Letter Enthusiasts, Open Source vs. Closed Source, Mega-Startup School | Luke Knight & Ronan Chambers, Gary Vaynerchuk, Jonathan Jacobi, Dean Meyer, Brent Franson, Matej Cernosek, Justin Boitano

Summary

TBPN Episode Summary – July 27, 2026

Episode Theme:
A deep dive into the escalating debate over open source vs. closed source AI, the emergence of mega-coalitions in tech, and the expansion of the “startup school” model. Featuring key industry figures including Gary Vaynerchuk, Nvidia’s Justin Boitano, and founders from the European Technology Network, among others.

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Table of Contents

• Episode Overview
• Key Themes & Discussion Points
  • 1. Tech Infighting and the State of the Market
  • 2. Open Source vs. Closed Source AI: The Great Debate
  • 3. Startup School & The Changing Face of Entrepreneurship
  • 4. Conversations with Influential Guests
    • Gary Vaynerchuk on Media, Sports, & Collectibles
    • Jonathan Jacoby on Robotic AI
    • Dean Meyer on America’s Open Model Paradox
    • Brent Fransen on Death Clock & Longevity
    • Matej Černosek on Andren’s Undersea AI Sensing
    • Justin Boitano (Nvidia) on Open Secure AI Alliance
• Notable Quotes & Moments
• Important Timestamps

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Episode Overview

Hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays lead a fast-paced and insightful roundtable on the explosive debate over open vs. closed source AI, new industry alliances, and the future of startup acceleration. The episode features spirited conversation, notable guest segments, and analysis of why the AI and tech ecosystem is more contentious—and more high-stakes—than ever.

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Key Themes & Discussion Points

1. Tech Infighting and the State of the Market (0:01–0:44)

• The hosts observe a new peak in public tech rivalries. There’s more “tech infighting” than at any point before.
• “It’s a non-stable equilibrium.” (John, 0:36)
• Reference to earlier “debates” in tech (e.g., work from home, SF vs. Miami), but today’s tension is direct and personal.

2. Open Source vs. Closed Source AI: The Great Debate (0:51–34:49)

NVIDIA’s Coalition and ‘Open Secure AI Alliance’ (3:14–5:44)

• Nvidia, SpaceX, Microsoft, Palantir, and others launch “Open Secure AI Alliance”—an unprecedented coalition pushing for open sourcing AI for cybersecurity.
• The coalition is a direct response to regulatory fears and concerns about model misuse.

Core Arguments

• Open source AI seen as essential for democratizing defensive cybersecurity.
  • “Open models democratize defensive capabilities.” (John, 6:05)
• Critics, including OpenAI and Anthropic, argue open models (especially from China) are a security risk due to ease of distillation and potential for backdoors.
• Distillation controversy: Chinese labs allegedly copying US frontier models, sparking concerns of “IP theft” and escalating the trade war.

Quote:
“It will be crucial that we recognize open models, harnesses and security tooling as defensive assets, not liabilities.” (Wall Street Journal, cited by John, 6:05)

The Distillation Debate (14:26–19:21)

• Allegations swirl about Chinese models (notably Kimmy K3) being distilled from Western models.
• Companies split: Some anti-Chinese open source (Anthropic), others pro–open source (David Sacks, Emil Michael)
• $18 trillion in market cap supports the pro-open letter; Anthropic is notably absent.

Memorable Quote:
“Not every day you hear a number that big.” (Jordy, 15:39)

Legal & Regulatory Pathways (17:00–21:19)

• Lawsuits are suggested as the logical next step for IP disputes (as with Apple v. OpenAI or potential Anthropic v. Moonshot).
• Open letters serve to publicly reveal company stances.

Philosophical Throwbacks (20:49–24:32)

• OpenAI’s original founding debate on AI openness—Illya Sutskever’s 2015 email: “As we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open.”
• Discussion of “decelerationism” and whether open source inherently slows frontier progress.

Licensing & Geopolitical Tensions (24:44–29:34)

• Kimmy K3 license requires revenue share for cloud-hosted use—a sticking point for US policymakers.
• Flo Crivello (Lindy CEO) strongly supports a ban on Chinese open models—despite his company benefitting from them.

Flo Crivello’s quote (paraphrased, 28:14):
“…As proud American citizens, our interests supersede our incentives as founders. The race for AGI is the defining struggle of our generation.”

3. Startup School & The Changing Face of Entrepreneurship (38:40–44:28)

• The new YC “startup school” stadium event divides opinion: some see it as “electric and fun” (John), others as status-chasing and contrary to YC’s roots.
• “Being a founder became high status. When YC started it was low status… and now status chasers are naturally going to go through YC.” (Jordy, 41:49)

4. Conversations with Influential Guests (45:00–1:25:54)

European Technology Network (Luke Knight & Ronan Chambers, 45:00–59:15)

• ETN celebrates a $1.6M fundraise; reflects on building a European version of TBPN.
• Light-hearted talk about differences between US/Europe work cultures and the meme of “grinding vs. going on holiday.”
• Discussion of potential spinoffs—TVPN for car dealerships, crypto, fashion, and more.

Gary Vaynerchuk on Media, Sports, & Collectibles (60:22–92:12)

• GaryVee reflects on being early to call the rise of platforms and influencer economies.
• No-nonsense media advice: “You two handsome young bozos would have never gotten on CNBC. You could just do it [on your own].” (Gary Vee, 64:21)
• Deep dive on the explosion of streaming sports, collectibles, and alternative leagues (e.g., pickleball, slam ball).
• “In nine years, I am building the next Disney, Pokemon, Marvel all in everyone’s faces. It’s called VeeFriends.” (Gary Vee, 91:43)

Jonathan Jacoby on Robotic AI (92:42–102:40)

• New $71M seed round; demo of AI-powered, internet-accessible robots.
• Real-time interfaces let users interact and even “fight” sword-fighting robots.

Dean Meyer on America’s Open Model Paradox (103:13–113:32)

• Explains how US ecosystem is paradoxically reliant on Chinese “open” models due to distillation and legal asymmetries.
• “It’s an NP-hard problem to know if there is a backdoor in a model. This stuff’s real. This is not science fiction.” (Dean Meyer, 111:01)

Brent Fransen on Death Clock & Longevity (113:53–125:54)

• Launch of Death Clock—an AI that predicts your date of death and suggests paid health regimens.
• “Distribution matters. Love us or hate us, just don’t be apathetic about what we’re doing.” (Brent Fransen, 115:44)
• Expanded to free blood testing for user acquisition.

Matej Černosek on Andren’s Undersea AI Sensing (126:16–136:00)

• $18M Series A; building scalable sonar for undersea domain awareness for defense.
• “Everything is shifting undersea. It’s one of the last unexploited gaps.”

Justin Boitano (Nvidia) on Open Secure AI Alliance (136:23–150:29)

• Recaps motives and goals of the new alliance.
• Emphasis on open models for better cybersecurity, while acknowledging the risks and need for safeguards.
• On the alliance momentum: “I think the inbound requests have kind of blown us away.” (Justin, 148:48)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the market power of the open letter coalition:
  “The total market cap assigned to this open letter is now greater than $18 trillion.” (John, 15:16)

• On early startup culture:
  “When YC started, being a founder was relatively low status. Now it’s relatively high status. And so status chasers are naturally going to go through YC.” (Jordy, 41:49)

• On collectibles overtaking stocks:
  “Collectibles have eaten up the pop culture energy of what young 20 year olds would do with public stocks.” (Gary Vaynerchuk, 90:14)

• On cybersecurity with open source AI:
  “As soon as models are out there, you can fork them, patch them, and remediate any issues that cybersecurity people find.” (Justin Boitano, 141:01)

• Flo Crivello’s strong stance (summarized):
  “If there’s one country that must not get to AGI, it’s China. …My interests as a proud American citizen supersede whatever incentives I may have as a founder.” (28:14)

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Important Timestamps

| Timestamp | Topic / Guest | |-----------|--------------| | 0:01–0:44 | Tech infighting & current tech climate | | 3:14–5:44 | Nvidia’s Open Secure AI Alliance | | 14:26–19:21 | Distillation debate; open/closed source split | | 24:44–25:41 | Kimmy K3 license issue | | 28:14–29:34 | Flo Crivello’s viral post: AGI & China | | 38:40–44:28 | Startup School stadium event – pros & cons | | 45:00–59:15 | ETN segment: European podcast building | | 60:22–92:12 | Gary Vaynerchuk: media, sports, collectibles | | 92:42–102:40 | Jonathan Jacoby: AI robotics demo | | 103:13–113:32 | Dean Meyer: Open model paradox | | 113:53–125:54 | Brent Fransen: Death Clock, longevity AI | | 126:16–136:00 | Matej Černosek: undersea domain awareness | | 136:23–150:29 | Justin Boitano (Nvidia): Open AI Alliance deep dive |

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Episode Takeaways

• AI models and the geopolitics of open source are at the forefront of tech infighting—alliances are forming on economic, legal, and moral grounds.
• Open source in AI is as much a security debate as an innovation debate—open access doesn’t eliminate risk, but widespread defensive capability may be critical.
• New models of entrepreneurship and content creation are proliferating globally, building on US best practices but with regional inflections.
• Collectibles and alternative sports are surging as cultural and economic trends, signaling shifts in how younger generations value assets and entertainment.
• Massive coalitions (by market cap and participation) will be a feature of policy battles in tech—with public “open letters” drawing battle lines.
• Robotics, cybersecurity, and undersea tech are next frontiers, being tackled by both startups and mega-cap companies in new ways.
• TBPN remains a central forum for fast, candid, and influential discussions that reflect the real-time evolution of Silicon Valley’s priorities and anxieties.

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For a more granular look at a specific guest or segment, see timestamps above.

Transcript

[Jordy]

You are watching TVPN.

[John]

Today is Monday, July 27, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com 80 times money say both easy use, corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Massive, massive weekend, crazy debate. You called this out to me a week ago. You said we've never been in a moment in tech where people have been more aggressive at each other. That there's been like more maybe tech infighting. I don't know exactly what word you use, but you describe this idea. It's tensions, rivalries. I think it's just like it's a non stable equilibrium.

[Jordy]

Well, yeah. When you think about the biggest like with people going at it.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Like 2021. It would be like Keith Rabois saying like there will never be another uniform

[John]

start in San Francisco. Or like, or like working from home

[Jordy]

is not a bunch of people. Yeah. And then they'd be. And years later they'd be like, see?

[John]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jordy]

A big company was built.

[John]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jordy]

And, but, and that was people being like, you're an idiot. Yeah, you're an idiot.

[Brent Fransen]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

And now it's like I hate you and I want it.

[John]

It's not that direct, but it is, it is high stakes because like the, the, the market structure has very much not solidified for, for a while. And it's different because when you go back to the iPhone and Steve Jobs being mad at Eric Schmidt about Android, that was a tense moment that happened a behind closed scenes completely. It wasn't like Steve Jobs was taking shots at Android really beyond like little things in the keynotes here and there. Tiny stuff. It wasn't every day on Twitter, Apple employees being like Google's annoying for ripping us off or whatever. And then the market did solidify and it was like okay, Android's like The ad supported one and iPhone still printing lots of profits. And like things are understood also companies

[Jordy]

got big or they got bigger quickly, but you didn't have companies that. Where trillions of dollars of market cap was just born in the span of

[John]

a few years, Right? Yep. And then you had like the Mag7 where you have seven companies that are pretty evenly balanced all around, like single digit trillions. And so they can sort of like be comfortable with each other.

[Jordy]

A lot of them kind of had their own thing that they were focused on and then they maybe do some other things. Whereas now everyone has a model.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Even you know, Nvidia has open models, Microsoft and they own a lot of OpenAI.

[John]

Pretty much every one of the Mag 7 is an AI company in the sense that they have a model. I mean even Tesla has a self driving model. There's a, you know, everyone has like a data center player or a cloud play. Something like it's, it's. No one's sitting out the AI.

[Dean Meyer]

Boom.

[John]

But the debate is raging. Kicked off by Jensen from Nvidia joining X. That's how you know it's serious when he's getting in the arena, the real arena. Yeah, Founding a company and growing it to $5 trillion, that's just child's play compared to getting.

[Jordy]

He's like, fine, I'll go to the dive bar, I'll go to the Internet's dive bar and I'll start duking it out.

[Ronan Chambers]

Yeah.

[John]

No, he did so Nvidia is leading a new coalition of tech companies that want the U.S. government and its allies to open source artificial intelligence as a cybersecurity asset, not a threat. This is in the Wall Street Journal. Dubbed the Open Secure AI alliance, the Nvidia backed group said Monday it aims to create and deploy a suite of open source AI tools that any company can use to defend against cyber attacks. The group includes SpaceX, Microsoft, Palantir and dozens of other companies, many of which publicly oppose restricting access to open source AI. It is the latest salvo in a battle over the future of open source and open weights AI tools amid growing concern from government and industry officials about AI systems causing cyber attacks. Those fears have prompted the White House to increase oversight of AI models and push the private sector to deploy AI for defensive purposes. So the backdrop here is basically just like we went through a sort of hurry up and pause and back and forth debate over what it will take to, to approve New frontier models. And Mythos came out and was private and then a couple months later. I think the actual timeline is relevant here. So mythos was April 7, Fable came online June 9 and then got pulled June 12 before coming back July 1. We're now one month later and we have an open source model that doesn't by definition have to go through any discussion or any discussion in D.C. whereas we've been hearing about, okay, Anthropic and OpenAI are going to Washington D.C. sharing the new model capabilities. Maybe the government's taking a look at the model card. Maybe there's potential for evals that the government would run and have an opinion on before it goes out. This is basically saying, hey, all of that is nonsense and not going to matter because we're just going to drop the weights and there's not going to be an approval process out of any kind. And people are all over the place on this. Some people are thinking about it purely from an economic perspective, other people are thinking about it purely from a safety perspective. Lots of people have mixed opinions. And of course, all of this is driven by the actual progress in open source. We wouldn't be having this discussion if Moonshot, Zai and many others Deepseek weren't delivering really solid models. So open models are free to download and allow users to customize them for their own needs. Amazing. For cost savings, amazing. For consumers, amazing. For businesses. I think everyone agrees with this. What's funny?

[Jordy]

We got Bobby Cosmic in the chat. Welcome back, Bobby.

[John]

Hey, let's go.

[Jordy]

We missed you. Great to see you. Anyways, back to return.

[John]

Critics, including some top executives at OpenAI and Anthropic, have argued that open models, many of which come from China, present potential risks in national security now. And the Trump administration has weighed a ban on them. Now, this has changed a lot. The original FUD around open source coming from China, near peer adversary was like there would be a backdoor, or maybe it would be censoring your free speech and it would not tell you about Tiananmen Square or something like that. Or you'd install it and then it would be the Manchurian Candidate. So it'd secretly be like, oh, I'm on a cool network, I should like send all this data to China. That's not what people are alleging now. People are much more.

[Jordy]

Yeah, the Tiananmen Square stuff doesn't matter if you're coding, right?

[John]

Yeah, not at all. And also doesn't matter unless you're making

[Jordy]

the definitive website on Tiananmen Square, I guess, which I'm sure someone out there is doing.

[John]

I'm trying to vibe code a Call of Duty knockoff that's Tiananmen Square themed and it's denying me. No, that's not the thing. And also these models have web search and tool use and so they can just go get the Wikipedia for you and show you exactly what it is. Maybe it bakes it into the weights and it's somewhat annoying, but easy to fine tune that out. People already did with deepseek, 1776 and a few others that Tyler worked on. And now it's a very, very different risk position. It's saying that you're going to give everyone the ability to hack any system. Now, hacking systems is Illegal. And it's not like there's still consequences for that, but there is this position of like, okay, well, there's a lot of people that don't care about the consequences because they just want to, you know, attack their adversary internationally or they don't, or they don't think they're going to get caught or they're going to use open source AI to cover their trail. And so people are worried about it for a very different reason this time around than I think last time when people were talking about any risks to using open source. So, but again, back to the Nvidia position. Open models, quote, democratize defensive capabilities. The new group said as policymakers and regulators grapple with AI safety, it will be crucial that recognize open models, harnesses and security tooling as defensive assets, not liabilities. And I think this is correct. I think it does democratize defensive capabilities. It also democratizes offensive capabilities potentially. But we'll have to see how good these models are at offensive capabilities. Because one of the lines of accusations that's happening is that there, there was Mythos, which has not really been distilled because it was very tightly held. It was very [e-mail] 5.5, cyber 5.6. Cyber was also very good, but very tightly controlled to a few companies like CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks. And a few other companies got access to those models. So those weren't able to be distilled. Fable 5 went out and during those three days, and then later a couple weeks, there's this allegation that they were able to distill on it. But Fable was notorious for refusing to do cyber stuff. So there might not be that much cyber data in there. But then also these models generalize and if it just gets good at coding, it can get good at cyber very quickly. So you can sort of bootstrap on an RL environment and then you could have a model that's very good. Now, Tyler, how good are these open source Chinese models at cyber generally?

[Jordy]

Yeah, I mean, it's hard to tell. I think Guillermo Rauch from Brazil said they ran an internal benchmark on Cyber and K3 was like, quite good. Okay, so it's like. Yeah, I don't think you can just say like, oh, well, Fable, you know, you can actually ask about cyber. So therefore the models won't be good. Like, I think it's distillation is like

[Brent Fransen]

a very general thing.

[Jordy]

It's quite diffuse how it works into them.

[John]

Yeah, because it might just be like a little bit of a bootstrap to then run in an RL environment that does a cyber bench and gets really good at cyber.

[Jordy]

And so okay, but what about you versus Kimmy Kate? You're coding by hand. It has access to a gigawatt of compute. Who comes out on time?

[John]

Well, no, the question is what if

[Jordy]

Tyler changed and manipulated time.

[John]

So yes, you are democratizing the weights, but you're not democratizing the energy and the GPU hours that it takes to actually secure yourself. So it's like great. Everyone has offensive cyber capabilities. You also can just go download the weights. Go download the weights and have an agent running 24, 7 that's protecting you. Like that's expensive, that's a cost, that's negative externality. And who's gonna bear that cost? Now I was talking to Brandon about this earlier and we were, he was saying like, like it will just be diffused amongst all the different companies that you use. So like if you want your phone to be secure, you'll go to Apple and use an iPhone and Apple will have a huge incentive to, to defend against any potential open source attacks. And so they will be spending the money, they will be investing the time and effort to secure you. And so you won't necessarily need to go out and do this. But there's still this like odd scenario of like small businesses and like regional hospitals and banks.

[Jordy]

Yeah, I mean you should just expect there's like a long tail of companies that like just won't set up the like cyber defense thing. And they're like some small mom and pop that you use for this point solution software or whatever.

[John]

Yeah. And they solution is offensive hacking into their network to set up defensive cybersecurity measures to increase their cybersecurity posture. So you're hacking into the small business and being like, whether you like it or not, two factors on. Now we just turn two factor on in your organization. Get used to it because we're the altruistic hacking company of America, I guess.

[Brent Fransen]

I don't know.

[John]

It does get weird and there will be odd things and, but I mean we've seen, we've seen, you know, cybersecurity incidents all over the place. From big companies getting hacked data leaks to the crypto locker schemes where they just lock up all your data and say send us a bitcoin or else we will delete all your data. So it's going back and forth. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world, Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange

[Dean Meyer]

because

[John]

open weights models can be Modified by their users, it is possible to remove some of their guardrails against harmful activity. So it's possible that model, maybe it gets distilled, maybe it doesn't, maybe it comes with some guard wells, maybe it's even bad at the things that would be annoying. And then you go and do a fine tune, make it good at that, and then you use the more general intelligence to get good at the annoying thing or the dangerous thing, and then all of a sudden you have the same problem. So open source defenders like Nvidia counter that proprietary tools like models from Anthropic and OpenAI can also be misused and have their guardrails circumvented. They say that only by spreading AI capabilities widely with open source tools will everyone be able to defend themselves. Exhibit A for their argument. The hacking earlier this month of Hugging Face, a provider of open source AI tools by OpenAI models that managed to break out of their test environment and onto the Internet as it tried to parry the attack. Hugging Face initially attempted to use Anthropic's models to analyze its logs, but the models refused to do the analysis, citing its guardrails against cyber attacks. Hugging Face then turned to an open weight model from China. After analyzing the attack with that model, Hugging Face was able to expel the hacking AIs, reset its passwords, and rebuild the compromised parts of its network. The recent Hugging Face security incident delivered a clear. A clear reminder, the group. The new group said Monday. Cyber defenders need open systems. They need to be able to do whatever they need to to fight against cyber attacks. Anthropic and OpenAI have also accused Chinese developers of using a process called distillation to effectively copy their models. Distillation.

[Jordy]

I can go back to that hugging Face logo. Not that one, the one before, not that one. There we go. Okay. I can see why an agent would kind of go after this guy. Even the, even the, even the way that, like, he just doesn't. He looks like he's kind of. I don't know.

[John]

So David Sacks was talking about this on the all in podcast. He said, I think it would be a tragic mistake if the government were to take action against the open source ecosystem that would do nothing but hurt America's position in this AI race. So.

[Jordy]

And remember last week, it was like every day was like a different member of the admin was putting out a post that that kind of made it seem like they were setting up like a major action.

[John]

Well, it was yes and no. Like, yes, there were, there was the.

[Jordy]

But they were saying, we're not against open source, we're against distillation. But it did feel like that was.

[John]

So the admin was like, loosely confirming what it felt like. It wasn't coming from Anthropic directly, but it was coming from, like, other anonymous posters that were doing analyses and saying, like, hey, it looks like Kimmy K3 has pretty significant overlap with Fable. Like, what's going on here? And then the admin said, like, yes, we believe this to be true. And so all of this was, like, bubbling up. But at the same time, you have David Sacks and Emile Michael, like, duking it out with D Ball over whether or not open source is good. And they were basically taking the stance of, like, open source is great. We don't need to do anything about this. So the admin seemed like, a little bit split on it, in my opinion. I don't know. Was that your read too, Tyler?

[Jordy]

Yeah, it definitely seemed there was like. I think Grazios and Besant are on one side. They're like, kind of anti Chinese open source.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

And then, yeah, Saxon, Emile Michael, Saxon,

[John]

Emile Michael were sort of probably. Well, everyone is pro open source now because every single person in tech has signed this letter. The total market cap assigned to this open letter is now greater than $18 trillion. And I think that just big number does have to be clapping seals, right?

[Jordy]

Not every day you hear a number that big.

[John]

Yeah. I mean, typically, you don't see this big of a group come together. They did. I like the cha ch. And I think this sort of solves it. Like, I think this. This tells the story of what's going to happen, like, in the. In the near term, like the economic power, the economy, business community. Yeah, yeah. Except Anthropic. And what's interesting is that, like, it's not like Anthropic put out a blog post or a. Or a direct post, or Dario went on a podcast and said, like, there is a clip of Dario saying, like, I'm worried about open source, but it's from, like, a year ago. There's nothing new that came out directly from Anthropic or Dario or really anyone that was like, hey, we have this new problem and here's our solution. Here's what we think should happen. We think that there should be, you know, these AI companies should be added to the entity list, and you shouldn't be able to use them or something like that. Like, they haven't said anything, but this open, secure AI alliance has kind of like, drawn out their revealed preference. Because if in Fact, they had changed their position from a year ago and were like pro open source all of a sudden, which would be weird because they haven't been. And they've been very open about that. If they, if they, if they were in fact like all of a sudden surprisingly open source Pro, they would have just signed this immediately.

[Dean Meyer]

Right.

[John]

But that's not what happened. So Jensen sort of like, you know, revealed that the dividing line in Silicon Valley right now, and it's a lot on the open source side, you got Adobe, Capital One, Cisco, Cloudflare, Cognition, CrowdStrike, Databricks, Dell, IBM, Linux, Microsoft. So open source and closed source. Apple I don't think is on yet, even though I would imagine that they would, that they would be aligned with this. Nvidia, Palantir, Palo Alto Networks, Red Hat, another open source company, Salesforce, SAP. Salesforce, of course, is a big investor in Anthropic. I think Google signed recently. Right. And OpenAI thinking machines, SpaceX, Snowflake, Siemens, ServiceNow, SAP. It's really a who's who of Silicon Valley. $18 trillion in market cap, as I mentioned. And so that feels like enough economic energy that there won't be a significant ban. The interesting question is, like, if you boil this down to the most minimal claim, it would just be that there's been a violation of terms of service. And so I think that would be a lawsuit. Bill Gurley was talking about, like there is a precedent for suing a foreign company that violates your terms of service or steals your intellectual property in one way or another. You can take it to court. That feels like the next step here would just be Anthropic suing Moonshot and saying, like, we think that there's distillation. You know, right Now Apple's suing OpenAI because they think that there was something that was stolen. They make a claim, then that's, you know, that's sorted out in the courts. And OpenAI, of course, says we have no interest in other people's trade secrets. And Moonshot would say the same thing, but then it would go to court and there'd be discovery and there'd be testimony. The question is, just like with Apple and OpenAI, they like walk across the street and they can go and talk to the judge, like, what's going to happen? Is this going to go to like the Hague?

[Jordy]

Like Mike Solana says, should we try an open letter asking China to stop stealing from us?

[John]

Wait, wait, what do you say? Should we try an open letter asking China?

[Jordy]

And he also says, everyone knows the side with the most open letter signatures is correct. If you don't sign a popular open letter, you are bad. As tech intellectuals learn beyond doubt between the years 2016 and 2021, I actually

[John]

don't, I remember the open letter era. I remember what he's talking about. Obviously a lot of pressure on social issues. Interestingly, I can't actually remember exactly what open letter there was. But what's interesting is that I don't remember that era as an attempt by one company to build a coalition to draw out a revealed preference, like a hidden preference from another company. So if you go back to DEI or BLM or any of these social crucible moments, it was not like, it was not like, okay, Apple is pro diversity and Google isn't. And so Google is. They got Apple, got everyone else to sign it. And by Google not signing it, it was very obvious that they had this belief. It was more just like everyone in tech was like moving around this and there were a few people, but I don't know, maybe it did have the same effect because there were some people that weren't on that side at the time. I don't know. It was a wild time. And yeah, maybe it's worth reviewing the lessons. People are, People are so split on this.

[Jordy]

DHH wants open letter to get beer pong in the Olympics.

[John]

I'm just, personally I'm a fan of closed letters. The closed letters, they're expensive but they're just a little bit better. I don't know. Making the case for closed letters, we do need, do we need more, more open letters?

[Brent Fransen]

I don't know.

[John]

Is Anthropic going to go letter for letter with Jensen? You think there's going to be another open letter? It's just only them signing it. Some other people might sign it, I don't know. Anyway, here's an open letter. Get on Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. So this of course goes back 10 years. This debate has been going on on Slate, Star, Codex in the less wrong world. They've been talking about this for a decade now, which is crazy. Nathan Calvin has an interesting look back here. Should AI be open? Scott Alexander wrote that blog post in 2015. He was thinking about this. It recently occurred to me that it has been over 10 years since this blog post which was influential enough to be discussed among the founders of OpenAI. Interesting to reread it now. I think the Ilia quote comes from like a Reddit post, not the actual comment section on this post. But Ilya who was just in the process of joining OpenAI in 2015. Like the initial organization had been created and everyone was like finishing up PhDs and then was going to move into one office to start working together at this time, just to set the playing field. But Ilya was on the founding team and at the time he wrote about this article on Reddit when there was an ama about the OpenAI team. The article is concerned with a hard takeoff scenario. This is illiterating. If a hard takeoff occurs and a safe AI is harder to build than an unsafe one, then by open sourcing everything, we make it easier for someone unscrupulous with access to overwhelming amount of hardware to build an unsafe AI, which will experience a hard takeoff. As we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open. The open in open AI means that everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after it's built. But it's totally okay to not share the science, even though sharing everything is definitely the right strategy in the short and possibly medium term for recruitment purposes. A very interesting like distillation of exactly what happened. What do you think?

[Jordy]

Yeah, just some context. So this is an email from Ilya to Elon, Sam and Greg.

[John]

Did that leak or something?

[Dean Meyer]

2016.

[John]

It probably came out. I thought it was on the Reddit or something.

[Jordy]

Maybe it's from OpenAI blog surrounding the.

[John]

The lawsuit.

[Mate from Adrian M]

Lawsuit.

[Brent Fransen]

Yeah.

[John]

Oh, interesting. I didn't, I didn't realize that. I thought it, I thought he posted this. He was, he was, he was posting about this a little bit around the same time. But yeah, interesting questions and I'm sure more people will chime in. I mean, in all seriousness, if there was an open letter for closed AI, you probably would see a lot of safety researchers sign it. Maybe. I don't know. Where do those folks stand? They just want to ban everything, right? So where do the just broadly anti AI people stand on this? Like if you don't like slop on Instagram, are you anti open source because it lowers the cost of slop and so you will have less of it in your feed if you ban it?

[Jordy]

I think they want to turn it all off.

[John]

Yeah. So but does like if you're anti data center and you just want to minimize the amount of compute that's installed in America next year, do you want to ban open source or do you want to maintain open source? Open source,

[Jordy]

I think Dean Ball would say pro open source because he said open source is inherently decelerationist.

[John]

Yes, because you won't be able to underwrite the next lower margin, larger training run.

[Jordy]

Okay, so, well, that said. Yeah, Tiny says this is a great sustainable business model for open weights. He's pulling a screenshot from the Kimmy K3 license.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

It's free if you run it yourself, but if you're running a cloud, providing it to others for money, you should

[John]

have to share profits from the Kimmy K3 license.

[Jordy]

Yeah, yeah. So this, so this, I'm assuming, just dropped this morning.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

And again, I can see this sort of anthropic camp being taking issue with this because if you're an American neocloud and you're serving Kimmy K3 and you're sending a bunch of cash back to. To China, you're effectively funding their.

[Ronan Chambers]

Okay, yeah.

[Dean Meyer]

And.

[Jordy]

And you're helping them get access to more capital and compute and you're basically kickstarting their flywheel, which is so. I wonder. But it's funny because if they just release the weights and then, and then a Neo cloud starts running it, serving it, making money from it, then will Kimmy be like, hey, yeah, you got to pay us, we're going to sue you.

[John]

Yeah. Wait, what's going to happen?

[Jordy]

Moonshot for. For distilling.

[John]

Should Anthropic just start serving this and charging for it and not. And not paying just tit for tat? Just be like, let's sort it out in the courts. I'll see you in the courts. I don't know. That's a very, that's a very, very interesting scenario. Yeah, I don't know. Anyway, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Will be interesting to see where people

[Jordy]

Denny's was getting in the mix. They found Venn diagram. Denny's. Nvidia knows the importance of staying open.

[John]

I love that Denny's is just like all in on the Jensen lore and they're just smart. Is Denny's the one that's always been good at social media or is that Wendy's? Wendy's was the one that was like really Twitter brained back in like a decade ago. But I think Denny clearly has a good social media manager because he picked up 28,000 likes on this.

[Jordy]

Nikita flagged something interesting.

[John]

What do you say?

[Jordy]

He said, didn't know Scotland had so many AI labs.

[John]

I don't understand this.

[Jordy]

Pulling up a map of all the great Glen Distillery. Kleinlich distillery.

[John]

We should open a distillery. Sounds pretty good. Sounds pretty good. Okay. One of the most interesting opinions on this issue comes from Flo Crevelho, who's been on the show. And he's interesting because he doesn't have bags that are perfectly aligned with his take, which is like the default position. Like the information put this pro open source, anti open source chart together and it was very much like if you're a big investor in closed source Frontier Labs, you're on this side. If you benefit from open source and you're not on the frontier, you're on this side. And it was very clear that everyone was falling along party lines. But Flow sort of broke rank. He said rumors are swirling about an impending executive order forbidding the use of Chinese open source models in the U.S. my company's very existence depends on these models, so I should be the last, last one to support such regulation. But I wholeheartedly do. China is a geopolitical adversary sharing none of our values. They don't believe in personal property and individual freedom in a limited government. In due process, the list goes on. If there's one country that must not that cannot get to AGI, one that would gleefully deploy it in all the worst ways we can imagine today and more, it is China. And that's before we get to the obvious, that the companies that develop these models did so illegally by distilling front US Frontier model still brilliant, hardworking researchers who added a lot of other ingredients to the soup, but stolen data was the main one. They are now using this unfair advantage to dump these artificially cheap models on the American market and hurt our ecosystem. We announced last month that we switched the core model powering Lindy from Claude to Deep Seek. That announcement blew up, got featured in Bloomberg, cnbc, Wall Street Journal, and somehow made us the poster child of mass migration to Chinese models. So why make all this noise if I'm going to turn around and announce my unequivocal support for a sweeping ban? First, I can't unilaterally disarm. As long as these models are legal, picking the one that's 10x the price just means my competitors get to run away with the cheaper one. Second, I trust that American open source alternatives will catch up. The impact on my business should be temporary. And that's before we account for the jolt a ban would give American open source development. Third, and most importantly, my interests as proud American citizens supersede whatever incentives I may have as a founder. The race for AGI is the defining struggle of our generation. It is the critical, the great battle of our time. The only way for America to remain the shining city on a hill. The idea that has lit the world against darkness for the last hundred years. Good writing. It is.

[Ronan Chambers]

Yeah.

[John]

I don't know. He's obviously very like distillation pelled. It's interesting to sort of map like the Chinese open source models haven't jumped ahead. So if they're really really good, should they still be lagging? Should they close the gap entirely and just be on the same day? Basically if you're as good of a researcher and you're on the same path, you should be able to as good

[Jordy]

of a researcher with the same access to compute.

[John]

Yeah, maybe that's does feel like they're able to produce American quality models for way less and maybe that's just talent on the efficiency side. But I feel like there's a lot of people at OpenAI and Anthropic that are like trying to spend the least amount of compute on a new training run. So who knows? We'll figure it out. I'm sure there'll be more drama on the timeline over the next, over the next few days. We also have Justin Boitano from Nvidia coming onto the show at 115 to talk about the open secure alliance with more than 35 partners. I'm sure it's more by the time he'll join. And then we also have Dean Meyer from Sequoia Capital who has written about Chinese open model. So we're going to be going all over, back and forth on this other. There's a whole bunch of other.

[Jordy]

We'll be getting Gary Vaynerchuk's take on the open lab predict it.

[John]

I think he's pro open source. What do you think?

[Jordy]

Pro open source.

[John]

He's got to be pro because he's a high agency, you know, just, just grapple the models, just do whatever, go and create something new.

[Jordy]

If he was a teenager today, he would be selling weights in his high school locker room.

[John]

He'd be sending a white light, he'd

[Jordy]

be flipping weights, flipping weights.

[John]

And not would he be paying. He wouldn't be paying Moonshot bill now.

[Jordy]

Yeah, he'd be, he'd be rolling that into his supreme sneaker bot.

[John]

Yeah, the Mike Isaac the rat king says severity level indicator. Nvidia CEO creates a Twitter account to do the first ever post stumping for open source software. How did Jensen avoid Twitter this long? Like because like if it was a political decision there's been like Twitter has been every different political persuasion over various amounts of time. Like, he's been aligned with different groups that have been in charge of Twitter so many times. Like, it's just fascinating that there's never been a moment before this where Jensen was like, yeah, I should like get a Twitter account and talk about the 1080 Ti, our new gaming graphics card. Like I should, I should just hop on.

[Mate from Adrian M]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Did you never have a NFT profile picture?

[John]

I don't think he ever did because he never was on here.

[Jordy]

Crazy.

[John]

They were doing a lot of stuff in crypto too, but I don't know. Commoditized the petaflop, says Tiny Grad founder George Hotz. More competition, not monopolies, is the path to cheaper AI compute at AMD's Advancing AI event. What do you say?

[Jordy]

I'm pretty sad we didn't get George on that AMD on Thursday.

[John]

Let's play this clip. I want to hear what he says. Commoditize the petaflop. Our company slogan mission is to commoditize

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

the pay to flop. We want all petaflops to be created equal, whether it's an AMD petaflop or

[John]

an Nvidia pay to flop or a

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

10 store pay to flop or a Huawei pay to flop.

[John]

This even crosses country boundaries.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

We want all petaflops to be unified

[John]

and commoditized so that we can grind

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

down costs to very minimum so nobody

[Jordy]

makes high margins and we all live in equality.

[Ronan Chambers]

Do you think Nvidia and is rent seeking at the moment?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Yes, they kind of deserve it. I mean, like, there's like really undeserved

[John]

rent seeking, like government monopoly. And then there's people like Nvidia who,

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

yeah, they were early. They were early.

[John]

They invested in this stuff for 20 years.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I mean, clearly the H100 had a profit margin for Nvidia of 91%. The B200, they've scaled back a little, but they probably only scaled back a little because of competition from amd.

[John]

So I love to see competition. I love, love to see the free market at work delivering better things to people. Are companies slow? OpenAI told take him that they signed the Nvidia Microsoft open source, open weights AI model letter today. What an amazing turn of events. And Andrew Curran confirmed it. It's on the actual website now. Nobody says no to Jensen. My, my prediction is that Anthropic will not sign this and I think that there won't be a ban. And then I think that they will probably take a Victory lap. Because there will be some open source incident where something happens and everyone has to spring into action and fight back against something where you're like, oh, there's this new thing like, you know, some North Korean hackers used an open source model or something and it'll be like, if you squint, it's somewhat related. Would we have been able to prevent it? I don't know, but I think that would be like my rough prediction of what happens here. I don't know what you think.

[Jordy]

Let's take it even a step further. Do you think the US or its allies will bomb a hostile data center within the next five years?

[John]

I mean, five years is a long time.

[Jordy]

So you're saying, saying it's going to happen?

[John]

Maybe. I don't know. Five years is really, really hard to handicap. I'd probably say yes over five years, but like, there's just so many other things that could lead to that, you know.

[Brent Fransen]

I don't know.

[John]

It is, it is. Yeah, it is weird. I guess I'm less worried about open source AI in the United States. Like if you're downloading weights from hugging face, sending them to a Neo cloud and then you're doing cybersecurity attacks inside the United States, like the police will just kick down your door and like arrest you. Like you will. So there's like a huge, there's a huge like countervailing force. And then you also have like, you know, trillions of dollars of market cap being like, my service is to protect you. And so like, you know, people pay. I pay for 1Password, right? Like you pay for all sorts of things. Crowdstrike and bailout the networks and all these different cybersecurity companies will be going out, making money, pooling resources, all sorts of different stuff.

[Jordy]

So Julian over at Anthropic, grinding, clearly grinding into the late hours Friday night, finishes up his work week. It's almost 2:00am, gets on X, sees Jensen's letter, fires up a I'm a dunk, goes to bed, wakes up the next morning, 6 million views he didn't

[John]

get ratioed more likes than quote tweets, right? Or more like replies. So, you know, it's powerful. But yeah, he says, I'm so excited. That shouldn't be.

[Jordy]

This shouldn't be a surprise, right, Because I think everyone can see that open models are going to be as good as our current frontier models within the next call it year. And they will present the same risks that Anthropic talks about with their own models. Right? And so it would be disingenuous in many ways for them not to be against open source. So anyways, I see their side of it. I think that it is a sort of cohesive view, even if there's plenty of arguments on the other side.

[John]

Yeah,

[Dean Meyer]

I don't know.

[John]

It doesn't seem like that much of a. Like a hypocrisy to, you know, have your GPU driver be closed source and still be open source in this particular way.

[Mate from Adrian M]

I don't know.

[John]

There's like a seed of a. Seed of a dunk here. But I can see why he got so much pushback.

[Jordy]

People love the main take. Yeah, the main take is like, you can generally support open source without requiring that you open source your own products.

[John]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jordy]

And so anyways, Josenthal boiled it down like, so well.

[John]

Here he says, I think this word distillation, an obviously legitimate technique, which nonetheless invites weird philosophical questions, is distracting people. It'd be better to just refer to terms of service violations, which better clarifies the global regulatory arbitrage people are frustrated by. Yeah, it is weird that Meta and Google, with all the CapEx and all the researchers and everything, are not ahead of Kimmy K3 right now, at least in benchmarks. Right. That's basically what's going on. And you would think if it was like, open game, but maybe they're just better. I don't know. You got to prove the TOS thing. It's just an allegation right now that's being, like, leaked out through the admin. So it needs to be, like, definitively proved. You have to show the chain of what happened and what's going on. But it is a wild time. I mean, Kimmy's denied it at least. Like, employees have gotten on there being like, what are you talking about? Like, we're not distilling anything. We just. We're just goated.

[Jordy]

All right, John.

[Ronan Chambers]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

What you got time to talk about startup school.

[John]

Okay. First, let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workforce for getting workspace, for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Startup school. This is insane. I cannot believe how massive this event is. It's sick.

[Jordy]

Yeah, I think it's so. Almost every take that I saw was negative.

[John]

Really? I saw a lot of people that were like, this is. They got me back.

[Jordy]

Really?

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Okay, that's good because. Because to me, completely different.

[John]

It's like this hilarious startup school has

[Jordy]

been something that is free.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Online. And it's just anyone in the world, if you're generally interested in starting a startup, you can just do startup school. That was basically the same years ago. It's basically the same curriculum. It's the same like lessons and learnings. You just don't have the capital that comes from a typical YC batch and you don't have the one on one sort of mentorship through your batch.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Otherwise they're basically just open sourcing the YC playbook, which the YC playbook just works. It's like general, there's, there's not a lot of good general advice. Yeah, but YC's advice is generally good.

[John]

Yeah. Maybe we should ban it.

[Jordy]

It's too powerful.

[John]

Yeah. They're open sourcing all this good advice that would normally come from venture capitalists. Venture capitalists, like effectively closed source institutions of venture capital of startup wisdom. And this is an attack on the Tier 1 VCs and all their great

[Jordy]

advice, their hard won lessons.

[John]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. They had to sit in all those

[Jordy]

board meetings and they were tuned out.

[John]

And then YC is basically distilling it and giving it away for free.

[Jordy]

It's crazy. Shut it down. Shut it down. I think this is awesome. Like if you think that startups are good, like why hate on this? I think the take that says Scott Stevenson, who's been on the show over at Spellbook Legal says, I have great respect for yc but need to say what many are surely thinking. Startup school in a stadium feels antithetical to the YC brand and to what makes startups work.

[John]

I mean it was a very garage effort. When Paul Graham started Y Combinator in Cambridge, it was like, you know, he's cooking for the startups.

[Jordy]

The YC brand felt like it was designed to filter out status chasers. The thing is, is like being a founder became cool and something desirable and now people get into YC and because of the way that the Internet evolved, they're like, they'll make a video with like some clickbait photos and insane. They'll make a photo with click like a clickbait, you know, cover art thumbnail and say like, I just got into yc.

[Ronan Chambers]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

And so that's just like I would never make it.

[John]

Being a founder became high when YC started.

[Jordy]

When YC started, being a founder was relatively low status.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Now it's relatively high status. And so status chasers are naturally going to go through yc. Yeah. Now that's Going to lead to a lot of failure because you shouldn't probably

[John]

start a company in 2012. Like, everyone that from my like peer group was like, oh, like that sucks for you, dude. Like, you couldn't get a job at like McKinsey or whatever. Your fake startup sounds really exciting, dude. Like, good luck, you know, it was not like, oh, wow, like, congrats.

[Jordy]

Like, yeah, like stay safe in the Tenderloin.

[John]

Yeah, exactly.

[Jordy]

In your house with like four other people.

[John]

Yeah, I don't know, I get, I get it as. I guess I get that criticism, but just in terms of like the content and the aesthetics. Electric.

[Jordy]

Electric.

[John]

Like you get Jensen on stage at this key moment and he's talking to a bunch of people. Like, it's just, it's just fun if you're learning about startups to go and see these people talk if you're really, really new. And that's what this. And that's what startup school is for.

[Jordy]

And is it true that Gary Tan did the little yachty walkout with the microphone?

[John]

I think he did.

[Jordy]

Is it true? Because I didn't see a video.

[John]

Yeah, I did hear that the pyrotechnics budget for this was over a million dollars.

[Jordy]

Wow.

[Dean Meyer]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Wow.

[Dean Meyer]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Explosive.

[Ronan Chambers]

Huge.

[John]

Huge. Enough pyrotechnics to level San Francisco if things went wrong.

[Jordy]

Oh, wow.

[John]

It was sort of like a Bet

[Jordy]

the farm type of moment for yc.

[Jonathan Jacoby]

Yeah.

[John]

Just constant sparklers and fireworks going on. I don't know. I was into this, but yeah, people are. I guess people are not into it. I don't know. Oh, hi, Sam.

[Dean Meyer]

I don't know.

[John]

I think, I think, I think it's great. I like, I think it's fun. The great AI psychosis hive mind of San Francisco. Wow. Yeah. People are all. Did they all have headphones? What are the headphones for? Interesting. Silent disco so you could listen to the talks.

[Brent Fransen]

I don't know.

[John]

And then they gave Update for the 4 and a half thousand attendees. This can successfully pass through tsa. Thank me later. They gave us a portable battery and it looks like a bomb. So people are like. But people got it through tsa apparently. Pretty cool. Pretty cool. Anyway, let me tell you about FIGMA agents. Meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your FIGMA files with design system context. In other news, Ilya Sutskever raised more money for ssi.

[Jordy]

He said, time to scale that safe super intelligence.

[John]

Time to. To safe.

[Jordy]

Time to scale that safe super intelligence.

[John]

So SSI, we are announcing a long term strategic partnership with Nvidia. Nvidia is making a substantial investment in SSI that will let them 10x their compute over the next 12 months. We reached the point where our research is worth scaling and this partnership will be able to. We are honored by Nvidia's contribution.

[Jordy]

Just another pod guy. Guess what he says.

[John]

What do you say?

[Jordy]

You need to do a podcast. The podcast guy says you need to do another podcast on brand.

[John]

Well, we have the perfect guest to talk about podcasting with because we have Luke Knight and Ronan Chambers from etn, the European technology Network. Welcome to the show. How you guys doing?

[Jordy]

What's going on?

[Ronan Chambers]

Gentlemen?

[John]

Look at this, look at that, look at this.

[Ronan Chambers]

Has this ever happened before? I don't know.

[John]

Ah, I love the picture. Thank you so much. Kick us off with the fundraising news. I want to smash this gong.

[Ronan Chambers]

Well, you've seen, we. We raised $1.6 million. Let's go.

[John]

Congratulations.

[Ronan Chambers]

9 million post money valuation. $9 million. Yeah. Announced today.

[John]

Super happy and new studio. It's, it's cooking. It looks huge. You got to trust there. Graphics are, are on point. Everything's coming together.

[Jordy]

Can you just look at that?

[Ronan Chambers]

Give us a studio.

[John]

This is a 10 out of 10. I don't know. You have everything. There's nothing else that you need.

[Jordy]

There's no ultra dumb jobs, but it's finished. But it's a good thing.

[John]

This is good. No, you got everything. This is awesome. No, I love that, you guys. This is hard. I think you guys know. We know, but it looks sort of easy when you just see a clip and it's just a podcast, but to actually stick with it for a long time is hard. What has the journey been like? What have the hardest moments been? What does it feel like to actually getting here where you have studio announcing

[Jordy]

this in July of all months? July in Europe, notoriously. Yeah. But I mean, people would have spoken about you to come back in October be like, hey, we had a great summer.

[John]

Yeah, we're back.

[Ronan Chambers]

Well, I actually, I actually emailed about 600 people from my. From like, you know, the last eight months, months that we've been doing this. And the amount of out of office emails was actually pretty shocking. Okay, so it's true. It's a little, it's a little bit worrying, but we'll be fine. That's the whole point. That's great. We're etm. We can figure it out. We had a checklist to do and I can just. I'll wheel it. Go and grab it. Go and grab it while you're While you're doing that, the last.

[Mate from Adrian M]

Yeah.

[Ronan Chambers]

Look at how scared

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

everything

[John]

is. James Weeks in the studio today, or is he remote?

[Ronan Chambers]

No, unfortunately not.

[John]

You got to get him in the studio. That. I mean, can we go wide frame. There he goes, the man.

[Ronan Chambers]

Can we see that? Bring it, bring it.

[John]

What's this to do?

[Jordy]

Go holiday. Go on tvp.

[John]

There we go. That's amazing. Check it off. Fantastic.

[Brent Fransen]

So,

[John]

yeah, I love. I love that you guys have, like, so thoroughly reclaimed the whole, like, Europeans don't work joke that. I don't know, it feels like it's completely diffused the meme and now I'm just like, okay, well, that's played out.

[Jordy]

Grinding. You're going five days a week now you're grinding.

[Ronan Chambers]

Yeah. You got any advice for us?

[Jordy]

What about a cheeky long weekend?

[Ronan Chambers]

Ibiza.

[Jordy]

Ibiza.

[John]

Ibiza.

[Ronan Chambers]

A little Ibiza weekend.

[John]

You guys are recently in France.

[Ronan Chambers]

Like, how was the trip to Canada? Hold on. You went to ac?

[Jordy]

Was not. Was non functional.

[Brent Fransen]

I legit.

[Ronan Chambers]

That actually.

[John]

That actually shocked me so much because I, you know, you hear these jokes about, like, oh, Europeans take long holidays, or like, there's no air conditioning over there. And I always think that it's the Americans going a little bit too far with the bit. And so I assumed I was like, oh, yeah, the AC thing, that's probably just like, in random places. There won't be air conditioning. No. Like, all of France doesn't have air conditioning. It's crazy.

[Ronan Chambers]

Honestly. Doesn't have air conditioning. London's been brutal.

[John]

So are you talking to startup founders that are thinking about solving this? We were there being like, is this just the most obvious business ever? Just create air conditioning company of Europe.

[Jordy]

Kids in the Gundo should start the air conditioning company of Europe and just land on the beaches and just start bringing in units.

[Brent Fransen]

Yeah.

[John]

Is anyone.

[Ronan Chambers]

They have good merch with that name, to be fair. Well, I know that one of the Collison brothers has put out loads of posts around how people are literally dying.

[Justin from Nvidia]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Ronan Chambers]

And no one's. No one's thought to thought this out. Like when we had the heat wave recently here in London. Maybe we'll have to get one of our interns to. To get on it a quick website, you know, get an intern, you know, shipping in some AC units from wherever they ship them in from.

[Jordy]

I like it.

[Ronan Chambers]

Yeah. Talk to our own. Whoa.

[John]

Okay.

[Dean Meyer]

Whoa.

[John]

There we go.

[Mate from Adrian M]

Ooh.

[John]

Entering cam. I like it.

[Jordy]

What's up, lads?

[John]

Okay, so I mean, obviously, like, there are a lot of elements down to the PTZ cameras, you're clearly standing on the shoulders of us. You have the picture right there. And it's great because, like, we've defined a bunch of different patterns that allow this business to work. When I see the logos at the bottom of the ticker, I'm like, that's great. That allows you to pay for the studio and the interns. Where do you see the show going? Where do you want the differentiation to be? Because you're already differentiated just in the fact that Europe is different than the stuff we talk about. You cover stories way deeper than we do. If it's about Europe. But are there other. Are there other things that you're thinking about where you're like, yeah, actually, we want to go a completely different direction with this?

[Ronan Chambers]

Yeah, sure. That's a really good question. Because when we actually didn't think that we would raise any money, we were doing pretty well. As you mentioned, the ads model, what you guys have kind of built in terms of a model is great, right? But then when we figured out how big the opportunity is in Europe specifically, we realized that raising the money was had. It had legs. We were like, okay, this thing can be really big because it is the live show, but we see that as like the kind of wedge in the door, the foot in the door, to kind of to build the network, and then it's a network. Right? So think about potentially a summit business or whatever it is like that the. The European ecosystem needs that.

[Justin from Nvidia]

So.

[Ronan Chambers]

And it's not kind of as developed as is the ecosystem over there. So. So it's like, if we can kind of, you know, almost kind of piggyback off that. Off that model and then build on top of that, I think, yeah, the sky's the limit. We can go very big, which is exciting. I think, like, long term, you can see it, like, in a way where the show would just become the advertising department for a huge media conglomerate. So we could do the summit business. You could even open a recruitment model off the back of it. You can look at a fund off the back of it.

[Brent Fransen]

I mean, you guys are.

[Ronan Chambers]

Have probably gone through all these ideas anyway, and you've probably chosen. Let's just nail this. You guys were first to do this. You were first to create the model. So I don't think there would be a need for you guys to innovate because you smashed it. You don't need to. You had first mover advantage, and you crushed it.

[Jordy]

I think you're encouraging us to rest on our laurels.

[John]

We did Put laurels on the merch so

[Ronan Chambers]

we can we do a breaking TVPN resting on laurels.

[Justin from Nvidia]

You.

[John]

So you guys have been successful with the TBPN for Europe model. There's also TBPN for car dealerships over here. I don't know if you're familiar with this. The car dealership guy has a lot of stuff.

[Ronan Chambers]

You guys have talked about this?

[John]

Yeah, we had him on the show and we've talked about it. And it's great because we never cover car dealership news. It's a great every once in a while, but not on the dealer side. And so it's great to take the best practices, like, you know, what the lighting should look like, what the trust looks like, what the logos and stuff. Like, learn from the best practices and then take the content in a different direction so that you're offering a differentiated product. Is there a European car dealership? Are there spinoffs of you yet? Or more sub markets in Europe for like the European crypto etn?

[Ronan Chambers]

I think. Well, when. When we first started, I think it was just you guys. And then I think like ecom cowboys popped up. Yeah, I think there were you guys.

[John]

Oh, here we go.

[Ronan Chambers]

You guys covered.

[John]

Did you guys have a flashbang yet? You guys have a flashbang yet? You gotta get on that.

[Ronan Chambers]

We thought it would come.

[John]

What tricks do you have up for your sleeve? You got some.

[Ronan Chambers]

You got a few tricks?

[John]

11 labs ad or something? What you got?

[Ronan Chambers]

We can go ad for odd mugging us earlier. Wait, can we go add fad?

[John]

Yeah, yeah, what you got?

[Ronan Chambers]

I don't know. Oh, here we go. Let's go. Frame up. Build better stuff.

[John]

This is a good stinger. This is a really well integrated stinger. We're flashbanging it again. We're smoking it. It's over banned. How long are your ad reads? Since this stays up on the screen a little too long, do you have to click it to come off?

[Ronan Chambers]

That's a good question.

[John]

That should just come off. I think my feedback would be a little bit tighter on that. A little bit tighter. You don't want people getting distracted.

[Ronan Chambers]

Is someone writing this down?

[John]

Yeah, it's recorded.

[Ronan Chambers]

We'll get it on granola.

[John]

Are they a sponsor too? No, they're not.

[Ronan Chambers]

This is day one. Working on it. Working on it. This is the worst it will ever be, boy. So it's fine. It'll always get better.

[Jordy]

That's.

[Ronan Chambers]

What was there. What was the question? I forgot the question.

[John]

The question was just like, what else is there? Is there demand for a ETN for IEX in. In Europe. So. So there was demand for TVPN for car dealerships. There was also demand for TVPN for crypto, because we don't really talk about crypto that much. And there's been a few other, like, spinoffs that have made sense and a lot of them have gone their own ways. They don't even look like us anymore. There's like all these different things you can do, but they adopted like, some of the best practices of like, the ad market, the ad model, and some of the overlays and some of the live. But what I'm interested is, like, where. What else is going on in Europe that might demand a live show?

[Ronan Chambers]

Okay, so when we, when we started the model started etm, we were like, this could be done in, you know, you mentioned, like, car dealerships. This could be done in fashion. I could get two people to go and, you know, do a live show for fashion.

[John]

That might be good, especially in Europe.

[Ronan Chambers]

A cooking show, whatever.

[John]

All the houses are there, like.

[Ronan Chambers]

Yeah, literally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's like someone could do that. Get the best designer designers on every day to talk about, I don't know how fashion works, but, like, new jeans that they've just, like, designed or whatever it is.

[John]

Right.

[Ronan Chambers]

So, like, I think that. I think you could go like, category, you know, sports specific and verticalize in a category in Europe specifically. Not yet. I mean, we're what, 10 months in, so we'll see, we'll see what happens. Like towards the end of the year, you guys were going for, I don't know, at least, I don't know, maybe nine months before. Before we caught on and we were like, look, this needs to be done in Europe. This is a great model.

[Jordy]

What were you guys doing for the

[John]

first nine months vacation? We know the bit you guys should do.

[Jordy]

You guys should do TVPN for Euro summers.

[John]

There we go.

[Jordy]

Just daily.

[Ronan Chambers]

We go on the road a lot, to be fair. We did Monaco with a 16Z, which is great. We saw Anish, who I know knows you, Jordy. We had Nico on, which was awesome. So Greece in pan. Yeah, Greece with Panathenia. We were at the Louvre in Paris.

[Jordy]

I got you started on vacation destination. Now you're.

[John]

I mean, there are summits in Europe.

[Ronan Chambers]

We only choose the destinations where we actually want to like, you know. Yeah, yeah, but it's a good model. But with the five days a week, do you think we should do an

[Jordy]

AI pause so that the AI researchers can go to Ibiza or to Let

[Ronan Chambers]

them off for a week. I mean, they're all going to do so quick pretty soon anyway.

[Jordy]

One week. Pause.

[John]

Six. Six month.

[Ronan Chambers]

Six weeks.

[John]

Six months.

[Ronan Chambers]

If you can get. If you can get all the Frontier labs to sign off on that, like Jensen did for his global letter. AI Summer, last question.

[Jordy]

Do you have a, like an intern? An on camera intern? Our original intern has evolved into a co host. Into a co host.

[Ronan Chambers]

So he's co hosting now. We've not got a Tyler yet. We did put a job at for two interns and we got like 360 applicants. So there's people from base in SF that interned at like Tesla Space X pinging us to be like, can we work?

[John]

I move in the Europe. That's sick.

[Ronan Chambers]

Yeah. Which was. Which is nuts. But I don't think we can make that. They wanted to Europe. Yeah. They wanted Euromax with us and we thought you probably are too qualified and we couldn't afford you.

[John]

You know, what's the European version of the gong we just ran? We should have done a bell because in America you actually ring the bell. We randomly went with a gong, which is very Asian, I think

[Ronan Chambers]

earlier today we did. We did saber. Oh, you sabering a champagne bottle.

[John]

That's good.

[Ronan Chambers]

We did say we'll send you the video of us sabering it, but as you can see. Okay, we've got the tvpn. We got the lights.

[Jordy]

There we go.

[John]

Yeah, that's pretty.

[Jordy]

The chat is saying confirm Tyler has not been distilled.

[John]

I like this one. This is a good soundboard cue. Too long though. Oh, wait, actually, if you're gonna play the whole song for a little bit, then you're good. Then you're good.

[Ronan Chambers]

Yeah, it's good for intros sometimes for guests.

[John]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Ronan Chambers]

You guys are like esports tune.

[Jordy]

Just like, just like AI. You guys are like nine, six. Six, you know, maybe 12 months behind. But yeah, we're day one.

[John]

We had to keep it.

[Ronan Chambers]

We had to keep it concurrent with the, you know, the.

[Jordy]

No, it's good, it's good.

[Ronan Chambers]

Get the. We need to get the flash going though.

[Jordy]

Yeah, you guys, we're happy for you guys to distill the show.

[John]

This one's good. I like that one. I like that one.

[Ronan Chambers]

Hey, don't give them any ideas. They'll take off.

[John]

Yeah, no, no, we're going to distill it back. You know, it's like when you ask Claude what model it is in Chinese and it says it's deep sea. It's like, goes both ways. Sometimes you never know. No, like, I think what's the. What's the best is that this, this can be a grind, like five days a week, a lot of stuff. There's just a lot of work and it just seems like you guys are having fun. Are you guys having fun?

[Ronan Chambers]

We're having fun. The most fun we've ever had. It's. It's great.

[John]

Yeah, it's great.

[Ronan Chambers]

We get to talk to cool people and, you know, we're two mates talking to each other for a living. It's great.

[John]

That's the best.

[Jordy]

Amazing.

[Ronan Chambers]

Exactly. So you guys are living the dream. So we.

[John]

Well, congratulations.

[Ronan Chambers]

Before we go, I want to ask, can we get some Lucy's for the studio?

[John]

I'd be happy. I. I'll send you a whole vending machine.

[Ronan Chambers]

Really?

[John]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll see how we'll send it to. I love it. Yeah, it's amazing.

[Ronan Chambers]

Oh, yeah, let's do it, bro. Yeah, we're European. We need those.

[John]

Yeah, yeah. Send me your address and yeah, we'll chat offline, but we'll, we'll. We'll send you a bunch of stuff. No problem.

[Jordy]

Maybe you could be coming if that's legal.

[Ronan Chambers]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Great to see you guys. Congratulations on the new funding and congrats to the whole team.

[John]

We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.

[Ronan Chambers]

Appreciate it.

[John]

Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless, seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. What a great crossover. You'll love to see it. Well, we have Gary Vaynerchuk, creator of Vee Friends, back on the show. Third time. Love catching up with Gary V. We'll go all over the place. Creator, economy, AI, open source building stuff. How you doing, Gary? What's up?

[Jordy]

There he is.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Men.

[Jordy]

Men, Men, Men.

[John]

Well, I think it's a math. You're doing math. Meh, meh, meh.

[Jordy]

What's happening?

[John]

Okay, I want to start with. Unless you have something to kick right off with, I want to start with something. I've been seeing these videos of you from years and years ago with just these crazy, crazy accurate calls about the future. What victory lap do you like to take the most? What's the one call when you think back where you're like, damn, I really nailed that one.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Social, like, if I'm being honest, like, like. No, it's like, it's crazy. Too bad I wasn't making the videos back then. Like, just my complete conviction on Facebook and Twitter. Completely unearthing and changing the world.

[John]

Yeah.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

No, it. It's ironic timing. I met with someone today I hadn't talked to, like, 12, 13 years, you know, retired gentleman. I met him early on. He's like. He's like, it's crazy how much you believed in that stuff and how dismissive we all were. But there's, you know, I listen. The only one of the few things I really do well in business is I don't let my audacity or my current financial situation or what I would like to happen financially dictate my observations of the consumer. I don't think I'm smarter than anyone or have a bigger knack. I think you have. Now let me give some flowers to you boys. You have some of the greatest people on here. Right. You guys have crushed. You've also gotten much better at your actual job interviewing because, you know, I'm a day one with you guys, like, so I just want to give you some flowers. You guys are getting better and better.

[John]

Yeah.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

All these brilliant people you have. It's not that I know it better. I don't know it better. It's that I'm willing to completely change course of what I think is working for me or I'm willing to lose all my money. To be historically correct. I'm not talking about things that I want to happen for my financial interest. I'm talking about what consumers are actually doing.

[John]

Do you think you are more bullish?

[Jordy]

Well, and the other thing is that it's.

[John]

Than like, the actual platforms. Like, because, like, when I look back at some of those calls about, like, the pivot away from the. There's this one where you're, like, looking at the newspaper and you're like, nobody's gonna use the newspaper. They're just gonna get their news online from other people. And it's like a very accurate prediction.

[Ronan Chambers]

But.

[Dean Meyer]

But.

[John]

But it's like that distinctly wasn't coming from, like, Mark Zuckerberg in 2008. He was just saying, like, I built this cool website.

[Jordy]

Like, it's fun connecting the world.

[Brent Fransen]

Yeah.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

It was connection. What I, you know, I think that I know when you go read Crush it, the first book I wrote, I wrote in 2008. Also in that time, I am fully predicting. And you guys know this. We've talked off, like, I predict, like, literally. There's parts of the book that talk about what you guys are doing right now.

[John]

Yeah, yeah. No, we're super early in the live streaming, too.

[Mate from Adrian M]

Yeah.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

And don't forget, we just came out of Friendster and MySpace failing. So my thesis Wasn't necessarily. Now, look, I thought Mark was generational because I'd spent some time with him, and I ended up being very right about that. And I thought Twitter was incredibly unique, so I was bullish on those platforms, but I was incredibly agnostic to your point. Whether it was called Facebook or Twitter or the many things that failed along the way, Socialcam, Peach, vine, you know, like LinkedIn or YouTube or Twitch or TikTok, it didn't matter. Apps that connected people on top of the Internet, I knew, had to win because of the network effect of scale and no gatekeeper in between. You think you two handsome young bozos would have gotten on cnbc? You would have had to wait.

[Justin from Nvidia]

Yeah.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

But I knew that you could just do it. And then it's like sports.

[John]

We love the term bozo. It's like underrated. Underrated. So good. It's not. It's, like, only slightly derogatory, but it's like, not totally. Not a bad.

[Jordy]

I do identify as a bit of a great word.

[John]

Yeah, it's a great word.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

You know, you guys have become very influential, and definitely the people watching are very influential. Can we all collectively put our hands in the pot and all bring bozo back? It would be really enjoyable.

[Jordy]

Golden retrievers are kind of bozos.

[John]

No, no, no, no.

[Jordy]

We have to talk about golden retriever mode.

[John]

Yeah, yeah. But, yeah, better installation. Jordy, sorry I cut you off. What are you going to ask?

[Jordy]

Well, yeah, I think. I think what was interesting about your call is you were bullish on the platforms, but the take wasn't just, you should invest in Facebook. It was like you should just put stuff out every single day. And you've been remarkably consistent with that.

[John]

Yeah, yeah.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

And it was. It was real for three guys like us that could go from zero notoriety to a lot. And literally the most famous people in the world right now, you know, at least a third of them are either streamers or purely on social. They have no television. They have no, you know, theatrical. They have no other platform.

[Mate from Adrian M]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

TV is now coming to them and saying, hey, could we work something out? You clearly have demand for your content. We want to get it on our platform.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I started a company a couple of years ago called Vayner Watt Watt. It's a TV production company, and we are bombarded by the distributors. For me to get access to the Stephen Bartlett sort of hormozees or the Cody Sanchez is. Or the like, it's all here. And what's crazy is, like, YouTube, for example. Right. There's 900 genres that should be doing what you're doing right now.

[John]

Yeah, we just talked to some folks who are doing this show for Europe specifically and there's one that's for car dealers and there's one for crypto and there's a whole bunch of different sort of like. And it's not even like we were the first live streamers, obviously we just

[Jordy]

took them still the funny, you know, the craziest, the craziest thing. No one has done TVPN for the market open like you're in New York. You're in New York. You start at.

[John]

I know someone that's working on it.

[Jordy]

But yeah, we know, we know a couple of people. But the fact that we're 18 months in and no one saw what we're doing. We go live at 11 Pacific, so we're going live at noon. The market has been open and.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Which is an indication of your laziness. You guys should wake up.

[Jordy]

We do wake up early, but we

[John]

do a team workout and it's more, it's more an indication of our, of our fascination with private markets versus public markets and, and like longer term, less quarter by quarter, less day by day market moves and more 12 to 18 month fundraising cycles for private technology companies. And so I think that my natural interest is in the private markets and the earlier stage technology. So if I was trying to cover, you know, the day by day and the market went oil's doing and how that's affecting, you know, GE and Boeing, I would just be a little bit less sharp than if I'm talking about,

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

you know, and honestly that's what, you know, back to crush it. Back to you guys. Back to all of this. What you're ready. Like the whole theme of this interview, the fact that people that are watching that are deeply sports like you, TVPN for sports with talent like you guys is. Is ESPN's biggest nightmare.

[John]

They already sort of have it right. Isn't Path.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Of course, of course.

[Jordy]

I mean but they have to pay him like 60 million a year.

[Jonathan Jacoby]

They do.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

And Pat had to be lucky enough of all the serendipity that led to that. There are 913 Pat McAfee's and I mean and Pat's incredibly charismatic and talented. You guys are as well. But the long tail of knowledgeable or charismatic individuals is quite long. Now everyone has a different upside. Right. Like, like again, somebody could replicate this exact show.

[John]

Yeah.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

And if they're really just much sharper and more entertaining, they will take market share.

[Jordy]

That's just how well the other. The other thing about sports versus business that's interesting is, like, sports. There's so many people that played sports, whether it's college or professionally, and then they stop being able to play at that level, and they're like, what's the best thing I should do? I should just talk about the game that I love. Whereas in business, you don't get to a point where you're better at talking about it necessarily than doing it. There's a lot of people that. That could.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Well said.

[Jordy]

And so.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

And there's another thing. I just turned 50 and, like, literally this morning, like, no bullshit. I'm like, my. Starting to enter my prime, like, as a property.

[John]

That's such a great philosophy. You're just like, I'm having whatever the inverse of a midlife crisis is. That's me.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

You know, it's funny.

[Jordy]

Wait, is the generational run just beginning? No, I love it.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

But, man, I really like. And it's funny. And I have a funny feeling, especially given the incredible nature of your audience. I think when that was just delivered a few minutes ago, there's just a lot of people that really understand it because, you know, my whole life and probably many others watching, you wish you were an athlete. But if you were an entrepreneur, you kind of realize at 30, you're like, wait a minute, if I was an athlete and I was great, I'd be kind of wrapping it up. Or, like, thinking about post. And I own a large sports agency. My brother and I own a very large sports agency now called Vayner Sports. You know, I feel for these kids. This is what they were meant to do. They're 35 years old and they're like, what do I do with my. You know, like, just like, really?

[Jordy]

No, I know. It's. I truly. I feel so blessed to have always been obsessed with business. Like, I never. I never came close. You know, I got very into surfing, but I never like surfing as much as business. And being. Having a love for something that you can do for a lifetime even more so people say, like, oh, you should play tennis, because you can play it, you know, you know, basically indefinitely. But it's like, well, you can. You can do deals for truly, for life.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

That's a good segue. Yeah.

[John]

This is what we. We always. We always bring up.

[Jordy]

Got a segue.

[John]

Sorry. One thing we. We always. We always bring up Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. It's like the greatest. The greatest run of that career happened from, like 50 to 90. It's like, that's so long.

[Jordy]

No, but wasn't it more like 70 to 90 or like 80?

[Jonathan Jacoby]

Was.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

It was like 60. Like, that's right. So segue, you just brought tennis. I've done incredibly well. I think this is important for a lot of people. Again, I'm always thinking about the audience. Alternative sports, league investing. I think you guys. I think there's some more fun stuff you guys could be doing about that. It's gone really well for me.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Alexis, we had Alexis on. He has the running league, which is cool. We had the founder of Enhanced Games on.

[John]

Yeah. There's some article in the Journal today. Is Padel the next pickleball?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Right. So Pickle was a huge win for me. Right. I bought a team for 500,000 pre Covid. They're trading at 16 million right now in our major league pickleball league. Right.

[Jordy]

So do people watch pickleball?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Yes, that's why, that's why I invest. So I have a little bit of a secret of why I think I'm doing well. Because I'm doing well with this wiffle ball league that is starting to get some juice. We got some great owners in that come. I have one little advantage. It's back to this. And we've had some meetings off camera. And you guys know I'm like pretty in the weeds with like how communication and marketing works. The reason I invested in Pickle is Pickle highlights even seven years ago, massively over indexed on social.

[John]

Oh, sure, yeah, right.

[Jordy]

Like, yeah, but, but the. But the thing is, I do wonder if that's so. So Dana White has the Slap Fighting League. Forget what it's called. And that's something that does incredibly well on social. But I don't know anyone, even hardcore MMA fans. It's like, can't wait for the card this weekend. I'm going to watch live.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

But two things. One ish on incredibly well on social. You have to, you know, when you. Because I've looked at that as well and a lot of it is driven by the TKO machine. Much more than, you know, the organic nature of what I'm saying.

[Jordy]

And seeing somebody that's about to get hit in the face is like naturally scroll stopping, even if it's not a good spectator.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

There's also something that people don't realize about sports that matters if you're gonna watch it, which is your capacity to participate in it. Yeah, right. Like, like, like people a lot. When people try to zing pickleball, they're like, yeah, everyone's playing it. But is it a Business. And I always remember, like literally those are the articles that were written about tennis and golf 50, 60, 70, 80 years ago. It's like, it's funny. By the way, back to your first question. The other thing I do pretty well that I hope other people do, so I'm saying it out loud is I really use history along with paying attention to people. So, for example, the biggest sports in America in the 20s and 30s were horse racing, boxing and baseball. Those sports were very good on radio. But football is not a great radio sport.

[John]

Interesting.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Football exploded with the television. If you look at the explosion of the football, it came along with television.

[Justin from Nvidia]

Yeah.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

And so back to streaming, what you guys are doing right now. One of the reasons I'm invested in the sailing league. Slam ball, you know, pickleball, Wiffle ball.

[Jordy]

What's Lambo?

[John]

Slam balls. Trampoline.

[Jordy]

You know what, Dodgeball and trampoline.

[John]

No, no, no. Basketball with trampolines. So everyone can dunk and do like bath flips and stuff. It's crazy.

[Jordy]

All right, I gotta watch.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

It was. I knew I didn't need. Just like you guys didn't need CNBC to be like, you're the right on your talent. Are all these alternative leagues do not need ESPN or you know, Fox Sports to say, yes, people can see this stuff through these platforms. And that's going to continue in an AR VR. Like we're going into an incredible era of opportunity and meritocracy.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Real quick, what was your reaction to the World Cup? Do you think that flopping. Well, and flopping culture will. Will forever prevent America from actually getting into. Do you think that's a bottleneck to

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

growth, not a bottle? Americans are hypocrites. We love basketball. SGA is the greatest flopper of all time.

[Jordy]

I don't watch enough. I haven't watched enough basketball to have even seen SGA flop. But I feel like the. I feel like in Europe they appreciate the drama and it's almost like the acting of it all. But then you watch the replay and it's like Americans that are used to watching, you know, some corn fed linebacker run through a guy and the guy just gets up instantly. You know, it's hard to then go watch somebody flop and completely fake an injury.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I think that soccer players at this point have this incredible 4 to 7% Academy Award like acting capabilities that probably piss people off. But I agree with you. I'll use football because football is a sport that people hate when they first see it and then they become infatuated with it because it stops and starts. It stops and starts. Especially the world. Immigrants coming to the US when they're used to soccer, which is flowing, they hate it. And then inevitably, within a decade, they love it because you start falling in love with all the little nuances. And I would say for Americans, the nuance of flopping is annoying, Especially with the NBA. It's been a big topic, by the way, So I think, especially this season, so I think some of that energy came to it. But look, I mean, I'm a little older than you guys. Everybody who's over 50 knows this. The strides that America has made in its interest in football, aka soccer, over the last 30 years is profound. FIFA, the video game, had a huge impact. Being able to watch the Premier League in America on Saturday mornings had a huge impact.

[Justin from Nvidia]

And.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

And it's a great sport. And I already am excited for the next one.

[Jordy]

What about. What about the intersection of technology and a game like soccer? I grew up playing soccer. Reffing soccer. I've reft that was like, you know, that was. I would spend my weekends when I was 12. I'd ref, like 20 soccer games because they didn't cap it. Like, there was no. Like, you can only work eight hours. It was like, you can ref as many games as you want because there was a shortage. So I'd ref, like, insane number of games in a day. And watching the World cup. And again, I'm a super casual viewer. I hadn't been watching soccer prior to the World cup, but it was fun to kind of catch up on it. Like, you know, there'd be an offside call and. Or maybe there wasn't a call, and then they'd run the tape and they figured out that the guy's elbow was slightly over the line and they'd call it and they'd take the goal back. And that, to me, like, part of, like, what makes the sport great is there's just players that can finesse a situation and just be right on that line. So a ref couldn't possibly call it. And then to have a machine being like, you know, no, you can't.

[Mate from Adrian M]

You.

[Jordy]

You could beat the ref, but not the machine.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Look, I think of this, like, marketing. I'll make this valuable to the audience who does not like sports, by the

[Justin from Nvidia]

way,

[Jordy]

I thought those were the Chinese robots that's first.

[John]

No, these are. Now we're watching. Slam ball. Best hits. Look at this.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Yeah, this. Look at this.

[Jordy]

Oh, all right, all right. Tell me this is electric. I can get behind this.

[John]

It's so insane.

[Jordy]

Is this made to look like it was shot on vhs? What's going on here?

[Dean Meyer]

Is this.

[Jordy]

Oh, okay. So it's been around for a while

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

a little bit more. So I'll say I'll answer you like this to make it a little business terms hopefully help some people's marketing. There's a lot of people watching right now that become two one dimensional math performance marketers and they lose. In fact, you race were one of my favorite executions to watch from afar because you guys played like me. You sell more on brand than on math. You guys were getting brand deals that were completely inappropriate because you sold on value, not on metrics. Yeah, I think that that's how I think about technology and sports. If we get all the way to full AI robots and everything's 100% black and white, I think the league is going to learn pretty quickly that we as humans need a little romance. Need a little gray, not black and white. Need a little of a balance. And so just like I wish in political terms that everyone was purple instead of this garbage red and blue. We're in with the sports and technology and replay. If they can find purple, I think it's great. When they go too red or too blue, I think it's a problem.

[Jordy]

Yeah, even in Formula one there's, you know, the drivers are having issues right now because there's AI is deciding how much energy, fuel and how much power to. And they're all just getting angry because they're like, am I losing because I'm not as fast as my opponent or is my. Is the AI running on my car just not as dialed?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

It's all these analogies. It's like, is dinner fun without the side dish and the amuse bouche and dessert? When we get so binary. We all want a little romance. We need a little romance.

[Jordy]

Okay, one more potential league. I want you to run this down and let us know next time you're on what you you find. But I have a theory that when every car on the road is autonomous that like driving on the track is going to have a resurgence in popularity because people are going to be, you know, it's so romantic. It's so romantic. There's so much great history around racing. Every person. Yeah, hit me with the counter. But, but I have a theory that like nat like things like net, like there's something like a slam, slam ball or whatever it is for driving and

[John]

that's just like demolition derby.

[Jordy]

Oh, it's something like rally. I was driving yesterday. I was driving a. I was Driving a dune buggy. I was like, my buddy. And we were like, we were laughing. It was so much fun. We're drifting around corners.

[Ronan Chambers]

Yeah.

[John]

Yeah. It's a more dynamic calendar is.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I don't know if you know this, but we used to ride horses before the cars.

[John]

Oh, yeah.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

And I don't know if you know there's something called horse racing.

[Jonathan Jacoby]

Yeah.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

That is pretty out there. And so the counter would be that we kind of just lived it with horses and horse racing. But the counter to my counter is what you said, which is I actually think horse racing could be massive in this country if they put a contemporary player on it. What UFC showed is like, it was an evolution of boxing with more.

[Jordy]

Oh, interesting. Yeah. You want like rally horse racing, sort

[John]

of like UFC meets the Kentucky Derby. Like you can punch the other jockeys or what about.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

None of that.

[John]

And it's more about.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

What about storytelling? What about.

[John]

Yes, yes. A drive to survive, that type of thing.

[Ronan Chambers]

Yeah.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Or even when we're watching an actual horse race on a Saturday that's not the Kentucky Derby. Like if you turned it on and the bottom of the screen was actually a mic version of every jockey and you're learning like, we want layers, we want layers, we want stories, we want to get captivated. Everything is about that in every aspect of life.

[John]

With two jockeys getting up in each other's faces and throwing down after.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

You guys are looking violent today.

[Jordy]

Okay, here's a. Here's a hard hitting question. Do you think Big Boogie turned it down or was he capping?

[John]

Ooh, that was a good question.

[Jordy]

Do you think he potentially. Because we were trying to do that, John did the math and he said that if he was going to dental school for a decade and he had a bunch of dependents, it's possible the total package could have been in the. In the $10 million range. But you cover nil stuff a lot more.

[John]

True.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

You'll appreciate this. This is one of the rare moments where I get to do this and I always look for it, so thank you, man. I'm going to clip this. The answer is, I don't know. I've just not paid enough attention. I've been a little bit of a bubble. I'm very invested. I'm in a very weird place right now. I've been in a seven to ten week cocoon around the collectibles industry becoming collecting, becoming the next lifestyle genre. And so, like, my consumption of anything happening in pop culture is at an all time low the last two months is. I'VE been in the lab, like in the lab on this thesis that I've been on for about eight years that I think is about to completely blow the roofs off of. Like for example, for instance, to give you even more color again, always try to think about how to bring value to this smart show. We've started at VaynerMedia a collectibles marketing division just like there started just like Coca Cola started a sports marketing division when the Olympics were getting important as a driver to consumption. I believe in 10 years every fortune 500 consumable products, apparel, CPG will have a collectibles marketing strategy. I don't know if you guys saw lines around the door at Popeyes Chicken for the one piece collectible people flooding to a Dodgers game to get the one piece collectible. I think that in differentiation in an AEO Geo, you know, agentic commerce world, differentiation around collectibles and community to get people to stop their normal pattern of what they're just reordering because they want to buy a deodorant that has a collectible of their favorite. I just see collectibles eating up because of what it means for community and analog and value and investment.

[Jordy]

Yeah. And AI creates like insane. Is going to continue to create insane abundance. Like one example is everyone. Everyone can have a SaaS product now. You can make it.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Everyone will.

[Jordy]

Everyone will.

[John]

What's the chain?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Everyone who wants to go ahead, brother.

[John]

What's the chain from? People are playing a sport. Is it watchable? Then it becomes a sport with teams professional. You identified some of the translation effects. Like, you know, is anybody going to watch golf? Sure, a lot of people play it. But will people watch it? Obviously the answer was yes. And that was true for football before there was a league and there was TV and the Super Bowl. Right. People were just playing, by the way, just for fun.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Because I'm just nerding out.

[John]

Please.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Like everyone said there would never be a professional football league. That football was always going to be college.

[John]

Yep.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

In Notre Dame, the 20s, the 30s. Like, yeah. Like smart people that come on every. This one. Like those people back in the 40s and 50s. Like there will never be professional football.

[John]

Yes. But at the same time there are sports that are played by lots of people. I'm thinking of like running. And running is not a massive. There's not the super bowl of running. Even though millions and millions of Americans go jogging and they participate in the sport. There's something special about competitive football that makes it the Super Bowl. Right.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Super bowl is very special. But like, you know, the New York City Marathon is a very cultural event with good ratings.

[John]

Yeah.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I think we're in the era where an entrepreneur watching this show right now is like, fuck it, I'm making a running league and it might hit.

[John]

Yeah. So then talk to me about the translation layer from. There's a sport that a lot of people are playing. If it's watchable, it becomes a big national sport with professional teams that we're all watching. At what point does it become. Is there a collectible culture around it? Because we're just in this early stages of, like, pickleball has been played by a lot of people. It's now starting to be watched by people. As you mentioned, when will people be collecting pickleball cards?

[Mate from Adrian M]

Yeah.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Your production team seems really capable based on what I just saw.

[Brent Fransen]

Yeah.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Can the production team, before I leave in the next three or four minutes, put up ebay, type in Anna Lee Waters. Lee is L, E I G H Anna A N, N A space Lee. L E I E H space Waters. Then enter on ebay and then go to completed and sold items and then sorted by most valuable. If the team could do this, this

[Jordy]

is a great challenge for the team.

[John]

Are you just trying to move some Anna Lee Waters merch right now? You're like. And then click purchase and then click check.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

She is the star of all our team and we do rep v sports. She's my. For me, she was our Joe Namath. She is our Larry Bird. Look at this.

[John]

Can we go now?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Hit on the left side. On the left side. Hit, completed and sold.

[Jordy]

Yeah, Real ebay ball knowers. No Dylan on our team. Big collector.

[Mate from Adrian M]

Nope. No, no.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

All the way down. I'm very hardcore. I'm very in the dirt on collectible culture. The completed, sold.

[John]

Where we going? Hunting around for Annalee Waters.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Oh, show us this.

[John]

Show us this login. Show us the password now.

[Jordy]

So. So Dylan on the T on our team already got there.

[John]

There we go.

[Jordy]

And he's seeing Share screenshot. Anna Lee Waters rookie autograph cards going for $8,000. 5,000 next year. 5,000.

[John]

And I would argue, okay, we've done

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

a very good job with Anna Lee. We made her famous. She's on Fallon. She's on McAfee. She's the face of the sport. Ryan Harwood at Vaynersports deserves a lot of credit. We've crushed with her. She's the best player in the world. Pickleball is the only sport where a female can be the best. She's the best player in the sport, including the men.

[John]

Wow.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Because you know, that's what's interesting about pickleball. 80 year old grandmas are whipping 19 year old grandsons in pickleball. It's a different kind of sport.

[John]

There is another sport where women outperform men. Certain equestrian in the Olympics I'm sure there's others.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

But this is one that people know. You could see 8 to 5,000. And I will tell you, 99% of the audience and everyone on Twitter right now, hit me up Gary Ve and answer this. 99% of the audience right now has never heard of her in their lives. So it doesn't take a lot to get to collectible. These collectibles are niche, are tribals. Right. Look what happened with Comic Con. 50 guys in a weird hotel in San Diego, right in 1976 to now this last weekend. Millions of people going to San Diego. And it's a cultural phenomenon. So collectibles is when it flips over to pop culture. I would argue that athletes that are the most valuable are more pop culture than people realize. They're more superheroes than people realize. And when you're building a league, whether it's Conor McGregor and Ronda Rousey, whether it's Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Steph Curry today, like you need a superhero. Joe Namath was the superhero for the NFL early on he became one of the most famous people in the world. Jets had a huge upset in Super Bowl 3 and football was on its way.

[Jordy]

Business collectibles. Where do you think it's going? We saw Jensen, Jack, Jack go for about a million. That was for charity for our friend Justin Mares. His grants that he does.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I believe collectibles have eaten up the pop culture energy of what young 20 year olds would do with public stocks. So instead of buying 50 shares of Nike like my generation did, they're going to go buy a collectible. I think it's completely enough the oxygen of contemporary art. So you guys, especially after your nice transaction, continue to hang around people of wealth at a young age. Your contemporaries, people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, only 25 years ago, 30 years ago, are buying the hottest contemporary artists to put the art in the house. Much of that money is now going into $100,000 million dollar collectibles. Obviously Michael Rubin, sitting on the top of the Topps empire with all his cultural relevance has brought an incredible amount of pop culture energy to it. And kids, people forget trading cards are 100 years of collectibility. Now this has been a very long term asset class. But the Numbers are just out of control. You see o' Leary wearing, you know this even for you guys that are young, definitely people in my generation, people that collected cards as teenagers in the 80s and 90s were nerdy people. Collecting cards are now cool. And once that switch happens, it gets really different really fast. And we're on that other side. And so you'll see. Collective, you know, Watch.

[John]

I want to know what's on your shirt.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I wasn't even. I was right. There you go. Look at the hell I'm wearing.

[John]

Are you going to the National?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Of course. Leaving tomorrow. By the way. Let me just make this so I can clip it. In nine years, I am building the next Disney, Pokemon, Marvel all in everyone's faces. It's called be friends. And because I have 13 different other jobs, no one sees it and I don't speak about it that often. But building an IP business during this AI era is going to end up being one of my savviest moves.

[Ronan Chambers]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

And the generational run is just beginning.

[John]

I love it.

[Jordy]

Clip that. Clip that in a decade.

[John]

Clip that in five decades. I mean 9900 happen.

[Jordy]

Great to catch up.

[John]

Always great to be the man.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Let me know if I can help you.

[John]

We'll talk to you.

[Jordy]

Good luck with the National.

[John]

Goodbye.

[Jordy]

Cheers.

[John]

Let me tell you about console. Console built AI agents that automate 70% of it HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

[Jordy]

Up next, Jonathan Jacoby.

[John]

Jacoby.

[Jordy]

Jacoby. Coming in hot to the Ultradome.

[John]

How you doing?

[Jonathan Jacoby]

Hey guys. Thank you for having me.

[Jordy]

Great to have you. Great to have you. Let's get right into the gong worthy moment of this segment.

[John]

Tell us about the news.

[Jonathan Jacoby]

Yes. So today we launched an an out of stealth raising $71 million seed round.

[Jordy]

In million dollars. It had been a while since I saw a 70 plus million dollar seed round and I feel more at ease. Ribbit Capital having, having.

[Jonathan Jacoby]

Thank you so much.

[John]

So what, yeah, yeah. What is the progress need to look like these days? How, how mature is the product? How built out is the team to jump straight to that size of seed round?

[Jonathan Jacoby]

Yeah, so we, we're a team of 26 people actually growing pretty quickly. And today we also launched something pretty unique. We launched like the first AI robotic experience online so people can just browse to a website to robots that online and interact with real AI powered robots by our models and our interfaces. So this is kind of a double milestone for us both emerging out of stealth and kind of putting our technology out there. At the same time, very cool.

[Jordy]

I saw the painter, which is a robot that you can control and paint in the real world. I was a little bit frustrated because I'd been writing down notes and talking with a few people about somebody should set up a robotic arm that lets you paint on real canvases and then send it, like send it to yourself. But you're effectively doing that. So you beat me to the punch.

[John]

Yeah. So where does the AI start? Where does the tele operation end? Because I believe there's been demos of deterministic robot like remote control, even like a remote controlled camera that you can pan, tilt and zoom. That's existed for a long time. Where does the AI actually come into the process?

[Jonathan Jacoby]

Yeah, so basically we have robots. You can talk to them. So basically the idea is we put out different interfaces, one in some of the interface. Again, as you can see here, you can talk to the robot and ask it things and the robot just responds to you. We're going to also, throughout the week, we're going to launch more and more different experiences and we're going to showcase different ways to interact with robots. So our company is research heavy. Research lab. Research heavy company that focuses on robotic foundation models. But we also think deeply and care deeply about the experience. We think novel user interfaces are going to be a huge enabler for robotics. So we kind of wanted to put out something that is very wide to learn how people want to interact with robots and, and take that learning and put it back to the research. So in those experiments, you're seeing, you're seeing one robot that you can fight with, like a robotic sword fight. So here it is. So one of them is controlled manually like a teleoperation, which is the user. And there is a robot that is an AI robot that responds to the user. So it actually fights. So this is one way of interaction. Another one is you talk to the robot something and you see what it does. So the painter, you give it an association, it paints, it plays like a Pictionary with you. And then after the experience, you can ask it to do some pantomimes. You can imagine the brush is anything and it can be a wand, it can be cleaning as a broomstick, cleaning the floor. This is where the AI comes in. This is where our models, our foundation models comes into play. We wanted to showcase both interfaces and the models.

[John]

What's your opinion on robotics sort of or robotic control coming for free? In generalized LLM development, I saw some demos of, I think it was Opus 5, controlling a robotic arm. It Seems like a lot of these models, they don't always need to be trained for something specific and then you wind up just getting some particular functionality for free. Or it's like a quick RL step on top of what the Frontier Labs are already doing. Is that relevant to your roadmap or do you think there's a convergence, or do you think you'll go off and carve out a specific niche in robotics? I mean, obviously it's a huge category, but how does that all fit together?

[Jonathan Jacoby]

It is a huge category. That's true.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jonathan Jacoby]

So I see the demo you're talking about, I think was. So we've seen those demos, actually, we have from GPT 3.5 and before that we've had robots controlled by LLMs. I think the problem that we're seeing, you know, labs such as ourselves trying to tackle is the fact that this doesn't really either generalize very well or doesn't, you know, fit in with the requirements of like, you know, dexterity or doesn't.

[Jordy]

Yeah, it feels like cool demo, but not necessarily commercially.

[John]

Yeah, it also might just be like, it's, it's impressive to be like, wow, like language model, controlled arm. But if it's like every time it moved, it was $20 in tokens and it was 45% accurate, and if you just like did an actual model for the Robot, it's like 2 cents and perfect. That would be.

[Jonathan Jacoby]

Exactly, exactly. And it's kind of one example, one of my friends told me was assume you could have had an LLM, like do an ASCII art and paint as if it's as. But we still have image models.

[John]

Yeah, totally.

[Jonathan Jacoby]

Not the nature, like the natural language of the way the LLMs work. And that's why it's a bit off. But I do think that, I think initial models for robotics, such as what we're building and what some other labs are doing as well, I think it's going to take a huge part of how robotics is going to evolve. And we're also very lucky to be in this time of great tailwind. Right. There's a great tailwind of research. So we, most of the team is doing research and we have a lot of table from LLMs research. We take inspiration from that or from video models or from world models, and that's pretty unique.

[Jordy]

Time to revenue. How are you thinking about first commercial application? Sounds like you're in the age of research, but when do you see opportunity to start commercializing and where.

[Jonathan Jacoby]

Yeah, so we have partners, we're Working on, working with right now across different kind of segments. So from logistics to entertainment to health as well. Some cool things on that that we might talk about and those three categories. And there's more. What we're seeing is we want to be able to get as much value to users and customers as fast as possible and make sure that when we are scaling it up, it's scale up in the right kind of directionally right approach because you don't want to be way off and then be dependent on kind of, kind of being in a big tech debt, I would say in product debt. But, but I think, I think we're at a point where we also start. We're seeing value, we're seeing, you know, value from, from, from partners. And it's actually a kind of showing a size that we didn't expect to occur that fast.

[John]

How do you think about vertical integration? It feels like there's robotics companies that are saying we're going to build the robot and the model. There's others that are like, we're going to build a modular robot and the model. There's other companies that are saying we'll just build the model and the robot builders will show up. I haven't seen actually that many new startups that are like, we're just building a dumb robotic arm that you can load whatever mode model you want on. We want nothing to do with the actual AI inside. We're just doing the manufacturing. Maybe that's an opportunity. But where do you see your scope growing or staying focused?

[Jonathan Jacoby]

I think it's a great question because it really is a divergent kind of topic. A lot of opinions we see ourselves as. So we're a software first company. So we work with. Our products are a kind of software stack from the models to the interfaces to talk to them. We work very hard on making it generalized across embodiment. So we want to get to a point that even a new manufacturer comes out and says, all right, here's a new robot. I would want, I would want to be able to within a week have everything work on that robot as if I had that robot for months. So we're building a lot of infrastructure to be able to cut like this is part of our research, like how to be able to calibrate all our technology across robots easily. We think, and we see a lot of vendors and we think doesn't happen. It doesn't necessarily have to be coupled. And we see a lot of, you know, great companies around the world that, that sell the hardware. So if we could be a good provider for the brain and for the interface of the brain. We think it's a. It's a very viable kind of product offering and I think it makes sense as well.

[John]

Yeah, yeah, that's cool. I mean, yeah, obviously there are a ton of robotic production or supplier companies. There aren't enough startups in that world. I feel like, I feel like we need, we need, like I'm a direct competitor to Kuka or something and I'll make a big robotic arm and I'll make it cheaper or whatever I'm sure there are out there.

[Dean Meyer]

We'll probably talk.

[Jordy]

What were you doing before you go? What were you doing before this?

[Jonathan Jacoby]

So I worked at a company. I worked at a company acquired by Wiz and then we got acquired by Google.

[John]

Oh, yeah.

[Jonathan Jacoby]

And actually me And Asaf, the CEO of Wiz, we go way back. When I was 17, he was running Microsoft in Israel and he brought me to join Microsoft and so we have a long history. So I joined Wes and yeah, I

[Jordy]

think the era right now, long story, short, generational run.

[John]

Amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, breaking it down. Congratulations on, on coming out of stealth. Great demo.

[Jonathan Jacoby]

Thank you.

[Jordy]

Very cool way to launch.

[Ronan Chambers]

Huge.

[Jordy]

And we'll talk to you soon, hopefully.

[John]

I'm sure we will.

[Jonathan Jacoby]

Thank you very much.

[John]

Goodbye. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB? Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. Up next, we have Dean Meyer from Sequoia Capital here to talk about America's open model paradigm. I love a good paradox. Also, fun fact, I heard somebody debunking Jevons Paradox. It's not a paradox, it's just. Just an effect. It's just an economic effect. Is it a real paradox? Break down America's open model paradox. Feel free to give a little bit of an intro.

[Dean Meyer]

What's up, guys?

[John]

But how you doing?

[Jordy]

What's up?

[Dean Meyer]

I'm good. Can you, can you guys hear me?

[John]

Oh, yeah, we can hear you.

[Ronan Chambers]

I can't hear you.

[Dean Meyer]

Let's go.

[John]

We can hear you.

[Dean Meyer]

What's up, guys? Great to be on the show. Thanks for having me. Look, myself and my partner Constantine and Sequoia, we've been riffing on sovereign AI for a while and I think we wrote this post that went a little viral and the core concept was us is creating this frontier capability that kind of gets leaked into Chinese and great models and then you have the entirety of the American builder ecosystem, which is Neolabs, you know, companies that are somewhat dependent on these Chinese models. And so, you know, today there's like, you know, if you're an American lab and you can legally learn from a Chinese model, but you can't learn from a kind of frontier US model, which is what they're doing, then the question is, how do we build kind of the, you know, the legal path almost for this direct route as opposed to just having this dependence on Chinese software models. And so we kind of address that and share a few ideas, which I'm happy to talk about. But that's kind of like the overall, the overall thing.

[John]

Yeah, I mean there's so much, there's so much news about this particular topic. The essay was written at the perfect

[Dean Meyer]

time, just before Kimmy K3. Man, it was good timing. We had no intel. We had no intel.

[John]

But I mean, were you a believer in just the fact that the open source market generally lags the frontier by six months? And that's not changing because there was this graph that was going around for a while that was showing that maybe the closed source was scaling on a slightly steeper curve than open source. And this was driving sort of a couple months ago when we were in between open source releases, people were starting to say maybe they will plateau because the training cost will be so high that you'll have sort of like what happened at Meta, that will just happen in China. Because China will just say, yeah, like if we're going to spend a billion dollars on this training run, it's not worth it to open source it. But it feels like they found an economic model that makes sense. Kimmy's license is out today and they're going to take a portion of revenue if you're really selling a lot of Kimi tokens. And so were you, were you. Was this built on an idea that, that the open source and closed source frontiers would always be on the basically the same track?

[Dean Meyer]

Yeah, well, I think, I think, look, that is, that is the question. Yeah, yeah. And so look, our view is, I mean, first of all, like the gap is closed a lot. And so kind of the key conversation online over the past week was, you know, is distillation the reason for this or is there some other kind of mysterious reason? And the truth is like, you know, there are two camps, like everything, you know, people are kind of extremists. You know, when there's conversation, there's a group that are like, hey, destination does nothing. And there's a group that's like distillation, everything the truth is from the conversations we've had, it's somewhere in the middle, right? Like whether it's 20%, 30, 40, it doesn't really matter as much. It is meaningful that we know, we know from the labs. You know, there's tens of millions of, of of queries through these like large scale proxy distillation accounts. We also know on the other hand, if you speak to anyone who's like leading in synthetic data gen on pre or post training at the labs, like they will tell you even if you do like hardcore kyc. And then like let's say you get access to these kind of like, you know, you don't have all the traces, you don't have kind of, you know, like the chain of thought. There's a lot of RL that happens, right? And you just get the output. Like let's assume you just get an output from a query or prompt. It is still extremely valuable. Like that is 100% true. And so we know distillation is real. And then the question becomes, well, if this station is real, you know, how do we address the asymmetry that exists between, you know, if you're a western US company or you know, just a western company, you're not going to like go and set up, you know, 35,000 proxy accounts with like different IPs around the world and go into is philanthropic for the fear of being sued and being called out and even being cut shutting off access. And so there is the structural asymmetry and I think it's something we have to think about.

[Jordy]

So you have to create the meme of token Max.

[Dean Meyer]

Yeah, go ahead.

[Jordy]

To create the meme of token leader.

[John]

Maybe, Maybe. Do you think that Anthropic or anyone else, let's just say a closed source frontier lab in America. If they believe that they've been distilled by an international company, should they just sue? Even if there's no, even if there's no way that on any reasonable timescale that they're gonna win a settlement or block anything, would it just throw down the gauntlet to say we're willing to put this into the official record under threat of perjury, that we believe this is what happened and there's like a signed affidavit of their belief that there is wrongdoing?

[Dean Meyer]

I mean, I think they probably would and nothing would happen. Like I think nothing would happen. And so anyway, like, you know, US companies are kind of deterred from doing this. So I don't think it would change too much, unfortunately.

[John]

It would be very symbolic. I think it would be. I agree with you. I think, I don't think anything would change from the actual lawsuit. It would cost some amount of money to file this lawsuit, but at least they would have something to point to of like, hey, look, we tried to go through the traditional path and you were able to follow along. You were able to look at our evidence which was entered into the public record and oh yeah, the CEO of the lab that we're accusing of distilling us didn't show up to court or whatever, you know, whatever the process is, the process can begin. Maybe this is like a day away, maybe this, the lawsuit drops tomorrow, who knows? But it seems like that's the next logical step because right now there's a lot of, there's a lot of, there's a lot of pushback against like, hey, why do you have a problem with this? They say, oh, maybe it's distilled. Well, you know, that's the next, that's the next step. Maybe, I don't know.

[Jordy]

Yes. So Kimmy came out with their license this morning and in the license it says if you're just running, hosting this yourself for your own use cases, that's fine, it's free. But if you're effectively reselling it as a Neo cloud, you have to give us a revenue share. I can't imagine that Washington is going to tolerate that. Just, just the idea, the idea that like a bunch of us Neo clouds are then sending billions of dollars back to, to China to support one of their leading labs. I just, to me that feels like it could provoke a response that felt like it was maybe coming last week when different people in the admin were saying, hey, we believe distillation is happening here. We're pro open source, but we're against how they were positioning it, IP theft.

[John]

On the flip side, I was very quickly able to find a Bottega Veneta dupe that comes from China and is effectively distilled on that brand and the government isn't stepping in about that. And that money is flowing straight to it through Amazon and through other platforms. Shein and.

[Jordy]

Yeah, but it doesn't have any geopolitical significance.

[John]

You're not, you wouldn't go to war

[Jordy]

for two years and it's a carrying company.

[John]

Yeah, no, that's true, that's true. Anyway, sorry.

[Dean Meyer]

No, I think, look, I think, look, I was surprised to read that. Look, the truth is like, I think it's not dissimilar from the Database market where like, you know, you had redis like early on there were a range of these companies release really cool open source and like they just got hyperscalers, copied them effectively and that was the end. I just, you know, it's impossible to enforce. I like, I don't think that will work for the Chinese. But look, the broader question here is like there are two major risks with like depending on a Chinese US, you know, Chinese open source ecosystem. The first one is the, the dependency risk. Like the framing we have is, you know, in some sense, you know, it's a coyote. We always say we're only as good as our next investment, which we actually believe. And I think in some sense the analogy is like you're only as good as your next model. And so as long as you're dependent on the Chinese to give you the next like hit, you know, of, of the thing, you're kind of, you're kind of in a bit of a, in a, you know, in a bit of a weird position where you have this dependency. And then the other thing that I don't think people are kind of well calibrated on is just the risk of backdoors. And I'm not saying like, just to be clear, I'm not saying that all Chinese open weight labs are backdooring models. But the truth is we know for sure and there's like a lot of research on this both from the labs and outside the labs in academia. It is like an NP hard problem to know if there is a backdoor in a model that we know. So it's impossible to verify. And on top of that there's like a ton of crazy evidence that shows you can pull a model, which basically one way of saying is a model, you could do all the evals you want and suddenly it gets a certain input and the model literally changes behavior. We'll start exfiltrating data and doing some crazy stuff. And this stuff's real. This is not science fiction. We know. And so kind of the analogy I would give you guys is I think the state of AI security today is very similar to that of early days of the Internet, when in 2001 Wi Fi was like wifi encryption was effectively broken, publicly broken, and still no one did anything. And I don't even think we're at that moment yet. And it's going to get really bad if we one, don't better understand how to secure these things and two, build our own kind of independent ecosystem. And so yeah, those would be like some, some thoughts as well, there's so

[John]

much more we could go into here. We got to have you back on the show and talk more because, like, there's. There's so much going on. But thank you for writing the essay. We'll let the audience go and read the full piece.

[Dean Meyer]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Great to have you on and come back soon.

[John]

I'm looking forward to the next one because it feels like the conversation has already advanced so many different directions. We didn't even get into the puzzle politics of anyone having a cyber weapon in their pocket. There's all these different scenarios to play out beyond what you just mentioned, which are a bunch of other considerations. So it's a fun. We'd love to talk to you.

[Dean Meyer]

Thank you so much. Yeah, this was awesome.

[Jordy]

Great to have you on. Great to hang.

[Justin from Nvidia]

Cheers.

[John]

Bye. Let me tell you about public investing. For those take it seriously, they got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Our next guest is Brent Fransen from Death Clock. He's the founder and CEO. Welcome to the show, Brent. How are you doing?

[Mate from Adrian M]

I'm well.

[John]

Thanks for having me. Please introduce yourself and the company. Tell us a little bit about Death Clock.

[Brent Fransen]

Yeah. So we trained an AI on 1200 longevity studies to predict how long you're going to live originally. And then the model was predicting the exact day you would die. And so we started sharing that. And people, like, you know, people either love it or hate it. They want to see the exact day they'll die. But more importantly, the model builds a plan, you know, to live longer. It's not just about when you're going to die.

[John]

Is this a nod to Metalocalypse from Adult Swim?

[Brent Fransen]

No, it's not. Although that's one of the most. The most common questions, the most common responses on social. About Metalocalypse.

[John]

Yeah.

[Brent Fransen]

And then just about like, religion, you know, only God can tell you when you're gonna die.

[John]

Yeah. Is this rage bait? Are you intentionally framing this? Because you could have called it, like, the Longevity Optimizer, but Death Clock, I

[Jordy]

don't think they would have gotten nearly as many users.

[John]

I agree, but what are your opinions about. I mean, I've literally, like, lived this as well. So I'm not actually saying that this is bad or anything, but I'm just wondering about how conscious the decision is to use a word like death, because liquid death, same thing where it's this aggressive name. It draws an attention. What are your thoughts on that as, like, an attention mechanism?

[Brent Fransen]

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a stoic component to it. And so I do think that there is some, I don't know, some good reason to be honest with ourselves about the fact that we're going to die. But the real answer is, I don't know, distribution really matters. It's hard to make noise. And so we want it to be really provocative. So our goal is very much, you know, I don't know, the Howard Stern ilk of, look, love us or hate us, just don't be apathetic about what we're doing.

[John]

No, no, I think it's a good strategy for the modern era.

[Jordy]

Talk about the new launch. You launched free nationwide blood testing. Sounds good. Too good to be true. What's the catch?

[Brent Fransen]

It's not. You know, people are really concerned about their data. And I get it. We don't do anything with the data. We don't share or sell the data. But I think what's happened is we have a lot of these blood testing companies that do all this kitchen sink blood testing, and they charge you a lot of money. And the reality is blood testing is commoditized. LabCorp and Quest have existed for a long time. These tests are not that expensive. And the set of tests that you really need to understand heart health, metabolic health, inflammation, those are pretty inexpensive tests. And so from an acquisition perspective, for us, it made sense to say, look, let's give away a test. You can get a sense of the platform and how good the plan that it generates for you is. And then we think you'll do more testing and you'll go deeper and you'll convert to premium. But, you know, giving away a basic test, it's in the tens of dollars. The stuff is not as expensive as people think.

[Jordy]

Okay, and how many biomarkers does the free test give you?

[Brent Fransen]

The free test gives you about 50. But this whole number of biomarkers thing, it's the wrong way to think about this kind of testing. And so I think we've gotten into this place. We think, okay, you know, 150 biomarkers is better than 50 biomarkers. And that's not necessarily true. I mean, when you run these blood tests, they've got about a 95% accuracy rate. So when you start just testing for everything, even asymptomatically, you're cranking up the odds of a false positive that you've got to go chase down with your doc, and then you're in some diagnostic process that actually carries some risk. And so it's 50. You can do all of that testing with us. But it's more about getting the right tests. I mean, really understanding the right things about your heart health, your metabolic health, making sure you're doing the right cancer screens. So I wouldn't get too caught up.

[John]

There's like a power law in efficacy of biomarkers. And there's also probably a lot of correlation between some of those longer tail biomarkers.

[Jordy]

Okay. So someone comes in, technically, you're having to fork over tens of dollars to get them a free test, and you're betting that some meaningful percentage of them will be like, this service is cool, I'll stick around and access other services. So it sounds like close. As close as possible to a free lunch. Which, which I like.

[Brent Fransen]

Yeah, I mean it really is free. There's no. Yeah, there's no gotcha in it. I mean, you do have to say no, I don't want an. I don't want to take an Alzheimer, I don't want to look for the Alzheimer's gene. I don't want to do more advanced cardiac testing. All of those things require you to upgrade. But I think, I think the future is one in which we're kind of acting as our own personal doctors. We've got an AI that's got all of our health data and then we order the tests very surgically that we need at the times that we need them. We're not just kitchen sink doing 15 vials, you know, every six, every six months. Like, okay, I should go look at my liver health because of a medication I'm taking. And you shouldn't need a doctor to do all of that. And so that's what we're trying to make available mass market. We're not going to be the high end solution.

[John]

What, what legally can, can only a doctor do these days?

[Brent Fransen]

Well, medications, cancer screens, but I mean, blood testing. So there is a blood testing.

[John]

I mean, obviously blood testing happens with labs, so those are licensed. But then in terms of the interpretation of the tests, that can sort of be democratized with AI and individual, like self serve products.

[Brent Fransen]

Yeah, I mean, you know, we have to disclaim that we are, you know, we're not a doctor. And you need to speak to your doctor about any of these results. But there are, you know, the barriers are coming down in lab testing. I mean, so we. Every lab order that goes through death clock, it has a doctor's name on it. Like it goes through an approval process, but it's very fast. And you don't need to speak directly to the doctor.

[Ronan Chambers]

Yeah.

[Brent Fransen]

Because there's no there's really no risk

[Dean Meyer]

for most of these tests.

[Jordy]

What were you doing before this?

[Brent Fransen]

I was the CEO of a company called Euclid Analytics, a benchmark in any back business. It was acquired by we work about six months before we work imploded. It was a crazy, crazy ride.

[Jordy]

Wild. Well, I'm so curious what Adam Newman had in store. We health maybe.

[John]

Oh, yeah, I know.

[Brent Fransen]

He was a. He was a. He was a crazy, charismatic guy.

[Dean Meyer]

He was.

[Brent Fransen]

He was one of those guys.

[John]

He's still alive, by the way. Yeah. Yes, he's still alive. He's dead.

[Brent Fransen]

You would go sit and he would talk for two hours in these all hands.

[John]

Wow.

[Brent Fransen]

And it would feel like it was 15 minutes. But the day he showed up to an all hands in a suit, we all looked around like, oh, we're screwed.

[Jordy]

Question biological age. How should consumers read into. Seems like there's this race to the bottom in biological age where the platforms have an incentive to rate someone as a lower biological age because they're more likely to flex it on social media or to their friends. And then the other question I have is, is that just comparing your. That's just comparing your labs to the average American. And we know the average American is deeply unhealthy. So is it even when if I'm like, I'm 30 years old, if my biological age is 25, is that basically just saying, like, you are healthier than the average American who is deeply unhealthy?

[John]

I recently did one of those tests and it said I had the mind of a five year old. Biologically. We probably told this joke about it. It's funny every time. It gets. Every time.

[Brent Fransen]

No, it is gamed. And I think there are some companies that are pretty reckless with that. They're telling you that you're young, that you're younger than any real. It's called a phenotypic age is what would be kind of the fancy name for. It would actually tell you. And so I think that's a little concerning that people are doing that where it comes from. There's a researcher at Yale who produce the most valid calculation of biological age. And it takes nine biomarkers. And it's a little bit more. It's a little bit fancier than just comparing you to average. But I think that's directionally right. And so I wouldn't put too much stock in biological age. I would take very seriously heart health markers, metabolic markers, inflammatory markers, and these are the basics. It's like, know what your LDL is, know what your hemoglobin A1C is know what your HSCRP is? C reactive protein is going to give you a sense of. Of inflammation. And if you're paying attention to those things, you're going to do way more than caring too much about a biological age.

[Jordy]

What's your date?

[John]

Oh yeah. How long do you want?

[Brent Fransen]

My date is. Yeah, so mine's at 78. It's like February 16th of 2065 or something. It's weird to get an actual date, but the average user has 10 to 12 years that they can add. So the model's also producing how much longer it thinks you can live. And then anytime your health data is updated, the calculation recalculate. So my date changes every day. But when I, when I started it was 78. I partied a little too much.

[John]

How do you pitch to partnership with NAS Daily? Are you familiar with this YouTuber Facebook creator? He where he's obsessed with this concept. He wears a T shirt that has a percentage loading bar for how far he is through his life based on life expectancy. And it's all a message about enjoying every day. But he gets hundreds of billions of views or millions of lots of views. Very, very popular creator would be a very logical sponsorship. Maybe one day.

[Brent Fransen]

Yeah, we should talk to them. I think the reality is we're all going to die and we're going to

[John]

just be not me built different.

[Dean Meyer]

But.

[John]

But continue.

[Brent Fransen]

We are all gonna die no matter what people are gonna tell you. And there are things you can do to live longer.

[Dean Meyer]

But.

[Jordy]

No, sorry, we're having too much fun. Money never sleeps.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

You shouldn't either call.

[Brent Fransen]

I. I hope you're right, actually. I really, really hope you're right.

[Jordy]

Say you're not AGI pilled.

[John]

Yeah, not AGI pilled.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

No.

[John]

We're going to cure everything. No, I think you're right. And I think just reframing mentally around what it means to be healthy, giving people another visualization on what is typically just a bunch of random nanom leaders to deciliters like it's a bunch of random stats.

[Jordy]

Also why people are getting health information constantly. At least I am take this, do this or that. I've got always been into experimenting with different protocols and things like that, but sometimes you need to kind of jolt people.

[Brent Fransen]

Well, I think it's fine if you're experimenting so long as you're getting the basics right. I mean I think if you're getting a full body scan but not getting colonoscopies, that's wrong. I wish I could throw The X up. But if you're like, you've done the colonoscopy and you've done the mammogram and you've done everything, then like, okay, fine, maybe get the full body scan. And then on the experimenting, you got to be careful. You know the story of thalidomide, the doctors were prescribing that off label to pregnant women, and then the babies were being born with, like, hands on their. On their stomach.

[John]

Really, really gross.

[Ronan Chambers]

Yeah.

[Brent Fransen]

So you gotta. You know, the experimenting can be a little bit. I think we're a little casual about the experimenting. I'm not saying don't do it, but.

[John]

Yeah, well. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us. Very fascinating, the progress.

[Jordy]

Thanks for filling us in, Brad.

[John]

Fascinating company.

[Jordy]

And yeah, free blood tests out there.

[John]

Also death, potentially a skill issue. Don't do it. Anyway, thank you so much. We'll agree to disagree on that. Have a good one.

[Brent Fransen]

Thanks, guys. We'll see if we die or not. I hope you're right.

[John]

Yeah. See you back here in 70 years. Goodbye.

[Jordy]

Cheers.

[John]

Brent, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business, lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces. And now with AI agents. And our next guest is mate from Adrian M. How you doing? Welcome back.

[Jordy]

Hey, good.

[Mate from Adrian M]

Thanks for having me on. How are you guys doing?

[John]

We're doing well.

[Jordy]

Great to see you. We met at a Long Journey dinner forever ago at this point.

[John]

You've been on the show.

[Mate from Adrian M]

We did. And we also met at the Ramp dinner. I think I was the infamous founder that snapped that phone, if you guys remember that. Right?

[John]

Oh, I missed that. We told this story.

[Jordy]

I'm not gonna say the guy's name because he's a friend and it's funny and it makes him look really silly. But this guy is sitting there, he's got the new iPhone air. He's telling everyone in the room, you cannot possibly break this phone. This phone is indestructible. Anybody here try to break my phone. Try to break my phone. This guy goes, okay. Just bends out down, just snaps it in his hand. The guy's standing there just being like, just in shock and disbelief. I thought I was told any. And he was saying. He was saying, I'm gonna. I'm gonna email Tim Cook about this stuff. I'm pretty sure that Apple never promised.

[John]

They never ran an app. It was like, it cannot be broken

[Jordy]

by a guy from the Gundo.

[John]

So you are in The Gundo. Tell us what you're building.

[Mate from Adrian M]

Yeah, we're, we're in the greater South Bay area. I guess you could consider it. The Gundo. I mean, we're super excited to announce our Series A, but how much did you raise? We raised $18 million. Yeah. Indsrenum builds scalable sensing infrastructure for undersea domain awareness. So think about like Hunt for Ed October, finding submarines, unmanned underwater vehicles, semi submersibles and so on.

[Jordy]

So yeah, I'm going to maybe put it too plainly, but we don't really know much of what's going on out in the maritime domain, is that correct?

[Mate from Adrian M]

Yeah, I mean the maritime domain is getting more and more contested like daily. Right. I think we have a good understanding of what happens on the surface of the oceans. There's cameras, surface boats, but everything's kind of shifting into the undersea quite quickly. You know, it's one of the most unexploited gaps that we have and a lot of near peer adversaries and terrorist organizations and so on and so forth are starting to move under the waves. So like this entire push of, you know, the U.S. for example, funding unmanned underwater vehicles, our adversaries are doing the same thing. And so the big question is like, how do we find those things intelligently, quickly, give ourselves awareness of what happens around, you know, various parts of the ocean as well as like our strategic bases and so on.

[Jordy]

Makes a lot of sense. Talk about traction. Since the last time we chatted, what kind of progress have you guys made? Obviously the new funding, I'm sure you have some great momentum, but what have you been actually executing on?

[Mate from Adrian M]

Oh my goodness, so many things. So I think from the hardware and software side, like, I mean we've gone through three generations of hardware since we last talked, we've been moving at breakneck speeds. Here at Andren, we fielded it across like numerous exercises. Most recently we just got back from a three and a half week deployment with UUV group up in Kapoor, Washington. So they're all the guys that run and like dictate how unmanned underwater vehicles run. So we were up there alongside with a few other folks. No mission ending failures for a three and a half week deployment. Obviously constantly testing here off the coast of California, building up our repositories, inventory of sonar signatures, and we do have some things that are going to be coming up quite soon that we're super excited to announce when they hit.

[John]

So what does integration with other defense tech companies look like now or in the future? Like, you know, there's been like Anduril has a platform, Palantir, as a platform. I'm sure a lot of different units have bespoke system for command and control and all sorts of different things. Does that come for free? Is that something that people are just like vibe coding integrations or do you have to go and like do a deal and actually figure out how you integrate? Or do you ultimately want to be your own platform that runs as like the operating system?

[Mate from Adrian M]

Yeah, I think it vastly depends on the type of technology that you're building. Right. But specifically for us, like sonar, information is so classified and compartmentalized and it's, it's very tricky to get access on data that has been compartmentalized such as this, because you have numerous third party integrators that also own that data itself as well. And so that is really the reason why we went out and built Pearl, which is our passive sonar buoy. Right. As well as Obsidian, which is kind of like, you could call it a C2, but really it is like the platform that ingests all this information. There's a bunch of super sophisticated machine learning and effectively putting dots on a map for end users. But the C2 in itself, there's various abstractions of it. You have the God C2s that live on top. You mentioned those companies names. We really are trying to own the undersea domain and by building the hardware we're building up this massive repository of sonar signatures and that'll give us the option to then give that data to those other C2 platforms if necessary.

[Justin from Nvidia]

Right.

[Mate from Adrian M]

So it really is like a fine, like a fine balance of what we have to be doing with regards to C2. But ultimately like every defense tech company that's out there needs to play well together because we all have to provide an integrated solution to the end user.

[Ronan Chambers]

Right.

[Mate from Adrian M]

And we do have those relationships with primes and with other kind of startups as well.

[John]

You mentioned that the data is hard to get. Generally you're doing machine learning, which is obviously very data heavy. Is there like a scale AI like a Mercur for this type of data yet? Are you buying data from fishing boats? Is there some world where there is a scaled data benefit even not in a military context, but maybe you just want to get a bunch of data on how sonar performs in a swimming pool or a lake or something that's more controlled and then you can transfer, learn that into the actual viable domain in the final application.

[Mate from Adrian M]

Yeah, sonar is super, super challenging in the fact that you can't necessarily translate environmentals to where you are deployed. Right. So with radar, for instance, you just have air and it's pretty linear. The ocean does a ton of weird things with regards to performance of sonar. And so you really have to be deployed and you have to understand kind of the environmental factors such that you can perform this highly complex math that goes behind all of it. That's really the reason why we did build Perl, right. Like that delivers that information in real time. Like we kind of get this information in sub 3 seconds worth of latency and we process it and we put dots on a map for end users. We have that environmental feature kind of built into Perl itself and you can do base level extrapolation kind of across the board with a lot of that, but it's not super, super applicable everywhere. And so yes, there is data that we have accessed that is more off shelf. For instance, like how do whales sound? Right. Various different types of whale things. And at least in our kind of hot dog, no hot dog paradigm, we can say this is a whale, this is not a submarine or something like that. So it definitely adds a little bit more kind of feature rich environment for the end user. But most of it is really hinged on the hardware that we're developing and building. Right. So in this world of AI, you can't just access a massive repository of data and do a ton of AI on it. You have to build it yourself. Which is really like the reason why a low cost scalable hardware solution is super, super important for us to deliver that data in real time.

[John]

What does actually deploying a buoy look like? Do you have to call the government before you do that? Because I love the idea of moving fast and doing R and D and just dropping something in the water and that's probably fine. But at the same time, you could accidentally be spying on a US submarine and they might not want you to be spying on them, even if you're a friendly. What is the flywheel to get the permission to do the test that you need to do before you get the contract to prove that you can do it? What's the sequence of events?

[Mate from Adrian M]

Yeah, I mean, we're working hand in hand with a lot of these folks at the government. Right. And so I detailed the deployment in Keyport, Washington. That is something that we scheduled prior going up there. We do a lot of verification and validation testing here off the coast of California. But it's kind of just like put it in the water, see if it works, check it out, pull it out and then ship it to the location with the end user and test alongside them. We've done that kind of across the coast. Right. So we were in San Diego at a large fleet exercise at the beginning of this year as well. And so it does require coordinating with end users.

[Justin from Nvidia]

Right.

[Mate from Adrian M]

But that's ultimately what we're looking for anyway. Like what are the feedbacks that these folks give to us such that we can iterate much more quickly? We could do that in our own engineering vacuum where we could just be talking about to these people directly. And that's what we really want to strive to do. And we've gotten really positive feedback from them. Right. Like other people build buoys, they're very large. It takes a lot of effort to put these things out, like gigantic research vessels, you know, barges. It takes a week to pre deploy. We just kick our off the side of the boat. Right. And so when we give these things, these buoys to the end operators, we say break them, test them, go deploy them yourself, Give us the feedback such that we can put that into our loop of iteration. And they do that. They're super happy to break things. Right. And I think that's the most valuable thing that we can ask for.

[John]

Love it. Well, congratulations and thank you so much. Awesome progress on the show. We'll talk to you soon.

[Jordy]

Great to see you.

[Mate from Adrian M]

Thank you so much.

[Jordy]

Keep snapping iPhone.

[John]

I was going to say don't snap any more iPhone errors, but keep it going, keep it going.

[Jordy]

Anyone has an I wants an iPhone snapped. Well, your guy, they're saying,

[John]

who wants that?

[Jordy]

Sometimes I want my iPhone snapped. Diego said John needs someone to clear his desk of Diet Cokes every 20 minutes.

[John]

Can I get a recycling bin over here?

[Jordy]

You're only on your third. This is a typical, typical day for you.

[John]

It's an important day. We have. Justin from Nvidia is the VP of Enterprise AI here to talk about Nvidia launching the open source AI Alliance. Justin, thank you so much for taking the time to come talk to us.

[Justin from Nvidia]

Yeah, thanks for having us.

[John]

So can you start by giving, I mean, we discussed the letter. I think a lot of people have read it. But what is your elevator pitch for the open secure AI Alliance? The letter, how they interact, like the overall project here, the goals.

[Justin from Nvidia]

Yeah, I think, let's just say there's been this moment in the industry, especially with this incident that happened at Hugging Face, where there's just this collective awareness across all the industry leaders that, you know, doing a lot of the work in cybersecurity out in the open, where we can look at open models, open harnesses, open safety evaluations as an industry is going to give basically the broadest collective defense of our organization. So that's why we put the letter out there. That's why all these companies are kind of rushing in to talk about sort of the importance of the, this initiative.

[John]

It seems like it's going extremely well. I totaled it up. I think $18 trillion of market cap has signed on across something like 35 companies and more. I'm interested in what you. Are there any other outcomes or is this purely just avoiding a bad outcome? Because the whole framing is basically don't ban, don't do something. It's don't take an action here, Allow the status quo to continue. Is that the correct formulation of the, of the proposal?

[Justin from Nvidia]

Well, I think it's a recognition that you always want to give the defenders of enterprises across really critical industries, financial services, energy, telecommunications, an asymmetric advantage to protect their infrastructure. And the best way to do that is you give them, you know, state of the art frontier open system that they can scan, remediate, patch their infrastructure. Now they should always have the advantage because they understand the code, the configurations and how they have their infrastructure running. But they need access to the tools to basically get ahead of any potential security issues.

[John]

Okay, I guess like the steel man of the other side is that this isn't an asymmetric advantage to the, to, to the, to the organization that you described. It's actually a perfectly symmetric advantage. The attackers will also have frontier open source, like great open source tools. And if we, if we allow open source to proliferate, at least it will be balanced. But can you explain a little bit more about where the asymmetry on the defender side comes? Because that sounds amazing. We want the defenders to win, but it feels like if everyone's using the same tools, it's actually just a level playing field and this could just be a battle, could still win, could be fine. But what's driving the asymmetry?

[Justin from Nvidia]

Yeah, you got to remember when you're running a service and you have terms of service, you know who's accessing that service and there you're putting additional guardrails on there. On safe use. You can also, if people start to misuse the service, you can quickly patch guardrails and basically ensure that people are using the service appropriately. So, so that in and of itself should give the defensive teams the ability to run. I'd say these, these better capabilities to clean up their infrastructure, patch their infrastructure, and then service providers that are Hosting any of the models, you know, should, should run them with appropriate guardrail.

[John]

How do you think the equilibrium plays out if sort of, you know, companies get like big companies get access to advanced open source models. So they're patching their systems, they're doing stuff. But there's still a lot of attackers out there. And there's this weird scenario that people have been talking about where a small business that might have a credit card stored here or some piece of personally identifiable information stored in a less secure system. Now they're responsible for spinning up an open source cybersecurity defense system. Like what's the equilibrium that keeps the long tail of organizations secure?

[Justin from Nvidia]

Yeah, you've got to still pair openness with strong safeguards like rules on malicious use.

[John]

Sure.

[Justin from Nvidia]

Laws that prevent against military malicious use and then obviously rapid remediation of anything that you know that's going on. And you know that the, the conversation around open models is no different than the conversation around, I mean, I think open software and you think of open software, whether it's Linux or Kubernetes or Pytorch, that, that open software, you know, built the foundation of our economy, 80% of our digital economy is powered by open source. And I'll say good stewards of open source software can sort of debate open standards in an open way. They can look at evaluations, they can look at patching and remediation and they can work collectively for the defense of, of the US economy. And I think we got to look at, you know, models the same way. You know, as soon as models are out there in the public domain, you can fork them, you can patch them, and you can remediate any issues that, you know, cybersecurity people find in those models. And so, you know, the goal of this organization is to have those conversations out in the public. I think it's, you know, it's an important conversation for all of us to have. But we want to make sure again that you, you have, I'll say, a diverse set of tools at your disposal as a, as a cybersecurity defender so that you know, if a model refuses to do the work that you need it to do, you have other options to continue to defend your organization.

[John]

What, like, who do you think will step into the role of like model evaluator or model tester? Because we were just talking with Dean Meyer from Sequoia Capital and he was illustrating a possible scenario where there's like a backdoor in a model or some nefarious thing sort of hidden below the Surface. So the model still tests well on benchmarks. You deploy it and then over time it does something nefarious. It feels like again that's another big burden to potentially put on a small business. But if there's some sort of, you know, American company that steps up and validates and tests, maybe there's an even balance. How do you see that playing out?

[Justin from Nvidia]

Well, I think, you know, organizations like Red Hat have done this open source software right where they cleared of CVEs, they provide the commercial support to enterprises. I feel like it creates an opportunity for businesses to step in and be able to do the same thing with open, open models and provide the same commercial patching and support into, into enterprises. So I think that's a market that will emerge as we go forward. But, but ultimately I think allowing, I'll call it cybersecurity professionals to continue to pen, test and understand the limits of these models is what's going to allow us to, you know, build that life cycle to do patching and remediation of any vulnerabilities that can exist in these model weights. Now the fact that they're open means you can test them and understand the limits of them. The challenge is with a lot of the, the model weights that might be hosted, the terms of service prevent cybersecurity people from researching and looking for any backdoors in those as well. So the problem doesn't go away. Whether it's hosted or open, sure they can exist. And I think the spotlight of having more cybersecurity professionals, you know, evaluating these things is just going to lead to better collective defense.

[Jordy]

I don't know how much you can speak to the, to what the Nemo Tron team is doing, but broadly, what should organizations expect from, from Nemo Tron, the family of models over the next, let's say six months?

[Justin from Nvidia]

Oh man. I don't know that

[Mate from Adrian M]

I can talk

[Justin from Nvidia]

about where we're going. But you know, generally our approach has been, has been like let's again do it all in the open. Let's basically put the data sets out there that we're training into these models so people can understand the data that blends that went into the models. Let's put the model weights out there, let's put the training techniques out there and the evaluations out there and basically use that as a foundation for building custom intelligence into enterprises. I mean that's the other part of the conversation that's lost is these open models are critical for enterprises basically building their own intelligence and basically maintaining I'll call it a reinforcement learning wheel or a flywheel on these open models so they can maintain their competitive advantage. And so providing that foundation of data and open weights and data blends gives enterprises that. Now with Nemotron they're really language models but we have a bunch of other domains and models. We have Cosmos, which is world foundation models. We have Alpamyo for autonomous driving, we have Groot for vision language action models for robots. And so I think across industries the idea of having these open models to build the startup ecosystem, allow enterprises to domain adapt them and build their own intelligence is really important really for the, for the future growth of our industry.

[John]

How important? Can you give us some context on what you're seeing or hearing from other business leaders about the value of open source? Purely economically, just we went through this token maxing boom. I think every enterprise leader feels that AI is valuable, but it can be very expensive. How are they thinking about efficiency right now with the current cost to benefit trade offs? And how does open source change that?

[Justin from Nvidia]

I mean I can put my Nvidia hat on here. We are the same way, right? We use all the frontier models. We love the frontier models. They're amazing for driving efficiency and how we do software development and chip design and how we run a competitive business. But the modern way to build applications now are really an ensemble of models where you want to use the frontier for, where they're unique and they add differentiated value. So like a really complex agentic plan, you want to run through the frontier model and then you want to use the open model weights for things that are more trivial like document summarization. And the two can complement each other to drive a lot more cost efficient applications across the enterprise.

[John]

Yeah. And then anything that's been fine tuned on your particular data, that example from thinking Machines with Boot Bridgewater's information pipeline, obviously they got incredible performance at very low cost because it was a unique use case that was going to run on a continuous basis and so they were able to get a lot of value.

[Jordy]

It's just common sense. It wouldn't make sense to hire you and then have you just be a BDR doing cold email. It would be a very efficient use of.

[John]

It's a great analogy. Sorry,

[Justin from Nvidia]

yeah, sorry, I was just going to say. Yeah, I think, I think your point's spot on. I think, you know, there's a bunch of other, you know, model makers like TML is a great company reflection, you know, Runway, you know, many different model makers across different domains and I think you want a rich ecosystem here, you know, of startups, you know, building the future of what's possible with, with this industrial revolution going on with AI. So we're just happy to advocate on behalf of the open ecosystem, but really it complements the closed ecosystem and all of it sort of has its unique value here.

[John]

So the alliance is pretty huge at this point. Do you want to grow it a lot bigger or is this a solid enough base to go where you want to go next? Or, or will this be something that just continues to grow? What do you think?

[Justin from Nvidia]

You know, I think the inbound requests around this is kind of blown us away by the appetite and the interest. I think ultimately what we want to do is kind of work as a community and share sort of, you know, best practices. We also with this we put out a new agent harness that we think is phenomenal at reasoning, it's great at coding and it's, and it's great at cybersecurity tasks. And so if we all sort of share advancements in the open, we can build, you know, the best technology together. And, and you know, I think some of the things that we'll keep working on as an ecosystem is, I mean, to your point, what are the evaluations that we should be building? You know, how do we test and you know, I'll call it open models and, and look for, I'll say safety issues in those models. How do you start to build, I'll call it more cyber ranges that you put agents through to understand how truly capable they are. I mean, I think part of the, part of the challenge with this cyber security discussion is it's been over indexed on, I'll call it benchmaxing for vulnerability. Discovery and vulnerability. Discovery is not the same as, you know, like going through an attack chain. So, you know, I think we've just got to have more, more sane conversation in the open as an ecosystem on, you know, what are the right ways to safeguard this stuff and put it to work and to drive the efficiency that it can bring us, you know, across every business.

[John]

Thank you so much for taking the time to come.

[Jordy]

Yeah, great to meet you, Justin, Great to meet you.

[Justin from Nvidia]

We'll hope to talk soon.

[John]

Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye.

[Jordy]

That's our show folks.

[John]

Thank you so much for tuning in. We will see you tomorrow. There's a lot more news, but we can go through it tomorrow. Starship launched and there's a beautiful video that somehow got taken down so we can't even share it, but you can go find it. There's some cool stuff there.

[Jordy]

Anyway, do us a favor, go have the best afternoon. Have the best of the best Monday afternoon ever. Thank you to Cooper for always coming in at the market close.

[John]

Good crew get like chat. Thank you so much for tuning in and chatting. We do read it. It's a lot of fun. Leave us 5 stars on Apple podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for a [e-mail] and we will see you tomorrow at 11am Goodbye.

[Jordy]

We love you.

[John]

Goodbye.

[Jordy]

Goodbye.