Sequoia's Leadership Shakeup, Palantir's Big Bet on High Schoolers, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions

Summary

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TBPN Podcast Summary

Episode: "Sequoia’s Leadership Shakeup, Palantir’s Big Bet on High Schoolers, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions"

Hosts: John Coogan & Jordi Hays
Date: November 4, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this jam-packed episode, the hosts, joined by producer Ben, dissect a day full of major tech news and market gossip, live from Silicon Valley. Key themes include the changing of the guard at Sequoia Capital, Anthropic’s bullish AI forecasts, Palantir’s radical high school recruitment, the state of AI competition between China and the US, and an array of internet culture, stock, and VC ecosystem updates—all with the duo's trademark banter and deep dives.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

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1. Sequoia Capital’s Leadership Shakeup

• [00:30] Sequoia announced new stewards: Alfred Lin and Pat Grady succeed Roloff Botha.
• Ben reads Roloff’s internal email, emphasizing Sequoia’s stewardship model and culture of leaving the firm “better than we found it.”
• The hosts joke about Roloff’s possible new hobby—racing cars—being the real reason for the timing.
• [03:27] Quote: “Bro went out and said venture capital is return free risk and then handed over the keys.”—Alex (via Ben)
• Observations about Sequoia's culture of intergenerational leadership transitions, and some skepticism around Roloff’s timing and recent media statements.

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2. Anthropic vs. OpenAI: AI API Market Race

• [04:04] Anthropic’s internal forecasts show 70 billion projected revenue by 2028; they expect to outpace OpenAI soon in API sales.
• [05:19] “Not something you see from AI players outside Nvidia.” —Ben, on Anthropic projecting $17B cash flow (2028).
• Discussion on the capex and scaling mentality in AI companies; Anthropic now claims its models will be broadly profitable, challenging previous narratives.
• Comparison: OpenAI planning $115B in spend to reach profitability by 2030; Anthropic claims it can do it with $6B by 2027.

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3. AI Discourse & Market Fears

• [07:22] Jokes about wild Twitter debates involving Sam Altman, OpenAI’s revenue goals, and LLM API market share.
• OpenAI’s market share of closed-source foundation models via API dropped from 50% to 25% in 2024, but hosts caution against reading too much into stats without context of overall market growth.
• Nvidia and AI stock bubbles: hosts reference meme posts, including CEO Jensen Huang eating Korean fried chicken causing stock surges and margin calls.

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4. Palantir’s Big Bet on High Schoolers

• [24:40] Palantir launches the Meritocracy Fellowship, hiring directly from high school (skipping college entirely).
• Noted as a significant cultural experiment, with CEO Alex Karp openly critiquing higher education: “Hiring university students these days meant hiring people who have, quote, just been engaged in platitudes.”
  —[25:18]
• Case example: Mateo Zanini, who turned down a Brown University offer (and a DoD scholarship) to join Palantir as a fellow.
• [27:47] Ben and John reflect on how skipping college can give ambitious young people a several-year career head start.

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5. AI Agents, Job Displacement, and Economic Narratives

• [14:48] Discussion on the gap between AI tool hype and real job displacement; hosts admit they still need to hire humans for creative and technical work despite AI productivity boosters.
• Reflection on the ongoing ChartGPT/job cuts debate, suggesting that much of the reduction in hiring is as much about interest rates and macro trends as it is about AI.
• [18:48] “Every CEO, even if they don’t have an AI narrative, wants an AI narrative. So if you have to do layoffs, why not say, hey, we’re getting a bunch of efficiency out of AI tools…” —Ben

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6. China vs. US in the AI Arms Race

• [28:55] Analysis of a Financial Times article on the diffusion of AI in US vs China.
• Hosts note China's advantages in deploying new tech widely and orchestrating society-wide transformation, but John questions if China’s AI is being as actively implemented as in US firms.
• Arnaud Bertrand’s points discussed, especially the power of societal optimism in China about AI versus skepticism in the West.

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7. Nvidia, Market Bubbles & Meme Moments

• [10:26]–[11:01] The hosts reminisce about Nvidia’s meteoric stock rise, joke about CEO Jensen Huang’s rockstar persona, and meme-tastic moments like him signing a shirt and causing viral trends (even in Korean fried chicken stocks).
• “He’s just a man who manufactures a new top signal every quarter.” —John [11:16]

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8. Palantir & Market Volatility

• [22:46] Palantir’s Q3 earnings: $1.18B revenue (+63% YoY), record GAAP net income, but stock still dropped 8% the next day—“shows the market’s a little shaky.”
• Karp’s spicy quotes highlighted: “Some of our detractors have been left in a kind of deranged and self-destructive befuddlement. This remains the beginning, the first moment of a first chapter.” —Alex Karp [23:57]

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9. US Restaurant & Retail Stock Crash

• [43:15] Many fast-casual chains like Chipotle, Sweetgreen, and Cava are down sharply after their pandemic-era overvaluation and bubble-like multiples.
• Chipotle specifically targeted younger consumers, but rising costs have driven their core 25–35 demographic to eat out less and cook at home, placing the chain under additional pressure.

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10. Timeline & Twitter Reactions

• [54:03] Anduril’s fully autonomous fighter jet makes history in the US Air Force, prompting the hosts to joke about tech that looks like “alien” design.
• [76:26] Fruitis raises $150 million to scale jumbo blueberries, sparking a lively debate about food tech and the value of “obscenely large blueberries.”
• [78:49] Will.i.am’s new professorship at ASU teaching agentic AI—hosts discuss his impressive track record as an investor and musician, and whether this is a top or bottom signal for AI.

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11. AI, Music, and Internet Weirdness

• [82:52] The first AI-generated music act (Xenia Monet, made with Suno) charts on Billboard Radio.
• Hosts contemplate the disruptive potential of pseudonymous AI musicians.

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12. Apple, Google, and the Future of On-Device AI

• [92:19] Extended debate on Apple’s strategy of licensing Gemini from Google for Siri and the iPhone—are they ceding too much ground or cleverly monetizing the AI boom?
• Hosts unpack the possible business models and revenue shares in a world where LLMs handle commerce.
• “Might be worse fates than missing AI… Imagine if [Apple] spent $200B building a frontier model that’s not even as good as ChatGPT.” —John [92:45]
• Potential for future platform battles over who gets paid for e-commerce transactions routed through LLM-powered assistants.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• [03:27] “Bro went out and said venture capital is return free risk and then handed over the keys.” —Alex, relayed by Ben
• [05:19] “Not something you see from AI players outside Nvidia.”—Ben, on projected AI cash flows
• [25:18] “Hiring university students these days meant hiring people who have, quote, just been engaged in platitudes.” —Alex Karp (Palantir CEO)
• [14:48] “Copilot is not actually an agent. It’s a copilot, which is different. An agent I see as a pilot.” —John
• [23:57] “Some of our detractors have been left in a kind of deranged and self-destructive befuddlement...” —Alex Karp
• [11:16] “He’s just a man who manufactures a new top signal every quarter.” —John, on Jensen Huang
• [92:45] “Might be worse fates than missing AI… Imagine if [Apple] spent $200B building a frontier model that’s not even as good as ChatGPT.” —John

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [00:30] Sequoia Capital’s new leadership
• [04:04] Anthropic’s forecasts & AI market commentary
• [14:48] AI agents and future of work debate
• [24:40] Palantir’s high school fellowship case study
• [28:55] US–China AI race and societal optimism
• [43:15] Restaurant stock bubble pop & Chipotle woes
• [54:03] Anduril’s autonomous jet milestone
• [76:26] Fruitis raises $150M – blueberry bubble?
• [78:49] Will.i.am to teach agentic AI at university
• [82:52] Suno and the first AI musician charting
• [92:19] Apple/Google partnership, Siri & future of AI commerce

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Show Tone & Style

• Conversational, fast-paced, irreverent banter
• Deep dives on technical and macro themes, often with tongue-in-cheek commentary
• Hosts frequently challenge accepted wisdom while spotlighting timeline memes, industry gossip, and tech subculture quirks

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Conclusion

This episode offers an incisive, up-to-the-minute survey of tech’s biggest stories—from leadership transitions at iconic VC firms and AI market arms races, to radical recruitment experiments, market bubbles, and the ever-shifting culture of Silicon Valley. John, Jordi, and Ben combine insight, humor, and skepticism—making the show a must-listen for those tracking the pulse of tech and the internet zeitgeist.

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Transcript

[John]

You're watching TVPN. Today is Tuesday, November 4, 2025. We are live from Silicon Valley.

[Ben]

That's right.

[John]

We're not gonna say exactly where we are, but we're in Silicon Valley and we're hanging out with some absolute dogs today. So we took show on the road. Thank you to producer Ben for helping us get set up and thank you for ramp for making this possible. Time is money save, both easy to use, corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place.

[Ben]

So glad we have Ben here to be our live studio audience.

[John]

Yeah, yeah, you gotta clap for everything. This is required. We have some breaking news out of Sequoia Capital. Just down the street from where we are, they have a new set of bosses. New top dogs.

[Ben]

Top Dog Alert.

[John]

Yep, Top Dog Alert. They're going Lynn, Sanity Mode and the Gradinator.

[Ben]

The Gradinator.

[John]

Pat Grady and Alfred Lynn are in. We haven't had Pat on the show. We've had Alfred Lynn. He's fantastic.

[Ben]

I can read through Roloff's message. He said they love to structure these as emails, so subject A new generation of Sequoia stewards. Don Valentine founded Sequoia with the future in mind. He instilled a distinct culture focused on stewardship. We think of stewardship as leaving the firm better than when we found it. This belief has enabled successful intergenerational transfers and ensures we hire the right people who want to create a partnership that outlives all of us. Stewardship grounds our culture in an ethos of performance excellence, teamwork and continuous innovation. It also extends to our companies. Even though we're called an investment firm, we think of ourselves as company builders. Since 1972, Sequoia stewards have transitioned the partnership from one generation to the next when they saw that the team was ready for the challenge. With each transition, a new generation is able to stand on the shoulders of those who came before them and build on and strengthen the Sequoia partnership. That that moment has come for me. Today I am announcing that Alfred Lynn and Pat Grady are Sequoia's new stewards. Alfred and Pat embody the cultural traits that have defined Sequoia for the last 53 years. They have exceptional performance having partnered with companies like Door Dash, ServiceNow, Airbnb, Snowflake, Citadel Security, Zoom, Kalshi, OpenAI, open evidence and Harvey. They are leaders. Alfred has co led Sequoia's early stage business since 2017 and pat our growth stage business since 2015. They they embrace our apprenticeship model. They have a fearless and resilience. Fearlessness and resilience that's necessary to win in this business. They do not shy away from difficult conversations and they roll up their sleeves to company build. Let's give it up for rolling up sleeves.

[John]

Let's roll up our sleeves.

[Ben]

Both with founders and within Sequoia, the two of them are true teammates. To founders, to their partners and to each other. They're the right pair to entrust with the stewardship of Sequoia. Like the stewards before me, I will transition into a new role advising the partnership while continuing to represent Sequoia boards. I'm confident that Sequoia's ethos will endure and the deep bench of talent at Sequoia will thrive under Pat and Alfred's leadership. Best regards, Roloff.

[John]

Both that Are you reading between the lines here? I think I know what happened. I think Roloff probably just recently got into racing cars and he's just like I need to go full time.

[Ben]

I need to go all.

[John]

I gotta, I gotta.

[Ben]

I found my real calling.

[John]

I found my real calling.

[Ben]

It's time.

[John]

I'm going to spend more time.

[Ben]

I can't wait another day.

[John]

I can't spend. Yeah, spending time at managing Sequoia as a steward is just, it's not, it's not reducing my lap times.

[Ben]

I put this post in from Alex because this was my first thought too. Alex says bro went out and said venture capital is return free risk and then handed over the keys. The timing is interesting. That read too much in that I, I don't think you need to read too much.

[John]

He said that on the Deli Deli podcast, right?

[Ben]

I think so.

[John]

That's, that's such a funny place to go. Drop a bombshell and then bounce. I, I, I don't think you can read too much into it because it's, it's. But he doesn't do a lot of media so I don't know may maybe he was like I'm, I'm out. Not a venture.

[Ben]

It's been a good run. Venture capital.

[John]

We'll have to keep keep tracking it but anyway thank you to Restream for making this stream possible. 1 livestream 30 plus destinations multi stream reach your audience wherever they are. Anthropic is the new king of AI API sales. Boatload of new financials and projections below from the information Anthropic this summer hiked its most optimistic growth forecast by roughly 13 to 28% over the next three years and is projecting as much as 70 billion in revenue in 2028. Okay, so that's up from close to 5 billion this year. So 5 billion, then 10, then 20, then 30. Like they're more than doubling every year for the next three years. Pretty remarkable. Are you walking over here to hit the gong somehow? What are you doing? Oh, is I off, Mike?

[Ben]

Yeah.

[John]

Okay, thank you.

[Ben]

We're back.

[John]

We're back. The company expects demand from businesses for its AI models to drive that growth. Anthropic projected that it's 2025. Revenue from selling access to these models through through an application programming interface will roughly double the revenue its bigger rival OpenAI generates. And Peter Wilde.

[Ben]

Yeah, the notable thing here is they're projecting cash flow.

[John]

Yeah, profitable in 2027.

[Ben]

17 billion in cash flow in 2028. Not something you see from AI players outside of Nvidia.

[John]

I don't know, from the way Anthropic talks about pre training and scaling and new models, I would be remember the whole Dario idea of like each model individually is cash flow positive but you keep having to scale up by 10x. And so we're going to do a $10 billion training run and then we're going to animatize that over five years and it's going to look great, but in the short term it's going to look terrible and it keeps looking terrible because you keep scaling up. This is the exact opposite of that.

[Ben]

I wonder if they feel like to actually be cash flow positive at the company level, I have to imagine they would have to not do the next training round.

[John]

Well, not do something that's 10x or 100x, I don't know. I understand that Compute will continue to scale with revenue, so they can still be extremely compute scaling pilled. But in terms of viewing the incremental progress on their models as essentially capex, that puts them deep in a hole. It feels like there's some shift in the way that they're thinking about this or at least messaging it to the market. I don't know, maybe this is in reaction to that last quote that came out about each model being so, so unprofitable in the short term. Well, let me tell you about Privy Wallet infrastructure for every bank, Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions and integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API. So Peter Williford said OpenAI's plan spend 115 billion to then become profitable in 2030. Anthropic's plan is spent 6 billion to then become profitable in 2027. We'll be curious to see what works best. People are the bub talk is going through the roof. It's going back and forth. Mass mimetic theory the the swing builder himself, the man who built the what.

[Ben]

Did he have to say?

[John]

He was saying that Rune has become extremely defensive. Late shots at former TBPN guest Rune and Jacob Rintamaki another guest says to be fair to Roon, people have also been saying a lot of crazy stuff about Sam Altman and AI CapEx. Twitter discourse in general just makes me want to take a shotgun to the brain so deeply Mid curve and mass is going back and forth showing that OpenAI has to 1000x their revenue over 5 years to get to a standard 15xp ratio which is is certainly not the goal for most companies. And I think Jacob makes a good point here. He says Palantir's price to earnings ratio is 600 yeah.

[Ben]

Meta's at something like a 2227.

[John]

27 to get to 15 is like yes, that might happen as a 40 year old company but certainly not as a company that's tripling revenue every year.

[Ben]

Also enterprise large language model API market share. This graph, this, the, this like study that was done is from Menlo Ventures who's a big investor in Anthropic. It was like a relatively, it was I think a relatively small sample size.

[John]

I mean I think you could be correct about the, about the market. I think it's probably the market's growing super fast. It's much less of an issue. And very clearly like the stated mission of OpenAI has never been like we're a pure play enterprise large language model API company.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[John]

It's been like give us credit in our price to earnings relative to our advances on science and our consumer app and our agent of commerce and our AI slob.

[Ben]

The other notable thing from that specific report was that OpenAI's share of closed source foundation models via API dropped from 50% to 34% across 2024.

[John]

Sure. And then went down even 25%. That's what it looks like. But I mean if the market's growing like how much does this really matter? It's. But yeah, they're going back and forth. They're duking it out. But Jacob Rinamaki shares something funny. Just a reflection on Nvidia that I wanted to share because it's the Wojack meme in 2019 people saying Nvidia stock is extremely overvalued. This was pre the Ethereum pump I believe. And Nvidia's market cap was $100 billion. And it did seem like, oh, they just like make, they just make chips. Like, it's just like they have like one product kind of. They make great gaming graphics cards. It was at 100 billion, then at 500 billion in 2021. Now, now Nvidia did trade down crazy after the crypto proof of stake move. But then in 2023, Nvidia hit 1 trillion and everyone was saying this has got to be the top. And then in 2025, we now see that the market cap is 5 trillion. And the Wojack is extremely dismayed.

[Ben]

And pulling up this post from Trevor Scott when Nvidia.

[John]

This was a crazy photo.

[Ben]

This, this, I read this. Pretty surreal to see this image surface. I'm surprised Jensen did this and allowed himself to be photographed doing it. But this was June 4, 2024. Yeah, he was signing a woman's shirt at a conference and Nvidia is up 85%. And obviously a lot of folks were.

[John]

Calling the top on this manufacturer fake.

[Ben]

Historically, historically these, these have been top signals. But here we are.

[John]

But I mean, to steel man, this like Jensen has always been a rock star. Like he's always like fashioned himself like a rock star. It's not like he put on the jacket at the top. He's just always been wearing. He was born in it. And so I think he's just a man who manufactures a new top signal every quarter. And that makes him link. Yeah.

[Ben]

Chugging.

[John]

Yeah, we're gonna look back on that in a year and be like, how was that?

[Ben]

And you know that Korean fried chicken stocks were pumping.

[John]

Wait, really? Because of what he said?

[Ben]

Well, I think he was eating. There's a. I don't, I don't. On Wall Street. That's three days ago. This could be a copy copy pasta. But there's a, there's a post with 18,000 upvotes that says, I am financially ruined short selling Korean fried chicken companies. I have lost everything and I'm not sure how to Continue. This week, $472,000 short selling Korean fried chicken companies. My idea was with the declining Korean population and the recent trend towards healthier eating vegan diets, there is an opportunity here. I did some research into consumer trends in Korea and determined that this would be a lucrative play. So I shorted Korean fried chicken companies across the board. Unfortunately. Earlier this week, Nvidia CEO Jensen dined out at a Korean chicken restaurant called Korea Kabu Chicken in Seoul. And pictures went viral of him enjoying fried chicken and beer stocks of chicken companies in Korea soared 20 to 30% and I was margin called. Everything is gone.

[John]

It's great.

[Ben]

I don't know how to continue. How could I not have known that Korean fried chicken is the future of AI?

[John]

That's hilarious. That does seem like a copy pasta. But the Internet is such a wide, such a big place that it is possible that there's one person that did that that actually yolo their full full send.

[Ben]

There's been crazier bets made on.

[John]

I mean we know some retail traders who full port into Crazy Thesis. Crazy thesis every week. So I wouldn't be surprised if someone out there did go giga short the Korean fried chicken stocks. It's totally possible.

[Ben]

Well, yeah, if you were shorting a variety of restaurant stocks in the US this year, you did incredibly well.

[John]

They all did poorly. Is that the Ozempic trade?

[Ben]

I don't even know that. There was just a lot of these restaurants that started trading at like 50 to 100 times earnings. We'll get to it later in the show or I'll try to.

[John]

Well, before we move on, let me tell you about Cognition, the makers of Devon. Devin is the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. There's some debate over how impactful the ChatGPT launch has been on job displacement. We keep going back and forth on this. I mean I was working on a slide deck yesterday with Tyler and we were mapping it out and I drew out the slide on the whiteboard and I was like, okay, now I need to get the picture of the whiteboard into Google Slides and have it like animate or get it into figma and have it animate so I can actually use slides. And. And I just like it was still a disconnect and we still wound up doing a bunch of it manually. And there wasn't just like take a picture of something you scribbled and turn it into a presentation. Like, it's just we're not in that like the era of agents. You said this in the show yesterday. You were like, you're like Codex or Microsoft. Copilot doesn't get enough credit for bringing us into the era of agents. But copilot is not actually an agent. It's a copilot, which is different. An agent I see as a pilot Copilot is sitting alongside you doing spell check. I would see Grammarly as a full Grammarly. The original Grammarly was a copilot and then deep research is an agent.

[Ben]

They have some agent specific functionality.

[John]

I see Devin as An agent. I see Codex as an agent, but I think there's still a. There is still a big problem to solve of, like, what is the agent in every category? How can someone actually get to be reliable?

[Ben]

So I guess my point was, like, Copilot is meant to be a way to orchestrate agents.

[John]

They certainly want it to get there, but that's not how people use it just yet. Like, for the most part, it is like.

[Ben]

Well, I think the notable. I think. I think something notable about, like, when I think of the ChatGPT, like, jobs, displacement, debate and discourse. Like, I look at our company, which is like, despite a bunch of new tools popping up, we still need to hire video editors. We still want to hire writers. There's, like, a bunch of these different roles that AI Is great at. Like, AI is. I mean, AI Isn't necessarily, like, great at writing, but it can produce a lot of writing, right?

[John]

Yeah.

[Ben]

AI Is great at writing code, or at least it's great at increasing productivity and velocity. That just meant that we hired a software engineer. Yeah, right.

[John]

We should. We should have a bigger debate about this. I feel like me and you can debate this a little bit, but we should have some. We should have some folks on the show to go back and forth on this chart, because it is first, I mean, we need to figure out how accurate is the. How accurate the actual chart is because it doesn't include a Y axis. And it's one of those things where we've seen these viral charts where when you go and recreate them, they kind of like, you know, don't quite line up.

[Ben]

This chart, to me, has always been about interest rates going through the roof. That's what it just happened to almost perfectly coincide with the ChatGPT launch.

[John]

Change in the high interest rate.

[Ben]

And then if you look at the gross of the ETH S&P 500, like, almost all the growth is driven by AI. So it's like, yeah, the narrative here is just.

[John]

It's just weird because high interest rates, higher interest rates should. Should hurt the S&P 500.

[Ben]

Right?

[John]

Like, that's what happens when interest rates go up. Like, you flood to bonds, the equities sell off. Like, and that did happen a little bit in 2021 at the end of the top. But then we got the AI Boom and we wound up building much bigger. And so bubble baby or something. Says Bu. Bubble Boy, who we've talked about before, says, if only there were some major event a year before that was important and affected interest rates and hiring trends and so is this the Silicon Valley crisis and then the Silicon Valley bank crisis and then the interest rate hike that I think Bubble boy is referring to. And Young Macro is replying and says, but shouldn't restrictive policy also have impacted growth proxied by the black line? Yes, and that's what I think we were getting at. Not saying the chart, but I don't get the consensus pushback, which is that policy was being tightened around the divergent point. So yeah, I would love to dig into more of this because there's just so many different things that are going on. There's like, there's like the cultural trends around the. What Elon did at X that just kind of like woke a lot of CEOs up to this idea that they could run leaner. The interest rates huge. The different like geopolitical dynamics of like, do you want to offshore or not? There's like so many different, different aspects. And then even just, Even just if AI isn't displacing, but if CEOs think that AI is going to displace people or AI will be in five years. Well, a lot of the reason why you hire someone isn't because you need the job done today. It's because like you need time for them to ramp. Exactly. Like the reason that a law firm hires a junior associate is because they need a new partner and the partner will, they'll grow up into a partner in 20 years.

[Ben]

Yeah, and I've said this probably 20 times by now, but I think that every CEO, even if they're not, if they don't have an AI narrative, wants an AI narrative. So if you have to do layoffs, why not say, hey, we're getting a bunch of efficiency out of AI tools and that's why we're doing layoffs. Or that's why we're not opening up a bunch of new.

[John]

Yeah, so it could be the cost of capital went up, you have to pull back on a bunch of investments because you can't get cheap debt anymore. You're tightening your belts and then you wrap it in the AI narrative. Yeah, yeah, that is possible.

[Ben]

Well, if you're worried about AI job displacement, why not invest in a SPV that has fees with 0% carry and a 7% one time management fee, just 7% tax immediately. This is not even the craziest that, that we've heard about. There's some out there floating around that are just 10% immediately, 10% off the top. Right off the top. The zero that's been happening.

[John]

Great for the Principal agent problem like.

[Ben]

Total solves that they're not incentives or raise as much money as humanly possible.

[John]

I mean it feels like, you know, I've heard a lot of early managers like flip this around where they, where they only get carry and they give on the management fee. Yeah. And they're basically working.

[Ben]

Yeah. Where they're charging like just an admin fee to cover the cost.

[John]

Barely anything. And you'll see people with like small funds that seem somewhat sizable. But the actual management fee, once they've given so many fees because they don't just come out with a 3 or 4% fee structure, they might have 2% and then they're giving it away in a bunch of places to get early LPs on board. And so there's plenty of early stage managers that are making like 100k or 200k. Like they're just not taking that much home. But they're heavily incentivized on the carry side that if it works they will wind up doing very well. And so they're betting on themselves. This is kind of the opposite of that. Anyway, let me tell you about figma.com, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free. Michael Burry has just filed his 13F 11 days early. He has never done this before. Massive put. He's going short Palantir and Nvidia. But didn't Burry come out and say this is fake news?

[Ben]

Yeah, this is a. I mean it's also.

[John]

Do you think people not understanding the notion, the notional the market. Do you think that there may be. One way or another.

[Ben]

It's a bubble.

[John]

It's a bubble is the entire account. Imagine what happens after the. After the bubble pops. Like your account is just so sad.

[Ben]

Yeah, this is just. This is just a. I think in general people continuously misunderstand the sort of like notional value versus the size of the actual portfolio.

[John]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And also just like I think that there's oftentimes there's multiple funds and multiple vehicles within there and multiple things that are hitting the reporting threshold. And so there's so much like legal nuance. I don't know that it's super easy to just like see a big number in a 13F and tell a whole story around it. Totally. Let Burry cook. We'll see what he has to say.

[Ben]

I wonder if Burry wish he played himself in the big short so that all the meme. If he knew all the meme images would be shared hundreds, thousands of times a day. It would just, he would just. It would be the ultimate marketing engine.

[John]

It'd be, it'd be a very tolerated that. That was a tough role. I mean it wasn't the toughest, I guess in Christian Bale's. It wasn't the biggest transformation, but it was like, I mean Christian Bale's a great actor.

[Ben]

I mean it was, it was perfect.

[John]

Is it called the Big short? Is he big or is he short? Is he both? The Big Short?

[Ben]

Both at the same time.

[John]

He was, he was defending his height. He said I'm not five, four, something like that. I don't know. Yeah, I've been there.

[Ben]

Amit shared some more on Palantir earnings. We covered it a little bit at the end of yesterday's show. Q3. They did 1.18 billion of revenue up 63% year over year. 883 million of U.S. revenue up 77% year over year. 397 U.S. commercial revenue up 121% year over year. Almost half a billion of U.S. government revenue up 52% year over year. GAAP net income of nearly half a billion at 40% margin. Rule of 40 at 114%.

[John]

Yes. Government contracts boom. This was particularly good for them.

[Ben]

Although it's growing slower than commercial revenue. Commercial, but still people understand.

[John]

Why did the Journal go with government contracts boom? That's interesting. Data analytics company said it had 1.18 billion in the sales for the third quarter. Palantir stock here, another record high. Man, what a wild story. The Palantir story. It's over.

[Ben]

I mean 20 years old. It's down, it's down 8% today. So. Yeah, but still, I mean like beating.

[John]

Just such a fascinating company that just.

[Ben]

Like beating like this, beating like this and Then trading down 8% the next day is shows that the market's a little shaky. Another iconic quote from Karp. He says some of our detractors have been left in a kind of deranged and self destructive befuddlement. This remains the beginning, the first moment of a first chapter.

[John]

Yeah.

[Ben]

Super, super base. To be 20, 20 years in and just be like jobs unfinished.

[John]

I like that. The Wall Street Journal summarizes what Palantir does. The Denver based firm sells software to centralize, manage and analyze large amounts of data. It's like the simplest one liner.

[Ben]

Like what does Palantir do?

[John]

Palantir was also in the Journal today because they're hunting for. They're hiring high schoolers. Now they're just like, college is pointless. We'll just hire you straight out of high school. Which is insane and awesome. I love it. One Palantir post says, college is broken. And we talked about this when they went out with the meritocracy kind of campaign, but the journal's writing on it a little bit more. The fellowship offers a path for high school students to work full time at the company. After deciding to apply, Matteo Zanini found out that he got the fellowship at around the same time he got admitted to Brown University. Brown wouldn't allow him to defer, and he had also landed a full ride scholarship through the Department of Defense. What a crazy.

[Ben]

What kind of track is that?

[John]

This kid is. Is like, what's a good example? Seal team 6 level or something like, this is like an elite operator. The DoD is like, we will pay for your Brown education. And then Palantir's like, but we'll also hire you direct.

[Ben]

I got a scholarship to be on the equestrian team at Brown. Yeah, I got.

[John]

The DOD's paying me to be here. Who is this Mateo Zanini? This is a crazy, crazy person. Okay, let's go through this. I'm super interested in this now. I said no one said to do the fellowship, said zanini, who turned 18 in September. All of my friends, my teachers, my college counselor. It was a unanimous no. His parents left the decision to him and he decided to go with Palantir. Zanini is one of more than 500 high school graduates who applied for Palantir's Meritocracy Fellowship, an experiment launched under Alex Karp. Palantir is a data analytics company that has been known lately for its government contracts, including with the US Military intelligence agencies. Karp, who studied philosophy at Haverford College and got a law degree from Stanford, said in an August earnings call that hiring university students these days meant hiring people who have, quote, just been engaged in platitudes. The inaugural class of 22 Palantir fellows wraps up in November. If they have done well in the four month program, they will have the chance to work full time at Palantir Sands College degree. The fellowship kicked off with a four week seminar with more than two dozen speakers. Each week had a theme, Foundations of the West, US History, Uniques, culture. They're talking about Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill. We felt obligated to provide more than the average internship, said Jordan Hirsch, a senior counselor who works with Karp on special projects. The interns experience that's cool early on.

[Ben]

So they're Getting some, some, some classroom time in, basically.

[John]

Yeah. Yeah. They're, they're studying, studying some stuff.

[Ben]

They're studying game and they're also getting into the history books.

[John]

Yeah, it's pretty crazy.

[Ben]

That's cool. I do, I find it a pretty, a pretty common experience to be like blown away by, let's say like a. Somebody in their, like mid to mid to late 20s.

[John]

Yeah.

[Ben]

And discover that they didn't go to college or they dropped out very quickly. Like these people just. I don't have a lot of. Maybe it's, maybe it's like, I don't know, maybe it's something to do with like our network. But it seems like you can basically get a 3, 2 to 3 year head start by dropping out. Right. And by the time you're in your 20s, like you look, you kind of appear and are accomplished like somebody that is in their mid-30s.

[John]

Yeah. Yeah. You just got to be ready to kind of build your own thing. If you're not capable of that, like, you're gonna have a bad time. But if you're, if you're ready to like, you know, just kind of go independent and like leave from, and just like solve any problem that comes your way, it's, it's clearly very, very accelerating to your career. Automate compliance, manage risk and accelerate trust with AI. Vanta helps you get compliant fast. And we don't stop there. Our AI and automation power everything from evidence collection to continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk, whether you're starting up or scaling.

[Ben]

Couldn't have said it better myself, John. Let's get into this. Highlights from this article in the Financial Times. The state of AI. Is China about to win the race? Clickbait. It worked. Uh, let's get into it. Arnaud. Arnaud Bertrand shared some highlights. He says this is rare enough to be highlighted. An actually good Financial Times article on the state of the AI race between the US and China. He put race in quotes. Three interesting points stood out to Arnaud. One, the fact that for a general purpose, technology such as AI long term advantage often comes down to how widely and deeply technology spread across society. This is because at the risk of pointing the obvious benefits from a new technology come from using it widely, not just creating it. You wouldn't get any benefit from discovering the steam engine in and of itself. What drove productivity gains and ultimately Britain's advantage in the Industrial revolution was spreading and using this technology in its society. And China has advantages here, as the article notes, since they're unarguably better at orchestrating society wide transformation as that's all they've been doing for the past three decades. They got some reps in to the point that US semiconductors export controls actually help China and AI since they pushed Chinese companies towards a different playbook. Pooling commute compute, optimizing efficiency and releasing open weight models. John. John is. Yeah, I mean like the efficiency thing.

[John]

Is but I mean the, the actual. I. I would love to know about like the data point that I have not seen that I would like to see is actual basically consumption of AI. It's clear that they were able to catch up on creation of Frontier model with Deep seq but how much is actually getting implemented? If you look at in America you would go to what's happening on Open Router. Let's look at OpenAI's revenue, let's look at Palantir's revenue, let's look at Anthropic's revenue and we can see that companies are paying to actually implement this stuff. To understand how close China is, I'd want to benchmark that a little bit more and try and understand that. Anyway we can move on.

[Ben]

Good point. The efficiency thing is real. The other thing that's fascinating is just like the, you know there, there's the energy abundance that China has. Right. Is like helps off offset the like.

[John]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ben]

If they can use more energy and be more efficient and then that's, that's an edge.

[John]

Before we move on to the next point, let me tell you about graphite.dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

[Ben]

Jordi, where were we? This is extremely ironic as the US effectively pushed China to develop models that are more efficient and open source, which turns out to be a better strategy for global diffusion. If you're a company in say Germany or Brazil, you can download Quant or Deep Seek, run it locally, fine tune it for your market and never worry about API rate limits.

[John]

But does that mean that you win? Like it's like cool. Like Linus Torvalds is not the most powerful person in computing. Like he did great thing by creating Linux, it's awesome. But he's not like he's nowhere near.

[Ben]

As powerful as anything. If anything it seems like you kind of hurt the anthropics and the open AIs of the world that have. Chesky was came out and talked about using Quinn models at Airbnb because they were fast and cheap and they were.

[John]

I'm dying to talk to the CEO of red hat because red hat Linux is built on top of Linux. It's the ultimate like the apex predator of the for profit business built on top of an open source software product. And to actually understand how much leverage you get from developing something like Quin or Deepseek is a very open question to me. I feel like it might be two orders of magnitude less value capture. If you look at, I mean all of the Linux value creation, I mean the creation's immense, but the value capture is I think on the order of tens of billions. And I think that the closed ecosystems iOS and iOS and, and Microsoft Windows is in the trillions. Trillions maybe. I don't know. It's hard. It's hard.

[Ben]

Last point here, which I think is the most notable, the oft ignored point of societal enthusiasm. As the article notes, the public in China is the most optimistic in the world about AI, far more than in the US or the uk. Optimism can be a powerful fuel, Arnaud says. I often lament about this as a European. We often have a doomist take on new technologies, AI very much included, which is a huge repellent for entrepreneurship and technological diffusion. And that ultimately hurts Europe in a lot of ways precisely because the first point above advantages from new technologies come down to how widely and deeply it spreads in society. If China is the most enthusiastic country in the world about AI, this in and of itself will help drive the widespread adoption that per point one is actually what matters for a long term competitive advantage. DJ Levy says the point made about operating under constraints reminds me of how post war Japan adopted fine tuned and promoted lean manufacturing to overcome scarcity. Interesting point.

[John]

There's a. There's an article in the Wall Street Journal today about about what happened behind the scenes between Nvidia and China. The reporting says that the Trump administration Trump aides sank Nvidia push to export AI chips to China President hearing from his inner circle opted not to discuss policy shift with Xi Jinping they met in South Korea and an urgent issue emerged. Trump wanted to discuss a request by Nvidia Chief executive Jensen Huang to allow sales of a new generation of artificial intelligence chips to China. Current and former administration officials said greenlighting the export of Blackwell chips would be a seismic policy shift, potentially Giving China, the US, the US's biggest geopolitical competitor, a technological accelerant. Wang, who speaks to Trump often, has lobbied relentlessly to maintain access to the Chinese market. As they prepare to meet Xi Jinping, top officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, told Trump the sales would threaten national Security saying they could boost China's AI data center capabilities and backfire on the U.S. officials said. And so I still wonder. I mean, it's like Nvidia is a $5 trillion company. Like, if they could sell to China, how much? Like, it's not like it's a $10 trillion company, is it. Is it that big of a deal? Like, how big is the China opportunity?

[Ben]

It's the second largest computing market in the world.

[John]

It's huge. That's right. But so do you think. Do you think that there's 5 trillion at stake here? Is that how big of a deal this is? I don't know.

[Ben]

Depends on how AGI pelled you are, John.

[John]

I guess. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, if you think AI is, like, safe, but you want to sell it everywhere, I don't know. I also just wonder how many American tech companies have really been able to do well in China over a long period of time. It feels like even if you have the blessing of the United States, you won't have the blessing of the CCP forever. So.

[Ben]

Yeah, Tesla was selling into China as long as. Well, as long as it took for them to copy it. Granted, chips are quite a bit harder to make than cars.

[John]

Before we move on, you might be aware that on the other side of the country, there's a mayoral election. New York City is choosing between Mamdani and Cuomo. And you can go to polymarket.com nyc to track it. There are 12 hours, 22 minutes and 33 seconds left, and Mamdani is at 95% chance. Cuomo's at around 90.

[Ben]

Earlier.

[John]

Yes, they flipped in July, and Mamdani has been grinding it up from the 70% up to 95 where he is right now. And his odds look very good. And. But, you know, there's a lot of people out there saying, smart money's on Cuomo. Maybe he'll win.

[Ben]

I think the degenerate money is on Cuomo.

[John]

That's probably true. I mean, yeah, somebody said that to me, and I was like. I was like, I don't think that it's, like, hard to pull Cuomo voters. Like, I don't know that much about it, but it doesn't feel like the Cuomo voters are, like. Are like, under a rock. Like, oh, they don't pick up the phone. Like, if anything, it's like the Mamdani voters, he's bringing out, like, a new voter. So, I don't know. You can go track it.

[Ben]

@Polymarket.Com NYC there's been some debate on whether or not like, foreign whales could be kind of, you know, pushing up one.

[John]

Yeah.

[Ben]

You know, pushing up. So Ron, for some reason, but there's so much, there's so much volume on, on this market that it's, I think at a scale that someone would have to be extremely motivated to try to. Really.

[John]

I always forget that. I believe we were doing the show during the election last year and I think we were so locked in on technology, we barely covered it.

[Ben]

I'm sure.

[John]

But. But I think it hap. I think the election happened like. Cause the election was in November and we started the show in October.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[John]

So that's like.

[Ben]

Well, that was the first. That was the first.

[John]

Didn't cover it.

[Ben]

That was, I mean, but that was the first that everyone was glued to the prediction market.

[John]

Totally. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But also, I think that was exhausting. And every show was obsessed with politics and so it was kind of refreshing to hop on the microphone and actually just talk about technology, talk about business.

[Ben]

Talk about schizo and on posters.

[John]

Exactly.

[Ben]

Break them down.

[John]

Exactly. And, and there was truly. I, I still, I still maintain that technology is like the most important story of 2024, for example, and, and tracking what's happening with OpenAI is just most important.

[Ben]

Most important to us. That's for sure.

[John]

For sure. For sure. Just like Julius AI, the AI Data analyst is the most important AI data analytics company. Connect your data, ask questions in plain English and get insights in seconds. No coding required. What's this post from Martin Shkreli?

[Ben]

So a couple accounts we're sharing, a couple big shorters, we're sharing that Chanos Hopper GPU rental index with a big move down in late October now down 28% year to date. Yes, just Dario says no signs of GPU oversupply whatsoever. And Shkreli comes over the top and dunks and mogs by sharing some NEO cloud, I don't know which one exactly, showing that every single service that this cloud is offering is out of capacity. So A1 hundreds, H1 hundreds, B2 hundreds, GH2 hundreds, et cetera. So definitely a tale of two chips.

[John]

Yeah, it seems very, very hard to, to, to like in, to assess the market based on spot pricing in the single dollars per hour. Like just the amount of like liquidity in the market if you want to spend ten grand is probably way different than wanting to spend ten billion dollars. And when you look at what the hyperscalers and the frontier labs are talking about, I don't think that they're happy one way or another to hoover up a couple little instances all over the place. I think they need a real data center, but I don't know. We haven't heard. This is so interesting because have you seen reports? We see reports when a startup's website goes down, right? Because it's like, oh, maybe AWS went down or maybe like they're just like, not. They're being sloppy, right? Like, like if. Especially if it's a company that somebody like wants to dunk on, right? Like Clulee. Like if, like, if Clulee was like out of GPUs, like people would dunk on Cluli, right?

[Ben]

They were dunking. You didn't see this? I mean, people were showing, but not for gpu. Yeah, they were just showing that the service was down.

[John]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was just like the status page. And there was actually some FUD about that. Like I wasn't sure if that was super real, but. But there are plenty of reasons why in any oligarch, oligopolistic like startup market, if there's two companies that are duking it out and one of them is like, oh, they couldn't secure their GPUs to do their inference, to do their AI agents thing, one of them would dunk, right? You'd think you'd see this, but you don't. And so I'm much more on the, like, there are generally enough GPUs to go around right now, but I don't know. I'd like to know more. I know Tyler does run into GPU constraints every once in a while, but it hasn't been like a major, major league gating factor. Most of it's available and if you need some GPUs or on demand clusters for generative media, head over fall. The world's best generative image, video and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine tune models. Serverless GPUs and on demand clusters.

[Ben]

Shopify, Quora, let's go. Plexity, Adobe, many more. This was the data that I was referencing earlier in the show. Qcap shared year to date, or actually, sorry, monthly performance from Canva, Wingstop, Shake Shack, a bunch of other restaurants.

[John]

CMG. Oh, CMG is down 22% in the last week in the quarter. They're down 20.

[Ben]

Hey, they're only down 47% year to date.

[John]

So rough.

[Ben]

But yeah, really rough. Wasteland Capital shares. Most of these restaurant stocks were trading at 35 to 100 times forward PE just recently. Many still are. They were valued at A massive Premium to the MAG7 and any comparable growth stocks in tech and AI. This is just a bubble deflating. Bubbles can't be sustained indefinitely.

[John]

Let me give you some more context on Chipotle because Chipotle was actually in the Journal today. B10. First, let me tell you about Turbo Puffer search. Every bite service vector and full text search built from first principles and object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. So the the Wall Street Journal says Chipotle's big bet on younger consumers is unraveling. An uncertain US economy is catching up to younger Americans and Chipotle Mexican Grill, the Mexican inspired chain has spent years cultivating a younger clientele, pitching its burritos and bowls as nutritious, protein packed meals for gym bros and healthy eaters. What do you think, Ben? Are you still a fan?

[Ben]

Do you still love it?

[John]

I still love it. I still love it.

[Ben]

It's so. Yeah.

[John]

Me and Ben used to go to Chihuahua every day.

[Ben]

I used to get almost. I used to get easily 90% of my calories from Chipotle at certain times in my life. And anytime you were like on a long drive.

[John]

Yes.

[Ben]

Knowing that at some point in the drive you could pull over and have a nice, fresh, nutritious, yes. Slop bowl was just, it was something to look forward to.

[John]

Oh, it was amazing.

[Ben]

And now the last time I pulled over and got Chipotle, I'm like, this is going to be rough.

[John]

Is it, is it a quantity?

[Ben]

It's a quality.

[John]

It's a quality.

[Ben]

Entirely a quality. The quality is degraded to such an extreme degree that it's no, I'd rather fast than eat Chipotle in almost any situation. Obviously I'm extra picky.

[John]

So apparently they've been going younger. They've been targeting younger clientele and it says here Chipotle sponsors video game competitions and some dedicated fans dub themselves Chipotle Boys.

[Ben]

That sounds like something they're trying to I haven't seen this at all. Have you seen this?

[John]

That's not good. I would never self identify as a Chipotle boy. In fact, the existence of the Chipotle boy makes me never want to shop at Chipotle ever again. Millennials and gen zers have helped power Chipotle sales despite rising menu prices and slowdowns at rival chains. In recent months, though, a harsher economic reality has set in. Rising student loan payments, stagnant wage growth, and higher health insurance costs have bumped burritos down younger consumers priority lists.

[Ben]

They're just what are they eating instead.

[John]

Dude, I've been in this scenario. When I first came to Silicon Valley, Chipotle was like a once a month luxury noodles at that same time, literally ramen noodles. You go to Costco, you get ramen noodles. Ramen noodles is truly 10 cents a meal. Like it is the cheapest, cheapest thing.

[Ben]

I mean, yeah, the ice cream. I sort of $10. I sort of look back fondly on the days when Chipotle was felt and was a luxury. When I was like, okay, getting extra.

[John]

Meat and guacamole, extra, extra guac and extra meat was like, I am a king.

[Ben]

Were you, were you like a frozen chicken breast guy too?

[John]

Yeah, for sure. I'd just be Costco.

[Ben]

I'd be looking at the huge bag, you know, yeah, one pound bag of rice in the frozen and chicken breasts being like, again, we meet again.

[John]

We meet again.

[Ben]

And then be like, I got to mix it up and have chicken and rice from somewhere else.

[John]

They're eating at home more often. They're eating with us less frequently. Chipotle CEO Scott Boatwright, I like that name. Said in an interview. One is Sean Chopra, a 23 year old law student at UCLA. Chopra typically stopped at Chipotle several times a week, but lately he decided he should make more Mexican style food at home. Okay, he's DIY Chipotle. It isn't that difficult to replicate what you get there. That's a great point. He has to cut back his Chipotle habit to twice a month. Chipotle said last week that customer traffic slid over the three months ended September 30th. For a third consecutive quarter, the company cut its forecast for same store sales. Consumers from 25 to 35, who account for roughly one quarter of Chipotle sales, are pulling back on visits. Other fast casual restaurant stocks, including Cava and Sweetgreen, also declined ahead of their own earnings reports scheduled for the week ahead. Thrifty eaters, there's more stuff.

[Ben]

So revenue is growing because they're opening new stores. But at existing stores, you see they.

[John]

Got to go up market. Caviar bowls. Yes. I'll have double caviar. I'll have double beluga. Can I get double beluga? Yeah, we got a double beluga with extra caviar. Yeah. Can I have, Can I have Wagyu, a five wagyu bowl with double beluga on top. Can I get that? That's the only way that they're gonna survive. They gotta go out market the young people. Do you remember the permanent underclass?

[Ben]

Do you remember the moment that you, you, you heard that you could just order. Even if you got a bowl, you could get tortillas on the side.

[John]

I never did that. Never. I've never once wrapped my own because I just don't know.

[Ben]

It wasn't even for me. The calculus is I wasn't even going to wrap it. It was just extra calories.

[John]

Extra calories. Okay, okay. That, that, that's a true min maxer. I respect that. I respect that. I also respect Google. AI Studio. Create an AI powered app faster than ever. Get started. Gemini understands the capabilities you need and automatically wires up the right models and APIs for you. You can get started at AI studio. SL build. Let's move on to the timeline. Burn Hobart. We got to get them on the show. It's been too long. A bunch of people have mentioned how cheap restaurant stocks are. So I looked at Sweetgreen and I would love to know what first principles you could use to deduce the existence of a fast food chain that pays 5% of market cap per year in stock based comp. This stock based comp thing is very, very interesting. Interesting to me.

[Ben]

I think sweetgreen has to get this number up more into the Snapchat range where it's. Where it's every 10 years.

[John]

So it's 10% of market cap per year. This is an interesting metric I would love to know across. Across a wide swath of companies. Market cap per year in stock based comp. This is a deep research report. Somebody's got to fire it off.

[Ben]

I want to get the Sweet Green founders on the show asap.

[John]

I'd love to.

[Ben]

Jonathan or Nicholas.

[John]

I wonder.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[John]

It just feels like at a certain point you're a mature business, you can just pay cash. Right. But maybe stock based comp is just advantageous because it's cheaper than cash somehow. Or it changes the financial profile. It feels like something that's more. It's more just financial engineering and it doesn't really create any value. But like, you have to play the game on the field. Right.

[Ben]

I think they've always invested more on the software side than other fast casual chains as well. And so I just imagine this. A lot of this is executives. And then.

[John]

Yeah, I'm just saying, like there is a world where, where instead of, instead of taking 5% of your market cap and giving your employees shares, you just sell 5% in the open market. You get the cash and then you pay the employees cash. Right? Like that's. Those two should be economically equal. And yet certain companies. Snapchat among them will pay stock based comp. And I feel like it's because the public markets price things differently. And this is just like the reality of the public markets. Like right now, $1 of AI contract revenue is worth $4 in market cap. Like we just see this again and again and again. And so if the markets are pricing things in a certain way, you have to put the game on the field.

[Ben]

$38 billion over, over seven years is.

[John]

Worth all of it to it. But yeah, it was a crazy moment.

[Ben]

Of added market cap for Amazon.

[John]

Yeah. I mean at the same time like the reason you could price that just a steel man a little bit the reason that you could price a 38 billion dollar contract at 120 of market cap or something like that is. Well, it's not just what's going to happen after that 30, 38 million, 38 billion runs out. Yeah, they're going to size up the next contract because they're going to keep growing. Like, like this is the beginning of a long relationship.

[Ben]

It seems like this is a capital intensive business. They're, they're, they're building restaurants. It seems like you'd want to compensate employees with stock. So you don't you like you have cash. It's not like an, necessarily an infinite bid.

[John]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ben]

In other news, Mustafa Suleiman says it's an understatement to say a lot of us haven't felt good about our relationship with technology. So absolute last thing we should be doing is making that relationship romantic. Shots fired. Let's check in with the stock. The stock's down 0.69% today.

[John]

That's not that much. What is that? It's like 60 billion now or something. Well, what a 1% move on them is 40 billion right now, 38 billion. So it's a, it's 30 billion. Was the price of the, of the adult content in Excel that was just.

[Ben]

Yeah. Or it was already priced in. It was always mostly priced in.

[John]

Anyway, you got to get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. You got to go to profound reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands and get started. Josh Wolf, who I believe we might see today, I'm excited to hang out with him, says history was just made. Lux Family Co. Anduril Technology. Anduril has just successfully flown the first ever fully autonomous fighter jet ever in US history. So this is the secretary office of the Secretary of the Air Force shares. Today the Air Force made continuous progress in the cca, the Collaborative Combat Aircraft Program. With the first flight of the YFQ44A developed by Anduril, this is a milestone that shows how competition drives innovation and accelerates delivery. He says one of two. And then maybe doesn't.

[Ben]

It is a crazy looking jet.

[John]

Yeah.

[Ben]

Like at some point it just starts looking like a missile.

[John]

Was this. So the mainstream narrative is that this was created by humans. That's what that's.

[Ben]

And I find that that's what almost.

[John]

Impossible wants us to believe. Yeah, that's the.

[Ben]

Just like the Aston Martin Valkyrie, everyone wants to say, oh, this?

[John]

Yeah. Human hands made. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They got a carpenter. They got a carpenter guy.

[Ben]

Pull up that thing. Looks like alien technology.

[John]

It does. It does. Make it make sense.

[Ben]

Make it make sense. Make it make sense. Make it make sense.

[John]

Linear. Do you think Linear was built by human hands?

[Ben]

Also hard to believe the design. We know the team very well.

[John]

It could have been discovered, though. It could have been something that they unearthed.

[Ben]

That's right.

[John]

And it was.

[Ben]

And it was built by intergalactic SaaS that landed here on Earth.

[John]

Landed here.

[Ben]

Discovered by humans to help build more.

[John]

And more great software and build products.

[Ben]

Yes.

[John]

You can go check it out at Linear. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps.

[Ben]

You remember when we talked about that ufo, etf.

[John]

Oh, yeah, yeah. Let's check it out. How's it doing? Is it ripping? It's probably way up. Tell me it's up. Because they had good stuff in there. Like, that was the funniest thing.

[Ben]

Okay. Procure space, ETF space, NASDAQ ticker. UFO.

[John]

Okay. UFO.

[Ben]

40% all time. So you bought it in 20. You could have bought it at $25 a share in 2019. It's currently sitting at $35 a share.

[John]

Invest in aliens, people. Simple.

[Ben]

The Procure space may provide diversification beyond the limitations of solely earthbound companies. And I'll read from their investment objectives. Since the beginning of humankind, our ancestors have looked to the skies with immense curiosity in search of answers. Space has always captured human interest. But recently the space economy has also captured commercial interest like never before. UFO may provide diversification beyond the limitations of solely earthbound companies.

[John]

Huge.

[Ben]

This is huge.

[John]

So, yeah, it's up 40% this year.

[Ben]

How do they have Sirius XM in their top 10 holdings?

[John]

They have satellites. They're out in space. They're literally out in space. How do you think they'll make contact?

[Ben]

What's the UFO theory behind it?

[John]

Serious, if not through Howard Stern recordings being Blasted out into the. The deep depths of space. That's how we make first contact with Stern. Howard Stern.

[Ben]

I can see it broadcast on.

[John]

I don't think he's actually doing well anymore on there.

[Ben]

Did you see this company, Incredible Energy?

[John]

Yeah. You mentioned this. And Harris nails it. Harris, Rothermel says, where are all these companies coming from? We're so back. And I completely agree. Like. Like, we've been talking. Everyone in tech has been talking about.

[Ben]

We don't know how to do this anymore.

[John]

Where are the solar panel companies? Casey Hanmer's doing a whole press tour. He's been on Door Cash. He's been on Cheeky Piney. Coming on this show multiple times. Like, Casey Hanmer's been saying, like, we're not making solar in America effectively. And here's this company that's just cooking, setting out 14 megawatts of solar panels in a single day. They're producing 5.1 gigawatts annualized pace. I very, very worry. I worry that there's Jerry rig everything says he'll go and make a video for free. That sounds awesome. I hope he does.

[Ben]

So the thing that was worrying for me on this front is that the company T1 Energy is just TE on NYSE is valued at $683 million, which felt very low in comparison to some of the American dynamism companies that we've had on the show who have valuations far beyond this, despite not. Not Even, you know, 10% of the overall production capacity.

[John]

I really. I really am so confused. Like, where did this come from? This was something that everyone was saying is not happening in America. Impossible. Like, we're so behind, and this seems really good. I guess we need to actually handicap this against the real production numbers in China. What is demand? Also, it seems like this is maybe a newer company that just hit 14 megawatts.

[Ben]

It's not like they're actually background. So, yeah, yeah. The company initially started as you did.

[John]

The Deep Research.

[Ben]

Freyr Battery. It was founded in Norway. It merged with Elusa Energy, SPAC listed on Nice as Frey. That was 2021, 2024. They bought Trina Solar's 5 gigawatt Wilmer, Texas module plant. And only earlier this year, they rebranded T1 Energy. And so this was an existing company that basically that's backed in the US that then bought a existing solar panel plant. And so this didn't just get spun.

[John]

Up over very typical spec, I guess it went out at 10 bucks a share, roughly $4 billion market cap, I think. And now is traded down to $4 a share. 680 million market cap. But as we've seen with a number of these, of these spacs that went out and got crushed after the interest rates like some of them build back like some of them just, just make it, make it work after a while. I love the story of Dave. You know Dave.com. i think it's Dave.com.

[Ben]

Oh yeah.

[John]

So it's a, it's like a loan company. I know one of the co founders Neobank. Yeah.

[Ben]

Lending component.

[John]

So went out at 4 billion. Everyone was like awesome. Like we did it trades down like 99.999%.

[Ben]

The chart is just absolutely brutal.

[John]

The chart is insane. It goes down. So they've done a number of reverse splits because I think they actually went out at like $10 a share or something and now it said so so if you split adjusted I think it went out at like $310 traded down to like five bucks. So literally down 99%. I think it was trading like well below cash for a while and now it's back up and is a $3 billion company. And so if you held on through all of that but there were like multiple people who basically at the IPO we're like I'm worth 100 million or like my fund is returned. And then it was like not yet, you're going to need to wait. And then they actually came back. It's such a crazy story.

[Ben]

I mean that was during peak bearishness around Neobanks and anyways turns out that.

[John]

High cheers salute to T1 Energy. Love what you're doing. CEOs welcome on the show. We'd love to to talk to you. This would be fantastic. And if you need to sell your solar panels online you got to pay taxes. Head over to numeralhq.com sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. What else is going on? I don't, I don't think we can play this video of Satya Nadella but the BG2 podcast is still burning up the timeline. It's. It is the current thing.

[Ben]

Brad knows how to to start a conversation clinic.

[John]

Martin Shkreli is forecasting that Nvidia will get to 100 trillion in market cap. Human thought is values by businesses. Even desk email jobs require human thought. But higher priced jobs like legal, medical, finance can also be replaced by AI. He's got a crazy bull case here. We will see 10 trillion. As I prophesied years ago this is short sighted. And extremely lazy analysis Stock Mike goes down so he's putting the screws to the Nvidia Bears pharma drug.

[Ben]

It's a nightmare post for Nvidia Bears. This is really like you're telling me we got 20x upside 25% of the.

[John]

Cost of a human thinker. A digital thinker is a great bargain. 10 trillion revenue creating 40 trillion in additional human thinking work. 10 hundred trillion market cap. That's his math. Pretty remarkable. And I don't know.

[Ben]

Yeah, I think it would be awesome if Nvidia can scale to being valued at the global GDP for 2020.

[John]

Yeah, I mean the crazy thing here is that he doesn't. I mean it's already worth 2 canadas GDP wise although you can't really. It's not really apples to apples but I believe Canadian GDP is 2.5.

[Ben]

Yeah, 2.2. 2.24.

[John]

Yeah, 2.2. But again GDP is more of like a revenue figure than like a valuation figure. So you can't. It's not really apples to apples but it's a funny comparison of the size. Anyway, let me tell you about Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one performance benchmarks, number one competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2. Do you want to read this Chris pike post about the end of cloud inference?

[Ben]

Is this worth looks very long. I'd say we should just have him.

[John]

Back on again but I would be very interested to hear this thesis. I think it is a little bit too long to read through the whole thing but I'm glad that he's. And the same thing for Casey Hanmer. We should have him on the show to break down his extreme hot take on NASA Orion space capsule. Capsule. He calls it hot garbage.

[Ben]

Flaming garbage.

[John]

We need to do like one of those complex style trading cards for one of the TVPN trading cards for this quote. Like this is a bombshell quote and like in other contexts news outlets would put this in big quotes and be like quote flaming garbage. Like Casey Hanmer declares NASA's Orion space.

[Ben]

Capsule in They've spent $31.6 billion.

[John]

Yeah.

[Ben]

They're planning to fly it around the moon with four astronauts next year and also test the life support system and heat shield which kind of sort of failed on the last flight. Anyway, this was miserable to write. I hope you enjoy it. Link below.

[John]

Oh so rough.

[Ben]

We got to talk to the astronauts that are. Yeah, potentially going to be going.

[John]

There's another. What is this post by Robin here? Robin says you can't make this stuff up. SpaceX Starship 2.7 billion HLS contract cost includes docking adapter NASA Lockheed Orion 31.6 billion cost and counting 19 in 19 years in development. Docking is an extra 2.5 billion extra. Wow.

[Ben]

Yeah. The dock, I mean the dock's gonna be an extra two and a half. We're sorry, we know it's already been 31, but we're gonna need another 2.5 to really get this functional rough.

[John]

Well, if you want to dock your body in your bed, get an eight sleep. Go to eight sleep.com transition king get a pod five.

[Ben]

They said you wouldn't be able to do a transition. I got an 86 despite. Despite the early takeoff this morning.

[John]

Seven and a half hours, not 77, I think.

[Ben]

There we go.

[John]

Let's see. But let me see. I think I forgot to like turn it off in the morning yesterday. I got an 87. Today, 77 not quite as good, but my REM sleep was up 17%.

[Ben]

There we go.

[John]

There we go. Not bad. John clearly pivoted. We barely touched on this. Maybe we mentioned it, but I don't know. Did they actually pivot? It was. It's refinement. It's certainly like a shift in the messaging. But let's go through some of the hot takes and then let's, let's, let's give our sort of analysis. So Hero Thousand Faces, great account says all this to be an AI notetaker app number 8 7. Blah blah blah blah. Nizzy says Cluly didn't pivot. They're simply selling. They're simply not selling to 20 year olds anymore. So the Clulee homepage now says the number one AI note taker for meetings. How would that have happened? There's so many. How do you jump straight to number one?

[Ben]

Always claim the top spot.

[John]

Number one in what way? Number one in newness. I don't know. But the pitches to get accurate notes, live transcripts and follow up emails at the end of every meeting. You can get it for Mac.

[Ben]

I felt a little bit bad because I was going so hard on AI notetakers last week.

[John]

Yeah, you could read. Toby Lutke stopped tweeting this. No. Yeah. No one had. No one had seen this. Like this new landing page. But then Toby Lutke just posted last week. I'm not a fan of those AI notetakers that come into the zoom rooms.

[Ben]

Well, he kind of.

[John]

He said it was the equivalent of coming into a meeting with your fly down.

[Ben]

Doesn't sound he he kind of clarified it and said, I like some of them. I just don't like the. The. On bringing an entourage into the.

[John]

Into the entourage is hilarious. But so, I mean, he said that bringing an AI note taker to a Zoom meeting is the equivalent of having your fly down, which seems negative. And then you went, you were like, I don't like it. I'm not, I'm not letting me. I'm not letting them in.

[Ben]

But I think Clulee, to their credit, is more of a. Is a desktop product, which means it wouldn't have to actually join the meeting, which is. So maybe they're building with the direction that people want. I think what they're doing here is like a half pivot, Right?

[John]

Yep.

[Ben]

They, they had a lot of traction around viral marketing towards a cheating tool.

[John]

Yep.

[Ben]

And I think they realized that that was going to be a great, you know, a trillion dollar market. And so they decided, hey, let's pivot to enterprise SaaS. They had always been, I think, doing some of this. Right. I remember Roy talking about, when he came on our show, talking about how, you know, Fortune 500 CEOs in his DMs, that kind of thing. But a half pivot is always dangerous because they're using this Cluley brand, which they built a, A very controversial brand really quickly and, and then. And then now need to kind of leverage that brand and the initial technology software that they built to try to pivot into a category that is kind of, I mean, just squarely at odds with the, with the original brand. Right. If you have like an AI note taker, you want to have, you know, full faith and trust in the team around a number of different things. There was another post in here. I'm trying to find it around. Ilya Sukar says, never kill yourself. There's so, so many post granola depositions to read in the next decade.

[John]

Post granola depositions.

[Ben]

Like when. When if somebody's in a deposition and the opposing counsel has a bunch of your granola transcripts.

[John]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Ben]

And they can be like, on this meeting that you had on this date.

[John]

You said, everything is admissible in court if you have an AI following you around, as opposed to. A lot of people would say, okay, be careful about what you put in writing. But if you hop on the phone and you're spitballing on, oh, well, like, will we have a monopoly if we do this strategy? Like, that's not going to be admissible in court. Yeah, but, but once you have a once. Once you have every meeting transcribed. Even like a little joke can be taken out of context in the court of law. So, yeah, pretty aggressive.

[Ben]

Yeah. The question, the question here is, is there a market for an AI note taker for the kind of people that Cluly is really good at marketing to? Right. If you just hyperscale an AI note taker to the TikTok Instagram younger generation that's not getting marketed. Marketed the same way as Granola.

[John]

Yes.

[Ben]

The challenge is like, I don't think it's possible for them to make a 10x better product than Otter and Granola. Otter's been around for a long time. But Fireflies, yeah, there's.

[John]

Fireflies has been literally doing it since like 2015. Yeah, it's. Some of these companies have been.

[Ben]

So I think, I think it's. I think it's possible that they'll still have this opportunity. But it's possible, like basically like killing, just retiring the Cluly brand and saying like, hey, this and then we're going to take another crack with a new brand.

[John]

And there are also, there are also note taking. There are also like, like non. Like, like, I don't know, what do you call it? Like vertical SaaS within note taking. So like there are certain, like, just for SDRs, call recording and analytics for like, you're not just bringing the AI note taker to your general meeting, your staff meeting, you're actually bringing a special one just for your sales calls. And then it's doing analytics on how you're performing, what points you're making, and then plugging all that into your CRM. If you need a CRM, go to Add IO Customer Relationship Magic. Adeo is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Daniel said, of course I'll give the guys who gleefully break every rule access to all my meetings from. Or a product experience I could get from dozen other companies. What's interesting is go back to the cheat on everything pitch. That was pretty hard because what, what are college students actually using? Like what? Like, from what we've heard, the stack, if you want to like cheat on your homework. What is the stack? Jordy? It's actually ChatGPT, Atlas. It's ChatGPT and Atlas because ChatGPT talk.

[Ben]

To a student who said, I started offering him dollar amounts on what it would take to get him to quit Atlas. We got up to $200 a month.

[John]

So Atlas is just like Cluly in the sidebar, hanging out all the time while you're navigating your homework and then on the free Tier you get 10 messages every five hours and one message per day with the GPT5 thinking model. And then also for $20 you can upgrade get more thinking models thinking and for a lot of parents I bet you the parents will see oh chatgpt, yes that's like a professional tool. Like I'm happy to Pay for your 20amonth plan like because it's like a tutor almost. And even the $200 a month plan I bet is getting expensed to the parents. Right. And so whereas cluly you come to your parent I want to buy this Cluly thing. It's a little bit harder to underwrite. It's much easier. And then not to mention this was your point that Gemini and Google is giving away a ton of queries for students and every student in college probably sets up a Gmail account when they get there.

[Ben]

Roy posted a couple days ago sometimes you have to listen to what the A B test tells you even if it means changing the words on your landing page. And he shows a chart of when they introduced a new language on the website and the growth accelerates. So anyways good.

[John]

Did you see this pleometric post talking to Claude? You have made the same mistake three times in a row now. You should kill yourself Claude considered the weight of a life such as mine. You're absolutely right. This is so clearly fake. But it's very funny and sometimes photoshopped is very very funny. Hero Thousand faces back on the timeline second time in the show talking about OpenAI marketing breaking down what all the different labs are looking like. So OpenAI marketing ominous evil Megacorp OpenAI employees. We are making the world a better place. We are building the most beautiful human friendly future imaginable. Anthropic marketing. The friendly AI in anthropic employees. Every single atom that is not a GPU is an atom wasted. I love checking in on the vibes on the timeline. It's very very funny. If you want to check in on the vibes of the market go to public.com investing for those that take it seriously. Multi asset investing Industry leading yields trusted by Millions Benchmark 2020 Vintage Fund marked at an 8x. Tyler Hodge has the story they're doing just fine.

[Ben]

Do I think crazy for the most part because of Sierra.

[John]

Yep.

[Ben]

As well as fireworks which we had on last week we've had all three.

[John]

CEOs the royal flush.

[Ben]

Royal flush and I think what Ev Randall should do. New GP over at Benchmark.

[John]

What should you do.

[Ben]

Is 10x that fun again?

[John]

For sure.

[Ben]

Another 10x. Yeah, on top of. On top.

[John]

Oh, 10x. Okay. The 8x is a base hit.

[Ben]

10X. 10x again.

[John]

10X it again. Yeah.

[Ben]

To an 80x.

[John]

Well, well, we're gonna get him on the show again. We're gonna talk to him about our expectations for him and we're gonna tell him, please don't let us down. Just, just one more 10x.

[Ben]

One more 10x. One more 10X. That's what the LPs are going to want to see, is going to give them faith.

[John]

Yeah, you're bringing fresh blood in there. You got to bring in some fresh ideas. You got to go on ad. You got to put benchmark on the.

[Ben]

One to your face. This is the first thing you do.

[John]

Put your face. Hey, do you need venture capital? Call Ev Randall at benchmark 1, 800, 1, 800. Let me just, let me just say his phone number right here on the street. Ad quick.com ad advertising but easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of adizing. Only Ad Quick combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. But in other news, people are making money on blueberries.

[Ben]

That's right. Fruitist fruit is raises 150 million to power the next wave of healthy snacking. This is Brutus has closed $150 million funding round Huge Blue led by JP Morgan Asset Management with Ray Dalio doubling.

[John]

We got to try some of these.

[Ben]

Valuing the berry powerhouse at over 1 billion. The round also brought in Oaktree Steve Kaplan Oak trees alignment.

[John]

This is a crazy.

[Ben]

Alamon capital bringing total equity raised to 443 million. The snacking company best known for its jumbo blueberries and new grab and go snack cups generated more than 400 million in revenue last year. With blueberry sales. They got to get an AI narrative here. This, this could. This should easily be a 40, 40 billion dollar company at this point. With blueberry sales tripling as Fruitus expanded to 12 12,500 stores across 40 countries.

[John]

Wow.

[Ben]

They're trading at two and a half times sales. I remember we talked about, we talked about this company when they made the CNBC disruptors. Yes. And they were like above Anderal. Why is a big fruit company above Anderal? And apparently fruit maxing is a good strategy.

[John]

Dalio pulled some strings maybe.

[Ben]

Henry said Charlie Munger once said take a simple idea and take it seriously. And. And sometimes the simple idea is obscenely large blueberries.

[John]

Do you see how Chaotic. The. The comments are on this Drew Fallon post. There's the food manufacturing guy is in there being like, yes, GMO blueberries are all the rays. Like, I don't like the fact that these are GMOs. And then Jeff Long Leong is here and he's saying Driscoll's quality is more consistent. And it seems like everyone has their favorite fruit brand that they're pushing on. And it's knockout Drag out fight. So Will I Am is in the news because he will be teaching a new class on agentic AI at Arizona State University. I don't know if this is the first time Will I Am has got into the professor game, but he's professorial game, but he will be teaching a general elective. General elective course in his Hollywood studio with some students in person and others joining from ASU classes.

[Ben]

Yeah. So the same, the same people that thought Jensen signing that woman's shirt.

[John]

A lot of people are saying this is a top signal.

[Ben]

This is the top. This has to be the top. Who knows? Kevin Gee, sharing that reminder.

[John]

Personally, I think that hearing how well I am is using AI would be interesting. Yeah, I find that interesting. And I'm, I'm. I'm. I'm endlessly entertained by. There's somebody who has a craft like, you might not like his music, you might love his music, but clearly you know that he makes music. Like he has a process. He has a. He makes. He makes hits. Exactly. And there's a whole process for that. You know, scheduling the studio time.

[Ben]

Okay.

[John]

Assembling the music.

[Ben]

But here, here's, here's. Here's why I think it's not so crazy Kevin G. Is highlighting Will I am was an early investor in Tesla, Pre Elon, Open AI, Anthropic, Twitter, Pinterest, Dropbox, Hugging face, beats and Runway. So he's got exits, he's got IPOs, he's in the labs. He was even in the Everything app. He was in hugging face. So put some respect on Will I am not a bad portfolio at all. And yeah, I hope they end up open sourcing the class so we can study along with them.

[John]

I would love to.

[Ben]

We should actually have Tyler. Tyler.

[John]

I was thinking about Tyler.

[Ben]

Get ready to go to asu.

[John]

Get ready to transfer.

[Ben]

We know you're studying physics, but we now need you to study agentic AI.

[John]

I like that. That's very funny.

[Ben]

In other news, there's some.

[John]

In other news. Bezel. Your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously. Any watch.

[Ben]

Any watch.

[John]

Do you know who kim.com is or is this before your time?

[Ben]

This is kind of before my time, but I've seen some kind of vibe reels and I. Oh, yeah, I think.

[John]

This guy, he had a wild build. He was running a crazy build. He had a very like mob boss enforcer type build.

[Ben]

I mean, he's still running it, right?

[John]

I believe so.

[Ben]

But he was 6, 7.

[John]

Oh.

[Ben]

According to Wikipedia. And Prosperous.com rose to fame in Germany in the 90s as a hacker and Internet entrepreneur.

[John]

I gotta, I, I gotta get my.

[Ben]

Arrested in 19, 1994 for trafficking and stolen phone calling card numbers.

[John]

Yeah.

[Ben]

Convicted on 11 charges of computer fraud. So he's definitely kind of mob boss coded.

[John]

Crazy. Crazy guy. And so L3 tweet engineer says, you don't really see guys like Kim Dotcom anymore. Modern Internet culture doesn't have room for these guys. It's interesting. Yeah. You, you see them a little.

[Ben]

AGM says they exist in crypto, which embodies much of the unhinged ethos of earlier Internet waves. Just siloed in crypto. Twitter and Telegram.

[John]

So that's true. But yeah, it is. The siloing effect is very, very important. I was thinking about that guy who takes those, like, funny pictures. He always goes viral. He's like the I'm rich guy. Like, he kind of has that aesthetic. But the weird thing about Kim.com was that, like, he actually made a product, Mega Upload, that a lot of people used. And it was like, very controversial. And no one else was getting rich on it. It was for file transfers. So I could. You could. It was in theory, I could say, hey, we're going to record a podcast. I'm going to send a 4 gig file to our editors. Like we use, you know, you could use Wetransfer, you could use Google Drive. You could use any sort of air. There's a whole bunch of different services for transferring, like, files.

[Ben]

Calder in the chat says 6, 7 mentioned.

[John]

67 mentioned. There we go. But Megaupload quickly became used for. For piracy. So people would use it to upload software. Movies, maps of the high seas. Maps of the high seas, Exactly. So it was just a wild time.

[Ben]

Andrew Curran says an AI generated song has entered a Billboard radio chart for the first time. Zenia Monet, created by Human Talisha Jones, who used Suno. Suno also signed a $3 million record deal a few weeks ago. Imagine 3 million. And then all of a sudden you got the $3 million record deal.

[John]

3 million.

[Ben]

It is funny that this is like.

[John]

Yeah, yeah, that's 2% of our revenue.

[Ben]

We'd like that AI song that we can't play on the show.

[John]

We can't. Oh, because it's on.

[Ben]

It's an actual artist.

[John]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's annoying.

[Ben]

What's the difference between the other 103 titles that have made the chart this year alone? An is an AI driven artist. The product of a poet named Talisha Jones and her songs chart arrival marks the first known instance of an AI based act to earn a spot on a Billboard radio chart. The move also represents another step in the evolving relationship between AI tools and creators in the music industry. I would like to see an AI musician not share their real identity and. And satoshi or banks. Satoshi of music.

[John]

Yeah. Not a pop star, but a slop star potentially.

[Ben]

Well, we have Michael, one of the co founders of Suno coming, extremely excited for that on the show Friday. Can't wait for that.

[John]

And if you want to log off, if you want to touch some grass, head over to wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views. Hotel, great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, 247 com concierge services, vacation but better they can't better make you listen to slop if you're in your wander.

[Ben]

Gwart says, like most of you guys, I didn't get into crypto to get rich. I got into crypto because I believed in the vision of 500 different stablecoins issued by 500 different centralized institutions on 500 different blockchains. The good news is you're going to be able to swap in and out of all.

[John]

Yeah, I do wonder what the stable result is like. What is the final equilibrium? Is it just endless proliferation of new coins or is it a consolidation because there was a war for store of value? Like there was like bitcoin classic and. And. And I can't even remember that other one. There was the one that was like it's the gold to bitcoin's gold. And it wasn't. I can't believe I can. I don't even remember it anymore. It wasn't ethereum. It was a different one and it was like very popular for a while and it's just completely left my brain.

[Ben]

Monero.

[John]

No, I'm so. I'm completely lost. I don't know. Anyway, yeah, there were a whole bunch of those. You know, there was a war. There was a war and bitcoin won capital. And then, and then there's been a war in the other in the other chains and the other like values. And I wonder if there will be a winner in stablecoin or a stable duopoly.

[Ben]

I mean right now it's effectively a duopoly between usdc, but there's still a.

[John]

Lot of value in creating new stablecoins.

[Ben]

Let's look it up. Stablecoin market top Stablecoin tokens by market cap you have tether at 183 billion, USCC at 75 billion. The next largest is USDE at 9 billion. Below that is DAI and then below that, below that is World Liberty Financial.

[John]

Wow. Remarkable. Palmer Lucky has a post here. He says, I have this partially formed hypothesis that artists backlash against generative AI crystallized largely in response to text driven user interfaces. The art world has come to accept tools like Photoshop and earlier photography itself that still shares the aesthetic of traditional art creation. If mid journey, ChatGPT, Dall etc had interfaces along the lines of Nvidia canvas from 2020 pictured below, I remember this tool. It was awesome. You could do that. You could draw whatever, whatever like outline you wanted and it would just automatically generate it and looked great. Palmer says. It would look enough like existing tools that the critique would look purist and elite. Art via command line on the other hand looks sufficiently other that you can easily berate the users as not artists. You just typed a few words. You aren't an artist has a better ring than your drawing skills. Rely on Photoshop somewhat more than mine. You aren't an artist. And that's really true. That's good. I was thinking about like I don't know if it's like bull case for Adobe or someone else, but there I was shocked. I wanted to do a. I won't leak it just yet, but I wanted to make a big like we do those market maps. I wanted to make a big tapestry with a lot of detail that I could zoom in and zoom out on. And I wanted to be able to iteratively put together the collage with generative AI. I didn't want to just try and one shot the entire thing. I wanted to zoom in and say in this corner I want a house and so generate a house and then I'll zoom out and then over here I want a person and over there I want a forest or whatever and I wanted to use something that was like the like the Nvidia canvas UI or something. And I just, I haven't found a tool and I was wondering I need to go back through all of the different like effectively like drawing tools there's been a few that have really taken off on the iPad that allow you different brushes. So you can say I want to make my brush a rubber stamp of a tree and then you can just kind of scrub in some forest and it will just stamp the tree again and again. And that's not generative AI, but it certainly helps you speed up drawing a forest, for example. And I was wondering how far caught up are those companies on implementing things like Nanobanana or GPT images and ChatGPT because those models are great. But I am kind of sick of just the command line because I try and one shot it and then I'm like, oh, that's not good to try again. And then it's back and forth as opposed to like actually building it up like clay where you're molding it. That's way more satisfying in my opinion.

[Ben]

Yeah. The thing, the question for Adobe that I don't necessarily have an answer around yet or even a strong take is if Genai makes it a lot easier for people to be creative, like combine these two ideas and make an image of it. But does that create more people going down the pipeline to becoming power users that ultimately subscribe to various Adobe products?

[John]

Right.

[Ben]

Because historically like the learning curve, the learning curve on a lot of those tools is very steep. Learning curve on just generating an image is much lower. So I don't know. I think that bearishness was on Adobe specifically was, was always, always overblown Photoshop.

[John]

I'm going to get to the bottom of this because I am somewhat comfortable in Photoshop mapping up, cutting and lassoing and stuff. I know they have Firefly if they had. Okay, so they have choose a model and then they have one of the non fly or fly models. What model could you use? I'm going to dig into this and understand this because potentially there's some cool stuff you could do because I really want to make this like collage and I need to figure out the correct tools or I need to delegate to someone.

[Ben]

The chat has some ideas for you. There was bitcoin gold, which was the thing. There was also litecoin thinking of Gustav called it.

[John]

Thank you, Gustav.

[Ben]

It was silver to bitcoin's gold.

[John]

Yeah, it was silver to bitcoin's gold. And I don't know where the market caps are now, but just in terms of like my, my, you know, mental awareness, the litecoin has truly fallen by the wayside. Whereas it was, it was something that I was aware of during the bitcoin.

[Ben]

Rise you probably invested in at one point.

[John]

I don't think I did.

[Ben]

Yeah. Litecoin is down at a $6.8 billion.

[John]

Valuation and Bitcoin's at 2 trillion, right? I think 2T. Yeah, 2 trillion on the dot. It's at 100,000 today. Bitcoin is off its high and the markets in general are very red. The Nasdaq is down 1.88.

[Ben]

Dow Jones down 0.64 meta down 16.

[John]

Everything is red. Everything is red today except for Apple, which is up. And guess what? My take today was a bull case for Apple. You're welcome, Apple. I will take full. I will take full responsibility. Maybe we close out with my take. I would love to get your feedback.

[Ben]

On what I almost getting may get to down being almost down 10% today. 9.35% bloodbath.

[John]

Well, not for Apple. And it feels like Apple's getting the good ending. It's not that like it's over. It's not like the conclusion of the AI Game of Thrones has played out, but it feels like we just watched the total vibe reversal on Google and I feel like there might be one coming for Apple. And the reason is that there's this popular narrative that they missed AI. Right. Like Apple missed AI. It's so egregious.

[Ben]

Gurman didn't really mince words.

[John]

He said two.

[Ben]

He said it was wildly embarrassing for them.

[John]

And he said even internally they feel that way.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[John]

And so it's weird playing like the bull from the outside.

[Ben]

The do nothing when dynamic.

[John]

The do nothing win dynamic. I should have put that in here because that was the correct phrase that we should have used. But. But and to be clear, like, I do think that they missed AI. Like, I'm frustrated with Apple intelligence. I never use Siri. I can't even use the native dictation and speech to text reliably. Like if I need to read a story out loud, I'll still like dump it in Gemini or ChatGPT. And like if I want to dictate something, I'll use a different app for that.

[Ben]

I don't just trying to get your phone to dictate an article challenge.

[John]

And it's like that is not super intelligence. Like that's a very basic model that's been out for two years. So I. So I do think they missed it. And for you know, this phone costs almost two grand. Like it should be able to do that. Like that's the expectation. But there might be worse fates than missing AI. Like there is a worse Scenario which is imagine if they, if they were like oh we're missing AI and instead of just being like oh let's do some software and do some on device inference and do some cute little gen Mojis, it's like we need to spend $200 billion of capex right now to build a massive thing. We got to build the Colossus data center, we got to build all this crazy, crazy, crazy frontier model and then they burn all that and then they get a model that's not even as good as ChatGPT. They can't really integrate it and then they run into Imagine, you know, Google like dealt with the whole like the generative image thing where the German soldiers were depicted with the wrong races. You remember this black Nazi fiasco. Like Google doesn't love that type of PR fiasco. They got through it. Apple is like 10 times more risk averse than Google in my opinion. And so Google is not like a move fast break things company but they were able to move fast enough to get through that. And now they have VO3 which like has been amazing and Nano Banana which has also been amazing. But Apple really would not want that if Genmoji was doing crazy black Nazi stuff like that would not be good. And so they, you know, Apple, we heard this yesterday, they kicked the tires on some multibillion dollar AI acquisitions but they never really got anything over the line. Now they're partnering. The news yesterday was they're partnering with Google to essentially white label Gemini into Siri. I think this is awesome. I think consumers will love this. I want exactly this. Right now Apple's paying Google for the API calls, but Apple is an underrated.

[Ben]

Threat to ChatGPT because what Gurman said that was most notable to me is that Apple will try to pursue the agenda commerce opportunity which didn't understand that.

[John]

At all because I don't know how they would set that up. I think that, I think that it's going to offload to Gemini entirely. And so my question and my, my take, I don't in the long term. So. So first off, yes, I do think, I do think ChatGPT usage could fall if Siri plus Gemini gets good enough that when you want to fire off, you know, a, a GPT5Pro query, some of the time you're just like, let me just ask Siri because I know Siri's going to Gemini. It's good enough, right? There's that possibility. The flip side is if the end state if like next year all of the models, when you Ask buy me a pair of shoes. They just go do it. Because that's just a functionality in the API. Well then Gemini is going to start making a ton of money. Like the API is going to make money because like a certain percentage of the requests, sometimes it's going to be like, tell me the history of the Roman Empire. And sometimes it's going to be like, buy me a case of Diet Coke.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[John]

But when it's time to buy me a case of Diet Coke, they're going to make money.

[Ben]

Apple at the product layer, if they're using Gemini at the intelligence layer does not mean they're doing revenue shares at the, at the model layer at all.

[John]

What do you mean?

[Ben]

Like, if Apple has, has like their LLM experience, which is like Apple Intelligence.

[John]

No, that will be Gemini. That's what they.

[Ben]

But that's not how I read. That's not how I read Mark's thing. He said that Gemini will be below the surface, powering the product experience.

[John]

Yes.

[Ben]

Because there's a world like you can imagine, ChatGPT could use non OpenAI models under the hood and still own the customer experience and own the customer relationship and monetize the queries.

[John]

Sure. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no. I think you're right. So basically, Apple, Apple, this is the thing that I want to dig into.

[Ben]

Apple sees what they have going with the App Store and Apple historically has not. They historically haven't been able to monetize commerce. Well, like all think about all the economic activity that's being driven by Apple products, right? How many? Yeah, unless it's digital, you probably spend, you probably spend. Like the average Apple user is like driving so much purchase volume off of their phone, whether it's buying clothes, buying.

[John]

Groceries just on Amazon, on your iPhone, like the iOS sales on Amazon.

[Ben]

And that was always off limits. That was off limits for App Store, you know, revenue share because it was real world products being sold and traded. And so I think they look at this and they're like, hey, this could be a trillion dollar opportunity for Apple and it's going to be super, super competitive. They're going to be competing with Google, OpenAI, you know, a bunch of other companies. But I just felt this was this.

[John]

I don't know, I think if it happens in the LLM, like in the, in the LLM, like for loop, basically, like if I go to Siri and I say order me a case of Diet Coke and it goes to Gemini and says the prompt is order John a case of Diet Coke. It's pretty hard for Apple to say, like, and we want the revenue. Like, it's like, Google did the work, so they are going to get the commission. It's the same thing as, like, wouldn't it be nice if Apple was like, oh, yeah. Like, you know, you can use Google on your phone, but like, if you click an ad, like, we're going to take the cut. Like, no, that's not how it works.

[Ben]

Yeah, but if they're surfacing the ad.

[John]

Yes.

[Ben]

At the app layer for Apple.

[John]

Yes.

[Ben]

Then Apple can decide what ad network do we use? Do we use a native ad network that we're building similar to the App Store? Do we partner?

[John]

I don't. No. No, no. So what I'm proposing is, I mean, yes, you could build it either way. And this is obviously going to be a point of debate and a point of negotiation, but there is a world where you go to Siri, you say, I order me a case of Diet Coke. It goes to Gemini with that prompt, and Google says, we're using Google checkout and we'll have it delivered to your thing. We'll book your credit card. It's on file.

[Ben]

Does that sound like Apple?

[John]

Apple would definitely fight that off because.

[Ben]

They ran a bake off with a bunch of different intelligence providers.

[John]

Yeah.

[Ben]

I'm just saying that that was something that would be top of the list in terms of, hey, we want to use you for search and knowledge retrieval.

[John]

For sure.

[Ben]

Knowledge retrieval.

[John]

And that's why Apple's paying Google. But, but if, if, like, play this out in a year.

[Ben]

But it would be flipped if. If, if what?

[John]

If Google is like, we can order you a case.

[Ben]

If Google knew they would monetize, they could monetize this.

[John]

Yes.

[Ben]

They would be like, you can have it for free.

[John]

Totally.

[Ben]

So.

[John]

And I think it flips at some point.

[Ben]

Well, okay, so you think it flips at some point.

[John]

I think it flips at some point.

[Ben]

Within the grounds of the current agreement, I believe that Apple will want to own any sort of, like, payments. Own.

[John]

Yeah.

[Ben]

Capture at least.

[John]

That's certainly their leverage. But there is totally a world where, Where Gemini learns my home address through Siri. Learns my credit card number through Siri.

[Ben]

Yeah, But I mean, just starts making orders. Literally the final boss of, like, yes. Disintermediating all business.

[John]

I'm not saying that they won't have leverage in the negotiation, but I, but I am saying that like, like, Google is more set up to actually build the product that delivers diet.

[Ben]

I totally agree.

[John]

And so, but I Think they're going to be in the same.

[Ben]

The middle ground. The middle ground to me would more likely be like a rev share.

[John]

That's what. Yeah, no, that's exactly what I mean.

[Ben]

And that's what's happening with Google Search.

[John]

But I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, exactly, but exactly.

[Ben]

Apple has built a taxation engine with the App Store. They've already built an ad network. And so I think internally they would probably like all the margin, but I.

[John]

Mean you could use the exact same logic to like they should build a search engine then and then take all that margin.

[Ben]

Yeah, but it was also harder to, it was much harder to build like a search experience until.

[John]

I don't think they're going to, I don't think they're going to do it. I think they're going to. I think that they're going to say, hey, look, right now, right now, LLM search queries cost a dollar every time you fire them off. So we're going to pay you a billion dollars for like a million of them or whatever. It's not a dollar each, but like, you know, a million. A million prompts is a couple bucks or whatever, Whatever the math is, over time it's going to be like, no, every prompt generates money. So you want people prompting your system because you make money every time people prompt it.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[John]

And you monetize through advertising. And so at that point there's going to be another Bake off. But the bake off is going to be who's going to pay Apple the most money. Yeah. Anyway, that was, that was a big part of the debate. The last question I had was like, who? How do you feel? If you're Tim Cook right now, you have to be pretty happy was my take. You don't get, you didn't get over your skis chasing the AI boom. You didn't invest in a bunch of infrastructure. You didn't acquire a company for 20 billion that you didn't need to. Even though AI features are super nifty, lacking them clearly doesn't cause people to switch phones. Imessage is such an insanely locked in network effect, everyone still went out and bought the 17 Pro. More importantly, Apple got through a massive existential crisis during Liberation Day and the ensuing trade war with China. Playing the political game of Thrones while being a supply chain mastermind is more than enough to propel Apple to a $4 trillion valuation and earn Tim Cook a major pat on the back. And so I think, I think his.

[Ben]

Comp has got to 100 at least.

[John]

@ least, at least, at least. Let's get him in Nine figure Club. It's, it's really, really depressing that he hasn't been.

[Ben]

But let's get to this post by Jason Schumann. He was highlighting Service Titan at $9 billion market cap on 866 million of revenue. Comparing that to Harvey, which is $8 billion valuation on somewhere around 100 million of AR. I think they're, I think they're quite a bit beyond that at this point. But Jason says at this point you have to believe that we're moving from a world of niche vertical SaaS to the next industrial revolution. I think that's exactly what the VCs that are backing Harvey at 8 billion believe. Right? They believe they're eating. This is a labor displacement, labor replacement opportunity. And so they're, they're underwriting, underwriting Harvey against the overall revenue of law firms globally. And can they capture a percentage of that? You would not be able to underwrite Harvey like this against like the existing legal AI market. And so, yeah, this is a bet that this is a bet on labor displacement.

[John]

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it is just a new market in some ways. Like Service Titan is a, I mean, not to boil it down too much, but it's like customer relationship management software for tradespeople with applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing, automation. So it is in like a niche of a niche that big and they make a ton of money. But it's somewhat niched down, which is the point about the niche vertical SaaS. Harvey, at least right now, it feels like is in a fairly new and broader niche. It's like the legal market, it's had niche vertical SaaS, but something that's like pretty dramatically accelerated. Like it's, it feels like, it feels like the returns to the AI ification of your vertical SaaS product are just higher in legal than in, in CRM for tradespeople. Yeah, I would think so.

[Ben]

Yeah. Apparently the 200 largest law firms in the world annually provide 130 billion of legal services. So that's the top 200. So Harvey's already sitting at, you know, basically their market cap at like 6% of the, of the global annual spend.

[John]

Also just the top 200. I mean, the growth rates are like wildly different. So price to earnings growth, if you do, if you just do peg, like you're going to get to a wildly different number. But I don't know, we've seen a bunch of examples of like, you know, the lawyers genuinely like expressing that they Are ready to pay for AI in a serious way.

[Ben]

Yeah, well, I have the right post to end it on. A rare Pagani Zonda R, one of only 15 ever built, has found a new life not on the racetrack, but as a centerpiece inside a luxury oceanfront condo valued at over one and a half million. This Italian hypercar has been suspended on custom engineered steel beams. Serving as a breathtaking room divider between the master suite and living area. The designs transforms what was once a track exclusive masterpiece into a sculptural focal point. Celebration of speed art and architecture. Very chat. GPT coded, unfortunately. Writing. But yeah, this is absolutely insane. I'd seen some of the pictures of it. I'd seen some of the pictures of it being like, lifted up into the room. Yeah, it's kind of cool to be able to like walk around the car and see the bottom of it, Although we can't see the pictures of it here, but keep it on the track.

[John]

This is disrespectful to my culture as a track guy, as someone whose entire personality is about tracking cars. Now that I went once. This is. This is extremely disrespectful. Take it out of.

[Ben]

Yeah, it really is.

[John]

Give it to a track.

[Ben]

Could you not. Could you give it to a track junkie in me?

[John]

Give it to a track junkie created.

[Ben]

Come to Hollywood and say, for a hundred thousand dollars, I want you to make a model of my car. I'm gonna keep my car at the track, but I want to have it in my living room.

[John]

Yeah. So, yeah, also, like, what is going on? Like, why is this in a condo? Like, like, if you have $1.5 million to spend on like a centerpiece, like, get a house.

[Ben]

Ever heard of a penthouse? Ever heard of a Miami?

[John]

It says condo. Doesn't say penthouse. It doesn't say, oh, they own the whole. Building a condo. They got a condo. They got. They got a little studio and they put a 1.5. I mean, honestly, respect for going crazy with the prioritization, you're just like, yeah, my rent's 4k a month, and I decided to put a $1.5 million car in my 4k a month studio.

[Ben]

You want to do what?

[John]

Yeah, tenant upgrades. I don't know. Let us know in the comments what you would do if you had a Pagani Zonda R1 of 15 ever built. I say keep it on the track.

[Ben]

Yeah. Personally, I would have at least kept it flat so you could use it as a. As a call booth.

[John]

Phone booth, for sure.

[Ben]

If you need to jump on a zoom. It's kind of loud. Yeah, yeah, you just jump in there.

[John]

So, anyway, thank you for watching the show. Thank you for listening. Leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. We will be back in the ultra in Los Angeles. We'll see.

[Ben]

Can't wait then.

[John]

Goodbye.

[Ben]

Thank you to Ben.

[John]

Bye.

[Ben]

Cheers.