.
- [33:58]
John
Anyway, anyway, yeah, it wasn't.
- [34:00]
Tyler
I think a lot of people weren't expecting this to last October actually have any type of, like, criminal component.
- [34:06]
John
Yeah, I think a lot of people were just expecting, like, a lot of drama, a lot of, you know, and.
- [34:10]
Tyler
They would eventually just settle.
- [34:11]
John
Exactly. Settle. And like, the worst case was like, okay, maybe it's like, like a, you know, like a series D size payment for rippling. But they're both going to just keep grinding. But it seems like it's going to the court. So we will see. Maybe there will be. Maybe there will be, you know, courtroom sketches of these folks.
- [34:29]
Tyler
Yeah.
- [34:29]
John
Anyway, Nick, the chief opening actor, has some breaking news from CNBC. OpenAI Chair Brett Taylor says AI is, quote, probably a bubble, expects a corruption in the coming years. Nick is. His camera roll is truly just filled to the brim with images of Sam Altman in various.
- [34:53]
Tyler
The guy has probably the largest collection of Sam Rare Altman. Rare Altman.
- [34:58]
John
He has every photo that's ever been taken of Sam. And Nick just is lmao.
- [35:04]
Tyler
Yeah.
- [35:05]
John
Anyways, this could be true. Like, you know, who knows? I wonder what, what more of the context was that?
- [35:12]
Tyler
Yeah, I mean, a Brett Taylor quote taken out of context turned into a headline and then. And then, and then it's like, nowhere, of course, would Brett Taylor be like, oh, yeah, I think. I think LLM usage is going to fall off a cliff. Yeah, it's like, yeah, yeah, there's variety of different companies and kind of subcategories that could be overheated. But yeah.
- [35:36]
John
You could easily dig into that. And he's like, there's a bubble in like, Seed stage valuations like I can't get an angel check in at less than 50 pre. The bubble can take a lot of different shapes and stuff. Who knows what he was actually commenting on anyway? CrowdStrike, your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Another clip from Demis from the big technology podcast. He's taking shots at OpenAI. According to Eugen Jin.
- [36:07]
Russ
I think actions speak louder than words. Going back to the original conversation we.
- [36:10]
John
Were having with Sam and others claiming.
- [36:12]
Russ
AGI is around the corner.
- [36:14]
Turin
Why would you bother with ads then?
- [36:16]
John
So that is I think a reasonable question to ask.
- [36:20]
Russ
But I think, look, from our point.
- [36:22]
John
Of view, we have no plans at the moment to to do ads.
- [36:26]
Russ
If you're talking about the Gemini app, Right. Specifically, I think we are going, obviously we're going to watch very carefully what, you know, the outcome of what ChatGPT.
- [36:37]
John
Is saying they're going to do.
- [36:39]
Russ
I think it has to be handled very carefully.
- [36:41]
John
But I think action speak louder Reason post AGI, the clankers need to advertise to each other. You gotta do ads for the clankers.
- [36:51]
Tyler
Yeah, I mean the thing here is like OpenAI has to not only figure out how to actually implement ads within the product, but they have to build out all the advertising like infrastructure, the platform infrastructure in order for people to run campaigns successfully and at scale. So Google already has all of that. It is far easy. Do you think it's like 100 times easier for Google to turn on ads in Gemini? Right. They already have all the customer relationship. Literally any company that advertises online is already working with Google. And so it's really just like you can just flip the switch. And so I could easily, you know, don't have any inside knowledge, but I could easily see Google just like having it all basically ready to go. Literally just being like, okay, we can launch this whenever we want.
- [37:36]
John
There is an interesting steel man here. Let me try and do it. So you need the helmet? I might need the helmet, but I think I'm good for now. So Sam and others. Well, first let me tell you about advertising Vibe Co, where DTC brands, B2B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences and measure sales, just like on Meta. So the steel man on Sam Altman claiming that AGI is around the corner, but we still gotta do ads well around the corner. Even if that means six months. Like if you have an incredible capital expenditure to get over that hump to create AGI, it's only six months away. But you got to do that last data center and you got to raise that last 50 billion and all of the investors.
- [38:21]
Tyler
Yeah, it's easy to say like we don't want to do ads when you have hundreds of billions of dollars in existing ad revenue coming in, funding everything that you're doing. So anyways, I think this is, I.
- [38:32]
John
Mean, we can also debate whether or not ads will exist post AGI. I would argue that they would, but. What do you mean, Tyler?
- [38:38]
Tyler
There was that headline about how OpenAI. Maybe they're thinking about like taking a percentage of the, of the share of like the discoveries.
- [38:44]
Jordy
I don't know how they would actually.
- [38:45]
Tyler
Do that or if it's like they're being serious at all. But that's like much more AGI pilled than ads.
- [38:49]
John
Yeah. Yeah. Oh that. Yeah, that's a good point. So they're doing both. They're doing both. Anyway, New York Stock Exchange want to change the world. Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just. Just do it.
- [39:02]
Tyler
Just do it.
- [39:03]
John
Just do it.
- [39:04]
Tyler
Apparently Vimeo, almost everyone at Vimeo was laid off. Yeah. Including the entire video team. I would assume that most of them. Most of their team. So unfortunate. I have some fond memories of being a teenager when Vimeo was like really.
- [39:21]
John
Vimeo was so differentiated.
- [39:23]
Tyler
Yeah.
- [39:23]
John
It was where you. There was like a level of quality that it wasn't just I would go.
- [39:27]
Tyler
There to watch random person short film films. In my case, it was like surf.
- [39:30]
John
Yes.
- [39:32]
Tyler
It was like if somebody was putting a ton of effort into making like a surf movie or you know, some snowboarding movie, it would be on Vimeo.
- [39:39]
John
Yeah. And they wanted higher quality footage. You could get higher bit rates, 4k HD. Like they, they were really on the frontier of that. Yeah. I remember watching a lot of ski videos there. There were some great ones. And also just like it was a place where people would put their, their short films. They had the Vimeo like, you know, awards with the little wreath laurels that you could rest on. But eventually YouTube just went everywhere, all places. The ads went away for the people that care about that because they had premium subscriptions. And ultimately the quality on YouTube just got better and better and better. And now you can get 4K really high bitrate on YouTube and it's indistinguishable from Vimeo. So fewer and fewer, fewer and fewer ways to make a case for consumer adoption, essentially. I certainly would not recommend anyone who's making video content distributed on Vimeo. I put everything on YouTube because YouTube has a massive audience and it's an ability. Yeah. Discoverability is just so high yield.
- [40:42]
Tyler
Harry has the meme for the moment, he says. But now we shall both surely drown, said the frog. Lol, said the scorpion.
- [40:51]
John
I don't think this is exactly right. Like if you buy. If you're a private equity firm and you buy an asset like this and you and you lay off the team, you're likely there are still people that are going to be trying to extract the value from that asset. It just might be a team in a different section of the firm or an outsourcing agency or something else. I would be surprised if this means that Vimeo is shutting down. I would imagine that they're trying to continue whatever business relationships they have and whatever subscriber base they have.
- [41:24]
Tyler
Anyways, Banjo says Vimeo was cool, but if you know about Vimeo, it probably means you're old. That's true. That's certainly true.
- [41:32]
John
You know about Vimeo?
- [41:33]
Tyler
Yeah, I know what Vimeo is.
- [41:34]
John
What's the last thing you watched on Vimeo?
- [41:37]
Tyler
I have no idea. Yeah, but you know, but I remember. Yeah, there was like. Like artsy films would be on there or something.
- [41:42]
John
Yeah, that was good. Anyway, Applovin profitable advertising made Easy with Axon AI. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. What is all this? So Matthew Zeitlin says, my basic model of modern artificial intelligence labs is that they are like emotionally intense graduate school programs, but with unlimited money. Matt Levine is writing about this and Mary says, my friend is dating a guy who works at one of the Frontier Research labs in SF and his sole job is to think and come up with a big idea every six months.
- [42:18]
Tyler
Capital B, Capital I.
- [42:20]
John
So his work day consists primarily of long walks spent pondering.
- [42:25]
Tyler
That's very well manitis coded.
- [42:27]
John
That's amazing. I mean that seems like honestly in the age of research in the Ilyas itself world, this is probably a good use of time as opposed to there are plenty of people that will lock in and improve, make minor improvements. The consumer application or the consumer side of the business.
- [42:44]
Tyler
Yeah, in a world where you have infinite minds. When you're a manager of infinite minds. What did Satya was quoting? Notion co founder. Yeah, you're probably just walking, pondering, thinking about what the next set of tasks to assign to your infinite minds.
- [43:04]
John
Well, Epic Games and Google apparently have a secret $800 million Unreal Engine and Services deal. And the quote in their scoop quote. Sorry I'm blowing this confidentiality. What a crazy quote. To give to a Verge reporter, but we're going to dig in. Addie Robertson and Sean Hollister have the story. A judge is questioning whether Epic Games and Google are settling their long running antitrust fight, partly because of a previously unannounced partnership involving the Unreal Engine, Fortnite and Android. In a hearing in San Francisco today, the court revealed that Epic and Google have struck a new deal that apparently includes joint product development, joint marketing commitment and joint partnerships. California Judge James Donato expressed concerns that the agreement, which he indicated would involve Epic quote, helping Google market Android and Google. Quote, Google's newly quote, using Epic's core technology could have led Epic to soften its demands for changes to the overall Android ecosystem. Donato allowed Epic and Google to keep most of the details of the plan under wraps. But during the hearing he quizzed witnesses, including Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, an economics and economics expert, Doug Bernheim on how it might impact settlement talks, revealing some hints in the process. Quote, you're going to be helping Google market Android and they're going to be helping you market Fortnite. That deal doesn't exist today, right? Donato asked Bernheim, who answered in the affirmative. He also described it as, quote, a new business between Epic and Google. Sweeney testimony cracked the mystery a little further. He referred to the agreement as relating to the Metaverse, a term Sweeney has used to refer to Epic's game Fortnite. Epic's technology is used by many companies in the space Google is operating in to train their products. So the ability for Google to use Unreal the unear. The Unreal Engine. More fulsome. Sorry I'm blowing this confidentiality, Sweeney said. Oh, that's a great line. Yeah, I mean we've seen a number. What was it? What is the DeepMind model that does that? Plays the games for you that I'm in the market for because I don't have any time to play video games, so I need an AI agent to do it for me. They have a number, so they have Genie 3, which generates basically a 3D world that you can walk around in.
- [45:24]
Tyler
That's SEMA 2.
- [45:25]
John
SEMA 2 will play the game for you. And both of those should, in theory, benefit from using Unreal as the backbone.
- [45:33]
Tyler
Elon's training. I'm pretty excited about that as well. Right?
- [45:36]
John
Why?
- [45:37]
Tyler
Because he likes to play on accounts that are.
- [45:40]
John
Oh yes, yes. Oh, oh yeah, yeah. So instead of needing to hire someone, you could bot your account. People already do that with like Aimbots and stuff. Usually you get banned, but makes a Lot of sense in terms of training. Google's generative AI models use Unreal, create a bunch of virtual worlds, walk around in those, interact in those, use them as reinforcements, learning environments for agents, and then bake that out into a bunch of different models that can be used for a bunch of different things. I'm super excited for all this, but it's just funny the way it's coming out. Anyway, if you need a reinforcement learning environment, you gotta go to Labelbox, reinforcement learning environments, Voice robotics, evals and expert human data. Label Box is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. So Coinbase established an independent advisory board on quantum computing and blockchain. Quantum computing, if built at scale, have the potential to reshape entire industries. We were talking to Cathy Wood about this a little bit yesterday. From finance to healthcare to material science and national security, for blockchain, the stakes are especially high. The cryptographic foundation that secures digital assets today could be challenged by the advances of the coming years. At Coinbase, security is our highest priority, and preparing for future threats, even those many years away, is crucial for our industry. Most people, I think, handicapped the quantum thing at like 2030, 2032, 2040. I think Cathie Wood's estimate was 2040 for serious quantum adoption, even if you get on a Moore's Law type adoption curve.
- [47:07]
Tyler
But yeah, Nick Carter has been super vocal about, about quantum just being like the biggest headwind to, like, further bitcoin price appreciation.
- [47:18]
Jordy
Yeah, I mean, there's also this question.
- [47:19]
Tyler
Maybe I'm just like very. I'm like super out of the loop, but if you can crack whatever, the bitcoin or any blockchain with quantum, surely you can also just get into banks or tons of things that are probably way more important than crypto. If we have a world where you have these incredibly powerful quantum computers, is crypto actually the most important thing that you need to be worrying about, or is it the nuclear codes that are. Surely those are stored.
- [47:48]
John
Yeah, you're probably right with the nuclear codes, but in terms of just like fiat stored in a bank, there are a series of backups that are offline. There's even paper backups at certain points. And so the financial system, although they probably don't want to talk about it, does have the ability to effectively roll back. So if there was some massive quantum hack and all the Morgan Stanley or JP Morgan accounts or Goldman Sachs accounts were drained, they would just be like, let's revert. But you can't do that on a blockchain. Necessarily so. But there is still the dynamic of, like, what happens if you crack bitcoin? Like, how much are you stealing? How many new bitcoins?
- [48:25]
Tyler
Yeah, I mean, if you like steal any bitcoin, bitcoin just goes to zero.
- [48:29]
John
Probably the point, but that's obviously still a threat. Even if you just have some malicious actor who's just like, I'm going to take out a short position on bitcoin, tank it and profit from that. That could potentially be disruptive. Certainly disruptive. Coinbase's business. So good to see them taking it seriously. Anyway, MongoDB choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best in class embedding models and re rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build. What's next? Let's go to Scott Besant. He was complaining about the food in Davos and he did an interview on Real America's Voice, I guess with Jack.
- [49:08]
Tyler
So again, if you're looking at Davos as though it's a bunch of kick streamers.
- [49:13]
John
Yes, that is the correct. That is the correct.
- [49:16]
Tyler
Besson has effectively been just clip farming this whole time.
- [49:20]
John
Okay, let's watch the Scott Besin.
- [49:22]
Tyler
They don't play carnivores here in Davos with the food. You're not a huge fan of the food here. I heard, by the way.
- [49:27]
John
I know. And no, I don't know if you remember a couple years ago, one of the recommendations from the Davos elite was we could all be eating bugs and insects. Yeah, the insect food. Yeah.
- [49:41]
Tyler
Right after.
- [49:42]
John
After a couple of days of the food here, I. I may switch to. To bugs and insects. You take the insect food.
- [49:48]
Turin
Yeah.
- [49:48]
John
Or unless that's what it is.
- [49:50]
Jordy
Or.
- [49:50]
Tyler
Or I'm telling you, I'm going to bring snacks.
- [49:52]
Jordy
Fell off.
- [49:53]
John
They did.
- [49:53]
Tyler
You remember, they were really. People were really pushing this. They were saying, oh, the protein content is so high. And I think humanity rejected it.
- [50:05]
John
Well, you know the story of Magic Spoon.
- [50:10]
Tyler
Were they gonna put cricket originally? No.
- [50:12]
John
They did a previous company called xo.
- [50:15]
Tyler
That's right.
- [50:15]
John
It was an American insect food company. They made some protein bars using cricket flour from pulverized house crickets.
- [50:23]
Tyler
House crickets?
- [50:24]
John
House crickets, I guess.
- [50:26]
Tyler
Sounds like you're taking the pets.
- [50:27]
John
They did a Kickstarter in 2016. They raised $55,000, which was more than their $20,000 target. They raised $5.6 million in Series A funding. I wonder from who? There's an article in the Journal. There's an article in Business Insight. Nas invested. No way. Legendary rapper Nas invested In a company that makes protein bars out of crickets.
- [50:51]
Tyler
Okay. So on the XO Protein site now all their bars are sold out. No, a couple. You can still get banana bread.
- [50:59]
John
Cricket Breakfast Co. Was acquired in 2018. Aspire Food Group.
- [51:03]
Tyler
You get salted caramel.
- [51:04]
John
Yes.
- [51:05]
Tyler
Cricket bars. And you can just get one pound of cricket powder. You can get a quarter.
- [51:10]
John
They should just get into selling live crickets. Just deliver them. Get your enemies addresses. Just deliver them. No, but. So I think 1-800-Cricket, I think they would. I mean the team certainly found a niche. A wide weird breakthrough. You're going to get a lot of earned media with a bizarre ingredient like that. But the ultimate traction. I think people just have an aversion to bugs and it just conjures images of bugs crawling around memories like it. Yeah. And so they sold the company, but then they started Magic Spoon, the not cricket based.
- [51:45]
Tyler
Which just immediately ripped.
- [51:46]
John
It ripped. Fantastic business. And I'm sure you've seen a ton of, you know, podcast ads about Magic Spoon and everyone's familiar with that company. So, you know, if you're in crickets, if you're in bugs, pivot to cereal, I guess. And that's what Besson's saying. He's saying he wants Pop Tarts. Pop Tarts, Basically. Magic Spoon. Magic Spoon might even make pop Tarts. I don't know.
- [52:07]
Tyler
Anthropic published a new constitution for Claude. The constitution is a detailed description of our vision for Claude's behavior and values. It is primarily written for Claude and used directly in our training process. Was it written by Claude? Did Claude write its own constitution? That's a good question. Rahul over at ramp said basically TL Dr. Is I love you, you love me. We're a happy family with a great big hug and a kiss for me to you Won't you say you love me too?
- [52:38]
John
You really know the Barney song.
- [52:41]
Tyler
I didn't just sing it as a kid. I studied it.
- [52:43]
John
I studied it.
- [52:44]
Max Sparrow
Yeah.
- [52:46]
Tyler
More importantly. Yes, Buzz balls. Incredibly important is selling a $35,000 diamond engagement ring shaped like its drinks. The ring will be auctioned on eBay starting February 3rd. So I don't. How is it. How is it actually going to be? Is 35K like the opening, opening bid?
- [53:06]
John
Or maybe it's. It's $35,000 worth of diamonds. It cost them $35,000 to. To make it and they're going to put it on ebay. Starting price, 100 bucks. And then it'll get bid up. I guess. I don't know Proceeds from the sale will benefit a heart related charitable cause. It's kind of odd for an alcohol brand to be like, we're.
- [53:25]
Tyler
I don't know. That's cool. I mean, if anyone out in the audience is wanting to propose and like, doesn't really know how to. Is struggling to figure out like the right kind of moment or way to propose, this is like, toss a buzzbally out of the box.
- [53:40]
John
That's the woman in your life.
- [53:42]
Tyler
Toss a buzz ball at the.
- [53:43]
John
If she catches, she has to marry you.
- [53:45]
Tyler
Yeah.
- [53:45]
John
She has to say yes. Is this rage bait? Is this good marketing? Do you think this is good for buzzball strategically? What do you think?
- [53:53]
Tyler
I don't know if it's. I mean, I find plenty of moments to talk about buzzball already unnecessary.
- [54:00]
John
I mean, it is gimmicky, but the whole brand is. Is sort of gimmicky to begin with. And so it doesn't feel out of context. It doesn't feel like they're trying to be a serious company and then they did something wacky on the side and I'm confused. This, like, feels within the. Within the buzzballs lineage. Within the buzzballs brand world. Very much so. Anyway.
- [54:22]
Tyler
Whoa.
- [54:22]
John
If you're heading to Cisco AI summit, be sure to bring some buzz balls because on February 3rd, Cisco is bringing together leaders from Nvidia, OpenAI, AWS and more to discuss the future of the AI economy.
- [54:35]
Tyler
We will be there.
- [54:36]
John
The whole thing will be live stream. We'll be there for.
- [54:39]
Tyler
Did you know what? Do you know who came up with the idea for buzzball?
- [54:43]
John
Absolutely not. I have no idea.
- [54:44]
Tyler
A public high school teacher.
- [54:46]
John
What?
- [54:47]
Tyler
Merilee Kick, a former public high school teacher, has become one of America's richest self made women after selling her ready to drink cocktail business buzz balls for at least 4,500 million 500. What started as a side hustle has now transformed into one of the biggest brands of the $2 million ready to drink cocktail industry. Kick founded Buzzballs in 2009 inspired by a simple idea while grading papers by her pool. I thought I shouldn't have this glass container out here. I should have a plastic pool safe type of cocktail. From this spark of inspiration, Buzzballs was born. Fun high proof cocktails served in colorful plastic spherical containers, Buzzballs quickly gained popularity. Is now sold at supermarkets, liquor stores and convenience stores. She says, I've been living the American dream. We've built a legacy. We've become a contender. In a space where women never went brutal, the brand has grown, intentionally distributing 29 countries with an estimated annual revenue of $500 million.
- [55:45]
John
Wow.
- [55:45]
Tyler
This is incredible story monster company. In April of 2024, the drinks firm Sazerac acquired Buzzballs in an all cash deal. Made it 500 million. Though Kick suggests the figure is much higher.
- [55:58]
John
No way.
- [56:01]
Tyler
Kick is an absolute dog. It has also cemented her place among America's richest self made women with Forbes estimating her net worth at 400 million after taxes. So yeah, of course she's gonna 10x.
- [56:11]
John
That get it in the market.
- [56:12]
Tyler
I'm sure she's max 7 on her next idea.
- [56:15]
John
Run it up.
- [56:16]
Tyler
Run it up. Kick Journey is remarkable because she never raised money from investors. She bootstrapped her business. She used a small inheritance, maxed out.
- [56:24]
John
Her is the founders podcast episode about.
- [56:26]
Tyler
It and took out a loan from a local community bank to get started. I scraped and scrambled, she says. I took every bit of every penny I could find and poured it into the business.
- [56:36]
John
That's incredible. Amazing story.
- [56:38]
Tyler
Her unique company started making a profit in the second year with 1 million in sales and 100k in profit. Not bad. By 2014, the brand was expanding quickly and the drinks were sold at major retailers. By 2019, annual sales were over 100 million.
- [56:52]
John
Get her on the Davidson.
- [56:53]
Tyler
Wow. I mean she's elite. A key to Buzzball's success was owning its supply chain.
- [56:57]
John
She vertically integrated on day one. It's just like most D2C founders in California can't figure out how to get off a co packer.
- [57:06]
Tyler
She moved production of the patented plastic spheres and the spirits used in buzz balls in house to ensure the brand's quality and reliability. Despite many investor offers over the years, Kik held onto her company until she found the right partner. Elite. I wanted somebody that was come in and have big guns.
- [57:21]
John
Big guns.
- [57:23]
Tyler
She explained. Sazrock, which owns over 400 brands, brought the resources and expertise to scale Buzzballs.
- [57:29]
Turin
Wow.
- [57:29]
Tyler
Kick and her family are still part of the business. I didn't sell because I didn't like what I was doing or wanted to leave, she explains. I sold for the exponential growth and because it's selfish to hold it back. It really has legs. From a teacher grading paper by the pool to a multi millionaire sent a millionaire merrily. Kick story shows the power of a good idea and the determination to make it happen. That is an incredible story.
- [57:54]
John
Got to get her on the show.
- [57:55]
Tyler
I love it.
- [57:56]
John
Let me tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of it. HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And before we move on to our, to our lightning round, let's debate Kylie Robinson's latest post. She says, do you think if the AI company's IPO this year will get insert Frontier Lab arenas like the crypto.com arena, what do you think? Should there be a Gemini arena, an anthropic arena, an open Airna? Should they do this? Is this good for the brand? They're already buying super bowl ads, so it doesn't, it doesn't seem out of the question. What do you think the probability is?
- [58:39]
Tyler
Yeah, I feel like these type of advertising on an arena like that, you typically see this with somewhat commodity products that are in large markets but are in the case of Crypto.com, they're just the products. Crypto.com is very interchangeable with Coinbase.
- [59:03]
Jordy
Right.
- [59:04]
Tyler
It's a place you can go give them USD and you can buy Bitcoin or whatever digital assets you want. And so they're really just competing on like brand entirely. And like currently the way that you're seeing the market evolve, like I don't, I don't know.
- [59:18]
John
Yeah, they're competing on technology. Like how does the model actually answer? What are the benchmarks? They're competing on product. Like how does the app work? How, what are the mechanics? What can you do? Can you generate images in there or not? Can you generate video? How good is the video? Does it do deep research quickly? Like there's a million different things. How is the voice mode? Like, they're definitely playing like a product race right now. There is a marketing race.
- [59:40]
Tyler
Yeah. I guess the question is, at the same time, was there ever was there any of like the OG search companies, did they ever get out and did Yahoo ever have. I don't know.
- [59:49]
John
It's interesting, but I do know that it's interesting that she mentions the crypto.com arena here in Los Angeles. Angeles, the former Staples Center. Because crypto.com is not a public company. So there's nothing that says that you can't buy an arena before you go public. Who knows, maybe we will have a Vanta arena by the end of the day. Automate Compliance and Security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And I'd love to head to the Vanta arena no matter where it lands. Anyway, we have our Lambda Lightning round starting now with base 10. We have Turin, the co founder and CEO of base 10 in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVPN Ultradog. How are you doing?
- [60:33]
Tyler
Hey man.
- [60:34]
John
Good to see you.
- [60:35]
Tyler
Welcome back, welcome back.
- [60:37]
Turin
Thanks for having me again.
- [60:38]
Tyler
You've been busy, you've been busy.
- [60:40]
John
Give us the news.
- [60:41]
Turin
Yeah, look, we've had a crazy year with 10x of last year.
- [60:48]
Tyler
10X alert. Hit the gong for the 10x. Sorry to interrupt. All right, back, back to you, back to business.
- [60:58]
Turin
Last time I was on here, I was telling you about our Series D. We've raised our Series D Now we've raised 300. $300 million. There's a 5 billion dollar valuation led by IVP and Capital G, with participation from Nvidia and a few others. Look, it's just been just to remind you guys about what we do.
- [61:17]
John
Yeah, please.
- [61:18]
Turin
AI infrastructure platform. We focus on production grade inference serving the fastest growing companies in the world. So a bridge, open evidence, cursor, notion, clay, gamma. Right. You look at that crop of companies and how they're growing and we're playing a supporting role in making sure that they can run their models as fast and reliable as possible. And just on the back of that we realize how big this could potentially be.
- [61:44]
John
Take us through how quickly enterprises are ramping up running their own models. If we go back to 2022, Google had Palm internally. They hadn't really launched Gemini. OpenAI had GPT3 and then they launched ChatGPT. But Microsoft had, they were vending GPT4 through, through Bing and stuff. But big companies were not really running their own large language models. Is that roughly correct? But now it feels like we're in the hundreds of companies. But out of the Fortune 500, like how many companies are actually running their own models at this point in time?
- [62:25]
Turin
Yeah, look, I think it's still relatively small but growing rapidly. I think if you go and look at like when we go and speak to enterprise customers, it's still incredibly early. But I think what they are doing is that they're looking at, you know, these other companies that, you know, they, you know, you and I would probably agree that are the future Fortune 500 kind of in their lunch and if they don't like figure out how to move at that pace, I think they'll just be left behind. And so like what we, we focus really, really heavily on the really fast growing companies because we think not only are they going to be the future Fortune 500, but the Fortune 500 going to look at them as like, how do we bring these models up to speed as quickly as possible?
- [63:08]
John
Yeah, and so I mean that makes perfect sense in the case of a company like Cursor. Obviously they Have a ton of training data. They have a need for a custom model. Are we years away from someone like a Coca Cola or developing their own or how does that play out?
- [63:25]
Turin
I think look, there's two things that are happening, right, which is if you go look at OpenAI anthropic adoption of these at these companies, it is that it is definitely there. Once you have proven out these use cases internally, then you start to think about better, faster, more specialized, more secure running on prem all these types of problems. And so that is coming. Is it like 6 months ways or 12 months away? Is it 18 months away? Who knows? I think the other trend that is pushing the enterprises online is rl which is like how do you take these open source based models and RL them and get them to be as good if not better than these frontier models for very specific tasks. And the big focus for us as well. We recently made an acquisition around that, but we do think that'll be a big driver of enterprise adoption.
- [64:16]
John
Walk me through the pushback from a large enterprise that says yeah, it's great, I can train a custom model on my business. But I looked at the smaller models for a variety of benchmarks and it feels like the big models just sort of are better at the small models tasks as well. Like I should just use the latest and greatest big model for everything because the frontier is better at the small specialized tasks as well. It just one shots things.
- [64:48]
Turin
Yeah, totally. Well, I think, I think a lot of times they'll be valid there. Yeah, like I don't disagree with you. I think what, what you will see though is that as the frontier is getting better, open source is already, you know, if you go look at the open source models that are out there today, like the GLMs, the coins and, and the deep Sea, it's not like they are 18 months behind.
- [65:12]
John
Yeah.
- [65:12]
Turin
You know, someone argue that they're you know, within a quarter and for certain tasks are better. The complexity actually comes around honestly from enterprises. Not so much like can I get a better outcome? Yeah, it's hey, you know these large lab companies have massive inference teams. Sure do I have the skill set to be able to run the service at scale within my premise with all my enterprise requirements.
- [65:36]
John
Got it.
- [65:36]
Turin
That's ideally where we can help in and be that partner to them to bring them all up.
- [65:41]
John
Okay, so walk me through what it looks like when a Fortune 500 company says okay, we're getting off of just a generic model. We want to do something that we have control over. The inference we're working with base 10, we're doing, you know, we're doing some custom RL. There's going to be some proprietary data in there. Who's involved? Are they hiring you or consultant to set up the RL environment? Who's doing the training?
- [66:05]
Russ
No.
- [66:06]
Max Sparrow
Walk through all that?
- [66:07]
Turin
Yeah, I think it's engineers and infrastructure engineers. I think that is like one of the realities right now is that I don't think engineers who don't know how to grapple with AI, just, you know, they don't. I don't know if they exist in the future to be honest. But that being said, like for a lot of these engineers it's like, hey, how can we make it as easy as possible for you to take this custom model, deploy it, scale it up either you know, in our cloud or within your own cloud. And so that is, you know, the job of the software. We have a, a really amazing forward deploy team that is very happy to help if necessary, but our goal is also just to enable them to do these things. And that is happening. I think it's early though.
- [66:47]
Tyler
From your view, do you think we need more NEO Labs based on the conversations that you have with customers?
- [66:57]
Turin
More models are great. I think more people developing models are amazing. Look, I'm making a bet with my career with this company on the long tail of models and that they're existing models outside of two amazing companies. And so I think more people developing models gives consumers and developers more choices down the line. And like, look, do we need more of the same? Probably not. But like, you know, all these companies have their own takes on the problem.
- [67:30]
John
Help me understand your current thinking around model routers. Routing inference across big heavy duty models that might be very expensive, like using all parts of the Pareto frontier. What are you seeing on the inside? Are companies trying to handle parceling out the workloads themselves or do they want that to be something that's off the shelf that you sort of provide? What are some of the trade offs that people are considering these days?
- [68:00]
Turin
Yeah, look, I think it's a spectrum. I think, you know, the, the most advanced companies, 100% doing that they are breaking, they're breaking up their, their tasks almost like model by model and then figuring out how to route. I think less sophisticated folks or people earlier in their journey, yeah, probably better way to put it, are relying on other people to do that. And you know, the model, the model companies are doing this themselves. I think the place where I struggle a bit is like some of these routing things are just routing for failover. Hey, model just stop working.
- [68:34]
Russ
Sure.
- [68:35]
Turin
We believe that reliability should be table stakes for serving models. And ideally you don't have to build across what happens when X model provider falls over, Y model provider falls over and have that. And that is a different routing problem. Routing based on capability is happening. It is happening outside the model, it's happening inside the model. And as the long tail model comes on, come online for specific model tasks, I think that's more and more going to be the case that that is being handled by Inference company or inference platform like base 10.
- [69:08]
John
Yeah, yeah. I mean that certainly happened in the database market. Like you have a big postgres installation. You don't have a MySQL installation there as like a backup, but you might have a redis cache layer in front of it, right?
- [69:17]
Turin
Yeah.
- [69:18]
John
So help me understand that at the hardware layer. I know you have some insight into Nvidia's strategy here. I'm very interested in how you or other partners, other folks in Inference might be thinking about the future of Nvidia's big powerful racks versus their more legacy chips. That might be depreciating but you can see still run a great model on it versus some of the more exciting stuff that's happening with GROK in the future.
- [69:48]
Turin
Yeah, yeah, look, I don't have a ton of strategy. They're very good. I could hypothesize, look, they're amazing partners to us. I think we are chip agnostic and we think, look, every task and you will have different requirements from a latency perspective, from a cost perspective, even what type of model runs on it.
- [70:10]
Russ
Sure.
- [70:11]
Turin
And so yeah, so like we use H1 hundreds, we use a 100 but we also use two hundreds and GB two hundreds. And as you know, we get these, you know, new, these new types of chips or across providers, we'll be working on them as well. So like if you think about the Nvidia Grox stuff, what are they solving for? It's like you know, kind of breaking out pre fill and decode using GPUs for pre fill. You know, there's a compute bound problem. You can saturate the gpu, you can do bad and have really good throughput, but then you have the LPUs or like the Groq chips or the decode which are memory bound. You're not doing a lot of new math per token. Why this is hard is that that's a pretty complex orchestration problem of handling workloads that are doing stuff on GPUs and on LPUs. And I think Nvidia's obviously built amazing software around this to break out, refill and decode. Dynamo is the name of software that we work pretty heavily with. But like, I think that would just be a new type of chip that the chip providers provide. And you know, I think one thing I don't think you can understate is how much, how much, how powerful Nvidia supply chain is. CUDA is. CUDA is and their, their ability to, you know, be dynamic with architectures changing. And I think, yeah, you know, we have very, very much bought into that ecosystem and what that enables, especially for inference and customers.
- [71:35]
Tyler
Can you give us your take or any insight on how companies at the application layer are kind of wrestling with the late like laziness specifically, like everyone at this point has experienced a product like asking, basically wanting a product to be able to do something that you know, it can do and then, and then running into this laziness element.
- [72:01]
Turin
What do you mean by laziness? I don't quite get that.
- [72:04]
Tyler
I would say thinking about, let's pick the biggest, not to pick on anyone, but the biggest consumer AI app, ChatGPT. Right. Everyone has experience asking ChatGPT to do something that you know, it can do and sometimes it will just kind of circle around or not really get to the thing that you want it to do, even if you're paying for it on like the max plan or something like that. And so, and so I would like, I would assume that every company at the application layer that gets to the point where they're caring about margins is like starting to get to the point where they're like, okay, like you don't always. Because sometimes the model can be lazy and you're like, great, like, yeah, you got a quick, you got me what I needed and I can just move on.
- [72:48]
John
Yeah.
- [72:49]
Tyler
Yet other times it's like wildly frustrating because it's like, you know, asking if like it's like asking an employee to do something at 5 o' clock and they're like, oh, like, you know, isn't.
- [72:59]
Turin
That like, to me that's like what defines a great application layer company, right? Like the, yeah, the ones that aren't good are just wrapping around, you know, GPT and you or whatever model and you know, you as a user are left to figure like, deal with that laziness. I think the best application companies, you.
- [73:17]
Tyler
Know, it's like serving the right amount of intelligence for the task and setting.
- [73:21]
Turin
Up the harness and how to use it for the problem that your user is asking you to solve for them or you were trying to solve. Like, you know, if a company like Open Evidence was just, you know, doing something the lazy way, that would not only be really, really expensive, but they wouldn't do a really good job of solving that problem for their users. And it wouldn't be a great business in the long term. But like, you know, what makes these companies so good at how they use the models, but how do they use multiple models and how they architect that to the thing the user is asking them and then layering in how do we do this efficiently so we can make a business out of it. To me there is going to be a great divide in solving that laziness problem. I think it's a good way to put it actually.
- [74:01]
John
You said two things that I'm sort of having trouble reconciling. You said that you're chip agnostic, but then you also praised the dominance of of the CUDA ecosystem. Is it getting easier to implement LLMs in a way that run on multiple chipsets? We've obviously seen really strong performance from DeepMind on the TPU stack and Anthropic's talking about TPU now but for a long time the narrative was like, oh, it's going to be really cumbersome to re platform off of the CUDA ecosystem. How are you thinking about just multi chip architectures these days?
- [74:37]
Turin
Yeah, I mean look, I think it is getting easier but it's not, it is not easy.
- [74:43]
John
You know, welcome to entrepreneurship.
- [74:48]
Turin
And like look, just sitting on top of like, you know, that's why like Nvidia is such a great partner for us. It's like sitting on them doing this stuff. You know, we were, I mean did you guys play FIFA or anything like that when you're growing up at Madden?
- [74:58]
John
Like I was more of Counter strike, Call of Duty for sure.
- [75:01]
Tyler
But did you starcraft?
- [75:03]
John
Yeah.
- [75:03]
Turin
It's pretty amazing that when we are doing stuff for GPUs today we're downloading from this a website looks exactly the same as the Nvidia driver page from the early 2000s. That is also the amazingness of it of like how rich that is and how powerful it is. And I think that is, you know. Yes, it is getting easier and like, like a diversification is great everywhere downstream. But also like Nvidia is just amazing.
- [75:27]
John
At what they do and yeah, and being able to run a model on AMD does not necessarily mean that it will inference at a lower total cost per token or vice versa. It Might be a little higher on certain models, blah, blah. And so yeah, there's all these different trade offs, but that's why companies come to base 10.
- [75:45]
Turin
Correct, totally. And that's why the open source ecosystem is so important. Right. That's why you mentioned databases earlier. I think similar to databases, in the fullness of time, open source has the fastest runtimes. And so I think that will like with Nvidia you'll see that which is like be really good at running stuff on Nvidia chips. It's going to be Nvidia who's going to be really good at stuff. Running stuff on AMD chips is going to be amd. And so working with these providers of chips, I think to get the best runtimes from them is very important. And I think this cross compilation stuff, while important, you know, I'm a little skeptical. I'd say it's just like, you know, like it's fanciful for me to think that we would be better at running software on Nvidia chips than Nvidia or better. Yeah. At the lowest level, obviously there's all the orchestration software stuff that we are building that we think is very important, but we also very, very invested in those ecosystems.
- [76:41]
John
Well, I believe in you, I think you can do it. But no, I take your point. Of course. Well, congratulations and on the progress. Thank you so much. Yeah, great to get the update to hop on the stream and have a great rest of your day. Have a great day.
- [76:51]
Tyler
So you'll be back on any day now?
- [76:55]
Turin
Hopefully not. Yeah, thanks for having me and appreciate you guys.
- [76:58]
John
Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Phantom cash fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. Up next we have Bryce. Bryce from Nominal. I believe Bryce is the brother of the previous guest from nominal, Cameron McCord.
- [77:21]
Tyler
Technology Brothers.
- [77:22]
John
No, not brother, sorry, co founder.
- [77:26]
Jordy
Got it.
- [77:26]
John
Okay. Well you know, you build a business with someone for a while people just assume you're brothers.
- [77:31]
Jordy
But anyway, second spouse is what I like to say.
- [77:35]
John
But yes, yes, exactly. Thank you so much for taking the time to come.
- [77:38]
Tyler
Where are you, where are you calling in from, guys?
- [77:42]
Jordy
Hello. From Daytona, Florida.
- [77:44]
Tyler
No way.
- [77:46]
Jordy
You are in, you're, you're in the garage, you're in the pits at the Rolex 24. So we are here. So yeah, a Nominal, you know, company. Cameron. Cameron, Jason and I co founded, we announced our partnership this week with Pratt Miller Motorsports.
- [78:04]
John
That's amazing. Congratulations.
- [78:06]
Jordy
Thank you, thank you.
- [78:07]
Tyler
Great timing.
- [78:09]
Jordy
Oh, come on, come on, come on.
- [78:14]
John
That's Fantastic.
- [78:15]
Jordy
Yeah, if, if you, if you don't know who Pratt Miller Motorsports is, you know, they are the heart and soul of the Corvette racing team in the IMSA race series. So you know, this is, this is full on heavy metal American dynamism right here.
- [78:30]
John
This is.
- [78:31]
Jordy
Hey man, I'm about, I'm about 30ft from a McLaren and.
- [78:35]
Tyler
Right.
- [78:36]
Jordy
Oh, you know, this entire garage is full of pretty, probably every, every famous sports car, you know, but I don't know if you know, but the most dominant of them all for the last 30 years has been this yellow Corvette right here. And that yellow Corvette.
- [78:50]
Tyler
Incredible.
- [78:51]
John
Look at that wow.
- [78:52]
Max Sparrow
Sticker.
- [78:53]
Tyler
There we go. Incredible. How's.
- [78:57]
Jordy
Good stuff.
- [78:58]
Tyler
Have you caught any of qualifying yet or have you just been too locked in?
- [79:04]
Jordy
Yeah, this is the epitome of forward deployed because we just sent a founder to make sure this went perfect. But it's been, it's been really fun. Yeah, I've been here for a couple days. We are so think like last night we were running our late night practice sessions. So Daytona itself is a like brutal race to start the season. It's a 24 hour race. I'm not sure if you, like me, have now seen a best picture nominee, but in the F1 movie, Brad Pitt's F1 movie, the first seven or eight minutes is actually Sonny Hayes. Brad Pitt racing here at the Rolex 24 and it's him racing the night shift. So. Yeah, amen. Yeah, him raising the night shift. So, you know, last night's practice session. Every team gets one night to go out and actually like see the race conditions at night. You know, different temperature profiles, totally different, you know, race profile. You have like I found out like at turn five, right here you have headlights from the parking lot that you have to deal with. Like, oh, interesting. Yeah, it's been a wildly interesting journey. But you know, on the, you know, on the nominal partnership side, it's also been just really fun to see. Like, you know, we've, we've had a lot of wonderful meetings and things about strategy and race strategy and this and that. But like, you know, we are watching it come alive here. So a lot of the practice and qualifying and everything else has come back to, you know, how do we help them Use a lot of data to.
- [80:27]
Tyler
Win and the pressure's on. Right? They're going for the fifth, fifth win this weekend. Is that right?
- [80:35]
Jordy
Impressive.
- [80:37]
Tyler
We've been following a little bit mostly the Shopify team. We've been following a lot Toby and.
- [80:44]
John
That was actually really funny. There's a lot of tech people out there. It's great.
- [80:47]
Jordy
There is, yeah. The tech community here is like small but strong. It is like the epitome of motorheads. It's people that late in life found thermodynamics in their life and are like, this is the coolest thing ever. This is way cooler than Kubernetes. Like, it's the best. Yeah.
- [81:04]
Tyler
And, and for us, we're, we're. The timing is great. We were at the track with, with a friend of the show, Paul, on, on Sunday and we were just doing like really quick laps. We'd go out for like five, you know, five, 10 laps and then take a quick break and kind of like settle down and we'd be spinning out on like, like the fifth and like realizing like actually like when you're going like these endurance races also just like.
- [81:32]
John
From an engineering perspective, you know, you take the car out for a couple laps and you let it cool down and check the tire pressure. Like 24 hours is endurance, not just for the humans, but for the actual vehicle. So can you talk a little bit about what goes into bringing that level of performance to the vehicle, what your role is, who the key players are in your world, who are you interfacing with?
- [81:55]
Jordy
Yeah. Oh my God. Okay, so yeah, 24 hours is brutal. You are right. You know, the rest of the season, There is a 12 hour race in the season. We've got some Sebring, but you know, the rest of the season is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 hours. And you know, you rip the car as hard as possible. So the 24 hour race, the strategy you're bringing in is much more around, you know, of all the things you have to care about more than anything, the cars get beat to hell. But it's fuel. You know, it's like this bad boy will burn a full tank of fuel about once an hour. And so a lot of the pitch, strategy, a lot of like the totality of the race comes down to really like managing all 24 hours well. And so our role in this, you know, we, we come alongside this absolutely elite engineering team and help them, you know, make those, make those calls. Sometimes it's the high, you know, highest level. You know, do we need to switch drivers earlier? Do we need to do something else? I have a. Let me leave another. Oh, okay. I got a fun one last night. One of the things we were looking at is I can't give away all the secrets, but I know everyone says they do this, but Pratt Miller, like actually does this and does it better than anyone else. But last night, they were talking about, you know, managing fuel from a, like, consumption standpoint. So think, like, you know, we're watching how throttling is happening, amongst other things. Think when this comes into play as the car is, you know, you're behind someone else, and your goal ends up being, how can I get them to stay on the throttle as much as possible? Because if they burn more fuel than I burn and we both go into the pits together, the long pole in the tent of a pit stop is refilling the tank. So they refill for five seconds, we refill for one second, and we run right past them.
- [83:33]
John
Interesting.
- [83:34]
Jordy
And that's the type of stuff, like, that is not a trivial thing to do. That is complex math happening. That's tons of different telemetry, you know, like, nominal. And to be clear, like, Pratt Miller has building. Been building elite software here for 25 years. I was in, like, the third. The second grade when they started building race software. You know, like, this is much more around, like, teams like this are amazing because they just are obsessed with winning. And so this whole partnership has really blossomed out of, like, that openness, you know, like, we have plenty of wonderful, elite, amazing customers that have interesting things that they've built. And, like, you know, there's a journey with getting them to, like, really adapt the way that we think engineers should work. In nominal, where Pratt Miller is like, okay, cool. I have all of this engineering.
- [84:20]
Tyler
It's an engineering sport. It's an engineering sport. Like, I imagine a lot of those engineers could go in a second and walk down to El Segundo and be hired on the spot, right? So. Amen.
- [84:32]
Jordy
The amount of. The amount of people that have left the Pratt Miller team to go to, like, the Anders of the world, There's a lot of.
- [84:43]
John
Please stop poaching, but zoom out for me and try and make a little bit clearer the involvement of nominal in this, how the product's being used, where the endpoints are. Are you working on manufacturing new parts for the car, managing supply chain, testing, like, what else goes in, and then maybe contextualize it with the work that. That you do with other defense contractors and other businesses.
- [85:10]
Jordy
Yeah, totally. So think like, Pratt Miller selected us and brought us into. Think, like, how can we transform how engineers and all of their partners so they don't just build these two cars, but they also build three more Corvettes in the field for other teams. How can they come in and, like, rethink fundamentally testing telemetry? Decision making across race operations. So these are producing terabytes and terabytes of data this weekend. You know, we have to do a whole lot with that during the weekend to make really good calls. And way more important, we need to like catalog and catalog and index and manage like all of this volume of data. And then like, you know, what we do for the team is like, it's not just about these ten races a season. Like you win when you have the same system integrated into your driver sim. Pratt Miller's also been way far ahead in the way that they think about driver sims in the IMSA sports car racing league. So all of the data from the driver sim is making it back into nominal. You know, we're helping them do like, actually like rethink the, like, procedural operations of that and automating a lot of pieces of that. And this is like almost verbatim. You know how companies in aerospace and defense, how companies in energy, you know, how our customers go get this work done across the board. It's just they have like win or lose on the line, so they just rip it out of our hands.
- [86:25]
John
What about the other simulations that go on during a race series? I'm thinking back to the F1 movie. Most people are familiar with the scene where the F1 car is in the wind tunnel. Everyone can visualize the wind, the smoke, floor flowing over a vehicle. Is that the type of data that someone could pull into nominal and then analyze, or are you acting more as just like a data layer and then there's another visualization software that would pull for that specific task? I imagine that there's a lot of point solutions still in place, but how do you fit into that?
- [86:55]
Jordy
Totally. Okay, I'll tell you about the old world and we'll go to the new world. So they have a team here that manages all of the corvettes on the field. So not the Pratt Miller race team. It's like the corvette racing team. I last night was sitting with them and watching them click through somewhere between six to eight different pieces of software to root cause a problem. A little bit of analysis here, a little bit of data management here. Go find the thing over here. Nominal has been built on the principle of clarity really fast. Comes with an end to end stack. It is how you manage the data, it is how you monitor the data, and it's how you analyze the data. So these engineers have been phenomenal and they're doing everything from figuring out, you know, yes, wind tunnels and other things are important. That's, you know, it's ultimately like small, small, small parts of the team thinking about something like aerodynamics, you know, like way more of the team is thinking about, you know, how are these settings affecting, you know, this particular force. So it's pressures, temperatures, voltages, vibration, video data, log data. You know, all the different work people use in engineers, multimodal, you know, like all the different types of angles that you need as an engineer to make a judgment call. But at the end of the day, it's like we want to help them make really good judgment calls and then have a really good record of why. And if they can do that really fast, we've kind of succeeded in the partnership.
- [88:14]
John
You mentioned terabytes of data coming off the car. What's the telemetry like? How is that actually, Are they connected to WI fi? How do you get the data off the car while it's on the track?
- [88:25]
Jordy
Oh, man, that is a fun, complex thing. Okay, so every race league actually just has a lot of regulation here. So like NASCAR, you can't pull any data off the track. F1 has like a mesh network where they are just ripping streams all day long. Huge, really high data rates. Like all the things. Sports car racing is actually like a really interesting middle ground here where they do have telemetry coming off the car that race engineers are sitting in. Double decker floor, fold out pit stations and stuff.
- [88:59]
John
Oh, yeah.
- [88:59]
Jordy
With everything around them.
- [89:00]
John
It's like they're monitoring situation.
- [89:02]
Tyler
Monitoring the situation.
- [89:03]
John
Situation monitors. We love it. It's.
- [89:05]
Jordy
It's the epitome.
- [89:06]
John
Yeah.
- [89:06]
Jordy
And yeah. So they, they'll have data come off the car. But then the really interesting part is like, it can't be that high rate of data. They are only allowed to bring very specific sources.
- [89:14]
John
Yeah.
- [89:14]
Jordy
And then every time it comes in for a pit stop.
- [89:16]
John
Yeah.
- [89:17]
Jordy
They'll do things like they put an umbilical into the car and that is like actually how they have a secure communications line with the driver.
- [89:23]
John
Okay.
- [89:24]
Jordy
The rest of the race, everyone can listen to everyone else.
- [89:26]
John
Oh, no. But if you want to, if you.
- [89:28]
Jordy
Want to give your driver a little.
- [89:29]
John
Edge, plug in head and then.
- [89:32]
Jordy
Amen.
- [89:34]
Russ
And.
- [89:35]
Jordy
And then if you want to get the high, the high volume data off, there's a technician that goes in and like, you know, pulls out a data stick and puts in a new data stick and all that starts go. Getting processed in nominal and another tool. So that's the, that's the fun.
- [89:48]
John
That's amazing. Well, good luck to everyone. Thank you so much for taking some time out of a busy day to come chat with us.
- [89:53]
Tyler
Yeah. So many, so many more questions. This was awes.
- [89:57]
Jordy
My only ask is, please, I need you to. If you don't have a team in imsa, I need you to pledge allegiance to the yellow Corvette.
- [90:04]
John
I'm done.
- [90:05]
Jordy
That's the only thing.
- [90:06]
John
I'm reading your plans for the weekend.
- [90:07]
Jordy
Rolex 24.
- [90:08]
John
We'll watch it. I love an American manufacturer.
- [90:11]
Tyler
He loves. He's. He's got his eye on the. The ZR1.
- [90:14]
John
Yeah.
- [90:14]
Tyler
X already. So it's a good car. Anyway, great stuff. Great hanging, Bryce. Good luck.
- [90:19]
John
Have a good rest of your day. FIN AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to husk to handle your customer support, go to FIN AI. And up next, go Z in the chat.
- [90:32]
Tyler
Forward deployed CEOs. That's the new meta.
- [90:34]
John
I like it. Our Lambda Lighting round continues with Max Sparrow, the. What do we call him? The Slop Janitor. Pangrim Labs. Yeah. Slop Janitor. Pangram Labs. Max, how are you doing? Thank you so much for taking the time to hop on the show. How are you doing?
- [90:49]
Max Sparrow
I'm great. I'm great. Yeah. Just cleaning up slop on X.
- [90:52]
John
It seems like it. When did this project start? I feel like I've been start. I've seen most of the viral stuff in the last few weeks, but have you been building this company for a while? Give us a little bit of the prehistory.
- [91:04]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [91:04]
Max Sparrow
So the company's been around for about two years. We've been building models to detect AI generated content and just building a lot of the research.
- [91:12]
John
Yes.
- [91:13]
Max Sparrow
And trying to be the most accurate in the market. But it wasn't until like end of 2025, December 29th actually was the first day where I launched the Twitter bot and it's really just blown up since then. People are using it on articles, on basically all these long form posts that people are just posting. Slop.
- [91:31]
John
Yep. Online. Are you already monetizing it? Because I imagine you have a ton of attention, ton of people that wind up on the tool. I interact with it mostly through I see the screenshots that people post or I see your post. But are there businesses who have an incentive to partner with you? Are you talking to big platforms, small companies? Have you started? What does the business look like today?
- [91:53]
Tyler
Yeah.
- [91:54]
Max Sparrow
Yeah. So individuals can either sign up for a free account on Pangram, they can get a Chrome extension and check things in the browser, or you can pay $20 a month to get access to a lot more checks. But we also Work with Internet platforms. So one of our biggest customers is Quora. So they send most of their content through Pangram just to understand, like, is it AI generated or not? Because that's against their policy and they want to keep the platform high quality. And so, yeah, we've had a number of API users, a bunch of different Internet platforms, large and small resumes.
- [92:28]
John
People basically like either officially RL ing on you or basically DIY reinforcement. Learning by. Just generate me an essay, go into pangram. It's at 100%, make some changes and remove the EM dashes. Okay. Went down to 70%. Rewrite a couple sentences and just keep iterating until I get it down to zero percent.
- [92:49]
Max Sparrow
People are trying. I think that's part of the fun is that this is such an adversarial space. So part of keeping up with it is just making sure. Yeah. We're robust to these GRPO attacks. And this like rl.
- [93:02]
John
Yeah.
- [93:03]
Max Sparrow
On the model.
- [93:04]
John
Yeah.
- [93:05]
Tyler
Does it make you mad when people are sharing an article on X and it's obviously written by AI, but they're just like, this is the best. This is the most well written essay I've ever studied, I've ever read on this topic.
- [93:18]
John
Changed my life.
- [93:19]
Max Sparrow
This changed my life. Infuriating. And the person probably spent like 15 seconds just typing in chat GPT. Make it really deep, make it really good.
- [93:27]
John
Yeah.
- [93:29]
Jordy
The worst one that I read was.
- [93:30]
John
Yeah, yeah.
- [93:31]
Max Sparrow
Tell us, was this like the one that went viral about the, like, supposed Ubereats or doordash Whistleblower?
- [93:38]
Russ
That's right.
- [93:38]
Max Sparrow
Like, they wrote on Reddit, their entire post was AI generated. They're talking about how, like, you know, the company's so evil and I think it went viral just because people wanted to believe that it's true, even though it's like, obvious slop.
- [93:52]
John
Wait, were you able to clock that as AI just personally or with Pengram? Because when I read it, it didn't jump out to me as AI generated, but there were other flags that just seemed like factually inaccurate or just inconsistencies and, like, logical to me.
- [94:09]
Tyler
It immediately read like fanfiction. It was.
- [94:12]
John
Yes, yes.
- [94:12]
Tyler
I'm on a. I'm in a public library.
- [94:14]
John
Yeah. Like, who does that? Like, you can just post on Reddit anonymously. Like, Reddit is not going to come and, like, arrest you.
- [94:23]
Tyler
I don't know.
- [94:23]
John
Anyway. Yeah. But yeah. How did you clock it personally with the tool? Both. What were you thinking?
- [94:28]
Max Sparrow
Yeah, yeah, I was reading it. I'm like, this reads like a story. This Reads like a story and not like real life. Somebody writing this. And then I checked it with Pangram said 100% AI. I went to the comments and there are already other people who were saying that, you know, this is obviously AI.
- [94:43]
John
Okay, yeah. And then. Yeah. Talk about the impact. Is this an AI safety project? Do you think that there's a societal disaster that comes from AI slop? Is it something we'll adjust to? Is there a white pill, good outcome here? How do you process the philosophical part of your work?
- [95:06]
Max Sparrow
Yeah, so, I mean, I think a lot of the big labs are already doing a great job on the. The internal AI safety side, which is making sure Claude doesn't go out and autonomously decide to kill everybody. But I think there's this application layer, the external AI safety of can people use AI for harm? And I think this is a great harm that people just aren't really thinking or even trying to tackle. I think this threatens the Internet as we know it today. If you're aware of dead Internet theory of just the idea that it's. The Internet is just going to become bots talking to bots, and it's like a ghost town where people can't participate anymore because their voices are drowned out by bots. And I think we're very much at risk of this if we don't have any technology to solve it.
- [95:51]
John
What do you think about the inverse I posted that you could probably drive someone insane by just, quote, tweeting everything that they say with the 100% AI. Pangram screenshot. Because so I write a daily newsletter and I write about 500 words and I always. I never use AI to write it or even proofread it. There's typos in there.
- [96:13]
Tyler
It's.
- [96:14]
John
People still accuse me of using AI and so we're like, maybe we need to live stream me typing it or something. And I don't know, it just doesn't matter. But it is sort of infuriating when you take half an hour, you write out some thoughts and then someone's like, oh, this is AI or share the prompt, even if they're joking. It's like kind of gets under your skin. What do you think about that?
- [96:30]
Max Sparrow
Yeah, no, it's. It's annoying. And I mean, I think that's another reason why like we're building this technology is sure there are other AI detectors out there that have 1% or 5% false positive rate.
- [96:41]
John
Sure.
- [96:41]
Max Sparrow
And so they'll like incorrectly flag a lot of things, even like the Declaration of Independence. And so we so Pangram has a 1 in 10,000 false positive rate. So the goal is we are almost never flagging something incorrectly. If we say it's human, like, we know it's human.
- [96:56]
John
Yeah.
- [96:56]
Tyler
Are you working with any of the big dating apps yet? I can imagine that this is something they'd want and kind of like actual like on, on the user side as you're uploading. Because they want to not have AI generated content because that would create a bad experience for users broadly.
- [97:14]
Max Sparrow
I cannot say. I've heard some like about some issues from people who work in dating apps.
- [97:21]
John
Sure.
- [97:22]
Max Sparrow
And I think the issue is growing.
- [97:25]
John
I heard an interesting story from a former dating app engineer who said that they had bot problems 10 years ago. People would just go and write a python script to just swipe on everyone and just send basic messages. And he said that when they detected bot activity, if they banned them, the botter would just create another account. So what they did was they put them in bot hell, basically where they would only talk to other bots, which is a funny solution because then their system says, hey, I'm still on the app, it's still working. I'm still seeing all the API requests, everything's working. But they're just only interacting with their bots. But you can imagine getting false positive in that and just it being the worst experience. You're like, I didn't meet anyone. Everyone, this app's a bot. So there's a whole bunch of funny new things I do want to ask about. Image generation, image detection that somewhat relates to.
- [98:13]
Tyler
Yeah, yeah. So yeah. What I was trying to get at is like where I assume over time most written content will have been run through some type of model before it's published. Almost like a spell check even. So I'm trying to think about where do you really not want AI content? I don't care if somebody uses Gen AI to make a headshot. Right. Because if they just want a headshot that looks somewhat like them, it's not.
- [98:40]
John
They might go into Photoshop anyway and add some color correction, increase the contrast.
- [98:44]
Tyler
Yeah, it's just pimple or something. Not that big of a deal. But where, where I do think is like the, probably the most pressing issue right now is just like any, anything news related. So if, like, if you're, if you're sharing things that are like news or, or any content that people are using to understand the world, like I could imagine, like are we moving to a world where you'll have to add like a pangram watermark to the to the post. Like, like, is that the kind of behavior that we want? Because like if you, if an AI generated image goes up, 2 million people see it and then six hours later it gets community noted and says like, okay, this is, this was generated by AI. It's too late. Like 2 million people, like, you know, may have thought it was real.
- [99:28]
Max Sparrow
That's a huge problem. And actually like this is happening today. So if, you know, like all the, like the Russian troll farms where they're like posting comments and like news articles, they've basically. Russia has expanded this to basically just use LMS that they fine tune themselves and they've. We've seen news websites come out of Russia that just have 50,000 articles that are completely AI generated. Most of them are like normal news. And then some of them are really pushing the like pro Russia, anti Ukraine stance.
- [100:01]
John
Yeah.
- [100:01]
Max Sparrow
And they're just posing as like random like Oregon local news. And. Yeah, and these are crazy. And they're popping up faster than we can take them.
- [100:14]
Tyler
Yeah. And the White. Didn't the White House. The White House shared an AI generated image.
- [100:17]
John
AI modified image.
- [100:18]
Tyler
Yes, AI modified.
- [100:19]
John
But got community noted on axe. Got quote tweeted. But yeah, I mean it's an increasing issue. What is the state of potential bots on other platforms? It's great that you got the bot working on X, but it seems like we really need it on Facebook. You know, if there's a couch the size of a room that is in the shape of a gorilla, there should be Pangram in the comments saying this is AI generated. So the elderly generation perhaps is protected from slop.
- [100:53]
Max Sparrow
So next up for us is Reddit and LinkedIn. Okay, so I think Reddit, there's a bunch of viral posts that are AI generated. I think people know that they can karma farm an account and then sell it to a bot farm or something. And on LinkedIn, I think it's just funny because people are genuinely posting slop. Like they're not bots, they're just like posting AI slop every day.
- [101:17]
John
Yeah. What is the state of wiring up a bot on a modern social network these days? I feel like a lot of the APIs have closed down a fair amount. Is it something where you need to have a relationship with the business to actually run a useful bot? That I would say as a user, I want this. It's not malicious activity, but you're still getting API access. You could slop yourself if you wanted to to you have the access. So what's involved in actually spinning up a bot? And keeping it online and keeping it posting regularly without hitting rate limits.
- [101:53]
Max Sparrow
So for Twitter it was actually pretty easy. I mean, besides having to pay $200 a month and then if we pass some limit, well, now they have usage based API, sure, but otherwise before this, the next tier up was $5,000 a.
- [102:06]
John
Month, which is absurd.
- [102:08]
Max Sparrow
But I still spoke to somebody else.
- [102:10]
John
Doable for a startup that has funding if you growing like it's not, it's not, it's not a completely prohibitively.
- [102:17]
Max Sparrow
But you can't do that as a hobbyist.
- [102:19]
John
Sure.
- [102:20]
Max Sparrow
But yeah, it was not too bad with X. And then the other platforms seem to be a lot more locked down. So LinkedIn, I've been waiting for API approval for two weeks now. And Reddit kind of same thing. But I mean Reddit seems to be pretty bot friendly, so I think we'll get there eventually. I've never seen a Reply bot on.
- [102:38]
Tyler
LinkedIn, but have you been surprised by conversations with any of the platforms? Because in some ways they just want more content that's engaging. And so there's kind of like this dilemma where they might say like, yeah, we're looking to crack down on, on, you know, fake imagery, but in reality they're like, okay, this is driving engagement. This is not like, you know, it's a, it's, it's like even with X, people have always said like, do they really want to crack down on bots? Or like, do they just say they want to crack down on bots? Because in some ways, like it's just driving notifications for people that might not otherwise be having a lot of activity.
- [103:13]
John
One man's slop is another man's filet mignon.
- [103:16]
Max Sparrow
The LinkedIn Trust and Safety folks seemed so resigned. It seems like they're having such a bad time because in every single text box there's a little like write with AI button. So like in I want to compose a post, I write 20 words and then have it expand it out into like a long essay. Or same with like inmails, they'll AI generate inmails that are customized for the person's profile. And so like they can't actually do anything around like AI slop or using AI as a signal because it's so integrated into the platform at this point and I think to the detriment of the platform, like the quality of content there is so low now it is.
- [103:54]
Tyler
How many words, how many words of text do you actually need to detect if something's AI?
- [103:59]
John
Yeah, I've seen some people tag pangram with like, someone will post like one sentence and it's just like, I don't know, I don't know if it's a hallucination. Hallucination or something, but it's a funny, funny meme.
- [104:09]
Max Sparrow
So our official line is 75 words, but I made it smaller for Twitter because obviously there's so many short posts and typically what is going to happen is just going to say it's human. Unless it's really obviously AI or as an AI language model, comma.
- [104:27]
John
Sure, sure, sure.
- [104:28]
Tyler
Yeah, it almost doesn't really matter because, like, I really want to know if something's AI if it's really long.
- [104:35]
John
Yeah, yeah, totally.
- [104:36]
Tyler
I only want to read this for the most part if I know that somebody put in a lot of effort to actually say something.
- [104:43]
John
And there is the flip side, which is like if someone does a really cool deep research report in one of the LLMs and then they just shared a link to it and they're just like, hey, I was interested in this particular research report. I generated it. You can just click here and read exactly what. What the prompt result was. I might be down because I like reading deep research reports sometimes if I prompt them and I might be interested in what you prompted. The funniest short Pangram request is always. Someone will say, is this article AI? And then Pangram will come back and say, yeah, it's 100% AI. And then someone will say, is the request to call Pangram AI? And Pangram will say, no, it's not. It's human. No, but anyway, so what's next with the business? What's the state of the company? How large is the company? Where do you see this all going?
- [105:36]
Max Sparrow
So far, we're pretty small. We're still seed stage nine people, but since July we've grown 25x in terms of users and number of queries.
- [105:51]
Tyler
There we go. We go. Nothing like that.
- [105:55]
Max Sparrow
We've seen a lot of interest basically in this consumer level interest. Just like I want to know what's slop or not. I. I'm not like a teacher, I'm not a writer. I just want to know that what I'm reading is authentic. And so what's next for us? In my opinion, look forward to a Chrome extension that's like adblock but for slop.
- [106:14]
John
Oh, I like that.
- [106:15]
Max Sparrow
It's going to automatically slop block everything that's slop on your. On the.
- [106:20]
Tyler
Do you own slopornot.com I do not. You should. It's not for sale. Somebody else. Somebody else beat you to it. But.
- [106:30]
John
Well, congratulations on the progress, the virality. I love seeing it. And thanks for all the hard work.
- [106:36]
Tyler
Really, really doing good for the world for sure, in the slop era.
- [106:40]
John
Yeah, thanks so much. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.
- [106:44]
Tyler
Talk soon.
- [106:45]
John
Bye. Let me tell you about Plaid Plaid Powers, the apps you use to spend, save, borrow and invest securely. Connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud and improve lending. Now with AI Next up. Next up.
- [107:00]
Tyler
Actually, we are next.
- [107:02]
John
Pause will be in the restream waiting room.
- [107:04]
Tyler
Still waiting on Russ from Livepo.
- [107:06]
John
In the meantime, we have some massive news. Johnny Carson's former LA estate just listed for $40 million. Little teaser of the mansion section. We will be getting into it later in the show, but the Los Angeles estate that late night TV legend Johnny Carson once called home has hit the market for a dash under 40mil. All proceeds from the sale have been earmarked for three charities. Cedars Sinai's Medical center, the David Geffen foundation, and Share, which supports disabled, abused and neglected children. Compass is sharing the listing. He's a longtime host of the Tonight show and he died in 2005 at age 79. An absolutely legendary talk show host. Big inspiration for me. If you haven't listened to the Johnny Carson episode of Founders, you absolutely should. It's fantastic. Also, we previously reviewed his other house, the Malibu compound that recently hit the market for $110 million.
- [108:06]
Tyler
Still sitting on the market.
- [108:07]
John
So. Originally built in 1950 for Mervyn Leroy, the late film producer and director best known for his work on the wizard of Oz. Have you seen the wizard of Oz?
- [108:17]
Tyler
Yes.
- [108:17]
John
Wow.
- [108:19]
Tyler
But I think I was like forced to watch that in school at some point.
- [108:22]
John
Yeah. The Yellow Brick Road Dorothy. It's toto. It's good. The estate rests. This particular estate rests on 1.5 acres in the prime Eastgate enclave. A gated driveway bolstered by a security booth empties at an expansive motor court with two garages with room for four vehicles. With sprawling stucco and stone accented structure at its center. Offering six bedrooms and 11 bathrooms. It's 9,000 square feet across, single level. It's introduced via a marble clad foyer with access to to an elegant wet bar equipped living room that wraps around to a cozy wood panel den. I like that.
- [108:59]
Tyler
I like the sound of that. You love a wood panel den.
- [109:02]
John
I love wood paneling generally. Ideally, mahogany, the official wood of business.
- [109:07]
Tyler
We need, we need a mahogany sponsor. It's truly huge. Missed opportunity. We've been mahogany's strongest soldiers.
- [109:14]
John
We love mahogany. From there, a spacious living room sports a fireplace and pocketing doors spilling out to a pillared loggia. Loggia, I'm not familiar with that word. While a formal dining room connects to a kitchen with an eat in island and a breakfast nook, A soaring rotunda flows to a posh primary estate which has a fireside sitting area and dual walk in closets and baths.
- [109:37]
Tyler
It has a tennis court of course.
- [109:39]
John
A basement with a wine cellar, detached two story guest house that once housed Carson's office. The amenities are continue outdoors. The manicured grounds host a sun deck, encased pool and spa flanked by an open air cabana with a fireplace as well as a lighted tennis court and a viewing pavilion holding a kitchenette and powder room so you can view the tennis that's played. Per the Wall Street Journal, Carson had to convince Joanna to relocate from the east coast to the west coast. She was truly a New Yorker at her core. So it was hard to move her out to California. The nephew you said.
- [110:13]
Tyler
How about one and a half acres in Bel Air? Will that do it?
- [110:16]
John
Not a bad. Not a bad option. Well, there are some other stories in the mansion section which we should go through. First. Let me tell you about railway. Railway simplifies software deployment, web apps, servers and databases run in one place with scaling, monitoring and security built in.
- [110:35]
Tyler
I loved hanging with Jake yesterday.
- [110:37]
John
He is potentially a Joe Rogan CEO. Fantastic conversationalist. Fantastic the way he breaks things down, tells stories. I really enjoyed that conversation.
- [110:47]
Tyler
He'll be back.
- [110:48]
John
He's on a generational run and congratulations to him again on the good news. So the Call of Duty creator Dave Anthony has a custom Bel Air mansion. It just sold for $22 million. And we will tell you more about this property after our next guest joins because we have Russ from Live Kit in the TVP and ultradome. Welcome to the show. How are you doing, Russ?
- [111:11]
Russ
Yeah. Jordan, how you doing?
- [111:13]
John
Good to see you.
- [111:14]
Russ
Great to be back.
- [111:15]
John
Yeah, thanks so much. First kick us off, give us the news. What happened?
- [111:21]
Russ
Dude, the news life kid is a unicorn.
- [111:31]
John
A $100 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation led by Index Ventures Salesforce Altimeters in red points in and you're now a billion dollar company. How does it feel?
- [111:42]
Russ
Feels amazing.
- [111:43]
John
Is the job finished? Is the job?
- [111:45]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [111:45]
Tyler
Yeah. Overnight True. Overnight success.
- [111:47]
Turin
True.
- [111:47]
John
Overnight success?
- [111:48]
Russ
No, definitely not. It's day zero but yeah, it took 20 years. Pretty incredible.
- [111:53]
John
What were the key growth unlocks the key KPIs. What was the first slide in the deck that got the deal done. Is there a break in the graph or has it just been continual growth and you're ready to take the next step?
- [112:06]
Russ
Yeah, I think it's really been kind of. I think like voice AI has really just started to grow and explode. And, you know, I kind of. I sometimes refer to us as the accidental AI company because we never meant to be an AI company. We were video conferencing, live streaming infrastructure, and then we started to work with OpenAI on ChatGPT voice mode and everything changed at that moment.
- [112:30]
Tyler
That's so true.
- [112:33]
John
What do you see as the key user experience UI features to a great voice mode experience? I deliberately daily drive all of the major LLM platforms now and I'm starting to notice little subtleties about does this one have the ability to go back 15 seconds, forward 15 seconds, make it like a podcast player, more familiar UI, what do you think is the most important for a potential customer to. If they're implementing a voice experience, how much should they make it feel like a podcast versus an avatar that they're interfacing with? What's your feeling on that?
- [113:12]
Russ
I think it depends on the use case. So I think if you were to separate it into two broad buckets, I think that there's like the personal assistance, right, that you kind of talk to as a friend or a companion for those kinds of use cases. I think feeling very human, like, so latency, I think is an important factor across both like B2B use cases and B2C use cases. But I think especially true in the B2C use cases, you're. You kind of expect that an assistant you talk to is going to feel like talking to a human being and have like a level of empathy that is not always necessary in a B2B use case. So for a B2B use case, I'll give you an example. Like if you're trying to do patient intake at a hospital using an AI all up on the phone, like really the goal, the job to be done there is to get on my doctor's calendar, right? It's do you need it to sound like a human or to respond with the absolute lowest latency possible? No, you need it to be reliable. So you need to make sure that it's going to actually, you know, qualify the user calling in, make sure they have insurance, figure out what's their affliction, and then get them onto the doctor's calendar, you know, 99.999% of the time or 100% of the time. And so the reliability of the voice agent is most important for the B2B use cases. And then maybe like the empathy and realism is more critical for, for kind of these B2C use cases.
- [114:39]
John
What are your predictions or keys to success with the new Siri? There's been a bunch of news about Apple did a deal with Google. They got the best model, they got a great model powering it, but there's a lot of work that they need to do on the actual voice experience side. What would your best practices be for Siri V2?
- [115:02]
Russ
Siri V2 I think the two most important things, I think the realism aspect is going to be there. I mean if they're using a model from Google like Gemini Live, their, their kind of voice to voice model is quite good, feels quite realistic. Maybe one area where it could use a bit more, it could use a bit more empathy in some places I think. And they just acquired a company called Hume in the space which has a pretty strong kind of deal.
- [115:33]
John
Yeah, that's right.
- [115:33]
Russ
Yeah, the licensing deal. So they, that, that model has a lot of like emotion and does like sentiment analysis in real time. And so I think, I think that'll be an important unlock for, for Apple as they're using the Google model for, for this new Siri. I think the other thing is just like having access to, you know, the right knowledge and reliability. Like the thing that just kills you with the original version of Siri is it's not reliable. It like can't do half the things and sometimes it does like a web search when you actually just want an answer and it. So, so I think like the reliability of it and making sure it has access to the right tools and can invoke those tools at the right time, I think that's going to be another critical thing. But you know, Apple's pretty incredible when they, when they focus and try to nail an experience. So I think, I think they'll, I think they'll get it done.
- [116:23]
John
One, one interesting thing about Siri is there, there is a woman who voiced Siri. There's like a singular voice. And I think everyone, no matter how much they, they use Siri, if they hear the voice, they're familiar with that identity. How do you think about companies that offer either one singular voice and they just build a brand around it and that is really an embodiment of this particular AI system. They give it a name and a personality and it has one voice versus giving the consumer the option to have multiple voices or even steer the voice over time. With like real time sensitive analysis.
- [116:59]
Russ
Yeah, I think it depends again on the use case. So I think I'm glad you brought this up. So for Apple, for like Siri 2.0, right, we're talking about, we're talking about a digital assistant or a voice assistant that is running at like the scale of the entire world. Right. Like Apple devices are everywhere. And so when you think about a, delivering a great experience at scale like that or at that level of scale, you have to think about kind of how do you meet the user, where they are. So to speak on voices in particular can't just be one voice. I mean like it has to speak different languages. Well, right, that's one thing. It culturally like, you know, you have to think about accents and like some of the paralinguistic cues, you know, if I say or the way that I do, the way that I speak also varies or the way someone speaks varies across cultures as well, varies across languages. There's different customs. And so if you're trying to build a voice assistant that can meet the needs or feel like the right experience at the scale of the entire world, you have to go really deep on kind of all of these different aspects, conversational dynamics. What are the right voices? Do they have the right accents? Do they speak the right languages reliably? All of that stuff matters. And yeah, and so that's, you know, that's something that at Apple scale and scope, they have to solve that for something that's a bit more contained. Like at a hospital in a particular part of the US you may not have the same kind of constraints or requirements.
- [118:33]
Tyler
What's your opportunity in robotics?
- [118:38]
Russ
It's the next big wave. I think that robotics has this 80% overlap with voice AI in that you can think of a humanoid robot, which are a lot of the robots that are getting built now by companies. You're not going to interact with that, that robot with a keyboard. You're going to, you're going to talk to it and it's going to have this additional capability where it's going to have eyes and be able to see you and move in, in response to what you do and your actions. And so you're going to talk to that thing and that's the overlap. But then there's a lot of other new stuff that you have to do. In the robotics use case because it has vision and because it has limited connectivity. So that robot may be out there in the field, it may not always be able to connect to the network. You may need to be able to do things kind of locally or on a local network if connectivity is compromised. So there's like a lot of opportunity to build in the robotics space. It's still a bit earlier than I would say voice AI is now in terms of like how it's scaling up and being adopted. But it's a wave behind voice AI that I think is going to be even bigger than voice AI.
- [119:48]
John
Are you tracking benchmarks around latency? I'm interested to know what you think about the progress to reduce latency in voice interfaces and particularly what the bottlenecks are. Do we need to just distill models down further? Do we need custom silicon. Are there going to be dedicated chips, asics for inferencing voice models? Because I'm not sure if you've seen those Instagram reels where people, people are doing like the human impression of ChatGPT voice mode and they sort of like. And it's, and it's funny, it's a very.
- [120:20]
Tyler
Talk about the guy who's like, I'm lying in front of the train tracks.
- [120:23]
John
Oh no, no, no.
- [120:26]
Tyler
You've probably seen these, you're seeing your product in action. Honestly, it's a great ad for voice.
- [120:32]
John
Mode, but it feels very much like we're almost in like the dial up Internet era of these voice interfaces where there's this like little delay and that's clearly going away. But I'm interested to know technically what needs to happen to remove the delay from voice interfaces.
- [120:49]
Russ
Yeah, so the way to think about it is that there's kind of a bunch of different components to this end to end experience of like I speak, model thinks, model speaks back. Right. And along that kind of path you have the network latency. I'm speaking only the primary components. There's a bunch of little things too in the middle as well. But there's network latency. So getting the voice from me to the machine, wherever it's located. Then there's the process of understanding when am I done speaking? That's called turn detection. When am I done sharing my thoughts? And then the model can now speak back to me or think and then speak back to me. So there's the step of figuring out when is the user done speaking. That introduces some latency, latency. Then there's the actual inference part of it. And it depends on whether you're using a full voice to voice model. So a model that takes in voice directly and spits out voice or whether you're doing a cascade approach where it's. The first model converts it into text. The next model is the LLM. And then the next model is taking the tokens coming out of the LM and turning it back into speech. If it's the kind of the cascaded approach, then you have like three different spots where additional latency can come in, right? Like there's three models here, they all have to run and then they have to pass information between each of those models. So there's another latency or place where latency creeps in. And then when the model finally spits out voice, whether that's from a TTS model or from the, the voice to voice LLM itself, then you have latency of the network where the AI's voice travels over the network and then is played out on my, on my phone. And so it turns out you can actually like shrink the latency in each of these different components. Where are you going to get the biggest bang for the buck? I would say there's two places where you get the biggest bang for the buck. The first one, three places. The first one is that kind of three models or one model. So is it voice going straight into the model and then being processed and then spit out, or are you actually doing this kind of like handoff between three different models? That's the first spot where you're going to get a big reduction in latency. The second place where you'll get a big reduction in latency is on the turn detection piece. So figuring out like, when is the user done speaking? And having the delay be as short as possible between okay, the user's done speaking, let me pipe the data straight into the model, or I'm already streaming it into the model, and then it's deciding when the user's done speaking and has its response ready to go. And then the third place is on queuing. So like you have many, many people that are trying to hit these models at once, they're all using voice mode or etc. At the same time. How do you figure out how to load balance that workload, that demand that users have that speech data that the users are sending to the model? How do you figure out how to make sure that there's a model already waiting and consuming that speech versus making a queue up and wait and then this person goes and gets a response and this person goes. So doing the load balancing across those GPU workloads is another. And then as you mentioned, I think you can get a speed up on the model side from hosting it on better hardware or chips that are dedicated to a particular type of architecture.
- [124:05]
John
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, that's exciting. Are you focused, like, you're raising a lot of money right now. Is this focused on OPEX Capex? Are you going to build your own data centers? Have you, have you confronted like the build vs buy debate internally?
- [124:23]
Russ
Yeah, I think for data centers, I mean, we have really healthy margins now. So there's no, there's no pressure to go and build our own metal yet, but we'll, we'll get there over time. You know, that's something that we've always talked about eventually kind of, kind of fully vertically integrating the stack. But, you know, I think that the capital for us is, is going to be used in two primary ways. I think the first one is that we started our life as like network infrastructure, but it turned and that used to be the product that we sold, even for voice AI companies. But it turns out that like when we had, when we were selling voice network infrastructure, someone would say, well, how do I, how do I like test this model? You know, I built it with your software and now I'm running it on your network. Like, but how do I test it? We're like, well, go over here, use this vendor and figure it out. Like, glue this stuff together. And then they were like, well, how do I deploy it? And we're like, well, use this vendor. And then I go, how do I observe it? And all the data generated which I use Datadog, what do I do here? Well, you can piece it together this way. We kept hearing this over and over and over and then we said, okay, well we're just going to start building out all the pieces. Because right now building a web application is very familiar, very easy, and you usually have one single platform that allows you to build out the entire thing. Right? Like Next JS has kind of become this default. Next JS and Vercel have become like the default platform for building out a web application, but a voice AI application, a robotics application, these things are actually very different from a web application. It's a completely different architecture. At the top of the iceberg, it looks like, oh well, instead of typing and clicking a mouse, now I'm talking and the AI can see me. But just that kind of change at the input layer underneath changes everything about the underlying architecture of how that application is built and all the infrastructure you need to get that thing built. And so what we're doing is we're really building every single piece of that across the entire development life cycle so that you can start with Live Kit from zero, just a dream scale to the moon in production, in reality with Live Kit and you don't really need to like go anywhere else. You can do everything within the platform. And so the first part is just building out this product, right. The surface area of it is much wider than where we started. So that's the first thing for the capital. And then the second thing is, is, you know, really investing in Devrel and some go to market around education, like helping developers understand how can they leverage this platform to accelerate what they're trying to build. You know, it's like lots of sample apps and workshops and things like that, events to make sure that people know that there's this tool that's kind of magical and can accelerate their roadmap and their kind of progress towards the vision of what they're trying to do.
- [127:15]
John
Yeah, makes sense. Well, congratulations again. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us and the whole team. Yeah, have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon.
- [127:24]
Russ
You too. You too. Appreciate it.
- [127:25]
John
Goodbye. Let me tell you about Figma. Figma make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma so outputs look good, feel real and stay connected to how teams build, create code backed prototypes and apps fast. Back to the Rob Report. Call of Duty creator Dave Anthony's custom Bel Air mansion just sold for 20 million. It was down in price. They first listed it 18 months ago for 27 million and subsequently it underwent a number of price drops. He was the pioneering video game writer, director and producer. He offloaded the residence in the posh Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles he acquired 15 years ago. In 2010, he paid $3.5 million for it, did some renovations. Now he has sold it for 22 million. The sprawling brick and limestone home sold to an unidentified buyer, repped by Ron F. Ron Smith and David Berg of compass for 22 million, which is a lot less than the creator of the blockbuster Call of Duty black ops franchise originally wanted. However, it's still a whopping 18 and a half million dollars more than he and his wife paid for an existing 1940s house on the hillside property before raising it and embarking upon a custom rebuild in 20, 2018. So they bought it in. When did they buy it? They bought it 15 years ago and then 18 years go by. Then they do the custom rebuild. Wow. Completed in 2022.
- [128:51]
Tyler
Fantastic.
- [128:52]
John
You're a fan. It's set on a gated and hedged hillside parcel spanning almost three quarters of an acre. The Orendothan designed abode now offers seven bedrooms, eight full baths and two powder rooms. And in roughly 9,000 square feet of H shaped living space across three levels. English country inspired interiors by Marie Carson and ML Designs Sport plastered brick walls and floors clad in wood imported from Germany's Black Forest. Plus smart home and security systems. Standing out on the main level is a fireside living room with a vaulted oak beam ceiling.
- [129:29]
Tyler
John, if you've seen Star wars, you'll love them this room. Have you seen Star Wars?
- [129:33]
John
I have seen Star Wars. Geordie. I've seen all of them multiple times. I am a fan. The kitchen is outfitted with a fossilized stone. Eat in island decor and sub zero appliances. And a windowed breakfast nook with built in banquet seating. While the primary suite has a projector and a retractable 100 foot screen.
- [129:53]
Tyler
Wow.
- [129:54]
John
That is a big TV or projector, a seating area that opens to a balcony and a marble bath anchored by a nickel soaking tub. Lower level features a soundproof movie theater. So they have a hundred inch projector in the master and then you go downstairs and there's a soundproof movie theater. This guy liked media. Makes sense.
- [130:15]
Tyler
Film enjoyer.
- [130:16]
John
Maybe he was playing Call of Duty on these. On the movie theater screen it has cashmere recliners and an entertainment lounge with a bar and acclimatized wine cellar. And upstairs a mirror gym in a dark hued study. We love the dark hued studies here. This is the second one we've found so far. It's also soundproof, has a wet bar and bookshelves concealing a server area that doubles as a panic room. Interesting. Outdoors, the grounds host a tiled zero edge pool with a baja shelf and spa, grilling station, fire pit, conversation area and fountain with lights and jets choreographed to music. Interesting. There's also cobblestone motor court flanking a two car garage. Born in Liverpool, England, Anthony relocated in 2004 to Los Angeles where he worked on Call of Duty, one of the best selling video game franchises of all time with more than half a billion copies sold to date. His breakout came in 2010 with Black Ops, which he directed and wrote. He also wrote and directed the the sequel. He went on to launch the gaming studio Deviation Games which recently closed up shop. As of now, he's reportedly pursuing a new challenge professionally. Well, we'll have to have him on the show and get him get the update what he's doing next. Have you played black ops or were you strictly Modern Warfare? You played black ops. I enjoyed Black ops as well. Tyler, were you a black ops kid?
- [131:34]
Tyler
Yeah.
- [131:34]
Jordy
Black Ops 2.
- [131:35]
John
Black Ops 2 is the one.
- [131:37]
Tyler
Yeah.
- [131:37]
John
I guess Black Ops 3 maybe sort of underrated. I've always been a fan of the single player experiences. I think more than the average. The multiplayer is still like fun.
- [131:45]
Tyler
You mean like zombies or Campaign?
- [131:47]
John
No, Campaign. Campaign. I feel like there was actually one Call of Duty recently.
- [131:51]
Tyler
You would be just a campaign.
- [131:53]
John
I like Campaign. It's very cinematic. It's like a James Bond movie. You know, that meme of you know what Greenland's gonna look like. And it's the. It's from. I think it's from Black Ops 2 where they're on the snowmobiles and they're shooting people. They're going through the forest. That's an iconic scene. I like the big set piece. I like the stories. Yeah. It's not the. Might not be.
- [132:11]
Tyler
That's probably the most memorable campaign moment in any. No, it's definitely no Russian.
- [132:16]
John
Yeah, no Russian.
- [132:17]
Tyler
Yeah. Did you ever play that, Jordy?
- [132:19]
Jordy
Wow.
- [132:20]
Tyler
No. Which version?
- [132:23]
John
It's in Modern Warfare, right?
- [132:26]
Tyler
I actually don't know.
- [132:26]
John
I don't know. I think it's more Warfare.
- [132:28]
Tyler
Yeah.
- [132:28]
John
No Russian is. They go. It was a very controversial scene. That one was super dark because you, you play, you go behind the scenes and you're embedded as a Russian. You're doing like a false flag attack basically. And your job is to like shoot a bunch of people in an airport, which is very aggressive, very controversial, super dark, but certainly memorable, as is Shopify. Shopify, the commerce platform that grows with your business, that lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces.
- [132:59]
Tyler
And now with AI agents, let's head over to Montana.
- [133:02]
John
Okay, we're going to Montana.
- [133:04]
Tyler
The booming mountain town with Montana's most expensive real estate. Once a remote ski outpost, Big sky has transformed into a destination of wealthy home buyers in southwestern Montana. Near Yellowstone national park is Big sky mountain community that emerged around 1973 with the opening of remote ski area Big Sky Resort. Over time, Big sky is transformed from a scattering of residences and businesses into a true town. Lately, the 10 year Big Sky 2025 plan added biz added. Added new world class ski infrastructure. Modern luxury residential resorts are reshaping the property landscape. This is helping push Big sky to the top of the state's price charts with a median listing of 3.05 million in December. Despite this growth, the community keeps an authentic Montana feel. Dressing up still means putting on cowboy boots, jeans, and maybe, just maybe a cowboy hat. Town center is a new, newer commercial and housing hub With a mix of dining, shopping, hotels and recreation. Nearby, the established Meadow Village has a small business area. Let's give it up for small business areas around the country and a residential feel. Together, these two districts have merged into Big Sky's growing downtown Lone Mountain Ranch. This historic guest ranch with a western vibe dates back to to 1915. So before I guess the town actually formed. It's known for antler adorned horn and cantle restaurant.
- [134:31]
John
We gotta give tips to folks who are heading out to Big Sky. There are memberships that you must obtain. Big sky has three exclusive ski in, ski out, private residential clubs. You got the Yellowstone Club, founded in the 1990s, offers classic timber aesthetics, private ski terrain and a Tom Wescop designed golf course. In addition to a variety of housing options. Montaj Big Sky Resort opened in 2021 and is within Big Sky's Spanish Peaks community, which you mentioned. It has 139 room hotel and private residences. Ownership provides an opportunity to join Spanish Peaks Mountain Club. And then there is the one and only Moonlight Basin Resort on the grounds of the Moonlight Basin Club.
- [135:18]
Tyler
Yeah, this just opened. This is great. I have two friends there right now. It looks, it looks incredible. And they have homes. Montaj is set up where I think it's only fractional for their residences. Whereas Moonlight Basin, the one and only, you can actually buy entire homes. The business model of just buying a bunch of land for cheap and then building a bunch of homes and selling them, it really is sort of like.
- [135:44]
John
A Montana forever environment. You know, Silicon Valley talks a big game about like building new cities.
- [135:49]
Tyler
California forever.
- [135:50]
John
Head out to Montana and they're like, yeah, we built three of these like just recently. We built like whole cities. Ski season is obviously the big headliner. Big Sky's calendar is actually a tale of two high energy peaks. Winter at the ski resort, spanning 5,850 acres and one of the largest in the US is the undisputed king. But in the summer, the Big Sky PBR claims the throne as the premier event. It brings together the world's elite bull riders to an outdoor arena in Town Center. Pairing the raw grit of professional bull riding with pyrotechnics and mountaintop sunsets. We got some advice for the buyer. The majority of the full time residents typically live in the vicinity of Meadow Village or Town center where there are more condominiums. A real estate broker says within a quarter mile outside downtown there are single family homes part time and second home residents and on the other hand often buy in the mountains where there is ski Access. Bullis suggests keeping an open mind. Some prospective buyers initially want a single family residence, she says, but even those who thought they needed a four or five bedroom house may be swayed by a well designed condo aesthetic or the convenience of being able to easily lock up and rent out the unit.
- [137:04]
Tyler
Alex Waters, who we were with on Sunday with Paul, he is running the racing program out at Willow Springs. He's setting up a new members club in Bozeman that allows you to buy garages, which means that you will have a primary or not necessarily a primary, but you will have a, a residence on Montana, which means you can get away with not. There was a loophole with. You could set up an LLC in Montana, buy a car and then avoid the 10% sales tax or whatever it is.
- [137:38]
John
The old whistling diesel.
- [137:40]
Tyler
But that's been getting cracked down on. It never really was obvious that it was legal at all. I think it wasn't. I think it wasn't it also aesthetically.
- [137:50]
John
It was a little offensive to some people. They said there was sort of a carve out if it was like, oh, you had to do it because of certain regulations, like a certain car couldn't get approved. But there were a lot of people that were like, hey, you bought a $800,000 car. Why can't you just afford to pay the taxes, the sales tax or whatever? Why are you, why are you nickel and diming? Like, can you really afford that Lambo if you can't just put a calculator, California license plate on always had like a little bit of like an aesthetic. Like you're, you're skipping.
- [138:22]
Tyler
Well, some, some people were doing that specifically because their cars wouldn't pass small in California.
- [138:27]
John
Yeah, if they're old or retro, like sort of get a pass. Graphite code review for the age of AI graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.
- [138:38]
Tyler
Did you see Amon is headed to sea?
- [138:42]
John
No way.
- [138:42]
Tyler
Got a video here.
- [138:43]
John
Okay, let's play it.
- [138:44]
Tyler
Pull up this video. Amon at sea. They're calling it a philosophy.
- [138:49]
John
Is it a. It's a boat. It's a cruise ship. Let's play.
- [138:53]
Tyler
This.
- [138:55]
John
Looks nice. Got a nice big bedroom. This is on a boat. Is this AI slob? Is this AI or CGI or is this real? Now we need to know. Let's go to the comments. I, I honestly thought that goat was in the video. That did fool me. The horse. That is a big boat.
- [139:20]
Tyler
Wow, that's a big boat.
- [139:22]
John
They actually built this thing.
- [139:26]
Tyler
That.
- [139:27]
John
Will this get you?
- [139:28]
Tyler
They're gentrifying cruises, John.
- [139:31]
John
Incredibly I. Absolutely incredible. You truly nailed it.
- [139:34]
Max Sparrow
Wow.
- [139:35]
John
The comments, adoring people love it. Amangatti is the embodiment of space and seclusion. Comprising just 47 spacious suites, the yacht is imbued with the same quiet elegance as Amman's sanctuaries on land with unparalleled surface from the onboard team attuned to.
- [139:55]
Tyler
So it's a big yacht, John, but it's a lot of people. Yeah, you're looking at. But hanging out with like it's over 100 people with the staff, I would assume you got 47 suites, couple people per suite and then staff. That's a lot of people to be on on a boat. I'm sure it'll be an amazing experience. Are you, are you signing up?
- [140:14]
John
I would, I've been anti cruise for a very long time. I, I think that there might be an over rotation against cruise culture. It's been, it's been degraded in many ways. Where many cruise ships the aesthetics are very like, okay, you're just basically drinking, gambling the whole time and it's sort of like boring and bland and it's certainly not the correct cultural way to visit a country. Like if you're just like, yeah, I've been to France. No, I didn't go on land, I was just on this boat drinking and gambling the whole time. It's a little bit, it's a little bit. It feels uncultured sometimes. But I think that certain cruise ships might offer specific things that people might enjoy. Depends on, depends on what you're going for and what the community will be like on the boat, what the goals are. Who knows, maybe it's all slot machines on the Amman.
- [141:11]
Tyler
I stayed in Montenegro for a couple weeks once and it was so funny because you'd just be in like the most quaint little village like by the sea. There's tiny little boats out, it's totally idyllic. And then just like this massive cruise ship would just like roll into the port of this tiny town and it would kind of, it would kind of kill the vibe.
- [141:31]
John
I like the smaller boats. I like a catamaran, something you can scuba dive on.
- [141:35]
Tyler
I guess like my, I guess like my big question with the Amman cruise is like if you're staying at Emon, it's probably think like 50k for the week for a room especially during peak season and so assume and like renting like a pretty nice yacht with a full staff that's private is like probably.
- [142:00]
John
It'S around the same.
- [142:02]
Tyler
Yeah, potentially like slightly more. But I'm not sold that this is going to be that great of a trade.
- [142:09]
John
Well, so the thing, especially if you're.
- [142:11]
Tyler
Going with friends, you're just like, do you want to go on the Amman. Do you want to go on the Amman boat?
- [142:16]
John
Yeah.
- [142:16]
Tyler
And you've got, you're sharing it with a hundred other people or do you and like friends want to like your own boat?
- [142:23]
John
You might like hanging out with other random people that are there at the, on the Amman boat. Like there might be serendipity that comes from the community that might be.
- [142:30]
Tyler
I've met some cool, I've met some cool people. What if you get like a hundred of your boys? Yeah, just load the whole thing.
- [142:36]
John
Yeah, yeah, maybe like 200. Pack them four in each suite. You know, you take the mattress off the bed and then half the dudes sleep on the box spring and then half the dudes sleep.
- [142:47]
Tyler
That would be, that would be such a funny bit to run on the Emman.
- [142:50]
John
Yes.
- [142:50]
Tyler
Is basically pick the most, like, figure out like what is like the least desirable dates like next year for cruising in general. And then all of your friends book it at the same time. It's like a offset.
- [143:01]
John
Yeah, that would be good. But yeah, I mean there's nothing wrong.
- [143:05]
Tyler
But even then at that point you're sweet. How it would be cooler to rent.
- [143:08]
John
Like a crew in there.
- [143:10]
Tyler
It would be cooler to rent 10 yachts with your friends all at the same time and then just like park them and hang out.
- [143:16]
John
I like the idea of just smuggling as many of your boys into one room as possible. Sir, you selected just two guests. Why are there 14 dudes in your room?
- [143:27]
Tyler
Why do you have 30 sets of.
- [143:29]
John
Seventh cot to add to your, to your room, sir? What's going on? Like, don't worry about it.
- [143:36]
Tyler
Yeah. The other thing with, with the Mon is the most like first world problem ever. But like some of the menus are just like so, you know, makes sense. But like so focused on like sushi, so raw fish, heavy.
- [143:51]
John
Sure.
- [143:52]
Tyler
That at some point you're like, I need to venture out like by like day five.
- [143:58]
John
I think is the actual value prop with the Aman is that you're potentially reducing the standard deviation or the variable experience. Because if you're chartering something privately and you're getting a private boat, you might have an amazing captain or you might have a mediocre captain. You kind of got to figure out the reviews and process that. And then, oh, the chef, how are they doing? And then all the crew Are they all good? Whereas Aman, you kind of know that there's like a standard that's being held within that group and that everyone will be trained to the same standard. That there will be an organization that's maintaining some sort of base level of experience. And so I don't know. Anyway, 11 labs build intelligent real time conversational agents reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs. We had some breaking news yesterday. Caroline Ellison has been released from federal custody. She of course was involved in the FTX drama that erupted a few years ago. She's out. And Martin Shkreli quote, tweeted us into the oblivion ratio, ratioed us by changing our changing. He didn't even use Nano Banana Pro. He just scribbled all over our trading card and said snitch.
- [145:09]
Tyler
Honestly, it worked. Yeah, I did. I was thinking like that felt very fast.
- [145:14]
John
It does feel fast. It does feel fast. But I'm excited to see what she does next. Will she build something? You know, we've seen some other folks get out and go on to redemption and we will see, hopefully at some point she tells her story. It'll be interesting to see her side of it. Maybe she has convincing arguments.
- [145:33]
Tyler
I heard she wrote a book.
- [145:35]
Jordy
Really?
- [145:35]
Tyler
There was some leaked. I don't know how true it is, but apparently she was writing. Okay, well, Jay Yarrow is sharing. Joe was highlighting intel sold off after earnings yesterday and Jay is particularly disappointed because he says I'm a US citizen and our sovereign wealth fund owns this one.
- [145:58]
John
Yeah, bad day, Bad day.
- [146:00]
Tyler
We all lost something today.
- [146:02]
John
Bad day to be a, to be a uss.
- [146:04]
Tyler
And should we talk about the news.
- [146:09]
John
On intel really quickly? Intel post loss after spending increase swung to a loss for the fourth quarter on Thursday and forecast further losses in the first quarter as the company spends heavily to ramp up production of its latest chips. Company reported a net loss of $333 million for the last three months of the year and analysts were expecting them only to lose 294 million. So they lost more than expected. Revenue was 13.7 billion and a year ago it was 14.3. So revenue is declining, losses are expanding. It's a bunch of bad news. Shares fell 6.7% in after hours trading. The CEO Lip Bhutan said our priorities are clear. Sharpen execution. Reinvigorate. Reinvigorate and engineering excellence and fully capitalize on the vast opportunity AI presents across all of our businesses. The CFO said industry wide support supply shortages were a factor weighing on results and said the problem would Worsen in the first quarter or 2026 before starting to ease in the spring. Well, I'm rooting for Lip Bhutan. I'm rooting for folks over at Intel. I'm rooting for the, the American taxpayer who owns a little bit of Intel. So good luck to all of them. Let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent. Secure any agent with Okta.
- [147:37]
Tyler
Well said, John. We should talk about this out of Home campaign.
- [147:41]
John
OpenAI has purchased a ton of billboards. They have hit San Francisco. We got a whole bunch of folks, Clay, Valfos, decagon, Unified gtm and Christina, of course from Vanta is sitting there on the billboard. I like the aesthetic, the black and white, the big, there's a lot of white space in the design. It's not too cropped in. I think they executed these billboards very well and it's fun. OpenAI is such a. It's easy to collapse it into. It's just an app on your phone. It's a singular business. But they do have a lot of partners all over the startup ecosystem and they are paying tribute to them with this out of home campaign.
- [148:25]
Tyler
I like to think about the 10 people left in San Francisco that have never heard of AI or OpenAI or ChatGPT and they're just very confused walking around looking at these nice pictures. It really is for the builders.
- [148:40]
John
It is another example example of San Francisco billboards being very insular. Insider jokes like, you know, there aren't that many people in many cities that would be able to identify all these founders by name or know these companies even, especially at the size they put there. They didn't even put taglines, they just put this person's name. Building this company. You have to know it's an if you know, you know, campaign. But I think there's a lot of people in San Francisco that do in fact know. So congratulations to everyone that is sporting their fits on a billboard in San Francisco. Now on AI's dime.
- [149:15]
Tyler
Let's head over to Faye Lee.
- [149:17]
John
Yes.
- [149:17]
Tyler
According to Natasha at Bloomberg, she's in the fundraising market with talks early talks, advanced talks, we're not sure, but their talks to raise 500 million at 5 billion. I do think when you think about the leverage that founders like Fei, Fei Li have to be going out and raising this much money this early and just still being like, sorry, the most I can give up is 10%. It's like they all want to do these 10% or less.
- [149:45]
John
She deserves the goat sound effect. She deserves the goat on the screen.
- [149:49]
Tyler
She's a true goat on the screen. We got a goat on the screen.
- [149:53]
John
Former TVPN guest. Very happy to have chatted with her. Her company, World Labs, has been posting some very interesting demos. Obviously there was that box that you could see a virtual 3D world inside that was very cool. And the way she talks about it is funny because it makes me feel like she's a gamer. And now I just want to get on Rust with her and experience whatever game she plays because she's sort of becoming an important player in the future of video games, potentially the future of gaming, the future of the metaverse. And I wonder if she has any favorites or has dabbled on COD late at night on voice chat, screaming at.
- [150:38]
Tyler
People, what's going on with so Green Oaks Altimeter have initiated a trade dispute with the government of South Korea. They're suing South Korea of unlawfully attacking equal E commerce giant Coupang. Coupang. Yeah. I think Neil went into detail on their investment in Coupang on invest. Like the best.
- [151:02]
John
Yes, yes.
- [151:03]
Tyler
It's a great episode.
- [151:04]
John
It feels rare to have the venture firms be doing this suit. The lawsuit or to initiate the trade dispute is interesting, like where. Where this lawsuit is sitting because typically, you know, if you, if you back some company and then they get into dispute with the local government, the company is the one that's sending their lawyers. But in this case, it is Green Oaks and Altimeter. But people are coming out in force supporting Neil Mehta. Gary Tan said, neil Mehta is who you want by your side when it gets real. Not a lot of investors would go up against a sovereign to defend a founder. South Korea's government is about to find out that Americans don't take well to being bullied. And Brad Gerstner gets in the replies with the American flag and the salute. Let me tell you about Cognition. They are the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team, for sure.
- [151:58]
Tyler
Substack.
- [151:59]
John
What's going on with Substack?
- [152:00]
Tyler
They're going into television.
- [152:01]
John
They're going into television.
- [152:03]
Tyler
They're taking on big tv. Big tv, they say. According to Max, they're launching Substack TV app on Apple, Apple TV and Google tv. Users will be able to watch video posts and Substack live streams. I think this is a. So much of Substack's opportunity right now is just that X is rolled into XAI and is like not operating. You Know as like a pure play, standalone company. Yeah. And so, yeah, Substack has been making.
- [152:31]
John
The most, has been definitely ramping up the video functionality. We've done some live stream streams there. There's a lot of opportunity and it's a very interesting community. I think that's the strongest thing about Substack is just that it's a very high signal place. Like if you were, you know, the Substack experience is not scrolling random posts, random creators. But I feel very confident about if Substack were to serve me a random piece of content that was doing well across the Substack network, I would enjoy it. Because the creators that choose to be on Substack, there are just so few.
- [153:06]
Tyler
Yeah. You could see a new kind of like we were talking about Vimeo earlier, the dynamic that you said between Vimeo and YouTube, where Vimeo was like a super intentional place, you can see something emerging again where like Vimeo is like maybe or sorry, substack TV is like a somewhat more intent, intentional version of YouTube just because it is like based on like your actual audience. Less around just like raw discoverability. Now logging onto the Substack TV app and seeing exactly content just from the people.
- [153:37]
John
And also with Substack, if you're trying to create a signal on a piece of content, the fact that people pay is really, really high signal. It's hard to clickbait someone all the way to putting their credit card down and being like, I support this creator and I'm willing to pay five or ten dollars a month for who knows how long. And so that just feels like a really, really strong signal to pull across the network. If you're surfacing things, it's like, yes, this person isn't just good at clickbait. They're not just good at driving traffic. They're not just good at thumbnails and titles and hooks. They are good at creating such a response from their community that the community puts down their credit cards. And in the case of like Emily Sundberg at Feed Me, maybe they pay more than they have to because people really do enjoy the relationship they're having with the creator. And so Subject has been very, very unique in that. Anyway, there are always more posts.
- [154:38]
Tyler
Did you see these people clearly have not read Rocco's Basilisk.
- [154:44]
John
Yes. What did they say?
- [154:45]
Tyler
They're tearing up the Waymos in sf.
- [154:47]
John
That's not good news.
- [154:49]
Tyler
I don't want this video here.
- [154:50]
John
They're really jumping on this. This is a new one because Waymos.
- [154:53]
Tyler
Have been getting stomped out this Is a new two words I haven't said put together before.
- [154:58]
John
They're really breaking the windshield. Wow, what is this? Did the Waymo drive through a particular protest? Did these people just. Do these people just descend upon a random Waymo? And also like, this is a crime, this is property.
- [155:12]
Tyler
What would your mother say?
- [155:14]
John
Yeah, also I'm just thinking about like the Waymos aren't cheap. You're gonna be hit with like a $500,000 bill, even if you just have to pay for repairing the Waymo. Very, very odd. But of course people are calling to give the Waymos weapons and people, that is the rallying cry of tech. I don't think Google will be doing that anytime soon. I think there were other ways to solve this, but it is terrifying if.
- [155:37]
Tyler
The bird and Lyme, the bird CEO, if he was looking at this, would be having a little bit of ptsd. You remember bird graveyard? That account.
- [155:47]
John
Yes, yes, yes. The autonomous technology really needs to get put through the wringer. Although a lot of, I mean the New York City bikes seem to have been, you know, made it through the whole destruction phase and seem to to be continuing to exist at least. Anyway, what else? Sam Sheffer had a post here that I wanted to read through. He said, I'm waiting for bangers to post. The Angers account on X apparently has not been posting very often. He's waiting for the Tesla Roadster. He wants another starship launch from SpaceX, he wants Apple's folding iPhone and he wants Daft Punk to be resurrected. I thought it was a good list. I think the another starship launch from SpaceX that's like for sure going to happen. Apple's folding phone. Maybe next year. I don't know. We'll have to talk to Mark Gurman about it, but it seems like it's coming. Certainly working on it. The Tesla Roadster that might be a ways away. That feels like that project has been fully mothballed in favor of other things like Optimus and data centers in space and whatnot. But I would would still love a Tesla Roadster. There's still something. It is remarkable how few electric sports cars there have been. Obviously there's the hypercars like the Rimac Nevera and the. What is it? The Ferrari. There's a few other like hypercars in the electric world that are like a million plus.
- [157:12]
Tyler
Ferrari has like this really weird.
- [157:14]
John
It's a Pininfarina Battista. The Batista is oh, I think over a million dollars in fully electric and has not been met with positive reviews from the car community. But if you put that level of performance in something that costs $200,000, it is a different equation. And I mean you take the cybertruck's aesthetics and you take those type of design risks and if it's low volume, you could at least create something that's curious to see on the street. And a halo car would be. Would be fun. I'm excited for that.
- [157:48]
Tyler
Anyway, funny, funny story out of from Semaphore Liz Hoffman writes an entrepreneur's 13 hours in Davos jail the food was phenomenal. Sebastian Heinemann's stint as a suspected terrorist started in the most Davos way possible. Hunting for something to eat. The 31 year old entrepreneur and first time World Economic Forum attendee was scouting for a salmon roll at a party hosted by Digital Life Design. Tuesday night at the Grand Hotel. He set the prototype of the machine he hopes to sell a verification device to fraud proof money transfers on a pillar. When he came back, it was gone. Hotel security was waiting to tell him the police had some questions. I'm the idiot in this. Heineman, founder of startup Vertico, readily admits it's a black cube with hot glue blobs and wires coming out the sides. He left it unattended in a small town police state. What followed was 13 hours in the custody of the fatigue clad but unfailingly polite Swiss belief. We spent all week thanking in broken German Semaphore reviewed his release ticket from the police which said that Heineman was noticed within WEF 2026 Security Zone with a tech device that seemed suspicious and its use for illegal purposes could not be excluded. And anyways, the view from a Davos jail cell out the Belvedere Hotel security There's this detective, mid-40s Swiss who searches me extremely thorough. They handcuffed me and put me in the back of a BMW. Nice, nice Swiss police riding in style. I meet another officer who has the best English. The jail is right next to the train station. They bring out a fingerprint scanner and the guy tells me I want to see if you're an international spy. I asked for my Lunesta pills because I have insomnia and he said I can't give it to you because I don't know if it's cyanide. Whoa, that's an insane story. We walk into the office and there are two cells. Everything is all painted white, very antiseptic and Swiss. There's a metal bed drilled into the concrete and a toilet sink combination. I love this founder's like, they're just like hustling, trying to get some customer interest and just goes to Davos Jail and is like, well, I may as well make the most of it, try to get story out of this. Anyways, there's a metal bed drilled into the concrete and toilet sink combination. They said it was spring water, so the water was good to drink. The food was phenomenal. Better review than Besson's gonna go to Domino's. They brought it from the hospital, apparently. Chicken lasagna, amazing. The only complaint I have was the smell. The next morning, they bring this guy named Chris, a technical expert. He says, come out here, explain your tech. I do my pitch. I say, look, I'm not a very good hardware engineer, but I'm a great user of AI. I was one of the top users of Cursor last year. I did 43,000 agent runs and generated 25 billion tokens. We opened my machine. Chris and I go line by line through the code. I don't know the language the code was written in because it was written with AI. So Chris actually explained the code to me. They come back and they say, you're free to go. You can take all your stuff with you, but you're banned from Davos between now and 6pm on Friday. I'm going to apply for another hotel badge next year. So anyways, insane story. Don't bring your hardware device that you don't fully understand with a bunch of hot glue in a plastic box. Very, very, very sketchy, but got a good story out of it.
- [161:12]
John
The other interesting takeaway from Davos, Alex Heath summed it up in the Sources news newsletter. He says, after my conversations with AI leaders that this week in Davos, I came away with the impression that the industry has collectively decided to gang up on OpenAI. And so you saw Demis and Dario hanging out, talking about how much they are open to collaboration, open to pausing, if that makes sense, open to working together and Elon on stage. But not a lot of OpenAI love from all the other lab leads leaders. Sort of an interesting dynamic. The Open the anti Open Air alliance. I was also following the Kalshee market on will Elon win his case against OpenAI? The volume's gone up. It's now a 58% chance that Elon wins his case against OpenAI. So, like, we're getting close to 50, 50. The market's pretty stable. Nothing's really moved it significantly one way or another, but I'm sure it'll be moving a ton later once we have more News that comes out. More back and forth, more people sharing facts and figures.
- [162:20]
Tyler
There was some reporting from the New York Times on Kash Patel's demands for a work trip to the uk. A lot of people were getting very angry about this, but I want your reaction, John. So every May, there's a five eyes conference with the head of every intelligence agency. This year it was in the uk Kash Patel is going and the lead up to that, his detail that starts making crazy requests. You can tell me if these are crazy. He's got special requirements on everything. And the Brits are getting pissed. Before the conference, his staff says he's unhappy because he doesn't like meetings in office settings. What he wants is social events. He wants premier soccer, Premier league soccer games.
- [162:59]
John
Now that's deeply un American.
- [163:00]
Tyler
He wants to go jet skiing.
- [163:02]
John
Okay.
- [163:02]
Tyler
He'd like a helicopter tour.
- [163:04]
John
That's fun.
- [163:04]
Tyler
So, yeah, I wanted to ask, is this fair? He wants to go and develop, you know, relationships.
- [163:10]
John
I think you need to go much further. You don't want to ask to go to some soccer match, do some European nonsense. You want to ask for American football match. Bring the NFL over there. Yeah. The super bowl is happening. I want the All Star game played here while I'm in town. Bring the Patriots.
- [163:25]
Tyler
I also think you're, you're excited about helicopters. You're excited about jet skiing. Why not combine the two? Combine the two. What's that like bring them out at the same time. Oh, head down at the lake. Yeah, head down to the lake or the river. Right. And just be zooming around together.
- [163:39]
John
Yeah.
- [163:40]
Tyler
Jumping off, you know, trading Places kind of thing.
- [163:43]
John
What about wingsuiting? Let's get some wingsuiting going. Some bungee jumping. I want to do, you know, that Red Bull jump from space. That's what I want to do on my trip. We're going up the edge of space. Felix Baumgartner. Yeah, I'm jumping out of the weather balloon into the central London.
- [164:01]
Tyler
Yeah, that's a good bit. You're going to tour another country and meet with people and say, like, actually, I want to go to space.
- [164:07]
John
Very high up.
- [164:08]
Tyler
I want to go to space.
- [164:09]
John
I want to go to space. In other news, Eric Jorgensen has announced pre orders for the Book of elon musk. It's 61 days until the launch. David Senra, who got an early copy and it's a, says it's awesome. He highly recommends pre ordering. If you're not familiar with Eric's previous books, he wrote the Almanac of Naval Ravikant, which did sit fantastically well, sold a ton. Jack Butcher is involved in the book of Elon. That should be very fun. And Naval wrote the foreword, which is very cool.
- [164:40]
Tyler
Equipment Chair went public today. IPO YC Winter 15 they say from Missouri to 373 locations nationwide. 7700 team members and 8 billion of fleet under management. They built the operating system. Construction has been missing. Our friend Mitchell from Lead Edge is a big investor in Equipment Share. We're working on getting the CEO on any day now. But congratulations to the entire team and cap table at Equipment shares.
- [165:16]
John
That'll be fun. Well, it's time to plant the bomb and wind down the show. Thank you so much for listening and tuning in today. A lot of fun.
- [165:24]
Tyler
We hope you have an incredible weekend ahead. Only three more sleeps so we're back here. We'll be counting them down.
- [165:32]
John
Leave us five stars on Apple podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for the TVPN Newsletter tvpn.com visit some of our sponsors, look in the description.
- [165:42]
Tyler
Go browse around on their website.
- [165:43]
John
There's a lot of good stuff.
- [165:44]
Tyler
A lot of good stuff. And thank you to our whole team.
- [165:47]
John
Yeah, thank you to the team Tyler.
- [165:48]
Tyler
Bunch of legends.
- [165:50]
John
Legends crew. And we will chat. We will see you on Monday.
- [165:56]
Tyler
Cheers, folks.
- [165:57]
John
Bye. Nice work, brothers. I'll see you on the next one.