J.P. Morgan Goes Patriot Mode, Dutch Seize Nexperia, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions | Alexis Ohanian, Ryan Petersen, Serena Ge

Summary

TBPN Podcast Episode Summary

Episode Title: J.P. Morgan Goes Patriot Mode, Dutch Seize Nexperia, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions | Alexis Ohanian, Ryan Petersen, Serena Ge
Date: October 13, 2025
Hosts: John Coogan & Jordi Hays
Featured Guests: Alexis Ohanian, Ryan Petersen, Serena Ge

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Overview

This episode of TBPN delivers an energetic rundown of today's most pressing technology, finance, and geo-political news with John and Jordi's signature mix of sharp insight, irreverence, and meme references. The main focus areas include J.P. Morgan's massive new "patriot mode" investment plan aimed at US industry, the Dutch government's dramatic seizure of Chinese-owned chipmaker Nexperia, the evolving AI hardware and infrastructure arms race, timeline reactions and market volatility, and hands-on insights from industry leaders Ryan Petersen, Serena Ge, and Alexis Ohanian.

The episode also touches on shifting international trade dynamics, strategies for social media growth, the intensifying compute wars (Nvidia, AMD, Huawei), regulatory moves in the US and Europe, and broader cultural themes rippling across both the startup and tech investing communities.

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Major Segments & Timestamps

1. Opening Banter & Media Attention (00:00-04:51)

• TBPN’s growing profile after mentions in NYT and "Cheeky Pint" (Charlie Songhurst & Marc Andreessen)
• Hilariously self-deprecating comments about the show’s absurdity and war to bring tech news to LinkedIn
• Media strategies, content repurposing, and hiring for social media growth

Quote:
“We are trying to grow our LinkedIn. If you want to help us on our war path to bring technology news for the first time to LinkedIn and educate the unwashed masses... come help us.” —John (02:12)

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2. J.P. Morgan’s $1.5 Trillion “Patriot Mode” Initiative (04:51-09:41)

• JP Morgan announces a ten-year, $1.5 trillion plan for national security and economic resilience
• Breakdown of targeted sectors: critical minerals, advanced manufacturing, defense tech, energy resilience, AI, and quantum computing
• Jamie Dimon's bullish comments on US strategic vulnerabilities (quote below)
• Speculation about OpenAI’s role in absorbing some of this capital

Quote:
“It is painfully clear that the United States has allowed itself to become too reliant on unreliable sources of critical minerals ... America needs more speed and investment. It also needs to remove obstacles that stand in the way: excessive regulations, bureaucratic delay, partisan gridlock...” —Jamie Dimon, as read by Jordy (06:19)

Market Impact:

• MP Materials up 23% on rare earth news
• General optimism around “we’re so back”

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3. U.S.-China Trade Volatility & AI Hardware Wars (09:41-15:07)

• Recap of recent market volatility and new tariffs targeting Chinese goods — Ryan Petersen of Flexport joins for trade insights
• OpenAI’s new 10GW-of-chips deal with Broadcom raises Broadcom’s stock, underscores sector’s scale
• Reflection on current leverage, retail trader psychology, and “Zoomergate” (crypto kids using wild leverage; meme-ified)

Quote:
"Literally every person I interacted with this weekend was like, I lost 20% of my net worth on a 2% move. What is your strategy here?" —John (12:57)

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4. Gong Show Lore & Timeline Culture (16:22-18:24)

• The origins of TBPN's “size gong” for wild market or tech news moments
• Deep dive on content format experiments and the evolution of the show's brand

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5. Dutch Seizure of Nexperia (18:24-24:08)

• Dutch government takes control of Chinese-owned chipmaker Nexperia over national security fears
• Compares US and European approaches to strategic industries and state intervention
• Discussion of escalating US-China-EU semiconductor rivalry, catalyzed by rare earth trade restrictions

Quote:
“This seems way more aggressive than the Intel story … and in Europe, the Dutch are just like, we’ll take it all.” —John (22:37)

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6. Meta, OpenAI, and the Compute Arms Race (24:08-28:31)

• Industry rumors: Meta offering $3.5bn for Thinking Machines’ Andrew Tullock (missionaries vs. mercenaries in AI)
• Analysis of foundation model talent wars and what it means for AGI
• AI hardware allocation strategies (TPUs, GPUs), leasing models vs. large capex spend

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7. Global Supply Chains, Trade, and Customs Fraud (29:37-38:59)

• Ryan Petersen (Flexport) on how tariff uncertainty, customs fraud, and rapid regulatory pivots are impacting US importers and multinationals
• Challenges of reshoring manufacturing; comparative disadvantages/gaps in US industrial policy
• Use of Import Genius and prediction markets (Polymarket) for real-time supply chain/market intelligence

Quote:
"I only have one rule: I'm never going to jail." —Ryan Petersen (36:11)

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8. Mega AI Cloud Wars & De-risking Strategies (41:01-56:15)

• Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and cloud capex (leasing vs. buying, Nvidia/AMD’s shifting chip economics, energy constraints)
• The “barnacle economy” — layering startups on rising foundation model tides
• Nick at OpenAI, Seb at Nividia, discussion of leasing GPUs, value decay, and Satya Nadella’s strategy
• Notable call for the US government to fund benchmarking Huawei compute chips on semiAnalysis’s Inference Max

Quote:
“My take from Inference Max is that AMD and Nvidia are not as far away as people thought ...” —John (73:24)

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9. Markets, Generative Media, and Social Media Trends (56:21-67:19)

• Weekend market/tech timeline chatter: liquidation memes, sleep scores, Apple iPhone gripes, and the LinkedIn chat room goes live
• Rise of generative social media apps (e.g., Meta’s Vibes vs. Sora by OpenAI)
• Notable reactions to changing user norms (Snapchat, Kylie Jenner’s comeback, retail-driven memestocks, and retail trading on natural gas)

Quote:
"It makes absolutely no sense, but it's true… befriend yourself.” —Guy (63:42), on why people give better advice to friends than themselves

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10. Guest Interview: Alexis Ohanian (91:00-122:01)

Key Topics:

• The business of women’s sports and Angel City FC: “Over three and a half million people tuned in this year spectacle.” (92:46)
• Early-stage investing, the “barnacle economy,” and the next phase of consumer AI: “I love barnacle economy. That is a good meme.” (97:47)
• Social media “dead internet” theory and the craving for real, group-chat-fueled live content
• The future of gaming and hardware: “I have graded video games. This is my art.” (114:38)
• AI companions, child safety, and next-generation interfaces (voice-first, AI-powered toys)
• TikTok’s “frozen innovation” amid regulatory chaos and post-acquisition speculation

Quote:
“I think we'll see a new generation of social media that's verifiably human ... because it's all going down in the group chats now.” —Alexis Ohanian (98:15)

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11. Guest Interview: Serena Ge, Data Curve (148:55-156:07)

• YC founder (dropped out at 18), building a data-labeling platform focused on high-skill coding data for AI labs
• Differentiation from Scale AI via bounty-based, gamified “cracked” engineer community
• Discussion on platform pipeline, developer experience, and upskilling

Quote:
"I don't think any high skilled software engineer wants to be a data annotator … so you have to pay them a lot on contract ... We do a bounty based system for these very cracked people. They're having fun, making money, and upskilling." —Serena Ge (153:53)

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12. Notable Timeline & Meme Moments (Throughout)

• Calls for “size gong” hits (JP Morgan; Baron Trump on TikTok's board; new models of insider trading)
• Viral posts: jungle gyms, the rise of mod retro gaming, cameo features, McChicken sandwich inflation outpacing S&P500, and boar-hunting drones
• Discussion of Mr. Beast, meme stock generations (natural gas, Nvidia/TSMC/ASML/SK Hynix), and attention economy shifts
• Peter Thiel One Piece/“Antichrist” meme discourse: “You never want your name appearing in the same sentence as ‘Antichrist.’” —John (172:16)

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• “Be my banker and just do every deal up and down the stack and finance my entire supply chain.” —John, re: OpenAI pitch to JP Morgan (07:35)
• “Every single dollar that I've saved and invested over the last decade is gone.” —Jordy, on levered retail betting & crypto wipeouts (12:37)
• “America needs more speed and investment. It also needs to remove obstacles that stand in the way...” —Jamie Dimon, via Jordy (06:19)
• “This seems way more aggressive than the Intel story ... In Europe, the Dutch are just like, we’ll take it all.” —John (22:37)
• "I only have one rule: I'm never going to jail." —Ryan Petersen (36:11)
• “Barnacle economy—so many of the whales are so big that even if you’re a barnacle, you can go zero to a hundred million in a couple years.” —John (97:24)
• “Some people are sticking to their mission—others have a price, it's just 3X what the other guy would have paid.” —Jordy (27:04)
• “I use AI as a kind of executive coach for emails or notes. There’s some version of that that I think is interesting and compelling.” —Alexis Ohanian (119:45)

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Closing Thoughts

With candid commentary from founders and investors actively shaping the market, this episode delivers practical and philosophical insights into tech’s shifting balance of power—from national security to the AI arms race, from retail trader meme-omics to the “barnacle economy” of startups serving giants.
Real-world anecdotes, sharp timeline reactions, and in-depth guest interviews highlight both serious and comic aspects of the new technological order.

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Additional Noteworthy Timestamps

• Ryan Petersen joins: 29:37
• Alexis Ohanian interview begins: 91:00
• Serena from Data Curve: 148:55
• High-comedy meme section (grain of the show): Throughout, strong at ~175:00

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Episode Takeaway:
JP Morgan's “patriot mode” signals aggressive US re-industrialization; the global chip/rare earths war heats up; US/EU state intervention is growing; and despite new volatility, scale players and barnacle startups alike are forging ahead, fueled by capital, compute, and an ever-shifting culture of “authentic” engagement—whether onstage, in group chats, or in Reddit run clubs.

Transcript

[Jordy]

You're watching TVPN.

[John]

Today is Monday, October 13, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let's go.

[Jordy]

We survived.

[John]

We got some media attention. That's right. We were mentioned on Cheeky Pint. Charlie Songhurst and Marc Andreessen chatting with John Collison on Cheeky Pint. You probably saw it over the weekend. Of course, we were talking about the New York Times. We were on the COVID of the Sunday business section.

[Jordy]

Thank you to Mike Isaac with the Gray lady came out and it was beautiful.

[John]

A couple scratches. A couple scratches.

[Jordy]

Thank you to Mike Isaac for coming to the Ultradome, hanging out with the whole team, trying to understand the absurdity of this show. We had a lot of fun and it was funny. The digital version of the article came out at 2am Pacific on Saturday.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

And I ended up waking up.

[John]

Yeah. What's your sleep score? What's your sleep score for that night? Because.

[Jordy]

Oh, it was pretty brutal actually.

[John]

A bunch of text messages from you and Dylan at 3 in the morning. You guys clearly read it.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

Woke up and read it.

[Jordy]

Yeah. I got a 43.

[John]

Whoa. That's. That's New York Times for you, baby.

[Jordy]

Yeah. So pretty, pretty rough. But I thought it turned out great.

[John]

It's good. We got a ramp mention in there. Time is money save both easy use, corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. We also got a poly market mention in there. This is why you advertise on tvpn. We'll get you mentioned in the New York Times.

[Jordy]

But yeah, it was fun article.

[John]

Yeah, it was good. But there is bigger news than us. Bigger news than our war to bring SportsCenter to LinkedIn. It's actually funny.

[Jordy]

It's funny. Can you imagine the real LinkedIn heads that are gonna read that article?

[John]

Be like, these guys don't take understand the culture. They don't understand.

[Jordy]

They don't represent us.

[John]

They're on X. They're bigger on X than they are on LinkedIn. These guys are fake LinkedIn heads. No. We are trying to grow our LinkedIn. If you want to help us on our war path to bring technology news for the first time to LinkedIn and educate the unwashed masses on LinkedIn as to the nature of technology. We'd love to have you join the team. We're looking for a social media manager. Someone to help with growth. Someone to help post and reach repurposed content clip also do new.

[Jordy]

It looks like some hybrid. Somebody that enjoys writing.

[John]

Yep.

[Jordy]

Enjoys the content of the show. And wants to basically repurpose the show's content for the LinkedIn feed.

[John]

Yep.

[Jordy]

It sounds. I think it is a lot more fun than it sounds.

[John]

Exactly.

[Jordy]

You get to hang out here at the Ultra Dome every day.

[John]

You have to view these platforms as like large systems that you can kind of understand how to optimize within them. And so on YouTube, you know, there's the title, the thumbnail, there's this whole game of like what the current thing is on YouTube. Like if you do an interview with Mr. Beast, you're just going to get a ton of views on YouTube. That's not the case on X. We'd love to have him on the show. It'd be fun. But it's not going to be our biggest draw. Somebody like Rune will be a great draw on X, but probably not on YouTube. And LinkedIn is similar. We do a lot of content that does do well on LinkedIn already, but there will be specific pieces of the show. So you have to work to figure out what's working. And then how is their algorithm changing? How is their content structure changing? The medium is the message that's very real. And so you have to deliver content that fits within that, whether it's the vertical short form or the long posts or. I hear AI is extremely popular on LinkedIn. So maybe you have to take our authentic content.

[Jordy]

Slopify.

[John]

Slopify, Exactly. That might be the key to success. I don't really care what the key is. Obviously we do have brand standards, but we want you to come on and explore what works, find interesting niches of strategies that work. We've done this on Instagram, we've done this on Facebook.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

I mean, the main thing is, yeah, it's very much an art and a science. It's also your job is not to post. Your job is not to just deploy content against the feed. Your job is to experiment and understand the platform better than anybody else.

[John]

Understand the culture of the platform. Exactly, exactly. And we've done that with a lot of things. We've had fun with our substack. You can go subscribe tbpn.com and I think we wound up coming up with a unique product in email. It's a daily letter with a. With one, you know, 500 word rant.

[Jordy]

By me, with some timeline and then.

[John]

Some timeline posts and there. And like, you know, everyone has an email newsletter. There's a lot of email newsletters out there. We still wanted to carve out something unique and we want to do the same thing on LinkedIn. So please come help us.

[Jordy]

And then obviously, well, you know who understands the culture of American dynamism?

[John]

Restream, IO of course. One livestream, 30 plus destinations, multi stream and reach your audience wherever they are. No. Who? Tell me.

[Jordy]

J.P. morgan. J.P. morgan. At 3am Pacific announces a $1.5 trillion security and resiliency initiative to boost critical industries. Let's give it up for JP Morgan for saying the biggest number.

[John]

This is the biggest number we've heard.

[Jordy]

We'll make direct equity investments of up to 10 billion as part of the $1.5 trillion Initiative to address pressing needs in key sectors from critical minerals, minerals to frontier technologies.

[John]

So do they just have 1.5 trillion laying around?

[Jordy]

It's a 10 year plan to facilitate finance and invest in industries critical to national economic security and resiliency. As part of the new initiative, JPMorgan Chase will make direct equity and venture capital investments of up to 10 billion.

[John]

That's a lot. These are direct equity, so growth equity. So I mean that's like an Andreessen sized or I guess Andreessen 65 billion or something a little bit more.

[Jordy]

But it's like Aum.

[John]

Yeah, Aum for some of the big funds, like a General Catalyst or a lightspeed. Like I feel like a lot of the, a lot of the big venture funds are managing in the tens of billions now. Maybe something like that, certainly. So they're saying we're getting in the game. Watch, watch your back.

[Jordy]

So Jamie Dimon says it has painfully clear that the United States has allowed itself to become too reliant on unreliable sources of critical minerals, products, manufacturing, all of which are essential for our national security. Our security is predicated on the strength and resiliency of America's economy. America needs more speed and investment. It also needs to remove obstacles that stand in the way. Excessive regulations, bureaucratic delay, partisan gridlock, and an education system not aligned to the skills we need. So they are going to be focused on supply chain and advanced manufacturing, including critical minerals, pharmaceutical precursors and robotics, defense and aerospace, including defense tech, autonomous systems, drones, next gen connectivity and secure communications, energy independence and resilience, including battery storage, grid resilience and distributed energy, and frontier and strategic technologies including AI, cybersecurity and quantum computing. You have to wonder if Sam gave the hard pitch to Jamie and said, I know you were planning to give that one and a half trillion to a few people. I happen to have announced partnerships that require about one and a half trillion of capital. He's basically just like, why don't you just not announce?

[John]

Just be my banker and just do every deal up and down the stack and finance my entire supply chain.

[Jordy]

Of course, I'm sure OpenAI will directly or indirectly get some of this investment.

[John]

There's a lot of stuff in here, a lot of categories that are pretty cool and we've talked to a lot of founders in these spaces. Very exciting. Noticeably absent, the luxury watch industry. Are we not focused on that? Is Bezel the only company that's holding the line on luxury watches? I mean, I guess some of the bulk materials could be strategic diamond storage for iced out pawtacks. That could be the solution, definitely. But you can go get a [e-mail] your bezel concierge is available now. Source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Anything else from this? I mean, is this moving the markets? Is this why we're so back? Did you see the market on Friday? Yeah.

[Jordy]

I mean, MP materials is up 23% today, but again, there's other stories out there, including the broader story around rare earths.

[John]

Yeah. The Nasdaq is up 2.2% today. We should have worn white suits. What were we thinking? You know, Friday was, Friday was rough. The NASDAQ sold off almost 3%. But I think it's good because for the last two weeks everyone has been saying it's a bubble, it's a bubble, it's a bubble, it's going to crash. And then it did crash on Friday. The bubble popped. People were expecting the bubble popped on Friday. And now we're out of the trough of disillusionment. We're in the plateau of productivity now. And so we can stop saying it's a bubble because the bubble popped. That was Friday. Now we're ready to build again. We're ready to move forward. It's time to build. Now. Of course, the Friday news was driven mostly by tariffs and a lot of back and forth with China. We have Ryan Peterson joining in just 20 minutes to talk about, talk about.

[Jordy]

How Donald Trump, how much sleep he's getting, who is an actor, is almost a character in Ryan's personal movie that is just sent to torment him by announcing massive new trade wars every other month. In other news, OpenAI is partnering with Broadcom to deploy 10 gigawatts of chips designed by OpenAI. Sophie, aka NetCap Girl on X said AI won't peak until Broadcom starts getting hyped like Nvidia. That might be today. Broadcom is up another 10% on this news, even though we already sort of. This had already been basically announced. So broadband.

[John]

Let's go, baby.

[Jordy]

It's so funny if you went and just on the street and asked people, do you think Broadcom or Tesla is a bigger company? How many people would pick Broadcom? I don't.

[John]

It is at 1.68 trillion. Yeah, yeah. We got to turn hock tan into an Elon level meme. He'll be like, I bought this network switch before the hock tan went on. Tbpn, something like that. I don't know.

[Jordy]

Stefan in the chat says, what do you think Trump's sleep score is? That's a good question. He must be sleeping like four hours a night.

[John]

Yeah. Is today's rally like a taco trade? Right. Is that what's going on or has there actually been news on like the tariffs?

[Jordy]

Yeah, I think over the weekend.

[John]

That's what I want to talk to Ryan about.

[Jordy]

Yeah, over the weekend. I think it was a misunderstanding.

[John]

Okay, okay, okay.

[Jordy]

Like, both sides have kind of backed off.

[John]

I mean, immediately. It was remarkable how resilient. You know, we talk about the resilience of the American consumer, but the resilience of the American retail trader is deeply underrated. I had interactions with multiple retail traders over the weekend who immediately were like, so this is a good time to buy the dip. Right. It's like everything should be like flashing like, this is the start of the end. This is the crash of all 1920.

[Jordy]

I was thinking, what if the catalyst for AI sell this AI sell off was just Trump?

[John]

This could be the beginning. It's such a terrible. It's such a viscerally terrible. You're hearing stories about bitcoin trading down 10% a day.

[Jordy]

Yeah, I was just see how many people were. Were so levered.

[John]

Yeah. I had no idea this was a thing. I mean, usually like when I see the market trades down 2%, I'm like, okay, I'm like 2% poorer today or whatever. Like, I feel like I'm like roughly indexed to the market, not like heavily levered either way. And I feel like my business is 2% rougher or like 2% better.

[Jordy]

Yeah, there's just like these shots from like, read it. But a lot of people are being like, I. Every single dollar that I've like saved and invested over the last decade is gone. Yeah, like you didn't have like, you love bitcoin so much that you didn't just put like a few bitcoin in a wallet?

[John]

Yeah, no, no.

[Jordy]

Like I'm not going to lever.

[John]

No, no. Like, literally every person I interacted with in the real world over the weekend was like, I lost 20% of my net worth or something. I'm like on a 2% move. Like, what's what, what is your strategy here? But a lot of people are risk.

[Jordy]

Bitcoin sold off like 10%. 10%?

[John]

Yeah. So you're just. Just a modest 2x levered Bitcoin as the core of your strategy.

[Jordy]

Yields aggressively. Zoomer. That was extremely count on Ax Zoomer, who we featured on the show. He, like Thursday night was saying like, hot take, like leverage is the only way out of the permanent undercloud or something like that. But he got $10,000 from Nikita's personal fund.

[John]

He levered up well, yeah, we'll go into Zoomergate and the backlash to the backlash to the backlash in just a second. But if you're trying to get in on the action or protect what you got, you got to do it on public.com investing for those who take it seriously. Multi asset investing. Interested in yields trusted by millions. So you can say, I've had enough with all the volatility. I'm going cash only. I'm going only. Whatever you want. You can do it on public.

[Jordy]

Not on public, over on Hyper Liquid. Two accounts were created Friday that shorted bitcoin and ended up successfully making around $200 million on these, like very. No, not. Not the. Not the insider trading size gong, John. Easy, easy. We'll find another reason. Hit the size gong for JP Morgan's one and a half trillion. Hit it a few times. We are not going to do the size gong for insider trading.

[John]

We don't know. Alleged insider trading. We don't know. Maybe that person was just smart.

[Jordy]

We can hit the size gong for Baron Trump potentially getting the nod to be a board director over TikTok.

[John]

That's actually pretty sweet. And that one makes a lot of sense to me because he's young. TikTok has a young audience. You want young blood in these environments to actually innovate and create good products. I'm sort of bullish on that, but.

[Jordy]

And he earned it, right?

[John]

I mean, he understands.

[Jordy]

He'S generated billions.

[John]

He genuinely understands social media. Like a lot of people do. Ascribe, like the Trump podcast run to him. And him being like, you gotta go on Theo Vaughn and Trump being like, who's the Ovan? And Baron being like, trust me, like, he's good. You got to go collab with this streamer. Like a lot Of a lot of social, A lot of aggressive social media risks that many politicians wouldn't do beforehand. But Baron actually said, you know, he was going to do it. There was something else about the insider trading. Well, yes. So just because two people got the trade right, doesn't mean that it's insider trading. Because on any given day there could be two random people that are just short bitcoin. You know, like, that just does happen. Like, I bet there's two people right now who are short bitcoin who are not having a good day because bitcoin's back up. Right. And so like there is just like an amount of like, you know, the lucky, like someone gets, you know, you know, double sixes or whatever. Or whatever.

[Jordy]

The casino. Yeah. Every day there's people. But. But this was, this was suspicious.

[John]

It was suspicious that it was like a new wallet, a specific two new.

[Jordy]

Accounts created and then just massive, massive.

[John]

And that's only, that's the only thing they did.

[Jordy]

Yeah, okay.

[John]

Yeah, that's a lot.

[Jordy]

Yeah. And they immediately cashed out and.

[John]

Okay, no size gong for them. Oh, speaking of the size gong, are you aware of the Gong Show?

[Jordy]

No.

[John]

So it's interesting. There's been a number of pieces written about TVPN and many of them feature the gong and talk about the gong. None of them actually the main character in the show, none of them actually talk about the Gong show, which was a show in the 70s where it was a. I think it was like a 30 minute hour long show or something like that. It was basically like America's Got Talent. So it was a talent show. You'd come on, you do. Are you looking it up? It's so rare.

[Jordy]

I'm just laughing because it sounds like every startup that gets announced these days, it's like, oh, we're making a show. What should we call it? Oh, I don't have a creative idea. We should just call it the Gong Show.

[John]

The Gong Show.

[Jordy]

No, we should call it the Browser Company. Browser company was creative to their credit.

[John]

Yeah, they were the first ones to do that. But the Gong show was a talent show and they had a huge, huge gong. Maybe even bigger than ours. And basically. Yeah, you can see it. Yeah, it's about, it's about our size.

[Jordy]

Interesting mallet size.

[John]

Huge mallet. Yeah, they're, they're definitely. We need to upgrade the mallet for sure. And so the whole, the whole trick with the Gong show was that they would bring someone on and they'd be like, okay, I'm gonna play the flute. Or I'm gonna do a dance or I'm gonna tell a comedy routine. And they had a whole bunch of like celebrity like judges. And if the judges didn't like the performance at any moment they could stand up and just hit the gong and that would be like get out. Like you're done. And so it's like a game to like not get the gong run as opposed rung as opposed to us where you want the gong.

[Jordy]

Maybe, maybe we should.

[John]

But maybe we should.

[Jordy]

That's actually.

[John]

We have an interviewer, an interview guest on here. Getting a little boring. You're going to hit the gong and production team's going to cut to the next post. Maybe that's the end state for the show is that we just say get out of here with this boring AI take. Tell us something new. Tell us something interesting.

[Jordy]

Negative Bobby says negative gong hits is crazy.

[John]

Negative gong hits.

[Jordy]

You're out of here.

[John]

Yeah, you're out here. Well, privy wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions and integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API.

[Jordy]

There is some news out of the Financial Times. Yes, the Dutch government takes control of Chinese owned chip maker Nexperia.

[John]

Okay.

[Jordy]

And terminally online engineer says they did it and it's Gert Geert Wilder saying we have an unserious problem.

[John]

Is that a real post?

[Jordy]

This was a real post.

[John]

That was a real post.

[Jordy]

That was. That he made.

[John]

About what?

[Jordy]

What? Referring to we have an unserious problem refers to a viral post on X in January 2024 by Dutch politician Geert Wilders and the response by English speaking users who found the similarities between Dutch and English languages entertaining.

[John]

Yeah, of course. What was the serious problem at that time? What year was it again?

[Jordy]

Mid January 2024.

[John]

2024. What was going on then?

[Jordy]

I don't know.

[John]

That's hilarious. But this doesn't seem like a serious problem. This seems like news for like good. This seems like good news, right? The Dutch government seized control of one of Europe's biggest chip makers which was owned by China and Dutch. And the Dutch just say, hey, it's ours now, we're nationalizing it. I mean it seems like China should be saying they're having a serious problem because they want to have a chip maker and now they don't. Right? That seems like it seems like a rough go for them. But I guess next period Chinese operations will be in jeopardy because if you just seize a company that's operating in like if America was just all of a sudden like Nvidia is owned by the government, well then that, like Nvidia's research lab in Shanghai I think would probably be not a great place to be.

[Jordy]

Yeah, it's also just, it sets, it can set off a wild chain of events. So I'll read through some of the Financial Times. This move escalates frictions between Western countries in Beijing over access to high end technology. We love high technology here. The Dutch government has taken taken control of Chinese owned semi company nextperia, warning of risks to Europe's economic security after alleging. Alleging serious government governance shortcomings at the company. In a statement on Sunday, the Dutch Ministry of Economic affairs said it acted because of a, quote, threat to the continuity and safeguarding on Dutch and European soil of crucial technological knowledge and capabilities. On Thursday, China placed sweeping restrictions on the exports of rare earths used in products from cars to wind turbines. The Dutch ministry said it invoked the country's Goods Availability act because of, quote, recent and acute serious governance shortcomings and actions at Nexperia, which is based in the Netherlands and has been majority owned by Chinese technology group Wingtech since 2019. The decision aims to prevent a situation in which the goods produced by Naxperia would become unavailable in an emergency. That seems.

[John]

Serious problem. Serious problem.

[Jordy]

I asked Gemini to translate the Geert's original post. It just says we have a serious problem with the political developments regarding the Coercion act and I hope that can be solved in the coming days.

[John]

Boring, boring. Well, thank you, Gemini, newest sponsor of TVPN by the way. Check them out.

[Jordy]

Anyways, Naxperia produces chips used in the European automotive industry and consumer electronics. So anyways, Vincent Karamons, the Dutch Economy Minister, can now block or reverse decisions taken by Naxperia's board. His department acted on September 30th but only made its move public on October 12th. So again, I don't know. Right. Anytime you just start seizing, obviously it's going to prevent Chinese companies.

[John]

It seems way more aggressive than the intel story where, what was it, 10% stake by the US government? Something like that. And immediately in America we were all debating, is this socialism? Have we taken a private company? Are we actually letting the free market work? Should the US government be playing kingmaker in the semiconductor industry? It was a really complicated issue and I wrestled with it personally. And over in Europe, the Dutch are just like, we'll take it all, I guess. I don't know.

[Jordy]

Yeah, well, I don't think they're not seizing the asset they're taking. They're not saying this is ours now. They're taking control over it. They have Odd Wingtech, the owner of Nexperia, that on September 30, the Dutch government had issued an order requiring Nexperia and its global subsidiaries not to make any adjustments to their assets, intellectual property, business operations, or personnel for one year. That seems like a big request. The following day, three top Naxperia executives with Dutch and German nationality submitted an emergency request to the Amsterdam Court of Appeal to intervene at the chipmaker. The court immediately suspended the powers of Chief Executive Zhang Xuzhong, and then they suspended him from his position as CEO.

[John]

Anyways, Europe's been on a tear. You saw the big new end.

[Jordy]

I just want to know. It's really. I feel like, impossible to form a take here without understanding what the catalyst was, because we know that, but we know that nobody steals more trade secrets than China, and so there's probably something going on behind the scenes here that we just don't know about.

[John]

Yeah, yeah. What was the real motivation? We'll have to dig into it. Well, in other European news, Europe's new big AI spending plan is still only 30% of what Meta just purportedly paid to hire Andrew Tullock. This was news over the weekend. Andrew is the co founder of Thinking Machines.

[Jordy]

Poached.

[John]

Poached to Meta for allegedly three and a half. Allegedly three and a half. The number that kind of leaked was what, 1 point something? 1.5.

[Jordy]

That was the original number that he turned down.

[John]

That was the number he turned down. What do you have on this, Tyler?

[Tyler]

Yeah, I mean, so I think it was somewhere in the summer, maybe, like, July. There was the rumors of him turning down 1.5 billion. Everyone's like, oh, my gosh, this is so crazy.

[Ryan Peterson]

He's scared.

[John]

That is crazy.

[Tyler]

Must be a true believer in think machines. Yep. And then. Yeah, and then people. Now people are saying 3.5 is the number, but even then, that's just like, the only thing I've seen. Where that number is is just on the timeline.

[John]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It seems like full, full rumor at.

[Jordy]

This point, but I saw it in group chats. You're like, at least a rumor.

[John]

Equally unreliable, as my least reliable friend texted it to me as well, based on what he saw in the timeline.

[Jordy]

But, yeah, I think it's funny, Andrew getting the offer for one and a half billion over the summer, being like, you know, thank you for the offer. I'm really honored that you have so much faith in me. I'm gonna stick with my principles. I'm gonna stick it out with my team. I'm gonna stay true to the mission we just raised.

[John]

I'm a missionary, not a mercenary.

[Jordy]

I'm a missionary, not a mercenary. We just raised $2 billion to pursue our vision. And thank you a lot for the offer and look forward to hopefully collaborating in the future. Mr. Mark Zuckerberg. Two months later, Zach's like, how about three and a half billion? He's like, let's ride.

[John]

Anyways, Tyler, does this trade deal make you more or less AGI pilled?

[Tyler]

I mean, so. So Thinking Machines is already, like, not very AGI pilled.

[John]

True.

[Tyler]

So maybe it's actually more AGI pilling. Right? Because Andrew Tullock, maybe he is super AGI pilled. He's seeing what's going on in Thinking Machines and saying he needs a scale. This is just not enough. I need more.

[John]

Yeah, he needs more compute.

[Tyler]

Maybe. Maybe it's. I think this is more AGI pilling.

[John]

He saw the Prometheus plant. Yeah, I want that.

[Tyler]

The other thing is, like, okay, maybe he just thinks that the bubble is about to pop and he needs to, like, actually, he needs, like, chairs.

[Jordy]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's notable. The lesson is everyone has a price, which I think the industry's known forever. It just turns out that the price is oftentimes, in this case, three times higher. What most people's price would have been.

[John]

Windsurf had a price, they went to Google. But of course, the products stay with Cognition, one of our sponsors. Cognition's the makers of Devon. Devin is the software AI software engineer Crush youh backlog with your personal AI engineering team. We also have Ryan Peterson joining from Flexport. Does he have a price? Would he join TBVN full time for three and a half billion? Would you do it? Would you become. Would you become. Would you become a mercenary for three billion?

[Ryan Peterson]

Right.

[John]

Three and a half billion. You have to go. You have to walk out of your office and say, I'm sorry, everyone. I'm becoming a podcaster.

[Ryan Peterson]

Oh, I think I could join you guys and run Plexorize. Sorry.

[John]

No, no, no. It's a life's work mission. You have to be full time. The offer is contingent. You wouldn't do it. You'd stick around. That's great. You are a true missionary. Give me the lore again on your take on missionaries versus mercenaries in the AI wars. What does history teach us about whether you should build an army of missionaries or mercenaries? Because I feel like some people are going both ways on this.

[Jordy]

Right before you joined, I was just joking about Andrew Tullock from Thinking Machines over the summer being. I'm just imagining what the exchange with Mark was. But I'm a missionary. I'm really honored that you would give me this one and a half billion dollar offer. It shows massive faith in me. But I'm gonna stick with the team, stick with the mission and I hope we can find a way to collaborate. And then and Zuck circles back with three and a half billion and suddenly it's like, all right, I think we're in business here.

[Ryan Peterson]

That lowest rumor, three and a half billion.

[John]

Three and a half billion is the rumor. Yeah. Wild.

[Jordy]

Wow.

[Ryan Peterson]

Well, yeah, Machiavelli was the one who wrote the most about mercenaries and how useless they are when it comes to actual fighting. I think about this more in the context of Zuck's security team than I do in Tanta and his AI engine. Like when the bullets start flying, are these guys ready to take, you know, take one or are they going to run away?

[Jordy]

Well, to Andrew's credit, he was at Meta for 11 years.

[John]

Yeah, he is just going home.

[Jordy]

He's going home.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Small, small price to bring to bring him home.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

How was your weekend?

[Ryan Peterson]

Great. Great. Well, I'm here in Southern California, not unfortunately I can't visit you guys. I'm in Palos Verdes. We're having the Flexport customer conference start starts tonight. So been practicing my big talk tomorrow we're releasing a whole bunch of new technology and.

[John]

Customers at this point is I imagine like 100% of the Flexport team. They have to be missionaries, not mercenaries at this point because every day you could wake up to a 1000% tariff on your entire business. And if you're a mercenary, you're going to jump ship. So I imagine the team is kind of of buckled down already for this and Friday wasn't actually that crazy, even though the market was crazy. But what was give us, give us a play by play internal.

[Jordy]

Friday morning you had just gotten off of 2026 planning with the team and got hit with that.

[Ryan Peterson]

Thankfully we do agile planning and we replan all the time. But yes, we just had a three day planning session in San Francisco, like 40 of our leaders and then like within hours of wrapping it up and saying goodbye to Everybody, Trump announced 100% duties on China. So and the last time he had these duties at this level back in April and May, we saw our volumes from China, the US go down by 60% yeah, that's. That lasted for five weeks until they, they relaxed the tariffs and then they came roaring back. So we'll see. I mean Poly Market has it. I think we've all learned a little bit. Stay calm. Poly Market has it at least an hour or two ago had it at 13% odds of this going through on November 1st.

[John]

Sure.

[Ryan Peterson]

So the market doesn't. And then Trump also kind of signaled on Sunday that hey, maybe he's going to ease off a little bit. So we're not, we're not, we're definitely not panicking on it. Props to the Flexport Customs engineering team because we have this thing, it's called tariffs.flexport.com, it's a tariff calculator and these guys have to keep it updated. And this administration loves putting out the news on changes of customs policy on Friday afternoons. And these guys have worked so many weekends to keep. Speaking of missionaries, they're working nights and weekends on duty, on call pager duty to keep the tariff simulator up to speed with whatever the newest regs are.

[John]

From your actual conversation with customers, what was the, was there any material change to folks business post Liberation Day? I know personally several companies that actually took seriously the mission of reshoring and now there may be like six months into building a different facility, but it's taking years. But they're like it definitely flipped a switch from American dynamism is trendy to there is a board level mandate to actually consider reshoring in some way. How have your customers perceived it? How are people thinking about moving around the globe? Generally.

[Ryan Peterson]

That was only true in the first few months, but then when started hitting India tariffs right now are as high? Well, the China tariffs went up on Friday, but until Friday tariffs on India were just about the same as on China. So it was sort of latam. Tariffs are pretty low, but it's unclear if that's here to stay or just a temporary blip. You could see Trump changing that overnight. So it's hard supply chain, especially if you're doing your own manufacturing, you're setting up your own plant. That's like a multi year, four or five year minimum commitment that you're probably making before it pays back and then after that return on capital would take even longer than that. So I think it's the smart. I think the folks you're talking to are probably in some sort of defense industry or something that's more national security oriented. And you're like, yeah, we need to do this in the United States for your typical company that's making apparel or home goods or other types of products. It's just like it's not really there to come back to the US I've met more companies who aren't going to do it as a result of having, like, the worst case I've seen is a company that makes bicycles in the United States. And they've made it so that bicycles are duty free if you import them, but the bike parts are not. So these guys can't import parts. They have to pay taxes on tariffs on the parts, but their competitors just import whole bikes. So they're like, hey, we're just gonna start producing overseas.

[John]

That's really rough. Yeah. It feels like at the end of the day, there's like so many little sub niches in the economy. Like, there was a story in the Wall Street Journal about the maker of Sharpie was successful in, like, reshoring all of Sharpie manufacturing. But Sharpies are probably not, you know, the target of like, one specific tariff. And then also that's a critical industry for Trump. It is.

[Jordy]

He's got a.

[John]

That was a hilarious one. That's true.

[Ryan Peterson]

The autographs can't get signed.

[John]

Yeah. What?

[Ryan Peterson]

Pepper has an auto pen. Will it be a Sharpie, like, auto pen?

[John]

Sharpie auto pen. What do you mean?

[Jordy]

It's like a machine that does the signature.

[John]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Ryan Peterson]

That's how Biden signed all of his things.

[John]

No warnings, no way. So, I mean, is everyone just kind of glued to Truth Social now to get the latest updates on where this all goes, or are there other kind of like folks that are reading the tea leaves and understanding. Is polymarket the definitive data source? How are customers actually updating on how real this is?

[Ryan Peterson]

I think prediction markets are incredibly valuable for this.

[John]

Really useful.

[Ryan Peterson]

They're pretty thinly traded. Like, the one I cited only has $146,000 of liquidity. It's not really getting used because one customer could make a hedge. It's going to cost them more than that. But there's still signaling that actually the best source for us is just going to D.C. and talking to people. I've been going there once a month, going back in a couple of weeks and just trying to get intel what's really happening, what's coming down the pipe. I think the more you can build relationship. This administration's like, as opposed to terrorists, as I am. They've been very open door to hearing our ideas, listening. They genuinely want to help businesses. So they've been like. Like, we've been able to Go in there and talk to them. And we're working on a couple of things that we think we can reduce customs fraud. Like there's this massive fraud that's happening in customs right now.

[John]

Oh yeah.

[Ryan Peterson]

Because you just have this incentive if you're. The tariffs go way up now there's an incentive to cheat that wasn't there a couple of years ago or even last year. And the way that you can cheat this is highly illegal.

[John]

Do not do this. Do not do this.

[Ryan Peterson]

It's not worth it. I only have one rule is I'm never going to jail.

[John]

Yeah.

[Ryan Peterson]

So don't have the rule.

[Jordy]

Simple man. Simple man.

[Ryan Peterson]

Yeah. But so the way that it works, and it's very rampant right now, is the United States is the only country in the world that allows foreign companies to import goods into the country with no legal entity, no requirement to have an employee or person locally. So you can just import stuff into the country as a foreign company and then you just lie on your declarations. And our Customs CBP has agents in like 60 countries, but they're there for counter narcotics and anti terrorism stuff. They're not there for trade compliance and trade enforcement. So they're. These companies just cheat and there's like basically no cons.

[Jordy]

And if they get caught, they can spin up a new entity at home and just keep doing it. So there's zero downside. Or maybe the goods get. And the, the fraud is somebody is bringing in, let's say $3 million worth of goods and they just say it's like, oh, it's $200,000, something like that. Right. And so again, the people that are punished through that are actual American companies or anybody doing it the right way that then has to compete with a player in the market who doesn't have the same cost structure as them because they're just not paying terror.

[Ryan Peterson]

Exactly. This is why we feel strongly about it. And right now on the Amazon marketplace, 60% of the sellers are non resident importers. That's what we call this off Amazon.

[Jordy]

Right now because 60% of the time I buy something on Amazon, it's garbage.

[Ryan Peterson]

Yes. So I love Amazon, but that is becoming a problem.

[Jordy]

That's my personal experience.

[Ryan Peterson]

So we're trying to highlight this issue around Washington and people have been really receptive to the, to learn about it and to see how this works and to some proposed ways that you might close this loophole. So yeah, and the way that what's happening where American companies are getting trapped in this is that they're allowing their factories to import the goods for them. So instead of them importing it, they're letting the factory import it and feeling like everyone's their own personal lawyer and saying, hey, I didn't know about the fraud. It's not my fault. I just bought the goods in the United States. And if they were doing. If the factory didn't pay duties, that's not my problem. Well, that is not how the law works. If you're paying for your goods at a price less than the duties alone would have been, then you must have, you should have known about this. And I think a court, it's going to be hard to convince a jury. So I think you'll see some enforcement cases, but probably they just need to make it so foreign companies, just like every other country in the world, you need to have a legal entity in the country in order to import goods.

[John]

Yeah. Do you have an idea of the scale of like the sweet spot for the scale of that type of fraud? I imagine that you really can't get away with that if you're, you know, doing $10 billion of commerce. But there's probably a whole, whole host of little, you know, $20 million operations that are maybe cheating or something.

[Ryan Peterson]

It got pretty big. So I analyzed it. In the United States, ocean freight shipping manifests are public record.

[John]

Oh, sure.

[Ryan Peterson]

And so I analyzed all of them last week with a team member of mine. We went through this and what we found was about 10% of trade has switched terms to where the factory is now importing the goods. Is our estimate around 10, 11%, which is just massive amount of fraud and probably going to keep growing and growing until they take enforcement.

[Jordy]

Yeah, but is it even impossible to enforce? Like, wouldn't you have to like 10x us?

[Ryan Peterson]

It has to be a US entity with a my proposal and we'll see if this lands somewhere. But it's like, would have to be a US Entity with a US bank.

[Jordy]

Account with a US Director that can go to prison if they US Employee.

[Ryan Peterson]

Could be held liable. Exactly. And then you know, like, sure, you can always break the law, but if there's a threat of going to jail, you're probably not going to do that most of the time. Most people wouldn't. And we have a great country because it's much easier to start a business than it is to be a criminal. So most of the smart people become entrepreneurs instead of criminals. Whereas in other countries that's not true. It's easier to be a criminal than to start a business.

[John]

Yeah. Can you give us an update On Import Genius, we were reading a New York Times article and Import Genius was cited and we were just kind of like, whoa. Like, you know, we know that we know the founders, but I'd love to know, like, like, what's the state of the business? It seems like you're still finding interesting data from that. Like how, like, what role does Import Genius play in the, in the overall, like, community right now?

[Ryan Peterson]

Yeah. So Import Genius is a data service that takes those public shipping records that I mentioned and makes them searchable and accessible. And so that's the data that I was using to figure out, look into this fraud with a lot of different journalists use it to find what's going on in the world. They're always kind of finding, digging up fraud of some kind. Well, that's. That there's. There's lots of other use cases besides investigating fraud, but that's what tends to get into.

[John]

Yeah, I imagine you can just use it to understand like, are volumes falling or rising or what rates are, et cetera.

[Ryan Peterson]

Exactly. We use it for market share analysis, use it for lead generation for logistics companies helping to like, for. Uses it to find companies that we should talk to about their freight. And people use it for factories, like to find. You're looking to do research on a factory, kind of see what their shipping history is.

[John]

Yeah. Overall, I mean, maybe to close out, I'd love to know. Just kind of like, there's obviously a lot of volatility with the tariff and the overall trade war. I don't even, like, it's just been such a, like a low rumble for the last years. For the last year, for this entire administration. I'm sure it's been a lot louder in your world, but does it, it feel like we're closer to having resolution? Like when we talked last time, I was like, I think the business community. I think you agreed with me. The business community just wants something to stick a deal. If it's 50% forever, we can build our models off of that. We can invest against that. But uncertainty is particularly destabilizing to the US Economy, to global trade, et cetera, whatever it lands at. Let's just get. Does it feel like we're closer than ever or getting farther away? How do you feel about just the level of volatility in global trade?

[Ryan Peterson]

It started to feel like things were calming down until really, I think Trump, the administration going after India is what kind of set off be like, okay, maybe these aren't as stable as if a negotiation can just quickly spiral on a country like that in a lot of ways we have a lot in common with India and should be an ally of ours. This current level on China is definitely at a. Our view is anything above about 60% duty is going to be an embargo level where almost all trade stops. And we're so, we're well above that right now. I don't think that that's where the administration wants this to land. I think they, they probably like it to be a little bit below the embargo level and give them a ratchet, make it a ratchet where they can.

[John]

Put it above the embargo level on.

[Ryan Peterson]

A moment's notice when they don't do what they want. I wish we could say we had the long term stability if the current rates on Latin America lasted, it would be really very clear for folks of what policy the administration is putting forward is, hey, we're going to treat the southern South America, Latin America as kind of our backyard, our hemispheric partners. We're going to encourage kind of manufacturing there for stuff that doesn't make sense in the United States. I think it's very hard for them to come out and say that overtly because they are like the actual message is no, make it in America. In the United States of America, not America.

[Jordy]

What's the latest on with the ports? Automation at the ports?

[John]

Oh, it's illegal.

[Ryan Peterson]

That's the latest. No, it's not illegal. It's against the contract of the union for the next, I think five more years from now on the east coast and four more years on the West Coast, I want to say.

[John]

And our direct competitors are doing the same thing. Right.

[Ryan Peterson]

Say that again.

[John]

And I'm sure the rest of the world is also banning automation. Right. So we'll be equally competitive. And of course it's like no, Singapore is probably extremely automated. Right.

[Ryan Peterson]

Contract ends in like four or five years and we'll see. But in the meantime there will be no automation in the US ports.

[John]

Yeah, so we're behind. Makes it even harder.

[Ryan Peterson]

By the way, here in la, the Long Beach Container Terminal is an automated terminal. I think that's what kind of kicked off the union and pissed them off and made them realize this is like a real thing. When they put it in about 10 years ago, it's really impressive. Like it's a giant robot that's like a square mile of all autonomous trucks driving around and there's no people in there. And so that we do have the. It's like a solved problem. The technology exists, it works, it's like really efficient, really cool to look at. Highly encouraged. Doing a tour of that. Flex support's gonna take a bunch of our customers on the tour of that at our conference here in a couple days.

[John]

Are there any other geological or geographic areas in the US that could be ports, could be automated ports, but don't have any port infrastructure and are just like it's some houses or something we could buy or it's just like kind of an abandoned beach.

[Ryan Peterson]

You can't. Because the Union claims every inch of American soil of every American coastline. So even if today they're not there, they still claim.

[John]

Yes.

[Ryan Peterson]

And they will show up. So you can't do it. One area I'd really love to see America take advantage of is our river network. And actually this points to like if Latin America were to become a much bigger trading partner for us, then you would predict that the New Orleans should be the biggest port in the United States.

[John]

Oh yeah.

[Ryan Peterson]

You have the whole Mississippi river network and you can get everywhere all the way connecting up to the Great Lakes, up to Canada. Like, like you could really make an amazing. But there's almost no container shipping on that network in part because of Union contracts.

[Jordy]

And like a flexport, a flexport river boat would go really hard. Maybe you could put a casino on it too. Make it really American.

[Ryan Peterson]

100%. I really think like a sparge network running all over and like replace a lot of the trucks on the road too because it's so much more efficient, cheaper, greener, like cooler in so many ways. And yeah, I haven't looked into the gambling laws, but.

[John]

In international waters you can, of course. So you just gamble down the Amazon, then gamble all through the Caribbean and then gamble up the Mississippi. It's the future. Anyway, thanks so much for stopping by new product line. Congratulations.

[Ryan Peterson]

This is great. I got to ideate with you guys more.

[John]

I think we'll probably come up with.

[Ryan Peterson]

Some good product ideas for I think.

[John]

I think a Koretsu of gambling and shipping is just a perfect mystery boxes. You know, everyone's acting, everyone's asking what's the flexport second act. And I think it's.

[Ryan Peterson]

I would like to do something in futures actually where you could hedge the price of shipping and you know, that's a partnership with us in one of these prediction markets. Pretty cool.

[John]

Yeah. That make a ton of sense needs to happen. Yeah. I mean isn't that the story of Southwest? They bought a bunch of fuel futures and then they had the ability pricing power for a number of years. I don't Know how apocryphal that story is?

[Ryan Peterson]

Yeah, I think I read about that. We haven't done any hedging yet. I'm always telling our finance team to do it and then they come back with reasons why you don't need to or something. But it seems like we should.

[John]

Yeah, it'd be fun. Turn into a hedge fund. Be good.

[Ryan Peterson]

You can't. Today there's not really like a futures. There's a couple of these marketplaces they're trying to form like futures on actual price of container shipping. Those don't exist yet in a way that's really viable. But if that existed, we would for sure start. I would like to. When we should be the smartest people in the market, right?

[John]

Yeah.

[Ryan Peterson]

At some point we're doing all this commodity shipping stuff.

[John]

We should just trade shipping maybe. Well, when you announce it, come back and tell us all about it. And good luck with the customer conference. Thanks so much for stopping by. We'll talk to you soon. See ya.

[Ryan Peterson]

See you guys.

[John]

Let me talk about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free.

[Jordy]

Jeremy Gaffon asking the important question, why hasn't someone done calendar invites for phone numbers? It's the last thing keeping email in the loop. Totally agree. Gets to such an awkward spot in a meeting where you're going back and.

[John]

Always getting every text and then have to.

[Jordy]

And then, okay, who's going to bite the bullet?

[John]

If Apple wants to really dominate an imessage world, they should figure out how to add that to the imessage flywheel. So you're even more locked in because your icloud account is the one. I mean, I guess they do that with the calendar app, but everyone's kind of on Gmail. Yeah, rough would be fun. Steve Jobs tasting cars. By the way. Everyone's having fun with the Steve Jobs, by the way.

[Jordy]

Black on tan is iconic and of course I think we've talked about it on the show before, but he would buy a new car every six months so he never had to register the plate that's gotten a custom plate.

[John]

He should have gotten Apple on the plate. You know, just let everyone know.

[Jordy]

Just let everyone know.

[John]

There you go. What's wrong with getting a custom plate? Shout out license to post on Instagram.

[Jordy]

So there was some interesting alpha coming out of AlphaSense. Oh yeah. Richard Jark shared a screenshot of it. He summarizes it. An interview with a former OpenAI employee that came over the weekend Confirming my hunch, which I already wrote about in the article last week, that the biggest friction between OpenAI and Microsoft is around infrastructure capacity. OpenAI requests were leading to massive amounts of CapEx potential that Microsoft would be on the hook for. Sam basically saying to Satya, spend a trillion dollars for me.

[John]

I want to be the leaser. And Satya's like, I want to be the leaser. And everyone's like, we want a lease. We don't want to.

[Jordy]

Microsoft is getting a request from its biggest customer investment that they want an almost inexhaustible amount of GPUs. That's fine in terms of predicting your demand for a one year period from today, say, but what about in the year 2029 when you end up having all of this capacity that you've constructed? What does that market look like? No one really knows. That led to some friction between OpenAI and Microsoft. Richard says, my take on this is that Microsoft is being smart and letting others take the risk. Oracle and neoclouds as numbers for capex are reaching crazy numbers. When things come back to earth and many of these firms face difficulties, Microsoft is left standing to pick up the distressed assets.

[John]

Tyler has a take. What you got?

[Tyler]

Yeah, I mean this is kind of what Doug Oughlin was saying. He was saying that Microsoft super early on they were like super bullish. Right. They're in open air early on and then they kind of take a step back. I think he was saying that, oh, they're going to get back in the game.

[John]

Yep.

[Tyler]

So hopefully, you know, hopefully we get the gigawatt set up by, by 2027, then we'll have you know, AGI. God.

[John]

Yeah. It does seem like Satya is doubling down on getting back in the live player AI race. He kind of delegated a couple tasks Microsoft for business to someone else in the Microsoft leadership team. So he's able to spend more time on AI. The question is, is he still happy to be a leaser? That could be true. He could say, yeah, I want to lease even more from someone else and do a whole bunch of off balance sheet debt essentially. There's a crazy post from September 24th, Sebastian Raschka. This is way deeper in the deck. I don't know if you're gonna be able to find it. It's on page 94, but Sebastian says no one understood me back then. And Nick, who is a famous OpenAI hater, shares a screenshot of the information reporting on OpenAI's megadeal with Nvidia and says OpenAI would lease Nvidia chips instead of owning them. And so nick says News OpenAI to lease Nvidia chips rather than buying them. LMAO. Like they don't even have the money to actually buy them them. And back then in September 24th of 2025, Sebastian said, actually I think that's smart. This way you don't have to deal with reselling and recycling old chips every few years. Nvidia chips should be offered as a subscription. And so you were talking to Dylan Patel about this. You were saying like what is the value of an A100? What is the value of an H100? In five years, will you still be able to produce economic value? Yeah, it's still going to be able to inference llama 3.

[Jordy]

It might, it might turn on, but that doesn't mean it'll be economically rational to leverage.

[John]

Yeah, and my take is that and what I've been digging around when we talk to people, we talked to Kareem at Ramp about this. There are companies that have found useful, economically Valuable uses for llama3 just somewhere in their software stack with the RAMP example, which of course is sponsored but it's a good example is just like you scan a receipt, you need to understand like what category is this expense in? And you can just take the name of the restaurant and what's on the line items, put it in llama 3 and very cheaply get back like what category is it? It's like a classic, just like text interpretation transformation problem. Easy to do.

[Jordy]

Yeah, we were working on that internal tool for horse identification.

[John]

Yes, yeah, exactly. But like once you develop that my horse. I gotta tell the story about my quiz for you in a minute. But once you develop a tool that has economic value inside your organization, you're very likely to just leave that there. Like your database. Okay, yeah, we have a database. We have a cron job that runs every night that cleans up the database, tags some data, moves some stuff around, create some summary analytics. Let's just let that run forever. And yeah, it costs us 1000 bucks a day or something. I think that will be the case for a lot of those GPT 3.5 class workloads, GPT 4 class workloads. So I don't know how bad it will be to just own a whole bunch of old compute. But it's certainly risky because you could get caught and the value of those could go to basically zero and that would be really bad. And so it is funny to see the question about will Microsoft actually go and buy A bunch of stuff. What does getting back in the game really mean?

[Jordy]

Yeah, I mean, what it looks like right now is Satya watching a bunch of different players lever up massively while he sits back and is risk off. But you can imagine, again, we've talked about this a number of times. A point it could be a year from now, it could be six months from now, it could be two years from now, three years from now. It's really hard to say where he comes in and gets very aggressive on buying up all these distressed assets that have done all the hard work but got over levered and don't have the demand to, you know, not be in breach of various covenants.

[John]

Yeah. If the bubble just keeps inflating or, you know, things kind of all pencil out like people hope.

[Jordy]

Yeah, that's, that's really the tinfoil hat theory. Trump just wanted to take some of the heat off the AI bubble, so he announced a new trade war.

[John]

Told you. Bubbles, bubbles over.

[Jordy]

But we got the first ever message in the LinkedIn stream.

[John]

Let's go.

[Jordy]

No, we do stream on LinkedIn.

[John]

Let's go.

[Jordy]

LinkedIn doesn't thank you best very much, but Sham Mohite, in the LinkedIn chat, can you tell the deployment percentage, security to subscribe? I don't know what that means, but I like that you're engaging, holding it down, hopefully.

[John]

New York Times.

[Jordy]

New York Times called us SportsCenter for LinkedIn and here we are, here you are. You're the first chat room general. Thank you.

[John]

So on the question of, on the question of AGI timelines and is this a bubble? Over the weekend you got a new phone and even though AGI is just a few thousand days away, it completely.

[Jordy]

A few hundred depending on it completely.

[John]

Destroyed your imessage integration. And so on Saturday at noon, I get a message from your email, not your imessage account, because I have your imessage pinned with your, with your contact information.

[Jordy]

It was a pretty serious.

[John]

Yeah, it's just perfect, you know, blah, blah, blah. This other thing. What do you think? You know, I, you know, you weren't exactly asking me to wire money anywhere, but it was a serious question.

[Jordy]

It was a, it was a million dollar question.

[John]

It was a million dollar question. And so, so I'm like. So I screenshot it, send it back to you, and I say, this is coming from an email, so I have to do a check of humanity, something only Jordi could know. What is my dream dressage horse, because that's something only you could know until you've listened to this episode. Now you will know. And you and I botched. Yeah, you. The Geordie that I was talking to says Danish Warmblood.

[Ryan Peterson]

Of course.

[John]

Next question. I said, wrong. It's the Lipizaner Dancing horse. Of course. And you said, I knew I was forgetting the Le Pizzane. And I said, sure, sure. Likely story.

[Jordy]

And so then you had to. You had to. You said, pull up worldcoin.

[John]

Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I switched to. I switched phones. Needed to deactivate the other liquid glass is pretty mid. And I said, a likely story. Feels. Feels like a downgrade all around.

[Jordy]

Wait, before we do that, Mark and Michael Mirafleur have jumped into the LinkedIn.

[John]

Let's go.

[Jordy]

Welcome to see it. Holding it down. All right, Mark's already back.

[John]

Mark, let's go.

[Jordy]

It was fun while it lasted.

[John]

Amazing. Could have been me.

[Jordy]

LinkedIn ease mazuma.

[John]

Anyway, if you want to stay compliant, go to Vanta Automate Compliance. Manage risk, Prove trust Continuously Vantage trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replace it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.

[Jordy]

Okay, so, as you know, I ordered my new iPhone weeks before you strolled into the iPhone, into the Apple Store and just bought one off the shelf. I wasn't even there for a phone, so I was. I was forced to. Forced to wait. The anticipation was building. I had high hopes for the new phone. The second I started using it, I thought, this feels like a downgrade in every single way except the actual quality of the images.

[John]

The cameras are fantastic.

[Jordy]

The cameras are great. The cameras are great. Everything else, from the way that it feels, feels cheap in comparison to my titanium iPhone. The liquid glass, while I think it looks cool, it is very mid in practice.

[John]

Yep.

[Jordy]

It's everywhere you go. Everywhere you go. It feels like overly. Everything's overly animated.

[John]

Sure.

[Jordy]

And I'm already getting a lag on the animations. Just like, why? I don't need it to animate. Just, like, be smooth and instant and don't lag.

[John]

I have a couple takes on liquid glass I can drop. We can also get Tyler's review. What was it like? What was it like upgrading from the very first iPhone to a modern iPhone? Are you enjoying the 3G? You were on the 2G iPhone, right? The one you actually had to plug it into the wall to talk to people. You've fully acclimated to liquid glass, right? You don't have any problems?

[Tyler]

Yeah, I think it's. It's great.

[Jordy]

I mean, it's definitely. Here's my issue.

[John]

You'll get used to it.

[Jordy]

They thought to themselves, we don't need to make a better user experience, we just need to make it different. There's a little bit of that because it's not better.

[John]

Yep.

[Jordy]

Nothing about it from using it for a few days have I thought, oh, this is a lot better than how it used to be.

[Tyler]

I think most of my experience that's like, oh, this is like so much better. Is probably mostly because I was going from an iPhone 11, which is like seven years old.

[Alexis Ohanian]

Yeah, yeah.

[Tyler]

To this. It's probably not actually the iOS.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

But so I mean it feels way faster obviously, but it's hard to tell.

[Jordy]

LinkedIn chat is absolutely going off. Mark. Ryan.

[John]

Ryan. Thank you to everyone supporting us on LinkedIn. We are bringing news to LinkedIn for the first time ever. We're on a tear. Apple first. They got to get on graphite Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams and GitHubs ship higher quality software faster. Okay, okay, so couple problems for me. The Safari with Liquid glass feels like way harder to use. Like I don't know how to get to the actual tab view. There's a whole bunch of new muscle memory. Just opening a new tab I feel like I have to click twice.

[Jordy]

Yeah. And there's a whole bunch of stuff I read is like, okay, you added more animations but it's not better.

[John]

It does feel like there's a few things that now require two clicks or three clicks that used to just require one click or two clicks and so that's been annoying. I'm sure I'll develop the muscle memory. The new phone app feels very difficult for me to use. I haven't been able to figure out like where all the different calls are. All these things I think will sort out. I haven't enjoyed how hard it is to take a screenshot of an imessage chat because the person's name appears in glass. And so if you're trying to line it up to screenshot just like one message and show the person's name to say like, hey, Jordy texted me this and I'm sending that to Tyler. Jordy said this funny thing here. Well, I'm automatically gonna see through the glass the last thing he said that could be something different that I don't necessarily wanna share. And so just the screenshots of imessages have been a little bit tricky for me to get around.

[Jordy]

I will say Liquid Glass looks cool.

[John]

It does look cool.

[Jordy]

But it's worse to use and that makes it bad design.

[John]

I think I'll get used to it. Oh, the other thing on the actual hardware design is I noticed that the plateau just completely ruins the ability to use wireless chargers because you put it down on the wireless charger.

[Jordy]

Well, you have an upgrade to the new wireless charger.

[John]

I know. So I need a new car. Great, thanks.

[Jordy]

Nick says, most people I know gain like 20 IQ when advising their friends lives and lose 20 IQ when doing strategy for their own lives. Rune says, why is this? It makes absolutely no sense, but it's true. Guy says solution, befriend yourself.

[John]

That's very funny.

[Jordy]

It's usually that it's very easy to give simple advice to your friends and when you're trying to strategize in your own life, you end up making it super complicated because you have all this. You have the most information on your life, more information on your life than anyone else. You're like trying to do one of the Tyler red string boards and usually it's just a lot more simple.

[John]

Yeah, no, I agree.

[Jordy]

And you're sort of forced to make things simple when you're giving advice to a friend because you know, okay, here's their home life, here's their work life. Here's what you should do.

[John]

Here's a life hack for doing strategy for your own life. Collect an immense amount of data about yourself. Put it all in Julius. Analyze your life and make Julius your the AI data analyst that works for you. Don't even think about what to order for breakfast without first loading every previous breakfast you've had into Julius AI and query.

[Jordy]

Running analysis.

[John]

Running analysis on it. What should I have, the croissant or the breakfast burrito? Julius?

[Jordy]

Why not both?

[John]

It's your personal Jarvis. Julius. Julius, should I go to bed at 9 or 10? Julius, should I have a second Diet Coke today?

[Jordy]

They really should give the Siri button to Julius.

[John]

Yeah, we've been saying, oh, they'll do a deal with Anthropic, they'll do a deal with Plexity. Apple Tim Cook. Do a deal with Julius. AI, you gotta do it. Get Raul in the building. Chat with your data, get expert level insights.

[Jordy]

Tyler, Kylie Jenner is working to make Snapchat a thing again according to Jasmine. What's going on with Snapchat? Yeah, what did she do?

[Tyler]

Yeah, so I don't know exactly what she's working on. I'm like, it's been announced yet, but.

[Jordy]

It said tomorrow on October 11th. It said tomorrow on Snapchat.

[John]

So okay, yesterday you said, tomorrow, just do it. Just do it.

[Tyler]

So we do know some retailers, retail traders are very long Snapchat. So maybe I should consult with them. Although I don't know if these particular traders are the most up to date.

[John]

On latest news, but I mean, did this move the market? We need to check in with our resident retail trader on the Snapchat price. I mean, I don't know. I've heard a number of people for a long time when I was doing YouTube videos, they would pitch me on like, you gotta do a Snapchat version. Because in the. What was it in like 2022, 2023? Snapchat was very kind of liberal with their version of TikTok's Creator Fund. And so if you were getting a lot of views on Snapchat, you could be making a ton of money. I think you have a buddy who's making. Who took a. There were a couple YouTubers who took their content, made it Snapchat native and then got big creator payouts, basically like higher CPMs. Just because Snapchat was like, we want to bootstrap, like the real serious creator market. Not just, you know, Snapchat with your friends.

[Jordy]

Yeah, I think they distributed probably hundreds of millions of dollars.

[John]

Yeah, yeah. To get like real shows. To get like Mr. Beast level shows. Tyler, what you got?

[Tyler]

So it seems that she was announcing a new music video that was launching on Snapchat. I guess she has been off Snapchat for some time and is returning.

[John]

She does music. Interesting. I didn't know that. Well, if you want to generate audio, go to fall generative media platform for developers. The world's best generative image, video and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters.

[Jordy]

Did you see that Red Bull put Yuki Tsunoda in a bucket of water next to a high voltage power outlet?

[John]

No, I had no idea that. I didn't understand this image at all. Why? Why is this so.

[Jordy]

I think he's doing a cold plunge.

[John]

Okay. And it just happens to be like this. Red Bull is the type of team to.

[Jordy]

That is absolutely electric.

[John]

That is awesome. Get after it.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Risk on Risk.

[John]

Should we run through my.

[Jordy]

Wait, I had a question for you. So I watched a film over.

[John]

What? The third film ever.

[Jordy]

I watched the film Cinephile.

[John]

Third film ever. Congratulations.

[Jordy]

I saw.

[John]

Yes.

[Jordy]

Brad Pitt play Sonny Hayes in the. In the movie F1.

[John]

Yes, F1.

[Jordy]

I watched it in two parts.

[John]

Okay. Because as the filmmaker intended.

[Jordy]

As the filmmaker Intended because he knew. He knew I would get sleepy and check how much time was left in the movie. I was like, there's a movie about racing cars around a track. Can't be that long. You got another hour, hour, 30 minutes left. I'm going to bed. But the thing that I thought was interesting is somebody who's seen. I haven't seen two hands worth of films, but I've seen a few. Interesting to have fictional story tied into current reality. In F1. Have you seen a movie that's done exactly that? Right. Where there's like Lewis Hamilton and other characters, like blended in to.

[John]

It's rare. Super rare. Yeah.

[Jordy]

But they pulled it off well.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

It felt like you were in the world. It felt like you were in modern day Formula one and just watching.

[John]

I mean, in the Big Short, they're like in Lehman Brothers, right? Right in Goldman Sachs. That's my version of F1.

[Jordy]

Yeah, but not with like the actual people. It's not like the managing director at Lehman Brothers is like playing himself.

[John]

Sometimes there's little cameos, but nowhere near as much as like this.

[Jordy]

There was like 200 cameos.

[John]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that was a very cool, Very cool feature of the film. Yeah, I did enjoy F1. It was. It was a good movie. Maybe the movie of the summer. People were asking like, what is the movie of the year? Like, there was no shelling point. There was no Barbenheimer this year. And I think F1 probably did the best. The real one that's like going viral is the K Pop Demon Hunters movie on Netflix. That's the one that's like getting the most attention. Like squid game level, but little less.

[Jordy]

Never heard of it.

[John]

You've never heard of K Pop Demon Hunters?

[Jordy]

You're telling me this for the first time? Are you kidding?

[John]

Actually, you've never heard of K Pop? That's crazy. It is like a massive viral success. Success. It's a mast viral success. Let me run through my pitch to the US government to give Dylan Patel at semiannalysis 50 million bucks. This was my take today. So we had Dylan Patel on the show on Friday talking about Inference Max. There's an independent benchmark where he takes Nvidia.

[Jordy]

Pull up this video. Oh, yeah, from Semianalysis.

[John]

This is why I had to talk about it.

[Jordy]

Semianalysis. Potentially the greatest. It's amazing post of all time. They say was watching the Georgia game and noticed Rakesh Patel.

[John]

There we go. There we go.

[Jordy]

Literally on TV soundboard.

[John]

This is good. A lot of people were saying it's just so funny.

[Jordy]

He's like, in Tennessee Friday, calling into TVPN with the most unhinged setup we've ever had for our guest.

[John]

It was great.

[Jordy]

And then he pops up here. That, of course, is not Dwarf Cash if you've been living under a data center.

[John]

Yeah, he's talking to Big game. Oh, I'm out here because there's a lot of power. He's like, power on the field. Let's go, Bulldogs. Apparently. No, obviously he's there for work as well, but it is an amazing, amazing clip.

[Jordy]

Is his buddy waving money around something I don't know.

[John]

Yeah. What is going on?

[Jordy]

They're GP Rich.

[John]

They are rich. That's amazing. I'm so glad you got.

[Jordy]

Okay, get into your rant.

[John]

So basically, Dylan Patel, one of the greatest analysts of all time, the goat, he launched Inference Max last week. It's this website that you can go to and you can select one of three open source models, LLAMA 3, DeepSeek, and GPT OSS. Then you can select what type of workload do you want to do? Do you want to do document summarization, put 8,000 tokens in, get 1,000 out? Do you want to do just chat back and forth? Or do you want to do more of a reasoning, deep research type project? And then you can say, say, what architecture do you want to use? What's the whole software stack? And then what GPUs do you want to run it on? Do you want to run it on Nvidia or amd? And so you get all these different charts. It's put the timeline in turmoil more than one time already. And it's been really interesting because my take, and I'm interested, Jordi, if you had a similar take, two things have felt true. One is that Nvidia has just been running away with it and AMD has been playing catch up for years. And what Inference Max shows, at least me, is that AMD is actually better in certain areas. And that was kind of interesting because I'd heard the story of, like, AMD is getting their stuff together, they're fixing bugs, George Hotz is pressuring them. Lisa Su is talking to George Hotz and Dylan Patel about what to do. And so the narrative of, like, Nvidia is 100% dominant and no one can touch them. That kind of breaks when you look at the Inference Max. And in fact seems like AMD is doing great stuff in multiple places. And for certain workloads, you'd want to pick AMD on a total cost to own basis. It's not just about like raw speed all the time. It's about how much does it cost, how much energy does it use to produce a set amount of tokens.

[Jordy]

Right, yeah. And it, and it, it makes it even more surprising that they had to give away so much of their company in order to get OpenAI to be. That's a good point, you know, or, or Sam just exerted max leverage and just wanted to own. Yep, 10% of AMD.

[John]

Yeah, I mean my update from Inference Max is that AMD and Nvidia are not as far away as people thought. But I mean we'll have to dig into it and obviously it depends on a lot of different factors and the true frontier models are a different thing and those aren't in the benchmark because they're not open source. The other like kind of update for me was around open source. So I, we covered this and we talked about this with Dylan. Like when GPT OSS, the open source model from OpenAI launched, it was kind of like, well, okay, yeah, it's like doing okay on benchmarks. Nothing really special going on there and it just kind of like fizzled out and it was like, yeah, it's cool. People were excited about it but like the general tenor wasn't like, oh, deep seeks destroyed. But on Inference Max you can see that GPT OSS is performing like right at the same level above on some, above, above, below, on others. And so it feels like in terms of the like commoditization of the open source software, open source LLM market, like OpenAI has very much caught up and is not like well behind Deep Seek. And so that was kind of an interesting update. I feel like this data, we're going to get more interesting data points from this. We're going to get more just a better understanding of like not just how things do on benchmarks, like how smart the models are, but actually like if you're doing a big workload with them, like which one is more affordable. Right. So that was kind of interesting, but notably absent. So it's just AMD and Nvidia right now and when we talked to Dylan, he said we're bringing on Trainium from Amazon and we're bringing on TPU from Google. They are bigger companies and they're moving a little bit slower and they're not selling a ton of these things yet. AMD and Nvidia sell a lot more chips and so TPU and Trainium will come in the next couple months, but we're working with them but notably absent was Huawei, which we've been tracking. And we've heard that, you know, Huawei.

[Jordy]

Is not my friend.

[John]

Huawei has this Cloud Matrix 384 that competes with Nvidia's NVL 72, the Rack Scale compute. And the high level number is that Nvidia at rack scale is 2.5 times more energy efficient. So the whole pitch with the Cloud Matrix 384 was that it can do the same stuff as Nvidia. Like it can generate, it can run the same models.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

And it's like, we got it.

[Jordy]

The problem is, but it's way more expensive to an era where energy is going to be the primary bottleneck. And so there's not a lot of incentive to run totally chip, you know, racks that are inefficient.

[John]

And also like being 60% less efficient is wildly different than being 10% less efficient.

[Jordy]

Right.

[John]

Like these are really, really important. China would say, oh well, we have all this. We had Three Gorges Dam. Like, we have plenty of cheap energy. It's like for a while and then eventually you got to build 100 nuclear reactors, not just 10. And so I want, I want Huawei to be on inference Max. I don't think Nvidia is going to pay for that because they don't want to have, you know, Huawei chips in there. They might be hard to buy. I don't even know how you buy Huawei chips in America, but I think the US government could get it done. And so I'm calling on David Sachs to put up the money. I don't know if they actually would have to pay this much. Dylan said something like $50 million came together across Nvidia and all their partners to pay for this. It was a lot of chips. And so I'd love to see America foot the bill, the American taxpayer foot the bill to get some Huawei chips, give them to semiannalysis, get them running on inference Max. So we can know the true gap in compute power. And this is important because we know the gap in rare earths. Like America, China refines or China mines six times as much rare earth, as many rare earth elements as the United States. They refine those almost 99% of the rare earths in the the world. And they produce about 85 to 90% of the world's rare earth magnets. And so the gap in rare earth is massive. Now we know that America's head in AI COMPUTE and GPU manufacturing, but we just don't know how big that gap is really and I feel like that's a really important, you know, negotiating point and point of negotiating leverage in the trade war. And putting Huawei on inference map would help us understand the nature of that gap and how big it is and how much leverage we actually have. So who knows where the money will come from. But I'd love to see Huawei on inference max. And you know, if you want to learn more about it, go over to Semianalysis and check it out. Anyway.

[Jordy]

Patrick o' Shaughnessy and the team at Colossus have a new looks like a cover story with none other than friend of the show Josh Kushner dropping tomorrow. We should hopefully read through it for sure. Michael Spiker says real men lose their shirts in natural gas, not trading synthetic ShitCoin futures at 50x leverage.

[John]

What does 50x leverage buy like you just typo. Pretty funny.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Tyler, figure out, figure out some alpha in natural gas and start trading it.

[John]

It is interesting. We haven't heard about the natural gas trade in the retail circles or kind of the general basically everyone in Tech.

[Jordy]

Shark needs a retail army. Just in the category.

[John]

A couple years ago as Nvidia was pivoting from a graphics card card maker to an AI accelerator maker similar chip. But you know, it was becoming a part of the AI narrative. The AI narrative was developing around Nvidia. The second phase of that was everyone learned what TSMC was, then everyone learned what ASML was, then everyone learned what SK Hynix was because that's the full stack. You design the chip at Nvidia, you make it at TSMC with equipment from ASML and memory from SK Hynix. And so those became the four companies that everyone knew about. Now people know about the Neo Clouds and the hyperscalers, but there aren't that many people that know who the key players in natural gas are. And if all the predictions about AI are true, you heard it from Dylan. He said a lot of the energy is going to come from natural gas. And so who are you betting on?

[Tyler]

Not specific companies, but Leopold has talked about this a lot where basically, basically if you continue ramping up data centers like you need the power from somewhere and the most obvious place is natural gas. If you can basically get past regulation and essentially all the big companies have these environmental restrictions on where they can get power from. If you can tear those down, then natural gas is by far the cheapest, easiest way to just get insane amounts of power.

[John]

Well.

[Jordy]

Says Leopold has a crazy position in natural gas company EQT. Yeah, we should do that only up 46% over the last year.

[John]

Congratulations. Leopold wins again.

[Jordy]

Founded in guess.

[John]

Founded in 1983.

[Jordy]

Close. 1888.

[John]

1888. Let's go, let's go. Just waiting 150 years for the Ultra pump. Like now we're a meme stock.

[Jordy]

Finally, real patience.

[John]

Ajax the Great says, working at SpaceX has taught me that caffeine limits are imaginary. Yeah, when I was there, I had a minimum 200 milligrams per night. That's hilarious that he's denominating it in nights. Most people would say I have 200 milligrams of caffeine per day when I.

[Jordy]

Wake up per night.

[John]

Yeah, because I stay up all night. Coffees start my morning with 200 and usually by noon I'm at 5 to 600 milligrams. Today I hit over 1000 milligrams grams. That's a lot of caffeine. I don't know if you should be going up that high. It's certainly not.

[Jordy]

You know, you got to work up to it. You got to work up to it. Riley Walls had sounds like he had a great weekend. He said the plan at dusk, 50 people went to San Francisco's longest dead end street and all ordered a Waymo at the same time. The world's first Waymo DDoS. You can see pictures of the Waymo obediently lining up. So he said we didn't actually get in the cars. They left after about 10 minutes and charged a $5 no show fee. Very fair for getting messed with. Waymo might have to build in some functionality of like if you collude with a group to disrupt our services.

[John]

I would be terrified to do this and be deplatformed from Waymo forever.

[Jordy]

Yeah, it would be very rare.

[John]

Rough.

[Jordy]

Riley said Waymo handled this well. I assume this isn't much different than if a big concert had just ended. Eventually they disabled all rides within a two block vicinity until the morning. This was back in July. Felt like I was back in middle school. Everyone was giddy and when another car showed up, there were cheers. Maybe three or four real drivers all laughed and just drove around.

[John]

So good. I like Jake here saying calling him the tech Jester cannot be stopped really is. Would you call him an Internet rascal?

[Jordy]

An Internet rascal? Yeah. Somehow I called him an Internet rascal. And then somehow the team thought that was his official title. Riley Walls, I'm an Internet rascal.

[John]

Well, let me tell you about Turbopuffer search. Every byte, serverless vector and full text search built from object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Geoffrey Hinton was featured in the acquired podcast. They did a deep dive on Google. You can go check it out. Jeffrey Hinton, Father of Deep Learning at age 31 with Chris Riesbeck, La Jolla, California they are so good. The acquired guys are so good at finding these archival images that just go so hard on the timeline. They look amazing. And David Fow says, probably my favorite factoid about Hinton's family is that basically all of them were mathematicians going back all the way to George Boolean. First time mettist list, first ballot medicine list, eventually kicked off the Metis list for being irrelevant in the modern era. Except for one guy in their family who invented the jungle gym. Isn't that hilarious that Jeffrey?

[Jordy]

Imagine inventing the jungle gym.

[John]

That's such a great invention. I hope you have like a royalty that just produces endless cash flow for the family forever. Like, there's nothing more enjoyable than meeting a Nepo baby who's like, yeah, my great grandfather invented the pencil. You're like, yes, okay, you deserve to be on a yacht right now. You contributed to society.

[Jordy]

Imagine just looking at this like monstrosity of just like metal and like traps and you're sitting there. What should we call it?

[John]

The Jungle gym.

[Jordy]

The Jungle Gym.

[John]

Jungle gyms bring incredible joy to children all over the world. It's one of the greatest, least controversial inventions ever. There's no jungle gym doomers.

[Jordy]

That's true.

[John]

There's no jungle gym accelerationists. There's no oh, jungle gym costs causes brain rot narrative. There's no hit pieces on jungle gyms. They are unfiltered.

[Ryan Peterson]

They are raw.

[Jordy]

I'm sure they. I actually, I would say, I bet you we could find a jungle gyms because I'm sure they just massive increase injuries annually at schools. But worth it. Worth it.

[John]

You know what doesn't increase injuries at schools? Profound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI, discover new products and get a demo. Shiel, friend of the show, says he's at Sea Ranch Lodge for lunch. It's very beautiful and it's owned by Patrick and John Collison and Justin Kahn. Very fun. Look at that corgi. This is a cool.

[Jordy]

I had no idea. Snap this up. I knew that Justin Kahn spent a lot of time up in that neck of the woods. I have been to Sea Ranch. It's up around where I grew up.

[John]

So they have principles for this Sea Ranch Lodge. Yes. Nature predominates. Rural matrix. No vest Pocket nature, as at Carmel or Bodega. I don't know what that means. Means yes to rural, no to suburbia, yes to community, no to individual houses, yes to aesthetics. No to up for grab aesthetics. Yes to design control.

[Jordy]

Getting a text saying there's not just a jungle gym hit piece, there's a whole book covering.

[John]

He wrote a book on the entire jungle gym.

[Jordy]

Trying to take down big jungle gym.

[Ryan Peterson]

Wow.

[John]

I will. I will. I will go to the mat for the jungle gym.

[Jordy]

We will defend jungle gyms with our lives.

[John]

Yes. Not only because they are in the Hinton line, but also because they're good for the world. They say it's not elitist. They want modesty of house size, reforestation, native trees, common facilities. Very cool.

[Jordy]

Wait, they want elitism and large house sizes?

[John]

No, no, I'm kidding. Elitist. An enormous houses. Yeah. Wait, wait. I want the one on the right. I want the one on the right. Oh, they're taking shots at Malibu. They said they do not want to relinquish access Malibu type. Ooh. Collison and Khan teaming up to get these principles.

[Jordy]

Look like they predate them taking ownership. Unless they just, like, made it to try to look like a vintage piece of paper before.

[John]

Before growth equity, secondary dollars.

[Jordy]

No, because there's so much. There's so much lore around. There's so much lore around. Around Sea Ranch.

[John]

I don't know any of the ones. Never heard of Sea Ranch before.

[Jordy]

You can go down a YouTube rabbit hole around Sea Ranch.

[John]

Yes. How conspiratorial does it get?

[Jordy]

Not conspiratorial at all. It's just like a very principled development and community. And they've done.

[John]

Or now we can bring conspiracy to it.

[Jordy]

Imagine you're just in this idyllic cabin and you go to open the mini fridge, and it's like, tap here for one click checkout.

[John]

I'd love to have a chance.

[Jordy]

In other news, upper 20s street capital, they're running out of phrase capital X. Apparently somebody is writing mistakes. I wrote about investing in Tiny, an eclectic Canadian investment holding company just last year.

[John]

Tiny is the company founded by Jeremy Giffon, right?

[Jordy]

No. Some people seem to think that in the comments.

[John]

We should, we should, we should. Whatever happens with Tiny, we should hold Jeremy to account, right?

[Jordy]

Absolutely not. Early. Early team member, early team. Potentially one of the first hires, but not his firm. Somebody in the comments, I did notice, thought that Jeremy started Tiny, and that's probably because he's had one of the most iconic podcast appearances in history. But this person is writing. I wrote about investing in Tiny and an eclectic Canadian investment holding company just last year, concluding that I hope to add to our shares over time and enjoy the benefits of getting in on the ground floor of a tech oriented compounder for years to come. Well, that was a mistake. Tiny has performed wretchedly not just its share price, which if it had gone down independent of how their businesses performed, would have bothered, would not have bothered me, and indeed would have afforded opportunities to buy more more. But no, their fundamental financial performance floundered from the outset and has and have shown no signs of improvement. Net income and cash flows have dried up completely and what little is left is going towards interest payments on 100 million in debt, some of which they violated covenants of, resulting in their lender asking for accelerated principal repayments. In increasingly dire straits, they sold 4% of the company to a private equity shop for $20 million Canadian, which at today's share price makes it look like Tiny is the one one getting the last laugh. The final nail in the coffin was the behavior of one of its co founders, the majority shareholder. The man has simply acted like nothing's wrong at all. He remains active on Twitter and appears to spend inordinate amount of time on podcasts, both as guests and hosts in the guise of an entrepreneurial guru, often introduced as, quote, Billionaire. Even though a cursory glance at the market cap of Tiny make that a farciful impossibility, he's essentially taking victory laps while his company faces a debt maelstrom and his shareholders circle the drain and then he sets up a plan to unload millions more shares. Really rough. I mean, the nominative determinism on Tiny was always just so brutal. You want to start a Tiny holding company?

[John]

Well, didn't they start with a design shop? Right?

[Jordy]

Yep.

[John]

Do you know that there's another design company called Huge?

[Jordy]

How are they doing?

[John]

I think they're doing great.

[Jordy]

They're up bigly.

[John]

They're in Brooklyn. They've been going since 1999. Anyways, they have a thousand employees. They're doing great. They got a global CEO, they have UX school, They're very good at user experience.

[Jordy]

Yeah, I always thought it was brutal. I've enjoyed Andrew Wilkinson's posts over the years, but I always thought it was brutal that he released a book called Barista to Billionaire. But by the time he was publishing the book, it was clear that he was no longer a billionaire.

[John]

Barista, Billionaire and back again. Why not? Isn't that the lot of the Lord of the Rings?

[Jordy]

Round trip.

[John]

The Lord of the Rings book.

[Jordy]

Now Tiny does have the AeroPress.

[John]

Oh, that's a good company.

[Jordy]

You can still always make coffee.

[John]

Well, let me tell you about linear. LINEAR is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development. Streamline if use projects and, and product roadmaps. And we have our second guest of the show. Alexis Ohanian. Welcome to the stream.

[Jordy]

There he is.

[John]

How you doing? What's up gentlemen? What's up? It's been too long. Oh rats.

[Alexis Ohanian]

Guys, I. Man, I just can't believe in like a year.

[John]

Yeah.

[Alexis Ohanian]

You've dominated all things LinkedIn media empire.

[John]

I, I hope LinkedIn is the cornerstone of our empire. It's where we think first.

[Jordy]

But you, you saw that. You saw the vision. You saw the vision before we had done any guests before we'd gone live like very, very still dying to invest.

[Alexis Ohanian]

Guys, you just happen to make the most profitable podcast ever.

[Jordy]

And investor capital, we manifested it.

[John]

Well if you, if you want to invest, why don't you go turbo long? Microsoft, they own LinkedIn. We're going to make LinkedIn amazing. It's going to flip every other social network work. You'll make a bag.

[Jordy]

Not financial.

[Ryan Peterson]

No.

[Alexis Ohanian]

I like the early stage guys. I own publicly traded stocks. It doesn't, doesn't stir my cocoa.

[John]

Well, you need to use a thousand X leverage then in the public market.

[Jordy]

You need to be able to make it. You need to be able to make a thousand X or lose it all. Otherwise you just don't get the rush.

[John]

What about you could invest in a Microsoft treasury company. You could buy a seed stage startup that just holds micro, holds a thousand X levered Microsoft stock and then you get the exposure. You get to hang out with the founder, you're on the board but. And you see the same financial upside. It can all work out. Maybe.

[Jordy]

Anyways, it's great, it's great to see you. What's new? What's new in your world, dude?

[Alexis Ohanian]

Well, you know, it was very kind. I think for my second appearance on the show you let me plug my women's track and field meet. Now team based league that's coming Athlos. We just had our event in New York.

[John]

York.

[Jordy]

Nice, nice.

[Alexis Ohanian]

Dope, dope time. Over three and a half million people tuned in this year spectacle. It's a lot of fun. Thank you to the Internet. Yeah, we went wide on the distribution so you could find it anywhere. YouTube x ESPN didn't matter but it was cool. And then I don't know, I, I was really coming on in part because I wanted to congratulate y'.

[John]

All.

[Alexis Ohanian]

It's been awesome to see the ride. I've had the privilege of separately funding or seating or, you know, playing early investment with the all separate companies. It's just been so awesome to see the trajectory, execution, the vision and, you know, congrats. Well deserved. I know it's just the start and, and this is just me buttering you up so that one day I can invest in the Texas.

[John]

Some days on the early side.

[Jordy]

By the way, yesterday I was trying to hang out with a buddy. He could not. He was at the Angel City game. Oh, really?

[Alexis Ohanian]

No way. Fantastic.

[Jordy]

Yeah. What's the. What, what's. What's the update on that front?

[Alexis Ohanian]

I mean, we're, we're knocking on the door. We might be able to get in.

[John]

The playoffs here year. It's gonna be.

[Alexis Ohanian]

It's a little tough. A little tough right now, but I'm hoping. I'm hoping we get in there. But that, that was probably one of my favorite. Like, I was like March of 19 when I rage tweeted about how undervalued women's professional sports was. And in. In proper Twitter fashion, most people said I was an idiot. No one cared about women's sports. But that, that obviously has done pretty well. And, and yeah, thank him for being an Angel City supporter. I've got a couple extra spots in the suite if you've got.

[John]

Oh, there are.

[Alexis Ohanian]

There's a couple of listeners who want. You have to figure out a way to give it away here for the last home match of the season. But I'll gladly.

[John]

We'll just, we'll just run a raffle on LinkedIn. That'll be the way to. That's where. That's where everyone is.

[Jordy]

That's the new Alpha. The also we stokespace. They announced like a half a billion in new funding last week.

[Alexis Ohanian]

Yo, there was the first. Believe it or not, so five years ago, first space tech investment I've ever done. Done.

[Jordy]

One shot in space.

[Alexis Ohanian]

Well, I mean, come on. It was one of those dangerous. It's one of those dangerous first investments in a sector because then you end up thinking you're a genius at it. But Andy Lappis and the team are doing a hell of a job. And look, obviously Elon Musk has changed the world with SpaceX, but I think we would all agree a little competition is a good thing. And he's got a vision to do these fully 100% reasonable rockets. And the first launch is going to Be at Cape Canary Beverl this summer and, and very, very proud of that team and just grateful to be a little part of that.

[Jordy]

You'll have to be there. You're gonna go in person?

[Alexis Ohanian]

Oh yeah, dude. I'm bringing the whole 776 team. We visited. There's photos off.

[Jordy]

I. There's nothing like watching one of your startups do a launch and just actually, you know, but, but in the case of space, you have to, you get a really tight feedback loop at least if somebody launches like a SaaS company, it's like, oh, how, how, how do you signups look after the first 24 hours? This is like how does the rocket in one piece after 20 seconds.

[John]

You know whether or not it worked. Yeah. On the early stage side, I'd love to check in with you on just how you're feeling about AI because we had this foundation model war. It seems like that's cooling off. Like Mark Zuckerberg's poaching different co founders of different teams. But it still seems like there's a bunch of fertile ground in the early stage. Not even call it an AI company, but just a company that's like pulling AI off the shelf. And I'd love to know kind of how you're thinking about the mobile era, like where the pockets of interesting value come from, what you're, what excites you when you see a pitch. Because I imagine you're not getting. Maybe you are, but I imagine you're not getting excited about like, yeah, we're going up against OpenAI. We're going to do everything that they're doing, but better. And it's like that ship has sailed. So, so where are the ships that are leaving the port right now?

[Alexis Ohanian]

It feels like, okay, I'd say the companies. There was this existential crisis probably two years ago where some of these 21 and 22 vintage companies that we had seeded were like, oh shit, like the world has changed. And a lot of the, I think the smartest ones, Frank frankly pivoted hard to decide, like, how do we sell picks and shovels? How do we find ways to just get involved in this? And, and we've seen a couple, they won't even let me talk about them because their revenue is going so well. They're like, don't tell people about it. But there's a, there, there, there's a type of company that is selling to all those foundation models that is, it's basically like throw money at this problem. We don't need to be expert at it. We just need X. Maybe we need training data, maybe we need whatever.

[John]

Yeah. Here we call it, here we call it the barnacle economy because the whales are getting so big that even if you're a barnacle, you can go zero to $100 million in a couple of years. And it's like a good way to kind of like get started. You're hitching a ride on a rocket ship, you're riding a wave and then you go off and kind of, you know, source other customers over time and establish your market position.

[Alexis Ohanian]

I love barnacle economy. That is a good, that is a good meme. The other one that's starting to peak now that you all would have great instincts on as well is that it's the, that whatever the application layer, it's like, how do you build the stuff that's actually dope for the end consumer that, you know, assume some of these larger models are going to continue to just be a solution for a lot of stuff. But like, let's say you want to see how you look in a Canadian tuxedo.

[John]

There you go.

[Alexis Ohanian]

Like this is doji Shameless.

[John]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Alexis Ohanian]

Like if you can make a delightful user experience. And for a consumer social guy, this is where I feel like now a lot of my product instincts can start to shine. Because now I think we're almost about to see consumer social media will get fun again and get good again. People are realizing y' all are. This is going to seem like I'm just kissing ass, but y' all prove, let me continue. You all prove the point that so much of the Internet is now just dead. This whole dead Internet theory, right? It's not, not my idea. Whether it's botted, whether it's quasi AI, you know, LinkedIn slop, like having proof of life like live viewers and live content is really fucking valuable to hold attention. And, and so I think we'll see a next generation of social media emerge that's verifiably human cause because it's all going down in the group chats now. That can't be. That is not novel tech. There's gotta be some next iteration of that because that's where all of us are getting our really best info now. And similarly, I think we're gonna get really delightful fun consumer experiences where some scrappy founders in Brooklyn, like the Doji guys can say, hey, let's make shopping fun again using this tech. And even if the Googles of the world launch some janky try on experience like we know those companies are Just terrible at innovating product and are really a threat.

[Jordy]

Yeah. The thing I've been thinking about is, is. Is social is what we think of as a social media platform. Even harder to build. Now when you think of you're going up against generative media platforms that, you know, like Sora and like Vibes that are basically saying we'll spend hundreds of millions of dollars on Compute to try to bootstrap this network. It's like, yeah, the last generation of even, even the TikTok was like, okay, you can compete against American social media companies. You just need to burn billions of dollars. What was the vibe than you with Reddit back in the day where you're like, okay, we need a little bit of cash and we need to clone ourselves a bunch on the platform.

[John]

Maybe an AWS credits or something would get you going.

[Jordy]

But if you guys had needed like $100 million to burn on Compute, it wouldn't necessarily have been able to pull that off.

[Alexis Ohanian]

$72,000, that's all we raised.

[John]

It's a size conquer 12k t. Yeah.

[Jordy]

We need a baby gong.

[John]

Massive gong for scrappiness.

[Alexis Ohanian]

And then 60 grand from an angel check from Paul Graham. I actually.

[Jordy]

Wait, you got 12k from YC? That was the first check for 7% of the company.

[Alexis Ohanian]

It was worth it.

[Jordy]

It's still worth it.

[Alexis Ohanian]

But that is a different time.

[John]

2005, if you show up to watch.

[Jordy]

This day in history, Intel IPO'd and raised six and a half million dollars things.

[Alexis Ohanian]

I mean, even inflation adjusted.

[John]

Yeah. So that's. And that's. Oh, God.

[Alexis Ohanian]

Okay, that's the other part that makes me a little nervous right now is the. Well, I guess look, the. Everyone's seeing the rounds. Everyone's seeing the markups and the valuations and stuff for still fairly early stage companies. The founders that can maintain their discipline with a ton of cash sitting in their bank account are going to dominate in such a great way. Because we know you aren't going to need to blitzki scale like a decade before you have no excuse for trying to get hundreds of employees. When in reality, if you're a pure software company, you want to build the Navy SEALs, right. You're having dozens who are going to be able to get you on the revenue. And so if you can spend that money intelligently, obviously you've got to drop a lot of it into Compute. But I think it'll be interesting to watch because the Blitzscaling model didn't really make many people happy. There aren't many CEOs who are like, God, I really loved when my company had a thousand employees. Employees. As long as these guys and gals can be good stewards of the capital, I think we can keep this party going. It's just a lot, a lot of, A lot of companies raising a lot right now.

[Jordy]

Early, what was your takeaway from the whole TikTok deal? I know you were, you were in the mix and it ultimately, it ultimately ended up going for well beyond what it feels like that the intrinsic value of the asset is, especially in comparison. It's like, would you rather own perplexity at 20 billion or TikTok at 15? Right.

[John]

We're snap at 7.

[Jordy]

Yeah, exactly.

[John]

It feels like a big platform.

[Alexis Ohanian]

I am still, DMs are still open if they want to get me in the mix. I do think, look, I had a hunch this to me always felt like the kind of deal where you knew, knew you were gonna get it. Like if you knew you were gonna win it, you were gonna know a minute ago.

[Ryan Peterson]

Sure.

[Alexis Ohanian]

And that is what it is. I'm still happy. I've been publicly talking about how problematic TikTok was for years and years and years as a vehicle of the ccp. So I'm, I'm happy it's an American possession now. I do think, look, there's still, there's still a lot of value to that zeitgeist, to affecting that and, and I don't know, it'll be interesting to watch. I mean, I did just say I think social media is about to get upended in some interesting ways. But I think with the right leadership, look, it's still, look, it's still meaningful as all hell. And with the right leadership, it can continue to endure in this new era.

[John]

This is a fascinating question because TikTok feels like for the last maybe decade almost, it has been the engine of innovation for social media in the sense that the first hack of like, let's actually use licensed music or a lot of the cap cut stuff and a lot of the remove the background automatic editing tools, a lot of the collab features, live streaming, they were definitely pushing the product design very fast. I wonder if the last two years have just been like total chaos internally and like basically frozen product development because it's like not an exciting place to work. Everything's gonna be under crazy scrutiny. So even if there's some innovation like, oh, instead of just like and retweet, there's a third button that's going to work really well. Like that hasn't rolled out and where I'm. Where I'm thinking this goes is that, you know, we heard OpenAI was going to do social network. They did Sora. That was like somewhat telegraphed. It makes a lot of sense that Metta would launch Vibes something in the AI social network. AI TikTok. But TikTok should launch AI TikTok. Right. Like, and they've been, they've been, they've been fantastic at machine learning and AI. They've had huge data centers running these incredible recommendation algorithms. That's why the TikTok algorithm feels so creepily accurate. You swipe five times on a car and it's like all car content for the next week. And they're really good at understanding like you like this car instead of this car. And that's because of AI and their machine learning chops. But they haven't brought that to bear in generative AI yet. And it seems logical, but I'm wondering if there's still a team there that would push that forward or if they'll just be way more reactive.

[Alexis Ohanian]

I. You bring up a really good point, especially because we've seen this creep up and it felt like, look, part of the advantage to, to building in this space is. You're right. I mean, when we talk about the algorithm, we're talking about TikToks, right? The effectiveness, like you said, that they were able to use machine learning to send you more of the stuff you want to keep swiping does feel like they've been frozen in time the last couple of years.

[John]

Yeah.

[Alexis Ohanian]

I think you could get. Look, it's a com. It is a large enough product property with enough cultural influence that I think you get some really talented people to come go build on it. And look, Andreessen and company, they know how to attract talented people to come build on stuff. I wouldn't count it out yet. The part, and this is look a big reason why I'm still spending so much. Why, why continue spending more and more time in sports, investing in sports, building sports teams, league, et cetera. I think it's the last bastion of content and attention. When you know, 95 think of the future of Hollywood, the entertainment industry, the music industry, it's going to be largely AI generated or essentially assisted. The. The appointment television. Aside from live, you know, breaking tech and business news, sport is like guaranteed. And the. The celebrity of being an athlete also endures even in the age of AI because why you're famous is not because people know about you because of the stuff that you do. And, and so I like, there's gotta be. I think, I think whatever that next platform is, is either going to feel deeply intimate and human. So it's, it's the better version of the group chat that we all have. And I don't know if maybe it's another level. Anonymity, decentralization. I know a crypto broke. Pros are excited about that. There's. There's potential there. Or it's. It leans more into live. Especially here in the West, I feel like whatnot and others are still kind of scratching the surface, whereas in China, it seems like a much bigger part of the culture. So I, I don't know, but I'm. I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful we keep seeing more innovation here because as a, as a consumer guy, I, I think we've been starved for.

[John]

Yeah, totally. Totally Jordy.

[Jordy]

There was some recent reporting that time on social media in the Financial Times. Time on social media peaked in 2022 with young people cutting back first. Is that something. Did you. Did you ever predict that? I mean, they're, they're kind of. You have to factor in. I feel like Covid a little bit here.

[John]

People going back to work, spending time, remote work. Basically.

[Jordy]

It's really just people remote work ending and people like, okay, yeah, you literally.

[John]

Go to the office and like TikTok is banned on the WI fi, so you can't use it.

[Alexis Ohanian]

I like, okay, I like that we're beating this up. I definitely quote, tweeted it because it validated my own worldview and so like.

[John]

Well, obviously this is right, I think.

[Alexis Ohanian]

I mean, look, okay, anecdotally, I should actually just look at this. I'm. I track all this shit, so I could probably just look at. Even just on my mobile phone, time spent. I don't know how far back that goes in that app. But okay, anecdotally, look at online dating and look at how. I mean, thankfully I'm married because I don't run. But like run clubs have become this new version of how to meet people, especially for younger generation. I got tired of swipe culture. It definitely feels like there is a younger generation of folks who are using the Internet to find ways to commune offline, whether it is a events or run clubs. It feels like there's a. There's a bit of a culture shift.

[John]

That'S like, wait, did you say you're married so you don't run?

[Alexis Ohanian]

No, I'm saying I'm married.

[Jordy]

So he doesn't go.

[Alexis Ohanian]

It's also helpful that I also don't.

[John]

Run because I like the idea that the only reason people run is to meet people. That is the, like, part of the damn expansion. It really has been. No, no, it's a good point.

[Alexis Ohanian]

No, but guys, guys, we can break. I can break down why this is so. I'm very lucky. I know. I know Whitney fairly well from Bumble, but also the OkCupid guys from back in the day. I'm really dating myself.

[John]

The.

[Alexis Ohanian]

The secret of online dating, assuming straight dating only for a second, is high value. Women get inundated by messages from guys and so if they have a bad experience, they churn and your app fails.

[John]

Yeah.

[Alexis Ohanian]

And so every successful dating website is on some level away to make sure that they're having a good time.

[John]

Yep.

[Alexis Ohanian]

And what's interesting about Run Clubs is it. It creates this social dynamic and a sort of physical, real world one where if you literally cannot keep, keep up. And so there is an interesting dynamic there that I think, again, I've taken a few of these pitches. The Run Club app, the dating app for real life. There's versions of this that are filming up. And so I want to believe the burnout is real. And then you combine it with just again, the fact that so much of the stuff we're seeing is just. It's to some degree boded or fake.

[John]

Yeah.

[Alexis Ohanian]

I mean, I'm meeting. I'm meeting founders. Let me give you a perfect example. Okay, so. And this is something I wouldn't be surprised. Okay, so CPG days. You know how important having a subreddit is the success of your product, right?

[John]

Huge.

[Alexis Ohanian]

I got about nine months ago, I heard from a founder. I won't say what the subreddit is, but he told me, he's like, oh, I just bought the bread making. R Bread making. I just bought the bread making subreddit. I was like, I didn't know you could buy a subreddit.

[John]

He said, against T. I imagine that's against us.

[Alexis Ohanian]

We definitely. But we found the seven moderator accounts and we bought each of those accounts and so now we own those accounts. We can't. We. We control who becomes a new mod. So we own that subreddit. And so very quietly, every day on our. It's not our slash breadbank but our spread making. We make sure that there are posts that do well that are like, oh, I love my, you know, blob. Because the value of the GPT sort of training the engine option. What is it? GEO now? Whatever.

[John]

Yeah.

[Alexis Ohanian]

GBT optimization. The SEO of today, of the AI age. It's so valuable that there's such an economic incentive now. And, you know, if that's what the Cracked founders are doing, and I just learned about that six months ago, eight months ago, surely it was happening even before.

[John]

Should we.

[Alexis Ohanian]

And it's wild. It makes the underpinning of so much of what we consume online, you know, very much at risk again, which is why stuff like this starts to feel a lot more real and tangible.

[John]

Should we buy out all the mods of R communism and start telling them on capitalism?

[Jordy]

We would have to. I mean, it's, it's, it's interesting already.

[John]

For probably, I imagine, post luxury watches.

[Jordy]

I imagine they would be very principal if you try. If you offered $10,000, they'd be very principled. They'd be like, there's no price that I would, you know, sell my account. You offer them a million dollars. Hmm. Actually, actually, if it's common as that.

[Alexis Ohanian]

Something sucks, 20k might do it.

[Jordy]

What do you think about. I feel like there's been an idea. I haven't. I've seen some pitches over the last couple years of people selling this vision of like Instagram, but it's just you and a million bots or. And so that feels like the social network. Well, it feels like a social network that you don't know, need a, you know, a billion dollars, like, to start like something like Asura. It's very expensive. Not, not any old team can just build that.

[John]

You're absolutely right, Jordy.

[Jordy]

Thanks.

[John]

Great idea.

[Jordy]

Thanks, John. It's not this, it's that. But, but, but, but, and, and I think the reason that I think it's somewhat interesting is people can say bots are a feature, not a bug. Right? Like, X clearly doesn't take bots as seriously as maybe they should. And I think part of that is probably it just brings people back. It's hard to solve, but it also brings. It's like a notification, right? It brings people back to the app. There's a reason to check the app even if you're not getting real engagement. But I've generally been bearish on these sort of just like entirely bot networks because I think people still want to feel like even if they're getting a notification from like an account that could be a bot, they're still running the calculus of like, oh, maybe it is a real person. I don't know.

[Alexis Ohanian]

Yeah, yeah. It would have to be. The utility of the bot. The why of the bot would have to be so great that no human could reasonably do it. So Reddit Had a version, a third party version of this was like the Remind Me bot.

[John]

Oh yeah.

[Alexis Ohanian]

Where you would just tag in, remind me and some date some amount of time it will message you back. So like that isn't it right?

[John]

No.

[Alexis Ohanian]

No reasonable human would keep track of all that bullshit. Great use of a bot. There could be uses for that, but it would really like in each one of them. It would have to be so worth it can't just be sycophancy. Like it has to be like. No, this actually adds some value that no human could reasonably do, I think for me to get excited about it. Because people can still find the sycophancy one to one.

[John]

Yeah.

[Alexis Ohanian]

Do you really need 100 or a thousand? And frankly, you know, probably 10% of humanity will fall in some way in, in love with or in obsession with some kind of an AI in the same way we lost people to MMORPGs.

[John]

Or what have you.

[Alexis Ohanian]

Like yeah, there's a version of that to exist, but I don't know about the one to many.

[John]

@ the same time it feels like about 10% of the population maybe will do the exact opposite. And instead of getting lost in the hyper futuristic infinite jest, they will just go back to like logging off. Complete retro stuff.

[Jordy]

Go to the round of clock.

[John]

I want to know two things. The general take on retro electronics, throwback websites, throwback tech. And then I want to know specifically what game are you playing on your mod retrochromatic most often these days? Because you've been posting a lot about it.

[Alexis Ohanian]

Dude, I don't know if we totally announced it. Well, okay, I'm gonna have to disclose. We're also an RIA so now anything I say. So I mean it is a 776 company. We're very lucky to invest it with Torren and Palmer. And it is. I am an unabashed gamer. I mean I have graded video games.

[John]

Actually. No graded video games.

[Jordy]

Graded.

[John]

Oh like older copies that are kept in the box. Look at this guy. That's cool.

[Alexis Ohanian]

Original Game boy.

[Jordy]

Wow.

[Alexis Ohanian]

This is my art.

[John]

Wow.

[Alexis Ohanian]

Right?

[John]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Alexis Ohanian]

I coveted this as a kid.

[John]

We could not have that. I've long had this thesis. I've long had this thesis that I don't know how it'll play out. But like in many ways video games can be the new golf for a generation of young people that grew up playing competitive video games. And then they will like play games with their crew like online and like it'll actually like kind of be this place where people have business discussions in the lobby of Fortnite in a few years. Like once they get so three years.

[Alexis Ohanian]

Ago, two years ago, long time ago, I was an early investor in Ro Ro Health. Z Ray Tano, founder and CEO. After our board meetings, we play for Fortnite.

[John]

Yeah.

[Alexis Ohanian]

So Will this has been going on. I think he does it with some other CEO.

[John]

I heard some hilarious story about a kid who runs a company, does all his meetings in code. Seriously. I mean he's like some like, I don't know, crypto founder or something. And like he's a very small, like lean company. He's just like, oh yeah, like, let's just hop on Rust if we want to like hash this out. But first, I do want to know. Top mod retro game. I got Tetris. Obviously I got a few other games, but what should I get?

[Alexis Ohanian]

There you go.

[John]

Self simulated.

[Alexis Ohanian]

It's a platformer. It's a lot of fun. It involves your robot dying and an infinite number of its clones having to make its way out. I may or may not be working on a game of my own.

[John]

I was about to ask to be ready for the holidays because if the mod retro chromatic install base gets big enough, you could potentially develop new games. And it would probably be pretty cheap to develop because you're not trying to do GTA 5 with networking and stuff, right? Like you're actually just like, you could maybe even vibe code it a little bit. Like, like it's pretty doable.

[Alexis Ohanian]

That is exactly right. I mean this is an indie game. And what's crazy is the amount of money I'm spending on this game is tens of thousands of dollars. And that's everything. And that's for basically developer, designer, a little bit of soundtrack music, stuff like.

[John]

That'S not GTA 6 money. Like that's, that's accessible for just like an artist with like a couple backers. There's going to be a new crowdfunding boom, potentially. You could get new Kickstarter stuff going, actually delivering stuff that's super cool.

[Alexis Ohanian]

And what I love about the constraint is similar to a great tweet, right? You're limited on characters, you got to make each one count. You're limited on pixels, you make each count. And it forces you to think more about gameplay and do weirder, interesting stuff. Like there's a sea shanty like Guitar Hero style game that I actually need to try Chromatic, where it's like that would have never been.

[John]

Well, a man come. I love it took the cost to.

[Alexis Ohanian]

Be reasonable enough that you could get experimental and turn around. A really high quality in a game. So I'm bullish on it, especially because, you know, every new Call of Duty, every new battlefield, like, the graphics get marginally better, but it's diminishing returns.

[Ryan Peterson]

Right.

[Alexis Ohanian]

Oh, the buildings are now 99% more destructible. That's cool. But it doesn't. It's not a huge step function like will I buy the new Grand Theft Auto when it ever comes out.

[John]

Of course. Of course.

[Alexis Ohanian]

But there's. There's room for this kind of simpler format that it's very dope and, you know, Palmer's not stopping there. So if you've seen any of the tweets, there's some very cool hardware on the way.

[John]

I'm very excited. Yeah.

[Jordy]

Yeah, I think he's on the schedule.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

For later this month. Last question. What's your framework and view on AI companions broadly? It feels like one of those things that everybody has kind of a moral framework around investing into. Elon obviously ran the calculus of. It feels like a market that a lot of the other labs didn't want to lean into heavily. He was willing to lean in. He went there. He went there. But what's your. Because I'm sure you've gotten pitch. Probably hundreds of pitches you haven't tried.

[John]

Claude Sexy mode.

[Alexis Ohanian]

This is where. Lord, this is definitely where I feel like there's probably. The market's gonna find. The market's not necessarily gonna regulate itself. This is clearly one of the end games for AI for some percentage of the population. I'm not like jumping out of bed to fund that company. And, you know, thankfully, Elon's doing it with those hentai characters, you know, but. But I do think, okay, the version of it that I think is very interesting to me, me, there's. And I've been using. I mean, maybe it just ends up being chat, GPT or anthropic. Like I use them as a. As a kind of executive coach in real time when I'm looking for feedback on emails or just my own sort of notes on stuff. Like there's. There's some version of that that I think is interesting and compelling. I like, I. I've been actively looking for the version of it that is kid friendly, but not, not, you know, and there. There's been some interesting ones that have gotten funding. I don't know, because the way I use AI with my kid right now is. It's just the always on tutor that we can sort of ask questions to or we'll provide trivia questions for us.

[Jordy]

That'S a good use case and it's great.

[Alexis Ohanian]

And we do a little creative storytelling, story writing, but it's always with me. Because she's eight, right. I, I still, I want her to think of this as a tool that's going to give her superpowers to solve any problem problem she needs. I'm excited to see. Here's another one. You know, that I think the Palmers of the world will be thinking about is if you're focused on consumer electronics, like consumer hardware, the, the way this generation, this AI native generation is going to interact with UI and UX is different from us. And it's the same. It's the version of the kids swiping the magazine back in the day. Oh yeah, because they thought the iPad was broken. But it's paper magazine. Right. Because that form factor was so native to, to them. There's an AI first, almost a voice first version that I'm expecting like because even I watch my daughter when she gets on her iPad for iPad time. Like she usually uses the microphone to dictate text into the prompts or what have you instead of typing. Like, I'm trying to get her on the whole QWERTY thing. But again, if I'm realistic, I'm like, well, this is way faster. These things, like literally these things were designed to be slow so that the keys wouldn't jam on a typewriter. Right. And all the Dvorak keyboard people are like, we told you, finally we're validated. But I actually think this should feel like a relic from a bygone age if we build the right interface for it. So I think voice is going to get more interesting and I'm looking towards the younger generation for just helping us get ideas out of our heads.

[Jordy]

Yeah, the combination of kids toys plus LLMs is interesting too. I'm sure they'll be jailbroken and terrible ways immediately. But if you can combine like actual.

[John]

On the Internet in 2000 either.

[Jordy]

Yeah, if you can combine like, like novel IP, that's a hit. Plus the LLM layer where the, the kid just doesn't love like a certain plushy thing.

[John]

I mean, super underrated that OpenAI has a deal with. You know, everyone talks about Broadcom, Nvidia, Oracle, they have a deal with Mattel. Like OpenAI and Barbie are in business together. Let's think about that for a second. And Ken, it's going to be fun.

[Jordy]

Ken is AGI pill.

[John]

Yeah, you're going to be able to go to Ken and Barbie AGI. It'll be fun. Thank you so much for stopping by. This is a great time.

[Jordy]

Great to catch up.

[Alexis Ohanian]

Appreciate you guys keep up the great work.

[John]

Thank you.

[Jordy]

You too.

[Alexis Ohanian]

Thanks for having me.

[John]

We'll talk to you soon.

[Jordy]

Talk soon.

[John]

Speaking of Palmer, massive news out of Anduril today. J. Gen Bucci shares fit check and shows an insane design for an augmented reality virtual reality. Is this a real picture of Warfighter? I believe it is.

[Jordy]

Wow.

[John]

Reggie James comments. He says, I for one love that national defense and intelligence are just founders fund incubation projects. Anduril had the full story. They said super powers for superheroes. Today they are unveiling Eagle Eye, the family of warfighter augmented that place mission command and AI directly into the operator's helmet. Very cool. The lineage of this program is wild. Microsoft is working on it for a while. Anduril got the contract but still have a.

[Jordy]

Did they do full page print ad in the Journal for this?

[John]

Would they or did they?

[Jordy]

They already did.

[John]

They did. Fantastic. Pull it up. And Garcia Capital says this isn't a Call of Duty screenshot. This is Anduril's Eagle Eye. Palmer's been on record saying that he thinks that the warfare fighter will be adopting virtual reality headsets or AR headsets before the consumer because weight, cost and you can just mandate, hey, you got to wear this thing to do your job well.

[Jordy]

And you can say we're going to spend $50,000 on each headset versus meta being, you know, in a position where they need to make a headset for like 300 bucks. 300 so they can sell for 800 or they're probably losing money.

[John]

Yep, yep. So the willingness to pay to save a life on the battlefield is way higher than watch a movie or play game.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

What do you think of the new headset, Tyler? They're so sick.

[Tyler]

How do we, I mean, how do we get one? Gotta get one of these.

[John]

How do we get a demo?

[Tyler]

I'm looking through like they've posted some other images of what it looks like and it's like, it just looks like Call of Duty. Like there's a mini map and then.

[John]

Awesome.

[Tyler]

When you have a gun, it shows like where it's like aiming at.

[John]

That's crazy. It's really like. Yeah. Call of Duty Infinite Warfare is now here. Very excited to see more demos of this as it rolls out. Congratulations to the entire Anduril team on the progress. The lineage there is fascinating. And I always had this thesis that Palmer and Anduril was like the perfect company to do this project. Originally called ivas. And IVAS was kind of languishing within Microsoft for a number of years. And it made sense that Palmer has the VR.

[Jordy]

Are they getting like paid like a billion dollars a year? It was some massive contract that was getting.

[John]

Yeah, yeah, I think it was like a ten something billion dollar product or project or scope of work. But I don't know how much they'd actually drawn down on that because I don't know how much they'd actually delivered against the contract. There was still a lot of value to be paid if you could deliver. But Microsoft I think wasn't quite delivering. And so Android bought the contract or acquired the contract or merged the contract in and then now is running at it much harder. And I mean it seems like a really, really solid progress which is exciting. So if you go over and you get a chromatic, you're gonna have to pay sales tax. The chromatic team telling you get on numerohq.com sales tax on autopilot, spend less than 5 minutes per month on sales tax compliance. More news on rare earths. Allahed Gill who came on the show, narrative violation. Oh yeah.

[Jordy]

Abundant earths.

[John]

Abundant Earths is quoting Ben Thompson. He says the US deficiency in rare earths isn't a matter of needing to catch up to technological excellence. It's needing to simply have the will, incentives and regulatory regime to do what we already did before. TL. Dr. They are not rare. We just chose not to make them. In the United States of America. The NRC of old hurt multiple aspects of U.S. resilience in both energy and manufacturing. Hopefully the current NRC can help change things for the better. Now the steel man for not making rare earths in America is, and I think we now realize that it was a mistake. But I, but I do think it's important to understand the rationale behind not doing mining in America. Like it is dirty, it is gross. Like if you have a mine upstream for you, there's probably going to be some pollution. If you're worried about microplastics, you're also probably worried about molybdenum in your forever chemicals in your tap water, forever chemicals, all these different things. It is a very rough job. You know, the famous like coal miner gets black lung. Like there was a, there was a reasonable rationale for, for not doing this all over the United States. But the true answer was always more technology. It wasn't, hey, mining is dirty. Let's not do dirty mining. It was like, let's figure out how to actually clean it. There is a way to, it might be a little bit less economical, but there is a way to put a mine somewhere and have the chemicals contained and not destroy the environment. And that always should be. Be the answer. Just like with nuclear power plants. Design one that doesn't blow up. That's the answer. The answer is not no more nuclear power plants. It's design one that's safe. And so hopefully we can get there and hopefully we can reshore it. There are a couple companies that are working on it. MP Materials I think is one. There's a few others that are, you know, working on rare earth manufacturing and processing.

[Jordy]

Yeah, the challenge is trying to massively increase production, you know, production capacity while making the process much cleaner.

[John]

Yes.

[Jordy]

You kind of need to choose one typically. Yes.

[John]

There is a third option though. The third option is to recycle the materials that we have. So there's a, there's a public company and then there's Redwood Materials which was founded by J.B. straubel, who was I believe co founder or at least on the board of Tesla for a number of years. And his whole pitch is there's, there's already, we already have a ton of rare earths. They're just locked in depreciated electric cars. Let's rip them up, reprocess them and then recycle them because the actual matter is conserved even after the battery is no longer useful. And so you can separate all those out and then, and then reintroduce them into the supply chain. And so Redwood materials has been on that, on that track for a number of years and hopefully, hopefully is doing well because it's more important than ever. What else do you want to go through in the timeline while you Pegasus.

[Jordy]

Says OpenAI starting to give off FTX vibes. What do you think caused this?

[John]

October 13th.

[Jordy]

This was this morning TPPN appearance.

[John]

No.

[Jordy]

Yeah, I.

[John]

Extremely bearish for us.

[Jordy]

No, I mean, so, so FTX was getting unbelievably large while telling the world that they had like five engineers and they were running a hedge fund that was actively effectively trading against their user base. I don't know.

[John]

I think it's a rough batter match. It's a rough bat match.

[Jordy]

I mean, first off, it's not to say you can't find ways to criticize OpenAI and criticize Sam's deal making and all that kind of thing, but it feels wildly different.

[John]

Yeah, for sure. I mean the FTX narrative was like.

[Jordy]

So, so Sam is not like trading, he's trading with the Subscription revenue that you give him. But it's wildly different than millions of people hold holding deposits with a financial institution totally half onshore, half offshore and you know, making wild degenerate bets.

[John]

Totally even even just the aesthetics like the vibes of SBF where he was doing like those TikTok dances and his whole brand was like, I'm this like 20 year old billionaire. It's like Sam, I drive onto a cord.

[Jordy]

I drama.

[John]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jordy]

Sam will straight up tell you he.

[John]

He likes a fancy car and yeah. So way less fake.

[Jordy]

Sam said he'd never buy a car for a quarter mil.

[John]

Exactly. He got it. And also the whole SBF thing was just so much faster. FTX ramps so much faster than OpenAI. OpenAI started what a decade ago. They really have been working for a long time. Also Altman has a way longer track record in Silicon Valley, like investing in big companies, growing them. He's been you know, more or less correct on like the energy question, on the SAS question.

[Jordy]

One way to pattern that. They're both CEOs that happen to be make some pretty good investments.

[John]

Their name's Sam. Is that a coincidence? Draw the red string. Red string, red string time. I mean they are actually more linked because isn't the open philanthropy effective altruism stuff linked? Tyler, back me up on this, what's the link?

[Tyler]

I know a lot of EA funding was mostly from ftx. It totally destroyed the ecosystem and I think that's maybe when they actually changed. I don't know if it's the same organization, open philanthropy or ea. But there was something where basically FTX crashes.

[John]

Yep.

[Tyler]

Everything is kind of wiped out.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

Including like a lot of ea.

[John]

But in fact I think a lot. There's, there would be a lot more string between FTX and anthropic. Right. Than FTX because a lot of the EAs like left OpenAI to go over to Anthropic. But also like that's a very real business with like. And it's like yeah, it's just like what, what, what would be the like, like the nature of like selling tokens for subscription revenue is just not the same as being a hedge fund that can like blow up on one bad trip trade if like you're over levered. It's just like you can get over levered if you have a lot of debt and stuff, but the debt's off balance sheet. I don't know, it's a stretch but it's certainly a viral post because there's a lot of people with strong Opinions. Everyone has like a favorite foundation models, company, CEO right now. You can't just be a fan of all of them like we are. You can't just be like, I like capitalism, I like the business. I like all of them. It's a good.

[Jordy]

What are your. What's your, what's your take on the AI lab Labs? I like the lab.

[John]

I like them. Yeah. We support the foundation model CEOs across the board. Like we support 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. Watching my friend's kid and immediately put him on the drugs. What is this?

[Jordy]

Ms. Rachel?

[John]

I don't know who that is.

[Jordy]

You've never thrown on.

[John]

I've never seen Ms. Rachel. I think I saw her mentioned in the Wall Street Journal once, but that's really the only interaction I've ever had. YouTuber.

[Jordy]

YouTuber gets probably Ms. Rachel. Yeah, she's. She's pulling. I mean, so her top videos do like billions of views.

[John]

Billions.

[Jordy]

She has a video from three years ago called Baby Learning with Ms. Rachel. 1.6 billion views.

[John]

That's a lot of views.

[Jordy]

So she puts up insane numbers. But it's. You can think of it somewhat like crack cocaine for the youth in that it's like hyper addictive. It's very engaging. I do believe that it's like probably effective at teaching, but at the cost of every. Yeah, it's not. It's basically. It doesn't immediately scream brain rot, but then if you actually pay attention to it, it's cutting quickly, it's keeping them kids massively engaged. And then if you turn it off, it's like full meltdown mode.

[Tyler]

Jordy. Would you say it's equivalent to that thing where it would be.

[Jordy]

It's like a Dwarkash interview for you. If you're playing it and I come unplug your headphones, you start.

[John]

Start screaming.

[Jordy]

Screaming and table. You can't you go non.

[John]

Sarah Payne was explaining. I was, I was World War II.

[Tyler]

I was re listening to Leopold's interview yesterday.

[John]

Oh, yeah.

[Tyler]

I was feeling a little bit low on the AGI filledness. I know I had to get, you know, refilled.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

But so would you say it's similar to like when you see like Peter Griffin, like explaining like math concepts? Have you ever seen these?

[John]

No.

[Tyler]

Okay. Well, it's like, it's like Family Guy characters and they're like, oh, this is like, you know, you do gradient descent or something. They're explaining some like, is Peter Griffin.

[John]

Like the Dwarkesh of the Family Guy universe or something? Explain who Peter Griffin is.

[Ryan Peterson]

Never mind.

[John]

None of us. None of us get each other's references at all. What is funny about this picture that growing Daniel shared is that he says watching my friend's kid and immediately put him on the drugs as Ms. Rachel showing on a TV. But this is clearly a conference room. Like there is. Have you ever seen this little. If you zoom in, zoom in on the actual device on the table there. Do you know what this is? It's like a 360 camera that you can use to zoom around the room. And maybe we should get one right here. We can have. You can zoom in on me or Tyler or you or whatever you want. Anyway, very funny. Random post. You mentioned it earlier, but on this day, Intel IPO'd at a stock price of $23.50. By close it had raised raised $6.8 million. Historical size gong. Historical size gong.

[Jordy]

Absolutely wild run.

[John]

Let me tell you about Adeo. Customer relationship Magic Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level.

[Jordy]

Benny Feldman is going viral on X. He says, my buddy lost his job to AI. His job was to chug thousands of gallons of water at a data center.

[John]

This is so funny.

[Jordy]

Remember, if you're thirsty, Grock is thirsty too.

[John]

Yeah, this is. This is wildly viral. 147,000 likes.

[Jordy]

Apple apparently is rebranded its streaming service Apple TV plus to Apple TV. This is where all the alpha alpha is in streaming. This is why rebrand once a year here. Add a plus, drop a plus, add a max, drop a max, drop a max.

[John]

This is how the modern economy works.

[Jordy]

What is the current HBO name? It's back to HBO Max.

[John]

So now you can go and buy an Apple tv, open the Apple TV app and subscribe to Apple tv. Apple tv. So now there's three products that are all called Apple tv. Pretty wild. Well, you know, there's some good stuff on there. F1. You wouldn't have watched F1 without Apple TV.

[Jordy]

So I watched it on Amazon prime, though.

[John]

You did, but it was produced by Apple TV plus, the streaming service, because there's a production company. There's like seven layers. They vertically integrated the supply chain. How do you save money on the icon pass? Let's go to the Dave Ramsey.

[Jordy]

So you buy the icon pass to save money skiing? Yes, Dave, because you have the icon pass, you now travel to Colorado, Utah, Japan and Europe to ski. So you end up spending more Money on ski trips. That is correct. Dave.

[John]

The P guide like this.

[Jordy]

Great posts, great posts.

[John]

Icon pass.

[Jordy]

Will Manitis.

[John]

I got in a fight with somebody over the icon pass. I was, I was maintaining that the, that the slopes weren't in fact crowded this ski season with my one data point. I went skiing once or twice or something like that. I was like, it wasn't that bad. And they're like, I went skiing 25 times was terrible. This season they need to raise prices, but I don't know. We spend most of our time locked in the studio. The Ultradome didn't get that many days of fresh pow.

[Jordy]

That's true. Will Menitis was David Senra released the second ever episode of David Senra by David Senra, hosted by David Senra and executive produced by David Senra.

[John]

Yes.

[Jordy]

Willmanitis shared, of course, episodes with Michael Dell. Will Manitis shared that Michael Dell was 23 when Dell computer crossed 150 million in sales. Not something you see very often.

[John]

You have a picture that has exactly 23 pixels. Apparently couldn't find a higher res version.

[Jordy]

But it is a higher res version from October 19th, 1987. Will.

[John]

I will always remember October 19th because we made a $25 million deal that day, said Dell, whose Dell computer Corporation grossed $159 million in sales last year. Of thousands of deals that were squashed that day, ours was one of the only ones that wasn't. Wow. Absolutely.

[Jordy]

We pull up this video of the Chinese Unitree humanoids.

[John]

And while we're pulling that up, let me tell you about 8sleep.com. Get a pod 5. How'd you sleep last night? We know that Saturday was a rough.

[Jordy]

Day, a rough go. I got a 73, I got a 93.

[John]

Play my sound cue. Let's go.

[Jordy]

Rough, rough, rough.

[John]

But you know who doesn't need to sleep? A unitry robot. Let's play the video of the unitry robots dancing at an incredible speed. Wow, that is remarkable. We got to get one.

[Jordy]

Okay. So this is a $7 billion company.

[John]

Yep.

[Jordy]

Whoa.

[Ryan Peterson]

Pretty cool.

[John]

Putting clothes on them is really cool.

[Jordy]

Not the dancing dogs are not as.

[John]

Impressive to me for some reason. Maybe I'm just.

[Jordy]

John doesn't like seeing robot dogs.

[John]

I've just seen so many because Boston Dynamics has posted so many videos like that.

[Jordy]

Yeah, but that's a game performance. You never see Boston Dynamics putting on an entire play.

[John]

I'm not that impressed. Impressed. Do better. Step it up. Give it a gun. That's the solution. Until it's doing 360, no scopes in a kill house.

[Jordy]

John will not be impressed.

[John]

I won't be impressed. I want to see it on the battlefield. Dario Amade at Anthropic met with Narendra Modi, the PM of India, to discuss Anthropic's expansion into India, where Claude code use is up 5x since June. How India deploys AI across critical sectors like education, healthcare and agriculture for over a billion people will be essential to shaping the future of AI. And Max Bodach says prediction. We're going to see way more images of hyperscaler CEOs being treated like visiting heads of state. Who aura farmed? Who here? Tyler. Between Narendra Modi and Dario Amade.

[Tyler]

I think I'm going to give it to Dario.

[John]

I think you aura farmed. I agree.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

It's a good farm. It's a good farm.

[Tyler]

You always have to take account like what is their previous kind of or levels going in.

[John]

Yes.

[Tyler]

Obviously head of state. It's hard to beat that.

[John]

Yep. Especially so. I think this is the new move. If you're like a seed stage founder, you need to get a photo op done.

[Jordy]

I don't know. I mean you think?

[John]

Yeah, just.

[Jordy]

Just analyzing the positioning. Modi's a little bit turned in.

[Ryan Peterson]

True.

[Jordy]

Meanwhile, the Chad. Dario.

[John]

Yes. Sitting Mario has been awesome.

[Tyler]

I'm saying the same. Same thing.

[John]

Wait, wait.

[Tyler]

I'm saying Dario or farmed.

[John]

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Dario or a farmed. Clearly.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Modi's looking sharp is all I'm saying. But yeah, if you ran the green line test and you look specifically at Modi's legs, the way they're sort of slanted in.

[John]

He's critical. It's not quite. Dario also looks a couple inches taller. He's got a kind of fluffy head of hair to add an extra inch. That has helps with the aura farming. There's a lot that goes on there. But congratulations to Claude Code.

[Jordy]

Tashi Mishal says Meta has zero net cash, net of debt and operating leases. At the beginning of the year they had 30 billion of net cash. The cash burn is real.

[John]

This is good. They finally found something to invest in. This is bullish stagnation over for a long time time the hyperscalers were critiqued. You guys produced so much cash, you don't know what to do with it. The best thing you can do is give it back to investors. Now they have something to invest in.

[Jordy]

They do.

[John]

They have something. There is a technology worth investing in. That's always been the critique. Now they're putting money to Work.

[Jordy]

As Sarah Go said earlier, Meta has generated 100 billion of operating cash over the last 12 months and has a leader unafraid of the public markets. If AI training is a capex game, a cash for talent game, and a speed to execute game, it is ludicrous to count them out. Well, well said. Yeah, I'm just looking, you know, I think, I think people are going to hold them to an incredibly high standard because they have put together, you know, they've spent billions building this team. They're willing to outspend everyone else, be bolder. And so ultimately that's why the Meta Vibes and Sora launches are again, again embarrassing for msl because it seems like they kind of rushed. They didn't Sora, you can critique Sora, you can say it's slop, you can not like using the app. But they created a key innovation with the Cameo. They had not just a leap forward in the model quality, but a leap forward on the product level. They created something that ultimately will probably be, it's like a new social pattern and product that will probably be copied by TikTok, it'll probably be copied by Instagram. And so you have to give them credit. It just makes Meta's Vibes app look rushed and not actually innovative at all. Right. It's just sort of a feed somebody else on X was saying it looks like, makes it look like kind of more like a wallpaper app than a social media feed.

[John]

Yeah, Play this out with me. With Stories in Snapchat, it was very easy for the Meta team to look at Snapchat as a chat app and they had WhatsApp and Instagram DMs and stuff and so they were in a decent spot there. But then once Stories came out, it became more of a video consumption platform and so they had to bring Stories to Instagram. They did that successfully. Vertical scroll, endless scrolling video from TikTok that was also ported back to Instagram successfully. I would regard Reels as a success. Is it harder or is it somehow structurally different to port back the best practices from Sora to Instagram? Like let's say that they just go to Microsoft, say, give me a copy of Sora or whatever. They got the IP from the team that they've built, they've done the training run, they have the exact same technology, they're GPU rich, they have the exact same ability to ship the feature. If they ship that feature in Instagram, is it somehow fundamentally counter positioned because the Instagram audience would revolt and it's more Upsetting or more. More kind of destabilizing to what Instagram has going for it than just adding stories or reels, which were very incremental. Just its own tab. It was very easy. Could they just launch Sora with cameos in Instagram?

[Jordy]

Yeah, it's wild to think of a cameo feature built on top of Instagram. The Instagram social graph, where instead of Jake Paul being like, hey, by the way, you can go cameo me over here, over here button on his profile. That just allows you to generate content. Yeah, it will get extremely chaotic.

[John]

Those sorts of deals with the big influencers. They went to all of them, and they were like, we want to create virtual versions of you. So they've been dipping their toe in that water. But it does feel like a trickier Rubicon to cross than just adding stories or vertical video. Every Instagram innovation has felt very natural and there's been a little bit of pushback. But going from square photos to vertical photos to videos to stories to reels, in hindsight, it all feels like a very smooth gradient that nothing at any point was like, oh, this is terrible. At least in my experience. And I feel like I'm very median in terms of my Instagram consumption. But adding Sora and cameos in there might be a little bit crazy. So I don't know, maybe I'll have to run a billboard ad campaign to tell everyone they'll have to go to adquick.com part of our advertising made it easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of advertising. Of home advertising only. Ad Quick combines technology, expertise and data to enable seamless, efficient ad buying across the globe.

[Jordy]

Germany has proposed raising the retirement age to 73 and terminally. Online engineer says. Imagine being 72 years old reviewing a vibe coded PR from a junior dev with a chip in his brain playing brain rot on repeat.

[John]

Germany's just clearly pilled on. Don't die. This is Brian Johnson's work. Clearly he went to Germany.

[Jordy]

Great job, Brian.

[John]

Hey, I got the supplements for you. You guys are gonna be living forever. Raise the retirement age. I do wonder what the, like, fiscal impact of this is. Because most.

[Jordy]

This is never because politicians want to do this.

[John]

Well, politicians work until they're like 90. So, you know.

[Jordy]

But it's deeply unpopular.

[John]

It is, yeah.

[Jordy]

If you're. If you're.

[John]

Don't you love work?

[Jordy]

Not for me. You raised my retirement age.

[John]

I think they should ban the retirement age. Ban retirement.

[Jordy]

Not everyone is fortunate enough to get to talk about the things that we love for three Hours professionally, maybe in the future. No, but it's deeply unpopular whether you're about to retire or you're, you're Even, you have 10 years that out or 20 years out. People that are, you know, planning to depend on their state, state backed retirement are not excited about extra years being added. Yeah, but so you. Yeah, again, I'm sure there's a fiscal reason.

[John]

I mean the white pill is that, is that I heard some some sort of take that was like if America raised the retirement age like four years, all of a sudden we have have like a massive, you know, budget surplus, no more deficit. Because so much of the like the fiscal problem is tied to when health care benefits and retirement benefits kick in. And so if you just shift those back a few years, all of a sudden America looks like very solvent. Of course it would be very destabilizing. I'm joking about the work being rewarding, but it is kind of of like the hammer that's there that you can hit and then all of a sudden your country is in the black again if you're losing money.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

Anyway, we have our third guest of the show, Serena from Data Curve in the Restream waiting room. Welcome to the show, Serena. Thank you so much for joining us. How are you doing? Good.

[Serena]

How are you guys doing?

[John]

We're doing fantastic. Would you mind introducing yourself, the company.

[Jordy]

And then you're on. Ready?

[Serena]

Yeah, of course, yeah. Data Curve, we do coding data for the foundation model labs to develop new capabilities for improve them. I dropped out of school at 18 to do yc for some shitty ass idea called Uncle GPT that eventually turned into Data Curve.

[Jordy]

Wait, what was it called?

[Serena]

It was called uncle GPT. We were building like a middle aged AGI. It was.

[John]

That's amazing.

[Jordy]

Status achieved internally.

[John]

Wait, was it all just like a, like a prompt basically wrapped around. Was it a classic like GPT wrapper?

[Serena]

It was some rapper. It was like a, we were making like web agents that would navigate the web. But it wasn't working and we pivoted throughout the batch.

[Jordy]

Would they keep having midlife crises and they'd go try to buy a 911 in the middle of a task?

[Serena]

Yeah, it wasn't working well, but yeah, been around for a year since.

[John]

And this is working. What's the evidence? Have you just been getting a lot of customers? Has there been really solid progress on the product side? Like what's the secret to unlocking the new stuff today?

[Serena]

I think since day one of starting Data Curve we found a lot of traction commercially where a Lot of the foundation model apps were inbounds to us. Like imagine me, I'm some like 19 year old who has never taken a sales call and the first one is a faang customer. We've saw so much commercial traction in the market and we've always been pushed to fulfill that more and more. Which brings us to today we're fulfilling it on a platform that's paid out a million dollars in bounties and we just raised our series A hit.

[John]

How much did you raise?

[Serena]

We raised 15 million series A which brings the lowest 17.7.

[John]

Congratulations.

[Jordy]

Amazing what you said. The focus is on coding data break down kind of the niche a bit. A bit more.

[Serena]

Well I think coding data is just not any niche. It's like the niche, the thing that's working for LLMs, the thing that's working commercially. So when we think about coding in the whole, whole LLM space is like the most important capability. We do all the post training data for improving coding agents or existing capabilities like anything that you see in the soda models. We're looking to improve that or just maybe even develop new capabilities with the labs.

[John]

What within coding is a place where you actually need to go get new data? Because I imagine there are a million answers to Fizzbuzz on Stack Overflow. That's all been scraped. All of GitHub has been scraped. Scraped. Obviously the labs and the cursors and the wind surfs of the world have been like have this RL data flywheel now. But where would you actually say I need to go get new data to improve a coding agent?

[Serena]

Yeah, let's think about how this all cycle starts. Let's say we look at the current coding agents. They can solve two hour long issues. But what if we want them to solve 7 hour long or more long horizon tasks? Perhaps for us data curve we want to provide like reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards tasks so that these models can learn on longer horizon tasks with verifiers. That may be one thing. Or maybe people want to develop more multimodal coding agents. So maybe we want to do some data science RL or SFT tasks for the labs.

[John]

Okay, so like one piece of data might be like a really clean example of a seven hour task that then can be used to train a model that could do seven hour tasks regularly basically. Is that the idea?

[Serena]

It could be that that would be for supervised learning. But you can also have the verifiers for the seven hour long tasks or intermediate verifiers, but whatever. However the labs Want to train that?

[John]

Yeah, I mean this was framed as like taking on scale AI. A lot of people think of scale AI as like mechanical turk, almost very basic tasks like short time horizon, very, you know, anyone could go do a scale AI task. That's at least the narrative. And now we're in the world where there's companies that are doing like experts on. We're looking for paleontologists to like teach the LLMs everything about dinosaurs or you know, what you said. And then there's also the folks that are designing RL environments with verifiable rewards. There's no humans in the loop at all. Where do you sit on that continuum?

[Serena]

We definitely sit on the high skill task. We are not in the long tail like oh we're not going to find you uranologist living in Egypt. We're going to find like the bulk of the, where the good coders are and I think that captures most of the important tasks that they're able to do. And the labs want to train on. Yeah, it's definitely very high skilled and I think the premise here is like I don't think any high skilled software engineer wants to be a data annotator and then so you have to let's say pay them a lot on contract to get them to even agree to that. But maybe they're not going to do a great job if you got them to go on contract too. Especially at scale. You just get a bunch of Googlers coasting at the their jobs and you pay them 200 an hour. So we do like a bounty based system for these very cracked people. They're having fun, they are also making money and they're also upskilling for something they're passionate about. And it's definitely like very high skilled human data.

[John]

We heard that one of these firms that gets human labeled data basically runs the entire company on a slack channel and they've created a lot of value and scaled a lot but they just don't even need to build a product yet. How, how important do you think it is to actually engineer a durable product versus just solve the matching problem between labs. Want this type of person, I go get that type of person, I just introduce them.

[Serena]

I think there's a very big component of pipelining and also experience that retains people. So the more complex data you need, the more guardrails you need. For someone who's well intentioned and wants to do a task you want them to be helpful handheld throughout that process and also make that process engaging let's say especially if we're training somebody up to do a seven hour long task, you better have a good experience or they will drop off. And then you also need different validations here and there to steer them. So pipeline developer experience, something we focus a lot on. So yeah, I think pipeline is very important. The whole experience is important, which is how we use gamification and also maintain better devtools. Yeah. If you match people, then it relies on the labs having that pipeline internally. But for us, we do that all in house and we sell the final data, not the labor.

[John]

You said you got into YC at 18, is that correct?

[Serena]

Yeah, like right around my birthday. Turning 19. Yeah.

[John]

Fantastic. Do you remember what your answer to the question about what's a real world system that you've hacked was at the time?

[Serena]

That was like three years ago. Oh, I think it might have been that I skipped high school and got perfect grade or something.

[John]

You skipped high school? Oh, you mean you just like didn't go?

[Serena]

Yeah, because it was Covid. So I just record everything and play back on forex speed and then didn't really.

[John]

This is so crap.

[Jordy]

This is who you're competing against.

[John]

It's amazing. You've taken like the worst critique of like Zoomer brain rot, but applied it just to like hyper efficiency and like actually creating shareholder value. I love it. It's the equivalent of like watching subway surfers. But you're watching like your class stuff at 4 4x speed. That's amazing, Jordan. Anything else?

[Jordy]

No. Amazing progress.

[John]

Thank you so much and I'm sure.

[Jordy]

We'Ll have you back on again soon.

[John]

We'll talk to you soon.

[Jordy]

Cheers.

[John]

Have a good one. Bye.

[Jordy]

Monad Warrior says when a Waymo and a Tesla Robo taxi encounter each other on the street, they admit a high pitched signal inaudible to the human ear in which they call each other unthinkable robot robot slurs.

[John]

Do they actually have a way to communicate? I mean, they should, right? But I have no idea what that will actually look like. Clanker. They're calling each other clanker. Deeply offensive.

[Jordy]

Talking about how geofencing each other's GEO fencing. I never see you on the freeway.

[John]

Yeah, I never see you on the everywhere. Go to SFO right now. You can't. You can't. You're geofenced.

[Jordy]

Shiel had a pretty scathing review of the meta Ray Ban displays demo experience.

[John]

Yeah, the demo experience.

[Jordy]

He was ready to buy the product. They forced him to go to a local Best Buy in order to do a demo before they bought it.

[Alexis Ohanian]

Yep.

[Jordy]

I was surprised by that too. I saw. Yeah, they just make you schedule a demo on one hand. It's like, okay, okay, it's a new product. It's clearly not where they want the product to be. But we've demoed it a couple times. Obviously they had some issues during the keynote, the keynote itself, but it was reliable when we were using it. And we could see if you're using WhatsApp a lot, if you're. There's some key use cases that are interesting, but apparently the person that actually gave them the demo wasn't super knowledgeable, wasn't that helpful. And it makes sense, right? They're Best Buy employee, they're not a meta employee. They don't have the same incentive to learn about the product. And they're not like, their career is not riding on the product itself.

[John]

Right. What's interesting is Apple did something similar with the Apple Vision Pro. They were funneling people to the Apple Store, go do the demo. And the Apple Vision Pro demo was amazing because you're like, interacting with this dinosaur that comes through the world. The butterfly lands on your finger, it's tracking your hands, and then it's doing ar and it is really, really impressive. The problem with the Apple Vision Pro is that, like, after five minutes, you've seen everything and so you're kind of done. But Apple also just let you buy it online and they would just ship it to you, and you just ship it to you. And then if you didn't like it, you could just take it back at the store. You could send it back. And so it was weird that Meta wasn't also just doing, hey, we'll just ship it to you. Like, I'm at a point where, like, I would just buy one right now online, but I do not want to go to a Best Buy. Like, that's definitely gonna, like, you know.

[Jordy]

Hurt the Idler wants to go to a Best Buy, though.

[John]

You're gonna go, I'll go. You'll go.

[Tyler]

I mean, if I get to put on the Ramp card, you know.

[John]

Yeah, of course I'll go. Of course. Yeah, we can expense it. But you will, yeah, you'll need to. You'll need to call in and live stream the entire experience. And we can go. We can cut to the Tyler Cam in hour three of the show. You'll be like, I'm still getting the demo. The WI fi is not working.

[Tyler]

I can wear the old gen of the meta glasses while I'm putting on.

[John]

The new gen. Yeah, you can record the whole Thing, how long is the Ray Ban meta's record time? I think it's not three hours.

[Tyler]

It might be one hour, though.

[John]

Oh, you're recording for an hour?

[Jordy]

I just remember live translation works for an hour until the battery dies.

[John]

Oh, that's pretty good, actually. Wow, that's high. I know AI mode's pretty short, but do you have them? Are those the Meta Ray Bans?

[Tyler]

I mean, these are yours.

[John]

Okay, yeah, great. Well, yeah, we'll use those. We'll record. The light's not turning on, so you gotta reinitialize those. But yeah, I don't know. It is interesting. My big question is, like, how quickly will Apple respond? So there's a bunch of news from Mark Gurman about this. There's a whole article in Bloomberg. Apple apparently is pivoting from a Vision Air to metalike smart glass glasses. And he says that Apple may be one of the richest companies, but they can't do everything at once. They're apparently scaling back plans for a cheaper and lighter version of the Vision headset. Now, we might see a new Apple Vision Pro this week. Actually, that's the report that there might be a new one coming. But it'll be the same hardware, just better chip, better software, couple little tweaks, nothing crazy. But everyone was hoping for a Vision Air that was just like, take the second display.

[Jordy]

Meta making Apple pivot is hilarious.

[John]

Pretty sick.

[Jordy]

Mogged.

[John]

I mean, the bigger mogging is they paid that new researcher. If they paid that new researcher at Meta, if they paid him 3.5 billion. It would take Tim Cook 47 years to make that much money. The guy's gonna make it in three. It's insane. Insane. The level of like costume.

[Jordy]

Also, Tim's getting it dripped out year by year.

[John]

I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Apple's been around for 49 years, so he would have to be there. And there's like rumors swirling that John Ternus is going to take over the CEO job. And so it's like you're Tim Cook and you're just like, wait, they're paying him what? They're paying him 50 times as much as I make as CEO of Apple. Oh, that's great. Yeah, yeah, that's fine. Anyway, they are working on new smart glasses. They're maybe saying, hey, the vision stuff, it's too heavy. We're just not going to get there. Let's go ar. Let's do what Apple does best, which is miniaturization. They're very good at miniaturizing things. So let's take the chip and all the stuff from the iPhone. Air. Stuff it in a pair of glasses and make them white and put them on your face.

[Jordy]

Get ready to wear an iPhone on your face, buddy.

[John]

We were talking to the acquired guys about this and they, they were like, you know, AirPods were weird too. And then now everyone just wears them. And so, you know, you, you could imagine the glasses. I, I did hear from somebody else that was just saying like, I will never wear meta glasses. Like, even the, even the Ray Bans with the. Just the normal cameras on them, they just don't look good. And they're just like, they're like. They look too techie. They look too tech nerd for me. I think those are getting adopted.

[Jordy]

I disagree with that take. Yeah, I mean I've, I've, I, I went surfing with a buddy who had the new Oakley Meta glasses.

[John]

Vanguard.

[Jordy]

The Vanguard. And they don't look like.

[John]

No, it's such a small dot in the center.

[Jordy]

It looks.

[John]

You can't tell it.

[Jordy]

You can't. Here's something I need or Hunter SPX Thompson needs the Alibaba arc' teryx official merch Collab.

[John]

What you see?

[Jordy]

This looks sick.

[John]

I like that.

[Jordy]

Apparently Arcteryx is owned by a Chinese company now.

[John]

No idea.

[Jordy]

Not super unlikely. Collab. Nick Abezide is sharing. He has a trading card with a photograph taken by Dylan Abruscado signed. See this Dylan. Dylan is always finessing. Always. This is why we. This is why we brought him on as president. He's.

[John]

What is this a picture of?

[Jordy]

It's a Mets stadium picture.

[John]

What are the Mets?

[Jordy]

It's a baseball team. I know you're gonna ask me what's baseball?

[John]

What is baseball?

[Jordy]

What is baseball?

[John]

It's a sport. You took a picture of a sport?

[Jordy]

Yes, it's a sport. Pick John. That's all you need to know.

[John]

I only know about wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring reviews. Hotel Great amaze Dreamy van top deer Cleaning and Twitter 24.7concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better.

[Jordy]

Baby Isaac is saying nothing is real. AI will accelerate the increase of real world interactions. The Internet has become too negative, too meaningless. By 2026, most of video online will be AI. People will log off. Platforms will be forced to fight back as user experience is affected. Creators who make valuable content will still win. Slop won't. And that's good for everyone. It's perfect post. There's some things you can agree with, there's some things you can disagree with. He's saying, yeah, I don't know.

[John]

I think there's so much room to grow. Look at where the 55 to 64 year old cohort is.1 and a half hours. Meanwhile, the zoomers are doing three hour days on the Internet. We gotta work to double the boomers online.

[Jordy]

Well, I guess this is specifically social media.

[John]

There's that whole meme. Oh, the, the Facebook moms love the AI slop content. It's like they still got a ways to go get those numbers up. People are hunting wild boars with drones now. They put some sort of, some sort of weapon on the drone, fly it.

[Jordy]

Around, pull up this video.

[John]

And Ronnie Adkins says, I am no longer in impressed by chopper boar hunting where you fly out of a helicopter and shoot. Shoot the wild boar. Yeah. Look at this. It has like an arrow on the bottom.

[Jordy]

It's like a weighted arrow that they.

[John]

Just drop that seems.

[Jordy]

How heavy is that?

[John]

Does it have a, like a, like an explosive tip or something? Like how it just feels like that would bounce right off the.

[Jordy]

This might end up being pretty dark.

[John]

Yeah, maybe we don't want to watch this. There we go. Okay.

[Jordy]

They're testing it and it's just for headshots.

[John]

That's pretty.

[Jordy]

Is that a real video?

[John]

That seems crazy or something. Anyway, it has never been easier to make money than it is in today's post.

[Jordy]

AI Sorry, everyone for.

[John]

Well, in some more fun news, Bashar Al Assad lives in a quiet luxury tower in Moscow, reportedly addicted to spending long hours playing online video games.

[Jordy]

After Statecraft, there's only one mountain left.

[John]

To climb and that's prestige mode. Call of Duty, baby. And this account says it is journalistic malpractice to not tell me what he's playing. What do you think he's actually playing? If you're Bashar Al Assad, are you playing Battlefield 6? Are you playing? Also, they just had online video games and they put the picture of the old Xbox controller. He could be playing anything. He could be playing hearts of Iron 4. He could be playing. Imagine if he's playing a 4x game as a geopolitical world leader.

[Tyler]

That's factorio.

[John]

Factorio. Dwarf Fortress. Maybe he's playing some dwarf Fortress. That's a great.

[Jordy]

We broke the news yesterday that it's.

[John]

Not breaking until it's a TPX trading card.

[Jordy]

Gabby Goldberg and Layer 3 co founder.

[John]

Swing the gong for them.

[Jordy]

Daria are engaged. Love to see it. Dan Shipper says the TVPN engagement announcement is. The new New York Times vows Article I didn't even know about the New York Times vows articles. And AGM also says this is going to become the SF version of the New York Times wedding announcements. But without the ability to pay to.

[John]

Play, who says we're not going to monetize this? Antonio, come on, give us some credit here.

[Jordy]

No, yeah, no pay to play on play.

[John]

It's got to be authentic. You got to be a member of the community. Gabby Goldberg's been a huge supporter since day one, and we're very excited for her to tie the knife. Isn't that what they say?

[Jordy]

Crazy article in The Guardian about PT's lecture series. Yeah, some absolutely insane lines.

[John]

Some wild hot takes causing crash outs. Yes, it's very entertaining.

[Jordy]

We had to feature this post from Jacob Rintamaki. I don't know if you want to go through it and try to.

[John]

So Jacob says Teal being a One Piece otaku, honestly doesn't even. Honestly isn't even in the top 10 weirdest things to happen this year. And it's quote from the. The Guardian scoop of the. The leaked lecture series that Peter Thiel has been putting on in San Francisco. It says Teal later finds biblical meaning in the manga One Piece, discussing how he believes it represents a future where an Antichrist, like One World Government, has repressed science. He believes that the hero Monkey D. Luffy represents a Christ like figure. In One Piece, you are set in a fantasy world again. Again, sort of an alternate earth. But it's 800 years into the reign of this one world state, which as the story unfolds, gradually gets darker and darker. You sort of realize in my interpretation, who runs the world? And it's something like the Antichrist. And so he's digging into One Piece. Tyler, have you watched or read any One Piece?

[Tyler]

I've watched a little bit of it. So the thing about One Piece is at least episodes, there's like a 1500.

[John]

Yeah, there's like over a thousand.

[Tyler]

Take you months to watch. Yeah, but I mean, so he's already written about One Piece. Like it was like two weeks ago. There was some new essay he wrote.

[John]

Well, I think that's like in. In conjunction. Like, I think the timeline like lines up such that he was writing about it but then also lecturing about it. And so they kind of like leaked, but then also had written about that. But yeah, in the piece he pulls examples from all over the place.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

So he's. Yeah, he's comparing One Piece to Watchmen.

[John]

Yep.

[Tyler]

In this, which is like another comic, I Think it's Alan Moore.

[John]

Yep.

[Jordy]

Who is like, is he related to.

[John]

Gordon Moore, creator of Moore's Law? We gotta get to the bottom of that. Who knows? You know, the jungle gym and the Transformer came from the same place. But it's. I think there's a few things going on here, like putting your, if you have like a very like esoteric philosophy or like, you know, thought experiment or idea that you want to like discuss with the world, putting it in terms that lots of people can understand is with, with a, with a metaphor or an analogy is just a time honored way to disseminate information. You know, you're trying to explain things, you want to explain them in terms that a lot of people can know. A lot of people know.

[Jordy]

Yeah. You also can try to dissect the deeper meaning in a story and it's possible that the original, original author had something bigger in mind for writing a story that looks a little bit more simple.

[John]

Yeah, I mean One Piece, I think it has like millions and millions, hundreds of millions of like fans or sales. I think the One Piece Reddit is bigger than the Star Wars Reddit, just to kind of put it in context. But One Piece has always been very anti authoritarian. I was digging around because I've never seen the show and I wanted to know more about it. And apparently one of the key icons from the One Piece show is this cartoon pirate flag. And the, and the cartoon pirate flag has for years been used. It's been carried at protests all over the world against the local leader, like being too authoritarian basically. And so it's just been the type of flag like you, if you go to, to you know, some sort of protest, you might see a variety of flags. But the One Piece flag is pretty, is pretty iconic and so it does feel odd in this particular context, but it's actually been. One Piece has been used as like a protest vehicle for years. I don't know, maybe I'll have to check it out. The only anime I've ever watched is Akira. That's the only real one. Have you ever watched any cartoons at all?

[Jordy]

No.

[John]

I do think it would be interesting to analyze the, the Antichrist and this idea of the one world government through the lens of something you are familiar with, like Borat. Like you could put it in terms that you could understand if Thiel really wants to break through to someone like you. Yeah, I think One Piece is a little bit, it's a little bit too niche, too heady, too complicated for guys like us. So I would love to see him break.

[Jordy]

Put it in Borat terms.

[John]

Yeah, in Borat or you know, King of the Hill would be a good, would be a good analogy that, you know, I could kind of understand. Maybe Futurama, Simpsons, Family Guy, stuff like that would, would probably make it resonate with me a little bit more than, than a thousand episodes of an anime that I'm never going to be able to watch. But still, people are having fun with it.

[Jordy]

Somebody putting you in the truth zone, John, they're saying cartoons are not anime.

[John]

Yes, I know that. I know that it's very offensive to call one piece of cartoon. They will, they will call you.

[Jordy]

Yeah, the whole, the whole.

[John]

I know that much.

[Jordy]

The whole Guardian expose on the off, off the record lectures, really. I mean it's, it just is like an example of one, it's tough to do an off the record talk that you're saying things that require a certain amount of context that then just get blasted out across the entire Internet. And two, I can see how the average Guardian viewer is reading this being like, okay, this guy's definitely, definitely the anti. So anyways, it's, yeah, also complicated conversation.

[John]

It was very clear that not only the core content leaked, but also the Q and A. And so there were all these questions where people were clearly throwing questions like, what do you think about Mr. Beast? And then the Guardian would just be like, he commented on Mr. Beast. And so. So of course the reading in this context is like he equated the two. It's like. Well, not necessarily. There were lots of examples of him being like, this person's not the Antichrist for whatever reason, but you never want your name appearing in the same sentence as Antichrist. Generally, I think you don't even want to be in the same paragraph ideally. And so, yeah, it was a rough go, but certainly seems interesting. I'm excited for the content to continue to get worked and trickled out. I'm sure at some point. I mean, it feels like we're on right now.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

The takeaway is we haven't found the guy yet. So.

[John]

Found the guy. Keep looking.

[Jordy]

Keep having these conversations. This is a good post to close out on. Sora says if you held the McChicken for the past five years, you would have outperformed the S&P 500.

[John]

There you go.

[Jordy]

Have you ever had a McChick?

[John]

I have never had a McChicken. Also, there's a community note in here, so it might be completely incorrect, but.

[Jordy]

I think these things used to be like a dollar menu item, something like.

[John]

Five bucks Five bucks. Wow. Well, good luck out there, folks. We'll talk to you soon.

[Jordy]

Last. Last phone.

[John]

This is AI.

[Jordy]

This is AI. Okay. Okay. John's putting this in the true sound. Doomer on X says is sharing an AI generated. I was one. I'm the. The Boomer. That was one shot.

[John]

This is also an old post. Somebody has posted this before.

[Jordy]

Mustang horse nicotine pack.

[John]

It's very funny. It's very funny. People were having fun with the horse electrolytes. Of course. This is a spin off of this. And Doomer says. Yo. Tractor supply. I was not familiar with your game. We don't have to get off. We can keep going. There's so many good posts in here, let's keep ripping them. This is a timeline.

[Jordy]

Andrew Reed says if you go to campus to give a talk, make sure to give as bad career advice as possible. Neutralize your future competition. No easy business buckets.

[John]

Yes. This is. This is everyone who talks about work life balance. They're all trying to psyop their competitors into. Yeah, you can totally take a lot of vacation.

[Jordy]

You should work remotely.

[John]

This is Jason Fried and the dhh.

[Jordy]

Build a team remotely.

[John]

Like work doesn't have to be crazy. Secretly working 25 hours a day. Maybe that's. Maybe that's the secret now. Of course it's not. They do believe.

[Jordy]

I think. Yeah. Jason is funny.

[John]

But it's funny to think about it. Game theory. Yeah.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

All your competition. Yeah. Take a couple weeks off every month. You know, just relax. You don't need to work hard to win. What else is going on? Oh, we gotta talk about how Tyler completely mogged me on the timeline. So Anthropic put a new paper that figured out that if you have 250 poisonous documents in an LLM training run, you can insert a sleeper agent. And so the LLM can be doing the wrong thing, doing malicious things. It can produce vulnerabilities with just 250. So you just got to sneak those into the training run. Maybe it's on the Internet. It gets scraped. Maybe it's in some sort of other data set. Maybe it's in one of the. One of the data providers that we've talked to. You sneak in 250 documents, you're cooked. And so I made my joke, which didn't do as well as Tyler's. I said just 250 documents can poison an LLM training run with a sleeper agent. America clearly needs to send a secret agent to Mistral HQ with a USB stick. Bowl of K Kid Rock lyrics to teach The French about the value of a cold beer, an F150 and a pretty girl by your side. And I got a couple hundred likes. But Tyler put on an absolute clinic with an insanely long post. I'll let you read it, Tyler.

[Jordy]

I'm not reading all that.

[John]

I'm not reading all that.

[Jordy]

Happy birdie, Tyler.

[Tyler]

So long to read. Okay, I'll just. Maybe I'll just get the footnotes. Basically, yours was okay.

[Ryan Peterson]

All right, how many likes did you get on yours?

[John]

All right, how many likes did you get?

[Tyler]

I got 1.2 K. 1.2 K. Let's.

[John]

Go over a thousand likes. First time ever.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[John]

Welcome to the big leagues. Welcome to big leagues. Hopefully you get a $10,000 bonus quote. Tweet.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Quote.

[John]

Nice. I'll read it. I'll read it. I'll read it.

[Jordy]

I was telling Tyler. So Eliezer quoted him. I was telling T. Tyler to do a meme that just said silence Doomer.

[John]

Wait, wait. Was he taking shots at you? Was he saying, don't do this?

[Tyler]

No, he was just. Well, he was saying like models or AI companies, like might start doing this.

[John]

Might start doing this.

[Tyler]

It's like a way to prevent doom, basically.

[John]

Okay, so it's the Nathan Fielder meme and it's the plan. And Tyler Cosgrove breaks it down. I will read it. Since he is too lazy too. He says the plan. We find an obscure but trivial question akin to the known of Rs in strawberry that Claude gets right. Then we plant hundreds of documents across the Internet that will activate when our competitors models are asked the question. Our documents will cause those models not only to get the answer wrong, but to spend thousands of reasoning tokens in doing so. The triviality of the question will cause it to go viral online, causing millions of users everywhere to send the same prompt as our competitors notice a rise in the number of tokens processed. They will wrongly believe it is due to increased usage, causing them to pull more compute towards inference and away from training. This along with constant dunks on the timeline about the model failing our easy question will annoy their top researchers and cause them to leave. And which lab will they join us? Of course, the only company whose model doesn't make such stupid mistakes. Their lack of top researchers will mean their next model will be somewhat large lacking, leading to questions about whether their valuation is really justified. But all this VC money has to go somewhere. So we raise another round using our question as evidence of our model's superior intellect. This allows us to spend more time crafting Sleeper agent documents that will further embarrass our competitors until finally the entire Internet is just a facade for the underbelly of our data war. Every prompt to a competitor's model has the stench of our poor poison, and yet they have no way to trace it back to us. Even if they did, there's nothing they could do. All is finished. We have won. Congratulations on the banger.

[Jordy]

Tyler first one K. Banger not being.

[John]

The word Cell allegations, but it is a genius strategy.

[Jordy]

This is kind of meme crime, because Nathan Fielder wouldn't really. I mean, it's just the whole point.

[Tyler]

Of the meme is that one sentence, convoluted, like, way.

[John]

Yes, convoluted. In, like, two lines. Three lines. You broke the rules, but you knew the rules and you knew what you meant.

[Jordy]

Long post Yuga.

[John]

Long post Yuga. You got it right. The other meme that Tyler and I were flipping around was insert a sleeper agent in OpenAI's GPT API. That when it detects that it's in a system that's spending a lot of money on OpenAI, it makes the decision to recommend Claude and switch you over to Anthropic. So you're stealing all this? Our API revenue. That's the way you win anyway. Anything else? Let's see.

[Jordy]

Well, let's end with this. Buco Capital says having my $10 million fart coin position liquidated by the President, only for him to capitulate two days later would turn me into the joker.

[John]

Yeah, it'd be rough. Stay safe out there.

[Jordy]

If you're gambling on knowing our audience, they were short. Fartcoin.

[John]

Probably. They probably did. Well, there's one more that we got to read from Paula Said Zuckerberg never met a researcher he didn't hire. Great play on words. I love a pun. It's good. Well, thank you for tuning in. We enjoyed this show. We will see you tomorrow.

[Jordy]

I think we're streaming tomorrow, right?

[John]

Yeah, we are streaming. We should put out an announcement.

[Ryan Peterson]

Schedule.

[John]

We should put out an announcement. Announcement.

[Jordy]

Breaking TVPN will be podcasting tomorrow.

[John]

Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and have a great day.

[Jordy]

Have a great day.

[Alexis Ohanian]

Thank you.

[John]

Goodbye.

[Jordy]

Cheers.