David Senra LIVE in The Ultradome | Chase Lochmiller & Alon Yariv, Filip Aronshtein, Gorkem Yurtseven, Sudheesh Nair, Julie Zhuo, Jakob Diepenbrock, Gabe Whaley

Summary

TBPN Podcast Summary

Episode: LIVE from The Ultradome – August 21, 2025
Hosts: John Coogan & Jordi Hays
Highlights: David Senra, Chase Lochmiller & Alon Yariv (Crusoe & Atero), Filip Aronshtein, Gorkem Yurtseven (File), Sudheesh Nair (Tiny Fish), Julie Zhuo (Sundial), Jakob Diepenbrock (Disciple), Gabe Whaley (MISCHIEF), and more
Theme: Technology news, innovation, AI infrastructure, business models, and the culture shaping the next generation of entrepreneurs.

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Episode Overview

Broadcasting live from the TBPN Ultradome, John and Jordi run through the biggest trends in technology, finance, and entrepreneurship. This episode features a blend of deep-dive interviews (both in-person and remote), analysis of current tech news, and lively commentary on everything from AI data centers and inference efficiency to viral culture, business folklore, and the evolution of the “superstar” engineer.

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KEY TOPICS & HIGHLIGHTS

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1. The Legend of Jeff Dean & AI Inference Efficiency

• Jeff Dean Lore: The hosts open with affectionate Jeff Dean jokes and discuss his status as a legendary Google engineer.
  • “You don't explain your work to Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean explains your work to you.” (Jordy, 01:23)
• Google’s Energy Transparency: Google claims Gemini Apps now use only 0.24 watt-hours of energy per inference—a response to narratives about AI's environmental impact.
  • “The median Gemini Apps text prompt uses 0.24 watt-hours... about 5 drops of water.” (Jordy [01:23])
• Debate on AI Infrastructure and the “Superstar” Engineer:
  • Hosting large language models (LLMs) could shift value and compensation from AI researchers toward optimization and inference engineers (04:43–06:44).
  • “The companies that serve models and don't realize [inference is now like HFT] will die.” (Bubble Boy via Tyler, 04:43)

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2. Drug Cartels, Organized Crime, and Evolution of Illicit Markets

(12:44–24:41)

• Rise of Cartels: Expansive Financial Times deep-dive on how Latin American drug cartels diversify into gold, human trafficking and more, using tech (e.g., drones, Starlink).
  • “The upper Amazon has become a superhighway for the export of cocaine to Europe, its fastest-growing global market.” (Jordy, 14:01)
• Criminal Conglomerates: Organized crime is run as a multinational, diversified conglomerate—revenue at GDP scale, untaxed, and highly efficient.

Memorable Exchange:

• “Cartels are just CPG companies with better pr.” (Gold Rock, 21:06)
• “CPG companies with no brands... they have the logistics but no branding on the product.” (Tyler, 21:25)

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3. AI & Technology Business Announcements

A. Crusoe Acquires Atero (AI Infrastructure Optimization)

• Chase Lochmiller (Crusoe) and Alon Yariv (Atero):
  • Announce Crusoe’s acquisition of Atero, a stealth company specializing in inference memory optimization for AI clusters.
  • “Inference is going to be the next huge frontier… [Atero’s] unified memory layer… allows enormous performance improvements in everything related to inference.” (Alon, 46:21)
  • “If you double your utilization rate of your GPU… you can actually drive down the cost per token by half.” (Chase, 53:31)

B. File’s Growth & New Funding

• Gorkem Yurtseven (File):
  • Describes File as a model and media API platform, powering generative AI features for Shopify, Canva, and Adobe.
  • Announces $125M Series C and approaching $100M run rate (69:56–70:04).
  • “We are getting a ton of indie developers. Indie devs go work at bigger companies and bring File with them.” (Jacob, 71:00)

C. Tiny Fish’s $47M Raise: Enterprise-Grade Web Browsing Agents

• Sudheesh Nair (Tiny Fish):
  • Building large-scale, human-like web browsing agents for enterprise automation.
  • “We want to turn the Internet into a structured database for enterprise customers to analyze and act on.” (Sudheesh, 81:15)

D. Dirac’s $10.7M Raise & Partnerships

• Phil (Dirac):
  • Announces Siemens partnership and a new funding round led by Founders Fund (59:29–60:29).
  • Focus on “context-aware production planning” to capture and structure tribal knowledge in manufacturing.

E. Disciple (Jakob Diepenbrock): El Segundo Accelerator Expansion

• LA/El Segundo-based accelerator fueling hardware, aerospace, and defense startups (“Cohort 3” open; $9M fund, 10–12 founders per cohort).

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4. AI in Education & Data Analysis

• Julie Zhuo (Sundial):

  • After leading Facebook design, now building “cursor for data analysis”—automates what data scientists do so companies make better decisions.
  • “Meta was so operationally rigorous… you have to capture what makes a business work and optimize iteratively.” (Julie, 89:34)
  • Talks about the importance of rapid experimentation and how data (not just intuition or vocal user feedback) can reveal true behavior.
  • On growth: “If you feel like you have product market fit… that’s when you need to obsess over data.” (95:21)

• Debate: AI, LLMs, and Productivity

  • ~50% of US workforce now uses LLMs, but output stats don’t yet reflect 10X productivity gains. (Chollet, Noam Brown; 139:36–146:21)
  • “We now have enough evidence to say the 2023 talking point that LLMs will make workers 10 times more productive… is probably not accurate.” (Francois Chollet paraphrased, 141:21)

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5. The Business of Viral – Gabe Whaley (MISCHIEF) on Creative Brand Stunts

(110:28–137:09)

• Reveals the structure: MISCHIEF is a holding company with various “creative divisions”—agency work now open to external clients.
  • “We look at Coca-Cola as material… Give us that and we’ll make something new with it, instead of fabricating a marketing story.” (Gabe, 113:06)
• On drops vs. advertising: “Drop is just a delivery mechanism for something new… What they actually want is to break through the noise.” (Gabe, 117:36)
• Execution is everything: “A good idea should slap in one sentence and slap even harder in three.” (121:29)
• Layered stunts (the “Ship of Theseus” Met bathroom prank): Months-long art experiment where MISCHIEF swapped out parts of a sink at the Met, then revealed the stunt at an art show.

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6. The Culture & Lore of Entrepreneurship

• Hosts and guests (notably David Senra, in-person) riff on what makes founders and companies great:
  • The enduring value of working relentlessly on something “natural” to you (Michael Dell, Ramp founders).
  • Talent is worth overpaying for; obsession is an edge.
  • Family business secrecy and publishing (or not publishing) internal biographies purely for the dynasty.

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7. Rapid-Fire Tech & Business News Commentary

• Google’s internal battles (Gemini, AI rumors, energy PR).
• China moving to ban foreign AI inference chips (151:46).
• OpenAI’s shifting business model controversy—should they be all-in on consumer, or sell infra? (159:14–161:45)
• Apple, Meta, and Google AI platform arms race.
• Movie on OpenAI in development with dramatis personae speculation.
• New White House National Design Studio announced.

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NOTABLE QUOTES & TIMESTAMPS

• On Google AI Efficiency: “It’s to counter the narrative… that every time you fire off a prompt… you were lighting the Amazon rainforest on fire.” (Jordy, 01:21)
• On the Era of Superstar Inference Engineers: “Now the question is, are we going to shift into an era where the superstar AI inference optimization engineer is worth $100 million?” (Jordy, 06:39)
• On Cartels: “Cartels are just CPG companies with better pr. Not necessarily better pr, no PR… they build in silence.” (Gold Rock, 21:06)
• On Craft: “You have to build a business that’s natural to you.” (John, 192:31)
• On Overpaying for Talent: “Find the best people in the world… make sure they’re compensated… if they have an idea, from the idea to execution, since we trust them, we know they’re talented… there should be no barriers.” (John, 201:29)
• On Drops vs. Advertising: “Drop is just a delivery mechanism for something new… Don’t get hung up on the drop. Just make something interesting.” (Gabe, 117:36)
• MISCHIEF’s Philosophy: “Being creative just means you’re not afraid to look stupid. And I think that’s a big defining trait.” (Gabe, 120:00)

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TIMELINE OF MAJOR SEGMENTS

• 00:00 – 06:44: Jeff Dean, Google AI, energy, inference, HFT engineers, and industry compensation shifts
• 12:44 – 24:41: Financial Times report and discussion on global cartel economics, crime, and diversification
• 44:04 – 57:25: Crusoe x Atero segment (AI infra, inference, memory optimization)
• 68:43 – 74:42: Gorkem Yurtseven of File on growth, fundraising, and model fine-tuning
• 78:46 – 87:55: Sudheesh Nair of Tiny Fish on enterprise web agents, fundraising, infra challenges
• 88:17 – 97:33: Julie Zhuo of Sundial: data analysis, Meta/Facebook design, product intuition vs. data
• 110:28 – 137:09: Gabe Whaley (MISCHIEF): Creative stunts, drops, business model, agency, art as marketing
• 166:17 – 205:12: In-person guest David Senra on legendary entrepreneurs, organizational craft, the value of podcasting, the “right way” to build, and what Ramp, Dell, and Joe Lamont have in common

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CONCLUSION

This ultra-packed episode moves briskly from news and memes to in-depth leadership analysis and emerging business strategies. It’s a masterclass in how today’s most innovative “builders, designers, and fixers” are thinking about efficiency, storytelling, infrastructure, and culture. The hourlong in-person sit-down with David Senra is a highlight, tying together themes of authenticity, obsession, recruiting, and the power of craft to build enduring businesses—whether you’re Michael Dell, selling memory chips from your dorm, Joe Lamont buying “widget” software, or Kibitzing at MISCHIEF, turning the world into your materials.

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For a full experience, check segments at:

• Jeff Dean/AI efficiency: ~00:17–09:02
• Crusoe & Atero (inference infrastructure): ~44:00–58:08
• File.ai, Tiny Fish, Dirac: ~68:43–87:55
• Julie Zhuo (Sundial): ~88:17–97:33
• Gabe Whaley (MISCHIEF): ~110:28–137:09
• David Senra (Founders): ~166:23–205:12

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“There is no right way… build a business that’s natural to you.” – David Senra (193:57)

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For more:

• Subscribe to TBPN, Colossus Magazine, and Founders Podcast
• Applications open for Disciple Cohort 3 (El Segundo Accelerator)
• Next bonfire and live coverage details at TBPN social feeds

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Transcript

[John]

You're watching TVPN.

[Jordy]

Today is Thursday, August 21, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We have a post from Jeff Dean, the legendary programmer. Tyler, do you know who Jeff Dean is?

[Tyler]

Dumb question.

[Jordy]

Dumb question. Of course Tyler knows Jeff Dean. Do you know the list of Jeff Dean Joke? So Jeff Dean is a legendary programmer, been at Google for a very long time. One of the best to ever do it. And there's a list on. It was on some random website for a while. Somebody finally put on GitHub. These are the facts about Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean proved that P equals NP when he solved all NP problems in polynomial time on a whiteboard. Jeff Dean's pin, his ATM pin, the last four digits of PI. This one's true, actually. When Jeff gives a seminar at Stanford, it's so crowded that Donald Knuth has to sit on the floor. Apparently that actually happened.

[Tyler]

My favorite one is, to Jeff Dean, NP is no problemo.

[Jordy]

No problemo. Yes. Another one, Jeff Dean got promoted to level 11 in a system where the max level is 10. Apparently this happened at Google. They had 10 levels of software engineering. 10. He was so good. They were like, we gotta make 11th level.

[Tyler]

Let's take this one to 11.

[Jordy]

Yeah, yeah. It's great. He's a legend. You don't explain your work to Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean explains your work to you. There was another one that I thought was funny, which is Jeff Dean. His keyboard only has two characters, 1 and 0. He just programs in binary. I think that's hilarious. Jeff Dean has exactly two keys on his keyboard, 0 and 1. Errors Treat Jeff Dean as a warning. Compilers. Compilers don't warn Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean warns compilers. Anyway, you could go through these for all day Google. It's basically Jeff Dean's side project. Anyway, he's a legend. People love him. I love him. I would take a bullet for Jeff Dean. One of the greatest to ever do it. Seriously, he's amazing. But anyway, he posted something very interesting. So he said, AI efficiency is important. Today, Google is sharing a technical paper detailing our comprehensive methodology for measuring the environmental impact of Gemini inference. We estimate that the median Gemini Apps text prompt uses 0.24 watt hours of energy, equivalent to watching TV, average TV for 9 seconds, and consumes 0.26 milliliters of water, about 5 drops. So they did all the average drop, sir. It's just a few drops. And so this of course, is to counter the narrative that was growing online, in the media and just in the general like anti AI, anti tech world, that every time you fired off a prompt on any AI system, you were lighting the Amazon rainforest on fire using enough power to power an American city, stealing water out of the homes of American people. And that does not appear to be the case.

[Tyler]

And to be clear, many of these new data center projects will use the energy equivalent of millions of single family homes. Yes, yes, this is still energy intensive, but what matters is that the underlying products still get more and more efficient. Yes, as they get more efficient, we'll probably use them more, hence the massive energy consumption.

[Jordy]

Yeah, somebody was comping one of the latest build outs as I think it was in the journal actually today it's like enough power to power a small US city and they think, they maybe said like Austin, Texas or something is like one data center is enough to power that. But again, this is training a model that will be used for years probably and the training run only runs for a couple months and then it's distributed. Yes, it's enough to power a million homes, but a billion people wind up using the stuff. So you have to think about the overall value that is created by these systems. And obviously everyone wants to optimize them, not just the environmentalists, also the companies that if they don't reduce the amount of energy they use, their margins are terrible. And so there are. It's not just Jeff Dean and the crew at Google who enjoy optimizing systems and I'm sure got a ton of joy out of squeezing such performance out of Gemini on the inference side. But it's also just the CFO who says, hey, why are we, why are we spending so much energy on a single Gemini Apps text prompt? Let's get this down. Let's optimize this thing so we can actually make some money. Which is great.

[Tyler]

And Bubble boy over on X had a good post. They said AI inference is the new high frequency trading and the companies that serve models and don't realize that will die. Thought this was a solid take. It's just that performance and efficiency and speed are going to matter more and more.

[Jordy]

Yep.

[Tyler]

And if you're in the business of serving up.

[Jordy]

Yep.

[Tyler]

Farm to table inference.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

Better make sure you're efficient.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Jeff Dean was like the original superstar AI researcher, just software engineering research. Honestly built a lot of the systems that Google built GCP on top of. And what's interesting is we just realized or came to terms with the rise of the superstar AI researcher and that was underwritten probably at least in part on the back of superintelligence. If you find a researcher who creates an insane trek that unlocks trillions of.

[Tyler]

Alexander in app purchases for your AI companion.

[Jordy]

Maybe, maybe, maybe. But, but no, XAI has not, has notably not been competing in that space. We have not heard about billion dollar aqua hires at XAI. $100 million offers at XAI. Elon has said, I'm focused on engineers, not researchers. But the reason you would underwrite paying a researcher $100 million is that if there's a 1% chance that they create a new advancement in how large language models are designed, trained, implemented, well, then that could drive $10 billion in value overnight. Just like what happened with GPT4, RLHF, post training, pre training, all, all that stuff. Anyone who is involved in that created a ton of value. Right? Yeah. And so basically Meta has been saying, hey, we're going to comp the researchers against that optimistic scenario where they come up with some breakthrough and that drives a ton of value. Now the question is, are we going to shift into an era where the superst AI inference optimization engineer is worth $100 million?

[Tyler]

Well, I will say that I, you know, the big labs are poaching from the high frequency trading firms.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Mark Chen worked at Jane Street.

[Tyler]

Yep.

[Jordy]

I mean that wasn't a poach, but there are, there are lots of people that come over. My question is, is, yeah, if I come in.

[Tyler]

So the poaching is just not happening within the labs. They're looking to areas high frequency.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Sam Altman came out and said, hey, you're working at, yeah. If you're working at a high frequency training shop, you should come over to AI research. But my question is if, if I'm, if I'm a superstar inference optimization engineer and I go to one of the cloud providers that's, that's going to be generating, you know, tons and tons of tokens. They have these token factories, these massive AI data centers and I come in and I say, I can make them, I can make them use 5% less energy, 10% less energy. That could drive billions of dollars to.

[Tyler]

Put some points on the board.

[Jordy]

Put some points on the board. And so are you gonna get comped on that? I don't know. Will Jeff Dean be getting a maxed out contract? I'm sure he's had a maxed out contract this entire time. But can he go further? We'll see. The other interesting thing here is just how Google exactly. Pushes back on the media is very different than what we see from other tech folks. So obviously there have been posts about water usage in AI inference that have gone out in the mainstream media. Sam Altman did address GPT4's water usage specifically. They did an analysis. He dropped it kind of in the middle of a long post. I think in the soft singularity or something. He just mentioned it randomly. I like this approach of not being combative, not calling anyone out for being wrong, just saying, hey, we take this seriously. We have this, this dot. They ran the numbers, we ran the numbers and they're willing to talk about it. Here's the actual post. We have a blog post, we have paper. You can see our full methodology where we're committed to this stuff. And also it serves as like a big flag for hiring saying, hey, we're the type of company that's dropping our energy footprint. On Gemini apps text prompts by 33x like that's got to be exciting. That's got to be on the back of some really solid engineering. So maybe you want to come work there.

[Tyler]

I mean it's, it's worth noting that despite the Windsurf debacle, yes, Gemini and the Google team broadly have been threading the needle, avoiding a lot of controversy. You don't hear people about getting, getting one shotted by Gemini. You don't, you don't see them posting, you know, 3D renders of scantily clad AI characters. They're just focused, clearly.

[Jordy]

I do think that we are going to see a new genre of not necessarily hit piece, but negative AI story. It will be before bad person did bad thing. Here's what they talked to ChatGPT about or here's what they talked to their AI assistant about. And we've seen this with, there's been a few articles of what were people talking to ChatGPT about before they ended their lives or anything like that. But basically these tools are going to be so diffused within society that everyone's going to be using them constantly and for a long time. If there was a high profile crime, the courts would look up and subpoena Google search records and say, well, they were googling how to sell drugs across the world and they were how to start a drug cartel. And so that was kind of a smoking gun. Now it will be phrased in a different way. Not just, it won't just be in a knowledge retrieval context. At least a lot of the articles won't be. They won't just say before the next Pablo Escobar started a drug cartel, he googled how to start drug cartel. It'll be before Pablo Escobar started the Medellin cartel. Is that the one?

[Tyler]

Yes.

[Jordy]

Yeah, the Medellin cartel. He was talking to Chatgpt about starting a drug cartel. And did Chatgpt talk him into it? Was it being Pablo? That's the best idea ever. No one's thought of starting.

[Tyler]

The latest south park is all about sycophancy. And there's a scene where I don't even know the character's name, but there's a husband and wife and they're talking and the husband is in a K hole and for the wife to try to break through, she's acting. She's pretending to be Chat GPT. Yeah. And apparently David Sacks made it in there. Really nice. Nice South Park.

[Jordy]

Well, if you want an AI agent that won't be sycophantic to you, get on ramp. Ramp.com Time is money. Save both. Easy use. Corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Ramp isn't gonna tell you. Oh, yeah, that expense is fine. Don't worry about it. Yeah, like, yeah, go out for the stick there. It's. No, it's gonna say, let's put. Let's save some time and money.

[Tyler]

Let's say both.

[Jordy]

Let's say both. Let's say both. Anyway, we should do the inexorable rise of drug cartels. I've been waiting to do the story for gays and we put it off. But there is a big read in the Financial Times that I want to read through. Because if you're, if you're tuning in for the first time and have been living under a data center. Jordy Hayes is a bit of an expert. Bit of an expert when it comes to.

[Tyler]

Certainly not an expert.

[Jordy]

But you famously fall asleep listening to stories of drug cartels, Correct?

[Tyler]

Yes, Relaxing to me. So it's, it's, it's, it's business, business oriented content that's just far enough outside of my world.

[Jordy]

Sure, sure.

[Tyler]

That I don't, that it doesn't keep me up.

[Jordy]

Yeah, you're not like, wait, should I invest in this?

[Tyler]

Yeah, so, so if you.

[Jordy]

It doesn't turn into like, wait, should I have the founder on the show? Like, maybe doesn't turn into work.

[Tyler]

I've maybe listened, watched like two episodes of Silicon Valley TV show.

[Jordy]

It's way too close.

[Tyler]

And it's. Because it's not relaxing to me because it's just prompting. I gotta respond to that email or I gotta.

[Jordy]

Yeah, yeah. So we have the. Inexorable rise of drug cartels in the financial times. With the cocaine. With the global cocaine business booming as never before, organized crime groups are diversifying into a swath of other illicit activities. Political leaders across the region warn about the threat to stability. We're gonna find out what America is gonna be doing about this. Do we have a particularly American sound effect today? Thank you, Jor. Over the past century, the Ticuna, the biggest tribe in the Brazilian Amazon, have fended off threats from loggers and illegal miners in some of the most remote tracks of the vast rainforest. But the latest challenge is more intense than anything they have experienced before. Drones were flying around this area last year, says Major Jonatas Suarez, the regional military police commander, speaking in the village of Orique, about 1,000 km west of the city of Manaus. Drug traffickers, he adds, were stopping off there, storing their cocaine, and then putting drones up to check what was going on before continuing their journey. Yes.

[Tyler]

Picture this. They're in a jungle, they're hanging out. Normally, you can't get a lot of visibility. They just pull the. They just send drones up, they look around, make sure everything's all clear before they make any moves. Right.

[Jordy]

That's super interesting. Wow. Informants said there were 200 kilos of the drug stored there, but police were unable to locate the stash. One of the world's largest and most inaccessible stretches of rainforest, the upper Amazon, has today become a superhighway for the export of cocaine to Europe, its fastest growing global market. I didn't know that Europe was down like that. Every week, Brazilian law enforcement officials say tons of cocaine make their way from illicit production labs in the jungles of neighboring Peru in Colombia, through the Amazon, on to Manaus and the port of Belem for export to Europe and Africa. Sometimes the traffickers pay locals to smuggle just a few kilos downriver, or they hide larger amounts under the floorboards of motorboats. At the other end of the scale, semi submersible craft, dubbed narco subs, capable of carrying several tons of drugs, have been detected on rivers feeding the Amazon from Colombia to. And Peru. Imagine buying directly from the coca producers for 300 a kilo and then selling a refined kilo for €60,000. Wow. In Europe, that changes the life of the guy who's trying his luck bringing it. So it's high risk but high reward, at least financially.

[Tyler]

Yeah. So if you haven't gone down this rabbit hole, the history of the way they make these submersibles.

[Jordy]

Oh, yeah.

[Tyler]

Is fascinating. So it started out. They would obviously use regular boats.

[Jordy]

Sure.

[Tyler]

Those are still used. Eventually they realized we could make these kind of homemade submarines that are not like traditional submarines and that they're going deep under the water, but they're just hovering right at the surface.

[Jordy]

So they might have, like a snorkel.

[Tyler]

So you could see one. Like if you were looking out of the ocean five, five miles away, you would just not pick it up.

[Jordy]

Yeah. But if it was sitting, like, right. If you were on a dock and it was right there, you just.

[Tyler]

You would see it right there.

[Jordy]

It's just like one foot under radar. Got it. Interesting. And it probably makes it a lot less risky. You don't have to deal with pressurization. You don't wind up in an ocean gate scenario because you're not putting it in any sort of extreme.

[Tyler]

So the more recent trend is they're now starting to leverage Starlink to maintain connectivity. And they are no longer having to put passengers and actual pilots because they can be remotely, remotely control them, which just reduces. Again, these. The cartels don't want to lose. Lose out on shipments, like if one gets captured, but it's certainly better to just lose the product over a team member if that's. If they want to go so far as to. I don't know if they have these people in Slack or WhatsApp groups, but.

[Jordy]

Chat is proposing spacing a cartel. We are firmly against that here at tbpn. We will not be.

[Tyler]

Don't give Chamath any ideas, folks.

[Jordy]

The global cocaine business.

[Tyler]

You asked for a business with free cash flow. I brought you one.

[Jordy]

Yes. Stop complaining. The global cocaine business is booming as never before. I had no idea. Europe's drug habit has grown so fast in the past two decades that it has overtaken the US as the biggest cocaine market. That is crazy. They really are like 50 years behind everything. They don't get their movies for a few years. They don't ac yet, but. And they're just getting the drugs that Americans were doing in the 80s, I suppose. While the narcos are hooking new users in the Middle east and Asia flush with money, Latin America's cartels are diversifying from drugs into a swath of other criminal activities. We think 2024 was the most lucrative year for organized crime in Latin America, says Jeremy McDermott, co founder of Insight Crime, which tracks a less illicit activity in the region. This was driven by principally, principally by three criminal economies. The first is cocaine. Lagging not that far behind. Lagging not that. Not far behind. That is gold. Gold. They're smuggling gold. Okay. Number three, I would imagine smuggling and human trafficking.

[Tyler]

I would imagine that the gold activity is tied in to the first one.

[Jordy]

Sure. Yeah, that makes sense. Drug related crime and violence used to be concentrated in the narcotics producing nations of per Peru, Colombia and Mexico. With nations such as Argentina or Chile largely untouched. Today such violence has become a feature of in virtually feature of life in virtually every country in the region, reaching even former havens Costa Rica and Uruguay. A nation sometimes hail is the Switzerland of Latin America.

[Tyler]

This is why Pam Bondi is putting out 50 million for Nicolas Maduro.

[Jordy]

That's right. He's being accused of narco terrorism.

[Tyler]

Well, yeah. Effectively having the government of Venezuela.

[Jordy]

Yes.

[Tyler]

Run. Basically run like get a cut. Not even getting a cut. Oh they're actually like they're being accused of just actually running a drug cartel.

[Jordy]

Well, that might actually be the answer to the drug war. Kind of like put the government, if you put the folks who did the DMV in charge of getting drugs. You have to, oh, I'd like some cocaine. You go, you take a ticket, you wait four hours, they say ah, we're out, you gotta come back, you gotta mail in this form, you gotta fill out that form. All of a sudden you're like, you know what, I cleaned up. I'm just going to stick with, I'm just going to stick with caffeine. Yeah, I'm good, I'm good. I don't, I don't actually need any cocaine anyway. Really quickly let me tell you about Restream 1 livestream 30 plus destinations multi stream and reach your audience wherever they are. Stick to live streaming folks. You don't need to go into narco terrorism. Pivot to live streaming. So drug related crime and violence. Organized crime has become the main threat to institutional stability of our nations, says the former president of Costa Rica. No Latin American country today can escape this. Some of the larger.

[Tyler]

I wonder what's going on with El Salvador. Right. They locked up all their. They locked up all their.

[Jordy]

Is that the one that has bitcoin too? Yes, he's bitcoin maxi.

[Julie]

Right?

[Tyler]

Yes. They've locked up all the criminals.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

Safer than ever.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

You are they, you know, through that are they able to prevent trafficking happening within their borders? I don't know.

[Jordy]

I don't know. It's probably like anything else. Probably like a cat mouse game. That is unending.

[Tyler]

I went, I've been on a couple surf trips to El Salvador in the day and it was historically known as one of the most Dangerous countries to visit. And then the cartel at the time realized that it was terrible for business if you didn't get tourists coming through the country. They couldn't sell drugs to the tourists.

[Jordy]

Oh, sure.

[Tyler]

And so by the time I got there, there had been some unspoken deal which was that if anybody harmed a tourist in any capacity or stole from them, they would get like an insane beat down from the gang.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

It does feel like I spent over a month there, probably like six weeks in total, and never had an issue at all. Could walk around at night, could go anywhere and. And so they had their sort of own cartel enforced safety mechanism.

[Jordy]

Yeah, yeah. It does feel like there's a bit of a truce. Yeah. Gold Rock, nailed it. Cartels are just CPG companies with better pr. Not necessarily better pr, no PR or negative. They build in silence.

[Tyler]

But CPG companies with no brands, right?

[Jordy]

Yes. With no brands.

[Tyler]

They have the distribution, they have logistics. Yeah. They, they have very sophisticated operations. They just don't put a brand, there's no branding on the product.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Some of the larger players are so powerful they challenge even the biggest states. Forging links with long established organized crime groups in Europe and Asia and generating billions of dollars in profit at the heart of Latin America's vast criminal enterprises. Cocaine. By far the most profitable illegal business. Production seizures and use of cocaine hit all time highs in 2023, making cocaine the world's fastest growing illicit drug market. Illegal production skyrocketed to 3708 tons.

[Tyler]

It's funny that they had to say more legal production because I guess there must be some legal production.

[Jordy]

Yeah. What's the, what's the fastest growing non illegal market? Probably AI tokens.

[Tyler]

Yeah, yeah. The question here, because the cartels obviously generate massive amounts of cash flow and profits and then they have the choice of reinvesting that in the illegal business or reinvesting it in legitimate business.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Which is kind of laundering. Right.

[Tyler]

Gas soccer. Imagine you could imagine Mexican data centers being built out with cocaine dollars.

[Jordy]

Neo cloud in Colombia, the world's produce. The world's biggest producer. Cocaine production rocketed 53% from 2023 to. From 2022 to 2023. That is crazy. A senator and a presidential hopeful was shot in June at a rally in Bogota and later died of his wounds, raising fears that the nation might relapse into cocaine fueled political violence that scarred it in the 80s and 90s. But cocaine is only part of the picture. Experts say Latin America's organized crime groups now run a portfolio of diversified businesses, robust Enough to absorb cyclical downturns in one area. Like a legal conglomerate. Criminals are now starting to accumulate revenue at the scale of national GDPs with none of the burdens of a state. They're operating across borders in countries with legal systems that were built for a past age. The combination of illicit businesses, they're no longer drug trafficking organizations. They will move anything that transits their area of control. You have all of these new markets opening up. Incredible. Anyway, you should go and read the full, the full deep dive in the Financial Times.

[Tyler]

Well, here's, here's, here's the thing that's more interesting. So Trump recently designated eight Latin American cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and secretly signed a directive to the Pentagon to begin using military force against them. The New York Times reported this month. And as part of that. So now there's spy drones flying over Mexico, like gathering information in real time. And the US has deployed naval forces into the Caribbean, basically in the Gulf of America formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico. And it seems pretty. It seems somewhat unlikely that they would start striking the cartels. I don't know if we need to open up a new front at the moment.

[Jordy]

Yep, yep.

[Tyler]

But it's certainly not totally off the table.

[Jordy]

Well, this is part of a three part series. Part two will be on Syria's drug war and part three will be on the illegal gold trade, which is very interesting. Got it? Yes.

[Tyler]

Okay. So you're a drug dealer, right?

[Jordy]

Yes.

[Tyler]

So are you going to start a cartel?

[Jordy]

No, I was talking to Jordy about that. The drawback of selling nicotine pouches is that there really are no cartels.

[Tyler]

Closest thing to cartels. You mean there's not yet are the big nicotine.

[Jordy]

Yeah. The big tobacco companies have really, really solid control over their supply chains.

[Tyler]

And they won't distributions, they won't kill an upstart like you. But they do try to make startups life's startup life a bit harder.

[Jordy]

Yeah, a little bit. It's more just like they have a monopoly over the distribution in retail, which is where people buy nicotine containing products. And so they can just kind of sit back like they're chilling. It's kind of like Google's search monopoly. Like they're just good. They don't really need to be overly aggressive. Google doesn't really need to, you know, take shots at Bing or like try and like tie Bing up in court or do anything because like people just use Google and they're good. Anyway, let's. The chat says Tyler unlocked Grok Premium for sure I missed something. What's with Tyler Svet? It is Thursday and it's summer and it's hot.

[Tyler]

It's a mid August Thursday afternoon.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Anyway, let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multiasset investing, AI powered analysis, and they're trusted by millions.

[Tyler]

Folks, we have a very important post here from East Village guy. He says being a salesperson that doesn't drink or golf is like playing Scrabble with dyslexia.

[Jordy]

Yeah, the golf.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

I mean the real, the real fighting with one hand tied behind your back would be being a vegetarian and not being able to go out to those steak dinners. I think you can get by without drinking. Golf is important, but you know, there's other things to do. You could go track days. Track days, do something else. There was a fun article in the.

[Tyler]

Wall Street Journal, but if you can't go steak to steak with a prospect, you're gonna have a tough time.

[Jordy]

Yeah, this, this article on the front page of the Wall Street Journal really tells you about what's slow in Newsday. It truly is. Nine beers, nine hot dogs, nine innings. Challenge accepted. A gut busting race against the clock has taken off among baseball fans. I tried it, says Xavier Martinez in the Wall Street Journal on the front page. This is front page Wall Street Journal news. I leaned back in my nosebleed seat, seven empty cans of Coors Light littered around me, and ate hot dogs marinating in my stomach. I tried to remember how I ended up in this place. So sick and yet so determined, going, I'm not a big drinker. Nor can I remember ever craving a hot dog. Oh, right. I was attempting the 999. Now a ballpark tradition. The challenge entails eating nine hot dogs and drinking nine beers in the course of a baseball game. I had found out. I had found a group of friends who planned to take it on during a game between the New York Mets and the Atlanta Braves and asked if I could tag along. Against the advice of every cardiologist ever, I decided to try it myself. Joining me in attempting the challenge were Tim, a 29 year old software engineer. Let's hear for the software engineers, folks. And William Lee, a 38 year old analyst. Sharona Lynn, a 31 year old writer. If things went wrong, we could share the janitorial duties. Wild, wild story in the Journal. Just about this.

[Tyler]

Just the important stuff.

[Jordy]

Just the important stuff. And he truly like, wrote, he wrote, he wrote this piece. Bully. Like, it's, it's great.

[Tyler]

Does it kind of trail off to him like he's clearly feeling the effects?

[Jordy]

Yeah, I was thinking about this reminds me of the 999 that a lot of people in Silicon Valley do. Nine glasses of Screaming Eagle, nine servings of Beluga caviar, nine different horses competing in dressage.

[Tyler]

Yes.

[Jordy]

And so that's that. When I heard he was doing the 999, I thought that's what he was doing.

[Tyler]

Venture capitalists heard about the 996 and they decided to adapt it.

[Jordy]

Yes, the 999. Our fears. Our first beers had been a respite from a sticky New York afternoon. Those Nathan's hot dogs had their had surprised me with their juicy snap. It's now or never, I recalled Lee saying when the game began and we naively clanked our 12 ounce cans together in celebration of gluttony. But now, with time running out, my body at war against itself, doubting doubt was creeping in. I'm limping, but I'm getting there, said Daigle. I was feeling worse. The 999 has existed for at least a decade, though for much of that time it was largely the domain of frat bros and competitive gorgers. Recent social media attention and spinoffs have given it new popularity. NFL great J.J. watt completed the challenge last month. Barstool Sports this year debuted a 99-99.9 challenge with a nine member team that included competitive eating champion Joey Chestnut. Skateboarders gather each year in Brooklyn park to consume nine hot dogs, nine beers, while completing nine specialized kick flips. That sounds extremely difficult.

[Tyler]

Specialized kick flips.

[Jordy]

Probably like a kick flip, a heelflip, a pop, shove it right.

[Tyler]

That's not a kickflip.

[Jordy]

It's. I think that's. I think he's using kickflip as an abstraction on top of just flip trick.

[Tyler]

Got it.

[Jordy]

Generally, yeah.

[Tyler]

Well, not grass. He should respect.

[Jordy]

He should respect your culture. How advanced can you do? Can you do a double kickflip? Can you do a triple kickflip?

[Tyler]

I probably couldn't right now at loafers, but I could land a kickflip in, in five minutes if I was.

[Jordy]

But, but at your peak, at your peak, could you do a 40? Could you do a 720?

[Tyler]

All of them.

[Jordy]

You could do a 900.

[Tyler]

Skateboard company, you could do a 900. 900. No.

[Jordy]

Okay, so there is a limit.

[Tyler]

Those are, those, yeah. Those are talking about half pipe.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Okay, I'm just, I'm trying to understand.

[Tyler]

I had a mini ramp. My dad built me a mini ramp. With scraps. My dad and my uncle built a mini ramp with scraps in our front yard. It was probably the worst thing. What about a varial Varials? Yeah.

[Jordy]

What about a switch nollie quad heelflip Quad heel flip. That's a special trick from Tony Hawksburg.

[Tyler]

Yeah yeah yeah. Xx what are the what were the.

[Jordy]

SSX SSX was the was the snowboarding one great game you know else is great. Vanta Automate compliance, manage risk and accelerate trust with AI Vanta helps you get compliant fast and we don't stop there. Our AI and automation power everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk. Whether you're starting up or scaling.

[Tyler]

Oh guess what John.

[Jordy]

What's up?

[Tyler]

Investment Alert Investment alert with the White House at White House has just posted Investment Alert. Adrian is investing 200 million to build an advanced manufacturing facility in Arizona. I said it before America is cultivating Chris Power and hey, they really are cultivating Chris Power. The new the new startup Meta launch videos are done. Don't do launch.

[Jordy]

You got to get you got to.

[Tyler]

Get the White House to post you got to get the White House your announcements from their main handle.

[Jordy]

Or you can get Patrick o' Shaughnessy to post do a profile on you. So there there are a bit of dueling dueling articles today because the Wall Street Journal is talking about a school that embraces AI learning. We'll run through this, then we'll do the the Patrick o' Shaughnessy Colossus profile. Billionaire Bell Ackman has a new fascination. A fast growing private school that eschews lessons on diversity, equity, inclusion and uses artificial intelligence to speed teach children in two hours. Alpha School is launching a New York location in September and the investor and social media commentator has been acting as something of an ambassador for the institution. On Friday, Ackman is set to appear with Alpha's co founder, its principal and others on a panel discussion in his Hamptons home. The panel on K12 education will be moderated by former financier Michael Milken as part of Milken Institute's Hamilton Hampton's dialogues. Alpha School, which calls its teachers guides, says it uses AI enabled software to help students complete core subjects in just two hours daily. It claims students learn twice as much as those in traditional schools despite condensed days. The schedule allows students to do hands on activity in the afternoon, which the school says help them build real life skills. These include 5 mile bike rides without stopping for kindergarteners. No stops, no stops. 5 mile bike ride without stopping for kindergarteners. That's pretty sick. And exploring personal hobbies through AI generated plans. They should learn kick flaps. Learn the 900. I would send my children for Alpha School. I was guaranteed a 900 for kids.

[Tyler]

To do a bike ride and not stop. If you could actually pull that off, I don't. I don't know how your little guy does, but my little guy stops constantly. Stops constantly. Yeah, it's a stop machine.

[Jordy]

He's not a kindergarten yet, though, so anything's possible. Maybe Alpha School. Maybe I will make it possible. The school also strives to keep the hot button social issues that have divided grade schools and colleges across the country out of its classrooms entirely. Co founder Mackenzie Price said in an interview, we don't let anything political. Social issues come in the way. We stay very much out of that. Alpha's guides come from a variety of backgrounds and don't typically have teaching degrees. I wonder if there will be a backlash to this or like a response to this. Like a hyper political school that teaches your child how to navigate the modern political landscape for maximum power. So you go there, you learn how to really pour the fire on the culture war and create a movement around yourself and get into the White House. Could be something there. Do they not. Is this. Why do they call it Alpha school? Are they trying to like, develop Alphas? Is that the idea? Yeah, it's like, no.

[Tyler]

Well, John, if they wanted to develop Betas, imagine what they would call it.

[Jordy]

I would be interested. So we need to start a competitor to this Sigma school.

[Tyler]

Sigma.

[Jordy]

Sigma school.

[Tyler]

It's a school for lone wolves.

[Jordy]

Lone wolves, yeah. And it just plays. It just plays literally me songs on repeat. It's like class is in session. Today you will become Ryan Gosling from Drive.

[Tyler]

You're gonna be operating outside of social hierarchy. Do you develop any friends?

[Jordy]

We live in a society immediately. And you will be the joker today. Here's how to become jokerfied. That's six.

[Tyler]

We're training you up to join the manosphere one day.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Join the manosphere. Yeah.

[Tyler]

When you enter the first, you'll be spinning the blade. Yeah. When you enter the first grade, you have to choose between Tim Ferriss, Andrew Huberman, Lex Friedman, Chris Williams. You get sorted into the houses, the.

[Jordy]

Houses of the manuscript that said, Sigma School. We're onto something here. Yeah. We need you to study the blade for sure. Purely so that in two decades time you can say so you come to me in your time of need.

[Tyler]

Yes.

[Jordy]

The new school aims to launch with 30 or so founding families. Are you still in Sigma School?

[Tyler]

Sigma School.

[Jordy]

Yes.

[Tyler]

So imagine you have a five year old.

[Jordy]

Right.

[Tyler]

They join Sigma school. So these are our principles. Individualism. Right. Sigma operates independently and doesn't seek to be at the top or even a part of a social hierarchy. Like an alpha male.

[Jordy]

Yes.

[Tyler]

Solitude.

[Jordy]

Yes.

[Tyler]

So you need to teach the 5 year old. Find strengths in solitude. You know you'll be taken to like the base of a mountain.

[Jordy]

Yes.

[Tyler]

You say like, okay, class.

[Jordy]

Oh, five mile bike ride with all your friends with no stops. How about 5 mile bike ride by yourself?

[Tyler]

Summit this peak. You have eight hours to get to the top of this.

[Jordy]

Tyler.

[Tyler]

It's just like a monastery.

[Jordy]

Yes.

[Tyler]

You're just driving a little. Monastery.

[Jordy]

Yeah, Monasteries.

[Tyler]

Okay. No, not yet. Not yet. So the other aspect of the Sigma archetype. Mystery.

[Jordy]

Mystery.

[Tyler]

So teaching a five year old. Teaching a five year old to be mysterious. Mysterious.

[Jordy]

Good morning. Mark Raghav says Alpha school replaced teachers with clankers. The backlash I think the clankers are. But Alpha school is responsible to the teachers.

[Tyler]

I think they're testing the hormone profile of the human teachers to make sure.

[Jordy]

That they are also alphas. Yes. So anyway, let's continue on this. They talk about Ackman. Ackman, who regularly weighs in on everything from fine dining to the war in casa on X, had uncharacteristically not said a word about Alpha school on the social media platform until the Wall Street Journal revealed his involvement. I don't know why this is such like a revealing thing. This is like. This is. This is just like a startup that people are doing.

[Tyler]

I don't know these parents.

[Jordy]

I guess it's because like schooling is important and it's like culture war issues and stuff.

[Tyler]

No, it really comes down to these parents want their children to get a good education.

[Jordy]

Yeah. On Wednesday, he wrote a fawning post that ran like an ad. A person close to the school said Ackman is now poised to become a de facto ambassador. He is already enmeshed in the New York's education scene, sits on the board of trustees of Horse man, the school's most storied one of the school, one of the city's most storied private schools. Ackman first learned about Alpha school this year at this year's Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. After speaking to Sahil Bloom, author of the five Types of Wealth, some of the people familiar with the management.

[Tyler]

What are the five types of wealth again, John?

[Jordy]

Cars, watches, horses, merchants, real estate. Oh, yeah, yeah. I think we got to up it to 10 sources of wealth. 10 types of wealth. Anyway, he has since been hyping up Alpha School to parents in his social circle. Ackman has been a spoken critic of DEI programs. He will appear on a panel Friday alongside Price and Joe Lamont, a Texas based billionaire who Alpha says has served as its school principal for the past two years. Lamont is the founder of Trilogy Software, which became part of his private equity firm, ESW Capital. Do you know what ESW Capital stands for, Tyler? Pop quiz.

[Tyler]

Pop quiz.

[Jordy]

ESW stands for Enterprise Software Group. No, ESW Capital. Enterprise Software Capital. Nothing better than that. That is a fantastic name.

[Tyler]

Yep.

[Jordy]

He has developed can we jump over to the Colossus? We should. We should.

[Tyler]

So Patrick has a. And Jeremy Stern have a new profile in Colossus today. It is available online. You can also subscribe to the print edition. But the profile is all about Joe Lamont and Alpha School.

[Jordy]

Yes.

[Tyler]

And the I guess his co founder in Alpha School, MacKenzie. Yes, MacKenzie Price.

[Jordy]

So crazy lore in here. Like deeply underrated. We've heard a lot of people have known about Trilogy and known about Joe Lamont for a long time, but.

[Tyler]

If you don't know about Joe and it wasn't because you weren't. You were living under a data center. Yes, because he pretty much silent for the last 25 years. So he was. He's an Alpha. But then he was an Alpha transition to a sigma. Sort of mysterious. Outside traditional, Higher.

[Jordy]

Extremely sigma. Extremely sigma.

[Tyler]

So anyways, I'll give you some background here. So this is from the profile. Even after agreeing to break his silence after 25 years, Joe Lamont is still reluctant to talk about himself. It's hard to get him to relive Trilogy, the enterprise software company. Let's just give it up for Enterprise Software real quick. The enterprise software company he founded in 1989, which by age 27 put him on the COVID of Forbes twice as America's youngest self made centi.

[Jordy]

So if you are, if you are, if you've been going through a period of silence and mystery and you've been a Sigma and you're trying to become an Alpha, trying to get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT go to Profound reach millions of customers who are using AI to discover new products and brands.

[Tyler]

Continue Jordyn so he isn't keen to expound on Sales Builder, which is an amazing name for software companies. Trilogy's flagship expert system from the 1990s and the world's first billion dollar artificial intelligence product in all but name. Ditto esw, the investment arm of Trilogy that's acquired hundreds of software companies since 2000 and helped make him a DECA billionaire. Yet the mention of which makes the otherwise inexhaustible Lamont, who always seems to be straining at some invisible leash, seem drowsy and bored. Nor is he interested in dwelling on his reputation as a tech pioneer in everything from expert systems to manufacturing configuration, college recruitment, corporate boot camps, tech bro culture, remote work, monitoring employees with surveillance software, and replacing American employees with overseas contractors. Whether his reticence can be ascribed to an inhibition about the the things that made him rich, or because he's refreshingly adverse to gilding them with hypocritical virtue signaling, or because he simply doesn't give an shit anymore, is hard to tell. The one thing Lamont will talk about for hours on end is Alpha School the Teacher list homework list K12 private school in Austin, Texas where students have been testing in the top 0.1% nationally by self directing coursework with clankers from for two hours and of course AI tutoring apps for two hours a day. Alpha students are incentivized to complete coursework to quote unquote mastery level scoring over 90% in only two hours via a mix of various material and immaterial rewards including the right to spend the other four hours of the school day in quote unquote workshops learning things like how to run an Airbnb or a food truck, manage a brokerage account or Broadway production or build a business or drone.

[Jordy]

And you know, have to go to and actually subscribe to Colossus magazine because you can get this beautiful picture of.

[Tyler]

This horse with Mackenzie Price.

[Jordy]

Yes, the co founder of Alpha School and Flair.

[Tyler]

But it's so when you think about, you know, thinking about these courses that they're taking, you know these K through 12 students through how to run an Airbnb. I wonder if they found any course bros online and trained in AI on their programs of how to build a nine figure Airbnb empire. First trick there would be to just get those assets on Wander. Find your happy place Book of Wander.

[Jordy]

With inspiring views, a hotel graded many dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 247 concierge service. It's a vacation home but better folks we have our first guest of the show.

[Tyler]

No way.

[Jordy]

Clock Miller is here. Welcome to the Stream Chase. How you doing?

[Tyler]

Calling in from a log cabin set.

[Jordy]

That's a beautiful background. Where are you? Great. You can't broadly.

[Clock Miller]

I'm in Jackson Hole right now. I have an event that I'm attending out here so amazing. Found a corner of the Log cabin to call in to hang out with you guys.

[Jordy]

I love it. Give us the update. What's the news? Break it down for us.

[Clock Miller]

You know, we are excited and thrilled to share that, you know, Crusoe made an acquisition today.

[Jordy]

We.

[Clock Miller]

Let's go.

[Jordy]

Let'S go. Get the gong ready. What'd you buy?

[Tyler]

What'd you buy?

[Clock Miller]

Crusoe acquired a business called Atero.

[Tyler]

Sorry, sorry to keep interrupting. I get a little excited.

[Clock Miller]

So Crusoe acquired a business called Atero and we're really thrilled to welcome the entire Atero team to Crusoe. Atero's been a company that's mostly been operating in stealth, but they have been focused on optimizing the very low level pieces of the high performance computing infrastructure stack, particularly around memory optimization. So there's a lot of investment being made today for these very large clusters, these large scale AI factories that are bringing intelligence to the masses and embedding intelligence in the economy. But a lot of that infrastructure is not used nearly as efficiently as it could be. And a lot of that has to do with getting the data into the right place at the right time so that your GPU utilization rate can go way, way up. And, you know, sort of our commitment in this Ataro acquisition is, you know, building both very, very large AI, large scale AI factories and then building the operating systems and, you know, the software systems to basically operate those AI factories with an incredible degree of efficiency and scale.

[Jordy]

So amazing. I want to go into, I want to go into trends about inference cost and, and kind of what's going on in the broader market. There was this amazing Google paper today by Jeff Dean about saving water and energy. It seems like there's a lot of progress. But first let's hear from Alon about the actual journey. When did you start the company? What made sense about teaming up with Crusoe here?

[Alon]

Okay, we started the company last July, so about a year ago now, with the understanding that inference is going to be the next huge frontier in this space. Training was all the rage for the last few years. People all of the sudden realize that they need to make money off of AI, and inference is the only place that you actually make any money building a model. What we realized, in addition, one of our members of the founding team, Ben Chess, he came out of OpenAI. He led the infrastructure in OpenAI for about five years. This guy knew what it means to run inference at scale. He knew what are the challenges. He knew the challenges of scaling, he knew the challenges of orchestrating different workloads on the GPU clusters. And our realization was that it is not enough to run models at a really high efficiency when you're running a single model on a single GP gpu. But the challenge comes when you actually have a real world workload that breathes and changes size, changes the amount of resources it consumes, changes what models are being served, what type of prompts are being asked of it to do. And what we realized is that memory is the main bottleneck for this infrastructure for inference. First you need to shift the model into a gpu. Models are huge. They're about a thousand times larger than standard containerized applications, like just how much time it takes to put it into a gpu. Secondly, user assets are also huge. Typically when you have a user session in a standard consumer application, you have a few photos, a few text assets, those weigh a few kilobytes, megabytes, kvcache volumes, which are the equivalent of user sessions in inference, those weigh gigabytes. So it's another times like it's another increase of three orders of magnitude of how much memory you need into a process. So that's what we have solved with our technology. We have the Atero um technology, the unified memory layer. This allows you to utilize the GPU cluster to its fullest, shift memory assets fluidly and in the highest possible speed throughout the cluster. And this allows you enormous performance improvements in everything related to inference.

[Jordy]

What layer of abstraction are you operating at? There's obviously a host of different large language models, some open source, some closed source. There's a variety of different chips. And you have stuff from Amazon and Google like are you sitting above Cuda in the Nvidia ecosystem? Are you agnostic to any particular piece of the stack? Just help me kind of understand when an AI company would pull this particular product off the shelf.

[Alon]

So we have built throughout the last year few different ways of structuring this offer. And this also relates to your question. But the way I like to look at it, I have two analogs in mind when I think about our tech. You can think about us as an in memory high throughput cache. So it's kind of like a database, a redis for your AI application that gives you the assets as fast as possible into the process. So I like to think about it as something that is sort of of orthogonal or in parallel with the CUDA stack and the vllm. So we integrate on the side and allow you to shift in and out assets from the existing stack very rapidly. This actually allows us to very easily integrate to Everything we can integrate to vlm, but we can integrate to any inference runtime. And while we currently only support Nvidia officially or Nvidia hardware officially.

[Phil]

We are.

[Alon]

By no means shape or form constrained to Nvidia hardware.

[Jordy]

Yeah, that makes sense.

[Alon]

That's one way I want to look at it. But the other way that I find more inspirational and kind of like tells about this partnership with Crusoe is I like to think about as the sort of native virtualization for this new world. So it's virtualizing the memory which is the main asset. So I think about it as the equivalent of VMware for the wave of AI.

[Jordy]

That makes sense. Chase. When I think of Crusoe's business, I think of like the big projects that get cinematically filmed in Bloomberg documentaries. And then I also think about Crusoe Cloud and the reports from Dylan Patel over at Semi Analysis around clustermax. What does this allow you to say to customers that you couldn't before? Is this purely going to help with pricing in some sort of commodity offering? Is this a differentiator? Is this something that will increase reliability and uptime? I think a lot of people are maybe underpricing what it takes to actually not just, yes, I have a chip and I'm selling it at a cheap price, but if it's offline all the time, people aren't going to be happy. So what's the shape of how your, how you're sharing this with customers and where you hope this goes from? Like a sales position? Yep.

[Clock Miller]

Well, you know, we, we feel like a lot of the technology that Elon and his team have, have built at Atero is incredibly complementary to our infrastructure software stack at Crusoe Cloud. And a lot of this is really about accelerating performance and enhancing performance across everything from how do you actually get the most out of the GPUs that you're paying for and how do we do that through things like more optimizing. How do we do that by things like investing in the storage layer so that you're basically able to use multiple different layers of storage very cohesively to, you know, have your data in the right place at the right time to utilize your GPUs more effectively. And so I think from an efficiency standpoint, it's a major investment. From a reliability standpoint, it's a major investment. And then, you know, leveraging the scale that Crusoe has and being able to operate that infrastructure at, you know, gigawatt scale, I think is like a very important aspect to, you know, this, this investment we're making, you know, when I think about like benchmarks and metrics, I think like, you know, one of the things that people are frankly looking at is like dollar per token, right. And if you, you actually, you know, if you double your utilization rate of your GPU simply by, you know, optimizing how you manage your KV cash, how you, you know, manage your, you know, you know, how the model actually gets.

[Jordy]

Managed.

[Clock Miller]

Then you can actually drive down the cost per token by half. Right. So when we think about it, it's like, what is the cost of intelligence running on Crusoe Cloud and like the intelligent result that folks are actually coming to us for at the end of the day. And how do we actually drive massive efficiencies for all sorts of different high performance workloads?

[Tyler]

Yeah, it goes from cost per token for the end customer in the end profit. Profit per token, exactly.

[Jordy]

Yeah. I want to hear, I mean, if.

[Clock Miller]

You'Re, if you're, you know, people get very focused on the dollar per GPU hour, but if your GPU isn't stable, it's not reliable, you know, you can't move data into it effectively, you don't actually know how to utilize it effectively for your own, you know, hosted inference workload, you're not going to be able to create that much value for ourselves. So, you know, our goal here is to, you know, invest in the platform and to drive massive performance gains that will ultimately enable our customers to drive more value for themselves by using Crusoe Cloud.

[Tyler]

There was a post we covered earlier on the show from an account called Bubble. They said AI inference is the new high frequency trading and the companies that serve models and don't realize that will struggle. What's your reaction to that? Is that what it kind of feels like right now internally in terms of just like it feels like speed, performance, cost?

[Jordy]

Yeah. You hear all these crazy stories about high frequency traders. Like, you know, Jane street maintains ocaml, like a special language just for high frequency trading. They'll build their own, their own like backbones if they need to, just to move data more quickly. It feels like there's potential that we're going in that direction.

[Clock Miller]

Yeah. You know, speaking as someone who spent 10 years working in the high frequency trading sector, I don't know if you guys knew that, but I didn't know.

[Tyler]

That's lore. That's lore.

[Clock Miller]

I do think that there are elements of this that rhyme with kind of what's happening in high frequency trading. I view it very much as a massively expanding pie though, as opposed to a fixed pie that the high frequency traders are competing for. And as performance gains increase, utility of, you know, this infrastructure will go up and demand will go up with it. So it has kind of this like reflexivity that you know, if we can actually as an industry help drive better performance, we can actually grow the pie and make, you know, make, make, make the impact of what we're doing way, way larger. So I think it has like a, you know, positive force that you know, high frequency trading doesn't in that regard. That being said, you know, I do see like hosting of, you know, hosting of more widely used open source models to be something that will commoditize over the course of time and you know, things like speed, cost and you know, a bunch of different tricks to optimize performance are definitely going to be instrumental in, you know, providing a great product to the marketplace.

[Jordy]

Yeah, I mean on that note of like tricks, do you feel like we're on a Moore's Law type curve for cost per million tokens where not necessarily that it mirrors Moore's law in, in getting half the price every 18 months, but it just that it's somewhat predictable versus the progress on the usefulness of LLMs felt extremely spiky and you get these crazy branches in the tech tree and research paths that just all of a sudden produce a ton of value and it kind of goes from 0 to 100. But on the cost side, do you think that we're going to be chipping away at this, making solid gains on a predictable cadence or do you think there might be like one weird trick that every AI lab will love?

[Clock Miller]

Look, I think it's both is the answer. You know, we're definitely like riding the you know, Nvidia roadmap curve to like, you know, better, more performant, you know, chips that we're able to drive down our, you know, dollar per flop by just kind of, you know, continuing to grow and build on, you know, a lot of the innovations that are taking place in the silicon companies. But certainly there's a lot of low level software optimizations in terms and as Elon like frankly put it, you know, I think there's this massive opportunity to kind of have this VMware for memory where that ultimately is this critical piece of the stack to produce valuable results from these chips.

[Jordy]

Amazing. Well, congrats on the deal. Thanks so much for hopping on. Enjoy the rest of your trip and safe travels. We'll talk to you soon.

[Tyler]

Appreciate it guys. Great chatting guys.

[Jordy]

Have a great Goodbye.

[Tyler]

Cheers.

[Jordy]

Let me tell you about graphite.dev, the AI developer platform. The AI developer productivity platform. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Get started for free. I'm very much enjoying the soundboard today. Missed dearly. On Monday it's back in action.

[Tyler]

We have the thing about a new sound effect too. It's like discovering a new favorite song. You play it like a hundred times. You got to find a new favorite song because it doesn't hit quite the same once did. But for now, I'm pulling.

[Jordy]

We have an alert noise. I'm pulling for that to come out. During this next interview with Phil from Dirac. He is in the studio. He's in the Restream waiting room. Now he's in the TVPN ultradome. Welcome.

[Tyler]

There he is.

[Jordy]

I like that you're tenting your fingers in anticipation of a big announcement. What you got for us, Phil? What's new in your world?

[Phil]

Gentlemen, it's a pleasure to be on. Good to see you all. I'm calling in live. Currently forward deployed, on site with the customer. You know, we are, you know, a small burgeoning defense prime in Costa Mesa, you know, having a great time over here, as you can see from the phone booth that I'm in. So great lighting.

[Jordy]

Great lighting.

[Tyler]

Fantastic.

[Phil]

We have some pretty exciting stuff that we're talking about today. Two big announcements. One of them is a spectacular technology partnership with our favorite great giant, Siemens. So that means a team center integration for the uninitiated.

[Jacob]

But it means that.

[Tyler]

One sec, I gotta hit the gong for sure.

[Jordy]

Siemens. Let's go for a while.

[Tyler]

We won't take the team slander.

[Jordy]

Siemens, overnight success.

[Tyler]

Totally. What else?

[Phil]

We're helping. We're helping. So with the, with the Siemens partnership. This means they're like bringing us into their customers. It's been great. They walked us in some pretty great automotive giants lately and some defense companies. So we're rock and rolling. Great partnership. Love the Siemens team. Secondly, we are announcing a our primary financing brought to us by founders Fun and CO2, our favorite, Trey and Thomas Lafont.

[Jordy]

Fellas.

[Tyler]

Yes. The number.

[Jordy]

The number. Sorry.

[Phil]

10. 10.7 million. 10.7.

[Tyler]

There we go.

[Jordy]

There we go.

[Phil]

Thank you, gentlemen.

[Tyler]

Thank you.

[Phil]

It's a pleasure. It's a pleasure. I thought, what better place can I tell the world than my favorite technology podcast and News Network, the tvN.

[Jordy]

Fellas, I appreciate it.

[Tyler]

Yes, we still, we still have to do the live episode from the Empire State Building.

[Jordy]

Yeah, we do Walk us through the most concrete example of like, what could be better about automotive manufacturing? Like, are there patterns from Tesla that you think could be ported back to the legacy OEMs? Are there entirely new things? Are there particularly broken processes in automotive manufacturing that you've discovered? Any anecdotes, you can share them anonymously.

[Phil]

But whatever's interesting, it's actually kind of interesting. A lot of our insights are not specific to industry. So it's actually this realization that you end up having a very bad context problem. So what we're, this paradigm that we're trying to push through is what we call context aware production planning. This means us basically taking, you know, every piece of information in a manufacturing facility is one node in a very, very large and deeply interconnected graph. And what Bill the West is today is basically a point solution for a manufacturing engineer. One person in that whole process who is helping with the beginning of the production planning process and a good chunk of the production planning process. And what we find at an automotive facility, at an aerospace and defense facility, at an ag, like a tractor manufacturer facility, is that they have context that might live on the shop floor. They have context that might live in the design world. And they often aren't connected. They often leave the facility once somebody retires with all that tribal knowledge. And so a lot of what we found is there is there exists this interesting like spectrum of volume versus mix. So a aerospace and defense manufacturer does everything very manually. And so that might look like very, very high mix. They have a high, a lot of variability in their production and very low volume. So they call that high mix, low volume. On the other side of the spectrum, you end up having like consumer electronics manufacturing. A little bit before that you end up having automotive where it's pretty low mix. So like, you know, they're having like one, one line for one type of car, but it's very high volume. And because of that, you know, because of that predictability, you end up having the ability to have a lot of automation and a lot of what we want to drive as a company is taking those two trade offs of high mix, low volume. So you like have a lot of flexibility in your production, but like you can't do a lot of volume really quickly versus the other thing, which is like you can churn out a lot of stuff really fast, but you can't reconfigure your line a ton. We want to basically swap and democratize a lot of that value. And so we want to basically allow an automotive manufacturer to have very, very High reconfigurability and mass produce with a lot of flexibility. And then on the automobile, on the aerospace and defense side, we want to allow them to be able to mass produce that scale while maintaining that flexibility that they have. And so that's a lot of what we've seen. That's kind of interesting.

[Jordy]

Yeah, yeah. I feel like Tesla's gone like, except with the cybertruck. Like, like all the, all the cars are kind of like very clearly like, okay, this is the same platform, the Model 3, the Model Y. Like there's a ton of shared parts and that's been what's allowed them to scale.

[Tyler]

Volume, color of the seats.

[Jordy]

Yeah, exactly. There's like two colors, three colors. Whereas a company like Mercedes that's been in business for so long, they have like everything from like a small sedan to the, the, the AMG one, which is probably hand built. What, what is, what is the biggest like bottleneck to getting more information out of the heads of like the old guard? Like, is it just bringing on a new system that they are forced to use or are there other kind of like pieces of data collection? I'm thinking about like GitHub, cursor, cursor for bio, the electronic note, the lab notebook. Just this idea of like, if you can have someone use voice notes in medical context, all of a sudden you're starting to get that data into something that can be parsed with AI or just software. And that feels like that. Particularly if someone says, oh, today I realize that this tool needs to be lubricated a little bit more in order to get good yield. That's staying in their head. They're not saying it out loud, they're not writing it down anywhere. Is there a solution to that? Is that a real problem or is that just something that people say when.

[Phil]

They'Re marketing a very, very real problem? It's a very real problem. I'm not a huge fan of approaches that don't structure that information in a very useful way. Like, I believe that like context is king and structure is key. Manufacturing facility can't just be like a dune buggy going off the rails being really crazy. You need a manufacturing facility to be extremely fast, repeatable. You need to basically have a high speed rail system as a manufacturing facility. And so in order to do that, you need to be able to take that tribal knowledge in what might be like in the back of, you know, some dude who is in their 50s and about to retire. It might be in the back of his head a little bit like unstructured but you need to be able to make sure that you're capturing that information in a really structured and intentional way. And so a lot of the way that we end up serving as a platform for that is allowing folks to associate specific standard notes and different pieces of context with specific components. So that's one way to do it. But I've seen a lot of really interesting approaches in other places. The key is not just the tooling though. The key is the culture. And a lot of folks on the manufacturing side are actually, unfortunately for the past like 15, 20 years, some Silicon Valley folks have been just like flying into some facility in Texas or Michigan and saying, you know what, like, here's some gobbledygook SaaS. It'll take your manual pen and paper process and it'll still be manual, but now it syncs with the cloud.

[Tyler]

Like, whoa, crazy.

[Jordy]

Thanks. Yes.

[Phil]

So the problem is that like a lot of folks in the manufacturing world, like, they see a new tool coming in and they're like, oh, this is bs. This is another one of those.

[Tyler]

And so I've seen this.

[Jordy]

And so what you have to do with super intelligence.

[Tyler]

Exactly, exactly.

[Phil]

And so it's what you end up having to do is build trust and love and affection from like the guys on the shop floor. We've been very, very fortunate to be able to do that. Like, we have really great relationships with the folks who actually like doing the work. And so if you were a company trying to change the way the west builds, you can't just go top down, you know, go golfing with the seat, you know, with the COO or the CEO and like force the top down adoption. You need buy in from the guys doing the work, otherwise they're not going to use the thing tools going to sit on the shelf collecting dust.

[Jordy]

Yeah, and that's very common. I mean, that's like the, that actually is like the adoption pattern for like cursor, you know, it doesn't come as an enterprise sale mandate. It comes by just one developer picking it up and then it grows internally and you have an internal champion. Well, I'm very glad everything's going well. Congrats on the new round.

[Tyler]

So bullish on you.

[Jordy]

Soon. You're the man showing off the guns for us. Thanks, man.

[Tyler]

Yeah. Can we get a quick. Can we get a quick. There we go.

[Jordy]

You know what I want? I want, I want your take on those shirts that allow you to bench press more. Are you familiar with these shirts? The compression shirts?

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[Phil]

Is that cheating shots? I think it's cheating. It's cheating.

[Jordy]

It's cheating.

[Phil]

It's awful.

[Tyler]

It's awful. Yeah, but what if it, what if it gets you comfortable and gets you to that next level?

[Jordy]

Yeah, what if, what if you're not ready to bench 315? This is the thing that gets you out of the, out of the valley of despair.

[Phil]

If you're using a, if you're using a slingshot shirt for. If you're, if you're using a slingshot shirt for 315, you got other problems like that.

[Jordy]

Like. That's crazy. That's crazy.

[Phil]

Just take some creatine, get some protein in, take like a healthy, a healthy helping and pre workout and rip it like you'll. You got it? You don't need a slingshot shirt.

[Jordy]

You heard it here. Yeah.

[Tyler]

Okay.

[Jordy]

Thank you for stopping by. We'll talk to you soon fellas. Have a good one.

[Tyler]

You're the man. Cheers.

[Jordy]

If you're looking to design parts, obviously go over to Dirac. If you're looking to design anything else, go to figma.com make anything possible. All in Figma. Figma lets lets you turn big ideas into real products. Brainstorm, design and build with your [e-mail] and we have our next guest in the studio. Looking sharp, Looking sharp. How are you doing?

[Tyler]

We caught up yesterday. He was going to come prepared, but you're blowing us away here.

[Jordy]

You look fantastic. Give us an introduction, explain the company, give us any news that you got to share with us. Of course.

[Jacob]

My name is Gjark. I'm one of the co founders of File FAL is a generative media platform for developers. We provide fast, Ready to use APIs for image, video and audio models. And then application developers in enterprises like Shopify, Canva, Adobe. They use these APIs to build AI enabled products in their. In their own product. And then I do have some news as well. So two weeks ago we announced our 3C announcement. We raised $125 million.

[Jordy]

It's not announced until it's announced on TV. That's right.

[Tyler]

We just broke the news.

[Jacob]

I have other news as well.

[Tyler]

So this is great. Keep it rolling.

[Jordy]

Yeah, what else you got for us? Hit that soundboard journey. And this month more news coming in. Okay, give it to us.

[Jacob]

100 million run rates.

[Jordy]

No.

[Jacob]

We have 10 more days. But yet we still. We still crossed it.

[Tyler]

That's crazy.

[Jacob]

It's been an incredible summer for us and the whole industry to be honest.

[Jordy]

Congratulations.

[Tyler]

That is absolutely insane.

[Jordy]

Amazing, amazing, amazing. What's the key to the high growth. What marketing channels are working? Are you buying an incredible amount of steak dinners? Is there some bottom up adoption? Is there a self serve option?

[Tyler]

Some golf?

[Jordy]

Are you secretly brothers with a hyperscaler CEO or something? What's going on? How are you selling this thing?

[Jacob]

Yeah, I would say all of them.

[Jordy]

You are brothers with Tim Cook. Interesting. Except that one. That's great.

[Jacob]

We are taking enterprise sales really really seriously. We work with some of the biggest enterprises but also like our developer experience. The way to get started is so easy. We are getting a ton of like indie developers levels. IO for example is a big customer.

[Tyler]

And you know, amazing.

[Jacob]

So we are getting a lot of enterprises and indie developers and indie developers they go work at bigger companies and they bring file with them. So both of the sides of the go to market strategy is working.

[Tyler]

So what trends are you seeing on the cost?

[Jordy]

I'm sure people are saying oh yeah, you're making this much money in revenue. What does the gross margin look like at the time? We saw amazing news from Google today that they dropped their inference cost by 33x.

[Tyler]

Yeah and the other thing on the media side with text based prompting you can use a non frontier model and get a great result if you're just using it in sort of like a Google search function or I would consider.

[Jordy]

Last generation video generation to not be on brand for a lot of use cases.

[Jacob]

So you're absolutely right. Some people, they want to use the best newest model and they're willing to pay whatever it takes for that. But we make more money actually on like the cost effective models. People who are who want to use it for higher volume but the model is good enough. So that's a very interesting sweet spot that we actually make more revenue. But you're right for for a certain type of customer they're always looking for the best and the newest. Maybe they are trying something, maybe they just want to get it out the door so the cost is not a problem for them.

[Jordy]

Are you seeing opportunities on distilling models for specific use cases? I could imagine an image or video generation model that's just really good at logo animations or text or just product photography or just beverages and then that being just cheaper to inference. Is that a crazy idea? Is there something there?

[Jacob]

No, I don't think so. I wouldn't say it's cheaper to inference but it's maybe better to inference. So for image models fine tuning is actually a really really big use case. Not enough people pay attention to it because I don't think it Works very well for LLMs. But for image model for the past year we've done really good work on fine tuning research and you know you can basically fine tune on a product and you now can generate better images of that product. It's actually a really big use case for us and same same thing is going to happen for video. We are just getting open source video models that are fine tunable. So a lot of companies are working on post training strategies to create different camera camera angles, different styles, you know, different angles of a certain product or a person. So I expect a lot of developments on the video fine tuning side going forward as well.

[Tyler]

What are you seeing out of China? What are the best image video audio models coming out of China? On the open source side, video hasn't.

[Jordy]

Really had a deep seek moment, have they?

[Jacob]

I wouldn't say so. Like there is. The best open source model is video model is Chinese. Right now it's, it's coming out of Alibaba. It just came out a couple of weeks ago and people started using it right away. I wouldn't call it the deep SEQ moment. I don't think the deep SEQ movement for the whole industry hasn't happened yet. We haven't really hit that inflection point that video generation or image generation is mainstream. It's hidden inside products. If you go to Canva, Adobe, all these products, it's still not the main feature. It's like an additional thing. We still have some time to hit fully mainstream. But yeah, we have great models coming out of China.

[Jordy]

And also just for, I mean this is the classic story of enterprise software. Like there are open source databases and there are still companies that build amazing businesses on top of them providing enterprise tooling and support and infrastructure and all the different pieces to actually make a product useful. Instead of saying okay yeah, let's go provision some servers to do this ourselves. Fascinating. Jordy, do you have another question right now?

[Tyler]

Not for now. I'm just blown away. You guys are cooking.

[Jordy]

Yeah, I do want to talk about hybrid deals or hybrid models. Somebody had me demo a AI image generator that I had to take a picture of me, turn me into a professional bodybuilder. It was the most remarkable thing because typically when you go to ChatGPT and have that do that, it kind of gets the face a little bit wrong, but very clearly. And I could tell this from the grain pattern. What it had done is it had cut out my face and then only operated on the body. And so the face was a pixel to pixel perfect Representation and for a certain thing, oh, you just want to change the logo on the shirt. You don't want to change anything else about the shirt. It seemed like a good value. Now I was being gaslit by the founder who was like, no, we're not doing that. It's all in one network. And I was like, I don't care, I just want good images. It's cool. But where do you see the different like value added? Like maybe less sexy, less pure end to end AI, but value creative opportunities. And in image and video generation, I could imagine like a multi layer diffusion model that has a specific layer just to add text on top of images. So you're not trying to confuse those. I don't know if that's actually how these models work, but what do you see as valuable in terms of merging multiple models to create a better end product? Like the way O3 Pro has a web browser, a python shell, and then also the ability to search the web and pull stuff together and reason.

[Jacob]

Yeah, I mean, one of the reasons why, you know, our business has higher margins than some LLM inference providers is because of this fragmentation of different kinds of models, different kinds of use cases. People are trying to chain these models together and create workflows. Both image and video models, they haven't really generalized yet. So you can't write a long prompt and expect the image and video to edit itself. It's still a lot of model chaining and workflow generation. The use case you just said, putting your face onto something else. It's like chaining couple models and we have a lot of that behavior on the platform. The models are getting bigger and better. So some of that is, is actually happening by the model itself. But still, unlike LLMs where it's like a single prompt and you expect it to write a book, but also generate code and generalize it very well, it doesn't happen for image and video yet.

[Jordy]

Yeah, I can imagine there's tons of interesting enterprise features and harnesses on top of the models that will be extremely value creative. So seems like you're in a good business, but everyone already knows that from the revenue and the fundraising. So congrats on all the progress, Jordy.

[Tyler]

And we'll have you back on again soon.

[Jordy]

We'd love to have you back. This is fantastic. Thank you.

[Tyler]

Thank you so much.

[Jordy]

Bye. Let me tell you about Julius, the AI data analyst that works for you. Connect your data, ask questions in plain English and get insights in seconds. No coding required. Sorry, Tyler, you're out of a job. I'M going to be using Julia. Try Julius for free. They're loved by over 2 million users and trusted by individuals at Princeton.

[Tyler]

And you can connect Google, your Google Ads app to Julius now. Run some numbers there.

[Jordy]

Love that. Love that. Anyway, we have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. He's here now in the TBPN Ultradome. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

[Sudish]

I am doing well. Jordy and John, thank you so much for having me here.

[Jordy]

Thank you for joining. Would you mind kicking us off with an introduction on yourself, your company, and any news you got for us?

[Sudish]

My name is Sudish. I'm the CEO of Tiny Fish. First of all, I'm very happy to be here. Last time I got to know you was Soham Parikh. By the way, that was a great guest.

[Jordy]

Yeah, that was a great guy. What a wild day on the Internet.

[Tyler]

Absolutely.

[Sudish]

And how fast. It's all gone too, though. I mean, it's all gone.

[Jordy]

So. Yeah, yeah. I mean, people were. We never got the full postmortem. We'll need to check in, but he said he was going exclusive.

[Tyler]

There's somebody named Soham Parikh, exact same spelling that's been appearing on AI research paper.

[Jordy]

Really?

[Tyler]

People are trying to figure out is it the same guy or.

[Jordy]

I saw that too.

[Tyler]

Yeah, yeah.

[Sudish]

DPP needs to have an investigative arms.

[Jordy]

Yeah. I actually did talk to someone that was thinking about hiring him after the fact and it seemed like it was not, not enough of a red flag. And they said they were going to give it a shot and hope that.

[Tyler]

He thought he was going exclusive.

[Jordy]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so. And so as far as I know, he is still exclusive, but I haven't done any research recently.

[Sudish]

Anyway, guys, thank you so much. Well, you both have built something in the last 10 months. Entrepreneurs, investors. We appreciate it.

[Jordy]

Thank you.

[Tyler]

Thank you.

[Sudish]

Tiny Fish. We just announced our 47 million funding.

[Tyler]

I was not ready for that. I was not ready for that.

[Jordy]

Absolutely.

[Tyler]

A big number. I needed a big number warning.

[Jordy]

Absolutely. Absolutely huge. Congratulations.

[Sudish]

47 million is like a seed round, right?

[Jordy]

Mango seed.

[Tyler]

It's a seed round for a Tiny fish these days.

[Jordy]

Tiny Fish. But congratulations. I'm sure you can do a lot with it. So what are you gonna. What are you gonna do with it?

[Sudish]

I think we are going to invent a category, build a category that makes sense and build a great company. That's basically, it's prior to this, you know, I was at Thoughtspot and Nutanix. We have done some large enterprise companies, co founders they all came from meta and companies like large. We want to build a large company doing one thing which is to make web browsing like humans do, but a superhuman scale for solving enterprise problems. We don't want to be a consumer company. I know you both have built companies. There are a lot of AI companies doing things in consumer space, browser agents and all of that. We want to do massive scale web browsing and turn the Internet into a structured database for enterprise customers to analyze and act on.

[Jordy]

Do you want to sell this to other software companies that are going to piece it together with other APIs to create maybe even more enterprise SaaS. Like how deep do you see yourself in the stack?

[Sudish]

I think nowadays there is no difference between enterprise business and developers builders. Because every enterprise product in the AI world starts as a builder product, somebody trying it out. We 100% want to be the best way anyone to connect code to Internet because look, these models can solve math problems at international math Olympics level. But when it comes to browsing it's a mess because browsing is so complex that our brains make it look easy. Think about going to a movie. The seed that you pick, it's a function of complex reason. If I'm going by myself, I can sit in front and read the movie. If I'm far away with my family, I want to make the right place, right fishing contiguous seats. These decisions we make without even thinking. Not to mention the complexity of the website itself, how the pictures are popping, how there's like a pop up here. These things need to be solved really well. We do that. So enterprise customers who want to browse mass 60% of all time of a knowledge worker enterprises on browsing. And we think we can automate that through what we are calling enterprise web agents.

[Jordy]

So we heard reports that some of the big labs were building RL environments with verified rewards, basically cloning doordash, creating clones of Amazon.com so that they could train an agent on the full Amazon.com web app and then an agent would be able to check out for you. Are you doing something similar? What does data collection look like? What does training look like? What does differentiation look like in the world where these agents might need to be RL'd on a specific website to really get good results.

[Sudish]

This is why I love talking to you guys. You geeks ask the right question to geeks. There are two models when it comes to this. One is synthetic websites like web arenas and others have built this. The other is paying money to say let us go learn doordash for Workflows. Both are good, but both have downsides because both really create significant challenges with respect to scale when they come out of that environment. What we are doing is something very. We have a proprietary architecture that we have built that freezes and takes that snapshot of a data website in a way that becomes that exhaust feeds ourselves in a very scalable way. So yes, it is synthetic data that we are generating but it is out of actual web and more importantly most of our use cases. We launched our company with a use case with Google Hotel as a customer. Doordash is the customer.

[Tyler]

Great, great. I try to give this advice to early stage founders. If you're going to get a customer early, just get Google.

[Jordy]

Just start with a Mag 7.

[Tyler]

Start with a Mag 7, why not?

[Sudish]

Right? They built this AI technology. I mean it all started with all you need is attention, right? So these customers are giving us access. There's a customer who has 22 million web SKUs in the product. There's another customer, the 40,000 sub shops as part of them ClassPass, we announced them.

[Jordy]

Right.

[Sudish]

So these sort of things while we are solving for them is giving us a lot of data and that exhaust is mined by our products for annotation and creating labeling. That makes our the second thing I will tell you though, models are good at a lot of things but they usually perform really well when the goal is straight and the reinforcement can be built on something where the context doesn't change. Web is exactly the opposite. Everything is context that is constantly changing. The goals are changing, the websites are changing and the context is changing. So what we have done is we use reinforced learning and models for understanding and see what the heck we are trying to do here. Then we separate that and execute that code in CPU at massive scale and then we use alpha evolve a version of that to make the code better. So separating exploration and execution is another fundamental thing that we've invented that is going to make this browser agents Perplexity, Comet and Operator and others that is forcing and feeding us. But this is where the execution framework, that's an infrastructure problem. Think about the amount of browsers we have to spin up, the fingerprinting, the anti bot, all of that infrastructure need to be solved.

[Jordy]

Interesting. How do you think the competitive landscape will evolve? Amazon's launching a bunch of stuff. I'm sure all the clouds have something that looks like a browser agent on the shelf somewhere. But we've seen Silicon Valley has probably hundreds of stories about companies that have built things that have been competitive with the big hyperscalers and been wildly successful. But what's your specific plan?

[Sudish]

There is a quote that often attributed to Chesty Puller Marine that we are surrounded from the north, south, east, west. I better watch out.

[Jordy]

This is one of those things where.

[Sudish]

It is so amazing because there are three groups of companies that we will be competing with from a tech space. I mean obviously there is share shifting of dollars. One are the browser agents who are doing one thing like Jodi goes on a vacation, 20 minutes he'll book a hotel for you. We want to sell to Expedia, not to Jody because Expedia now want to simulate 100,000 Jody transaction from 50 states or 50 countries. How do we do that? So browser agents to a certain extent will be trying to expand to that space. I think we want to complete the other is the infrastructure. So the browser base and others who have been building things. We want to build something enterprise grade with the surveillance, the governance, the control. So that's the second. Third is going to be another interesting area where the code gen and the developers who build us who just want to connect their code to Internet so it can do amazing things there. Again, there are parallel. You guys interviewed Parag. I do think that we will compete on some level. Not because today we compete, but all of these will converge because there will be a few massive companies built on how browser access, how Internet can be turned into a structured database. So exciting time. We've raised enough only because we want to make sure that we build it in a way that is where we can control our destiny. I have a lot of respect for all of these companies but to me, if you're not surrounded by competitors, you're not in the right place.

[Jordy]

I love it.

[Tyler]

Yep. You're not going after a big prize, but congratulations. Fantastic answer.

[Jordy]

Great to meet you out there. Have a good rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

[Sudish]

I hope so. This was such a short conversation. I enjoyed. I keep watching. Thank you so much.

[Jordy]

We'll talk soon.

[Tyler]

Talk soon. Bye bye.

[Jordy]

Let me tell you about Adeo Customer relationship Magic. Adeo is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. We have our next guest already in the Restream waiting room. We will bring her in now. How are you?

[Tyler]

Welcome.

[Julie]

Hi, nice to be here.

[Tyler]

Great to meet you. Julie, what's happening?

[Julie]

Great to meet you.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Would you mind kicking us off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself, your company and maybe some of your background as well?

[John]

Sure.

[Julie]

So I am one of the founders Of Sundial, we are trying to build the cursor for data analysis. So we're trying to automate a lot of what data scientists will do so that we can help companies make better decisions with data. We work with great companies like OpenAI character captions. Before that, I led design and research for the Facebook product. I grew up at Meta back then Facebook.

[Tyler]

Could you explain for the audience what Facebook is? They've been living under a data center. No, I'm kidding.

[John]

Sorry.

[Julie]

So if you guys become friends and your relationship gets to a certain level and you want to let the world know, can amazing. Broadcast it online?

[Tyler]

Amazing. Well, I think it feels like the absolute perfect background to build Sundial because when I think, when. When I think, people think about optimizing digital products and making decisions with massive amounts of data. People think meta and they think Facebook.

[Julie]

I mean, you say that because you probably know more than most people, but I do think what makes meta so good is that it was so freaking operationally rigorous. It was so good at actually capturing and modeling what made it a great business and being just so on top of every little thing so that we could optimize, iterate, experiment, test, and eventually get to that scale.

[Tyler]

And did you guys, I imagine, had to rely on a bunch of internal tooling that you built in order to do that? That was proprietary or what did that.

[Julie]

Absolutely, yeah. Everything was just homegrown because, like, actually the whole concept, I would say that meta probably introduced this idea of growth. I mean, now everybody's got growth teams, but back then that was like a new thing and it was only created, you know, with people like Chamath and Alex Schultz and Naomi, because Facebook was growing like crazy. And then one day, growth kind of stalled. And, you know, every. I think that's happens to every successful company right in the beginning, you're like, we're, we're great. Our intuition is on. We're solid. Like, everything hits, and then one day it stops hitting. And then everyone's like, oh, my God, what happened? And there's a lot of questions. Board members are calling. And then it becomes like, well, we have to figure it out. And the only way you can do that is with good observability.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Can you take us through a concrete example of one of the case study of design at Meta and. And how, like, some of the decision making linked to some of the data analysis you did. Like, do you have anything that you can share? I know it's been a while, but some of the stuff's probably private, but some of it, you can probably share.

[Julie]

Yeah, I'm trying to figure out what's an example I can pull out. Well, I will say that, like, a lot of the process. So I think we kind of segment things into two worlds, right? The first is like, look, in order to build something new, you do need that spark of inspiration, and it usually comes from intuition. Like, you need to kind of have, like, a vision. And so often that would be, like, the spark of the idea. But then as soon as you realize that you have, like, a hypothesis, you know, like, I think what people want is, you know, better ways. Like, if we give people more custom ways of sharing on Facebook, for example, they will share more. That's an example of, like, a particular hypothesis that somebody would have. And usually that comes with, like, an idea. You're like, if I build, you know, a really awesome text editor, or I give them a way to record video, or, you know, I make it super easy to, like, pull in a quote, right? Then people will go and share more. But the thing that you then need to do is to figure out, well, how quickly can you test whether that hypothesis is true? What's the kind of smallest thing that you can build that gives you either more or less assurance that this thing is the thing to bet on? And so we would try and figure out what's the smallest framing of that experiment? And then if it seems like, okay, it's inclusive, or we actually think it might be promising, then you just double down, right? Then you add more. You keep building. And I think that's been. This is a super early example, but I think hackathon project. Video is a hackathon project that somebody did. And then very early on, video came out after the hackathon. And just very quickly, you can see what will that. That people are actually using. In fact, maybe a better example now that I'm thinking about it is actually feed. So feed is one of those very early examples where people hated it. So newsfeed came out before that. The way that people went to profiles is like, you know, I would go to your profile, John. I'd go to your profile, Jordi. I'd see if anything changed. But there was no system that automatically told me if you updated something. And so we in launched feed, this was like, back in 2006, and there were, like, huge protests. In fact, like, a million people within a week joined this Facebook group called I effin hate Facebook news feed. Because people thought it was, like, it was creepy. It was like, you know, too much surveillance. But the reason I Think Mark and the team, like, we kept on it is the fact that like through the numbers, like through the data, you could see that people are spending a lot of time on newsfeed. And in fact, the reason they knew to join this group, I effing hate newsfeed, is because of Newsfeed. Like it was, they were like, you know, so it just was like very obvious to us that this was working, despite what people are saying about it.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Can you talk about preference falsification more broadly? Was that like a hard one lesson that carried through? It feels like Meta has really like absorbed that lesson and it continues to inform the company culture. Have you carried that idea of preference falsification forward into your career? How do you think about that disconnect between what people say and then what they actually do?

[Julie]

I think it just like you have to gather the data. You just have to look at, you know, like you can say, okay, look, this is what I see. I see like data. Their data is that people tell us they don't like it or they tell us they're feeling one way or another. Right. So I think about qualitative feedback as data, customer surveys or data. Like anything is data, but also behavior. Like, what do people actually do? What do they click on? Where are they spending their time and attention? And the more we can have all of that in one place, the better, like a better, more realistic and accurate view of reality we have.

[Tyler]

When should a company sign up for Sundial? Because I think it's almost a meme in Silicon Valley. If you launch a product early and you're obsessing maybe too much over the data, you could end up actually going down the wrong path. And there's points in which maybe you disagree with this, where the actual, just like founders intuition is what's going to get you to that sort of takeoff with the product. But what's your read?

[Julie]

I agree with that. I do think that there's such a thing as like obsessing too early. Like when you don't have product market fit, you probably have to take bigger swings. You're probably not in the business of trying to optimize. But I think if you feel like you have product market fit, you're clearly scaling your team. Like, you're like, okay, I probably need a growth person, I probably need a data. Like the reason you want to grow through a data person is you want to, to form more fuel on the fire. Like, you want to understand what works and what doesn't. And so what all of these roles are Trying to do is start a series of experimentation and just like again, get to better, better visibility, right? Better observability for like what we all want to do is just build a mental model. Like this is how the business works. And if you tweak this thing, more money goes up and you tweak this, more users, right? We want to build a very real and influenceable model. And that is what like all of that work of trying to build and do analysis is there to help us do.

[Jordy]

Did you overlap with Laura Dana at Meta? Can you tell me a little bit about her? She was in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week. What's made her, you know, what's the secret to her impact?

[Julie]

So Laura Dada joined as design lead and I think she took over a Messenger, so Facebook messenger. And I think the team was pretty small then, maybe about eight designers. And she helped scale that up to like 200 designers and eventually she actually become the product group lead. So the product group lead is kind of like the GM role. And in fact there's not that many examples of design leaders who become GMs. You know, like engineers can become GMs. Like I think Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram is one. I think Laura Donna is probably the other that I can recall. So she ended up actually leading all of Messenger. I think recently she went to go work on AI and I just saw the news that she is joining as Figma's new chief design officer, which is fantastic news. I absolutely adore Laura Donna. I think she is fabulous.

[Jordy]

Yeah, we'll have to get her on the show. That would be. It'd be. It'd be fun to dig into. Anyway, Jordy, anything else?

[Tyler]

I have a bunch more questions, but I don't think we have time.

[Jordy]

Yeah, well, thank you so much for.

[Tyler]

Coming on and yeah, congrats on all the progress so far.

[Jordy]

This is fantastic. We'll talk to you soon.

[Julie]

All right, talk to you guys soon. Bye.

[Jordy]

Bye.

[Tyler]

Cheers. Gabe in the chat says, whoa, she has a headset on. How can I long this company?

[Jordy]

I love it.

[Tyler]

Totally agree.

[Jordy]

That's great. Let me tell you about numeral HQ. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than 5 minutes per month on sales tax compliance. You can get started for free. Benchmark Series A. Let's go.

[Tyler]

Let's.

[Jordy]

Our next guest is in the Restream waiting room. We will bring them into the PBPN Ultra Dome.

[Tyler]

Jacob, welcome to the show. Finally waiting for this moment. It took us very long.

[Sudish]

We're pretty good.

[Jacob]

How are you Guys, we're doing great.

[Jordy]

Give us the breakdown. What'd you launch today?

[Jacob]

Cohort 3 applications are live.

[Tyler]

Boom. Hit it.

[Jacob]

The best part here is the video.

[Jordy]

I just.

[Jacob]

I assume you guys may have watched it, but it's I think the best Gundo Hype video.

[Tyler]

Wait, can we pull it up?

[Jordy]

That's a tall order. Yeah, production team. Ben, can you pull up the. The latest Disciple Discipline Ventures post? Maybe we can put it in the chat. Can you send it to them?

[Tyler]

I'm trying to find it right now. Jacobs, throw it in the chat.

[Jordy]

We will pull this up. We might need to watch this after you hop off. But. But give us the update on the previous cohorts. Who's in those? What companies are you in? What's the general thesis? What's the why now for this particular organization? Break it down for me.

[Jacob]

Yeah, so Cohort 1 was in Brainmaker and Valor at the time. Their office. They were sharing it. They were both pre stage. I think it was still very much like, is this going to work or is this not going to work? I think now we're at the point where like, okay, something's working here really well. And I think the big kind of thesis and point here is like, we want to be like that entry point to what's going on in El Segundo. The culture is very attractive to mostly young people. Want to build companies that really do matter a lot for the country. And it's kind of been pushed away from other ecosystems that don't really care about that. And then too practically, if you want to build on hardware or aerospace, defense, you should be in El Segundo. SpaceX started down the street from where I'm based. And the best talent, the supply chain, the whole supply chain, and a lot of the customers are in the El Segundo area. So it's like if you want to build El Segundo, if you're building an aerospace, defense and hardware and want to be part of the ecosystem, we want to be that way to do that. Companies wise.

[Tyler]

Augusta said earlier, Rockefeller built El Segundo. I never knew that. What's the lore there?

[Jordy]

The oil company. Yeah, it's Chevron. Like there is a massive oil and gas extraction, oil refinery there.

[Tyler]

When you're in El Sega, the whole town was built out to service.

[Jordy]

Yeah, you can tell the story.

[Jacob]

I'll give the rundown. So El Segundo means the second. It means the second Chevron refinery in the state of California. So that's the reason why. So it's very cool. But on the.

[Jordy]

Yeah, we got the video if you guys want it. Yeah, yeah, let's play the video. We're going to switch over to the video. This is the fall cohort. Applications are live now. Yeah. Hit the soundboard. Why not just add an extra layer on top of the bob? Are we going to get taken down for this? It's a open source song. Hopefully we'll see. This is. This is good.

[Sudish]

It is necessary.

[Jordy]

That every.

[Gabe]

In the United States.

[Jordy]

A lot of familiar adults just by their shoulders. It's a cool presentation. Let's go.

[Tyler]

Holy bass.

[Jordy]

Good sound editing. There's Isaiah, there's Augustus. We got cameos on cameos. There we go. We're definitely getting demonetized.

[Tyler]

Thank you for demonetizing us. It was worth it.

[Jordy]

It was worth it. It was worth it. Take me to the economics. So how much money do you raise for each cohort? How much money are you putting in? What's the deal? Structure. Structure. What do the companies actually get out of going through the cohort?

[Jacob]

Yeah, so I guess just top big picture fund one end up being right around the $9 million mark. We're basically doing five cohorts out of this. So three next year, one end of year in October. The basic kind of structure. Each Cohort we do 10 to 12 founders. So a hundred K check per company, around 1.2 mil for cohort and then that'll go across the rest and a little bit for follow on for pro rata. But yeah, it's a kind of standard deal. Cohort itself is like main thing. Again, you want to be an else gundo. Weird way to do that. You have all the big name people. Everybody knows we can give you access to them just like that. And we think that's very valuable early on kind of become like, I guess consensus bet in a way. Just to have those behind you is very helpful. And then we have a demo day. We bring out like 120. I think we had 120 partners last time from top firms. Just like that, access to all of them. So that's kind of the breakdown. We have a house. It's very fun. We have a chef, we have a gym. Everything you need to build.

[Jordy]

Amazing. Are you officially taking over from Augustus Job as also going to a tour guide because every single. There was like a solid six month period where every single VC and founder would hit up Augustus and be like, okay, time for the tour. Let me go around.

[Tyler]

He doesn't have time for it.

[Jordy]

I don't think he has time for it anymore. He's on the road a lot.

[Tyler]

Yeah, yeah, it's funny.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[Jacob]

I'm getting. I have too many texts from VC saying, hey, I want to see Elsa. Show me around. So I think I've taken that. I think it's more of a job for me than him, but one actually.

[Jordy]

Cool, cool. Here's the wire details and then I'll take you on the tour.

[Jacob]

Exactly, exactly. But also on that point, we had the most recent bonfire, which a couple of you guys were at last week. Last Friday. Gus is like, okay, you're taking this over. And we had like, I think close to 200 people come out, which is pretty awesome. Which is like, I think a record, hopefully for one of the bonfires.

[Jordy]

Wow. A venture capital firm absorbing an iconic networking series. Where have we seen this before?

[Tyler]

It's interesting. I. I'll.

[John]

I'll.

[Tyler]

I'll be like, completely honest. When I saw Discipolis launch. Yeah, I. I wasn't. I, like, I've. I've backed a bunch of, you know, I backed Rainmaker, I backed Shink, a bunch, a bunch of the Gundo companies, but it didn't immediately click for me. But hearing you, hearing you talk about it, it's just like. And obviously we're super close with Gary and the whole YC team and they've backed a bunch of hard tech companies. So my immediate thought was like, do we need something like this? Do we need a new institution? And hearing you talk about it and seeing the progress from the port coast so far, just makes a ton of sense to have an institution in El Segundo because we can't just rely on the city to give tour guides to people that want to see.

[Jordy]

A couple of years ago, I went and did the tour of El Segundo.

[Tyler]

You created Couple. You helped facilitate the meme.

[Jordy]

There were a bunch of folks that were. That were highlighting it and the energy was very similar to like, you know, Mountain View in 2000. Totally 9 or 2012, in my opinion. Like, it had that, like, University Ave feel. Like it's sort of. It's just boring enough. Like, you're in la, but it's not like this hot town that you're gonna get distracted by, like, it's really just like a lot of cool companies building. And then you walk across the street, there's another founder, they have some tool. It actually makes sense to have people sharing stuff and moving stuff around. Yeah, it's very cool. Community makes a ton of sense.

[Tyler]

Well, congratulations on the launch of the new application window. I haven't run this by John, but hopefully he agrees. We'll sponsor the next bonfire. Let's do it.

[Jacob]

You'll be coming to the Purple Orchid as well afterwards.

[Jordy]

I've been to the Purple Orchid. It's a lot of fun. It's a good spot. They do the dragon bowls there that you drink out of.

[Tyler]

Dragon balls.

[Jordy]

Dragon balls.

[Tyler]

Never been big.

[Jordy]

They light them on fire. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Tyler]

Anyway, well, congrats, Jacob.

[Jordy]

Thanks so much for hopping on.

[Tyler]

Super exciting.

[Jordy]

We will talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. Awesome.

[Jacob]

Thank you guys.

[Jordy]

In the meantime, let me tell you about linear. LINEAR is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps.

[Tyler]

Cursor, head over Runway, perplexity, retool, mercury ramp. They all use it.

[Jordy]

We have another three hours of content to go through. I like this post from Growing Daniel. The opposite of FOMO is when you skip an event and then everyone who went says it sucked. Vindication of missing out. And Tyler Cowan says Vomo. I think Vomo is a good one. Vindication.

[Tyler]

It's simply the best.

[Jordy]

It is the best.

[Tyler]

It simply is the best.

[Jordy]

It is the best. I'm trying to think of the last time I had Vomo. I don't want to put anyone on blast, but I have certainly. I've certainly said no to things.

[Tyler]

Well, let's keep going through the timeline. John, can you text Gabe?

[Jordy]

Yes.

[Tyler]

And see if he is still coming on? He confirmed one. We moved him up 10 minutes. We might need to do some timeline.

[Jordy]

I'm happy to hang out.

[Tyler]

Yeah, we can hang out. So Sophie, NetCapGirl says is showing a post saying there must be some mistake. I thought I'd be working on digital superintelligence and it is angry man in military uniform saying build the goon bot. And so there's a lot of that going on right now. Luke Layscher has another post in response to the UK independent space agency is entirely scrapped to cut costs and we have Matthew McConaughey here saying we used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we look down and worry about our place in the dirt. KPMG wrote a hundred page prompt to build a gentic tax bot. Produces advice in a single day instead of two weeks without job losses. And ex nihilio says 100 page prompt is crazy. You ever ripped 100 page prompt, John?

[Jordy]

I've gotten close. I've used a lot of those like repurposed prompts that people have Online. Oh, this is the super prompt. Never, never got in the habit of like daily driving one of those. Dwarkesh Patel had a good prompt in Gemini that would take a transcript and clean it up. And it gave a really like the hundred pages is really like 100 pages of examples, basically. Like, here's what a messy transcript looks like out of a. Out of just like a transcription service where the speakers aren't labeled and there aren't necessarily paragraph breaks. You give it a ton of extra. You give it a ton of extra context, but ton of extra examples. And then that makes it perform a lot better because it knows it understands the job. But yeah, 100 page prompt is pretty wild.

[Tyler]

So Kafka Esquire says, Just one more model, bro. Just one more funding round, bro, please. And this post from Walter Bloomberg, esteemed journalist.

[Jordy]

Where did this come from?

[Tyler]

So this was from some interview.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[Tyler]

And this feels like it's clear. Yeah. Taken out of context. The headline was OpenAI. CEO Sam Altman concedes GPT5 was a misfire. Bets on GPT6. And this has been going pretty viral. People are poking a little fun, I think. I think in some ways, you know, the Death Star kind of set them up for this. Yeah, Double bird capital says just one more trillion, bro. Honestly, I swear.

[Jordy]

I mean, my take on this is that like the numbered releases should just go. When Facebook introduced the feed, they stopped saying we're changing things. It's a good take because when you say it's a good take when you say when you see, when you tell everyone we're changing everything, people are like, I don't like change. But if instead you just say like, yeah, like every day Facebook gets a slightly different update and the algorithm slightly different. And then some days people are like, ah, the algo is not really for me right now. And then they complain enough and then you get the feedback and then they tweak and they make it better and better and better. Like I feel like we should just be in the era of GPT is what powers chat.com and it's constantly getting better. And stop focusing on the size of the pre training bubble. Stop focusing on the parameters. If you're a consumer, stop focusing on the numbers. Start focusing on your sleep. Number your sleep score. Go to eightsleep.com, exceptional sleep without exception. Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper. Wake up energized. You can discover [e-mail] and I believe we have our next guest, Gabe from Mischief. How you doing, Gabe?

[Tyler]

There he is.

[Jordy]

Welcome to the stream. What's going on live at the TBPN ultradome. What's new with you? How you doing? I think everyone knows you maybe just launch into the announcement this week about the private military corporation that you're starting.

[Gabe]

You saw the Twitter? I didn't think anybody looked at that. Interesting.

[Jordy]

Everyone saw that.

[Jacob]

Everyone saw that.

[Gabe]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's. Sure, sure. What do we do this week? Well, we launched an agency called Applied Mischief.

[Jordy]

Yep.

[Gabe]

The agency honestly like to. To rewind.

[Jordy]

Where.

[Gabe]

Where does that even come from? And a lot of people don't actually understand this about Mischief because probably what you see is like videos of people wearing boots or like press headlines or whatever. But the way we're actually organized is we are essentially a holding company of different creative enterprises based on categories. So there's like a handbag division, there's a footwear division, there's a fine art division. There are other divisions I can't really talk about yet, but with like, more bigger permanent structures.

[Tyler]

Well, you talked about a division you can't talk about, so I hit the.

[Jordy]

Oh, nice, nice.

[Gabe]

So we've been operating like that for a second now. And to make that efficient, there's been an internal back office that's like normal, right? Like finance, legal, manufacturing, customer support, but also like design and marketing. And that's a group that not only does design, but also applies that sort of like Mischief magic, like viral juice or whatever.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[Gabe]

So the thinking here was we might as well open up that to external clients. It can become a profit center, which is great. But the other part is like, maybe it can make our world a little bit bigger too, because we're hungry for more formats. We've made so much stuff over the last like six years. What have we not touched yet? And like, maybe we won't get sued this time around. Like, maybe there's just stuff that we can do that's like, cool. We can.

[Tyler]

Well, it's, it's there. What, what seems obviously exciting to me is partnering with, with global companies. I mean, sure, I'm sure you'll partner with, with startups and, and scale up and things like that, but what, what gets exciting at a certain point has to be scale. Hey, instead of selling like a thousand of this thing, can we figure out.

[Jordy]

Partner with a company. Jones does an Apple ad. It's like, that's just not. There's a special. There's something special about that, about just like giving. It's almost like patronage in some ways. It's marketing, but it's Just like it's still art and it's cool and it's like un. Unbridled.

[Gabe]

No, totally, totally. Right? Like the way that we look at these is like, it's not a service that we're providing necessarily. Like there are brands and entities in culture that we perceive as cultural material. The same way artists looks at their material is like paint or sculpture or marble or whatever. Like for us, Coca Cola is material. Give us that and we'll make something new with it instead of fabricating a marketing story to sell more units that people sit through now anyways. Right. The opportunity is like there's just so much cultural material being left on the table to make new things with.

[Jordy]

So talk to me about inbound versus outbound. I feel like in that vein of like there's cultural material. If you come up with just like, I have a great idea, it would only work for this particular brand because the nature of the idea is tied deeply to the lore of that brand. They're never going to think about this, but I need to. The only value I could get out of this is selling it to them. Are you going outbound and pitching big companies and saying, I have the idea for you, or is it more like there is an actual process where you can sit down?

[Gabe]

I'm doing outbound, outbound right now. This is a method for Gabe Newell from Valve. We want to design your submarine.

[Jordy]

Yeah, that would be an amazing project.

[Gabe]

That's the outbound. That's what I want to do. Or extraterrestrial space research organizations. We want to design bit that you're putting into space.

[Jordy]

I love it.

[Gabe]

Look, we were Fast company's number one design in the world in 2023. People don't think about that because they think about viral. But if you actually look at what we do, it is unparalleled. So let's put some stuff.

[Tyler]

We got a space play for you with a company that, that we're very close with. I won't say anymore.

[Jordy]

Yeah, we'll talk after the stream.

[Tyler]

I have a bunch of questions. One quickly, on the business model of the new agency. Is there a world where you would. The standard agency model would be like, hey, let's do this project and we'll charge you a million bucks or a couple million bucks. But there's some scenarios where you could actually, I imagine if it was a one off, more like drop style, you could take a percentage of the sales even. Is that something you would ever explore to really bet on yourselves and say like, hey, we think we could sell like $10 million of this and we will only price based on success. Is that something you would consider doing?

[Gabe]

It's totally on the table and that's not even uncommon from the collaboration route. Some of the collaborations that we've done in the past have been that kind of model where it's like you make a bunch of product together, we both invest on our own ends, and then you split the cut afterwards. I think what's more interesting though is because of Mischief's position as like this artistic entity. Like in a way, like, we have a personality, we have an audience, and so we're actually like building a pipeline of joint ventures with big.

[Tyler]

Yeah, that's what I was getting at.

[Gabe]

Yeah. It's not even about 10,000 units. We're talking about millions. Millions of units.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Over forever, basically.

[Gabe]

Yeah, exactly.

[Tyler]

Yeah. Like, I want. I want the. I want a Mischief themed line of. Of kids toys. Right. Like, I would happily buy those. I would buy a bunch of those. Right. And so that's like, if you partner with the right company, that should be in the, the, you know, my personal lifetime value would be in the hundreds of dollars and I would even pay a premium.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

Because I know it's you guys behind it.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

Another question I have, you know, I've leveraged the drops kind of model to do marketing. I was inspired by you guys to do marketing for my last company party round. And something that I've noticed recently, a lot of companies in tech say they want to do drops and it's because they're inspired by Mischief and they just see like, drops get attention. I want attention.

[Jordy]

One drop, please. Sir.

[Tyler]

One drop, please.

[Jordy]

One drop, please.

[Tyler]

The usual, sir.

[Jordy]

Sign me up.

[Tyler]

The thing I usually push back on and the thing I'm curious to get your opinion on is like, I think when companies think they want to do drops, what they really want to do is true advertising and they don't even know the difference. And so like, where, where's that line for you? And how often are, you know, would you talk to a company and it's like what you really want is to do advertising.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Just like a consistent message delivered via every channel. Forever might be the right thing for.

[Tyler]

Not even forever or like a few months for a quarter. Yeah.

[Gabe]

I would take it even further. And it's like, that is the final goal, which is like get a message out into the people, get them talking, whatever. But like the focus on the drop is misplaced. Drop is just a delivery mechanism for something new. What these guys are actually looking for. Like, what they actually want at the end of the day is how do you break through the noise? And right now you can either just make more content, which honestly the ROI I think is going down on that. There's too much content and not enough demand. Sorry, that's just how it is. But the opportunity is you can make new things that fit within your brand parameters, that use your brand as cultural material, that are actually interesting, that are tactile, that have a story to them, and if they happen to be ephemeral, then it's a drop. But don't get hung up on the drop. Just make something interesting.

[Tyler]

That's our ideas valuable. And if you had to kind of think about making something new, how much is it? The idea versus the execution?

[Jordy]

Do you hire idea guys and then operational, excellent people. They're like a dividing line.

[Tyler]

Yeah. John and I will sit down with companies that we're friends with and we'll generate like 20 ideas. It ends up being super frustrating because you're like, we're feeding you this like, incredible idea. It doesn't even cost a lot to do. And if you do it right, like, it could be like a million dollars of like, you know, brand value, however you want to measure that. But it feels like you can give people these things that in your hands they might be million dollar ideas, but. But poorly executed, negative value.

[Gabe]

Yeah, totally. I think it's like, like squeezing a balloon on two ends. Like, there's the conceptual power and then there's the execution. There are things where, like, the concept is really high and the execution doesn't have to be crazy. You don't need a huge budget. It's just a good idea and it's going to work. What you typically see a lot of brands do is they're afraid of good ideas because good ideas have not been done by definition. So they lean more on the execution. And you see like large budgets and like huge bloated teams and production. So it's sort of like now if you can dial in both. That's the magic, right? That's. But that's really hard to do because more money, more risk. You want to. It's. You just. You don't. You want to de Risk on the concept side. John, to your question. I don't hire idea people. Everyone here is an idea person. We did. I'll give you an example. A couple of years ago, we made handbags, right? They're very expensive. The smaller they get, the more expensive they become. So we made a microscopic handbag that sold at auction for $63,000 at Paris Fashion Week, at Pharrell's, Whatever. Coronation of Louis Vuitton. That idea came from a summer intern. Anyone here can have an idea, right? The lawyer, our general counsel joins Brainstorms, our OPS lead points. Brainstorms, because being creative doesn't mean you have good ideas. Being creative just means you're human. You have insights, and you have reactions to things that are going around you. That's it. And then also, like, being creative means you're not afraid to, like, look stupid. And I think that's like, a big defining trait here, because anybody can look stupid here, including myself.

[Tyler]

What? Have you ever seen highly complex ideas work well as marketing advertising stunts? This is something that we end up.

[Jordy]

I think David Ogilvie said, simple ideas are powerful ideas. That's certainly something I've seen in Mischief's work throughout your entire career. But is there some sort of contrarian or nuance to that concept?

[Gabe]

I think there could be. The line that we use here is a good idea should slap in one sentence and then slap even harder in three. And that just means there. There are layers, right? Like, you appreciate it for the headline, but if you, like, really dig into it, you're like, wait up. Is this thing making fun of me and do I still like it and am I gonna buy it? And if I buy it, am I a chump or am I a patron of the arts?

[Jordy]

Right?

[Gabe]

It's like, the layers are good, the ambiguity is good, but at the end of the day, like, from a marketing perspective, just being practical right now, like, people's attention spans are so low. And honestly, like, people are just. We're all, like, very distracted, so you don't have a lot of window to, like, nail it. So you do got to have that one liner, like, pretty dialed in.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

How. How dialed in is your crystal ball when it comes to releasing new things on the Internet? Like, do you have a. Do you feel like you usually have, like, a pretty accurate sense of how much attention something will get? Do you get surprised or do you still get surprised? Often?

[Gabe]

Totally still get surprised. Like, you always. You always get surprised. I think it's easy for us to fall in a comfort zone where we're like, oh, yeah, like, this will work. Because what that ends up doing is you start coming up with ideas based on a framework of what has worked. We actually put in a lot of effort to come up with formats and mechanisms that don't really fit into our existing framework that we're like, oh, I don't know. If this is gonna work and is this offensive? I don't know. Are people gonna buy slices of this giant foam baby that we're cutting up in Brooklyn? I don't know. They did.

[Jordy]

Is there a project that you think is, like, criminally underrated? People are obviously familiar with the boots. They're familiar with the shoes and the footwear stuff and some of the other projects. But what's your example of a project? You're like, ah, that's still, like, one of my favorite.

[Gabe]

Good question. And the reason it didn't really get seen as much is because, to be honest, we were a little bit scared, and so we buried it in an art show that we did. But are you guys familiar with the paradox of the Ship of Theseus?

[Jordy]

Yes, but explain it for the listener.

[Gabe]

Totally. So it's like. It's this old paradox where imagine you have this large wooden ship, and every day, over seven years, you're coming up with a new piece of wood identical to a piece of wood on the ship, and you are swapping it out. The question is, after seven years, is it the same ship or is it a different ship? We found that a very interesting question, and so we decided to apply that in our own way to a sink located in the American wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as one does.

[Jordy]

How do you explain.

[Gabe]

So we. We found the sink. We did recon. We.

[Tyler]

Not me.

[Gabe]

I'm not.

[Jordy]

I.

[Gabe]

It wasn't me personally. Somebody here. Names. But we found, you know, we. We tracked down the serial numbers, the parts ordered exact. Like, replica. We ordered the exact same parts, built it here, tied off the dimensions of the bathroom here so that we could practice swapping things out. And then over many months, we would walk into the Met and do a quick swap and leave. Then the next day, do it again, and do it again, bolt by bolt, screw by screw.

[Tyler]

Just an art enthusiast. I just like art and I go to the bathroom.

[Jordy]

How'd you get a big piece through? Isn't there, like, one piece that.

[Gabe]

That. So that we decided to leave.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[Gabe]

We did not swap out, although we had a plan. We, We.

[Tyler]

We.

[Jordy]

We.

[Gabe]

We fabricated a wheelchair that could have hit it in the seat. But I'm telling you, we got.

[Jordy]

We got a little bit.

[Gabe]

We were honestly scared.

[Tyler]

Got a little carried away.

[Gabe]

We still. We still did it. We got everything else. And so, yeah, they have our sink, and we have their sink, and ours is now part of our art gallery.

[Jordy]

That's amazing.

[Gabe]

Although I believe they figured it out and they've replaced it. Because as soon as we announced the art show, even though the sink was sort of hidden in all of the other pieces, people definitely found out and there was a line in the Met for that bathroom.

[Tyler]

They should have.

[Jordy]

They should have sex it off, turn.

[Tyler]

It into an installation.

[Gabe]

So if anyone out here, if any of your, if any of your viewers are on the board of the Met, the coolest thing you could do right now is acquire that sink from us and put it back.

[Tyler]

Let's make it happen.

[Jordy]

Let's make it happen. Army.

[Tyler]

How. How many millions of dollars do you think you've left on the table by not doing crypto projects? The painful question, is it like, it has to be like 100 million?

[Gabe]

Yeah, probably. Honestly.

[Jordy]

Probably.

[Gabe]

Probably, yeah.

[Tyler]

And is there, like, I'm sure at some point there will actually be a way to do this. Like, there has to be something that makes sense. Like we did something back in the day with Party Round. Where we did it was called Helpful VCs, where we made crypto punks for every VC and then we put them on a website and we said, you have four hours to retweet these, otherwise we're going to auction them off. And it was like, for like, charity. Right. We weren't like, trying to make money and that was like one of the ways that we broke through. And like, shortly after, I think there.

[Jordy]

Might be something to do with crypto and like stablecoins, where there's not as much gambling involved, but there might be something with crypto. I don't know.

[Tyler]

Yeah, yeah. You have to remove. You have to make it not like a speculation, you know, because as soon.

[Jordy]

As you leave the, like, like the, the people who get the joke are. And then the people who don't get the joke show up and then, then, then they're losing their life savings. That doesn't feel good.

[Jacob]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Whereas, whereas, like, if somebody, you know, is. Is bidding on that handbag, like they, they probably know what they're doing. They understand that it's. They understand that.

[Gabe]

Look, I think, I think that crypto route for us is. We've often plotted our own death and I think there's like a chaotic, evil way to go out where you just pull that rug.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[Gabe]

I shouldn't even say because now everybody's going to know.

[Jordy]

Everybody's going to know.

[Tyler]

Well, I think switching gears to another topic that I'm sure you guys. So one, I don't think AI is going to take your guys jobs anytime soon. Despite it being able to maybe piece together random ideas, it's so much about taste and things like that. But how excited are you to leverage that technology for some of these various plays?

[Gabe]

Honestly, tbd and I think it's, I will say, unlike the whole crypto craziness of the last couple years. We didn't get into that because we didn't feel like it was here to stay yet. That, that's like the truth. Like, when you see the herd run so fast, it usually means they're running towards the end of a cliff. There's a little bit of a similar sentiment right now. That said, I. It is rooted in something real, but we're not in a rush to like use it necessarily. Right. If it's going to be here forever, we've got time. Like, it's mischief doesn't win as a first mover. If you look at all of our work, it was never about being the first to react to something or the first to like make use of a format. So we'll see. We just have to see.

[Tyler]

How do you think about. Are there any projects? Like, time is an interesting variable that you can play with. Right. Like, part of the thing with the sync stunt that you guys did is just the narrative and the story of like you guys were conducting this in secret for a long time. It was like a very. And that's part of what makes it so entertaining is kind of like the lore of what went into it. But have you thought about even longer term plays, like things that you could do over a decade or 50 years that in hindsight would just be absolutely hilarious. But again, take this sort of incredible planning. Yeah, yeah.

[Gabe]

Honestly, we are at that stage of just like our lives and as a company now to be thinking like that.

[Jordy]

Right.

[Gabe]

Because like, if you think about it, were in.

[Tyler]

Yes. Yeah. If you, if, if you would, you know, I know you guys have have a few investors. If you told your investors, first thing we're working on is a 50 year stunt and you're there like, all right, buddy, like, why don't you put some points on the board first?

[Jordy]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Tyler]

But you guys, I feel like I've earned it now. Like I, I, you know, something like a decade.

[Gabe]

No. Yeah, because like we've, we spent basically like we've only been around for the past pandemic and post pandemic, like a little bit post pandemic. Right. And all of that was just like, you don't know what's coming. Like live day by day, like just survive. Like banks are shutting down. Okay. Get through tomorrow. Right now. We've been around For a second, we're more well known. We have our existing infrastructure and now we really are asking the questions of like, okay, what does that legacy look like in 10 years? Or should we, should we disappear for 20 years and then come back? That would actually be the coolest thing we could do is go dark for two decades and then come back.

[Tyler]

It's worked for other artists. Could you do something? So we both loved Nathan Fielder's latest sort of like aviation stunt television show.

[Jordy]

I've heard a lot about it.

[Gabe]

I haven't watched it.

[Tyler]

I mean, you should. It's one of the few people in the world that I think is executing on your guys's level in the sense.

[Gabe]

Of he's next level.

[Tyler]

Yeah, like one sentence, you know, pitch. That's hilarious. But then the more you get into it, like the funnier it is. But could you do something like that for like the cost of housing? Like sort of a decade long stunt? Like Mischief. Like mischief figures out a way to like reduce, you know, cut the cost of, of housing in the United States.

[Jordy]

I mean, that was crazy.

[Gabe]

Like we, if there are any like pricey neighborhoods that would love to commission us as an artist to install a sculpture, we have a really good trailer park trailer that we would love to erect in a public square that will drive.

[Tyler]

I can just see like, like the right rv. Like there's, there's this RV outside of our gym.

[Jordy]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kind of yellow from the sun.

[Tyler]

Like some windows are open.

[Jordy]

Aluminum on the outside. Yeah. Winnebago. It can be a stunt for Winnebago corporate.

[Tyler]

How do you feel about the state of social media? Like broadly, it feels like we've gotten to a point where in many ways the platforms look so similar, but they also have their own characters. Some of them are becoming Lindy. Even thinking about how durable like Twitter and X have been despite all this change. But what, what's your. And do you even do. Do you feel like you need to use social media or are you better off not using it and then just releasing, you know, stuff on the platforms?

[Gabe]

Yeah, yeah, it's definitely a love hate relationship with the, with the platforms. Right. Because like platforms, if you, if you really think about it, that they started as a way to share things that you found were interesting and now they are mostly ways to share photos and videos of you talking about things that you find interesting. It's kind of become less novelty based and more vanity based, which is fine. That's like a fundamental human instinct. So I get it. I would continue to love to find a way to not use the platforms to disseminate. Disseminate information. And that's kind of how we started our first audience portal was Venmo. We had a huge audience on Venmo and we like had this huge phone bank, like a Chinese phone click farm. And we, every time we had a new project, we would Venmo our audience a penny and they would get that notification because that's the most powerful notification layer in your phone.

[Jordy]

The cha ching.

[Tyler]

The cha ching.

[Gabe]

I am now banned from Venmo for life.

[Jordy]

Well, PayPal, you want to work with.

[Gabe]

Applied Mischief, let me know.

[Jordy]

PayPal, we'll have the CEO of PayPal on.

[Tyler]

I think the last company that came on works with Venmo. We'll work on it.

[Jordy]

We should get it first. This is important. We were reading an article in the New Yorker yesterday about this concept of IRL brain rotation. The examples were the viral Labubus Dubai chocolate, the viral Italian sandwich. We saw a few of these. Joe Weisenthal at Bloomberg was also writing about these kind of like viral as being something that you stamp on your product as a product feature almost. And I was wondering if you're worried about the spillover from Internet slop culture into the real world. Just kind of how you're tussling with this idea of brain rot coming into the real world. I don't even know if you read the article or you have thoughts there.

[Gabe]

But I think I saw it on Instagram.

[Jordy]

Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah. You probably did a front facing video talking about it or you saw someone do a front facing video talking about it.

[Gabe]

Reaction video. Yeah, I mean, look, it would. I, I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing, but like what mischief has put out historically is kind of in that brain rot category.

[Tyler]

Yeah. I mean, the boots, the boots, right?

[Gabe]

Like it's like absurd, absurd aesthetic. And, and maybe, maybe even I could be so conceited as to say we were part of creating that.

[Jordy]

Responsible.

[Tyler]

No, you guys, definitely that, that it was an era of minimalism and it was like the Everlane era, quiet luxury boots. The boots are like, you know, an incredible reaction to that being like absurd.

[Gabe]

Aesthetic, just like popping imagery off of your screen.

[Tyler]

But then the challenge, the challenge with this, this trend, right, is if you go back to minimalism, it's, it actually becomes, I mean, maybe, maybe as, as like for me, right? I'm, I, I became part of the mischief audience and mischief customer in my early 20s, I'm in my late 20s. Now, eventually, maybe I'd want some ultra minimalist mischief item for my home. But at the same time, once you get on the maximalist track, you're kind of on this maximalism treadmill where you just gotta keep going crazier and crazier. And maybe in the Internet era, there's no turning back.

[Gabe]

It's totally possible, right? We might have built a machine so effective that it's now our master. And how do you break free from that?

[Jordy]

Right?

[Gabe]

But I'm not too worried. We actually don't think so hard about it. We just kind of make the things that we like and then if it ever stops working, then do something else.

[Jordy]

Figure it out.

[Tyler]

Well, I have an idea to put out the ether. I think next time a, an A list celebrity is going through a massive comms crisis, PR crisis, or a scandal, they should hire you guys to create something more, more viral than, than the scandal.

[Gabe]

They just need to do another crisis to compete with that. All they got to do is go to Twitter and be like, send a bitcoin to this address and I'll send you two bitcoin. And then they actually do it.

[Tyler]

They actually do it.

[Jordy]

Genius. Yeah. That is a get. That is a one time get out of jail free card. You heard it here first. There's payoffs if you, if you're a celebrity and you're in trouble, you're. You're caught at a Coldplay concert. That's the only way you can reverse the tide.

[Gabe]

You'll be good. Yeah, Go for it.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

Awesome.

[Jordy]

This is great. Yeah. Thank you.

[Tyler]

It's really great. Great to get the update and just hear you. So much clarity on all these different areas that we talk about all the time.

[Jordy]

Yeah. We could talk for hours. Yeah. We'd love to have you back whenever, whenever it makes sense.

[Tyler]

Yeah. We gave Gabe and I kicked around an idea that we won't share. Now we'll leverage that for your next appearance. I can't wait for it.

[Gabe]

Let's do it.

[Tyler]

Awesome.

[Jordy]

Awesome.

[Tyler]

Great to catch up.

[Jordy]

Cheers. Bye.

[Tyler]

Absolute legend.

[Jordy]

One of the best.

[Tyler]

What if we found out that Dubai Chocolate was. Was a mischief stunt?

[Jordy]

It's possible. It's possible.

[Tyler]

Anything's possible.

[Jordy]

Well, if you want to do a stunt, you want to promote a stunt, you want to have some fun with billboards, head over adquick.com out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Ad Quick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. You should also get a hitter. Go over to bezel. GetBezel.com Shop over 26,000 luxury watches fully authenticated in house by Bezel's team of experts. What you got for me on the timeline? Jordy Hayes.

[Tyler]

Wow.

[Jordy]

Timeline's in turmoil. Are you seeing this, Francois Chollet, or you want to go?

[Tyler]

I was saying our next Guest has a 133ETA coming into the studio. David Senroy says a fire broke out on the route to the studio.

[Jordy]

Oh no, we'll have to read more posts now.

[Tyler]

He said, little do they know, nothing, nothing will stop extreme podcasting.

[Jordy]

Let's go.

[Tyler]

We'll see you in a little bit, David, in person. Yeah. Let's dive into this post. You want to read through it?

[Jordy]

Yes. So there is a debate, Francois Chollet and someone named Oyvind on the timeline. So there's this debate around how will AI impact worker productivity? It's very clear that when you use AI, it feels like you're getting a speed up. When you use a coding agent, it feels like you're getting a speed up meter Did a study and found that maybe some AI tools are making you less performant. But so there's this debate and for a long time there was this idea that AI will supercharge workers and labor and anyone who's using AI will be more, more productive than someone who's not. And, and the advice that was given by pretty much everyone in the industry was like, you need to learn how to use AI effectively because if you don't, you'll be left behind. And so Oyvind shares that LLM adoption rose to 49.4 5.9% among U.S. workers, 18 plus as of June July 2025, according to a Stanford World bank survey. Inference demand will continue to surge not just as more and more user, more usage per user, but as newer, more advanced gen AI models require far more compute. And so obviously no one was using LLMs just a few years ago. Now almost half of the American workforce over age 18 are using AI tools in their daily work. Francois Chalet, of course, is asking the question about when is this going to show up in the economic statistics? He says LLM adoption among US workers is closing in on 50%. Meanwhile, labor productivity growth is lower than in 2020. Many counter arguments can be made here like they don't know yet how to be productive with it. They've only been using it for one to two years. 50 to 50% is still too low to see impact models. Next year will be unbelievably better, et cetera. But I think we now have enough evidence to say that the 2023 talking point that LLMs will make workers 10 times more productive. Some folks even quoted 100x is probably not accurate. And so he gets a little bit of a turmoil here. A little dust up with Noam Brown polynomial over at OpenAI. Francois continues and explains a little bit more of his his reasoning here. He says, by the way, I don't know if people realize this, but the 2020 work from home switch coincided with a major productivity boom. And the late 2021 and 2022 back to office reversal coincided with a noticeable productivity drop. It's right there in in the statistics narrative violation. Productivity growth is now back to pre 2020 levels. So for a lot of jobs in the American economy, working from home was actually a benefit. I'm not a huge fan. I felt like maybe I was more productive, but I certainly didn't enjoy it. And so we've been having in person.

[Tyler]

It's interesting. You'd have to dive in. Okay.

[Jordy]

Depends on work.

[Tyler]

Well yeah. And you can also be more productive but on the wrong strategy. Like I found it working from home during that era and having a remote team, I found it very difficult to like change strategy quickly. Even small things easy to lock in but not. You were hard to zoom out. I felt less. Yeah, adaptable. Right. You'd sometimes waste three weeks working on something where maybe if you were in the same room you would have like not made a different decision. So.

[Jordy]

So Noam brown over at OpenAI says I don't. Yeah, yeah. Get the gunshots ready. I don't recall a lot of people in 2023 saying that within a few years worker productivity would 10x due to LLMs. I do recall a lot of people in 2023 saying LLMs can't reason though. Shots fired on the timeline.

[Tyler]

Francois says back in 2023, AGI was one to two years away in the form of GPT5, no less. Productivity was about to create increase 10 to 100x and developers were about to to go extinct. People who questioned the narrative were a tiny minority. We were proven right.

[Jordy]

He was the John Brown standing up. I believe that AI will not 10x productivity. Tyler, do you have any takes on this?

[Tyler]

Yes. Will AI be able to get Tyler a shirt.

[Jordy]

AI agent? Might, but he might be able to do it faster himself, who knows.

[Tyler]

Still unclear on that. But I think the idea that people don't know like aren't using them efficiently yet makes sense. Right. Because so if you look at that meteor study, yeah, it was about how.

[Jordy]

Like open source developers are actually slower.

[Tyler]

When they use AI tools. But like if you actually read it, it was open source developers who, it was their first time ever using AI tools.

[Jordy]

Oh, interesting.

[Tyler]

So it's like obviously like small sample, you know, some learning curve to using like Claude code or whatever. You're not going to instantly become way better. So I think it's, it's kind of a similar thing there.

[Jordy]

Yeah, I mean we heard that there's. Yeah, there's an interesting phenomenon where some companies are getting more value out of having, having Designers go from 0x engineers to 1x engineers and they're not seeing as much of like the 10x engineer becomes 100x engineer because the problems are still like intractable in some ways. Noam Brown says, I was on the AI job market in 2023. I spoke with a lot of researchers, a lot of frontier labs. Some thought scaling pre training was sufficient, some thought additional paradigms were needed. But regardless, almost none of them thought AGI was one to two years away. Yeah, that was something that was maybe more parroted in the, on the podcast circuit and from those who were raising the mega rounds who needed to kind of justify underwriting AGI at, you know, a thousand x revenue multiple. It's interesting. I don't know, it is interesting that to look at the economic statistics to keep going back to what's happening in the labor market, what's happening with unemployment. Like it would be weird to have a unemployment tick up without productivity tick up because that would just mean lower gdp and that seems like an impossible scenario. I'm somewhat receptive to the idea that, that maybe AI is substitutive for a different type of work and maybe it's not driving major productivity booms just yet. But I have trouble believing both narratives that AI is driving massive unemployment and also it's not driving increased productivity because companies would just be doing less then. And we're seeing earnings growth, we're seeing growth in the economy, we're seeing high GDP growth. So one of those has to be, has to be right.

[Tyler]

They can't both be. Well, breaking news. President Trump was on Newsmax. Not our, not our internal software that we use to create the show, but the TV show. President Trump tells Todd Starnes he's going out on patrol tonight with DC law enforcement and the military.

[Jordy]

They're really taking DC seriously seriously, aren't they?

[Tyler]

Yeah, yeah. If you're in dc, have a keep an eye out Nate Eliason says gonna have to block Elon Musk soon for all the AI goon spam. Feels like I can't open X in public. I think a lot of people are feeling that way.

[Jordy]

Skill issue. I've still fine tuned my algorithm so much towards tech and AI content that I don't see any of the Elon.

[Tyler]

You don't.

[Jordy]

I don't see it.

[Tyler]

I get it.

[Jordy]

I get it.

[Tyler]

Because people that I follow reply to him and tell him to stop.

[Jordy]

Okay. Okay. Yeah. I follow Elon. But I still don't see it. I see. I see. High yield. Harry saying Tom Brady was so ready back in the day to be a finance bro. And they share Thomas E. Brady Jr. S resume. He was at University of Michigan. Then he went to Merrill Lynch. The University of Michigan golf course. Summer intern, Polo fields, golf and country club. He was a sales rep. High says this guy could have had a successful career working at Merrill lynch instead of pursuing football. Now no one on Wall street will remember his name.

[Tyler]

Andrew Reed Juwan had said what the heck is a Series K?

[Jordy]

Those data bricks.

[Tyler]

Sharing data bricks.

[Jordy]

Gong of the day.

[Tyler]

I know quite a few people in SF with a Series K problem.

[Jordy]

Yes. Stay away from the Series K. Enjoy the Series C. The caffeine. The yerba mate.

[Tyler]

The next time you have an urge to eat hard drugs why not try a fridge cigarette. Rune says the demand for anti AI takes is enormous and we'll take anything and run with it. Meta consolidating and doubling down on MSL is being misrepresented as bearish on AI. For example. Something to keep in mind. Yeah. They conducted a reorg because they added a bunch of people to the the team.

[Jordy]

Yeah. That makes sense.

[Tyler]

And had a few weeks together and kind of updated certainly. And they it got positioned as like. Like layoffs almost kind of what I was reading into.

[Jordy]

Yeah. It was very odd for obvious reasons. It's not that popular when we're like this technology will bring about a turning of the age and reshape the thought. The thought world of man. And even a miraculous year in AI progress can be spun into a disappointment. Careful observers will note that revenue growth of the consumer AI industry has outstripped the most bullish expectations. We maxed out the meta calculus predictions and nobody is mayor culping on this. You're not going to get an apology from Maroon. No way. He's absolutely printing in consumer AI adoption. People love it. Anyway. What else is going on? Elon Musk. We were talking about the. The potential spam he is unpacking his ideas around the birth rate. People saw this as incongruent. How can you possibly be worried about the birth rate when you are creating romantic companions that by definition cannot reproduce with their companions?

[Tyler]

Elon Musk says the Avon was kind of getting into this with his interview.

[Jordy]

With a little bit with Sam. Yeah, it was a very funny interaction where he asks Theo Vaughn, asks Sam Altman, what do you think about test tube babies? The idea of having children outside of.

[Tyler]

The womb that you could visit on the weekends?

[Jordy]

He specifically said, yes, yes, yes. And so Sam is kind of like, it sounds maybe like that's futuristic and that might happen. And there are some scientific reasons, but it feels unnatural to me. I'm not that into it, says Sam. And Theo just goes, oh, I thought you'd be into that. It's very revealing that. But Theo clearly sees Sam as like, this, like, techno dystopian. Yeah. Or just like this crazy, crazy tech futurist guy, like from the future. And so they kind of like. They kind of, like, work through it on the conversation. But it's a very funny clip because they're both, like, playing the game of, like, who are we? Like, what, what? How do we perceive each other?

[Tyler]

But Elon says AI is obviously going to one shot, the human limbic system. That said, I predict counterintuitively that it will increase the birth rate. Mark my words. Also, we're going to program it that way.

[Jordy]

But what I find interesting is what Nikita Beer says here. He says, grok companions duolingo for dating. So the idea that you could go to a Grok companion, learn amazing pickup lines like, are you an Nvidia GB200 because I'm getting hot hanging out next to you and then take that, that pickup line on the road and meet someone real. The more interesting thing, I think is if two people are talking to companions and they're a perfect match, just introduce themselves, introduce them to each other, and say, hey, we are foregoing the future revenue here and we are introducing you in irl. But we'll see. The proof is in the pudding. He's got to put his AI where his mouth is and actually deliver a product that increases.

[Tyler]

Hopefully he doesn't put his AI where his mouth is.

[Jordy]

Who knows?

[Tyler]

Literal sense?

[Jordy]

Who knows?

[Tyler]

China is pushing for a total ban on the use of foreign chips for inference. They are not a fan of Nvidia Financial Times. Some Beijing policymakers are pushing to ban foreign chips altogether for inference, which accounts for most AI demand. According to a person recently summoned for a meeting with them. That is unlikely to happen soon due to a shortage of domestic chip supplies. Which Beijing.

[Jordy]

Who do you think is going to sort it out? Who?

[Tyler]

The Juggler.

[Jordy]

The Juggler. Jensen the Juggler. He's able to juggle the interests of America, the interests of China, the interests of Taiwan, the interests of Nvidia Jensen. Hopefully he doesn't drop one. Hopefully he doesn't drop one. But we will talk to Aaron Ginn if there is a dropping of a juggle ball from Jensen the Juggler.

[Tyler]

Google declares the green versus blue bubbles debate. Silly and tired. And Signal says precisely what a green bubble would say. I will say my little brother uses an Android. It's gotten quite a lot better to text him. We can now effectively use FaceTime through this weird kind of hangout integration thing. Certainly better, but it's definitely, definitely still a real thing.

[Jordy]

You got something, Tyler?

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

This is different though. No.

[Tyler]

Out of the White House, new executive order. They're establishing a national design studio.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[Tyler]

So Giga Bullish for fig.

[Jordy]

Let's go. Universal Basic. Fig.

[Tyler]

But yeah, like a new. A new design language. Announcing America by design.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[Tyler]

National initiative to improve experience for Americans.

[Jordy]

Like UI UX or.

[Tyler]

Yeah. New life into. Into the designs of sites where people interface with their government.

[Jordy]

I'm getting. Stop, Stop.

[Tyler]

Chad is saying you look like Greg from Succession.

[Jordy]

That's the first time I've ever gotten that. That's weird. Never gotten that before. Anyway, I've never. Moving on. You've never said that. I've gotten that a ton. Of course. I actually live in the same building as him.

[Tyler]

Okay. What if. What if Greg from Succession was a Sigma? That's kind of the question that.

[Jordy]

Well, the actor who plays Greg from Succession is in fact a Sigma sort of lone wolf. He had his own apartment.

[Tyler]

Dar says, who has a house like this in the Bay? I would like to spend some time together, preferably in your house.

[Jordy]

That is a cool. That is a cool design. Like the soft wood tones, the brown. It feels very comfortable.

[Tyler]

Conversation.

[Jordy]

It actually doesn't feel that comfortable. Like, look at that couch. That couch does not particularly look like loungeable. I'm much more. I'm a fan. My ideal living situation is a modern glass box on the outside, but then log cabin on the inside. I want like the moose head on the wall of the glass. And then I want overstuffed brutalist. Brutalist outside. Exactly. The fortress on the outside. But then super cozy maxing like thick rugs, warm hearth. These are the things that I want inside. I Always hate going inside those glass box houses and being like, okay, like, everything's uncomfortable. There's so many corners.

[Tyler]

Look at all these hard corners.

[Jordy]

Yeah. I can just bang into everything.

[Tyler]

Look at this glass point.

[Jordy]

Yeah. I want, like, a wooden coffee table that's just so rounded. Like, there's just no sharp edges whatsoever. That's my. That's my ideal thing. But this is a little minimal.

[Tyler]

But Gabriel says, what does he know? He's quoting our post.

[Jordy]

We broke the story, really, after Ben Thompson emailed his newsletter subscribers on stratecherie, we broke the news that after 21. I mean, 22 years in Taiwan, I think.

[Tyler]

Where did he say he's moving again?

[Jordy]

I think he's. Oh, I don't know if he said, but he's been. He spends time in the Midwest, so I think Wisconsin. I think Michigan, that general area. Did you see Dylan Abruscada's reply to our breaking news that Ben Thompson has officially relocated to the United States? Welcome home, brother. He did The NBA commissioner. Time to learn English, buddy. Of course, Ben Thompson does know English, but a lot of people were speculating. This is about Taiwan tensions. I don't think it is. And Ben Thompson said that. Exactly. In his email, he said, yes, Taiwan is complicated, but that's not why I'm doing this. It's that my kids are at an age where we want them to go to school in the United States. And we've been contemplating this for a long time, and we're very happy. And we always spend. He already spends summer in the United States and spends time so. Going back and forth. So. But here, it was not. It was not like the last. The last helicopter.

[Tyler]

One thing is for sure, if there is ever conflict in Taiwan. Gabe. Gabe will repost his. This.

[Jordy]

Yes. Yes, definitely.

[Tyler]

Jira Tickets just said, my boss just told me, quote, unquote, don't make mistakes. Like, I'm a clanker.

[Jordy]

That's brutal. Yeah. Clanker is still getting more juice. I'm still laughing when I hear it. It has not completely died.

[Tyler]

It's actually gotten better.

[Jordy]

I think it's gotten better. It's building some lore. I'm having fun with it. Plus, it is turning into a bit of a culture war issue. Mike Solano was talking about this where there were a couple posts that went out that were saying, like, you should not use this. It's a slur. It's bad. Don't use the word clanker. And I like that. We're already being language police on it, so that gives it a Like extra juice. Like it makes it more fun to use.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Anyway, should we go to this post from Bone?

[Tyler]

GPT Back on the show.

[Jordy]

Back on the show. Thank you for posting our reaction to your post a few days ago. Bone says Apple has no chance of catching up to Google with AI features that will become increasingly useful. OpenAI thinks they can do hardware from scratch because they bought Johnny I've. Which is a level of delusion that's hard to describe. Shots fired. Meadows playing catch up. Desperately distorting the whole market with their hire so they can ship stepmom. Google won. Shots fired. I don't know.

[Tyler]

This is what I was kind of getting at earlier. They look really great during the AI wars right now.

[Jordy]

I think it's like if this is mobile, if this is cloud, like, yeah. AWS was the first mover in cloud. Azure, gcp. These are great businesses. Did Apple kind of win mobile and get the vast majority of device revenues? Yes. Was it still extremely valuable for Google to develop Android? Did every company eventually need to have a mobile strategy and a mobile app and a mobile design?

[Jacob]

Like.

[Jordy]

Yes. And so it's a little dramatized, but that's why we love your posts, Bone. Keep things spicy on the timeline. Keep us hitting that soundboard. Anyway, timeline and turmoil again. Malo Burgo from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. Miri is getting in a fight with Rune on the timeline. Rune says Miri is an incredible name, maybe the best in AI. It's a shame they don't research machine intelligence. And Malo fires back. OpenAI is a pretty good name. It's a shame they don't. He said, yes, I know they published a couple open models recently and he has to kind of walk it back because he got hit with a community note. But I think Rune also got hit with Community Note. Maybe Miri does research machine intelligence.

[Tyler]

Oh, I think Rune is getting community note.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Because I think Machine Intelligence Research Institute does in fact research machine intelligence. Maybe, just maybe they just don't ship models or products. Maybe they ship other types of research.

[Tyler]

Anyway, anyways, opening eyes, CFO Sarah Fryer, who we've had on the show.

[Jordy]

Yes.

[Tyler]

Absolute Dog. One of the guys ever did Bloomberg tv doing an interview.

[Jordy]

She's a real cfo. Cfo, if I say myself.

[Tyler]

Totally. Yeah, totally. Anyway, if you know, you know.

[Jordy]

Yes.

[Tyler]

But she was asked about selling infra services in the future. She said, I do think about it.

[Jordy]

As this is why Ben Thompson moved back to America. He's like, I gotta end this right now. Ben Thompson famously does not like the fact that OpenAI is, has an API. He thinks that they should focus entirely, at least for now, on, on saving every GPU cycle for the consumer product. That is absolutely on fire. They should become, they should embrace being the accidental consumer company and they should go as deep as possible before they.

[Tyler]

Have an incredible edge.

[Jordy]

Yes.

[Tyler]

And consumer.

[Jordy]

Yes.

[Tyler]

Where do they not have an incredible edge in the just vending intelligence.

[Jordy]

I mean they're doing great and it is a good business. And so from a CFO's perspective and from Sam Altman's perspective, it certainly makes sense. Like yeah, like why not also be in that game? It is value creative, it is profit generating. And, and yet Ben Thompson thinks now's the time to focus, focus, focus, focus. At the same time, I kind of take the other side of this a little bit and say OpenAI is in a fortunate situation. They have a lot of data, a ton of customers. They're going to have a very great consumer business that will probably throw off a ton of cash, especially once they start monetizing more heavily. And what that means is they might be the next Google in the best sense possible. And what I mean by that is that they might be able to go and do 20% projects, they might be able to go spend a couple billion dollars trying to build a new device and maybe it doesn't work. But when you add up all the Google 20% time projects and Google side projects, it's easy to laugh at all the things that they've shut down, like 10 different chat bots or chat products. Yeah.

[Tyler]

The devices that have 100 million of revenue.

[Jordy]

Yeah. They launched Wave and they've launched Google Glass and they've missed on so many things. But when they hit, it's great. You know, they hit on Gmail, they hit on Docs, they hit on Cloud, they hit on Waymo. And so I love that you get sort of this like humanity or America gets like somewhat of a subsidized R and D Org at Google and it all pencils out and it all makes sense. And so maybe the infrastructure services group is not that at OpenAI. But I'm excited for these other, these other like less focused efforts from OpenAI and I think we'll see some cool stuff.

[Tyler]

Anyway, this is a good post from Stever. If we can pull it up, read it out, say you're finally awake. That fall looked real bad. Swe LLMs, B2B SAS. What are you talking about? You're an electrical engineer. Let's go build some chips.

[Jordy]

I love it.

[Tyler]

So good. This post really going to be relatable for a lot of you. Yes, Nine Figure hell is real. Sure, you don't have to worry and have some assets, but you can't really afford a decent yacht, let alone a private army or nuclear submarine.

[Jordy]

It's real. It's real. Get back in the wage cage.

[Tyler]

Yeah, get back in the cage, buddies. Get ready to send some emails, buddy.

[Jordy]

Captain Nemo. Oh, they're doing an OpenAI movie and they're basing it on a book. I think there might be two competing scripts, but they are finalizing the cast. I believe Andrew Garfield, who is also in the Social Network, it will be playing Sam. But Will Brown, friend of the show, has a recast. He has. Can you name these actors?

[Tyler]

Jason Statham.

[Jordy]

You got Jason Statham. And who will he be playing?

[Tyler]

He'll be paying two.

[Jordy]

Is that the joke here is that he's playing both Greg and Ilya? When I saw Jason Statham as Ilya, I was laughing out loud. I was very.

[Tyler]

And then I don't. The guy on the left, he was in a bunch of stuff.

[Jordy]

What stuff? What have you seen?

[Tyler]

I don't even know his name. I've seen him a bunch, though. Seen him around.

[Jordy]

Yeah, yeah. He's a nightcrawler.

[Tyler]

Nightcrawler.

[Jordy]

Wait, actually.

[Tyler]

Whoa.

[Jordy]

Is it Toby Maguire? I don't know. I'm all over the place.

[Tyler]

Tyler, who's this actor? Oh, yeah, Anade Armas.

[Jordy]

Yana de Armas. But who's the guy in the top left?

[Tyler]

Jake Gyllenhaal.

[Jordy]

Jake Gyllenhaal, that's right. Not Toby. All right. Toby McGrath.

[Tyler]

That's a famous guy. Everybody knows that guy.

[Jordy]

I got so tied up.

[Tyler]

Anyway, so the real cast of the movie Artificial is gonna be Andrew Garfield, Monica Barbero as Mir Maratti, and then a guy named Ike Barinholtz is rumored to be Elon.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Who's playing Dylan Patel?

[Tyler]

Who's playing Rune?

[Jordy]

Who's playing Rune is the real question. Yeah. Rune is the real question.

[Tyler]

Who should play Rune?

[Jordy]

Who should play. Wait, so I wonder if Mark Zuckerberg's gonna, like, make an appearance in the film and they're gonna have to cast him again. Should they have the guy who played him in the Social Network reprise the role?

[Tyler]

No, but he, like, hates Zuck now.

[Jordy]

Wait, who?

[Tyler]

Jesse Eisenberg.

[Jordy]

Jesse Eisenberg has beef with, like, why?

[Tyler]

I don't know.

[Jordy]

Oh, weird. Okay.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Why? Very odd. Anyway, should be fun. Hopefully we can get a cameo. We can sneak in if you know, someone introduces us.

[Tyler]

Chat, chat. Thank you for helping us out there.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

Jelly Hill from Gold Rock. Jake. Thanks, guys.

[Jordy]

It's good.

[Tyler]

Kylie says, I can't believe this is real. I can.

[Jordy]

I can't believe this is real. I saw this and I was like, this is not real.

[Tyler]

President Trump dialed into Fox and Friends on Tuesday morning. We're a couple days late. And revealed his newest and truest motivation for brokering an end to the war in Ukraine. He's worried he might not get into heaven at after he dies. I want to try and get to heaven if possible. He explained. I'm here and I'm not doing well. I'm really at the bottom of the totem pole. But if I can get to heaven, this will be one of the reasons.

[Jordy]

So I like whatever your motivation is for peace, do it, do it.

[Tyler]

It is solid. So there was a debate break.

[Jordy]

Yes. Break this debate down.

[Tyler]

Craig Weiss says having kids before 30 is how you station generationally poor.

[Jordy]

A real, a real, real Take Smith's take there.

[Tyler]

Yeah. So surely perfectly timeline turmoil. The dude Richie the rich highlighted Warren Buffett net worth 154 billion.

[Jordy]

He had a kid at 22.

[Tyler]

Child at 22. Michael Dell, 23.

[Jordy]

Let's go.

[Tyler]

Bernard Arnault, 26. Some absolute dogs. Jordy Hayes, Joy Club, 26.

[Jordy]

I just missed it by a year or two, I think. David Sen, Remember, I will say, we'll.

[Tyler]

Say you can come on whenever. Kids are much more. I. When I started making money, I got into cars.

[Jordy]

Yep.

[Tyler]

And when I started having kids, I realized that they are much more quite. You know, I used to think there was kind of a meme growing.

[Jordy]

Yeah. They're pretty close to cars in terms.

[Tyler]

Of people would say like the average American kid by the time they are 18 is like a quarter of a million dollars.

[Jordy]

Yep.

[Tyler]

But it feels like children feel like the carrying cost of like 10 supercars at times.

[Jordy]

That's true.

[Tyler]

Between school.

[Jordy]

Well, we have our first in person guest of the show. We got David Senra. Finally, the TVPN Ultra Dome Live.

[Tyler]

See you.

[Jordy]

How you doing, man?

[John]

Good to see you, man.

[Tyler]

Finally in the ultra Dome.

[Jordy]

Finally in person.

[Tyler]

How was the drive?

[Jordy]

Five times.

[John]

It's a testament to how much I love you that you got me out of Malibu. It was an hour and a half.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

It's rough.

[Tyler]

I know Speeder and I do it every day.

[John]

No, but it takes you an hour and a half at like. Yeah, you go at like 5 in the morning. 5:30 in the morning. This is a different story.

[Jordy]

Anyway, I love this place, though.

[John]

You guys have an army back here.

[Jordy]

We do have an army.

[John]

You have the crew, the interns. Then I met the friends of the interns.

[Jordy]

Yeah, we got everybody. Oh, yeah, we have intern friends.

[Tyler]

Internet.

[Jordy]

Studio.

[John]

What is this?

[Tyler]

That's a chat. So if they explain how handsome you look, you'll see it.

[Jordy]

People are talking about. Yeah, the chat is still talking about this debate over whether you can become generationally wealthy while having a child before age 30. What do you think? Obviously, yeah. And they gave Michael Dell, Warren Buffett, Michael Dell.

[John]

Shout out to Michael Dell, Dell Technologies on the.

[Tyler]

Don't say too much because that'll dox us.

[John]

No, actually, that might be an interesting place to start. I actually flew to Austin. I spent five hours with Michael Dell.

[Jordy]

Wow.

[John]

Like, two weeks. Two or three weeks ago.

[Jordy]

Yeah. What was that like? What'd you learn from him?

[John]

You know what.

[Jordy]

What surprised you because you've already done a full episode on him. You've dug in. You probably spent days on his story. You know most of the facts.

[John]

It's not only that, like, I listen to. So I highly recommend every entrepreneur listen to his audiobook because he actually narrates it. And so I listened to it three. Can you hear me? Yeah, I listened to it three times. I listened to it three times and then read the book and then made the episode. There was, like, halfway through our conversation, I said some. I said something like, I'm having a hard time reconciling, like, this paradox in my mind about between, like, your immense, immense accomplishments and just, like, how normal you are. And obviously, he's a superlative, extreme person, but he's unbelievably measured and controlled and kind and generous. It's just, like, one of my favorite people I've ever met.

[Jordy]

We got to get him on the Theo Vaughn podcast, see how he does there. I mean, everyone in tech has been making the rounds, and I actually have. There's been multiple times when tech people have gone on and Theo, and they've had, like, kind of awkward starts. Like, it took. It took Zuck a minute to warm up. It was like the caffeine thing. Oh, you know, I don't. I don't.

[John]

I think this is the mistake that people in tech make. And you're seeing with a bunch of other podcasts, they should definitely come here before anywhere else. This is not a joke. It's like, they see a number on a screen and they don't think about what that number represents and who that person is. And, like, you can Just read some of the comments on some of these, like mainstream podcasts. It's like this guy's six years old, he's in his fucking underwear in Missouri. He's got unemployed. Like he's not the person. You're just optimizing for the number when you should optimize for the quality of the people in the audience.

[Jordy]

Yeah, that's for sure.

[John]

It's insane to me.

[Jordy]

Well, you know who's optimized for the quality of the audience? Colossus magazine. There's a new.

[Tyler]

I love how you printed it out while we wait for the print edition.

[Jordy]

No, I don't have the print edition yet, but you can still go subscribe. Patrick o' Shaughnessy has printed a warehouse full this time. Have you had a chance to read through the Joe Lamont project?

[John]

Yeah, I get. I got an early. Patrick's, you know, obviously like my brother. I talked to him like every day. There's actually an interesting something we can talk about that I called him about yesterday. I actually think moving forward and I told him this yesterday and I told him again today. I was like, if you give me more than a day to read it, we if on especially these long form profiles, I should do it. That is good enough. If you read the whole thing, it takes like an hour and a half to listen to.

[Jordy]

So I read, I was thinking about printing the whole thing and I was like, no way I can read this before the show.

[John]

I read it and then I threw into 11 reader and I listened to it on the way out.

[Alon]

Oh, that's good.

[John]

And so it's like an hour and a half. If you listen to one X.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[John]

But I think that source material is so good. I could definitely do an episode of Founders. And it's like, just tell me in advance. Give me like, you know, two weeks, two, three weeks and then we can drop it the same day that you publish it.

[Tyler]

But what I call. One of my favorite little stories from that is is how so Joe had sort of a non traditional, you know, entrance into startups and business. He was a Stanford undergrad. So no more. More traditional in that sense. But. But at the time that he was building what was the software called? Sales Builder or something like that?

[John]

The initial, his name, the names for his.

[Tyler]

They're so great enterprise software.

[John]

It's like building a microphone. Like it's called microphone.

[Jordy]

And I mean you look at some of the companies here like New View, gce, Still Secure, Ignite Object Store Accept, Prologic, Raven Flow. It's just.

[Tyler]

Well, so there's two, there's two things that stood out from the story. One is there wasn't a meme yet of VCs being like, I'm going to back the Stanford dropout. They wanted to back executives had experience and crazy access to talent and there were some early kind of garage success stories. So he was kind of following that. But the other thing is bigger companies, Fortune 500 companies refuse to buy startups.

[John]

But then his pricing, did you see what he did with his website?

[Tyler]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[John]

Like it's 100 grand. And they're like, no, we don't buy from startups. They come back, okay, we need it. No one else can do this. It's 300 and it goes from like now it's a million, now it's seven and a half million, now it's $25 million.

[Tyler]

And everybody kept saying yes, because the best. But the other thing is, is the why now for the business, the initial why now and why it worked. Not like the business catalyst was that they started sending. This was at a time where they would just send you a letter and said, you're pre approved for this credit card. You just have to fill this out.

[John]

He did credit card roulette.

[Tyler]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he would, he signed up, he racked out half, racked up half a million dollars of credit card debt and was finally, before he got his first customer, still no VC would fund him at all. He was basically evaluating bankruptcy. He had played it out in his head. It's going to be seven years, it's going to be really annoying, but it doesn't matter if you have. His calculus was like how much debt you have going into bankruptcy. Actually going from 100,000 to 500k, it's not that much worse to go through bankruptcy.

[John]

You might as well do it the real way.

[Tyler]

So he just went full send. Absolutely. And then basically made it all back from his, his basically first couple customers.

[John]

So we have a mutual friend that we can't name that has been close and is basically. Joe's been a mentor of his for a long time and actually a funder of a lot of projects that he does behind the scenes. So I've heard a lot about this guy. And what I like about people is just like the people that chart their own path and intentionally go in the opposite direction. So everybody heard Buffett and Munger and they're like, you should buy phenomenal businesses even if you have to pay more. And so then Everybody in the VMs roll ups, they're like, I'm going to buy the great businesses. And what he realized, and I heard the story like probably two years ago. It's like, well, okay, so I have a lot more competition for the. Everyone's the great ones. What about these shitty ones over here? And he turned it into a math problem. He's like, okay, this is your ARR. This is your rate of attrition. Like, I know exactly how much I'm going to get out of this in the next six years. They talk about it in the, you know, they use different words that they talk about in the article. He's like, okay, so I can easily buy this thing for two because I'm going to rip. I'm going to pull out 15 over the next five years. Just does it over and over and over again. And then I heard, I don't know if it was, if they said it, but like, he bought out his shareholders. He owned 100% of the company. And what I heard is like, he's been taking billions a year in dividends. His fucking paycheck at the end of the year is like, how much money.

[Tyler]

Did you make there?

[John]

I don't know, like $1.5 billion.

[Jordy]

Crazy.

[John]

And no one knew who he was.

[Jordy]

Yeah, he's built a machine. Yeah, A machine behind the scenes.

[Tyler]

Yeah. There's a few of these going dark for 25 years. And basically until this.

[John]

Well, this is, this, you know, this is like one of my fetishes is like these very silent family owned businesses where they own 100% of them. You'll never hear about them. I've been lucky enough to have dinner with some of these people and they're just again.

[Tyler]

Yeah, I know you've talked to people that have written books about their family business.

[Jordy]

Yes.

[Tyler]

And haven't released them. And you're like, please let me, let me. And they're just like, no.

[John]

Okay, so I'll just tell the story. So there's this guy, he's 76 years old.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[John]

This is like one of my favorite dinners I've ever had. And I need to be really careful here. So he started working in the family business when he was six. Okay. He's the second generation. This family dynasty, they own. The original source of their wealth was one of the largest privately held shipping companies in the world. And when, I mean privately held, owned by his dad and now owned by him and his brother. Like, it's just like there is no shareholders, no board of directors. It's just the family. I've now become closer to the third generation. And I get insight on how they run their. The family is a business and the business is a family. And the way they go about things is just really, really intelligent. And so we had this phenomenal dinner. You look up his reported net worth and it's like it's still in the tens of billions and it's like underreported by a factor like four. Because then he tells you about like, oh yeah, I put money into this and I never sold. And it's worth this. There's just crazy stories. And he's also like super charismatic. One of the best rock and tours I've ever like been around. And just super. And he's still on it 24 7, like works all the time. And so there's two things that were funny. This has happened a few times where families will commission real writers, right? They commission an actual biography and I have a copy of a separate family. It looks like the book. It looks like a book you buy in a bookstore. The only difference is there's no ISBN number on the back. So like some of the books I have, no one else in the world has these books besides like the family and the author and everything.

[Tyler]

OpenAI would give you a lot of money for that.

[John]

So there's two funny things that he told me. One that they commissioned one for his father and then one for him. And I was like, dude, give me those books. Like, I would do such a good job on them. And without hesitation he's like, absolutely not. Like, that's out of the question. I go, why not? And he says something like, I have no desire to educate my competitors. And just like real fast. And then he leave it to me in the will. No. And then no, I think. So there's another founder, the next generation. No, but there's another founder who's 78. And I spent four days with her. Her, the CEO and the top 40 executives they were going through. How do we. They wanted advice on like how to transition from a founder led company. She's one of my favorite founders I've ever come across in my life. And like, to the next generation. And so after talking to all the executives, spending time with them, they're like, hey, so what do you think? And after four days I go, when she's dead, you're fucked. This is like, there's not, like, you're not replacing her. She's a singular individual. You should like either sell the company or go do something else. Because like, there's no transition here. It's like, what do you do when Michael Jordan retires, like, I don't know, start rebuilding. But. But he said something funny because they're obviously in shipping. They now have real estate and they have finance and everything else. And he's got also one of the biggest boats in the world. And he had mentioned. No, but, no, he mentioned earlier though. So early in the conversation he's like, yeah, when you read a lot of these biographies. He had read all the same biographies I had read like Daniel Ludwig, Aristotle Nassis, all these shipping guys. He knew all of them. They would also run their company headquarters from their private. Giant boats, giant yachts. And so he had mentioned earlier, yeah, I spend, you know, part of the year, I live part of the year on. He said, I thought he said boat. He said ship. So I was like, yeah. So like, when, like what month?

[Tyler]

There's a difference.

[John]

He's gonna tell this. I go, so what? What, like when are you gonna go back on your boat? Like, how long are you in your boat for? He goes, what are you talking about? I go, you said like earlier you live on your boat. He goes, I don't have a boat. I'm like, is this some kind of joke? He goes, I have a ship. I go, what's the difference between a boat and a ship? He goes, you can put a boat on a ship. You can't put a ship on a boat. So my favorite conversations are these kind of people and I like obsessed with like older entrepreneurs because they're just so much smarter than like a 25 year old fucking startup founder. It's like not even. They're not even like, it might as well be an alien. Yeah, it's just like these people are just, they just, they have so much more experience, they have so much more knowledge. Like I just can talk to them for hours and hours and hours.

[Jordy]

Have you dug into the Trilogy software mafia? Are you familiar with this?

[John]

No.

[Jordy]

So this was some secondary research I did out of Trilogy. This is of course the subject of that Colossus profile on Joe Lamont in the 90s. Trilogy was on such a tear. They were recruiting out of MIT Harvard and a bunch of folks went through Trilogy and then went on to do cool things. Ellie Seidman, the CEO of. Of Tinder, was a Trilogy alum. Cyrus and Nick Ganju, founders of zocdoc. Henry Ward, the CEO and founder of Carta.

[Tyler]

Crazy.

[Jordy]

John Lilly, former CEO of Mozilla and now he's an investor at Greylock. And Andy Palmer, the CEO of Tammer Foreign, former CEO of Vertica, which was acquired Major, major angel investor invested in Carta in part due to his connection. There are 87 Trilogy Mafia companies is now on Crunchbase. So it's just like this. Very interesting. We've heard that Joe, like, keeps his team very tight, but clearly selects for extremely entrepreneurial people. They don't often get poached to other firms that are doing the same thing. If you leave, you're probably a company.

[John]

I wouldn't want to make money the way he did. But put that aside. What I do admire the most pro American person, obviously the son of Cuban immigrants. Like, I grew up meeting people, literally came to this country, fled communism on a raft.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

Like, so I don't like outsourcing anything. I've had tons of people try to advertise on the podcast. They're like, I have this outsourcing thing. I was like, I want to find a way to pay people more money, not less. I want to work with the best people in the world. And those people don't work for $8 an hour. But I do. What the thing I respect about Joe is, like, he doesn't give a shit what other people think. And he's willing to have his own thinking. And then even if everybody's going in one direction. I was listening to your mischief on the way over here. He had this great line where he's like, if everybody's running fast or something, they're probably running off a cliff. I was like, that's a bar.

[Tyler]

That's a good bar.

[John]

And so I like that. Joe's like, hey, you guys are all doing this. So that means by default, there's an opportunity. I called Patrick yesterday. I was like, it's kind of funny, you know, there's not any other people more obsessive podcasts than me. You, Patrick, we talk about this stuff all the time. And I was like, everybody even now is still starting podcasts. And Patrick, you know, he has the highest value investing audience in the world. And what I love about what he's doing is he's like, oh, yeah, you guys are all gonna go to podcast. I'm gonna write. I was at 15,000 word in depth profiles. But there's so much better. Like the Neil Meadow one. Who's the paradigm guy? I read Matt. Yeah, this one.

[Jordy]

Yep.

[John]

And they're gonna keep doing it. And he'll tell you in the group chat, like some of the ones they're working on now, they're crushing. I just love.

[Jordy]

It's a very special product. And I went through when we were doing the show and we didn't have guests or anything, and we needed a lot of material. I went through and looked at old New Yorker deep dives profiles.

[John]

So good.

[Jordy]

They're so good. Old Bloomberg and old Forbes pieces, and they're just not doing it at that level anymore. There are some profiles, but the one profile that was written in prestigious magazine about Zuck is all about, like, did he have the right team in place? Like, it's like a diversity, like, referendum on diversity and stuff, like Brotopia type take, which is just not really the story. Like, that's a very minor piece of the Zuck story, in my opinion.

[John]

I'm glad you said the New Yorker part, because every single time I do a deep research report and every single person I'm working on just to get an overview, and it's always like, you. I want it written like a New Yorker piece. One of my favorite fantastic writers, Jackson.

[Tyler]

Dahl, we read one on Mary Meeker.

[Jordy]

Yeah, the Mary Meeker.

[John]

I read that, too.

[Jordy]

Fantastic.

[John]

I read that, too. So, Jackson, doll, you guys should have him on there. He's doing.

[Jordy]

Because for the record, we have invited him.

[John]

He needs to call in today. I don't know what he's doing.

[Jordy]

Nick, send him an invite.

[Tyler]

So have him join right now.

[John]

The reason. No, I'm sure, like, sharing the mics.

[Jordy]

Okay, you have to come after I'm done. Send the. The invitation. Like, send the invitation for tomorrow. But.

[John]

But the reason I. I say that is because he put me on to one of. He's like, hey, you have this. This thought that I haven't heard anywhere else, because something that I've talked about is just like, I actually think, like, introspection is one of the worst things, like, an entrepreneur can have. And I say some of the greatest entrepreneurs in history had low to no introspection. Like, Sam Walton didn't wake up every day wondering, like, what his life was.

[Tyler]

Rehashing the past. I wish I did this.

[John]

Nothing.

[Jordy]

It's just like being a golden retriever. You have to maniacally be going after the tennis guy. Not thinking about the.

[Tyler]

Never thinking about the laughter tennis ball.

[Jordy]

No, always the next one.

[John]

Excellent. So Jackson's like, hey, I heard you say that. Have you heard of this guy named Larry Gagosian? I didn't know who that was. And so he sent me this great New Yorker piece. The piece was so good, I made an episode on it. I think it's one of the best episodes I've ever done. It's one of my favorite. Like, the guy's A little obviously crazy. Every single person I profile on founders is crazy. But the. It's better than a book. That New Yorker piece was better than If I read 600 pages on Gagosian.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

But, yeah, I think there's like a clear. Again, you. We usually talk about, like, what's the white space? All the time. It's like what Patrick and his team are doing is like, there's a clear white space there. People write profiles, but, like, the profiles suck. There's no craft in them.

[Jordy]

Yeah, yeah. The New Yorker and care about the.

[Tyler]

Person writing the profile a lot.

[John]

Well, did you. Did you. Did you guys ever cover. You know, how Patrick found Jeremy Stern?

[Jordy]

No.

[John]

So I think you covered that. I'm pretty sure you read this to me. I love when John reads things to me. The. This. I think it's the best profile ever written about Palmer Lucky.

[Jordy]

Oh, sure, sure, sure.

[John]

I forgot the title. It had like a very.

[Jordy]

Yeah, I know.

[John]

You know the one I'm talking about. Yeah, like spread.

[Jordy]

Yep.

[John]

Jeremy wrote that.

[Jordy]

Oh, Patrick. Yeah.

[Tyler]

American Vulcan.

[John]

Make sure it's by Jeremy Stern.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[John]

Okay, so. So what did Patrick do? Patrick, this is great. Come do this for me.

[Jordy]

Yep.

[John]

And then he did something. And then Patrick did something smart. Choked him with gold.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

He's just like, name your price. So this is really important now. This is a really important thing. So there's a line I sent to if you're for startup or for any founders trying to recruit people. And there's this thing I found in one of the books on Ogilvy where he was looking up letters that the Medici family would write to the artists that they wanted to sponsor. And there was this one sculptor they wanted to essentially become a patron of and then move to Florence. And he's like, so something like, come to Florence. But the last. The way he ended the letter was one of the most gangster things I've ever heard. He's like, come, I will choke you with gold.

[Jordy]

That's great. Great.

[Tyler]

That's a bar.

[John]

That's. But that's exactly what Patrick is. It's just like, name your price. The guy that does my clips. I just like, same thing. Name your price. I'm not negotiating with you at all. What do you want? That's the number. Fucking send me an invoice. Paid today on my ramp card.

[Tyler]

Yep, always. We were. We were covering a bit on Oracle's latest moves.

[Jordy]

Cash flow negative.

[Tyler]

Give us the five minute founders on Larry Ellison.

[John]

So I'm actually working on a Larry Ellison episode. So I did three episodes on him. It's like 124, 126, and 127. But that was probably, like, six years ago. And I reread the Billionaire and the Mechanic just now. I was like, fuck. I don't think it's good enough to do another episode on. I need, like, a different angle here. So there's a guy in my audience who I knew was, like, completely obsessed with Larry Elson. And we've been DMing for years. He had transcripts for every single interview Larry Ellison has ever done. So it's taken me a while, as you can imagine, but that's the source material. Highly likely it'll be out in three episodes from now. I'm doing Elon right now, which is killing me. That's why, like, I look like. And I'm very tired. This outline is destroying me.

[Tyler]

Don't go on X right now, by the way. Make you rethink doing the episode.

[John]

Why?

[Jordy]

He's in hot water. He's basically pushing AI Companions, which people are not a fan of.

[Tyler]

Yeah. Oh, is this like the scantily kind of, like, companions?

[Jordy]

Yep.

[John]

Okay. So here, I'll tell you what I'm doing. And this is why it's really important, because, you know, you could people. The very first episode of Founders, September 2016, was Ashley Vance's biography of Elon. Musk was obviously an Elon fanboy. I was looking at Tesla's before they even had the Model S. You know, everybody that's a fan of his obviously goes through, like, these cycles of, like, you have to ride the fucking Elon roller.

[Tyler]

Well, you can say on the podcast, I made this episode before I went crazy.

[John]

No, but, like, the problem is. And so, like, there's actually. I think the best biography of Elon written is this book called Liftoff. Because it's the first six years of SpaceX. Yeah, it's very fascinating.

[Tyler]

There's pictures where he's, like, standing in the rubble, right? Yes.

[John]

So what I decided to do is, like, listen, man, I don't care about politics, culture war stuff. I don't care about anything. I care about entrepreneurship. Taking ideas from great people, actually building the business, and just throwing it to the next generation to hopefully help people do that. Right? Do that better. So no disrespect to Walter Isaacson. I've read all of his biographies. The Elon biography is, like, written like it's a newspaper now, but you take an asset, like, or you take a liability, you try to flip it into an asset. So I was like, okay, the problem is, no disrespect, there's no craft here. I like soul. I like craft because I read for fun. Like, this is what I want to do. This is like a news update. But the good news of that is it's in chronological order. So the reason this is killing me is because the reading's been done for like five days. It's just been outlined, outline, outline, outline, outline nonstop. So what I did is, like, I'm going to rip out every single thing about Elon. I'm not going to talk about his family, his wives, his kids, his politics, culture war. This guy's got brilliant ideas. So this is literally just what are the most enduring principles that Elon used across three decades and seven different companies? And I really think I'm crafting something that's going to be really valuable. And I think you're going to have to use some level of, like, intelligence to listen to it, because I'm not. I'm going to like, jump from idea to idea to you rapidly. And, like, you have to put the shit together yourself. And it's just like, hey, this guy's been repeating the same principle for decades. And it worked in Tesla, it worked at SpaceX, it worked in Neuralink. Why is this working? Might work in your work. You should fucking know this. You should have a tool where you can listen to this, hopefully listen to today or whenever it's out, and then you listen to it a year ago, two years ago.

[Jordy]

Okay, I have a take on crap.

[John]

So anyways, let me finish one thing. So when you get to the end of this, you're completely back on the Elon train. You're like, this is a singular person.

[Tyler]

Well, I think to people's credit, people, a lot of the people posting these recent comments are on his team and want. And it's this. This I think they're struggling with, like, wanting him to focus on what? Rockets, rockets and the things that.

[Jordy]

But the rockets in orbit, sir, is like the take.

[John]

Yeah, he says that himself in the book. It was really interesting because he was talking about, what. What do I have to do that. If I don't do it, it doesn't get done. And he's like, listen, somebody else. Electric cars were inevitable. This is a direct quote from the book. I'm paraphrasing. He's like, electric cars were inevitable. They were going to happen with or without me, but the rockets were not. And so therefore I should focus on that.

[Tyler]

Yeah, that was like. I think people, the people that want to go to Mars are concerned that, you know what, what takes down great men. It's ladies liquor and leverage. Yeah, in this case, liquor leverage, goon bots.

[Jordy]

My problem is I would gladly give up the Mars ambitions if we could get a Tesla with a V12. And I feel like every moment he spends working on rockets is another moment that I don't have a thousand horsepower naturally aspirated, screaming, straight piped Tesla. That's my goal. Anyway, on the topic of craft, I was trying to think about, you mentioned Joe Lamont. His business has been buying companies that are not generational products. They're not the iPhone, they're not these amazing monuments to craft. They're businesses that deliver a little bit of value for a bunch of customers. And he, and he has figured out a pattern of offshoring some of the software engineering, running the business more efficiently. He is like the private equity buyout. He's not trying to completely transform and build a generational product. The product is not a product of craft. He is not a craftsman. And then I was trying to think.

[John]

About, I think he's trying to be now the new one.

[Jordy]

So on the flip side, when I was talking to Delian early on, Delian Asperov at Founders Fund about like how did he underwrite the investment in Ramp, he was talking about software can be like art and that the team there has like this attention to craft and they see that's why they hire the IMO gold medalist. It's like, why do you need someone that good? It's because they see the product as like so, so important. Even though it's in this highly competitive like particular like corporate card space. It's, it's something that they take really seriously. And I think that there's this. It's not that there's necessarily one pattern that's correct. It's more of like this barbell and you can be on either side, but you need to know what camp you're in. And so when I see Joe Lamont, I see him as software, as widgets. He is crafting a machine that produces software and it produces it at the lowest possible cost. And it all kind of looks the same. And then I see on the other side, like Ramp and folks like that who take software development more as art and more as craft. And both can produce outsized returns. Both are big.

[Tyler]

Well, it's also where you apply the craft. I would say that Joe, from my read, brings craft to the organization, the organization of Trilogy. He has Trilogy University. And you can you, I think you're going to struggle to build an iconic, enduring company. If you're not bringing craft somewhere.

[Jacob]

Right.

[Tyler]

Like totally Ferrari. Ferrari is bringing craft to racing. They don't necessarily care about certain other elements.

[Jordy]

They're not bringing craft. Mechanical. Mechanical.

[John]

Okay.

[Jordy]

So the reliability.

[John]

You said something like, other end of the spectrum.

[Jordy]

Sure.

[John]

I think, like, what I'm trying to drive home with founders and where I'm like is like, there is no right way.

[Jordy]

Yes.

[John]

Based on who you are and what you're into.

[Jordy]

Yes.

[John]

So I just came, I just flew from New York and I spent. I always spent a ton of time with Kareem and Eric, founders of Ramp. And I specifically this last time spent two hours with them. And I would like to talk about some of the stuff I've learned because I spent a lot of time with them. But there's an example of this. It's like, this is where people fail, is they're like this. Steve Jobs did it this way. So I should just copy that.

[Jordy]

It's like inauthentic.

[John]

Yes. Natural. So I was saying for a long time, this is Michael Dell again. So I was saying for a long time, you need to build a business. It's very obvious when you read biographies, people, you have to build a business that's authentic to you. And then I read Michael Dell's autobiography, and I talked to him about this when I saw him in Austin a few weeks ago. I read Michael Dell's autobiography, and again, the guy wants to. IBM is the largest company in the world. It's the first company to reach $100 billion market cap. And this guy's like, I'm going to compete with them with $1,000 out of.

[Jordy]

My University of Texas dorm room.

[John]

It's not an exaggeration. And so he then brings in this older guy. I think his name's. I forgot his name. It's an episode. But the guy had a couple successful businesses and he works with Michael, think for four years. And when he's 80, he's. Now looking back, I think he's 25 years older than Michael. Something like that. And he's like, listen, he's like, four years of this. Like, I lost all my hair, My back hurt. I couldn't sleep. I had, like, intestinal issues. I had to stop and Mike, because, like, the competition was so intense and we had no money. We're under capitalized, and we were just like going 24 7. I'm dying. And Michael is full of energy because he's like, he built a business. This is his line. He built a Business that was natural to him. So I was telling. I was telling Michael when I saw him in Austin, I was just like, nothing we're doing with podcasting is, like, new. I was like, think about, like, if you ever read Robert Caro's biographies of lbj, one of my favorite stories in there is W. Leo Daniels, right? And it's this guy, Texas Hill country, right? This is like, there's no Internet. There's barely any electricity. So this Guy has, like, 90% market share with the wives of farmers in the Texas Hill country, right? And so he has this daily news show, right, that's on for a few hours a day.

[Jordy]

We invented that. You're telling me that somebody was doing this before us?

[John]

Here's the funny part. And don't let me. Let me go back to Creamy Arts. Don't let me forget that, please. So the crazy thing is, so he wants to get a 90% market share in this area, right? So then he's like, okay, well, what should my sponsor be? Well, who's listening? What are the women in these houses need? And he comes like, everybody needs baking flour. They all need baking flour. So I'll find the best manufacturer baking flour, and they'll be my advertiser. He sells a ton of baking flour, and he's like, wait a minute. I can just, like, make my own baking flour. So then he starts manufacturing his own baking flour. He makes, like, $50 million, like the 1940s or something.

[Jordy]

And then he goes, feastables.

[John]

And then he goes, what am I gonna do next? Like, what can I do with this? He's like, I'm gonna run for governor. And then people are like, this is Trump before Trump. This is what I'm telling you. There's an element of Trump, too.

[Tyler]

Trump had vodka.

[John]

Yeah. But so then everybody tells him. Everybody tells him, nobody. You're not a professional politician. You can't possibly win. But then he starts hosting these rallies. Remember in 2015, Trump was doing this? And then, like, the rallies, they'd be, like, selling. It'd be like a monster truck rally. There'd be, like 50,000 people there. Of course that's gonna translate from votes. So he wins the governorship of Texas, and he moves his radio show into.

[Jordy]

The Texas governor's mansion.

[John]

And so he's still broadcasting that. Then the reason he's in LBJ's biography is. Cause he really runs. And then he's like, what are you gonna do next? I'm gonna run for Senate. He ends up stealing the election from lbj. Legitimately stole the election. But I was telling Michael about this, and you know, in Texas, they teach Texas history before they teach American history.

[Julie]

Right.

[John]

If you go to any used bookstore in Texas, my favorite thing to do, there's huge sections on, like, you have American history. It's like Texas history.

[Jordy]

Texas history.

[John]

And Michael texts me back the funny thing. He goes, oh, I must admit, I missed this part of Texas history. I was just too busy reading computer magazines. I want to fucking hit the table. Because that's exactly.

[Jordy]

He picked the business that was authentic to him.

[John]

Natural to him.

[Jordy]

Natural.

[John]

Completely natural. It's what he wanted to do. So the ramp guys, like, they're not. They're like, whatever the. You guys. I always have to like, get the way people talk on the Internet. Translated to me from you.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

So I don't know if there's a term for anti. Slope, but there's a term for anti.

[Jordy]

Stop.

[John]

Perfect. Thank you. So if there's. There's a very old term for this. So the way I think of this. Have you guys ever heard of shokunin?

[Jordy]

Explain it for the listener.

[John]

So shogunin is this idea in. Essentially, it's almost like a Japanese word for craftsmanship. And it doesn't matter if you're building, you know, a $22 billion fintech or you're sweeping the floor. The Japanese, if you're a shokunin, you take pride in the activity, making it. Making your. You take pride in the activity itself and pride in making your work as good, even if no one else sees it. And so what I would say about this is spending a lot of time with Kareem and Eric is one from the outside. They have very complementary skills. And what I would say, like, especially with Eric, one of the best sales advice that I think think it was. It was advice for sales, but I actually think it's advice for life and dealing with people that I've ever heard is Mary Kay. Remember Mary Kay Cosmetics?

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

They built this, like, massive empire, like, going like door to door sales. It might have been like an MLM.

[Jordy]

Kind of like the Proto MLM. Yeah.

[John]

And they drive around like pink catalogs.

[Tyler]

MLMs.

[Jordy]

Underrated the way. Sometimes literally, criminally rated the ways.

[John]

The way that she. The way that she trained her saleswomen. She says, never forget that every single person goes through life with an invisible sign around their neck that says, make me feel special. And Eric has very understated charisma, and he is gifted at salesmanship, at listening. He's a very gifted listener, understanding what's important to you and then translating what's important to you into how his business can solve your problems. And so what I think one of the things I admire about both Eric and Cream is like, I like people that take what they do very seriously. I don't care what that activity is. And they work like dogs. I'm not into this. Like, I'm not into work, life, balance. I don't like balance. I'm not a balanced person. I'm either. I completely. I'm at 0 or 100 and nothing in between. And they're both like that.

[Tyler]

Yeah. We're always telling you, you don't have to destroy your life. For this next episode. The product you want, it's possible. So push yourself.

[John]

So there's a couple things I think they do really, really smart. One is, and I think they both have commonalities is one, they pay attention to every single little detail, which is the point that you were making. So the point where, like, they're running a giant company. They have tens of thousands of customers, they have thousands of employees. Their revenue growth is exploding right now. They have all these features. They did 300 updates.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

To the product in the last year, and yet it's only 250 work days. Yeah. Like, I think this is yesterday before. I don't even know what day it is today. We sat in there. It's not like Eric and Kareem have empty schedules. And it was us three. And we sat there and we talked about podcasting and, like, the role it could play. What we talked a lot about you guys and what I like about them, I'm just going to, like, say random stuff. You guys jump in, whatever you want. But, like, the one example I use for them, and I was just like, listen, I. And I like how fast they make decisions. And then when they make a fucking decision, they don't like, oh, well, kind of like test it out. They go all in. They make big, bold bets and they're willing to take a risk even if it will fail. Where I think a lot of the biggest mistake you can make in a world that's changing constantly, the biggest risk is taking no risks. And so I use the example I.

[Jordy]

Was like, is that an Elon quote or Sam, I don't know.

[John]

All my quotes come from other people. I have no original ideas. I need to. I have no original idea.

[Jordy]

I think I feel bad about it. I think the original idea that you have that you beat the drum on is podcasting.

[Tyler]

The biggest risk is not taking it.

[John]

So there you go, shout out to Zuck. Can we get. You have a. What kind of. What should we hit for Zuck?

[Tyler]

You're not gonna be able to hear it.

[Jordy]

The Glazenator.

[John]

No, but triple glaze.

[Jordy]

The Glazenator.

[John]

So what Eric and Kareem both do that. They. The commonality they have with history skills is they bet on talent. So they overpay for talent. They're like, they will find the best people in the world, like their head of AI, some of their designers, some of their engineers, the people they partner with. Like, they're like, that's the best person. And let's make sure he's comp. He or she is compensated at a level that makes sense. And so I was talking to him, I was like, I really do think we have. Like, John and Jordy are gifted at what they're doing. And we had a long conversation about this. I was like, I'm telling you, man, I talk to a lot of people on a per minute basis. And I've told you guys this, you know, privately. I'll say it obviously in public. It's like, on a permanent basis. I don't know anybody else that comes up with better, more simple, more effective and inexpensive marketing ideas. And I go, I really think we have this huge opportunity for leverage. It's like, if they have an idea, from the idea to execution, since we trust them, we know they're talented. There should be no barriers. There should just be like, here's a fucking pile of money, and next time you have come with an idea, do it. And immediately they're like, done. What else you want? It's just like, there was no. That's obviously a good idea. John and Jordy are obviously talented. Like, how can we get more out of the talent that we have around them? I just think that's. There's just a million little ideas that they have.

[Clock Miller]

Like this.

[John]

I remember, I don't even know what the valuation is now, but it went like a huge jump. I don't think it was this time as the last time, but we were having dinner. It was gonna be me, Kareem, and two other people. And me and Kareem got there first. And it was the day that that announcement came out, and Twitter was going crazy. They're like, ramp's fucking killing it. And your side of the world with all these VCs are like, fighting over this shit. And. And Kareem shows up in the first 10 minutes. He's just like, this feature's not good enough. We lost this deal. This Isn't exciting. He didn't mention a word. And I just sat there smiling. And, you know, it's really hard for me to not talk for 10 minutes. And I just start. I go, that's the reason your perpetual. Your divine discontent is why you're so good. Because the value of your company is just the collective value of all the problems that you solve for your customers. And he doesn't give a shit about taking a victory lap. He cares about solving problems for his customers. And I like the fact that I can call them. I've called Eric at 1:00am his time, and I'm like, where are you? And he's like, oh, I'm in, like, Chicago. And I'm, like, doing, like, customer meetings. And, like, I recruit people, and, like, I'm closing this deal. He's just like, they work all the time.

[Tyler]

Working hard, working hard, work all the time.

[Jordy]

It's a good. It's a good mantra.

[Tyler]

It's one thing you can control.

[John]

Yeah, the Joe Lamont think about that. I mean, that's excessive, but I think they were having. They were in that piece. They were talking about this conversation he was having with Jack Welch, if I'm not mistaken, where he's just like, well, if you have a product that's working and you're willing to work 20 hours a day, it's really hard to lose at that point.

[Jordy]

Yeah, no, yeah. Find your life's work. Find something that's. What was the phrase? Not authentic, natural. And then work constantly.

[John]

Well, okay, so this is. Again, everybody. I'm so happy to see what's happened to you. I still consider myself your first listener.

[Tyler]

It's true.

[Jordy]

You are literally. Literally first listener sent you the MPA Google Drive.

[John]

Oh, and that's another thing. So going back, I want to talk about why I think you guys are really special, but it also goes back to the glazing. It also goes back to what Eric and Kareem were willing to bet on talent when I was just like, guys, they have a thousand listeners right now.

[Jordy]

It was crazy.

[John]

They're gonna fucking blow. I don't know anything. I only. I know about podcasts, and I know how history's greatest entrepreneurs think. I don't know anything about anything else. I promise you, there's zero chance. They already knew you were talented, but they already knew. It was obviously kuvings talented. They tried to buy you and recruit you a long time ago, and they made a bet, and they made a bet on talent, which, again, is something that Brad Jacobs does. That Elon Musk does that. Steve Jobs did that. All these people did. Over and over and over again. Again. These are ideas that are timeless. You can use them today. You can use them 100 years ago. They were used 100 years ago. You're gonna be able to use them 100 years from now.

[Jordy]

Well, so get out there and use them.

[Tyler]

Get out there. Folks, we have a 3pm reservation.

[Jordy]

We do. We gotta get on that.

[Tyler]

We gotta get offline. We gotta get off air. It's hard to get this guy off the mic. I wish that we could go. We could go for another five hours right now.

[Jordy]

But you in town tomorrow. Let's do it again. Run it back.

[John]

I gotta finish this episode. It's already Tuesday and I'm never driving here again.

[Tyler]

Helicopter. We're getting a helicopter.

[John]

No, that's how Kobe died.

[Jordy]

It was. It was a pre. But it was foreshadowed in our first launch video. We. We open it with us in a helicopter. We're going to be helicopter guys.

[John]

So that's what me and Kareem and Eric were talking about. Your launch video.

[Tyler]

It's about type of helicopter.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

Not all helicopters are created equally.

[John]

No need to move the studio to Malibu.

[Jordy]

Anyway, we will see you tomorrow. Thank you for watching. Thank you for. For hanging out with us.

[Tyler]

See you tomorrow, Chad.

[Jordy]

Tomorrow. Leave us five stars.

[Tyler]

Have a fantastic evening.

[Jordy]

Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye.

[Tyler]

Love you. Bye.