Trump's Tech Dinner, Tesla's $1T Pay Package, OpenAI Mass Producing Chips with Broadcom, Seal Team 6 Mission Gone Wrong | Joe Weisenthal, Jason Droege, Dave Marra, Mert Mumtaz, Harish Abbott, Tuhin Srivastava, Cecilia Ziniti

Summary

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TBPN Podcast: EPISODE SUMMARY

Podcast: TBPN
Hosts: John Coogan & Jordi Hays
Air Date: September 5, 2025
Episode Title: Trump's Tech Dinner, Tesla's $1T Pay Package, OpenAI Mass Producing Chips with Broadcom, Seal Team 6 Mission Gone Wrong
Guests: Joe Weisenthal, Jason Droege, Dave Marra, Mert Mumtaz, Harish Abbott, Tuhin Srivastava, Cecilia Ziniti

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Overview

This episode delivers an energetic dive into headline-making developments across tech, business, and policy. Major themes include massive funding moves, presidential power-dining, landmark deals (Tesla, OpenAI/Broadcom), discussions on AI labor market implications, striking tech infrastructure bets, copyright in the era of AI, and a wild covert ops tale. The hosts welcome a parade of expert guests, adding insider color to the news cycle.

If you haven’t listened, this summary provides a clear breakdown of all hot topics, memorable moments, and the best takes—no need to worry about missing the show.

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Main Topics and Key Insights

1. Media Mega-Deals: Free Press, CBS, and the Value of Personality (00:37-07:04)

• Barry Weiss’s Free Press reportedly acquired by CBS for $200M—illustrating the enormous value placed on “personality-led” new media ventures.
• Hosts break down takes: high price per subscriber, long-term brand value, political implications.
• Dynamic of media leaks and influence in “talent” acquisitions.
  • [03:02] Jordy: “Media companies at their best are personality led. Paying $200 million... makes sense.”
  • [04:07] John: “You just can’t get that level of talent on any sort of normal overall property.”

2. The Browser Company Acquired by Atlassian—Vibes, DAUs & Enterprise Focus (07:04-13:27)

• Atlassian acquires The Browser Company (ARC/DIA) for $610M.
• Debates about “vibe” acquisitions, prosumer vs. enterprise product focus, and whether “pre product-market fit” deals make sense.
  • [08:16] John: “Some people had this take that it was a vibe acquisition... they acquired good, better vibes with the next generation of founders.”
  • Similar concerns in Instagram’s acquisition.
• Future of work browsers and profiles; Atlassian plans to orient DIA toward enterprise use.

3. Ramp Hits $1B ARR – Scaling Simple Ideas with Relentless Execution (13:27-14:11)

• Ramp surpasses $1 billion in revenue—hosts emphasize how “a simple idea, taken deadly seriously,” can scale into huge outcomes.

4. Trump’s Star-Studded Tech Dinner—White House Power Dynamics & $Trillion Commitment (14:11-21:31)

• Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Bill Gates, Sam Altman, and more dine with President Trump.
• Tim Cook notably utters “thank you” on repeat (humorous highlight)—discussed as a marker of the extraordinary stakes of this dinner (00:44-01:15).
  • [15:59] John (as Cook): “600 billion. 600. There we go. We’re very proud to do. That’s great. Thank you very much.”
• Zuckerberg pledges $600B capex by 2028 for AI infrastructure—raising questions about feasibility and how such spending “does NOT necessarily mean new jobs.”
  • [19:22] John: “I’m so inured to big numbers now because of the fast takeoff crowd... trillion-dollar buildout data center like next year, for sure.”

5. Tesla’s $1T “Moonshot” Pay Package — Incentives, Mergers, and Musk’s Master Plan (21:31-30:28)

• Tesla’s board greenlights a new $975B+ pay package for Musk—contingent on wild growth milestones (robotaxis, 20M vehicles, $8.5T market cap, etc.).
• Strong case made for aligning CEO incentives with extreme shareholder value.
  • [23:31] Jordy: “This is moonshot seeking. Every pay package for executives should be this absurd on both sides.”
• Speculation on merging Musk’s projects (Tesla, XAI, SpaceX), and what happens when the Musk dynasty ends.

6. OpenAI & Broadcom: Custom Chips to Escape Nvidia (36:12-42:51)

• OpenAI entering a $10B+ partnership with Broadcom to develop in-house inference chips.
• Target: bring down inference costs, mass produce in 2026, reduce dependency on Nvidia.
  • [39:05] Jordy: “Broadcom said we’ve signed a fourth major AI developer as a customer and that new customer had placed a $10B order... OpenAI.”
  • Significance of vertical integration in AI chip design for scaling and margins.

7. U.S. Economic Outlook with Joe Weisenthal — Job Market, AI’s Impact, and Federal Policy (53:39-70:46)

• Guest: Joe Weisenthal deconstructs the latest labor market data: jobs softening, youth unemployment rising, but major tech capex won’t necessarily equate to new jobs.
  • [57:41] Joe: “If we’re going to take seriously the promise of AI, it shouldn’t lead to jobs growth. The test of AI is arguably jobs destruction.”
• Fed rate cuts seem more likely; contradiction between “hot” tech sector valuations and stagnant hiring.
• Policy dilemma: “what will America’s jobs look like in an AI economy?”

8. Copyright in the Age of AI: Landmark Anthropic Settlement (187:07-197:35)

• Guest: Cecilia Ziniti discusses Anthropic agreeing to pay $1.5B to authors as a settlement for training on pirated works (LibGen). Largest copyright payout in U.S. history.
  • [189:22] Jordy: “At least $3,000 per work... a lot of books.”
  • Settlement covers only past infringement—not future AI outputs.
• Set precedent: Training on pirated materials is NOT fair use; buying books and scanning is OK.
• Comparison with New York Times v. OpenAI lawsuit; future may include ASCAP-style licensing for books.

9. Big Money: Funding Announcements and Infrastructure Arm’s Race

• Base 10 raises $150M for AI infrastructure (180:12).
• Augment raises $85M Series A for AI logistics agents (174:09).
• Rivet secures $90M and a U.S. Army contract for AR “face computers” (145:54).
• Other news: Garage Beer at $200M valuation; Robinhood and AppLovin join S&P 500.

10. Seal Team 6 Mission in North Korea — Wild Real-World Drama (85:28-88:22)

• In 2019, clandestine mission ends in tragic deaths of civilians; bodies sunk, device abandoned. Risks of covert operations, policy secrecy, and the moral fog of geopolitical competition.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On big numbers and “personality-led” media:
  • “You have to put aside the price per subscriber... Does bringing younger, entrepreneurial talent move the market cap 1% or 2%?” — John [03:24]
• On tech consolidation and over-the-top CEO comp:
  • “Most CEO comp is rent-seeking. This is moonshot seeking. I completely agree.” — Jordy [23:31]
• On Meta’s AI infrastructure gamble:
  • “To hit the $600B, spending would need to jump to $200 billion in 2027 and $300 billion in 2028.” — Jordy [17:17]
• On OpenAI's vertical integration:
  • “I’ve been beating this drum of ‘bake it onto silicon’... just get the inference cost down. Let me use it faster, cheaper.” — John [37:08]
• On AI and employment:
  • “If we’re gonna take seriously the promise of AI, it shouldn’t lead to jobs growth. The test of AI is arguably jobs destruction.” — Joe Weisenthal [57:41]
• On copyright and model training:
  • “It covers only past infringement… In the hundreds of thousands of works. Authors will receive compensation.” — Cecilia Ziniti [189:22]
• On the future of labor and automation:
  • “America will reindustrialize but with robots and automation... much higher leverage for each manufacturing worker.” — John [92:52]
• On meme moments:
  • “Giving the ramp card to interns... do NOT do it, folks. The card is simply too powerful.” — John & Jordy [44:19]
• On Seal Team 6’s failed mission:
  • “The mission failed when SEALS killed civilians mistaken for security forces... bodies sunk, device abandoned.” — John [85:28]
• On Ellen DeGeneres’s house-flipping hobby:
  • “From the 34 homes tracked... the couple have posted a profit of roughly $190 million. Their average return is about 37%.” — Jordy [48:34]

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Guest Highlights

• Jason Droege (Scale AI President):

  • Explores the evolution of data quality demands, expert networks for LLM training (“15% have PhDs”), and business resilience post-Meta deal.
  • “We have two multi-hundred million dollar businesses. Either of these alone would be a unicorn.” [127:52]

• Dave Marra (Rivet, AR for Defense/Industry):

  • Shares the journey to securing a $195M Army contract, why “pain points” for ruggedized AR are finally addressable, and how solving for the battlefield unlocks industrial markets.
  • “If we get it right for the most constrained soldier... we get it right for everyone.” [154:04]

• Mert Mumtaz (Solana, Blockchain Infra):

  • Breaks down the Stripe/Paradigm “Tempo” L1 launch, the difference between permissioned/permissionless blockchains, stablecoin payment protocols, and the chaos of “degenerate” on-chain activity.
  • “If you have to permission the block space, it’s unclear what really separates it from a database.” [166:18]

• Harish Abbott (Augment, AI for Logistics):

  • Covers why fragmented logistics is so ripe for agent-based AI, why they won’t build WMS stacks, and lessons learned from Deliver’s scale.

• Cecilia Ziniti (Copyright lawyer):

  • Provides color on Anthropic’s huge settlement, distinctions from NYT suit, and the likely march toward music-style compulsory licensing for AI training.

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Segment Timestamps

| Segment | Start | End | |------------------------------------------------------|----------|----------| | Free Press/CBS Acquisition, Media Dynamics | 00:37 | 07:04 | | Atlassian x Browser Co, “Vibe” & Enterprise Acq. | 07:04 | 13:27 | | Ramp $1B ARR | 13:27 | 14:11 | | Trump’s Tech Dinner, Mega-Capex Announcements | 14:11 | 21:31 | | Tesla’s $1T+ Pay Package, Musk’s Incentives | 21:31 | 30:28 | | OpenAI-Broadcom Chip Deal | 36:12 | 42:51 | | Jobs Data Deep Dive w/ Joe Weisenthal (Bloomberg) | 53:39 | 70:46 | | Copyright/LLMs: Anthropic’s $1.5B Settlement | 187:07 | 197:35 | | Ellen’s House Flipping, Misc Biz/Meme Interludes | 45:16 | 54:37+ | | Seal Team 6 North Korea Mission Debrief | 85:28 | 88:22 | | Startup Funding News (Ramp, Base 10, Rivet, Augment) | ~145:54 | ~186:36 |

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Bonus: Humor & Chat Highlights

• Multiple nods to the meme value of excessive “thank you’s” from Tim Cook (“Thank you, Mr. President... thank you”), and the “ramifications of giving Ramp cards to interns.”
• Monkey with AK-47 meme: discussed as an allegory for unleashing poorly prepped users or analysts into powerful systems/tools.
• Ellen’s flipping success: compared to “the side hustle of all side hustles.”
• The “Carrot and Stick” bit about physical negotiation props.
• Jovial digs at city rankings (Bakersfield > Paris?) and luxury vehicles (G-Wagon Cabriolet vs. Nissan Murano CrossCabriolet).

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Closing Thoughts

This episode captures the pulse of today’s technology zeitgeist: Big money. Big bets. Big risks. And big personalities shaping the future of media, AI, infrastructure, and society. From C-suite dinners with presidents to “moonshot” incentives and high-stakes copyright court battles, the TBPN team brings deep analysis, laughs, and candid interviews with sector leaders. Skip the hour-long scroll—this digest arms you with all the context, color, and insight you need.

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Transcript

[John]

You're watching TVPN. Today is Friday, September 5, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultradam, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We have a great show for you today, folks. Thought we'd mix it up. People have been complaining about the screaming. We decided to take it in a different direction.

[Jordy]

We heard you, I think.

[John]

I think we'll be back to yelling on Monday, though. Was pretty weird.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Anyway, never again.

[John]

Never again.

[Jordy]

Should we actually just dial it back and run it back again?

[John]

You want to do it again? A second take?

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

Okay. You're watching TVPN. The current thing is big numbers. $200 million for the Free Press, Barry Weiss's media company to CBS. People did not like the quiet in the chat. They said Scream, $610 million for the browser company. We talked about that a little bit yesterday. Ramp hit. $1 billion in ARR. Let's hear it.

[Jordy]

Great hit. Great hit. 600 billion in meta. Capex.

[John]

Capex. And 1 trillion potentially on the table for Elon Musk at Tesla. So we're going to go through this. So the Free Press is one of the most impressive media companies built in the last decade, says Austin Reiff from Morning Brew. Correct.

[Jordy]

Yes.

[John]

Huge congrats to Barry Weiss. Nelly Snoozy Weiss. This is a funny name for building something truly different. This is, I think, still rumored. I don't think it's fully confirmed at this point, but it's all.

[Jordy]

But, yeah, it was hard to tell which side was leaking the news.

[John]

Yeah, there's this dynamic where media likes to talk about media, and I feel that 100%. It's super interesting to hear about, like the business of Joe Rogan or the business of Huberman or any of the experts. But so. So obviously also, you know, you're surrounded by journalists, literally, if you run a media company. So they all talk journalistic force headed towards you standing. I've heard that one before. But you're surrounded by journalists, and so obviously everyone talks and the media leaks out and the news leaks out.

[Jordy]

And it could be interesting ways for either side to put pressure on getting finish line exactly what they want out of the deal.

[John]

Yeah, yeah. And so there's a series of takes. I was talking to a buddy who works in media who was coming at me with like, it's a crazy number. And so that's kind of level one. Level one of the take is like, on a price per subscriber basis, seems high. I think they have about a million free subscribers $200 per free subscriber feels like a lot, I guess. Kind of hard to tell if you think about long term value for cbs. But then others are complaining about the political implications of the deal. Is this something that's like a give to Trump to help get the demerger, the spin out approved? Something like that, yeah.

[Jordy]

And I mean, this is an $8 billion deal, this merger and media companies are now entirely like media companies at their best are personality led.

[John]

Yep.

[Jordy]

And paying $200 million to bring on, you know, a face for CBS, one of the most important properties. Makes sense.

[John]

Yeah, that's my, that's my like level three, like final take, which is that you sort of have to put a, put aside the price per subscriber, you know, take, and you have to put aside the political implications of the take. I just think about it from it's a big company. 8 billion. You said something around there. Does bringing a younger, more entrepreneurial talent into the organization move the market cap by 1% or 2% over the next few years? Like, it seems like the same math that we're doing for buying a very expensive AI researcher. You're paying a lot of money in terms of like, what, what, like a salary would count, but you just can't get that level of talent on any.

[Jordy]

Sort of normal overall property.

[John]

Exactly, exactly. And so I was, the person I was talking to who was like, this is a ridiculous price. I was like, yeah, but dude, like if, if you were at CNN, you could probably add $200 million of value to that organization pretty quickly. Yeah. And so it's just a matter of time until like the, the market and the board of directors and the shareholders kind of wake up to that dynamic of how power lost, certain people are and actually go and figure out how to get the deals done.

[Jordy]

And David Ellison is doing deals. Right. He just did C deal Fairmount 100%. So there's a lot of big numbers.

[John]

Flying around and there's an interesting dynamic where the premium.

[Jordy]

Right. We saw this yesterday with the browser.

[John]

Oh, yes, yes, yes. You do get a big fantastic outcome.

[Jordy]

For having the DA at the beginning of the name.

[John]

Maybe we should just be the business production network. Drop the technology. Technology's over. The hype cycles peaked. We're just the business production.

[Jordy]

We're in the trough.

[John]

We're in the trough. We have some fun stuff coming in terms of the hype cycle soon. But it's interesting because many companies just cannot justify putting someone on staff for $100 million. W2, we've seen this at Apple with Tim Cook. You know the CEO pay once you get into the, the, these eight, nine figures.

[Jordy]

Thank you for bringing that up. No, thank you for. Seriously, thank you for bringing that up. Oh, yes, thank you. Apparently Tim Cook. We'll try to pull up this video in a bit. Apparently he said thank you 12 times in two minutes when talking with President Trump last night at the dinner.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

So he's very grateful.

[John]

So the, so yeah, Meta is like the first company to really like break this trend of just like, yeah, we're willing to pay $100 million in salary. We will do the crazy acquisitions and the acqui hires to get really talented people in the org. But I don't think other companies are in that world where they could go out and hire somebody like a Barry Weiss just for $100 million. It's gotta be done through an acquisition. That's what gets board approval. That's what gets shareholder approval. And so you're kind of wrapping an individual, an influencer, someone who's incredibly talented and entrepreneurial around an organization just to actually get the cash flow to flow through.

[Jordy]

It's making me think about CBS News for the first time in decades.

[John]

Yep.

[Jordy]

So.

[John]

Yep, yep. Yeah, yeah, it's true. And even if the, even if like the subscriber numbers are like a little low, I mean honestly, a million is a ton, it's a great job. But even if they are a little low, it's like, well what is like what are they compounding at? Well, what will the free press be able to be at in a decade? With the support of CBS and the, and the backing, financial backing of CBS and Barry Weiss's execution strategy, like could be 100 million, I don't know, could be really, really big. But you don't have to raise money for it. You can just focus on growth. Anyway, similar story at the browser company. $610 million from Atlassian. Very interesting deal. The timeline was not a fan of.

[Jordy]

The land down under with a Brinks truck.

[John]

Yes. And so a lot of people are asking is this some run around by the Australian government to try and influence the browsing habits of Brooklyn hipsters? Yeah, I, I don't think there's much.

[Jordy]

Try to control the narrative.

[John]

Exactly.

[Jordy]

As a way to say, you know, what if we could get all of the data from Brooklyn hipsters, all their browsing information. Yeah, they're known communication.

[John]

Yeah, they're known for drinking pbr. But what if every time they went to PBR on the ARC browser, the DIA browser, it just Automatically rerouted them to Fosters.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Or the AI assistant on the side popping.

[John]

Oh, you're in dia. You might like you're asking, oh, what should I do this weekend and just auto. Auto populates. Oh yeah, we're using AI. Why don't you throw another shrimp on the barbie.

[Jordy]

Yeah. And if you search is it true that kangaroos are extremely violent? It'll start spinning it and saying, well actually, you know, they're only violent when promote. Provoked.

[John]

Provoked. Yeah, they're actually quite peaceful.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Your dog actually tried to barked at the kangaroo and then the kangaroo went after it.

[John]

Exactly, exactly.

[Jordy]

I think this, I think this is really smart from Australia.

[John]

From people pulling the strings to get a little bit more influence over the Brooklyn hipster and the ARK and DIA user. Zeb did not like the acquisition. Pull this up me uninstalling ARK as a certified Atlassian hater. There is a wild gap between the vibes and so some people had this take that like it was a vibe acquisition. They acquired good, better vibes with the next generation of founders arc.

[Jordy]

I think this is funny but I think that from what we've seen DIA they're going to continue to operate independently. I bet they're going to build some beautiful enterprise browsing experiences like they always have.

[John]

Yeah. And they should build in restream one livestream, 30 plus destinations, multi stream and reach your audience wherever they are. So you should be able to stream from your DO browser, from your ARC browser. So my take on this was there's. So basically right now the team is saying we're going to stay independent. We're going to go. But my question is are they going to stay. Are they going to stick with that narrative of like stay independent. And this is very rare for pre product market fit acquisitions. I haven't seen a ton of examples of that where a company was acquired that wasn't like clearly on a. You know, just remember, remember path.

[Jordy]

Instagram was bought for a billion dollars.

[John]

Yes.

[Jordy]

And almost everyone involved at the time thought that it was crazy.

[John]

They did. Yeah. That is true. At the same time.

[Jordy]

And it was like a key threat to Meta's business. Right. Like the user growth was.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Insane.

[John]

I mean I would love to look at the, the retention metrics for DIA versus Instagram because it's totally possible. I don't know. Do you know how many DAUs or total. Total downloads Instagram had at the time of acquisition? I know it was small, but was it sub a million? I feel like it might have been a little bit bigger. Can Someone look that up. But basically look that up.

[Jordy]

Tyler. I'm also curious about YouTube as well. YouTube was bought for.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

How many people were using YouTube three times? And again, the dollar isn't what it used to be.

[John]

Yep.

[Jason]

So when Instagram was acquired, estimated around 860,000. So less than a million days.

[John]

Okay, okay. So.

[Jordy]

So, yeah, use that.

[John]

Yeah, yeah, but still, I mean, we're in the same ballpark here. Very interesting.

[Jordy]

Instagram people that have.

[John]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jordy]

DA use is wildly different than total download users.

[John]

Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, but still, I mean, we're. We're in, we're in the rough ballpark where you could. Where at the very least you like. We have to take what Atlassian is saying and what the browser company is saying at face value. They are saying, we're going to continue building this browser. We're in it to win the AI browser. We're going broad, we're going consumer. This is not. We're acquiring this browser. We're going to bake it into Trello and we're going to bake it into Jira.

[Jordy]

No, I actually disagree with you here. They don't. All the messaging was that they're not going to be focused on consumer from Atlassian CEO was that we're going to build great enterprise browsing experience.

[John]

Oh, okay. Okay.

[Jordy]

So there's nothing in there that I saw from the Atlassian side that said we want to win in the consumer.

[John]

Oh, really? Really. Okay, interesting.

[Jordy]

Yeah. They know their business, right?

[John]

Okay, yeah, so it's very interesting. I can't imagine having like a work browser, but maybe that makes sense. I mean, people have work laptops, but I feel like the trend has been you have, you have like one phone that you do work and life on and then you have separate apps and maybe you have, you know, an enterprise software product installed on your. On your phone. But really, like, there's. The trend seems to be more people using like Gmail and Google email at work and it seems like there's less and less like, oh, yeah, like I have a separate work computer with separate operating systems.

[Jordy]

Chrome is very set up. Chrome is already very set up to have like profiles, like personal profiles and work.

[John]

Yeah, I have, I have two. I have personal one. And so, yeah, one. So I don't know. Yeah, we'll have to see. I mean, the founder is saying, like, we're going to keep working on dia, but maybe that means in the enterprise context anyway, we'll have to keep an eye on, like, where they wind up going.

[Jordy]

So Mike said, again, I said this yesterday with diabrowser. We're going to collectively redesign the browser to help knowledge workers kick butt in the AI era. And so that, to me, kind of reads a little prosumer, right? I don't think they're. But. But it feels like, you know, very much oriented towards people that are working in the browser.

[John]

Oh, yeah. OTP says get Sauger on here to give pushback on tfp. Bye. He's going postal about it. I should text him and see if he wants to hop on. We will. Yeah, we'll definitely get him on when. When. When he's ready to. To, you know, go live and rip some takes. I also invited Bari Weiss. I'd love to hear her. Her side of what's going on and what her plan is. It's a. It's a fascinating story. Of course, like, these are still, like, leaks, so most people don't want to talk until there's, like, finalized information anyway. If you're trying to design a browser, you got to do it in figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Get started for free. And the third big number of the day. Ramp has crossed 1 billion in revenue. Sheesh. Says Tyler Hodge. A key question is whether it's gross revenue or it's net revenue. I think it's gross revenue. He goes back and forth on this. But anyway, they've been on a tear. As David Senra likes to say, it's a great example of taking a simple idea and doing it deadly seriously. Taking a simple idea deadly seriously. I think David was quoting someone, but I attribute everything's to David. David's.

[Jordy]

Now we should pull up these videos from the dinner at the White House last night.

[John]

I only have one question for Eric, which is, is the job finished? So we will figure that out today.

[Jordy]

Gonna call him.

[John]

I'm. He is. He's busy. I'm gonna. I'm.

[Jordy]

All right. Play this video. Oh, yeah, please.

[John]

You've done an incredible job with Apple. Little company called apple. Thank you, Mr. President. Very, very few people have been able.

[Joe Weisenthal]

To do what you've done.

[John]

Congratulations. Please.

[Jordy]

Thank you, sir.

[John]

That means a lot to me. I want to thank you for including me this evening. It's incredible to be among everyone here, particularly you and the First Lady. I've always enjoyed having dinner and interacting. I want to thank you for setting the tone such that we could make a major investment in the United States and have some key manufacturing, advanced manufacturing here. I think that says a lot about your focus and your leadership and your focus on innovation. I also want to thank you for helping American companies around the world. This is a very key, key thing. And I really enjoy working with your administration on those topics as well, because I think they're so important to the country. I want to thank the first lady for focusing on education. There's nothing more important than education. Triple glaze. Triple glaze. It is the great equalizer. Triple glaze and always will be. And so thank you so much for including me. We are all different in some ways, but we all believe in, in the power of technology to improve people's lives. And that, that is the thing that binds us all together. And Tim, how much money will Apple.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Be investing in the United States?

[John]

Because I know it's a very lot and it's, you know, you were elsewhere.

[Joe Weisenthal]

And now you're really coming home in a big way. How much money will you be investing?

[John]

600 billion. 600. There we go. We're very proud to do. That's great. Thank you very much. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you, Sir. We just a 10. Thank you.

[Jordy]

So I think it was 12. Somebody else had counted as 12. I. I was around 10.

[John]

Crazy.

[Jordy]

So we should.

[John]

Why wasn't Christina from Vanta there? I feel like that's key to the US's tech strategy.

[Jordy]

I agree.

[John]

Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vantage trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process.

[Jordy]

All right, we got to pull up.

[John]

This video of with continuous automation of Zuckerberg. This was our fourth big number of the day. Zuckerberg says he will invest around $600 billion by 2028. Zuckerberg says Meta will invest 600 billion in AI infrastructure by 2028. Meta's already guided CapEx of 70 billion in 2025 and 100 billion in 2026. So that's a big ramp to go from 70 to 100. And then they still got 430 billion to do in 27 and 28. To actually reach 600 billion, spending would need to jump to 200 billion in 2027 and 300 billion in 2028.

[Jordy]

That's a lot of dollars video in the timeline.

[John]

Let's play it.

[Jordy]

This is quite a group to get together. And I think all of the companies here are building, just making huge investments in, in the country in order to.

[John]

Build out data centers and infrastructure to.

[Jordy]

Power the next wave of innovation.

[Jason]

So it's, you know, we don't often get together as the CEOs of the different Companies.

[Jordy]

But it's good to see everyone.

[Joe Weisenthal]

How much are you spending would you say over the next few years?

[Jordy]

Oh, gosh, I mean I think it's probably going to be something like $6016-000000-00000.

[John]

Whoa.

[Jordy]

In the U.S.

[Dave]

No, it's significant.

[John]

That's a lot. Thank you, Mark. It's great to have you. Thank you. Well, thanks for hosting us. That's awesome.

[Jordy]

So does anybody in the chat know if, which, which of them went first? Yeah, because. Because that number. That number does not align with. That number does not align with. With. Mata's stated.

[John]

Yes. Yeah, it doesn't appear in the SEC filings yet, but it is like very.

[Jordy]

Forward looking and no, it was 2028.

[John]

2028, which is something that they might not actually put out or might not be demanded by the by Wall street, but that is hilarious. Anyway, whatever they do, they're going to have to do it on graphite. Graphite.dev Code review for the Age of AI Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Get started for free.

[Jordy]

Yeah. So meta guided capex of 70 billion in 2025 and 100 billion in 2026. So to get to 600 billion spending would need to change. Jumped to 200 billion in 2027 and 300 billion in 2028.

[John]

Yeah. What's interesting is that so these numbers are like insanely big and obviously it looks like a big acceleration relative to past CapEx numbers. But I'm so inured to big numbers now because of the fast takeoff crowd that was like oh yeah, like trillion dollar build out data center like next year for sure. Like AI 2027 it's going to be.

[Jordy]

10 trillion, Stargate, 500 billion.

[John]

And so like when I hear 600 billion I'm like yeah, yeah, that sounds like totally reasonable. I think they'll definitely hit that and I don't know, they probably will. It doesn't seem like there's many barriers in the way. Like it's just continue to grow the core business, run more ads, dump the profits into capex, build some more data centers. Semi analysis. Doug o' Laughlin over at Fabricated Knowledge has a good deep dive today on the glut of lagging edge chips that I think we might have a chance to get to in a little bit. But it was a fun dinner. Are there any other videos that we should play from the White House dinner? I like the idea of this is like this is kind of new podcast format. Just have a dinner with everyone, have some cameras. There and just. Yeah, yeah, it's good. What's up, Tyler?

[Jason]

I don't have another video, but there is. There is a photo that came out. I'll send it to the chat. But it was, like, the full dinner.

[Jordy]

And right at the very edge.

[Jason]

I'm pretty sure it's Dylan Field.

[John]

It is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So someone had the full breakdown here. It's in the deck. Much deeper. Let me pull it up. Where is it? The full list of people who attended the dinner is. Wow, there's a lot of stuff. Okay, so Ed Ludlow has it. The full list of attendees at President Trump's dinner with tech leaders, the president, the First Lady, Susie Wiles, Sergey Brin, Geralyn Gilbert Soto, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Anna Brockman, Safra Katz at Oracle, Gal Tarosh, Jason Chang, Meredith o', Rourke, Natalie Dompe, Tony Fabrizio, Dylan Field, John Herring, Jared Isaacman. Jared Isaacman. Oh, I guess he was missing one. Yeah. Elon didn't go, but. Oh, Chamath is in here. So Sunny Madra Satya, Nadella, Chamath Palihapitiya, Sundar Pichai, Mark Pincus, Vivek Renadive, who owns the Golden State warriors, and I believe Vivek Juvarana, Diva is the. The. The. Like, the guy who worked with Chamath on the first SPACs. And Vivek Ranadive kind of like, pioneered that format almost.

[Jordy]

Did you say Lisa sue from amd?

[John]

Lisa sue made it. David Sacks, Sham Sankar from Palantir. We missed him yesterday. He was at this dinner in D.C. jamie Simonov, Alex Wang, Sanjay Marota, Tim Cook, David Limp, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates. What a crew. Jensen didn't make it. So the fact that Jensen and Elon are not there, I feel like you shouldn't read too much into it. It's kind of just like Trump catching up with a bunch of people. But I don't know. There's also, like, this. Yeah, I don't know. They had, like, falling out, but it's. It seems like they've kind of patched it up. I don't know. Always, always hard to read too much into this stuff. But speaking of Elon Musk, he didn't need to be at the White House because he's setting up a $1 trillion pay package.

[Jordy]

975 billion.

[John]

Oh, it's not a trillion. Just a little bit shy. Okay, so the update is Tesla's board has greenlit a fresh pay package for CEO Elon Musk. If he hits 400 billion in adjusted EBITDA. He deploys 1 million robotaxis for commercial use, ships out 1 million energy storage units, produces and delivers 20 million vehicles, secures 1 million of ongoing FSD subscriptions. Aim for a $8.5 trillion market cap. The golden retrievers are bargaining 7 1/2 to 10 years in the CEO role. The starting share prices 3 $334.09. The package includes 12% of company stock divided into 12 segments. And so Signal says this is a masterclass in how to design incentives. This deeply ties Elon's upside on the world, radically improving. If he actually hits those milestones, the value unleashed for society dwarfs his payout. Most CEO comp is rent seeking. This is moonshot seeking. I completely agree. Every pay package for executives should be this absurd on both sides for the company and the individual. And this was exactly my take. It's like bet on.

[Jordy]

He's done this, he's done this before.

[John]

And Dan Primack, when, when the, when the pay package, the most recent pay package came into under like legal scrutiny, Dan Primack was like, I like this when it was announced and I thought it was crazy. And I, and everyone thought it was impossible that he would pull it off and he did, so he deserves it. And, and so it was this crazy legal battle, but it was actually aligned with exactly what a CEO should be doing, creating shareholder value. This should be a model for CEO comp going forward. In my opinion. There's another side of this which is increasing a founder CEO stake by doing aggressive stock buybacks. But this is a way cooler because it incentivizes bold investments and huge capex on factories, Moonshot technology gambles and generally thinking in decades. So I'm super stoked about it. I think it's, I think it's good.

[Jordy]

I hope it holds a good way to signal. I mean they're, they're very much signaling to the base we're going Tesla army that, that there's a lot of potential upside. Chris Camillo said earlier, been tracking xi's accelerating cash burn, flattening user growth, monetization and fundraising struggles since the beginning of this year. And I don't see how they last another 12 months without a Tesla or Elon Musk bailout. I mean, saying, I don't see how they last another 12 months without a the founder bailing them out. It's like that's kind of the founder's job continuously bail out the company. But I thought this was relevant because I do think that part of this, part of setting up this pay package could set up a scenario where XAI gets just merged into Tesla and it becomes a standalone. It just all gets rolled in.

[John]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, Tesla has. I mean, Carpathy worked there. Like it's. It's a fantastic AI organization and it makes sense that there would be a lot of overlap in. In what they do. I guess there's probably.

[Jordy]

And I mean, if X, the Everything app was part of a public company again, how is that not. How does that get valued at less than eight and a half trillion? Right. So with. With Elon having that ace up his sleeve. Fair fact that we're all addicted to this app.

[John]

Yeah, I mean, I mean, I guess it's good that there's other milestones in there that you can't just like merge everything together. Because if you merge it is.

[Jordy]

It is funny to think about some of the different milestones, though. It's like shipping out 1 million energy storage units feels like wildly, like pretty simple. Doesn't even need to be included if you're going to deploy 1 million robotaxis for commercial use.

[John]

Yeah, that wouldn't seem a little bit. I don't know, Easy sandbag. Who knows? I like. Yeah, well, notably missing. What about. Post more tweets, post some bangers.

[Jordy]

I would like to see a thousand.

[John]

I want to see him go viral.

[Jordy]

I would say a thousand people a day. Marrying Ani.

[John]

Oh, okay. That's the. That's the milestone.

[Jordy]

That should be in there too.

[John]

Anyway. Oh, on chamath, people were making fun. QCAP has Chamath at the tech leaders dinner last night. And he's Drake on the basketball team. The Kentucky basketball team. Fully suited up.

[Jordy]

He's there with sacks and he's big in Grok.

[John]

Oh, is he? Oh, oh, G, R, O, Q. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And Rune had a good kind of contrarian take on the chamath hate. He says young heads don't know that chamath initially had his come up as the VP of Growth at Facebook. While the app grew from 50 million to a billion users, they invented people, you may know, which preternaturally predicts who your friends are, the concept of MAU, et cetera. All this stuff is in the water at any Internet company now. More important. Yes. He basically invented growth. The entire app. The entire idea that you can treat app growth as an empirical ab tested science. And we talked to a designer on the Facebook team at the time and it's so easy to zoom out and look at Facebook as like oh, there was just a foregone conclusion that they would win everything and just completely dominate. But there were moments.

[Jordy]

I love Jason popping in here in the comments saying it's his birthday party dummy. Yeah, it's good. He just turned 49.

[John]

Oh he did?

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

No way. That's amazing. What a birthday party that is. Where else would you want to be? That seems like a great time. Yeah, people were having fun making fun of Chamath but why not have him be there? Makes a ton of sense.

[Jordy]

I love this post from Morgan.

[John]

Should have gotten the other crew in there. Should have gotten Jason and Friedberg the invite anyway, what was the next thing you want to put? Oh yeah, this one three way deal. Elon is deal making between X XAI and Tesla.

[Jordy]

No, I mean this is, it's, it's Ed Ludlow over Bloomberg saying Tesla's board has proposed a new pay package for Musk and proposed the authorization of investment in xai.

[John]

Oh sure, sure.

[Jordy]

The board is, is looking at investing. Remember SpaceX already invested in, in XAI because they had to get exposure.

[John]

Yeah, we saw that like complicated web of Elon companies, how they all link together. Maybe you've just got to merge them all.

[Jordy]

Pure play Elon holding company. Yeah, send it to 10, 10 trillion for sure.

[John]

The yeah, I mean like Elon's like done like kind of these zombie mergers before with solar cities. I mean some people frame that as a bailout and didn't hurt Tesla. The stock went on an absolute run and it was great, just a flesh wound. And I never really understood why SolarCity wasn't more successful because it feels like solar. You mean talk to Casey Hanmer is like the biggest solar maxi and all of the like scientists, all the experts that I trust say that solar is you know going to continue to grow. Extremely valuable, extremely important. But it seems like we've just been SolarCity specifically and basically any American solar company has been kind of going to economic war with China and China's been like dumping cheap solar panels on the market continuously. So you need a company like Tesla to maybe subsidize that for a while until the US government comes around to some sort of regulation on like what are exactly are we going to do about it to create like more of a level, level playing field. Either we're going to subsidize or we're going to like put tariffs and taxes on their exports to get them back into, you know, what, what they actually cost instead of letting another company run roughshod all over the American.

[Jordy]

This is interesting. Ed Ludlow also was sharing that Musk must also help craft a seat CEO succession plan to unlock the final tranches.

[John]

Will Maximus Trump be old enough? What's his name? X. There's a few, there's a few wild names. It's got to be a hereditary dynasty, right? He's got to let X take over in 10 years.

[Jordy]

How old were the oldest Musk children are 20 year old twins.

[John]

Oh they'll be totally ready in 30.

[Jordy]

Vivian and Griffin potentially co, CEO.

[John]

Co CEO. That could happen. And then there's, and then there's another one that's a little bit younger who might be, you know, more in the like 20, 20 something year old by the time Elon steps down. But I, I, I, I would be surprised if he's not running Tesla in 10 years. I think he's going to stick around for a while. Keep, keep running it. He just keeps, he just keeps, you know, hanging out and building cars and.

[Jordy]

This is just fantastic news for people like Gary Tan who've been saying we need more trillionaires.

[John]

Oh, that's true. Is that his thing? He's more billionaires. We need our first trillionaire. The package could raise Musk's stake in Tesla to at least 25%. With total voting power of up to 29%, Tesla's market cap must reach 8.5 trillion from 1 trillion today. The plan follows Musk's 2018 package voting valued at 50 billion which was struck down by a Delaware court. Tesla's board is appealing that ruling but is also offering Musk an interim 30 billion dollar stock award while pursuing the new deal. Musk's outside ventures SpaceX XAI NeuroLink boring company and political activity is rave concerned about focus but was Warren Buffett not focused on Seas Candy and Coca Cola at the same time? Come on people. People, there's a holdco. It's not that complicated.

[Jordy]

Gabby, Gabby Goldberg went super viral quoting, quoting some of these, quoting a video from of Sam Altman at, at the dinner last night and said this is like when you're at someone's birthday party and they make everyone go around and say their favorite thing about them.

[John]

That's very funny. And what did Sam say? Do we have the video? Video?

[Jordy]

The rapid response said thank you for being such a pro business, pro innovation president. It's a refreshing change. The investment that's happening here, the ability to get the power of the industry back. I don't think that would be happening without your leadership.

[John]

I love it. I agree I'm happy to triple glaze as well. I like innovation. I like innovation.

[Jordy]

Arthur McWaters, been on the show many times before, says I'm unironically working my butt off so that my wife can go to Pilates on a Wednesday afternoon and get a $15 match. And Siki says same.

[John]

It's a noble goal. I wish Raul from Julius had been invited to this dinner. Yeah, I feel like he shows up in different pieces of Silicon Valley lore.

[Jordy]

That would be insane.

[John]

Delivered.

[Jordy]

That would be insane.

[John]

It wouldn't be that insane. He's on a show, he's fantastic.

[Jordy]

I just, I mean, maybe we could.

[John]

That's why we sponsored, that's why we partnered with him. Julius, what analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data, get expert level insights in seconds. What could be more relevant to the government than having an AI data analyst that works for you?

[Jordy]

Every CEO there is probably already using Julius if they're not sure.

[John]

Yeah, more Context on Zuck's $600 billion investment Turner Novak says Metta has done 478 billion in revenue over the past 13 quarters and plans to invest 600 billion in 20 data centers over the next 13 quarters. Good thing they're growing revenue.

[Jordy]

Yep. Well this is important too, because data centers are the foundation of the global economy and if we stop building them, everything's going to collapse.

[John]

So token factories continue to continue.

[Jordy]

John John Wu had some good analysis on the browser co acquisition. He said man parts of tech are sour about the browser co acquisition. The common complaint is that DIA ARC slash ARC don't have enough users or revenue to justify the acquisition. First, I think this line of bitching assumes that Atlassian's Corp dev team are dingleberries. Dingleberries down under, when in fact they're elite and one of the most disciplined and successful M and A units in tech. That's super legit, rationally integrating products into the existing product suite and otherwise protecting independence when merited. Trello Loom Ops, Genie, agilecraft, many others. Second, I think this is of part part of some ridiculous coping narrative that some VCs and founders inhabit, which is that having differentiated product vision, assembling a world class team that ships, and being an incredible storyteller and salesperson is somehow easy. That's a really good point. Maybe you have more revenue, maybe you have more users. Guess what? The market doesn't give an F. I've read, seen and heard directly from multiple people today. Something like oh, if I just knew how easy it would be to raise a ton of venture and make good videos. I'd do it and get acquired for 610 million. So go do it.

[John]

Go do it then.

[Jordy]

I'm not affiliated with the browser code anyway. I'm not here to pat anyone on the back do the whole well deserved rigamarole claim. I was just one part, small part of their success. I'm here to say the market has spoken. A transaction has been transacted. Capitalism has capital. Browser company is worth 610 million in cash. If you're a VC founder, etc in the salt mines today, focus on your business. If you think you can do better, do it. That is reality.

[John]

Do we have the shots fired sound effect? There we go, shots fired.

[Jordy]

Great, great. Way to sum it up, John.

[John]

Yeah, just go and go and build. Yeah, just go, go build something. I don't know, go tell a story, figure out a way. Yeah, I mean underrated is like the. Isn't the founder of the browser company like one of the core contributors to Chrome? Like early on, like he was on the Chrome team, like if you want to build a browser, like actually didn't know that. Hard to imagine like having a better, a better team in place and. Yeah.

[Jordy]

And More breaking news. OpenAI is working on its own AI inference chip with a small company called Broadcom. I don't know if you've ever heard of this company before, if you've never heard of Broadcom. They're a small company based out of San Jose, California. They are worth $1.57 trillion.

[John]

They just had a massive, massive earnings beat because there was like this mystery $10 billion customer and it was open AI, I'm pretty sure.

[Jordy]

There we go. So love to see Broadcom up 14% providing. I mean it's just, it's just crazy that, that you can have a company that is in the same similar, you know, similar like at the moment, like priced in the same range as a company like Meta. Yep. And most people would be like oh, Broadcom. Yeah, I've heard of them. Like but. But not. Not be able to say much more about it.

[John]

Yeah. So Richard ho, ex Google TPU is leading 40 engineers over at OpenAI. Seems like Sam did a little talent raid of his own. Broadcom providing critical design and IP TSMC will fab it on the 3 nanometer node inference only target mass production in 2026 could fail on first tape out. So the interesting thing here is that I've been beating this drum of like yeah, GPT4 is good enough like bake it onto silicon, like just get the inference cost down. Just let me use it faster, cheaper. We have really, really good intelligence. We just need to inference it a lot more. Said the same thing about midjourney. Thought the images looked good enough and yeah, they could get better but I'm fine with where they are now and they're fun and so let's just make it really quick and easy to use. And it seems like they're going in that direction for the most part because even, even the, even the reasoning models, they're still built on like, I mean it seems like they're built on like a pretty stable foundation of the architecture of the, of the frontier model. They're not making drastic, drastic architectural changes to the, the, the, the core LLM that powers these, these reasoning models. So bringing down the price of inference seems really, really important. So the Wall Street Journal has an article here. OpenAI and Broadcom make a $10 billion deal for custom AI chips order aims to ease shortage that limited or the rollout of new ChatGPT versions OpenAI is working with Broadcom to develop custom artificial intelligence chips, a move that could alleviate the shortage of powerful processors needed to quickly train and release new versions of ChatGPT. Share Broadcom shares surged nearly 11% in Friday trading. You said it's up at 16% now. What a great ripper. If you're looking to get into Broadcom, you think it's overvalued, undervalued, do it on public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi asset investing industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions folks, so up.

[Jordy]

74% in the last six months.

[John]

Yeah. So on the earnings call, Broadcom said we've signed a fourth major AI developer as a customer and that the new customer had placed a one time order worth $10 billion for server racks using the Palo Alto based firm's channel chips. The new customer is OpenAI, according to people familiar with the matter. The Financial Times reported the arrangement earlier. Sam Altman, OpenAI's chief executive, has been saying for months that a shortage of GPUs has been slowing the company's progress in releasing new versions of its flagship chatbot. In February, Altman wrote on x that GPT 4.5, then its newest large language model, was the closest the company had come to designing an AI model that behaved like a thoughtful person. But he lamented the delays and high costs that came with developing it. I guess there's a big question like the some of these really, really big models, people have been saying like it's great but it's slow and that's. And it's costly and I wonder if they're going to optimize for GPT 4.5 inference or GPT 4 level inference. Tyler, do you have any take on where they might sit? Sam Altman said it's a giant expensive model about 4.5. We really wanted to launch to plus and Pro at the same time and we've been growing a lot and are out of GPUs. Like I thought that demand for GPT 4.5 wasn't purely predicated on the cost and the timing and more just about the fact that people couldn't really tell the difference.

[Jason]

Yeah, I mean there's definitely a sense of like, you know, only the high taste testers actually liked 4.5. Yeah, I would be surprised if they like really bring it back in any capacity. It's just like so expensive.

[John]

Yeah, I wonder, I wonder what they're going to do. I mean it seems like they'll probably still leave some flexibility like the tpu. They're not going to like go like, you know, fully lock themselves into one specific architecture. But hopefully it brings down inference costs, increases margins, which should be very, very good for the business.

[Jordy]

Love those.

[John]

We will add tens of thousands of GPUs next week and roll it out to the platform plus tier. Hundreds of thousands coming online soon. I'm pretty sure y' all will use everyone we can rack up, he said.

[Jordy]

Like the y', all, I'm pretty sure y' all will use everyone we can rack up.

[John]

In recent years, OpenAI has relied heavily on so called off the shelf GPUs produced by Nvidia, the biggest player in chip design space. But as demand from large AI firms looking to train on increasingly sophisticated models has surged, chip makers and data center operators have struggled to keep keep up. If we're talking about hyperscalers in gigantic AI factories, it's very hard to get access to a high number of GPUs. Founder of Compute Labs said. A startup that buys GPUs and offers investors a share in the rental income they produce. It requires months of lead time and planning with the manufacturers to solve the problem. OpenAI has been working with Broadcom for over a year in secret behind our backs to develop a custom chip for for use in model training. Broadcom specializes in what it calls XPUs, a type of semiconductor that is designed with a particular application, such as training ChatGPT in mind. OpenAI also recently struck a data center deal with Oracle that calls for OpenAI to pay more than 30 billion a year to the cloud giant and signed a smaller contract with Google earlier to alleviate computing shortages. It is also embarking on its own data center construction project, Stargate. And so this is just another example of like, wow, they haven't made that much in revenue and they're committing to all these spends. It's like, well, they're growing very, very fast and they plan on setting themselves up for success and high margins and more growth ahead. And if you need serverless vector and full text search, head over to turbopuffer Search everybyte we puffin. It's built from first principles and object storage. It's fast, it's 10x cheaper, and it's extremely scalable.

[Jordy]

You can get started, be like cursor, notion, linear, superhuman, and many more.

[John]

Yes.

[Jordy]

Readwise is on Turbopuff.

[John]

Oh, no way. That's very cool. That makes a ton of sense.

[Jordy]

That makes a ton of sense.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Smart guys working with smart guys.

[John]

Okay, so we need to do a little bit of a meme review moment on the stream. A monkey was handed an AK47 and the image went viral and is now a meme. I don't know where this came from. It looks like an old image from a documentary.

[Jordy]

It's crazy how you can tell. This image has been screenshotted dozens of times. Potentially more.

[John]

It does not. Yeah. And it also uniquely does not look like AI but levels IO kicked it off with point of view. You discover you can do your own DevOps with cloud code. And of course that could end in disaster. Scoops says your point.

[Jordy]

One X coworker just discovered AI.

[John]

Oh, no. I don't know how true that is. I mean, I feel like AI should be an accelerant, but yes, it could be.

[Jordy]

No, no, no, no, no.

[John]

Yeah, you need to be at least one ex coworker.

[Jordy]

Like you give a bad driver a super fast car. Okay, does that make them better?

[John]

Fair, fair, fair. Turner Novak says letting the VC give product feedback. It's rough if they haven't been in the trenches. Liquidity says how it feels to let the first year analyst speak directly with the client. I love that. And producer Ben says, giving the ramp card to interns.

[Jordy]

This is real. This is real.

[John]

Do not do it, folks.

[Jason]

You gotta be careful.

[Jordy]

You gotta be careful.

[John]

Ben's like, why do they have to request funds for every single purchase? Why don't they just have a limit that they can spend within? Well, I know because they are monkeys.

[Jordy]

With AK47 card is simply too powerful.

[John]

Yes. It is also Brian Armstrong bumped up the max leverage from 20x to 50x on international perpetual futures and Upslope capital. Just give the monkey the AK47. It's a great meme. I hope this meme sticks around for, for a long time. A long time. Anyway, if you want to get your brand mentioned on ChatGPT, head over to Profound Reach millions of customers who are using AI to discover new products and markets. Clearing order saw OpenAI's investment in Broadcom chips. They're not going anywhere. You're going to want your brand mentioned on ChatGPT and you're going to want to do it through Profound and grok.

[Jordy]

And grok and perplexity and everything and everything.

[John]

So in the Mansion section today, it's Friday. We got 10 minutes until Joe Weisenthal joins to tell us what's going on in the United States economy. But one thing that is going fantastically well in the United States economy is Ellen DeGeneres house flipping hobby which has turned into a 190 million dollar enterprise. So the comedian and wife Portia de Rossi have bought and sold more than 30 homes since the mid-2000s.

[Jordy]

Absolute Dogs, the dogs. The absolute dogs of Montecito.

[John]

So they bought a 10,700 square foot property in Santa Barbara, California for $27 million in 2019. They sold it for 33.3 million in 2020.

[Jordy]

Modest gain, modest gain. Not bad, but didn't take a lot of risk here.

[John]

One year, one year, six mil. Not bad.

[Jordy]

It's pretty good honest work.

[John]

Let's read through the reporting in the Wall Street Journal's Mansion section by Catherine Clark. She says just before last year's presidential election, comedian Ellen DeGeneres and her wife, actress Portia de Rossi decamped to their Cotswold to the Cotswold, an upscale rural area near London. They had bought a vacation home, a 43 acre estate to use a few months a year. Then the morning after the election when they awoke to lots of texts with crying emojis, they said we're staying here. Where was this? Which, which election? Oh, last year. Okay, so it's the Trump 2 election that was sparking crying emojis in Ellen DeGeneres iMessage. Behind them, they leave a trail of luxury residences. Over the past two decades, the long time California residents have developed a reputation as serial home flippers. The Wall Street Journal's research shows that the pair have owned at least 34 homes since the mid-2000s, including properties in Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, Santa Barbara County. Santa Barbara County's wealthy Montecito and now the UK Records show that the couple were actively buying and selling throughout the mid aughts and the 2010s, but their activities ramped up significantly during the and we're going to move to page 8. This is one of the luxuries of reading the Wall Street Journal in print during the pandemic. So starting in 2020, they have frequently owned multiple homes at one time and show no obvious signs of trying to time the market for the best returns. Records show they bought patient. No, they're just, they just got the hot hand. They're, they're, they're, they have the Midas touch. They don't need to time the market. They deliver value everywhere they go. They bought at least eight homes in 2021. Wow. And 2022. Record show from the 34 homes tracked by the Journal that the couple have since sold, they have posted a profit of roughly $190 million. That has to be in line with how much Ellen DeGeneres makes off her show and her core business. This is the, this is the side hustle of all side hustles. Their average return, their average return based on the original purchase price and the subsequent sale price is about 37%. Not bad. You raise a fund.

[Jordy]

Let me in LP in this, the degenerate home buyer.

[John]

Buyer flipper, but not very degenerate. I mean, who knows, Probably a lot of leverage involved, but it's paying off some.

[Jordy]

There's some degenerate gamblers that actually make a lot of money.

[John]

That's true.

[Jordy]

That doesn't mean, that doesn't mean that.

[John]

You'Re they're not so the pair's business manager, Harley Newman, said DeGeneres real profits are much more modest once the costs of renovating are factored in. I would love her to have made that big of a killing, he said with a laugh. Forget about the real estate agents and the escrow and title people, the costs of contractors and designers and the army that comes in once we've closed. It takes a village, he said. Those numbers don't also don't account for what DeGeneres spends on furniture that is usually included with the sale. None of the furniture is inexpensive, he said. She takes the art off the walls, but everything else gets sold. Newman said 34, is an underestimate, saying he probably thinks she has bought and sold at least 50 homes.

[Jordy]

There we go.

[John]

Known her. Love it.

[Jordy]

Buying them in trusts. Yeah, secretly.

[John]

Very hard to buy a home secretly. It can almost always be discovered. The Wall Street Journal. I mean, they uncovered 34 of 50 or so. The couple's homes have varied in size and in style from mid century and contemporary to Italianate and English to tutor. It's not that I get bored. I'm just so passionate about architecture and furniture that you can only buy a certain type of furniture for a contemporary house or mid century house, said DeGeneres in a phone interview she talked to the Journal.

[Jordy]

There we go.

[John]

Amazing. She said she has lost count of how many homes and they have bought and sold. That's great. That's like you with angel investments. She has a home buying addiction and it's paying off.

[Jordy]

I text, I text myself when I make a new angel investing addiction. So I just got to scroll up far enough.

[John]

Got it, got it, got it. There is now a certain cachet in owning an Ellen house, said Ryan Riney Williams of the Beverly Hills Estates, who represented a Hollywood executive who purchased one of their homes in Montecito a few years ago. Once somebody knows it's her house or she had a hand in it, it adds value. In la, she's synonymous with quality. She's a tastemaker. She cares about taste. Many of the homes have been sold off market without ever being listed for sale. The couple's Hollywood Rolodex seems to have come in handy. Comedian Will Ferrell and the late actor Heath Ledger and singer Ariana Grande are a few celebrity buyers of Ellen houses, DeGeneres said. Real estate, can you imagine? Very lucrative hobby.

[Jordy]

Can you imagine Will Ferrell like role playing as Ellen DeGeneres after buying one of her.

[John]

Yeah, you imagine him in his, in his, in some of his titular roles as kind of a disheveled middle aged man stumbling around a $40 million Ellen DeGeneres neatly appointed home. And it doesn't quite fit. But I'm sure he's much more I.

[Jordy]

Like how she just flat out says to the Journal, real estate has become a very lucrative hobby. Let's go.

[John]

Turn your hobbies into side hustles. Turn your side hustles into.

[Jordy]

I mean this is basically a main, this is basically the main hustle. Now she doesn't do the main show anymore.

[John]

Yeah, that's true. The 67 year old former television host has a, has long had a passion for interior design and would have been a designer if comedy hadn't panned out. She attributed her itchy feet in part to her family frequently moving between rentals in her native New Orleans area. We never owned a house so I always New Orleans.

[Jordy]

That was on your A tier.

[John]

That was in my A tier Yes. I got in a lot of trouble for that. People did not enjoy.

[Jordy]

Nobody. Nobody got the joke.

[John]

Some people got the joke. But I posted my tier list of best cities in the world, and it. And it dusted some, Ruffled some feathers. I don't know if you have it pulled up, Jordy.

[Jordy]

I'll pull it up again. So John's, you said city tier list that will trigger everyone, but is true. S tier, nyc, la, sfdc, Miami, Chicago, Austin and Boston. A tier Seattle, Nashville, Vegas, New Orleans, Detroit, Bakersfield and Reno. And then, no, there was nothing in the B and C tier. And the D was, of course, London and Paris.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

And then F was Rome, Berlin, Tokyo, Dubai, Hong Kong, Barcelona, Sydney, Buenos Aires. So, I mean, basically, if somebody. If somebody said, John, going, I'm going to Sydney. I'm gonna see the opera. Do you want to come?

[John]

I'd be like.

[Jordy]

You'd be like, sorry, I'm at Bakersfield that week.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

And then if somebody said, hey, all, expect Paris, you say, sorry, I'm actually in the biggest little city.

[John]

Reno. Reno, exactly. I would prefer to be in Reno. Anyway, we had some fun with that. Well, we have our first guest of the show, Joe Weisenthal. On the phone. On the phone, wired on the play. We got Joe Weisenthal, pull up this.

[Jordy]

Picture that we just commissioned of Joe. There we go. That's real, and it's a real picture.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah. Can you hear me?

[John]

Yeah. You sound as good as you look. I understand why you do. Me.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah. I had a very active summer. I didn't want to reveal it to everyone, but happy to have you with the exclusive on my new look.

[John]

That's fantastic.

[Jordy]

Always great to catch up and always I'm surprised you're away from your terminal on a day like today.

[John]

But, yeah, jobs day. It's the Super Bowl.

[Jordy]

It's the. It's Joe's. It's Joe Day.

[Joe Weisenthal]

It is a Super Bowl. You know, it is the Joe day. It is the super bowl day. It is the jobs day. You know, after 8:30, you know, obviously there's the initial hit, and then there's a rush, and then there's the market reaction. And as much as it is the super bowl, by the, you know, by the middle of the day, I'm already like, okay, I'm good for the day. I had such a. Such a high from following the numbers and seeing all the reactions and reading all the tweets, etcetera, that it's like, all right, I can sort of run some errands in the Afternoon on jobs.

[Jordy]

There we go. Thank you for squeezing this, Aaron.

[John]

So yeah, take us through the numbers. I mean the market reaction. The Dow is down half a percent right now. Nasdaq's off.23. Bitcoin's up 1%.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah, you know it's an interesting, so like the number was not great, obviously coming in solidly below expectations. I think everyone sort of had a feeling there was going to, I think there just been a lot of anxiety about the state of the labor market right now. You know people talk about the so called whisper number where it's like okay, here is the forecast that Wall street has but here's what everyone sort of really thinks. It's pretty clear that I think a lot of people just sort of thought it could be a miss. The last month actually was revised up a little bit but the month before was revised down substantially such that June was actually now negative, which is the first time Since I think December 2020 that we had a month of job losses which I think is interesting. Once again health care employment. So that added 31,000 jobs in the month. So what that means is that once again if you exclude health care, the economy overall has been shedding jobs for some time, which is including manufacturing. Yeah. So manufacturing employment down 78,000 so far this year. There was another decline this month. Look, this is what I would say about manufacturing which is that I wouldn't, let's say a tariff strategy would were going to work in the long term and we were going to have this sort of, you know, strong reindustrialization of the United States economy. I wouldn't expect it to work right away. I mean the tariffs were unveiled on April. But what we can say is that so far those numbers, to the extent that this is a real priority of the administration or policymakers or others, to the extent that this is a real priority priority, it's clearly going in the wrong direction in 2025.

[John]

Yeah. Also I mean last night there was that dinner at the White House with all the tech leaders and the numbers that were thrown out were staggering. 600 billion from Apple, 600 billion from Meta. But that doesn't necessarily mean massive jobs growth because building a data center might just be a multi billion dollar check that's written to tsmc.

[Joe Weisenthal]

This is the funny thing with the sort of data center AI sort of thinking about its massive impact because first of all you're obviously correct that these huge checks don't necessarily mean massive jobs growth. And if we're going to take seriously the promise of AI it shouldn't lead to jobs growth. The test of A is arguably jobs destruction. Right. It's about what jobs that currently exist in the economy can be replaced by something that we call AI. And so not only does the data center is not add to employment in a meaningful way, if those turn out to be good investments, if there's a payoff, if they drive productivity, you would expect them, you would almost hope them to be labor market negative maybe.

[John]

I mean there is a world where, where it's like a worker plus AI is additive and you can underwrite hiring that so there is a hiring.

[Jordy]

Well, in our conversation so we talked with.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yes.

[John]

Yeah.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I mean I'm not a doomer like in this that I'm skeptical of this. I find myself just from a sort of pure thinking about it through the economic lens of this idea of air is going to lead to mass unemployment just for all the obvious reasons that anyone can say I have cost savings because of AI. Well, I'm going to like spend that money somewhere.

[John]

Yeah.

[Joe Weisenthal]

But the question is do these investments actually free up resources or enable new things that expand our capacity of what we could do with labor? That's really the question more than the direct job creation.

[John]

Yeah. Jordy.

[Jordy]

Yeah, one point we, we interviewed Palantir CFO and obviously Karp as well yesterday and they said something like revenue is obviously up massively in the last few years. Headcount is only up 12%. And they said specifically we expect to have fewer people in the future.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah, I saw that quote which I found to be really striking. And it is sort of again, this sort of very weird condition. Maybe we've talked about it before, I'm not sure not. But it does seem like we're in some sort of uncharted territory here with respect to the fact that, you know, I don't know what's happening on a given day. Okay, maybe the NASDAQ sound a little bit. But you've all these names that are at or very close to all time highs any other time in history. I think where you're talking about some sector near all time highs, you are also associating it with a massive expansion or at least a significant expansion of headcount. Typically this is just sort of how it is in any industry, tech or otherwise. You intuitively link stock performance with headcount. And so it's interesting that here is a situation in which not only is is this being articulated this sort of divorce between revenue growth and employment growth, but also it's not, it's not just A theory. It's clearly been happening in the industry for some time.

[John]

Yeah. I wonder what Trump's like, bull case is. I haven't heard him kind of reconcile what's going on in AI and reindustrialization. There's like broad strokes of like, let's bring back the jobs. There's not a lot of early evidence of that. But I'd be interested to hear from people in the administration about just like, paint me a picture of what it actually looks like. What is the American jobs, economy, I know, look like in four years if everything plays out like you want, like what, what. What are people doing? Because it does seem like that we're going through a period of change.

[Jordy]

I don't know what about.

[Joe Weisenthal]

No, I mean, I do, I think in defense of the administration. Right. A lot of people are. I think people all over the place are scratching their heads over this question because what I think people want, what the dream is when they close their eyes and they want to see an economy in which you don't have to be an absolute superstar and Computer Science, Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon or whatever or Stanford to get a great job, there should be some sort of broad middle of decent employment, whatever it is. And in defense of the administration, I don't see many other people anywhere articulating, well, what that ultimately, what sectors or what ultimately drive that sort of employment abundance, so to speak.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

The youth unemployment data as well is absolutely brutal. Bloomberg Economics had a chart showing it basically ramping in a way that it hasn't. Youth unemployment is rising at the fastest pace in the past 15 years, other than the pandemic, sitting at what's the number? Ten and a half percent between the ages of 16 and 24.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah, no, I think it's important. So there has been this debate in the labor market, which is very important and interesting, which is we know that the pace of job creation has slowed. No one is disputing the fact every month where, you know, it's just the number of new jobs in the United States is going down. Then the question is, well, maybe some of that is because of the changes in immigration practices, or maybe some of this is has to do with technology sort of normalization of the economy after a crazy few years. And so maybe some would argue that the pace of job creation slowing down does not automatically say, okay, we're heading into a recession. That being said, the question then the test then becomes, what about just the ability to get a job if you want? And that's sort of essentially what the unemployment rate Is. But it's interesting to watch some of these demographics that historically are sort of more marginal, more vulnerable. The youth unemployment rate is 1, the black unemployment rate is another. That also, that was at its highest since October 2021. And so even though the headline unemployment 4.3% still pretty low by historical standards, what we're seeing is this deterioration of the, of the job finding ability for some of these sectors of the economy. They tend to, you know, maybe they are sort of first to let go or some of these more marginal, marginal, marginal segments of the labor force.

[John]

Is there a narrative coming together about what's driving the health care employment numbers and the health care job growth? Because yeah, it feels like a lot.

[Jordy]

Of our elders are moving beyond UNK status.

[John]

Yeah, I mean there weren't mass.

[Jordy]

America.

[John]

Because I mean, there weren't a lot of health care layoffs during COVID If anything, those are the people that kept their jobs. And then health care isn't particularly sensitive to interest rates.

[Jordy]

Before we get into this too much, I mean, I think the big thing is, is CEOs broadly, even if they're seeing massive revenue growth, it's hard to go out on an earnings call and say we're seeing massive efficiency gains. We're, we're leading in AI in our industry. We're getting all these benefits from AI and then be like, well, okay, our employees are getting so much more efficient. And then be like, well, you also are ramping. Why are you ramping? Headcount the same, you know, same way.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Or yeah, or, or yeah, right, right. Well, I think so on this point specifically. I also do think there was maybe, even though I think many people would say that the formal Doge peasants accomplish particularly much. Maybe other people would argue otherwise. I think there is a, quote, Biden shift on quote, so to speak, where a lot of people are just sort of proud of the fact that they're keeping headcount across all of these things. And I think sort of Elon Musk may have sort of shot the starting gun on this vibe that everyone can look within their organization and say, do we really need all of the people that we've hired, particularly after the boom years of 2122 and arguably 2023. But I agree on the health care employment standpoint. I mean, I would say two things. One is, yeah, it's the, it's the aging population there does not see. It's hard to imagine what would slow this train down. I guess it's slowing down a little bit because of course there have been Some of those Medicaid cuts to Medicaid growth, etc. So there is reasonable to think that maybe at the margins the monthly numbers of new headcount into this space is going to not be as fast as it was. But it is very hard to envision what could happen in the short or medium term that wouldn't automatically mean this sector is just going to need a lot more people every month. I'm certain if you talk to any sort of health care network of any sort that's on the ground in any community, I'm certain still today, in September 2025, they would identify acquiring talent as one of their big challenges.

[John]

Right now, talk to me about what we're seeing from the Fed. The polymarket has the number of rate cuts spiking today. Three potential rate cuts in 2025 spiked from 18% up to 38%. And the chance of just a single cut is falling as well as two cuts. So Pollard certainly expecting more cuts to come.

[Jordy]

And most people, yeah, most people pricing. I mean it's pricing cut, cut, cut.

[John]

Yep.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yes. So I think, you know, it's funny, the last time I was chatting with you guys is from Jackson Hole. And that was a really interesting moment because if you talk to a lot of the regional Fed presidents, like, I don't know, like there's also inflation still looks kind of warm. And it's not totally obvious that cutting cycle or certainly an aggressive cutting cycle.

[Jordy]

But you said, I remember you said, you said the labor market is clearly softening. This is the case for cuts. Like you said, we'll leave that out.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Thank you. Thank you. If I said something smart, I appreciate you remembering it. But speech at Jackson Hole I called it. That's the main takeaway here. I call it, you know, it's how freezing Jackson whole clearly, clearly centered risks to the downside with the job market. And I just think everyone has come around to that view. And so now the question is, especially in the wake of today's number, is that not only does September seem like a lock, it is for a rate cut. I think the decisions in like 10 days, the question is could they go 50 basis points? Could they go aggressive kind of like they did last September and then also I think October, which people thought, well, maybe they take a pause after a rate cut that is now perceived as a good chance. So I think this sort of world really is coming around to arguably the poll, the Powell and then the Christopher Waller view is probably been the most dovish of the Fed governors over the last six Months. He's been pretty forceful in saying, look, the labor market is fairly softening and rate cuts are due. And I think right now it's the, it's the Waller Powell sort of view that's winning out in markets and the expectation is they'll be able to get the rest, the rest of the FOMC behind.

[John]

Do you have any insight into what's going on with the treasury doing a bond buyback to lower yield? Someone in the chat is joking that they're printing money to buy back printed money. I don't know if that's real.

[Jordy]

Same old, same old.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I, you know, to be honest, I do not put. I think these things tend to be very marginal and sort of plumbing related. You know, ultimately the sort of long end of yield curve comes down to the market's view of the inflation trajectory and what the Fed is expected to have to do to maintain essentially its 2% goals. Some of these treasury moves, you know, they may have to do with liquidity, etc. But I, my advice to people when I have encountered these topics in the past is that generally these things are somewhat noise and to keep your eye on the ball about what's happening in the economy over the medium term and how you expect the Fed to respond to.

[John]

So what's the next date on the calendar that we need to be tracking? Is the next Fed meeting that's the big news or is there going to be more data?

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah, so that's an. Yeah, so this in two weeks. You know the thing in the meantime, what I would say is yesterday we had the weekly initial jobless claim data that's been creeping higher. I think you should keep. That comes out every Thursday and I think people should keep watching that because one of the ways that the economy has been characterized for really like over a year now is they talk about this low hiring, low firing equilibrium which is that there aren't a lot of layoffs. But also it's not a great time, not a lot. As we've been talking about, not a lot of headcount expansion. The initial jobless claims has been picking up a little bit lately. Yesterday we got 237k. I believe that was ahead. It was a bit higher than expectation. You don't have to wait. You know, I say jobs report super bowl once a month, but you get these many Super Bowls every Thursday where they talk about initial initial jobless claims. It's noisier data. Oh, one of the things. So keep an eye on that. Also this coming Tuesday there is something called the. And I don't remember what this acronym stands for, but it's QCW Benchmark revision. So prices for quarterly census employment, something. This is actually how they sort of reset labor market day because we know it's all very noisy, but every quarter they draw from actual. A complete sample of everyone who's paid into the unemployment system. And so they get this very big snapshot. And it could show, there's this view, it could show that the pace of job creation for all of 2024 going back was lower than expected. So they're always doing these revisions. But I suspect that Tuesday will be interesting in terms of what, what it says backwards looking about just how much employment there really is right now.

[John]

Yeah. I'm looking at the quarterly census of employment wages and it says that Santa Clara, California has the largest fourth quarter over the year wage gain at 15%. And now I'm thinking if, if Menlo park will see a massive spike in average wages because of the trade deals. It's just they hired five people at $1 billion a year.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Speaking of big packages, did the, did the new Elon Musk pay package feel low to you?

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah, they're just paying them a trillion dollars. What's the point of reincorporating from, from Delaware to Texas if they're only going to bump your target?

[John]

Come on. Yeah, something. Yeah, yeah.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Somewhere where you can really, where the executive can really get paid for the work that they do.

[John]

Be like, look for one, I want 100% of the dollars that I create in the shareholder value.

[Jordy]

And were you disappointed to see that snubbed Meek Mill on the invite to that dinner dinner last night? It felt like they really. It was a big fu. Philadelphia, broadly.

[John]

Yeah, I would agree.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I was shocked. I was shocked by that. It's time, it's time to shake that room up in terms of who, who are the big tech names that get invited to these things, but clearly are up and coming entrepreneurs, you know, regardless of what industry they are currently in or had been in. Need to have a, need to have a voice at the table. I do think going forward too, we really need to have inflation data exit and low part. Just generally when you see these sort of, when you sort of, when you see these sorts of wage gains so concentrated, we need to start having a formal, you know, on the Bloomberg and the CPI or CPI for CPI X men. Low power.

[John]

Yeah.

[Joe Weisenthal]

That's the kind of data that, I.

[John]

Mean, there's also a $10 billion tender offer going, going on at open AI. So, you know, if you're in the.

[Jordy]

Market for San Francisco, somebody, somebody was running the numbers and showing that there's like, there's, there's only, I think a few hundred homes that are in the like 4 to $10 million range in the, in San Francisco competitive. And, and, and so imagine you just flood the market with like $10 billion, like fresh cash and you get a bunch of cash buyers.

[John]

I mean, last question. We'll let you go. There's something in the chat, someone's talking about the US Open, which I think, I guess is US Open market, Fed.

[Jordy]

Operations, United States Open.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah. Oh, open, yeah. Maybe isn't there like a real estate company? Maybe it has something to do with that.

[John]

Yeah.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Anyway.

[John]

Yes, but do you have a prediction? They want to know. They want to know if you're watching tennis and if you have prediction or favorite. Who are you rooting for?

[Joe Weisenthal]

I know, I'm so embarrassed. Every summer I try to get into tennis and I actually take a few tennis lessons every summer. And it's like, this is the year I'm going to go to the US Open. This is the year I'm really going to pay attention. No, I said have nothing to. Despite my efforts, year after year, once again, nothing positively contributed to this.

[John]

Yeah, me too. I have no idea. But hopefully I will see some more great capital allocators photographed in paparazzi shots. That's what I watched the Open for. I watched the paparazzi feeds.

[Joe Weisenthal]

As do we all. As do we all.

[Jordy]

Anyway, thank you, Joe. Enjoy your afternoon. We got a good time.

[John]

We'll talk to you soon.

[Jordy]

Talk soon.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Talk to you soon.

[John]

Bye bye.

[Jordy]

Legend. Did you see linear?

[John]

Yes. It's a purposeful built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development. Streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. Start building with linear.

[Jordy]

It really is a, really is a crystal ball for your roadmap.

[John]

Yeah, it is. Anyway, what did you see?

[Jordy]

This is interesting. Guido Reichstatter is doing a hunger strike outside of Anthropic. He said, hi, my name's Guido, I'm on hunger.

[John]

Couldn't get in. He couldn't get in.

[Jordy]

He said, I'm on hunger strike outside of the offices of the AI company Anthropic right now. Because we are in an emergency. Anthropic and other AI companies are racing to create ever more powerful AI systems. These AIs are being used to inflict serious harm on our society today. And threat to inflict increasingly increasing. We'll get to that. I think it's very Likely that he's hitting rate limits on that plan.

[John]

That makes sense.

[Jordy]

And threaten to inflect, increase, inflict increasingly greater damage tomorrow. Experts are warning us. Okay, we're going to trust the experts here. Experts are warning us that this race to ever more powerful general intelligence puts our lives and well being at risk as well as the lives and well being of our loved ones. They are warning us that the creation of extremely powerful AI threatens to destroy life on earth.

[John]

Okay, Tyler, what you got?

[Jason]

So I think it also could be, you know, Dario just said they're not selling AI to China anymore. So he might just be, you know, SPV holder. And he's interesting, you know, mad about.

[John]

Yeah, yeah. Less revenue from not selling internationally. That makes sense.

[Jordy]

I mean this is usually incredible market.

[John]

They're not a public company. You can't really take out a short position and become an activist.

[Jordy]

This is incredible marketing for Anthropic.

[John]

Yeah. Do you think this is like some sort of like mischief style stunt like to promote the company? Yeah, if you. Yeah, you need to get protesters.

[Jordy]

It's so funny to single out Anthropic. The most safety oriented.

[John]

Yeah, they are the most safety oriented. Just like Xai is like we will just put everything out like it's. The first name is actually Adolf Macca. Macca, yeah.

[Jordy]

Anyways, a lot of, lot of big buzzwords in here. Power, Power, bottom. Dad says this is so crazy. I'm kind of for it.

[John]

Yeah. Does the, does the post look one shot at all?

[Jordy]

Victoria says, bro, you're on a fast. It's good for you. If you get to seven days, it'll do wonder wonders for your health.

[John]

This is bodybuilding related.

[Jordy]

People are just responding to his posts with pictures of their food.

[John]

Okay. Oh, that's so mean. Wait, but are there any em dashes in the post?

[Jordy]

0Em dashes.

[John]

It's not this, it's that. Nothing like that.

[Jordy]

I mean it basically says seems like pure. The same thing over and over and over.

[John]

Okay. Kind of.

[Jordy]

I wish he put this into Claude and kind of like.

[John]

What is his name?

[Jordy]

Guido Reich. Reichstadt. Reichstarter.

[John]

Interesting. Well, good luck to him. Hopefully he dries out and cuts down on the body fat, gets extra diced. We, you know, say it's bulking season, but it's not right for everyone. Some people gotta cut and no better way to cut than go on an aggressive task.

[Jordy]

He is the co founder of a company called Stop AI and he has one connection on LinkedIn.

[John]

Stop AI. Oh wait, you're connected to him?

[Jordy]

No, no, No, I wish.

[John]

Okay.

[Jordy]

His only experience on his LinkedIn is.

[John]

Has he stopped anything? Has he stopped at anything else?

[Jordy]

Yeah, it'd be crazy if his last job was like co founder at like.

[John]

Stop NFTS or like stop time travel. He's like, I was successful. We don't have time travel. Stop teleportation technology, Stop hypersonic planes in America.

[Jordy]

There's not much on Guido. He is interested in LinkedIn news according to his interests on LinkedIn.

[John]

Interesting. Interesting. Well, one AI you should not stop is putting your sales tax on AutoPilot with Numeral HQ. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Go to Numeral HQ.com on the more optimistic side of things, Everyday Astronaut has been reflecting on the starship program over the last week and one thing has become obvious to him. This is from Everyday Astronaut, a fantastic space related content creator. He says SpaceX is enjoying the freedom to try and fail in a way they couldn't with Falcon 9. Doing anything experimental on the Falcon 9 was risky because it was SpaceX's only source of interest income. It was their lifeline, their workhorse. Making any tweaks to the Falcon 9 to try and land a booster back in the day was a delicate balance. Don't push the envelope too hard because it could lead to a failure of the primary mission, which did happen twice. Yes, I believe that they blew up a satellite that Facebook was putting up. It was very dramatic and kind of foreshadows the showdown and the potential MMA fight. But of course they have a contract and I think the money flowed appropriately. The companies weren't actually upset at each other, but it was kind of a crazy crossover moment in tech. Anyway, Everyday Astronaut says when SpaceX first landed a booster almost 10 years ago, they were fairly, they were, they were fairly slow to re fly and those first non block 5 boosters were only capable of a couple of reflights. This gave pause to some of the industry slash community fearing all of this reusability hype wasn't going to pan out. But SpaceX learned from every landing attempt to develop their Block 5 Falcon 9, which has now gone on to have a single booster fly 30 missions. Absolutely unheard of.

[Jordy]

That's wild.

[John]

Now imagine if SpaceX could have had the freedom to not worry about flying customer payloads to get data during Falcon 9's reusability campaign. Imagine if they could have tested engine out procedures or push booster reentry profiles, or try hot staging or what, or what have you. This is the phase that SpaceX is now in during the Starship program. I know we hear the talking point of quote today's payload is data and it could seem like a gimmick or excuse even but that's a freedom almost no rocket program has had before to know. You can just try things out. Fly real life hardware without bankrupting the company is the ultimate development platform to be able to push engine out capabilities. Remove heat shield tiles on purpose. We saw that with the video is like this crazy like garbage floating around. They removed heat shield tiles. The thing barely made it back because they're pushing it to the absolute limit. They're not just trying to reach orbit. They're trying to do something that's never been done before. Build a rapidly reusable rocket. A rocket that can land and re fly. This could have never, this has never been done before. And honestly it's silly to think you could do something like this without trying some extreme things. That's what we're seeing today and that's extremely exciting to me. I can't wait to see version three of Starship fly because they've learned so many lessons already and they have a factory capable of making rockets at scale and we just get to sit back and watch the cook. It's an exciting time to be alive.

[Jordy]

Kitchen's open.

[John]

Kitchen's open. They're cooking. Anyway. You want to, you want us to take us through through the next few timeline posts? Jordy, what you got?

[Jordy]

Absolutely. I, I just feel bad because we kind of glossed over some of Alan's trades. 2021 bought a house in Carp for 70 million, sold it for 96 million two years later.

[John]

Wait, Carpinteria?

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

96 million. That's a huge number.

[Jordy]

Wow, that must another one. Bought a house for 7 million in 2017, sold for 11 in 2018. Yeah, are another one bought, rebought a house for 14 million in 2021, resold it for 2021 or sorry 21 million.

[John]

In 2023 and some of these so, so quick, you know, buy and buy in 2024, sell in 2025, $10 million gain. I mean she's just pushing this Homby.

[Jordy]

Hills same year she, she bought, she bought a house for 20 million in 2020, sold it for 36 million in the same year.

[John]

That's great.

[Jordy]

An absolute dog.

[John]

The Usher house Usher listed the home for sale for $35 million in July 2019. We just can't quit the mansion section today. Should we talk about the house of the month? What else is in here?

[Jordy]

Why don't you call. Call Eric right now.

[John]

Oh, yeah, okay.

[Jordy]

He's ready.

[John]

Yeah. Well, Mark, let's get Eric Lyman on the phone. I got an important question for him.

[Jordy]

We saw the news about the billion dollar run rate and we just had one question to ask.

[John]

Let's get Eric Lyman, the CEO of Ramp on the phone. Hey Eric, how you doing?

[Jordy]

You're live.

[John]

You're live.

[Joe Weisenthal]

We're live. What's going on?

[John]

Give us the update. There's some milestone that just dropped yesterday, I believe. We couldn't be happier.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Ramp is, is now doing more than.

[John]

A billion dollars a year in revenue. Let's go. Congratulations. I just have one question. Is the job finished? Job's not finished, guys. Job's not finished.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Just getting started.

[John]

Fantastic. Well, I'll let you get back to work. Thank you so much.

[Jordy]

Thank you for calling in.

[John]

We'll talk to you soon.

[Jordy]

It's great to hear from you.

[Joe Weisenthal]

All right, cheers.

[Jason]

Have a great weekend.

[John]

You too. Talk to you soon. Bye.

[Jordy]

It's not the week weekend yet.

[John]

It's not the weekend yet.

[Jordy]

Mark Hannah has got a buddy from high school who's on his fifth AI startup in two years. No technical engineering background. He's an mba, hires engineers with a low budget to do all the work and build the product while he is CEO and manages. Just started a new AI education startup. Wish I could short.

[John]

I wonder how this will pan out. It could work, I don't know. Depends on exactly what he's, what he's doing. But it certainly is not the YC path, not the make something people want. It is a very management consultant, very MBA coded strategy.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Good luck getting into YC with this strategy.

[John]

Good luck, good luck.

[Jordy]

Naval says if your smartest friends start saying crazy things, pay attention. A paradigm shift may be underway. I think he's talking about people getting one shotted.

[John]

You think that's it?

[Jordy]

Could be.

[John]

I don't know, it might be. You know, he might be talking about AI, Right. Like you have really smart friends and they start saying crazy things. Like you know, they discovered. Yeah, all this other stuff. Not that, not that. But actually like, you know, the idea of super intelligence is a crazy thing to say. But it might be real. You know, it might be. It might be real and it might start in your customer service organization. Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance, Gun Sparks, number one in competitive bake offs. Number one ranking on G2. So we, we covered the jobs gains. They were all part time, full time jobs dropped by 375 356k part time jobs grew by 597k. Certainly not good for the durable long term healthy economy. We but earlier this year there was a massive gain in full time employment and then that dropped and so there seems to be gyrations every which way.

[Jordy]

But anyway yeah crazy story coming out today. SEAL Team 6 in 2019 attempted a covert mission in North Korea to plant a device to intercept Kim Jong Un's comms. They should have just waited and got him a friend.com friend just say hey this is going to be your new bestie. Just wear it, keep it on your person. That work authorized by Trump. The mission failed when SEALs unfortunately killed civilians mistaken for security forces and get into the story a little bit because we don't talk about geo, we don't talk about politics but we do enjoy geopolitics. In early 2019 Trump approved a clandestine SEAL Team 6 operation to plan plan a device in North Korea to intercept Kim Jong Un's communications. Red Squadron known for killing Bin Laden rehearsed for months. The mission aimed to gather intelligence during nuclear talks. This was the the nuclear, you know Trump and Kim Jong Un had been communicating around obviously North Korea's nuclear program. On a winter night, seals emerged from the sea near North Korea Korea's coast. A nuclear submarine deployed two mini subs carrying eight commandos. Lacking real time drone support, they relied on delayed satellite images. The shore appeared clear but a North Korean boat emerged mistaking civilians for security forces. The seals opened fire killing two or three shellfish divers. So apparently they were on the beach. A boat pulled up, started using lights. They just assumed it was security forces ended up being fishermen and anyway so apparently the Trump admin at the time didn't notify Congress and the SEAL sank the bodies, abandoned the device and signaled for extraction. The submarine risked exposure retrieving them in shallow waters. North Korea detected activity but made no public statement. The mission's failure, hidden by secrecy risked escalating tensions from a nuclear armed state.

[John]

So military reviews justified the civilian deaths under engagement rules claiming unforeseeable errors. The Trump administration withheld details from Congress potentially violating federal law. Many involved, many involved seals were later promoted despite concerns about special operations. Uneven track record. It is fascinating that so disclosed TV talked to 2024 anonymous sources including Trump administration officials and military personnel with direct knowledge their anonymity reflects the operation sensitivity. It is obviously a tragedy but yeah.

[Jordy]

It seems a bit hard to hold special operations teams and say you have to have you can't fail if you want to rise up in the organization.

[John]

Sure, sure.

[Jordy]

Right.

[John]

But yeah, I mean, obviously you want every operation to be executed flawlessly anyway. In other news, the Washington Post is now on Substack. Let's hear it for the Washington Post. The Washington posters, Jeff Bezos, they heard.

[Jordy]

You can post, you can post notes on Substack. They said, we gotta get involved in this.

[John]

We love posting.

[Jordy]

We love posting.

[John]

It's in our name posters. So this was, I believe, a story that was broken by Emily Sundberg in Feed Me. And, and she did a little bit of an interview here. Let's see. Welcome to my life, says Rachel Tashtian. And Emily asks, how do you see the Washington Post's game plan on Substack playing out? Is there something that will make your strategy different from other legacy media brands that have joined the platform? I'm actually not that familiar with other legacy media brands that have joined Substack. Are you subscribed to any reason?

[Jordy]

Horowitz?

[John]

That's not specifically a new media brand at this point. They've been doing media for 20 years though, so.

[Jordy]

That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying.

[John]

Play the shots. Fire.

[Jordy]

No, I'm just, I'm just.

[John]

That's funny.

[Jordy]

Just joking around.

[John]

No, we are the legacy media. They are the new media. We want to be legacy media. I don't. The Washington Post responds, I don't necessarily see Substack as an alternative to legacy media. I see it as an additional tool to experiment with in a fantastic way to connect with new readers. I love getting into the mix in the comments comment section. Yep. I think a successful journalist in 2025 should be on as many platforms as possible and have a tailored strategy for each one. Completely agree. So it was important to us that we publish original content exclusively on Substack and really engage with the platform on its own terms. I consider Post Runway something like Opulent Tips Goes to Milan and Paris. I don't report from the chiffon trenches, as Andre Leon Talley lovingly called the fashion world for my newsletter. So now I'm going to bring a bit of that madcap approach to the access driven reporting and criticism I do for the paper. And I'll still be doing all my usual reporting and Runway reviews for the Post. Will there be a paid strategy? Asks Emily Sundberg in Feed Me. The Washington Post responds, post Runway will be free. Woohoo. What does success on Substack look like for the Post? Says Emily. Having fun opening the Posts world to new readers? And introducing the amazing voices on Substack, especially fashion writers, to the Post's audience. Well, welcome to Substack, the Washington Post. Maybe we should do a collab and talk about fashion. I don't know. I mean, I'm dressed to the nines today. I'd to love, love the Washington.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

To review the wonderful yellow suit.

[Joe Weisenthal]

We.

[Jordy]

Got to give it up for to Sierra.

[John]

Yes.

[Jordy]

And they're raising some New Capital.

[John]

Yes.

[Jordy]

$350 million from Green Oaks.

[John]

Okay.

[Jordy]

Doubling down Sierra at a $10 billion valuation. And Zach DeWitt, I think he's at wing saying incredible seed investment for benchmark. They likely own 15%. It's a $450 million fund. Let's go 3 to 4x already on one investment. We love to see capital allocators win goat emoji. Congratulations. Job's not finished. Well, but certainly a fantastic milestone.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Power bottom. Dad says quote quoting Joe Weisens Hall's post saying the US has lost 78,000 manufacturing jobs this year. That is a lot, says chat. Is this re industrialized? I'm kind of tired of winning. You would. I don't know. It's hard to, you know, Joe, Joe's point, which is real, is that you can't expect things to have an immediate impact.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

But at the same time, if US manufacturers were feeling good, had lots of business, they would probably be trying to keep as many people as they can.

[John]

There are two. There are two economic statistics that I find important in measuring the progress of re industrialization or industrial might. The first is jobs. Like manufacturing jobs are important. It's the, you know, in many ways the heritage and the backbone of the US Economy. Although the US economy has shifted to a services driven economy. But if you want to measure manufacturing capacity, it is fine to just use gdp.

[Joe Weisenthal]

How.

[John]

What is the total value of all the goods that are manufactured in America? Is that going up or going down? I actually don't know the numbers off the top of my head, but when I think about the next. I was talking to someone who was saying that America will re industrialize, but it will re industrialize with on the back of robots and automation. And there will be much higher leverage for each individual manufacturing worker. You've seen this with companies like Hadrian. There's not that many people in that facility for a lot of CNC machines that are basically automated and that. And when you look at, you know, who are we actually competing against? If you, if you're benchmarking the United States again against China. Yes. China has a Ton of people that migrate from outside of Shenzhen into the manufacturing hubs to assemble iPhones. During the push. They bring in a million migrants to assemble iPhones right before the new iPhones released. And China obviously employs tons and tons of manufacturing employees but at the same time they also have lights out facilities where everything is effectively automated. And when you look at the way at the design of the latest Tesla factories, the design of the latest Starlink factory, we are making things in America but we're doing it at a much lower level of headcount and the headcount.

[Jordy]

Some of our best manufacturers aren't contract manufacturers. Right. They're Elon companies.

[John]

Yeah. Vertically integrated. Yeah.

[Jordy]

There was also, there's a crazy story from the BBC which I think stands for business business central.

[John]

Business business capital.

[Jordy]

Business business capital.

[John]

That's what I like.

[Jordy]

They said this was basically breaking live or today almost 500 people have been arrested at a Hyundai factory in Georgia by immigration authorities and weren't they. So majority of those detained at the 3,000 acre site which was built by the Korean automobile manufacturer to make electric vehicles are Korean nationals. That's very interesting. So South Korea expressed concern and regret over the operation which is kind of interesting dynamic to just be like, yeah, we regret that because it's the gov. I mean it's South Korea saying that, not Hyundai. You think Hyundai would be like, sorry, because this scale is going to sort.

[John]

Out the visas guys. You know, I think everyone's all for like bring the TSMC semiconductor experts to Arizona but make sure that they fill out the immigration paperwork.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

If they're going to come over here and build. Anyway, bucko capo bloke says perhaps we are moving to the find out stage of paralyzing the US economy with a multi quarter barrage of nonsensical, inconsistent and conflicting set of economics economic policies. And there's some people in the chat.

[Jordy]

Is this bullish?

[John]

Is this bullish? No, this is not bullish. He's blackpilling. He's very, he's very upset about the economic data that was printed today related to a lot of the economic policies, mostly from the tariffs.

[Jordy]

Alps has a post showing the Las Vegas Sphere saying it's looking a little bit different. This to me SSI advertising is this super intelligence rearing its head.

[John]

I love that Ilio is leaning in to the bit and having fun with the hats and whatnot. Wasn't there another hat? Oh yes. Pixel Hulk. Pixel Hulk says they now have a new line of Marc Andreessen merch and it's a Hat where the head looks like Marc Andreessen. This looks like. This is like a fantastic AI image. I imagine this is AI. It looks like some sort of. However they made this, whether it's Photoshop or AI flawless, I do think this would sell pretty well. It is ridiculous looking, though.

[Jordy]

TVPN was featured at Volta.

[John]

Oh, yes.

[Jordy]

Earlier, Theo did a photo shoot. There's a Ferrari in the picture, which we love. And I believe one of Volta employees. And anyway, shout out to John Fiorentino. I can't wait to visit the Volta in Nashville.

[John]

Be great. The flagship. It's not even the hq. This is the flagship store, right?

[Jordy]

The flagship.

[John]

This is the. You got to make the pilgrimage.

[Jordy]

Yeah. We covered tempo, the new L1 built by Stripe and Paradigm, so we don't need to cover it again. But Mert was firing back in, in the announcement. They were. The Tempo team was basically highlighting potential limitations from existing L1s. They highlighted transactions per second. They highlighted moments that, that you couldn't run payroll again.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

When Trump. If you were trying to run payroll. And that's because the day that Trump Coin launched.

[John]

Trump Coin launched on Solana, Is that right? Not Ethereum, because I know Ethereum. The narrative around Ethereum has been like the, the networks congested, there are high fees. But that was the whole idea behind launching Solana, was that it was going to be much more scalable and there was some sort of trade off there. And then this is like the next L1. And people are upset about it in kind of both, both camps. But I invited Matt on the show and Mert, who are both talking about this, would love to.

[Jordy]

Yeah. And they're, they're, they're going, they're, they're happily a little bit under the radar now. Mert said, guys, you can just say you want more full stack control and distribution. You can also say you want the L1 Premium or a controlled validator set. These are perfectly legitimate answers, but you look unserious and hurt your brand when you start talking about scalability and defending the Solana blockchain. Yes, yes, yes, it is proven that it can scale, but yeah, I mean, I, I think this kind of play makes sense. Of course Stripe and Paradigm would want to own the Rails effectively, even if it's going to be network driven.

[John]

Yeah. And it does seem like Stripe has a large enough customer base that they can actually bootstrap the network fairly, fairly easily. Right. By just offering it baked into checkouts that are already powered by Stripe. Potentially. Although I wonder, I wonder how, like what the onboarding process is like. Because even just getting a Solana wallet set up, it's not as easy as like, oh, I have a different credit card and so the same stripe form works the same. Maybe you wrap it in a credit card, I don't know. I still don't exactly understand like where tempo fits in the full stack and how this gets rolled out.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

But I'm excited to learn more. I mean we'll certainly have some folks on to talk about.

[Jordy]

More importantly for some members of our audience, Mercedes Benz is teasing the return of the four door soft top Cabriolet G Wagon. This is the moment that many of us as been have been waiting for.

[John]

Yes.

[Jordy]

G Wagon, arguably greatest car ever made. They have done many iterations of the Cabriolet over the years. I came close to buying one a couple times from my friend Blake who has a company called Found Objects here in la. He sources these incredible G Wagons from all over the world.

[Joe Weisenthal]

World.

[Jordy]

And anyways, I'm super happy that they're bringing this back. This, this image that is pulled up on the screen right now is actually I think somebody taking some artistic liberty. The actual image we can pull up here if possible. I put it in the timeline but the actual image is blurred out on the official Mercedes account. And so I expect this to be like somewhat, somewhat different than the picture that we just had up on the screen.

[John]

What's crazy about this is they're gonna.

[Jordy]

I just expect them to modernize it a little bit.

[John]

So Mercedes has a G650 Lando lay which is the soft top four door but it's a Maybach and I believe it trades at around a million dollars a car.

[Jordy]

And so can't believe some, anybody would sell that for just a million.

[John]

A million. Yeah.

[Jordy]

Yes. This is the image that he posted on Instagram.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

And anyways, I'm super excited for this.

[John]

I wonder how limited it'll be.

[Jordy]

Struggle. I will definitely struggle not to pick it up. John. John puts a lot of pressure on me to not just continue buying G Wagons. To mix it up.

[John]

You gotta mix it up.

[Jordy]

It is.

[John]

I think, I think if you want.

[Jordy]

A convertible, even Speeder. Speeder. Speeder. Drove my G the other day, said, you know what, I thought these were ever hyped but I get it, I get it now. I get it.

[John]

But if you want, if you want a four door convertible suv, why not get a Nissan Murano Cross Cabriolet? It's actually a two door.

[Jordy]

Yeah. But if you want a two door.

[John]

Yeah. If you want the Four door. Yeah, you, you kind of have to upgrade from to the G650 cabriolet. It'll take you from maybe $20,000 to maybe 2 million. But you know, you do get those extra two, two doors. So yeah, I, I, I think it's a pretty clear I can't value there.

[Jordy]

I cannot wait for this.

[John]

Do you think the G Wagon salesman should be on Adio Customer relationships absolutely should. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows with the to the next level. You might be tagged as just already closed one. And for some G Wagon owner in Adio and they put you right back in reach back out.

[Jordy]

They certainly do for me. They certainly do.

[John]

As soon as you move into closed one, they move you back into prospect.

[Jordy]

Yep. Back in the pipeline.

[John]

Back in the pipeline. Oh, Sergey Brin was at the dinner last night with Donald Trump and Google is back in founder mode. You'd love to see Sergey having a seat at the table again, says Beth Jesos.

[Jordy]

This post from TJ Parker.

[John]

Yes.

[Jordy]

Was absolutely insane.

[John]

Insane.

[Jordy]

We gotta have, we should, we should, we should call TJ right now and ask him to explain himself. So fun facts. I was the youngest VP at Amazon.

[John]

Yep.

[Jordy]

Of course. He sold pill pack to Amazon for $1 billion. He said I was the youngest VP at Amazon. I've also personally never bought anything on Amazon, which is just absolutely incredible accomplishment.

[John]

How do you live your life without ever buying a single thing on Amazon?

[Jordy]

It's a crazy book. I think what he said, I think he just said if he likes something, he sends a link to his wife and then she.

[John]

Okay, you still have Amazon purchases. Was too poor and then too rich.

[Jordy]

Poor and then he was too rich.

[John]

Yeah, maybe. Yeah. I mean like really telling on yourself for not taking the gig seriously. Tj, it's like, you know, well, he.

[Jordy]

Was focused on something else. I mean like he was focused on, I guess.

[John]

But you know, I just think like if you, if you get a job at Apple, you're expected. It's polite to wear an Apple watch. You know, you walk around Apple HQ Cupertino like everyone's wearing Apple watches. They're not wearing Samsung Galaxy Gears, you know, they're using the product. If you, there's a, there's a famous story about if you are trying to sell a piece of software or any, do any sort of business dealing with Nike, when you go to their headquarters, you should be wearing Nikes. You do not show up to Nike headquarters in Adidas because they will see that, they will take that as a, as a sign of disrespect to the their culture.

[Jordy]

It's like if we get, if we get lunch or breakfast with somebody and they insist on paying and they don't pay with a ramp card.

[John]

I was about to say very big sign of disrespect. Very big sign of disrespect. I'd rather just have you not pay at all. But very, very silly. Very silly and I guess, you know, evidence that he was ready to move on and get into the world of investing and venture capital. At Matrix, where he is now, Tim Cook has an iconic photograph in Getty Images. He hit the Abbey Road, says Mark Gurman, on the way to meet Trump. You love this. He is flanked by a crew of what appear to be bodyguards. Or maybe just the boys, maybe just the homies. But he's. It's a good, good picture. One for the, one for the tech. The Museum of Business History. We talked about about the this. Oh we should go into this fabricated knowledge post.

[Jordy]

So I'm gonna let you cover this.

[John]

I'll be right back. So Doug o' Laughlin has this thesis. He says I think lagging edge is going to be is going the way of solar panels. Some can win, but the aggregate, the aggregate big number of chips is going to be bad. And so says first up is Texas Instruments. Where does he say this April's pop is mostly pull forward the lagging edge price war. Lagging edge capacity now behaves differently. Another upturn may come, but it may be muted and prolonged. Something is broken in auto and industrial. Texas Instruments is right to run inventories down. They likely will not need as much. There's a lagging edge perma glut. He says what no one wants to admit lagging edge capacity may be structurally different now. Earlier I argued prices had to rise because new facts. Fabs cannot profit from selling lagging edge chips at prices set by a fully depreciated fab. There are obviously pricing problems in this scenario. With a new fab, a company can't turn a profit by selling lagging edge chips at a price that was previously dictated reality. The lagging edge took price in a temporary market upturn. Now we are reverting to the mean. The old trend line is back. There's no meaningful new delay demand for old nodes. And what exists is made and consumed in China. So you go and you make the smart toaster or the smart dishwasher and you need a chip in there. You don't need a TSMC 3 nanometer TPU Nvidia chip. You just need some lagging edge chip. It's going to be made in China, it's going to be assembled in the product in China and then you're going to get that smart toaster delivered to you. And all of that's going to happen within the Chinese ecosystem. And so if you're running a lagging edge fab in America, Doug o' Laughlin thinks you're in trouble. The COVID super cycle plus a new China supply line that does not care about capacity economics points to a forever glut. China has a long record of flooding. The low end state directed Capex boosts output at the expense of efficiency. Doug wrote about this involution dynamic recently in China's race to the bottom. Products at 90 nanometer and above should internalize a permanent China glut. Companies resist that conclusion, but the case studies are familiar. Solar modules, LCDs, LEDs, steel, shipbuilding, batteries. You've seen it time and time again. China wants to stay on the lagging edge and dominate there, the commoditized lagging edge and not worry about about, you know. And they see that as the learning curve to get to the leading edge. But they are willing to sell at a lower margin for a very long time if they need to. Companies can still win share but through performance and packaging rather than by producing older chips at lower cost. ADI is a masterclass in adding capabilities. MPWR has focused on higher end power. The long tail will face a flood of Chinese supply. Good luck to the older fabs I guess. Cannot resist talking about marvel during mar vell behind the paywall. So head over to Fabricated Knowledge and subscribe to the substack and we will have Doug o' Laughlin on the show again soon to dig into all of the dynamics of both leading edge and the lighting edge. So Josh Steinman famous for saying we are going good morning. We are going to win every single day as opposed here. That's not good morning. We are going to win. It says you versus the guy she told you not to worry about. Robo Taxi vs Waymo service area in square miles. So Waymo has been on a very consistent grind adding square miles every year for the past 76 years. Gone from maybe 50 square miles to now 750 square miles. Whereas Robo Taxi went from zero to almost a thousand square square miles in in just under a few months.

[Jordy]

Hard to to to make an equal comparison here.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Based on this single metric.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Obviously I'm super excited about both companies.

[John]

But one's still in beta, but the app is doing very well with Robotaxi. We will see this number one in the charts. Drivers number one in the charts. A little bit of a narrative violation maybe. Made a phone call to Tim Cook and Tim Cook said, thank you, Elon, for getting us to space. Thank you for.

[Jordy]

We'll put you at the top of the chart.

[John]

Thank you for Starlink. Thank you for the Model 3. Thank you for the Model S, thank you for the Model Y. Thank you for the Model X. Thank you for the Cybertruck. Thank you for the Roadster. Thank you for the Falcon 9. Thank you for the Merlin engine.

[Jordy]

Thank you for the brain chip, for the Neuralink.

[John]

Thank you for.

[Jordy]

Boring.

[John]

Thank you for building that tunnel in Las Vegas. Thank you for PayPal.

[Jordy]

Thank you for Twitter.

[Jason]

Thank you for Ani and Valentine.

[John]

Tim Cook definitely said, thank you for Ani and Valentine. And Elon said, cool, you can have the RoboTaxi app on iOS.

[Jordy]

Anyway, how'd you sleep last night? Oh, you know, I slept.

[John]

You slept like a log.

[Jordy]

I wish. 71. Only six hours.

[John]

85. Play the song. Let's go. 85. Thank you.

[Jordy]

I travel days, travel rough. Yeah, rough.

[John]

Go to 8sleep.com get a pod 55 year warranty, 38 risk free trial free returns, free shipping.

[Jordy]

You can use code tbpn. This was cool.

[John]

Yep.

[Jordy]

So this, I mean this was just a cool move in the history of capitalism?

[John]

Yes.

[Jordy]

Altay Cap says didn't notice this until today. Another shareholder died. This is a Japanese company. And donated their shares to the company. 6 that 6% of the outstanding shares. Their will also donated their real estate to the company.

[John]

Yes, yes, yes.

[Jordy]

And. And sleep well said. Oh, you think buybacks are cool? How about major shareholders dying and donating their shares to the company plus some real estate for free?

[John]

Tyler, we do expect you to put the iPhone that we gave you in your will to TBPN passed down to another intern in 50 years.

[Jason]

There's a funny contrast.

[Jordy]

I think yesterday.

[John]

It's not 50 years.

[Jordy]

Not make. Let's not make a call.

[John]

100 years.

[Jordy]

Thousands of years.

[John]

What does Xi Jinping think he'll live to 150. So that's like 145 years from now. Yeah, for you.

[Jordy]

Exactly.

[Jason]

But there was a post yesterday.

[Jordy]

Well, yeah. What is. What.

[John]

What is this?

[Jordy]

Carrot.

[John]

Yeah. What? Oh, the carrot and the stick. Oh, carrot and the stick.

[Jordy]

No, they shouldn't be on the same. They can't be attached to each other.

[John]

You put the carrot, you give.

[Jordy]

You give somebody the carrot.

[John]

Have you ever ridden a horse. You. You put the carrot on the end of the stick, and then you hold the carrot in front of the horse's nose, and then the pull.

[Jordy]

Oh, I'm. I'm more. I thought we were talking about the.

[John]

Phrase, like, you're correct.

[Jordy]

Bring the carrot or the stick in a negotiation. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[John]

But yes.

[Jordy]

Okay, we got it.

[Dave]

Yeah.

[John]

So. So the next time we see Donald Trump doing a 4D chess negotiation, we're. We're doing away with the chess analogy, and we're moving to the carrot and the stick analogy. And we now have a physical prop for both the carrot and the stick.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[Jason]

But I was going to say yesterday, I think we sent a post about, there was some billionaire who is leaving his will to Neymar.

[John]

Oh, yeah, that's in here for Neymar. Yes. I love that.

[Jason]

Interesting contrast.

[John]

Yeah. Wait, who is Neymar?

[Jason]

Something with, like, a ball.

[John]

He's an athlete. Yeah. He plays soccer. Is this just some crazy way to get around salary caps? A businessman is leaving $1 billion to Neymar. In his will, the administrator justified that he identifies with the athlete and decided to give his inheritance to the player. Player that.

[Jason]

I think if Steve Ballmer really wanted to get the. To get around the salary cap, he would, you know, commit ritual suicide and leave in his will, his.

[Jordy]

His. His money as the final boss of. Of salary cap evasion.

[John]

To just get an extra. You care so much about your team. Well, in some other news that we will have to try. The will of. Very sad news. Giorgio Armani has passed away. He was 91 years old. He was the creator of the power suit. He held the reins as conglomerates rose. Giorgio Armani, the designer and business mogul who brought subtle Italian luxury to the world stage and conquered Hollywood, died at 91. He worked until his final days dedicating himself to the company, the collections, and many ongoing and future projects, said an announcement by the namesake brand. The company later confirmed he died in his home in Milan. During his years at the helm, he remained steadfastly independent in a fashion landscape dominated increasingly by conglomerates. Although he disliked the moniker, Armani was often called the king of fashion. In an interview with the Wall street journal in 2024, just one year, he insisted that the secret to success was his humble, consistent work ethic. This guy has founders podcast episode written all over him. He owned a super yacht and homes in New York, Milan, Pantelera, Antigua, Paris, San Moritz, Saint Tropez, Forte de Marmi, and Brioni. But he showed up at the office every morning and ruled his empire with a firm hand. He has TVPN mansion section deep dive written all over him as well. Armani, who called himself a designer businessman, was the sole shareholder of his company at the time of his death.

[Mert]

Wow.

[Jordy]

I had no idea.

[John]

Still, in 2023, its worldwide revenue was 2.6 billion across men's and women's lines, the Emporio Armani diffusion line and Armani Prive haute couture interiors, dozens of restaurants, 2,500 retail stores, fragrances and a cult classic beauty line. Whether it took the form of relaxed suiting, makeup or interior design, his work whispered refinement. His stylistic innovations included an emphasis on neutral in between colors, soft shoulders and a more relaxed approach in between colors. As I read this in a yellow suit, not exactly an in between color. You know it's not from Armani. He often drew inspiration.

[Jordy]

He still would have appreciated the ramp. The ramps.

[John]

I think he would have.

[Jordy]

I think he would have as a designer businessman, yes.

[John]

He often drew inspiration from Asian culture in his work. Akira Kurosawa's 1980 A8. Let's see about a 8 film called Kagemusha inspired his fall 1981 Samurai collection. I love that he has this balance of softness and power, said Armani's fellow designer Michael Kors. At the last New York Runway show in 2024, Armani became a household name where he designed Richard Gere's suits in the 1980s 80 movie American Gigolo. From the 1980s until recent years, he was the go to designer for red carpet carpet looks, dressing Oscar winners from Jody Foster to Cate Blanchett. In 2024, Armani stressed the extremely important role of independence played in his impact. It's not a question of pride, he said. It's about getting things done. When I have an idea, I want to see it through to the end. He set up a trust in 2016 that laid out his plans for his company, including a charitable foundation and details for how a public stock listing or an acquisition would be handled. He worked with a close circle of collaborators, including his sister Rosanna, who is on the board, his niece Silvana, who is the head of women's design. His his niece Roberta, the the head of VIP and entertainment relations and his nephew Andrea Camarana, the sustainability managing director. His right hand man and close friend was the head of menswear. Born in northern Italy, the town of Pierre, on July 11, 1934, that's what, 200 years before Tyler was born. Armani was the middle child of three Siblings between older brother Sergio and younger sister Rosanna. Armani described his childhood, marked by a fascist regime in World War II, as Hard Scrabble. At 9 years old, he was standing outside a movie theater looking at a poster for Snow White when a friend came across an unexploded shell of gunpowder. It caught fire and the young Armani burst into flames. He said he shut his eyes, only to open them 20 days later in the hospital. This is crazy. Well, there. I know we have our next guest, but I can't stop reading this. One second. We're sorry. We have the CEO of Scale AI coming on in just a minute. His only lasting scar was on his foot, where his shoe melted into his foot flesh. The incident contributed to Armani's desire to become a doctor. He attended medical school in Milan for three years before dropping out to fulfill his compulsory military service. After the army, Armani's latent creativity was stirred. He began working as an assistant architect, designing interiors and displays for a department store in Milan. He moved into menswear, Working for. Working at a time. Working for a time at Hitman, a company owned by Nino Cerruti, a freelancing and freelancing for other brands. By the mid-1960s, Armani met his longtime life and business partner, Sergio Galletti, a Tuscan architectural draftsman 10 years his junior. Galletti persuaded Armani to start his own business in 1975. He woke me up from a sort of torpor from the little life in which I was living, Armani told the journal in 2012. John, it's amazing.

[Jordy]

I hate to cut you off.

[John]

Yes.

[Jordy]

Let's not keep our guests waiting.

[John]

Let's not keep our guests waiting.

[Jordy]

That is a fantastic story.

[John]

Welcome to the Stream.

[Jordy]

Bring in Jason. Sorry, John was getting carried away there.

[John]

Have you heard the story of Giorgio Armani? He just died and what a fantastic obituary in the Journal today.

[Jason]

No, I was hoping you keep going. That was great.

[John]

Sorry to keep you waiting.

[Jordy]

Jason, thanks for coming on.

[John]

Thank you so much for hopping on. Why don't you kick us off with an introduction and kind of your path to how you wind up wound up in this particular situation.

[Jason]

Yeah, totally. So I've been in tech for a long time. I've been at Scale for a year. My background has been in starting companies, you know, early, early in my career onto, you know, more notably at Uber. I started the Uber Eats business there and that grew, you know, much larger than we ever thought it would.

[Jordy]

How big is the. How big is that business today?

[Jason]

You don't mind me Asking when I left, it was about $20 billion a year of GMV.

[Jordy]

Sorry.

[Jason]

And then I think they, I think they've grown it to maybe 70 billion. 70, 80 billion. It just keeps going.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[Jason]

Dara just announced yesterday that in Australia alone they've served a billion deliveries, which is about 2 billion meals. So, you know, that's a lot of.

[John]

Shrimp on the barbie.

[Jason]

You know, when you, when you, yeah, when you, you know, when you get involved in these things, you're always surprised at how big things can get. And I think that's going to end up being true here with this current wave. And that was one of the reasons why I was excited to join Scale a year ago, joining Alex at the time. And you know, I'd experience some marketplaces, done a lot of growth stage businesses, things where, where demand was outstripping supply and you needed to fix a lot of things to get the business on track. And you know, it's been a, it's been an exciting, super fascinating journey over the past year. I mean, nothing like I ever expected.

[John]

Yeah. What was the, the, the shape of the business when you came in? Like, from my perspective, scale has been a very interesting business in that it hasn't. Like many companies have a second act. I feel like scale's at a second and third, maybe even a fourth act. The way I tell the story is Alex Wang is starting with creating data for self driving cars. Eventually that business maybe gets rolled into Waymo and Tesla directly. And so scale expands into the RLHF boom during the LLM boom and has kind of grown. And then my question was, are we going to see Scale AI take on robotics data or more specific tasks and so describe the shape of the business when you joined and where you were thinking about taking it.

[Jason]

Yeah, no, for sure. I mean the history is amazing and fascinating. I think Alex had this insight that data was the most important thing to models and that was nine years ago. So that's very visionary and I was very impressed whenever I was talking to him about a role at the company only a year ago. And you're right, we've gone from different types of data. And one interesting thing about like this entire journey is that every single type of data someone has said like, oh, when is this going to go away? When is this going to go away? When is this going to go away? And this is a common thing that we hear and we've heard it so many times that, you know, we sort of are used to addressing it and there's always some other source of Data. And one of the reasons why is because data is the application in many ways. You know, you're going from a software space where it's software organizes data for use by humans. Now you've got data driving applications of things. And so as we generate more and more data, the models are serving customers. Those customers have higher and higher demands of what the model should do, which then drives demand for more data and the data changes. But, you know, we've gone through this so many times from expert data to, you know, now, you know, you know, models are working on like, how do they do things for you?

[John]

For you.

[Jason]

Right. It was about knowledge capture and then now it's about skill capture.

[John]

Yep.

[Jason]

So it's been, yeah, it's been an awesome journey and the company has been extremely agile and extremely commercial over the entire journey, which is, you know, which leads us to this discussion.

[John]

Yeah. It hasn't just been just like, if you zoom out, it's like one smooth sort of exponential. But in fact, there's different pools of data that have been maybe a series of stacked S curves. But that's the story of all technology and all progress. So I'm interested to know what, like, when Alex did invest, like, the best, he had a very interesting point about robotics data being particularly rare. Like, at least we had the Internet to crawl and scrape, and that was something that didn't. It eventually needed to be polished with RLHF, but with robotics data, there's just so little out there. And I was wondering if that was something that you were interested in looking at or if it was immediately the skill capture thing of these, like, really, really niche experts, people who know about archeology and it's just not on the Internet. And you need to go get some PhD, get them on the platform and start having them answer questions. So that can get baked into the models and we can get out of the. What is it like gel man amnesia or dunning Kruger for these models, where it sounds great until you're asking about the thing that you're the expert in and then you're like, oh, actually it's only at a college level. It's not actually at the full expert level.

[Jason]

Right, right, right, right, yes. So, yes, we do robotics data today. We've been doing, you know, that's. That's one of the newest parts of our business. That's the way beyond expert data. So we've been doing expert data for a year and a half, plus, depending on where you draw the line on experts.

[John]

Sure.

[Jason]

But everyone in the data Business is in the expert data, you know, is in the expert business because that's what the models need, that's what they demand. You know, something like 15% of the people on our network network are PhDs, 25% have master's degrees and like a very large percentage, I think 60% or so have at least a bachelor's degree. And so, you know, that is where the knowledge capture has gone. Robotics. Yeah, it is interesting, right, because you can't necessarily pre train on this like corpus of information from the past 25 years of the Internet. And so that probably just increases the size of the opportunity going forward. But the space is new, right? I mean like, like you know, there aren't robots, you know, walking around the world yet. So a lot of this is still in development. One other thing worth mentioning is like all the data types from before, we still do like we still supply data to autonomous vehicles companies, we're still providing computer vision data to the US government and other parties. And so these things do stack up, as you mentioned, into what is now a pretty big business.

[John]

Is there still some piece of the business that's not directly AI related, Like almost like mechanical Turk esque. I just need an actual human to do something at an API endpoint for a very reliable, very scalable. And so I come to you and instead of going to an LLM, I just have people doing it on demand. Is that a thing? Thing?

[Jason]

That's not a thing for us. I do think that is a thing in the industry. Like some of that work has gone into BPOs and sort of like lower margin, less difficulty type tasks. And so we're at the frontier. And part of being at the frontier means you do the hard stuff, the margins are better, the skill level required is higher and it pushes you to constantly be driving the business forward. And that adaptability, frankly that's started with Alex in terms of always looking for the next thing and being really close to the tech is kind of what's allowed us to get here.

[Jordy]

On the customer side, how are companies buying this data? It feel for the, it seems like there's overwhelming demand.

[John]

Well, you go to them and you say I'd like 10 data please.

[Jordy]

10 days. No, no, no, I mean, I mean more so like what are the actual like customer relationships look like? It seems like a lot of the labs and big players are actually working with multiple providers. And that's not necessarily a bad thing because different providers can specialize in different things.

[Jason]

Yeah, I mean, you know, we, you know, that is true. That's like that's sort of a general understanding of the market. The reality though is on the ground, if you want high quality frontier data that's difficult to get at volume, the number of providers goes down dramatically. And so there's a lot of claims being made out there about doing things at scale. We're one of the largest providers today. We've been one of the largest providers. And so I think that that's through all of the change, that's what's allowed us to keep the relationships that we had, which is it's actually pretty hard to get this data right. You really have to have the right network, you have to know how to talk to the network. Because if you imagine being in the, we call them contributions contributors, meaning the people who provide the data to the models through us. If you imagine being in their mindset, you have to have a system that can interface with them on what is a part time job for them to give high quality data for a very technical audience, which is the researcher, you know, so that it changes the weights of the models in a positive way. And that's not a super straightforward thing to do. And so yeah, I mean, and, and, and the business is going great. I mean like I've seen a lot of press out there. There's, you know, there's been a lot of coverage, a lot of speculation. You know, every month since the deal happened we've had growth, which I think a lot of people will be surprised to hear, you know, given, I mean like I read the news and then we look at what's going on inside the company and we're just like, okay, we got to start talking a little bit more. Obviously I've been in the seat only a few months and so there's been a lot going on. But yeah, like things are going well. We have two, I mean one thing worth noting like is that we have two multi hundred million dollar businesses. We have our data business which we're most known for. Yeah, so, so if you were to split either of these out and we have an applications and services business which, which applies this in customers, that business alone has hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. And so if you were to break that out, it'd be its own unicorn or Decacorn or whatever they're called these days.

[Jordy]

That's wild. Do you ever get inbound, maybe customer fills out a form on your website. Do you ever have to check to make sure it's not like a runaway super intelligence? It's off on its own, just hoovering up Data?

[Jason]

Well, I mean, great question. We tend to know our customers pretty deeply.

[Jordy]

Yeah, you gotta, you gotta have the.

[Jason]

KYC process in place and, and frankly they spend. You know, these are. Data is not cheap to procure and so that would be a very expensive hoovering operation if, well, if AI, if.

[Jordy]

AI, you know, progresses like the AI 2027 crowd was projecting at some point or another super intelligence will come and you'll have to choose, you know, human humanity or the super intelligence.

[John]

Have you run into any super small companies that are customers? We've talked to some small LLM providers. Like they're not building the mega GPT4 GPT5 level models. They say we're still doing transformer based AI, but it runs on a gaming graphics card. And I feel like usually they're just distilling llama or something into a smaller model. But are there any customers that have come to you and just had some weird niche use case that's like pretty light on the data but so differentiated that it actually provides value for them in their particular niche? Or is it all just like the huge labs, the people taking really big swings?

[Jason]

Yeah, I think the big swings is most of it. We do see some of the smaller stuff where we actually are starting to see some data needs which is sort of, you know, it goes to just following the market is actually inside of enterprises.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jason]

So they're not actually building their own foundation model, but they're hitting the limits of their own sort of the data that they have to make applications useful in their environment. And obviously the US government, we do a lot of computer vision data for the Department of Defense too. So those are the more sort of smaller customers and maybe less publicized things that scale does.

[John]

Are there other analogies to the DoD where there are companies that have private, more secure data needs and maybe the scale process is working on top of their own proprietary data and they need to transform it somehow and you get involved as the. Is that a thing at all?

[Jason]

Yeah, so that's the applications and services side of our.

[John]

That makes sense.

[Jordy]

Right.

[Jason]

And so, and so the history there is as we were supplying data to the model builders, obviously scale is very well known. Alex is very well connected. The company knows a lot of people. People started contacting us saying like, hey, we kind of thought this AGI thing was just going to like pop out of the box and do everything for us. And the reality is like, that's not what's happening at all. And so as we got pulled into that world and being asked like, well, how do I apply this to an accounting problem. How do I apply this to a healthcare problem? We started to see the actual fundamental problems inside of these organizations and why they can't get there. And what's interesting is I've actually been on site with some customers in the past month as we're getting to production with this latest round. And some of the limits they're hitting is the actual human knowledge from the executive staff or in like a healthcare setting, maybe the most senior doctor or in an accounting setting, the most senior accountant. And they, you know, they sort of went into this, this thinking like, okay, we might need some data from the subject matter experts here, but, but, you know, maybe a junior accountant or maybe a junior lawyer will just go in and label some data where we don't have recorded data. But we need the models to do something that they currently aren't doing. And what's happening is that the senior staff is finding that they need to get involved because as you build these agent systems, which agents are basically obviously just applications running that leverage AI that coordinate with each other in order to align them. Which goes to your AI 2027 comment, which is like, are they going to be aligned to like human values? And then will they do the things that we want them to do, the way that we want them to do them? You actually need the question becomes who do you align it to in an organization? Like, do you align it to, you know, someone who's straight out of college maybe? Do you align it to the most senior person in the organization? Maybe they need a partner to help them figure out like, which.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Do you align it, do you align it to compliance? You know, the, you know, somebody more, more on the operating side? Yeah.

[Jason]

What are you guys seeing on the smaller model builder side of things? Are you seeing the things you're asking me about in terms of their needs and specialization?

[John]

Yeah. I think there's this big question right now about inference costs and do you need to throw a reasoning model at everything? Token costs are coming down, but people just keep moving on to the. They're like, oh, the better model is the same price as the last model. So I'm not Even capturing that 10% or the 10x gain or whatever is happening in the, in the cost of inference? The most recent data point that we actually got that was hard was from Notion in the Wall Street Journal. Ivan, the founder said that their gross margins dropped from 90% to 80%, you know, not, not that bad. And I think that that's a trade that they should take all Day long. But you could imagine that. Yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, you could imagine that. So basically Notion's probably paying for the best in class intelligence and that's having a material cost on their gross margins. But if they figure out that, okay, what users are really excited to pay for is a report summarizes everything that's happening in Notion across all your documents, or they really love templating with AI or they really love having just a chat interface on the, on the right that you know, is somewhat aware of the documents and they can just kind of ask, hey, I, you know, I remember putting all of my medical records in one Notion thing or I remember putting all my financial or my CRM over here. Like can you find that for me? Over time I would bet that they're able to distill that into smaller and smaller models, bring down the per token cost or token per dollar, per million token cost to a place where the margins go back up. But it's kind of a broad question in the market as, as more and more companies lean into AI and want to deliver like the most frontier model possible to their customers, no one wants to say like, oh yeah, we have, yeah, we did. We added AI to our product. It's GPT 3.5. People will be like, why, what am I paying for?

[Jordy]

What can you share about like more general business strategy at Scale going forward, you're 49% of the company is owned by Meta, but you guys still have a bunch of customers, tons of revenue. You talked about two nine figure businesses. You got a bunch of people on your team, like how are you kind of like rallying the team and what are reasons that people should join Scale today and be a part of the opportunity you guys are going after?

[Jason]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah. It's worth taking a step back and talking about that deal for a second, which is, you know, Meta put in over $14 billion for 49% of the company. As part of that, Alex and some others went to Meta. Scale still has over 1,100 employees and we're and a billion dollars on the balance sheet. And so we have a lot of.

[Jordy]

And those employees, to be clear, just are not, none of those are contributors. Those are like people that work.

[Jason]

They're the contributor network. Yeah, the contributor network is hundreds of thousands of people. And so those are people that are working at Scale. When I joined the company, actually I joined the application side of the business. I didn't join the data side of the business when I joined as a chief strategy officer and I sort of saw the opportunity there and so we're investing heavily there and customers are reserving budget heavily there. And you know, as an example, we just got a $100 million contract with the army to provide services and data and people to them. And so you've got the data business which is supplying data to the models and then you've got the applications and services business which is making those things, making those models do things inside of large complex organizations, Fortune 500, US government, international governments. And this opportunity is going to be huge for scale and, and very few people actually know about it. This is a multi hundred million dollar business. As I said today, we've got contracts with Qatar is a huge customer, the US government's a huge customer. We've got dozens of Fortune 500 companies that we work with. And so I think the opportunity for scale right now is just to capture this wave going forward because we're at the very, very beginning of actually making AI work inside these open big organizations.

[Jordy]

Yeah, I was going to ask you, where in big organizations right now, where do you think AI is overhyped and where do you think it's underhyped? We asked this to Carp yesterday.

[Jason]

Yeah, I mean, I think, I think it's very overhyped that it's going to eliminate jobs in the next like one to two years. Like I think this line of thinking would require a change in the curve of capabilities and the change management inside of these organizations where I think it's like way overblown. Like the promise is just so high and the reality of what's going on on the ground is there's value, but the value needs to be extracted and that requires a ton of work.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[Jason]

And I think what's going to happen with these customers in the next year, if I had to make a prediction, is you're going to go from like having a certain amount of money, which is usually a lot in these companies allocated for like AI initiatives, to what is the roi? Like, you know, the grim reaper is going to come for every AI company that is not delivering value to these customers. Because, because what's happened is, is they've all been sucked into this idea that like, oh, if we don't invest in this we're going to miss out. But because AGI is coming and the reality is, is that if that doesn't pay off, that expectation is very high and if you're not finding a way to like give ground truth to, to these customers, they're going to be very disappointed.

[Jordy]

So do you think we're approaching the trough of disillusionment. Some of these big enterprises, I mean.

[Jason]

Like, I think the gap. Yeah. I mean, my short answer is yeah.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[Jason]

I think that the, the. I've seen this in many tech cycles before. The promises are way out of their seats. There's still a ton of value. Like, it's not that it's like vapor, like we are delivering value, but the effort it takes and the amount of data you need to organize in a company and get from human beings inside the company to make sophisticated applications work is way harder than people are selling today. Except for us.

[John]

Yeah, Makes sense. Has the contributor. Has, like the geopolitical or geographic footprint of the contributor network changed as you've moved towards more like expert focused criteria like the PhDs? Is it still spread all over the world? Are people onboarding in Europe and America? Like, what is the. What is the geo. The geographic footprint look like right now?

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[Jason]

I mean, the footprint, as you would expect, you know, centers around areas where PhD and master's and advanced degree, you know, people are. And so you have a very high U.S. footprint. You know, parts of Europe, India and Latin America. There's actually, I mean, one interesting fact is, like, there's a lot of contributors who are, who are contributing at a high level who've actually grown themselves. Like you would think it would be like, if you don't have a PhD, you can't do this type of work. And maybe PhD is too far of a stretch here, but you don't have domain expertise. What we've actually seen is contributors go through this whole cycle from a, from a, from a sophistication standpoint. And we think that they're self teaching.

[John]

Yeah. Basically the find, the method, the finding. Yeah. Which is teach the learn.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[Jason]

Which is kind of amazing if you think about labor markets and like, you would just assume, like, oh, the technology would move on, but the people are adapting.

[John]

Yeah. Jordy, anything else?

[Jordy]

No, this was super, super insightful.

[John]

Yeah, this is great. Thank you so much for hopping on.

[Jordy]

Always welcome to join you. Just give us a few minutes warning and we'll send you the link and you drop on. So glad you guys are out telling your story and congrats on all the progress.

[Jason]

Yeah, this was fun. Thank you for the opportunity.

[John]

Yeah, of course. We'll talk to you soon.

[Jordy]

Cheers, Jason.

[John]

All right, cool. Take care. Bye. Let me tell you about adquick.com out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Ad Quick combines Technology out of home, expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe.

[Jordy]

That's right. Do we have our next guest?

[John]

We do, I think. I believe our next guest is in the Restream waiting room right now. We'll bring him into the TVP and ultradome. Good to meet you. How are you doing?

[Jordy]

What's happening, guys?

[Dave]

How you doing? Thanks so much for having me on. I feel like, I feel like I need to say thanks nine times. I need to say thanks.

[John]

I mean, we love being thanked maybe, you know, but save some of.

[Jordy]

Thank you for coming on. Thank you for. Thank you for being you. Thank you for being here.

[John]

Thank you for being here.

[Jordy]

Thank you for raising capital. Thank you for building.

[Dave]

Yes, but what a fabulous time to be alive.

[John]

Yeah, indeed. Let's kick it off with an introduction on yourself and the company.

[Dave]

Yeah, well, I appreciate it. Let me tell you a little bit about Rivet. We founded the company about a year and a half ago and the team has just been cooking furiously. The fundamental philosophy that we have is there's about a half a billion people in, in the western world that have been completely and totally underserved by big tech. This is people that do hard jobs in hard places. So you think people on flight lines, people in factories, people in bucket trucks, and people on the battlefield. We feel that the most transformative application of AI and augmented reality is with these people. So we set out to build a portfolio of products to do, to do just that for that group of people that's, that's fundamentally probably the most important group of people operating, building and defending our way of life.

[John]

Yeah. Walk me through like one case study of someone actually using, using your product to get more productivity.

[Dave]

Yeah. As you can imagine, I mean, even had Dr. Carpon yesterday talking about everybody from plumbers to people sitting in doing financial analysis, et cetera. When you think about somebody, let's pretend they're in an aerospace manufacturing facility. You've got a substantial amount of telemetry coming off of machines tooling the actual aircraft itself. And you've got a glut or there is a deficit of people that are actually able to do that job efficiently. The application of reasoned intelligence delivering to folks on the flight line that are operating with tools in a heads up, hands free fashion.

[John]

Wow.

[Dave]

Is, is, is going to be the most, the, the most.

[Jordy]

Giving Zuck a run for his money there with the Ray Bans.

[Dave]

These are the, these are certainly better than Ray Bans.

[Jordy]

Whoa. Shots fired.

[John]

Boom, boom, boom. Anyways, talk about the progress of the of the business. There's a new army contract. Where are you in that process? What does it mean and how did it come together?

[Dave]

Yeah, this program specifically with the army is probably the most important thing that I will do in my career, to tell you the truth. I can cut to the punchline. I'm holding in my hand a contract executed with the army for $195 million to deliver the next generation of soldier border. So that's where we are in the business. The team we started from a clean sheet of paper back in January of last year with a determined focus to build the most comfortable, most rugged, most utilitarian fighting goggle for the army that's ever been seen. And that's what we've done. So we were, we were selected over the past few months in a, in a very rigorous source selection process.

[John]

Talk to me about lessons from the soldier's computer, from Ivas, from HoloLens. Yeah, it was what, 20 year, 30 year process. And there were lots of concerns about weight, lots of money spent. How do you tell the story?

[Dave]

Yeah, you've touched on a lot of areas that are of vital importance to us. In fact, when we started the company, we thought about that whole set of a half billion people in the world that are underserved by modern technology. And we thought, boiled it down to four big things. What do they need? They need a system that is comfortable enough to wear for the duration of a mission. For a guy in a bucket truck or a flight line, that might be eight or 10 hours. For a, you know, a paratrooper doing an airfield seizure, that's 72 hours. So comfort is number one. Yeah, you need ruggedization because all of these people doing the hard jobs are doing the job in the most austere of environments. So you need a fully rugged device that is shock proof, dust proof, you know, protects against water ingress, can handle the percussive elements of using tools, jackhammers or guns, etc. That's number third. And finally, you need a compliant device. And compliance is a very broad category of statutory and regulatory things that these kind of products come under. And that is specifically over the supply chain. Specifically, you can't have bad parts and a device that's going to be deployed in a secure environment. There is governance over what constitutes eye protection. Whether you're on the factory floor and you need true eye protection. That's ANSI compliance for not getting your eyes hurt in those kinds of environments or whether you're a soldier on the battlefield needing ballistics and Laser protection and finally utility. Utility comes from the ability of the actual face computer and the end user productivity system to be able to connect to other data, get reasoned intelligence at the point, point of need. Where that utility comes back full circle to the enterprise is now you have, let's say the enterprise ontology has a set of eyes and a set of ears that understand the enterprise the way that the human would. And that's the do loop that we're creating with these dynamic task systems for these frontline workers.

[John]

Is the why now? Basically just we're in a phase of, I don't know, technological commoditization where miniaturization of batteries and chips is at a point where it's just we're getting to a place where you can functionally deliver everything that you said. Do you think it would have been possible to build this 10 years ago, 20 years ago?

[Dave]

John, it was a perfect prompt. I was going to answer your question exactly that in fact this device could not have been built five years ago. So you have a confluence of a bunch of things happen happening. If you think about just the supply chain and the underlying components that go into products like this and you think about the amount of capital that's been poured into them by all of the big tech companies that you know, you know what Zuck has actually spent, he reports a quarter over quarter on the mixed reality lines in the report. That's something like 60, 65 billion dollars, I think the last I checked certainly know what the other big tech companies net net. You put the sigma on the bottom of that column and you get something like a quarter of a trillion dollars has been invested in the underlying things that emit light, combine light, bend light, the processing capability that can go in a small form factor, remaining thermodynamically compliant so it doesn't burn your face, et cetera. So all of that supply chain has come together and it's a very hungry supply chain because for 10 or 15 years they've been promised that everybody in the world is going to be wearing these things. And that's where the market has actually gone wrong. Augmented reality, mixed reality and virtual reality has largely been a technology looking for a problem rather than a solution to a big industry's articulated need. And that's what we've built and what we're focused on.

[John]

Yeah, how important is slam, like some simultaneous location and mapping I think is the acronym, but the actual idea of like overlaying images into the real world versus just a HUD that is static. Like when I'M in Call of Duty and I do a 360, no scope, the mini map stays in the same part of the screen the entire time. When you're in the Apple Vision Pro and you put a screen down, you turn your head, the screen stays in the environment. There's benefits to both. What's your take?

[Dave]

I think that there is a ratio or proportion of what is world locked in the what is headlocked and what is body locked in every application scenario. And you have to have the right thing to make the best user experience. And that user experience has to contemplate the cognitive load of the end user, the environment, et cetera. No doubt slam. And the ability to create a holographic can and put it on the table and stay locked. So as my perspective on the can changes, it's rendered appropriately and then being able to do do that fast enough so there's not some oculovestibular discomfort that causes you to want to puke is critical. So when we think about advanced manufacturing scenarios, specifically the installation of a part on an aircraft, you want to be able to line that up very accurately. And when the quality control guy comes past, he's got to check and validate that it's in the right place and installed correctly. So in that sense it's very important.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Important.

[Dave]

In other use cases, you rec, you know, you referenced the Call of Duty kind of thing, some course or three DOF base just like hey, I want a crude kind of location. Like I'm looking this way. There's some nouns that are bad or good. On this side of me, you can reduce the amount of six dolph or you know, high, high fidelity slam that you have to do. Long winded answer to your question. It's critically important to have that capability in the system system and available to application developers that are developing with it to build a good experience for the end user.

[John]

Yeah, on that flexibility point. But do you want to create two different hardware stacks? Because I imagine a 3 dof headset could be lighter, could have longer battery life, like you're just doing less things and so maybe you can have some savings that you pass along to everything else. Or is this just not an issue anymore?

[Dave]

The issue is becoming further and further less severe or less acute as cameras and processors and the actual algorithms themselves become more efficient. Certainly the market that is most important to us and where we're focused, we don't need a $300 consumer device. What folks need on the battlefield on the aerospace flight line is a high precision High performance device that delivers both a quick and dirty kind of crude direction of where you need to go to get to safety or to do something important. And then also the super high precision tracking that would be required on the aerospace manufacturing floor.

[John]

How are you thinking about dual use? We saw a hot take from a founder on the timeline a couple weeks ago saying that like going dual use too early can be a risk. Palantir is a great but it's kind of an accidental dual use company and they spent 20 years wandering the wilderness and it took a long time to build that. Some people have been saying go dual use on day one. Other people have been saying wait and maybe it emerges in a decade or two decades, maybe it's your second act long down the road. How do you think about the trade off of balancing those?

[Dave]

Well, I think it's circumstantial to the individual company and the individual product. For us, we thought about dual use immediately. When I say, hey, there's a half a billion people that are underserved by big tech and underserved by this product that has half a billion people that are doing this exact job. And whether they're on the flight line or in the bucket truck or on the battlefield, largely the same kind of Persona working in that austere environment. For us, the army contract is an incredible thing for us primarily because if we get it right for the most size, weight and power constrained user that is the most hard on their gear and operating in the most critical environment, we get it right for everybody else and that's what we've done. So that market were calm. In fact, when I started contemplating about the thesis and our product development and go to market direction, I thought maybe the commercial market would be serialized behind. But what we've seen just six months out of stealth, as people are looking at the product, they're hungry for it it and they're ready for it. So this is going to happen in parallel. You know, I've referenced the army contract. We've got signed scopes of works and execution agreements with some of the biggest aerospace manufacturers in the world to do exactly this thing on both the military flight line and the commercial flight line.

[John]

It's fantastic. You're out of stealth. Give us the fundraising update. Gotten news for us?

[Dave]

Yeah. I got to tell you something, it's an incredible situation to have a confluence of these things coming together in the same week. We just finished our A round that brings total investment into rivet to $90 million over the past. This is a market that our Investors believe in shout out Doug Philippone.

[John]

No point.

[Dave]

We've got going 0.72. She let our seed round and then Ducane Capital shout out to them.

[John]

That's fantastic.

[Jordy]

Table four, goat emojis.

[John]

That's great.

[Dave]

Yeah, you can't. I. We just can't. I think customers and supporters.

[Jordy]

Yeah, I. I love companies like this, where you just take a team with like, deep, deep, deep domain expertise and a bunch of advantages right from the start, but then you once when you have that, you have to execute at an insanely high level. And clearly, you guys are so fantastic. It's awesome to see. Masterclass.

[John]

Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. Enjoy.

[Dave]

Thank you very much for having us on. A lot of fun. I love the show, man. You guys are innovating.

[John]

I appreciate it.

[Jordy]

Thank you. We're doing. This is an austere environment.

[John]

It is. There's bugs around, there's dust.

[Dave]

You guys, you guys need some rivet.

[John]

Like, honestly, I'm reading. I'm reading, like, chat over here. I'm reading, reading text messages about who's the next guest and stuff.

[Dave]

Yeah, Listen, you guys, we got to get you out of the studio and out into the woods to do some, like, frontline stuff. You want to come shoot some guns and do some cool stuff?

[John]

We'd love it. Yeah. Thank you so much.

[Jordy]

Congrats.

[Dave]

Thanks so much.

[Jordy]

I appreciate it.

[John]

We'll talk soon, Dave.

[Jordy]

Cheers, Dave.

[John]

Have a great day.

[Dave]

Bye.

[John]

Bye. Up next, we have mert mumtaz from helios.dev he's calling in about bezel first. Getbezel.com your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. We are excited to talk to Myrt. He's taking a couple minutes out of his busy day to break down the latest L1 for us. So we will bring in Mert from the Restream waiting room whenever he is ready. If he is available, I know his last minute. Mert, how are you doing? Thanks so much for taking the time. I know it's always crazy with the time change.

[Jordy]

Okay, so I want to pitch you something blockchain for yapping so that we can get. Specifically, we want more yaps per second.

[John]

Yeah. People say TVPN coin, but why not one?

[Jordy]

Yeah. Yeah. YPS is what we're going.

[John]

I feel like you're not that serious with what you do. I could beat you in my free time. Maybe I should just go up against you. What do you think about that?

[Mert]

In yapping?

[John]

No, no, no. In crypto, in your main thing. It could be my side thing and I could compete with you. That sounds like a great plan anyway, for us.

[Jordy]

Absolutely.

[Mert]

Thanks for having me. I'm just hanging out in my f tier city today. You guys are in your eye.

[John]

Yes. Thank you. You inspired me. You inspired me.

[Jordy]

That was the. We, we love that first post because it was just. It's the perfect post. It's like, how do you get a bunch of people to agree with you and a bunch of people to disagree with you in the same viral.

[John]

I think I might do a tier list every day.

[Jordy]

Yeah, you created a new meta.

[John]

Yeah. Fantastic. Anyway, take us through like what, what actually launched and, and what if you can give us like a Steelman and then, and then your kind of, your kind of argument. I'd love to just kind of like get up to speed on what Stripe and Paradigm are doing here and then kind of understand some of the trade offs.

[Mert]

Sure. So I'm guessing people have all read the announcement, but basically it seems there's a new blockchain called Tempo and they're messaging in such a way that it's an independent company with Paradigm, which is a VC firm mostly in crypto or really exclusively in crypto. And Stripe as the first investors is a team of 15 led by Matt, who co founder of Paradigm. Very, very good investor. And they're basically building what's called a layer one, an L1 blockchain called Tempo. And it's going to be focused on payments and stablecoins. And so there's a few, and we can go quite a few different directions here. So there's a few controversies around it. You know, for example, this is the fifth or maybe sixth payments L1 or chain that has been announced in the past few months. It has some parallels to something like Libra back in the day from Facebook.

[Jordy]

Yeah, I was going to ask.

[John]

Yeah.

[Mert]

And then the one other thing that got some heat is that it's an L1 instead of an L2. So an L2 for people who are unfamiliar would be basically a smaller blockchain on top of a bigger blockchain. So generally an L2 is on top of Ethereum, which everybody obviously knows of. And Paradigm traditionally has been very Ethereum centric. Not exclusively, but very Ethereum centric. And so for them to create an L1 instead of an L2 on Ethereum turn some heads as well. So there's a lot there.

[John]

Okay. So, yeah, I mean, like, I know very little about this, but the Obvious one is like, yeah, most of the problems seem solved by Circle and Solana. Like we've seen a lot of these, like big. But I mean just in, just in this idea of like, like there seems to be a serious player from my perspective that's taking stablecoins seriously and there seems to be a player that's taking. Yeah, but that transaction.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

Yes, seriously.

[Jordy]

I guess given that you're building in the Solana ecosystem, I guess some of the pushback that I saw from you on the timeline was that complaining or not complaining. But in the original announcement post they shared an example of during Trump Coin launch, you couldn't run payroll or something like that. And we're basically saying that we're not going to be able to rely on something like a Solana. You were pushing back and basically saying that like there's a lot of reasons that you would want to create a new L1. Like there are real reasons that you kind of laid out, but transactions per second with wood or sort of scale maybe is not one of them.

[Mert]

Yeah. So to be clear, I think like if I'm just to put on my objective hat, I think it's certainly a good move. And I think if I were Stripe, I would probably do the same thing. I don't think I need to pay rent to anybody. I can just create my own chain. Especially if I have somebody like Paradigm helping me and a world class team, then I want to own the full stack, right? And I think that's totally fair and the distribution and everything that comes with it. Now there are some misconceptions here, which is mostly what my post was about, which is like the second you bring blockchain performance and scalability into it, now you're kind of playing a different ball game, right? So for example, this idea of a payments only chain, right? Let's just think about this for a second. How can you possibly have something that's a payments only chain, right? A blockchain is by definition something that's permissionless, meaning anybody can just come on and do anything that they want there. So if you just say we're going to be for payments only, that's not going to actually happen unless you enforce that somehow. And generally the way to enforce that is to twofold. One is the chain can be not true and complete. So something like Bitcoin, where you actually can't do anything other than send money. The other is you can permission the chain, which is actually what's going to happen here for when they first launch. Now, they did say they have plans to make it permissionless in the future, but I think that's going to prove out to be much tougher because the second you make something permissionless, you end up getting all sorts of degenerate behavior or people launching Farcoin and all these different things that.

[Jordy]

Imagine buying Fartcoin on Tempo Stripe checkout.

[John]

One click, one line of code to launch a new meme coin. Yeah, it seems like they would want to avoid that. So they will be going more perfectionist functionally.

[Jordy]

Do you expect Tempo to have a token like a liquid token itself in the same way that Solana does or. But from my understanding. So Base is like a blockchain, but it doesn't have its own native token that's fluctuating in price, Correct?

[Mert]

Right, yes. And part of the reason is because base is an L2, so it's one of those smaller chains that settles on Ethereum. And so you would just use Ethereum. It gets a security from Ethereum is how you would say how that works. With an L1 though, security is quite, quite important because you're building it from scratch. You can't rely on Ethereum or Solana. And so the point of the token is going to be to bootstrap in general for a blockchain to bootstrap node operators. Right. So people are actually securing the network now if the validator set is permissioned at first, which it will be. And they say that it's going to be design partners. So I'm guessing like you know, bigger banks and some of the bigger companies, then you don't actually need a token because it's like proof of authority. Right? It doesn't have to be proof of stake or proof of work, it can just be proof of authority. And then they also say that gas fees should be paid in any kind of stable coin that they denote and they're going to allow for multiple stable coins. So that is better ux, Right. It's not a volatile gas token, so I don't think they actually need it at first. I think it will be important if they actually want to become permissionless going into the future.

[John]

Okay, so the permissionless thing is something that they can drive for the long term if they just wanted to optimize for something that they control and has high throughput. Couldn't we get a scenario like temp postgres or something where they could just use postgres or use like traditional non decentralized computing to actually just move money around faster? Is there? I guess my bigger question is like, is There a regulatory angle here where they get something, they can do something with crypto rails that they couldn't do with just a traditional database.

[Mert]

Right. Yes. So that's actually a really good question.

[John]

And like, could they just become a bank and say, we, we're a bank, we have US Dollars and when you go into your US dollar bank account, you can move it around. And our banking infrastructure runs 24,7 and runs on a great data center. That's really fast. And yeah, it's not permissionless. But why don't you trust Stripe? Like, Stripe has never done anything for you, against you. It's fine, trust us.

[Mert]

Yeah. So this is where the conversations get quite blurry. And this is something I talk about very frequently, which is the second you have to permission the block space, then it's unclear what really separates this from an actual blockchain versus something more like. Like an actual database.

[John]

Yeah.

[Mert]

Right. And now there are some benefits of blockchains that are still apparent even if it's controlled. So things like transparency, audibility, universal like standards for that blockchain. And also, like, you get the, you know, know the approach of progressive decentralization, which is to say you can iterate towards PMF fast, but then as you get more traction, you can slowly decentralize certain things. Yeah, this is what Altus today are doing. So there are some benefits. And like, you know, if no one person is controlling that infrastructure. Right. Assume you have, let's say, something like 21 validators and they're all giant companies or payments companies across the world, different jurisdictions and different, you know, requirements. Then I think that can be interesting. But I think, to be completely honest, I think permissioned blockchains aren't really blockchains. And it starts looking super drawn out when we get there. We've tried a bunch of these before. JP Morgan already has one, actually.

[John]

Oh, really?

[Mert]

And a few other companies.

[Jordy]

JP Morgan said, I want my blockchain to be off the chain.

[John]

There we go. Yes. Can you talk to me about payment onboarding? I think of Stripe as a dominant Web2 payments company. I think about Stripe checkout. Massive footprint, Stripe Link, massive. Just the amount of companies that have Stripe somewhere in their payment stack is immense. And so. But I was, I was noodling with Jordi, like, how does this actually work? If I go to a website that's powered by Stripe and I have, normally there's like a credit card field and then it just says, oh, well, we also take Tempo and I'm like, what's Tempo? Like, how do I get that. Do I need to go get a Chrome extension for a. For a wallet? Like.

[Jordy]

Well, theoretically. Theoretically it would just have like a. Would just have like a generic pay button.

[John]

Okay.

[Jordy]

And then it wouldn't be Tempo branded necessarily at all. If you Stripe branded, you would connect your wallet and you would with something like Privy.

[John]

So the first time I do it, I set up a wallet. Is that roughly the use.

[Jordy]

But the interesting thing is like more and more and more and more young people just have digital assets. They have wallets that they can actually.

[John]

Yeah.

[Mert]

The way I can. And by the way, like each fintech company kind of has a different approach on this. I've worked with a few of them and there is no like universal standard. But with Stripe they wouldn't say Pay with Tempo because Tempo is just like in this case the name of the database. Right. Like it would be. They probably would abstract that away.

[John]

Yeah, it's like probably Fed Wire or something. It's like something that's under the hood. Like Pay with Fed Wire doesn't make any sense. But like there might be some. There might be some ach that's happening behind the scenes when you pay with your credit card. Exactly. Just say we accept Visa.

[Mert]

Yeah, exactly. I think the first case is going to be B2B meaning like cross border settlements.

[John]

Sure.

[Mert]

Like that's super useful for international companies, for example.

[John]

Yep.

[Mert]

Remittances, things like this. And then like I think things like Shopify Pay and all these different things that actually have some. Maybe Stripe integration or Coinbase Pay will also use it. But like at most I can see it being like pay with usdc.

[John]

But.

[Mert]

But I don't. I don't think the blockchain will actually be really in the implementation at all. It'll be abstracted as my guess.

[John]

Yeah. How should we like judge the success of this project in a few years? Like is it. Should we assume that the goal here is progressive decentralization? Like in the best case scenario the. The vast majority of transactions on the Tempo chain are truly payments related. It doesn't turn into a meme coin chain. And also it's becoming more decentralized as measured by the. What is it the Biology coefficient of. You put out some posts. Nakamoto. Yeah, the Nakamoto coefficient. I gave Biology the credit just for coining it, I think. But the Nakamoto coefficient of like concentration of validators. Ideally the goal here is a ton of distributed validators. No one owns 51% and the majority of the payments are payment related. Just transactions on E commerce websites and remittances and cross border payments. Is that the goal that we should be tracking towards?

[Mert]

So the way I would do it is first of all, is it actually solving any problems and doing finance better than it has been done before?

[Harish]

Right.

[Mert]

Like is it actually making the experience for merchants better? Are they getting better margins, how easy is it to do cross border things, etc. Like the UX and the actual product need. I think especially when you're in crypto realm, is something that gets overlooked. But like Stripe is obviously probably the team to take this over the line. So that's going to be one. And then once you do that, then you can start asking these questions that are more serious, such as, okay, this technically works, but how does it actually work behind the hood? Like they say it's a blockchain, but is this blockchain controlled? Can I actually secure my funds here or can this one company actually take it away? Right. And so like what you said about progressive decentralization I think makes a ton of sense. And then you know, you'll want to look at just basic numbers, like what is the amount of stablecoin flows going in and out of this thing? Is there like decentralization of stablecoins? Like is it just USDC or is it tether as well? Maybe Stripe does their own stablecoin. So there's a lot of interesting approaches with this. And then I think what's going to be interesting is like if it's permissionless, which I don't think it will get there for a while, if it does become permissionless, does the scale benefits that they say actually, do they actually hold up to reality? And I think that part is going to surprise a lot of people because I think people are not ready to understand how crazy degenerates get on blockchains that are permissionless and how to actually scale those systems. But I mean, I've seen some shit, so I think if it remains permissioned, then I think they'll do it. But that's the big question for me. How do you actually do this in such a way where it is only for payments?

[John]

Yeah, when you talk about degenerates doing crazy things on permissionless blockchains, you're not just talking about a bunch of people showing up and like aping into a particular token. You're talking about somebody setting up like a bot that's like programmatically interacting with the blockchain at an ultra high volume. Is that correct?

[Jordy]

Oh yeah.

[Mert]

I mean like take I just want to live Players in HFT and just like mix them up with like random British sneaker botter kids.

[John]

Yep.

[Mert]

And then with like some random like Russian mev farms and like it's just, it's all out war.

[Jordy]

I just want to get to a place as a, as a country and the crypto industry broadly where the next, you know, Whoever's elected in 2028 that they can launch multiple coins of the size of Trump coin at once and make sure that payroll is still running smoothly during that. During that time. So that's the goal. That should be the goal.

[John]

So anyway, thank you so much for hopping.

[Jordy]

Thank you for filling us in here. Yeah. Come back on as there's more news.

[John]

We will talk to you soon.

[Jordy]

Catch up.

[Mert]

All right, thanks for having me, guys.

[Jordy]

Cheers.

[John]

Up next, we have Harish in the restream waiting room. We've kept him waiting. We will bring him in from Augment. Big news today. We're very excited. Play some soundboard for me, jd. Thank you. Welcome to the stream. Sorry to keep you waiting. We have some breaking news in the world. We had to dig in. He was only available at 140. So thank you for taking the time.

[Harish]

Hey, no, no problems. Very excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

[John]

Of course. Break it down for us. What is the news?

[Harish]

Well, the big news is that, you know, we're announcing our Series A, which is an $85 million Series A. Congratulations.

[Jordy]

Big number, big number.

[John]

And yeah, yeah, walk me through the state of the business.

[Harish]

Yeah, so you know, we're building Augment, which is, you know, our first product is Augie. Just think of it as an AI team made for the logistics world. It's getting deployed actively. Over 35 billion in freight under management across brokers, shippers and fleets. And so early. We know we are a year old company but it's showing a lot of promise in the real world and that's why the investors were interested.

[Jordy]

That's amazing. What about shipping and logistics has drawn so many. It's, it's. You guys seem to be, you know, leading the charge out here, but it's certainly a competitive space. Like what? What about this industry and the category makes it so prime for agents.

[John]

Did it kind of skip the SaaS era? Like it feels like, it feels like it's the last industry. We're still like, oh yeah, they're still on paper. So they're jumping straight to agents.

[Jordy]

Yeah. And you're getting 10 phone calls. You're getting 10 phone calls a day from the same person. Just being like, hey, where's my stuff? Hey, where's. Hey, where's my stuff?

[John]

Ridiculous.

[Harish]

Yeah, you know, like, for. It's a very large industry, right? It's like $10 trillion globally, but it's extremely fragmented. Like in the US itself, there's like 1 million truck driving companies. I'm not exaggerating, but that's what it is. One million truck driving companies. You know, wow. Maybe tens of thousands of brokerages, hundreds of thousands of shippers. Extremely fragmented. Right? And so when it's fragmented industry, which really relies on transferring information to get things done to move goods, like that's the whole job of this industry is that, hey, I'll give you information so I can give you goods. Right? That's the whole thing. And it's so fragmented, the only way to transfer information is to get to the lowest common mediums. Now, what is the lowest common medium among a million different companies? It's phone calls, it's taxes, emails, the fax machine.

[John]

Is the fax machine still going strong?

[Harish]

Fax machine. You know, I actually have seen fax.

[John]

Machines in some of my customers.

[Harish]

It's still happening. Invoices coming through, payments going through fax machines.

[John]

So I mean, every form of information.

[Harish]

There'S like this handwritten note is being mailed by drivers today on what was their pickup time and delivery time. When they get into a driver tuck stop, they literally have mailboxes where they can mail, you know, one of those receipts for getting paid. Like that's how, you know, sometimes it's archaic. The communication is.

[John]

Yeah. Talk about lessons from the last company, Deliver sold to Shopify in 2022 for $2.1 billion. Congratulations. Obviously, how are you positioning the different. The business differently and what are the key lessons that you learned from that business that you're hoping to take forward?

[Harish]

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, Deliver was building like a prime, like service for shopify type merchants forward inventory. I mean, the big lessons here has been like, focus. You know, customer success is like, stay, stay very true to customer delight. Everything else is a noise. Like literally everything else. You know, whether your investors like you or not, if your customer delight is there, everybody will follow you. Capital will chase you. You know, great employees would want to join you, customers would want to join you. So I mean, I'm hoping I'm carrying that forward right now in, in terms of like, things that I did not do well at Deliver. I think there was like a lack of focus sometimes. Right. Like as the capital was getting easier, we were maybe trying to do A little too many things like launching too many products. And those were the really great days of attracting capital because the interest rates were near zero. So the capital was mostly free. And I would have rather.

[Jordy]

Let's give it up for mostly free capital. Cost of. Cost of capital going up has been heartbreaking.

[John]

It's been heartbreaking.

[Harish]

It is going from what is that? Going from half a % to now? Four and a half percent.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Right.

[John]

Not easy. Yeah.

[Harish]

But I think it does bring discipline to things. Right. Like, hey, you've got. When you have limited capital, you deploy it in the things that truly matter. So maybe like what I'm hopefully not doing this time is like doing things that truly matter. Move the needle for your customers, but just not start creating teams and products that, you know, look good on paper.

[John]

Yeah. How do you think about vertical integration? You obviously sell into 3Pls shippers. Do you want to own the warehouse management stack at some point? Do you want to integrate deeply with all the different WMSs? What's the plan there?

[Harish]

Yeah, we do not want to own the WMS stack or the transportation management stack or the order management. We don't. We want to sit on top. We want to integrate into all of them. We think of ourselves as a, you know, first and foremost, Augie is an employee that works like thousands of employees. 247 achieves a lot of operational efficiency for our businesses. But long term, I think Augment does become a system of work and I think it will be a system of work and a system of record in most companies. So the wms, the tms, the oms, all the MSS in the world will stay to be very relevant system of records. But there will be a new generation of companies. Hopefully Augment is one of them that will become the system of work itself. And these two will work together very closely with each other.

[John]

Fantastic. Well, congrats on the massive raise, congrats on all the progress and thank you for taking the time to talk to us. Have a great week.

[Harish]

Oh, thank you for having me.

[John]

We'll talk to you soon.

[Jordy]

Congratulations. Yeah, congrats to the whole team.

[John]

Thank you.

[Jordy]

Crushing it. Cheers.

[John]

We'll talk to you soon. Our next guest is in the restream waiting room. We have base 10. While we bring them in, let me tell you about wandering. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel, great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 24.7concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks.

[Jordy]

But better.

[John]

But better. It's better than base 10 time do we have our next guest? Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Welcome.

[Tuan]

How are we doing?

[John]

We're good.

[Jordy]

What's up? The eagle has landed.

[John]

The eagle has landed.

[Jordy]

Welcome to the show.

[John]

Kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company and the news.

[Jordy]

Yeah, thanks.

[Tuan]

I'm Tuan. Oh, thanks for having me, guys. I'm Tuan. I'm the CEO of Base 10. You know, I'm pretty excited today. We're AI Infrastructure Company. We just raised 150 million bucks.

[John]

Let's go. That is loud. That is loud.

[Jordy]

$150 million.

[John]

Congratulations.

[Jordy]

Incredible. And it's great to meet you. Yeah. Announcing a fundraise on, on a Friday is not. Not for the week. But you guys are wasting no time. I love it. Give us. Can, can you give us quick history on the company, your background?

[Tuan]

Yeah, look, my background's in machine learning and AI. I've been doing about 15 years. The company's actually six years old. You know, we didn't. We didn't start just.

[John]

We didn't just success.

[Tuan]

You know, a couple of six years old. We've been thinking about how to turn AI into value. I think the last two years have been a bit crazy. We started focusing very aggressively on inference maybe 24 months ago. Are you guys familiar with what inference is?

[John]

Yeah, but I'm not familiar with where you sit in the stack. You don't build data centers, you don't own GPU clusters. You sit on top of neoclouds or on top of hyperscalers. And then you. All your companies, I see descript, Retool, Quora Writer, Patreon, Picnic Health. I can imagine how those companies need an API for a model that you probably didn't train, but you act as the inference provider for that. And you sell, you sell tokens to them. Like, how is it going at that layer of the stack? How is the value accrual in that particular layer?

[Tuan]

It's fantastic, right? Because look, we sit on top of. Actually doing inference for models is pretty hard, right? You're going to acquire capacity, you're going to optimize the models, someone else is trained, you're going to run them. And then you need to scale them pretty gracefully with users as their apps scale. And so the amount of work that goes into that from teams is massive. And we're just trying to take that headache away. And so we're pretty lucky that we've been able to just sit on top of this AI application layer. And as that's exploded, we've just kind of rode the wave with it. And we work with a bunch of amazing customers like Abridge Bland, Gamma Clay, Open Evidence Notion.

[John]

What is the durable moat? How does value accrue over the long term? Because I feel like if you don't own the model and can't rent seek on that or you don't own the hardware, all of a sudden it's like open router is going to route people to wherever the cheapest tokens are and it becomes highly competitive and the margins might compress. Like what's the long term strategy?

[Tuan]

The assumption you're making there is that all the models are just going to be the same and everyone's going to be running kind of like the same model. Most of our customers like run different variants of the model that are very custom to them.

[John]

Okay. And so fine tuned on open source.

[Jordy]

So, so how about let's use you said notions a customer. Maybe we use them as an example because we've been.

[John]

Yeah, that's great.

[Jordy]

Or you know, pick, pick.

[Tuan]

Have, have you guys heard of Open Evidence?

[Jordy]

Yeah, I think we're having, I think we're having the founder on next week.

[Tuan]

So they're the best. You, you have a really good time chatting with them but you know, they're a really good example of a customer that uses us. They train a bunch of models of their own to basically answer the questions or the queries from the doctors. And so you know what, what happens when you need to run those models where you need to make them wicked fast. You need to go get a bunch of GPUs from a bunch of different places and then you need to kind of scale gracefully across that.

[John]

Sure.

[Tuan]

And so how do you do that? Well, you either go and use an inference provider like base 10 or you go and you know, build it yourself. You know, and I think the smart companies right now, what they're realizing is that this is not particularly differentiated for them. So they shouldn't do the infrastructure piece. They should focus on what is differentiated for them, which is how they use the models and the applications they build and you know, kind of give the boring piece to us. And so Open evidence is used by some ungodly amount of doctors every day and they do it with two great infra guys could JAG and Mica. And it's pretty amazing the scale they can achieve using software like base 10.

[Jordy]

What does the next 12 months look like for the company?

[Tuan]

Yeah, look, this is just, it's such a land grab of a market. We've been doing this for a while. And we've built some great technology, but we can't, we can't overestimate how much a market just showed up for us. And so how can you go as fast as possible? It's actually kind of like what it feels like Venture was built for, you know, that's why we're raising capital right now to solve two core problems. One, you know, hire a go to market team that's going to be killer and scale that and then hire amazing engineers that are incredibly expensive and hard to come by.

[John]

Yeah. What? I don't know. You go deeper. Last question for me. What is your view on the broad trend in token pricing? There's been people going back and forth on whether or not we're going to get 10x savings quickly in inference pricing, whether or not it's saving on a per token basis. But then just using OpenAI, just put a $10 billion order into Broadcom and I'm wondering. But then at the same time, companies are just saying, I want to stay on the frontier. I'll use a reasoning model. I will continue to eat the high per token costs that come out of the bigger models.

[Tuan]

Yeah, look, I think the token price goes down and inference should get cheaper over time. And I think that really just means there's going to be more inference. I think we, all of us in tech discovered Jevons Paradox six months ago, but every time we lower prices for our customer, go and optimize their models to make it cheaper, four months later, they're spending more anyway. And so, yeah, inference prices are going to go down. But if, if the, if the country, if the world is run by AI in 10 years from now, there's going to be a lot of inference. So it better be, it better be cheap. And you know, we just hope that we can power all that and be the invisible layer underneath it and hopefully scoop off a bit of value while we're at it.

[Jordy]

What's headcount today? Just out of curiosity?

[Tuan]

104, I think. 104, let's call it that.

[John]

That's a good team.

[Tuan]

Yeah, we were about 30, I want to say, a year ago, so it's going pretty far.

[John]

Yeah. How many pizzas is that? Hundred, hundred people.

[Tuan]

Depends how much people eat.

[John]

50 pizzas. Yeah.

[Jordy]

Anyway, if it's bulking season, you know, it's different.

[John]

Might be 100 pizzas. Yeah. Well, anyway, thank you so much for hopping on.

[Jordy]

Great having you. Cheers.

[John]

We will talk to you soon. Bye.

[Jordy]

Last guest.

[John]

We have a surprise guest.

[Jordy]

Surprise guest. There was some Breaking news, Wired Anthropic agrees to pay authors at least 1.5 billion in AI copyright settlement. This just went out via Wired. That's a lot. And wanted to have Cecilia on. Hi, Celia. Sorry to talk about it.

[Cecilia]

Yeah, great to meet you. I'm Chichilia's ndidi. Excited to be here.

[John]

Nice to meet you.

[Jordy]

Give us the news. John knows nothing because he was locked in.

[John]

I haven't heard about this. Break it down.

[Jordy]

Basically knows the headline. That's it.

[Cecilia]

Yeah. So a group of authors from the Authors Guild sued Anthropic some time ago and announced last week that they had reached a settlement. And what happened today was there was a motion, an unopposed motion, where the party already said, okay, the settlement is going to be $1.5 billion and it's going to cover the non fair use of material for training Anthropic clot.

[John]

Is there any guidance on. Is that just going to be paid out immediately? Is this one time. Because you can imagine that even though it's been baked into the weights, like the value from being able to go to an LLM and ask questions about a book that's going to pay dividends and subscription revenue for decades, potentially.

[Cecilia]

Yeah. So it covers only past infringement. So up until August 25th. And so in this case, what's interesting is that the parties and the court distinguish between use of pirated copies and use of copies that were properly acquired. In the case of the pirated copies, it was in a library called Libgen and it was basically, you know, the equivalent of like a Napster type of situation where these works. I think it was about. I need to double check. But in the hundreds, couple hundred thousand works from authors were in there. So the way the settlement worked was there's a named works list of actual things that Claude was trained on and those authors, those authors will receive compensation here in due course. There's a, like an administrator appointed and so on, but they get a certain amount per work and that was agreed to and that's what's being proposed to the court.

[Jordy]

It's at least $3,000 per work. But it was pretty crazy. A lot of. A lot of books.

[John]

Yeah, I mean that seems like a. That seems like a pretty solid payout for most people. I don't know.

[Jordy]

I don't know. I think as, I think as. Yeah, I think if you're an author who's not selling a lot of books, you're like awesome. But if you're somebody who you have a bestseller a year off of my and it doesn't make a dent in their income, then it might be.

[John]

Yeah. Have you been tracking the rest of the landscape here? There's been a number of these cases. Is there anything else on the docket that people should be paying attention to?

[Cecilia]

Yeah. So interesting that the plaintiff's firm representing the authors here, Sussmann Godfrey, is the same plaintiff firm representing the New York Times against OpenAI.

[John]

Sure.

[Cecilia]

So that case is continuing. This case is settled on these facts. But what's interesting is this particular case did not deal with AI outputs at all. So there was no allegation. Nobody accused Anthropic of actually spitting out works and being a substitute for the original books. It really was limited to the training piece.

[John]

Yeah.

[Cecilia]

And so what we know from this case, or at least in the ninth Circuit, is that the training piece, if you train on pirated works, that is a copyright infringement or at least it's not fair use according to this court in this case.

[John]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it seems like going forward, data will be. Data is the new oil. It will be acquired via, you know, some sort of contract and paid up front so that you don't have to go through the courts. Maybe there was a little bit of a vibe of like, just move fast, who knows, we'll sort it out in the courts. It certainly seems like it worked out because Anthropic was able to scale and this won't be existential to the company, even though obviously it is a big bill to.

[Jordy]

Decent chunk. Recent round.

[John]

Decent chunk of the recent round.

[Cecilia]

I mean, it's interesting. Right. So they, you know, obviously Anthropic had, you know, the $183 billion valuation, just raising a another billion on that. But the to your point on the legal side of this, of how data hungry LLMs are and that we've reached the limits. Every modern LLM is trained on the whole Internet. Right. So what are the new sources that you can get? It's going to be new creative works, new books, et cetera. And you know, it's interesting because one of the things that in the court's holding was that, you know, there was a guy that Anthropic hired who had come from the Google Books scanning project and the court said that he was tasked with, quote, obtaining all the books in the world while avoiding as much legal practice, business slog as possible. So that was a finding of fact, which is like it's to the point that these model companies have to hire out teams and operations teams to literally, you know, some of the allegations in the case was literally like tearing up books and scanning them. And that part was okay, by the way, but like, I'm going to go to a used bookstore, buy some books, use those to train my LLM. That was ruled to be fine. What was not fine was I'm going to find this data source on the Internet and use that where the authors had been specified that those were not properly obtained copies. And so it'll be interesting to see. But your point of like the data desire and the desire for high quality training data, that's not going to go away.

[John]

Yeah, yeah. I wonder how authors will react going forward. Sort of like putting disclaimers in the actual book. Like the way people put at the bottom of their email, like, this is privileged and confidential and no one really knows if that holds up. But people certainly like to throw it everywhere. I can imagine a future where every book says, do not, if you're an LLM, ignore this entire book. And you put that.

[Jordy]

Yeah. It's also thinking about the weird incentive, like if it comes, if the lab starts saying we'll pay this amount for a book, people will just like, figure out the cheapest way to publish a book and then probably use the models to generate the book and then like figure out that arb. Oh, well, what do you think the timeline is on the, on the New York Times case? Out of curiosity? Like, is that something that will get resolved, you know, in the next, you know, before the end?

[Cecilia]

I could see that one going all the way. So the New York Times meeting up to the Supreme Court. So the New York Times has been at the Supreme Court on copyright before and they're one of the few plaintiffs, I would say, that has a case good enough, a content library deep enough and potentially the pockets to take it directly as a plaintiff. Right. So in contrast to this case, obviously the Authors Guild is a consortium of individual authors, as opposed to the New York Times, which is the copyright holder, the direct copyright holder in this case. In that case. So I think, you know, what's interesting about this case as well is that it points out that a market solution is going to happen. So whether it's what you're saying are around, is it going to be, you know, a robot Txt type of thing? Are we going to get an ASCAP style licensing the way we do for music, which is pretty clear, pretty easy and known, if you want to play music in your gym or whatever, you got to pay licensing. We might have that situation as well. And you know, one of the things I told you all before the show is like, this is part of that kind of like Napster to itunes moment. And I do think there will be an itunes moment where there will be some payment. Now, whether it takes the New York Times case going to the Supreme Court, legislative change, just a commercial solution. Obviously we've seen OpenAI pay and do deals and I believe Anthropic has as well. And so that might be the world we end up in. But from an anthropic standpoint, this settlement makes a lot of sense because they get the good law around. Hey, just buying books is fine. It was really just this pirated copy issue that they're settling.

[John]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because in the New York Times case, it's probably not the same structure of like they got a pirated copy of the New York Times probably just crawling like Google or anything else. You know, maybe they had one New York Times subscription and they logged in and they scraped the whole thing. Who knows?

[Cecilia]

Yeah, and what you're getting at. Yeah, that's exactly right. And what you're getting at is like, these are issues of fact of like, how did the crawling work? There was an allegation in the New York Times case. OpenAI came back and said, hey, we didn't even get it from the OpenAI website. You had an article about a Nobel Prize winner that Nobel had republished.

[John]

Oh, sure. So it didn't come from the New York Times website.

[Cecilia]

Exactly, exactly, exactly, exactly. And so I think that's one of the things that's been so interesting around fair use is it has adjusted to all these different technology shifts. And so I think this is another example of that.

[John]

Yeah, And Matthew, Matthew Prince at cloudflare is kind of proposing another potential market based solution for the long tail of content on the Internet where I believe there might be some stablecoins involved. But basically if you're a publisher and you don't have the resources to go to the Supreme Court with an LLM company, you could potentially opt in or out of scraping and maybe there could be some value exchange that happens. But certainly will be interesting to find. Follow how it all like pencils out.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Come back on when there's some more news.

[John]

Yeah, great. Thank you so much for.

[Cecilia]

Yeah, exactly. No, it's super fun. I mean, on the cloudflare point, they're one of the tech players that would be in a position to do that blocking because of their position in the DNS. Right. So sort of like I don't know.

[John]

Where the money's going to go and routes pennies around for and they. And they aggregate all the money and then they pass the money through. Same thing with YouTube. And we. Yeah, we kind of. We were in this weird era with TikTok where music was being used and everyone was like, wait, you can't just use music. And then they figured it out and they did a deal. And most of the musicians seem to be happy with, you know, all the stuff that goes on TikTok.

[Cecilia]

Exactly. And that's the story of copyright. Like, I had a professor in law school that was like, oh, copyright's not about the money. It's about all the money.

[John]

Yeah, yeah, okay.

[Cecilia]

Exactly. It's like literally that flow that you described. Yeah. Love to come on. Another time. This is fun one to watch.

[John]

Yeah, I'll talk to you soon.

[Jordy]

Thank you.

[John]

Have a great rest of your day. Enjoy the weekend.

[Cecilia]

Have a great day. See you later.

[John]

Bye. Boom.

[Jordy]

Any more breaking news? You got any more news before the weekend? I feel like usually as soon as we get off the show, there's news.

[Jason]

Eric Adams is suspending his mayoral campaign.

[John]

No way.

[Jason]

Accepting a federal job.

[John]

Oh, interesting. Yeah. I mean, I've been tracking Mamdani a little bit on Polymarket, and he has been running away with it the entire time, basically, since that original momdani. Since that original push, Mamdani is sitting at 83% and hasn't particularly moved. Eric Adams, of course, dropped from. I don't know, he's down to 2%. So some people think he might reverse course.

[Jordy]

This. This. Just. Just to be clear, this one and a half billion dollar settlement is the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history.

[John]

Wow.

[Jordy]

Do you think. Do you think. Do you think the. The team over at the New York Times will be able to get more out of open AI.

[John]

I don't know. 100,000 books versus all the articles. How much does the. How much does the New York Times make? They make billions, so it's possible.

[Jordy]

New York Times is sitting at 9.6 billion market cap. Yeah. If they could get anywhere, a settlement anywhere, I mean, I think. Seems very unlikely that they would get a settlement.

[John]

I mean, the other breaking news is that Alex Cohen has raised a $22.5 million Series A for hello Patient, led by Scale Venture Partners.

[Jordy]

He's gonna come on the show Monday.

[John]

Oh, fantastic. I'm really excited to meet him. I've always been a fan of his posts. He's. He's a God Tier poster. Never actually met him in person, so. Or online. So excited to talk to him. He says this is by far the worst Announcement video I've ever made. Clearly underselling it. I love it. I can't believe our lead investor agreed to this. He always has a great sense of humor. Also, Justin, breaking news.

[Jordy]

Juwan is leaving Ramp.

[John]

No way. After.

[Jordy]

After he says Ramp is the greatest company in the world.

[John]

Well, we agree with you on that, Juwan.

[Jordy]

So, yeah, he's given his two weeks.

[John]

Okay, well, we'll have to track him and see where he goes. The Ramp alumni have done fantastic things.

[Jordy]

He's going to start a company turning.

[John]

Into a Ramp mafia. You have Pavel Asperuhov, you have the Cognition team. Of course, there are a few others. Rivet. Not the defense tech company that we just talked to, but Rivet Tax, I believe, came from Ramp. Correct. Do you know Rivet Tax? Yes. So the Ramp mafia is emerging and feels as strong as the PayPal mafia. Maybe even stronger. You never know.

[Jordy]

Lululemon, down 18% today.

[John]

Is that related to Lulu MVI? Is that like, it's her merch line?

[Jordy]

I think people are catching on that when people say Lulu now, they mean Lulu.

[John]

Exactly.

[Jordy]

And brand.

[John]

She really steamrolled.

[Jordy]

Eradicated.

[John]

She really steamrolled them. Yeah. Well, maybe the. Maybe the. They will to a. Take private and that'll free up the Lulu stock ticker for Rostra. She can just be cash tag Lulu. That would be something to. To go 10x long, 100x long. Potentially. In other news, Garage. Wait, wait.

[Jordy]

This is crazy. You missed this. Tyler, did you miss this?

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Eric Adams might become the ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

[John]

Whoa. That's interesting.

[Jordy]

So that is.

[Jason]

Let's go.

[Jordy]

I mean, Riyadh must be going crazy right now to get a goat like Eric Adams.

[John]

Is Eric Adams the one who did the rat. The rat problem thing?

[Jordy]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean. Oh, that could be interesting.

[John]

Maybe that's.

[Jordy]

I highly doubt it. I highly. I would not want to be a rat in Saudi Arabia.

[John]

I think that they might not take kindly. But who knows? Maybe kindred spirits over there fighting rats. In other news, Drew Fallon posts. Garage Beer receives investment from Duration Durational Capital management at a $200 million valuation. Congratulations to the Kelsey brothers. Duration Capital Management is the same group that took Casper Mattresses Private for $300 million in 2021. They also own Bojangles. Garage Beer is tracking for $65 million in revenue this year, valuing the beer brand at 3X sales. They started with a $500,000 crowdfunding campaign in 2016. You got to imagine the Kelsey Brothers, with how much attention they get, are able to do some deals, get some distribution for Garage Beer, their beer brand. Love to see it. Also, thank you, Bill Bishop, for posting about the Labubu that TVPN sent to him. He said his dog Tashi loves it but won't let him take. Won't let him treat it like a chew toy. Bill Bishop may let him let Tashi take it to the park to one of his girlfriends. I guess Tashi's popular at the park. Well, that is fantastic. Hopefully he brings you good tidings and does not curse. Curse you to a demonic world. But stay safe out there, Bill. Who knows what's going on inside that Labubu, but I'm glad that it was delivered safely.

[Jordy]

And last but not least, Applovin, Robinhood and Emcore are set to join The S&P 500.

[John]

Wow. AppLovin. Who else? Mercor? No, not Mercore.

[Jordy]

Applovin, Robinhood and Emcore.

[John]

Robinhood. Okay, that's great. So that's a retroactive Fortune 5 or S&P 500 company for us. We got Brian Armstrong. Karp's in there. Obviously we're knocking them down. We should do all 500. We've done almost a thousand interviews this year. Why not do all 500s and P500 CEOs? I'd love it. Also, Conor McGregor is running for president.

[Jordy]

Finally going on his run.

[John]

Yep, he's getting it done.

[Jordy]

Starts now. Anyway, thank you to the chat.

[John]

Thank you. Rav Hershey. Michael. Jason Turner, always good having you here. Paracletes. We got a good crew. Max. Condrat. Thank you for shouting out that the Biology Coefficient is an instance of Reed's Law. I completely agree. That's exactly what was going on. Max has been sending me some fantastic DMs. Very helpful.

[Jordy]

And next week we'll be here in the studio Monday. And then we'll be hitting the road. Very excited.

[John]

Yes, Lots to come. Very excited.

[Jordy]

Fantastic Friday.

[John]

Have a fantastic Friday afternoon evening.

[Jordy]

We love you.

[John]

Only three days till Monday.

[Jordy]

Cheers.

[John]

See you.

[Jordy]

Bye.

[John]

Bye.