Marc Andreessen & Ilya Sutskever Host TBPN, Mag 7 Earnings Recap | Aydin Senkut, Dean Ball, Shreya Murthy, Lulu Meservey & Gaby Goldberg, Jakob Diepenbrock, Shishir Mehrotra, Karri Saarinen

Summary

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TBPN Podcast Episode Summary

Episode: Marc Andreessen & Ilya Sutskever Host TBPN, Mag 7 Earnings Recap | Aydin Senkut, Dean Ball, Shreya Murthy, Lulu Meservey & Gaby Goldberg, Jakob Diepenbrock, Shishir Mehrotra, Karri Saarinen

Date: October 31, 2025
Hosts: John Coogan & Jordi Hays

Episode Overview

In this Halloween-themed edition broadcast live from the TBPN Ultradome, John and Jordi don elaborate costumes as Marc Andreessen and Ilya Sutskever, respectively, setting a light-hearted yet insightful tone as they recap the "Mag 7" (biggest tech companies) earnings, discuss market and regulatory shifts, and welcome a parade of leading voices in technology, policy, and investing. The show features spirited analysis of company performances (Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Tesla, Nvidia, Google), regulation, venture trends, product launches, and playful takes on tech culture—punctuated by guest appearances and memorable industry memes.

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Key Segments & Discussion Points

1. Halloween Kicks Off - The Andreessen & Ilya Bit

00:00 - 04:12

• Hosts appear in full Hollywood-level prosthetics—John as Ilya Sutskever and Jordi as Marc Andreessen.
• Light-hearted banter about the difficulty and details of their costumes.
• Various cast and crew participate in the Halloween spirit, highlighting the show's commitment to cultural moments in tech.

“If you’re not taking Halloween this seriously, what’s going on?” — John Exley (03:31)

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2. Quick Global Headlines: China/US Trade Truce

04:50 - 08:35

• US-China update: Recent detente, US cuts tariffs on certain Chinese goods in exchange for Beijing’s crackdowns—direct implications for tech supply chains and rare earths.
• Reflection: Trade dynamics remain fluid but tech’s “Mag 7” stays the focal point for market impact.

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3. “Mag 7” Tech Earnings Deep Dive

08:36 - 39:00

Amazon

• Strong quarter: Revenue up 13% to $180B, profits up 39%—retail, cloud, and AI cited as drivers.
• AWS & AI: AWS beats revenue projections; Trainium chip business up 150% Q/Q.
• Perception shifts: CEO Andy Jassy moves from defensive to offensive after headcount reductions.
• “Jassy needed this after the timeline had turned against him.” — Jordi Hayes (09:34)

Microsoft

• Beats expectations but initial stock dip after hours.
• Narrative: Microsoft’s AI position, especially with OpenAI, considered under-appreciated despite robust offerings.
• “If you believe GenAI is a sustaining innovation... there is not a company better positioned from a product and distribution standpoint.” — Jordy Hayes (13:31)
• Big company tradeoff: Slower to adopt risky, bleeding-edge features due to compliance and global reach.

Meta

• Results hit, but $15B tax prepayment leads to earnings ‘miss’ and negative headlines.
• Mixed investor confidence: Strong core social business ($50B Reels run-rate), skepticism on hardware/AI strategy.
• “People thought Mark was crazy going all in on the metaverse and VR... so far, that part hasn’t shown any signs of being ROI positive.” — Jordy Hayes (19:07)

Apple

• Top & bottom line beat, but China revenue declines.
• Consumer Intelligence data: iPhone Pro/Pro Max strong, iPhone “Air” underwhelms.
• Fun anecdote: Attempt to prove iPhone Air’s strength at LA Tech Week ends with someone snapping it in half (33:15).

Tesla

• Stock shrugs off ‘moonshot’ R&D spend; vibe-based valuation.
• “Tesla’s robo taxi fleet is a year or two behind Waymo’s right now...but the hope is they come from behind with flywheel effects.” — John Exley (24:16)

Nvidia

• On top of the world: The “AI factory” narrative remains strong; CEO Jensen Huang hailed as the world’s most value-creative founder/CEO.
• “Let the man have a couple beers with his boys in South Korea.” — John Exley (36:55)

Google

• Tokenomics over revenue: Controversy over reporting token counts instead of dollar metrics for AI business.
• “The fact that Google leads with token count instead of revenue tells you everything.” — John Exley (39:27)

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4. Policy & Politics: AI Regulation with Dean Ball

86:54 - 123:51

• Guest: Dean Ball (FAI/White House AI advisor).
• Big tension: AI anxiety among regular voters vs. corporate/regulatory maneuvering.
• California legislators seek to be the “Brussels of the US,” driving proactive state-based AI rules (91:17).
• Deep dive on “doomer” narratives, the Skynet ban letter, and actual legislative dynamics.
• “If you want to have a letter signed by a bunch of important people… that’s fine. But when you say ban, you’re making an ask about public policy—not just here, globally.” — Dean Ball (102:27)
• Emerging policy: Cybersecurity risk and token counts, AI GDP share, US/China chip sales.
• Book writing challenges in a fast-evolving field humorously discussed (123:33).

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5. Venture & Startup Trends with Aydin Senkut (Felicis)

129:22 - 153:55

• Aydin’s VC story: Rejected by top firms, became Google’s first PM, went solo, proved skeptics wrong (“Rejection is rocket fuel”—130:41).
• Early outlier investments: Shopify, Meraki, Supabase, Mercor.
• Current trends: AI has changed the value-creation curve—software merely helped, AI now automates in closed loops and goes after labor budgets, “the dollars at stake are so much larger.” (139:39)
• Thesis: Growth rate and data moats matter more than entry price—be consistent, keep investing, outliers drive returns.
• On expertise: None of his 53 unicorn founders were domain experts; “experts are anchored in how things have always been done; generalists see new solutions.” (149:28)

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6. Accelerator Demo Day Recap with Jakob Diepenbrock

154:52 - 167:26

• Nine startups presented: Themes include energy, manufacturing, mining, food, and industrial automation.
• Fewer defense companies, shift to real-economy disruption.
• Vibrant demo day and afterparty described; optimism for “hard startups” and the flow of capital into legacy industries.

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7. Product/Brand Updates

183:36 - 189:52

• Superhuman Rebrand (Shishir Mehrotra):

  • Description of transitioning Grammarly’s holding company to “Superhuman”; four products under the brand: Grammarly, Coda, Mail, and Go (Superhuman Go: a new AI assistant platform built atop Grammarly’s enabling tech).
  • “It’s a bit like the Google to Alphabet transition,” — Shishir (184:04)
  • Focused on embedding AI everywhere—platform brings proactive “assist” AI as opposed to “chat” or “do” modes.
  • “The word ‘human’ is more important than the word ‘super’… It’s about empowerment, not replacement.” — Shishir Mehrotra (185:12)

• Linear (Karri Saarinen):

  • AI agents are shifting workflows; designers now using agents to ship features or bug fixes.
  • Linear’s pragmatic design aims for function over flash but aspires to “make the world a more beautiful place” by inspiring better software aesthetics.

• Partiful (Shreya Murthy):

  • “Halloween is by far the biggest day for Partiful...it’s like our Black Friday.” — Shreya (168:50)
  • Apple’s failed attempt to clone viral party-invite product; brand & vibe are as crucial as features, and Apple “is not good at fun.”
  • Vision: to become “big social,” the default for IRL friend gathering as ‘big social’ platforms become entertainment.

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8. Tech Culture, Memes & Miscellaneous

Scattered throughout – highlights below

• Recurring joke: “Do you know Ball?” (86:50)
• Hard-boiled eggs as the most divisive office snack (71:55).
• The practice of companies trolling prediction markets on earnings calls (Coinbase/Brian Armstrong “bitcoin, ethereum, blockchain” call out—44:21).
• Mansion/housing market watch, luxury watches, and land speculation advice.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “You gotta be living under a data center to not know who I’m dressed up as.” — Jordi Hayes, on his Marc Andreessen Halloween costume (00:42)
• “Is the head that wears the crown heavy?” — John Exley, on Nvidia’s AI chip dominance (35:18)
• “I have to think it’s gestating — I have to think other companies will [pursue Intel partnerships] if they’re smart.” — Dean Ball on future US chip supply chain plays (122:02)
• “Venture capital is a growth game. If you find a company growing 50x faster than public companies, it’s going to end well, even if you’re off by 10x on price.” — Aydin Senkut (138:22)
• “When you say ban, you’re making an ask about global public policy.” — Dean Ball, on calls to ban superintelligence (102:27)
• “Apple is not good at fun… the party page should feel as much fun as the party itself.” — Shreya Murthy, Partiful (171:29)
• “None of our 53 unicorn founders were domain experts. If you’re an expert, you’re too anchored in the old ways; generalists are first-principles thinkers.” — Aydin Senkut (149:28)
• “Halloween is Partiful’s Super Bowl — everyone hosts six parties, and we’re on call all weekend.” — Shreya Murthy (168:21)
• “There’s now a group seven meme meetup — the speed at which online meme culture turns into real-life Partiful events is wild.” — Shreya (177:10)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• 00:00 - 04:12 | Halloween cold open, costume talk.
• 04:50 - 08:35 | US-China policy and macro headlines.
• 08:36 - 39:00 | Mag 7 earnings, deep dives: Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, Tesla, Nvidia, Google.
• 86:54 - 123:51 | Dean Ball on AI policy, regulation, and global competition.
• 129:22 - 153:55 | Aydin Senkut on VC trends, outliers, and investing philosophy.
• 154:52 - 167:26 | Demo day with Jakob Diepenbrock: new startup wave in industrial hardware/energy.
• 183:36 - 189:52 | Shishir Mehrotra (Superhuman/Grammarly), brand/platform strategy.
• 190:24 - 202:17 | Karri Saarinen (Linear), impact of AI on workflows/design.
• 167:47 - 183:17 | Shreya Murthy (Partiful), brand defensibility, party culture.
• 203:01 - End | Wrap-up, future Halloween ideas, show-ending banter.

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Tone & Style

• Energetic, conversational, irreverent.
• Tech-bro meets financial news, with heavy dose of memes and meta-commentary.
• Balances real insights and analysis with parodic humor, inside jokes, and culture war references.
• Frequent callbacks to audience memes and current events.

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For Listeners Who Missed the Episode

You’ll get:

• A unique, off-the-cuff recap of how the trillion-dollar tech companies fared this quarter and where the market is heading.
• Deep context on AI regulation and political undercurrents from someone who shaped the new US federal action plan.
• Lessons on venture capital strategy in a world reshaped by generative AI—from “rocket fuel” rejection to betting on outlier founders.
• A cross-section of product strategy—from party apps to productivity tools—emphasizing the enduring value of user experience, viral growth, and brand vibe.
• All peppered with good-natured ribbing, memes, and industry in-jokes.

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In sum:
This episode blends incisive real-world tech and policy commentary with a Halloween party vibe. Whether you’re looking for insight on AI chip flows, how to land a unicorn as a non-expert founder, or how to beat Apple at party invites, this show gives you the pulse of Silicon Valley—with plenty of laughs and a little wisdom to go with it.

Transcript

[Jordy Hayes]

You're watching TVPN.

[John Exley]

Today is Friday, October 31, 2025. It's Halloween. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome.

[Jordy Hayes]

The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.

[John Exley]

We have a fantastic show for you today, folks. We're going to be talking about Mag 7 earnings, recapping what's happening in the public markets. The trillion dollar tech companies that have been powering and holding up the entire global economy.

[Dean Ball]

We're.

[John Exley]

Will they continue to hold up the global economy? So far the answer is yes. I'm glad the chat is enjoying the costumes. Jordy, who are you today?

[Jordy Hayes]

You gotta be living under a data center to not know who I'm dressed up as today? None other than Mark Andreessen.

[John Exley]

Spitting image. Spitting.

[Jordy Hayes]

Spitting image. How am I doing?

[John Exley]

I think you look great. I think. Yeah, I. I think you nailed it. I saw some other folks, of course. I am Ilya Siskever. There are a lot of people that boil down the Marc Andreessen costume to just being bald. And that's of course not it. You need the shirt, you need the watch, you need the beard. These are all.

[Jordy Hayes]

The only thing I'm not gonna be able to do very well is talk quite as quickly as it goes.

[John Exley]

Yeah, it feels like the mustache and the outfit might be actually slowing you down a little. But I'm not trying to channel Ilya. We were watching Guardian video on Ilya, his interview, which is beautifully edited and one of the most interesting. I don't even know. It's like an interview. It's almost a podcast, but it's this documentary. It's 12 minute video by the Guardian.

[Jordy Hayes]

They cooked.

[John Exley]

And Ilya is the only one who says anything the entire time. Yeah, there's no guest or there's no interviewer, there's no host. And it's just him talking about AGI will be able to do anything. We'll make. It could be good, could be bad. And he just has these crazy long, these ways of answering these questions that are really interesting and it fits with that medium. I don't know how much editing they did to get his answers to a place where it had that kind of flow. But it's fantastic.

[Jordy Hayes]

Ilya's weights. Ilya's words hold so much weight. Yeah, I think that's part of that format. That format just worked incredibly well. But anyways, if you are watching the recording of this at some point in the future, recommend whenever I'm talking, put it on 3x speed to get the full mark experience. And we should talk about the Gen AI company that we work with to make this possible. Of course. I think people will be wildly impressed at how little latency there is.

[John Exley]

Yes, yes.

[Jordy Hayes]

Kind of character consistency.

[John Exley]

We are partnered with Fall, the generative media platform for developers. The world's best generative image, video and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters.

[Jordy Hayes]

But of course we did this the old fashioned way. The Hollywood way.

[John Exley]

The Hollywood way.

[Jordy Hayes]

We were at the office at 6:30 this morning. It took hours to get to this point and shout out to the whole team that made it possible.

[John Exley]

Yeah, it's a lot of fun. It's not a mask, it is makeup. It's a series of prosthetics that go on layered up with a wig for me and a beard for Jordan. They kind of take you through the the process of becoming fully bald and then add back whatever they need to, including the eyebrows. And the eyebrows do a lot of the work.

[Jordy Hayes]

They do a lot of the work.

[John Exley]

They do a lot of the work. But yeah, if you're not taking Halloween this seriously, what's going on? You gotta be taking it seriously. Tyler, are you taking Halloween seriously? What did you do for.

[Jordy Hayes]

I'm taking Halloween extremely seriously.

[John Exley]

Well, who are you?

[Jordy Hayes]

Sam Altman at 2008 WWDC.

[John Exley]

Okay.

[Jordy Hayes]

Pitching looped.

[John Exley]

Yeah. You're the spitting image. Were those the colors of the polos he was wearing?

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, I think the camera temperature is. Oh, you think that's what it is in real life. If the viewers could see, they would be.

[John Exley]

And the hair is a perfect match. And you also had to do three hours of prosthetic makeup.

[Jordy Hayes]

I was actually here a little earlier than you guys.

[John Exley]

Yeah, sure.

[Jordy Hayes]

It is so strange looking across.

[John Exley]

It's very weird.

[Jordy Hayes]

And seeing. Seeing the spitting image of Ilya himself.

[John Exley]

Anyways, ramp time is money. Say both easy use corporate card bill pay, accounting a whole lot more all in one place.

[Jordy Hayes]

When we partner with ramp, they now never expected to see Ilya pitching ramp.

[John Exley]

This is why you advertise on tvpn. You get ad reads from Mark Andreessen from the Goats.

[Jordy Hayes]

The Goats themselves. We have a super fun show today. We have Lulu Maservi and Gabby Goldberg coming on later. We have Dean Ball joining. Who else we have? We have Tyler.

[John Exley]

Do you know Ball?

[Jordy Hayes]

Every time we mention his name. Do you know Ball?

[John Exley]

Well, after today everyone will know Ball because Dean Ball is coming on dbpn. We're very excited for that. So let's take a second to tell you about restream one livestream 30 plus destinations of course we are restreaming today. Multistream reach your audience wherever they are. But I think it'd be good to just kind of go through some of the headlines. Trump cut China tariffs after he met up with Xi Jinping in South Korea President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping emerged from their face to face for their first face to face meeting in six years with a temporary detent in the bruising trade fight between detente between the two superpowers. The US Agreed to lower a fentanyl related tariff on Chinese goods to 10% from 20% after China promised to crack down on chemicals used to make the often deadly precursors precursors that would bring the average tariff rate on many Chinese goods to around 47% from 57%. So America's backing back and off a little bit. Beijing almost promised also promised to ease some of the controls it imposed on exports of processed rare earth minerals. For one year. China dominates the production of the minerals which are in which are needed to make everything from smartphones to submarines. Wow, that's a a world tour of everything in the trade deal. So we're slowly ratcheting things up, ratcheting things down. We had a good conversation yesterday about this with Chris McGuire. You're welcome to go check that out. He gave us more details on the history of the China trade war with the US but the bigger news in tech world of course is earnings. Amazon posted a big jump in profit and revenue. Amazon.com reported net revenue net profits surged 39% and revenue rose for the third quarter propelled by strong retail sales as well as continued growth in its in its cloud computing and artificial intelligence business. The e commerce giant said Thursday that sales rose for the period they rose 13% to 180 billion and net profit rose to 21.2 billion in that quarter. And so you had a little bit of a take on what was going on in Amazon world. They've been sort of at the last earnings. They were sort of left out of the AI narrative. All the other hyperscalers in their cloud businesses were telling great stories about acceleration and growth and Andy Jassy was a little bit on the defensive. Well now he's back on the offensive and the results were much stronger. So they beat on the top line, they beat on the bottom line. They also beat on AWS revenue, which is great. The Trainium to chip business grew 150% quarter on quarter and there's still some debate over how Trainium will scale relative to TPU, whether anthropic is going to buy a bunch of TPUs, maybe they're going to pull back on Trainium. But it seems like even if the top end is diversifying and you have OpenAI saying we want to be on every cloud or that's not necessarily a bull case because there's so many more buyers coming from behind adding to it. So my take was a lot of FUD around Trainium underperformance relative to tpu, but they both seem to be catching up. Finally, I think it'll be interesting to see TPU on Inference max. I mean, analysis is benchmark.

[Jordy Hayes]

Are they opting in?

[John Exley]

Well, so TPU and Trainium, the way Dylan Patel framed it to me at least was they haven't said that they're out. In fact they, in fact they said that they are in, but it's going to take them time to actually provision everything because it is a significant cost and it's something that requires a decent amount of resources and there's, you know, a whole bunch of, it's a big.

[Jordy Hayes]

Company and it will determine the fate of their product line correctly.

[John Exley]

Potentially. Potentially. And so, I mean people are going.

[Jordy Hayes]

To be paying a lot of attention.

[John Exley]

It's possible that they want to like that they want to get their ducks in a row so they don't just get like clobbered in this, in this race. But interestingly, AMD and Nvidia were both pretty happy with the results. There were tons of, there's tons of positivity about AMD in certain use cases and Jensen on stage at GTC was giving spending like minutes just on inference max slides and data.

[Jordy Hayes]

So my take from the newsletter on Amazon, I said Jassy needed this after the timeline had turned against, against him pretty horribly in the last few months. People even saw the headcount reduction from Monday as bearish. I think that just shows how far ahead Satya was. He did multiple rounds of layoffs earlier this year and obviously Amazon has its dance partner now and so we'll see how this develops. One of my favorite posts I think from last week was somebody said I don't care if I get caught. I was, I was heavily involved with the NBA illegal gambling scheme. My name is Andy Jassy. I [e-mail] I didn't realize that they.

[John Exley]

Were like, I feel like once you get to Mag 7 level, you don't have like a retail army that gets like frustrated about like, you know, middling financial performance.

[Jordy Hayes]

But I mean, they were, you know, proud member of the lag 7.

[John Exley]

The lag 7.

[Jordy Hayes]

You look at Alphabet, the lag 7.

[John Exley]

What's that?

[Jordy Hayes]

They were. I mean, not the lag 7, but they were the lagging part of the mag 7. Right.

[John Exley]

That's a thing. That's a meme. Or did you.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, it's a meme. It's a meme.

[John Exley]

I haven't heard this one.

[Jordy Hayes]

It's. It's a pleasure to introduce you to a new meme, Alphabet, up 247% over the last five years. Amazon is still only up 62% even after the pop this week, so.

[John Exley]

Well, that's the story with Amazon. We also got Apple earnings after we wrapped the show. Before I tell you about Apple, let me tell you about Privy Wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rail securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions and integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API.

[Jordy Hayes]

Okay. Sarah Wang GP over at Andreessen just posted the only thing better than Halloween is Halloween AI edition. In case you missed it tagged Ilya and Mark. And of course no AI here. We did this, did this one. The old fashioned.

[John Exley]

We did this organically organic intelligence. It would be interesting to actually benchmark. I mean, obviously the Frontier video models are remarkable, but we've done this bezel bench for a while where we went and did something very weird and very specific. And on that specific use case of Tyler, a person that needs to be him, he needs to look like him and he has to be wearing six different watches and you have to zoom in from the very start all the way out and he has to be lying down and like. So you have really to understand how the anatomy comes into the picture. The models haven't really been great. I feel like if we tried to recreate this using AI right now, it would get pretty chaotic. The fact that we're allowed three hours, it'd be doing. You know, you could do a face swap live. We've had some founders come on the show and do them, but it feels like it's almost more of just like a background. Descartes was really cool. Yeah, Descartes was awesome.

[Jordy Hayes]

But it was still very much felt like a video game. It didn't feel photoreal.

[John Exley]

Yeah. And didn't feel like you could reach out and touch. You can in fact touch shorty. Oh my God.

[Jordy Hayes]

I'll be drinking through a straw today because.

[John Exley]

Yeah. Is it locking yours in? My take is I have the same level of prosthetic makeup on, but I'm just full sending it and by the end of the show, I'm expecting this to just be melting off my face, basically crumbling.

[Jordy Hayes]

We'll see how it holds up.

[John Exley]

We'll see how it holds up. Also tell you about cognition. We're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Yes. Did you want to go to Apple or did you want to go somewhere else?

[Jordy Hayes]

Let's go to Microsoft.

[John Exley]

Microsoft.

[Jordy Hayes]

Microsoft, what's your Microsoft top line? Beat earnings Beat Stock traded down 3 to 4% after hours. It's recovered quite a bit since then. I said I was surprised to see Microsoft trade down following earnings, but it's recovered since. Satya, in my view, has already gotten a lot more credit for the company's opportunities in AI than Amazon and even Google. People have known about Google strengths, but the big questions around search have held back performance to date. Microsoft hasn't really had any narratives holding it back, but I don't think people give them enough credit for the OpenAI deal. If you believe Genai is a sustaining innovation and will transform knowledge work, there is not a company in the world that is better positioned from a product and a distribution standpoint. Again, we talked about this with Satya on Tuesday. There are so many companies that are trying to build Excel plus an agent on top of it or agents for Excel, which is exactly what Microsoft is also doing with Excel with Copilot. Right. And they're model agnostic. They're going to be able to bring in any kind of intelligence that they want. And so anyways, I think they continue to be super well positioned. It's also fascinating because they have access to OpenAI's IP. OpenAI wants to be a big player in the workplace. You can imagine them getting into a bunch of other applications there. And so it'll be that competitive dynamic is just something that we're going to be watching for a long time.

[John Exley]

Yeah, I saw some haters on the Timeline talking about Microsoft launched a research product and the hot take was like Microsoft's late to launch this and it's somehow worse. Like they couldn't even just copy. Exactly. And I was thinking like there is something real about like when a big company launches one of those features, like they typically have to move a little bit slower because maybe they're regulated by Europe. They're all, they're international. They have, you know, they obey all the different rules around accessibility. And they have, they have like 24, they might be like SOC2 compliant plus ITAR compliant plus 25 other compliant levels that just slow down, like how fast you can move and how many things you can break. But that is very different. Like as an early adopter, it's very different to look at a new product from a what, 40, 50 year old tech giant and say like, yeah, I prefer like the cutting edge product as opposed to like what actually plays out in the market. Like Slack was very much the same thing where Slack was this product that was so much better than the alternatives. Like if you, I don't know if you ever used like workplace chat pre Slack, but it was, I was basically born. You were born on Slack. Okay, you were born on Slack, but Slack really was like a delightful, like you know how there's just those companies, companies that come out and you're like, oh, like this company takes design seriously. This company is a power user of figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. But you know how you get that vibe and then you get the other vibe where it's like, oh, this company is owned by private equity and they don't really care.

[Jordy Hayes]

John, I gotta give you. The chat's giving you a shout out. I never knew John was so ripped. There's been some other comments. Yeah, put em up, John. There you go, baby.

[John Exley]

Let's go. Ilya AGI has been achieved. Let's go.

[Jordy Hayes]

Ben Gilbert in the chat. You guys are absolutely insane. I love it.

[John Exley]

Welcome to the stream. Ben, thank you so much for stopping by. You're an absolute legend. We couldn't do this show without you. Massive inspiring everything that they've done over at Acquire. If you've been living under a data center, get over to Acquire fm. Subscribe.

[Jordy Hayes]

Let's get into Meta. Let's talk about Meta.

[John Exley]

Yes.

[Jordy Hayes]

Top line beat earnings. Ms.

[John Exley]

Massive like a $12 billion not. People are not talking enough about what happened. Like it is crazy that you could be operating such a big company. Just be like, oops, $10 billion. And it's not like, I mean think.

[Jordy Hayes]

Of how they've been spending.

[John Exley]

Yeah, yeah. It is crazy.

[Jordy Hayes]

This seems like the quarter.

[John Exley]

Yeah.

[Jordy Hayes]

You know, this is like, you know, I'm sure Meta and the executive team. It's like after a weekend bender checking like your credit card statement. Right. It's like you have an idea maybe of what you spent. Yeah, but it's way beyond that.

[John Exley]

Okay, wait, so Tyler, can you look up what the actual tax charge was? Because I don't think it was about scale. AI which everyone, A lot of people would say, oh, it was a lot of Money to pay for something maybe is acquire. Right. Or like the $3 billion that maybe Zuck just paid for like one AI researcher. Like he's been on the spree. I think this is a separate $10 billion charge.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah.

[John Exley]

Which is.

[Jordy Hayes]

Came out of nowhere.

[John Exley]

I like, I like the. I like the metaphor of like you're just on a bender and you're just like my credit card bill is so huge this month. What happened?

[Jordy Hayes]

Wait, so are you talking about the $15 billion?

[John Exley]

It's 5 more than I thought. I thought it was 10.

[Jordy Hayes]

I thought it was roughly 10.5 something. 14 came out of nowhere.

[John Exley]

It was in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. But we'll.

[Jordy Hayes]

Okay. Yes. Okay. So apparently it was a one time tax charge related to the Big Beautiful Bill Act.

[John Exley]

What?

[Jordy Hayes]

So I'll read into this more, but it's not the.

[John Exley]

It has nothing to do with research.

[Jordy Hayes]

In the X chat says from what I read they missed only because of the tax prepayment, which is only on paper, not actually cash. And they said it would save them on tax costs over time.

[John Exley]

Okay.

[Karim Atiyeh]

Okay.

[John Exley]

So thank you, Noah. That's very helpful. Yeah. Okay. Okay, so they're changing the amount of like how they're accounting for these taxes and so they took the hit to earnings. But is that why is the Stock Traded down 10%? Is it specifically because of this one time tax charge? Like, I don't know that it is. I think it might be.

[Jordy Hayes]

I think it could be a little bit of vibes in the mix.

[John Exley]

I liked your vibe.

[Jordy Hayes]

Okay, so now it sounds like your take was rough to be completely rebuilding an AI while simultaneously still finding footing in hardware. Core business rips though. My take in the newsletter was the timeline. Loves the core meta business, but doesn't have a lot of faith in Zuck. I think that sounds harsh, but I think that is generally, generally real. Yeah. People thought Bezos, who had a similar, similar level of control over Amazon, was crazy to spend like he did building aws. And he was ultimately completely vindicated. People thought Mark was crazy going all in on the metaverse and VR. And so part. So far that part of the business, like has not shown any signs of, of, of being ROI positive.

[John Exley]

Right.

[Jordy Hayes]

Like obviously they're still shipping. They're the new meta. Ray Bans are like the, the, the leading publicly available pair of glasses.

[John Exley]

It just feels like the win case there is like a. It's like an airpod size business.

[Karim Atiyeh]

Right?

[John Exley]

Yeah, it's hard to get to. Okay, yes, this is going to be as big as I Don't even Waymo. I don't know.

[Jordy Hayes]

I don't know. I think that if you actually win that category, it could be an iPhone sized business.

[John Exley]

Yeah.

[Jordy Hayes]

So I'm not saying that it's. I'm not saying that he shouldn't be investing there, but I don't think the market believes that he's going to win that category yet.

[John Exley]

Which is fascinating because what company do you think is in the lead in terms of VR and AR right now? Rank them. Who do you think is the lead?

[Jordy Hayes]

I think the challenge is when products are not at the level where people are saying, I love this. I use this all the time. I use this every day. I can't live without it. You don't get credit for being at the leading edge.

[John Exley]

Yeah, people aren't saying that yet.

[Jordy Hayes]

Like, people expect Apple to come over the top and do you know they.

[John Exley]

Tried and they didn't pencil it out.

[Jordy Hayes]

I know, but now they're working on a pair of glasses and it's gonna integrate with your iPhone, it's gonna integrate with imessage and like that's gonna be a real competitive challenge for Meta.

[John Exley]

Yeah, no, I know. No, no. It's a really good. It's a really good argument.

[Jordy Hayes]

It's really good. So at the same time giving Meta some credit Reels is now a $50 billion revenue run rate business.

[John Exley]

Let's go.

[Jordy Hayes]

Let's hit the gong for the Reels team. So where is our mallet? Ilia? Gong hit incoming. The moment you've been waiting for. Clean, clean. Moving on. The market reacted positively to scale AI acquisition and hiring spree. But I think investors have the right to be concerned about Meta's vision and ability to generate revenue from their gen AI efforts, either directly or indirectly anytime soon. I'm still shocked they released Meta Vibes knowing how much scrutiny their first release as a new team would get. Yeah, the product showed a complete lack of vision in my opinion, and just product quality when compared to Sora which launched about a week later. So it felt like they knew Sora was coming. They wanted to be first to market with an AI native social feed.

[John Exley]

And they did not just completely burn the ships on the Meta AI Apple. Like, because that app was originally the reason that I have it on my phone is because I got Meta Ray Bans. And so when I got Meta Ray Bans, I had to get the Meta app to use the Ray Bans. Then it turned into the Meta AI app and it was like, hey, do you want to use this as an LLM And I was like, I'm basically good on that front but thanks. And then they were like, well, do you want some AI video? Would you like some slop in this drop? Which is just like a. It's just a wild canvas to be iterating on so quickly. They used to launch different apps every single time, but not this time. I don't know. The meta Vibes needs to turn. I still like the mid journey model. I think it is beautiful. I think there is something cool to be done with that.

[Jordy Hayes]

I'm not judging the.

[John Exley]

It needs more ui.

[Jordy Hayes]

But the big problem is that you couldn't as a user consistently generate beautiful things.

[John Exley]

Yeah.

[Jordy Hayes]

Whereas with Sora it's not like they were necessarily beautiful, but at least they were entertaining. And that's what kicked off that viral.

[John Exley]

Yeah, it's weird.

[Jordy Hayes]

So the main thing is like for Microsoft, Google and Amazon, it's a lot more clear what winning in AI actually looks like. I think Meta is going to have to clarify what the win state looks like beyond just saying we're building personal superintelligence because investors are smart enough to know that personal super intelligence doesn't mean a lot today when the business today is focused on monetizing the world's attention.

[John Exley]

Yeah.

[Jordy Hayes]

And so I expect them at some point to have to kind of clarify what their, what their plans are.

[John Exley]

Yeah. Tesla beat earnings. Missed beat on revenue. Missed on earnings. The stock reaction was down about 4% after hours. You reposted the Buco Capital bloke post. I'm always so confused when Tesla goes down on earnings as business performance is completely irrelevant to the price of the stock and it has been more of a Vibes based stock for a while. I had a more by the book analysis. I said if Elon goes straight shot to the full self driving equivalent for humanoid robots, basically no teleoperation. The project should be years behind. What's going on with 1x I would imagine just like the Waymo dynamic. Like Waymo was able to launch a lot sooner because they could always fall back on, hey, there's a human tel operating this thing so you can trust us on the city streets. And they've had a pretty good track record because of that. Tesla's going full moonshot, full send. But it, but it's going to take a little bit longer. Like no one debates the fact that like Tesla's robo taxi fleet is a year or two behind Waymo's right now. Now the whole the Tesla bull hope is that you come from behind and start compounding because you have just structurally better costs, way more manufacturing, more of a flywheel on the actual data and the training. There's a lot of options. And I said they also need to build a full size suv.

[Jordy Hayes]

You're. You can't wait for that.

[John Exley]

I just think it's so crazy not to build a full size SUV in America. Like Americans love full size SUVs and you see them, it's like, I mean, it's as crazy as not being in the truck market for as long as they were.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah. It's interesting that Tesla has been so dependent on the, on the luxury sedan for its entire history, even though the luxury sedan has like completely fallen off in popularity. I saw some data on Lexus's sales. Lexus used to sell one of the most popular luxury SUVs, and they sell either single digit, thousands now of them a year. So it's like that category has gotten just killed by the suv. And Tesla of course has the X and the Y, but it's not exactly what you're. If they were to ship like the cybertruck suv, I think that would sell significantly better than the cybertruck.

[John Exley]

Yeah. I wonder if they'll ever do multiple brands. It's so normal at every other car company, but I see no reason why Tesla would ever do it. Yeah, like Lexus is what, Toyota's upmarket brand, right?

[Karim Atiyeh]

Yeah.

[John Exley]

Isn't that the linkage? I don't know.

[Jordy Hayes]

I doubt Elon. Whatever.

[John Exley]

I mean plaid was sort of like the, the trim. Trim level.

[Chris Messina]

Yeah.

[John Exley]

I wonder if they'd ever do a different trim level. Yeah, plaid. Plaid plus like, like what, what is the equivalent of like the Maybach of Tesla if plaid is their amg, right?

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, I don't know. I don't think he cares about.

[John Exley]

They have that in, in China. They have like a mybachified model Model X or model Model S. That's like chauffeur where the seats, the front seats are pushed forward basically. I have other Elon Musk news, but first let me tell you about Vanta Automate Compliance, Manage risk, Prove Trust Continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Elon Musk on data centers in orbit. SpaceX will be doing this. He said he's going to do data centers in space.

[Jordy Hayes]

Didn't we say this out loud yesterday with someone? I don't know if it was on the show or not, but yeah, it Just seems obviously if there is, if.

[John Exley]

It'S a thing and it's big, they're going to.

[Jordy Hayes]

It's easy to be bullish on space right now, but if you're investing in different categories, you have to imagine that if there are adjacent opportunities besides Starlink for SpaceX to do, they will enter them if they are large enough categories. And so again, that's.

[John Exley]

What does that mean for starcloud?

[Jordy Hayes]

I mean, I can still think, I can still imagine them over time figuring out more niche use cases. But building the satellite cloud, I think is something that Elon is not going to just happily hand over to someone else.

[John Exley]

Yeah. So let's read through a little bit of this from Ars Technica. As artificial intelligence drives the need for vastly more computing storage and processing power. Computing storage, what's that mean? Interest in space based data centers has spiked, although several startup companies such as Star Cloud have begun to address the problem. Address the problem. They haven't. They're like identifying the problem, maybe prototyping. This is very oddly worded. I'm like struggling to read this. The idea has also attracted the interest of tech barons. In May, it emerged that former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt acquired Relativity Space due to his interest in space based data centers. That's fascinating. I know that Relativity was not doing well with kind of the v1 strategy and there was this turnaround project and Eric Schmidt came in and was I think paying a ton to keep the business going and really investing. I had no idea that that was his thesis. That's fascinating. Then earlier this month, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos predicted that gigawatt scale data centers will be built in space within the next 10 to 20 years. That's big. Now Elon Musk, whose SpaceX owns and operates significantly more space based infrastructure than any other company or country in the world, has also expressed interest in technology after ours wrote a story about the potential of autonomous assembly to construct large data centers in space. Musk responded on X by saying that Starlink satellites could be used for this purpose. Simply scaling up Starlink V3 satellites, which have high speed laser links would work, he said on the social media Site X, SpaceX will be doing this. Very interesting. Yeah, I think it makes sense. The question is just like, yeah, what is the actual timeline for any of this? This, I mean no one really expected Starlink to ramp as fast as it did and then it just kind of worked. But if there is, I don't know, a bunch of. If there is a lot of actual fundamental foundational science around Heat Dissipation that needs to be done. That might be something that's a little bit bottlenecked. But at the same time, I kind of like, I would kind of bet on the SpaceX team to figure that stuff out since they already do a ton of heat dissipation and material science just on.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah. It's also just fascinating to look at the space industry versus the automotive industry. The automotive industry is the most brutally competitive, challenging business where Elon is having to compete with every car manufacturer in the world. Obviously there's export import controls in automotive, but in space, it's like you can imagine that being not a perfect monopoly, but certainly having every possible advantage in order to dominate in that category when the time is right. Should we talk about Apple before we continue?

[John Exley]

Yeah, definitely.

[Jordy Hayes]

Apple beat top line, beat on bottom line. China sales declined year over year. If you've been paying any attention to Apple, you know that their China business is slowly going away. IPhone revenue, they missed just by 300.

[John Exley]

Million, 50 billion or 49 billion this quarter.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, iPhone revenue was 49 billion versus 49.33 estimate. Stock is relatively flat since then.

[John Exley]

Yeah. So this is the real, like, this is the real bombshell in their strategy. Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, a third party analyst firm, said it observed great interest in the Pro and Pro Max models, While the new iPhone 17 air model showed virtually no sign of traction.

[Jordy Hayes]

So I saw my first iPhone air in the wild yesterday.

[John Exley]

No, you saw that one get smashed. Tell that story.

[Jordy Hayes]

Which one? Oh, oh. This was genuinely like the most I posted about this during LA Tech Week. We had a different.

[John Exley]

Why'd you put it in quotes? It was LA Tech Week.

[Jordy Hayes]

Well, there wasn't.

[John Exley]

I mean, literally was an LA Tech Week event. You're like Los Angeles, Los Angeles technology.

[Jordy Hayes]

No. So we had dinner with some folks and there was a founder there from Venice.

[John Exley]

From Venice.

[Jordy Hayes]

And he was saying that the iPhone air is the strongest iPhone ever made and that he challenged anybody. At the dinner, there was like 20 people.

[John Exley]

Do you remember Bendgate? Do you remember the. Do you remember Ben Gate, Tyler? It was like the iPhone 5 or something.

[Jordy Hayes]

I was pretty young, okay?

[John Exley]

Yeah, probably before your time. But there was a time when the iPhone launched and you could just bend it. And it was like a lot of phones were getting bent. So this guy is going to you and he's going around and saying that no one can bend this phone. Right. That's the strongest. No, no.

[Jordy Hayes]

He said, nobody can break this phone.

[John Exley]

No one can break it.

[Jordy Hayes]

He said this phone is absolutely unbreakable.

[John Exley]

Unbreakable.

[Jordy Hayes]

They've tested it internally. You cannot break it. It's the strongest iPhone ever. They compared it to every other iPhone, even the titanium iPhone. And so he was bending it like this, going crazy. And he challenged anybody at the dinner who wants to try to break this phone. And a Gundo founder. I'm leaving both of them unnamed. A Gundo founder.

[John Exley]

We got Gabriel from OpenAI in the chat. Good luck, man. You're building cameos over there. But you're gonna compete with us.

[Jordy Hayes]

We're doing it the old fashioned way.

[John Exley]

Yeah, we're doing it the old fashioned way. It just took us three hours sitting here in makeup.

[Jordy Hayes]

What do you mean three hours? It was like more like four hours.

[John Exley]

It was like four hours. So Gabriel, you've sped that up just a little bit. But you know, I think we're sticking with this for the meantime.

[Jordy Hayes]

Okay. So anyways, this founder challenges the entire group at dinner. Any can anybody break this phone? Gundo founder raises his hand, takes the phone and like tries for a second and just snaps. It basically just completely shatters. Completely broken, won't even turn on. And the Venice founder sitting there saying like, like he was like in disbelief. Like every. The whole room just went completely quiet. And he was like, I'm going to, I'm going to email Tim Cook about this.

[John Exley]

Emailing Tim Cook. What is he going to do? You're not supposed to smash your phone anyways.

[Jordy Hayes]

On Apple, John, your take. You said sort of the inverse meta core business not at risk due to AI, but not investing aggressively. Consumers seem happy to just open an LLM app. Could take. I said, Apple's trading at 40 times PE with very low growth. This feels steep even if I don't think they're threatened by AI in the near term. And then I highlighted a quote from Bernard Arnault from LVMH. He said, I don't know if in 20 years time people will be using iPhones, but I do know they will be drinking Dom Perignon.

[John Exley]

It's a good one. And hopefully they'll be using graphite.dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. In other news.

[Jordy Hayes]

We should close it out with Nvidia just to finish this little earnings wrap up. Basically John, your take was on top of the world. But is the head that wears the crown heavy core AI factory build out going flawlessly but unclear why Nvidia is pushing data centers in space humanoids, quantum computing mumbo jumbo maybe it's real of the same old AI story. Question mark, I said, I don't think Jensen would be just chugging beers on camera in Korea if he was having a rough one. So we'll see how it nets out their earnings or not until November 18th.

[John Exley]

What? Chugging some beers? Yeah. What's wrong with chugging some beers especially? I mean you gotta. He is superlative at this point, I believe just quantitatively he is the most value creative founder CEO in human history. No founder CEO has created 5 trillion. I mean no one's created 5 trillion in any capacity, whether in the CEO seat or not. Because with a Microsoft or with an Apple, you have to start having the conversation when you're having the goat debate on how much credit do you give to Tim Cook for market cap creation. How much credit do you give to Steve Jobs? Right. And same thing with Satya, Nadella and Bill Gates. Like obviously Satya has taken Microsoft from 300 billion to 4 trillion. Does that mean that he's 10 times better than the founders that started the company in the goat debate of value creation? Like he did have a big. He had a lot of great shoulders to stand on.

[Jordy Hayes]

It's not entirely about number go up.

[John Exley]

Exactly, exactly. But with Jensen, you don't even have to have that debate because he's been the founder CEO the whole time and so he deserves a beer. Let the man have a couple beers with his boys in South Korea. He's been on an absolute journey.

[Jordy Hayes]

A couple more posts here. Jay Boltard says, I'm sorry but no company generating the cash meta is with the margins it has should ever be raising money. Of course they announced another bond sale yesterday morning to fund their buildout. Jay Boulthard said, absolutely pathetic. Maybe just spend a little less and don't pay every AI scientist like their Shohei Ohtani.

[John Exley]

Yeah, I want to understand more about the private credit dynamic here because I believe that a good CFO would tell you that if you're buying land, you should get a mortgage because it can be secured and there's just some cost of capital math that you should do. And it would actually be irresponsible if they were saying, hey, we're building a new data center, we need to buy some land, we need to buy a building, buy a bunch of GPUs. And they're like, and guess what, we're not going to use debt. That's like paying off your mortgage, basically. And it's like, okay, yeah, you can pay off your mortgage and you can be like, I'm One of those guys that doesn't have a mortgage and it's like, congratulations, but you're probably not using capital efficiently. And so when I hear that they're setting up a big data center and they're raising debt for that particular deal, I don't have like red flags flying off in my mind. But I don't know this Bultard guy.

[Jordy Hayes]

Does semianalysis had a post here quoting Sundar. Sundar said, over the past 12 months, nearly 150 Cloud Google Cloud customers each process approximately 1 trillion tokens with our models for a wide range of applications. For example, WPP is creating campaigns with up to 70% efficiency gains. Swarovski has increased email open rates by 17%. Let's give it up for increasing email open rates and accelerated campaign localization by 10x. Semi analysis says AI is not a bubble. Enterprise AI is very strong. Nearly 150 enterprises each process 1 trillion tokens with Gemini models for a wide range of apps. And then they say, wait, that's less than a million bucks per year per Enterprise or 150 million of annual revenue. That is 0.3% of GCP annual revenue.

[John Exley]

So the fact that Google leads a token count instead of revenue growth tells you everything. If enterprise AI was actually strong, those 150 companies would be spending 10x more. I don't know about that because when you're a big company, you don't want to break out more GAAP metrics, non GAAP metrics, than you absolutely have to. Because if you develop some monster of a business like the AWS IPO story, the whole idea that Amazon had this amazing business and was like, oh yeah, just include that in everything else. Definitely don't let everyone know. And Satya told this to us on the show. He was like, when AWS had to disclose what was going on over there, it was the best day for us because everyone looked at our business and we're like, they got the same thing going on over there. They got a monster of a business cooking. And so the question of like how Google positions this, like, do they want to share dollars? But I don't know. I just wonder, I wonder what the shape of GCP adoption is. If it's, if it's nearly 150 Google Cloud customers each processed 1 trillion, I wonder. It would just be slice in.

[Jordy Hayes]

I mean, yeah, if Sundar had come out and says we got enterprise AI to $150 million run rate, everyone would be like, but it sounds really good when you say 1 trillion.

[John Exley]

Yeah, yeah, that is a weird, weird way to frame it. I don't know. I mean this is all so weird because it's like, okay, so then what's actually happening in the core business? Because they crushed earnings. They did great. And it's like, are we just in this weird world where every business is like, yeah, I totally want like I'll take $1 million of tokens, but then I also need $75 million more of just traditional databases. Is that what's going on? What's actually driving the growth, if not the token generation? There might just be something longer tail going on here too. This might just be like this slice of this 150 enterprises that's actually. That only makes up. I don't know. The big question is just what percentage of GCP annual revenue is AI is gen AI. We've seen that the CapEx at Meta, they have core AI, they have gen AI, like every. Everyone wants to track that now about what workload is happening. Sometimes the hyperscalers don't know because they just said, look, I just rented you a bunch of GPUs. Are you inferencing a recommendation algorithm on it? Are you playing video games on it? Are you generating tokens on it? We actually don't know because we respect your privacy and you can do whatever you want with it. So all we can tell the market is like, hey, we sold a lot of GPU hours and it's all masked anyway. Tyler, what you got?

[Jordy Hayes]

I mean, yeah, a trillion is just like not a lot at all. OpenAI is doing just on the API like something around like 250 trillion a month. So compared to that, I mean if it's a trillion over the past year, even if it's 150, I mean that's pretty bad.

[John Exley]

Each 150 trillion tokens. And you said OpenAI is doing like 260. I actually can't keep these numbers straight anymore. Everything is like nothing's in apples to apples. And I think that's very much intentional. I think that you don't want to be easily comped across anything. That's why everyone just focuses on valuation and then revenue and revenue scale.

[Jordy Hayes]

Dylan Patel says so many people hated on us for the AWS acceleration thesis a couple months ago. And we were right of course. Only we can do these calls due to our deep knowledge and insights with core research, data center, accelerator and tokenomics models. Amazon does the AMZN with and just drop [e-mail] so I expect if you'd be printing the next legendary chart 24 hours. This was crazy. I wasn't sure if this was fake news or not, but on the Coinbase earnings call yesterday, Brian Armstrong went. There was a prediction market that people were betting on which words he would say during the. During the earnings call. And he waited until the end and he just read through and read off every single word that he had missed. He says, you know, I just wanted to add the words in here, bitcoin, ethereum, blockchain staking and web3 to make sure we get those all in before the end of the call. So completely trolling. We've had that a few times during interviews because I was tracking the prediction.

[John Exley]

Market about what Coinbase will say on.

[Karim Atiyeh]

Their next earnings call. And I just want to.

[Jordy Hayes]

Add here.

[John Exley]

The words Bitcoin, ethereum, blockchain staking and Web three. It's actually crazy that he hadn't gotten to Bitcoin until then. It really tells you a lot about how mature the Coinbase business is that you can get to the end of your Q3, 20, 25 earnings call without mentioning Bitcoin, which was like the entire reason the business exists. But the business has grown so much. There's a lot going on.

[Jordy Hayes]

It's possible that he said it and he just didn't remember.

[John Exley]

Maybe, maybe, but. But it is, it is funny that, that he's just.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, one, one thing is, is we. We've had prediction markets created around different interviews done. And when Sam Altman, while he was mentioning, distracting. When I'm looking at the chat and people are like, say this word. Yeah, say that word again.

[John Exley]

It's crazy.

[Jordy Hayes]

Say it three more times.

[John Exley]

It's a very weird, postmodern, hyper techno, capital accelerationist, like, aesthetic to be like, people are gambling on the words that you're saying in a live stream. It's very, very weird. I don't know what his. I would love to know Brian's honest take on, like, how he feels about that. Like, there's a little bit of just the market is going to exist, it's going to be a thing. And so he, by doing this, he's kind of trolling the market to just say, hey, you're never going to be able to reliably bet on this market because you never know what I'm going to do. Which is one way to interact with it as opposed to being like, hey, guys, I know that everyone has a prediction market up on what I'm going to say. And so please don't do that. It's like, no, just like, go create Chaos. And then everyone will just know that it's a meme and chaos.

[Jordy Hayes]

Well, it's going to just drive more attention to the next earnings call because people are going to. Oh, is he going to. Well, I'll just bet yes on everything in case he does that again. The odds might be at like 95% for every word. And then he just says like he just doesn't mention it at all.

[John Exley]

Yeah.

[Jordy Hayes]

And then everything, you know, it certainly.

[John Exley]

It certainly kind of cements him as just a very in the culture CEO and a very, a very like online founder, which I think is positive. We are of course partnered with polymarket as a prediction market. We're usually tracking the largest companies on their largest company at the end of 2025. Nvidia has been predicted, of course.

[Jordy Hayes]

And what's the percentage?

[John Exley]

It's like 99% now. I mean they're a trillion above everyone else. It was a horse race though.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, it was really close mid summer.

[John Exley]

At one point, I mean the market caps were eclipsing each other and they were going back and forth and at.

[Jordy Hayes]

One point, yeah, June 1st, Microsoft and Nvidia were both at 37%. Exactly.

[John Exley]

It's been a pretty crazy, it's been a pretty crazy year because of the tariffs and the AI narrative. The deep seek moment. The horse race has changed a few times and Microsoft has been in the lead, Apple's been in the lead, but Nvidia is running away with it and that deserves a beer with your boys in South Korea. And so that's what he's been up to.

[Jordy Hayes]

Did you fully understand there's an article here. Microsoft seemingly just revealed that OpenAI lost 11 and a half billion last quarter.

[John Exley]

That seems like in line with what we've been kind of assuming. It's like it's, it's a massive loss making business. I don't know that we'd heard that they were on like a 40 billion loss run rate, but that kind of.

[Jordy Hayes]

Profitable business in the world, Maybe intel.

[John Exley]

Like you mean the, like the biggest?

[Jordy Hayes]

Who's losing more money than open AI?

[John Exley]

Do you count Capex as losing money? Because I would almost certainly assume that these are not losses, these are investments. If I raise $10 million for my startup and then I'm like, okay, I'm going to buy a office building for $5 million. That's not negative 5 million earned earnings. That is negative 5 million cash flow. I've lost 5 million cash and I don't have liquid cash anymore. And so I would assume that a lot of OpenAI's losses are actually investments in capex one way or another, but.

[Jordy Hayes]

They'Re also probably losing stock based comp is factored into this as well.

[John Exley]

Yeah. And that's also in many cases a non cash expense and so still important to track, still significant. But all of this stuff, it's like I'm kind of in like a wait and see until the, until the S1 drops, until we can actually get data. Do you have any?

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah. So apparently this is, this is double what they've like what has previously been reported. So I think before there was a report it said first half of 2025 they were going to do 3.5 in losses. So this is basically double that. But even then it's still, I don't think this is very surprising at all.

[John Exley]

It's so hard to track how much money they're actually raising because they'll, they'll raise for a particular deal, they'll raise for Stargate, they'll be a secondary transaction. It's very hard to understand like how much cash is actually going from investors onto OpenAI's like for profit balance sheet that is like available to burn. And then once you have the cash, like I think everyone's fine with the idea of Sam Altman burning money for 12 to 18 months and going out and raise more. Like that's not crazy when you're growing your business, especially in a new category.

[Jordy Hayes]

In other news, Palantir sues former employees for stealing company secrets. Company alleges pair violated non competes to create copycat AI firm.

[John Exley]

Interesting.

[Jordy Hayes]

They've two employees. They're accusing them of stealing confidential data to build a rival company called Percepta, backed by General Catalyst.

[John Exley]

I would not want to steal from Palantir.

[Jordy Hayes]

Bad idea.

[John Exley]

That seems like one of the worst companies to steal from.

[Jordy Hayes]

They will find you, you.

[John Exley]

Yeah.

[Jordy Hayes]

And they will kill you.

[John Exley]

But it is a wild thing.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah. You think about a company that's going to have like, you know, things pretty locked down. Their whole shtick is they know that if I remember I read the article yesterday, but I believe they tracked that the employee had slacked themselves a document that they then opened on their phone and like presumably, you know, saved. So yeah, we'll see how this nets out. They say that taking access to Palantir's crown jewels, such as source code and customer workflows to create what it called a copycat platform. So they're just trying to block them from using the data and to force the return of stolen materials. One of the comments says never Go against a company that sued the government and won.

[John Exley]

Interesting. Sham Sanger was on the Ross Douthat. Ross Douthit. It was really good. I don't know how much you listened to, but he. He. It's funny because they open with the classic question of. Of, like, what does Palantir actually do? And I don't know, like, why are people so confused by that question? It's so crazy to me. It's like. And Shaun explains it extremely well. He's just like, you have data. We help you understand your data, we help you understand what's going on there. He's like, it's a data analytics firm, sir.

[Jordy Hayes]

It's the same exact thing. When Trey Stevens went on Shawn Ryan, the questions were almost the same exact questions. What does Palantir do?

[John Exley]

Oh, interesting.

[Jordy Hayes]

You read the comments, and then everyone's like, this is the Antichrist.

[John Exley]

Yeah. People go crazy, crazy, crazy. And I think it's. I like Shama, this great example of, like, when you want to make a thing. Like, if you're running a manufacturing plant, you will have a system for tracking. Like, if you're trying to make, like, yerba mate, you will have a system that stores, like, the specifications of the can, what type of ink you're using here, the size of the can, the shape, what materials, how this gets printed. Like, that will all be managed in a particular software system. Then how you're actually making the cans will be like, okay, I'm producing 25 cans a second, or whatever that will be tracked in a different system. Then you might have a CRM to sell. Who do I sell these cans to? I'm selling them every month. Jordy buys a bunch. So I have a CRM that tracks you. And he's just describing, like, like, the different enterprise software tooling sets, like CRM, cms, warehouse management system, inventory management system. He's just describing those and explaining how Palantir can tie them all together and how Palantir can build them. And sometimes you need custom ones for specific industries.

[Jordy Hayes]

Well, let's check in with the. Let's check in with the Palantir bulls anyway.

[John Exley]

Yes. What do the Palantir bulls say?

[Jordy Hayes]

The Palantir bulls will get exhausted at these levels. Full send. I like the guy doing our team workout. Should look like that.

[John Exley]

We don't break nearly enough of a sweat compared to this. This is so sick. Let's go. Look at this, bro.

[Jordy Hayes]

Backflips.

[John Exley]

I like that guy who's just, like. Who's just, like, racing it. Like, it's Chariot or like it's a horse race. That's hilarious. Yeah. This also seems slightly sped up. Maybe. What do we think? Do you think this is like 1.1x this slowed down. You think it slowed down? Get on Julius. AI, what analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data. Get expert level insights in seconds. Where. Where to next? We got the mansion section. There's a bunch of stuff we can go through. Did you hear that the Hamptons market is making an epic comeback? Let's go. Finally, the moment home sales of $10 million or more houses are sur on the East End, even topping the COVID surge in the Hampton, New York's affluent beach vacation destination, the luxury real estate market has come roaring back. Have you, have you ever been to the Hamptons? I still think I've never been. Bobby Kosmik was worried about the maybe.

[Jordy Hayes]

As a kid, not as an adult.

[John Exley]

The number of home sales above $10 million on Long Island's East End has surged to unprecedented levels, even topping the area's pandemic boom. The uptick comes even as Florida and other locales replace New York City as a primary home for many billionaires. The Hamptons is, for a lack of a better term, kicking ass at the very high end of the market. Wow. Uncensored swear word in the journal. Absolute dogs over there in the really writers room.

[Jordy Hayes]

I mean, out of control.

[John Exley]

Out of control.

[Jordy Hayes]

We would never.

[John Exley]

We got to get this under control. No, I think. I think that's not that bad of a word. Ass. The high end Hamptons market was in the doldrums before COVID Home sales of 10 million or more plummeted from 58 in 2015 to 30 in 2019 as the ritzy area faced increased competition from areas such as Nantucket or Hudson Valley. And so there are some stories here to the banner born.

[Jordy Hayes]

I've been working at my land thesis.

[John Exley]

Yeah.

[Jordy Hayes]

I think, I think, I think that it's probably the most underrated asset class right now.

[John Exley]

Well, don't all throughout the alpha.

[Jordy Hayes]

I mean, I mean, I'm down to share the alpha with.

[John Exley]

The team.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah. I just think throughout, you know, all human history, people were like, how do I acquire land?

[John Exley]

Yes.

[Jordy Hayes]

And then at some point or another, people just stopped. Right. It became just about getting the home and not thinking about land. So where.

[John Exley]

Where do you want land? Do you want to buy Fifth Avenue to?

[Jordy Hayes]

I just want to buy up land in the area that I love the.

[John Exley]

Most, which is American jurisdiction.

[Jordy Hayes]

Of course. America.

[John Exley]

California.

[Jordy Hayes]

Of course California.

[John Exley]

So Southern California.

[Jordy Hayes]

I'LL never give up on California.

[John Exley]

I still think there's huge alpha in just acquiring massive swaths of. Of Alaskan land. Yeah, I still think you've been working.

[Jordy Hayes]

This one out for a while.

[John Exley]

Yeah, I think it's massively underrated because if global warming is real and unstoppable and we can't fight the force of global warming, well, then temperatures will rise and Alaska will be the last beachfront property. It'll be balmy, it'll be amazing. Everything else will be a desert. But Alaska will be nice and temperate, and that's where you want to be. And. And if we cure global warming, if we stop global warming, if we wind up figuring out how to manipulate the environment, we harness the.

[Jordy Hayes]

You can manipulate time.

[John Exley]

Yeah, manipulating time, manipulating the weather. If Augustus is successful, if geoengineering is successful, well, then it's not going to be cold up there because you'll just be able to transform it into a lush environment. 72 and sunny all day. So I think in either scenario, no matter where you land on global warming, is it unstoppable? Is it preventable? Alaska looks great in that world. What do you think?

[Jordy Hayes]

Did you ever resolve your beef with the Alaskans?

[John Exley]

No, I locked. So I posted on X. Actually, it was Twitter back then, like four years ago. I posted like, we got to go to Alaska. We got to build some condominiums, we got to build some strip malls. We got to build some skyscrapers. It's too nice up there. And I was basically like, we're going to. We're all the tech people.

[Jordy Hayes]

All the.

[John Exley]

All my tech friends were all going to go to Alaska. And the Alaskans did not like this. And they said, stay out of Alaska, you tech boy. And I was getting. I was getting attacked. The left and the right kind of.

[Jordy Hayes]

Listened to I did.

[John Exley]

I. In fact, I did not invade Alaska, but I was getting lots of DMS from Alaskans who are, you know, gun totem, good old boy Americans do not step foot. Do not. You wouldn't last a day up here. You're not tough enough for the Alaskan wilderness. And then I was also getting canceled by the left Alaskans who are like, this is my indigenous homeland. You can't come here. That type of thing. And so I was getting it from both sides. I wound up locking my account because the post went majorly viral in Alaskan, like Twitter, Alaska, Twitter. Of course, I was joking around, but the Internet doesn't care about that.

[Jordy Hayes]

Twitter is such a small place already. Imagine how small Alaska Twitter is. There's like six posters up there, regional posters.

[John Exley]

But this is the lesson for folks who post and are worried about getting canceled. Not that you should go out there and get canceled, but if it does happen, it usually starts by somebody quote posting you. And you can tell that you posted something. You got 100 likes, but the quote post is taking off and people are having a lot of fun quote tweeting you.

[Jordy Hayes]

Well, that's when the like ratio on the original post is just abysmal.

[John Exley]

Exactly. So if that happens, you can just bail by locking your account, which then kills the quote tweet because it doesn't show up in the quote tweet. And so no one's liking or retweeting a quote tweet with just a this account is locked. And so it just kills the virality of the quote and the dunk. And so you stop getting dunked on. And then no one can really like DM you or reply to you or dig through your account. And so. So usually, at least in the short term, people are kind of like moving on to something else. I'm not letting it percolate. We should talk to Lulu about how to handle cancellations when she hops on. She's of course seen a bunch of these. Speaking of people who should be canceled, someone owns a disgusting house in Los Angeles. We gotta dig into this. The mansion section's really getting wild today. They put a curse word in here. Don't like that. They also are listing an $85 million mansion here for sale in LA. An estate with a curated collection of sex toys. What's going on, Mansion section? Why are you getting so wild? On Friday, October 31.

[Jordy Hayes]

Spooky.

[John Exley]

It has a pleasure.

[Jordy Hayes]

Not like them.

[John Exley]

A pair of Los Angeles mansions, one with a pleasure suite outfitted with a curated collection of sex toys, is hitting the market for $85 million. The seller is British music producer Alex da kid. He's 44. He spent 14 years building one of the houses, a roughly 24 foot.

[Jordy Hayes]

14 years?

[John Exley]

Yeah, he started when he was 30.

[Jordy Hayes]

I guess he thinks in decades.

[John Exley]

He thinks in decades. In addition to the pleasure suite, the Hollywood Hills home, which Daqid called his entertainer's fortress, has eight pools, very cool. An auto elevator and a private nightclub. In 2020, DA Kidd purchased an adjacent five bedroom home with its own pool for around 7.6 million property records show. He bought the roughly 6,125 square foot house with the idea of adding it to the main residence, he said, but ultimately decided to use it as A guest house instead. Dekidd bought the first property, a Spanish style home in the Bird Streets area for around 4.3 million in 2011. The purchase came shortly after renegotiating his first publishing deal.

[Jordy Hayes]

Mr. Morale in the chat. Alex Dakid. He's 44.

[John Exley]

Real name is Alexander J. Grant. I basically got this house thinking it would be a six month remodel. But after more than a year of renovating, Da Kid decided to raise the house, destroying it and start over. It was like making an album for me, Da Kid said. I got these other ideas. McLean, who's known for designing modern mansions, is a madman just like me. Takid said the four bedroom house has a glass elevator for cars. A pleasure suite with a Murphy bed and mirrored wall contains antique chairs customized with patent leather upholstery, restraints and chains. I think we're beyond the days of it being taboo to enjoy pleasure, Da Kid said. I wanted a place where you could feel comfortable and intimate and explore.

[Jordy Hayes]

All right, let's go to the next.

[John Exley]

We're not past it. It is taboo. Tear your house down.

[Karim Atiyeh]

I don't know.

[John Exley]

Now the mansion section is all over the place. Today, Shutterstock founder sells a Bridgehampton home. What a great time to get out of Shutterstock. With the dawn of generative imagery. This has to be one of the hardest businesses.

[Jordy Hayes]

John, he's not out yet. He's still the executive chairman.

[John Exley]

Yes, but he's clearly sold enough to buy 57 million.

[Jordy Hayes]

We should have John on. I'd be interested to hear how he's. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure they get so much traffic still, and I imagine they just help people generate assets based on other assets.

[John Exley]

I mean, the bull case is the Reddit thesis, right? Where you're licensing the data and that's actually very valuable, and the stock sort of pops off of that. He sold his oceanfront house in Bridgehampton, New York for 57 million. According to people familiar with the deal, he bought it for 40 million in 2014. He's listed the house. The buyer of the identity. The buyer's identity couldn't be learned, huh? We're gonna have to figure that out, get to the bottom of it. Let's see. Set on more than two acres, the modern Bridgehampton home has a gym, a game room and a media room. Interesting. Outside there is an infinity pool. You'll love that. An outdoor kitchen, a fireplace and a television. A private lighted walkway that leads to the beach. Sales volume in the hamptons hit a 14 year low, but it's coming back and the founder of Shutterstock is getting out at maybe the top, but a local boom. Very fun. What else is going on on the timeline?

[Jordy Hayes]

Back to the timeline in the Journal as well. Turbo Puffer There we go.

[John Exley]

Search every bite. Serverless vector and full text search built from first principles and object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Continue.

[Jordy Hayes]

BlackRock stung by loans to businesses accused of breathtaking fraud an entrepreneur tapped private credit funds to finances telecom businesses. Now the lenders say he defrauded them. So stock market news over on X says we have our fourth private credit collapse in two months. And this one shows exactly why institutional lenders shouldn't be trustified to verify their own collateral. Bakim Bambot ran Kariox Capital, a New York telecom financing outfit that convinced BlackRock's HPS Investment Partners at BNP paribus to lead him 552 million. The entire deal was built on one claim. He had legitimate receivables from T Mobile, Telstra, Bixivables, Fraud, Sparkle and Taiwan Mobile backing the loans. None of it was real. Brahm Bot forged contracts that appeared to be signed by representatives from these character carriers. He created fake invoices supposedly issued by these companies claiming they owed Kariox money. Then he spoofed email addresses mimicking these carriers real domains and sent verification emails to make the receivables look legitimate. By stacking these fabricated invoices on top of each other, he created what looked like 500 million-plus in collateral. Lenders sought assets and funded the deal without catching any of it. Here's where it gets embarrassing. When HPS and BNP Paribus finally tried to verify these receivables by actually calling T Mobile, the carrier said they had no idea what Kariox was talking about. No contracts, no invoices. Nothing existed. One phone call would have instantly revealed the entire fraud. These are supposed to be institutional grade lenders with world class risk management. Yet somehow they missed basic due diligence. While all this was happening, Bram Bot's people were also stealing cash. Whenever payments came through the lender controlled collection accounts. Instead of applying those funds to the debt, they diverted the money offshore. So he wasn't just fabricating collateral, he was stealing actual cash flows in real time. Lenders sued in 2020 August 2025 and froze all assets. Then they filed for the company. Kariox filed for bankruptcy. With up to 1 billion in liabilities and basically zero assets remaining, HPS is sitting on half a billion in losses with nothing to recover against. The kicker is that BlackRock acquired HBS for 12 billion in July 2025, specifically to expand, expand into private credit and get access to its $148 billion platform. Within 90 days of closing that deal, they're holding a half a billion dollar fraud loss on receivables that HPS supposedly vetted and monitored.

[John Exley]

I mean, that's not that big of a deal, right?

[Jordy Hayes]

Half a billion.

[John Exley]

I mean it's not great but you know, it is like 5% of the deal. Like I feel like people get deals mispriced by a couple percent every once in a while.

[Jordy Hayes]

I mean it's just, this is a big deal in the broader context of like private credit has exploded as an asset class. Yeah, there's a lot of, you know, people have, you know, we saw this with sloppiness. What was it? What was the AV in the chat? Large scale fraud is actually a sign of good times.

[John Exley]

I mean, that's true. Yeah.

[Jordy Hayes]

But yeah, who, who knows? But anyways, that, that auto parts company that, that went bankrupt a while back also had a bunch of totally private credit in the mix and so are just waiting for more and more.

[John Exley]

We got to dig into that story of the satellite repossession. Maybe one of the, I don't know, private credit gets crazy. I mean there's a famous example of one credit firm buying Argentinian debt and then repossessing a aircraft carrier or like destroyer, like a military boat. And apparently the same thing can happen in space with satellites like they are, it is possible to more or less repossess them. And so I think a lot of these deals, a lot of these private credit deals are like you're on a knife's edge in terms of like are you going to continue to get payment or are you going to need to get the value from the assets? Whereas in venture capital it's just so much, it's just so much further out on the risk curve that you're never like or yeah, am I like a big piece of my business is making sure I can liquidate the Apple display monitors in the office or the Herman Miller chairs. It's like, no, that's going to be basically immaterial to your business. It's going to be the difference between 99% of the value is going to come from 1% of the investments anyway. And then of the money you lose, you're not going to be recouping an extra 5%.

[Jordy Hayes]

Making a difference in some more positive news.

[John Exley]

Google AI Studio. That's right, create an AI powered app faster than ever. Get started. Gemini understands the capabilities you need and automatically wires the right models and APIs up for you. You can get started at Aistudio AI Studio.

[Jordy Hayes]

Build Britain over at Microsoft says, Please, Mr. President, respectfully let us buy this truck.

[John Exley]

He was responding, Wow, 64,000 likes on that.

[Jordy Hayes]

Palmer says working on this. This got another 20,000 likes. So people want these little Toyota trucks.

[John Exley]

But what does this mean in the Palmer context? Does this mean he's going to like call the president and ask Trump to allow it, or is he going to make a mod retro version of this car? Is Anduril gonna produce this? Like there's like 12 different ways that Palmer could like solve this problem of like Americans not being able to get cool trucks, which is interesting.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah. I don't know if these, these trucks are blocked. They're blocked in the US or just you would have to import one yourself.

[John Exley]

Yeah.

[Jordy Hayes]

But they, I mean INEOS is basically, I think INEOS has basically done this. They're, they're the, they have a. What do they have? It's not the main Grenadier, but they have. I'm pulling it up right now. The quartermaster, the quartermaster from Grenadier looks quite a lot like this truck, but it's certainly, I think this one from Toyota internationally sells for like 10 to 20 grand. Like it's very cheap.

[Aidan Sudguth]

Yeah.

[John Exley]

People love to point out the fact that the Ford F150 has the same bed length as these tiny Japanese Kei trucks. But interestingly, that's just why you should always buy the Ford F250 super duty crew cab with the long bed. Because if you just go for the biggest truck, then you will be bigger than the Japanese K truck. People love the K trucks. They have fun with those. Well, if you're starting a new truck company, you got to get your brand mentioned on ChatGPT. You got to go to profound reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Andrew Reed says, if I ran a company, my first act would be to ban hard boiled eggs in the office.

[Jordy Hayes]

Hard boiled eggs are really an insane snack. I gotta put these in quotes because the smell, the smell's crazy. Unbelievably bad that you should be forced to eat them outside only.

[John Exley]

Yeah, it's. Is it more, it's not more protein than a steak in a bag. You gotta go, chesky, man. That's the way. If you want to have protein on the go, throw a steak in the bag and take it with you everywhere. The hard boiled eggs in the office. That seems like an Odd choice. Probably a time and a place.

[Jordy Hayes]

Maybe they should put name one time and one place.

[John Exley]

One place would be like, you know how in offices they have like. Well, where you can go the smoking area. Like I wouldn't have a problem with somebody going. And if there's like a cigarette smoking area, like a back alley and you can go into the back alley and scarf scarves. Hard boiled eggs. That seems reasonable. People are smoking glass or glass.

[Jordy Hayes]

Go outside, put one in each, you know, cheek and then go back like chipmunk mode. Go chipmunk mode. And then just pretend like you don't have them.

[John Exley]

I don't know. Yeah, I've never been big in the hard boiled egg thing. I have, however, been big into linear. Linear is a purpose built tool. Planning and building products meet the system for modern software development. Streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. Our first guests of the show are in the restream waiting room. We have Lulu Maservi and Gabby Goldberg stopping by.

[Jordy Hayes]

Whoa.

[John Exley]

Look at this.

[Gabby Goldberg]

Oh, shit.

[John Exley]

Hey, hey, hey. You look fantastic. Is that a wig too?

[Gabby Goldberg]

I don't know what you're talking about, but it's great to see you guys. We were watch shopping during our break between sauna and eating cheeseburgers for breakfast.

[John Exley]

The lore.

[Gabby Goldberg]

Hey, John. John.

[John Exley]

Yes, yes, yes.

[Gabby Goldberg]

Do you want to show we're live. You want to show the watch you got?

[Dean Ball]

Oh, this. Oh, this is nothing special. This is just my AP Offshore. But yeah, great to finally cross that off the list.

[Treya Lam]

What watch did you get, Jordy?

[Gabby Goldberg]

Oh, I got the Jaeger LeCoultre.

[John Exley]

Oh, there we go.

[Gabby Goldberg]

It's in the same color. You know, it matches the new my box that I just bought.

[Dean Ball]

Did you know that's right.

[Gabby Goldberg]

Is outside and it matches this watch and really. Sorry guys. Let's get right into the show. John, you ready?

[Treya Lam]

Let's do it, Jordi.

[Karim Atiyeh]

All right.

[John Exley]

You're watching TVPN. There we go. Today is Friday, October 31st.

[Gabby Goldberg]

We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome.

[Dean Ball]

Technology.

[Treya Lam]

The fortress of finance, the capital of capital.

[John Exley]

They got the whole stick. What is that?

[Jordy Hayes]

Is that the soundboard?

[John Exley]

What is that? Oh, the air horn.

[Jordy Hayes]

Oh, the air horn. Happy Halloween.

[John Exley]

Happy Halloween.

[Gabby Goldberg]

Good to see you.

[John Exley]

The chat is absolutely loving this.

[Dean Ball]

How did you big fancy both Ilya and Mary.

[Jordy Hayes]

How did you guys advise? Oh, wow. With the loafers up on the desk.

[John Exley]

The level of detail here, the shtick is remarkable here.

[Jordy Hayes]

We'll fire back someone else.

[Gabby Goldberg]

It's a shtick to us. It's a lifestyle.

[Jordy Hayes]

On a more Serious note. What's the advice to clients on how to. How to approach Halloween? Is it just ignore? Is it distraction?

[Gabby Goldberg]

Nope. It is, as with every other day, a chance to only lock in more.

[Dean Ball]

We actually, yeah, we printed out some examples.

[John Exley]

Yes, take us through it, please. What else you got for us, John?

[Gabby Goldberg]

You want to tell them about this one?

[John Exley]

You're disappearing? What is this? Oh, this is Halloween. The Halloween starter kit. I've seen this. But what is in the image?

[Gabby Goldberg]

Okay, so this is Spirit Halloween, the Brian Armstrong set. It includes one.

[Jordy Hayes]

For the whole head, right?

[John Exley]

Oh, perfect. Perfect. Yes, yes.

[Gabby Goldberg]

Everything below the head is strictly.

[John Exley]

Wait, why didn't we consider that we were in makeup for three hours this morning? We could have just shaved her head with a razor in the morning.

[Jordy Hayes]

That would have been so much easier.

[John Exley]

We would have done 90% of the work for us. Really?

[Jordy Hayes]

And I could have just grown a beard.

[John Exley]

Yes. What other ideas do we have here?

[Jordy Hayes]

Here.

[John Exley]

Let'S see.

[Gabby Goldberg]

So we've got.

[Dean Ball]

Oh, here's one that John and I like printed posts.

[John Exley]

The level of detail here is amazing.

[Jordy Hayes]

This is insane.

[John Exley]

Continue. We might have to lose the virtual background, by the way. It's really cutting in and out. But what is this?

[Jordy Hayes]

I can see it. What is this?

[John Exley]

It's the stressed out guy.

[Gabby Goldberg]

Smoking gay Halloween. What do you mean you're stressed out? Hayao Miyazaki. Look at this. This is a fine piece.

[John Exley]

That would be a fantastic costume. Oh, someone did it. And that's what that post is.

[Gabby Goldberg]

Someone's real costume. Oh, no.

[John Exley]

That makes sense. Yeah. You see, you're kind of tripping in and out. It is a wild.

[Gabby Goldberg]

And then here. We thought this was very disrespectful of you in particular, Mark. Whenever you see this person, we will admonish them on the spot.

[Dean Ball]

We're looking for them.

[Gabby Goldberg]

We did like this comment from the random recruiter. This is my sleep paralysis.

[Jordy Hayes]

I do look like a sleep paralysis demon.

[John Exley]

That's hilarious.

[Jordy Hayes]

I look a little bit scary. I don't know if I'm doing Mark justice.

[John Exley]

Yeah, it's a remarkable, remarkable effort.

[Gabby Goldberg]

We did have a.

[John Exley]

Who do you think won? Do I look more like Ilya than he looks like Mark? Who wins the costume contest today?

[Gabby Goldberg]

I think it's the Ilia thing.

[John Exley]

You think so?

[Jordy Hayes]

I think so. I was getting freaked out before the show. We had like five minutes after the costumes finished. Watching a 6, 8 jacked Ilya just, like, come around the corner is scary.

[John Exley]

It is a wild, wild experience.

[Dean Ball]

Climbing the.

[Gabby Goldberg]

Yeah, it's easier to climb the Mountain when you're six, eight.

[John Exley]

Yeah. It's all in the eyebrows. The eyebrows are really everything because as they were working on getting the makeup on, I was like, there's no way this is gonna work. This is gonna look like party city level. It's fun that we did this, but this is not gonna look convincing at all. And it's definitely a crazy.

[Jordy Hayes]

Your post, Lulu. This isn't reposting John's post. This isn't AI. This is human craftsmanship, but it's actually crazy. So, like, the. The crew that typically works on, like, you know, normal film productions, they did. Was it, like, 50 different layers of stuff that they were putting on our heads?

[John Exley]

It was one of the most.

[Jordy Hayes]

They're painting. They're. They're doing. They did, like, a base layer. They did the head. They painted over our eyebrows. They glued, you know, things over the eyebrows, and they put another set of eyebrows on. Then they painted over that. It's gonna take, like, probably an hour to just get. Get all this off.

[John Exley]

They said 45 minutes.

[Jordy Hayes]

Okay.

[Gabby Goldberg]

I don't know why you want to take it off.

[John Exley]

Yeah. Do you think. I mean, obviously we're in a unique position because we get to kind of have some fun on the show. It's like, almost a comedy show in many ways. Do you think there's any hope to bring back April Fool's Day in a cool way? Or will tech just, like, flop on that immediately?

[Gabby Goldberg]

It's hard to do. Someone told me a couple years ago on April Fool's Day that actually doing it on April Fools is the cringy part. Surrounded by so many people doing it badly that it's really hard to get away from that. And they were saying if you think of a great prank or jape or.

[John Exley]

Joke, just do it randomly.

[Gabby Goldberg]

Why wait till April 1st when everybody knows?

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah. So there was a company that yc company that pissed a bunch of people off because they created an IDE that has, like, brain rot in this. In the. In the software. So you can do, like, gambling on steak. You can do subway surfers. And, like, they pissed.

[John Exley]

They.

[Jordy Hayes]

They. Because it's on the YC website. I feel like they, like, they're putting, like, you can gamble while you code. They piss a lot of people off. And I think if they had just dropped it as, like, a feature that was, like, a real feature that you could play around with but wasn't, like, the. Their entire brand, it would have hit a lot harder and been and gotten a much more, like, funny, positive reaction versus people just Being like, I hate this. Blah, blah, blah. Like, you know, why does this.

[John Exley]

Yeah. It's almost like taking. Yeah. Taking the joke, like, too seriously. When you haven't established your brand at all, then people. There's just. You're making people do so much work. I guess that's the benefit of doing something on April 1st, is that you're. There's a lot less work to be like, is this a joke? You can just kind of. You can kind of lean on. You know, the audience needs to, like. Like, you don't need to. You don't need to. You don't wind up in the situation where you have to explain to, like, 10,000 people like, we're kidding, we're kidding, we're kidding. Like, people kind of put it together themselves and be like, okay, I'm good.

[Jordy Hayes]

Are Drops dead as a meta, do you think, like, it feels like launch videos and drops are both kind of over?

[Gabby Goldberg]

So. So I don't think that drops are dead. I think that that specific style of drop with the, like, launch video has been over. Is completely saturated and overdone.

[John Exley]

Yeah.

[Gabby Goldberg]

I think you just have to feel like people are not going to stop announcing things and stop dropping things. You just have to find new ways to do it.

[Jordy Hayes]

Well, I meant drop in the. I meant drop in the context of, like, we made this product with our branding on it, kind of.

[John Exley]

I think I thought Base did a really good job. Did you see bases drop for their $1 billion round? It was a newspaper. And I thought that was well executed in the sense that it had a lot of text, it had a lot of content there. Yeah. Tyler has it there. Join the charge. And I just thought, yeah, it's not just a T shirt. It's way deeper. And I'd say the same thing for the launch videos. It's like. Like, we found a very unique aesthetic yesterday. I'm not gonna share it. Cause I think it would be a good launch video. But there are specific formats where it's immediately identifiable as, like, oh, that's that type of video. And if you use that as your launch video, you'll break through and you'll be the first person to take. You know, like right now it's like the default meta is basically like, after Game of Thrones. Stick around for the interview with the actors. That's the aesthetic of most launch videos right now. It's like cinematic. Couple minutes, interview with a few people. Kind of like mini documentary.

[Jordy Hayes]

They said we couldn't build enterprise in this category. They said it was impossible.

[John Exley]

Yeah. That did get a little commoditized, but yeah, fresh ideas.

[Gabby Goldberg]

I said at one point that somebody should do a version of it. Of those sorority dates dance videos.

[John Exley]

That's a great one. That's a great idea.

[Gabby Goldberg]

That's a great one. If you have someone who can do flips or if you just, like, all wear a matching outfit. Like, it has to be a company. If you're, like, solving cancer and cancer, that's probably not right. But as long as the joke is not too close to home. The problem with being a slop adjacent company that jokes about slop now it's so obvious that that is very close to what you're doing, and now you have to defend yourself.

[John Exley]

Yeah.

[Gabby Goldberg]

Like, what was that? Our company that was gonna do that rebrand a couple years ago.

[Jordy Hayes]

Jaguar.

[John Exley]

Jaguar.

[Gabby Goldberg]

Jaguar was really bad too. Yeah.

[Jordy Hayes]

There was another.

[Gabby Goldberg]

There was another one where they joked about a rebrand. I don't even know if it was a joke. They claimed it was a joke because people hated it.

[John Exley]

I don't remember this at all.

[Jordy Hayes]

Claiming after getting a reaction that people don't like something and then saying it was a joke is not an effective strategy. I've seen that a little bit. But the substrate launch was crazy. That was kind of like Lulu and Gabby masterclass special.

[Gabby Goldberg]

Well, James is pretty.

[Dean Ball]

We'll let them know.

[Gabby Goldberg]

Yeah, yeah, we'll let Lulu and Gabby know. They'll feel really good about it. James Proud is in heavy founder mode, by the way. He did a lot of the writing and outreach and a lot of that themselves, which obviously we think is the right way to do this. Like, the founder can't just sit it out and deploy. Do it all for them. But yeah, substrate. Very cool company. Absolute. What do we call it? Absolute dog.

[John Exley]

There we go.

[Jordy Hayes]

An absolute dog. That's the word.

[John Exley]

That's what we love to use.

[Jordy Hayes]

He's an absolute dog.

[John Exley]

Straight from Pat McAfee. All right, guys, well, have a great rest of your day. Yeah, get back to the gym.

[Dean Ball]

You know, before we go, we should talk about ramp.

[John Exley]

Oh, please. What you got for us?

[Gabby Goldberg]

We almost had a whole conversation before we go to the gym. Let me tell you about ramp.com, time is money saved, both with corporate cards.

[John Exley]

Bill pay, and more.

[Gabby Goldberg]

The average company saves 5% with.

[John Exley]

There we go. Flawless ADRI.

[Jordy Hayes]

Incredible. We'll have you guys. We'll have you guys do a proper, Proper guest. Guest host hosting session.

[John Exley]

Guest hosting would be fantastic if. Clearly.

[Jordy Hayes]

Well, if we ever. Yeah. Anymore. Some morning where we're like two hours in the gym. Not at all. Enough today. I'll call you guys up and you can fill in, but looking sharp. Hopefully you guys have some other costumes for later this evening. Trick or treating. But if not, tell them to go to tvpn.com all the kids you run into and tell them send all the.

[Gabby Goldberg]

Children to tvpn.com and.

[Jordy Hayes]

Cavie's gonna hand out APs, everyone.

[John Exley]

So you gotta get over there.

[Jordy Hayes]

Gotta get over there. Great to see you guys.

[John Exley]

Talk to you soon. Cheers. Bye.

[Gabby Goldberg]

Bye.

[John Exley]

We have to do a real ad read for numeralhq.com sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. We have Dean Ball coming on the show next. I don't know if he knows that we're dressed up as Mark and Ilya. Tyler, do you know Ball?

[Jordy Hayes]

Of course I know Ball. I can't keep getting away with it.

[John Exley]

This is one of the jokes that keeps getting funnier. Dean Ball is a senior fellow at fai, author of Hyperdimensional, former senior policy advisor for AI at the White House, and strategic advisor at the nsf. Previously at the Mercatus Center. Do you know the Mercatus Center?

[Jordy Hayes]

Of course.

[Gabby Goldberg]

Why?

[John Exley]

Do you know the Mercatus Center?

[Jordy Hayes]

Tyler Cowan.

[John Exley]

Of course. They absolutely goat himself. He's been at Stanford, Hoover Institution, the Manhattan Institute. Focuses on AI, emerging technology. He's in the Restream waiting room. Dean Ball, welcome to tvpn. How are you doing? Dean, Good to meet you.

[Jordy Hayes]

Welcome to the show.

[Dean Ball]

Hey, guys. Thanks for having me.

[John Exley]

Sorry to jump scare you on Halloween. We're having a lot of fun over here.

[Dean Ball]

I love it.

[John Exley]

It's crazy. You look exactly like Dean Ball. Your costume is flawless almost to a T. It's amazing. Were you in. Were you in six hours of makeup this morning? Make me look like Dean Ball.

[Dean Ball]

Exactly. Yeah. That's exactly what I said. Make me look like the former White House policy advisor.

[John Exley]

Yes, yes, yes.

[Jordy Hayes]

They know that actually would be potentially the most, like, scary costume is getting prosthetic makeup to look like yourself.

[John Exley]

Oh, my gosh.

[Jordy Hayes]

That might feel.

[John Exley]

It's a very jarring, very bizarre experience looking in the mirror and actually seeing, like, for the first time in my life, seeing something that looks like materially different from the way I.

[Jordy Hayes]

And I will say I did ask John. I was like, is Dean ready to do a somewhat serious interview with us? And extremely unserious characters. And we talked and we thought it'd be a really fun conversation even though we look absolutely ridiculous. But it's Great to have you on the show finally.

[John Exley]

Yeah, great to have you on the show. Thank you so much.

[Jordy Hayes]

You featured a bunch of your writing on the show over the last year, so very happy to have you on.

[Dean Ball]

Well, thank you guys very much. It's great to be here.

[John Exley]

Let's kick it off with sort of what's top of mind for you. There's a lot of different policy positions that I'm sure you could be working on. FAI is pretty big organization. It feels very, very significant to me, especially right now in this moment, but also just feels like the organization generally has been on a massive upswing. What has been the key focus this. This year for you? And then let's just kind of like continue to dial in the aperture and go and go deeper and deeper as we go.

[Dean Ball]

Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, started the year I was still a kind of policy scholar and writing at think tanks, including at fai. Yeah, worked on state policy, you know, the. All the crazy bills that were coming out at that time for AI regulation. And then in April moved to the White House. And so I wasn't writing anymore. And my focus was really entirely on the AI action plan plan, which the Trump administration released in July of this year, then a couple of weeks after that. Once the action plan seemed like it was in a good place and well accepted within the sort of bureaucracy of the federal government, I thought it would take longer to get it rolling downhill, but it really didn't take that long. So once I felt like it was in a good place, I retired from that role and went back to the private sector, where I feel like that's my strength. Writing, communicating, things like that, that.

[John Exley]

What do you think is a bigger force in AI regulation right now? A constituents who just don't like AI. I'm worried about it taking my job. I don't like the way it looks. It's slop, it's bad, it's brain rot, whatever. Like anti AI for just genuine direct. I don't like it. Reasons versus jockeying between labs of like, if I can get this law through, I will have an edge over you. And we're kind of doing jiu jitsu between both people who are actually both pro AI, but just trying to get a business edge. Is there one camp that you think is, like, more powerful?

[Dean Ball]

I think for the most part, it's the first thing you mentioned. I think it's that there's generally kind of a negative AI sentiment among the public. It's not that high salience of an issue, so people will say I want AI regulation. But then when you ask them how important of an issue is that to you? It's like 8, 9, 10. You know, immigration, economy is much higher. And like, once you get down to 8, 9, 10, it means it's not really an issue that. That many voters are making their decisions at the ballot box on. And so there's. But there's this general motivation that a lot of politicians feel of, you know, well, we let the Internet get away from us, we let social media get away from us. We can't let the same thing happen again. And so we have to be preemptive and regulate this time. That's basically their attitude.

[John Exley]

Then, then why is California trying to kneecap AI? Like, is it just a bigger issue within California? What are the dynamics in California specifically?

[Dean Ball]

So California views themselves much like the Europeans do. They view themselves. First of all, the one big difference is that California is also an exporter of technology, but the people in Sacramento are not. San Francisco is the exporter of technology. Sacramento views itself really as a nationwide regulator. So their mentality is the federal government's not going to act, especially President Trump. You know, they would say President Trump was irresponsible, so we have to act for him. And, you know, one thing that a senior European diplomat that told me when I was in government is when we want to talk policy in America, we fly from Brussels right over D.C. to Sacramento. So they're coordinating. The European Union has a coordinating office in San Francisco where they meet with legislators and companies. And it's basically like this sort of transnational governance regulation happening between California and Brussels.

[John Exley]

Interesting. And so is it correct to frame the idea of the motivations of Californian regulation as well? Nationally, AI regulation might be 8 or 9, but in California it's much higher because there's more visibility. Or is there something else that's driving the California regulation movement?

[Dean Ball]

I'm not sure it's a higher salience issue for the voters in California, but I think it's a higher salience issue for the legislators because the legislators smell power. Right? I mean, you can regulate this. You know what I think will be a multitrillion dollar industry while it's still nascent before. You know, one of the things about regulating now is like, if you tried to regulate the iPhone now in a major way, well, like 150 million Americans or whatever use iPhones. And so they'd be like, mad at you. But, like, AI is still a little bit nascent, and there's all kinds of use cases that might just be killed in the cradle. And you can control it, you know, much, much easier when it's a younger technology and you can control it. If you're California, you can control it for the entire country, more or less unilaterally. And it's Democratic super majority state, so they have all the cards.

[John Exley]

So if it's a low salience issue, is there a world where this is all about like leverage to get to generate more taxes to create a more balanced budget? Like what are the different incentives that are working within the California political like jockeying that's going on?

[Dean Ball]

I think certainly regulatory power is one of them, but I don't really think they're after money, particularly if you're a California legislator. The basic reality is that money kind of just prints itself. Yeah, they're basically opposed to scarcity like Petro state. Yeah. The petrodollars are not oil. Instead it is capital gains taxation.

[John Exley]

Yep.

[Dean Ball]

I had a. I was once talking to a California legislator who was on the budget committee and they get these like, you know, every other week or whatever they get these like reports from the state treasury about the state's fiscal position. This was a couple of years ago, sort of right post Covid. And they were like, we had a $10 billion surplus in the last month. And they were like, What? Where did $10 billion come out of nowhere? And it was the SNAP IPO. Yeah, it's all. Just one IPO generates that kind of revenue for the stock state. So, you know, and it's going to be like that on steroids when, you know, when, when the Frontier Lab employees start to have their liquidity events, the state is going to have an enormous windfall of capital gains tax.

[John Exley]

I mean. Yeah, there was a rumor just earlier this week about OpenAI going out at 1 trillion, which would be.

[Dean Ball]

Yeah.

[Jordy Hayes]

And already, already the employee pool of the public, the PBC is worth roughly at current marks like 130 billion. And so multiple on that, it's going to be substantial. How does this power struggle between Sacramento and D.C. around regulation play out going forward? I think people like Sachs have been not only talking about what Anthropic is doing, but I imagine doesn't want AI to be regulated at a state level. But how do you see this playing out over the next next, call it six months.

[Dean Ball]

Yeah, I don't think anyone wants to see AI regulated at the state level except for the California legislators. And so, you know, at the end of the day, I think the President Trump and Azar Sachs have made their position clear that we Want a nationwide legal framework to govern AI the question is going to be can we. Can Congress act? You know, can Congress get together and come up with something that sort of everyone can agree to? And I think we don't know the answer to that yet. I think, you know, it's hard to see where the politics will go. Politics evolve. They don't evolve quite as fast as I, but they evolve quite quickly. And so we could be in a totally different. There could be a total vibe shift between now and say, June. June's probably your cut off before the midterms to sort of get something serious done. And so, yeah. Can it happen? In principle, sure. But will, you know, we'll see.

[John Exley]

What are the, I don't know, like, what are the regulatory frameworks that either you think will actually land on or California is advocating for? I just remember we were watching the Elias Sitzgiver interview with a Guardian a couple years ago and the point he was making was like, in the long term, AGI might see humans like we see animals and just convert the entire earth like, you know, all the land into solar panels and, you know, sort of like a complete AGI doom scenario that doesn't seem like the focus of regulators today. He also was mentioning the risk of fake news and the idea of generative content potentially muddying the waters of understanding what's real on the Internet. That one feels like it's totally here today, but has also kind of always.

[Jordy Hayes]

Been here because of Photoshop, you know, tech. I don't correct me if I'm wrong, but tech has never gone through like a tech lash where there's so much video footage of the key players talking about the doom states, technology. So if you look back, go look at interview footage of Sam Altman and all these people and they will say like, yes, there's, you know, or Ilya, the one you're referencing. Like, it's very possible the world will be covered with solar panels and data center.

[John Exley]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jordy Hayes]

And we were playing that video this morning while we were getting this crazy, you know, you know, costumes on. And like the, the people that were doing it were like, that sounds horrible. Like they listened to the whole thing and they were like, I don't want any of that. Yeah, it's not like during social media there wasn't footage of Mark Zuckerberg being like, it's very possible.

[John Exley]

But the election could be.

[Jordy Hayes]

Social media won't be social.

[John Exley]

You know, like the Facebook data could be used to target voters or something like that.

[Jordy Hayes]

So that's just like Incredible ammo that I imagine in Sacramento they're pulling up and it's like, okay, you want to go with what this guy wants and not what our.

[John Exley]

Yeah, yeah. What's the dynamic there? Are they actually pulling up doomers?

[Jordy Hayes]

It's hard to be like, oh, I didn't mean that. It was just kind of a sci fi thing.

[John Exley]

Yeah, it helped with fundraising, actually.

[Dean Ball]

It really depends. So there's people in the California legislature and elsewhere that have sort of very mundane concerns. And that's like sort of your modal policymaker, I would say. That's kind of. Yeah, your. Your misinformation, your deep fakes, the things. Not that they're not serious, but that are here today. And then there's the people that are thinking about these sort of very far flung doom scenarios. There's not that many legislators who do that, but there are a lot of people in like, quote unquote, AI policy who think about that. And so they do influence some of the legislation. One of the funny things, though, is that thus far the legislation that that camp, the sort of AI safety camp has been able to get through has actually been like, somewhat more measured than some of the crazier stuff that we've seen from the people that don't know anything about the technology and just kind of have a generally hostile attitude. Like, state of Illinois banned mental health chatbots, which is basically like, If I ask ChatGPT, you know, if I say like, hey, I'm having a bad day, can you like, tell me something to make me feel better? In Illinois, that's like a chatbot engaging in mental health services in the till. You. That's crazy. Yeah, it's like really. It's really crazy. Yeah. That's not like a doomer bill, you know.

[John Exley]

No, totally.

[Dean Ball]

That's like. That's.

[Jordy Hayes]

Nashville's been going on their own path because of how big the music industry is there.

[John Exley]

Yeah. Can you get us up to speed on that? Like the regulation of AI music We were talking about Suno earlier this week. I think we're gonna have the founder on, but would be very interested to hear the. The how that landscape differs from other. Other regulatory pushes.

[Dean Ball]

Yeah, so you're talking about something called the Elvis act, which passed last year. And yeah, basically that's a bill that's about like name, image, likeness, basically saying if you're a celebrity residing in the state of Tennessee, you can't. If someone makes an AI model that mimics your style or mimics a song of yours or your likeness or something like that, that then you have a right to sue them. Not for copyright, because copyright is a federal issue. But name, image, likeness is a sort of property. Right. That's like done at the, at the state level. Yeah, that's part, that's a creature of state law for the most part.

[John Exley]

Yeah.

[Dean Ball]

So that's what they control there. Yeah.

[John Exley]

And is there any early read on where that will pencil out? We were talking to. I forget who we were talking to. We were talking to somebody about how that is. Oh, it was Zach Kukoff. He was talking about how the Elvis act plays into national geopolitics and some players who are on the national stage are wanting to win at the.

[Jordy Hayes]

Pretty smart naming the Elvis act. Sounds like something that anybody would want to pass. Sounds cool.

[John Exley]

You don't think it would go farther if it was the Gunna Act?

[Jordy Hayes]

What's going on? You had a post, it was last week call calling out. There's a group. Max Tegmark said a stunningly broad coalition has come out against Skynet. AI researchers, faith leaders, business pioneers, policy makers, NATSAC folks and actors stand together and they say we call for a prohibition on the development of superintelligence not lifted before there is one broad scientific consensus that will be done safely and controllably and 2 strong public buy in. It's kind of a crazy thing to try to require from my view, because even the scientific community cannot agree on much and everybody has these like wildly different, you know, strategies and incentives. And then of course it's very possible that the public will never to rely on the public of how we should should develop technology that has to do with national security and try to make it like a direct democracy. But maybe unpack what the latest is on that front.

[Dean Ball]

Yeah, so I mean the statement is very simple. It says no superintelligence until we have agreement that it's good until there's broad public buy in. So I think the first problem with this is like, look, if you want to have a letter signed by a bunch of important people or celebrities and whatnot that says superintelligence is something that has profound implications and we should really think about it and we should have groups of, you know, civil society type of stuff, that's fine with me. There have been letters like that in the past and I haven't complained about them. But when you say ban, you're making an ask about public policy. Not only that, you're actually making an ask about global public policy. Because you know, the superintelligence could be trained in China, could be trained in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, a lot of other places, are amassing large amounts of compute. It's not like we're the only people that can do this. And a lot of the researchers who do this work are highly mobile. So like you need a global treaty to ban superintelligence. That's what they're asking for. And the problem is that not only is there not scientific consensus about the safety of such a thing, more importantly, there's not scientific consensus about what superintelligence is. If GPT5 or let's say GPT7, say that it like can make novel advancements in mathematics, it can come up with new theorems and what whatnot, come up with new science, but say it also can't autonomously plan a wedding. For me, I think that's a very plausible future, by the way. I think it's super. That's super possible that we'll get advanced, you know, genius mathematic AI before we get sort of an agent that can like plan a wedding for you.

[Jordy Hayes]

Truly, truly agentic AI.

[Dean Ball]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so like, what, you know which one of those is super intelligence, right?

[John Exley]

Like, no, no, I mean, take an even more extreme example. We, we were reflecting on the original OpenAI definition which Ilya was reflecting on, which is AI. You should be able to tell it to do a job and it should be able to do that, any job at the level of a human. And we were sitting for three hours getting makeup done and we were like, okay, to replace this job with AI, you need the most flawless humanoid robots. Because this is not a digital task. You, you need dexterity. But also understanding the artistry of how the colors blend and mixing the different chemicals and stuff. Like, it's just like, it's just like, and that's for like, you know, just a, it's just makeup. It's just like, it's not, it's not as complicated as the IMO gold medal. And yet because it exists in this cross domain world, it's somehow more challenging. So, yeah, it's just a fascinating thing that we, yeah, we did not have dynamic.

[Jordy Hayes]

That's interesting now is like, like I feel like the industry like is somewhat going through a small period of disillusionment when like the big labs are, you know, or OpenAI doing like Sora and announcing erotica and stuff like that and realizing like, wait, like I thought we were building, you know, super intelligence. Like, why are we, you know, creating more forms of social media and. But that's at the same Time that you have like peak sort of like fear and like peak pressure to make moves from a regulatory standpoint because people are afraid of, you know, runaway super intelligence and, you know, losing, losing their job and all these things. And also big tech companies have been doing layoffs and the CEOs want to say like, well, we did these like the. As a CEO, you want to say, like, well, we're getting so much efficiency out of our, you know, AI. Like, of course we're doing layoffs, but in reality it's like they just went through, they've been bloated for a while. There's, you know, X is a good case study of like, you can cut, you know, like a lot of people and still have a functioning business. And so I don't know, there's just such a complicated moment.

[John Exley]

Do you think there's a massive tech lash coming?

[Dean Ball]

Yeah, probably would be my guess. I don't know exactly what will cause it. Maybe it'll be fears about labor market, which could be real, could be not, not could be caused by AI. Could be not. Could also be electricity prices. I think that's, that's very possible. And so like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So again, like the super intelligence ban, like it's doing populist politics that are based on kind of vague emotional sentiment. And that's like the problem with that is that those kinds of broad statements that implicate policy tend to not lead to good places. Defund the police was one of them. Net zero by 2030 was another one where it's like, we have no real plan for how to do this, but we're going to articulate some broad goal that sounds good that everyone can kind of, you know, you can just slide down the incentive curve of politics and it's, it's, it will not lead to good places, I basically guarantee you.

[John Exley]

Yeah, that makes sense.

[Dean Ball]

Even if you're worried about AI safety, even if you're worried about AI safety.

[John Exley]

If you're, if you're to rank the reasons, like, if we rank like AI safety is like the 8th or 9th most salient political topic. And then within AI, you rank the most salient worries. Job losses, energy prices. Those are at the top. How far down do you have to go until people start caring about dead Internet theory and like the sloppy vacation, because it does feel like it's esthetically like risky. Because if you launch a model early, it's sloppier, it doesn't have great aesthetics. And then you're faced with the question of like, so my Internet went. My electricity prices went up and I got slop as opposed to my Internet prices went up and yeah, I actually got like a kind of super powered Google search. Like, it's actually pretty great. Like, it's definitely helping me at work.

[Dean Ball]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it's a little bit of both. I think there's a lot of people who say deterioration of the Internet is definitely happening. Yeah, I think that's true.

[Karim Atiyeh]

Right.

[Dean Ball]

I mean, I think it's. The current experience of the Internet has gotten worse, I would say. And I mean, with the exception of the AI models themselves, which are great. But yeah, I mean, that's like, probably true. I think it's. I think it's up there. I think it's way above like catastrophic risk, you know, Like, I think if you were to put like autonomous cyber attacks, you know, bioweapon development, I think that's probably lower than no way. This sort of slop stuff, I would guess. Yeah, it's interesting to see. I don't know if anyone's ever done that, but to see.

[John Exley]

So we were reflecting on this this week. We had Christina from Vanta on talking about security, and then we also had the CEO of CrowdStrike on and we were kind of blown away. Reflecting on. We've been in the AI boom for two years at least, and we haven't really had a moment where we're like, oh yeah, that major cyber, that outage, that cybersecurity incident, that problem, that hack, that virus, that's generative, AI's unique. That hasn't happened. Like, AWS went down last week and it was just misconfigured DNS on a database. There's been a bunch of crazy cyber attack stories. None of them have been related to Genai just yet. I still think it has to be coming at some point, but until you get that solid anecdote, it feels very hard to go and run the campaign of like, never, never again will we allow this to happen when it hasn't happened for the first time.

[Dean Ball]

That's how it always goes with tail risks. You know, people can't really internalize them until they actually happen. And then there you go. I actually wouldn't shock me if we see something like that in the next six to 18 months because the models are now getting good enough that that kind of thing seems possible. Biological cyber bio is going to take a little bit longer.

[Karim Atiyeh]

Longer.

[Dean Ball]

But cyber, cyber, maybe even cyber might take, or bio might take much longer because, like actually making a bioweapon is still hard in the physical world. But cyber is purely digital. There's already many skilled cyber attackers, so it feels, it feels like plausible. Luckily, you know, cyber defense is keeping up right now. You know, we've seen a lot of advancements there too.

[John Exley]

Yeah, yeah, there are definitely like script kitties that go around and just like to unplug different pieces of the Internet for fun. And it's almost like it can be state actors, but it's also, it just feels like low stakes. It doesn't feel like often like these like little cyber attacks are like life and death, so they feel lower stakes. They feel more like theft and like economic crimes almost. But being like, I'm gonna go release bubonic plague, like that feels like way more like act of war or like mass murder. Like, it puts you, it takes you from like script key kitty, who wants to deface a website with a DDoS attack to like, okay, you're doing a mass shooting now.

[Jordy Hayes]

You posted a comment.

[Dean Ball]

It's interesting how.

[John Exley]

Yeah, let's get.

[Dean Ball]

Oh, I just think it's interesting how these cyber risks, though, we think of them as like, yeah, it's not an act of war, it's just an economic crime because it's like purely digital. At the same time. If North Korea had a bunch of people that were going into hospitals every other week and stealing medical equipment or taking people's patient records, we'd be like, yeah, yeah, we're going to kill you. We're going to destroy your country if you do that to us. So it's weird, it's interesting how people think about these things and sort of compartmentalize them.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, you posted a couple days ago. My sense is that selling Blackwell chips to China would quite possibly be the most unpopular tech policy move of the Trump admin, especially on Capitol Hill. It's plausible that the long term, really, even near term result will be much more compute regulation. Any updates, thoughts on that front? It didn't, Blackwell's didn't, I guess, come into the negotiation in South Korea, but you still expecting them to be a part of some sort of deal.

[Dean Ball]

I think it could very well happen eventually. And by the way, the wisdom of doing it changes over time. Right. The chips get worse over the chips, you know, there's, there's new chips come in and they get much better. And so, you know, like, the idea of selling Blackwells to China in two years is very different from the idea of selling them today. I think part of the reason that it seemed like many people in the Trump administration, you Know, were opposed to this move. Was that like, you know, we're racking Blackwells in American data centers right now.

[John Exley]

Yeah, right.

[Dean Ball]

Like, it was different with the hopper, because the hopper was a previous generation. So the H20, maybe the pill went down a little bit easier. But I think with this, it's like, yeah, I think that you have to. I think it's on the merits and politically, you gotta wait. Yeah, you gotta wait.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah. What did you think about basically giving American companies a RO for on the Blackwell? Is that something that you think makes sense?

[Dean Ball]

You mean like, this is like the.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, basically like every American. If every American company says, yeah, if.

[John Exley]

Infinius says there's no more American companies that want to buy from us, well, then, yeah, you can go sell some determination China. That feels.

[Dean Ball]

So this is like the.

[Karim Atiyeh]

Yeah.

[Dean Ball]

There's a bill in Congress right now in the ndaa, the end of year defense bill called the GAIN AI act that basically tries to do this. You know, I think it's an interesting idea. I think the problem always is, like, how exactly do you operationalize that? Particularly because there's things, you know, in this that are like, well, the public, the hyperscalers are going to have to disclose things kind of to the public about like, you know, that sort of sensitive proprietary information. So, like, how exactly do you do that? I personally have not been super in the weeds on gain. But like, but like, yeah, I think that. I think the implementation is a challenge there. And that's kind of what I was saying though is like, you know, so many people in Congress are opposed to the idea of selling Blackwells to China right now that I think if the admin had done it in Korea this past week, I think there's a very high chance that you would have seen maybe some legislation with unintended consequences pass.

[John Exley]

What about the idea of you don't sell the Blackwells, but you do allow Chinese companies to purchase cloud computing resources from American hyperscalers. Is that more palatable? Who gets upset in that world?

[Dean Ball]

Well, that's the status quo right now.

[John Exley]

Sure.

[Dean Ball]

You know, that's basically what happens right now. And so.

[John Exley]

Wait, wait, but could Deepseek or High Flyer actually go to AWS and say, we want to do, you know, a billion dollar training run?

[Dean Ball]

They could. Yeah, there's nothing, there's nothing restricting them from that now. I think Deep Sea kind of rolls their own. I think they build their own data centers and do everything themselves. But yeah, like, I mean, Chinese companies definitely do make use of American compute. Now that Being said, I think the Chinese government doesn't like that. I think the Chinese government does all kinds of things to disincentivize them. So it's. It's a complicated thing that makes a lot of sense.

[Jordy Hayes]

What's your approach to truth seeking? One of the challenges in trying to even conceptualize what the right policy approach is on a number of these issues is that everyone is just heavily conflicted. There's just so much money sloshing around. It's like the people that have the most knowledge of what's happening at the frontier quite possibly have somewhere between 10 and a billion dollars of, like, riding on a certain approach. And so I'm curious to know, like, kind of how you try to clock, like, the truth.

[Dean Ball]

I always try to start from technical fundamentals. So when I decided to get into writing about AI policy, one of the first things that I learned to do was like, train a toy neural network for myself just so I could see how things worked. Right. And I like to really understand the sort of roots of the technology that I'm talking about, whether that's the physical world or the digital world. And that helps a lot. That helps ground you quite a bit to understand those sort of actual constraints and where the technology might actually go. And then beyond that, you know, it's listening to a lot of different people. It's understanding financial incentives closely. Right? You have to understand how everyone is incentivized. And you kind of know, like, there are a lot of areas where incentives are for you to sort of spin reality in a certain way. Those are a lot of other people who have incentives to just basically tell the truth. And you have to just be able to. To differentiate between those things. And so, yeah, you know, I mean, it's like, it's basically just, you know, there's no simple way. It's just read a ton of stuff, listen to a lot of people, maintain an open mind and be humble all the time.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, that makes sense. What neck like, like, how are you forecasting next year? What do you think the most important issues, Is it more. Is it more of the same? Is it. Is there going to be a new conversation that you kind of see on the horizon? You know, basically, like, is the debate around, you know, chip sales just going to continue throughout the entire admin, or do you think it'll at any point settle?

[Dean Ball]

I think that debate will continue. And then I think, you know, more broadly, though, my guess is that that issue becomes less salient in AI policy over time. Time and probably more people join the sort of join the debate right now policy is very much an elite conversation. You know, it's not something that a lot of people like, the average American, so to speak, is thinking about that much. But I think that starts to change again. Maybe it's the electricity prices, maybe it's the jobs, maybe it's a little bit of both. Maybe it's also some crisis that happens, like cyber stuff. But I think that like, in general, the salience will go up and it will also be quite complicated because. Because I also expect that in 2026, just like this year, a very meaningful fraction of GDP growth will be coming from AI. So policymakers are going to find themselves, I think, in a bind.

[John Exley]

Oh, yeah, sorry. I know we're wrapping up, but I'd love to know your thoughts on like the AI as the only driver of GDP meme. How real do you think that is? How bad do you think that is?

[Chris Messina]

Yeah, it's interesting.

[Jordy Hayes]

Some people hear that and they're like, this is bad. And then the other take is like, if we're not doing this, like, it's even worse.

[Dean Ball]

Yeah, yeah. So I think it is. It is a big chunk of it. You know, I think it's probably at least like 25 to 50% of growth right now. Another big chunk. Like the Q2 number was really high. It was like 4%. And a chunk of that is definitely companies stockpiling in anticipation of tariffs.

[Jordy Hayes]

Tariffs.

[Dean Ball]

So they're like mass importing stuff, which is going to be counted toward gdp. So it's like there's some of that going on probably.

[Karim Atiyeh]

And.

[Dean Ball]

But yeah, I mean, I think that it's almost certainly the case, the gdp, you know, if I had to put in, if I had to guess, I would guess it's something like 40%. AI is something like 40. And of course, yeah. And that's just enabling AI. That's just AI CapEx. That's not even, you know, know what is AI enabling?

[John Exley]

Like business services and accelerated revenue growth and productivity. Yeah, I mean, like, like how much of Google's revenue should be counted in like AI GDP now or like Instagram reels? Like if it's an. If there's an AI slop video that goes viral and that generates 20 million in AI ad revenue, are we counting that in GDP? We have no idea yet. It's going to be. It's going to be years before we have understand it.

[Jordy Hayes]

Last question that I'd be curious to get your read on is sentiment around. We're a couple months out from the intel deal. How is Washington and Capitol Hill feeling about that deal? Obviously it looks good on paper for the taxpayer, but do you expect to see more of this kind of thing? We've saw it with MP material materials as well, but what's your read?

[Dean Ball]

I think you'll absolutely see more of it. More equity positions. I'm long USG equity positions in private companies. For better and for worse. I think that will continue to be a thing. We've seen it throughout the critical mineral supply chain. In fact, a lot of other companies, not just MP Intel.

[John Exley]

How new is this on? Is this a Trump thing? Specifically, Is this a 2020s thing? Are there other examples of Americans doing this?

[Dean Ball]

It's not new under the sun, but it's new in recent history, particularly for companies that have like sort of consumer brands.

[John Exley]

Sure.

[Dean Ball]

But yeah, like, it is. This sort of national champion model is not something that's. It's not. Again, America did it, you know, a lot. You know, there are periods of American history where we did this a lot.

[John Exley]

And not in a total crisis like Government Motors, General Motors, the bailout of the banks. Like that is very different than, okay. Nvidia and AMD are doing pretty well. Intel's not exactly going bankrupt. There's a lot of market cap there. But we're still going to come in and do something.

[Dean Ball]

I think Intel's position was really precarious and you really needed that. I mean, I think you needed not just the injection of capital which they were going to get either way, but kind of that vote of confidence and kind of that indication to the market that like, hey, this really is, is like, you know, the US government is serious about this. That says things to OpenAI as they think about developing their ASIC says things to Apple, it says things to Nvidia, it says things to all sorts of people. And you've already seen some of these companies respond in kind with, you know, new, new orders to intel or at least partnerships with them of various kinds. So I think you'll see more of that in terms of intel itself. I think people in D.C. are pretty nervous still because Intel's got a serious Hill decline. You know, they've got a promising roadmap and they have to execute on it. And thus far the execution has been shifted, shaky. And their track record shouldn't make you confident.

[John Exley]

Yeah. Have you been surprised that we haven't seen an OpenAI intel deal yet? Sam Altman seems ready to do deals with everyone. Intel feels like it needs a deal. It needs several deals. That feels like A match made in heaven. And yet I haven't seen it yet. What do you think?

[Dean Ball]

I have to think it's gestating. I have to think that probably other companies, I mean, if they're smart, they will.

[John Exley]

Yep, yeah, totally.

[Dean Ball]

Just as a political matter.

[John Exley]

I mean there's just so many, like, I've seen so many pundits like asianometry laid out the thesis that Nvidia should dual source their CPU for Grace. For Grace Hopper from intel. Make the CPUs there, don't go to TSMC for those. Support intel as a fab in and a provider. So fascinating, dynamic and I feel like the intel story is going to be one of the most interesting.

[Jordy Hayes]

Any plans to write a book?

[John Exley]

You've written a book?

[Dean Ball]

You know, I've been. No, I haven't. No, no, no. But I'm thinking about it. We'll see. More to come, maybe. I'm pondering it. Hard to know what's going on.

[Jordy Hayes]

It feels hard if you're kind of like writing about what's happening to like pick something and start writing, writing, you know, hundreds of pages when like everything's so in flux that you could write like, you know, six chapters that then maybe made like that aren't even an important part of the story.

[John Exley]

Sure, sure.

[Dean Ball]

Yeah. If I picked up the phone and called an agent today, you'd probably be looking at a publication date of like Q1, 2028. Someone just the other day I was asking like, why the hell are these supply chains so long for? Like, why is the timeline so long for books? And they told me it's because it's a manufacturing business run by humanities maybe. No way that makes sense.

[John Exley]

Yeah, that's funny. Maybe the answer is Kindle Print on Demand or something like that.

[Dean Ball]

There you go.

[John Exley]

Kindle Digital Publishing. Right next to all the literotica. We can slot in some geopolitical analysis.

[Dean Ball]

The AI slot books.

[John Exley]

Yeah. Oh, there's, I'm sure so many.

[Jordy Hayes]

Somebody's going to hit you up and be like, I can generate you 10 books by. By next week.

[John Exley]

Where can people find you? Where can people follow you in the meantime until the book drops in 2028? You heard it here.

[Dean Ball]

You can find me. I've got a substack at hyperdimensional and on Twitterball ball. Like football.

[John Exley]

There we go. Thank you so much, Dean.

[Jordy Hayes]

Great to finally have you on. Welcome back. Anytime.

[John Exley]

Chat all the time. We'll talk to you soon.

[Dean Ball]

Thanks guys. Great to chat.

[Jordy Hayes]

Cheers.

[John Exley]

Have a good one. Bye. Let me tell you about Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one performance benchmarks. Number one in competitive bake offs. Number one ranking on G2. And breaking news from Sam Altman. GPT6 will be renamed GPT6.7. You're welcome. He's doing the Six Seven meme.

[Jordy Hayes]

But it's a joke.

[John Exley]

It's a joke.

[Jordy Hayes]

Okay.

[John Exley]

Wow. That one really did not hit. That was remarkably, remarkably not.

[Jordy Hayes]

Oh, it's a joke.

[John Exley]

Funny. I, I, this got 30, I thought 37,000 likes.

[Jordy Hayes]

I thought you were going to say. I thought you were going to say. It'll just be the chat. GPT 2026.

[John Exley]

I would like that. I think that actually would be a better naming scene. No, he's having fun with the, with the 67 meme.

[Jordy Hayes]

Go through some timeline with Tyler.

[John Exley]

Not my shtick, not my. Well, I will first go through Addio customer relationship Magic. Adeo is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free. Let's see what in the timeline should me and Tyler talk about what is here? Tesla Roadster. Sam Altman has asked for a refund. He says a story in three parts, a tale in three acts. Act one, your Roadster reservation is complete. This was in 2018, long time ago. Tyler was five years old. He put down $45,000 as a reservation payment. Then act two, Sam Altman emails reservations at Tesla. Hi, I'd like to cancel my reservation. Could you please refund me the 50k? And he's just trying to riz an extra 5k out of Elon. Did you notice this?

[Jordy Hayes]

Because it was originally 45.

[John Exley]

It was 45k now. Okay, with interest with inflation, Sam clearly deserves 50. But it's a wild move to just have 45k on the line and be like, Can I get 50? Can we round to the nearest 50? But when you're Sam, I guess is being cents, it's probably pretty reasonable. So he says, can you refund me the 50k? I think he's actually just rounding. I think he's like, yeah, send me 45, but I'm going to refer to it as 50 because I'm rounding to the nearest 50k, I guess. But then he gets an address. Now found reservationsesla.com is unavailable to receive emails. Recipients rejected.

[Jordy Hayes]

He could use the extra feature.

[John Exley]

You think so?

[Jordy Hayes]

I think you could put it to work in the business.

[John Exley]

One more Blackwell.

[Jordy Hayes]

Nobody's losing more money than OpenAI. Every 5k. 5k can go a long way.

[John Exley]

That's true. Yeah, Tesla and SpaceX seem to be.

[Jordy Hayes]

Doing that's one minute. That's one minute of soar costs. Every minute counts.

[John Exley]

But I mean this just feels like they changed whatever the email is in the last seven years. But it is remarkable that the project has been in process so long that the email address has been forgotten. And also I would assume that this type of stuff happens all the time because I imagine that people are canceling and placing new Tesla Roadster orders like all the time. So you would think you'd want to be monitoring that box. Well, oh well, it's funny to read into it as like more battles between, between Elon and Sam, although I don't think that's what's going on here. It's more of just a funny quirk of their email configuration. Bernd Hobart says, wow, Elon passes the replies to your email in under a minute. Test. That guy is going places. Bullish. Well, whatever you think about Tesla, you can buy it, you can sell it on public.com, investing for those take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields and they're trusted by mill. Jordy Hayes. What would you like to do next?

[Jordy Hayes]

Let's bring in our next guest, Aidan Sudguth.

[John Exley]

Welcome to the stream.

[Jordy Hayes]

There he is.

[John Exley]

You look fantastic. How are you doing?

[Aidan Sudguth]

Hey, Jordy and John. Happy Halloween.

[John Exley]

Wait, wait, wait. What are you drinking? What is next to you?

[Jordy Hayes]

Wow.

[Aidan Sudguth]

Do you recognize this drink?

[John Exley]

Of course I recognize that drink.

[Jordy Hayes]

Cheers.

[John Exley]

That is Andrew Huberman's Matayina Yerba Mate. We refer to it as a podcast in a can.

[Jordy Hayes]

It's hard to drink this on my end. The fake beard is getting into getting into the drink. But it's great to see you. You're looking sharp. Do you wear a suit often? You look very natural in it.

[Aidan Sudguth]

You know what, I used to wear a uniform in high school. It's coming back to me and I'm a huge Formula one fan. So I feel like I'm already wearing like this is the cap you normally get when you're on the podium with kind of the reeds. So I feel very good. Taste year.

[Jordy Hayes]

Championship, championship hat.

[John Exley]

How'd you actually get into venture?

[Aidan Sudguth]

It's a good story. I was Google's first product manager and then first international sales manager. Always wanted to start something. Both my parents were entrepreneurs and I felt it's just kind of the way of the Valley. You go from being an operator to being an investor. But interestingly, originally I thought hey, maybe like the right way to do it is like go Get a stage stint at a venture firm. And the five firms that I talked to not only told me I wouldn't make a good vc, they told me I wouldn't even make avc. I just did not have the wherewithal. So I'm sure many people also wanted that. Your idea would not run.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah. Did they have any good reasons? Did you agree with them on anything? Obviously they were wrong.

[Aidan Sudguth]

But it's so funny. I wasn't an engineer. I wasn't senior enough at Google. I never had done anything in venture again. Maybe on paper it makes sense, but to be honest with you, it's the best thing that happened because I always feel rejection. I call it rocket fuel. And it was such a simple situation where I had to burn the bridges. And the only way to prove the skeptics wrong, to actually get into the business and do well. And even after 20 years, I'm like, 10 IPOs is still not enough. 100X. I think it should be 200 exits and maybe then the point will sink in.

[Jordy Hayes]

Hit that gong. Oh yeah, great hit. How big was your first fund?

[Aidan Sudguth]

The first fund, actually I started as a solo LP and solo GP, which was only four and a half million. And then our first institutional fund in 2010 was only 41 million modest amounts.

[John Exley]

What story did folks tell at Google about the funding of Google that helped you kind of understand how venture works? Like, I've heard this story about Sequoia invested that was probably more like a traditional round. There's also this maybe apocryphal story about somebody going to their car and writing a check before the company was even founded. Like, what was your introduction to Just.

[Jordy Hayes]

Like Bezos Tank and a flyer.

[John Exley]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What stories did you draw on where you were like, this worked out for this particular person really well in the Google story that I felt and experienced. And I want to go and recreate that.

[Aidan Sudguth]

I mean, look, I was there like right after the Sequoia Klein around. First of all, the biggest thing about Google is that that what people sometimes misunderstand about this business is all about outliers, positive outliers. And the best training for that is to actually be an outlier. And I think more than the VC story, to me, it was my experience working for Larry Page, because every single thing that I've done in that first year for Larry, he would see it and I'm like, this is kind of 1% of what I'm expecting. Like you need to do things 10x faster, like 10x more. And then it's like, you know what, maybe humans are not meant to do that. And my joke is like one of my projects was to launch Google in international languages because I wasn't an engineer, I spoke six languages and I'm like, look, you know what I can do for Google is make sure it's launched in non English languages. And he was frustrated with that. And so I always tell people I'm an occasional and accidental father or grandfather of Google Translate because they're like, from now on, anything that's internationalization or translation, let's make sure machines do it and not humans.

[Jordy Hayes]

That makes sense. What was your first true home run venture?

[Aidan Sudguth]

So the first true home run venture, you can define it in many different ways. My first billion dollar exit was Meraki which started as a Wi fi project in Mountain View with Google. And I was one of three ex Googlers that invested in it. And the first IPO was Shopify. And that was amazing, like showing up to nice not for Google's ipo, but as an investor that hey, early believer and the company was great. And what was crazy is like $2.7 billion valuation at IPO for Shopify and today there are like 150, like another 50x from that. Google was similar. Like it went 40x from the IPO. And that in a nutshell is positive outliers. And I can't imagine better examples of outliers.

[John Exley]

Yeah, that's remarkable.

[Jordy Hayes]

Completely. What about more recently? You've done Mercour, Supabase and others. Maybe we start with Mercour. We just had Brendan on earlier this week to talk about the new financing. You guys have been in a couple rounds now, is that right?

[Aidan Sudguth]

Two rounds. Two rounds. We are huge fans of Brandon and his co founders. Look, I think it's another great example. When I started like right after Google, we thought going 0 to 100 million in 10 years was a great achievement. Maybe eight to 10 years. I had companies like Shopify go IPO in six years. But Mercour is a new breed of company. They went 0 to 100 million in gross revenues and 11 million months. They essentially have built this great platform where they can essentially find any type of talent or discipline in the world, find the people, have AI, interview them and generate expertise and data based on that. And it's just like again, what's so exciting about the AI age is these companies you never thought would be at this kind of scale are able to deliver these things because it's just that age and that opportunity. We're very lucky to be part of it. We are huge fans of Brandon and team. And then Supabase is another great example. We are like listen, some of the most valuable tech companies were database companies and somebody is going to build a developer friendly backend. At that time there was a front end company but no real backend company. It was crazy because when we invested in Supabase we did almost a growth round valuation and the traction was not even close to a million in ARR. And since then the company has grown own 50, 70, 80x plus in just a few years. And that makes me think like what you're doing is really special because the private companies are growing 500 to 1000% and public companies are growing at 20%. So it's a 50x delta. So in case anybody is wondering why it's interesting and exciting to be in venture or to be involved with private companies, the very best are doing an insane job. And I think those are the stories that need to be out there. And that's why I love my job. I feel like it's super based on.

[Jordy Hayes]

The so they announced their series A in October 28th of 2021. I'm assuming you guys did the deal like you know, some late summer or something like that at the time, was that a deal that you think maybe other people would have passed on because of the price? Like it just looks crazy. Obviously was the peak.

[Aidan Sudguth]

So we did the series and it was really interesting. Not only did multiple other VCs passed on price, but they went and then invested in competitors because they could get in at half the valuation. But we never compromise what we believe is our belief in the founders and the company. And look, I mean at the end this business is all about early belief and it's all the founders. We get to participate in their journeys. And Supabay is a prime example. They had all the initial signs that things could be really great. Like I said, traction was really low. They were starting to essentially take off among developers and it was built on postgres, it was very technical and people are like no, nothing could be worth that valuation at that stage with only that much signal. I think that's the magic of Felicis is that when we back these incredible founders, the success is far from obvious. But then after we invest, these companies go through these insane hockey stick growth curves and Supabay is a prime example of that, as is Mercor.

[John Exley]

How do you think about what is different about this boom, this moment from previous cycles, the top things that have really changed in the last two years that justify more investment that change the job of the venture capitalist are we're seeing higher growth rates. We're also seeing higher capex requirements for some tech companies than before. We're seeing just more potential new markets because you could be going after a labor pool instead of a different like an existing market. There's entirely net new markets. There's questions about enterprise adoption churn like what in your mind is different different this time around from the mobile wave, the cloud wave or anything else that informs how you're underwriting deals this year?

[Aidan Sudguth]

Yeah, look, I have seen the Internet wave as well as the mobile wave. There are a couple things that are really different. One is the point that we were getting at is that venture game, it is very basic, is essentially it's a growth game. If you find a company that is growing 50x faster than public companies, it's going to end up in a good place. And even if you're off by 10x on price, if you're in one of those companies, things are going to work out for you. Also interestingly, 20 years ago when I first got into business, a lot of people would worry about distribution. But the reality is today everybody's watching YouTube, everybody has a mobile device. Distribution is no longer a product. But what is really interesting that is different is the AI age. Normally before with software, first the budget was limited. I don't think any company is going to spend more than 10% of their budget on software. But also the value creation was different. Like software, yes, it is helping you, but still people are working with it. You have to put data in it and then to get value out of it, you have to look at the results and say, okay, now I'm going to do something based on what the software is telling me. And the software is like streamlining it a little bit. In AI age, what's really stunning is like you now can have a full closed loop without humans where everything is being done by AI. So the data entry is automatic, the data output is automatic. I sometimes think of a turbo engine in a car. Like one of the interesting technologies is you take the exhaust gas and then if you channel it into the engine, the car can accelerate a lot faster. So in some ways, like what is happening with AI, there is growth, growth vectors in so many different areas. I had to make an engine example since I'm wearing a formula one like hat. But first of all there is so much more value creation and now you're going after labor which depending on the sectors you look at is like 40, 50, 60, 70% of a company's budget. So the dollars at stake is so much larger.

[John Exley]

How much more important is it now to think about terminal market structure? Because I completely agree with you, the growth rates are insane. Insane. The risk, I feel like, is not that the growth isn't real, it's just that you pick a market and there's one company that goes from 1 to 10 million in ARR to 100 million in ARR. And you project that out and you're like, well, the market's 50 billion. They're going to get there really fast. But if the market can support 50 companies that all grow really fast and they all take 2% of the market market, then you will see some sort of S curve in the growth rate. At some point. I feel like there's some markets that will probably be perfectly competitive, some that will be highly monopolistic and everything in between. And it feels like as a venture capitalist, it's going to pay to be the type of person that can clock how markets play out. Does that map with what you're thinking, what you're trying to do?

[Aidan Sudguth]

Look, I think you're getting at a very important point, which is, is it is not just enough to have high growth, but you need to have durable growth. And we use the examples of Google, Shopify, even like more recently we had companies like Canva. And I think one of the things that people sometimes really underestimate is that that kind of high growth compounded will generate stunning results. And one of the things that I learned from both Google and Shopify is that if and when you choose the right markets, you will probably get the sizing right. But if you choose a mega, mega market, even at what we think success, there is still so much of the market left. One of the things that I never realized is even when Shopify went IPO, it was less than 1% of that market. And that's what helped it get a 40x growth. After that, same thing happened to Google. And the very best companies can also expand the market. So to your question though, one of the things that we really pay attention is what are the moats of these companies is not just that they have the chance of high growth growth, but how durable will it be? A lot of times it's the founders. A lot of times it's also different elements. For instance, we very frequently talk about data modes at Felicis. Right? Like one of the things that helps you differentiate is if you have data that nobody else has, since data is the new oil that's going to Be a huge differentiator, because at the end of the day, there's a lot of AI tech and that's more pervasive. But if you have data that nobody else has, that's going to be tremendous value. And if you start doing something where you basically become a key part of the process, people are not going to rip you off. So we just recently won a term sheet over Healthcare AI company. And what was interesting is through AI, they've been able to service a part of the patient market that here too, was not possible to be served at a positive return. And the moment they fix that part of the market, hospitals are like, why am I only going to give you 35% of the market? You know what, the rest of the market, there are 19 players, but I'm just going to come straight to you. It's too much work. You guys can take 100% of our referrals. So it's yet another good example of if you do a really great job with the hardest part of the market, you can essentially have a much larger portion of the market. Nobody wants, like, is interested in, like, somebody who's only going to win 1 to 2%. They want people that can do everything together and not just one part of it. And again, that's kind of also the big leap from software is maybe only solving one part of the problem and they want a full solution. I want a full turnkey, not just like, hey, the software can get you the numbers or analyze things or be the system of record. Now, everything is about system of action, and AI can enable that. And if you have a data mode on top of it, obviously that drastically increases chances that not only are you going to have high growth, but the high growth is going to stick with you.

[Jordy Hayes]

Did the venture industry learn its lesson in 2021? Things got a little bit crazy. There was a lot of top signals. We had a crash. But at the same time, you did companies like Supabase at what was then a crazy valuation, and then now it looks like you bought it, it looks like you stole it. Now, this time around, it feels like we were. I remember in 2022, it felt like we were going to go into like a VC apocalypse. It certainly doesn't feel that way now. Do you think we learned any key lessons or are we going to kind of relearn them in the future?

[Aidan Sudguth]

Let me tell you an interesting lesson, or maybe like a key secret, is that venture business is you have to be consistent. You cannot sprint and pause. Sprint and pause. If you're not Growing in this business, you're essentially losing, stagnating. There is no such thing as cruise control or steady state. And I think the mistake that happens with a lot of VCs if their conviction is not deep and they're essentially playing the market game. There are a lot of followers and not a lot of original thinkers bankers. What happens is the moment the market gets risky and things look dire, people pause and like, oh, you know what, I'm going to stop making investment. And one thing I'm really proud is even in the 2021 vintage and 22 when things were really expensive, we still kept on making investments and we never slowed down and we were basically like steady growth. And part of that is because look, this is not public markets where if there is 20% growth and your entry price is wrong, you're going to lose a lot of of money. But if you find the right companies and you do have 50 to 100x growth ahead of you, even if you overpaid for them, you're still going to do well. In fact, the only way you're going to do well is to have these positive outliers that are fun makers. And so I think the biggest lesson is like a lot of VCs spend too much time of like this valuation high and low and this trend and that the reality is you got to be a surfer that can surf any wave in any season and not just one. Like you can't just go to the beach and call it quits. You need to go back out. And I know Jordan lives in Malibu, so he's going to like the surfer analogy. But part of the other thing also is that you have to find the companies where there is going to be so much growth that even if you got the price slightly wrong, it's not going to slow down. So anybody who's like, oh, we're going to be in this business and it's all about the price, they're misunderstanding. It is all about being early and understanding that incredible growth that's going to follow that's going to basically give you the long term success. And so I feel there is definitely a Delta between the VCs that are original thinkers that still had the conviction and the courage to make those bets. And not just like Supabase for us, but also companies like N8N. That was a sleeper company in Berlin and all of a sudden in fall like multiple VCs have woke up that they are doing a great job in agentic AI.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, that's a company, interestingly enough I saw it on getting people started making videos about it on Instagram, which I look at as much more mainstream before I saw anything about it on X, which is, I think, a good sign. It means that it actually has traction outside of our little Silicon Valley bubble.

[Aidan Sudguth]

100%.

[John Exley]

How do you think about your philosophy on expertise versus, like, being a generalist?

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, there's a lot of debate about this expertise on like a category versus, like, judgment around human.

[John Exley]

But take me through, like, advice for a venture capitalist who's joining your firm. Advice for someone who's graduating high school and thinking about how to pursue, like, what is your philosophy on. On generalism versus becoming an expert in something.

[Aidan Sudguth]

I mean, look, I think generalism in general, it's a really good thing. But I think, look, there are a couple really interesting secrets or insights. Number one, just to give you real data to make this point, is that when I started Inventure, the other thing that people underestimated is like, they're like, listen, all these sectors you're gonna invest in, you're not an expert in any one of them and you're not gonna be able to make a good investment. I think people, what people misunderstand is if you're an expert in a sector, you're going to look at a company and you're only going to look at the orthodox way of doing things. And when somebody comes in as an outsider and like, I want to do something the way it's never been done before, you're going to say, that's never going to work. And so like, the paradox here is the expertise, right? Like, the experts are supposed to know the field really well, but that also anchors them in the way that things are done. Traditional versus a generalist is going to be first principles and say, you know what, there's actually a new way of doing things. And if this thing works, it's going to be amazing. And at Feliz, the most interesting stat that I'm most proud of is that we made early investments in companies, 53 of them that exceeded a billion dollar in valuation. Not a single one of them was led by an expert.

[John Exley]

That's amazing.

[Aidan Sudguth]

And so, like, that's the thing, when you guys start, you were not media experts or like, proven, like media people, and you had a great idea.

[Jordy Hayes]

I would tell you, the funny thing is, in our case, I've been working in and around advertising my entire career. John had been an expert on content production, but we certainly were not experts on hosting a show. And if you had asked us even a Moment ago if you had asked us would you be hosting, could you ever see yourself hosting like a daily show? We would have been like, I always.

[John Exley]

Love that Paul Graham formulation, which is like most co founders, if you look at the co founding teams, it's usually like two or three people where each of them are somewhat experts in like two or three disciplines. So you have someone who knows like marketing and finance and operations and then someone who knows like front end and back end and technical design and architecture and also some of the trade offs about how the product design works. And so you wind up with like some level of expertise in 10 different categories bundled up in two to three people on a specific team that seems to work really well. But yes, they're not like pure play experts, which is what we think of at least what I think of when I think of expertise.

[Aidan Sudguth]

100%. Look, I'm going to add two more things which is I think one of the other elements of being successful, whether you're a father, founder or investor, especially as a vc, is all about the people. And I've actually done sales at Google. And you would say, how is that related to being a venture? At the end it's a people's game. The founders are not taking money based on numbers, but if they can trust who you are. And so being good with people and being able to relate to them is really important. So these days when people are starting in the business, whether they're a founder or future VC or emerging vc, I'm like, look, your biggest asset is your network and the people that you know. But the second thing is especially for venture, you need to be exposed to outliers, right? Like I feel like my training at Google, you know, every single thing that Google has done in the six years that I was there, not a single thing was standard. Every single thing we did, we did a completely different way that it's been ever done before. And the results were stunning. So if you've never been at a company where the founders and the firm was crazy enough to do things completely differently and you kind of understand that culture, that mindset, right? Like we did talk about being generalists, but it is also important to have been exposed to some of these things and then you're like, okay, you know what? Now that I have seen it, it's in my DNA, it's in my blood, I can kind of like see other signs of that. So being good with people, being able to understand outliers, at least being exposed to the them I think are key ingredients at least in venture, those are things that nobody ever told me, like, hey, this is going to be really important for you. But now, after 20 years of doing it, I can tell you that it is very important. And like generalists, I worked in every discipline across four continents. I've done finance, sales, marketing, product. That was also really great. I didn't have to be the deep expert in all of these things. But being able to understand so you can like see around the corners and find little things. You know, just enough to make sure that you're not going to make a stupid move, but you don't know too much that you would be too anchored in it and you would be skeptical of a brand new way of doing things.

[Jordy Hayes]

Well said.

[John Exley]

I just can't get over how good your outfit looks and your frame looks.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah. You're ready to co host with us?

[John Exley]

Yeah.

[Aidan Sudguth]

Thank you. Like, honestly, like, I'm down to that. I love this hat and I'm enjoying my.

[John Exley]

Yeah. Are you an Si?

[Aidan Sudguth]

We are in Menlo park, actually. We do have an SF office, but we are in the Bay area right now.

[John Exley]

Right in the heart of Sebastian. In person.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah. Let's hang out soon. Are you going to be at F1 Vegas?

[Aidan Sudguth]

I'm thinking about it. So my older son is in varsity football. If there is no conflict with this game, I'm definitely going to be there.

[John Exley]

Okay, cool.

[Jordy Hayes]

Let us know if you are. We will look quite different. Different. So you can watch some older footage to recognize us over there. Thank you for hanging out.

[John Exley]

Yeah, this is a lot of fun.

[Jordy Hayes]

I'm impressed with how that you were able to do a normal interview when we look so ridiculous. But it was really fun chatting with you and thank you for sharing.

[Aidan Sudguth]

That was a blast. Should I say Mark and Ilya, but very well done. Great impersonation. And Jordi and John, it's such a. A such a pleasure. Let's do this again.

[Jordy Hayes]

And the audio team is appreciative as well. You're looking absolutely crisp.

[John Exley]

Everyone's a fan. Everyone loves it.

[Jordy Hayes]

Great stuff. Awesome. Talk to you soon. Have a great. Have a great rest of your Friday.

[John Exley]

Have a good day. Bye. How'd you sleep last night, Jordy? I got a 92 on 8 sleep. You can go to 8sleep.com, get a.

[Jordy Hayes]

Pod 5 code tbpn 32 minutes.

[John Exley]

Perfect.

[Jordy Hayes]

Perfect. 93.

[John Exley]

93. Oh, you beat me by one.

[Jordy Hayes]

I smoked you.

[John Exley]

Good job.

[Jordy Hayes]

Smoked you.

[John Exley]

Our next guest is in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVP and Ultra Dome. Wait, is that who. I think, I think you're. Did you get full prosthetic makeup to look like Jacob Diepenbrock from Discipline Ventures? Is that what's going on here?

[Jacob Diepenbrock]

That is correct. You guys have his costume better, though?

[John Exley]

Yes, your Jacob costume is flawed. Wallace, how was demo day? Take us through it. What were the highlights? What are the new trends? What's the actual structure? Maybe start there. What's the structure of demo day these days?

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jacob Diepenbrock]

So yesterday, 2pm Got started. We did it at Longwall's space here in El Segundo. One of the OG El Segundo companies used to be ABL shout out to Dan.

[Jordy Hayes]

Piedmont.

[Jacob Diepenbrock]

Started 2pm I think we had 100 and probably 60, 70 people come out for it. I had a panel with Augustus, Isaiah and Ted.

[John Exley]

The Godfathers, the brothers. It was a good group. It's a great group.

[Jordy Hayes]

Founding father.

[Jacob Diepenbrock]

Everybody was hating on sf, which was all active investors in the. In the audience.

[Jordy Hayes]

Why hate on sf?

[John Exley]

Oh, well, Paul.

[Jordy Hayes]

Well, so what? One thing is, when we were there earlier this week, I thought they had like somewhat solved the human feces on the ground thing. And it was like John and I walked home from. Walked home from dinner, granted, was about a mile walk and it was like at least six.

[John Exley]

It was through the Tenderloin, which is a rough spot. There are rough spots in la, but El Segundo is beautiful. At least when I walked around it was. It's very clean.

[Jordy Hayes]

And if you're, if you're an industrial. The smokestacks, you know, that's actually a plus.

[John Exley]

That's actually a plus. But yeah. So how many companies graduate and it's a proper demo day. Like people are giving pitches, raising money like that.

[Jacob Diepenbrock]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So we had nine companies pitch yesterday from all over the country and a couple from out of the country as well. We start off with, like I said, panel, nine pitches. They all kind of go out to their booths afterwards and then all the investors get to know and get to talk with them and meet them afterwards. And then we had a sick little after party in Manhattan beach afterwards. So it was great. But I guess companies was happy to run through some. I also just posted a thread as well, if you want to pull it up.

[John Exley]

Yeah, we'll have the team pull it up. But yeah, read through and let us know who's top lined.

[Jacob Diepenbrock]

So I will say less defense companies this time than ever before. A lot more.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, I was going to ask. And when we across the different YC batches, like there's very clearly like some core themes and trends that you've seen. So I'm not surprised to see like less. We probably like don't. We don't need the same volume of defense tech companies now. I think in general, like, there's just been so many, like every category.

[John Exley]

Oh, you think the job's finished?

[Jordy Hayes]

I don't think the job's finished, but I think it's like probably healthy for like every category now has a few players, they can now fight it out. One or two will rise to the top. We don't necessarily need 10 backfilling trying to go after the same types of contracts.

[Jacob Diepenbrock]

Yeah, I think my general thought is I think defense proved that you can kind of disrupt these legacy industries and build massive companies in these kind of legacy industries that haven't really had venture interest until Andrew and SpaceX. And I think it's now like, okay, we will do these hardware. We will do these kind of more, more, I guess less tech, less venture heavy industries. There's a lot of stuff that unlocks within energy, within mining. We did.

[John Exley]

I always make this point where Sam d', Amico, I mean SF founder, but he runs Impulse Stove, it's a stove company. And I don't want to tell his story for him, but it always feels like obviously that's not a defense tech company, that's not an anduril competitor, but that's the type of. That's the type of company that maybe doesn't exist unless we make like hardware cool. And get founders and get VCs piling into the category. But take us through some of the companies from this batch. Who stands out?

[Jacob Diepenbrock]

Yeah, I mean, it's a small enough batch.

[John Exley]

We're like, take us through all.

[Jacob Diepenbrock]

I'll go through all of them. Starting off, we got Petra Power. Shout out to Aaron Goodman. Hopefully you're watching right now. He's doing basically replacing generators. So basically building a new electrochemical process to replace the generator. And there's like a massive bottleneck. Generators, obviously energy shortage is pretty real.

[John Exley]

Real.

[Jacob Diepenbrock]

Especially with the new data centers going up. And he already has received $9 million in DoD contracts, which is pretty crazy. So first one's a pretty fun one. Making shoes in America. Autonomous shoe manufacturing at price in the usa.

[John Exley]

That's bold. That's very bold.

[Jordy Hayes]

We're gonna make it in America.

[John Exley]

Okay.

[Jacob Diepenbrock]

There's all these missile drone companies. We're making shoes, guys. We're making shoes in America.

[John Exley]

I love it. I love it.

[Jacob Diepenbrock]

Three Hedges. They're one of the few software companies, they're basically Building a commodities hedging app for SMBs, typically oil and gas to start. Because it costs a lot of money to actually have like a hedging team. And they said 97% of distributors just can't afford a full team. So they basically make it their whole thing. Is Robinhood. Robinhood for industrial companies.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah.

[John Exley]

Yeah. We've seen a lot of startups do the sort of like treasury management, just like earn a little bit of yield because maybe you don't have access to an investment bank and a whole treasury team. And so plenty of companies have offered that type of product. It makes sense. Sense that you would need something a little bit different in the industrial space. Very cool.

[Jordy Hayes]

Imagine day trading commodities on your phone. Those are that too.

[John Exley]

What is actinide?

[Jacob Diepenbrock]

Actinide is pretty cool. So basically what they do is they enrich isotopes basically. So they're starting off with one material. So there's three materials in the Russian. So the Russian stations list these materials you can import or cannot import. There's three materials that are actually removed from that sanctions list which means like you can get as much as you want because we just need them. The highest cost per gram. One is a material called terbium. It's used in cancer medication. They basically make this material and it's a two dollar per gram material. They enrich it. It's $36,000 per gram. Wow. And then they already have. It's in the tweet as well. They already have some contracts on the very large contracts they just signed literally in the last week. It was pretty sick. Like Monday morning. Yesterday, Monday morning signed two contracts locked in there with some companies everybody watching knows very, very well.

[Chris Messina]

Yeah.

[Jordy Hayes]

Attraction so far is pretty, pretty amazing.

[Jacob Diepenbrock]

Yeah, it was great. I think, I think we definitely seen like over the last couple batches like kind of an increase in traction just because people want to be hearing Elsa gun. No, people kind of see the brand we provide and that's I think pretty evident with companies.

[John Exley]

Tax Pro is Bloomberg for heavy equipment procurement. So that's. Oh dealerships. Interesting. So actually figuring out. So Bloomberg, you think that means looking across all the different industries like how you can go on Bloomberg and find someone's auctioning off a private jet, but they're also selling some, some, some slug of of equity or something like that. So this is a platform to connect buyers and sellers.

[Aidan Sudguth]

It basically is.

[Jacob Diepenbrock]

Yeah. Brings together people who want to buy very cool mining equipment type machinery more generally. There's like no central database with all this, this information. It's Just like Boomer X in Texas, calls Boomer Y in Arkansas and then they hopefully make it happen. But there's no like label database of all this equipment. It's basically just like compile it all. Well kind of like with Carfax for example early on there was no data and basically they just went out and called all the dealerships like hey, how much is this worth? How much is this worth?

[John Exley]

Is Loris sort of like the V2 of the vertical farming era. It says they turn grocery store rooftops into autonomous farms.

[Karim Atiyeh]

Yeah.

[Jacob Diepenbrock]

So my take here was like vertical farming obviously been tried. It didn't really work because it was all climate kind of carbon credit driven. A lot of the time where the actual union economics not making make sense. With that gone basically they remove like one of the biggest costs which is real estate and they basically just put these like blow up farms on grocery stores roofs and then it's like a pretty. I mean the numbers are here. Like they have like they don't pay for the actual unit. They have people that go in and license them and bring them out to grocery stores and then they get like individual profit based off what the grocery stores make. And then the goal is bring the, the produce profits progress up by 50%.

[Jordy Hayes]

The produce is then sold directly in the grocery store that it's sitting on.

[John Exley]

Exactly.

[Jordy Hayes]

Cool. Exactly.

[Jacob Diepenbrock]

Interesting co location and they're already like in, in. In stores.

[John Exley]

That's awesome.

[Jacob Diepenbrock]

Pretty big contract recently which is pretty exciting. But yeah, I think like generally like this again, food security is important. Yeah, this stuff that was tried last, I don't know, five, five, ten years ago or so didn't really work because of the economics. Like this makes sense. There's also these general tailwinds of like we need to make food in America. It's like actually healthy.

[John Exley]

Cool.

[Jacob Diepenbrock]

So that's them. Lark Kai legend at Skunkworks right out of college. There's this new MOSA standard basically which is like open source. Like if you have a component it has to actually work with every type of system. There's no way to actually test this. They basically have a software that can test the compliance for any component and then eventually going to build the hardware to test it in a more in depth fashion starting with the software.

[John Exley]

I like Blitzpanel. That's a good name, Blitzpanel. Reminds me of Mixpanel.

[Jordy Hayes]

It's a pretty simple company.

[Jacob Diepenbrock]

They make electrical panels for cheaper and they have a whole automation process he's built out. He was at Pipe Dream Labs in Texas. The huge problem and now he's basically just building the.

[John Exley]

Yeah. Going through all this stuff. It really shows you that there are a lot of stuff that, that fits in thematically that does not feel like it competes with Anduril, for example, but it feels aligned with the general theme that you've put together of cool, hard problems. There's a little bit of American dynamism, a little bit of military stuff in here. Tell us about the last company. Number nine.

[Karim Atiyeh]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jacob Diepenbrock]

So Arcatos Energy. This guy reads old German papers from the 40s in German and he found this process that basically.

[John Exley]

What kind of German papers is he reading?

[Jordy Hayes]

You can guess.

[Aidan Sudguth]

You can guess.

[John Exley]

That doesn't instill confidence. Tell this guy to clean it up. What is going on?

[Jacob Diepenbrock]

No, the papers are scientific papers that were.

[John Exley]

Okay, okay, okay. Needs to be clarified. Clarified papers about scientific processes. No problem. Yes, yes, they did have some good scientists in the 40s.

[Jacob Diepenbrock]

Exactly. And one of these papers in particular goes this way of making hydrogen for cheaper.

[John Exley]

Okay.

[Jacob Diepenbrock]

And if you hydrogen cheaper, you can make crude oil for cheaper.

[John Exley]

Very cool. Well, congratulations on the demo day. Thank you so much for coming.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, really cool lineup. Breaking it down. Great. I mean it's cool to see a lot of people focus on energy. I mean that's that like, um, yeah, people will criticize like, you know, accelerators and like for having like too like being like too on trend. Totally, totally healthy. Like, we want a new. We want a big group of companies like going after a bunch of different problems.

[John Exley]

This just doesn't seem like that narrow of a trend. It feels extremely narrow when you introduced it the first time and it just felt like, oh, it's just defense tech or something. But clearly like it's. It's such a big area that some of these folks, if they're both successful, like they're not even going to do business together because they're operating completely different layers of the stack. It's just a fantastic end result and really cool to see the growth here. So congratulations.

[Jordy Hayes]

I think.

[Jacob Diepenbrock]

One last point about the general defense market that I think is interesting is a lot of these big companies like Androl, like Saronic, the big tier ones, have already chosen a winner and they're not going to back another annual competitor. So it's like you need to have the stack, the capital stack. Makes sense be every single level of it been like all these funds have already chosen somebody as like their winner. It's kind of hard to come in and like be back these funds. So I think there's like so many opportunities now to come. Because again, legacy industries are like open for venture. There's a lot of talent flowing in. That's what we're trying to kind of take advantage of. Is this like new movement, the best talent capital actually interested in solving these.

[John Exley]

Hard, critical national problems. Thank you so much for coming on the show and breaking it down for us. Congratulations on another successful demo day. We will see you next day. Demo day and hopefully before that. Of course.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah. Great to see you, Jake.

[John Exley]

Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon.

[Jordy Hayes]

Cheers.

[John Exley]

Goodbye. Let me tell you about adquick.com out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe.

[Jordy Hayes]

Our next guest is a living legend.

[John Exley]

This is amazing.

[Jordy Hayes]

The founder of Cartiful. I'm sure she's dressed totally normal, so let's bring her in.

[John Exley]

Welcome to the show. How many Halloween parties did you get invited to?

[Jordy Hayes]

Okay. Is this AI?

[John Exley]

Yes.

[Chris Messina]

Is this AI?

[John Exley]

Hi.

[Treya Lam]

I wish. Cause it would have been a lot easier to put on.

[Jordy Hayes]

Did you do this yourself or did you have a team?

[Treya Lam]

I did do it myself, which is why I missed a few spots.

[John Exley]

Oh, it looks great.

[Jordy Hayes]

This is incredible. I mean, I feel like Halloween is probably high pressure on the Partiful team. You guys are facilitating a lot of Halloween events. Like, you kind of have to really show up and do it right. So congratulations.

[Karim Atiyeh]

Did any.

[John Exley]

This is your Black Friday.

[Treya Lam]

This is our Black Friday. This is our Super Bowl. This is our D Day.

[John Exley]

Yeah.

[Treya Lam]

Yeah.

[John Exley]

Well, thank you for taking some time to talk to us on your Black Friday. Is it actually Black Friday in the sense that like, the. The servers will be melting or is it just like, it's the best opportunity to capitalize on the. The value proposal that Partiful can deliver?

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah. I would actually be curious. What are the. What are the biggest holidays or just days celebrations?

[Treya Lam]

Halloween is by far the biggest.

[John Exley]

Really?

[Jordy Hayes]

No way.

[Treya Lam]

People celebrate Halloween like 10 times, right? Like, everyone can go to multiple Halloween parties and it's very valid. You're only gonna go to one New Year's Eve party. Maybe during the holidays you're like, traveling, so who knows if you'll be around? But, like, everyone's here, everyone's locked in. Everyone knows what the job is. And so usually it's like you'll have six Halloween parties and I don't because, like the entire particle team. I'm like, kind of on call today, this weekend, but that's why I'm dressed up right now.

[John Exley]

Yeah. I love the idea of you being on call and then there's some serious thing happening in the business and you're just hopped on zoom together and then.

[Treya Lam]

You dressed up like very serious. Yeah, that's great.

[John Exley]

It seems like a good company culture.

[Treya Lam]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Servers are not melting because our engineers prepped heavily for this, but it is like a triple on call situation.

[John Exley]

How. How has the business been growing? I know that a couple months ago there was like, oh, Apple's coming after you. And that felt like maybe it was just always going to be, focus on.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yourself, Apple, focus on yourself.

[John Exley]

But was that even like an OSHIT moment or was it just kind of like, okay, we didn't really see any blip in the numbers whatsoever and we've just been on a growth trajectory the entire time.

[Treya Lam]

When it happened, it was definitely. Are you not allowed to curse on this show?

[John Exley]

We don't curse on this show, but you're welcome to.

[Treya Lam]

But kids do watch.

[Jordy Hayes]

Our kids watch. So if you, whatever you say, our kids will repeat to us later. Be like, what did Treya mean by that?

[Treya Lam]

It was an oh, darn moment.

[John Exley]

There we go. Oh, shucks, melon.

[Treya Lam]

But then we're like, let's wait to see how this plays out. Because I think so many startups go through the thing where some big player comes in and they try to reheat your nachos and it either works or it doesn't. And I don't know. Have you guys gotten an Apple invite?

[Jordy Hayes]

No.

[Karim Atiyeh]

No.

[Jordy Hayes]

There you go. There you go. Yeah. I mean, it seems like an obvious. I mean, the other thing is Apple is not good at fun. Like they, they did the Gen Moji thing and, and they were laughed at for. Was like kind of a cool product, but again, it doesn't even get real usage. And I just think Apple was always known for magical software because it was just like so polished and good. And I think they're becoming less known for that.

[John Exley]

Yeah, I have another take here. I'd like to know if this resonates with you. You're obviously on the inside of this, but I feel like the invite product has like there are technical features that someone can clone and check the box. But the brand is so important and I feel like when I get a part of it says something about what I'm going to expect walking in there. When I get a paperless post, that's a different vibe. That's a different thing. When I get a physical piece of mail that invites Me to something that's also a different brand, a different vibe. It sets me up. It's the welcome moment to the actual event. It's part of the event experience. And so I feel like there's a world where you could clone all the features, but it's not going to bring the same energy which is actually what your customers, customers are buying in some way.

[Jordy Hayes]

Part of the product.

[John Exley]

I think it's part of the product. But how do you think about brand and how you stand out from the competition?

[Treya Lam]

I think it's brand and there's something about you have to want to break the rules. Because a party is not a corporate meeting. Right? A party is a party. And so we from the very beginning have always been like, the party page should feel as much fun as the party itself. Like you're already asking guests to do a lot by RSVPing. Like you might as well make it fun for them and give them a reward where they get to see the guest list after they rsvp like you, you gotta make it something where people can actually feel bought into the experience. And you don't do that by, you know, building something that just looks like an online form or gets buried in someone's email. But I also think there's an interesting like cross platform aspect of this too when you think about Apple. Like if I want to invite, invite people to my party, I want to invite my friends who have an iPhone. I want to invite my friends who have Android. Like I don't care what phone my friends have, they're still my friends. And so I think it's really important and it's just, it's hard for certain companies to execute on this.

[Jordy Hayes]

Wait, does the Apple app only work if you have an iPhone?

[Treya Lam]

It does work for Android.

[Jordy Hayes]

Okay, that's just like, that's just mean. Okay. Not even being able to invite Android people, the parties, that's just mean.

[Treya Lam]

I mean, well, they're already green friends, they're already like, look like this.

[Chris Messina]

What?

[Jordy Hayes]

So, so we oftentimes, you know, if we're talking to an, an enterprise software founder, we don't typically ask the question like what's the 10 year vision? Like where does this go? Because usually it's like more seats, more contracts, more products margin, expansion. But how do you like, you know, and I'm sure you've just been learning about what part of full is as you built it. But like has the vision, like what was kind of the founding vision, what is it today, how has it changed and kind of where are you Going because I've always, I've seen like your posts or like different press hits throughout the years and there was some really funny post about like not having any, not making any money that stuck with me and obviously just like joking about it or whatever. But yeah, where did you start from and where are you going?

[Treya Lam]

Yeah, it's funny how many people took that post like very seriously. It's like you can't joke the Internet anymore.

[Jordy Hayes]

What was the exact line? I forget.

[Treya Lam]

It was just like powerful, won't make money, VCs gave us funding to help you party, enjoy it, babes, something like that. There are these like very serious news articles of like particle said that VC's game party, like is it true?

[Jordy Hayes]

That's kind of a. If you guys aren't making money, if you guys are making money, it's kind of a systemic risk to the party, to big party, you know.

[Treya Lam]

Yeah, yeah, no, we, we will definitely, we will definitely make money, just not right now. The, the long term vision is if you look at where most social apps have been gone, they've kind of turned into entertainment platforms, right? Like when, when I open Instagram, I'm being fed a bunch of reels. I'm seeing less and less of my friends content. TikTok is obviously huge and it's also an entertainment platform. And so when you really think about it, the content that we're consuming is more and more just like it can be Netflix, it can be YouTube, it can be reels, it can be shorts, it can be TikTok, but it's all just, you're watching entertainment from people who you don't actually know. And so what's gotten lost in that is like where do you go if you want to actually connect with your friends? Where do you go if you want to meet more of the people who could be your friends? Because less and less you're discovering them online. And so what we want to do is create the home for you to hang out with your friends, see them more easily, discover new things to do and new people to do them with. And we think that as big social actually stops becoming social and starts becoming big new media, that big social deserves to exist. And right now it's small social, it's part of whole. But the goal is become big social.

[John Exley]

That's for.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, I love it.

[John Exley]

Yeah. I mean we were talking to Brian Chesky, somewhat similar thesis and it's grown on me so much. The barbell idea. You're going to be, there's going to be the Internet slop Feed. There's going to be a lot of content and stuff, but then you're also going to want to. To touch grass. And both can be true. And you can kind of toggle back and forth. What's the most underrated part of F that you've ever seen?

[Treya Lam]

Okay. So I. They're. They're somewhat rated. It's not fully underrated, but I'm obsessed with the. The performative contest. So there's like performative male contest that's happening right now. I saw in San Francisco there was like a performative reading. Reading contest.

[John Exley]

Okay.

[Treya Lam]

Yeah, yeah. It's just like there's something really funny that's happening where online meme culture. People are using particle to take that offline.

[John Exley]

Sure.

[Treya Lam]

So they're taking like.

[Jordy Hayes]

I know, by the way. I know. I used to go to the same gym as the kid who, like, initially went viral for the performative reading in New York where he was reading like.

[John Exley]

Like some infinite jest or something.

[Jordy Hayes]

It wasn't that. It was like a feminist. Feminist text or something like that. And he's like, you know, reading and people are like, he's been reading the same page for like 30 minutes. Like, what's going on? And that. I'm sure that was part of what kicked off this kind of thing.

[Treya Lam]

Yeah, yeah. Or like group seven on TikTok. Like, there's now like a group seven meetup, I think, this weekend in New York. So it's like the speed at which every single Internet meme now has a real offline particle event that people are actually going to. That's actually happening. That's been pretty cool to watch.

[John Exley]

Take us through the SF party culture. I'm hearing nine, nine, six. It's getting crazier. Everyone's working nonstop. Is that bear? Is that a bear signal for your business? No one's going to be partying, right?

[Jordy Hayes]

Are they just using it for, like, happy hour? Come talk about sass.

[John Exley]

Oh, that could be a bull case. Break it down.

[Treya Lam]

996. Culture is very concerning to the party community. I'm here to declare a state of emergency in the SF party scene.

[John Exley]

We have to end it. The drinks. Happy hours are coming back. It's okay to crack open a happy dad at 2pm Pass me that happy dad. I'm going to crack that open right now. Let's get the party started. Right.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, we do. Tech companies need to bring back boozy brunches during weekdays. Was that ever a thing? Like what. What's. What's kind of the solution here?

[Treya Lam]

Maybe that's what we should start using our VC dollars for the power lunch.

[Jordy Hayes]

Power lunch?

[Dean Ball]

Yeah.

[Treya Lam]

Funding everyone's boozy, boozy lunches and boozy dinners.

[Jordy Hayes]

I mean that kind of, that was kind of the joke in 2021. It was like there was like, you know, people used to do joke, 30% of all dollar venture dollars go to Meta. And then in 2021 it felt like 30% of VC dollars were going to like founder dinners. It was just a founder. You could basically eat for free as a founder by just going to a different founder dinner every night with a fintech.

[John Exley]

I want to keep going. I know we're way over time, but I want you to synthesize something you've been thinking about, about this, this idea of like rage bait marketing being not effective long term. Synthesize that with some, I feel like partiful's done a little bit of it, but you haven't like crossed any line. So it's always like worked out like even that, even that example you gave of like, oh, we're spending all our VCs money, that's kind of rage bait marketing. But it never, it never bubbled up.

[Jordy Hayes]

To the point where people were like, oh, you don't have a sense of humor. That creates goodwill. Yeah.

[John Exley]

So I've always.

[Jordy Hayes]

The VCs are financing this party and for the user, that's cool. Yeah. But, but there's that, that's quite, that's quite different than like the memes that were going around earlier this year. People being like, I used VC dollars to buy this Lambo.

[John Exley]

Oh yeah. And myself. Yeah. How do you think about like rage bait where the line is on your brand. Obviously you came on a show that's, I don't know, mostly a joke, but somewhat serious, dressed up like you have have fun. But then there is the line. How do you think about that?

[Treya Lam]

We, there's a little bit that I think you kind of have to acknowledge it. Like if a company's revenue, like you know, there's clearly VC funding that's, that's backing it. So you can't not talk about that. Right. And I'm a beneficiary of VCs funding a lot of free Ubers in my peak partying era. So I have a responsibility to pay it forward to the next generation. I think we're here to make people happy. That's the entire purpose of the company. We're not here to make people angry. And so there's only so much rage baiting that we at Particle can do. That's authentic because it's like, no, the rest of the Internet makes people angry. And we're like the one thing that's trying to not do that. So I think that's part of why we toe the line is just not as authentic to us. If the Twitter mobs are up in arms.

[Jordy Hayes]

There's also. John, you were writing about the come for the tool, stay for the network for sure. Dixon's piece is like a perfect example, but a stronger, like, I think a stronger example than come for the tool.

[John Exley]

Stay for the network. John Coogan. Chris Dixon. Chris Dixon, last question and we have to have you back on and go way deeper. But I'm super interested. It seems like Particle has complete and total domination over like tech culture in terms of like, if there's a party that's happening in SF tech, like, you found your beachhead, you've landed, you've dominated. How much time are you spending hunting around to find like these crazy adjacent markets for. Okay, there's someone who collects some odd object in the Midwest and like you just dominate in Milwaukee now because like you're highly dominant.

[Jordy Hayes]

Is part of full. Because I don't.

[Treya Lam]

Yeah, it's grown. It's grown a lot. So we've never had boots on the ground in a market like D.C. or Boston or Chicago. And those are all huge, huge now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're growing like crazy in London. Yeah, we do have on the ground there.

[John Exley]

Yeah. It's all just web flywheel stuff, right?

[Treya Lam]

Yeah, yeah. Just, you know, network effects.

[John Exley]

Yeah. Just good old fashioned viral growth.

[Jordy Hayes]

Hit the gong. For network effects.

[John Exley]

Let's hit the gong.

[Jordy Hayes]

Great hit. All right. This was super fun. Thank you for taking 15 minutes out of your. Out of your to come on. Hopefully no crises later today because the people are depending on it.

[John Exley]

Yeah.

[Jordy Hayes]

And I'm excited for you to become big social media.

[John Exley]

Yes. We're very excited for you. Thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon.

[Jordy Hayes]

Talk soon.

[John Exley]

Our next guest has been in the recent waiting room for far too long. Shishir Metrora from Superhuman, formerly Grammarly. We're gonna break down the rebrand we.

[Jordy Hayes]

Had him on when they acquired Superhuman.

[Karim Atiyeh]

Yes.

[John Exley]

Welcome to the stream.

[Jordy Hayes]

Welcome to the show.

[John Exley]

Congratulations on the next iteration. We pressed you about this. We asked you, is there going to be a rebrand and you were like, nothing to it now. I think you did.

[Dean Ball]

Yeah.

[John Exley]

But congratulations, it's done. And it happened really fast, actually. Many corporations would take.

[Chris Messina]

Glad it feels that way.

[John Exley]

Take a year. I know. I don't Know, it feels fast to me, but anyway, how's it going? What are the key changes? What's the thesis? Why'd you go with Superhuman and not Grammarly as the. As the key hero brand?

[Chris Messina]

Yeah, that's, that's great. Yeah, we did talk about it a few months back when we bought Superhuman. There's two big changes we made. We changed the name of the corporate entity to be Superhuman instead of Grammarly. It's a little bit like the Google Alphabet transition. There's still Grammarly, still an important brand in our portfolio of products. We now have four products under the Superhuman brand. It's Grammarly, it's coda, it's mail, which you used to know as Superhuman before. And the other big announcement is we added a fourth new product we call Go. Superhuman Go, which brings a new AI assistant product. Product takes the best parts of Grammarly and makes it a platform.

[John Exley]

Okay, explain that more to me because.

[Jordy Hayes]

Like, okay, one, one. Before we jump into that, I will say Superhuman is a perfect name for a suite of AI enabled apps at a time when a lot of humans, especially even I would say more so outside of the tech bubble, are like worried about being obsolete in an age of AI. And so this kind of ethos of like, let's give people superpowers, hours, very strong, makes a lot of sense.

[Chris Messina]

Exactly. You nailed it. That's why we picked the name. I had two tests. One was it need to be broad enough for the suite first thing you said. And the second one was actually the word human is more important than the word super, and it's actually part of the Grammarly DNA because Grammarly has always been about empowerment of humans. You still, you know, we help you, assist you in your writing task, but you still, at the end of the day, submit the, the article, you, you submit the essay, you write the email. We're just helping you be more human. So I love the concept of Superhuman that way.

[John Exley]

Okay, so walk me through the actual instantiation of the product. I understand Grammarly is like a widget.

[Jordy Hayes]

But yeah, let's maybe talk about Superhuman Go, the new product, because that's what I. No context please.

[Chris Messina]

Right, right. Yeah. And actually we teased that a little bit last time I was here too. And the core idea is a simple reframe of Grammarly. So Superhuman Go takes the core underlying technology layer of Grammarly and opens it up as a platform. So most people think about Grammarly as a grammar assistant and that is a big piece of what it does. But underneath it is a layer that allows you to bring AI to a proactive embedded experience in every tool you use Grammarly works in about a million different web apps, desktop apps, and mobile applications. And now you can run any agent, not just your writing assistant on top of that platform. Embedded, connected, and personal.

[John Exley]

How do you think about the wars at the various layers of the stack? There's a war.

[Jordy Hayes]

They're fighting all of them.

[John Exley]

I mean, there's an AI assistant in basically every web app. Now, like, if I go into Gmail, it's asking me to use Gemini. And then at the browser layer, there's Atlas versus. Versus what Perplexity's got going on because companies built on. And then there's also the OS layer. So I was reflecting the other day on Gmail was trying to get me to use Gemini, ChatGPT was asking me to use Atlas, and then Apple was trying to get me to use Apple Intelligence. And it's three helpful AI assistants, all in just. You want to summarize this email?

[Chris Messina]

So you said the keyword that you said ask. Yeah. Actually, interestingly, my frame for if you took all those AI providers and you put them into buckets, I call it the assist players, the chat players, and the do players. So the chat players, that's. That's what you're referring to. There's a chatbot everywhere. ChatGPT is obviously synonymous with that category. And there's now dozens of them. Those all ask you to go chat with a virtual human assistant. There's a set of folks working on what we call do, which is I want an AI agent that can go do things on my behalf as headless tasks. And, you know, I think the most popular one right now are the ones people are talking a lot about. About is all the ones in the coding space. You know, the anthropic team said 39% of their queries are for headless agentic tasks and being used for developers writing code. But at the bottom of that stack is another category we call assist, and that's the category where we bring AI to you. So I'll give you. I'll give you one fun stat. We do about 100 billion LLM calls a week. It would make us a top AI provider based on anybody's volume. But we do that across about 40 million users, which, if you do the quick math on that, that's about. That's a few thousand AI calls a day per person. So if you're a really, really good Gemini user or you're a really good ChatGPT user, maybe use it a dozen times.

[John Exley]

Yep, we do it.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah.

[Chris Messina]

Every time you press a key, every time you load a new dock, load a new app, we proactively bring AI to you and we're figuring out all the places we can invisibly insert AI so it can assist you right where you're working.

[John Exley]

Yeah, that makes tons of sense.

[Jordy Hayes]

Any plans to get into the browser game? Are you going to let people duke it out there?

[Chris Messina]

Yeah, that's not our plan. I mean, I think we work. Our strength is that we work everywhere. By the way, I should say I'm so excited that there is a browser game. I remember when I was at Microsoft when Chrome came out and I worked at Google for a long time and I watched that happen and then it just felt like it went away for a long time. It's pretty exciting. Exciting, actually, that there's some competition in browsers, but we work wherever you work. We work in browsers, we work in the desktop, we work on your mobile phones. To be honest, some fragmentation in the browser world is probably good for us.

[Jordy Hayes]

Totally.

[Chris Messina]

It makes it even more valuable to have an assistant that follows you everywhere, and that's the core of the technology we've built anyways. But I don't see us in that game. But I'm very curious to watch.

[Jordy Hayes]

It makes a lot of sense.

[John Exley]

Well, congratulations on all the progress you're.

[Jordy Hayes]

Dressing up for Halloween later.

[Chris Messina]

I am dressed up. I'm the Superhuman CEO. Yeah, there we go.

[John Exley]

That's fantastic.

[Jordy Hayes]

That's the most locked in costume.

[John Exley]

It's incredibly locked in costume. I love it.

[Jordy Hayes]

He's Super Superman himself.

[John Exley]

Thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations.

[Jordy Hayes]

It's great to get the update. Love the new name.

[John Exley]

We'll talk to you soon.

[Jordy Hayes]

Cheers.

[John Exley]

If you have a new name, you need to get on adquick.com out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Introduce everyone to your unified brand. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Ad Quick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. You also need to get a luxury watch to celebrate your new rebrand. Get your superhuman on your wrist with bezel. Your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet.

[Jordy Hayes]

Our next guest is dressed up as the co founder and CEO of linear. I can't wait to talk. Come on in. Great to see you.

[John Exley]

Great to see you.

[Karim Atiyeh]

Well, great, great. Thanks for having me again. And yeah, like, my plan was the same as everyone else's. I could have dressed up like you guys.

[Jordy Hayes]

It'S already done.

[Karim Atiyeh]

So I thought, like, well, I'll just do a different thing and not dress up.

[Jordy Hayes]

Well, you're locked in. Locked in. CEO of linear. You. You could. You could plan to, like, if you grew out the hair on the sides. I bet by next year you could do a pretty good impression of one of us without a pure play. Great to see you. I think. Did we overlap? Almost. Were you at the GitHub Universe on Tuesday?

[Karim Atiyeh]

No, I wasn't there, but yeah, that's why I couldn't join. But yeah, we can talk about that or something else.

[John Exley]

Yeah, yeah, I mean, we talked. We got a good whirlwind tour of what Microsoft's doing. Obviously, Satya has taken a victory lap on the OpenAI deal. And we talked to the Codex team over at OpenAI. We also talked to some GitHub folks. And I think the general shape of Software development in 2025 is becoming clear. You have asynchronous agents that you can fire off. You're doing code review. You also have a tab completion model, an IDE that's getting smarter every month. But I'd really love to hear how you see LINEAR evolving in that context. You can think about linear as delegating different tasks. How do you delegate when you have super long running agents? We were talking to the Codex team. What do you say? Something random.

[Jordy Hayes]

60 hours.

[John Exley]

60 hours. It's like, that's something you need Linear to manage at this point. But take me through how you're seeing folks change their use of LINEAR and what you're doing. Doing with the product.

[Karim Atiyeh]

Yeah. One of the things I've been thinking about is that like a lot of like Linear was, was founded before all this, like, AI things started happening more and as well as, like, I think like most companies out there today have, like, even like large companies, they started before this, this was happening. So I think we're all in this journey of kind of like an evolution of like, how do we do these things? So, like, what are the workflows? What needs to change and what doesn't change? I've been thinking about the whole kind of writing example. So we used to write on paper. We write documents on paper. Then we moved to typewriters, Then we moved to online text processing on our computers, and then we went to online writing. The writing is still. It's like you have a piece of paper on the screen, you're still doing the writing activity. And then now the AI can also do some of the writing activities, but it's Kind of like a lot of the tooling changed around that activity or that concept or that need, but the activity itself didn't change. So we still have documents and papers as an idea because it's useful. So I see that the chains on the software industry similar that the AI doesn't mean that we will just throw everything out of the window. There's no longer any of these IDEs or workflows or something, but it's more like we have to kind of go piece by piece. Like does this still make sense? Okay, it does make sense. Let's do that. And then does this have to change? Okay, it does has to change or it would be better if it changes. So I think our thinking with that has been that we want to help companies move to that direction as well. So we do have for example the agents platform where also can GitHub copilot now integrated with so you can delegate tasks directly to the GitHub copilot. Then it can work on the background. You can then come back to see what the results are and review the code. We also have other agents.

[John Exley]

Yeah. Is there any world where the ability to delegate to agents enables more non technical people? It gives more non technical people a reason to have a seat on.

[Karim Atiyeh]

Yeah, I think it's something like we're definitely seeing today. And I think it's one of the values we can give to value we can give to our organization. So IDEs and technical tools are used by engineers but what we even see in our company now is designers are making fixes with the agents when they see something like oh this is a little bit off. I can properly instruct the agents like find this in a code base, do a version of this and you can also in our case you can preview the result through linear so you can actually see like oh this is how it is and test it. So I think it gives a nice loop for a non technical person to sometimes just fix things when they see something. And you don't always have to assign it to nginx engineer.

[Jordy Hayes]

How do you think about like project management software broadly evolving? Like do you expect to. Are you guys experimenting with any new paradigms? Like agents are great in that right now we even call them like human like names oftentimes. Right. Everyone has their, you know, like sometimes it's a girl name, sometimes it's a guy name. And like the way that we're using them today is very much like a team teammate. That might suggest that we're not going to see a bunch of new ui Paradigms. But are you and the team kind of like what doesn't get shipped that you guys are kind of playing with behind the scenes?

[Karim Atiyeh]

Yeah, I think I like to think about there's like two areas. One is the organizational workflow. So that goes everything from what linear really offers is like coordination and prioritization and communication and visibility to the organization. Like this is that this is the direction we're going and this is how it's going and these are the people working on those things. And so I think with AI we are looking for those problems and what can we actually fix there or improve there with the AI. And then I think the other is the individual engineering workflow. Where does that change? So I think there is definitely something we're thinking about that do the issues still make sense? Do pull requests still make sense as a concept when you are more working with the AI to develop something? I do think there is still need for reporting things like bugs or capturing issues, having discussions around it. So I don't think everything is going to change that. I think a lot of times what really help companies with this some kind of direction and some kind of kind.

[Jordy Hayes]

Of.

[Karim Atiyeh]

Like a guidance to their teams. Like here's a system for you to operate in and these are the pieces and this is the goals and then you let them do their work. So I at least like to see that it's not like when we think about the SaaS future or like SaaS products, it's more about making them more proactive. Also self driving, we like to say self driving SaaS is that we are not yet at the stage of with transportation. We still need cars because we don't have teleports. So we need to now we're at the stage of let's make those cars self driving. And so I think when it comes to software products, I think we are also there that I don't think we are at the stage yet and maybe not for a long time that we no longer need no software products products. But I think they could be much more proactive and driving things on their own, on the background without you interacting at all. So the idea would be that bugs just fix themselves. When bugs get reported, someone like the AI will fix it and you don't even have to see it. I think there still needs to be eventually.

[Jordy Hayes]

I'm excited for the future when teams can just go into linear and just watch a bunch of work happening. It's an agent, an agent finds a bug, another agent solves it. An agent has an idea For a feature or a user gives an idea, the agent ships it. The fully autonomous future is wild. I wrote a post, maybe it was a couple weeks ago at this point or last week, about the uninspired company of Silicon Valley and how I mentioned at one point that companies, I'm sure now, like so many companies have copied linear. I'm sure there's companies now that copy linear without even knowing like the origin of design language. They're just like, oh, this is just the way that design looks. So I was wondering like, your philosophy on like, you guys get a lot of credit for kind of like creating an entire way, you know, feeling for software and design language and all these different, you know, UI elements. Do you ever have a desire to reinvent the next paradigm and kind of ship something that would create an entirely new version of the software that would completely reskin it?

[John Exley]

Or do you feel skeuomorphic, it's all just like wooden blocks and grass simulation?

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah. Or do you just continue to own it and be the godfather of model modern software as a service?

[John Exley]

Random fonts everywhere, random colors everywhere.

[Karim Atiyeh]

I think we definitely think about that like especially on the website side that like, well, what is the next thing we can do? Since like everyone is kind of like doing this thing we're doing. So I think there's definitely that need. But I think in the end, like we try to be functional or pragmatic about the design that it still should serve the purpose. I believe the old design quote of the form follows function. So it's like you're not like with productivity tools or other tools. I don't think the point is to be an artist or something. You're not trying to invent something crazy things just for the sake of it. I think it needs to be to the purpose or the function of the tool. And then around that there's always. You can try to figure out out what needs to what could be better or like maybe you can go against some convention when you have that reason. So I mean we're always looking for those opportunities and I think for us part of the mission of the company is to accelerate and inspire builders. So we also do in a way like that we are accomplishing the mission of inspiring a lot of different companies on how to design or focus on the craft or quality. So that's kind of like personally what I also wanted to do that could we shift this industry a little bit more into the like we can do nice things and it doesn't always have to be just like what metric goes up or down or some other reasons.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, yeah. Made the world a more beautiful place.

[John Exley]

I love it. It's a good time. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you so much for. For taking the time on Friday.

[Jordy Hayes]

Next time you're passing through by the Ultra Dumb in person, we love to hang.

[John Exley]

Ideally on a day when we're not dressed up like fools.

[Jordy Hayes]

Like a couple of characters can be.

[John Exley]

A little bit more serious. But thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us and thank you for supporting the show this entire year. It's been very helpful.

[Jordy Hayes]

One of the very first few.

[John Exley]

We've had a lot of fun and everyone in the chat is celebrating Linear. Connor says he just onboarded his business onto linear today, like 20 minutes ago. Let's hear it for that. John Exley says Linear is TVPN royalty.

[Jordy Hayes]

That's right.

[John Exley]

So awesome to see Kari in the Ultra Dome. Thank you for coming by. We will talk to you soon.

[Jordy Hayes]

Have a great give our best team. We'll talk soon.

[John Exley]

Have a great weekend.

[Karim Atiyeh]

Thank you.

[John Exley]

Goodbye.

[Jordy Hayes]

Cheers.

[John Exley]

There's one scoop I want to talk about. Katie Roof is confirming a scoop from Techmeme that Axios is driving dropping Human Interest, a 401k platform for small and medium businesses that aims to cut down on administrative work. Raised $100 million at a $3 billion post money valuation. This is a leak, but I know the CEO of Human Interest. He's a good buddy. I just want to say congrats to Human Interest because it's a very cool company.

[Jordy Hayes]

Elon has a new pod up on All In Rogan.

[John Exley]

He's on a press tour. He's on a press tour. We got to get him. Maybe this is the time to strike. Strike. Maybe we get him on TVPN next week. The team seems to like the idea.

[Jordy Hayes]

We will work on it. Thank you guys for hanging out with us on. On such a crazy day. Yeah, it's going to be hard to. We were. While we were putting this on, we were talking about how do we one up this next year.

[John Exley]

Yeah.

[Jordy Hayes]

What could possibly let us know in the chat as iconic as these two?

[John Exley]

Maybe we do Elon joke Rogan. That would be good. I think throwing in a Rogan is a good one.

[Jordy Hayes]

You as you as Rogan. Even though you're 14, maybe 14 inches taller than Rogan.

[John Exley]

Yeah. Yeah. I could see a rogue. We could do Rogan and Alex Friedman. That could work. Maybe we could do a human.

[Jordy Hayes]

Lex would be the experts.

[John Exley]

Yeah, the experts is good. As other podcasters. Kind of hits. We could do a David Senra. We could both be David Senra. How about that?

[Jordy Hayes]

David Senra. By David Senra.

[John Exley]

Yes. We could both be David Senra, an executive producer. That'd be a lot of fun. I think your mustache is actually falling off your face.

[Jordy Hayes]

I feel this weird thing where it feels like I'm sweating underneath everything, but I've had this scratch up here by this fake vein, and I'm not able to itch it, and so I'm looking forward to taking this off. I won't be.

[John Exley]

So, Tripp, a lot of people were.

[Jordy Hayes]

Asking, are you gonna. Am I gonna go home and trick or treat with the kids like this? I was thinking about it. No. I do not want to traumatize my young children.

[John Exley]

Yeah.

[Jordy Hayes]

I will be dressing up as something else. But thank you for tuning in with us today. Have a wonderful day.

[John Exley]

Thank you to the team that helped us pull this off. This was a very special, funny thing. I never thought we'd be doing this, but that's the nature of this show. And so thank you for everyone that supports us. Leave us five stars on Apple.

[Jordy Hayes]

Go out and have a. A wonderful evening and weekend. Be safe. We will see you back here on Monday.

[John Exley]

We'll talk to you soon.

[Jordy Hayes]

Can't wait.

[John Exley]

Goodbye.

[Jordy Hayes]

Cheers.