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You're watching TVPN.
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Today is Monday, August 25, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance and the newly hotly contested capital of capital. Did you hear this?
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No.
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It's in the stack. Abu Dhabi is claiming that they are the capital of capital. We have to build capital for capital with them. We will figure it out. We will be running through that. It's in the wall. That one's in the Financial Times. But we are kicking it off with a Wall Street Journal article and a couple posts. We're also going to tell you about ramp.com both easy use, corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. So Polymarket, also a sponsor breaking the US government, now officially owns a 10% stake in Intel. The poly market jumped to a 99% chance. This broke over the weekend.
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A
They didn't think Uncle Sam could get an allocation.
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They didn't. You know, this is technically Intel Series A. They did a seed round of 2.5 million on convertible debt in 1960.
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A
Convertible debt?
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Convertible debt. Arthur Rock. Not the anonymous poster, not our Fur Rock, but Arthur Rock, the OG. The OG. And then they raised 6.8 million in 1970. And that was their IPO. So this is their Series A, in my opinion.
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A
Anyway, back then. Back then, even if you would, you would round down, right?
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B
Yeah.
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Like if it was going to be 6.9 million.
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B
Yeah.
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The very Elon code to go with that number.
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Oh, yeah, yeah.
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Close.
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Yeah, yeah.
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Decided, hey, let's round down.
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We don't need to keep it classy.
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Let's keep it classy.
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Yeah. So over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported, President says US will take big stake in Intel. President Trump said the government is taking nearly 10% stake in intel, capping a two week frenzy in Washington over the future of the company and fueling speculation about what else might be done to help the troubled chip maker. Trump said in the Oval Office Friday that the company has agreed to give the government the stake as part of discussions about the company's future and billions of dollars in grants it has received from the 2022 Chips Act.
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To be clear, I don't think they've actually received it yet.
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They've received 2 billion already.
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Okay.
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But there was something like, something like roughly 10 billion, maybe 11 billion promise in grants and then another equal amount in loans for an Ohio facility. And those are going to be rolling out and they should draw. And intel should be able to draw down on them. But they could always be rolled back. If something changes and the chips act, it kind of goes away. And so this is all the art of the deal. This is the pressure. And so it's very funny the way Trump phrases it. He says, I said, I think you should pay us 10% of the company. And they said, yes. Which is not typically how people discuss equity investments.
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A
Government grants, too.
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Yeah, yeah. Well, people just don't. People don't say, pay us 10% of the company. Like a VC will come to you and say, hey, I want to invest, you know, $20 million, and I want a 15% stake in your company.
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In exchange.
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B
In exchange, and if anything, I would ask for that stake, or I'm trying to build towards that stake. I want to build a position in your company, not I want you to pay me, but that's the nature of this thing. So there's. I mean, we've all been tracking this. There's been a little bit of back and forth between Lip Bhutan and Donald Trump. He originally called for the. For the resignation. We can take you through the timeline. The Wall Street Journal laid it out really well in an article, a deep dive that we'll go through. But let's kick it off with this Howard Lutnick video.
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Let's play it.
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The art of the deal, colon Intel. And this is from Howard Lutnick sitting next to Lip Bhutan in a beautifully appointed room. If we can go full screen here, that'd be great. I'm sitting with Lip Boo in my office, and at 3 o', clock, we're going to sign a document together in the Oval Office where the United States of America will own 9.9% of the great American technology company Intel. I can't be more excited for America and for intel that we get to work together. First of all, thank you so much, Secretary. And this is a big, important historical agreement that we can work together.
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And then more important, I don't need.
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The grant, but I really look forward to have the US Government be my shareholder and we can work together.
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A
Have you ever heard what happened is.
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B
Lipu became the CEO of Intel, and he came to see me and he said, you know, the Biden administration gave this company a grant of $10 billion, and we don't need a grant. We're a great company. Maybe not with the best leadership, but now it has leadership.
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A
This video is absolutely insane.
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B
He said, you know, and that was the conversation. And then when we had the conversation with the President, he said, look, we don't want to take your money away. From you. But shouldn't it be fair? And we agreed it would be fair that the same money.
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A
They're blogging deals.
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America should have shares for us because it's just bad. And we agreed together. And then you went to your board of directors.
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Yes.
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And they agreed. Yes. It's a giant public company. So it had to be fair. Yes, had to be fair. Had to be fair. There's no other way. And so we did it fair for intel and for the American people. And I think this is exactly what Donald Trump is all about. I'm really excited.
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A
Today we get to do the.
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B
That's right.
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C
Thank you so much for your support.
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B
What's that botched handshake? What happened there?
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Whoa.
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Wow. Lip Boo went for the dap up and Lutnick hit him with the power. The power grab, the power shake. And it just was botched. Interesting. Interesting.
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Ben, can we put that in slow motion and play that back? Well, the journal has a timeline here. Lip Bhutan was anxiously preparing for the biggest meeting of his life. Just five months into his tenure as chief executive of Intel, Tan was already fighting for his job. A few days earlier, Donald Trump had demanded he step down over his past ties to the Chinese military. The demand sent to Intel's leadership. The demand sent Intel's leadership into a panic. They immediately contacted the White House for a meeting, and Tan flew to Washington, huddling with advisors for hours. On Sunday, August 10, his team reassured him that the President would hear him out because, quote, trump loves meeting with CEOs. Who doesn't? Even those whom he has attacked publicly, according to people with knowledge of the conversations.
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Yeah, yeah, he's been.
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This is wwe fought in wwe.
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B
He understands. You call out your opponent, you hash it out on the field. Yeah, it's good.
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The next day, Tan met with Trump Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant in the Oval Office. He sought to convince the President that he wasn't a Chinese spy and that the US Government has a long term interest in bolstering intel, one of the only homegrown manufacturers of the computer chips that power the modern economy. The CEO's argument proved persuasive. The President also took a liking to Tan, a Malaysia born, Singapore raised US Citizen who once considered a career as a professional basketball player and backed off demand for the CEOs ouster. Can we get a Tyler, can you actually try to find a highlight reel of.
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B
Can you generate an AI image of Lip Bhutan dunking on LeBron James?
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But the truce came with a cost. In Return for Trump's support, the administration proposed taking an equity stake in the company. It's interesting, in that video, they framed it as Lip Bhutan was like, you know what, we don't need the money. Why don't you take a stake maybe, you know, it's kind of unclear who.
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Made the initial move both ways. So just for context, last year intel brought in $50 billion in revenue, but they lost 18.8 billion. So they did not do well on earnings. They missed on bottom line, essentially, just a little bit. Just a little bit. And they switched CEOs. Obviously they've struggled on the founding side of the foundry side. They're not making chips for, they can't find customers for their stuff. So, you know, if that continued for a really long time, yeah, they, they would need the money, but they technically don't. And you can just look at the, you can just look at the stock price, like before any of this. Like, it's not like intel was trading as a penny stock. Like it was still, it was too rich for Elon to buy with the, what was it, 40 billion that went into Twitter, Something like that. Like, I remember thinking like, oh, I would prefer if he bought intel potentially, because that one seems important. But it's always been around $80 billion company. And so if it was truly on the brink of bankruptcy, the shares would be falling even more in my opinion. So I think Litboo is not being disingenuous there. They actually could get by without the money, but they need to restructure very seriously. And Lip Bhutan's like doing that. He's cutting a ton, he's going to cut more. And if you cut everything that's not additive to that 50 billion and you just try and hold onto as much of that 50 billion in revenue as possible and you cut everything that's losing money. Yeah, you should wind up with something actually generates, I don't know, maybe $10 billion of free cash flow.
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Not a bad little business, no. Intel decided to convert nearly 9 billion in grants promised intel as part of the 2022 Chips act into a 10% equity stake in the company. An unusual arrangement that makes the government. Intel's biggest shareholder meeting was a pivot point in a frenzied period for intel, once one of America's most venerated technology companies, now stuck in a years long downward spiral, the company scrambled to control the fallout from the President's demand that Tan stepped down. Tan, triggered by a Fox Business Network segment, underscores the unpredictable environment major corporations face under Trump by the end of the two week roller coaster ride, Thanh's job appeared to be secure and the company's situation more stable. Japan Softbank Group agreed to invest 2 billion. Seeking to curry favor with Trump. On Friday, intel and the White House officially, officially revealed the terms of the deals. He came in, he saw me, we talked for a while. I liked him a lot. I thought he was very good. Trump said of Tan from the Oval Office. I said, you know what, I think the United States should be given 10% of intel. And he said, I would consider that. Yet a host of questions remain.
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B
This might be the gong of the day. This might be the true size gong moment. This is the fundraising hit.
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A
That gong.
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B
Congratulations.
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A
Clean first hit of the week. It is good to be back.
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We're calling it 1600 Pennsylvania Ventures.
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Yep.
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White House Capital Group.
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White House Capital Group. Tan must resolve core business challenges to get his company on track. Some analysts say intel isn't in a much better position without new commitments from customers. Converting government grants to stock will only leave the company in a worse financial shape. By diluting shareholders, Trump will likely need to find more ways to support intel, not wanting it to fail on his watch. Let's view this as a.
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B
And that's why Liputin's genuinely excited.
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Yeah, because now you're in. Trump is effectively the SPAC sponsor of Intel. Yeah, it's a new era.
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B
Yeah. He has bags and so he's aligned. And so if Liboutin needs to come to him and say, hey, you know, we're trying to make this a facility in Ohio, it's not going well, we need you to put some pressure on.
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We need to line up some customers.
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We need to line up some customers, all sorts of things. Like in terms, he's on the board, he's value add. Trump is a value added investor.
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He's got audience, he's got business, he's got, I mean, he's got his own social media tech giant.
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True. Could be a potential buyer. Maybe Truth Social becomes a hyperscaler. Yeah, you know, it's happened before.
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Truth Cloud.
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Truth Cloud.
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Intel needs a lot of help and the US needs Intel said to meet Goodrich, a senior advisor to the think tank Rand, who focuses on tech issues. Hopefully something good is going to come out of this.
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We had, we had Jimmy on the show like two days ago.
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Yeah, Jimmy, Jimmy. Good work, Jimmy. Intel was founded in 1968 by semiconductor pioneers Robert Noyce, who co created the modern computer chip, and Gordon Moore, originator of Moore's Law, the Idea that computing power and chip efficiency would likely double every year or two. A guiding principle in the tech revolution. By the 90s, intel dominated the market for processors used in personal computers. Its Pentium line and intel inside marketing campaign with dancers and multicolored clean room suits made the company a household name. Then came a series of tragic missteps. The company largely missed out on the mobile phone and artificial intelligence booms by over emphasizing short term financial targets. Analysts say rivals in chip design like Nvidia and manufacturers such as Taiwan Semiconductors surged ahead. It's interesting how you, if you're a huge tech company, you can miss maybe one platform shift and do fine, but you miss two, you're going to be even. Even Microsoft said we missed mobile. Gotta get into social media and LinkedIn.
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B
Yeah, you could. It's a really, really stretched metaphor but you could say that like Nvidia missed mobile more or less. They weren't really switching into okay, let's be the design arm of. Because the iPhone you were buying enough.
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Chips for your gaming edition.
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Yeah, yeah, no, it was just a gaming company at that time. Mostly in scientific computing a little bit. But there is a graphics processing unit on mobile phones. It's just part of the system on a chip that goes into the phone and it was never, Nvidia never really like figured out a way to get a piece of mobile and there's a world where like the cloud rendering stuff happens but Nvidia kind of sat that out but it didn't matter because they, they crushed AI.
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So company is still as keen to reviving US manufacturing videos.
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Sales. This is sales by quarter and it's just like, and this is what a 30 year old company is. Just completely, completely looks right, Looks like a YC demo day.
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Looks like a ramp.
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It's crazy.
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The company is still seen as key to reviving U.S. manufacturing. In his first term, Trump touted Intel's plans for $7 billion manufacturing plant in Arizona. Trump advisors began discussing what became the chips act, wanting to attract companies such as TSMC to the US Has Arizona.
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Tried to brand like what they're doing? They have so many different chip manufacturers coming in Arizona. They need like Silicon Desert or something like Chip City. Chip City. It really feels like like there, there is a significant center of gravity. Yeah, that will ultimately become like a company town type vibe.
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Chip City. As discussion on the CHIPS acts crescendoed during the Biden administration, Intel Pat. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger lobbied aggressively hoping for some of the law's tens of billions of dollars in subsidies. In 2022, he sat in the first lady's box for the State of the Union speech, during which President Biden touted Intel's investment plans. While the bill was being negotiated, senators including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren pushed unsuccessfully for a version that would see the government receiving equity in companies it backed. Very interesting. This is what Mark Cuban was saying last week. He was saying, this is Sanders and Warren's dream. Yeah, he said it in a little bit less PG language correctly. But intel became the law's biggest beneficiary, qualifying for roughly 11 billion in grants and about 11 billion in loans for a plant in Ohio, an expansion in Arizona and other projects. It seemed like a boon at the time, but the law's slow rollout and Intel's core business challenges led to repeated delays.
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B
Talk about ROI there like, like Lip Bhutan saying, like, you know, we don't need these grants. And I think he's like, technically correct, but it's incredible nice to have and the ROI on your CEO going to the State of the Union and just sitting in a box and like taking some meetings. And, you know, I don't know what Intel's lobbying budget was, but it probably was less than 10 billion, right? It was probably less than 10 million. It probably wasn't very much at all. And yeah, and you get a huge.
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A
Friend of the show, Andrew Ross Sorkin said yesterday, should the government start taking equity in every startup for the federal tax incentives we offer or Tesla? How about the banks? How about when a state government offers a tax incentive, should they get an equity stake in exchange board representation? This is a super slippery slope. And Bill Gurley said, here's my take. If the government is a quote, unquote lender of last resort, they should take a hundred percent take equity and arguably 100% of the equity. Failed to do this with GM, Goldman Sachs, United and other airlines. How do you know if they are the lender of last result resort? The company takes the deal, which trash.
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B
Because otherwise the company would go with a financial investor who says, I only want 50% for the same price or whatever. And so it is a good. It's a good point. It's a good point by Bill.
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A
So in reference to the original CHIPS act grants, the Journal says it seemed like a boon at the time, but the law's slow rollout and Intel's core business challenges led to repeated delays. Late last year, Tan, who had been an intel director since 2022, left the board in protest of Gelsinger's strategy. The board also Soured on Gelsinger and pushed him out. Trump's victory presented another curveball. He had bashed Biden.
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B
Quitting in protest. Deeply underrated. Deeply underrated strategy. Just in life. Yeah, Yeah. I respect tan for quitting in protest and then ultimately getting back for the top spot. It's pretty sick. Pretty under underutilized strategy.
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Yeah.
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Just amount.
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He decided, basically, in the trough of disillusionment, he quit in protest. And then he said, yep, I'll pop back on the roller coaster for the slope of enlightenment.
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B
That's where intel is.
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A
And we're really. Yeah, I think we're. I think. I think we were.
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B
Who's. Who's on the slope of Enlightenment? I thought we were doing three colors. Me, you, Tyler.
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A
I didn't get Tyler on there yet, but you're on. You're just.
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B
I'm just.
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A
You're just coming up to the peak.
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B
I just went to San Francisco. I mean, this is talking to AI researchers. They told me deep learning is undefeated. They told me that pre training scaling will continue. And so I'm, I'm. I have yet to. My infl. My expectations can continue to be inflated.
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A
I am looking at the trough.
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B
You're looking at the trough.
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A
Looking at the trough.
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B
You're going headed straight. Tyler, where are you?
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D
I think I'm where Jordy is too.
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B
The red one side of the downslope. Wow. I thought you were so AGI pilled, bro. I thought you're so AGI pilled.
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D
But I mean, like, okay, even Dwarkesh. Dwarkesh is extending his timelines.
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A
Like, how can you.
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D
I mean, it's hard to still be extending the timelines.
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B
Just means that the initial innovation trigger slope is just going like this. But he's still. He's still going up. He's still going up and to the right. He's happy. Are worse. Yeah.
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D
Y axis expectations.
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B
I don't know. I don't know. Let's just sprint to the plateau of productivity. The real move is that I don't think we're in the trough of disillusionment yet.
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A
How about. I think we need to make the TVPN version of this for the AI hype cycle and the slope of Enlightenment.
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B
We need to just like another vertical line.
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A
Another vertical line for the fast takeoff scenario.
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like we get a bubble, we get a crash, and then we get a fast takeoff. That's the most likely for sure. No, our job is to recognize and diagnose when we are in the trough of disillusionment. And re illusionize people such that we can get to the slope.
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A
I've never been in a trough of disillusionment that didn't one day get to.
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B
The slope of enlightenment. Exactly.
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A
So there's always hope. There's always hope, yes. But anyways, you know what could have.
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B
Made that video better? If it was streamed on restream.
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A
That's right.
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B
Live one livestream, 30 plus destinations, multi stream and reach your audience wherever they are. Lip Bhutan Howard Lutnick, if you're listening, get on Restream. Anyway, continue.
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A
Jordan of course. So Trump's 2024 victory presented another curveball. He had bashed Biden's implementation of the CHIPS act, fueling worries that he could try to change deals or cancel them altogether. Intel's financial condition worsened and the incoming administration worried the company might fail. Even with the recent share price rebound in August followed by reports of the deal with Trump, the company is now valued at? 110 billion, a fraction of his dot com bubble peak. The stock is down roughly 50% since the start of last year. Intel has been left behind, Trump said last Friday.
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B
So around Trump's inauguration in January, Lutnick and administration officials began evaluating CHIPS act recipients and which tech companies generally could increase their US Investments in line with the president's goals. They asked semiconductor companies receiving CHIPS act awards to increase their total US Investment. But they knew they might need to revamp Intel's deal or help the companies in other ways. What's interesting there is that when we talk to all of this is like, like everyone's doing art of the deal on each other. And meanwhile, like when we talk to Doug o' Laughlin at Semianalysis, he's like, realistically, like all this trailing edge capacity is going to be done in like South America. Like it doesn't make sense to do it in America. Like a lot of this stuff is just going to wind up getting offshored because it's easier to build some facility that's just copy pasted down there. And so it's very unclear like how, like how it can actually work in the long term. And then, and then on the leading edge, like it seems like it's TSMC and Samsung, like Tesla's going with Samsung and those will be in the United States and those will be like cutting edge, like PhD level jobs, amazing researchers, like really, really great, like American innovation. But like we're kind of already on that path and Intel's not really the party that you need to be twisting the arm of. It feels like if you want America to be like the leading semiconductor country. You just need to make sure that you have leverage over TSMC and Samsung. Not so. And maybe AMD GlobalFoundries a little bit. I mean Global Foundries is part of intel now, but, but a lot of the, a lot of the trailing edge, like it seems like it might not be a long term thing that America's ever good at again because it's like, like it's commoditizing so rapidly. I don't know. Anyway, clearly Trump cares about it and wants to keep it here, so that's what he's pushing for. The administration began early conversations with Intel's board about taking an equity stake. The talks didn't move forward in part because the board, which has often been mired in disagreement, wanted more than the administration was willing to give.
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A
Did they want him to take take a bigger position?
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B
No, they probably wanted like 40 billion in grants or something like give us more for that. Former banker Lutnick has had in recent months asked other tech executives what can be done to help intel, even asking other chip companies like tsmc, AMD and Micron whether they would consider potential deals.
- [22:39]
A
This is what Doug is. Doug has just generally wanted people with semiconductor manufacturing experience to be involved with the company. And so it's very possible this seems.
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B
Like a step in the wrong direction, according to his heuristic, because it's like more government people on the board. But I mean, to be clear, the US Government is not taking a board seat and not having a controlling stake. It's a purely financial stake which will get into so in March, Intel's board named Tan, 65, as CEO. One of the biggest decisions he faces is whether to keep the company as one of the few chip firms that does both design and manufacturing. Some analysts say intel should consider splitting the business or doing other types of deals to cut costs. Tan has so far shied away from spinning off the manufacturing segment, which lost 3.2 billion in the second quarter. He has told confidence he has inherited a very bad hand. In July, intel said it would lay off 15% of its workers by year end, cancel billions in planned investments and further delay work on the sprawling Ohio plant. The new rules of the road were no more blank checks, Tan wrote in a memo to employees. Tan's early decisions at intel were aimed at getting the company on more stable ground. But the CEO's past work at chip design software company Cadence Design Systems thrust the company into the spotlight in late July. July, Cadence agreed to pay $140 million for violating U.S. export restrictions by selling banned technology to a Chinese national. Def. The sales happened while Tan was CEO. So, you know, you, like. It seems like he probably had to sign off on that in some way. Of course, it's like, is it a university? Is that like. I don't know. I don't know how you like steel, man. This. Or dig into like, you know, steel. Manage steel Manning.
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A
You're the steelman champion of the world Steel Manning.
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B
It would probably be like the, the export restrictions are just like super complicated and it's unclear. And it's one of those things where it's like, there's the spirit of the law and the letter of the law and they made some case for, you know, in this particular, in this particular, technology did not fit within the export restrictions because the export restrictions might just be like, you know, oh, chips of a certain size or scale and they had. And they had a chip that was like slightly under. And then they, and then the government like, you know, reinterpreted the export restrictions to include that. Like, this stuff happens all the time. Because when these, when these export restrictions get, get. Get written, it's easy to.
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A
Crazy. You don't hear much about Cadence Design Systems, by the way. Huge company, $95 billion public company.
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B
Yeah, and, and, and that's why people think Louboutin's so equipped to run intel because he took that company to like 100 billion market cap basically from I think like 5 or 10 or something when he, when he, when he joined the company. So he is. He's a talented operator. So. A week later, Senator Tom Cotton sent a letter to Intel's board raising concerns about Tan's ties to China. Trump was watching this is wild. Trump was watching Fox business network on Aug. 7 when host Maria Bartiromo highlighted Cotton's criticism at 7:34am Eastern Time. Five minutes later, Trump fired off a message on his Truth Social platform. The CEO of Intel is highly conflicted and must resign immediately. It's crazy. He's just watching the news and then posting about it.
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A
Journal says it was one of the first times in modern history that the president publicly called for the leader of a major company to step down. Trump's demand was seen by some on both sides as an opening bid in negotiations with the CEO. The president had already grown intrigued by the idea of government stakes in key industrial companies during his May trip to the Middle East, a senior White House official said. Though the official added that it wasn't what sparked Trump's post. The president wants to see More such deals in the future.
- [26:27]
B
Well if you're trying to maintain compliance, get on Vanta Automate Compliance. Manage Risk Group Trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes manual work out of your security compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. Whether you're pursuing your first job, I.
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A
Imagine that will be. We know that Trump is not going to be on the board and not going to be sort of directly pulling the strings on the business but I imagine one of the first things he wants to wants lip to do is implement Panto.
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B
Yeah, for sure. So intel stock price has been on a tear. Shout out to Leopold Ochsenbrenner at situational awareness.
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A
They mocked him. They mocked him. They said this guy's fun. Must have already blown up.
- [27:02]
B
Yep. Oh he's the last 13F. Oh he's a weird non consensus bet. Oh well it paid off. So I mean the question there mid August then Trump met tan SoftBank, invested 2 billion and the share price rose from under $20 to over $25 a share and the deal has been announced. So anyway, sorry I cut you off.
- [27:25]
A
No, I think, I think people were speculating whether Leopold had some inside information or he just viewed intel as a super strategic asset.
- [27:36]
B
There was some post about this guy.
- [27:37]
A
Wouldn'T possibly let fail.
- [27:39]
B
There was some guy on X saying like oh this is like insider trading. Everyone is insider trading. Even like Warren Buffett made his money on insider trading very black and and so just being like there's no evidence of any of this happening at all. And and yeah what you got Tyler?
- [27:55]
A
I think also like this trade like.
- [27:57]
D
Him being long intel totally aligns with the thesis of the, of of the fund Situational awareness. Like his whole thing is they're going.
- [28:05]
A
To monitoring the situation.
- [28:06]
B
Yeah.
- [28:07]
D
They're going to nationalize like AI.
- [28:09]
B
Oh yeah.
- [28:10]
D
So obviously like if the US is going to nationalize like start a lab, start like building compute and stuff, they're going to have like, like they're going to take the existing infrastructure.
- [28:19]
B
Yeah, yeah. I hadn't even thought about it from that perspective. I was just thinking about it from the perspective of like we talked to Ben Thompson about Intel, we talked to Doug o' Laughlin about Intel. Like we were kind of like noodling on it back and forth as like commentators and I didn't come away with a super strong like bull or bear case. I didn't really look at the stock price or the valuation of the financials but it didn't seem like crazy to come up with a like a, like a An expression of your position in financial terms. And it's very clear that like, Leopold and his team just like looked at intel more deeply and saw that there was an opportunity there you don't need. Not every good trade needs to be inside of trading people. It's like so ridiculous. Yeah. And yeah, I mean it's the same thing. Like, it's like, what does he know about Nvidia? Like, is it possible he just knows that he's not in Nvidia? What does he know? Is he insider trading or is he just looking at like, oh well, Nvidia is like the obvious bet. So everyone piled into Nvidia. It's like the biggest company in the world. Like maybe not a lot of juice left there. Yeah, I'm going to go where I'm going to go and bet on the things that have high upside potential. And yeah, I don't know anyway. In the Oval Office, Tan told the President his ties to Chinese businesses were years in the past and he was loyal to the United States. He presented ideas for turning intel around and investing more in the United States. Lutnick told Tan that he thought it was dangerous to have so much of the global chip making capacity controlled by foreign companies. Tan agreed and reiterated that he was dedicated to Trump's America's first manufacturing agenda. By the end of the hour long session, the President was convinced and agreed to lay off the criticism.
- [29:56]
A
I will no longer call for your immediate resignation on my social media app, Mr. Tan.
- [30:02]
B
That's great.
- [30:03]
A
Tan and Lutnick then moved quickly to hammer out a deal for the government to take a minority stake in Intel. It was complicated negotiation because it was unusual to convert government grants that had already been awarded into equity. While they were in talks, Softbank, led by Masa, suddenly agreed to put 2 billion into the company, part of its campaign to bet on US Firms and appeal to Trump. Absolutely.
- [30:22]
B
If they were putting together like a pitch deck for SoftBank, I feel like they should have used Figma for that. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together.
- [30:32]
A
I would be shocked if SoftBank uses Figma for their. The design of their decks. Yeah, because they seem to be very PowerPoint coded, but they still are powerful. Imagine how powerful they could be if they would, you know, simply get on Figma slides. Let's see here.
- [30:50]
B
Did I tell you that my first internship ever was at a SoftBank backed company?
- [30:56]
A
No way.
- [30:57]
B
Yeah. Dr. Drdrew.com so Dr. Drew was a radio host with Adam Carolla on Kiss FM in 2005.
- [31:09]
A
Wait, that's crazy lore.
- [31:10]
B
Yes, this is insane lore. So Dr. Drew was like a board certified psychologist. Psychiatrist, I think.
- [31:21]
A
Wait, we're pulling up this website, by the way.
- [31:23]
B
And so Dr. Drew, during the dot com boom, wanted to start his own livestream property basically, and raised money from Softbank and built a team of engineers and had their own data center racking servers. And one of my jobs was like, well, I mean, this is like what it is now because he has like stuff and you don't really need like necessarily like a venture backed startup to be an influencer, but went to the same high school as me, and.
- [32:01]
D
Every single famous person has gone to John's high school.
- [32:04]
B
Yeah, it's wild, but yeah, like one of my, like, you know, pop by the summer office was like, go in the data center and it was like super cold. It was like not like a data center like people think today. It was like a room with a couple racks of servers, but there was no aws. So if you wanted to set up a website, you had to like rack a server and like put this, Put the code on the server and then run it.
- [32:26]
A
Just put the servers in the bag, bro.
- [32:28]
B
Yeah, the brand was a little bit different back then. The first show that they were gonna greenlight was this sort of like, it was about a lot of his stuff was like relationship coaching. So Loveline, people would call in about their relationships. And so I think, I believe they were gonna put two people like a, like a man and woman who were maybe dating and they were gonna go on a road trip and they were gonna like live stream it and it was gonna be like some sort of like new, new media.
- [32:52]
A
Well, all I can see is, I can see why Masa needed to be in that website.
- [32:58]
B
It is, it is incredible. Lore.
- [33:01]
A
Is that part of how you underwrote the internship too? You're like, look, you know, I wasn't.
- [33:05]
B
Really like technically an intern. I was so young. I was just like stopping by the office space basically. But it was cool. It was like a true startup environment. Like they had pool table, like pretty big office. Like very much like pool table. Yeah, pool table.
- [33:18]
A
Amazing.
- [33:19]
B
It was very iconic of like pool tables in office now it's like ping pong tables. They've taken over.
- [33:26]
A
We should. Do you like pool?
- [33:27]
B
I like pool.
- [33:28]
A
Okay. We should get a pool table back here.
- [33:30]
B
Billiards.
- [33:30]
A
Billiards, yeah.
- [33:33]
B
Yeah. It was like the classic, like kind of overfunded ventureback.com bubble company where like huge staff for something that like would ultimately Be small media. Like so, yeah, yeah, a media company that should focus on like the media piece and then, and then like the YouTube should just be like a platform. And so it's like, it's like it didn't make sense to be in like the middle. You either just wanted to be like the influencer or the, or the platform anyway, so.
- [33:59]
A
Softbank had already pledged to spend at least 100 billion in the US on AI and other tech investments, a move announced by sun at Trump's Mar A Lago club last December. Softbank had also earlier this year discussed a potential deal to acquire Intel's chip manufacturing business. Intel and the US soon agreed the government would use 8.9 billion in grants that have been committed but not paid to take a nearly 10% stake at a slight discount. The US won't have a say in governance. It already gave Intel 2.2 billion in chips acts, grants. That was what we were talking about earlier. Some had been given, but not all that was promised. David Shapiro, a former partner on the Wall street firm Watchdoll Lipton and Rosen and Katz drew up the terms, including a provision that the government could acquire another 5% of intel at a discount if the company sells a majority of its manufacturing business.
- [34:47]
B
Underrated naming scheme. I really wish startups would do this. Like the next AI startup should just be like Coogan and Hayes and Cosgrove.
- [34:56]
A
And this could be totally a new meta. It can only be done once.
- [35:00]
B
Yes.
- [35:00]
A
By a great team.
- [35:01]
B
If we did Coogan, Hayes, Cosgrove and Kohler, that'd be amazing.
- [35:06]
A
I mean, at some point we should just add the whole team.
- [35:09]
B
The whole team.
- [35:10]
A
We could definitely get the dot com last names Coogan and Hayes and Cogsgrove and over and over and over. So the administration insisted on this provision is 5% at a discount as a type of poison pill meant to dissuade the company from fully exiting the manufacturing segment. And this is what people are really excited about, you know, government involvement in the decisions of.
- [35:36]
B
Highly technical projects.
- [35:37]
A
Highly technical, complicated businesses.
- [35:40]
B
Government famously good at building things.
- [35:42]
A
Yes, yes. So if intel were to give the government another 5%, it would obviously dilute shareholders and complicate things. So despite the initial optimism, many analysts say the agreement will only be a boon for intel. If Trump can also find customers and attract more investment for the company. I think he's going to be able to do both, to be honest. I think he's going to be able to strongly encourage other companies.
- [36:03]
B
He's not going to be like a VC that just like sits back and like, reads the investor updates.
- [36:06]
A
There's one thing, one. People can criticize Trump for a lot of things. But he is available the week of August 25th. He's online. While many allocators. He's not a Burning Man.
- [36:16]
B
He's not a Burning Man.
- [36:17]
A
Which is crazy. Which is crazy. You'd think that he's starting to get into venture.
- [36:23]
B
Yeah.
- [36:23]
A
That he would.
- [36:24]
B
Naturally he would go to Burning man.
- [36:25]
A
Set up an Oval Office camp at Burning Man.
- [36:28]
B
But instead of being at Black Rock City, he might be at blackrock.
- [36:31]
A
That's right. Doing deals.
- [36:33]
B
Doing deals.
- [36:36]
A
That was one of our good. There's an early episode of TVPN where John and I are riffing out blackrock City, the home of Burning man, and wondering if there's a connection. There's almost certainly a connection. Connection to BlackRock financial institution SoftBank's 2 billion and the 8.9 billion in government funding that had already been promised aren't game changing for the chip manufacturing business in the grand scheme of things. It's not.
- [37:03]
B
It's so crazy. They lost 18 billion last year. Like we're not even covering last year's losses. But better to have and not need, I suppose.
- [37:11]
A
Yep. So the agreement is fueling speculation that the President could lean on other tech companies to work with Intel. Lean, strongly encourage, demand that they are fired if they are not. If they do not, he's going to rip some posts. Tan has met with potential customers, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, trying to win support for Intel's next generation manufacturing process. This is not the kind of thing I see Tim being super interested in. He's like more expensive, less performant.
- [37:41]
B
Apple has spent what, a decade getting off of intel and, and Intel Max and going to Apple Silicon, which are like so integrated, so perfect for the Apple ecosystem. Now you can run iOS apps on Mac and vice versa. There's a ton of. They've been spinning up the ecosystem on top of Apple Silicon for so long, the different graphics engines and getting developers to go deeper into optimizing for Apple Silicon. And then they just rug it back on it.
- [38:14]
A
Yeah. So the Journal says many executives say would need big incentives to use intel for manufacturing, given how badly it trails industry leaders like tsmc. It is difficult to switch semiconductor manufacturers because the processes are specialized and have to be planned out years in advance. The government stake in intel is the latest in a series of extraordinary interventions in the private sector.
- [38:33]
B
I mean, what's the craziest thing that they could do? Like Apple GPU for a Cluster at intel or something like kind of fresh start. That seems like something way out of their wheelhouse of both companies. I have no idea how they would do that. But I mean, if, if Amazon can do Trainium and, and Google can do TPU at tsmc, like, maybe there's a world where that happens. I don't know. Anyway, Foundry's punching the air right now.
- [39:02]
A
Anyway, the administration, they highlight a couple of the other deals worth covering to the president when a quote unquote, golden share of control over Japan Nippon Steel in return for allowing it to take over U.S. steel. These golden shares are in reference to what, the ccp.
- [39:19]
B
Oh, I thought it was in reference to the president's toilet, which is gold.
- [39:23]
A
Yes, and many, many of the fixtures in the Oval Office. Yes, but. And last month, Trump struck a deal with Nvidia AMD for the federal government to take 15% of their chip sales in China in return for allowing the exports. In early July, the Defense Department took a minority stake in MP Materials, a maker of rare earth magnets. Days later, Apple, which the Trump administration had long pressured to expand its U.S. supply chain, announced a $500 million deal to buy MPs products.
- [39:52]
B
Yeah, so that's an example of like, Trump, like, acting as, you know, biz dev basically for the companies he likes.
- [39:59]
A
I mean, he's really going to make a lot of VCs look bad.
- [40:01]
B
Oh, yeah.
- [40:02]
A
Big promises during the deal process when they're trying to win allocation and then.
- [40:07]
B
Kind of, I'll help you ramp your revenue.
- [40:09]
A
Yeah, I'll help you out.
- [40:09]
B
I know a lot of the top guys. I know a lot of the top guys.
- [40:11]
A
I know a ton of founding engineers. I don't have 50 other portfolio companies that also want to hire founding engineers. I got you. I got you. But the intel stake is among the most notable given. Trump called for Tanda to resign, then quickly brought him to the negotiating table. There's this Darth Vader aspect of the whole thing, said Gwantum Makunda, a lecturer at the Yale University School of Management. Never heard of it. Who studies innovation and leadership, referring to the Star wars villain who started as good, became evil, then redeemed himself. Anyways, you want to read through this.
- [40:50]
B
Post from the big question is, is this socialism?
- [40:54]
A
MAGA socialism?
- [40:55]
B
Is this MAGA socialism? A lot of people have been saying this and I mean, I think like, my default take is that, like, I don't know that intel is so critical that we need necessarily a backstop. I don't necessarily that the government is the right.
- [41:13]
A
You don't trust Doug on this. Doug really doesn't want. Doug from Semiannalis really does not want intel to fail.
- [41:21]
B
Yeah, I don't know. I'm still like on the fence about it, but so the debate has been raging like, is this socialism? And so we're going to the socialists who are self proclaimed. The people's line from Carl Beher. And Carl says no, but that hasn't stopped Democrats from complaining about it. And this is interesting because obviously the Trump camp is very pro this deal and they're saying this isn't socialism. What are you talking about? We're just doing art of the deal. We're making good deals. And this is an America first agenda project. The Democrats are saying, oh wow, Trump is a hypocrite. This is socialism. The socialists are saying this isn't socialism. It doesn't go nearly far enough. It doesn't count as socialism because it's not a controlling state. Carl says former under Obama, Undersecretary of State Rick Stengel is freaking out right now over the news that the Trump administration has taken a 10% equity stake in chip manufacturer Intel. This quote from Rick Stengel Trump Trump's strong arming intel for government equity is something Mao and Stalin would be proud of once the GOP believed in laissez faire capitalism and government not interfering in the private sector. Look it up. The state owning the means of production is called Marxism.
- [42:42]
A
So Carl, I couldn't find any evidence of Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders taking a victory lap on Trump's acquisition of intel shares. Yes, which was surprising given that back in the Biden admin era they were pushing for this.
- [42:58]
B
Yes, but the key discussion that's going on right now is is financial ownership versus true control over capital. And that's what Carl's going to get into here. So he says. Anyone old enough to remember the phrase Government Motors, this is from the era of the takeover of gm, should be able to appreciate what a wild line of criticism this is to hear from a former Obama official. As part of his Troubled Asset Relief Program TARP, Obama took for the US government a 61% equity stake in General Motors. And the rights backlash was entirely predictable. Rush Limbaugh called this a sterling example of the left's crusade for government control of business that proved the left's enchantment with socialism. John Stossel complained that this was a move toward more government control of the economy. And in the end, that's pretty close to socialism that so many liberals have adopted. This line of criticism. Joe Scarborough took it up on Thursday, and Democratic consultant Jessica Tarlov ran with it on Friday, for example, should probably provoke some reflection among socialists who think of liberals as fellow travelers. While socialists may share certain egalitarian values and other priorities with contemporary Democrats, American liberals are still reflexively ambivalent to hostile toward the basic socialist agenda of nationalization. They will opportunistically support it when it's time for Democrats to bail out the economy, but they will aggressively attack it if they think if they think this will score points against Republicans. There are a few things that contemporary liberals enjoy more than catching a Republican doing something that they can rightly or wrongly construe as socialist. In this this case, I would say wrongly. Stengel's definition of Marxism as state ownership of the means of production is confused for all kinds of reasons. But here are the most salient that but here the most salient is that ownership does not imply control. Even if this was ordinary equity, 10% would hardly give the government any kind of significant control over the company. But as intel made clear in a statement, this deal doesn't even give the government 10% control.
- [45:01]
A
The government 9.9%.
- [45:03]
B
But no, no. So there's more. The government's investment intel will be a passive ownership with no board representation or other governance or information rights. The government also agrees to vote with the company's board of directors on matters requiring shareholder approval with limited exceptions. So this notion of passive ownership perfectly illustrates why socialists would do well to talk about control rather than ownership of the means of production. A major function of modern finance is to sever the relationship between those two. To identify control, you have to look past the legal and business terminology and figure out who actually has the final say over any given lot of capital. In that light, it isn't clear that 10% ownership stake even represents incremental progress towards control of intel, which is what the socialists want. Convincing a business to give you 10 a 10% non voting stake in their company is very different thing from getting a 10% voting stake, let alone a 51% voting stake. Nevertheless, American partisans clearly aren't interested in litigating the fine details between owners control. And that's why socialists have an interest in this fight. If Democrats are going to vilify Trump as a socialist, the best response is to complain that he isn't even doing socialism.
- [46:10]
A
He's not doing enough.
- [46:11]
B
He's not doing enough. And so my takeaway from this is that it's a good point. Like it is not the goal of socialists. But at the same time, it reaffirmed that I do not want to do the socialist thing here because I don't want the government voting on what intel should do. Like, I don't think the government's equipped to make the decision on how they should position against tsmc where they fit in. Apple Silicon versus TPU versus Trainium. It just doesn't seem like government's set up to actually run this company more effectively than anyone else. And so I'm very hesitant about that. It sounds like something that's like very good in some abstract sense to the socialists. But I have no faith that if the government were to get a 51% voting stake in intel, that we would get a better outcome here.
- [46:59]
A
Well, the better outcome people were talking about this on the timeline would be Trump answering questions on earnings calls.
- [47:05]
B
That would be fantastic. Maybe that's, maybe that's a good outcome. Yeah, but it'd be odd to have like, I mean, if we went to pure direct democracy and socialism, like, you go to the ballot box and you vote, like, are we going to do 3 nanometer, like, decide. You decide like, yes or no. Like, I think it's, I think it's a waste of money.
- [47:26]
A
Or just have the, whoever's the intel CEO, just have that as, you know, an elected, basically official.
- [47:33]
B
Yeah.
- [47:33]
A
Like, let the people vote on who should be running.
- [47:36]
B
Yeah. I mean, the question is like, how much democracy do you want? You can vote on everything. You can vote every single day. California is extremely democratic. We have ballot measures for all sorts of things. We tend to not do ballot measures for different, different things. At the federal level, we have a representative democracy, not a direct democracy. But if you really play out the direct democracy, socialism thing, it's like, yeah, you'll be voting on whether or not intel launches a gpu. Intel, like, hey, we miss mobile. What should we do about that? Okay, let's ask the American people broadly at the ballot box. That is the kind of crazy to me.
- [48:08]
A
Should intel launch energy drinks? Yeah, it's not really in our wheelhouse today, but. But big, potentially large opportunity.
- [48:16]
B
Yeah, it does seem fraught. It doesn't seem like. It seems like there are.
- [48:23]
A
It's potentially one of the slipperiest slopes that we've ever been on as a country.
- [48:28]
B
Well, I don't know. This is saying that his point is that this isn't a step towards real socialism because it's not real control. It's purely a financial instrument.
- [48:40]
A
Yeah, but the intel board said the government also agrees to vote with the company's board of directors on matters requiring shareholder approval with limited exceptions.
- [48:49]
B
What are those?
- [48:49]
A
Except. So what are the exceptions? Right? I'm not sure. Not sure that we know. But anyways, the timeline, the analysis says.
- [48:56]
B
It'S a bad idea. We can vote against you. That's the exception. Anyway, first step, I would vote for. If I was in a democratic socialist society, I would vote for that. Intel gets on graphite.dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Get started for free.
- [49:17]
A
Canor in the chat says, I think intel needs to launch short form content.
- [49:20]
B
Well, make sure your voter registration is up to date because President AOC might just make it happen. You never know.
- [49:28]
A
I could see it. I could see it possible.
- [49:31]
B
I mean, the real wild one is, yeah, Tesla. Because Tesla's had a number of government incentives that they'd taken advantage of. You could make the same argument. You put the screws to them and you say, hey, we need voting shares for this.
- [49:45]
A
For the years and years.
- [49:46]
B
This is what Andrew Sorkin was saying. He was saying like, yeah, like, where do you stop? And I understand that, yeah, there is this, like, slippery slope. But to Bill Gurley's point, like, intel could have said no. They could have said, like, yeah, we're actually going to be fine with that without the chips act money. And so we don't want an equity stake.
- [50:07]
A
Although Bhutan is sitting there just on fire and he's being like, you don't need to help. You don't need to help put it out. I'll be good. I'll be good. Flames like, no, I'm good, I'm good. I'll cut more. I don't want to give more. I don't want to give the president the ick. I'm just gonna act all like, Hey.
- [50:25]
B
I mean, BlackBerry is a cybersecurity company now. Maybe intel just like pivots all the way down to just like, yeah, we actually just own real estate at this point. Like. Like all we own is we're real estate and we just lease to TSMC and that's it. We're. We're completely out of probably decent business. I don't know.
- [50:43]
A
Anyway, timeline was in turmoil earlier. Daniel Tenrero said, the Emily Sunburgification of everything you love continues apace. I don't know what that means. Emily fires back and says, keep my name out of your mouth. If you came to the party I hosted with TVPN and you didn't say.
- [51:01]
B
Hello to me, he said hello to me. I don't know. There were a lot of people.
- [51:04]
A
There were a lot of people. There were a lot of people.
- [51:06]
B
But we gotta get some sound effects for that. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Who's a journalist?
- [51:12]
A
Well, I mean, there were multiple journalists. In another life, Emily could have been a journalist. But anyways, you guys should.
- [51:22]
B
Emily Sunder.
- [51:23]
A
Again and just debate.
- [51:24]
B
Oh, that'd be good.
- [51:25]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great. Andrew Reed is highlighting some small cap sellside research notes under the. What? What company is this?
- [51:36]
B
I have no idea.
- [51:37]
A
Cmrc. There are some things that just go better together. Austin and live music. Tex and Max smoked brisket and just about anything. And perhaps Commerce and the next wave of AI driven agentic discoverability.
- [51:51]
B
Oh, this is for Big Commerce, probably Big Summit. Commerce is. Oh, maybe, maybe they just rebranded as Just Commerce. But it used to be Big big commerce.
- [51:58]
A
Commerce. Commerce.com. big commerce.
- [52:02]
B
Big Commerce. And it was a competitor to Shopify, I believe.
- [52:07]
A
Yeah.
- [52:08]
B
And they did not have a go. I have a buddy who was like, I think Shopify is overrated. I'm going long Shopify. I'm going Short Shopify, long BigCommerce. Because I think that there's like too much of a Delta there, like, and I think that trade went very poorly. I'm not sure exactly executed it down 93, but this one went way down and Shopify went way up.
- [52:27]
A
Commerce.com, though, is a pretty hard domain.
- [52:29]
B
It is a good domain, but you need more than that. You need a goated team.
- [52:35]
A
Yep. Silicon Valley launches pro AI packs to defend industry in midterm elections. Andreessen Horowitz and OpenAI President Greg Brockman are among those helping launch and fund Leading the Future. Leading the Future, Silicon Valley is putting more than $100 million into a network of political action committees and organizations to advocate against strict artificial intelligence regulations. A signal that tech executives will be active in next year's midterm elections.
- [53:03]
B
Well, if you want to analyze where all that $100 million will go, you got to get on. Julius, what analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. Loved by 2 million users and counting.
- [53:16]
A
2 billion soon. Many are saying this.
- [53:20]
B
So A16Z and Greg Brockman are among those helping launch and fund Leading the Future, a new super PAC network focused on AI. There's been a lot of rumblings around this idea, but no one's gotten it off the ground to the tune of $100 million yet. The head of government affairs Colin McCune and Brockman and OpenAI chief global affairs Officer Chris Lehane were involved in initial conversations earlier this year about the need to help shape industry friendly policies. Leading the Future hopes to use campaign donations and digital ads to advocate for select AI policies and oppose candidates who the group believes will stifle the industry at large. One of its goals is to push back against a movement backed by some other tech titan that focuses on regulating AI models before they get too powerful and create catastrophic risks.
- [54:12]
A
This is tech titan on tech titan Team Deathmatch.
- [54:15]
B
This is absolutely love it. The organization said it isn't pushing for total deregulation, but wants sensible guardrails. So I mean the main debate is like, is like is there going to be the AI fda? I think this was a talking point that I heard on all in years ago and I heard repeated in Washington from a someone in the House of Representatives. This idea that there should be a government organization that like reviews and tests models before they get deployed and very clearly that would, that would slow down progress like significantly, significantly. Because like, I mean Deepseek ships a model without even updating the model card and they're just like, yeah, run your own benchmarks. Like we're not testing this thing, we're just releasing.
- [54:58]
A
We don't have time for it.
- [54:59]
B
It's on hugging face and so it.
- [55:01]
A
Might be wildly dangerous.
- [55:02]
B
Imagine if you, you can figure it out.
- [55:05]
A
Let us know in the comments of.
- [55:06]
B
This is before you release to hugging face, like you need to go through some sort of like FDA style regulation. That could take years. That's going to really, really slow things down, probably be bad for the industry overall. Maybe it creates a little bit more monopoly power for companies that have the resources to get through that process, but would be very, very difficult and it would certainly hurt the, the rollout of like small models depending on how it was. Because if you just say like any, you can't deploy any neural network of a certain scale or size. Like how are you even defining that all of a sudden? Like do you have to approve the latest REALS algorithm before you like update that? That's something that's updating all the time. The future of these models is like much, much more iterative than like one big release. So it seems sort of out of equally important.
- [56:00]
A
Shiel is on the timeline right now highlighting that Greg Brockman married his wife anna at the OpenAI office on a workday. Ilya was the officiant.
- [56:09]
B
That's amazing.
- [56:10]
A
Which is absolutely amazing. Love it, love to see it. If you are a busy executive, consider marrying your wife in the office with your co founder as the officiant. There's some good precedents here.
- [56:21]
B
Now. Absolute dog. I really hope Ilia goes back to OpenAI. That'd be such a fun twist.
- [56:28]
A
I can see it.
- [56:30]
B
Anyway, if you're trying to get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT, go to Profound Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brand.
- [56:39]
A
And brands used by MongoDB indeed. DocuSign Zapier Ramp Majori Workable 8 Sleep USB Bank Chime Clay It's a good.
- [56:49]
B
Crew, good crew Many tech executives worry that Congress won't pass AI rules creating a patchwork of state laws that hurt their companies. Earlier this year, a push by some Republicans to ban state AI bills for 10 years was shot down after opposition from other conservatives who opposed a blanket prohibition on any state AI legislation. It does seem very difficult to deal with state by state regulation when you're running an Internet.
- [57:14]
A
The chat is adding some commentary. QSBS rollover says little language models are threatened yeah, yeah, we must defend the little language models. Taylor says USG doesn't realize the future of LL proliferation looks more like the AK47 and less like the bomb.
- [57:31]
B
Well, yeah, I mean that's a bull case for for state regulation since most of I mean there are some federal regulations obviously, but a lot of it's state by state. The California compliant AR15 the California compliant LLM will be severely nerfed.
- [57:49]
A
It certainly cannot do physics.
- [57:50]
B
Certainly cannot do physics. Yeah, that would be too dangerous anyway. LINEAR is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps leading the future will generally align with the White House AI and crypto czar David Sachs, a frequent critic of AI doomers. The organization plans to start work in four states seen as key AI policy battlegrounds. New York, York, California, Illinois and Ohio. The group said it would support both Democrats and Republicans. It would include federal and state PACs and a 501c4 organization that advocates for policies. The network's AI campaign is expected to start later this year. One of the best known venture capital firms, Andreessen Horowitz, is also big backer of Fairshake. Billionaire co founder Mark Andreessen was one of the most notable tech executives to support Donald Trump. Trump last year after previously boosting Democrats, part of a swing in Silicon Valley towards conservatives. The shift has worried some Democrats who fear they may be hemorrhaging support without more positive messaging around AI Brockman Co founded chat GPT maker OpenAI along CEO Sam Altman and others and is now one of AI Altman's top deputies. He is contributing to the new group with his wife Anna Brockman, who he married. And yes, this is the, this is the quote on a work day day. Other backers include 8Vc managing partner and Palantir Technologies Co founder Joe Lonsdale, AI search engine Perplexity and veteran angel investor Ron Conway is in the deal. So certainly bipartisan. Well, it'll be fun to track that and see what kind of billboards they're buying, what kind of out of home advertising they're doing, what kind of. Maybe they should head over to adquick.com out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to that. I was actually just talking about, you know, like a lot of these packs, they run like attack ads or they run, you know, policy ads. They put out policy papers. There's a variety of things that they can do.
- [59:38]
A
But let's get a lead. The futures packs spending I would say like at least half, you know, the $100 million on on ad.
- [59:46]
B
Quick.
- [59:46]
A
We'll, we'll work on making it happen. But without further ado, we have our.
- [59:51]
B
First guest in the Restream well room. Darren, how are you?
- [59:54]
A
Welcome to the show.
- [59:55]
E
How we doing?
- [59:56]
B
We're doing great. Great.
- [59:57]
A
We're doing great. Excited to have you.
- [60:01]
B
What a fantastic backdrop. This is not a virtual background, correct?
- [60:04]
E
No, it is not. It's a one of one painting of Kobe Bryant called Unfinished Business. And I was pretty close to Kobe and to have him in my office staring at me, making me do my best every day, that's a good thing.
- [60:22]
B
Over the weekend I rewatched the Kobe Bryant, Wyden and Kennedy ad campaign. The Kobe System. Are you familiar with this? Jordy, are you familiar with this Kobe System ad campaign? It is remarkable. It's like this bizarre blend of comedy all in promotion of the latest run of shoes. But we should watch and dig into that at some point because it is fantastic. Anyway, could you give us a little bit of background introduction on yourself just for those who might not be familiar?
- [60:50]
E
Sure. I was at ESPN for 13 years covering the business of sports. Did that for six years at CNBC. Then it went over to gambling, the quant kind of gambling side with the action network sold to a Danish company called Better Collective. And for the last year and a half I've been running Collect, which is on one side pretty much the best journalism source. Proudly in covering Collectibles we also advise teams, leaks and brands on what to do in collectibles building their Bespoke collectibles. Have 13 clients and excited about that side business.
- [61:33]
B
What's on the frontier of like collectibles? What's something that you've seen like a team or a league do that's kind of out of the typical path?
- [61:44]
E
Well, we actually just helped the Washington Capitals do a. A piece that teams have never done before. So like our, our idea is if we're advising you, you're going to make something cool. We'll stand in the background and be white label. So when Alexander Ovechkin broke 895 goals, the all time NHL record, I literally was shoveling the ice that came off the Zamboni. After the second period. We got 125 gallons of ice. We put them in these kind of like receptacles that then looks like it's the real ice. It's a mini rink and you get it in a cherry wood box. And the 895 on the back has the shavings from the gold stick that Ovechkin was presented with by the NHL. So 1500 bucks range. These are high end things that teams have never done before. So those type of things we're working on.
- [62:50]
A
That's very cool. Let's talk about the $13 million card and the buyer that was just announced. Can you break down kind of the significance of that deal, how it came to be and kind of what you expect out of.
- [63:03]
E
Yeah, so this is very non traditional. When you hear about cards, you think about the most valuable and to cards come up the T206 Honus Wagner from 1909, 1911 and of course the 1952 Top Smoky Mantle. For the most part for all time that has been 1 and 2 alternating with the small exception of Mike Trout for a little bit.
- [63:31]
A
And how often do those actually trade like reprice effectively?
- [63:35]
E
So it depends. It depends on what? What grades. So like so a PSA 8, 8 out of 10 of a. Of a Mantle will trade maybe twice a year. A PSA 9 will trade maybe once every two or three years and a PSA 10 mantle, there's three of them. They're probably in order for someone to, to trade it at this point among those three guys they'd probably have to get 40 million for it. So that hasn't traded in 10 years. The honuses, there's 60 of them, they trade usually once a year. And now you have these other cards, these modern cards which in 2003. Upper deck started coming out with these exquisite and logo men cards. Essentially gives you signed from a couple of players and then patches of that where upper deck says that it's been represented, it's the them that this is a game use patch. And these cards back then were 35,000 to $100,000. In the last five years, they've become easy million dollar cards. And you know, there's not many of them. Most of them are one of ones. So the Kobe LeBron, a Kobe Jordan, whatever. And this one was seen as kind of the most coveted. Couple years ago probably would have sold for 5 million bucks. And now there's a lot of interest. There's interests from, from the people that bought it. Kevin o' Leary and Matt Allen started Secure Collectibles, which is essentially we think a fund to buy into these modern cards. Previously we've had like funds for like vintage and get into these vintage cards, but the modern cards seem to be the ones that people are into. And it's hard for me. I have about a 15 million dollar collection. I've been collecting for 20 years. It's hard for me to get into the modern cards. What is that? I dropped.
- [65:35]
A
I dropped. No, no, it's just a big number. So I had to.
- [65:37]
B
We're just excited for it. That's a huge collection. Congrats.
- [65:40]
E
Yeah, yeah. So, but I don't really. I collect real one of ones. To me this is, I'm not trying to, to shoot it down, but this is manufactured scarcity. Right. The card company says it's one of one. I'm collecting something that's like really one of one. Like, you know.
- [65:56]
A
Well, this has played out somewhat in the, in the car world as well. Like, you know, I think from, from what I understand, like the sort of true classic Ferrari market has somewhat slowed. It has in that the, the younger generation, the Instagram generation, the millennials are probably more focused on some of these modern supercars. Like they might be more interested in acquiring an SP3.
- [66:23]
E
That. That has happened. That has definitely happened. You know, the question becomes obviously the $13 million card. So this card now has surpassed on the price alone the Honus and the Mantle. The question is there's a lot of people still collecting a lot of these modern cards and they rely on. We're in a degenerate economy. My friend Howard Lindsin, that's his term that he loves and you know, my son opens up packs and he's 11 years old and if it doesn't have a number on it, if it's not out of 25 or have a gold little foil or whatever, he literally throws it in the garbage. It's in the garbage. And you're having these businesses now that.
- [67:10]
A
Are we getting, are we getting the youth hooked on gambling at a young age?
- [67:16]
E
I think everything is on tv, Tilt. So if they're not gambling, straight up gambling, they know about Bitcoin already. They know about things that trade nonstop. The stock market stops. And so they're always like these repacks. Have you seen these digital repacks? Basically what happens is you open up cards that they've scanned in the system. System. Okay. So they've opened the packs, they have cards, they've scanned in the system. You open it, it spins, it opens. And then if you don't get what you love now you can, you could take that, they could send it to you. If you don't get what you love, you could sell it back immediately at 80% of the value. Now normally you'd say 80%, that's horrible. Like, I lost 20%. And you know, that's, that's so bad. However, however, if you come in from a gambling world, 80% is great because it's a zero sum game, right? Like if you're gambling, when you lost, you lost, it's zero. And so if you compare it against the gambling world. So these companies are, you know, this company, Courtyard July, they did $60 million in repacks and they're making the delta every time someone returns something back or if they're shipping it to them. And so, yeah, I mean, we're all on tilt right now. We can't go forward back.
- [68:40]
A
Yeah, that makes sense. What is the. Give us a read on the overall state of the collectibles market right now on.
- [68:50]
E
Absolutely on fire. I mean, if you go to Fanatics Fest, if you go to the national sports collectors convention, 125, 150,000 people, kids walking around with briefcases with $30,000 worth of cards. It's is, it is not what it was when I was a kid. I think the energy's there, but the money and the. I mean, it's outrageous. There, there are going to be things that will pop. I don't think the whole thing is a bubble, but there are a bunch of things that don't make sense. I think there's just a lot of very interesting markets. Psa, which grades everything. Just started grading magazines, you know, so what, what magazines do you want to grade? I, I say, okay, like, everyone finds their own niche. For me It's Hollywood debuts the first time someone has come on a magazine. Right?
- [69:44]
A
And so.
- [69:46]
E
Hold on one second, hold on one second.
- [69:47]
B
No worries.
- [69:48]
E
Let's bring this bin over here.
- [69:50]
B
We need PSA graded arena mags in Colossus. So you know, we got for sure.
- [69:55]
A
Let's see.
- [69:56]
E
I mean like this is a beautiful Forbes, you know, you got the crawdaddy, you know, Ackroyd Belushi, you know that, that, that's an early, that's an early one. You got the first time John Candy appeared on a magazine in 1985. A Canadian only, you know, you got the first Ralph Macchio here.
- [70:16]
A
I just appreciate how, how. I know, I know, I know. Like two out of the ten names.
- [70:23]
E
Yeah, right, exactly.
- [70:25]
A
Give it. But, but talk about the shape of the market and who the kind of key players are. I know that at some point or another I think people were kind of writing them off, but they seem to.
- [70:37]
E
Have no, the issue is that live commerce is the thing, you know. And right now ebay live is just not as great as whatnot, which is just doing tons of business. And so they're a little bit behind, I think.
- [70:56]
A
So Live is. And live is dominating the traditional auction.
- [71:03]
E
Live is dominating. A lot of it has to do with breaking, which is also gambling. So I told you about repacks. Breaking is essentially I buy a team, right? So let's say I spend $3,000 and I want to buy the Golden State Warriors. And they open up a box and all these people are watching, do I get a Steph Curry or do I get. And if you don't get one, they have to give you kind of some sort of card because otherwise it's an illegal lottery. Again, these things are on the cusp of will Attorney General get into these and say this is gambling. But yes, these are breaking is just another reason why live is just going crazy.
- [71:46]
A
And what's fanatics strategy been to date? I know they've been acquisitive and they now have an advantage in terms of, of actually originating.
- [71:56]
E
They have all the rights. They're about to take over the NBA rights. They have the major League baseball rights through tops. They're about to take over the NFL rights. They have fanatics live, which is breaking. They, you know, clearly have a lot. They have fanatics collect, which is their auction house. So they're really, really involved in the game to a point of, you know, know almost or definitely monopoly power.
- [72:24]
A
Interesting.
- [72:25]
B
What do you think of Le Booboo? We got a question. In the chat.
- [72:31]
E
I Think it's hard to figure out. See, the key to PSA and the key to the growth of collectibles has been population reports. Tell me exactly how many there are. Right. So I can tell you.
- [72:45]
B
You.
- [72:45]
E
There's only three Mickey Mantle PSA 10s. Right. On Labubu. It gives me the odds, but I feel like I need to know live, how many have been opened, how many have. Like, how do we figure out how to have population reports and grading these things? Because that's what gives you, like, the want and the wish to say, okay, I want to invest in these things other than just have. Again, that's just. These mystery boxes are another way to gamble.
- [73:17]
A
Yeah, the degenerate economy. What about in the business collectibles space? I know there was this signed Steve Jobs business card that traded. But what are you tracking?
- [73:30]
E
I like Jobs. I was worried about the number of checks that came out. I am one of two people who own a Steve Jobs signature that says, go change the world.
- [73:40]
B
World.
- [73:41]
E
I think that's a. That's a cool one that I'm holding on to. I own the largest Warren Buffett signature in the world. It's 2ft long on 18 uncut, uncirculated $ bills.
- [73:53]
B
Wow.
- [73:54]
E
I think, you know, when Warren passes, I think someone's going to want that on. On their wall. I'm gonna. I'm gonna hold for now.
- [74:04]
A
Do you think there's a. Do you think there's a potential play to build a kind of vertical marketplace for just business collectibles or.
- [74:12]
B
Yeah, for sure.
- [74:14]
E
I have every Berkshire Hathaway meeting pass from 1996 to 2025.
- [74:20]
B
That's incredible.
- [74:21]
E
The hardest one to get is 2000. I just got it, so I'm really excited about it. The business cards are tough, though, because unless they're signed, it's hard to figure out if they're real.
- [74:33]
B
Yeah, we're in a unique position. We were recently at the Figma ipo, and we brought a special gong and had the CEO Dylan Field ring the gong. We were thinking about how we should evolve that maybe.
- [74:44]
A
And we have a big studio here. We can hang him from the raft.
- [74:47]
B
Yeah.
- [74:47]
A
We think game hit.
- [74:48]
B
Yeah, Game hit gongs or something at the ipo.
- [74:52]
E
That would be pretty good.
- [74:53]
B
Okay. I don't know that we're doing it for. It's more just for lore at this point than roi. Yeah.
- [74:58]
E
But if you had a hundred gongs, that would be kind of cool.
- [75:03]
A
We'll work on this.
- [75:03]
E
I always tell you. I always tell teams, you know, when you have a concert of a, of an important figure in there. You should give them some custom thing and then you should have your own custom thing so that you get it signed.
- [75:14]
B
Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense.
- [75:16]
E
Yeah, but it's a listen, it's a, it's a fun vertical. It's, you know, if you know what you're doing. I think like anything, you should have a take, right? You should have a strong take and you shouldn't be a follower. You know, like, why do you think something should, should increase in value? And I jump all over the place in terms of trying to get into markets every day. I think the Beatles costly, but still has a huge run up. There's two guys still alive. How do you figure all that stuff out?
- [75:46]
A
Is there a cottage industry of people specifically in music collectibles that are just focused on acquiring assets from artists that are emerging today? Yeah. Or do people typically kind of wait too late to start taking an artist seriously?
- [76:03]
E
Well, again, it's like it's, it's not too late, right? It's, it's, it's, it's not too late in music because I think again, we're still so behind. You know, Billy Joel, right? Like every. You could see, there's, now there's, there's a fervor for Billy Joel type stuff. You could still get some good stuff. Now you can't get it his own. His first concert at msg, because I own the only two in the world and I'll have to sell it to you. But you know, you can get into these things. It's not, it really is not too late. It's never too late. You have to just say, okay, at the price it is now, what type of upside does it have? But in music in general, I think Billy Joel, Bon Jovi, Springsteen, Madonna, all early, early days.
- [76:50]
B
How do influencers play into the world of collectibles? I followed the story of Ed Bolian and the Lamborghini Murcielago market, where he kind of figured out that there were maybe less of a certain type. I think it was particularly manual transmission. LP640s. The market had estimated that maybe it was like, like, you know, 60% people went for automatic when that car came out. And when he actually put all the VINs together, figured out all the numbers, it was more like 99% of people had selected automatic. And then he popularized that through a series of YouTube videos. And I believe the market really caught up because of that. Does that happen? Do you have any stories around that?
- [77:34]
E
Yeah, I mean, I, I boot, I controlled the ticket market. So when, when PSA said they were coming out with grading tickets, I said, okay, I got to find the hundred best tickets of all time. I got to be really quiet about it. And then a year later I got to say, hey, tickets are great. Now this was not just a pump by me, because I should say that I've only sold about 1% of my collection. However, I bought Tiger woods first PGA Tour event for $1,000 and then a year later sold it for 77,000.
- [78:05]
B
You know, so underwrite the entire collection.
- [78:08]
E
So some big, yeah, there were, there were definitely some ridiculous pops. I bought the, the, the nicest full ticket of Marilyn Monroe singing Happy birthday to JFK. Bought it for 6,000, sold it for 105,000, you know, so like, there, you give me another one.
- [78:24]
B
There we go.
- [78:26]
E
So, so yeah, you, you can influence markets and I do. But again, I, it's genuine, right? I love, loved, I love, I love tickets.
- [78:37]
B
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, at a certain point, like what Ed Bolan did with Lamborghini was like very much fact finding. He wasn't, he wasn't manipulating the market. He was just bringing extra, sharing information.
- [78:45]
A
Yeah, I do, I do. Do you worry that, do you worry that, that so many, so many different things in our lives have gone digital, which just reduces the number of like.
- [78:58]
E
But is that, is that a, is that a positive or a negative?
- [79:01]
A
Yeah, right. No, it's a good point.
- [79:02]
E
And, and I, I would say in collectibles you can't appeal to every audience. The ticket market is going to really appeal to the 40 to 65 year old person right now. And guess what? Those are the people that have the most money to spend. So should I feel bad that I'm not that, that, that the 20 to 35 year old doesn't care about my market? No, I, especially if you have one of ones. Right. Like, you know, I have the only 1899 silver certificate that was in the pocket of a guy who died on the Titanic. Like, okay, my market isn't that liquid, But I need two people. I don't need 700.
- [79:39]
B
Yep.
- [79:40]
A
Yeah, right.
- [79:41]
E
And that's really, that's really where, you know, for my philosophy, it's like the real one of ones. Yes. If you collect cards, you immediately know how much that's worth. Usually if it's not a one of one because you go on ebay and it sold yesterday to me, that's not fun. I like to buy real one of ones where someone says, hey, I'll pay you $20,000 for Disney paying his 1962 taxes, his check. And I'd say, no, I want 30. You're not going to go and find it somewhere else. So you either pay me or whatever. So the real one of one markets are less liquid, but in a lot of ways, they're more secure, if you really believe in it.
- [80:24]
A
Yeah. What we have. We have some space here in the studio. We would like to acquire a car that has some, like, you know, provenance with a great technology CEO. I don't know that we were. We'd be in the market for Elon's F1 yet that he crashed with PT.
- [80:47]
B
Yeah.
- [80:48]
A
But what is there a. A great former vehicle of a silicon valve.
- [80:56]
E
There were a bunch of replica cars that were exact replica cars that sold on Saturday. There was a Ghostbusters replica hearse. There was two Jurassic Park Jeep vehicles which were kind of cool. I'm trying to think of, like, what normally if someone.
- [81:17]
A
Larry Ellison.
- [81:19]
B
Larry. You know, Larry Ellison's McLaren F1 just went to office auction. 23 million.
- [81:23]
A
Yeah.
- [81:24]
B
Yeah. Just out of the price range for us, but hopefully.
- [81:26]
E
Which is interesting because. Because often if you have houses owned by celebrities or houses that were used in movies, people think that it ups the value. It actually decreases the value.
- [81:38]
B
Interesting.
- [81:39]
E
People who are buying these houses at the 3 to 5 million dollars level or the 20 million dollars level, they don't care that a movie was filmed in there or a celebrity house at it. They just care about what are the bones and how much do I have to redo.
- [81:54]
A
There's the house that was used in Hannah Montana is near me in Malibu. And if you owned it, it would actually be extremely frustrating because every single day, typically, European tourists are taking pictures in front of it. So you'd just be constantly in the background of just random photos.
- [82:13]
E
Yeah, that's kind of. That's like what happened with the Home Alone House. And, you know, in Illinois, you know, it's. People just keep coming by. You become part of house tours.
- [82:21]
B
Yeah, yeah. Do you think, like, how do you think the Internet and modern technology is changing, like, the creation of collectibles? Because when I think about tickets, I feel like almost everything's digital now. People don't really get the physical tickets. And so maybe what some of your work and what you're doing, consulting with folks, like, allows for the creation of new, unique collectibles that kind of fill that. But are we seeing, like, net more inventory or less inventory? There's just so. I feel like so many products Whether I used to give someone a DVD box set or a book and now it's, yeah, you probably have it on Spotify anyway.
- [82:58]
A
Just go, yeah. And I was asked generally about this a bit earlier, but also is there. Did you ever get excited about new technology like NFTs?
- [83:08]
E
So I think there's actually the shame of it is that blockchain got thrown out with the NFT decline and I don't think they should be together. Blockchain has great applications, just really, really good for future, for counterfeiting, for everything in this space that we've been struggling for. For friction. Right. You can move some something frictionless, you don't have to get it graded then put it on ebay. And so I do think that I'm not sure the NFTs, unfortunately. I think a lot of it was just grift and garbage and it just is what it was. And because bad actors gravitated to it, I think it got a bad reputation. I don't think all them deserve that. And I certainly think that blockchain has significant applications. I think we just need a little bit more time away and it will emerge.
- [84:11]
B
Yeah. Yeah. We had a founder CEO of an NFT company called Pudgy Penguins on the show and they've kind of gone backwards where they're focused on creating real products in the real world and kind of bootstrapping the community that way. They've already done the NFT launch and that's kind of been.
- [84:31]
E
It's almost going back through typical licensing going.
- [84:34]
B
Exactly. And I think it's worked out really. I just saw one gifted from a grandmother to a grandson and I had no idea that there was any connection there. So certainly at least that company's kind of figured out a way to.
- [84:49]
E
But I do think that the young population does like physical still when it's available.
- [84:57]
A
Totally perfect.
- [84:58]
B
Well, thank you so much for hopping on.
- [85:00]
A
Yeah, thanks for joining. Anytime there's. Anytime there's something in the news, hit us up. We'd love to have you on to break it down.
- [85:07]
E
Thanks, guys.
- [85:07]
A
Cheers.
- [85:08]
B
Darren, let me tell you about numeral sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Numeralhq.com and we have Dr. Drew in the waiting room in the restream waiting room. We're bringing in Dr. Drew to hear you're the real story of Dr. Drew. I botched the story earlier on the stream. If you're turning in. In my defense, I believe I was 9 years old at the time, but I'M glad to have Dr. Drew here on the show, hopefully. Let's bring in Dr. Drew Pinsky. How are we doing?
- [85:42]
A
There we go.
- [85:43]
B
Can you hear us? Welcome to the stream. Hello. Hello. We are working on audio. Let's sort that out. And in the meantime, let me tell you about Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2 Fin AI production team. Tell me how we are doing. Hopefully we can get Dr. Drew in.
- [86:11]
A
I believe we're having audio issues. We will jump into the timeline.
- [86:18]
B
I can also just have him call my phone.
- [86:20]
A
I'm hearing something.
- [86:21]
B
Can you hear us? Oh, hello. Oh, wow. Wow, you really undersold this. You said you were just gonna do a phone call and now here you are.
- [86:31]
C
No, I thought I'd get the full monty here.
- [86:34]
B
This is amazing. Okay, so first off, I need to apologize. I completely botched the story of drg.com in my defense, I believe I was 10 years old when I stopped by the office as, as a kid. But please break it down for us.
- [86:46]
C
It's so funny. The only thing I found disturbing was how miserably you did with my credentials.
- [86:51]
B
Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
- [86:53]
C
Let me start with that.
- [86:54]
B
Okay, Please.
- [86:54]
C
I'm a physician. I'm a board certified internist. I'm a board certified dictionaryist. I'm a fellow with the American Board of American College of Physicians. I was an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry. Practiced medicine my whole life. I'm not a psychologist. Okay, yes, we did do Loveline back in the day.
- [87:09]
B
I love Loveline. I sincerely love Loveline. I wish I listened to it constantly, instantly. It was amazing.
- [87:15]
C
Well, it was very popular and it served a function back in the day, but this business spun out of it. I thought you guys would really like to hear this history because it is a piece of history.
- [87:24]
B
Incredible.
- [87:27]
C
Good friend of mine from high school, Polytechnic High School, we went off to Amherst College and then he went to Harvard Business School. I went to medical school. And I'm going along, doing all these wild things, practicing medicine and then doing radio. And he shows up and he goes, I want to. I want to show you how to form a business. We're going to do a dot com company. Of course, I was hearing about all the dot com stuff in the. In the wind. And he got some seed capital from a company in Orange county, like a million dollars. And then he put together a little board and we went. He grabbed me by the arm and Took me up to Sandhill Road and we sat at Softback Softbank, rather, and made him. He just said, follow me. I go, what are we doing? What are we. I had no idea what we were doing.
- [88:09]
A
Doing.
- [88:09]
C
Didn't know how to start a business. I didn't.
- [88:11]
A
You had. You bought your dot com, by the way, had you, like, gone out?
- [88:15]
C
Probably had done something like that at that point. I don't think it's sitting there without that.
- [88:19]
A
Yeah, exactly.
- [88:22]
C
And. And he just goes, follow me. And I was like, okay. So I followed along and they go, what do you want to do? And I'm like, you know, So I, I don't remember what I said, but the six or seven SoftBank VC representatives marched out of the room and my Harvard Business School friend was anxious and like, I didn't even understand what was happening. Still, I did not. And they came back in and they go, okay, $10 million. That was that.
- [88:53]
B
Let's go.
- [88:54]
C
We went down and we built the company exactly as you described. And in fact, drove my wife crazy. She goes, what are people doing here? Why. Why aren't they working? It shouldn't be this nice an environment. But most of that was for the tech team. And you pointed out how weird the tech situation was. You got that part exactly right. But the part you got wrong is, remember, people didn't have any idea what a website was. And so we had an editorial staff, we had a medical staff, we had a marketing team. And they envisioned. I kept saying, why do we need a magazine on my computer screen? Why? You're. You're building this really great magazine, but with a chat room and with some feedback. And they kept, they. All the, all the, all these sort of trigger words back now were interaction. And, And I didn't understand. I saw no value in any of it. I kept saying. I, I kept. I. We had 120 employees and we had a board of directors from, From Northern California who were demanding, we, quote, get big fast. It's. This is interesting.
- [90:00]
A
Get big fast.
- [90:01]
C
This guy, this. I. I came to our first board meeting. I said, look, I. I'm trying to decide if we should figure out how to make money, how to make this profitable or. Or what we should be doing or how to, you know.
- [90:12]
A
Did they tell you, don't worry about that. Don't worry about that.
- [90:15]
C
Worse than that, this one guy goes, if he was manic as hell, and he goes, if I thought you were so stupid, I never would have been on this board. And he jumped up and he goes, here's how you make money A dot com company. And there was a giant wiper board and he wrote in huge letters get big fast. And they were demanding we burn through capital faster to try to get big fast. So that became the weird. It was the weirdest thing I ever seen in my life. But the one thing I got right, I kept saying, it's going to be video. Why else do we need this thing? It's going to be video. But look what we're doing right now, right?
- [90:50]
A
Yeah.
- [90:50]
C
And I just kept saying that. And we put together a one night a week television show that was really a high quality show. We still have some of the tapes from it. And everybody came in, Paul Rudd, Tommy Lee, everybody came on that one night a week show. Cause it was the cool thing to do. Because there's this new idea, this.com company creates a TV show and nobody could watch it. You know why?
- [91:14]
A
Because you couldn't stream it.
- [91:16]
C
Because nobody had stream. Nobody had broadband. Broadband. You needed broadband back then. That's, that's how far ahead of the technology we were.
- [91:27]
A
It sounds like you weren't making a ton of money, but were you selling the show on a subscription? Like what, what did that was.
- [91:33]
B
Was there any business model or like any revenue ads? No, just eyeballs. But so, so Get Big Fast didn't mean revenue or profits. It meant eyeballs.
- [91:43]
C
Eyeballs get big meant money, bent number of people. And they kept talking about how the cur, you know, how the asymptotic curve would develop around viewership and engagement and this kind of stuff. And we literally, this was a company, I mean it had lots of traction and engagement and stuff. People were kind of intrigued by it. So people were stopping by and looking at this thing. Not sure. We did lots of interviews with celebrity. It was sort of like E meets teen, B meets, you know, it was all these different sorts of things all together in one site. And we literally were sitting in Goldman Sachs on, I believe it was March 19, 2020, 2010. When was that? The day the NASDAQ fell apart. The day we were sitting in Goldman Sachs and the woman across the table was contemplating giving us $30 million on a $110 million valuation for a company that had never made a penny.
- [92:47]
B
Wow.
- [92:48]
C
And I just thought it was the dumbest thing I ever saw. But I knew it was tulips the whole way. And I kept. And one friend of mine finally goes, look, it's Amsterdam 1680. It's tulips. You're going to grow Brussels sprouts. Or are you Going to grow tulips. What are you going to do? I thought, all right, I'm going to grow tulips.
- [93:05]
A
Well, it's interesting to think back and if it was structured as an investment that was actually. And you. And your name and likeness, it would have been a tremendous investment. But that wasn't a good.com story.
- [93:19]
C
It was why we got the money, though. In fact, there's a. There's an Inc article on my wall here. I was going to actually pull down and wave in front of the camera. But it'd be almost impossible to do it where that they were sort of saying that's what they were. You know, that's kind of what they were thinking they were doing. But it was not. It was not a clear thought. Thought. But they were looking for brands.
- [93:39]
B
Yeah.
- [93:39]
C
And I don't think they really knew that. That was not a fully developed thought at that time.
- [93:44]
B
Yeah. So what was the conclusion?
- [93:47]
C
I go into business school. I saw the entire. The entire.
- [93:50]
B
From.
- [93:51]
C
From seed to dissolve. I saw the entire business cycle in one year.
- [93:56]
A
So did you. Did you eventually take. Take over the site again yourself or what?
- [94:00]
C
Dr. Coop brought. Bought the site. Remember Dr. Koop? You wouldn't. You're too young. He was the Attorney General and then he had a website that actually did rather well for a minute.
- [94:10]
A
Did he just redirect the website or was he still using Dr. Drdrew.com?
- [94:14]
C
No, no, he was a redirect absorbed everything and he went bankrupt, as everybody did. And we were able to weasel it back. I forget how we got it back.
- [94:28]
B
But we had to.
- [94:29]
C
We had to do some sleuthing or we finally got it back.
- [94:32]
B
So. Yeah. How did the shape of your business evolve then? And how do you think about packaging everything that you do now?
- [94:44]
C
I was listening to you guys talk and I was thinking, boy, I don't have any framework. This is all very interesting to me, but I don't have a framework to sort of understand what I do. My stuff is always an improvisation.
- [94:55]
B
Sure.
- [94:55]
C
Right. When I started radio in 1983, I had no designs on radio. I just, I was. Leave me alone so I can practice medicine. I'll come here in the evenings on Sunday and do community service. Yeah, that was my little notion in 1983 when I started doing radio. Then some television guys came along. I'm like, how do you do a TV show? I've never. I don't know what you're talking about. Well, this was the same thing with the dot com. My good friend comes to me, he Goes, we're going to do this. And I thought, I, I, I don't see it, I don't get it. But I think we might be able to do something with it. It'd be interesting. This was a hell of an education. And, and you're asking how I frame everything I do now. Now?
- [95:32]
B
Yeah. I was wondering.
- [95:33]
A
Well, it's just been interesting how many techno, how many different technology friends from the dot com to, you know, podcasting. But it all comes back to basically radio and tv.
- [95:43]
B
Yeah. Like over, over the past, you know, you know, more recent tech boom history. Have you been hit with the hey, let's do, let's do a Dr. Drew or let's do an AI thing. Is this coming? Is it rearing its head again?
- [95:57]
C
That has been, that has been. I've had conversations like that.
- [96:00]
B
Yeah, of course, of course.
- [96:02]
C
Exactly what to do with it. Nobody knows.
- [96:03]
B
Nobody.
- [96:04]
C
Right. But it's part of the exploration. I'm doing streaming shows regularly. You guys blasted them up there. It looked like hell. Wait, where you put it up there? I'm going to talk to my webmaster.
- [96:16]
A
I mean, it looks really good for conversion optimization. It made me want to click. So I think, I think your person's doing a good job.
- [96:23]
C
Not meant to be shown to other people's shows, but, you know, that's been interesting. It, it happened, that all happened just because I got cancelled for daring to say people shouldn't panic about COVID Oh yeah. And that caused me to just stop doing everything. And I had somebody who said, hey, you should do a streaming show. I was like, what's that again? That's sort of my, it's where I start every one of these projects.
- [96:48]
A
Yeah. You had a bad experience streaming the first time, where you're like, if, if I make the show, you're sure people are going to be able to watch it. But, well, no more confidence this time.
- [96:58]
C
I knew it. I already knew that. I already, I saw what was happening with videos. I just kept, we just kept saying we were so early. We just, we, we could have been. Who knows what. We could have been.
- [97:06]
B
You.
- [97:07]
C
God knows we could have been YouTube or something if we had sort of been the first to be really advocate for this kind of platform. But we were way early and nobody else was quite as much of a believer as I was. And so the streaming thing has been very interesting. And you. I'm in my own, my kids playroom doing this and it's the same thing. Everything here used to require me to go out to a satellite booth at cnn and now I just do it from here. So the efficiencies are fantastic. And so I do television out of the studio. I do do podcasting out of the studio. I do streaming shows. And it all started because I got canceled. And some. My webmaster said the streaming is probably going to happen pretty soon. I said, let's try that. And I wanted to talk to all the people, other physicians who have been canceled. One of them happens to be the director of the NIH right now. And so I just had the sense that these people had something to say and the cancellation thing was some sort of bizarre aberration. Certainly in science and medicine.
- [98:05]
A
Had you. Have you gotten, you know, the opportunities that you maybe lost due to the cancellation? Have you gotten invited back in the last.
- [98:15]
B
Or is it just a different set of opportunities?
- [98:17]
A
Or is it. Yeah. Are you looking at totally different? Or do you not even want to go back to the. To kind of the old.
- [98:21]
C
Those are great questions. I don't know that I want to go back, but I probably would because I've taken the position that my opinions have never changed. I'm happy to express them on any platform, anywhere. What has happened in the meantime is what I used to do, say all the news outlets, all of them. All of a sudden, the only people that would have me on was fox. Now, just last week, CNN called. So I thought, okay, good. This is a good sign. I couldn't make it, but I would have had I been able to.
- [98:50]
B
Nature's healing.
- [98:51]
A
Nature's healing. Yeah.
- [98:55]
B
We've been really obsessed with this idea that sort of a barbell is emerging in modern media where all the value either accrues to the platforms like YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, or the individuals, the Joe Rogan, the Andrew Huberman, the Cruise, and that it's very hard to actually build anything in the middle. Would you agree with that? Would you. Is this something that you've kind of experienced? It feels like something that the.
- [99:24]
C
I. I absolutely concur with the. On the talent side that because it used to be, I would require. To do what we're doing right now.
- [99:34]
B
Yep.
- [99:34]
C
There'd be an executive producer, there'd be a segment producer, there would be a director in the studio, in the satellite booth. There'd be somebody directing in the other end, at the satellite booth there would be.
- [99:43]
A
And then you got the union, the unions involved with it.
- [99:45]
C
There'd be unions, there be sales forces, there'd be executive structures. Now it's me that it.
- [99:51]
B
Yeah.
- [99:51]
C
So it's so much more efficient and it drives that world crazy.
- [99:55]
B
Yeah.
- [99:55]
C
So when Colbert gets, gets fired for losing $40 million a year, I just looked at that and I go, well, of course. Yeah, that's gonna happen to all of them. This is just not a. Yeah.
- [100:04]
A
And our reaction at that point was he could just go set up his own home studio and probably have a fantastic business just with his existing fan base and none of the, none of the overhead.
- [100:15]
C
100%. But they are, they are, are. You got to know how that world thinks. They're very spoiled. They're very spoiled and they're used to gigantic infrastructure and dozens of writers. And this is this the world we're living in. Right. As we have this interview to them looks sort of cheap and dumb and people aren't talented do that. The real people, people back. Back us with infrastructure and money. That, that is just not. So this the other side of the barbell.
- [100:42]
B
Yeah.
- [100:42]
C
Which I'm wondering how you see it. I just see it as largely non viable. So much of it has got to shrink dramatically. And it's resisting. Yeah, it's resisting like crazy.
- [100:51]
B
Yeah. I mean, I would almost put the traditional media corporations like in the center. When I think of the far big mega side of the barbell, I think of the platforms, Spotify, Facebook, Meta, YouTube, Twitch, LinkedIn, the networks and they actually accrue a ton of the value. And it is extremely hard to start one of those companies. And if you do, you're not talent at all. In fact, you're probably an engineer and you probably at this point have the backing of a state government because that's the only way TikTok got going was so much energy and capital flowing in to actually break through. The ship has sailed on starting new platforms for the most part, in my opinion.
- [101:34]
C
I think that's probably right. And they don't need to buy talent.
- [101:38]
B
No, not at all. It just comes to them naturally and they give 50% of the revenue or whatever.
- [101:42]
A
Yeah, we would rather, we would rather just have you jump on our show from your studio and you benefit because people are going to trickle over to you and, and, and X makes. We don't have their ads and we just get to focus on making content and not, not focused on talent.
- [101:59]
C
But the interesting thing is you, you have to wonder, is there. Are we somewhere in a business cycle that's going to lead to some consolidation and when the talent consolidates, are they going to start negotiating with the platforms? Is there going to be some sort of. I mean, that would be a natural business cycle, right?
- [102:16]
B
Yeah. What was that new left wing substack publication that just announced. They said they're living out or something. Remember this?
- [102:24]
A
Yeah. What are the.
- [102:24]
B
Anyway, there's like a collection, the Argument. So there's a new publication that's launching that's aggregating a number of. Of writers who are sort of on the left. And we were kind of debating will they have leverage over different platforms because they're all together, or does it actually make more sense for Matt Iglesias and Derek Thompson to just have their own substacks and go direct? And then on the far other side is the platform and there's really no one in between. But we're still early in the development of the Argument.
- [102:57]
C
There's something very strange. It says there's a weird confluence of worlds right now.
- [103:02]
B
Now.
- [103:02]
C
Yeah, my son just texted me and he's. He's been trying to get to. You guys really know this.
- [103:10]
A
Does he want to. Does he want to.
- [103:11]
B
Does he want to Hop on, we'll send him a link.
- [103:12]
A
Yeah, yeah, we'll send.
- [103:13]
C
You can join right after you listening. Maybe call my phone and I'll put you up to the microphone here.
- [103:19]
D
But let's do it.
- [103:20]
B
Let's do it.
- [103:21]
C
He's consolidating the ad department. You know, the, the management, the. The lawyering, the ad service, the distribution. He's trying to consolidate that onto a tiny little team because these things aren't necessary. All this stuff is not needed anymore. You need to. Ad agency.
- [103:38]
B
Yeah. This is amazing. The chat is going wild. Everyone's really happy with this. They're calling your son the prodigal son.
- [103:47]
C
I'm gonna see if I get him to call me. He said he emailed his partner named Jake emailed one of you guys.
- [103:53]
B
Okay. Okay. We'll have to follow up, but they're.
- [103:56]
C
Having huge success and it's great. He's the one that. He's the one that started talking about AI. He's. He's in the middle of all of this. The tech influencers, the Google store, the TikTok store, everything. Yeah, but all of that is more efficient. More efficient. More efficient.
- [104:11]
B
Yep.
- [104:12]
C
Right? I mean, and the. And what you have is these, the, the talent agencies and the ad agencies and the managerial services and the lawyers holding on. They're like, they're like going into the foxholes as opposed to adjusting and adapting and changing what, what it is they do. They are just insisting that things continue to be done the way that they've always been done. And it's, it's It's, I guess, a classic business mistake, right?
- [104:35]
B
Yeah, totally. Yeah. I have one.
- [104:38]
A
I have one. One.
- [104:40]
B
One health.
- [104:41]
A
One health question for you. What are the. John. John and I are starting a. What we hope to be multiple decades, decade's run of daily livestreaming. What would you have done when you were earlier in your career, health wise. To better sell. You seem to be doing incredibly well now. So what are the key things to look out for, health wise, to make sure you can do this for decades?
- [105:13]
C
Be hypomanic.
- [105:15]
B
It helps.
- [105:16]
C
Which a lot of successful business people are.
- [105:18]
B
Are.
- [105:18]
C
Yes, you're going. I hear many of the podcasts. You're going to suffer. You're going to work hard, you're going to lose sleep. I wish I'd paid more attention to sleep, but if I had, I couldn't have done most of what I did. I'm trying to pay attention to sleep now. And you know, you've heard it all before. This is not new. Trust your instincts. Explore. Don't be afraid to fall down. For me, the big. As I look back on all the things I did, it just the willingness to improvise and to go into dangerous situations. I mean, a lot of. Oh, he's calling now.
- [105:52]
B
Let's get him on. We got the sun on.
- [105:55]
C
I don't know if they can hear. He can. I'll have to translate.
- [105:58]
B
Put on speakerphone. Hey, how's it going, guys? How you doing?
- [106:01]
A
What's happening?
- [106:02]
B
Good, son, obviously. But we. My business partner and I actually emailed you a couple weeks back. Okay. We rep Roberto Nixon. Oh, no way. I love Roberto. That's amazing. Okay. Yeah, we gotta get in touch. My dad was on the air. I'm flying back from Seattle. Okay.
- [106:18]
A
Yeah, okay. I do. So we did have a little exchange.
- [106:20]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's follow you guys.
- [106:22]
C
He's gonna keep talking. Okay, you can't. I'll tell him what you said.
- [106:25]
B
He can't hear you. Okay.
- [106:26]
C
Keep talking, Douglas.
- [106:27]
B
I was gonna say that I. So Rob and Jake are going to an Oasis concert next week in Pasadena.
- [106:33]
C
And I was gonna ask you.
- [106:35]
B
Rob in Pasadena? Okay. Yeah, her kids are going to. Paul and Douglas went to poly, too. Douglas went to polygamy.
- [106:44]
C
Like you said at the beginning of the show, only famous people go to polytechnic school.
- [106:52]
B
No, I just wanted to say hi and show you that we're not like the rest of those guys that probably email you randomly asking for things and wanting to build a relationship. It's. It's very funny that this all happened in a Strange way. So. Yeah.
- [107:05]
A
This is incredible.
- [107:06]
B
I actually have to take a call for this creator named Rorkey, who's a gen AI creator. Cool. Because he's in Dubai and I, you.
- [107:13]
D
Know, just trying to get on the.
- [107:15]
A
You got to get on with Dubai. We know. We know how that goes.
- [107:17]
C
All right, get going. I. I call these guys because they butchered my. My.
- [107:21]
A
My dot com.
- [107:26]
C
John, is that. Which one's John?
- [107:27]
B
I'm John.
- [107:28]
A
John.
- [107:28]
C
John was actually@drd.com when he was, like, 10 years old.
- [107:31]
B
Yeah. Yeah. I was in the very cold data center. Yeah. Racking servers. That's spectacular. So there's a long history on all fronts.
- [107:43]
C
And he went to Pollock, so. Okay, we'll talk later.
- [107:46]
A
Yes.
- [107:46]
C
And he went to Polk.
- [107:47]
B
Amazing. Okay. Okay. I have one more question on the house for you. For you.
- [107:54]
C
Okay.
- [107:55]
B
Sorry.
- [107:55]
A
Douglas, later. Douglas, later.
- [107:57]
B
For you. Last week, we had Mark Cuban on the show. He said that drinking raw milk is extremely dangerous. Dangerous and should never be done yet. Is there anything to it?
- [108:05]
A
I drank. I'll go on the record. I drank a liter of raw milk that day every day for two years straight.
- [108:11]
B
You were fine.
- [108:12]
A
Yeah.
- [108:12]
D
What's those?
- [108:15]
B
Can you explain why he didn't give any underlying rationale?
- [108:19]
C
Yeah, I doubt he knows why.
- [108:20]
B
He was just saying that the LLMs might convince you to drink raw milk and that might lead to some sort of doom scenario.
- [108:28]
C
You can get brucellosis, you can probably get tutemia, you can get listeriosis, and we can treat that with antibiotics, no problem. But they can make you very sick and they're very rare. I wouldn't do it, but I don't. The fact that. Look, there's something terrible going on where people are so fearful of being the biological agents that we are. And the reality that we are going to die, that they are afraid to live. Living well is the goal. Not living forever, not living perfectly free of illness. It's living a good life. And we are off of that. I can't. We are so far off that it is disgusting. And for a non physician to have an opinion about milk that contains pathogenic organisms that he's never heard of.
- [109:23]
B
Of.
- [109:23]
C
Or he learned to pronounce yesterday is disturbing to me. The same thing was when people went after hydroxychloroquine the day they learned how to say that word. A medicine I've been prescribing for decades. So it's all. We are so out of whack with this. Going to live forever. Fear of death, illness, infection. Oh, shit.
- [109:43]
B
Yes.
- [109:43]
C
We are my generation of physicians. We walked into illnesses that had 100% fatality. AIDS had 100% fatality. And we did not know what we were dealing with. And we didn't cower in the corner. We marched in. It's the right thing to do. I don't know what's happened. I can't understand this at all. But here we are. We need to focus on living well, living a good life, period. Biological stuff comes what may.
- [110:11]
A
Did you predict the decline of alcohol consumption? I did not.
- [110:17]
B
I did not. Off a cliff, right?
- [110:19]
C
Yeah. Yeah. That's still surprising to me. But it fits with the lack of dating and the lack of having sex and the lack of socializing it. That was. That was a prime social lubricant for decades. I'm glad to see it. It's a good thing. You know, the people are starting to understand it's a poison and it's not good for any tissue in our body ever. But it makes me also. I mean, what happens? When did we become such pussies? When did that happen? That's my. When did that happen?
- [110:52]
B
I don't know.
- [110:54]
A
Have you ever said something like that on cnn? This is why you got to stay off the networks. You just got to do your own show, I guess.
- [111:01]
C
I've been through so much lately, I've just lost all inhibition. I'm a huge advocate for freedom of speech and freedom of many sorts. I'm not happy about this flag burning thing. Freedom, freedom, Freedom is what I'm all about. Now he's speaking my mind.
- [111:17]
B
I will pitch you one possible explanation. I think that the fear of very consequential but low probability events like the raw milk or the risk from raw milk or the risk from COVID is tied to a lack of belief in immortality and not in the sense of living forever like biological immortality. Like science will cure this and let you live forever. That's just one way to think about immortality. You can also think about immortality and your legacy. If you are written about and you have lived a great life, you will be remembered and immortalized. You can also think about it through your children and also through the afterlife. If you're spiritual or religious, you could think that you're going to heaven. And if you don't believe in any of those modes of immortality, you don't believe that you're going to have kids or do your life's work and be remembered in the afterlife or go to heaven or. Or you don't believe that science will be able to fix you if you do wind up getting sick from raw milk, then even a small chance has an incredible, incredible penalty. And so you discount it very, very high.
- [112:27]
C
I agree with you. With a couple of caveats. I do agree with you. Embedded in that observation is a general lack of meaning making is if the meaning is I'm trying to ascend to a afterlife, whatever the meaning is of my living, that meaning should be deeply meaningful to me and purposeful. It doesn't, it does not have to include an afterlife. It can also include just creating a good life for my children. That's why I'm here, to do that, that kind of thing. But, but we people are here for their narcissistic needs and that's when things become fragile.
- [113:04]
B
Yes.
- [113:05]
C
Because we are not the beginning and the end of everything. We just are not. And if we think we're all there is is what's happening to me. Yeah, man. And then we have people whipping the frenzies and the fear and they're learning to control us with that. And that is disgusting.
- [113:22]
B
Yeah.
- [113:22]
A
So what about, have you been tracking AI psychosis at all? Any thoughts?
- [113:29]
C
I hear about it, I don't, I don't believe it. I'll tell you, I'll, I'll take, I'll make a bet that, that it's over. Way overblown. It was somebody who was already psychotic and you know, whatever. There's not that the AI relationships are necessarily going to be good. I, I, I worry about that. But this psychotic episode, I don't know, I don't know if you remember back in the 90s, there were news stories every night.
- [113:52]
A
I wasn't born, sir.
- [113:54]
C
Okay, do you have to rub that in? Do you have to say, could you just said no, I don't remember.
- [113:59]
A
No, no, no. Late later 90s, I guess got into the action.
- [114:02]
C
But, but there was news reports like every night. Like oh, these parties where all the parents throw their keys in a bowl and they just, they just grab a set of keys and that's who they go home with that night.
- [114:13]
B
Oh sure, sure.
- [114:15]
C
The press, the fake. I don't think people were sensitive to fake news. We have to be very sensitive to reporting these days. And so much of what's being reported is fake. And it's just to catch your eyes, it's just to get your attention. The person that wrote that article was a 23 year old segment producer somewhere who doesn't do any research of any meaning. It just becomes something that they catch on the line. They saw other people report it. They report It. It's ridiculous.
- [114:41]
A
Yeah. I mean, my read on it is, it seems obvious now that if a large number of people take ayahuasca, some of them are going to have some type of psychotic break of sorts. And maybe they were prone to or had some underlying issue that enabled that. But the issue with.
- [115:08]
C
You're right, they already had a psychotic illness and they just happened to break when they were working with AI but you're making a very smart observation that AI world is populated by people that microdose on acid and do Iowa, which, I tell you, it categorically causes severe psychiatric problems. I've seen it my entire career. Scares the hell out of me. They should not be doing that.
- [115:31]
A
If you're listening, did you ever consider. Yeah. If you're listening live from Burning man, just listen to Dr. Drew. Did you ever go to Burning man, by the way?
- [115:39]
B
No.
- [115:40]
C
We got friends keep trying to get us to go. It's not. It's not my jam exactly.
- [115:45]
A
Well, you could go there and try to try. Try to, you know, talk people out of it.
- [115:48]
B
How about we stick to the Bud Light, buddy?
- [115:50]
A
Yeah, let's stick to the crushing beers.
- [115:52]
B
Have a couple glasses of wine. Anyway, this has been fantastic.
- [115:56]
A
Thank you for joining the Record. Come back on anytime.
- [115:59]
B
We appreciate this. We'd love to have. You guys are great.
- [116:01]
C
I. I learned something just listening to you guys, this talking about the playing card, the baseball cards, that was fascinating. You guys have a great. You're obviously extremely well trained in. In your. In your respective field. And it's very interesting to hear you talk about these various markets and opportunities and things. And I leave with one caveat.
- [116:19]
B
Please.
- [116:20]
C
If you don't call my son, he's going to kill me.
- [116:22]
B
We will definitely.
- [116:23]
A
We're going to. We'll go to this concert with him.
- [116:24]
B
We will. We will. Exactly.
- [116:25]
C
It's in Pasadena.
- [116:27]
B
I live in Pasadena now.
- [116:28]
C
You live there now?
- [116:29]
B
I do. I live over there. Rose Bowl. Rose bowl is literally walking distance for me. So do I. Amazing.
- [116:35]
C
There we go.
- [116:36]
B
Okay, we should.
- [116:36]
A
Did you guys just become best friends?
- [116:38]
B
But I'll swing by, bring you a 30 rack of Bud Light.
- [116:43]
C
We live by Annandale.
- [116:45]
B
Oh, okay. Yeah, I'm right over there. Okay, so just up Linda Vista.
- [116:49]
C
No excuse.
- [116:50]
B
I don't want to get too. I don't want to get too. Too precise. Show up with people at my front door. Anyway, thank you so much for hopping on. This is fantastic.
- [116:56]
A
Great hanging.
- [116:57]
B
We will talk to you soon. Bye. That's why we leave a 30 minute gap in the middle.
- [117:02]
A
Exactly.
- [117:03]
B
We got to start doing that anyway. We are shifting gears. We're going into the world of Palantir. We have Colin Anderson coming into the studio. He's in the restream waiting room, but we're bringing him in now to talk about running finance at Palantir. He was there for years. I actually ran into him on Saturday, got a chance to catch up with him and he had some fantastic stories. Hopefully he can share most of them here. And we're going to talk about different force multipliers for finance teams and growing businesses like Palantir. What else do you want? So we will welcome Colin to the studio. How are you doing?
- [117:41]
A
Hey.
- [117:41]
D
I'm good. Thanks for having me.
- [117:43]
B
Good to see you again. It's been too long. It's been almost 48 hours.
- [117:47]
D
I was going to say it's pretty short, but good to be here with, I guess, more audience this time.
- [117:52]
B
Yeah, for sure. Where should we kick it off? Could you give us a little bit of just history for the. For the listener on your career, your path, particularly like the road into Palantir? I think that that's an interesting story. You were touching on some of the. Some of the. Some of the stories there. And then we can kind of take this wherever you. Wherever you'd like. Totally. Let's do it.
- [118:12]
D
Well, maybe just to situate for those I'm meeting for the first time, Colin Anderson, co founder here at Friends and Family capital venture firm we started and before that was the CFO at Palantir firm for very long time, led finance there for eight years. So what does that mean? Intersection of supporting great businesses through finance for two decades and a lot of scar tissue is the other thing that means. And how do you share that with people getting into Palantir? That was really saying, hey, who's working on a really hard problem that matters. And if you look at the time you had, you know, we were still post 9 11, we were still trying to overcome the false trade off between national security and being able to defend ourselves and also privacy and civil liberties. And people used to think that that was an impossible trade off and that seemed like a worthy challenge. We only have so many hours in the day. We should work on something that matters. And talent density was there. And I was just really attracted to that. And it helped. Having spent time deep in the bowels of an investment bank where you realize that humans are a very expensive piece of middle. And what if you could see all the data? You're supposed to see nothing that you're not. You can probably do a lot of great things there.
- [119:23]
B
Yeah. How'd you first hear about Palantir? What was your first day on the job? Like, who was around the table? I mean at this point people know everyone from Karp to Peter to Sham Senkar. Like Gary Tan's involved at some point. Like people, people know who's around the table. But what was your early, like first days in the job like?
- [119:42]
A
Totally.
- [119:43]
B
Well.
- [119:43]
D
But was introduced to the company actually through Joe Lonsdale. He brought me in and I was an industrial engineer by training, which means to my English major friends I'm an engineer, but to my engineering friends I'm an English major. So got pretty deep into the process at Palantir in the early days. There were probably 20, 30 people at the time. And Joe said, hey look, I actually think we're not ready for you. You want to go work with Peter Thiel and myself up at Clarium Cowboys Capital.
- [120:12]
B
Sure.
- [120:13]
D
So privileged to, to work there, learn a lot and fast forward. The company had grown to the mighty number of, I don't know, just over a hundred.
- [120:21]
B
Yeah.
- [120:21]
D
And Peter's like, hey, I think, I think they might need some, some help here. It's a great. And you know, it's really the mission that drives you. I was like, I don't know what I'm going to do. Maybe I'll sell software, maybe I'll talk to politicians, maybe I'll, I'll help with this finance thing. And I don't think I was very good at the first two, but the last one stuck. So just, just keep doubling down where it works.
- [120:40]
B
Yeah. What was the, what was like the day to day role like? Is it everything from just like financial control to putting together projections, thinking about burn rate? I imagine that the company wasn't wildly profitable in the early days. It was, it's known for being one of those like slower compounders and now is like one of the biggest companies in the world. But it took a long time to get there. What was that like at the early stages stage?
- [121:07]
D
Well, Palantir had its time in the desert. Right. Where it's the roughly four years of pre revenue large expense, you know, wouldn't exist without for, you know, basically Peter Thiel and the co founders just pushing through and, and bringing capital to bear. So what does that look like? And we, we see this all the time at, at companies now in our portfolio where you spend all this time in the desert.
- [121:29]
B
Yeah.
- [121:30]
D
Building things and then suddenly you realize, oh wow, we actually have a product here. And now we have a real business. What do we do? And finances, you know, at Palantir and today, something you, you wish you had yesterday once you realize you need it. And it was kind of one of these fire hoses that you keep your head down and build.
- [121:46]
B
What was the reaction like from venture capitalists around that time? Because there's, there's, there's like the, this is controversial to be working with the government at the same time. It's like it is an enterprise software company. It should be pretty easy to underwrite if you're an enterprise software venture capitalist, I would imagine, hopefully. But then at the same time you're out in the desert and so there's a little bit of like, is the company mature enough to underwrite this particular investment? It's not this like hot no brainer. It's kind of secretive, it's cool, but it's like behind the scenes. So what was the temperature in Silicon Valley around defense tech around that time?
- [122:23]
D
Yeah, well, first off, defense tech as a term didn't even exist. We got it way back. I met the company in 2007. Yeah. And joined in 2009. And we were very shy because no one knew what quite what to think of us. We were kind of in a Marvel team up of a bunch of superheroes that had weird peaks but also weird valleys and just kept our heads down and built really. In the earliest days, no one in the valley but for a small group understood what we were and we made every mistake from what they wanted to invest. Investing. Right at the time this was Facebook was cool. So you should be doing consumer, not enterprise. And if you were going to do enterprise, you should sell the big corporate. Well, we're going to actually sell to the government and well, if you're going to sell to the government, you should go hire a bunch of experienced operators and generals.
- [123:11]
B
We're going to go hire a bunch.
- [123:12]
D
Of 20 year old kids. So every single on the decision tree was we were wrong. And so that sort of pushed us out. And it really took building a great product and showing value to customers to actually prove to people that it worked. And it'd be great to see what.
- [123:27]
A
They'Ve been able to do as an investor. Now how do you try to underwrite teams that are still wandering in the desert? Because there's great examples and survivorship bias that happens when you have a team like Palantir that's wandering in the desert and then you find this, you find something that works and you can really scale out of it. But then I, I've, you know, I've ended up, I've invested in teams that stumble into the desert and never make it out. So it's not exactly, not a no guarantee that you're going to find, you know, some palm trees and water.
- [124:03]
B
Yeah. You find the skeleton drinking out of the whiskey bottle a decade later.
- [124:07]
D
Not, not everyone makes it out of the desert where we, we spend a lot of our time in the earlier stages here at Friends and Family Capital and we put a lot of our dollars once it's clear it's worth working.
- [124:17]
A
Right.
- [124:17]
D
So tech is one of those great businesses where when it works you can run and you can win a whole lot longer. So we're, we're happy to get involved and you know, you know it's kind of the forward deployed engineering model. We'll, we'll forward deploy, we'll help you. We're not going to charge you. Maybe we'll put 50, 100k small check in and, but we're really looking for those operational unlocks. When does it look like Palantir? We were there, I joined, we had about 5 million in revenue.
- [124:42]
C
Right.
- [124:42]
D
So you sort of 5 million revenue to 20 billion valuation. You see full stack back what good looks like. And so you're, you're watching for those inflections. What are some of those like getting a seven figure software contract is really hard. So if you see that, you should get pretty excited. Being in an enterprise and going from you know, let's say a million a year to 3 or 5 million a year like a, a multiple of the initial land, that's pretty hard. We get pretty excited. And I think the other thing is just what's the mission? What's the purpose? Why are people joining this company? Why is the, the, you know, many people say why is the 20th person, why is the hundredth person. I say why is the skeptical, you know, engineer when you're a thousand people going to join you? Fast forward why, you know, five years post ipo, why is the skeptical public market investor going to join you? It's got to be, you got to be doing something that's, that's worthwhile to dedicate your life to. So find a big mission.
- [125:32]
B
Yeah. How do you think about the relationship with the government? I keep, I don't know if this is true but I seem to remember that in Q Tel made an equity investment. This is the venture arm of the CIA very early on. And so you had this situation where Palantir's like customer is the government and, but the government is also on the cap table and we're seeing that today with intel. There's now the government's taking an equity position and it feels like this has never happened before. But then when I flash back I'm like wait, actually this, this isn't the rarest thing. There's a world where the capabilities that are brought to bear by Palantir exist within the US Government and yet the they don't. Like what, like how does that, how does that, how should like the American taxpayer think about the interaction between like public, like private companies and the government. Like when should the government be willing to invest? When should the government be buying a capability? It's always seemed like Palantir, the actual technology was something that could not be brought to bear with inside the government. Even though the government had a very clear set of requirements in front of itself. It needed to be go, it needed to be built in Silicon Valley.
- [126:44]
D
I mean enter software is really difficult and some people are, you know, hardware is difficult too. But building world class software to handle complex things is tough and often can be built better in the valley than you know, at the coal face. And I think Palantir is a good example of that. But we've got, you know, we've got many examples examples But I would push back and say you can't build great software or great business in an ivory tower. And I think one of the great things about Palantir and you've seen Anduril and we've got a company, Peregrine Technologies, they're really breaking down the barrier of saying we're going to go build it in an ivory tower and then we'll sell it and people will just use it. It's like no. If you think of a spectrum of product and services, everyone always put Palantir in the services bucket for the reasons we were misunderstood.
- [127:30]
B
Good.
- [127:31]
D
Really what you're doing is you want to capture the perfect value delivery of services. Right. You're solving one thing for one person that 100% solves their, their problem but you want to do it as a product. But the, the product roadmap, the traditional playbook says create distance from your customers, not create proximity. So Palantir was able to this is that forward deployed engineering model you hear a lot about. It's like you need the beauty happens when you get world class software talent that's willing to go deep into the, the belly of the beast. At the coal face. You're going downrange, you're sitting in an air gap network with a tie on when you're a silic and like and that's where you, you actually see what's the core problem. So we, we really, I think Palantir did that in spades. I look for that every day at friends and family.
- [128:15]
A
What companies shouldn't be using the forward deployed model because anytime something becomes a meme, then everybody starts applying it. It sounds, it sounds like it makes sense. This is the whole like, you know, Uber, Uber for dogs kind of meme. People were like, we're Uber for this. And it's like, wait. There's actually unique things that in Uber's sort of supply, demand consumer packaged goods.
- [128:39]
B
I want Andrew Huberman to come pour this yerba mate into my mouth or deployed caffeine salesman.
- [128:48]
A
Yeah.
- [128:48]
D
Well, it's funny. Yes, you should run. Anytime you hear someone pitch themselves as I'm the X for Y, just run the, the FD model. It's great in certain markets, it's terrible in others. The only reason Palantir could pursue anything with deploying is you've got to be solving a hard enough problem. Right. So you think of a world class engineer plus their equity dilution. I mean this is an expensive check. So you really have to be a capital allocator as, as a founder to want to pursue this model. So if you're selling things small and medium business where your average contract land is 20k, 100k or less, you shouldn't, you shouldn't look at this unless you're saying let's get out there, that's R D. Let's productize it and push it out. When you start to get up into those seven figure plus contracts that can support it. If you're doing eight or nine figure, it definitely can support it. But then even then you get people, people think they're doing it. So I love these conversations. I get probably one inbound, two inbounds every week of like, hey, how'd you do forward appoint engineering in the early days.
- [129:49]
B
Yeah.
- [129:50]
D
And you can understand if someone's in a position to build it by the questions they ask around it. So you'll get these like figuring out the footwork. What's the, what's the pre sales? What's the who, who does it pre sales or post sales? Is it customer success or is it sales AES? And like if you're looking at the, the FD model through that lens, you've lost the plot.
- [130:11]
A
Right.
- [130:11]
D
It's really like, let's start with first principles.
- [130:13]
B
How are you thinking about focusing the firm on stage or theme or sector. Do you have any kind of guardrails?
- [130:21]
A
Well, they already have a round named after them.
- [130:26]
D
What's funny on the round. So friends and family round. It's usually the early days when it's like a deeply consultative relationship and people who have your best interest at heart and want to, we'll, you know, do it and I don't know. But when we got to the later stages of, of building Palantir, right, it was there through the series K. The nature of the relationship changes with your investors around the table. So the ethos here in the name is how do you extend Jordy to your point, how do you extend that friends and family mentality and really partner and, and deliver and, and sort of live. Live your values, so to speak. Like, don't take board seats, be deeply consultative for. Deploy your finance people if they need help, all those sort of things.
- [131:02]
A
Things do do. A lot of gen AI companies need help with the finance function. We've heard. We had a, we had a, we had a video go viral because we had an investor on the show who made an offhand comment about account. She said, accounting rules aside, and a lot of people picked that up on X and we're dunking rules, in fact, do matter. But it was a part of a larger conversation and, but, but yeah, I'm curious, like, you know, what, what you're seeing out there in terms of people getting maybe a little too liberal in terms of like, what's, what's ARR, what's not ARR, all that good stuff, like.
- [131:38]
D
One of the core functions of finance, there's many. It's hygiene, right? It's hygiene, it's legibility. And if you lose that, then you're building your house on sand. So there's a very important part of the world for accounting for getting those entries right now you can disagree on the exact accounting treatment. You can do your, you know, your pro forma, here's your GAAP to non GAAP reconciliation. Every company has their own version of how they run the business. But it's helpful to have some standard way of looking at it. So I think you got to get it right. But really with finance, it's what's the past, what's the present, what's the future. And you've got to do all three. If you're running your business just on the accounting, you're going to have some trouble. If you're just looking forward, but you can't pay your bills on time or, you know, a pound. The, the cell phones in the Nordics went out because we, you know, the credit card bill that we paid didn't apply. You got to really hold that as a first class priority. And then on the future, like, there was times where it's like, hey, look, Sham who I know you've been on your program, the CTO at Palantir, it's like, look, we're going to hit our numbers this year and we're going to hit our numbers next year, but we got to do more pilots or we might have a problem three or four years out. And here's the data why. So finance has to do all of them. So it can't just be world class accounting, it's got to be world class everything.
- [132:53]
A
Lessons from Palantir's IPO that you think? I think now that the IPO window feels extremely open, God willing, it'll stay open forever. But any lessons from the Palantir IPO that you would advise a founder that's exploring opportunities in the public markets today?
- [133:17]
D
Totally. Well, first off, I was not the CFO taking it public. My dear friend who I pulled into the finance team, Dave Glaser, he's, he's the CFO and, and took it through there. And a lot of the team that joined and worked with us back in the day is still running the company, which, which is refreshing. And I think that's, you know, as, as you're getting ready for the public markets, I think you really need to be able to articulate like why you have a strong core business model. You have to back it up with data and you have to have a narrative that says, here's why it's going to keep going for a while. And we have a bunch of companies, you know, whether it's friends or it's in our portfolio that are at the scale where they could, they could go public. And I think you're seeing a lot of people start to weigh, you know, is the window open? Should I run through it? I think there's still some question marks depending who it is. But if you're, you know, you're operating at scale, you've got accelerating revenue growth, expanding free cash flow, margins, and a good narrative. I think we're going to see a lot more of that, which is exciting. But if you can't articulate your core business model, it's, I think the window's not open yet.
- [134:16]
A
So you got to keep building and that's probably helpful. Healthy.
- [134:19]
D
And that's healthy.
- [134:20]
B
Yeah. How are you thinking about opportunity in defense tech broadly? Right now? There's the meme of the Anduril for X is Anduril. Palantir is this compounder that's going to take a lot of market share and the ship has certainly sailed on a few of the really big companies. But at the same time there's a boom and people are starting to start companies in the space because there's more appetite from investors and it's more, more, more just accepted to hire people. What's your temperature check right now?
- [134:52]
D
Yeah, well, so been honored to be a part of some of the great names of that people now call defense tech. So Palantir, we've been investors in SpaceX since 10 billion anderil since around 4 billion built palantir. Those guys so love that the whole ecosystem is starting to develop. Back in the day there was no defense stack. I think what does the world think? The world needs a strong America, right? So Pax American I think is, you know, we can argue, debate this many people do, but I think it's good to, you know, to be able to back up at the. Hopefully we never have to use it, but just be able to negotiate and look, we need more of it. And I think you're also seeing the, the intel news from today. You're starting to see that hey, vertical integration matters. A saying we had deep in the bowels of pounds was trust no one's execution but your own.
- [135:39]
B
Right.
- [135:40]
D
And if you're beholden to someone else, whether it's on the supply chain or whether it's the value delivery to customers like the tail might wag the dog. And so I think it's great that we're starting to see more capital flow here. I think as with anything where you turn on the spigot, not everything is going to be the highest ROI project. But let's look at the other truth. If we do nothing, then we're certainly not at a local maximum. So we need to do something. I'm excited with the development.
- [136:05]
B
Yeah. There was a post by a founder talking about the state of defense tech. I want to get your take on some of this. The end user is not the buyer. In commercial, the person who uses your product often decides to buy it. In defense, the operator might love your system, yet it means nothing. The buyer is a program manager with a budget. The operator's endorsement is at best a data point, not a scalable purchase order. I don't care that some esoteric a drum played around with your product and thinks it's cool. It doesn't really matter. True, false.
- [136:36]
D
What's your Take you're hitting on this causes many sleepless nights, months, years at Palantir. Ultimately Palantir had to sue the US Army. You can go to Palantir versus US army for should you buy Cots versus Gotz.
- [136:52]
A
There's many that must have been a fun decision for you to be weighing in on the like how much do you spend on legal litigation is already expensive. Going up against your customer.
- [137:05]
D
It's not the preferred let's just say they don't teach that in a classroom. Look, I think enterprise sales is tough, but enterprise sales inside the government or any large institution is even more difficult. And there's a couple different things you have to do. And number one, you've got to create the facts on the ground. Right? That's, that's the mission winds that you're, you're referencing there. But that's not enough. It's. It's necessary but not sufficient at the other side. You have to go and, and make sure the decision makers know what to do. And then you can do a pincer and say all right, let's just move it and put some pressure on the middle. And I like to think of when is it riskier to not act than to act. So you're sort of creating this constellation where you can get movement. But the advice to anyone embarking on the defense tech journey journey is make sure you're very well capitalized because it's going to take you along. It's a long road to hoe and so make sure you can withstand it. I also think this is a point Sham Senkar at Palantir has made is you've got a dual source really helps because it can bring down that cost curve as you scale, especially if you're working with atoms and not just electrons. And that can help you survive while you're waiting for the door inside the government to open. Palantir would not have had a strong government business if it didn't have a commercial business and vice versa.
- [138:21]
B
On that note, Chris in this post says if you're pitching dual use, you're probably just unfocused. Real dual use companies are vanishingly rare. The example he gives is Palantir. Most that try end up with a watered down product. No real defense traction, no commercial fit. Pick a market. Do you disagree with that or does it just depend like what nuance would you add to actually understand if a company can meaningfully be dual use? Because you do see founders kind of bolting it on now that it's a little bit trendy oh, we have this thing. Yeah. And we also have an office in D.C. and we have one person who we work out there and. Yeah, how would you lay out, like, if a company can actually get the benefit out of dual use as opposed to it just being marketing?
- [139:09]
D
Well, it's easier to change lines of marketing than lines of code. So you gotta start out from a first principle and say, what is the thing that ought to exist, exist? And if you look at Palantir or any other class that's, that's built dual use, it's saying, I can build one product and with a little bit of customization at the end and just the end, then it can be sold to both for a very important but different reason. So an example, you know, also in our portfolio we have Astranis. Right. They're building Micro Geo satellites. Yeah, same, same. You know, broad category. There's a few tweaks, but. But who doesn't want the sovereignty over their data? Right? And so if you need that and you can sell it in a defense capacity, they've been down selected on $2 billion plus programs. So, you know, a lot of work to do. But that's exciting.
- [139:54]
B
We love those guys.
- [139:56]
D
And then, yeah, they.
- [139:57]
B
John's on the show. He's great.
- [140:00]
D
Yeah, he's great. And then like also on the commercial side, like, let's say you need, you know, more trunking and backhaul and a lot of telcos are turning to this from the disruption they're seeing in the market market. So I think that's one of those ones where they're not building two types of satellites. That's a terrible idea. But if you can build one thing and sell it to both parties, that helps bring down the cost curve.
- [140:16]
B
Fantastic. Totally Jordy. You have anything else?
- [140:18]
A
No, this is great.
- [140:19]
B
Thank you so much for taking the time to hop on. This is fantastic. We will talk to you soon.
- [140:23]
A
You're our new finance correspondent.
- [140:25]
B
Is that Sleeping Bear Dunes behind you?
- [140:29]
D
Close, but I'll tell you next time.
- [140:30]
B
Okay, you'll tell me next time because somebody in the chat said bullish on the painting of Sleeping Bear Dunes in the background. I was just trying to take credit for being identifying it, but I was wrong. Wrong because they were wrong. But anyway, we'll talk soon.
- [140:41]
D
Well, good to see you guys.
- [140:42]
B
Thanks so much.
- [140:43]
A
Thanks for coming on, Colin. Cheers.
- [140:44]
B
Bye. Bye. We have Truman Sachs coming on in a few minutes, but in the meantime, let me tell you about Adio Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and Grows your company to the next level. And you heard Dr. Drew talking about the importance of sleep. You got to get an eight sleep.
- [141:00]
A
Yeah. I mean I was like, we partnered with eight Sleep was one of our very first partners. We had the foresight to understand that if we wanted to do this for decades, we needed to sleep like champions.
- [141:12]
B
It really was one of those partnerships where it was like, this is going to be additive in like more than in many, many ways. Right.
- [141:19]
A
93. I probably back in the 90s, 7 hours, 47 minutes I put up. What did I do? Two and a half hours of deep sleep.
- [141:28]
B
83. 83. How did I do on deep sleep? One hour of deep sleep. Oh, no.
- [141:32]
A
You were an absolute mess this morning.
- [141:34]
B
I know. I was such.
- [141:35]
A
John showed up to the gym and so sleepy. I was like, wake up, dude.
- [141:38]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, we should do. We got to touch on the timeline and turmoil. Martin Casado said the idea that non consensus investing is where the alpha is is actually quite dangerous in the early stage. Follow on capital tends to be more and more consensus aligned. He's basically saying being contrarian is bad. Being consensus is good. I could not agree more. I completely agree. Consensus Consensus is amazing. Do you agree?
- [142:04]
A
He's not just right, he's on point.
- [142:07]
B
It's incredible. Tyler, do you agree? Yes, I think everyone agrees. Ben, do you agree? I think everyone agrees. Everyone agrees that agreement is good here? No, of course. This is. It's funny because the whole contrarian meme has become such a meme that it's now consensus to say that contrarian ideas are better. And so by saying that consensus things is actually contrarian. But of course the contrarian idea still holds. This consensus thing turned into momentum.
- [142:37]
A
John Chu went on the attack.
- [142:39]
B
Oh yeah. What he said.
- [142:40]
A
It sounds more like they overpaid for everything and their companies are struggling to raise. So he's asking for help marking things up.
- [142:46]
B
That John pose is hilarious because in his name is Khoslaventures. And so it hits as like a subtweet. So it's like going to war so much more progressively.
- [142:55]
A
It's not. It's not a great. Yeah.
- [142:57]
B
It's not a subs.
- [142:58]
A
It's a direct.
- [142:59]
B
Yeah, yeah. It's just a direct attack. It's a timeline and turmoil. But I mean, I just.
- [143:03]
A
I just like. I mean this was a way for the entire allocator community to signal that, hey, we're not packing for blackrock City. We're here.
- [143:13]
B
Oh, yeah, we're here. Debating, debating, debating whether or not we should do consensus deals or non consensus or stick to the non consensus ones.
- [143:23]
A
There was a really funny post earlier. I don't know if it made it into the timeline, but there was this somebody who had created a restaurant and they were complaining. They were like, my, my food is so good. It's all farm to table. I don't know why people aren't going, I'm only making $50 a day. And somebody quoted it with like a picture of PT. And then the excerpt from 0 to 1 where he's like talking about, you know, British food in San Francisco and how you can have the best British food.
- [143:52]
B
Yeah, it's highly competitive.
- [143:53]
A
Yeah.
- [143:54]
B
So, yeah, the Martin Casado post, there's a little back and forth. Leo Polowitz says, if you consider the top few dozen highest alphabets of the last 10 to 15 years, what fraction would you say were consensus versus non consensus @ early stage? Martin Casado says, I suspect more consensus than not. And Keith Raboy chimes in and says, OpenAI was non consensus. Scale was non consensus. Stripe was non consensus. Wiz the C round, I guess was Not Ramp DoorDash, RH, Robinhood, Canva, Figma all being non consensus. He gets quote tweeted then by Martin Casada. Yes, Keith, you're right. I'm very sorry. You're very original. And it's an AI image of Keith Roboy saying, I'm so original, I moved to Miami.
- [144:40]
A
I like how he was kind of dunking on Keith, but Keith looks fantastic.
- [144:44]
B
He does look diced here. He looks really good. But that's the nature of the AI. Like, nice picture, nice picture. Yeah. But the other thing is, like, is like, like moving to Miami was contrarian. Like, that was not. That was not a consensus thing at all. So I don't. He really is. Was. That was a very original idea to try and build a tech company in Miami. Like, and that's the nature of the, of the contrarian. And like the non consensus bets is like, yeah, sometimes you get a lot of wild bets.
- [145:12]
A
You want to be consensus among the contrarian investors. Investors with elite returns and non consensus with the consensus investors.
- [145:21]
B
No, I actually have distilled it. You want to be greedy when 145 IQ people are greedy. You want to be fearful when 101 IQ people are greedy. That's the real move.
- [145:33]
A
That's the play. Yeah, we've cracked Venture.
- [145:35]
B
Yes, that's it. It's fine to be hyper memetic as long as you're hyper memetic with a genius and you're copying a genius. Genius. This is like the Nancy Pelosi stock trader or something. Anyway, if you're trying to trade some stocks, get over to public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi asset investing industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions when you get on there. Remember, be greedy when others are fearful and be fearful when others are greedy. Do your own research. Make some good investments, folks.
- [146:02]
A
Well, we should pull up this launch video from our next guest, Truman. Let's pull up the who announced Cubby Law today? Let's pull it up, let's react and.
- [146:14]
B
Then we'll bring in Truman Sachs from Cubby Law. You shared it in the group. Let me tell you about bezel while we're pulling that up, your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Go to getbezel.com.
- [146:32]
A
And here's Truman. Welcome to the show, Truman.
- [146:35]
B
No, stop. Let's play this. And how you're graded depends entirely on your professor. But most students study with generic outlines and flashcards, not the materials they're actually. Cubby is the first AI teaching assistant for law students. Trained on your professor syllabus, past exams and student outlines. So your case briefs match how they teach and your practice exams mirror how they test. It's like having your professor tutor you every night.
- [147:04]
D
Learn the law, master your professor and.
- [147:06]
B
Outperform the curve with Cubby. Good set design too. I love it. Well, welcome to the stream. Truman, how you doing? Welcome from the restream waiting room. You are muted Ultra dome.
- [147:17]
A
No, you're good. You're good. Here you.
- [147:19]
B
Now we can hear you. I think we're just being noisy.
- [147:21]
A
What's up?
- [147:22]
B
Congrats on the launch.
- [147:23]
A
Haven't seen you since workout Phil was six months ago.
- [147:27]
B
It's true. Yeah, it was about six months ago.
- [147:29]
F
I know. I like every morning I'm like, damn, I wish I could steam with the boys today.
- [147:32]
B
Yeah, yeah. Next time you're in la, come hang. It'll be fun.
- [147:35]
A
Every day. Every day. And you were telling us about. You were telling us about this play.
- [147:39]
B
Yeah.
- [147:40]
A
So it's great to see it launch. Thank you, man.
- [147:43]
F
I'm excited for it to go public.
- [147:44]
B
Yeah. Break it down for us. What are you launching? What's the pitch? And what kind of led you to this particular submarket?
- [147:51]
F
Yeah, great question. It kind of dates back to a conversation you and I were having with Senator Genre a few years ago. Now when we have that Runyon hike.
- [147:59]
A
Yeah, you're Telling me how like Runyon Hike where great stories begin. Runyon Canyon Canyon, Runyon Canyon in and.
- [148:08]
B
Out, a couple influencers doing Runyon.
- [148:12]
F
We got stopped like every second.
- [148:14]
B
It was crazy anyways.
- [148:18]
F
But no, I mean, John was talking about this idea that just like there are power law people, there are also power law books. It's a Coogan idea right there. And zero to one is the we both agreed is the business power law book. And there's a quote which I think kind of defines my personal operating philosophy, which is like the perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors. So I think that sums up the law school industry in a shell. Law school is three years. It's curve based, so everyone's stacked, ranked against each other with public ranking rankings. And it's like directly correlated to the job you get after law school is how you perform with your grades. So like big law firms, everyone's vying for the same big law jobs after law school, which pay like 220k out of pocket like first year. And there's only a limited amount of.
- [149:05]
A
Them and they're 225 a day. Yeah, the AI research market is.
- [149:13]
B
If you don't make that, start chasing ambulances, bro. That's what happens. Seriously, it is a knockout drag out fighting long school. Got to get to the top of the ranking.
- [149:23]
F
But no, yeah, it's crazy. So like everyone's competing each other because there was like, everyone knows there's public rankings. Like you're either at the top of your class or you're not. And the firms see that and that's what they're recruiting off of. So the mindset of the consumer is that of like, I will invest in my future. Like, anything that will help me do better in school is an investment and I will spend money on it. So it's a really like powerful lever to tap in as a, as a business. You're right to tap into that market. So what we built was like the first AI teaching assistant lawsuit students. We've trained the model on thousands of practice exams and case sweeps written by a top Georgetown law student who just graduated. And we built an entire experience that's almost like a duolingo style course that calibrates all the material that's specific to your course and your professor all the way through the final exam. So you could take unlimited final exams in practice throughout the semester, get instant grades, feedback, and it's all kind of built to mirror exactly how your specific Professor. Professor would like teach it.
- [150:16]
B
Great.
- [150:17]
F
Because that's who decides your grade.
- [150:18]
B
Yeah. Well, what's the business model then? Do you, do you want to sell to the law school? Sell to the law students.
- [150:23]
A
Just take like 30 of their lifetime earnings. Yeah, don't worry about the business.
- [150:27]
F
We have like a really aggressive terms and conditions.
- [150:31]
B
Lambda school is doing ISAs. Income.
- [150:33]
A
That wasn't lifetime. That was. No, no, no.
- [150:35]
B
But income share agreements.
- [150:37]
A
But I think those are. I think those aren't kosher anymore.
- [150:39]
B
Yeah, it's always true. Tricky. Anyway. Yeah. Who are you going to. Who's actually putting down the credit card? So.
- [150:45]
F
Good question. Right now, like, funny enough, there's already an existing tool in this market from 2007 called Quimby. Everybody or everybody in law school, like ask 8 out of 10 law students, they buy Quimby for 30 bucks a month. So there's around 120,000 law students in the US per year. And like they're all spending 30 bucks a month on this software from 2007. That hasn't changed. It's like a static company for like Cliff Notes for case law, effectively. So we plan to come in as like a 10x better replacement for that and think that like our tool versus theirs, like just shape, like the decision will be obvious.
- [151:14]
B
Sure.
- [151:14]
F
So that's kind of coming in what we're trying to strip up initially and then over time, like we've already had some interest about like partnering with schools themselves.
- [151:20]
B
Yeah, yeah, like that. How do you see the top of funnel? Like how do you reach a.
- [151:24]
A
There's so many, there's so many fun things that you can do on campuses to make sure that you cannot go to law school without knowing about drone show.
- [151:34]
F
Well, as we speak right now we have hundreds of law students at. From Cordoza Law at a Cubby cafe truck outside of the campus. Yeah, exactly.
- [151:44]
D
We had free coffee.
- [151:45]
F
Yeah, free coffee. Papa bagels, ice cream. So that's like an on campus approach for this week.
- [151:51]
A
I'd like to do branded Adderall.
- [151:53]
B
Dude, low key. Do not do that.
- [151:58]
A
Do not do that. I'm sure there's. I'm sure there's the telematic medicine company.
- [152:04]
B
No, the Cubby care package. Controlled substance specifically. You cannot do that.
- [152:09]
F
But it's just so funny because this industry is run by like, like legacy, like these like massive bar prep companies. Like our biggest got acquired a few months ago. And like the second we launched like a small TikTok like of just like what we're doing, we got seasoned assisted by them just like, like, hey, like we, we think you might be training on our materials. Like, and if you are, like, we're gonna come after you. But like we're not sure. So we were just like, fuck off. And they're like, oh yeah, yeah, we're sorry. Like we're going to counterser you for these anti competitive practices. So it's an interesting like sleeper market that I like, I think is an interesting wedge as well to go deeper intellectual law, like legal tech space as well. Because once you have that relationship with the customer, you know they're the future lawyers of America.
- [152:48]
B
Sure.
- [152:48]
A
You should prove how well the product works by personally countersuing.
- [152:54]
B
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Pass the.
- [152:57]
A
I learned it all with counter.
- [153:00]
B
It is particularly difficult to pass the bar without going to law school. There's one loophole where I believe you can mentor under a lawyer and they can say that you're allowed to, but in general you cannot take the bar and pass it just because you did the studying. You have to be in a law school. Accredited. Yeah, it's all control, the number of lawyers to drive up computers.
- [153:23]
F
Well, maybe we'll open our own law school at this point for kids who just are fed up with the traditional stuff.
- [153:28]
B
Yeah, there's like one online law school or there's only a few like that actually let you do it in this particular way. Like it's very like hacky. It's a very tightly controlled like market in general.
- [153:39]
A
Sounds like you tried to hack it at some point.
- [153:40]
B
I did. I actually, if there's a system, I did, John will try to hack. And I emailed a guy who did it and he was just like basically credential maxing and he, and he was like a lawyer, a doctor. And he figured out how to do all of these things because he was really smart and he could take tests really well. And so he just went around and got like law degrees, but figured out the minimum time, maximum amount of money. So you pay a ton of money to do this, get all the test prep and then take the test. And I was like, well, did you wind up using the law degree ever? He's like, no, but it's a flex. Yeah, it's a flex. It's a flex. And I was like, I like this guy. I should email him, get him on the show. Yeah. Anyway, how big is the actual market? Are you going to go like venture meg around like Harvey style or. Or is this more something that you want to grind out for for a long time and you think you can just like find a great wedge, great business and then maybe if there's like a secondary market that opens up, then that's the venture territory.
- [154:36]
F
Yeah, great question. So the legal education market is five years. It's from LSAT bar, like you mentioned.
- [154:42]
B
Yeah.
- [154:42]
F
120,000 plus people going through that every, every year. And I think the average like customer spends over, over, over five years, $5,000 on like supplemental spend.
- [154:52]
B
Yeah. Supplement.
- [154:52]
F
So take that times the time. You're looking at like a billion dollar. Just education work.
- [154:55]
B
Sure, sure, sure.
- [154:57]
F
But at the same time like, so I, I do think bar and LSAT's kind of where we take it next, that we could see some like meaningful AR growth from there. But I, I just, I'm really excited about this concept of like we, we know in the age of AI everything is like distribution and like what kind of like moat and competitive edge do you have on, on the customer acquisition side? And like it's so difficult to break into legal tech. Like I don't think that's why we see so many rappers in the legal tech space because, because it's just like such an old guard and you need enough connections, you need to have specialized models. The bar for quality so much higher. And I think if we really entrench ourselves and establish ourselves as a meaningful player in law school, like I said, every single one of these players are going to the big law firms next. And I think if we're able to kind of create that relationship with them, help them start building practicing legal research in their breaching classes while they're in law school, they're going to get used to that flow just like they got used to Google Docs and brought that to them to work with them. So I do think there is a really interesting play to kind of like continue with the, the customer to the workforce that I think we'll try to angle for.
- [155:57]
B
Makes sense. Are you playing to somebody?
- [155:59]
A
Taylor? In the chat? This is not a, not a PC.
- [156:03]
B
But that's going wild right now.
- [156:05]
A
They said Cubby branded one one and a quarter by one and a quarter Ziploc baggies for, for maybe the associates after they moved to New York.
- [156:13]
F
Cubby event at Marquee on Saturday nights.
- [156:17]
B
John actually threw the horse emoji in the chat. Is there plan to do horse branded merch. You know, huge into horsepower, please. Oh, you got horse noise on there.
- [156:25]
A
Of course.
- [156:26]
F
I don't know if you guys see that on my wall.
- [156:27]
B
Oh yeah, there you go. Anyway, so great catching up with you. Thanks so much for hopping on.
- [156:34]
A
Yeah, great to see you. Congrats on launch.
- [156:36]
B
We will talk to you soon. Good luck with the rest of the rollout. Talk to you soon. Bye. Let me talk about Juan.
- [156:43]
A
Find your happy place. Find your happy place.
- [156:46]
B
Book a wonder with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 247 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. But anyway, Paula Rambles says every day in SF is an opportunity to discover a new type of guy, eg this guy in a holographic Ferrari with a pet duck and a very loud chihuahua dressed up as a chicken. So the duck is real.
- [157:08]
A
The duck is real.
- [157:09]
B
The duck is real.
- [157:09]
A
But the Chihuahua is a dog.
- [157:12]
B
Not as this is wild.
- [157:14]
A
We got to get this guy on the show. I'm assuming he already listens to the show.
- [157:18]
B
I hope he made his money in enterprise SaaS.
- [157:21]
A
That would be incredible.
- [157:22]
B
It has crypto written all over it. But it could be driving business value with vertical integration or something, I don't know.
- [157:31]
A
Well, on Friday, Alexander Wang announced a partnership with Mid Journey to license their aesthetic technology for our future model models and products. Bringing beauty to billions and David Holt says bring sublime tools of creation and beauty to billions of people is squarely within our mission. Excited to partner with the titans of industry to make this happen. How much do you think they are paying to license Midjourney's tech?
- [157:54]
B
I have no idea. Has it leaked or no?
- [157:56]
A
No, I'm just purely speculating. I mean I would go out and guess that it's hundreds of millions of dollars.
- [158:04]
B
Yeah, I mean I would imagine it's priced based on like inference. Right. It's probably like some margin on top of like Midjourney's inference infrastructure. And I believe Midjourney was fantastic at optimizing inference. Early on they were known for because the images take a minute to generate latency, actual latency like to the data center doesn't matter. And so if you're in America and you're generating an image on midjourney that that generation will happen halfway across the world in a data center that's at not peak load. And so they're basically always moving. Allegedly. I have no idea if this is true. I just heard this on the podcast one time. But they're allegedly moving inference around the globe to find pockets of available compute to do the inference. And I mean I think the Mid Journey models are so good they should should be able to do a ton of optimization, bake it onto a chip at some point, who knows but it's certainly like having midjourney in Instagram makes so much sense.
- [159:06]
A
Yeah, 100% agree. The reason this feels like, I would say the Mid Journey team and David, I'm sure they're not interested in flexing some big number on timeline. Meta at the same time doesn't care to have a number, another massive deal even be announced. But this feel in the way that licensing the. Think about when we've been hearing technology licenses in the sort of AI wars, these end up being, you know, Google paid a billion dollars, billions of dollars to license Windsurf.
- [159:39]
B
Right. And so what do you think, Tyler? How do you think the Mid Journey partnership will play out with Meta and.
- [159:46]
A
They might need to rename because this is anything but a Mid Journey.
- [159:53]
D
Yeah, it's definitely interesting.
- [159:54]
A
David, he also replied to that post.
- [159:56]
D
He said we remain an independent community backed research lab with no investors.
- [159:59]
B
Yep.
- [160:00]
A
So we just now have hundreds of millions of suckbucks coming in.
- [160:04]
B
I mean they, I'm pretty sure they.
- [160:05]
A
Have hundreds of millions of subscriber dollars. Yeah, I know, that's what I'm saying. Like they have to be underwriting this against like, well, we could just go get a bunch more customers.
- [160:12]
B
Yeah.
- [160:13]
A
So I imagine that Zuck had to back up.
- [160:16]
B
Yeah, it's very interesting. I heard David Hulse's secret sauce described as just pure taste. So they would train a model, they would look at the different benchmarks and evals and what was performing and he would just look at the images and be like, we're using that model, it doesn't matter what it says. Basically. Yeah.
- [160:36]
A
I mean it's hard to do really.
- [160:38]
D
Good benchmarks in, in diffusion models, like when you're generating visuals or video or stuff like that.
- [160:44]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think you kind of set up like a gan, like a generative adversarial network where you have one model that's trying to detect is this a real image or a fake image, and then you have another. So you're generating a bunch of. You take a bunch of real images and you take a bunch of AI generated images and you keep training the AI generated image generator until the detector can't detect that it's fake. And then you have something that produces real images. But I think his goal has been I don't just want to create images that look real. I want to create images that look good.
- [161:14]
D
And so, yeah, and there's definitely, I mean you can see even like different Mid Journey versions. There's definitely like a style that you can like almost it's not like immediately, obviously you can say like, that's midjourney V5 or something, but there is like.
- [161:25]
B
A vibe, I mean, images in ChatGPT, it was like clearly nailed Ghibli's like, out of the the park and was probably like RL to some extent, like on that or like optimized for that a little bit. And it was a great user experience and it was a good decision. But the flip side is that Midjourney's kind of gone for like, their own style and it's great. Yeah, very exciting. I mean, Jordy, have you heard the story of David Hull's first company, Lean Motion?
- [161:50]
A
Oh, it's fantastic. I think you've told it before.
- [161:53]
B
Crazy, crazy story. Yeah, I probably told it. I made a whole video about it and stuff. But basically it was a point projector that would track your hand in 3D space so you could pair it with a virtual reality headset to detect hand motion. And so you could actually put it using this aftermarket 3D printed device like on the front of an Oculus and then it could track your hands doing hand tracking. And I believe that there was a plan rumored to sell the company to Apple and Apple had already like printed welcome packages to the to the Leap Motion team. And then I think at some point the deal fell apart. Maybe that was because David Holes didn't want to work at the company or something happened and the deal fell apart and he wound up moving on. But then like took clearly like all those learnings, everything he had studied, and transferred all of that over to image generation when the first image generation boom started and then just absolutely found a rocket ship opportunity with midjourney. So fantastic, fantastic story, Very excited that they're partnering.
- [163:07]
A
And then the other story that we should cover, I don't want to miss it. Elon Musk's XAI sues Apple and OpenAI alleging that are quote, monopolists. So Elon in the team going to legal war. Musk says the partnership between the two companies has given chat GBT maker access to billions of user prompts.
- [163:27]
B
Interesting.
- [163:30]
A
So Elon Musk's AI company XAI sued Apple and OpenAI Monday, Monday, alleging the companies are illegally thwarting competition for AI companies. The lawsuit says the iPhone makers part partnership with OpenAI makes the startups ChatGPT, the only gen AI chatbot that benefits from billions of user prompts originating from hundreds of millions of iPhones. That enables OpenAI to use the prompts and feedback to improve its model, a significant advantage according to the complaint. The suit also says Apple is deprioritizing the apps of competing chat bots and app store rankings.
- [164:00]
B
Is it really billions of user prompts? That, that is crazy. So I've tried to use ChatGPT prompt. I like ChatGPT. I use it a lot. I have it on my home row. I also, I try and trigger it with Siri. Every once in a while I'll go to. I'll press the Siri button and, and bring up Apple Intelligence, which is Siri. And I'll. And I'll ask it a question and then I'll go open the Chat GPT app and type in my actual question because it does not work. I just had this happen where I asked Siri to calculate the hypotenuse and series triggered to calculate the hypotenuse of a triangle with a right triangle with sides that are like 18ft. We need to calculate something in the studio here. And it just says like the hypotenuse is equal to the Pythagorean. It just didn't. It didn't answer the question at all. And then I just had to go over ChatGPT and have it actually do the math. So there's ways to trigger it, but like, I would just be shocked if people if like your average iPhone.
- [164:59]
A
I'm sure they're just counting in this lawsuit count. Counting all people that have downloaded the ChatGPT iPhone app.
- [165:05]
B
Oh, you think it's that?
- [165:06]
A
Yeah, I don't. I don't think it's because. Not. It's not because. Gabe Azar, who said earlier he has 15 lawyers in the Azar family, says yet again, lawyers stay winning with these pointless cases. The lawsuit says. In a desperate bid to protect its smartphone monopoly, Apple has joined forces with a company that benefits that most benefits from inhibiting competition, position and innovation in AI OpenAI monopolists in the market for gen AI chatbots. An Apple spokesman didn't immediately respond to request for comment. Apple has previously said the App Store is designed to be free of bias. And the company has defended the fairness of its partnership with OpenAI. Apple executives have said they will only partner with what they see as the best products to provide the best user experience.
- [165:49]
B
Yeah, so I believe the. I believe The Apple open AI partnership on routing Siri queries to ChatGPT is no monetary value exchanged either way. Which is interesting because you could see, you could make an argument that both of them would pay because Apple would be better off if I had ChatGPT kind of installed Natively within Apple Intelligence. And then simultaneously ChatGPT benefits from getting more users from Apple ecosystem. So I believe that it just netted out where they don't pay each other at anything. But if you're, if you're Xai and you want that relationship, you could go and say, I'm going to pay potentially and maybe pull it away and say, hey, now, now Mac is coming to Apple Intelligence. Might be a hard sell.
- [166:39]
A
Yeah. I mean, the challenge here is I think the brand Apple can defend just based on the kind of content that, you know, I don't see Apple putting XAI or Grok at the top of.
- [166:55]
B
Even the adult content.
- [166:57]
A
But I do think that Apple's never been adult content. They've just never been XAI has it as should fairly. Should. Should be able to request that Siri route to Grok.
- [167:08]
B
Yeah, totally.
- [167:09]
A
Right. A user should be able to.
- [167:10]
B
Yeah, I mean you can do that. That the long term scenario, I'm pretty sure you can go and select a different search engine for your safari default in iOS. You can say, I'm a Bing guy and I want it to route to Bing and it will do that within the Bing army.
- [167:25]
A
Does that.
- [167:26]
B
Stop talking down on bing, they made 4 billion a year or something. Was it more?
- [167:30]
A
I think it was more.
- [167:31]
B
Was it 16 billion or something?
- [167:32]
A
Yeah, it was some crazy number.
- [167:33]
B
Yeah. And so you could imagine that. Yeah, you should at least be able to do that. And that's certainly not a feature. And so I don't know. Anyway, yeah, the chat.
- [167:43]
A
The chat is saying the Grok army wants to route Siri to route through to Ani.
- [167:50]
B
Yeah, it's the worst time to be named Ani, I suppose. Anyway, congratulations to our buddy John Fiorentino. These pictures, he says, are about 10 months apart. First picture was the test. Second is the condition.
- [168:02]
A
Pull this post.
- [168:02]
B
You can move faster than you think. Experiment, find the spark, explode it.
- [168:07]
A
Drink. Volta.com I went, I went. Yep, roughly 10 months ago. I went and got vaulted.
- [168:14]
B
Vaulted.
- [168:16]
A
John had a setup outside of Jeans in New York. The product worked honestly, potentially too well. I was, I was, I was jacked up after it. But he has his flagship in, in Nashville now and seems to be packed every single day.
- [168:34]
B
So God wills it is the phrase.
- [168:38]
A
From Theo Saw how quickly Elon is spinning up data centers. He said, why can't I spin up a flagship, a Volta flagship in Nashville in months?
- [168:46]
B
Let's do it. It's been a huge success.
- [168:49]
A
Dax said, my wife's water broke, so she went to download an App to time her contraction. I grabbed her phone out of her hands. What are you doing? Don't you realize we live in the age of personal software? We downloaded Replit and Vibe, coded the Perfect app with three JS and Supabase. We're naming the BA the Baby Grok High 2025.
- [169:10]
B
I put this in here, and I only. I only read the first line. And so I thought it was going to be like a meditation on, like, actually, like, staying in the present during, like, a beautiful moment in your life.
- [169:20]
A
Yeah, I put. I put this in there. I'm glad you didn't actually read it.
- [169:24]
B
That's really funny. I love it.
- [169:26]
A
Yeah. This is a good post from Andrea. Productivity is a spectrum, and this we basically have picked a side.
- [169:36]
B
Yeah, I got the Diet Coke here. I eat McDonald's.
- [169:39]
A
I spent the weekend in my sauna and cold plunge with my.
- [169:43]
B
Oh, you're on the left.
- [169:44]
A
I'm on the left.
- [169:44]
B
I'm on the right.
- [169:45]
A
You're very. I've even bat. I'm an investor in Magnet.
- [169:47]
B
Oh, you are? Okay. Yeah. I mean, I pull from both sides. I pull from both sides. I like Huberman Lab. I like the sauna. I won't shy away from a monster Chipotle burrito bowl. I do a little bit of both. Never get into the heart. Stop over. Don't like that.
- [170:03]
A
Get in the middle. The middle is the.
- [170:07]
B
Yeah, yeah, a little bit of both. Everything in moderation. Including moderation, folks.
- [170:12]
A
Okay, so pull up this President or sorry, not president. Picture of the Oval Office. We have.
- [170:18]
B
Wait, do you want to start with.
- [170:19]
A
No, we should start with what it looks like today.
- [170:22]
B
Today. Today is the third one it looks like.
- [170:25]
A
Yeah. So this is the Biden Oval Office versus the Trump Oval Office.
- [170:30]
B
One forward is the Biden Oval Office, I believe, and probably every Oval Office for the past, like, three decades. Pretty standard. Comfortable, muted. It's opulent, but not over the top. And then if you switch to the next shot, you will see Donald Trump has really, really brought back the 17th century touches.
- [170:53]
A
Yes.
- [170:54]
B
With gold accents everywhere on every surface.
- [170:58]
A
Floor to ceiling.
- [170:59]
B
Floor to ceiling gold.
- [171:01]
A
I like how he added those trophies. Like, I want to know what the trophies are for.
- [171:05]
B
It used to just be some leaves.
- [171:07]
A
And then semiconductor world champion Edwin.
- [171:09]
B
Edwin says when a millennial becomes president and it's this ultra minimal design that is. It hits hard. That is a standard. That is the standard issue luxury apartment or living space these days for everyone.
- [171:25]
A
First millennial president is gonna be wild.
- [171:29]
B
Yeah. Maybe we go straight to Zoomer. I've said for a long time I want a president with stamina. Someone who can just pull an all nighter with his boys and solve the problem, monitor the situation. Anyway, Lala says there's no such thing as taste at the signal level. There's only personalization and variance. When LLM outputs look tasteless, it's a sign of the app not having the right user model or not having tuned the output variety. Well, let's go to our taste expert, Tyler Cosgrove. Do you believe AI can have taste?
- [172:06]
D
Maybe not right now, but the post just seems like, it seems like obviously wrong. There's that good Paul Graham post where he's like, is there good art? Or like can't can is like, can you. Is there an objective like good art?
- [172:19]
B
Yeah.
- [172:19]
D
And like obviously there is because some artists are better than others, right? Because like I'm a worse artist than whoever maybe. And like who's a better artist? It's if you make better art, which means there must be better art. So like taste is the same thing. There's obvious, there's objectively good taste.
- [172:38]
B
Taste, because I would say there is good taste. I would say there is not objectively good taste. There is subjectively good taste. But I believe that subjective things are true. I believe that money is a construct, it's an idea, it doesn't have intrinsic value.
- [172:58]
A
There's many people that would say that Trump's Oval Office is of poor taste, but to him it's the highest of high.
- [173:05]
B
Exactly. Exactly. And yet I believe in things that have an unobjective quality, a subjective quality.
- [173:14]
D
Do you think there's objectively like good art and art that is better than other art?
- [173:19]
B
I think that there is art that is better than other art, but I don't believe that it is objectively better.
- [173:24]
A
Okay, do you think?
- [173:25]
B
I don't believe. I can quantify.
- [173:26]
A
John's been bidding on the banana tape to the wall, by the way.
- [173:31]
B
I'm not a big fan of that one, but of course I think that there's some art that's better than others, but I would not say it is objectively better.
- [173:39]
D
Do you think Michelangelo is objectively a better artist than me?
- [173:44]
B
Maybe. There's certainly the ability to instantiate the art is an objective quality. A certain person will be able to make a functional vase on a pottery wheel and another person will fail at that. One person will try and draw a person. It will look more photo real. But that's not the only thing that I see art being like Michelangelo did not paint The Sistine Chapel himself. Right. He had a team that did that. I'm pretty sure. I don't know. We'll have to look it up. Grok, is this real? Chad, is this real? But.
- [174:18]
A
Well, more important than this.
- [174:19]
B
But I do think the two things are separate and I think the taste is different than the skill. Skill set.
- [174:24]
A
Can we. I want to get onto some more important topics. Can we pull up this post of Doge employee big balls repping 225.
- [174:34]
B
Wait, really? Oh, that's who that is. I saw the picture. This is great. I saw. It's Edward Korostein. Is that who that is? Recovery.
- [174:46]
A
Yeah.
- [174:48]
B
This is Mr. Balls. Wow.
- [174:50]
A
Just repping it out.
- [174:51]
B
Looking great too. Good form. He's not. Five points of contact. Okay, but.
- [174:57]
A
But coming off strong men create good times.
- [175:00]
B
Happens to me. Wow. And this is of course a response to the. The mayoral candidate in New York City, Mamdani, who was seen potentially not being.
- [175:10]
A
Able to Big balls running.
- [175:12]
B
But it's possible that he just had an over eager spot. Spotter.
- [175:16]
A
We're unclear, but he didn't look super comfortable under there.
- [175:19]
B
Yeah.
- [175:20]
A
He had to go to a dark place for those reps. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He knew. He knew when he stood up that he was cooked.
- [175:26]
B
But I. I don't understand why. How he wound up in a situation. He seems very calculated in what he films. A lot of it's very cinematic.
- [175:32]
A
Apparently there's other angles of it. He was resistant to doing it.
- [175:38]
B
Oh. He got kind of like. Yeah. Got talked into it. Oh, okay. That's rough.
- [175:41]
A
Yeah.
- [175:42]
B
That's a bit of a catch.
- [175:44]
A
I forget who was posting. Somebody was saying like the real shrewd political. Like if he had taken a step back and said, you know what, this is going to be hard for me. But together we can do anything. Let's rep this out. The city of New York.
- [176:00]
B
Let's socialize. The weight. I want two guys.
- [176:02]
A
I want to distribute the weight.
- [176:04]
B
Everyone weigh 10 pounds with me right now. And we're good.
- [176:07]
A
Yeah.
- [176:07]
B
Anyway, Nikita Beer went to Starbase. It was one of the perks of being executive at X. I spent the day at Starbase and never really understood the scope of what's happening here. It's a modern day Manhattan Project. An entire city built for the singular mission of going to space. Rows of 1950s ranch homes, a couple of restaurants, a grocery store. Hovercrafts. Shuttling people around on water. I didn't know they had hovercrafts there. That's awesome. And launch pads and rocket factories. Everywhere. He shares a beautiful picture of himself looking up at the starship, which I believe did not launch. Is that right? Or it did launch and it was not successful, but obviously.
- [176:44]
A
No, it didn't. It didn't launch.
- [176:46]
B
They scrapped. Yeah, they aborted the launch. But of course, the machinery at Starbase is unrelenting and I think they're gonna get that thing up there eventually.
- [176:57]
A
They will. Yeah. The video. The video that Elon showed of inside the factory just showed this, like, incredible scale.
- [177:04]
B
Yeah. Yeah.
- [177:06]
A
Well, I have a post we can end the show with. Buco Capital says this is from last night. My timeline tonight you need extremely concentrated positions. 10 Bagger thread bet heavy on consensus. Stupid to have cash because bear markets are so short. Cyclicals pitched as secular winners. They're going to run it hot. Careful out there. And Zoomer. Zoomer, the legendary Zoomer who is zooming on Chinese tech says Max levered long. All in tech, bucko. And of course Zoomer is going gigalong.
- [177:39]
B
How do you even end up at PDD and 4? I genuinely don't get it.
- [177:44]
A
You got to have them on the Great debate. Zoomer vs. Buko.
- [177:49]
B
Zoomer vs. Unk. Debate.
- [177:51]
A
Buko Unk.
- [177:52]
B
Oh. Starship is set to launch today. 2 hours and 20 minutes till launch.
- [177:55]
A
Oh, wow.
- [177:57]
B
I'm really for it. Never bet against Elon, baby. He's gonna get that thing up there eventually.
- [178:03]
A
Well, thank you for tuning in. Fun show today. Always great when we can get the doctor to drop on. Always a fun show. I cannot wait for tomorrow. We're working on getting somebody to call in from the Playa, folks. So working on it. If you are listening to this from Black Rock City City, let us know. We'd love to get some live coverage.
- [178:25]
B
The trophy in the White House in the Oval Office is the number one president trophy self glaze. Thanks for hanging out, guys. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good day.
- [178:35]
A
We love you.
- [178:36]
B
See you tomorrow.
- [178:37]
A
Good evening. Goodbye.