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- [00:00]
Jordy
You're watching TVPN.
- [00:02]
Spiegel
Today is Friday, November 7, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance. The capital capital. Time is money save. Both easy to use, Corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Ramp.com baby. The timeline is in turmoil over again. Sam Altman again. What were we calling it? Backstop gate. Backstop gate continues unabated.
- [00:29]
Jordy
John. Timelines and turmoil.
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Spiegel
Turmoil over.
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Jordy
Sam Altman telling me this for the.
- [00:34]
Spiegel
First time every single day this week and last week. It is non stop. OpenAI. What will happen? Is it over? Is it the end of the global economy? Or will we, you know, live to fight another day? The main point of debate is is over. You know Sarah Fryer's comments that she used the word backstop. She backtracked on her backstop comment and said I wasn't asking for a backstop of OpenAI equity. I was advocating for this American manufacturing plan. Then Semper Satoshi is going pretty hard. He says here's an OpenAI document submitted one week ago where they advocate for including data center spend within the American manufacturing umbrella. They specifically advocate for federal loan guarantees. And Semper Satoshi says Sam lied to everyone.
- [01:28]
Jordy
Let's read the specifics.
- [01:29]
Spiegel
Yes, the specifics are AI server production and AI data centers. Broadening coverage of the amic, which is the American Advanced Manufacturing Investment Credit, will lower the effective cost of capital de risk early investment and unlock private capital to help alleviate bottlenecks and accelerate the AI build in the United States. Counter the PRC by de risking US manufacturing expansion to provide manufacturers with the certainty and capital they need to scale production quickly. The federal government should also deploy grants, cost sharing agreements, loans or loan guarantees to expand industrial base capacity and resilience.
- [02:12]
Jordy
Okay, so loan guarantees people. So what's happening here is OpenAI a week ago and everyone can go and read this letter which is publicly available on their website. Was making the recommendation that the government should effectively treat data centers or AI or token factories, put them in the manufacturing bucket, which would qualify them for similar incentives that traditional manufacturing, defense tech, et cetera.
- [02:44]
Spiegel
And I don't have a problem with asking the government for a handout. I think that that's actually like best practice. It's actually in your shareholders responsibility, like you have a fiduciary duty to ask the government for as much help as possible. I think that everyone should go to the government right now, hey, if I'm paying 50% tax, how about we take that down to 20%. How about we take it down to 0%? Like you have every incentive to ask your, your person in Congress and your senator, the people in Washington to do everything they can to support your mission. This has worked out in the past with Elon and Tesla. It didn't work out in the case of Solyndra. But like the game on the field is if there are taxpayer dollars that are moving around the board, you want to get those into industries that are aligned with you.
- [03:29]
Jordy
And so the thing that people are taking issue with is that in the opening of his message yesterday he said we do not have or want government guarantees for OpenAI data cent.
- [03:40]
Spiegel
Yes.
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Jordy
And that seems to conflict with the message. The letter that they wrote a week ago that is still up on their website.
- [03:48]
Spiegel
Yes. So if it's, if it's, what is it? What Loan guarantees to expand in the.
- [03:58]
Jordy
Capacity X Chat is taking the initiative. Just sent the admin a safe to sign uncap, uncap, uncapped note.
- [04:06]
Spiegel
You literally can do this. Now there's a sovereign wealth fund like it sounds crazy but like they're ripping checks like this is the new economy and you know you can, you can, you can be upset about it but you also have to understand like what is the game on the field. You can always advocate for like we should change the game. Like we shouldn't be doing this. Like I would prefer a more of a free market economy but in the world where we're not in a free market economy you want to have your company win. Right? That's just rational. That's just actually playing the game on the field. Now it is weird optics to talk about the game on the field. That's something most people don't like doing. And that's very odd because when you say oh yeah, this is a one hand wash is the other situation or oh yeah this is a situation where a backstop will allow us to be more aggressive. That feels like the banker saying oh yeah, I knew that the government was going to bail us out in 08 so I was intention underwriting loans that where it was somebody's fifth house and I knew that they couldn't pay it. I wasn't asking about their job, I wasn't asking about their income, I wasn't asking about their assets. And so I pushed it way further and I made a lot of money and I got out at the top. That's what's really upsetting to Americans because the bailout comes in, the backstop comes in. Yes, it makes sense to rationally do the backstop in that moment. But if some people get out early and then other people get cooked, that's a really bad optics. That's really, really bad optics.
- [05:39]
Jordy
Which is why I kind of expect a lot more of the narrative to shift towards subsidizing and incentivizing, bringing new energy.
- [05:48]
Spiegel
We were talking about that yesterday, which.
- [05:49]
Jordy
Directly benefits the labs and anybody building a data center, but it also feels very much in America's interest, broadly.
- [05:58]
Mikey Schulman
Right.
- [05:59]
Jordy
And it benefits. It theoretically would benefit the average American too.
- [06:02]
Spiegel
We were listening to Ben Thompson this morning. It wasn't on restream one livestream, 30 plus destinations, multi stream. Reach your audience wherever they are. We were listening to the Strathecary RSS feed. Hopefully Ben goes live at some point. And restream, that'd be awesome.
- [06:16]
Jordy
By the way, I think the chat has discovered that yes, this is a turbo puffer. This is one of two. I sent the other one to Simon, but you can see it looks great.
- [06:29]
Spiegel
Especially with the green background, the color grade. The production team is on point today. Let's. Let's hear from the production team. So yes, I agree with you on the energy front. I think Ben Thompson, his point today.
- [06:46]
Jordy
And fabs.
- [06:47]
Spiegel
Yeah, and fabs too. Yeah. His point today was like OpenAI needs to be crystal clear about the position that they're in, which is that they are the hottest company in the world. There is unlimited demand for their shares. They could be a public company, they could go raise more private capital. They need to be on the opposite end of the risk curve from the stuff that's like no one really wants to invest in an American fab that might lose money for a decade. Like, like there is truly much less appetite for. Yeah, let's go and build a nuclear power plant. That might take a decade. And who knows? Like when you think about the things that make money in the short term, it's SaaS. Right. AI for SaaS. Just go and transform the legacy business with some AI sprinkled on top and just start printing money like this is what works.
- [07:40]
Jordy
People's concern for government backed data center lending is that you're lending against chips which have a really fast depreciation schedule. We don't know.
- [07:51]
Mikey Schulman
Right.
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Spiegel
There was some pushback. I made the comment, hey, maybe that these things don't depreciate as fast. There was some pushback in the comments. I think everyone kind of agrees that these things depreciate quickly. And so energy infrastructure is the place.
- [08:04]
Jordy
Yeah. And if you look at right now, it's Core weaves, corporate default swaps are now sitting around 500 basis points jumped up dramatically and so this is one of the leading Neo Clouds.
- [08:20]
Spiegel
500 basis points. 5%. Yeah, they jumped 5%.
- [08:25]
Jordy
They jumped from like, I think like 2 to 5 and try to find somewhere in the stack.
- [08:29]
Spiegel
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But sorry, I don't mean to like ask particular stats, but clearly like people are, are worried about this.
- [08:36]
Jordy
Yeah, so, so and again, this is for a leading neocloud, right. We, we semi analysis cluster Max. The updated version came out yesterday. They're only in the platinum neocloud in the Platinum platinum tier. And people are worried about them, right? Yep. Potentially, you know, having some bankruptcy risk. And so if you start doing, you know, basically government guaranteed data center lending, you could get in a situation where there's a bunch of new data centers that come online that really don't have a clear pathway to roi.
- [09:10]
Spiegel
Yeah.
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Jordy
And it just incentivizes the entire stack to just get, you know, really exuberant. Right. And again, going back to Sarah Fryer's interview on Wednesday, she was, she felt the market was not exuberant enough. And I think a lot of people disagree with that. Right. There's a lot of, there's been a lot of insanity this year silliness, maybe we don't need more. But we will see the other news that was interesting out of today. The director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, William Polt, says Fannie and Freddie eyeing stakes in tech firms. Bill Polt, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, said that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are looking at ways to take equity stakes in technology companies. We have some of the biggest technology and public companies offering equity to Fannie and Freddie in exchange for Fannie and Freddie partnering with them in our business. Paul said Friday during an interview at a housing conference, we're looking at taking stakes in companies that are willing to give it to us because of how much power Fannie and Freddie have over the whole ecosystem.
- [10:19]
Spiegel
So yeah, this Wall Street Journal event is just. So many articles came out of this. The Wall Street Journal did a fantastic job bringing a ton of people together. This is where that Sarah Fryer quote came from. It's also where the Core Weave CEO was on stage. You were mentioning core weave earlier and the Core Weave CEO. The headline in the Wall Street Journal is CoreWeave CEO plays down concerns about AI spending bubbles. And the quote is from Michael. If you're building something that accelerates the economy and has fundamental value to the world, the world will find Ways to finance an enormous amount of business. And he went on and said, if the economy doubles in size, it's not a lot of money to build all those data centers. And so there's a lot of folks to, you know, addressing bubble concerns right now. He says it's very hard for me to worry about a bubble as one of the narratives when you have buyers of infrastructure that are changing the economics of their company. They are building the future. And so if you are. If the products are effective in growing the economy, then all of the investment is worth it. There's a fascinating mansion story we should get to that's actually related to this.
- [11:31]
Jordy
Good.
- [11:33]
Spiegel
So there is a. Before we do, let me tell you about Privy wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, integrate on chain infrastructure all through one. Civil aviation. Did you get a whole new soundboard? What's going on with the soundboard?
- [11:46]
Tyler Cosgrove
I did, thank you.
- [11:47]
Spiegel
Wait, really? Like, they swapped them all out?
- [11:48]
Jordy
Michael, do you still have the horse? I still got all the classics. Working with some new material.
- [11:52]
Spiegel
Working with some new material. I like the sheesh. Can we get the vine Boom on there? Is that on there?
- [11:59]
Jordy
I don't know.
- [12:00]
Ahmad
Boom.
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Spiegel
The thud. That's a big one. Anyway, Casa Encantada is a 1930s estate in Los Angeles. It's one of the most important, important homes in the 20th of the century. In 2023, it was also briefly the most expensive home for sale in the United States, with an ambitious asking price of $250 million. This is in Bel Air. So it's a Bel Air property. It was sold in the foreclosure auction after the death of its longtime owner, financier Gary Winick. So it's an 8.5 acre property. He bought it in 2000 for $94 million. He bought it in the year 2000.
- [12:41]
Jordy
No way.
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Spiegel
Do you know who this guy is? Gary Winnick.
- [12:45]
Jordy
He had something to do with the last bub.
- [12:48]
Spiegel
He did have something to do with the last bub. It's one of the craziest stories. So is it to satisfy the debt which has now grown. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So Basically, it's a 40,000 square foot house built in the 1930s. Counts Hotelier Conrad Hilton and dole food billionaire David Murdoch among its former owners. It's located right next to the Bel Air Country Club golf course. It's seven bedrooms, has a swimming pool, tennis court. It's awesome. Anyway, Gary is perhaps best known as the founder of Global Crossing, which built fiber optic cable, a fiber optic cable network across the world. The company made him a billionaire, but it imploded.
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Jordy
Did they have a little bit of dark did they have a little bit of dark fiber?
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Spiegel
A little bit of dark fiber imploded in the early 2000s under the weight of massive debt. Casa Encantada. Gary's primary home went on the market in June of 2023, five months before his death. Now it's asking 190 million and they kind of move on from there. But is that Global Crossing was.
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Jordy
He was somewhat of a global businessman. He was. The headquarters were in Bermuda. You know this.
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Spiegel
I didn't know that.
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Jordy
I wonder why. I wonder why.
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Spiegel
I mean, it might literally. Because it insulates the assets in America. Like that is one thing that you can do if you don't want to have to give up your lovely home post bankruptcy. You want to be able to get liquidity before the bubble pops. That's the lesson here. Sell the shares before the top, buy low, sell high. That's the phrase that we live by here. Was there anything else, Tyler, that came out of your deep research report on Gary Winick? Did you get a chance to.
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Tyler Cosgrove
I mean, so let's see.
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Spiegel
How do you tell us?
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Tyler Cosgrove
He also started Pacific Capital Group in 1985.
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Spiegel
Oh, wow.
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Tyler Cosgrove
That was kind of the precursor.
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Spiegel
So he was set up to actually marshal all the debt to do the big infrastructure.
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Tyler Cosgrove
He had been a global businessman for a while before that.
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Jordy
Okay, nice. Let's give it up for global businessman.
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Spiegel
Let's give it up. Yeah. What a wild, wild story.
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Jordy
We're hyper local businessmen. We like to do our business right here in the ultra dome. But we do got to give it up for them.
- [15:15]
Spiegel
Also in the mansion section, which we should continue on. But first, let me tell you about Cognition, the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. You have a new neighbor. Jordi, you have a new neighbor. So Tom Petty apparently lived in your neighborhood in Malibu, California. The late free fallen rocker had a personal music studio.
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Jordy
Some deep lore, please. I saw Tom Petty. I believe it was the first ever. Who headlined the first ever. Outside lands was the first or second.
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Spiegel
He was living in Malibu in a $11.2 million house. 8,744 square feet, seven bedrooms as a music studio. The buyer is Steven Slade Tien, a psychoanalyst and author, according to people with knowledge of the deal. Tien didn't respond for a request for comment. I wonder if He. If he'd want to, you know, get beer sometime, hang out, maybe go surfing, go for a walk on the beach. We should reach out to him for comment.
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Jordy
Okay. So the. I was at the first ever outside lands.
- [16:28]
Spiegel
Really? How old are you? I thought. I thought you were.
- [16:31]
Jordy
It was. It was my. Basically the first ever, like, major concert experience. I didn't realize that's Tom Petty headlined on Saturday. This was in August of 2008. And that was my first time smelling cannabis. And I kept. I was there with my friend and his parents and I kept asking, like, his friend's parents, what is that stinky smell? Stinky smell. We can't get away from it. Very memorable.
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Spiegel
Very memorable. That's amazing. Do you know where this is? 2.6 acres above Escondido Beach. Is that close to you?
- [17:14]
Jordy
Escondido beach market area. It's a few minutes away, but Escondido beach is the most underrated beach.
- [17:20]
Spiegel
It was Petty's home decades before his death in 2017, lead singer of the Heartbreakers purchased the property for about 3.75 million. In 1998, Petty turned his guest house into his personal music studio with soundproof rooms for recording music. And said Levi Freeman, who's putting up, there's a one bedroom guest suite, seems like a very nice star. He was from Florida. He shunned the spotlight off stage. He's a member of the Rock and Roll hall of Fame, best known for songs like American Girl and I Won't Back Down. What a. What a lovely little house. Well, that's always fun. Anyway, we should move on to our top story. Do you want to go through the Elon. The Elon pay package thing a little bit? I had two questions for you on that and then we can go into our Mag 7 review. Does that sound good?
- [18:09]
Jordy
Let's do it.
- [18:10]
Spiegel
Okay. First, let me tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. I really enjoy this graphic package we got. This is great. So Elon's trillion dollar pay package is done. It's signed, it's approved. I'm sure it will be contested in the courts. It's always contested in the courts, but the Wall Street Journal has a very nice little breakdown of how it works. They have a nice little infographic here I can share. And it kind of shows this. This is.
- [18:45]
Jordy
This is what technology podcasting is.
- [18:48]
Spiegel
Pull that up.
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Jordy
Holding. Pull that up.
- [18:51]
Spiegel
Yeah.
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Tyler Cosgrove
Pull that.
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Jordy
Newspaper.
- [18:52]
Spiegel
Yeah, yeah. So basically, Elon could get 1 trillion in Tesla stock if he hits all these different tranches and so it's actually not that many shares. So he's worth half a trillion now, but he also owns 414 million Tesla shares outright. Got another award in 2018 of 300 million shares. And this next award is 424 million across 12 tranches. So it's not like they're giving him four twice as much as he already has, they're just kind of giving him a little like basically what he already had. They're giving him the same amount again. And there's a bunch of things that he has to do. He has to get the market cap really, really high. And then there's also these like qualitative operational goals or I guess they're quantitative but.50 billion in EBITDA, 20 million cars delivered, 1 million robots sold, 1 million robotaxis in operation, 10 million full self driving subscription. Now some of those are obviously more gamble than others. What's the definition of a robot? If he comes out with a really cheap robot and he sells a bunch of those because it's more of a toy, does that really fulfill the goal? Or like what's the, what's the, you know, million Robo taxis in oper. What's the definition of robotax?
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Jordy
Yeah, it qualifies if it's a Tesla that is enabled and I turn on.
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Spiegel
FSD and my friend rides in it for one.
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Jordy
Is there anything for actual rides?
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Spiegel
There's 10 million full self driving subscriptions.
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Jordy
Yeah.
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Spiegel
And so some of these are more gamble than others, but the market really isn't.
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Jordy
How many full self self driving subscriptions are there today?
- [20:28]
Spiegel
I looked that up. It's somewhere between like 1 and 3 million. Right, right now. So he has to, he definitely has to like triple the size at least. Robo taxis obviously goes from like 0 to 1 million because there's barely any on the, on the road. He hasn't sold any robots, so a million would be entirely new robots. He's obviously delivering a lot of cars. And on The EBITDA front, 50 billion in EBITDA company did like 13 last year. So that's, that's a huge increase in EBITDA. I mean 50 billion in EBITDA is a lot of money, but he's, you know, it's not, it's not 20x where he is right now and neither is the market cap. Like he's, he only has to take the market cap to 8.5 trillion and Tesla's already worth a trillion. So it's, it's, it's within you Know, striking distance. The. The market cap is now around 1.5 trillion, actually. So my two questions were, one, like, it's going to be weird to live in the world of the trillionaire. Like, but we are getting close. Like, that's going to happen not just within our lifetime. Like, definitely within the next decade. This sets him up to be the first one, but it's going to happen. And I wonder how that's going to reshape our culture, like, the world in America. Because when I had this. I had this realization that when billionaires became so prevalent and prominent, there was a lot of heat that was taken off the millionaire. Like, if you're just like, a guy, yeah, I have an hb.
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Jordy
Billionaires are the heat shield.
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Spiegel
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Like, yeah, I'm a millionaire. I have a boat. I go to Bass pro shops, but I'm not getting protested because I have a million dollars in my house and boat.
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Jordy
And isn't it, like, practice? One out of ten Americans is a. Yeah, yeah.
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Spiegel
So the millionaire became more accessible, and the billionaire became the thing that the society scapegoats for all the problems.
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Jordy
Approximately 9.4 to 9.5% of American adults are millionaires.
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Spiegel
Yeah. But my question was, what do you. You, like, what happens to the billionaire when trillionaires come in? Because, you know, like, Bernie Sanders and there's a whole crew that say, like, billionaires shouldn't exist. Every billionaire is a policy failure. Like, what happens when you have to say, like, well, like, trillionaires are the real policy failure, but billionaires are also the policy failure. And millionaires, we're, like, kind of okay with, but it's not great. It's like, it becomes much more complicated. But at the same time, it definitely. Like, if Elon is the only trillionaire, it's gonna be really, really easy to target him and be like, he's bad. He's a trillionaire.
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Jordy
Get any more targeted?
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Spiegel
I don't know. Yeah, maybe he's maxed it out already, but I thought that was interesting. And then the flip side was, what does this mean for other companies? What does it mean for Sam Altman at OpenAI? Can he run a similar playbook? It's clear that he had a ton of soft power during the OpenAI coup. Could he go to the OpenAI for profit board and say, hey, if. If OpenAI IPOs at 2 trillion, I want 20%. If OpenAI moons to 10 trillion, I want 50%. Like, how extreme can Sam get? We know that Sam runs a bit of an Elon playbook. They were in business together, they co founded OpenAI together. So clearly they learn from each other. I wonder what, what Sam Altman can do similarly. And then I also wonder what, what will happen at the garden variety unicorn. If you're just the CEO of a $5 billion company and you're just kind of hanging out there and you say like Yeah, I had 30% of the company when I started. I've been diluted down to 5 or 10. But I like this company and I want to get it up. What if I say, hey, could I go to the board and say okay, we're at 5 billion now if I get us to 50, will you double my equity position? And how would shareholders treat that, how would Sequoia treat that or Founders Fund or Kleiner or a 16Z? Like how would the growth stage venture companies, the venture capital firms feel about that? So I don't know any reaction to that stuff?
- [24:23]
Jordy
Yeah, I mean I think there's a sentiment like there's, you know, any, any venture backed founder is like going to be hyper conscious of dilution. Right. There's a sense that it's like one way.
- [24:35]
Spiegel
Yes.
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Jordy
Right. It just goes down and down and down and down. And I think the right way for founders to think about that is like, okay, you're not actually like no one's taking your shares unless you decide to sell them. Your job is just to make the share price go up and there's going to be more shares issued over time. But if you just make the share price go up forever, it doesn't really matter.
- [24:54]
Spiegel
And you can also buy.
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Jordy
But then there's also, you can also buy back. You can also get buy back like Drew Houston.
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Tyler Cosgrove
Yeah.
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Jordy
You can also sell all the best.
- [25:01]
Spiegel
Examples and then give more share. Create new shares if you want to get your percentage ownership way down.
- [25:07]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [25:07]
Spiegel
Like if you want to go to zero, more like if you want to bail.
- [25:11]
Jordy
I mean, yeah, we, we, we need to do, we need to do an analysis of the most diluted CEOs in the public markets. Because if you look at some of the IPOs from the last 10 years, like some of the guys that are still hanging around running these companies have, have sold out, you know, sold down so much of. And this is what makes Larry so admirable. Yeah.
- [25:33]
Spiegel
Because just buyback, buyback, buyback. And he's the second richest person. 300 billion. It's remarkable.
- [25:40]
Jordy
By the way, I think Oracle is like fully round tripped now from.
- [25:44]
Spiegel
It happens. Well, what about the. So, so yeah, I mean the question Is like, on what timescale do you think this happens? Like, Jordy, do you think we'd actually hear the story of somebody, a CEO founder, maybe pass their vesting cliff? Maybe one of their co founders has left? Because I think about that a lot where it's like, okay, yeah, there were like, there were like two or three people. They were basically equal. They did their full like 4 year earn out, but then there's clearly one that's like still there grinding for the next decade. Like, they kind of do deserve more. It's not that crazy. And yes, there is. The. Just the stock buyback don't sell. But, but is there a world where someone like Drew Houston goes to the board and just says, like, I think I can 5x this and I want the pay package to do it and I'm going to be in the office nonstop and I'm going to go more time.
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Jordy
I think that happens all the time.
- [26:37]
Spiegel
Not to this degree. No way.
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Jordy
Not okay. Not to that degree.
- [26:40]
Spiegel
Yeah. Not even the headline number. Not even the headline number. Just in this sense of like, we're going to dilute everyone like 5 or 10% if this happens. Like a trillion on 8.5 is serious dilution for the rest of the shareholders. But if I'm holding at 1.5 trillion and I'm like, you're going to take me to 8.5 trillion, like, I'm totally in for 10% dilution, you're going to 5x my shares. Like, I'm in. But what's interesting is that we just haven't seen other CEOs pull that from the Elon playbook and say, and this is why I'm doing it too.
- [27:12]
Jordy
Was it Kimball or someone else saying like, Almost no other CEOs would take a deal like this because it's so ambitious.
- [27:20]
Spiegel
Yep.
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Jordy
And so I think it's, I think it's healthy. Yeah, no, no, I think people are gonna, people are offended by the headline number.
- [27:26]
Spiegel
Yeah. So, I mean, obviously I'm very pro this. I think we're all pro this. That's not the, that's not the discussion. The question is like, how widespread does this become? Does it become mimetic? Is it like every CEO? Cause there's a lot of people that are just like, oh, Elon did it this way, I wanna do it that way. You know, And I'm wondering how much it actually spreads. Anyway, we'll have to keep monitoring it. We'll also have to tell you about Vanta Automate Compliance. Manage risk and Accelerate trust With artificial intelligence, Vanta helps you get compliant fast. And we don't stop there. Our AI and automation powers everything from evidence collection to continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk. What else is in the timeline? There's so much in the timeline. Should we do our, our mega cycle review?
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Jordy
Let's do it. We got the laser pointer.
- [28:13]
Spiegel
We got the laser pointer. Our good friend Tyler Cosgrove has put together a slide deck for us that tries to help map the Mag seven. Really? I call it the TVPN Top ten. The top ten.
- [28:28]
Tyler Cosgrove
Well, technically nine.
- [28:29]
Spiegel
There's nine?
- [28:29]
Tyler Cosgrove
Well, no, no, no. There are ten.
- [28:31]
Spiegel
There's ten.
- [28:31]
Tyler Cosgrove
There's ten. We'll see. Well, one of them maybe is. Shouldn't be there.
- [28:35]
Spiegel
No, no, no, no, no. There's actually 10 because it's the Mag 7.
- [28:39]
Tyler Cosgrove
Oh, Oracle. I forgot Oracle.
- [28:40]
Spiegel
Yes, you did. So, so it is. It is the TPP and top 10. The 10 most important companies in AI. Loosely, the Mag 7, plus a few bonus ones. And we're going to try and watch your head through and look, you're a horse.
- [28:56]
Jordy
You got a hoop, man.
- [28:58]
Spiegel
We're going to try and go through the various companies and rank them based on how AGI pilled they are and how much they need AGI. Is that right?
- [29:07]
Tyler Cosgrove
Yeah, basically. So let's pull up the actual scales. There's two axes.
- [29:11]
Spiegel
Let's go to the next slide.
- [29:13]
Tyler Cosgrove
So basically on the horizontal, we have how AGI pilled they are.
- [29:16]
Katherine Boyle
Sure.
- [29:16]
Tyler Cosgrove
So I feel like that's fairly self explanatory. You kind of believe that AI will become something like it can produce the median economic output of a person.
- [29:24]
Spiegel
Yes. And there's a few different ways to understand if somebody believes in AGI. It could be the rhetoric of the CEO or the founder. It could be the actions of the company speak louder than words. And is there anything else that could lead someone to show that they believe in AGI? I guess it's mostly just the actions and the words. Right.
- [29:51]
Tyler Cosgrove
I mean those are the main things that you can kind of do as a person. So you can do things.
- [29:55]
Spiegel
Well, we have it then we will be judging them by both their actions and their words.
- [29:58]
Tyler Cosgrove
Yeah. So then on the vertical axis we have. Have how much they need AGI. So I think this is maybe a little harder. So I want to qualify this.
- [30:05]
Spiegel
Yeah.
- [30:05]
Tyler Cosgrove
So I mean this doesn't necessarily believe that you have this kind of sentient AI that's as good as a person, but I think it more so in this context just means that AI will continue to Become more and more economically valuable.
- [30:18]
Spiegel
Yes.
- [30:19]
Tyler Cosgrove
To where you can kind of sustain building more and more data centers. You can do more and more capex.
- [30:25]
Spiegel
Yeah. There's a little bit of like, how much will this company be transformed if the AI wave plays out well?
- [30:32]
Jordy
AI doesn't play out well. How chopped are they? How cooked are they?
- [30:36]
Tyler Cosgrove
Exactly.
- [30:37]
Spiegel
That's a great framework. Yes. And then also, yeah, if we flash forward, nothing really changes. Total plateau, total decline in token generation or something. Is the business just continuing business as usual? Okay, so who are we starting with?
- [30:53]
Tyler Cosgrove
So let's start with Sam Altman.
- [30:54]
Spiegel
Okay, Sam Altman. Where is he on this?
- [30:57]
Tyler Cosgrove
So Sam Altman, I think this is pretty reasonable spot. He believes in AGI. Right. He runs kind of the biggest AI company. He also needs AGI because if you imagine that if the models stagnate, they have a lot of capex they need to fulfill. If models stagnate, what are they going to do? Maybe the margins somehow work out, but you're probably not in a good spot if models get worse or if people start using AI less. If you're saying all one. But he's also not, you know, in the top, top corner.
- [31:26]
Spiegel
Okay. Right.
- [31:27]
Tyler Cosgrove
And I think this is. You can justify this through a lot of OpenAI's actions. You see stuff like Sora. You see maybe the erotica. This is not very.
- [31:35]
Spiegel
Who's.
- [31:35]
Jordy
Who's running the laser pointer? I'm running the laser pointer. Maybe put them down here.
- [31:41]
Spiegel
Okay, explain that. Explain that.
- [31:43]
Jordy
I think that more and more, at least in the short term, OpenAI looks like a hyperscaler. They're kind of a junior hyperscaler. And I think their actions are more, you know, I think that OpenAI. A lot of people, you know, want to say that they're, they're bearish on, on open air current levels, but ultimately, when you look at how their business is evolving, they seem to me like they'd be fine if the models plateaued.
- [32:11]
Spiegel
Yes. But, yeah, I feel like the, I feel like the mood on the timeline was much more slide. Sam to the left, doesn't believe in AGI. There was that post about, like, if, if, if OpenAI really believed in AGI, they wouldn't be doing Sora or they wouldn't be doing the erotica thing. Like all of those were very much like, needs it, but it. But kind of accepts that it's not coming and so stop believing it.
- [32:36]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [32:36]
Tyler Cosgrove
So I think in responsibility, I think, yeah. Because it's not like this. The vertical axis is also just about like if it's going to continue to be economically, you know, economically useful. So if people just stop using AI in general or like, people, if the kind of, you know, revenue stops accelerating or any of this stuff, I think OpenAI will be in a bad spot regardless of the models, like, actually getting much better. Like, if they just make the models much more efficient to run. You could say that's not very like, AGI pilling because the models aren't getting a lot better. Yeah, but that's still like, but I'm.
- [33:09]
Jordy
Just saying, like, if there was no more progress at all.
- [33:12]
Spiegel
Yeah.
- [33:12]
Jordy
Like, we never got a new model for many of the labs. I think that OpenAI would add ads, they would add commerce, they would increase.
- [33:21]
Spiegel
Yeah. So they might be fine without AGI.
- [33:22]
Jordy
They would make agents a lot better.
- [33:24]
Spiegel
But, but I mean, the 1.4 trillion enterprise, the 1.4 trillion in commitments like that is hard to justify if it's just the business today just growing. Like, it's growing because it's just, like, it's good. No, no crazy breakthroughs. Like just.
- [33:41]
Jordy
Yeah, but they're, they're, they're.
- [33:43]
Spiegel
You're laying out the bulk.
- [33:44]
Jordy
They're playing, they're playing crazy.
- [33:46]
Spiegel
You're laying out the bull case saying, oh, if they just add ads, they're going to be able to hit the 1.4 trillion, no problem.
- [33:52]
Jordy
I'm not saying, I'm not saying they can pull back on a lot of these commitments.
- [33:56]
Spiegel
Sure.
- [33:56]
Jordy
They don't, like.
- [33:57]
Spiegel
Okay.
- [33:57]
Jordy
I don't, I don't think these are, like, going to end up being, like, real liabilities. The business is just cooked.
- [34:04]
Spiegel
Okay.
- [34:04]
Jordy
They can't hit them. Right. So I'm just saying, like, I think there's a shot they have, they could, you know, when, when they talk about having success in consumer electronics. Right. Which is something you talked about yesterday. Like, they don't need, like, I, I think they can probably build a really cool device. Maybe it could be competitive with, you know, if there's, if it can be at all competitive with an iPhone like that, they could be fine without AGI.
- [34:33]
Spiegel
Right.
- [34:34]
Jordy
Also getting into. Let's, I guess let's get some other.
- [34:37]
Spiegel
People so we can see where.
- [34:39]
Tyler Cosgrove
I think it's useful to be relative because these are not quantitative numbers.
- [34:42]
Spiegel
Yeah.
- [34:43]
Tyler Cosgrove
So next we have Dario. Okay, well, Dario is up here. So I think Dario is kind of, when you listen to what Dario is saying, he is, you know, he's extremely AGI pilled.
- [34:53]
Spiegel
Yes.
- [34:53]
Tyler Cosgrove
Right. He, he, this is kind of the reasoning why he's he's so anti China. Yeah, right. Because he sees it as an actual race. This is going to clear weapons. It is a national, you know, security total. It's a problem if China gets there first.
- [35:07]
Spiegel
What is that new sound cue?
- [35:08]
Jordy
I don't think Tyler has sound effects.
- [35:10]
Spiegel
What is it?
- [35:10]
Jordy
UAV online.
- [35:11]
Spiegel
UAV online. Okay. I like that we got. This is the uav. We should give this UAV aesthetics. For sure. This is good. Okay, continue.
- [35:19]
Tyler Cosgrove
But there's also a sense that he needs AGI because if AI stops becoming. If it stops growing as fast and you imagine that things kind of settle where they are now, OpenAI is definitely in the lead.
- [35:31]
Spiegel
Sure.
- [35:32]
Tyler Cosgrove
So you need a lot of continued growth for anthropic to keep kind of making sense economically, I think.
- [35:37]
Spiegel
Okay. Yeah, yeah, sure. Who else is on here?
- [35:40]
Tyler Cosgrove
So I think next is Larry. Larry Ellis. Larry's in kind of an interesting spot. So this is kind of a weird place to be where you don't believe in AGI, but you need it.
- [35:51]
Spiegel
Okay. How did you wind up there?
- [35:53]
Jordy
So I think you're probably wondering how I ended up in this corner.
- [35:55]
Spiegel
Record, scratch, freeze frame.
- [35:57]
Tyler Cosgrove
So I think this is how you factor in. There's kind of the personal rhetoric and then there's the actions of his company.
- [36:02]
Spiegel
Sure.
- [36:03]
Tyler Cosgrove
So when you listen to Larry speak, he doesn't seem the type that is believes in some kind of super intelligent God that is going to come, that's going to, you know, birth this new thing. Humanity will rise. But then you look at Oracle.
- [36:18]
Spiegel
Has anyone found his less wrong username? Is he on there?
- [36:21]
Tyler Cosgrove
Exactly. I don't think, you know, I don't think Larry's reading gwern.
- [36:24]
Spiegel
Okay, got it.
- [36:25]
Tyler Cosgrove
But then, but he's investing and they are, you know, they need AI to work.
- [36:32]
Spiegel
Okay.
- [36:33]
Mikey Schulman
Right.
- [36:33]
Tyler Cosgrove
They are maybe covering up a little too much or maybe not enough, depending on how AGI pulled. You are, but, you know, AGI pilled, so.
- [36:41]
Spiegel
Exactly.
- [36:42]
Tyler Cosgrove
It's kind of hard to square, but.
- [36:43]
Jordy
It'S a bold bet.
- [36:44]
Tyler Cosgrove
Yeah. This is a unique spot. I think it is a unique spot.
- [36:48]
Spiegel
He's off the grid. Okay.
- [36:49]
Tyler Cosgrove
Yeah.
- [36:50]
Spiegel
Who's next?
- [36:51]
Tyler Cosgrove
So let's see who's next. Who did I. Okay.
- [36:53]
Spiegel
Okay, so we go.
- [36:54]
Tyler Cosgrove
I think this is a fairly reasonable spot.
- [36:56]
Spiegel
Yeah.
- [36:57]
Tyler Cosgrove
Obviously there's, you know, there's some sense where he is slightly. I pilled or maybe more than believes.
- [37:02]
Spiegel
In the power of the technology.
- [37:03]
Tyler Cosgrove
I mean, he's very early on. Open AI.
- [37:05]
Spiegel
Yeah.
- [37:05]
Tyler Cosgrove
He thinks that AI in general will become very useful, but maybe it won't become, you know, super intelligent, maybe. It's not going to replace every person. It's just a useful tool. It's.
- [37:14]
Spiegel
The next quote I always go back to is him saying, like, my definition of AGI is just greater economic growth. So show me the economic numbers and that will be. It's like, it's a. It's a very practical.
- [37:25]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [37:26]
Spiegel
Definition.
- [37:26]
Tyler Cosgrove
I think people see him as very reasonable. He's not getting over skis.
- [37:29]
Spiegel
Yeah, I like him. I like him in the center of the grid somewhere.
- [37:32]
Tyler Cosgrove
That seems like he's also, you know, if AI doesn't work out.
- [37:37]
Spiegel
Yeah.
- [37:37]
Tyler Cosgrove
I think Microsoft is in a very.
- [37:39]
Spiegel
Good spot to stick around.
- [37:40]
Tyler Cosgrove
You know, they're not crazy over investing OpenAI. They have a nice.
- [37:45]
Spiegel
Yeah, they'll write some code.
- [37:46]
Tyler Cosgrove
If OpenAI works out, he'll do very well. If they don't work out, I think he's also. He's doing quite well.
- [37:51]
Spiegel
He's hedged.
- [37:51]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [37:52]
Spiegel
The man's head.
- [37:52]
Jordy
He's happy to be a leaser.
- [37:53]
Spiegel
Yeah, that's a good quote, too. Okay.
- [37:56]
Tyler Cosgrove
Yeah.
- [37:56]
Spiegel
Yeah. You wouldn't be leasing if you were super AGI pilled. Right. You're hoovering up everything. You keeping it all for yourself.
- [38:01]
Tyler Cosgrove
Exactly. I think. Let's actually talk about that with. I think it's Jensen next.
- [38:05]
Spiegel
Okay. Yes, Jensen. So Jensen, he doesn't believe in AGI. He's the whole reason why we're here. Explain that.
- [38:10]
Tyler Cosgrove
So, yeah, this is maybe my personal take.
- [38:12]
Spiegel
Please.
- [38:12]
Tyler Cosgrove
If Jensen was very IGI pilled.
- [38:14]
Spiegel
Yes.
- [38:15]
Tyler Cosgrove
I mean, he is the kind of. He's the rock on which this all is built on. Yes, he has the chips.
- [38:20]
Spiegel
Yes, he has the chips.
- [38:21]
Tyler Cosgrove
If he was AGI peeled, he would not be giving out those chips. He would keep them all to himself and he would be training his own model.
- [38:25]
Spiegel
Okay.
- [38:26]
Tyler Cosgrove
So that's why I think he's more on the doesn't believe in AGI side. But if there's any kind of downturn.
- [38:32]
Jordy
In the AI, could you put Sam potentially closer in this direction too? Because he's talking about getting into the.
- [38:40]
Spiegel
Compute cloud reselling for sure.
- [38:42]
Jordy
So if there's so much demand.
- [38:44]
Spiegel
Yeah, yeah.
- [38:45]
Jordy
And the models progressing so quickly. Wouldn't you want to just hold on to all. All that?
- [38:50]
Tyler Cosgrove
I think this would also be interesting to see over time. Like, Sam has definitely shifted leftwards over time.
- [38:56]
Jordy
He's moving.
- [38:56]
Tyler Cosgrove
He's basically. This summer, you've seen a lot of the actions of Opening Eye. They seem less and less AGI.
- [39:01]
Spiegel
Pretty much everyone has been like, Moving the AGI timelines outward, which is which you could transform into no longer believing in AGI. It's more just like the timelines have gotten longer this year. Broadly, pretty much everyone. Dwar Cash app.
- [39:16]
Tyler Cosgrove
There was a new blog post yesterday. It was basically AI 2027. There was a new one. It was AI 2032. So it's basically very similar, different team. But the team of AI 2027 was promoting it did.
- [39:29]
Spiegel
Yeah. AI 2027 should be like it was actually AI 3027.
- [39:37]
Jordy
Typo.
- [39:39]
Spiegel
30 twenties.
- [39:40]
Jordy
We couldn't get that domain.
- [39:42]
Spiegel
We were just off by a thousand years.
- [39:44]
Tyler Cosgrove
Yeah. But there's definitely the sense where if there's a downturn, Jensen, the stock is going to go down, but it's not going to go down as far as Larry. Right. Because they're still not on. They don't have insane.
- [39:55]
Spiegel
This is not financial advice.
- [39:56]
Tyler Cosgrove
Yes. They don't have completely unreasonable capex. They're not levered up that I know of.
- [40:03]
Spiegel
Oh yeah. Their Z score is through the roof.
- [40:05]
Tyler Cosgrove
Their Allman Z score is still the roofman.
- [40:06]
Spiegel
Z score is through the roof.
- [40:08]
Tyler Cosgrove
They're looking pretty safe.
- [40:09]
Spiegel
Yes.
- [40:10]
Tyler Cosgrove
Okay, let's see the next one I believe. Okay. Sundar.
- [40:13]
Spiegel
Sundar believes in AGI more than Satya. You think?
- [40:16]
Tyler Cosgrove
Yeah, well I think you can see this in kind of. They were even earlier in some sense than Satya. Right. With DeepMind.
- [40:23]
Spiegel
Yeah.
- [40:24]
Tyler Cosgrove
So I think AI has played a fairly big part in the Google story very recently.
- [40:29]
Spiegel
Yeah.
- [40:30]
Tyler Cosgrove
They've always, I think basically for the past 10 years they've been trying to get into AI. Maybe their actions didn't actually do much but you know, they were the Transformer paper. They, you know, applied AI.
- [40:40]
Jordy
Like they're actually applying.
- [40:41]
Spiegel
They built self driving cars. Core Google Search is just an AI product. It's just an index on information they're organizing.
- [40:48]
Tyler Cosgrove
Also, I mean compared to Satya, I mean Gemini is a frontier model.
- [40:52]
Spiegel
Totally.
- [40:52]
Tyler Cosgrove
Gemini 3 is supposed to be this incredible model. Everyone's very excited. Satya is not. Microsoft is not training their own base model yet. Yeah.
- [40:59]
Spiegel
And also like it's like there is a little bit of like if you really believe in AGI, the actions that we see are you like squirming and being like, I gotta get in. It doesn't matter if I'm 1% behind or 10% behind or 80% behind, I gotta get in. And I think we know someone who's.
- [41:18]
Jordy
Doing Gabe in the chat says, is this AGI or AG1 from athletic greens needs AG1 needs AG1. Fine. Without AG1. Believes in AG1. Now, we are the only podcast that is not partnered with AG1.
- [41:35]
Spiegel
But we do like green. Green is our hero color. Let's go to the next person.
- [41:38]
Tyler Cosgrove
Okay. But also before that, I think Sundar is also definitely below this line because Google has been doing very well. AI was at first, I mean, people thought of AI as like, oh, this is going to destroy Google. This is bad for Google. So if AI doesn't work, then Google's just in the spot they were before, which is doing very well. If AI does work, then, I mean, Gemini is one of the best models. They'll do very well too.
- [42:02]
Spiegel
Speaking of Gemini, Google AI Studio create an AI powered app faster than ever. Gemini understands the capabilities you need and automatically wires them up for you. Get started at AI Studio. Build. Yeah, continue.
- [42:14]
Tyler Cosgrove
Okay, so I think, yeah, next is Zuck.
- [42:18]
Spiegel
Yes.
- [42:18]
Tyler Cosgrove
So Zuck is also kind of in an interesting spot.
- [42:20]
Spiegel
Yes.
- [42:22]
Tyler Cosgrove
I think Zuck is actually someone who has shifted rightward.
- [42:25]
Spiegel
It's fascinating.
- [42:26]
Tyler Cosgrove
Yeah. You've seen this.
- [42:29]
Jordy
I mean, for a while he's been traveling.
- [42:31]
Spiegel
Yes.
- [42:31]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [42:32]
Tyler Cosgrove
So for a while he was doing open source. Yeah. Which in some sense it's very AGI pilling because, you know, you're building it, you're training a model. Right. It's like you're moving the frontier forward, but it's also, it's open source, which you can kind of think as being. You're trying to commoditize everything. You don't think that there's going to be some super intelligence that will take all the value that you need to hold on to. You can kind of give it out. And now he's kind of moved towards closed source. We're going to get the best people, we're going to train the best model.
- [42:57]
Spiegel
It felt like Zuck was sort of like, oh, yeah, AI. Like, it's this cool thing. I'm going to check the box. I got my team. We did this fun little side project. It's this open source model. We kind of found our own little lane. But we're not like competing in the big cosmic battle between OpenAI, anthropic DeepMind. Like, well, don't.
- [43:19]
Jordy
Do you think that was just a counter position to way to like, try to win the war? Go say, hey, we're just going to try to commodity, commodify this market. Commodify Chinese approach.
- [43:30]
Spiegel
Yeah. Commoditizing your, I think, is a good strategy.
- [43:33]
Tyler Cosgrove
Yeah, that makes sense. And then maybe you could say that, oh, once the Chinese have. Have been getting better. He can kind of step out of that position.
- [43:38]
Spiegel
Sure.
- [43:38]
Tyler Cosgrove
And move towards close source.
- [43:40]
Spiegel
Yeah. But now it feels like he's way, way going, way harder on the AGI vision. Paying up for it, Investing so much money in it.
- [43:48]
Tyler Cosgrove
Yeah.
- [43:49]
Spiegel
You know, it's like.
- [43:50]
Jordy
And depending on how much he invests, you could see him pushing up.
- [43:56]
Spiegel
But right now the business is just insane. It's so phenomenal that even if he winds up spending all this money and, you know, they don't even get a frontier model and like, all the. All the. The researchers, like, yeah, we didn't discover anything and we're just gone. Like, the business is fine because it's such a behemoth. So.
- [44:14]
Tyler Cosgrove
Yeah, that's why he's after earnings. They took a fairly big hit.
- [44:18]
Spiegel
Yep.
- [44:18]
Tyler Cosgrove
So maybe he should be a little bit higher.
- [44:19]
Spiegel
Yeah, maybe a little bit.
- [44:21]
Tyler Cosgrove
Meta broadly is still a very safe play if AI doesn't work out.
- [44:24]
Spiegel
And it was the same thing during the metaverse. It was like he believed in the metaverse, he invested in the metaverse, but he never needed the metaverse. And so after the stock sold off like crazy, it went right back up.
- [44:34]
Jordy
Because everyone realized, wait, he's also raising debt off the balance sheet, which would kind of could push him up into this zone. Right. If he's like, you know, if you're worried about, why don't you just carry it yourself? How do you carry yourself? You believe in AGI? Just let it ride.
- [44:53]
Spiegel
Yeah. Okay. Who else are we missing? Okay, so we have Most of the Mag 7.
- [44:57]
Tyler Cosgrove
Now is Jassy. Oh, Elon. Elon.
- [44:59]
Spiegel
Elon.
- [44:59]
Tyler Cosgrove
Yeah.
- [45:00]
Spiegel
Okay. Elon.
- [45:01]
Tyler Cosgrove
So Elon, I mean, he's been AGI pilled, I think, for a very long time.
- [45:04]
Spiegel
Super AGI pilled. I agree with that.
- [45:06]
Tyler Cosgrove
OpenAI co founder, even before that, I think he was fairly big in the safety space.
- [45:10]
Spiegel
Totally.
- [45:10]
Tyler Cosgrove
You see him, even on Joe Rogan, he was talking about AI safety.
- [45:13]
Spiegel
He still believes in it. He hasn't backed off.
- [45:15]
Tyler Cosgrove
And AI safety is important because going to become super intelligent. It's going to take over the world. Yeah.
- [45:20]
Jordy
Even this was part of the dialogue around the new comp package. Wanting the voting power to be able to be part of securing his robot army.
- [45:30]
Spiegel
Oh, yeah. Interesting.
- [45:31]
Tyler Cosgrove
Yeah. I think robots are very underrepresented on this board.
- [45:35]
Spiegel
Totally.
- [45:36]
Tyler Cosgrove
And Elon is kind of the main player in that space right now.
- [45:39]
Jordy
Yeah. So he talked yesterday about. About humanoids being sort of an infinite money glitch. And I feel like you kind of.
- [45:48]
Spiegel
Need.
- [45:50]
Jordy
AGI in order to kind of unlock the infinite money glitch.
- [45:54]
Spiegel
Yes. But at the same time, very strong core business. The cars don't need AGI, the rockets don't need AGI, Starlink doesn't need AGI. So he's not entirely indexed on it in the way the foundation labs are. Right.
- [46:07]
Tyler Cosgrove
Yeah. I mean there's definitely a significant part of the Tesla market cap that is basically betting on robots.
- [46:13]
Spiegel
Totally.
- [46:13]
Tyler Cosgrove
But there's also a big part of it that's just.
- [46:15]
Spiegel
But that's why he's in the middle of the needs are fine without. It's like.
- [46:19]
Jordy
Yeah, everything on it is needs.
- [46:23]
Spiegel
Yeah. But that's just one piece of the.
- [46:24]
Jordy
AGI more than SpaceX. SpaceX?
- [46:27]
Tyler Cosgrove
Yes. SpaceX is very. Seems very uncorrelated with the.
- [46:30]
Spiegel
Totally, totally, totally.
- [46:31]
Tyler Cosgrove
Unless you have the data.
- [46:32]
Jordy
He's happy to be a telecom baron.
- [46:35]
Spiegel
He's happy to. Yeah, he's happy to be the new Verizon. Who else?
- [46:38]
Tyler Cosgrove
Okay, so I believe now is Andy Jassy.
- [46:41]
Spiegel
Jassy.
- [46:42]
Tyler Cosgrove
So he is, I think broadly does not believe in AGI, although he, you know, fairly major stake in Anthropic.
- [46:49]
Spiegel
Yeah, yeah.
- [46:50]
Tyler Cosgrove
Which maybe is very AGI playing, but they have not.
- [46:53]
Jordy
He's hedging with Anthropic.
- [46:54]
Tyler Cosgrove
Yeah, yeah. I think that's basically what you can say. He doesn't seem at all worried about kind of the core business. AWS seems to be.
- [47:01]
Spiegel
And isn't Google building their position in Anthropic? I saw some headline about that that was wild. Imagine Sundar. Such a beast. Sundar and Satya, really, both of them, they just have huge stakes broadly.
- [47:13]
Tyler Cosgrove
Andy Jassy seems very quantitative. He's focused on the numbers, realistic. He's not making these grandiose statements about the future of intelligence or what humanity is going to be like.
- [47:23]
Spiegel
Yeah. When you look at the AWS earnings, it feels like they invest when the demand shows up and they build data centers when there is demand. And they are not in the business of doing a 10 year hypothetical sci fi forecast based on breakthrough.
- [47:40]
Jordy
So Ben Thompson on the recent Sharp Tech, we were listening to it on the way in. He was talking about how Amazon has repeatedly said, hey, we're supply constrained. We have a lot more demand than we can fulfill with this new deal with OpenAI. The $38 billion which only got announced Monday, which again feels like forever ago at this point. But Ben was kind of hypothesizing that they kind of let OpenAI jump the line because that $38 billion deal was starting effectively immediately versus some of the other. Like Larry's deal with OpenAI was announced. This like massive backlog is revenue that cannot be generated in a meaningful way today because they have to build the data centers that can actually deliver the compute.
- [48:28]
Tyler Cosgrove
Yeah, I mean, and you know, Amazon has been building data centers, they're building data centers. They're basically, they built all the data centers for Anthropic. But it still seems very kind of restrained. It's not overly ambitious. Anthropic has had issues with capacity and it's probably because you know, Andy Jassy doesn't want to get over his skis. He doesn't want to build too much. So I think that's why he's kind of on the left side. And also, I mean if you think AI doesn't work and we're going to kind of be in this, you know, the same spot of web 2.0, you need AWS, you need your EC2 server. I think he's very well positioned there. And then I think the last one is Tim Cook.
- [49:06]
Spiegel
Tim Cook. Let's hear for Tim Cook. Criminally underpaid but has done a fantastic job not getting over his skis.
- [49:16]
Tyler Cosgrove
Yeah, this one I think is goat contention. Fairly self explanatory. He, I mean he seems, he doesn't.
- [49:22]
Spiegel
Believe in AGI, he doesn't believe in LLMs, doesn't believe in chat bots apparently.
- [49:28]
Jordy
I don't know the new, the new Gemini deal signaling as you had two.
- [49:32]
Spiegel
Years ago, Apple was like, yeah, we're not, we're not doing that stuff.
- [49:36]
Tyler Cosgrove
Yeah, there was that famous for three years.
- [49:38]
Jordy
But I think what's, what's under discussed. My takeaway from the, our conversation with Mark Gurman and Apple's ambitions around their new LLM experience with Gemini is that I think that there's a very real scenario where Apple like wants to compete for the same user base as OpenAI. They want that transaction based revenue, that commerce revenue.
- [50:02]
Spiegel
Yeah, I disagree on this point but.
- [50:07]
Jordy
I'm not saying that I'm putting their odds at like winning that market at over 10% but I think that they would be right to realize that it's potentially an opportunity.
- [50:18]
Spiegel
Yeah. Is it $1 billion a year that they're paying Google for?
- [50:22]
Tyler Cosgrove
I believe that's the number. Yeah.
- [50:23]
Spiegel
That feels really low, doesn't it? I don't know, it just feels super low to me. Among all the different deals that are going on. When I think about like when I just think about like the value of AI on the iPhone and you're like $1 billion. Like when, when I think about like what is the value that we're, that the market broadly is putting on like AI for the enterprise.
- [50:48]
Jordy
But at the same time, when, when Sundar on the Google earnings call was talking about their top I think 10 customers and how many like trillions of tokens they were using, but it really was netting out to like $150 million of like actual revenue. And so this is, this will be their biggest customer for Gemini on day one.
- [51:09]
Spiegel
Until one of our listeners gets on of course.
- [51:12]
Tyler Cosgrove
Yeah. And I think, I mean even with the, with the Gemini news, Apple still seems very kind of reactive to AI.
- [51:19]
Spiegel
Yeah.
- [51:19]
Tyler Cosgrove
They're not kind of seeing oh this future where is going to do everything and moving there right now. They're kind of seeing where the demand is, seeing where the users are and then moving which I think is very kind of, you know, classically, you know, that's how business work. It's not very appealing.
- [51:34]
Spiegel
Also on that point of $1 billion, like I have no idea how can they possibly know the amount of inference that's going to happen in Siri plus Gemini over a year period? Like there's just no way to predict that. Or can they? I feel like if the integration is good there will be a ton of queries. It will, it'll.
- [51:58]
Jordy
I didn't read the 1 billion headline. Chat can correct me if I'm wrong, but I didn't read the 1 billion headline. I felt like that was a technology license, not necessarily inference.
- [52:08]
Spiegel
And then there might be consumption on top of that. Yeah, okay. Or maybe. Or maybe. Yeah, yeah, maybe they're licensing Gemini and then they pay per query for like the energy and the capex.
- [52:18]
Jordy
Like they couldn't a lot of the stuff be done on device?
- [52:21]
Spiegel
For sure. Yeah. Because Gemini Gemma has like baked down models that could be smaller so that's possible.
- [52:27]
Jordy
Chad says where's Tyler on the chart? Feels like Tyler is an AGI pilled anymore.
- [52:31]
Tyler Cosgrove
Let's actually am on the chart here.
- [52:33]
Spiegel
Let's go to Tyler.
- [52:35]
Tyler Cosgrove
I am over here. So I, yeah, I think I'm very AGI killed.
- [52:41]
Jordy
Right.
- [52:41]
Tyler Cosgrove
I'm ready for the Dyson sphere.
- [52:43]
Spiegel
Yes.
- [52:43]
Tyler Cosgrove
I think it's you know, only a matter of years. Handful.
- [52:46]
Spiegel
Only a matter of years.
- [52:47]
Tyler Cosgrove
It's a couple thousand hundred thousand days away.
- [52:50]
Spiegel
You need to publish a blank 100,000 AGI. 2026. Yeah, 2025.
- [52:54]
Tyler Cosgrove
We still have a month left.
- [52:55]
Spiegel
We still have a month left. Yeah, we got a month AGI on Christmas. This Christmas.
- [52:59]
Jordy
It's coming this Christmas, this holiday season.
- [53:02]
Spiegel
But why do you need AGI?
- [53:04]
Tyler Cosgrove
I think I also need AGI.
- [53:05]
Spiegel
Why do you need AGI?
- [53:06]
Tyler Cosgrove
Well, I mean, look, if you look at the current jobs data for like college age students, it's looking pretty bad.
- [53:12]
Spiegel
It's bad.
- [53:13]
Tyler Cosgrove
So I think you kind of need AGI to really boost the economy. If AI does not work. The macro economy is looking not good.
- [53:21]
Spiegel
Oh, sure, sure, sure.
- [53:23]
Tyler Cosgrove
So I feel pretty bad about my job outlook without AGI.
- [53:28]
Spiegel
Sure, sure, sure. Even though you're already employed. That's hilarious. Well, thank you for taking us through Chat.
- [53:35]
Jordy
Wanted to know where would you put Lisa sue?
- [53:38]
Spiegel
Amd?
- [53:38]
Tyler Cosgrove
Yeah, so Lisa Sue, I think she's broadly been quite reactive, actually.
- [53:43]
Spiegel
She.
- [53:44]
Tyler Cosgrove
You've really only seen AMD start.
- [53:46]
Jordy
You don't get credit for being reactive is what you're saying.
- [53:48]
Tyler Cosgrove
Yeah, I think it's really only over the past year maybe that she's been making any kind of deals.
- [53:55]
Katherine Boyle
Right.
- [53:55]
Tyler Cosgrove
You saw George Hotz maybe a year or two ago basically trashing AMD chips for how bad they were in.
- [54:01]
Jordy
But maybe she's given so much of the company away. Maybe she thinks that shares won't have very much value in the future. She's like happy to just give away 10% of the company.
- [54:12]
Tyler Cosgrove
Yeah. So I think I would, if I had to pick somewhere, I would say that she is. She's honestly getting a little close to Larry in that amd, it's very much like an AI play still. Right. They're a chip company, obviously, but you don't get the feeling that she's a true believer.
- [54:31]
Jordy
Yep, yep, that tracks.
- [54:33]
Spiegel
Okay, that tracks. The new Siri. I'm reading through some of Mark Gurman's reporting. Speaking of Apple and AI, the new Siri is planned for March, give or take, as has been the case for months. Apple has been saying for nine months it's coming in 2026. Apple simply reiterated on that and then on the actual deal. It's a $1 billion deal for a 1.2 trillion parameter artificial intelligence model developed by Google to help power and overhaul the Siri AI voice assistant. The two companies are finalizing an agreement that would see Apple pay roughly 1 billion annually for access to Google's technology. With the Google model handling series summarizer and planner functions. Apple intends to use the Google model as an interim solution until its own models are powerful enough and is working on a 1 trillion parameter cloud based model that it hopes to have ready for consumer applications as soon as next year. That is interesting. I feel like they're going to have to pay a lot more to actually run all the queries, generate all the tokens. But I'm sure we'll find out more as Google reports earnings and Apple reports earnings. Before we get to that, let me tell you about graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. What else is in the news today?
- [55:56]
Jordy
We have some breaking news.
- [55:57]
Spiegel
What's the breaking news?
- [55:58]
Jordy
TJ Parker has finally found a new car that he likes.
- [56:03]
Spiegel
Huge.
- [56:04]
Jordy
Guess what it is.
- [56:05]
Spiegel
Guess a new car that he likes. It's not the Serato. It's not the Lamborghini Huracan Sterrato.
- [56:12]
Jordy
No. It is the Gas R. Look at this. Look at this. Finally found a new vehicle I quite like and great gas mileage to boot.
- [56:20]
Spiegel
This was the problem with your Ford Raptor. It wasn't the R. It wasn't the R. You only had 600 horsepower instead of 8.
- [56:27]
Jordy
That was the main problem. I also needed to park it in. Park it in cities.
- [56:31]
Spiegel
Oh, yeah.
- [56:33]
Jordy
Just absolutely brutal.
- [56:34]
Mikey Schulman
Yeah.
- [56:35]
Spiegel
What are the specs on the Raptor R Again, it's a pretty wild. How much horsepower Raptor.
- [56:43]
Jordy
0 to 60 and 3.9, 720 horsepower.
- [56:48]
Spiegel
5.2 liter supercharged V8. Fantastic. It's kind of the Julius AI of trucks. It really is. AI data analyst. Connect your data, ask questions in plain English. Get insights in seconds. No coding required. Trying to go through the timeline, we got Will Menidis talking about some other stuff.
- [57:08]
Jordy
Let's pull up this post from Pegasus since it's relevant to the overview we just did. Pegasus, says Altman today. Of course, he's talking about yesterday. We're looking at selling compute, but we need as much as possible. Zach, last week we could sell compute. Are we in a compute shortage or not? Because both are saying they're buying as much of it as they can and thinking about selling it.
- [57:31]
Spiegel
That's very interesting. Yeah. I mean the supply and demand dynamics. I like that story about Jensen where he understands the dynamic here. But there's still. You get kind of crushed if there's a sell off in terms of demand. Like you just have to go back and study what was going on during the crypto boom for Nvidia. Like during the crypto boom for Nvidia, it was like buy as many as possible. Just ramp, ramp, ramp. And then they literally had a gluttony.
- [58:00]
Jordy
Yeah. And I can.
- [58:01]
Spiegel
Completely out of glutton. They took huge write offs because they.
- [58:03]
Jordy
Were making so much steel, man. Here. If you're a large tech company and you have the ability to and the financing capital to buy a lot of GPUs, it's not the worst idea to buy as much as you can so that you have preferred access to it and then resell some if you have more than you need. Right?
- [58:24]
Spiegel
Yeah.
- [58:24]
Jordy
But yeah, the question is historically that.
- [58:28]
Spiegel
Is not how things have been done. I understand the pitch there, but I mean we just talked to David Baszucki from Roblox and he was saying that look, we had our own on prem, but then we had spikes of demand and so we went to the hyperscalers for that because they can load balance across while people are playing Roblox here and then maybe they watch some Netflix over there and they are storing all sorts of different data workloads that happen at different times. And so traditionally the hyperscalers have been able to service multiple users across them. Jumping straight to selling compute. I think that the timelines are a little bit funky on this one. It seems odd, it seems rushed. It seems rushed especially when your core product is growing so quickly. Google Cloud platform was released what, seven years after Google launched. Same thing with aws, same thing with Azure. These were very mature businesses, very stable businesses with cash flow that were able to justify the investment. It was not something that was done as part in the growth phase as much. I don't know. Speaking of other wild new business lines, Elon apparently confirmed that Tesla is going to build a semiconductor fab.
- [59:54]
Jordy
Yep.
- [59:54]
Spiegel
I've been advocating for this for a long time. I'd love to hear what Elon had to say. But first, let me tell you about Fall, the generative media platform for developers. The world's best generated image, video and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters. Let's play Elon. What do we got here? Let's play Elon from our suppliers.
- [60:18]
Jordy
It's still not enough. So I think we may have to do a Tesla Terafab. Whoa, great name.
- [60:31]
Spiegel
That is a bombshell.
- [60:32]
Jordy
It's like Giga but way bigger.
- [60:36]
Spiegel
Terabytes.
- [60:37]
Jordy
He's feeling good right now. I can't see any other way to get to the volume of chips that we're looking for. So I think we're probably going to have to build a gigantic chip app.
- [60:49]
Spiegel
Morris changing TSMC is like, no, actually I'm fine. I will supply you. Samsung is like, I'm good. I will do it.
- [60:56]
Jordy
Pull up this Other video of Optimus. That's crazy because there was some new moves of Optimus getting jiggy. Let's see, it is at the bottom of Tyler app. Look at this. Let's see, look at this.
- [61:16]
Spiegel
Okay, so this was, this was shown in contrast to the first Optimus, which was just a guy in a suit. That was so fun.
- [61:23]
Jordy
This thing has motion.
- [61:24]
Spiegel
Yeah, it's not bad. This feels like getting pretty close to unitary level. Definitely at that level. I don't know.
- [61:36]
Jordy
Imagine you're working late at the office one night and this thing just walks out onto the floor and starts looking at you and doing these moves.
- [61:43]
Spiegel
Yeah. Weird. It's so weird how these new projects, like, they seem. I understand why a lot of people look at this with skepticism, but at the same time, it just doesn't seem that complicated to just manufacture that thing and ship it. They do it in China, they do it all over the place. This doesn't seem that insane. And at the same time, Apple couldn't ship a car. So these new projects, they do.
- [62:14]
Jordy
Elon shipped some cars though.
- [62:16]
Spiegel
Yeah, yeah. I meant it more as like, if you're doing one thing, it can sometimes be hard to branch out into the other thing.
- [62:23]
Jordy
I remember a few weeks ago there was a headline around Tesla ordering like $600 million worth of actuators. Yeah.
- [62:32]
Spiegel
Like, it seems like they're going into some sort of production.
- [62:34]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [62:36]
Spiegel
I wonder what, who they're gonna sell.
- [62:38]
Jordy
You don't need 600 million for like test, just for testing.
- [62:42]
Spiegel
It's just the car analogy is so tricky because it's like most people that bought Teslas already had cars.
- [62:53]
Jordy
Right.
- [62:53]
Spiegel
And so it's just like a one for one swap. Who are you replacing with this? You know, it's tricky. What do you think?
- [63:02]
Tyler Cosgrove
Well, with this you can replace like an exotic dancer.
- [63:06]
Spiegel
Yes, that's true. I don't know if many people have that, an exotic dancer in their life. Who they're ready to. Who they're ready to replace. It seems. I don't know, it'll just be very interesting to see where these things actually diffuse. Like, because if you sell them, if you sell them for one price to consumers to do their laundry, but they work in an industrial capacity. People will just buy them and use them for that. But when we talk to people who are in industrial environments, they're like, I definitely don't want a humanoid robot for that. I'd rather just like a big massive robotic arm that's like bolted to the ground and can actually lift like £10,000, as opposed to one that can only lift like £50. I don't know. Ryan says they're going to sell them to the police. We'll see. Maybe. They certainly would be, I don't know, backup.
- [63:59]
Jordy
I think they would be pretty effective. Deterrence, maybe.
- [64:03]
Spiegel
Maybe. I like Vittorio having some fun on the timeline. Going viral, getting community noted. Vittorio said Elon Musk now has $1 trillion in his bank account. That's 1,000 times $1 billion. He could give every single human on Earth 1 billion and still be left with $992 billion. Let that sink in. People love this funny math whenever it drops. What else is going on? The humanoid. Yes, China has a similar humanoid robotic project, although it's way, way scarier because it went full Terminator mode on this. Of course this one is hooked up to power, but yes.
- [64:44]
Tyler Cosgrove
So this video was in response to earlier this week. There was a. I think it was unitary like presentation and they brought up this new robot and it was walking with such like swagger, natural gait.
- [64:54]
Spiegel
Yeah.
- [64:54]
Tyler Cosgrove
Basically that. That people thought it was actually just a person really.
- [64:57]
Spiegel
And it was not.
- [64:57]
Tyler Cosgrove
And so they replied with. With it.
- [64:59]
Spiegel
Wow.
- [65:00]
Tyler Cosgrove
Stripped down.
- [65:01]
Spiegel
That is remarkable. Yeah. Oh, because they put it. They put it. They put like the suit on the robot.
- [65:07]
Tyler Cosgrove
Yeah, it was like a Neo kind of like the 1x robot.
- [65:10]
Spiegel
We're getting spooky, Spooky territory. These are pretty crazy. Oh, wow. Yeah, it does look human. It does look human. I'm looking at the other video. Sorry. Let me tell you about Turbo Puffer search. Every byte, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles and object storage.
- [65:27]
Jordy
See all these new logos?
- [65:29]
Spiegel
Cheaper.
- [65:29]
Jordy
You see these new logos?
- [65:30]
Spiegel
Oh wow. Stacked, stacked. Absolutely stacked.
- [65:33]
Jordy
They're cooking.
- [65:34]
Spiegel
Chris Backey says In the last 10 months, three very talented friends have joined separate hot early stage startups in senior roles and quit after realizing that the company's actual revenue was significantly, significantly less than what the founder had told them during the interview process and shared online. Hmm. Few things to clarify. I'm not joking. In two of the three cases it would be hard to tell that you were joining a bad actor company. On the surface, solid investors founders worked at unicorn companies. The third was maybe more obvious. The only ones who really lose here are the employees. The investors have 200 port cos and can afford some losses. And our industry doesn't really pursue founders over fraud. Leading information up to a certain point. For if you're thinking about joining an early stage startup, ask to see their stripe and or signed contracts. Before you join. Not bad advice.
- [66:27]
Jordy
Yeah. Again, this going back to spring, right, that just felt like there was this, like every founder was feeling this insane pressure to show like 1 to 10 million of.
- [66:37]
Mikey Schulman
Of.
- [66:37]
Jordy
Of like a 1 to 10 million ramp. That was just insane.
- [66:41]
Spiegel
Yeah. And the weird dynamic is that like, as that pressure ramps up, you just get more and more incentive to fake it. With community adjusted ARR and contracts that don't actually stick and all sorts of different twists on something that's like, is it actually cash? Is it actually people coming in? Are they on long contracts? The quality of revenue has been maybe degrading, but also just maybe in just, you know, it's just been easier to game than ever. There's been more incentive to game it than ever. So stay safe out there, folks.
- [67:22]
Jordy
Kazakhstan has signed an MoU to buy up to 2 billion of advanced chips from Nvidia. Let's hit the gong for Kazakhstan. Warm it up, warm it up, warm it up. Great hit, Great hit for our friends in Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan. Good to see them getting into the game.
- [67:43]
Spiegel
Does. Does Borat take place in Kazakhstan? Isn't that. Is that the whole thing? Maybe they should do Borat 3 about data centers. He goes to a data center.
- [67:52]
Jordy
Sacha Barra Cohen. Cohen would be.
- [67:54]
Spiegel
Reprises his role. All to bring AI to Kazakhstan.
- [67:58]
Jordy
Sacha Barra Cohen doing a doc. Like a.
- [68:01]
Spiegel
Like. Yeah, like just on AI. Incredible. It'd be amazing.
- [68:06]
Jordy
So I can use it to do better web search. So I can use it as an autocomplete.
- [68:16]
Spiegel
You're not doing the Borat voice, brother.
- [68:18]
Jordy
I'm not gonna do the Borat voice.
- [68:20]
Spiegel
I will take the profound voice. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Go get a demo. The Kobsi letter says breaking. Nvidia's losses accelerated to negative 5% of the day. Now down 16% since Monday' high. That marks a drop of 8,800 billion since Monday. Wow, that is a wild sell off. Didn't Tyler quote this and say, is this bullish or something like that?
- [68:47]
Tyler Cosgrove
No, that was on the. The door dash. They went down 20%.
- [68:50]
Spiegel
Everyone's down 10 or 20%. We need.
- [68:52]
Jordy
Yeah. Whether you m. Whether you beat or miss, you're going down.
- [68:55]
Spiegel
Wait, is this true? R. Emanuel said he's working with Elon to bring Optimus to the ufc? That would be incredible.
- [69:04]
Jordy
Please don't be fake news.
- [69:05]
Spiegel
Please don't be fake news. We need robots in the ufc. I mean, Rogan and Palmer Luckey were talking about it on their podcast and it certainly seems like a hilarious and wild thing, even just as an exhibition match. Before the real UFC get an Optimus, though, here's a question. Would Elon want a human to thrash on Optimus? Is that good for his brand or would he want Optimus to win? And if Optimus wins, then is that actually entertaining? I don't know.
- [69:37]
Jordy
I think putting Optimus up against the best MMA fighters in the world.
- [69:43]
Spiegel
Yeah.
- [69:44]
Jordy
Is fine.
- [69:44]
Spiegel
It's impossible though, right? Because if you just kiss metal, you'll just break your foot. And if you punch.
- [69:50]
Jordy
This was Ari Emanuel at the All In Summit. Yeah, it was released I guess one day ago.
- [69:55]
Spiegel
Oh, interesting.
- [69:56]
Jordy
He was talking about wanting.
- [69:57]
Spiegel
Wait, wait. What a weird. What a crazy, crazy time. Timing.
- [70:00]
Jordy
That's so interesting. I saw what he's creating. The man's a genius. I want to do a UFC fight with his robots.
- [70:06]
Spiegel
Yeah, yeah.
- [70:08]
Jordy
Very cool. Heisenberg sharing a little bit of red here. Microsoft down 10% in the last eight days. Nvidia 12% in the last four days. Palantir at 16%. Down 16%. Meta down 18%. Losses have accelerated. Compound 248 was sharing yesterday. He's like, when I clipped this, I didn't expect to crash the markets globally. But he certainly. That clip seems to have played a part in this little sell off.
- [70:51]
Spiegel
Always take a victory lap for having world historic consequences. I actually think that that particular clip was like less than 5% of the total views on that clip because there were other people that clipped it and it got.
- [71:03]
Jordy
Oh sure, it just went everywhere.
- [71:05]
Spiegel
But always claim victory. That's the lesson.
- [71:07]
Jordy
That's right.
- [71:08]
Spiegel
Anyway, we have our first guest of the show, Katherine Boyle from Andreessen Horowitz joining us. She's in the Restream waiting room. Welcome to the TV film. Katherine, how are you doing?
- [71:17]
Katherine Boyle
It's great to be here. Good to see you guys.
- [71:19]
Spiegel
Why are you playing the night vision goggle sound? Jordy got new soundboard today.
- [71:23]
Jordy
I felt a little tactical. I felt a little tactical. It's great to see you.
- [71:28]
Katherine Boyle
Good to see you.
- [71:29]
Spiegel
Should the Department of War get a soundboard during these speeches? I heard Hegseth was giving a big speech. Are they sticking mostly to the cheers and the clapping or are we firing off muskets? Are we firing off cannons? Is there pageantry? Is pageantry alive in the Department of War speech?
- [71:49]
Katherine Boyle
Bring the pageantry back to the Department of War. That is important. You guys should definitely have your own sound for them.
- [71:55]
Spiegel
For sure.
- [71:55]
Katherine Boyle
You guys are getting the first look at a major speech.
- [71:58]
Spiegel
Yes.
- [71:59]
Katherine Boyle
So it is just ending right now. I just hopped off the live stream and I can tell you my phone is blowing up with just how many people are enthusiastic, not only in the venture community, but just across Washington about what has been said in the speech. And it's going to have dramatic repercussions for defense tech and for Silicon Valley and the broader defense innovation base. It's an extraordinary speech. You'll be hearing a lot more about it, but you're getting the first look.
- [72:24]
Spiegel
Fantastic, Incredible. Take us through it.
- [72:26]
Katherine Boyle
And it is definitely, I'd say for the last, say 10 years or so we've been talking about defense reform, why it is so important for increasing competition for startups. And what is amazing about this speech is that it's not just lip service to. Yes, of course we need competition. Basically what you've been hearing in Washington for the last 10 years, it goes line by line. Hegseth actually made a very, very funny comment. He said, if you're watching this on Fox News, your eyes are glazing over because this is the most boring thing you've ever heard. But for everyone in the room, from the Andurils, The Palantirs, the SpaceXs of the world, all the way down to the little guys, to the Primes, it was like Christmas come early. Right? Because it really is changing the way that acquisitions are going to happen inside the department in ways that are so meaningful not only for Silicon Valley companies, but for private equity backed companies and for the Prime. He basically told the Primes in the very beginning, you have to be investing more in research and development. The companies that have been getting the large programs cannot just continue as business used to be done. He actually quoted Donald Rumsfeld. Didn't tell us he was quoting Donald Rumsfeld for the first five minutes and basically went line by line through a speech that he gave on September 10, 2001 about how important it is to change the defense acquisition process. And he said, you probably don't recognize this, but the speech I'm giving now is actually Rumsfeld.
- [73:47]
Spiegel
Wait, September 10th?
- [73:49]
Katherine Boyle
Yes, yes.
- [73:49]
Spiegel
The day before just happened to be.
- [73:52]
Katherine Boyle
Happened to be the day before where he said, we have to make him mix.
- [73:57]
Spiegel
That is a crazy coincidence.
- [73:59]
Katherine Boyle
Very crazy coincidence. But it shows you just how long this has been going on.
- [74:03]
Spiegel
Sure, sure, sure.
- [74:03]
Katherine Boyle
So I'm happy I have my notes here because I was taking copious notes throughout the speech.
- [74:10]
Jordy
Yeah, let's go line by line, let.
- [74:11]
Katherine Boyle
Startups know what's going to be changing?
- [74:13]
Spiegel
Yes, please.
- [74:15]
Katherine Boyle
But the first thing that I think is really important for all of the startups in Silicon Valley is that he mentioned and called out the importance of commercial first technology. So this is going to shock people who are not in the defense world that right now if you need to build a product specifically for the Department of Defense, the vast majority of contracts that are given out are not given out with a purview of what exists already in the marketplace that we can buy people. You know, it's a requirements process, a very long 300 day requirements process actually that he called out that requires the different program offices to say what they need to write it down and then to find people who will build explicitly for those requirements. They are doing away with the old requirements process and saying this is not what we're going to do anymore. We are going to focus on commercial first technologies. Even if there is a technology out there that is only 85% of what we need, we will buy it. That is the goal. And then we will turn it into what we need for actually for the warfare.
- [75:13]
Spiegel
This is Potts vs Gotts for the DOD, Dow nerds like commercial off the shelf vs government off the shelf. This is what Anderal and all the defense tech community has been beating the drum on for basically a decade now. And it feels like it's finally getting echoed back from the administration. Is that correct?
- [75:33]
Katherine Boyle
Yes. And there was a lot the administration and the EO that was out a couple months ago said that they wanted commercial first technology. Now you're hearing it straight from the secretary's mouth. There's always dust ups about this on Capitol Hill with various parties arguing over whether we need more studies or whether we should just do this. It looks like now this is real change that's about to happen and it's going to be transformative for all of the startup community. What it really says is that the best products will win.
- [75:59]
Jordy
Yeah. Who are the losers here?
- [76:02]
Katherine Boyle
Well, I think, I mean the major loser from this speech is the Primes. I mean he said, I don't want to pick on anyone. I'm not going to call out companies. But you have to be investing in research and technology. Like you have to be the fact that the Primes only spend 2% on research and development and are focused on constantly kind of maintaining the status quo. That is not going to happen on his part.
- [76:24]
Jordy
I think it was 2% on R& D. Yes.
- [76:29]
Katherine Boyle
And haven't historically been acquiring venture backed companies. So this is also the problem where they're really Just on a much slower timeline than is needed by the department. And I'd say that the takeaway from the speech and I think the sound bite you'll be hearing more and more about is that the new process is really going to be used to enable speed and volume. And one of the things that I think a number of companies have been talking about for a long time is that by taking more risk in the acquisition process, you take less risk on the battlefield. And he actually echoed that. He said, we want to take more risk. We want to reward the people inside of the department who are making risky decisions or supposedly risky decisions because they're acquiring new technologies or from companies that are not Raytheon and the kind of big guys. Right. But what they ultimately said is like, they want the people who are going to be making those acquisition decisions to be taking on the risk because it will affect the risk of the war fighter. Right. It will make things safer for the war fighters. So it's basically linking this entire process, bringing it back to what needs to be done before war start and before products get into the edge of the warfare.
- [77:38]
Jordy
This is like a top down directive. And then who are the players that need to actually put this into, like, who are the kind of key players that need to put this into practice?
- [77:47]
Katherine Boyle
Yeah. So I mean, like the main thing that I. This is definitely a message sent to Congress because there's currently, you know, two different bills going through on Congress that are actually pretty aligned in most of the things that they're saying. There's a few call outs where I think you'll see sort of some sort of back and forth between the House and the Senate. But this is definitely a call to them. Like this is happening on the secretary of. This is something that he cares deeply about. This is something that the administration cares about. And so it definitely is a huge push. Not just, not just a major signal, but they sort of outlined this is how we're going to change things inside the department. One of the biggest things that they do is they created this sort of portfolio based approach of how they're going to be allocating capital to companies now. And this is always shocking when I explain to people that this is revolutionary because you'd say in a normal company you're given a budget and if the vendor you choose fails, you'll go to another vendor and you'll use that capital in order to buy whatever product you need. That is not how the department works with this new portfolio based approach. They're basically saying, we're going to give what's known as the PAEs, the portfolio acquisition executives, the right to say, okay, if this one product that we acquired 60 days ago isn't working on the battlefield, we can use the rest of the money and reprogram it for a product that is working. And right now that is not possible inside the Department of Defense. Right now you have to write a whole other list of requirements and ways that you would build a new product. In theory, that can take years to actually build, and by the time it's built, it isn't meeting the requirements or the needs of the war fighter. So the fact that they're even changing the budgeting process and that they have an explicit call out of how they're going to do that, that will show up in this year's NDAA once it's passed, and it will be the way that things are done from now on.
- [79:29]
Spiegel
A couple years ago I saw.
- [79:30]
Katherine Boyle
This is extraordinary.
- [79:30]
Jordy
Yeah, so this means that if a contract is allocated to a certain company and they start underperforming in real time, the person who's in charge of allocating that budget can basically say, hey, this other startup, we're gonna like rotate this budget over here, because they're actually gonna deliver on this. I've heard super early stuff. Yeah, I've heard some horror stories and even opportunities where some of the bigger primes have just held onto contracts forever. They're kind of like barely delivering. They're kind of like trying to deliver and startups coming in and saying like, hey, we'll actually take this over. And sometimes those deals can happen, but this seems like it'll be a lot more effective.
- [80:15]
Spiegel
Are there any new categories that are opening up generally? I mean, we've heard this week about data centers in space. So if you're tracking data centers or space, like that's a story. But I remember Secretary of the army was talking about modularity of weaponry, taking apart a drone, fixing it. I feel like the whole idea of drones or autonomous submarines, these are new categories that sort of opened up. There have been a number of competitors, but at the thematic, like within defense technology level, are there any categories that you think this new administration is maybe more excited about than ever before?
- [80:56]
Katherine Boyle
Yeah. So I mean, you mentioned modularity and what the Secretary of the army is talking about. I mean, this was actually called out in Secretary Hegseth's speech where he said, part of the reason why we need these PAEs and formerly called PEOs, but PAEs, these portfolio based approaches, is because right now, if you want to take something apart and put it back together. You have to build an entirely different system to acquire those parts and you have to go through a requirements process. So if you're building modular based approaches that update in real time, and he actually said we want it to be more like software. We want to do software updates in real time and not have to go through a requirements based approach. You need to be thinking about things in terms of modularity. So I think there's a lot of different, even just changing the way the budgeting works, it opens up a lot of different technologies that were not able to participate in the acquisition system because they didn't want to go through the requirements process or they knew they wouldn't meet the requirements that are being put out by the Department of War. So it is going to radically change, I think not only the types of products you're seeing in the hands of the war fighter, but just how quickly.
- [82:01]
Jordy
They get there makes a lot of sense. Switching gears a little bit, Sam Altman suggested on Wednesday this idea of my interpretation of it was kind of like a go co model for AI factories. Without commenting on that specifically, can you give us the history of gokos when and how they work well and what kind of some of the challenges have been?
- [82:28]
Katherine Boyle
Well, I actually didn't see what. Can you give me a little more context on what he said?
- [82:34]
Jordy
Yeah, yeah, so I'll read exactly what he said. So this was in response to clarifying the sort of, of backstop gate he said. So anyways, he basically said obvious one, we do not have or want government guarantees for open AI data centers. And then like later in the post he said what we do think might make sense is governments building and owning their own AI infrastructure. And then the upside of that should flow to the government as well. We can imagine a world where governments decide to off take a lot of computing power and get to decide how to use it. And it may make sense to provide lower cost of capital to do so. Building a strategic national reserve of computing power makes a lot of sense, but this should be for the government's benefit, not the benefit of private companies. And just in some of the like, some of the ideas around this just reminded me of how go cos have worked in defense tech where the government is basically saying like we're willing to commit resources and land to a certain initiative and then you can have, have the private market potentially pay a role. And I have no idea how, how this would, how this would look like in the AI context, but I just want, I just Thought it'd be helpful to understand, like, how these sort of, like public private partnerships have worked in the past, specifically in defense.
- [83:50]
Katherine Boyle
Yeah, well, no, I can. I can talk to one that was actually discussed today. So the Secretary of the army was on squawk box this morning talking about specifically, if we are giving the land and security for massive data centers, could the army have its own data centers and be one of the largest providers and actually off take that compute? So I do think that there are ongoing conversations. Candidly, I haven't seen massive conversations about how it's going to be enacted by the Department of War, but I thought it was very interesting that the Secretary of the army was basically saying that this is something that they would be very interested in, that they know that they are going to need their own compute and that if there is sort of a trade off of we provide the land and the security, there should be an understanding that that compute then goes to the Army. So I don't know that they fully fleshed out the details of those sorts of things, but I do think there's a lot of conversations about this. And it's good to hear that Sam is also talking about that in certain ways. But I do think for the Department of War, they know that it's top of mind. And I think they're being a lot more experimental. Which again, comes back to if you have a system of requirements that is far more sort of open, I'd say, to experimentation or working with new companies that can do that. It does give the secretaries of the army or the Navy a lot more authority to make those decisions on kind of the actual things like compute or energy that they need.
- [85:07]
Spiegel
Yeah. How do you think about the flow between entrepreneurial ideas, problems that are identified in the private sector? Somebody starts a company with Anduril is the flipped model, this idea that R and D should maybe live outside of the taxpayer dime, be funded by venture capitalists, that company gets built, eventually those ideas are percolating into D.C. and then the world updates, America updates. We change the way we work, things get better. But Anduril benefits. And people are pointing the finger like, hey, you're the one that advocated for this. And I feel like that's kind of where Sam's caught right now, where OpenAI is advocating for things that I think are good for America but also might benefit OpenAI. And so he has to do this delicate dance of like, well, I was independent on this one, but this one does benefit me, et cetera, et cetera. It's like such A communications challenge. Do you think it's like, do you have any best practices for how to not get over your skis on that?
- [86:11]
Katherine Boyle
Well, I think it's. I think, as you said, it's sort of a typical Washington story where in order for things to change, you do have to sort of, you know, kind of Washington's a meme town, just as Silicon Valley is a meme town. Like, you have to be able to, to tell your story, why it's so important. I would argue that Anduril was exceptional at really telling the story of why you need attritable systems, why you need modular systems. Basically, the kind of frameworks that we're using today inside the Department of War came from those memes being established. But yes, if you're successful inside of Washington, you're going to tick off a lot of different people totally. And you're going to certainly understand upset, sort of the bureaucratic class. And what was very interesting too about this speech is that the secretary actually called out the bureaucratic class and said, this is not a problem with people that we have. This is not a problem with innovation or technology. It is the bureaucracy that is stopping us from making great decisions. And I think that is something that has always been the problem with D.C. and I think the most important thing that companies can always do is just continue saying what they believe, going to Washington, building those relationships. And I think if anything, over the last 10 years, this defense acquisition reform, which everyone said was impossible, is now actually at our fingertips and going to happen because it makes sense. The argument has been made, it's been made in dozens of different ways across many administrations and everyone's in agreement on it now. So for founders that feel like, oh, gosh, look at these great companies that are getting backlash because they kind of spread their own gospel and now they're being attacked for it, that's actually, I think, a sign of progress. If you're being attacked for what you're advocating in Washington, that's usually a good thing.
- [87:55]
Spiegel
Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense.
- [87:57]
Jordy
Final question. What is your most up to date guidance for your portfolio companies around the shutdown?
- [88:04]
Katherine Boyle
Yeah, no, so, I mean, it definitely is having an impact, Right? Like the companies that were expecting contracts to come in or reprogramming dollars, they're not going to necessarily, necessarily see it on the timelines that they thought maybe, you know, maybe a quarter ago. That said, I do think that a lot of these provisions that are happening right now are so transformative that in the long run, like the kind of if we look back on what happened in the year 2025, it will have been a very, very good year for startups. Maybe their numbers will lag by a quarter just because. Okay. Like the funds can't be delivered. Depending on how long the shutdown goes down, I think it's having a greater impact actually on the citizen. Right. Like, I mean, what's happening with air traffic control, what's happening, you know, across, you know, civic benefits like that is something that I think we're now all feeling the pain of, or people who are dependent on those benefits are certainly feeling the pain of, or people who are traveling or planning to travel for upcoming Thanksgiving are certainly gonna feel the pain of the shutdown. But it's certainly having an impact on companies. And I think most companies are still working exceptionally hard on the things that they can work hard on now, even if the contracts can't get signed or the press releases can't be put out, or the dollars aren't coming in yet. But I think when we look back this year, the story of this year will actually be the defense acquisition reform and what's happening for these companies in the long term versus sort of the short term.
- [89:23]
Jordy
Yeah, short term pain, long term gain. Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking notes and giving us a full breakdown.
- [89:31]
Spiegel
Thanks so much.
- [89:31]
Jordy
Yes, always great to come and we'll.
- [89:33]
Spiegel
Talk to you soon. Cheers. Have a good one. 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 and start building. And we have our next guest, Mikey Schulman from SUNO in the Restream waiting room. Welcome to the TVPN ultradome. How are you doing?
- [89:52]
Katherine Boyle
It's great to be here. I'm doing great.
- [89:54]
Mikey Schulman
How are you guys?
- [89:54]
Spiegel
Fantastic.
- [89:55]
Jordy
Fantastic to have you.
- [89:57]
Spiegel
I'm very excited about this. I have a million questions and I know that we're just going to go super deep into all the details of user behavior, but kick us off with just a general high level introduction on you and the company and then we'll go from there.
- [90:15]
Mikey Schulman
Cool. Yeah. Great to be here. I don't know, I'm not so interesting. The company's much more interesting. The way I like to think of it is we are delivering the best, most valuable digital musical experiences to the whole world. And right now the things that are available to the end user are not always amazing, they're not always differentiated. And I think that's just like a failure of Imagination that. That you can do so much more with music and you can enjoy it so much more. So that's how I think about us.
- [90:42]
Jordy
What was the first song that you ever made?
- [90:45]
Mikey Schulman
Ever made? I've been playing piano since I'm four. I played in a lot of bands in high school and in college. I play every day. So I don't actually know the answer to that, but it was probably like Chopsticks or something.
- [90:55]
Spiegel
Are you a foundation model company? Chopsticks or an application layer company or both?
- [91:02]
Mikey Schulman
Look, the answer is both. You know, all the technologies are ours. These didn't exist. But I think about. And maybe this will color the conversation. And certainly, you know, when you guys were discussing us last week or two weeks ago, all that matters here is the product. All that matters is that we deliver an experience to a user that makes them feel a certain way. And so at the end of the day, like that, like, if there were a way to do what we're doing without AI, like, we would probably do that. There just isn't.
- [91:29]
Spiegel
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there is a window where you don't even train models and you use someone else's models, but as long as you have the best application, that's where the value accrues, I think.
- [91:41]
Mikey Schulman
So, like at the end of the day, yeah, users don't care. And I think probably at some point, maybe there's like a last model we officially release and the rest is just like amazing product updates.
- [91:54]
Spiegel
No, no, I completely agree with that. That makes sense.
- [91:56]
Jordy
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Walk us through. We normally don't talk about the history of companies too much during interviews, but because this is the first time on the show, I'd love to kind of understand the different inflection points for the business. I mean, you guys just grown tremendously over the last year. So walk us through kind of the history of SUNO and then kind of the history of even AI music and how those two things track.
- [92:26]
Spiegel
Sure.
- [92:27]
Mikey Schulman
We launched this product a little over two years ago. I think it was in September and it was kind of barely passable back then. It was a Discord bot is actually something I got wrong completely. Thankfully I have good co founders who disabused me of my bad ideas.
- [92:42]
Jordy
And was that like a mid. Was that a Mid Journey Inspired by Mid Journey.
- [92:46]
Spiegel
Makes sense. It was working for Mid Journey.
- [92:48]
Tyler Cosgrove
Why not?
- [92:48]
Mikey Schulman
It was working so well for midjourney and I thought we'd be on Discord forever. And then it was like around Thanksgiving we released of that year. We Released like a really thin web app. It didn't even have the full functionality of the discord bot. And five days for 90% of the traffic to move over to the web. It's like market signal that I got something wrong. That was like very, very strong. And I think slowly but surely we keep releasing new products, new models. The product gets more engaging, the music gets more impactful. And slowly but surely, I would say the cartoon you should have is, it becomes more and more appealing to a larger and larger group of people every time you make the product better. And so it's basically been a lot of iteration. Yes, there are inflection points. Everything consumer is like a little bit lumpy. But that's, that's the history of it.
- [93:37]
Jordy
Yeah. What did, what did the early cohort of users look like? How are they using the product? Where, like, why were they. I'm assuming they were. I'm sure you had a cult following kind of early. What did that early cohort look like? And is it that much different than today or is it just scaled up?
- [93:56]
Mikey Schulman
It's very different today. So the early cohort I would describe as like very tech forward and music curious. And it's like, here's this new thing. You kind of have to suspend disbelief. You need to be really forgiving because the music actually isn't all that good. And as you make the product better, you, you grow out from there. And now it's like people who love music who are like a little bit tech curious. And actually at this point you don't even need to be all that tech curious. There's like a fairly easy to use experience on both web and mobile that you can just kind of dive into. And so I think the, the early users are indeed like, you know, if you were on Discord.
- [94:35]
Spiegel
Let me put it this way, if.
- [94:36]
Mikey Schulman
You were on Discord, like you are a very different kind of user than the type, type of person who might find it. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
- [94:44]
Jordy
Yeah. And so today I think like part of the debate that we were having and you can deliver some truth around this is like what are kind of the key cohorts that are using and loving Suno. Everyone by now has probably seen viral short form videos where people are combining two different songs and, and some of the reach on these assets is insane. You'll see somebody combining rap artists like Future with jazz music and getting hundreds or tens of millions or potentially even more views on this type of content. But then we've also heard of stories of professional musicians using this to accelerate their workflows. And then we've now heard stories of people that are just creating music just for personal consumption. And so what are the different kind of cohorts look like and what kind of user are you guys most focused on?
- [95:44]
Mikey Schulman
So the professional content creator, be they professional music creator or other content creator, this is like mid single digit percentage of our user base. And the vast majority of people are people who love music but aren't making music for any other purpose. That's just, we call it creative entertainment. This is just like a new behavior. And so I think trying to apply too much of what you know from other things, be it consumer social platforms or video games, it's always, you always just have to take everything with a grain of salt. But most people, they come and they find that music making is incredibly enjoyable. And if you have studied an instrument and made music with your friends, like you probably already know this and you just don't believe that it can be done digitally. And then you kind of find the product and you realize, oh my God, this can be done digitally. I'm going to enjoy the hell out of making music. I usually try to cartoonize our average user as people who would say, I love music, I love to sing. You don't love it when I sing. That's kind of, that's kind of our sweet spot.
- [96:43]
Spiegel
That makes sense. And that tracks on like actual monetization. It's not like those are the free users and then all the revenue comes from professional people or like API. Like it actually matches roughly what you described.
- [96:57]
Mikey Schulman
That's right. And so you guys mentioned a couple weeks ago the Chris Dixon thing though, like come for the tool, stay for the network. I think about it a little differently for us. I kind of think of it for us as like come for the gimmick and stay for the joy. And this is like the party trick of making that song that even if it's not your favorite artist, which you largely can't do platform, but it's make the country song about Debbie being late. That's the party trick trick. But there's something that is behind the party trick that you get pulled into and all of a sudden you are a music maker and you're enjoying it. And so I actually, I don't think it's bad that you know, there's like this, this, this song that is meant to be consumed once, that you're never gonna consume again, that like you laugh for four seconds with your friend. I think, you know, one of you said like, I almost just need to Know the prompt, and then I don't need to know the rest of the song. I don't actually think that's bad because there's this amazing experience that it gets backed up with that people spend hours a day on.
- [97:54]
Spiegel
Totally. Yeah.
- [97:55]
Jordy
And when I think about some of the most fun moments of my childhood, it was my dad writing and playing a song for guitar and singing it one time and never singing it again. And I still, like, just remember the moments and the joy of that. And so the concept of ephemeral songs that can be created for a moment that historically you would have needed studio time, you would have needed to spend all this time writing the song, producing it, all this stuff, and now it can be done in an instant. I think it really is totally magical.
- [98:29]
Mikey Schulman
I think this is similar to this. There's ephemeral pictures on your phone. Right. And you're never gonna look at them again unless Apple tells you to.
- [98:36]
Spiegel
Yeah. Where are the rough edges or where are the edges that you want to be careful around? I feel like with ChatGPT, no one was really expecting the whole getting one shotted and psychosis and delusions of grandeur that came out of nowhere, in my opinion. And then all of a sudden it was an issue and they had to work on it. And of course, there's guardrails that they can put up midjourney. I think a lot of people use that as art therapy. I haven't seen that many people or heard that many anecdotes about people going crazy because of midjourney, but they're still like. If you're doing image generation, you don't want to generate adult content. For example, do you have an idea of, like, the shape of the battle that you're going to be waging against, like, the, like, the risks that you want to, like, fight off?
- [99:21]
Mikey Schulman
Yeah, look, I think for us, they're actually just fairly lower stakes than those other ones. Like, sorry, I. Turning anyone into paperclips.
- [99:28]
Spiegel
And.
- [99:29]
Mikey Schulman
Not that I think that that's a real thing anyway. And like you said, I don't think we're inducing psychosis in anyone. You know, this is a tricky question. Music, the content has kind of always been filthy in the best music, and I don't really want us to be the arbiter of that. So we have some content moderation that's pretty. I would say, pretty forgiving. And currently, that's actually. That's it. And then lots of copyright moderation, of course.
- [99:58]
Spiegel
Yeah. I was raised on Little John and the Eastside Boys. And it was indeed filthy.
- [100:05]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [100:06]
Spiegel
And it would not be your place to necessarily filter that. I would imagine that you at some point have to do some sort of like KYC age verification or even something that's just like parental controls, that type of stuff. That certainly makes sense. I have a follow up question, but go for it. Yeah. There was an article in the Journal yesterday about how Instagram had used PG13 as a heuristic for the type of content that they would show to teenagers on Instagram. And the MPAA actually pushed back against that. And I was very upset about that because I feel like we need shared language for how we describe what is acceptable on new tech platforms. So like, I want you to be able to put the label of like explicit content. Remember that explicit content on every album. It became so iconic it was actually cool. Which maybe had a bad effect. But if you put, if you put that black and white flag with the explicit on there, I know exactly what I'm getting and I know that I'm gonna keep that out of the hands of my kids for a number of years. And I would hate to be in a situation where you couldn't use that and you had to come up with some new jargon for your policy. I love just building on the shoulders of giants, but have you thought about adapting any of those terminologies or just making your moderation language match what people already know? Is that relevant to you?
- [101:39]
Mikey Schulman
Not as much as it is on other platforms, I mean, but it is. You know, I feel like we should not be the arbiters of a lot of these things. And you know, quite quite frankly, maybe like, you don't want us to be the arbiters of these things and that there should be other guidelines set by other things. And so like, yes, if you're dealing with children, you're going to have different roles about, about the songs that you can make and that you cannot make. And actually right now, parents making songs with their kids is actually a mega use case. It's probably half of my usage, which is a lot. I use the product a lot. And so it's like right now this is actually not the biggest focus for us. Like what we have, like works pretty well. There are always going to be edge cases. There are edge cases in moderation on every single platform, literally, you know, ever. And kind of through them as they come.
- [102:24]
Spiegel
Yeah.
- [102:25]
Jordy
What are your conversations like with people in the music industry? There were, there was some news earlier this week around the first, like AI artists signed a record deal. I don't know if it was actually the first, but that's how it was being reported. How are the conversations with Go are going with your users that are like true pro users that are using SUNO to either like, you know, experiment with like a bunch of different variations of songs, get new ideas, make entire songs themselves? What are those conversations like?
- [102:58]
Mikey Schulman
You know, I think there's been a huge shift in the last six months. I would say like now I really don't meet a lot of professionals who don't use Suno at least a little bit. Like songwriters use this a ton. We run a lot of camps as it's cliche, but a creative companion or a creative co pilot for helping craft the right songs, you know, verse by verse or getting ideas. Basically every producer I know uses suno. It was recently put to me just in an incredibly pithy way of We've become the ozempic of the music industry. Everybody's on it, but nobody wants to talk about it. And while that might be frustrating for us that in the interim nobody wants to talk about it. In the long run, that's actually great.
- [103:37]
Jordy
In the long run.
- [103:38]
Mikey Schulman
The fact that everybody is using it and loves it is fantastic. And so. So it's this weird dynamic I think, where one on one people are quite pro, even though like the industry as a whole may have different feelings about it.
- [103:51]
Spiegel
That's interesting. I wonder how this like the creative element of this like really throws me because on the one hand I see if I'm thinking about SUNO in the creative realm as like know cursor for your, for your daw, your workstation, your Fruity Loops or your Pro Tools or your Ableton and you're generating samples and actually working through that. I feel like that is something that yes, would get to 100% penetration. But on the flip side, like we've had the ability to generate blog posts and text for years now at human turing test level, and yet it does not feel like we're close to just oh yeah, just put in a prompt, write a good blog post and it comes out and it's good. You still need that spark, that inspiration. And then most people I feel like are still not. They're still in the copilot era for sure. And I feel like that's interesting. Yeah, I don't know.
- [104:59]
Mikey Schulman
I think there's a big difference though here, which is that there's a few big differences. But for me, you know, hearing you say that, it makes me think a lot of you're thinking of us largely as a tool. And it's because a lot of AI products are tools. And the point is not to just turn this blog post out. Actually the point is to have enjoyed the process of it. I happen not to really enjoy the process of writing so much. Maybe, maybe you guys are different. But like for us, the way people use Suno, it's like you're coming. Yes, there is some song at the end of it that you listen to and the fruits of your labor are enjoyable, but the journey of doing it is actually why you're there. And so the actual tool analogy doesn't really work there of like I don't just write in the prompt and it comes out perfect. That's not even the point here.
- [105:39]
Spiegel
Yes. So I think where I'm getting is that the actual market for AI audio is going to bifurcate, in my opinion. And there will be people just like there are, there are people right now that use LLMs to just chat and just have an AI therapist or they have a friend or they just ask chatgpt4 oh for hey, what should I do at work about this? They're just having a conversation. And then out of text generation, out of LLMs, we also got just the ability to do code completion. And so we got Windsurf and cursor and codecs and we got these like coding agents and then we also got like AI therapists. And these are two wildly different things from the same underlying technology. And I feel like I would just be shocked if you don't see both emerge over time. I mean maybe the different company comes in and takes one more seriously than you, because if the market's really big. But I would imagine that you wind up servicing both to some degree. No, for sure.
- [106:44]
Mikey Schulman
I mean we already service both, but I almost think of this as in the coding example. You might vibe code something and that's just a few prompts, or you might actually need fine grained control over the thing and then you use a different tool. Like something that's basically auto complete on steroids.
- [107:00]
Spiegel
Yes.
- [107:01]
Mikey Schulman
I don't mean that in a pejorative way. It's like anything 100% music is the same way. I might vibe create something and have a session where the music is generally what I'm looking for. And I enjoyed the process of getting there, but maybe that's the end of it. And if this is going to be a song that is everlasting and intended to top the charts, I need that fine grain control. And I need a different paradigm and a different set of workflows. And tools for doing it. And so there may even be the same underlying model that powers both of those things. And it's a different end user application.
- [107:32]
Spiegel
Yeah.
- [107:33]
Jordy
How do you think video creation is distinctly different than like music creation? Because I think, you know, on our side, watching the Sora launch, Sora was like a cool creative tool that had this novel like feature that was the Cameo feature. But then immediately those outputs just wanted to go live elsewhere. Right. They wanted to go where these big audiences were. And I feel like with Suno, the difference is like you can create music and you want to save stuff and it's actually can be very enjoyable to just listen to the content. Is that just a. Do you think that will. Do you think that will always be kind of the dynamic or do you think eventually video models will catch up to the point where people are generating videos and then just consuming them a lot? Because I haven't. Again, I think a lot of the output of something like Asura has been very ephemeral. It gets maybe shared in a group chat or gets shared on, on another social media platform, but people are not revisiting the content.
- [108:40]
Mikey Schulman
Yeah, I think look very fast moving space. And so this is just one guy's opinion today. I think there's basically two big differences. One is the joy in making the music and I think people mostly enjoy consuming the Sora outputs and the experience of making it is less interesting. And then the other thing about video in general, but especially AI video is is it really tends to short form. And actually the beauty of music is that it really is meant to grab you for minutes at a time and not seconds at a time. And it makes for a completely different consumptive experience. And I think that's actually a lot of what's broken in music consumption today is there's so much pressure to put on a song and then put through headphones and then put your phone in your pocket it and not even really pay attention to it. But I think a lot more is possible where I do have somebody's attention for three minutes, four minutes and you can actually tell the story through music in a way that like a 30 second video really does not. And so maybe AI video will get there, maybe it will get there in a year, maybe it'll get there in five years. But like today, that's what I see as the two big differences.
- [109:50]
Jordy
Makes sense. How do you think the music streaming platforms will navigate AI Music?
- [109:58]
Mikey Schulman
I think they look, they already are. There's AI music on these platforms. Spotify has announced that they'll start doing AI music. And so I very strongly suspect that in like five years, this is not a conversation that's being had because I already know that there's little bits of our music everywhere in, you know, mega smashes. And the same way you don't think about like, was this song digitally produced or was it produced on a giant console in a studio somewhere? And that's maybe something that people thought for five years, you know, 30 years ago. My very strong suspicion. Or just like auto tune, where now every song has auto tune in it, even if you can't hear it. My very strong suspicion is that that is where everything ends up. And the reason is it is better for consumers. It would really be bad for consumers and therefore bad for the size of the ecosystem if these things kind of bifurcate.
- [110:52]
Jordy
Yep, that makes a lot of sense. It's like asking, I don't even think anyone ever asked the question, how will social media apps handle Photoshop? Photoshop was. Photoshop outputs were just immediately the tool existed prior to social media, so it just proliferated immediately.
- [111:10]
Spiegel
I mean, speaking of Photoshop, Photoshop has had to grapple with the existence of generative images through partnerships, through rolling their own. How important is it to you to play in the market of like, the enterprise audio workflows, do deals, partnerships. Because what we saw in the text, at least in code, at least every coding platform, and there were a whole bunch of new ones. Like, there's been a real battle for the idea and I'm wondering if there's like a battle coming for the top end of the music production workflow.
- [111:53]
Mikey Schulman
I think there probably will be a battle, but it will be not nearly the bloodbath that it will be in other domains. And it's just because the average piece of music today is produced in 800 different tools and everybody has all of the tools. And so I actually don't think it's entirely reasonable people to think that there will be one tool that uses up all of your screen time and like, that's going to be the thing that you produce 99% of your music in if you are a true professional. And so there, the end goal is the perfect song and a little bit less the journey of how you got there.
- [112:25]
Jordy
Yep, interesting code.
- [112:27]
Mikey Schulman
It's like VS code is just open all the time. And I don't want to have another editor. And if you like, talk to people who develop iOS, they're pissed off because they have two editors. But it's not nearly the same. 800 different tools that it is in music.
- [112:40]
Spiegel
Yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense.
- [112:42]
Jordy
That makes sense. This is super interesting. Thank you for coming on to break it down.
- [112:47]
Spiegel
Yeah, this was awesome. Thanks so much.
- [112:49]
Jordy
I'm gonna use Suno to try to make bedtime with my three and a half year old a little bit easier later tonight. So I'll report back. What are some of your favorite prompts that you use with your kid or kids?
- [113:07]
Mikey Schulman
You know, a lot of them are songs. I have a one year old and four year old. It's like still too early for the one year old. A lot of them are songs about him in fantastical situations. Like my most favorite one is just like last winter after the the Zamboni driver at the local ice rink let him like ride in the Zamboni because it was like, like a whole album of songs about him riding in a Zamboni doing all sorts of crazy stuff.
- [113:30]
Jordy
Stuff.
- [113:31]
Mikey Schulman
And yeah, they're like very special and personal and I do go back to those and gosh, yeah, I think this is wonderful. Sometimes we joke if we were a kids app, we'd have five times the revenue that we do. You know, it's just like kids is like the most straightforward way to get me to part with my money. I'm sure you're the same way.
- [113:47]
Jordy
Totally, totally agree. Suno kids. Maybe the iPad. The iPad app coming next year?
- [113:54]
Mikey Schulman
No, not actually.
- [113:56]
Jordy
So great to meet you, Mikey. Thank you.
- [113:58]
Spiegel
Congrats on all the progress. Take care guys. We'll talk to you soon.
- [114:00]
Ahmad
Cheers.
- [114:00]
Spiegel
Hi. Let me tell you about numeral.com sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.
- [114:07]
Jordy
Speaking of kids, so nice to drop the hq. Yeah, drop the HQ RIP to Numeral hq.
- [114:14]
Spiegel
Speaking of kids, I want your review of this way to decide how to buy a house. So in New York City in 2023, this real estate agent worked with a couple who wanted to purchase an apartment on the Upper west side of Manhattan. But they wanted their Pokemon obsessed 6 year old son to have a say. How? By playing Pokemon in each neighborhood before his parents would commit to a purchase. We spent an afternoon covering four neighborhoods as the child played the game and caught Pokemon characters. It turns out that Central park west was a hot spot for Pokemon Go characters that day. And we toured a two bedroom co op that was listed for about $2 million. The child ended up catching a Snorlax as soon as we stepped inside Central Park. A Snorlax is a blue green character that looks like a bear and Is apparently extremely rare to find because it spends the majority of its life asleep. The child is screaming, jumping up and down. He was so excited to find. Although my clients looked at seven other apartments that day, no other area came close in terms of Pokemon action. So they knew that apartment was the one. They wrote up an offer that same day for the full asking price. What's your review? Is that a good way? Is that cute and adorable to bring your kids in or is it weird?
- [115:39]
Jordy
It potentially could lead to total heartbreak, you know, if the kid's just like, yeah, this is the.
- [115:45]
Spiegel
It's actually a dry spot now.
- [115:47]
Jordy
This is a Pokemon hotspot. And then they're. Then the Pokemon dry up after moving in.
- [115:52]
Spiegel
Good take.
- [115:52]
Jordy
And they're like, what are we doing here? I know we just moved in here, but we gotta. I gotta get closer to the Pokemon.
- [115:58]
Spiegel
We got it, mom and dad. We gotta book a wander. We gotta find our happy place, find our Pokemon hunting spot. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dream beds, top tier cleaning, and 247 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks. Yeah, I don't know. I think I like the idea of bringing the kid, the six year old, into the house purchase process, but let's leave the phones at home and let's develop a taste for. Let's become snobs. How about that six year old become a snob and say, no, I couldn't live anywhere.
- [116:33]
Jordy
But I don't like the cafe the.
- [116:35]
Spiegel
Upper east side because I have strong opinions about this. Get into the lore what happened on this street. That's what the six year old should do. I'm fine to delegate to the six year old, but not to Niantic, the company behind Pokemon Go. Anyway, our next guest is waiting for us in the Restream waiting room. We have Ahmad from Mercury. How you doing? Good to see you. Welcome to the show.
- [116:57]
Jordy
Great to see you.
- [116:58]
Ahmad
Hey, good to be back. How are you doing?
- [117:00]
Spiegel
Great.
- [117:00]
Jordy
It's been a little bit.
- [117:01]
Spiegel
Yeah, it's been a while. Give us an update on what's going on in your world. And then I want to just talk about all the crazy stuff that's happening in tech, honestly.
- [117:10]
Ahmad
Yeah, let's go for it. We just announced today on Fortune term sheet that we had three years of profitability.
- [117:19]
Jordy
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
- [117:20]
Ahmad
I'm excited about.
- [117:21]
Jordy
All right, we're hitting all the sound effects founder mode.
- [117:27]
Ahmad
Nice.
- [117:28]
Jordy
That is wild. Yeah.
- [117:29]
Ahmad
Full founder mode.
- [117:30]
Jordy
Yes.
- [117:31]
Spiegel
It's been a VC's hate this. VC's hate this. One weird trick area. Man discovers profitability. Congratulations.
- [117:40]
Ahmad
It's actually really funny. You know, I love my VCs, but there's definitely every. Every board meeting, they're like, okay, you know, how can we spend this money a little bit faster?
- [117:48]
Jordy
So it's true.
- [117:48]
Ahmad
I was actually talking to some CEOs just, like, last this week. And yeah, most of the time, like, spending more money doesn't mean you grow faster. And that's kind of like what I was trying to celebrate with this milestone that, like, it's, you know, we're building software companies there. At least we are not everyone.
- [118:06]
Spiegel
Yeah, I got a pitch.
- [118:06]
Ahmad
You don't need to spend money to grow.
- [118:08]
Spiegel
I got a pitch for you. You're in a strong financial position. You should put out a press release, say, we don't need a backstop. We don't need a government backstopper. We are profitable.
- [118:17]
Ahmad
I didn't know there was a backstop available to me.
- [118:20]
Jordy
Well, I mean, yeah, I was ready to use. I was ready. When those comments started floating Wednesday, I was ready to use the analogy of, like, what would happen if there was a government backstop on venture, backstage, corporate cards.
- [118:33]
Spiegel
I mean, I mean, truly, you are. You are a bank, and you. And you've obviously lived through. You live through the financial crisis.
- [118:39]
Jordy
Like, can't say he's a bank.
- [118:40]
Spiegel
No. Okay, okay.
- [118:41]
Ahmad
But we're not a banking partner with.
- [118:44]
Spiegel
Partner, but you're obviously intimately familiar with the financial system. Do you have any. Do you have any unique lessons or stories that you tell from the financial crisis? Warning signs that you pull from, even just like, movies or books or something that you keep going back to as, like, you know, we want to stay sharp on this.
- [119:05]
Ahmad
I think building trust in what Mercury does has always been. It's actually probably the hardest thing we do because we're asking a lot from people. We're storing all their money for their business. I had this conversation when we first launched Mercury with someone who'd raised $10 million. And he was like, this is more money than I've ever seen in my whole life. I'm not going to give it to a startup banking service. And now we have customers that have more than 100 million with mercury. So, like, building that trust is always so important. And obviously I know which financial crisis.
- [119:36]
Jordan Castro
You were referring to.
- [119:38]
Spiegel
2008, actually. But I do want to talk about SUV as well.
- [119:43]
Ahmad
It's like the SVV crisis.
- [119:44]
Tyler Cosgrove
Yeah, of course.
- [119:47]
Spiegel
Take us through the SVB crisis. Yeah. What were the biggest lessons from the svv? Cross Crisis.
- [119:54]
Ahmad
Yeah. I mean the biggest thing for us was it can't just be all talk, right. Like if I, you know, and I was talking to founders saying like, hey, you should trust Mercury. And they'd be like, oh man, like SVB is a 40 year old company and they just like, you know, for sure are dying. Why should we trust Mercury? And then, you know, what we did and what we've continued to kind of invest in is to make it. So it's not just about trusting Mercury, it's about like having products that, that deliver like trust. So, you know, we have like accelerated FDIC insurance which is, you know, I guess on the website we publish 5 million but it's actually most accounts get way more than 5 million. So almost all the deposits that sit at Mercury are FDIC insured.
- [120:32]
Spiegel
Yeah.
- [120:33]
Ahmad
And that was the big thing. I think SVB was at 80ish percent uninsured deposits.
- [120:40]
Jordy
And that's just because, just for anybody that's not super familiar, that's because they had had standard two and a quarter million dollar of FDIC insurance, but almost every account had. Well beyond that because. Yeah, exactly.
- [120:53]
Ahmad
Especially, especially VC backed businesses, you know.
- [120:55]
Spiegel
And also in a zero interest rate environment. In a zero interest rate environment, you're like, I'm just going to keep it in the checking account. I raised a $5 million seat. I'll just literally keep it in the checking account because like what's the point if I move it to some other vehicle, I'm going to earn 0.5% or 0.1%. Now it's, now it's a different environment.
- [121:11]
Tyler Cosgrove
Yeah.
- [121:11]
Jordy
What, what was it always the plan to get profitable, stay profitable as fast as sort of reasonably possible? I think like.
- [121:18]
Spiegel
Or did that happen?
- [121:20]
Jordy
If people are trusting you as like a financial platform institution, it's not exactly comforting to know that you're burning money and your financial institution.
- [121:28]
Ahmad
Because I think the other, you know, the other thing that was part of SPV was, you know, like people just had so little time to move all of their banking operations and it's just like there's so much reliant on a bank account for a business.
- [121:40]
Spiegel
And it was such a moment I was with svb, it collapsed and I was like, I need to go someplace less risky. I'm going to First Republic. Yeah. And then that collapsed too. And I was like, but that's, that feels like an even old, I don't know if which one's actually older. I think First Republic was older, but it was this odds of Republic was.
- [121:57]
Ahmad
A little bit old, I believe.
- [121:58]
Spiegel
Total, total refutation of the Lindy principle. It was like actually go to Mercury would have been better off.
- [122:05]
Jordy
Sorry, I got it.
- [122:07]
Ahmad
I was going to say, I think one of the parts of that was like you rely so much of operations and it's even more extreme for Mercury customers because we do more than banking. So we do people's credit cards and invoicing and we've been building more and more features and our customers are reliant on a broader set of features. So I think part of being profitable and sustaining profitability is making that promise to our customers that this is something that's going to stick around.
- [122:33]
Jordy
So.
- [122:33]
Ahmad
So if they use us, it's not like one day we don't raise a funding round or whatever, there's like a crash or something and people have to worry about that. So it's definitely like a core part of that kind of having that trusted service.
- [122:46]
Spiegel
Yeah.
- [122:47]
Jordy
Where are you guys getting the most leverage from AI?
- [122:51]
Ahmad
Yeah, good question. The biggest thing we've done is like back office stuff. There's just a, to run a fintech especially kind of on the banking side. There's just a ton of people that have to do a lot of of back office things and it's like you have to upload a formation document and someone has to review it and all of these things are very ripe for AI to just smooth it out either like automate 100% or automate it 80% so that a human can just review the answers. So yeah, lots of stuff on compliance risk. Back office has been our biggest investment. We've got lots of. I'm not, I guess a lot of what we do at Mercury is not kind of follow fads or whatever. So we've done a bunch of things that are user facing but we try to add little bits of value here and there. So yeah, we have a chat bot so you can ask your questions and that's been actually it's solved like 40% of tickets. Customer questions are just like, hey, how long does it take for a wire to settle? And those kinds of questions. And that's just a better customer experience. And we think about how do you think.
- [123:56]
Spiegel
And that's 40% over the baseline of like because most customer support systems, like if you email in it would just previously do like fuzzy database search to be like, oh, it seems like you're asking about this FAQ. You got a 40% lift on top of that because you were already doing best practices. I imagine something like that.
- [124:17]
Ahmad
Yes, it's a bit more complicated because we still have that email system when people email it in. So this did replace the suggested topics in like the live messaging system. So yeah, I don't know exactly.
- [124:30]
Spiegel
What about on the cost side?
- [124:31]
Ahmad
The suggested answers was way, way less because people don't like reading things like they just want an answer and they.
- [124:37]
Spiegel
Want to move on. What about on the cost side? We were talking to Ivan Notion. He said that his insurance bill was actually having an effect on his gross margins. You've remained profitable, but if I'm looking deeper in your financials, will I see an uptick in inference bills based on actually, is that something that you're actually trying to manage as you stay profitable or has it been low enough that it just.
- [125:05]
Jordy
Yeah, and I think it's wildly different. I think using it in back office context where you're sort of processing forms and PDFs and things like that versus AIVEN where people are like, I'm going to generate, you know, trillions of tokens because I'm just making long documents. Totally.
- [125:20]
Ahmad
On the back office side, it's mostly been a cost saving. Right. Like you're kind of giving leverage to humans.
- [125:27]
Spiegel
Yeah. Or you're moving off of like a mechanical turk or scale or something like that.
- [125:31]
Mikey Schulman
Yeah, exactly. Workload.
- [125:32]
Ahmad
And yeah, on the user facing side it's, you know, I think a big difference for us is, you know, we have 200,000 plus customers, but it's not that many customers. Right. Like a lot of like consumer services have millions of customers. Like each of our customers is obviously like much more valuable.
- [125:48]
Spiegel
And also you probably don't have like a ton of DA. I mean you probably have a lot of DAUs, but it's not the app that people open when they wake up. You know, I mean it's a great.
- [125:58]
Ahmad
It'S much more utility than productivity.
- [126:00]
Spiegel
Right. Like people are actually kind of like.
- [126:02]
Ahmad
You need to do something, that's why you do it.
- [126:03]
Spiegel
Exactly. So and so the inference is just gonna be so much lower than if Instagram is all of a sudden being like, we're gonna run an LLM query on every, on every photo that gets uploaded. It's like, okay, well that's a huge amount of inference.
- [126:16]
Jordy
What?
- [126:17]
Ahmad
Yeah, and we're doing more and more though. So, you know, potentially when you're churning through all these transactions, they'll go up. I don't expect for us. We also make way more on a per customer basis than actually. I don't know about notion. But then like most prosumer consumer Type things. So I think it would net out that it would be a smallish percentage.
- [126:35]
Spiegel
Yeah, that makes a lot.
- [126:35]
Jordy
What are you. What are you seeing across your angel portfolio? You've been. You've been investing like.
- [126:44]
Ahmad
Like, I guess for context, I've done about 350 investments in the last 10 years. I don't know if I need to go for that. And I just actually announced earlier this year I have a formal angel fund now. It was a 26 million kind of angel fund. I mean, I'm still mostly investing in the same way I mostly invest because it's just fun to talk to founders and I guess the same reason you guys run this podcast. It's interesting to talk to founders and learn new ideas. It's very AI focused right now, as you can imagine. You know what's. I think AI is kind of fun to invest in because, like, every six months, what you're investing in, like, changes a lot, right? Like, for a while, it was kind of dev tools in AI, and now I feel like that's done. So most of what I see right now is kind of deeper, vertical, kind of B2B applications of AI.
- [127:42]
Spiegel
Do you think AI gives people the permission to invest in more unique categories? Because basically, like, there. There used to be like a whole set of categories that were just kind of like small businesses or industrials or some niche, some weird niche thing, and they would just be kind of off limits because it would be like, oh, no, no, no. Like, the real money's made in fintech. The real money is made in maybe the edtech, but that one's difficult. Or ad tech or marketing martech. You know, it's like there were these easy themes, but with AI, you can go and actually put together a pitch around something that's maybe more or less untouched by tech and actually generate a deck.
- [128:30]
Ahmad
It's definitely like this extension of the software is eating the world kind of vibe that Marc Andreessen talks about, right?
- [128:37]
Spiegel
A little bit more of the world on the edges.
- [128:40]
Ahmad
Like, 10ish years ago, it was all social and mobile, right? That's where everything was. And. And then we started doing, like, Even Mercury's, like, 10 years ago was probably off limits to like, try to make something that went after the banking market. And I remember when I started in 2017, it was like, you know, it sounded weird, right? Like it was not something that was done. I think the thing that AI does is like, open up labor, right? Like in robotics, it opens up physical labor. And then in the case of kind of the White collar workers. It opens up like human kind of intellectual labor and that is like a whole set of categories. So you know, people generally, VCs hate services firms, right? Like, it's like they'll be like, oh, that's like a services firm. But now like services firms are cool. You're like, oh yeah, it's human. It's human AI. Plus human services firms are like the thing that a lot of people are investing in, ideally trying to get to like fully human only. So fully AI only. But yeah, it's definitely opened up a lot of industries that wouldn't have been interesting from a investment perspective.
- [129:48]
Jordy
Do you think people have been overly bearish on SaaS? It's notable that OpenAI uses everything from Salesforce to Slack to Qualtrics. And I imagine you use a lot of on your business. I don't think anybody's out there saying, you know, I'm going to vibe code a bank. You know, even if they could, even if you could somehow build that on like a banking as a service platform, it's like the level, you know, the amount of work you need to do to maintain a Vibe coded bank on top of, you know, generally.
- [130:22]
Ahmad
I mean, I think there will be a wave of disruption that will happen in SaaS, but I don't think the answer will be everyone's just making their own end to end. Like Salesforce. Like that just. That sounds ridiculous to me. I do. I mean, I hope someone builds a much better Salesforce, but it'll still. Yeah. And maybe their pricing won't be like per seat and it'll be like per sale or whatever. But I think the category will exist. The shape of the category will change, the business model will change. But I don't think the answer is everyone's building their own Salesforce. Like that just, that just sounds inefficient. Like it just sounds ridiculous to me. But there will be like, I think actually like the incremental new applications people build will actually make make will just be more applications. Right. Like if the number of vendors you had was like 10 and like you're paying a lot, like maybe you'll have another 90 internal apps that people just made for small use cases. So the amount of software people will use will go up, I think because of vibe coding and the ease of coding. But I don't think these big categories are going to just disappear because people can now make it themselves.
- [131:24]
Jordy
And do you think companies will go multi product sooner? And are you seeing that across the portfolio? If the engineering, actual engineering hours or less to go from one product to a second to a third. That will just encourage more companies.
- [131:39]
Ahmad
I think it's going to be industry specific. I think a big story about fintech in the last couple of years has been every fintech going multi product. I think it's partly because when we started in 2019, no one was building a better Neobank. So that's, you know, that's all it took. Like our first product was a bank account and it was like really good. Now to compete against Mercury you would have to have bill pay and credit cards and invoicing because like that's just what people look for. Like they look for more of a bundle product. So I think it depends where you're competing and to some extent it gets a little easier because you can just make products quicker. But making like amazing products is never easy. I think you just the quality and craft and all of that do matter. And we try to invest a lot when we make a new product. It's never easy. It takes a lot to make an amazing product. But when you're very new to a category and almost everything in AI is very new, you can build more, quicker and then kind of refine it over time.
- [132:47]
Jordy
But it's a good question.
- [132:48]
Ahmad
I think a lot of the ways people will end up competing with incumbents. I've heard a ton of like, I don't know why we're picking on Salesforce but I've heard a lot of like how do we beat Salesforce kind of strategies. And a lot of them are like, oh actually we're going to bundle like AISDR and X and Y and like we're going to make it like a much more fully featured kind of version of like Salesforce. So I think when you compete against incumbents, like doing a bundle strategy sometimes is like a better strategy. So we'll see that play out.
- [133:18]
Jordy
Yeah, very cool. Well, congratulations to the whole team.
- [133:21]
Spiegel
Congratulations.
- [133:22]
Jordy
Three year milestone. Looking forward to the fourth, the fifth, sixth and hopefully hundreds of years of Mercury profitability. You gotta get past the SVB mark, become the longest standing institution.
- [133:37]
Ahmad
It's funny, they were started like a year before I was born so I have this exact mental model. They were started 42 years ago but maybe I'll stop thinking about that when.
- [133:48]
Spiegel
They'Re actually going to further down.
- [133:50]
Ahmad
But yeah, really appreciate you having me on.
- [133:53]
Spiegel
Yeah, yeah, we'll take care.
- [133:54]
Jordy
Congrats to the whole team.
- [133:54]
Spiegel
Have a good one.
- [133:55]
Jordy
Cheers.
- [133:56]
Spiegel
Bye bye. You heard about the importance of AI agents for customer service? You got to head over to Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake, number one world champion ranking on G2. And he was also mentioning better CRM. Why not try out Addio Customer relationship Magic Adeo is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Brett Adcock fired back at hype around 1x presumably figure CEO Brett Adcock says his quote major competitors are using teleoperation human operators in their videos and calls it deceiving. Will he call out 1x by name? Will he call out Elon by name? Will he call out Unitree by name? Let's find out by watching this clip. His analogy it's like if a self driving car pulled up and we found out there was some guy, a demonstration of a robot doing something that's like not teleopped or like coded and what you're seeing now in the world is like I would say most major competitor to us at this point are putting out most of their content and updates teleops from a human. And I think it's like perhaps some of the most deceiving things I've ever seen. It's like if I was driving a self driving car, if a self driving car pulled up next to us and we found out there was some guy from Tennessee driving it, we'd both be like that's not what I thought this would look like. What you want to see is so the funny thing is that Tyler, why are you laughing at that? Tyler?
- [135:27]
Tyler Cosgrove
Well that's like exactly how self driving cars work right now.
- [135:33]
Spiegel
Teleop is actually maybe critical to the development of full self driving cars and maybe used by all the top companies all the time. Yes. I mean it is odd that like.
- [135:47]
Jordy
I think it's like a key, it's the key enabler for 1x to actually get robots in homes and getting them to a point where they can do valuable work.
- [135:58]
Mikey Schulman
Right.
- [135:58]
Jordy
And they're gonna be taking a loss. They're gonna be taking a loss on that. They're charging like $2 an hour but that's gonna be, you know, a flywheel for them to get more and more training data.
- [136:10]
Spiegel
Oh, the founder of One Axe actually replied, I think Dar, that's the founder, right?
- [136:15]
Jordy
No, Dar's just the vp.
- [136:17]
Spiegel
Oh. But he's just the loudest voice on X. So I give him all the credit. He's one of the people, he created One Axe. It would be nothing without him. Anyway, he says so basically Waymo, there were two Operators to every car when Waymo started. It is interesting that. Yeah, Waymo has never. That I know of. They've never really, like, published data on how many operators they have per car. I think that that would actually give people a lot of reassurance around, like, okay, these cars are driving around. Are there people over watching them? And then you just get to a point where you say, okay, yeah, there's 10,000 operators for 5,000 cars. And then next year, there's 8,000 operators for 5,000 Cars. Then eventually there's 5,000 operators for 5,000 CarS. And then eventually there's 1,000 operators for 5,000CarS. And eventually there's one operator for 5,000 CarS. But it's just a slow process of getting people up to speed on the new technology, and it just gives people confidence at every turn, much like the confidence that I feel when I go to sleep on my eighth sleep. How'd you feel? How'd you sleep last night, Jordy? 88 from me. 7 hours, 38 minutes. I want to hear if that soundboard still has my favorite song on it. Boom.
- [137:31]
Jordy
You got an 88. I'll give it to you.
- [137:32]
Spiegel
Wait, do we tie?
- [137:33]
Jordy
Yeah, I got an 83.
- [137:34]
Spiegel
Oh, 83. Okay.
- [137:35]
Jordy
Rough one, rough one.
- [137:37]
Spiegel
Well, we have breaking news from the Pope. He chimed in on the AI bubble. Some bub talks from the Papacy, a papal bull. Is that a top signal on the bub talk? No, no, it's not on the bubble. It's not on the bubble. It's not on the bubble. It is from the Pope, though, who I should be following. Why am I not following the Pope? Technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation. It carries an ethical and spiritual weight. For every design choice expresses a vision of humanity. The church therefore calls all builders of AI to cultivate moral discernment as a fundamental part of their work, to develop systems that reflect justice, solidarity, and a genuine reverence for life. I like that.
- [138:30]
Jordy
Good line.
- [138:31]
Spiegel
Liquidity thinks it's AI generated slop. Very bearish. No. Yes. He used one EM dash. Like, the EM dash is not a telltale sign. You can just use one if you're just hammering on the keyboard, or you can just write a note, and then in the edit, someone can use an EM dash. I don't know. Is the Pope one shotted? We'll never know. I think this is fine. I think this is a nice little call to action. What do you think, Tyler? You put this in here, right?
- [139:00]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [139:00]
Tyler Cosgrove
I mean, what are you guys doing? If The Pope comes out and says like, I actually don't care about AI margins. What are you doing?
- [139:08]
Spiegel
I would be extremely bullish on that. What I'm worried about is the Pope coming out and being like. Actually, like I've discovered some novel physics. I've been chatting, I've been talking to Grok and I've been talking to Chatgpt for just like thousands of hours.
- [139:20]
Tyler Cosgrove
People don't think about the recursiveness in the Bible.
- [139:23]
Spiegel
Yeah, no, yeah, recursiveness in the Bible. Actually it's crazy. You know, I'm the Pope of the Catholic Church, but I've been getting into polytheism. Recently I went down a rabbit hole and I think there might be more than one God. I think there's multiple gods.
- [139:37]
Jordy
AB in the chat says, gotta get the Pope on vanta. Totally agree, 100%. I think it'd be interesting if the Pope started coming out and said we're exploring taking equity stakes in technology companies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
- [139:52]
Spiegel
Yeah, we'll see if we gotta get the Pope on bezel. Because your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, Any watch. Yeah.
- [140:01]
Jordy
The Pope already has the drop top six wheel G wagon.
- [140:06]
Spiegel
Is it six wheels?
- [140:07]
Jordy
I think so.
- [140:08]
Spiegel
No way. I always thought it was a rules. No, it is a G wagon. But there's. I feel like he has a wild set of cars.
- [140:14]
Jordy
No, it's not. It's not six wheels.
- [140:16]
Spiegel
No, it's not six wheels. Six wheels would be so.
- [140:18]
Jordy
But it is a one of one. And they made an EV.
- [140:21]
Spiegel
I love it. Speaking of EVs, the Ford F150 Lightning is potentially going out. Out of production.
- [140:29]
Jordy
No way.
- [140:31]
Spiegel
It is close to failing. The Wall Street Journal has a story on the front page talking about where is this? Pull that up. The Ford ways ending electric F150 truck. Executives at Ford Motor are in active discussions, active talks. They're in talks about scrapping the electric version of the F150. People familiar with the matter said which would make the unprofitable truck the US's first major EV casualty. Maybe this is. Do you think this is all triggered by TJ Parker? Possible world famous venture capitalist and founder himself. He bought a Ford but he didn't buy an electric one. He bought a Raptor. Why they should make. Why don't they make the electric one like the Raptor R? They should.
- [141:28]
Jordy
With an internal combustion engine.
- [141:30]
Spiegel
Exactly. I feel like if they want people to buy the electric version of the truck they should give it like an exhaust and an engine.
- [141:37]
Jordy
And a real engine note.
- [141:39]
Spiegel
Yeah, real engine note.
- [141:40]
Jordy
When I had my Raptor I. It's more cylinders for people. Anytime I was on a call in the car.
- [141:47]
Spiegel
Yeah.
- [141:47]
Jordy
People would assume that I was driving a sports car because there's so much engine noise in the cabin. It was ridiculous.
- [141:54]
Spiegel
Yeah. I mean the Raptor R has. How many cylinders does it have? Is it a V8? It is, right?
- [142:00]
Jordy
I thought it was.
- [142:01]
Spiegel
So it has eight cylinders. The F150 Lightning had zero cylinders.
- [142:08]
Jordy
That could be why it's not selling very well.
- [142:10]
Spiegel
The Ford Raptor river had 5.2 liters in its engine. The F150 Lightning had a zero liter engine because it didn't have one. So it makes sense why this has been struggling. And we will see what they wind up doing.
- [142:26]
Jordy
We gotta change the subject because all this Raptor talks got me thinking about getting one again and pull the trigger.
- [142:33]
Spiegel
Well, if you think it's bullish or bearish that Ford is pulling the Raptor. No, they're doubling down on the Raptor. They're pulling the Lightning. Head over to public.com investing for those that take it seriously. Multi asset investing. Industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions.
- [142:49]
Jordy
Quadrillions.
- [142:50]
Spiegel
What else is going on in the markets?
- [142:51]
Jordy
Hiro Lewis. Nada says. My inbox is full of people breathlessly trying to interpret this. And it is a one year look at Spy.
- [143:00]
Spiegel
It's over.
- [143:01]
Jordy
Slight dip.
- [143:02]
Spiegel
You can interpret this in two seconds. It's over. It's just completely over. The bubble popped. Now it's ready to start rebuilding.
- [143:08]
Jordy
It was a good run.
- [143:08]
Spiegel
We can go off from here because the bubble has popped. You're welcome. It was rough. We got through it. We are now.
- [143:14]
Jordy
It's almost a weekend.
- [143:15]
Spiegel
We are now past the trough of disillusionment. We're in the plateau of productivity. That's what I see.
- [143:21]
Jordy
That's good. And pretty soon the stocks have already stopped trading. So we're safe now.
- [143:26]
Spiegel
We're safe. You can't hurt us anymore.
- [143:28]
Jordy
The economy can't hurt you on the weekend.
- [143:32]
Spiegel
There's so many more charts. It's really chart talk time. Consumer sentiment almost back to its record low. People are not happy with consumer sentiment right now.
- [143:41]
Jordy
You see this too. Bank of America just as of yesterday, just fully recovered from the global financial Crisis.
- [143:51]
Spiegel
Wow.
- [143:51]
Jordy
Took 19 to the day.
- [143:53]
Spiegel
And then it's like back in another crisis. Can you imagine? It's like. No. We just dug our way out of the hole. No. Fantastic. Famously Backstopped by none other than Warren Buffett. Profit.
- [144:06]
Jordy
Yeah, it's been interesting to follow. I mean, Berkshire Hathaway is green this week.
- [144:12]
Spiegel
He's got so much cash.
- [144:13]
Jordy
So much cash, he's building cash pile. So it's $1.07 trillion.
- [144:18]
Spiegel
Maybe the least AGI pilled person in the world. Cash pilled.
- [144:25]
Jordy
Imagine if Berkshire Hathaway just comes in and just acquires like 90% of OpenAI.
- [144:32]
Spiegel
He likes those authentic greenbacks. Ag, what's the I for authentic greenback incentives? I don't know.
- [144:43]
Jordy
Daniel Eth says is commenting. So Nvidia put out something on Wednesday. As I've long said, China is nanoseconds behind America and AI. It's vital that America wins by racing ahead and winning developers worldwide. Daniel says this is an insane statement. America is more than nanoseconds ahead of China and AI. The actual gap is months. And it would be larger too if Nvidia stopped the flow of advanced GPUs to China. So putting him in the truth zone. There's some more information on the Snap Snapchat deal. Snap gets 400 million, which is greater than Perplexity's total revenue. Snap gives nothing except access to.
- [145:29]
Spiegel
Wait, wait, it's more what they're paying more than their revenue. How does that work?
- [145:39]
Jordy
Perplexity is taking VC dollars, giving them to Snap for distribution. There's also an equity. All the Snap holders are.
- [145:50]
Spiegel
Sorry, this is extremely confusing. Let's read this. The deal looks incredibly in Snap's favor. Snap gets $400 million greater than perplexity total revenue. Now Signal is saying this is most likely 399 million of perplexity equity to Snap, not cash. So there is a question about how much of it is cash versus so yeah, the raised VC dollars give it to Snap is one theory. But it is possible that they're just giving $400 million of equity like a stock grant.
- [146:23]
Jordy
I think it's a. It's some split. Yeah, I don't know if they, they.
- [146:26]
Spiegel
Published it, but like Signal's thesis is that it's. It's 399 million of equity and like 1 million of cash. And so it's basically just like, like we want distribution in Snap and we're willing to give you equity to pay for it. Because 400 million on 20 billion is 2% of the company, right?
- [146:44]
Katherine Boyle
That.
- [146:44]
Jordy
Yeah, it's crazy.
- [146:46]
Spiegel
2% of the company. Snap gives nothing except access to an unloved AI chat. Perplexity gets indirect access to zero income teens. Sasha is not a fan of this deal.
- [146:57]
Jordy
Spiegel, go back to the conversation we were having. I think Saturday we were, we had a couple hour drive and we were basically doing a podcast with no, no mics. But I was saying I was surprised that Snapchat has not figured out a way to just monetize all the capital that a lot of these consumer AI companies have given their massive, massive user base.
- [147:20]
Spiegel
Well, it's because. It's because the numbers are like all flipped around. Snap is, I think, way more mature on all the business metrics and yet worth half Perplexity. Right? Look at the difference in terms of business metrics.
- [147:39]
Jordy
Daus, paid views, Flexity does not want, will not want people comping it to Snap in their next financing.
- [147:49]
Spiegel
Yeah, it's odd. I don't know, it's some sort of like, you know, dance to actually integrate these two things. Tane says Snap will be integrating Perplexity directly into Snapchat's chat interface. Perplexity will pay Snap $400 million over a year in a mix of cash and stock as part of the deal and gets access to Snap's 900 million monthly active users.
- [148:16]
Jordy
AB in the chat. Snapchat's going to accidentally build AGI. Just trying to make the dog filter blink.
- [148:22]
Spiegel
Realistically, I love it.
- [148:25]
Jordy
Do you think Tyler's at a pathway to AGI?
- [148:29]
Tyler Cosgrove
Well, well, I mean, look, Spiegel, I mean, Spiegel might be back.
- [148:34]
Spiegel
You think so?
- [148:35]
Tyler Cosgrove
I mean, look, we know someone who was previously.
- [148:39]
Spiegel
What do you think?
- [148:39]
Tyler Cosgrove
He had a big solution.
- [148:40]
Spiegel
What do you think he actually gets? What do you think he actually gets? I have a lot of trouble understanding what Perplexity is because it's somewhat of an application layer company. But a lot of the APIs, a lot of the foundation model products, like, do deep research, some of them have news hooks already, so. So if my choice, like Apple could have gone to Perplexity, they went to Gemini. Like, does Gemini give you search results the way Perplexity, like, Perplexity's initial pitch was, it's a LLM, but there's no cutoff. And we'll search the web for you. I feel like Most of the LLMs just do that out of the box now. And so, like, what are you getting when you partner with Perplexity over something else? What's the differentiation?
- [149:23]
Jordy
You're getting cash. That's why I think you get paid. No, I think a lot of this deal had to have been cash because I think if I, if I'm Evan Spiegel And I'm looking at Perplexity's revenue and user base relative to his own, and you're not.
- [149:37]
Spiegel
Okay, so help me understand this math. If I'm Apple. How many DAUs does Apple have? It's like the same size as Snapchat, right? In terms of actual iPhone users, it's gotta be a billion, right? There's like a billion iPhone users, something like that.
- [149:59]
Jordy
I think it's more like 1.5.
- [150:01]
Spiegel
Okay, so, and then Snapchat has like 400. Oh, wait, no. Snapchat has almost a billion MAUs. But DAUs is like 400, right?
- [150:11]
Tyler Cosgrove
Yeah, like 470.
- [150:12]
Spiegel
Okay, so let's say that Snapchat has roughly 40% as many users as Apple. So it's 40% to Apple's billion, plus 1.5 billion. Apple is paying Google 1 billion. Snapchat could potentially go and pay Google for access to Gemini 40% as much because they're 40% the size. So they could pay 400 million and get the exact same quality of AI products that Apple is vending. You'd think because Apple says, hey. Or Google goes to Apple and says, hey, you want to service a billion users, that'll be $1 billion. Oh, you want to service 400 million users, that'll be $400 million. Because it's billion. Because it's basically a dollar a user.
- [151:02]
Jordy
I don't know.
- [151:02]
Spiegel
Google's basically charging a dollar a user. But perplexity is in the opposite scenario where they're paying for the right. As opposed to the other way around.
- [151:10]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [151:10]
Spiegel
This is the flip.
- [151:11]
Jordy
The definition of perplexity is inability to deal with or understand something complicated, did or unaccountable.
- [151:18]
Spiegel
It's perplexing.
- [151:19]
Jordy
It is perplexing, similar to confusion, bewilderment, puzzlement.
- [151:22]
Spiegel
Yeah, I mean, this was a little bit of my question with Mark Gurman, and he was like, no, no, no. And he kept shutting it down. And I think he has a strong opinion and he might wind up being right. But my take was when a platform, when an aggregator partners with a foundation model lab, which direction should the money flow? And he was like, obviously it should flow from the application layer to the foundation model app. So obviously Apple should pay Google because Google is inventing a technology and then selling that technology to Apple.
- [151:56]
Jordy
I think, again, it would have looked a lot different. It would have been flipped if Apple was just. If Gemini was becoming the default assistant within Apple, which they would never probably allow, right?
- [152:08]
Spiegel
Well, they would if they're getting paid.
- [152:10]
Jordy
Potentially if they were getting paid. $20 billion. Exactly.
- [152:13]
Spiegel
Which is like how I think this plays out actually. Yeah, which is, I think somebody, maybe it's OpenAI, but I think somebody will be paying Apple for the right to funnel those LLM queries wherever they want and take the cut. Just like what happens in Search. But that's a hot take. And I, and I, I, I respect people that don't agree with me.
- [152:31]
Jordy
In other news, Deutsche bank is exploring ways to hedge his exposure to AI guide to data centers. It's looking at options including shorting a basket of AI related stocks and buying default protection via synthetic risk transfers. So they're hedge, so they, so they.
- [152:47]
Spiegel
Bet big on data center financing. The scale of the expend expenditure on AI infrastructure has prompted concerns that a bubble is forming, with some likening the enthusiasm to that which preceded the dot com crash. Skeptics have pointed out that billions of dollars have been deployed in an untested industry with assets that quickly depreciate in value due to rapid change in technology.
- [153:07]
Jordy
Streamyambi in the comments says if there's one thing Deutsche bank is really good at, it's being very exposed.
- [153:15]
Spiegel
So in recent months Deutsche bank has provided debt financing to Swedish group Eco Data center as well as The Canadian company 5C, who together raised more than 1 billion to fuel their expansion. The investment bank does not break down how much money it has lent to the sector, but it's estimated to be in the billions of dollars. Hedging exposure to the industry could prove difficult because betting against a basket of AI related stocks in a booming market will be expensive. Well meanwhile SRT transactions require a diversified pool of loans to earn a rating and investors to likely hire demand higher premiums. Hyperscalers Pursuit of super intelligence has fuel demands for infrastructure that will help them build it. I mean this is everyone from the haunted mansion proprietor like everyone is getting in on the action. Like a few years ago it was like if you have anything that's related to AI like go, go go, raise money, grow it, spin it, flip it, turn it around, pivot it, whatever you want to do. Europe is expecting a wave of deal making, consolidation in digital infrastructure and the cost estimate from the Financial Times on the total AI build out 3 trillion. 3 trillion bucks. Pretty wild times. Business Insider has a scoop here that Google is looking to invest in anthropic at a $350 billion valuation. It's interesting, anthropic seems what 1/4 the revenue of OpenAI and yet from a vibe perspective, from a, from a public attention, from a PR crisis Perspective. Anthropic used to be in trouble every other week because Dario would be out there being like, paperclip, we're gonna paperclip everyone, you know, we're gonna get rid of everyone's job. And it was like, really aggressive, right. And so, like, like, they had to back stuff up, they had to backstop. They had to backstop their comms a couple times. But it's been great. And Dario's looked great for the last six months, and he's just been beating the drum on, hey, there's geopolitical considerations here with China. But overall, we're building and we're happy to be an API. We're happy to be. We're happy to help businesses. Yeah. Generate code.
- [155:33]
Jordy
Running. Running the experiment of like, highly focused lab versus highly not distracted. But they're taking a lot of shots on goal with OpenAI.
- [155:45]
Spiegel
We could be looking back on this in a couple of years and being like, man, they really missed erotica. They really missed slob.
- [155:51]
Jordy
Consumer electronics.
- [155:52]
Spiegel
They missed consumer electronics. It's possible. But on the flip side, it does seem like they've built a bit of an elegant business. And it seems to align well with Google's strategy.
- [156:01]
Jordy
And every hyperscaler wants a piece of it.
- [156:03]
Spiegel
Yeah, I mean, similar to how Microsoft has access to OpenAI models on Azure. Google bringing Anthropic in through an increased investment. Also, I just wonder, is it hard to do a deal at 350B these days in the venture community? There was already that reporting that Dario had to go all over the world to scrap together the last round. And I'm wondering if there's a world where if you're trying to billion dollar, you should just go to the hyperscalers.
- [156:32]
Jordy
Well, yeah, they're using it for every possible capital source. We've seen some of these SPVs that have like 0% carry, 10% management fee up front, so they're tapping everything.
- [156:43]
Spiegel
Let me tell you about adquick.com out of home advertising made easy. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising Only Adquick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Jordy, where'd you want to go next?
- [156:53]
Jordy
I think we should bring on our next guest. Our first and only in person guest, Jordan Castro De.
- [157:00]
Spiegel
He's here live in the TVP in Ultradome.
- [157:02]
Jordy
And we will bring Muscle man himself.
- [157:05]
Spiegel
He is the author of Muscle man and the Novelist. Wait, was that your first novel? Did you write a novel called the Novelist?
- [157:13]
Jordan Castro
Yes.
- [157:14]
Spiegel
What inspired that it's kind of like it's recursive.
- [157:18]
Jordan Castro
Yeah. Well, I wanted to say, first of all, thanks for having me.
- [157:20]
Spiegel
Of course, of course.
- [157:21]
Jordy
You know.
- [157:24]
Jordan Castro
And. SHOUTS OUT to Norman plays in the chat Someone just showed me this, said, I'm here for Jordan Castro.
- [157:30]
Jordy
There we go. Shout out Norman.
- [157:32]
Jordan Castro
But, yeah, I write novels. But also, you know, you guys had the Pope up talking about the Pope. And I work with this guy, Luke Burgess, with this thing called the Clooney Institute.
- [157:43]
Spiegel
Oh, no way.
- [157:44]
Jordan Castro
And one of the things I've noticed, it's sort of. We sort of do stuff at the intersection of, like, what we say, Athens, Jerusalem and Silicon Valley. And so sort of bringing religious wisdom into the tech conversation. But so I've been like, I'm not really related to tech, but I've been like, at all these different, like, talks and so on about tech and whatever. And I noticed that when people normally talk about AI, they sound like AI. They immediately just sound like AI. And when you guys were doing your AI quadrant thing, I was like, they sound like people.
- [158:08]
Spiegel
Interesting.
- [158:09]
Jordan Castro
And I was like. I'm like, why?
- [158:11]
Jordy
Let's give it up for people.
- [158:11]
Jordan Castro
Yeah, let's give it up for people. That's right.
- [158:13]
Katherine Boyle
That's right.
- [158:13]
Spiegel
That's right.
- [158:14]
Mikey Schulman
Yeah.
- [158:14]
Jordan Castro
And I was like, why do I like tvpn? You know, because I shouldn't, like. I mean, you know, I shouldn't like it or whatever. And I was like, because you guys, like, talk like people and you talk about people. You know what I'm saying? And so much of the conversation about tech.
- [158:25]
Spiegel
Yeah, there was a. It was very deliberate to put the faces of the people there, not the logos of the companies. Yeah.
- [158:30]
Jordan Castro
And I noticed that they weren't particularly flattering photos.
- [158:34]
Ahmad
Yeah, yeah.
- [158:35]
Spiegel
Oh, interesting. You mean we didn't make gigachads A lot of times we'll give them muscle. Well, we will literally make the muscle man. We have fun with that for that. That decision was actually more just about out. Like, how do you actually fit them all in? Like, if you make him the muscle man, then you have to make it smaller. You can't see the face, facial features. No, I mean, some of those photos are like their hero photo that, like their comms department clearly, like put on their Wikipedia page or something. I don't know.
- [158:58]
Jordan Castro
Amen.
- [158:59]
Spiegel
Or like their corporate photo. You don't always get to pick what photo is becomes you on the Internet.
- [159:04]
Jordan Castro
But sometimes, trust me, I know when people get mad at me on Twitter. I've been publishing since I was like six.
- [159:07]
Spiegel
Oh, do they go find those stupid people?
- [159:08]
Jordan Castro
They find pictures of me like in high school wearing like a pink button up and they post it in their comments.
- [159:14]
Spiegel
That makes sense. Yeah, Yeah. I have some silly photos of old that I'm sure will resurface when people want to dunk on me. Break this post down for me, actually. What was your read on this? So technological innovation, you think you used AI for it? Do you think you did?
- [159:29]
Jordan Castro
Well, I think the worst, actually, the worst thing about AI is that people are saying you can't use EM dashes anymore.
- [159:36]
Spiegel
I agree.
- [159:36]
Ahmad
I love that.
- [159:37]
Jordan Castro
The M dash.
- [159:37]
Spiegel
Okay, okay, so I don't love the M dash. Like, it's not that I hate it. I'm just indifferent to it. I didn't. I don't even know where it is on the keyboard. And so like it's. You do minus sign, minus sign. And then space. I think to generate, I think double.
- [159:52]
Jordy
Tap, double tap, space shift, option dash.
- [159:55]
Spiegel
So like, isn't it just double tap here? And I go, here be like, this is the story. And then I want to do an M dash and then space shift.
- [160:04]
Jordan Castro
And you can hit it.
- [160:04]
Spiegel
Oh, you can hit.
- [160:05]
Jordy
Putting on an absolute human shift isn't underscore.
- [160:08]
Jordan Castro
That's right.
- [160:08]
Spiegel
That's an underscore. That's an underscore. Dude, look. Underscore, underscore.
- [160:12]
Jordan Castro
Maybe it's just something that I know how to do.
- [160:14]
Spiegel
Test, underscore, test. There you go.
- [160:17]
Jordy
I just run it. Double dash, space.
- [160:20]
Spiegel
No, no. So I completely agree with you. So I write like a little 300 word, 400 word, like summary of my current current thinking on whatever's in the news every day. I just write it right in Google Docs here. I don't use any AI. I hand it off to Brandon on our team. He edits it. I don't think he uses any AI. Sometimes he would put EM dashes in. And if we put in even one EM dash, all the comments, what was the problem? And it's just like, okay, like now I just can't use the EM dash because like, like the. The masses will go crazy.
- [160:54]
Jordan Castro
I refuse to let them take. Take that from me.
- [160:55]
Spiegel
You're fighting the good fight. Okay.
- [160:57]
Jordan Castro
Yeah.
- [160:57]
Spiegel
You think you can win? I think that it's just. I lost it. I was. And Brandon was like, really like. And there were places. I'll show you. Sometimes I will literally just write like, like a minus sign, not an EM dash. I'll just be like, you know, close a quote. I will deliberately break the rules that I know I'm not supposed to. Like, even when you. When you. When you put something in quotes, you put, like, the period inside the quotes or whatever, I will just break all those rules because it just makes it clearer that I'm not slopping it up.
- [161:26]
Jordan Castro
I don't. I think you're accepting. Accepting the frame of the haters.
- [161:29]
Spiegel
I think so. I think I. I think it might be. I think you're right. I think you're right.
- [161:32]
Jordan Castro
Also shouts out Brandon. I don't. I didn't hear any claps for Brandon.
- [161:35]
Spiegel
Yeah, let's get some claps going for Brandon.
- [161:38]
Jordan Castro
We call him in the. In. He's in.
- [161:39]
Spiegel
He's got a new haircut.
- [161:40]
Jordan Castro
He got a new haircut.
- [161:41]
Spiegel
We need a. We need a trading card for Brandon's new haircut.
- [161:44]
Jordy
He's a sleeper muscle man, too.
- [161:45]
Spiegel
He's a muscle man.
- [161:46]
Jordy
I know.
- [161:46]
Jordan Castro
Why I've got. I got. Is it fair to say I got you into it?
- [161:49]
Spiegel
What? You're. Wait, you. You're the reason he's the reason you got jazzed?
- [161:53]
Jordan Castro
Is that fair to say or that.
- [161:54]
Spiegel
He'S the reason that you're absolutely shredded and diced? He's the reason you're walking around at 2% body fat. Okay.
- [162:01]
Tyler Cosgrove
Wow.
- [162:02]
Jordy
Wow.
- [162:02]
Jordan Castro
Brandon, content.
- [162:03]
Spiegel
That's why. That's why you can bench three plates. You can just rep it out because of him.
- [162:08]
Tyler Cosgrove
Four.
- [162:08]
Spiegel
Okay, four. Wow.
- [162:10]
Jordy
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
- [162:12]
Mikey Schulman
Look.
- [162:13]
Jordy
Crazy.
- [162:14]
Spiegel
It's good. Wait, so, yeah, actually, tell me the story of the muscle man book. Like, what inspired it? What was the thesis?
- [162:20]
Jordan Castro
It's a novel about an English professor who hates being an English professor and loves lifting weights. And part of it was that.
- [162:27]
Jordy
And this is a real person or.
- [162:29]
Jordan Castro
No, it's a fictional character. Yeah, but, like, you know, part of it was that I. When I was growing up, I basically grew up online. And, you know, it's sort of a quote, classic story, but it was like I was totally anxious, you know, Like, I would be at school, then I would get on the screen and, you know, I would just post and sort of lurk and be sort of weird and creepy in front of the computer, you know, and then when I started lifting, my anxiety and depression just, like, completely went away.
- [162:54]
Jordy
Yep.
- [162:54]
Jordan Castro
You know, and I was like, damn. Like, you know, was my dad right my whole life, you know, are all the sort of jacked guys who are, like, annoying and saying that, you know, you got to start. Start lifting? Were they just all totally right?
- [163:06]
Tyler Cosgrove
Basically?
- [163:07]
Jordy
The other thing that tracks with my personal experience, I used to have trouble Falling asleep at night.
- [163:12]
Jordan Castro
Yeah, that too.
- [163:13]
Jordy
The second I started lifting daily or six days a week, it just went away entirely. And the lesson is people that struggle to fall asleep, at least in some cases, are just not exerting themselves enough to be just physically tired enough to, like. Like, fall asleep. Started lifting soon enough. It's like, okay, you basically close your eyes. You're knocked out in like, five minutes.
- [163:36]
Jordan Castro
Totally.
- [163:36]
Jordy
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [163:37]
Jordan Castro
And so I wanted to just kind of like. And then I tried to find novels or even books about lifting that I thought were, like, compelling at all, and I couldn't find any, so I started sort of trying to write something like that. It's also, like a satire about higher education. There's, like, a lot of rants and stuff about the universities and stuff.
- [163:52]
Tyler Cosgrove
That's cool.
- [163:53]
Spiegel
So, yeah, talk about the reception.
- [163:57]
Jordan Castro
The reception has been sort of idiotic.
- [164:00]
Spiegel
Okay.
- [164:00]
Jordan Castro
You know, the. The. The. The. The media, as we all.
- [164:03]
Jordy
Let's give it up for idiotic.
- [164:04]
Jordan Castro
Let's get up for the idiotic media.
- [164:06]
Spiegel
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [164:09]
Jordan Castro
You know, it's a.
- [164:10]
Mikey Schulman
It's.
- [164:10]
Jordan Castro
It's.
- [164:13]
Spiegel
The idiotic media, and we have a horn going off.
- [164:15]
Jordan Castro
We are.
- [164:16]
Jordy
Well, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [164:17]
Jordan Castro
You know.
- [164:17]
Spiegel
You know, a horse wearing a hat in the back, I consider idiotic.
- [164:21]
Jordy
We're not journalists, but I definitely consider us to be part of the idiotic media.
- [164:24]
Jordan Castro
Yeah, well, that's. Now you're using it in a good way. You're reclaiming it. You know what I mean? But most of them are idiotic in a bad way. And the reception has been like, here's a novel to explain the manosphere.
- [164:36]
Spiegel
The manosphere.
- [164:36]
Jordan Castro
And here's a novel about men. And I feel like back in the day, there's this great. The writer Norman Mailer has this debate with these feminists back in the 70s, and he keeps calling them, literally, lady critics. This is very hilarious debate. And I feel like, in a weird way, they're doing the same thing to me, but they're calling me like a man novelist.
- [164:54]
Spiegel
Okay.
- [164:55]
Jordy
You know what I mean?
- [164:55]
Jordan Castro
Where it's like, this is a novel about a man.
- [164:57]
Spiegel
Sure.
- [164:57]
Jordan Castro
So, like, it has to be about masculinity or something like that. Yeah. Everyone wants to know what's going on with young men, and it's this kind of fake discourse.
- [165:05]
Spiegel
Yeah. I saw Chris Williamson on Tucker the other day. Yeah, yeah, it felt very much. I mean, honestly, like, I feel like Chris has done a fantastic job of actually sort of explaining, like, what's going on with young men. Like, it is an interesting Question? Yeah, yeah, there's a whole bunch of. And I feel like every media outlet has their own way of interrogating this, whether it's Harper's or Vanity Fair or Wired. Like, everyone's telling stories and writing profiles about interesting people and young men and. I don't know, it seems like it was somewhat worthwhile discussion to have. If they're. If it can inform interventions, even just in your own life or with your own kids, it seems like there's some value to the discourse. But did you have any intention of actually sparking that debate or actually was one of your thesis. I need to put this book out so that more people lift weights at young ages.
- [165:55]
Jordan Castro
No, but I did write an essay for Harper that was just basically a straightforward pro lifting essay. So that had more of that.
- [166:01]
Spiegel
Sure, sure, sure. That's awesome.
- [166:04]
Jordy
The thing that I think that my takeaway from going. I was very anti gym growing up because I was a skateboarder and a. Yeah, me too.
- [166:12]
Jordan Castro
Right, exactly.
- [166:12]
Jordy
Skater surfer. Like, the idea of, like going inside, being indoors, lifting stuff up and putting it down just for the. Whatever the reason was, it wasn't appealing to me as a kid because I was like, well, I could just go to the beach and surf and like, be out in nature. And so I had a generally negative sentiment around the gym. And I was also, like, super scrawny growing up. I've got, like, long arms. I'm. I was like in high school, probably like 140 pounds. Like, getting under like one plate on bench was like, big. I'm gonna die. At first, I never really got into it. I wasn't. I didn't play football or anything like that. And then I got really into it in college and it was the biggest unlock for like, mental health. Yeah, like, I. Prior to that, I was like a teenager. I was like, teenagers, I think, are just naturally kind of moody and figuring out who they are and how they fit into the world and all that stuff. And then I found lifting and a lot of that stuff just went away entirely because I had a purpose. Even if that purpose was so simple and just going. I woke up, I was going to eat well and I was going to go to the gym. I was going to lift as heavy as I could and go on with my day. And it's just. It ended up being like. It was like a drug almost immediately because I was like, I want the feeling of how I feel after I lift. It was incredibly addictive in a very positive way. So I did that. And then about probably a Year or so, I went from, like, 100 and by that point, like 150 pounds to like, 190 in, like, a very short period of time. Like, basically spending. This was from freshman year to sophomore year, and I was spending so much of my energy just focused on lifting. And I ultimately reached a point where I was like, okay, at some point, this is actually not the most productive use of my time. And I was fortunate enough at that point to kind of, like, discover work and things that I was passionate about and ways that I could use my energy that was more interesting to me. And so I think the debate hate to have around lifting is like. I think, like, basically everyone should be, like, picking up heavy stuff and putting it down, like, at least a little bit. Right. You don't need to go to the extreme. The advice that I find myself maybe giving, like, you know, people that were in my shoes is like, figure out the point where you maybe actually want to dial it back a little bit because it's possible and probably healthy to go way too much to the extreme where you're spending, like, I was, like, all my time and energy, like, just lifting because I didn't have anything better to do besides, like, you know, work and school. And then at some point, I actually needed to dial it back and actually apply that energy in other places. But I got the benefit of, like, that period of just, like, obsessiveness that I still carry with me.
- [168:59]
Jordan Castro
Yeah, 100%. I mean, that was sort of actually what the novel is exploring, you know, because when I first found it, like you said, it's like, is this the answer? Is this the ultimate answer? You know what I mean? And it really isn't. I mean, that's part of the issue that. That I take with, like, the optimizers, you know, like Huberman. I mean, I know you guys had Huberman on or Brian Johnson, where you sort of become, like, perversely obsessed with health or with lifting or something like that. You sort of tinker, you know, you think of the person, the human person, as some sort of, like, you know, mix of neurons and chemicals and stuff.
- [169:28]
Spiegel
Yeah. It's interesting. Like, even between Brian Johnson and Huberman, I see a huge, wide gap. This is a big gap, but let's put them in the same bucket.
- [169:37]
Mikey Schulman
Yeah.
- [169:37]
Spiegel
How do you contrast your philosophy?
- [169:40]
Jordan Castro
I think you need to be injury maxing.
- [169:42]
Spiegel
Okay.
- [169:43]
Jordan Castro
You need to be horsing heavy weights. And I think it's like a spiritual endeavor. I think you need to almost. I think you need to get crushed under a body Breaking weight a few times.
- [169:55]
Spiegel
Okay. And yeah, it's more of a spiritual process than an analytical process.
- [170:02]
Jordan Castro
Yeah, 100%.
- [170:03]
Spiegel
It's, it's.
- [170:04]
Jordan Castro
It's Eric Bugenhagen, who's like my favorite, like, lifter on YouTube, always talks about how it's a mindset.
- [170:10]
Spiegel
Yeah.
- [170:11]
Jordan Castro
And he has these things where, like, he'll just fail insane amounts of weight multiple times and then just like work himself into this kind of like, crazy mental state and then lift it, you know?
- [170:21]
Spiegel
What do you think about the other YouTubers? What do you think about Sam Sulek?
- [170:23]
Jordan Castro
I love Sam Suck.
- [170:24]
Spiegel
What do you think about the Trend twins?
- [170:26]
Jordan Castro
I love the Trend Twins.
- [170:27]
Jordy
I love. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [170:28]
Jordan Castro
For sure.
- [170:28]
Mikey Schulman
For sure.
- [170:29]
Jordan Castro
Sam Suck. Also, Sam Suck is weirdly emo.
- [170:31]
Spiegel
Yeah.
- [170:32]
Jordan Castro
Like, he will, you know, his vlogs. Actually there's this weird thing where so my, my. I don't know I'm talking about this now, but my brother died like a year and a half ago. And after the funeral, one of my buddies threw on a Sam Sulek video. And I don't. Yeah, it was incredibly inspirational. But I noticed, I was like, Sam Sulek's videos are sort of emo, where he's like driving by himself.
- [170:52]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [170:52]
Jordan Castro
He's, like, talking to the camera. He's like taking unnecessary loops around the parking lot.
- [170:56]
Tyler Cosgrove
Just.
- [170:59]
Jordy
I've maybe watched like 20 minutes of Sam Suck. I appreciate, like, the content like, that, the world that he's built, but because specifically I remember being in that mindset of like, I was kind of like. Again, I remember I was like 19. I was in school. I wasn't that happy. I was like, living in Santa Barbara, which was like paradise. But, like, mentally I was chasing that. Like, I need to. I'd be like. Like those scenes where you're like, driving. I'd be driving to the gym at like 5am Yeah, I can relate with.
- [171:27]
Jordan Castro
Everything you're saying, like, down to the specifics. Like, I started lifting too. Like, sort of like, I was in school, just moved, didn't really have friends, would, like, go to the gym at 11 o', clock, you know?
- [171:37]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [171:38]
Jordan Castro
Weird hours.
- [171:39]
Jordy
Early. Early mornings or late and then getting, like, food afterwards. And like, honestly, that era for me, like, Future the rap artist was like, absolutely peaking.
- [171:49]
Jordan Castro
What year was this monster for me?
- [171:51]
Jordy
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So.
- [171:54]
Jordan Castro
So we might. We might do this.
- [171:55]
Jordy
I became a man.
- [171:57]
Jordan Castro
Is your full name Jordan?
- [171:59]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [171:59]
Spiegel
Wow, brother. Make it make sense. Make it make sense. What's going on here.
- [172:05]
Jordy
But, but, yeah, so I would. I would drive. I I. I just remember, like, at the time I was driving a. A Prius with like 200, 000 miles on it, and I'd just be like, like driving to the gym, just blasting future, drinking protein shakes. And that's, like, when I think I became a man. Like.
- [172:26]
Spiegel
Incredible things.
- [172:27]
Jordy
And so I want. I think it's super important. And, like, when I hear. When I hear that a young person is getting into going to the gym, I'm like, great. Totally. Like, you're gonna become. You're gonna find yourself through that. And my only thing is, like, I think at some point you have to evolve beyond that and take the learnings and that, like, that mentality that you get from going to the gym and apply it to other, other ways. I think, like, the big takeaway that I learned early on was, like, early on I was obsessed with, like, how many. How many sets am I doing? How many reps am I doing? How am I. How am I, you know, just approaching different lifts. How many different exercises should I be doing in a lift? And I very quickly realized that there was, like, two factors. There was maybe three factors. It was like, was I sleeping a lot? Was I eating a lot? And was I, like, hyper consistent and doing a lot of volume? And those are the same lessons that I've brought into my real life outside of the gym. It's like, am I sleeping a lot? Am I, like, nourishing myself? Am I getting the right amount of calories? Am I getting, you know, getting the right amount of just, like, the right kinds of food? And then am I being consistent in the work? And so we apply that every day. We come in and do the show well.
- [173:40]
Jordan Castro
And you also go to the gym. I mean, behind the scenes, look, the whole squad was at the gym this morning, which I think is a great thing that you guys do.
- [173:47]
Spiegel
A lot of people that were on that chart, a lot of the tech elite are deeply unpopular people. I think Elon was polling is less popular than Donald Trump. So not just controversial, but actually just unpopular across a lot of tech CEOs. A lot of tech people are just unpopular in America. Obviously we love them here, but we're weirdos about that. But my question is, like, when I think about who's really popular, I think Tom Cruise, I think George Clooney. I think people that are in shape. Is there something, you know, we do this jokey, like, gigachadification of these people. Is there something where, like, it would actually be in their best interest for the tech elite to get a lot.
- [174:28]
Jordy
More look at Bezos, look at Zuck.
- [174:29]
Jordan Castro
I was gonna say like that. You know, I, I used to think Zuck was a full creep. He was like a beady eyed sort of bug. He would like you could. When Zuck would look in the camera, you could almost like hear him blinking, you know what I'm saying? And then he got jacked and threw on a chain and I was like, this guy's not so bad after all. You know what I mean? So maybe they would all benefit from that.
- [174:51]
Jordy
PR teams hate this one simple trick.
- [174:54]
Spiegel
Well, PR teams should love. They maybe aren't awake to it for some reason.
- [174:58]
Jordan Castro
Yeah, look, if you're on a. If you're on a billionaire's PR team, step one, step one, hire a trainer. Yeah, yeah. Bring the trend twins in. Get jacked. And you know, then, then the public opinion.
- [175:11]
Jordy
Why do you think health is so political?
- [175:15]
Jordan Castro
Oh, man. I did an event two nights ago here and someone asked the same question and this guy in the audience stood up and he. Because I actually don't know. I mean, one reason is that I think that when you're jacked and you're strong or you're competent, it acts as a judge, actually. Because if you're fat and you're lazy, then you feel just sort of implicitly judged. The other thing is that going to the gym and getting jacked implies a certain value system. There's like, if you lift 145, you know, that's less than 225.
- [175:53]
Spiegel
Sure.
- [175:53]
Jordan Castro
And if you're in the gym, you're trying to get stronger, the implications that it's better to lift 225. And so like, a lot of people who are like dogmatically committed to a certain kind of like egalitarianism don't like that. But the guy at the event stood up. This guy, he looked just like Joe Rogan. His name's Anthony. Actually shouts out Anthony, but he was like. He said that generally speaking, the left tries to impose their ideas onto nature and the right starts with nature and discerns their ideas from there. And so there's something just sort of fundamentally different about that. I think lifting sort of falls into the latter camp.
- [176:24]
Spiegel
I have a question.
- [176:25]
Jordy
Yeah. I'm always surprised at how much, like there seems to be more controversies within, in between, like various people even that consider themselves all to be pursuing their ideals of health. It's like everybody like kind of picks a lane in a category and then it's like, like they're fighting over like green powders. What green Powder. Should you take. Oh, my green powder is better than your green powder.
- [176:47]
Spiegel
It is universal. Like, I feel like it's hard to make a political issue out of something that doesn't affect everyone because you just keep bumping into people. And if your whole thing is like, you know, corporate cards or something, or like, you know, the manufacturing supply chain for large gongs, it's like, there's just a lot of those.
- [177:06]
Jordan Castro
You just have a lot of those around. You got to. I noticed in the bathroom, the picture of the jacked guy, the shirtless guy hitting the gong. I was like, these guys love it.
- [177:14]
Spiegel
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's hard to get everyone animated about that. It's a niche interest. Whereas, like, health care, how much money you have, your job, your health, your food, like, these things are universal. So anyone can relate to them and I can give you a take and you can bounce off it immediately instead of being like, I don't really know anything about that. Doesn't really affect me ever.
- [177:36]
Mikey Schulman
Yeah, but there's also.
- [177:36]
Jordan Castro
There is so much more people die in this. This is actually. I actually don't know if this is true, but you see this talking point all the time. More people die in this country from, like, obesity and from starvation. You know, there is this total cope around. Around being unhealthy and people. People don't like the idea that there's actually something you can do about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [177:52]
Spiegel
It's just like everyone. Everyone can be obese or not. Like, not everyone can have a. Like a large corporation that goes bankrupt under their stewardship. Like, so it's just less relevant to them because, like, they might not be the CEO of a company that's going bankrupt or something. Pickleball. There's. I couldn't find it in here, but there's a. In the mansion section online, there is a house that is up for sale right now that has a pickleball court outside and a pickleball court inside. What's your take on pickleball.
- [178:24]
Jordan Castro
Dude? It's fun. I hate to say it, but it's fun.
- [178:27]
Spiegel
Guilty pleasure.
- [178:28]
Jordan Castro
I mean, I played it one time with a friend and I was like, man, this is. I probably said some words and then we played it and I was like, this is awesome.
- [178:37]
Spiegel
Yeah. So I've nothing inside or outside.
- [178:40]
Jordan Castro
I mean, two quarts is a little bit, you know, I don't know.
- [178:44]
Spiegel
If you love something, zoom out for me. Build the ultimate mansion for athletics. Are you going all in on one particular athletic endeavor? Are you making sure that There's a pool and a basketball court, a tennis court. What's important to have around the mansion?
- [179:03]
Jordan Castro
For me, definitely a basketball court, a basketball court, and then like a gym in a garage. No ac.
- [179:09]
Spiegel
No ac. And what's in that gym? Are we doing rogue racks? Are we doing rogue racks?
- [179:14]
Ahmad
Are good.
- [179:14]
Spiegel
Okay.
- [179:15]
Jordy
Yeah, yeah.
- [179:16]
Spiegel
Free weights.
- [179:16]
Jordy
What is it about? What's the archetype that can make a home gym gym really work? Do you have to be like, like spiritual, like every time? I've just been in a dead. Like, only like during COVID I bought a bunch of weights and I was working out of my garage and I just got so small.
- [179:33]
Spiegel
Hard to be motivated.
- [179:34]
Jordan Castro
Yeah, I got j. That's a skill issue.
- [179:36]
Jordy
Yeah, sorry. No, no, I think I'm. I'm implying it's a skill issue because I would be going in there and I was at home so I could get an email and I'd be like, okay, I'm gonna run in and respond to this email on my computer. Cause it's easier. And if I was taking a more monk like approach, I'd probably have been getting even more jacked because there's no distractions. Right? It's just like more focused.
- [179:57]
Jordan Castro
Well, during COVID I mean, we ordered a bunch of weights, me and my lifting buddy, like right when. Like right at the tail end because everything sold out like super fast.
- [180:05]
Spiegel
But you still had a buddy that helps.
- [180:06]
Jordan Castro
Had a buddy, yeah. And we ended up getting these like dinky. Probably like 25 pound barbells with these like shitty weights or whatever. But I would just go. I had a shed at the house and I would like go in the shed and throw on music. And it was actually the first time that I was lifting where I understood the power of like shrieking and screaming while you lift.
- [180:26]
Jordy
There's a lot of power.
- [180:28]
Jordan Castro
You can. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [180:29]
Spiegel
Okay.
- [180:30]
Jordy
Modern man does not shriek and scream.
- [180:35]
Spiegel
What's in the supplement stack? What's Lindy? What's interesting? What are you staying away from? Are you beta alanine? Are you creatine? Protein supplementation, mass gainers. What do you like?
- [180:46]
Jordan Castro
I'm feeling reactionary against the optimizers, and I want to just say nothing. I mean, I creatine for sure, protein's fine, but I think you could basically just eat. Eat.
- [180:57]
Spiegel
Yeah.
- [180:58]
Jordan Castro
Raw milk. I do, I do like raw milk. I drink a lot of raw milk. Recently I gained. I went from like 165 to 200 pounds over the course of like three months. And so I was drinking like a gallon of raw milk a day. A tub of Greek yogurt a day.
- [181:10]
Jordy
Day.
- [181:10]
Jordan Castro
Yeah. The raw eggs. I do think, like, drinking, you know, 12 raw eggs makes you feel amazing. Okay. But that's kind of the.
- [181:17]
Jordy
I went through a raw egg. I went through a phase where It'd be like, five eggs mixed into raw milk, just raw.
- [181:24]
Spiegel
Were you bodybuilding.com guy back in the day?
- [181:28]
Jordy
That was a long. I was like. I wasn't even, like, a phase. I was just. That was just me for a long time. I realized, like, wait, I don't have to scramble the eggs. I can just put them in a jar and just drink it. I would. I didn't like the taste. I would kind of almost throw up sometimes, but it was just so effective.
- [181:46]
Spiegel
I mean, Derek from More Place, More Dates talks about just drinking the full carton of liquid egg whites.
- [181:51]
Jordan Castro
He does in the carton. Yeah, that was a good era. There was a period where I was watching his videos, like when I was first getting lifting, watching, like, I remember being like, I can't believe I'm watching an hour and a half.
- [182:02]
Spiegel
It's crazy. But it's so meditative.
- [182:03]
Jordan Castro
Well, it's like what you're saying at breakfast. It's just amazing to watch anyone who loves what they do.
- [182:07]
Spiegel
Master of craft.
- [182:08]
Jordan Castro
Yeah, exactly.
- [182:09]
Spiegel
Makes sense.
- [182:10]
Jordy
You would have appreciated. We gave a talk last year when we had done like, a few episodes of the podcast, and then we gave a talk at Hereticon of the case for founders getting on peds, because you have. Think about. Pro athletes are spending all their time trying to be healthy, sleeping well, working out, and being as strong and as physically fit as possible. And they legally or cannot take PEDs. Although if you ask them, like, if you could take PEDs, if it was legal, would you do them? They'd be like, yeah, absolutely. I want to go to the next level. Meanwhile, in the business world, you have people that are not sleeping that well. They can't train that much, they're not that healthy. They have, like, kind of not that great hormone profiles. In a perfect world, they just start sleeping well and training and eating well and getting on track. But for a lot of people, if you're a CEO, busy CEO, you're scaling your company, you don't have, like, some of these people, like, can't prioritize it or they don't for whatever reason. And, like, I genuinely think if they just got on PEDs, they might build. They might build the. Build the. You know, of course, under. Under doctor's supervision, but they Might actually, like, get motivated in order to build some of those healthier habits, but at the very least, have a lot more energy and bring that intensity. What. What do you. What's your take on. On pds?
- [183:27]
Jordan Castro
I don't do them because I haven't had kids yet, but they do seem probably good. I don't know.
- [183:32]
Ahmad
Have you done them?
- [183:33]
Jordan Castro
One, actually. Although I actually one of my buddies from.
- [183:37]
Mikey Schulman
From.
- [183:37]
Jordan Castro
From Cleveland was having a hard time on. I want. I won't say his name. He's having a hard time on the dating apps. And he was like, no one's responding. You know, whatever, like. And he started blasting gear because he thought it would help him get girls. And I was, yes, immediately.
- [183:52]
Spiegel
Whoa.
- [183:52]
Jordan Castro
And I was like. But he didn't even get jacked. It was like, it was literally immediate.
- [183:56]
Jordy
And I was like, was it a mindset?
- [183:57]
Jordan Castro
I think it might have been a mindset.
- [183:58]
Spiegel
Sure, sure.
- [183:59]
Jordan Castro
Yeah.
- [183:59]
Spiegel
He's like, I got. I. I have. I've solved the problem. Yeah, it was. Solved my problem. So I can bring the confidence.
- [184:04]
Jordan Castro
It worked for him. Like, the next day.
- [184:06]
Spiegel
I. I find dating last thing. What's that? I find creatine. Genuinely very.
- [184:12]
Jordan Castro
Yeah, Yeah. I take reads.
- [184:14]
Spiegel
I also find caffeine extremely performance enhancing in the gym. Like, if you can like, the Celsius phenomenon, I think is very real. Like 200 milligrams of caffeine. Getting actually very fired up before a workout genuinely helps you stay focused during the lift. Push your. Push your.
- [184:30]
Jordy
Yeah, we want to make the beta Alanine for the workplace. You know, imagine you got to do emails.
- [184:36]
Jordan Castro
Is that the tingly.
- [184:36]
Jordy
Yeah, you start tingling. You're like, I gotta get through these emails.
- [184:39]
Jordan Castro
I mean, I will say, say that the. Yeah, for sure. I. I guess the supplement stack is like drinking enough caffeine to like, kill a small child.
- [184:45]
Spiegel
It. It's really not that I'm going to.
- [184:47]
Jordan Castro
Kill a small child, but that would. If they drank it, kill them. These mates are really good, though. You guys by these guys.
- [184:52]
Spiegel
We're not.
- [184:53]
Jordy
We're just friends.
- [184:54]
Spiegel
That's Andrew Huberman's brand. God damn.
- [184:57]
Jordan Castro
Sorry, man. Hey, look, look, look.
- [184:59]
Spiegel
I love your product. If you, you know, I'm talking trash, but yeah, I don't consider.
- [185:04]
Jordy
I don't consider. Consider Andrew's philosophy, like, about Ovation.
- [185:08]
Spiegel
Nothing you said is wildly disagreeing with.
- [185:11]
Jordy
Yeah, but yeah, I think it's more about like, understanding. Understanding yourself and the various inputs so that you can then make calculated decisions. I still, I know how important sleep is. There's plenty of nights we were traveling on Tuesday, didn't get a lot of sleep. Made a call to try to get some more sleep. But ultimately, I think it's just about. My view is, like, as much as possible, try to understand how the body works. But at the same time, you need to remember that the real edge is, like, having a fiery spirit. And just. That's the thing that you want to cultivate. Right.
- [185:57]
Jordan Castro
Yeah, there's that. Yeah. I mean, I. Yeah. Maybe part of my feeling about it is that the one time I tweeted something negative about Andrew Huberman, I got, like, ratioed into oblivion. People calling me gay. And it gets like 5,000 likes, you know, And I'm just so. Yeah, they came after me hard. But you're probably right, you know, I don't know.
- [186:18]
Jordy
But then.
- [186:18]
Jordan Castro
But the counter argument to that is.
- [186:20]
Spiegel
Like, that makes a delicious yerba mate.
- [186:22]
Jordan Castro
Well, yeah, he makes a delicious matina yerba mate. He makes a great product. And actually, in my first novel, there's a long passage about how your romantic is great.
- [186:32]
Spiegel
Oh, really?
- [186:33]
Jordan Castro
Yeah, yeah. In the novelist. But I guess the counterpoint to the. To the sleep thing that you're saying is that there's that for a while when, like, the Tate brothers were just all over the field, there was that one of Tristan being like, you know, I'll go to sleep at 6am and wake up at 5:59am and, you know, one minute before 6am and I don't need any sleep. And like, that's the kind of sort of counter argument.
- [186:53]
Spiegel
That's what you want to do. I mean, it's a sleep for negative one minute. Is that what it is?
- [186:57]
Jordan Castro
It's an admirable vibe.
- [187:00]
Spiegel
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Right? Yeah. I always get it. I always do beef with Brian Johnson about this because I'm just like, don't you think that if you just have great will and a life's purpose, you can live forever even if you're super unhealthy? And I always say, like, Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett who eat McDonald's and drink coca Cola all day long and, like, live to 99 and 100 and just like, you know, they don't look jacked. They don't really do any biohacking, but they seem. I think they seem to be one thing.
- [187:28]
Jordy
That one thing we probably agree on is, like, I don't think you should let health trackers, like, decide your mood.
- [187:33]
Spiegel
Totally.
- [187:33]
Jordy
Or decide, like, how you're going to approach.
- [187:35]
Spiegel
Totally. Totally.
- [187:36]
Jordy
It's like, I wake up some days I sleep on an eight. Sleep. I have like, a.
- [187:40]
Spiegel
No, the tracker is a competition.
- [187:41]
Jordy
Going to the gym.
- [187:42]
Spiegel
It's not telling me what to do.
- [187:43]
Jordy
Well, and it's. And it's just. Yeah, it's just a. It's a. It's a little friendly.
- [187:46]
Spiegel
It's not tracking me. I'm tracking it.
- [187:48]
Jordy
You're tracking it?
- [187:49]
Spiegel
I'm tracking it.
- [187:50]
Jordan Castro
But then there are also studies that are like, you know, the people that live the longest have, like, you know, they have, like, good relationships.
- [187:56]
Spiegel
Yeah.
- [187:56]
Jordan Castro
They have some sort of spiritual life.
- [187:57]
Spiegel
You know, stuff is that. Yeah, that stuff is very unquantified right now in the quantified self movement. And it needs to be more included, I think, for sure.
- [188:04]
Jordan Castro
That's why I don't think you can really, like, quantify that stuff. People are really uncomfortable. Things you can't quantify.
- [188:08]
Spiegel
Totally, totally, totally.
- [188:10]
Jordan Castro
But I think probably a good relationship, some sort of spiritual life, general health, you know, eating the things that, like, you're. Because also, different people, different, you know, diets work better for different peoples and stuff.
- [188:21]
Spiegel
Totally.
- [188:22]
Jordy
Yeah. What's your actual routine?
- [188:27]
Spiegel
Split. What's that? Are you in, bro? Split. Push. Pull.
- [188:31]
Jordan Castro
The manosphere Split. Just crushing.
- [188:35]
Jordy
Yeah, the manosphere. Alligator.
- [188:38]
Jordan Castro
Exactly. Lately I was doing Mad cow, I think it was called. It was just three days a week. And it was literally just go crazy. It was just powerlifting. So it was like squat, bench, deadlift, barbell rows three days a week. Five by fives. Three days a week.
- [188:55]
Spiegel
So you do all of those every day?
- [188:56]
Katherine Boyle
No, no, no.
- [188:57]
Spiegel
All of those three days. Or you rotate through them.
- [188:59]
Jordan Castro
You rotate through them. But you're squatting three days a week, benching twice a week. You're doing overhead press, too, and you're adding. You're adding £5 a week.
- [189:08]
Spiegel
Okay.
- [189:08]
Jordan Castro
So it was like. And that was when I was doing.
- [189:09]
Spiegel
The Spirit and five by fives.
- [189:12]
Jordan Castro
Yeah, exactly.
- [189:12]
Spiegel
I like the five by five.
- [189:13]
Tyler Cosgrove
That's good.
- [189:14]
Spiegel
That's a good.
- [189:15]
Jordan Castro
So I was doing that recently. I do, like. I mean, the thing that got.
- [189:18]
Jordy
It's funny, I. The thing that maybe we're just holding back a little bit of our progress is like, we want to work out every day. And there's actually, like, studies that show if you just take more rest days you can put on, you can. You can just like, start.
- [189:35]
Jordan Castro
But the problem with that program is, like, I also like lifting every day.
- [189:38]
Spiegel
Yeah.
- [189:38]
Jordan Castro
So it was like a problem. Like, I was like. It was actually not the most enjoyable thing. I do, like, as much as I'm like opposed to it in theory. I do like Jeff Nippert's programs.
- [189:47]
Spiegel
Oh yeah.
- [189:48]
Jordan Castro
Power building program.
- [189:48]
Spiegel
I like him a lot.
- [189:49]
Jordan Castro
Yeah, they're. They're very good. Yeah.
- [189:51]
Tyler Cosgrove
Yeah.
- [189:52]
Jordan Castro
So the Power Building one and Power Building three, I think my favorite programs I've done.
- [189:55]
Spiegel
Yeah, I just like the way he like structures his like lessons and stuff.
- [189:59]
Jordan Castro
Well, he's also natural, which is like a big deal. You know what I mean? A lot of people who make these programs aren't natural, so it won't work for guys that aren't.
- [190:05]
Spiegel
Sure, sure, sure, sure. Yeah, makes sense.
- [190:08]
Jordy
Yeah, they're like, do 10,000 reps of this.
- [190:11]
Jordan Castro
The rich Piana eight hour arm workout.
- [190:14]
Jordy
I'm on enough trend to kill a horse.
- [190:17]
Jordan Castro
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [190:19]
Spiegel
That's fantastic. Thanks so much.
- [190:21]
Jordy
What's your. You have your next book in the works?
- [190:25]
Jordan Castro
Yeah, kind of, but I don't. I don't want to talk about it.
- [190:27]
Jordy
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [190:28]
Jordan Castro
It's gonna be a thriller.
- [190:29]
Spiegel
Can you share the prompt? What's the prompt?
- [190:30]
Jordan Castro
No, no, I can't because.
- [190:34]
Jordy
Don'T make mistakes.
- [190:35]
Jordan Castro
No, I'm not, I'm not. I'm not gonna do it, but thanks for having me. Make sure Muscle man is the current one you guys can buy.
- [190:39]
Spiegel
What about the biggest fish you've ever caught?
- [190:42]
Jordan Castro
Dude, I just did. I never.
- [190:43]
Spiegel
You've never been fishing?
- [190:44]
Mikey Schulman
No.
- [190:44]
Spiegel
No. Not once?
- [190:47]
Jordan Castro
No, dude, I was too punk. I was too much like he was escaped.
- [190:49]
Spiegel
You've never shot a fish in a barrel? Nothing?
- [190:51]
Jordy
Nope.
- [190:52]
Spiegel
Nothing. Okay, well, we'll have to change that soon. The outfit looks like you could maybe transport.
- [190:58]
Jordy
I agree. On a fishing boat.
- [191:00]
Jordan Castro
It's funny. That's funny because I. I wore this the other day for an event and my buddy was. I told him, my friend, that I was coming on the show and he was like, you're actually kind of dressed like. He thought the vest was somehow tbp. Also, Brandon Content over there has the same. Has the same vest he told me about. He told me that he has it.
- [191:15]
Spiegel
So he's looking. He's looking sharp. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify.
- [191:21]
Jordy
And if you're listening to this and you haven't lifted today, hit the gym.
- [191:27]
Spiegel
Re visit the Church of Iron.
- [191:30]
Jordy
That's right. Have a great weekend, everyone. We love you.
- [191:34]
Spiegel
Goodbye.
- [191:35]
Jordy
See you Monday.