บทถอดความฉบับเต็มของ New OpenAI Hardware Device, Google I/O Reactions | Erik Prince, Anthony Pompliano, Scott Wu, David Senra, Joe Wiesenthal, Nikunj Handa

very interesting to see what they actually launch. Anyway, let's dig into the Mark Gurman article. Bill Gurley immediately, within minutes of Mark Gurman posing this cash or stock? What was the deal? I wanna know. Speaker 3: 05:18 I wanna know. Speaker 1: 05:19 And Mark Gurman says 5,000,000,000 in stock. OpenAI bought an initial 23% in q four for about 6,500,000,000.0 in total. Patty's in there saying, I don't want an OpenAI phone. I want an OpenAI brain chip. I want the four o hallucination straight to the brain. Speaker 1: 05:35 Love Patty. Hope Speaker 3: 05:36 he's doing well. Speaker 1: 05:39 Let's let's dig into this article and break it all down. So from Mark Gurman in Bloomberg, OpenAI to buy AI startup from Apple veteran Johnny Ive in $6,500,000,000 deal. They will acquire the AI device startup cofounded by Apple Inc veteran Johnny Ive in a nearly all stock deal for $6,500,000,000. The purchase, which is the largest in OpenAI's history, will provide the company with a dedicated unit for for developing AI powered devices, and that makes a ton of sense given that they are subject to the platforms. Google, obviously, is Android. Speaker 1: 06:10 Tons and tons of AI products. As we saw yesterday, we're gonna go into some of the Google IO reactions and what Ben Thompson's saying on Strutecari about about Google IO. And then Apple. Apple's obviously a little bit behind the ball with Apple intelligence, but they can charge 30% on everything still. They can, you know, gate things, and they certainly can't let OpenAI have free reign of the OS as they'd certainly like to have. Speaker 1: 06:32 And so not a not an unreasonable decision, although many companies have tried and failed to break into hardware. Facebook, famously, with the with the Facebook phone, which I believe was a project that was run by Chamath Palhansky. Speaker 3: 06:44 The interesting thing here is that so OpenAI is not acquiring LoveFrom, which is the sort of consulting agency by Johnny. Yeah. But LoveFrom will continue to work on IO internally at OpenAI. Speaker 1: 06:57 Okay. Speaker 3: 06:59 Sorry, not internally, but IO is now part of OpenAI. So the big question for me is 6 and a half billion dollars is a big number. Yep. They must have made some meaningful amount of progress. Otherwise, they could just say to to love from Yep. Speaker 3: 07:12 Can we just pay you, you know, $500,000,000 a year to develop a device ourselves. Yeah. And so in the video, the thing that was notable to me is that Sam has an early version of whatever their initial device is that he says he's blown away by. Yeah. And they've gone out and said they're making a family of products as Speaker 1: 07:30 Yeah. Makes sense. I mean, at the same time, if you flip it around, what does it take to get Johnny Ive to join your startup? Is it close to 2% equity? It's Speaker 3: 07:41 a couple of points at least. Speaker 1: 07:43 A couple of points. Right? I mean, that's not unreasonable. And so you

run that math, and all of a sudden it's like, well, we're taking we're paying for this mostly in stock. It's an all stock deal. Speaker 1: 07:51 6,500,000,000.0 latest valuations, what, three fifty? Three hundred? Speaker 3: 07:54 Three thirty. Speaker 1: 07:55 Yeah. Three thirty? And so it's basically 2% of the company of OpenAI is going to Johnny and his team. He's going to slice that up, probably owns a bunch of it. And so what would it take to get someone to get Johnny Ive, the legendary designer, to be their head of design? Speaker 1: 08:10 You know? If you were any other company, you'd be like, yeah. One, two percent probably. Right? Speaker 4: 08:13 Yeah. Speaker 3: 08:14 Maybe more. Senior executive. Speaker 1: 08:15 Yeah. Exactly. Like like, the the numbers, they're they're all they all have four extra zeros Yeah. Behind them, but but they but they all make sense when you when you rationalize it that way. Anyway, so there's gonna be this dedicated unit for developing AI powered devices. Speaker 1: 08:28 Acquiring the secret startup secretive startup named IO will also secure the device the services of Ive and other former Apple designers who were behind iconic products such as the iPhone. Here's a quote. I have a growing sense that everything I've learned over the last thirty years has led me to this place and to this moment. Very poetic. I've said in a joint interview with OpenAI chief executive officer Sam Altman, it's a relationship and a way of working together that I think is going to yield products and products and products. Speaker 1: 08:55 For the British born designer, the move marks a high profile return to a consumer technology industry he helped pioneer working for years alongside Steve Jobs. He crafted the look and feel of the modern smartphone in addition to the iPod, the iPad, the Apple Watch. Speaker 3: 09:10 Left Johnny specifically called out that these are decades old devices. Right? And so his point here is what what comes next. Right? What is the next platform? Speaker 1: 09:20 So he left in 2019. Obviously, Apple was working on Vision Pro for more than five years. Right? So he must have seen that project at some point and then been like, got Speaker 3: 09:29 Not it. I gotta leave. Not it. Here's your Speaker 1: 09:32 resignation letter. No. I don't know. I mean, obviously, it has it has touches on the ground. Speaker 3: 09:37 There's this picture of the two of them here, which Johnny unfortunately fails the green line test. He did in his case the switch. Let's pull it up. That for us. Tagged us in it actually. Speaker 3: 09:47 But the crazy thing here would be if Johnny is actually wearing the first device. Right? Mhmm. We don't know we don't know the form factor. Right? Speaker 3: 09:56 It could be Speaker 1: 09:56 Could be glasses. Speaker 3: 09:57 Something like a pendant. It could be glasses. Maybe. It could be something else. I'm just speculating. Speaker 3: 10:03 But I wouldn't be surprised

if there's Easter eggs. Speaker 1: 10:06 But, I mean, the green line test here makes sense. It's like Sam's the CEO and Johnny works as CEO now. Speaker 3: 10:10 Yeah. So it's Speaker 4: 10:11 hard to say he failed. Speaker 1: 10:12 Yeah. Maybe in some represented the true relationship of the business partnership. Speaker 3: 10:15 Yeah. The boss man. Forward. Always always fail the green line test for the boss man. Speaker 1: 10:18 Yeah. Yeah. You don't wanna you don't wanna mog your boss in a photo. Don't mog Speaker 3: 10:21 your boss. Speaker 1: 10:22 That that's a disaster. Yep. Ive was once described by Jobs as his spiritual partner, and his new stint designing rival technology products could be seen as a bad omen for Apple, a company already struggling to compete in AI. In the interview, Altman said Jobs would be damn proud of Iove's latest move. OpenAI is gonna create a product at the level of quality that has never happened before in consumer hardware, Altman said. Speaker 1: 10:42 AI is such a big leap forward in terms of what people can do that it needs a new kind of computing form factor to get the maximum potential out of it, he said. Not saying what form factor that is, but could it Speaker 3: 10:55 be a rectangle on the screen? The critique of the video I think if was a a beautiful conversation Speaker 1: 11:01 Yeah. Speaker 3: 11:01 That shared almost nothing other than they clearly admire each other and they're excited about what they're building. Speaker 1: 11:08 It's just two guys hanging out yapping constantly. It's ridiculous. Why would anyone do that? Why would anyone Speaker 3: 11:13 I did that. Speaker 1: 11:14 Publish multiple minutes of just two guys talking to each other? This is crazy. Speaker 3: 11:18 I love, I love at the beginning of the video that you know, they're clearly walking meet at this coffee shop or bar or whatever they're meeting at. Yeah. To me, the idea of the two of them just walking around San Francisco seems probably hard to go that far without, Speaker 1: 11:35 you I was thinking about that. I was like, if I saw Johnny I just crossing the street, he's jaywalking, right? Yeah. Just, you can just do things. Speaker 3: 11:42 Yep. You can just do things And Johnny walking. Speaker 1: 11:44 Jaywalking. Yeah, so they just walk in and yeah, full camera crew, very cinematic shot. Really, really cool. Speaker 3: 11:53 John, I called it by the way. Would you? Ben just broke the news to us in the chat that there was an earthquake in LA. There was I was sitting here at the table a minute before Speaker 1: 12:00 I said fake news. Speaker 3: 12:01 Minute before a minute before we went live and I'm like Speaker 1: 12:03 Built different. Speaker 3: 12:04 It I was like, there's an earthquake happening right now. John's like, no. Just banging the table. Speaker 2: 12:08 Oh, there's Speaker 3: 12:08 an earthquake. I'm scared. I'm terrified. I can't lie to Your water is shaking. I was, this is

showbiz, John. Speaker 3: 12:15 The show is gonna go on. We were not gonna stop the show. There was did of earthquakes. Imagining things. Anyways, the other thing here, OpenAI had acquired a 23% stake in IO last year. Speaker 3: 12:29 Yeah. So already pretty major shareholder. Speaker 1: 12:33 Separately, OpenAI startup fund also invested in Ives company. At that time, billionaire philanthropist Lauren Paljabs Speaker 3: 12:39 Has there been rumors as well? Do you remember rumors? I feel like it was about a year ago that Sam and Johnny were like in The Middle East pitching this Speaker 1: 12:47 They were working on Speaker 3: 12:48 some device products. So there had been a bunch of rumors but never a ton of clarity. Speaker 1: 12:53 I mean, Sam just understands the full implication of the AI stack and is interested in having a play in all of them. Like, HeLeon, He's thinking about fusion and energy at the super, super long tail. He he was talking about chip fabrication yesterday. He's obviously doing data center build outs now as well as the product level and the foundation level. It's like, yeah, if the app oh, where does the value accrue? Speaker 1: 13:20 The model layer or the application layer? Speaker 3: 13:22 It's Speaker 1: 13:22 like, it doesn't matter if it if it if the value accrues to the the foundation model layer, the application layer, the energy layer, the data center layer, the chip fabrication layer, the device layer, or the energy level, like, he he wins because he's got he's got Full Full Speaker 3: 13:39 He's verticalizing. Speaker 1: 13:40 Yeah. He's verticalizing. The deal is expected to complete to be completed this summer pending regulatory approvals. The takeover of IO will will Speaker 3: 13:47 provide By the way, if this gets blocked, I'm taking to the streets. I can't be Yeah. I'm gonna be out there. Speaker 1: 13:54 Two guys can't even get a coffee and build together anymore. Speaker 3: 13:56 Yeah. Speaker 1: 13:57 Yeah. It's ridiculous. I do wonder how Elon's gonna respond to this. He's probably gonna like, Speaker 3: 14:00 this is ridiculous. I don't like this at all. It's very annoying. Yeah. It's very annoying. Speaker 3: 14:06 For for Elon. Speaker 1: 14:07 For Elon. Speaker 3: 14:08 For Elon. Why? Because because to be one of the most powerful wealthy people in the world Yeah. And have it out for somebody Yeah. And be so publicly aggressive towards them but not seem to be able to actually, you know, he's consistently trying to, you know, Sam's biking by. Speaker 3: 14:28 Elon's trying to throw like a broom through the through the wheel, you know? Speaker 1: 14:32 Yep. Speaker 3: 14:32 And it's just the wheel's breaking the broom. Speaker 1: 14:37 I feel like maybe Elon needs to pick up somebody, some some iconic designer. Who is is Pininfarina available or something? Speaker 3: 14:48 Yeah. Who's the one that comes to Speaker 1: 14:50 these days? What Speaker 2: 14:51 are they up to Speaker 3: 14:51 these days? Speaker 1: 14:52 I mean, we've talked about, like, Mansory for Tesla, but maybe he needs to get someone to design some some x hardware. The funny thing is that, like, there have been these fake Speaker 3: 15:01 But I would be interested I would be interested to it's it's very possible Elon has a different thesis around hardware and AI. Right? Might not point of view, who knows, could be it's Neuralink is all that matters. You guys are focused on the wrong form factor. I'm sort of Speaker 1: 15:18 Yeah. Neuralink is playing Speaker 3: 15:20 ten, twenty years in the future. Guys can Speaker 5: 15:23 a point. Speaker 3: 15:23 You guys can make cute glasses. I'm gonna be in your brain. Yeah. Like, that that's Elon's lawn game is like, he's like He's even farther. And like, Sam is gonna have to at some point Speaker 1: 15:33 be like, oh, yes. The ChatGPT app is available for Neuralink and then Speaker 3: 15:37 Elon's like, Speaker 1: 15:39 gotcha. Gotcha. Speaker 3: 15:40 You let the you let the fox into the hen's house. Speaker 1: 15:43 Fox into the hen's house. Speaker 2: 15:45 Yeah. You let the chip in your brain. Speaker 3: 15:46 Yep. And it's just like, imagine he's like, you know, Sam Sam has endured, you know, having Elon, you know, comment the like crying emoji. Yeah. But imagine Elon just piping that into Sam's He's like, why why do I hear this in the background? Time I talk. Speaker 2: 16:03 It's so distracting. It's ridiculous. Speaker 1: 16:06 It's funny. Yeah. I mean, the other thing is like, you know, maybe the next AI product is just the humanoid robot. Optimist just sits there. It's like C-3PO. Speaker 1: 16:19 I was watching Star Wars this weekend. And like the other question, you just ask C-3PO. Speaker 3: 16:23 The other thing is You Speaker 1: 16:23 have your humanoid robot, and you just ask the robot. Speaker 3: 16:26 Like, the the opportunity with with the long term opportunity with Neuralink and AI is that you have a new sort of artificial internal monologue, right? That basically is augmenting your existing thinking. Yeah. And so you have to imagine that Johnny and Sam have thought about that potential scenario. Yeah. Speaker 3: 16:47 And so it's poss you could imagine they Apple's working with that company around Yep. Sort of brain computer interfaces. They could just buy that company for a billion dollars too. True. Speaker 1: 16:59 Yeah. There are few players. Interesting. The deal is expected to complete this summer. Takeover of my ramp Speaker 3: 17:05 card embedded into my finger. I can just swipe. Speaker 1: 17:08 You can actually do that. You can get an NFC chip in your, under your skin. Okay. Embedded in like a little capsule. Speaker 3: 17:15 Our people will talk to ramps people Biohacking. We'll make it happen. Speaker 1: 17:20 Yeah. No, you can do it. You can do RFID. I know someone who did it and has, could like open a door with it, basically. Speaker 3: 17:27

Yeah, super helpful. Super helpful. Yeah, way easier do it the keyboard. Totally worth it. Speaker 1: 17:32 And the really crazy thing is that capsule's like metal and so your body like rejects that. So they have to coat it in silicon. But if the silicon What about Speaker 3: 17:41 just replacing your fingernails with? Speaker 1: 17:43 I think there's probably other ways. I'm not into the body modification stuff. It's not enough for me. About internal monologue? Speaker 3: 17:48 Got one? Yeah. I've spent after the height mocking incident, you know, went went way down the rabbit hole around, you know, height surgery. Speaker 1: 17:55 Sure. Speaker 3: 17:55 Try to go from six one to seven one. Speaker 1: 17:57 Yeah. Oh wow, that would be Speaker 3: 17:58 Height mock you. Yeah. But it would mean missing the show. Yeah. Speaker 1: 18:03 I do that. Have an internal monologue? Yes. I can you imagine not having one? Like, I cannot imagine not having an internal monologue to the degree that I think the whole story about no monologue people are like, I think it's fake. Speaker 3: 18:19 TVPN audience all has an internal monologue. Speaker 1: 18:22 Is it just like an is it just like an IQ test basically? Do do you think the no monologue thing is real? I think it's just entirely fake and just made up. I'm very skeptical of it. We should have. Speaker 3: 18:35 If you don't have an internal monologue, come Speaker 1: 18:37 on the Come on show. Speaker 3: 18:39 We'll break it down. Anyway Anyways, the pair Speaker 1: 18:43 X55 hardware engineers, software developers, manufacturing experts, a team that will build what I've and Altman expect to be a family of devices. The two executives have already been exploring some early ideas for about two years. They said the pair expects the first device to be a truly novel type of product. People have an appetite for something new, which is a reflection of a sort of unease with where we are currently. I've said the question is just like Apple's really tested every possible screen size down to the watch is super tiny. Speaker 1: 19:12 Then there's the phone, the iPad, the the Speaker 3: 19:14 iPad. You mean the YouTube machine? Speaker 1: 19:16 The YouTube machine. And then and then you put on the Vision Pro and the goggles and you can get an IMAX screen. And so like if the device has a screen, it's got to be something between one inch and 200 inches, and and quickly you fall in that continuum. Speaker 3: 19:33 Yeah. I mean, question is, are they building for GPT four o? Or are they building for GPT six or five? Right? And how much better do the models get and our screens Speaker 1: 19:46 I mean wasn't Sam also an investor in Humane? I think he I think Speaker 3: 19:49 so. I mean, I won't list the investors in Humane because some of them are friends and they wouldn't wanna be associated necessarily anymore. But I think Speaker 1: 19:59 Sam's been thinking about hardware in a in a in a bunch of different ways and wants to test both no screen, see if that works, maybe screen, maybe different different opportunities. I don't know. Ivan Altman's first devices are slated to debut in 2026. Just like three months before ASI. Speaker 3: 20:17 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right around the corner. One one thing I feel really confident in is that I believe they could sell a million of these devices almost immediately. Speaker 3: 20:28 Right? Speaker 1: 20:28 Well, it depends. Think I mean, yes. A million is, like, low enough that, like, it'll happen no matter what. The the question is, like, if it's if it's additive and complementary to my current tech stack, it's a no brainer. Absolutely. Speaker 1: 20:42 Everyone will will will will get one. If it's a replacement, it it really has to be also a good phone still. And if they don't hit the basics of Speaker 3: 20:50 Yeah. Speaker 1: 20:51 Okay. It it works with iMessage, Then there's a question about, like, am I really gonna drop my phone, or am I carrying two phones now if it's like a phone sized device? Right? Yeah. Whereas it was very easy to to add a chromatic to my tech stack. Speaker 1: 21:08 And it's like, yeah, I could probably get a Game Boy emulator on my phone, but it's just a cool device. I throw it in my backpack. If I'm traveling, I have it. Same thing with, like, even the Vision Pro. It's, like, very additive. Speaker 1: 21:19 It's not fully replacing your phone. So so VR headsets could be something like glasses, like the Meta Ray Bans. People add those to their stack. It seems like it's easier to get someone to to add something than to replace something as important as their laptop or their phone, which they have like ten years, fifteen years of, like, daily driving use and expectations on where the apps are, where how things work. It's gonna be a lot harder to rip out the current flow. Speaker 3: 21:42 Yeah. I don't know. Speaker 1: 21:44 When he left when he left Apple six years ago, I've started the firm Love From, a collection a collective of designers and engineers. Their staff includes veterans of Apple's hardware and software departments as well as friends of Ive and other collaborators. He then cofounded IO last year with Apple alumni Scott Cannon, Evans Hanke, and Tan Tang. Hanke was Ive's successor at Apple and remained at the company until 2023, while Tan led iPhone and Apple Watch product design until 2024. Absolutely stacked roster. Speaker 1: 22:13 Tanen worked at Apple before cocreating the once popular email app Mailbox, which was acquired by Dropbox. Oh, I had no idea. Did you ever use Mailbox? Nope. Fantastic app. Speaker 1: 22:24 2013 comes out, and it and it invents the the swipe to archive, swipe to snooze paradigm and really makes it easy to start doing inbox zero. And that's where I learned inbox zero because when you signed up for Mailbox, there was this big long wait list. It took you a long time to get through. It was very like it was a hot product at the

time. And one of the first things they would do is just say, hey. Speaker 1: 22:47 You have 5,000 emails. Let's archive them all. Because when you archive an email, it just leaves your inbox. You can still search for it. It still exists. Speaker 1: 22:54 It's not deleting it. So just let's archive it all. And then from now on, you should triage your email by swiping. And it was it was amazing. It was a great product. Speaker 1: 23:02 And then Mailbox bought bought it or Dropbox bought it, and I think they shut it down. Speaker 3: 23:05 So It was one of those Jiro sushi products. Right? Speaker 1: 23:08 Totally. It was, like, really great design, and everyone loved it for, like, the year that it was viable, and then I don't know what happened with it. At IO, the group set out to to develop, engineer, and manufacture a collection of products for an era of of artificial general intelligence, the point at which technology achieves human like cognitive abilities. The team will now continue that mission at OpenAI becoming a threat to the very devices the designers helped create. That adds to Speaker 3: 23:31 the challenges of Speaker 1: 23:32 Apple, which has fallen behind in Silicon Valley peers in artificial intelligence. The art the company's AI platform released last year lacks the capabilities of rival systems and relies in part on OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot to fill in the gaps. Still, Ivan Altman don't see the iPhone disappearing anytime soon. In the same way that the smartphone didn't make the laptop go away, I don't think our first thing is going to make the smartphone go away. Okay? Speaker 1: 23:54 We'll get in a little bit more detail here. It's a totally new kind of thing. I'm really excited for this. The phone as it as it as it is as it currently is, is a remarkable general purpose device, I've said, adding that people will connect with AI in very new ways. We gotta get, Speaker 3: 24:12 I'm so excited to understand what the interface for this first device is gonna look like because one thing stood out, Nikita was posting earlier that if your onboarding flow requires any sound Yeah. You just see it immediate massive reduction in usage because a lot of people use their phones. Speaker 1: 24:30 What's an example of an onboarding flow that requires sound? Speaker 3: 24:34 Some apps will play a video but I'm talking about this in the context of like a voice interface Sure, sure, with the app. Speaker 1: 24:40 Sure, sure, sure. Speaker 3: 24:41 The issue is people use their devices in bed In Speaker 1: 24:43 public, they don't want to be loud. Speaker 3: 24:44 The bathroom. Speaker 1: 24:45 Got it. And they don't want to be loud. So if the experience requires sound, you're cooked. Speaker 3: 24:52 Yeah, Nikita says the majority of new app installs take place in bed or on the toilet. If your app requires sound on or voice to sign up, you're voluntary, you've voluntarily accepted a 60% tax on your growth. And so that's, you know, if your voice, voice AI has progressed so much, right? We've seen examples of Sesame, super low latency. Yeah. Speaker 3: 25:15 You could imagine a hardware device that's purely allowing you to interact with AI like it's a human, right? Speaker 1: 25:22 What if the device is a response to all the fears around AirPods? And so it's a set of wired headphones into a Walkman like device. Something there, to Speaker 3: 25:35 the AI without needing to Speaker 1: 25:36 use wireless headphones. That could be really trendy. They could go back to the original iPod video of the silhouettes dancing with the headphones on. Speaker 3: 25:44 So TJ has a great post here. OpenAI got the best hardware and design team in history for 6,000,000,000 or framed differently for the same amount Amazon burns annually on Alexa and devices? Speaker 1: 25:57 Yeah. Yeah. No. I I I really think that this is not a crazy overpriced acquisition. It seems totally reasonable to take 2% of your equity and say, hey. Speaker 1: 26:08 Let's take a shot at owning the next computing platform because this is such a seismic shift that that there's totally a world where they go and solve glasses or watches or headphones or some sort of other mobile device that you carry. And maybe it's additive. We should get some of the device the device entrepreneurs on the show. Maybe shift Speaker 3: 26:28 What is the opposite lookin' up? Speaker 1: 26:29 I'm sure he's ripping tweets. I'm sure he's Speaker 3: 26:32 He's launching in seventy one days. Speaker 1: 26:34 Seventy one days. Speaker 3: 26:34 He says not launching just posted a minute ago, too many cooks. Speaker 1: 26:38 Too many cooks in the kitchen? Speaker 3: 26:41 Which is funny because is that a play on Tim Speaker 2: 26:44 Cook? Speaker 1: 26:44 Yeah. Maybe. You know? Also, there's that adult swim, video too many cooks. I don't Speaker 3: 26:49 know if see Too many cooks in the kitchen. Avi, I'm very excited for his launch. Speaker 1: 26:54 Yeah. Yeah. We should give him a call. Speaker 3: 26:56 And it would be even if even if OpenAI and the IO team just completely come out with their own version of Friend, it's still cultural victory for Avi. For He the form factor right. Speaker 6: 27:09 And he Speaker 1: 27:09 can probably sell an Oracle for a million dollars Amazon or something. I mean, the Alexa Speaker 3: 27:15 Let's get Larry Speaker 1: 27:15 in Alexa Friend, That'd be good. Speaker 3: 27:17 The Alexa friend. Yeah. OpenAI Speaker 1: 27:21 also shook up management ranks this month with the San Francisco based company, appointing Instacart chief, Fijisimo as the CEO of applications. She reports directly to Altman allowing him to focus on the broader strategy. Henke, who will become an OpenAI employee along with Tan and Cannon, said that ChatGPT's debut prompted a realization that hardware technology would have to change. A number of us looked at each other and said, this is probably the most incredible

technology of our career. So agree, but how will it change? Speaker 1: 27:47 Tell us something. Speaker 3: 27:48 Just one thing. Speaker 1: 27:49 Just one thing. Speaker 3: 27:50 Just a crumb, sir. Speaker 1: 27:51 Just give us a weight. How much will it weigh? Speaker 3: 27:54 How big will Speaker 1: 27:54 it be? Speaker 4: 27:55 That would be fun. Speaker 1: 27:55 Is it bigger than a breadbox? Can we do 20 questions with one of these questions? Speaker 3: 27:58 Questions with. That's what we'll do with Sam. Speaker 1: 28:00 Twenty out of metal or plastic, or is it organic? Can I eat it? Is it a robot? Does it This Speaker 3: 28:09 is this is interesting. Speaker 1: 28:10 We're have Speaker 3: 28:11 a hint? So so Sam says we are obviously still in the terminal phase of AI interactions. Mhmm. We have not yet figured out what the equivalent of the graphical user interface is going to be, but we will. Mhmm. Speaker 3: 28:22 That saying that there's a should we Speaker 1: 28:26 What's interesting is like the graphical user Speaker 3: 28:28 interface Potentially like Speaker 1: 28:28 a prototype. Right. The graphical user interface didn't change with mobile. The thing that the iPhone did well was multi touch. And so being able to like pinch to zoom and all of that was like Speaker 3: 28:40 Well, I mean, the breakaway app was when you could just Speaker 1: 28:43 drink Drink the beer. The beer app was really the win. Speaker 3: 28:47 I mean, iPhone wouldn't Speaker 1: 28:48 I mean, we've already had that with AI. That's the Harry Potter Balenciaga. That is the iPhone beer app of AI. Speaker 3: 28:55 That's a good take. That's a good take. Speaker 1: 28:57 Love From has a number of former Apple designers who helped create the look of the Mac and iPhone operating systems that haven't changed in a decade since they did Speaker 3: 29:05 some work. Somebody stopped working. Somebody go check on John Giandrea. Speaker 1: 29:09 Oh, we never finished that article. I really wanna finish it. They they could help redesign OpenAI's app for new generations of consumer consumers. Love From will continue its existing relationships like Ferrari and and Airbnb, but it won't take on new clients. Their new hardware team within OpenAI will be overseen by Peter Weilander who will report to Altman as product vice president. Speaker 1: 29:32 They should just buy Ferrari. And Airbnb. Can you imagine if OpenAI owns Airbnb is This is the new device. If you want to interact with ChatGPT, we recommend getting an Speaker 3: 29:43 '2 '9 '6 SF90. GTB. Speaker 1: 29:45 SF90 comes with ChatGPT integrated. Yeah. I mean, you're already paying $2,000 a month for ChatGPT Pro Plus. Why not put it up to 4,000 and get a lease for a SF90? Speaker 3: 29:58 Yeah. Ferrari will finance it Speaker 1: 30:00 for you. Exactly. Yeah. Totally doable. For the price of a ChatGPT subscription, you could easily be driving a hypercar. Speaker 3: 30:06 Totally. Totally. Yeah.

Everybody talks about the $20,000 a month, you know, ChatGPT subscription. Speaker 1: 30:13 That should come with a Ferrari. Speaker 3: 30:14 Yeah, should come with an SP3, right? Absolutely. Not humanoids, folks. AI will be embodied by the legacy of Enzo Ferrari. Speaker 1: 30:23 Think about how low churn would be if you were like, in order to use AI really effectively, I got to be revving that V12. I got to be I got on the open roads. Speaker 3: 30:33 The device needs to be vibrating from the naturally aspirated V12. Cutting canyons. Well, mean, was didn't Elon say something yesterday that it wasn't off the table that that Speaker 1: 30:43 Tesla and XAI and Speaker 3: 30:45 X could merge? Speaker 1: 30:46 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Luke Metro was was Speaker 3: 30:47 predicting that a year I'd finally buy a Tesla Yeah. So I could be terminally online behind the wheel. Speaker 1: 30:54 Yeah. I like those. Roll in Ferrari for sure. You heard it here first. Breaking news. Speaker 1: 31:00 I've said chat GPT was initially put on his radar by one of his twin sons, Charlie. Oh, twin dad. That's here. It's the twin dads. Love that. Speaker 1: 31:08 And he immediately knew he had to meet Altman after using it. The new team at OpenAI will work at IO's existing workspace in Jackson Square, a neighborhood in San Francisco, and OpenAI's current offices, so they're not far apart. I have felt that my most important and useful work is ahead, I've said, adding that he has been training for this moment. He compares the experienced Apple in the late nineties and early two thousands before the iPod and iPhone. I'm real I'm just really, really grateful we all found each other. Speaker 1: 31:35 Ive and Altman wouldn't elaborate on what hardware products they are working on, but they will be entering a market in its infancy. Meta Platform's the owner of Facebook and Instagram is perhaps the most notable maker of AI devices. It sells the popular Ray Ban smart glasses, which Apple, which Google is now competing with. They launched two different, devices, Nreal, these VR glasses that, it's it's not full virtual reality. It just projects a really big screen in front of you. Speaker 1: 32:01 I've been wanting to pick one of these up because my main use case for the Apple Vision Pro is just watch a movie on a plane. And these are, like, cheaper, lighter, easier to use, and they just put the big screen in front of you. Very cool. I wanna get some of those, and we should probably try and get the CEO on the show. And then and then they also launched, like like like smart sunglasses that don't have a display, but you can talk to Gemini, which also very cool. Speaker 3: 32:26 I took shots at Humane and Rabbit saying those were very poor products. Woah. And says there Yeah. It's a quote. Brutal. Speaker 3: 32:37 There's an absence absence of new ways of thinking expressed in products. Speaker 1: 32:42 I is that the problem, though? Like, those were definitely new ways of

thinking expressed in products. They just weren't good new ways of thinking. They were definitely new that. Speaker 3: 32:51 Not every new way is going to be It's good. Yeah, I also think that I still feel like the humane AI pin built for children Speaker 1: 33:00 could have been a great The Rabbitr one specifically too. Like it would be so easy to sell that to your four year old, your five year old is going to start demanding an iPad. Instead, get them this and it's a nerfed iPad. And it's just educational. Speaker 3: 33:17 It's a machine for your child's curiosity. Yes. They can ask it any questions. They can ask Speaker 1: 33:21 it any questions. They Speaker 3: 33:22 can say, tell me a story Speaker 1: 33:23 about They can't play Skinner Box games. Speaker 3: 33:25 Yeah. Speaker 1: 33:25 And they can't play Candy Crush on Speaker 3: 33:27 it or whatever. Yeah. Speaker 1: 33:28 Yeah. No. There's definitely something Speaker 3: 33:30 They'll figure out a way to put Candy Crush on there. They will. Some of these whale kids spending $20 a day on Candy Crush. Speaker 1: 33:36 But but it's a it's a vandiver. Speaker 3: 33:39 Johnny's like, this was not my intention. Speaker 1: 33:41 Yeah. He just creates the most addicting advice device possible. They're calling it the new cigarettes, folks. The Ivan Altman wouldn't elaborate on what they're working on. Tan, who is a central who is central to developing every version of the iPhone within Apple's hardware engineering department, said the new team isn't tied to a legacy and will have an opportunity to rethink the space. Speaker 1: 34:03 It'll be worth the wait, Altman said. It's crazy. It's a crazy ambitious thing to make. Not much detail here, but thanks for the post. I am excited. Speaker 1: 34:15 I hope it's huge. I hope it's a hit. Really, really big. I want it to be as big as a newspaper. Speaker 3: 34:20 I think part of part of really loving big tech is wanting more companies to become big tech Speaker 1: 34:27 Yeah. Speaker 3: 34:28 Or high technology. Yeah. And OpenAI has clear potential to get into that group and Speaker 1: 34:34 Maybe they should launch our newspaper. This is kinda hardware. Just print out deep research reports. Speaker 3: 34:39 Yeah. People Just Speaker 1: 34:39 mail it to me. Put it drop it off Speaker 3: 34:41 online. People discount paper as as a, you know, a On an exportable hardware form factor. Speaker 1: 34:46 Yeah. It is. It is. Anyway, Google IO reactions. Let's move on. Speaker 1: 34:51 Everyone on the Google team made the exact same hand gesture apparently. They were all trained. Speaker 3: 34:56 Tulsi in there? Speaker 1: 34:56 Tulsi's in there? She's been on she was on the show yesterday. Speaker 3: 34:59 I guess Logan didn't make that. Speaker 1: 35:00 No. Maybe he had some wild hand gestures. Speaker 3: 35:04 Shweta says goo gang sign. Speaker 1: 35:06 Goo gang sign. Are you familiar with the Merkel route? This one? Angela Merkel would always hold her hands like this. It's pretty sick. Speaker 3: 35:13 Similar to Andrew Tate? Is that where It do. Where you got it from? Wait, Tate does it? Oh, didn't know that. Speaker 3: 35:18 That's hilarious. I think I think his his infamous. Oh, does he does like this this Speaker 1: 35:24 He tense his fingers. Tenting your fingers is very like pensive and thinking. I'm thinking, oh, yes. I'm tenting my fingers. Speaker 3: 35:29 It's not very golden retriever coded. You you never see a golden retriever do that. Speaker 1: 35:33 No. Definitely not. Speaker 3: 35:36 Charlie, before Speaker 1: 35:38 founders waking up to realize that their startup is now a bullet point in Google's keynote. Speaker 4: 35:41 Yeah, a couple of Speaker 3: 35:43 things here. They launched a product to generate product designs. Yep. It was interesting. They launched a Doji competitor, which is like a try on product. Speaker 3: 35:54 They obviously launched Joules, Coding Agent. They launched the Eyewear, you know. Basically, whether you're Sesame, Doji, Doji Yep. Even Figma, right? Figma has generative AI Yeah. Speaker 3: 36:07 Tools. Speaker 1: 36:08 Yeah, I feel like Speaker 3: 36:09 But again, I don't think that founders, I don't think like the doji founders are seeing that and thinking, oh, I'm suddenly worried, right? Because the idea that Google is gonna dominate Yep. In fashion, which is so culture driven Yep. It seems really I I don't I don't see it happening. I can see them having Speaker 1: 36:31 Yeah. Speaker 3: 36:31 A version of the product in Google Google Shopping that enables try ons, I don't think it's gonna be this, like, social cultural thing that that Doji has clearly tapped into. Speaker 1: 36:41 Yeah. I wonder how many startups Google has actually killed in history. It doesn't feel like that many. The famous example, of course, is, like, Microsoft really did kind of kill off Slack's growth with Teams. Yeah. Speaker 1: 36:53 Right? And Slack kind of reached its peak and kind of flatlined after Microsoft Teams took off because Microsoft had such a distribution advantage. I feel like there's two different types of startups. Yeah, Teams Speaker 3: 37:08 took off because defence tech got cool and all the defence tech I didn't mean compliant. For But Speaker 1: 37:17 seriously, it's like, I think that if you if you saw a Google feature and you were like, I'm gonna start a startup on that, and you're basically copying Google because you're like, Google's slow, then, yes, this is real. Like, to all the companies that were, like, putting up fake NotebookLM apps that weren't really, like, raising money and kind of just, like, cash grabbing on top of, like, wrapping stuff that's already been created and pioneered by Google, if Google drops a a NotebookLM app and they, like, wipe you, you can't really be that upset. Like, you're always in a cash grab. But if you have built, like, a massive design tool like Figma and it has so

many different customers and so many different things, and then they come out with, like, oh, something that allows you to do, like, a little bit of design work, like, it doesn't feel like as nearly as existential. And so I feel like this narrative is always like, oh, Google just, like, you know, completely destroyed this stuff. Speaker 1: 38:10 And it really depends on, like, is is this is this truly aligned with Google's mission that they're gonna just keep pouring relentlessly at and they're gonna make this great and it's and it's completely on their road map? And were you always building a feature, or were you building something that can that can grow into its own behemoth? And if if if you're on if you're on the right track, you're probably fine. Anyway, what's next? Speaker 3: 38:35 Well, speaking of behemoth, The US formally accepts luxury jet from Qatar Speaker 1: 38:40 for Really? Speaker 3: 38:41 No way. That is crazy. And it will possibly be used as Air Force One. And Yahoo is reporting that turns out Trump's Qatar private jet wasn't even a gift. It wasn't? Speaker 3: 38:58 Despite the insistence that the plane was a gift. Speaker 1: 39:02 What was it then? If it's not a Speaker 3: 39:04 gift. Payment for service. A senior White House official told CNN that Trump tasked Steve Witkoff, the president's special envoy to The Middle East with tracking down a replacement for Air Force one. After Trump learned that Boeing would not have new jets ready for another two years, Witkoff ended up leading initial conversations with the Qatari government agreement. Speaker 1: 39:21 They have them in stock. Right? Speaker 3: 39:23 Yeah, Boeing provided the Pentagon with a list of other clients who might be able to help with America's search for a new plane. One of those sources says that Qatar was included on that list of clients. And remember, we saw that chart, right? Speaker 1: 39:34 Yeah, Speaker 3: 39:34 yeah. There was not that many people in the world that actually have these jets set up in this way. There were also discussions about leasing the plane. So again, when we saw the initial headlines, we thought that, we imagined that it was possible that the the full truth was, not, not really revealed yet. And, apparently, legal negotiations over the plane's transfer are still ongoing. Speaker 3: 40:02 And it's unclear how the plane went from being a potential purchase to a $400,000,000 gift. So Speaker 1: 40:09 Anyway, where should we go next? Probably ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot of work all in one place. Speaker 1: 40:20 We already talked about Figma, but let's tell you about Figma as well. Think bigger, build faster. Figma builds does helps design and development teams build great products together. Get started for Speaker 3: 40:30 the backbone of TBPN. Yeah. You like some the merch that you've seen, that's where we're making it. Speaker 1: 40:37 Oh, yeah. Let's go to this Gary Tan post. This is good actually talking about the cycle never ends. Every month, a new world's most powerful model takes the crown. We applaud, compare, and then wait for the next. Speaker 1: 40:48 OpenAI introduces the world's most powerful model, then Anthropic, then Gemini, then Grok. There's a little bit of fracturing now in the sense that I haven't played with Gemini's LLM enough to displace my OpenAI workflow, but the generative video, like VO three is truly way, way better than Sora right now. Yeah. And so Speaker 3: 41:10 I You compared the two. Speaker 1: 41:11 I'd I'd same prompt in Speaker 4: 41:13 prompt, and Speaker 1: 41:13 it was brutal. Not there was not even a question which one you would go with. Speaker 3: 41:19 Yeah, one, the Sora output made me kind of Speaker 1: 41:25 It was lot of was really hard to tell a story. Didn't have movement. It was definitely like, a lot of gyrations and just hallucinations. Now that's not to say that the Speaker 3: 41:36 Looked like it was Speaker 1: 41:37 kind of a movie, John. The v o three had a lot of crazy hallucinations, but they were not as disturbing or more, like, psychedelic. Like, I we we we generated this one video of, of an Audi r eight with a TBPM livery pulling out of our new studio, and it peels out. It's very cool. But then all of a sudden, it's driving backwards, which was very odd and jarring. Speaker 1: 42:00 I did another one with a a Rolls Royce Phantom pulling into the studio with a TBPM GT three cup car livery. Speaker 3: 42:07 Foresight. Speaker 1: 42:08 And that foreshadowing. And that one Yeah. When when it pulled in, did you notice this? It had a wing on the back, and it pulls in, and then all of a sudden, the car morphs, you're looking at the front of the car again. And so it kind of hallucinated and transformed. Speaker 1: 42:21 It did that a couple times where us blasting through the Hollywood sign, it we there's a Hollywood sign in the background. We bust through one Hollywood sign, then there's a third Hollywood sign. Like, it is still hallucinating. It doesn't seem it doesn't seem ground in reality in any way, but just visually, the the the the fidelity of the visuals is incredible and the ability to to include three or four different concepts, and then it weaves all of that into an eight Yeah. Into an eight second clip. Speaker 1: 42:47 It's very, very cool. And the sound is obviously amazing. And so I have been begging Google representatives for more v o three credits because it's a lot of fun. But, yeah, we love we we we we love a we love a an AI race. Speaker 3: 43:00 Well, we have some kind of meta news. Somebody is doing live translation of TBPN in Dutch right now. Really? Do you wanna try playing it, Ben? Oh. Speaker 3: 43:13 We'll see if this works. Speaker 1: 43:17 And we have Anthony Pompliano joining at at 12:30 now. So in the meantime, while we're pulling that up, let's tell you about Vanta. Automate

compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the work out of your the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. I need Pomp's email for this invite. Speaker 1: 43:44 Let's also tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products, meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product road maps. Speaker 3: 43:54 Linear launched, their agents product into GA today, which is very And I want to ask Scott about it because they have been working on some serious integrations there, which will be cool. Wow, Speaker 1: 44:13 they're translating us. Speaker 3: 44:14 That's pretty amazing. Speaker 8: 44:15 It's Speaker 3: 44:17 gonna get really it's gonna get really freaky once. They get to this point in the stream. Yeah. They're translating us. Yeah. Speaker 1: 44:25 And it becomes very meta. Oh, wow. They're actually talking about Vanta now. This is incredible. Wow. Speaker 1: 44:32 Is really impressive. Okay. Anyway, let's move on. Enjoy that if you're looking to for TBPN in Dutch. Chubby shares, this is freaking insane. Speaker 1: 44:40 The holy grail of personalized AI for daily usage. If this demo turns out to deliver what it promises, we'll be much further ahead in 2025 than I would have thought. So this is a video of a guy who uses a Android phone to troubleshoot a bike that he's trying to fix, and he asks the AI to pull up the actual manual or, yeah, manual for the bike. And it's scrolling the PDF, and then it says, hey. Go find a YouTube video. Speaker 1: 45:06 And it opens the YouTube app, so it's very much working at the OS level to use all of the features that are available on any Android phone. And that seems like what we want from Apple Intelligence that we're not getting yet. You can't tell Siri to go open the Notes app and search there or take a new note. Everything has to be puppeteered at, like, the API level through these specific integrations instead of just using the whole the whole phone. And so, it's a very full it's a very cool demo. Speaker 1: 45:37 There are a bunch more pieces of news. Sam from Futurinomics says Waymo does more rides than than Lyft in San Francisco. There are only 300 Waymos. Lyft has 400, 45,000 drivers. Every Waymo is doing more than more rides than a 50 human drivers. Speaker 1: 45:52 Now there's a community note on this. I don't know how true it is, there were some staggering Waymo numbers. I think they crossed 10,000,000 rides or Speaker 3: 45:58 something There's this comment right underneath it that I think is probably why it's getting noted, which is that this guy Williams says, that number feels implausibly high, though I wonder if that Lyft number includes surrounding area drivers to occasionally do ride. There's no way Yeah. 45 that Lyft has 45,000 drivers. Speaker 1: 46:16 In San Francisco. The streets would be packed. What, a city of, like, 7,000,000 people or something like that? Speaker 3: 46:22 Like, little bit a Speaker 1: 46:23 And and reminder, like, Uber's, what, a hundred times bigger than Lyft. And so you have 4,000,000 Uber drivers for 7,000,000 people or something like that. Yeah. Makes no Anyway, Olivia Moore over at Andreessen Horowitz says, although she Speaker 3: 46:38 has a bad guy. List is kept flat on the last year on the last twelve months. So it's up actually up 1¢ over the past year. Speaker 1: 46:49 So Anyway, we need a polymarket on the current best AI model. I wanna see where that's trending because Google obviously released a bunch of models and Google was in the the in the leading contender for top model. And I wanna see where Speaker 3: 47:05 the poly market is shaking End of May, Google's sitting at 91%. Speaker 1: 47:09 Ninety one %. Speaker 3: 47:11 Yeah. For Google. Forty percent for December 31 end of the year. Speaker 1: 47:15 Yeah. So Olivia Moore here says Google had a bunch of great AI launches today, but they're so hard for consumers to access. I completely agree with this. I get stuck all the time in the wrong flow, in the wrong app. Even accessing v o three, I wound up in Flow, which is their TV product or something. Speaker 1: 47:30 It was just showing me AI stuff. And then I there's, like, I can get into the dev studio, but then I'm have to set up an API key. And then I finally have the the Gemini app, but the Gemini app wasn't wasn't upgraded. And so I had to go through a flow on on Chrome, on desktop to get that. And I get that I don't have an Android phone, but I feel like I'm being punished too much. Speaker 1: 47:50 Yep. Just The Speaker 3: 47:52 bull case there is that that kind of stuff is actually easier to figure than being on the technological edge Yes. And leading in benchmarks and all these other things and having massive Yes. Speaker 1: 48:02 Yes. But they should be able to Speaker 3: 48:03 do both. Speaker 1: 48:04 They have so Speaker 3: 48:04 many ideas No, I totally agree. I'm just saying it's it's it's you know, talking to Tulsi and Logan yesterday, they clearly are incredibly locked in Speaker 1: 48:12 Yep. Speaker 3: 48:12 Aware of aware of the the pushback. Speaker 1: 48:14 Yep. So she goes on to say, feels like every debut comes with a new subscription, which you need a specific account type to access and have to hunt down the playground for. I know AI products are expensive to run, but with Google's distribution revenue streams, I don't get why they don't offer some of more some more of this for free. That was my question. Or at least make it easier to find. Speaker 1: 48:33 Notebook NotebookLM feels like their last big viral launch, which had no paywall. At various times in the last three months, I've been subscribed to Gemini Advanced, Google One AI Pro, and now AI Ultra. The madness needs to

end. I agree. Although, I'm now an AI Ultra subscriber, so maybe they got me. Speaker 1: 48:49 Maybe it's all part of the plan. Four d chess. Speaker 3: 48:51 Yeah. I'm interested to track the ramp data on Gemini over the next Speaker 1: 48:55 Totally. Couple months. See if see if it's see if it's ramping up. Anyway, everyone's gonna have to pay sales tax on this. Get on Numeral. Speaker 1: 49:02 Go to numeralhq.coms. Put your sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Wes Roth says Google IO twenty twenty five was an absolute AI overload, and everyone is still picking up their jaws off the floor. Here's the TLDR. Speaker 1: 49:15 Gemini gets an agent mode. It's so powerful. It borders on executive assistant. So excited to check that out. Speaker 3: 49:21 This post from Addy. Gemini is the kid that got bullied in high school and is now jacked a millionaire and practices gratitude. Speaker 1: 49:28 It's very accurate. Yeah. I mean, they just like I mean, that's the nature of these companies that that are on the annual releases is that, like, you you're like, they're behind for eleven months out of the year, and then they're state of the art for the big release. And then, of course, everyone else Speaker 3: 49:42 will launch. Yeah. I'm just, feeling extremely grateful that, you know, we own, you know, 80% of, you know, what you know is the Internet and, you know, we can leverage this into creating, you know, really great AI. Speaker 1: 49:53 Yep. Theo says Google buying DeepMind in 2014 for 400 to 6 hundred and 50 million dollars might have been the greatest acquisition of all time. Completely agree. It's definitely up there. Definitely in the conversation. Speaker 3: 50:06 Definitely in the conversation. Speaker 1: 50:08 Signal says Google's edge in local data, especially now with LLMs, is absurdly underrated. Nobody touches the depth, historic history, and granularity they have on local businesses, landmarks, real time conditions. Every other mapping service is just a sad knockoff because Google has been building this mode for decades. Overnight success. Also, I mean, the YouTube data is super valuable. Speaker 1: 50:26 You have to imagine that their edge in VO is because of the YouTube data. Because, I mean, like, it's the biggest repository of video content. Speaker 3: 50:34 New stream of video Constantly. Constantly. Constantly. Right? Speaker 1: 50:38 Yeah. And so that's probably why there's so much good stuff coming out of VO3. Ben Hilack showed the first ever ad produced Speaker 3: 50:46 in v Welcome Speaker 1: 50:48 to the Token Tavern. It's in the tab if you guys wanna try and pull that up. Justine Moore, Venture Twins, says, man singing a song about being Speaker 3: 50:55 a handful these. We should play both of these. Speaker 1: 50:58 Good Alexander contextualizes it by saying, you can own Google at 17 x earnings or short and short Costco at 50 x earnings. Long AGI, rotisserie chicken is actually value investing. People love people love Costco. And then Archie Sengupta says, got access to Google diffusion. Holy 909 tokens per second. Speaker 1: 51:20 I made a calendar in three seconds. Speaker 3: 51:22 Yeah. I mean, this is this is what people are talking about in terms of Speaker 1: 51:25 Yeah. Speaker 3: 51:25 Being able to generate entire applications. Right? And this is the risk to Speaker 1: 51:32 Yeah. Speaker 3: 51:32 Existing software applications that don't have network effects Yep. Are really sort of thin wrappers around AWS and, you know, these sort of simple applications. I mean, I I still think that this will be one of those things, you know, people people can make their own food. They still order out from restaurants. Right? Speaker 3: 51:56 So talk for Speaker 1: 51:57 with audio if we can. The Token Tavern. It Speaker 3: 52:03 looks so good. Speaker 5: 52:05 I don't think I'm supposed to be here. Speaker 7: 52:07 Well, that's why I use raindrops. Speaker 1: 52:10 I Speaker 7: 52:10 can find bugs like you before they bother my users. Let's get the hell out of my town. Wow. Speaker 3: 52:20 Ben cooked. He cooked. Ben cooked. Speaker 1: 52:23 Although, though, I know that those graphics came from After Effects. That overlay, for sure, After Effects, not generated Speaker 3: 52:31 the produced with v o three. Speaker 1: 52:33 Yeah. Yeah. It uses v o three. This is the most impressive shot in the whole thing, though. Look at this. Speaker 1: 52:37 Perfect lip sync. Speaker 7: 52:39 Get the hell out of my toe. Speaker 1: 52:40 Like, the teeth look great, the voice, the texture. But get an alert when your AI product fails, that's motion graphics, baby. Speaker 3: 52:47 Truth zone. Speaker 1: 52:48 Truth zone. Speaker 3: 52:48 Ben Cook, Congrats to Ben. Speaker 1: 52:50 That's a very cool ad. Speaker 3: 52:51 Very cool. What about the other one? Yeah, This one, basically watched this and I said, I had to watch this. I'm gonna make John watch this. Is pretty rough Speaker 1: 53:00 on my Yeah. Let's lock in. Check it out. In the meantime, me tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields. Speaker 3: 53:10 Trusted by millions..com. Public Com. Speaker 1: 53:14 Get on there. Also, how'd you sleep? Speaker 3: 53:19 You know how I slept, John. I had to come back. You've had a couple good nights. I had to show you whose I think I did poorly. Speaker 1: 53:27 90. Not bad. Speaker 3: 53:29 97. Speaker 1: 53:30 Oh. I got you two I'm Speaker 3: 53:31 back in the game. I'm back in the game. Autopilot made Speaker 1: 53:34 20 two different Clinically bad. Two Get a pod five ultra. Speaker 3: 53:37 Autopilot made 22 adjustments to the temperature of the bed to get my REM sleep up 8%. Speaker 1: 53:43 Just last night? Speaker 3: 53:44 Just last night. 22. Speaker 1: 53:46 That's actually a lot. Okay.

Anyway, let's play this Speaker 3: 53:48 next video. Thank you to Eight Sleep. Alright. Turn it off. Turn it off. Speaker 1: 54:00 Turn it Speaker 8: 54:01 it off. Speaker 1: 54:03 Is so bad. Speaker 2: 54:05 So bad. That's wrong. That's just wrong. Speaker 1: 54:12 Let's just end the stream. Speaker 3: 54:13 Yeah. Just just turn it off. Speaker 1: 54:16 Let's just turn it Speaker 3: 54:16 That's enough for today. Honestly, let's take the rest of the week Speaker 1: 54:19 off too. Let's just hang it up. Speaker 3: 54:22 That's so Speaker 1: 54:22 bad. Was looking at that viral video video and the prompt was just like stand up comic telling a joke and everyone was like, this is actually funny. Like I went to the zoo, they only had a dog, it was a shit zoo. Funny. But like that joke is not created from AI. Speaker 1: 54:42 It's literally on Reddit. It's literally at the top of like Reddit slash r slash jokes. It's like we'd still we're still training on the same data. Speaker 3: 54:49 Okay. Somebody somebody take that video of somebody take that video of the the VC singing that song, post it on Blue Sky and said and just say like, hey, I know you guys haven't been on X in a while and but like, here's what's going on. And given that they're generally decelerationists, I think they They Speaker 1: 55:07 actually hate it. Speaker 3: 55:08 Yeah. They're not gonna be happy with that. Bad. They hate to see a young venture capitalist singing. Speaker 1: 55:14 Very bad. Just just go to Adquick.com. Buy a billboard. Out of home advertising made easy and Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Speaker 1: 55:31 Thank you. That was rough. Yep. Anyway, we have three minutes. Let's just do a little quick timeline. Speaker 1: 55:37 We'll get to the Ben Thompson later. But I wanted to cover this article in the Wall Street Journal. Europe's firms fall far behind in the race to create big tech. Lack of innovation holds economies back, weighing on the continent's future. Berlin, the world's technology revolution is leaving Europe behind. Speaker 1: 55:57 Europe lacks any homegrown alternatives to the likes of Google, Amazon, or Meta. Apple's market value is bigger than the entire German stock market. The continent's inability to create more big technology firms is seen as one of its biggest challenges and is a major reason why the economies are stagnating. And so if you look at their chart, and they're looking at number of unicorns by region. In The United States, there are 90 unicorns with a combined value of 2,350,000,000,000.00. Speaker 1: 56:22 SpaceX and OpenAI, of course, the biggest. In The EU, there's a hundred and seven unicorns. So actually more companies, but their combined value is 330,000,000,000, basically an order of magnitude less value. And they include Stripe in Europe, which is not fair in

my opinion because Speaker 3: 56:38 True sound. Speaker 1: 56:39 Stripe is a YC company that's very San Francisco coded. They have their conference Speaker 3: 56:43 They do. In San Francisco. Speaker 1: 56:44 In San Francisco. But I've been thinking more about European venture capital because a lot of people have been hating on it, thinking that it's impossible to make money there. This is kind of consensus. All the smartest venture capitalists think that it's just impossible. But there is something amazing about that type of radical risk taking in such a challenging environment. Speaker 1: 57:02 Totally. And if you just think about it, like the act of launching a VC fund in Europe, it goes back to the early spirit of Silicon Valley. Speaker 4: 57:09 Totally. Speaker 1: 57:10 It's totally like Speaker 3: 57:10 a huge crazy This idea of giving money to a company, giving millions of dollars to a company that has no cash flows Speaker 9: 57:15 Yeah. Speaker 3: 57:16 That's maybe entering a market that doesn't even exist yet. Yeah. Speaker 1: 57:20 And It's a million to one. Speaker 3: 57:22 Investing in European companies. Speaker 1: 57:24 It's a million to one that you even make a dollar of revenue. Totally. Potentially a billion to one. You know, people talk about like one miracle companies, two miracle companies. Speaker 3: 57:33 Yeah. Speaker 1: 57:33 In Europe, you need to be a 10 miracle company Speaker 3: 57:36 Totally. Speaker 1: 57:36 To do anything. And so if a VC can go there and even return, even just a one x on the fund, I think that they should be at the top of the Midas list. Because it is such a remarkable achievement. Speaker 4: 57:47 It's so Speaker 3: 57:47 Who's running the Midas list these days? I don't Speaker 1: 57:49 know. Post Speaker 3: 57:50 Conrad? Post Post Conrad. Speaker 1: 57:51 But it truly, it's like, given the given the expectations, if you can if you can even get out of there with returning 50% of your fund Speaker 3: 57:59 Yeah. Speaker 1: 57:59 You should be remembered as one of the greatest venture capitalists to do it. I think so. It would be it would be a remarkable You need a reality distortion field. Yep. To just to just go and deploy in Europe. Speaker 1: 58:11 It's remarkable. Speaker 3: 58:11 Some level of hubris. Yeah. Massive. Anyway. Anyways, we have Eric Prince in the studio. Speaker 3: 58:17 What's Bring him in. How you doing? There he is. What's happening? Speaker 1: 58:21 Welcome to the stream. Speaker 3: 58:23 Gentlemen, how are you? Speaker 1: 58:24 We're great. How are you? Speaker 3: 58:25 Thank you. You. Why don't I don't know if you need any introduction, but why don't you give an introduction for those that that may be unfamiliar? Speaker 9: 58:42 Born in Michigan, served in the Navy for a while, and built a business called Blackwater, which was a defense services firm, a private military contractor, if you will. I sold that in 02/10 and have done some things

in resource investing, upstream in mining and exploration. And I still I governments from time to time with large intractable problems and started a company just over three years ago called Unplugged, which is a standalone independent phone outside of the Google and Apple universe, is really kind of an an answer to surveillance capitalism. Speaker 1: 59:21 Mhmm. What was the first dollar of revenue for Blackwater? Like, how do you get that business off the ground? Speaker 9: 59:30 So SEAL teams, special operations units, because of the gun culture in America, have gone to private facilities really since the seventies. Mhmm. Some, you know, some champion shooter that's running a shooting school somewhere. And we all wanted done that on an industrial scale. And so I knew coming out of the SEAL teams, I knew what the teams needed, and I built the largest facility of its kind in the world within an hour drive of Norfolk naval base and all the SEAL teams and military concentration that's there. Speaker 9: 01:00:01 And, actually, our first customer was from the West Coast, the West Coast SEAL team. But, yeah, we we built ourselves into becoming a indispensable part of the train up of military units. And then when Columbine High School happened, that terrible high school shooting, you had dozens of police departments that responded and didn't do very well because it took them hours to clear the building and people bled out that should have been cared for. And so we ended up building a big mock up called Are You Ready High School, where we could train thousands of SWAT officers how to respond to those kind of disasters and process with all the sounds and lights and role players and screaming and and that was very effective. And then with the USS Cole, the Navy ship was blown up in Yemen by a suicide boat. Speaker 9: 01:00:52 The Navy realized that, well, the the sailors that were guarding that ship were holding largely unloaded weapons that they never fired before because the Navy thought it was too dangerous to train with live guns. And so we ended up training a hundred thousand sailors. That was really our first big defense contract. Speaker 1: 01:01:06 Interesting. Speaker 3: 01:01:06 And then Speaker 9: 01:01:07 when and then when nine eleven happens, obviously, the demand signal for security and training and aviation and, you know, operating in difficult places was our specialty. Speaker 1: 01:01:18 How do those contracts actually work? We're familiar with the defense tech pipeline. A lot of defense tech startups right now, maybe they're drill they're building counter UAS drone systems. And the typical path is they get some SBIR money, then they move to program of record. They start scaling up manufacturing. Speaker 1: 01:01:37 But for what you're doing, I imagine that the contracts are structured differently. How do you project revenue? How do you think about ongoing relationships with the DOD and making sure that the customer is satisfied

for a long time? Speaker 9: 01:01:53 It's a much shorter flash to bank in terms of demand signal. A customer would come and say, I need this kind of airlift in this part of the world, move this many tons, need to be able to fly on night vision goggles, and operate under this level of of FAA or not scrutiny. And Speaker 3: 01:02:16 we would Speaker 9: 01:02:17 bid it, but 98% of our revenue was competitively bid. And I look. The same time I was building Blackwater, I took over my dad's original business, which made die cast machines, a big, you know, heavy machine tool business. And I took that through a lean transformation process really based on the Toyota production system. And, you know, lowering the cycle time of large quantities of steel and other work in process. Speaker 9: 01:02:42 And so as we laid out Blackwater, I kind of thought about it like a like a factory. And what does a military do? It recruits, vets, equips, trains, deploys, and supports people to do a job in a difficult place. That's what we did. And because we were a training facility to start with, we could back into the recruiting and the vetting. Speaker 9: 01:03:02 We had our own in house, doctors and, psychologists for all the psych screening tests, our own supply, obviously, an enormous and impressive armory. Yeah. Speaker 2: 01:03:17 What is the Speaker 1: 01:03:18 So yeah. Speaker 3: 01:03:18 What do you think the the PMC of the future looks like? Right? You have warfare's changing. We have autonomous systems now. A lot of the new capabilities being brought online are, you know, drone based. Speaker 3: 01:03:31 I imagine your sort of vision of of how you counter that, probably ends up looking like a mirror to some degree, but but I'm curious. I'm sure you've thought about it more than anyone else. Speaker 9: 01:03:46 Yeah. Well, when you look back in history, the contractors on the battlefield have always been there. And if you were laying siege to a city in Europe A Thousand Years ago, the people you contracted for, the PMCs, would have been the guys building the trebuchets or the battering rams, which was at that point the most sophisticated system mechanical system on the battlefield. Now those that cutting edge, bleeding edge technology is obviously in the drone and autonomous space. And, yes, you're right. Speaker 9: 01:04:16 The the private sector can adapt and operate so much faster, including in the cyberspace as well, that the that is how you deliver significant punch above your weight by having a few people that do that those systems very, very well. That's something that we're still the US DOD procurement swamp is still truly not learning from fast enough is you go from idea to prototype to field testing in combat in Ukraine in a matter of days or weeks, and you get a buy decision from a customer that needs it, that same process in The US takes years. And so the obsolescence of ideas is so quick that we are missing, and so that that speed of advancement is obsolescing, I would say, hundreds of billions of dollars of past procurement decisions now. And and we're diluting ourselves if we think we're we're fat, dumb, and happy just because we've spent trillions of dollars over the last twenty five years in stuff. Buying stuff does not equate to buying capacity. Speaker 3: 01:05:28 Yeah. That makes sense. Have you been happy to see the the army's recent modernization efforts? They actually came on our show and and talked about it for thirty minutes a couple weeks ago. It seems like they are extremely General drone But I imagine Yeah. Speaker 3: 01:05:41 And I imagine on your side, these are maybe things that you've been pushing for for coming up on a couple decades now, but what what was your read on it? Speaker 9: 01:05:50 Yeah. I I I didn't sorry. I didn't see their specific comments, but I I know there's certainly trying to be a refocus on lead on merit and lethality Mhmm. And not all the other distractions. I would go as extreme as extreme as it would sound, I would push the purchase decisions of a lot of the next generation equipment down to the division or even brigade commanders. Speaker 3: 01:06:12 Mhmm. Speaker 9: 01:06:13 Instead of effectively, what we have now is a socialist monolith buying apparatus of these PEOs through a few verticals back in Washington with enormous headquarter staffs. Mhmm. And I I laud the guys that are trying to reform the Pentagon, but the fact is you have 800,000 Pentagon civilians. Wow. If they cut that number to 200,000, now we're getting somewhere. Speaker 9: 01:06:36 Because you have so much dead wood that it literally blocks any kind of the speed or innovation. And when I say devolve purchasing decisions, yes, that will come with with supply chain chaos. You're right. I want that. I want the twenty fifth Infantry Division based in Hawaii, which is probably never gonna go to war alongside the first Armored Division based in Texas. Speaker 9: 01:07:01 I want them I want I want them to buy and adapt current drone tech that's that to their unique needs of the theaters they're operating in and let the best ideas float to the top. So then the Pentagon buys makes a much, much bigger buy across it. If they bought 10 or 15 systems that are okay, but they don't really like, the speed of advancement of obsolescence as we were talking about almost necessitates that kind of trial and error. Speaker 3: 01:07:29 Have you been happy that the startup world is is, you know, firmly pro defense tech investing these days? Is there enough new investment happening, or is it is it already too much? What what's your read on on on just how much investment activity there's been in defense tech? Speaker 9: 01:07:48 I am I am happy to see defense tech money flowing into those spaces. I think there's a lot of great ideas. My worry is that for the Silicon Valley crowd, which is used to spending and investing at a pretty high burn rate of overhead, because they're

used to finding somebody that will buy their stuff because they have thousands or millions of early adopters. You don't have that in the Pentagon. You have basically four buying verticals, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and maybe a little bit from SOCOM and a little bit from CIA. Speaker 9: 01:08:21 But that's it. And so what that however optimistic or aggressive their acceleration of purchasing timelines, it's not near what those defense tech investors are gonna be for used to. And so the the amount of overhead burn time they have to plan for is probably three to four times what they're thinking it is. And so I worry that there's a lot of great ideas that are gonna wither on the vine, almost like planting a planting a seed in really shallow soil until you get roots to where they can get to water, you're screwed. Speaker 1: 01:09:00 Yeah. What's been your experience with, the capital markets generally throughout your career? Have you ever worked with venture capital? Has private equity played a role? Is there can debt be used to finance, some of these problems that we're trying to solve? Speaker 1: 01:09:16 Like, how have you interfaced with the capital markets, and where has it kind of fallen short in your mind? Speaker 9: 01:09:23 Well, I had a, I had the luxury. I because of my father's success, I was able to self finance Blackwater. Speaker 1: 01:09:30 Sure. Speaker 9: 01:09:31 And after the initial tranche of capital, I think it was 6,000,000 to start the whole thing Mhmm. Buy the land, build the facility, we didn't have a huge CapEx load until the aircraft purchases started. Speaker 1: 01:09:46 Mhmm. Speaker 9: 01:09:46 But we went from one leased aircraft to 73 aircraft that we owned in six years. Speaker 6: 01:09:53 Wow. Speaker 9: 01:09:54 All self financed. No other equity. We got a a a working line, a revolver. Mhmm. Speaker 1: 01:10:00 And Speaker 9: 01:10:01 and that worked. I really don't like partners. I don't like PE. I don't like boards. I I don't like any of it. Speaker 3: 01:10:12 I'm kind Speaker 9: 01:10:13 of a unilateral person that way. And Dictator. So I'm not the I'm I'm not the I'm not the right one to ask about that. Speaker 1: 01:10:18 Yeah. That's fine. What what was your pitch when you were scaling the team and hiring people? I mean, I've heard the narrative that, that the money is better when you transition into private military work. But was there more to it than that, or is that narrative kind of overblown? Speaker 1: 01:10:36 Talk about building the team throughout your career. Speaker 9: 01:10:41 That was it it became a significant vortices, a a real center of gravity of being able to pull talent because, yeah. You know, c suite talent, I I I never gave away equity in the business because it was dangerous. It was volatile. And I paid I paid extremely well. I paid very competitive bonuses and then would bonus two, three to five times base at the end of the year. Speaker 9: 01:11:11 Mhmm. So it

was effectively a big profit sharing. And maybe that's not as tax efficient or whatever, but, the the people liked it. The guys that you know, our ideal staffing then was somebody that spent time in a special operations or military unit, not a career, not usually a full career, no colonels, no generals ever, intentionally because they had spent so much time this is take note, DOD or venture capital startups. People that spend twenty and thirty years in the military tend to get stuck in that way of thinking. Speaker 9: 01:11:49 Mhmm. And so they can't think of just finding a a unconventional, different, cheaper, better, faster way to do something, because that's just the way it has always been. Speaker 6: 01:12:02 The Speaker 9: 01:12:05 but our pitch to people was, and especially for the guys deploying, was you get to do what you're really good at, and we will pay you very well for that every day you're in the hot zone. The day you leave, their pay goes to zero. So we really our our pay for deployed guys are truly more like paying a roughneck. Our guy that's going to a rig, they're busting their ass for sixty to ninety days, and they're off the rig. They're relaxing. Speaker 9: 01:12:27 They're going to the beach in Thailand or or managing their family farm or whatever. Mhmm. But they get to do they get to maximize their marshal skills, whether it's flying a helicopter on night vision goggles at rooftop level at night or a a sniper, a instructor, or whatever that might be, they get to maximize that skill set and, and get paid for it without the nonsense and bullshit and the layers of of stupidity that sometimes goes to the military. Speaker 1: 01:12:57 In in in this, like, onboarding process as you're hiring, was there a story that you found yourself coming back to and telling, people that would join the organization to highlight heroism or sacrifice? Like, what what was the defining story that you like to tell to kind of characterize the work? Speaker 9: 01:13:18 Well, I guess there's two. One happened to me, when I was speaking at the National War College in Washington. So there's 300 colonels that are training to become generals. Mhmm. And they had me come in and talk about what we were doing as a PMC in the battle space. Speaker 9: 01:13:37 And, at the end of it, this colonel came up to me, and he had just been in brigade command, so in command of about 4,000 people in Baghdad. And he said, I want you to know that at, you know, at the top of the dashboards of his people in Baghdad's Humvees were the Blackwater call signs and frequencies. Because they those guys knew that if they ever got in trouble, the Blackwater guys would come for him. No bureaucracy. No nonsense. Speaker 9: 01:14:02 And, that was hey. I was happy to hear that. That's exactly the guidance I gave my people was the good Samaritan rule applies. If you see a friend in need, go help him out. And, and they did that above and beyond way too often. Speaker 9: 01:14:19 And

then I remember, at the change of command for admiral Eric Olsen, who was the first seal four star ever and a friend and a great guy, another seal admiral, who is in charge of all special operations in Europe and Africa came up to me, and he gave me a bear hug. And he said, thanks. You guys really saved our bacon last week, and you have, some really sporty flying. I said, that's why we have very sporty pilots. And what had happened is a so there was a army special forces team, active duty, training up in Mali. Speaker 9: 01:14:57 This is before the coup and the jihad, all the rest. And their tents were staked down and a big wind, k, they called the Shmaul wind came through and it basically picked up the tent and tossed it with guys inside. And it killed one, broke another guy's back, another guy's, lift, trashed all their comm gear, and it gave another guy massive internal bleeding. That was the guy who was in danger. It actually picked our aircraft up off of its moorings, damaged the landing gear and the wingtip, and, our satcom was the only thing that was working in the aircraft. Speaker 9: 01:15:32 So they called the other aircraft, which was a thousand miles away. And we're in the shit, and we need medevac. And the Shmaul winds are still going, and now it's getting to to nightfall. And at that point, the DOD would not let us fly in that area with night vision goggles even though we'd requested it. But that's okay. Speaker 9: 01:15:50 Our pilots came anyway, and they landed on a single set of headlights in the desert at night. Now if you've ever flown over the desert, you see how utterly dark it is. And so to land on a single set of headlights is extraordinary and extremely dangerous. Speaker 1: 01:16:06 Wow. Speaker 9: 01:16:06 And they landed and our medic, our 18 our former eighteen Delta medic was strapped into the back. And he gets all these wounded guys on board. He starts to work on this guy who's now his blood pressure has gone to, like, 50 over nothing because he's gone through every bit of liquid. And he works him for the next thirty six hours, keeping him alive. Now the guy's body was distended because they couldn't figure out where the internal bleed was, and he get him to back to Ouagadougou, and he goes way beyond protocol to save his life at at personal licensing risk to the guys you know, to himself. Speaker 9: 01:16:44 He opens him up on an operating table of this lousy Wagadugu Burkina Faso Hospital. And sure enough, finds that the guy's spleen is ruptured. That's where the leak was. And so he removes it, clamps it off, puts it in a ziplock bag, puts the guy's organs back in, sews him up. And then finally, the high dollar air force surgical ward finally arrives twelve hours later. Speaker 9: 01:17:12 Too little, too late. Yeah. But our guys our guy completely saved his life, and he took massive personal risk to do that because his job is to be a medic. It's not to do surgery. Speaker 1: 01:17:22 Mhmm. Speaker 9: 01:17:22 But he did it anyway. And so that's in keeping with the attitude of having the right people with the right attitude and the right skill set, with with it. And we try to do intent based leadership. Go forward and do good things and support the customer, make sure the good guys win, and that was a good day. Speaker 3: 01:17:42 Incredible story. It's a Speaker 1: 01:17:44 great story. Speaker 3: 01:17:44 I wanna switch gears completely and ask you about a topic, that I'm sure you spent some time thinking about, but AI safety, that you might you might laugh a little bit about that. But I'm curious if you've worked with any groups kind of globally around this idea, just sort of the idea of AI safety as AI systems advance. You know, the labs talk about this quite a lot, the potential dangers of misaligned AI and the dangers of a adversarial government with advanced AI. What, if anything, have you, are your thoughts on on that sort of very broad question? Speaker 9: 01:18:33 Well, I guess, the the first question comes back to who's yes. I agree. Those are all very concerning topics. And, undoubtedly, there are hostile, unfriendly governments that have done serious germ and biowarfare, research and development that we're not aware about not not aware of. But I even questioned our own government, when I think it's legitimate questions to ask of NIH and the rest of those guys for the gain of function testing that they were doing and funding in China, which ended up causing, apparently, the COVID debacle. Speaker 9: 01:19:11 I'd say almost like, the Hippocratic Oath. Let's first do no harm, and let's not spend money on dumb people that should not be doing that kind of research in the first place. But you're right. It I I am certainly no AI expert. I'm probably more of a I don't know what I'm an expert in. Speaker 9: 01:19:30 But I I Speaker 3: 01:19:31 A few things. Speaker 9: 01:19:33 It's safe to say that if if AI can be used for malign purposes, and it will be, it's going to be done or it will be done. So whether it's for breaking passwords or, or for targeted people, I'm sure some some entities are well along in that development, and, and one should be careful. Speaker 3: 01:19:57 Yeah. That makes sense. I also wanted to ask you about there was some unfortunate news, or at least it seemed unfortunate that Taiwan had decommissioned their last remaining nuclear reactor and are now completely dependent on imported natural gas. I'm sure you have some strong opinions around this. Speaker 9: 01:20:18 Yeah. I find that extraordinarily stupid of them, and that's a DPP. I mean, look, the two political parties are the Komintang and the DPP. Speaker 1: 01:20:26 Mhmm. Speaker 9: 01:20:26 The KMT is the one that's really much more pro mainland CCP tilted. The DPP is just kind of a super green and a bit woke as a party Speaker 1: 01:20:36 Mhmm. Speaker 9: 01:20:37 That they would carry through on this and turn off a nuclear power that was a

nuclear plant that was not dependent on hydrocarbons coming from The Middle East is extraordinarily shortsighted. It speaks to their, disbelief, their lack of fully understanding that that we are not there to hold their hand and to guarantee their safety. I have advocated as loudly as I can that the only answer for deterrence there is an actual hope guard because that government is corrupted at many levels. Any weapon system of significant or strategic value has already been probably preregistered to be hit with not one, but probably five Chinese missiles. So whether it's an airplane, a submarine, or whatever, the only thing that can inject uncertainty into an invader is a home guard. Speaker 3: 01:21:33 In Speaker 9: 01:21:35 the same way that, you know, the American Revolution, there was only 3% of our population that took up arms to fight. If we found and in Taiwan, that's 24 ish million people, so over 700,000. If we were allowed to recruit and train a home guard three to four weeks, their military is largely useless. Their reserve forces, not so much. They don't their idea of combat training is far from what ours is. Speaker 9: 01:22:04 But if you find the citizens that are willing, that injects a massive uncertainty into an invader's mind. Because the terrain itself, either super urban or mountainous jungle, definitely favors the defender. And if Xi Jinping and the CCP are gonna go for it, they have to be quick. They they themselves cannot afford a long multiyear fight like you see in Ukraine because they depend on hydrocarbons and, even food for imports. Speaker 3: 01:22:35 Switching gears a little bit again, I'm I'm curious, to get your thoughts on the European defense tech ecosystem broadly. I'm sure you've done a bunch of business out there over the years. There's been some renewed, you know, new kind of spending bills. Ryan Metall specifically been ripping. Speaker 1: 01:22:54 Fantastic stock, but I don't know about the company. And and and I I guess there's just this overarching idea that America has Andoril, and now every European country wants to kind of own their own defense stack, and there's a lot of energy there. But how do you think the the the landscape around defense in Europe is changing either on the the government side or the private sector? Speaker 9: 01:23:20 The only country I see being serious about it at all is Poland. They have invested they have invested and built some real combat capability. The Baltics have not yet. Finland, a bit. There's lots of talk about a big European defense. Speaker 9: 01:23:36 Extra spend, Germany has been atrocious. I don't know. I I think I think people have bid up Rheinmetall because I I I don't know their earnings have been that spectacular. Their stock price has probably done great. Speaker 1: 01:23:48 Yeah. Speaker 9: 01:23:48 But that's I hope that's a hope of future earnings. Speaker 1: 01:23:51 Sure. Speaker 9: 01:23:52 But I just see a complete lack of seriousness of European political leaders to address their own defense. And it's taking them a long time to wake up from this this hangover of of and lethargy. Speaker 1: 01:24:09 I I I Speaker 9: 01:24:10 and how being said that Speaker 3: 01:24:11 that was that Speaker 9: 01:24:12 being said, the the most capable military in in Europe right now is Ukrainian military. Mhmm. The lessons learned that they have are very significant. The drone tech is far and away the best. Their ability to to fight against and to even conduct electronic warfare and even closer support in this environment is, is leaps and bounds ahead of even what the US military is. Speaker 9: 01:24:39 So that's the military to learn from. Ukraine does does have a corruption problem. I hope sincerely that Trump is able to to get a ceasefire in place Speaker 1: 01:24:51 Mhmm. Speaker 9: 01:24:51 And to stop this killing because it's it's absolutely pointless. It's just Slavs killing Slavs at this point and it's it's nobody's gonna advance. Speaker 1: 01:24:59 Mhmm. Speaker 9: 01:25:00 And you have a, a blend of old and new. I mean, if you look at the pictures of the front there now, it's almost indistinguishable from the Battle of the Somb. Right? Artillery duels, static lines, bunkers, all the rest. Now the problem is somebody can fly an FPV into your bunker on the other side. Speaker 9: 01:25:20 But between tens of millions of landmines, which make armored breakthrough very difficult, It slows down any attack so that the FPVs and and artillery can get to it. You're not going to see any kind of blitzkrieg, Hans Kuderian maneuver warfare there, until some significantly different weapon systems come along. So, look, Europe needs to get serious about it. They're far from it at this point. Speaker 1: 01:25:49 Yeah. I I mean, at home, these conflicts have been raging for years, but they feel very abstract because in America, you just kind of go about your day and go to the grocery store and things feel normal even though, the the global tenor of great power competition and and, even these more minor conflicts is growing every single day. Between Ukraine, Russia, Israel, Palestine, India, Pakistan, Taiwan, China, what is the most where should the focus be right now? How should people stay up to speed? How do we get an I even an idea of of where these conflicts are going? Speaker 1: 01:26:30 How should people understand the nature and the risk associated? Speaker 9: 01:26:37 Well, they could follow my podcast because I talk about these conflicts almost once a week. Speaker 1: 01:26:41 Okay. That's great. That's a Speaker 3: 01:26:42 great place to start. Speaker 1: 01:26:43 What's what's the name of the podcast? Let's plug it. Speaker 9: 01:26:45 It's Off Leash with Eric Prince. Speaker 1: 01:26:48 Fantastic. Yeah. Speaker 3: 01:26:50 I got one last got one last kind of question for you. Rumors that we've heard around how the whole TikTok debacle is being solved haven't given us a lot

of, hasn't gotten either of us excited. We the, you think we're the laughing stock of China that we can't, you know, ban the Chinese AI brain rot app Speaker 1: 01:27:17 or app store. And and will you promise us that TikTok will not run on your phone? Speaker 9: 01:27:24 I I don't think it's capable to run on an unplugged phone. But I'll now that you mentioned it, I will make sure that is the case. Speaker 1: 01:27:30 That's great. But, yeah, any other color on the TikTok ban or just general relationships between China and The US with regard to technology and business, which is our focus here? Speaker 9: 01:27:42 Look. The Trump administration is still in the process of getting its people in the seats and getting those institutions organized. Yep. I think I mean, what what the president just did today in showing video to Sir Ramaphosa from from South Africa about the the ongoing murder and genocide of white farmers was absolutely fantastic. And it I even happier that senator secretary Rubio is right there supporting the president. Speaker 9: 01:28:15 How about that? It's it is a different administration than we've seen in the past, and I am happy to see those kind of issues being addressed. I wouldn't discount the TikTok thing being addressed properly this time Mhmm. Since it wasn't the last you know, the '45 administration. Speaker 1: 01:28:32 Yeah. Speaker 3: 01:28:33 Yeah. That makes sense. Well, we're hoping for something good. Speaker 1: 01:28:36 But thank you so much for joining us. This is a really fascinating conversation and fantastic stories, really. I mean, just was sitting back Oh, I got a of I'm listening to the podcast. I'm listening to you. It's great. Speaker 1: 01:28:47 But thank you so much for stopping by. We'd love to have you back, and we'll talk to you soon. Speaker 4: 01:28:50 Yeah. Cheers, Eric. Thanks for coming. Cheers. Speaker 1: 01:28:52 Have great rest your day. Bye. Next up, we have surprise guest. Not on the announcement post we put on on X, but we got Anthony Popliano, good friend of mine. Hung out with him in Miami A Year Or Two ago. Speaker 1: 01:29:05 We talked YouTube. We talked all sorts of video essay stuff. Speaker 3: 01:29:08 And he's got a SPAC. Speaker 1: 01:29:09 He's got a SPAC now, and he's also launching a an asset manager with, like, a trillion dollars under management already. So, he's off to the races left and right. Speaker 3: 01:29:19 Big week. Speaker 1: 01:29:20 Big week for Pomp. Fantastic show as well. So, excited to invite him into the studio and catch up with Anthony Pompliano and get a bunch of great takes. You're here. Welcome. Speaker 8: 01:29:32 Guys, I love to see the, the suit, but we need some ties going on. Speaker 1: 01:29:36 I know. Yeah. Speaker 3: 01:29:36 You you Caught us caught us Speaker 1: 01:29:37 lacking. Us lacking. Speaker 3: 01:29:39 We're working on a tie. We're working with it on a tie that has ads on it. Speaker 1: 01:29:42 Our that's our next

ad unit. We'll send you one. Thank you so much for joining. How are things going? What's latest in your world? Speaker 1: 01:29:50 How are you spending your time? Because you've a lot of different things going on. Speaker 8: 01:29:53 Yeah, look, I think that the future is very Speaker 4: 01:29:55 similar to what you guys are doing, right? You've to be able to operate businesses. You've to be able to invest capital, and you've got to be able to create content on the Internet. Speaker 8: 01:30:00 And if you think of what Speaker 4: 01:30:01 a business really is is you gotta build products. Speaker 8: 01:30:03 You gotta be able to, invest resources, and Speaker 4: 01:30:06 then you gotta be able Speaker 8: 01:30:07 to market those things. And so I don't think there's any different than what people used to do in the past. It's just now that you do it Speaker 4: 01:30:12 more as kind of an individual brand rather than a company, and that's what we've been doing. Speaker 1: 01:30:15 Yeah. What what was the the the kind of the I feel like you're going through, like, the v two of the pop media strategy. The there's Daily Show now, and you were building businesses before. What'd you learn from those, and where is this going with the next, iteration? Speaker 8: 01:30:31 Yeah. I mean, look. Actually, we we used to have a daily show, very similar to what you guys are doing, the best business show, which was hilarious Speaker 5: 01:30:38 when people would have Speaker 8: 01:30:39 to cite us breaking news. You'd have to write the best business show. Speaker 1: 01:30:42 That's amazing. Speaker 8: 01:30:43 Good, nice little troll there. But, no, look, I think you guys are doing it the right way. Right? It's like everyone is up leveling. And the way I describe it is when content started on the Internet, everyone was basically on, like, their webcam. Speaker 8: 01:30:54 And then they were, like, in their kitchen in their webcam. And then it was like, oh, I have, like, an extra camera instead of the webcam. Yep. Now, we pretty much just think you need TV quality with digital distribution. Totally. Speaker 8: 01:31:04 So everyone is leveling up. You guys have built I think you guys just got a 4,000 square foot facility. Yeah. Speaker 1: 01:31:09 You know, Speaker 8: 01:31:10 all this stuff, right? We've got, obviously, studio stuff. Yeah. And, it's just the the cost of the technology is compressing. And now with a very small team, you're able to have massive reach, and I think that's just gonna be the future of, all this content. Speaker 1: 01:31:21 Can we just glaze x for a little bit? I know you've built a business on x. We love X. We've talked to the team earlier this week. I just think that, like, it's so underrated as a distribution platform. Speaker 1: 01:31:32 People think YouTube and there there are other great platforms, but the the the the current moment with X has been particularly good for us. And I wanna know what your, what your take on X is, how it's been going, and any, any learnings that you have to share. Speaker 8: 01:31:47 Is Linda hiding behind your Speaker 1: 01:31:48 camera there Speaker 8: 01:31:49 or something? Like, got a gun Speaker 4: 01:31:50 to her Yeah. Speaker 3: 01:31:50 She's got a gun to her head. Speaker 1: 01:31:51 Yeah. Right. Speaker 3: 01:31:53 No. We're gonna we we we just invited Linda on the show. Yeah. Speaker 1: 01:31:55 We wanna have her on. Speaker 8: 01:31:56 Amazing. Amazing. No. Look. I I think that every platform is very unique in what it provides, both in terms of the type of audience. Speaker 8: 01:32:03 Obviously, you know, who's on LinkedIn is very different than who's on X. LinkedIn finds out things maybe a week or two after people on X find out about it. But also, I think the type of content that lives there is really important, both in the form factor and also the actual substance of it. And so it doesn't make a lot of sense to go and talk about daily news on LinkedIn. It makes a ton of sense to do that on X. Speaker 8: 01:32:23 Yeah. And so what I think many people, including ourselves, have figured out over time is that we were essentially using X as an engine of growth to drive people elsewhere. Go watch on YouTube. Go listen to the podcast. Go read the email. Speaker 8: 01:32:35 Go to this website. You know, whatever. Why not be able to just bring that content right there in the feed? And I think that that's really what they have leaned into, and that's why it's working. And so The Daily Show that we have with them, I literally sit at my desk, talk direct to camera. Speaker 8: 01:32:49 Yeah. We cut it up in this modular format, format and deliver it right in your feet. Speaker 6: 01:32:52 You don't Speaker 8: 01:32:52 have to go anywhere. You just consume it right there in these bite sized components. And it's no secret that your guys kind of clip strategy and the live streaming. Everything you're doing is, like, very eccentric. And I think that doesn't mean you give up on the other platforms. Speaker 8: 01:33:04 It just means that you're building for x, and everywhere else is kind of the exhaust of that, content. Speaker 1: 01:33:10 Yeah. Yeah. It is crazy. Like, there was all this, fallout from, like, oh, they banned links. I can't link to my YouTube videos. Speaker 1: 01:33:17 And I'm like, but you can just upload those videos here. Like like, they literally have a video product. Like like, and, oh, like, you you you wanted to link to text? Like, you could just put the text on x, and it'll do way better, and it's not that complicated. And, yeah, you might have to change your monetization strategy a little bit. Speaker 1: 01:33:32 Maybe the rev share is gonna be different. On YouTube, it's like a per video thing, and x, it's monthly. But, like, it all works out. You're just playing for attention and reach. And, obviously, x has this the thing that I like about the flywheel is, like, is, like, on

YouTube, I couldn't every once in a while, another creator, like, you would comment on my video or I'd comment on your video, and we'd see each other. Speaker 1: 01:33:52 But we couldn't DM each other on YouTube. But on x, it's like if somebody sees a clip and they respond, oh, I think, you know, Pump's wrong about this or I love this. Like, we can all hop in a DM group chat immediately and just start talking and then hop on the show, do whatever. And so, like, I think the water cooler with all this stuff is actually really, really, inventive. Anyway, Jordy, you Speaker 3: 01:34:11 you gotta Yeah. It's been it's been interesting. People, you know, will point out. They're like, I don't understand how TBPN is like, has has so much attention. Speaker 1: 01:34:19 People say it's good. And yet YouTube Speaker 3: 01:34:21 channel small. It's like, yep. We don't really spend any time on YouTube. Yeah. We were happy to just focus on one platform as, you know We're a very Speaker 1: 01:34:29 young company. Speaker 3: 01:34:30 Of important Speaker 1: 01:34:31 Yeah. Tech people hang out. Speaker 3: 01:34:32 Yeah. Yep. Speaker 1: 01:34:33 Anyway, I I let let's talk about the other news. The SPACs in the news. How do you raise $250,000,000? Where does that money come from? That's so much money. Speaker 1: 01:34:41 I I mean, we Jordi and I both raised money at various times, but, Speaker 3: 01:34:44 It wasn't six months ago that I think we were on the show talking about Yeah. How there's nothing intrinsically wrong with the Totally. It's just been maybe misused or Speaker 1: 01:34:55 abused Speaker 3: 01:34:55 in the past. Also just bad Speaker 1: 01:34:57 timing, right? Because Speaker 3: 01:34:58 server time, Timing and ultimately what matters is the underlying asset, right? Yeah. Are you, you know, Speaker 1: 01:35:05 what So give us the pitch for your SPAC, and then we're gonna pitch you SPACing TBPN. Speaker 8: 01:35:09 Alright. I mean, look, I I do think six months is actually an interesting time frame because that's about when I decided, hey. I I should go do this. And, you Speaker 7: 01:35:17 know, look. Speaker 8: 01:35:18 I got the big audience. For years, bankers have Speaker 4: 01:35:19 been coming to me saying, do Speaker 8: 01:35:20 a SPAC, do an RTO, do all these things in the public market. Speaker 1: 01:35:23 Sure. Speaker 8: 01:35:23 And I always joke that we're all about the same age. Pretty much everyone in our generation watched the social network and wanted to be Zuck or invest in Zuck. So everyone ran to the private market. It was like, you know, Wall Street and hedge funds. All that stuff is kinda loser stuff now. Speaker 8: 01:35:35 The cool stuff is in tech. But we have a world where this undisciplined monetary and fiscal policy is a huge persistent tailwind for liquid assets. Crypto and Bitcoin obviously saw benefit from this, gold, public stocks, etcetera. And so I think a lot of people, you're starting to see them say, hey. How do I marry technology stuff with liquid assets? Speaker 8: 01:35:53 Right? So you're you're gonna see that. With the SPAC in particular, I agree with you guys that the vehicle itself is not the problem. It's that people were basically doing public venture capital. Buy a money losing company with a high valuation, and you've to try to grow into it. Speaker 8: 01:36:05 And some people did do that, but a lot didn't, and so it got a bad name. But what I really have talked about is like, look, if you Speaker 3: 01:36:11 Well, the other thing, sorry to interrupt you, there's an adverse there was an adverse selection issue at the time as well, which is that companies had huge access to capital in the private market. So if they were spacking, it was possible that they had exhausted Yep. If you couldn't do Speaker 1: 01:36:26 the Stripe thing and just put $3,000,000,000 tender, you would SPAC or Speaker 3: 01:36:29 something Yeah, there are businesses today that are fundamentally good businesses that have bright futures that maybe should just get public and Speaker 1: 01:36:38 get I I remember years ago talking to a public markets investor, and he was like, well, yeah. Like, once you're in the public markets, like, you shouldn't ever need to raise capital again because you're supposed to just be a going concern. And I was like, wait. What are you talking about? Like, businesses lose money. Speaker 1: 01:36:51 I'm in venture. Like, this is what you do. And he was like, No. No. Like like, if you're publicly listed, you should not be losing money for a long time because then you just shouldn't Speaker 3: 01:36:59 be a public company. I was like, oh, I didn't Speaker 1: 01:37:01 even think about that. But, yeah, anyway, sorry, to cut you off. Speaker 4: 01:37:04 Yeah. Well, I I think that, Speaker 8: 01:37:06 you know, I've always looked at this as if you buy a good company that has all the right criteria to be a public company, and you do it at the right price, which is an important component, basically, if you're a disciplined buyer Yep. Then it doesn't matter who the sponsor is. It doesn't even matter what the vehicle is. Right? It should do well in the public markets to your guys' Mhmm. Speaker 8: 01:37:21 And people weren't doing that. And so I think that that is kind of one big component. The second thing is a huge part of what we specifically have said, publicly and in the filings is we want to buy a profitable company. Mhmm. So we don't wanna buy a company and then try to make it profitable. Speaker 8: 01:37:34 Like, that's hard. Let's go buy a company that is already profitable. And the reason why that six month mark was so interesting that you mentioned that is that's about the time I started to get lots of inbound. And I frankly don't know why. I think some of it was the political change in DC. Speaker 8: 01:37:47 I think a lot in financial services, there was, like, a regulatory shift from a headwind to a

tailwind. So people are like, okay. Like, this may be a better time to go into the public market. And then also, like, think of all of our friends who have built companies that started sometime between, like, 2015 and 2020. Those companies are just now becoming big enough to actually be public companies. Speaker 1: 01:38:04 Yeah. Speaker 8: 01:38:04 And so there's, like, that cohort of people are now, like, ready to get into that public market, and so they're looking for the vehicles to be able to do that. And we hope that, you know, we're one of many that they consider to, to be able to do that. Speaker 1: 01:38:14 How does the actual deal work once you find a company? Are you buying a minority stake in the company, or are you buying the whole company? And then the the as I remember, it was like, you'd usually see, like, a couple hundred million dollars in a SPAC, but it'd be trading at 4,000,000,000. And then you take a company public, and then the share price goes from there. Is that roughly correct? Speaker 1: 01:38:33 I I I I don't know enough about that. Speaker 8: 01:38:34 The best way that I know to describe it is, like, the SPAC gives you a lot of optionality, which is why I'm attracted to it. So we raised $250,000,000 into the SPAC. You have the ability to buy a lot of a company, or you can buy a very little bit of a company, right? But you have $250,000,000 of cash. You do have to go to those investors and say, hey, this is the deal that I found. Speaker 8: 01:38:53 This is the deal that I negotiated in terms of the economic terms. They vote. So if you bring them a bad deal, they can also just say, screw it. We're gonna take our money back and, like, you know, good luck. Yeah. Speaker 8: 01:39:02 So you have to, you know, do a good deal that they obviously are signing up for, but you also have the ability to, use pipes and other kind of capital markets tools so that you can size up in terms of total capital invested in one of these businesses. And then the beautiful thing about this is it's a negotiation with a target company, and so it's two people in the market coming together and saying, this is what we think it's worth. Right? This is what they're willing to take. This is what we're willing to buy. Speaker 8: 01:39:25 And I think that that tends to, if people are rational and disciplined, actually end up with something better in the public market. Speaker 1: 01:39:31 And it's different than a venture fund where the money is not literally sitting in the venture fund. They need to make a capital call. With the SPAC, like, the money sits in t bills. Right? Is that is that correct? Speaker 8: 01:39:41 Correct. Yeah. Correct. It's in the vehicle. Yeah. Speaker 8: 01:39:43 Some people have interest, some people don't. Know, there's some some nuance there. But, basically, you can go to someone and be like, I have the money. Speaker 1: 01:39:48 I have the money. Speaker 8: 01:39:48 That's no the money. Don't but LPs can't tell

me like, hey. Sorry. You know, I'm not gonna send the money. Like, I got the money. Speaker 8: 01:39:54 And, Speaker 3: 01:39:54 and he's gonna have $2.50. Speaker 1: 01:39:56 So so I I mean, I'm super fascinated by this whole industry. And so are people pitching you? Do you expect this to be something where, you get an introduction from a venture capital ist or an investment banker or just a founder? Is this like a founder led deal, or are you gonna be going outbound finding some business where they're not even considering selling because they're profitable, they're happy, and you kinda come in, give them the pitch, and say, hey. This might be the right time to look at something else. Speaker 8: 01:40:34 Frankly, some of them are probably interesting. Some of them aren't. I don't know. I haven't talked to them or done the work yet. But also, think that you have an idea of, hey, it would be interesting to go talk to these types of businesses. Speaker 8: 01:40:43 Right? And so you want to go and figure that out. The whole key to Speaker 3: 01:40:47 this What categories are you excited about? Is kind of are you just going to kind of ignore? Right? I don't imagine you're going to like, defense tech obviously doesn't make sense, or I would imagine doesn't make sense. Maybe it could. Speaker 1: 01:41:01 Maybe Maybe could. Speaker 8: 01:41:02 In partnership with TVPN. No. We're very focused on financial services. We do have a legal mandate. We could do things outside, but financial services is a focus. Speaker 8: 01:41:12 And idea there is, I think most people it's no secret. I've got a reputation from all the Bitcoin and crypto stuff. So, like, are you gonna go buy that? And I just look at financial services as it's all becoming one thing. You know, Robinhood is a traditional exchange business, but they have crypto as a fast growing segment. Speaker 8: 01:41:28 Kraken is a private crypto exchange, but they're adding US equities. And so we're just seeing the merging of the new and old worlds in finance, and I think that's where you're gonna continue to see this go similar to, you know, what we're building with, Sylvia. That's what we're gonna, do on the SPAC side is we're just looking for, where can you get distribution directly to my audience with financial related type product services and companies? And then that's where we wanna play. Speaker 1: 01:41:53 Yeah. Talk to us about Sylvia. I know you got 18,000,000 sitting in cash. We got some recommendations for hypercars you could pick up if you need one, but, break it down. Speaker 3: 01:42:01 Stable assets. Speaker 1: 01:42:02 Yeah. Who who Speaker 3: 01:42:03 who could pick Sylvia? P one. Speaker 8: 01:42:05 Well, before I tell you about Sylvia, who's the best sponsor? Like, maybe we should just talk like, you know, you guys should just, just boast them up a little. Speaker 1: 01:42:11 Well, next up, we got Wander so we could talk about finding your happy place. We sing. Speaker 3:

01:42:15 Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Speaker 1: 01:42:19 Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, twenty four seven concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better pump. Do it. Just book a wander today. Speaker 3: 01:42:29 Do it right now. We're not letting you we're not letting Speaker 1: 01:42:31 you on. Trillion dollars. You could live in a wander forever. Speaker 8: 01:42:33 People just organic integrations like that right there. Speaker 1: 01:42:37 We're gonna clip this. We're both promoted. It's it's a dream come true. Speaker 3: 01:42:40 One Thank you for thank you for participating in that with us. Speaker 8: 01:42:43 Yeah. You're you guys got it. So Sylvia is, look. I I think every single person I know, who is in, like, the business tech finance world, they got the spreadsheet. And the spreadsheet is basically the thing that ties together all your accounts in one place so you know just like, what do I own? Speaker 8: 01:42:58 Yeah. There's not usually a lot of expense related stuff. It's all about, you know, how much cash do I have? What are my investments? What what are they worth? Speaker 8: 01:43:04 All that kind of stuff. And so what we did is we built essentially a box that you go and you attach your brokerage accounts, your cash accounts, your crypto accounts, your private investments, your collectibles. People have added precious metals, guns, cars, houses, all kinds of stuff. In that box, it gets encrypted and anonymized. And then what we did, we overlaid a bunch of AI models on top of it so that you can do simple things like you can prompt it and say, you know, what's my debt to equity ratio or analyze my stock portfolio and tell me, where you see risk. Speaker 8: 01:43:34 But, also, you can email Sylvia. You can call her on the phone. For those that are wondering, I do not have $18,000,000 in my checking account and 500 k in my savings account. Speaker 3: 01:43:43 At this very moment. Speaker 1: 01:43:44 That was some great that was some great dummy data. But, yeah, it's interesting because I feel like mint.com was popular and kinda fell off and maybe even got shut down. I I was getting an email about that. Maybe it's done. And so, obviously, this is a this is an opportunity. Speaker 8: 01:43:58 But those are very expense related. Right? It's all about, like, saving money, and there's a huge market. Obviously, people in America there's a lot of people focused on saving money. Yeah. Speaker 8: 01:44:07 But I do think that there is this very specific cohort. You know, the the data that we have right now, which we just crossed over $2,500,000,000 connected on the platform. It's been about four weeks. Think about it, it's less than a thousand users that have connected accounts. Speaker 1: 01:44:22 Wow. Speaker 8: 01:44:23 And so these are people who are multimillionaires who are going onto this platform on average and connecting these accounts.

And so to them, it's less about, you know, how do I save money, and it's more about how do I make more money? And that's what they're really trying to figure out. It's like, where's my money? Where are my assets? Speaker 8: 01:44:36 And then what can I do to actually grow those assets? And we think that there's something interesting to build there. Speaker 1: 01:44:40 We're gonna let you go, but finish it out with where can people get started with Sylvia? Speaker 8: 01:44:46 Well, after they go and they stay at a wander Yeah. And, they sleep on an Eight Sleep Speaker 4: 01:44:49 Yes. Then they can go Speaker 8: 01:44:50 to, CFOSylvia.com, and, they can check it out there. Speaker 3: 01:44:54 Okay. Thank you so much for stopping by. Speaker 1: 01:44:56 We'll have to have you back for a deeper dive. This is fantastic. Speaker 3: 01:44:58 To follow this back. Speaker 1: 01:45:00 We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Next up, we're going over to a OpenAI land. We got Nikunj coming in from OpenAI talking about a new release, new tools and features in the responses API, their MCP server. We're gonna explain, we're gonna have him explain, the the the adoption of MCP, that standard, and welcome to the stream. Speaker 1: 01:45:22 How are you doing? Speaker 3: 01:45:23 Boom. 12. Speaker 6: 01:45:24 Yeah. Welcome. Great to be here. This is exciting. Speaker 3: 01:45:27 Thanks for watching. To the temple of technology. Speaker 1: 01:45:29 Welcome to the temple of technology. Yeah. It happens to be this podcast specifically, not OpenAI. Speaker 3: 01:45:35 Also, big big probably, I mean, big day in the Big day. OpenAI Slack today. Speaker 1: 01:45:41 Yeah. Congratulations the emoji reaction. Merger, the acquisition. That's Speaker 3: 01:45:44 very exciting. Speaker 1: 01:45:46 Yeah. I'm sure we'll get into design and decision making around design and devices at some point. But let's start with the announcement today. Can you introduce yourself exactly what you do at OpenAI? Maybe even how long you've been there and then what you released today. Speaker 6: 01:45:59 Yeah. Sure. My name is Nikunj. I'm on the product team here working on our API. Been here for almost two years now. Speaker 6: 01:46:06 I've been working on the API since day one, and, mostly focused on getting out new models in the API, releasing new tools, just making the API much easier for developers to use to build applications. So, yeah, that's me. Speaker 1: 01:46:20 And then today, what what's the big announcement around tools and features in the responses API? Speaker 6: 01:46:25 Yeah. Sure. So, about two months ago, we released the responses API. We we used to have, an API called chat completions that was, you know, the the thing that almost all of, AI was built on top of. We we created a new iteration of that that endpoint called the responses API, which is much more powerful. Speaker 6: 01:46:45 It supports built in tools. It supports multiple model turns. It's really, you

know, natively built for models like o three and o four mini, which, which have reasoning, built, into them. And today, what we did is we expanded the suite of tools that, developers have access to. So the most exciting thing is support for remote MCP servers. Speaker 1: 01:47:08 Mhmm. Speaker 6: 01:47:09 And so now developers can plug plug in their responses API integration into any remote MCP server across the Internet. You you haven't you have servers like Stripe, Shopify, Asana, Linear, HubSpot. And I think this ecosystem is just gonna, you know, grow so much more over time. Really excited to see what people build on top of it. Speaker 1: 01:47:30 Is the benefit of of direct MCP support something about latency, the idea that because I imagine that I could be interacting with the ChatGPT API or the GPT API and then and then make a separate call to Stripe's API. And can even have Cursor or Windsurf write that integration for me, and that doesn't seem that difficult. And I've so I've always wrestled with with MCP being it's great. It's cool. It's a standard. Speaker 1: 01:47:57 But what's the real value besides saving a couple developer hours writing an API binding library or wrapper? Speaker 6: 01:48:04 Yeah. I think there are a couple of angles to this. So firstly, because these organizations and companies are building MCP servers, they're taking an LLM first approach to to to what the API needs to expose Speaker 1: 01:48:17 Mhmm. Speaker 6: 01:48:17 To the agent. So Stripe has, you know, a bunch of APIs that can be used to create a subscription or a customer, or a product or a price. But for for an LLM, they could just sort of combine that into a single function. And instead of returning this, like, massive JSON object, they can return something that's very specific to the task that was being solved so that the LLM can, like, more easily understand what's happening. So it's an opportunity to, like, rewrite your APIs to be very LLM first. Speaker 6: 01:48:48 So that's the first thing. The second thing is, like, friction. Right? Like, what you said is, like, maybe two hours of work, but why do the two hours of work when you can do it in, like, four lines of code in, like, less than a minute? And so this is just gonna make it so much easier for developers to to put together multiple tools and whatnot. Speaker 6: 01:49:08 The other sort of thing that I'm really excited about is, like, responses API. It takes multiple turns. So in chat completions, you would have to, like, put it in a for loop and, like, make it keep going until it tells you it's done. The responses API, you give it three or four tools. You give it a task. Speaker 6: 01:49:25 It'll keep going automatically. Single API call, finish the whole thing, and give you the result. So it's truly magical when you when you get that. Speaker 1: 01:49:33 That's amazing. Rune famously wrote text as the universal interface. Is it just standing over ovation for him over there today? Because this feels like a, like a victory for the text as the universal interface paradigm. But is there more nuance that you could add to that philosophy of of machines communicating with other machines via text? Speaker 1: 01:49:56 Because that feels like, you know, again, the LLM understands JSON. I understand what you're saying and probably faster and and and smoother. But at the same time, we could just train an LLM to speak JSON. Correct? Speaker 6: 01:50:08 Yeah. Totally. I think LLMs can understand JSON. I I guess the meta point there was if you could optimize your tools and combine them for tasks that you want AI agents and developers to be able to do, that's much better. Right? Speaker 6: 01:50:22 Like, at at the end of the day, an a model is not deterministic. So even if you ask it to call, like, four tools one by one, it it's gonna have some instances where it takes a wrong step and then needs to backtrack and, like, fix it. But if you have these, like, curated functions and tools exposed via an MCP server that it can directly go to, It just makes it so much more reliable for agents to be able to, like, do the thing that they're designed to do. And so there's definitely some benefit to that. In terms of text, yeah, that that that's that that makes a lot of sense to me. Speaker 6: 01:50:56 Yeah. It's that makes sense to me. Speaker 3: 01:50:59 How how has your general high level view on m m MCP evolved over the past, you know, few months? Were you skeptical at first, or were you always excited about the potential of it? It seems like a total MCP victory Mhmm. At this point. Speaker 6: 01:51:17 Yeah. Yeah. Initially, I mean, the the main goal was how do we get an ecosystem of tools started. And OpenAI did this thing with plug ins back in the day where we built it all on top of open API specs. And our plug ins was, integration was, like, a little too early for its time because the models weren't that good at, like, using these, like, third party tools, really well. Speaker 6: 01:51:41 And we didn't take a second stab at it, but, the MCP folks did. And m c four MCP is great. It it supports so much more than just tools. It, and it took off. It was initially, like, local only. Speaker 6: 01:51:54 So, you know, there was some hesitation about, like, how will people easily plug into this thing? But now with the Streamable HDTV protocols so that these things can be hosted remotely across the Internet, It's just perfect. Like, I I'm so excited about, what's gonna happen with MCP over the coming months. The hundreds of remote MCP servers that are gonna exist, developers are just gonna, like, plug into them. It's it's just gonna make things so much better. Speaker 6: 01:52:20 I'm really, really excited about the opportunities here. Speaker 1: 01:52:22 I mean, currently, most of these most of these like, when you hit an MCP server, you're kind of expecting a few seconds of of latency just because of how long it takes to inference these

models. I've been kind of beating the drum on, hey. Some of these models are just good enough. Let's bake them onto silicon and make them respond in, like, two milliseconds. And I don't know if that's happening or not. Speaker 1: 01:52:44 You don't need to comment on that. But I've I like, mid journey v five, I was like, it's good enough. Like, just make it instant. V o three, I'm like, I'm ready for it just to be, like, instantaneous. Certainly with deep research and and chattypd generally, I'm super satisfied. Speaker 1: 01:52:59 I'm like, I don't really have any any requests for improvements to the models. I just want faster and cheaper and easier. But do you think that if inferencing does go through some sort of massive speed up, whether it's from custom silicon or or architectural redesign, does geocaching or edge computing become important to the way MCP servers communicate with each other? For example, like, I don't necessarily if I'm going to the Portland AWS hosting of some MCP server, I don't actually want to be routed to Virginia, by accident. And so Yeah. Speaker 1: 01:53:39 Do you think that that that will require, like, a new rethink of the spec, or is that something that can just be naturally handled by load balancing? Speaker 6: 01:53:46 You know, the the spec is just like how do you communicate between, the MCP client and the MCP server. So it tells you, like, you know, literally the JSON RPC, like, object that that needs to go between the two parties. Optimizing the geocaching of it really depends on the service provider. Right? So if I'm gonna call mcp.stripe.com or allbirds.com/api/mcp, which is by the way, allbirds has an MCP server. Speaker 6: 01:54:13 How crazy is that? Shopify has to write around it to, like, the right place. Speaker 1: 01:54:18 We need an MCP server. Help us build one. I don't know what we do, but, we wanna we we wanna get in on the action. Speaker 6: 01:54:24 Yeah. You Speaker 1: 01:54:24 should be Speaker 3: 01:54:24 bit less. Speaker 6: 01:54:26 A create a Shopify store, and and you'll have one instantly. Speaker 1: 01:54:29 It's Oh, that's good. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. For the merch, you can integrate. Speaker 6: 01:54:32 Yeah. So, I mean, OpenAI already does a lot of geo routing based on on on where the inference request is coming from. So we we try to, like, route it to something here. And then when when the request leaves OpenAI's infrastructure and goes to, say, Stripe's or Shopify's, they could do that as well based on, you know, either, like, a explicit URL or something more magical on their end where they can detect where it's coming from and and route it to the right place. Speaker 1: 01:55:00 Makes sense. Yeah. Any other questions, trends in pricing? I know that there's pricing and availability updates. Anything to share there? Speaker 6: 01:55:09 No. Pricing is like, you know, it's a it's an infrastructure play over here. MCP is free to use. You just pay for the tokens. We have code

interpreter, which is like the Python tool. Speaker 6: 01:55:19 By the way, the Python tool is the thing in o three that can do geoguesser like things when you when you upload your images. So you can just bring that Really? Into the API. Yeah. So Wait. Speaker 1: 01:55:30 How why is Python relevant there? Speaker 6: 01:55:33 Yeah. So what's actually happening is when you when you put a, an image in the o three model Speaker 1: 01:55:40 Yeah. Speaker 6: 01:55:40 It writes Python code to, like, zoom in. Sure. Like, try to find tries to find clues. It crops them. It inverts the images. Speaker 1: 01:55:47 Got it. Speaker 6: 01:55:48 It then, like, does web searches. So it's like all the all the image manipulation is based on Python, and that is enabled by the code interpreter tool, which is also available in the API today. Speaker 1: 01:55:59 That's interesting. I I noticed that because I was I took a picture of, of a of a podcast. I wanted to see how tall the table was. I uploaded these images from the Pat McAfee show, and and and I noticed that when I unpacked the o three internal reasoning, it was like writing tons and tons of lines of image processing code in Python all to to draw lines and count pixels to see how tall the the the table was relative to the person. It wrote, like, 500 lines, 5,000 lines of my thought. Speaker 1: 01:56:26 We were joking about it. Speaker 3: 01:56:27 Four zero three yesterday, I said how many white boxes in this picture, and it and it and it was coding for, like, almost fourteen minutes. It was like Unfortunately failed. It was like putting a putting a software Speaker 1: 01:56:38 engineer on the task for a month, but, you know, now you get it in two minutes. But it is incredible. I can see where that goes. It just adds a completely different angle of attack on reasoning, and it needs to be an important tool in the tool chest. So, yeah, we really Speaker 3: 01:56:52 need press it. How are you leveraging Codex today? I'm sure you guys got got early access, but I'm I'm curious if and where it's fitting into your your toolbox toolkit today. Speaker 6: 01:57:04 I see the engineers using it nonstop. Like, we had to make a couple of changes for the launch. We had to, like, fix error messages. These are, like, such small things, and and you can just fire up a a task and do it. Yeah. Speaker 6: 01:57:18 I've used it for docs changes a bunch of times where I'm just like, there's a typo here. Change this heading, and and these are tiny things. I just, like, write it, forget about it, create a PR. Does it. I mean, the I don't have to bug people anymore. Speaker 6: 01:57:30 It's it's really it's really helpful. And I think engineers are actually doing, like, even more complex tasks on top of it. But I just see everyone in the company using it, which is, really cool. Speaker 3: 01:57:43 Very cool. Speaker 1: 01:57:43 What are you, what are you daily driving as a personal smartphone these days? Are you iPhone, Android Yeah. Maybe something else? Speaker 3: 01:57:50 I O. What what do Speaker 1: 01:57:51 you got? Speaker 3: 01:57:52 I O. You got early access in your pocket? Speaker 1: 01:57:55 Okay. Okay. It's iPad. Speaker 3: 01:57:57 No leaks. No leaks today, Speaker 1: 01:57:58 but we've been asking. We we Speaker 3: 01:58:00 Still part of Johnny's legacy. We we we tried to trick you Speaker 1: 01:58:03 into leaking the hardware here, but we'll get you back Speaker 3: 01:58:05 next time. Speaker 6: 01:58:06 Yeah. Well, I'm sure we'll find out soon. Speaker 1: 01:58:08 But it's an exciting it's an exciting acquisition. But thank you so much for stopping by. It's very exciting. We'll talk to you soon. Speaker 3: 01:58:13 Yeah. Congrats to you and the team on the on the launch. Speaker 1: 01:58:15 Cheers. Thank you so See you. Bye. Next up, we got David Sandra coming in the temple of technology, the godfather of podcasting himself. That it's brother behavior. Speaker 1: 01:58:25 Brother behavior. We need a lot of we need a lot of sound effects for this one. He's been on an absolute tear dropping podcast after podcast. But, today, we wanna talk about John Johnny Ott. Yeah. Speaker 1: 01:58:38 I and Apple and Steve Jobs. What would Steve Jobs be doing in this situation? I wanna I wanna play out that scenario for sure. And then we got Scott Wu coming in from Cognition, talking about Devon, coding agents. Every company has a coding agent now. Speaker 1: 01:58:52 Crowded market. I wanna know how it plays out, so we're excited to talk to him about that. Then we got Joe Wiesenthal from Bloomberg Odd Lots coming on the show. We'll get an update on the market. It's been flat for a couple days. Speaker 3: 01:59:03 Last week for Joe. Speaker 1: 01:59:04 Been terrible. Market. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 1: 01:59:06 Not Speaker 3: 01:59:06 getting his dopamine fixed. Speaker 1: 01:59:08 How is he how is he getting through it? I wanna know. Speaker 3: 01:59:10 I'm sure he's finding obscure exchanges where Speaker 1: 01:59:13 He might be going a hundred x short volatility. Yeah. Maybe he's just printing. Speaker 3: 01:59:18 Might be shorting Costco at 50 times. Speaker 1: 01:59:20 Right? Maybe we'll have to ask him. Anyway, let's do some more ads in the meantime. Let's tell you about Bezel. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Speaker 1: 01:59:31 Seriously, any watch. Any watch. And I think we got through Speaker 3: 01:59:34 our ads every day. Download the app. Speaker 1: 01:59:37 Yeah. Do it. We can also go through some Speaker 3: 01:59:40 I'm actually shocked at frequently I use Like Speaker 1: 01:59:45 I'm a DAU. Speaker 3: 01:59:46 I was talking to Quaid Speaker 1: 01:59:47 Yeah. Speaker 3: 01:59:48 Friend and one of the co founders. And he was like, yeah, a lot of like a lot of people actually daily are just BAUs. Yeah. So it's actually shopping right away. Speaker 1: 01:59:59 Well, we got

David Senra from Founders Podcast coming into the studio. Welcome to the show. How you doing, David? What's up, guys? Speaker 5: 02:00:08 Before we begin, I have to apologize for not wearing a suit, but I think you'll make an obsession an exception because I'm wearing a ramp shirt. Speaker 1: 02:00:16 Oh, there we go. Let's hear it. Switch your business to ramp.com. Save time and money. How you doing? Speaker 1: 02:00:23 What's the latest? Speaker 3: 02:00:23 There there used to be this thing. I I mean, it's probably still a thing Yeah. Where David, like, would you you would you'd be happy to meet somebody, but the the one requirement was that they listen to Founders. Yeah. Eventually, it's gonna be you listen to founder and your business rep's on ramp. Speaker 3: 02:00:38 And if don't check both boxes, not happening. Speaker 1: 02:00:41 No No shot. That's hilarious. Anyway, what's the latest? Did you read the Bloomberg article about Johnny Ive joining OpenAI? Okay. Speaker 5: 02:00:53 No. You said a message on me. What's going on? Speaker 1: 02:00:55 So I just got Speaker 5: 02:00:56 a bunch of text messages about this, and I think there's something related to Steve Jobs coming back to Apple we could talk about too. That's interesting. But, no, I have Speaker 3: 02:01:02 no idea Speaker 1: 02:01:02 what's happening. So the article is obviously like, it's amazing in the sense that it's Johnny Ive, a $6,000,000,000 acquisition, huge number, 2% of OpenAI equity going over to Johnny Ive and his team. But the and it's also super interesting because they're gonna build a hardware device for ChatGPT, for for AI, an AI first hardware. And if there's any team that can break through with a consumer electronics product, it's gotta be Sam Altman and Johnny Ive. Right? Speaker 1: 02:01:30 Like, they are an incredible combination to go after this. At the same time, the article basically said nothing. And and they put out a 9,000,000 video, and it's just them saying, oh, he's one of the most thoughtful individuals. He's one of the best people to work with. His family's amazing. Speaker 1: 02:01:44 And they're just talking about, like, how much they, like, love working together. And he doesn't actually give us any advice on, like or any guidance on, like, is it a phone? Is it a watch? Is it gonna fold? Is it big? Speaker 1: 02:01:54 Is it small? Speaker 5: 02:01:55 That's very Steve Jobs esque. He'd be very proud. Speaker 1: 02:01:58 Well, That's good. Speaker 5: 02:01:59 I guess going into this, like, I I'm an unabashed, like, Johnny Ive fan. Speaker 1: 02:02:04 Okay. Speaker 5: 02:02:04 There's actually an excellent biography of him that I think everybody should read. Please. Speaker 7: 02:02:08 I read Speaker 5: 02:02:08 it, like, five years ago. If you want to listen to the podcast I did on, it's episode one seventy Speaker 7: 02:02:13 eight before you get the book. Speaker 5: 02:02:15 Yeah. But I'd highly recommend reading the entire

book. Yeah. I just I think if you think about, like, the conversation we had this morning about taking things very seriously, I FaceTimed you guys at, like, 06:30 in the morning, and you're in your studio, like, getting ready and preparing. Speaker 3: 02:02:30 We're sitting in these exact seats. Speaker 1: 02:02:32 Yep. Speaker 5: 02:02:33 Yeah. Like, I I think that's one of the things that jumps out in Johnny's biography. Just like his intolerance for a lack of effort. So, like, there's a great story. I just pulled up a bunch of my highlights from the book. Speaker 5: 02:02:45 But when Johnny was in design, he was studying industrial design. Mhmm. I think it was in England. And there's this great line where a friend of his comes over. They have a project. Speaker 5: 02:02:54 Right? And they're making these, like, foam product prototypes of product they're designing. And he goes in Johnny's apartment, and he found over a hundred foam model prototypes where most students would build half a dozen. So the normal expectation is, hey. I'm gonna make six prototypes of this, you know, new design for this product I'm doing. Speaker 5: 02:03:13 And Johnny's like, yeah. Fuck that. I'm doing a hundred. And I think when you read the book, you it makes sense. Like, I just tweeted this out where it's actually Steve Jobs. Speaker 5: 02:03:23 Let me pull it up. Steve Jobs talking about Johnny. And he's talking about Johnny with Walter Isaacson, and he's writing the book with Walter Isaacson as he knows he's dying. And he calls, you know, he says that essentially if he had a spiritual partner at Apple, it would be Johnny. He's not just a designer. Speaker 5: 02:03:40 That's why he works directly for me. He has more operational power than anyone else at Apple except me, and there's no one who can tell him what to do besides Steve. Mhmm. So again, I always think of, like, actions express priorities, like, of my favorite maxims. And Steve is telling you, you know, he had this probably the highest bar of talent out of anybody's ever maybe anybody's ever existed. Speaker 1: 02:03:59 Yeah. Speaker 5: 02:03:59 And he's saying, this is the best guy. This is my number two. Yeah. I I think that, like, speaks volumes about, like, what he thought of in terms of Johnny's talent. Speaker 1: 02:04:08 Yeah. I mean, it's it's so interesting because I guess the op I guess the open question in my mind is, does Johnny Ive need a Tim Cook figure to do what he does? And what I mean by that is that, obviously, Tim Cook's been the CEO of Apple for over a decade now, but he was a supply chain mastermind. And Johnny Ive could throw a crazy idea out there like an aluminum milled unibody design for the MacBook Pro, and Tim Cook was able to actually go get it done. And in the new era of global competition with China, faltering relationships, and not a legacy at OpenAI around hardware manufacturing, which is a unique skill set, can Johnny Ive actually deliver a product that gets into the hands of millions of consumers with the quality that Apple is known for without a Tim Cook like figure? Speaker 1: 02:05:13 Will we see another acquisition? Speaker 5: 02:05:15 Steve Jobs needed a Tim Cook figure. I think an anybody So, like, yeah, the answer is, of course, he does. Like, I will have we have no obviously, idea what they're gonna build. What I think is just interesting is, which way more applicable to, like, us and the people that are listening, it's just like, to study I I just treated this back at Sampar from My First Million. Mhmm. Speaker 5: 02:05:34 It's like, you don't copy the what, you copy the how. Mhmm. And so I think the important thing of like, yeah, you could hypothesize of like what Johnny's gonna build or you could just like, hey, how does this guy approach like his life and work? Is there anything that he said in there that I could actually use? And I think that's like much more interesting to me than be like, can you predict what's gonna happen with this thing that they're told no no details about? Speaker 5: 02:05:55 Yeah. And that like, who knows? I don't know. Like, can they build hardware? Who the fuck knows? Speaker 5: 02:06:00 Like, we're gonna find out. Speaker 1: 02:06:01 That's the fun part. Speaker 5: 02:06:02 Yeah. But, yeah, I'm not into, like, prediction. I'm just like, we'll see. Speaker 1: 02:06:06 Yeah. So, I mean, he wasn't a founder at Apple. He became a founder with by founding io and, his his his love from his agency. Now he's back in the senior executive role. Can you tell me a little bit about his management style, how hardcore he is, anything that ties to Johnny Ives, like, living, like, founder mode or any of those kind of, ties to other executives, kind of what we might expect or what we might pattern match against? Speaker 1: 02:06:36 Is it just Yeah. Steve Jobs or are there other people? Speaker 5: 02:06:39 Yeah. I think he had, like, I would argue, like, you know, equal to sense of, like, a high threshold for quality that Jobs did. Mhmm. I was just listening to the episode I did five years ago on Johnny's biography, and it's, like, talks about it's, they they thought very similar design and products, and they were very much partners. You know, I almost like a cofounder relationship is the I know that'd be controversial, but, like, that's the way I would think about it, like, how deeply they were working together. Speaker 5: 02:07:05 But what I say is he's, like, much more diplomatic, where Johnny's, you know, we we could do better than this. And Steve Jobs was, this is shit. Get it out of my face. Speaker 4: 02:07:14 And and part of that, Speaker 5: 02:07:15 they I think they hypothesize his biographer hypothesizes that it's, like, you know, his his growing up in England, like, he's just more reserved and quiet manner. But what I loved is I I think the very beginning of the book, the the the author's interviewing him, and he he was and this is even before he was

gonna write a book on him. He was just covering Apple at the time. I think he was a reporter, if I remember correctly. And he just, like, wanted a sound bite on this new Apple product. Speaker 5: 02:07:40 And he says, I just wanted a sound bite. But he launched into a passionate twenty minute soliloquy about his latest work. I could barely get in a word edgewise. He couldn't help himself. Design is his passion. Speaker 5: 02:07:49 And I think that's just he's just obviously completely obsessed and willing to, like, work hard. There's another thing that I thought was interesting. He calls it attention to invisible details. He says, I've Johnny cared deeply about the parts users would never see, believing that, quote, care was taken even on details, hard and soft, that people may never discover. And he says that he was fanatical. Speaker 5: 02:08:11 He he he provided a fanatical care beyond the obvious stuff. So these are just like, that's why I'm just a huge fan of anybody like this. I don't care if you're building the iPhone or you're making a pizza. Like, just I I'm very attracted to and obsessed with people that take whatever they're doing very very seriously. Speaker 3: 02:08:26 It's funny that the opposite is is Enzo, who's like, I don't care if the door panels align. I care if the driver Speaker 5: 02:08:35 Shits his pants. Speaker 1: 02:08:36 Yeah. That's Speaker 5: 02:08:37 I I would actually argue that they're very similar, because Enzo remember, like, Enzo was building a race car. He wasn't building like, he wasn't trying to it just happened that when they were winning all the races, then you have all these consumers say, hey. I want a Ferrari, though, too. But I would actually think, like, what they both share in common is they keep the main thing the main thing. Speaker 1: 02:08:56 Yeah. Speaker 5: 02:08:56 And in Enzo's case, he's not trying to buy build a luxury product. He's trying to literally make the fastest car. That that he didn't give a shit about Ferrari, the actual auto manufacturer, if you read his biography. And, in fact, the longest book I've ever read for founders Let me see if I can find it real quick. Was a thousand page biography of Enzo Ferrari. Speaker 1: 02:09:17 Of Enzo? No way. Speaker 5: 02:09:18 And it's It was just republished. Same author. This book is excellent. It's Enzo Ferrari by Luca DiMonte. So this used to be a thousand pages. Speaker 1: 02:09:27 No one Speaker 5: 02:09:27 bought the goddamn book Speaker 3: 02:09:28 because no one wants to Speaker 5: 02:09:29 read a thousand pages. So they edited it down to 450 pages. Yeah. So so if you you know, Enzo's one of my favorite founders I've ever I've done, like, three or Speaker 1: 02:09:39 four of them on Johnny Ive at love from his his design consulting agency. One of their biggest clients is Ferrari today. Speaker 5: 02:09:46 I didn't know that. Speaker 1: 02:09:46 And so there's probably some linkages here. Speaker 3: 02:09:49 Perfect. Speaker 1: 02:09:49 So can you give us a little bit more about what we can expect? We were joking about maybe OpenAI should just Speaker 3: 02:09:55 The device with Speaker 1: 02:09:56 the Ferrari. And you just need to buy a Ferrari if you want to access the premium tier of ChatGPT. You only access Speaker 3: 02:10:04 the should only Ringing Speaker 1: 02:10:05 out of the leather of a That Speaker 5: 02:10:10 will only work if they're going to do a collaboration with TPBN. Yeah. Think that's the Speaker 1: 02:10:14 Oh, I'm sorry. I can't do my homework today. My Ferrari's in the shop. Speaker 3: 02:10:18 This this summer, I'm gonna I'm gonna force you to go to the the Ferrari dealer in LA and get one. Because if you're really such an Enzo fan Speaker 1: 02:10:26 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. You should have a Ferrari. Speaker 3: 02:10:29 Shouldn't you be honoring his legacy every time Speaker 5: 02:10:30 you go to the grocery store? It's funny. I would I drove past the my daughter used to go my the the school my daughter used to go to was actually next door to a Ferrari dealership in Miami, which is like the most thing ever. Speaker 1: 02:10:41 Super Miami. Speaker 5: 02:10:43 But there's a great I tweeted out when I passed by the other day, because it says he had this great line where he's like, passion can't be explained. It can only be lived. Yeah. Speaker 3: 02:10:51 And I Speaker 5: 02:10:52 was like, oh, that's like a really good way to think about the way it looks like. But when we finish that thought, it's just like, his primary thing was just like, I want the fastest race car in the world. And so that's what he meant. He's like, don't give a shit if the doors don't line up. I just when the the race car driver hits the gas, I want him to shit his pants, which is also a fucking hilarious quote. Speaker 1: 02:11:10 Yeah. I wonder what the AI equivalent of that is. Like, what is the Ferrari of AI models right now? They're all kind competing I'm Speaker 5: 02:11:17 personally very excited about this. I was just talking to our mutual friend, Patrick, from Invest Like The Best. And we both feel very similarly. It's just like, I don't want to look at screens all day long. So I know you had, there there you had that guy that's building friend. Speaker 5: 02:11:30 I his name is Avi. Yeah. Just this idea, like, I'm not saying I wanna wear something around my neck or have glasses on my face, whatever, but anything that would kinda get me out off of looking at screens, like, I'm I'm very like, I would buy it day one just to test it out. Speaker 3: 02:11:45 Yeah. John was saying like maybe a Walkman style device with wired headphones, know, kind of analog, but just piping the AI right into your brain. Speaker 1: 02:11:54 Maybe a football I was saying mean you packed Speaker 3: 02:11:57 months out I was thinking it's like Elon what is Elon's AI hardware place? One is Optimus. Right? But then the other is actually just

Neuralink. He's like, I wanna jump. Speaker 3: 02:12:09 You know, he he could say, I wanna jump to like the end state, which is like human and one. Pretty crazy. Speaker 5: 02:12:16 Yeah. I I want the opposite of that. I did this episode on Christopher Nolan. Mhmm. And I it was very fascinating, because this guy makes some of the most high-tech movies of all time. Speaker 5: 02:12:25 They're very difficult to make. You know, send scripts everywhere. So they're like, oh, yeah. Just like, I'll read your script. Email it to me. Speaker 5: 02:12:45 He's like, I'm gonna fly on a plane tomorrow, and I'll be at your house at noon. And he'll hand you the script if he wants you to be in the movie. And then he sits there and stares at you while you read it. Then you're done. You talk about it. Speaker 5: 02:12:55 And then he takes the script back Speaker 1: 02:12:56 and leaves. Speaker 5: 02:12:58 There's no other copy. Speaker 3: 02:12:59 That's amazing. Speaker 5: 02:13:00 Yeah, man. Everybody's gotta figure out their own integration for what they want for technology. I want it disappear in the background. In many cases, like, if you study this book and, again, I would order the book. I would definitely read it. Speaker 5: 02:13:10 It's worth it. Because he's gonna play a fucking huge role at one of the most important companies in the world right now. Speaker 1: 02:13:15 Totally. Speaker 5: 02:13:15 But I I I just like I want a more like, I want technology to disappear. I do there is some quotes in the book that might be fascinating that kinda answers your question, John. I didn't mean to, like, sidescrew it at all. But as far as, like, what he how he thinks about design, he says he takes big chances instead of evolutionary approach to design. And if they focus grouped any of his designs this is a description of him in college. Speaker 5: 02:13:36 It was also accurate when he went to Apple. And if they had focused his designs, they would they wouldn't have been a success. So he's not looking for, like really wasn't interested in, like, any kind of, like, iterative design. He wants something that looks completely different. And there is a weird story. Speaker 5: 02:13:54 I think some people might find it odd, story from his college days when he was studying design, that he talked about that the best physical objects, they they are very inviting to the touch, that humans have this I forgot what he called it. Like, an obsession. Has a word for it, but essentially obsession with touching things. And, so he was asked to, like, design a pen. And people are like, okay. Speaker 5: 02:14:14 I'm gonna write a you know, create a pen that that you can write, and it works upside down, or it never runs out of ink. He's like, no. But what do people actually do at pens? Like, anybody holding a pen in their hand? Like, clicking it, they Mhmm. Speaker 5: 02:14:24 They move it around. He's like, they wanna I didn't think he said this word, but they wanna finger it, for lack of a better word. So they wanna, like, play with it a lot. Yeah. And so, yeah, any kind of physical device that he makes, I think, isn't gonna just be like, oh, this kinda looks like an iPhone. Speaker 5: 02:14:37 I think it's it's gonna be, like, drastically different. Speaker 1: 02:14:40 Yeah. It's a big challenge. Speaker 3: 02:14:42 And I mean, he he's pulled away from Apple a lot of the people that were integral to so to the magic of of the devices, the MacBook, the iPhone Speaker 1: 02:14:52 Yeah. Speaker 3: 02:14:52 All these things. Speaker 1: 02:14:52 I'm really excited to see it. 2026 can't come soon enough. What about Jim Simons? You did a recent show about him. Very different from Johnny Ive, but what are the similarities? Speaker 1: 02:15:05 Because you think about a hedge fund versus a consumer electronics manufacturer. I imagine that there are no similarities, and yet I imagine you found some. Speaker 3: 02:15:14 How much would you pay to rip a heater with Jim Simons and Johnny Johnny I mean, that's a priceless heater right there. That's potentially a 7 figure heater. This Speaker 5: 02:15:27 is why I think I got so many text messages and they linked me to whatever article today. Yeah. Because OpenAI essentially what bought Johnny's company. Johnny was the founder, and it's for like 6,000,000,000 or something, I guess, the thing. And everybody said the same thing in the text messages, like, how much money did Apple pay to, like, buy back Steve Jobs? Speaker 5: 02:15:45 Yeah. And this is one of the thing that Jim has in common, Rocke feller has in common, Bezos suggested Bezos to shareholder letters, which I think is a really good episode, Michael Dell Yeah. Over and over again. It's like this idea of like, you you absolutely must work with the highest quality people you can, and everybody fucking says that, and nobody does it, because it is so hard to do it. And one of the reasons I also Brad Jacobs talks about this, like, you have to overpay for talent because it's nearly impossible to overpay for talent. Speaker 5: 02:16:11 So the obviously, the canonical example of that is, hey, Apple's gonna buy Next for 500 half a billion dollars. They paid essentially half a billion dollars to rehire Steve Jobs and they got the deal of a century. Nobody's gonna look back at what Steve did and be like, oh, you overpaid it. It just doesn't happen. So Jim the crazy thing about Jim and then actually me and a mutual friend of ours that I can't name just stayed up till like two in the morning talking to this guy that works at Citadel. Speaker 5: 02:16:36 And it was very fascinating. Like, Ken Griffin was the same exact way. We were just like, I heard some of the competition for his top people. And guess what? Like, they would blow I think it would shock how much money they make, but then you look at their performance. Speaker 5: 02:16:49 It's like direct essentially, Ken won't cap their compensation. So, like, if

you make him more money, you're, like, unlimited money that you'll, that you'll get because of he understands the the talent. So the thing about Jim is that's that's nuts, right, is he churns through partners. And, you know, people say Jim Simons had a hedge fund. I don't think of it as a hedge fund. Speaker 5: 02:17:08 I think he had a magic money machine. Like, it was very different than normal you know, the the fund made well over a hundred billion dollars in profit, and it continues to make, from what I understand, you know, many, many billions in cash flow every every single year. And there's no outside money. It's just owned. The only monies in there was Jim's family's money, and then you have to work at Renaissance. Speaker 5: 02:17:29 Yeah. And then if you quit, they they the reason they have such low turnover is because if you quit, you can't invest in the medallion fund anymore. Speaker 3: 02:17:35 Yeah. So you're never gonna quit. Invest your Speaker 8: 02:17:38 money somewhere else. But the crazy Speaker 5: 02:17:40 thing is, what I'll do is like the the fascinating thing is Jim is like churning through partners, because it takes him decades of trial and error to to actually get the system that he wants. But then he would talk about, and he talks about this when he's an older man too. He'd give interviews much older because he wasn't doing that when he younger, but he's just like, you have to work with the very best people, and when you identify the person, you have to just put all the effort you possibly can to convince them to work for you. Okay? A lot of people understand that. Speaker 5: 02:18:05 But then you go look up the people he identified, and it's just like, he hired nothing but mathematicians and physicists, and you'd be like, yeah, it's not just like some professor in a math department somewhere. It's like this guy has a theorem named after him, and he had there's a law named after him. It's like literally the top of the top of the top of the top, because they're, you know, made a hundred billion dollars plus with 300 anywhere from, whatever, 250 to, like, 400 employees. So a very, very tiny team, small team relative to the profits produced of just unbelievable a players. And I I have to imagine that's what, you know, people at OpenAI are doing. Speaker 5: 02:18:40 It's like, well, who's the best designer in the world? If we're going build our own product, who would you go and get? Yeah It's Speaker 3: 02:18:45 worth two points. Maybe Yeah. Speaker 1: 02:18:48 Yeah, 2%. It's totally worth it. That's what I was saying. It's a big number, but it's a big company. It's a big And of Speaker 3: 02:18:54 course, Josh Josh Kushner was already in IO. Oh, Using something. So now he's getting more OpenAI. Speaker 1: 02:19:02 Using everything. Speaker 3: 02:19:03 Thrive gets more of OpenAI. Yeah. But anyways, speaking of mathematicians, we got Scott Wu. Speaker 1: 02:19:10 Yeah. We got Scott Wu from Cognition coming in next Speaker 5: 02:19:12 I'm jealous. I love Scott. Big fan of his. You guys ever played the video of him at a math competition when he's like 12 on the show? Speaker 1: 02:19:20 I mean, it's been viral so many times. We haven't played it on our show, but we probably should. Speaker 3: 02:19:24 It still plays in my mind. Speaker 5: 02:19:25 But It's excellent. Speaker 1: 02:19:27 We'll bring him in to the studio. Thank you so much for stopping by. Speaker 5: 02:19:30 Yep. Of course. See you guys soon. Love you. Thanks for having me. Speaker 1: 02:19:33 Talk to you soon. Speaker 3: 02:19:33 Love you. Speaker 6: 02:19:33 I love you too. Speaker 3: 02:19:34 Bye. Love you too. Bye. Speaker 1: 02:19:37 And we'll bring Scott in in just a second. Jordy, you wanna kick off the intro? Yeah. Let me take a quick break and maybe do some ad reads. Talk about his former employer, ramp.com. Speaker 1: 02:19:46 Switch your business to ramp.com. Speaker 3: 02:19:48 John, use the restroom use the restroom. Get out of here. No dead air. We do not stop talking. Scott is in the studio. Speaker 3: 02:19:57 Let's bring him in. Welcome, Scott. There he is. Speaker 4: 02:20:05 How's it going? Speaker 3: 02:20:06 What's happening? Good to have you back. Speaker 4: 02:20:08 Yeah. Good to be back. And by the way, I love David Sedra. It's it's it's it's so fun to be on back to back Speaker 8: 02:20:13 with him. I know. Speaker 4: 02:20:13 I love the I I love the story of of of recruiting and truly just fighting for the best people. It's I've I've always felt the same way, which is, you know, people always ask about evaluating talent, which is of core you know, it's it's it's a very deep thing. But but if anything, I think the much more valuable thing is just you kind of already know who the the really great people are. And the question is, like, how how can you how can you build your whole whole organization around, you know, making it the right one for them to join? Speaker 3: 02:20:40 Yeah. Speaker 1: 02:20:40 So Speaker 3: 02:20:40 Yeah. The sort of a random story but but was reminded of this. I think we talked about it a couple of days ago but Steve Jobs apparently called the founder the original founder of Siri like over 20 times. He called him every single day. He knew that he wanted Siri to be a part of Apple and he just repeatedly called over and over and over and over and over and over. Speaker 3: 02:21:02 Wouldn't stop until he finally said yes to joining. But I think some something about it too is like, I think to You you said something which is like everybody knows who the best people are. But I actually think that's maybe only the case if you're also ultra No. Speaker 1: 02:21:18 It's easy. Hiring is easy. You just look up who's won an IMO gold medal. You hire all of them. And then, you just raise a bunch of money, and then the rest is easy. Speaker 1: 02:21:27 It's super easy. Speaker 4: 02:21:28 No. It's it's fair. It's fair. Yeah.

You have to be you have to be the right kind of circles and communities to know the best people. Speaker 4: 02:21:34 But but I I generally think that people spend relatively too much time, I think, on evaluating, you know, people who are at the border versus, like, really just fighting for the the absolute top tier people. So Speaker 1: 02:21:47 Yeah. Yeah. It's always it's always a mistake to think like, oh, this is like a b player. I I can make them into an a player. Like, there's just so much sweat there, and the math rarely works out. Speaker 1: 02:21:58 Usually, you're better just finding someone who's a great fit for your company, your team, the skills that they have, and you can just, turn them loose and let them run, which is always the best. Anyway Yeah. Mean Lots going on. Tons of news. Every company seems to have an AI coding agent. Speaker 1: 02:22:14 I wanna know how should I be thinking about the market. I was, I was, on X talking to some people. I'd kind of mapped it out as there is consumer code that is written when I just prompt o three. So I the example I gave was I wanted to know how tall a desk was in an image. I uploaded the photo. Speaker 1: 02:22:35 And o three, without me asking it to write code, wound up write writ writing a ton of, image processing code in Python. I didn't say write code. It just wrote code for me. That's kind of autonomous AI coding. Now there's Codex, which feels more prosumer. Speaker 1: 02:22:51 I have a GitHub repo. I wanted to go fix a bug for me. Then there's something more in the enterprise side, like hands on the keyboard all day long. I need a super powered IDE. That's Windsurf cursor. Speaker 1: 02:23:02 And then I'm seeing the top down enterprise deals Yeah. From companies like Cognition. So how is that the reasonable frame for thinking about the market, or are there is it all just winner take all? Is there one market? Are there four? Speaker 1: 02:23:16 How are you thinking about it, and what are you seeing in the market these days? Speaker 4: 02:23:20 Yeah. For sure. So so high level breakdown. Look. I I think there's a few different product experiences. Speaker 4: 02:23:24 And by the way, it's fun to see Yeah. To see so many agents coming out this week. But there there's a few different product experiences, but I think there's primarily two markets is is how we kind of think about it. And it's you know, in one line, it's basically engineers and engineering teams versus nonengineers. Mhmm. Speaker 4: 02:23:42 I I think the thing about it with DevTool you know, totally agree with your point, obviously, that there's there's some differences between enterprise and self serve and so on. In I mean, you know, we have both businesses, for example, like a lot of these other players that you mentioned also have both businesses. In practice, I think what happens with developer tooling is, you know, engineers are engineers. Right? And so and engineers are talking to the same people. Speaker 4: 02:24:03 You know, the same people who are building their own projects at home are also going and, you know, shipping pull requests and stuff at work, and and there's kind of a lot of overlap in this that space. And so there's kind of the the the I'll call it the, like, kind of, like, the app builder category of, like, you know, build me a simple app, and and that's kind of, like, targeted towards, you know, non engineers today and giving them the the ability to to write software or build software like you're kinda saving. And then there's there's engineers, which there are kind of some subcategories within, but but I I I think for the most part, it's all it's all connected much more so. Speaker 1: 02:24:36 My current AGI test, I've moved the I've moved the goalpost 25 times. I'm moving them again. Yeah. My current and my current AGI, goal is if I can go to Google's new, Jules AI agent, and if I can, with one prompt, say, build me Google Reader, and it does it, then AGI has arrived. That's my new goalpost. Speaker 4: 02:24:57 Yeah. It's kind of insane if you think about you so so one of the things you know, there there was, some research that came out and kind of people did some statistical analysis. And if you just look at, you know, the length of time that an autonomous coding system can go in between every human intervention, it's it's kind of insane. It's doubled, like, every three months. Yep. Speaker 4: 02:25:16 And so it's like that's like 16 x a year, you know, and we've been doing this for a couple years now. So we're like, you know I mean, not that long ago. Was like a couple seconds at a time, and now you're doing hours of work. Right? But but it's like I I just should mention that because, you know, Google Reader is obviously, it's like a really great product. Speaker 4: 02:25:30 You have to imagine they put like a million hours Speaker 1: 02:25:31 into that. Right? Speaker 4: 02:25:32 There will be a a point at which it is, Speaker 1: 02:25:34 that window is a million hours of But Speaker 3: 02:25:37 yeah, we'll get there. We'll Speaker 1: 02:25:38 get there. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, we had Will Brown on the show, and he was saying Speaker 3: 02:25:41 that How do you Speaker 1: 02:25:41 We have AGI, but I call it fifteen minute AGI. And so, yeah, you can go and do But if it's a task that would take a human a week, it's not going to be one shottable in the traditional Speaker 3: 02:25:53 sense of a single How do you and the team think about the balance between wanting to create product experiences that somebody could just be almost like a demo, right? Somebody was posting yesterday that they one shotted a calendar app. And like that's like cool and and you know exciting and all that but maybe not massively valuable. But I'm curious, do you guys have some sort of like internal framework for how you decide whether something is, like, really worth spending time on? Is it, a truly important problem? Speaker 3:

02:26:27 Or or is it just is is an opportunity just an opportunity to go viral and get attention but doesn't create that enduring value? Speaker 4: 02:26:36 Yeah. Yeah. For sure. So, I mean, it's in the long term, our target has always been, you know, let's let's do real engineering work that that is, you know, that that that teams are actually products that teams are really building out there in the real world. And think the thing that's kind of interesting is is, yeah, because it is all, you know, one group of people, I I think it is the ability to to build all these, like, cool things out does matter. Speaker 4: 02:26:56 It's we have a distinction internally where we call it street performer Devin. Basically, it's the the version of Devin, you know, that that that where where people are asking Devin to just do really cool stuff. You know? Yeah. And it's something that we spent some time on, but obviously, the the the core by far is really just like, how do we have Devin solve real issues and real projects for your code base? Speaker 4: 02:27:16 Yeah. Speaker 1: 02:27:16 Yeah. Street performer. I like that. I do wonder yeah, it feels like there's still two frames of mind, this consumer and enterprise, even for stuff that I would call I would call work. There are certain times when, like, I don't want to open an IDE or I don't have time in my day as a live streamer and someone who does most of their work over email and phone, more of, like, the executive role. Speaker 1: 02:27:42 I I still will want an engineer to intermediate the products that I wanna build. And I'm wondering if if there's a time line for when that stops happening or I start instantiating whole software products, this idea of, like, the it feels like most of the time when you hear someone say, oh, I used AI, and I vibe coded an app in the weekend. They're still a programmer, and they're still running a business, and they're still working on that forty hours a week or something like that. But they're just getting a lot more leverage to this. I I feel like the really cool moment that's maybe coming is when I I I actually say, I want Google Reader and just build it for me. Speaker 1: 02:28:19 And so so in terms of shifting that enterprise experience of, like, real, not street performance, but real software into the consumer, into the consumer space, does that come top down, or does that come bottom up from, like, the chat box that I'm already interacting with? Speaker 4: 02:28:36 Yeah. And so so I I I think both forms are gonna happen in the sense that, you know, big companies are gonna look. There's there's obviously always competitive pressures. There's a lot of relative things going on. And and I think, you know, big companies that already have, like, software products that millions of people use, there's gonna be a lot more onus on them to just make really, really great software. Speaker 4: 02:28:55 You know? It's I I mean, it's I I I keep track of this every day, you

know, when when I'm doing things and I run into just bugs in software and the stuff that I'm using. It's it's it still happens Speaker 6: 02:29:04 all the time. Speaker 3: 02:29:05 I I mean, let's let's let's Speaker 4: 02:29:07 be honest. Speaker 1: 02:29:07 And book a flight. Speaker 3: 02:29:08 X is X is the the absolute worst culprit here. I I interact with more bugs on X than any other piece of software I use. Speaker 1: 02:29:17 I completely disagree. I I mean, it's Speaker 3: 02:29:19 so much worse if you go and try and book Speaker 1: 02:29:21 a flight on the American Airlines app. Yeah. Like, the bar's Speaker 3: 02:29:24 so low. I don't know. I guess Go ahead. Go ahead. Sorry. Speaker 3: 02:29:28 No. Go. Go. Speaker 4: 02:29:29 Yeah. Was gonna say, yeah. So so that's, know, their like product quality is gonna have to get way, way better there. I think the other side is also gonna be true, which is individuals are going to be be able to build cooler and cooler apps. But but, yeah, I mean, I think at the high level kind of general trend is is, as we're saying, you know, as these tools get more and more autonomous, autonomous, like, you want to be able to just use them for longer and longer stretches of time, which is, I I mean, which is which is pretty topical given all the agent launches that we've seen this past week. Speaker 1: 02:29:54 So Yeah. Talk to me about positioning against Google's offering. My my experience from as a consumer, I only interact with, Google right now on the AI front as a consumer. Obviously, I've, like, run ads on Google from a business perspective. But in general, I see a Gemini launch. Speaker 1: 02:30:12 And then as a consumer, it's very, very hard for me to access that product. The I have five different Google accounts. I can never tell which one is on the Google AI premium tier. I got I finally got in. I got access to v o three. Speaker 1: 02:30:24 It was an incredible model. Feeled like it felt like they were truly a a step above, and there was kind of a chat GPT style moment for for video that given that the audio comes through. It's super photorealistic. It's a great experience, and it's and it it justified me not only paying $500 a month, but going through the UX hurdle. Is is the developer experience on the enterprise side dealing with Google similar, or are they more dialed in there because it's more important? Speaker 1: 02:30:52 Because I imagine that one of the advantages that you have as a startup in the enterprise sales space is that you you can do founder led sales. You can take the needs of the enterprise into account much more, different SLAs, more custom solutions. There's so many more things we can iterate even if Google is able to come out with something that, is like, wow. Okay. They're really good at at research, but on the product side, maybe it's lacking. Speaker 4: 02:31:16 Yeah. Yeah. So so it's you know, Google has Jules now. OpenAI has the co codex launch. You know,

GitHub is doing doing more with agents as well. Speaker 4: 02:31:23 And can I just tell you, mean, it's the the we have always had the view that just, like, everybody's gonna go do this eventually? Yeah. You know? Speaker 3: 02:31:30 No. It'd be really bearish if everyone was like, oh, no. Scott's, like, just kinda crazy. I don't know what he's up to. I don't think it's a good idea. Speaker 3: 02:31:37 It's like, no. You should inspire a bunch of people to be like, that's a good idea. We're gonna do it too. Yep. And then you should still beat them. Speaker 3: 02:31:45 Yep. Yep. Speaker 4: 02:31:45 Yeah. Yeah. And it's like parallel asynchronous coding agents, you know, has been it it's been the core bet of our entire company basically for the last year and a half. And and I think it's it's really interesting to see. Yeah. Speaker 4: 02:31:55 And so so I think there are a few factors going on. Like, I I do think there will be multiple players, you know, in the long term. But but to your point, John, I mean, I think there's also just a lot of there's a lot of meaningful differentiation. I think the thing that's so interesting about the coding agent space is, like, it is truly you can kinda look at most spaces and and kind of call it I'll say, like, this is a capability space. This is a product space. Speaker 4: 02:32:18 Right? And to just give you a kind of a few examples, would say, you know, it's like image generation is like sure. You know, there's a lot of kind of, like, icing you can put on and things like that. But at the end of the day, you know, if you just have a way better image generation model, you know, that is the that is the the kind of the the core. Like, that is the the meat of what you're building. Speaker 4: 02:32:35 Right? And and, like, on other spaces, for example, you know, like, support or something like that, you know, it's no one would disagree with you that the capabilities are there, and a lot of it is just, like, what is the right interface for humans and AI to really work together and and and get that going? With coding agents, it is truly both Speaker 1: 02:32:50 Mhmm. Speaker 4: 02:32:51 Where it is, you know, on on the one hand, obviously, yeah, mean, every every every IQ point really matters, you know, in the system that you build. And every every piece of data that it can use and analyze and works with, it it really matters. And then on the other hand, it is, you know, it's the software is just messy enough and deep enough that it's it is it it's it you do want to have a lot more control of what's going on. You wanna be able to specify these details. You wanna be able to check-in and review the work yourself and all of these other things, and so there's a lot of deep work with interface. Speaker 4: 02:33:20 And it's yeah. I mean, in short, think these are these are the kinds of problems that we've been thinking about for the last for the last year. You know? And so it it's it's fun to see. And and, you

know, the fun thing too actually is, like I I mean, it's we're we're up 30% week over week actually with with just the and it's and and I think there's kind of a funny thing which is like, you know, people people know how to use chatbots. Speaker 4: 02:33:41 Right? It's like something that we've all kind of learned over the last couple of years. Yep. I I think the the the agent form factor is just really different. Right? Speaker 4: 02:33:49 And and it's something that people have to learn and have to understand. And and now that everybody's talking about agents, it's actually, you know, it's it's actually been great for us. Speaker 1: 02:33:55 So Do you think deep research is part of that? Like, I feel like deep research for a lot of people is their first first, introduction to agentic, AI in the sense that it's like, you fire it off and you let it go for twenty minutes and then you come back. Right? Speaker 4: 02:34:10 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. I I think the whole right. Speaker 4: 02:34:12 Asynchronous kind of action is is really, like, a a big piece of it. And I think it's you know, we were talking about this last time, but it's like agents are gonna be everywhere, you know, pretty pretty quickly. And there's no reason you shouldn't have an agent who's, you know, going and buying your flights so you don't have to go on the website yourself or going in, you know, all of these different things. And and I think for a few reasons, code has kind of been the first place where that's really taken off. But but but yeah. Speaker 1: 02:34:36 Yeah. This is a total wild card, so feel free to pass if you haven't dug into it. But Ben Thompson was talking about the agentic web. We're talking about agents now. And he was kind of noodling through the idea that stablecoins could be a relevant tool in the toolkit for Speaker 6: 02:34:53 Yeah. Speaker 1: 02:34:53 The agentic web as you, you know, ask the one of the examples was plan a birthday, and it's doing a lot of things on online. Maybe it's buying, birthday cards. It's also looking up a cake recipe and then printing that out. Well, that cake recipe website is monetizing with advertising right now. Stablecoins in the future, you could just pay a tenth of a cent for that page visit. Speaker 1: 02:35:16 Are you thinking about stay stablecoins at all? Does that sound reasonable to you? Just, if you noodle on it, how do you think about this stuff? Speaker 4: 02:35:23 Yeah. For sure. So, I mean, I think with, you know, building software engineering agents, we're probably, you know, on the further end of Yeah. Away from it. But but with that Speaker 3: 02:35:30 Crypto pivot. Speaker 1: 02:35:31 Yeah. Not a lot of it. Yeah. I imagine that not a lot of customers are paying 1 tenth of a cent for Devon right now. It's probably more in the Speaker 4: 02:35:38 hundreds of thousands. You know? It's it is, like, an interesting thing, which is, like, maybe a one way to put it is like a lot of the norms of the Internet are gonna have to change. Right? Sure. Speaker 4: 02:35:45 You know, it's we have captchas, for example, which is kind of how you prevent bots. And I it's it's almost like captchas aren't really the right, like, system where you'd actually now want your agents to be able to go and, like, navigate on the Internet and do things for you. And, like, a simple example of that for us is, like, this is, again, totally unrelated to software engineering, but it's, like, you know, we give Devin our rent card, then Devin just goes and orders groceries for us and stuff like that. Really? It's, like, yeah. Speaker 4: 02:36:07 It's great. But but you can imagine, you know, there's a lot of these systems of, like, yeah. How how should agents interact with money in the real world? How should they you know, how how can, like, products and and and websites and stuff have the right incentives if it's not humans that are going to them anymore, but agents and humans? And and so, yeah, a lot a lot of questions. Speaker 1: 02:36:25 Has Devin ever missed a memo on a ramp receipt, or is Devin pretty good about that? Speaker 4: 02:36:30 I think Devin's got it all down. Yeah. Devin Devin takes screenshots and stuff as well, so it's all yeah. Speaker 3: 02:36:35 That's interesting. Are you thinking about the the sort of stack, right? Because I know you guys have a partnership with Linear. Obviously, work with Yeah. With Linear. Speaker 3: 02:36:44 There's this idea that much like a a member of like a team, an agent can kind of appear in a lot of different places, right? A teammate can be in the office. They can be in a, you know, in a Zoom call. They can be in Slack, whatever. And how are you thinking about kind of like a agentic kind of like orchestration, right, in sort of managing agents? Speaker 4: 02:37:08 Yeah. Yeah. Linear is by the way, just had to launch this week. They had launch this morning, actually. Yeah. Speaker 4: 02:37:13 So so yeah. Yeah. Shout outs to the Linear team. And and, yeah, it's it's it's an interesting one. Mean, speaking of this kind of, like, product interface question. Speaker 4: 02:37:20 Right? You know, the the a lot of the work that you have to do is is really, like it is is you know, I I think one of the big difference between chatbots and agents is an agent is truly like, it truly needs to be, like, basically an employee in the same way. You know? It is really like you as an engineer are using your team of of of junior buddies who are gonna go and, like, implement this stuff for you. Right? Speaker 4: 02:37:45 And and and and so, like, a a lot of what that means is it has to be in all of these same systems, you know, in in order to work really cleanly. Okay. And, like, the the the standard workflows that we have. I mean, we have Slack, for example. We have Mhmm. Speaker 4: 02:37:58 Linear and and Jira and so on, but it is a big part it. Speaker 1: 02:38:00 Yeah. Last question, actually from your post. You asked

for questions from people who follow you, and Remy Olsen asked a great one. What do you see as the primary limiting factor for coding agents between context window, reasoning, which I imagine is just the amount of of inference, you're delivering to reasoning tokens, managing complex environments, or other things? Speaker 4: 02:38:25 Yeah. I think of those, I would say I I would say managing complex environments is probably the biggest one in the sense that, look, if if you like speaking of fifteen minute AGI, you know, if if you give it, like, a a a very contained coding problem where it's just like, alright. Write one, you know, one file of code that solves this thing. It's honestly it's already insanely Speaker 1: 02:38:43 good. Sure. Speaker 4: 02:38:44 You know? AI is is already basically there, I would say, on that. I I think that the areas where you see these agents or or models in general, like, really slip up is is kind of stuff where, like, you actually just need outside information to go and do what you're doing. You know, it's it's and like the the simple examples are, you know, if you're fixing bugs or you're implementing things, like, you wanna be able to go and test the code yourself. This is a big part of why connecting with all these systems is so important. Speaker 4: 02:39:11 And so, you know, plugging into Slack or Linear, for example, makes it really easy for you to kick off your dev and runs or whatever it is. But but I think a big part of it too is, like, if you guys are actually doing your issue tracking in Linear or if you guys are, you know, this is how you do front end deploys and this is how you run the linter or something like that, it is obviously you know, the the agent is gonna be super handicapped if it doesn't have access to the same things. It's Totally. You know, the the next step beyond that, obviously, is not just accessing those things, but but learning how to really intelligently work with these and and and use them to make decisions. Speaker 1: 02:39:40 Any reaction to the llama four behemoth? I I I think I saw 10,000,000 token context window. Seems bigger than ever at the same time, kind of been going back and forth on how that project is progressing. There's been kind of mixed reactions online. What what what's been your takeaway from that? Speaker 4: 02:39:56 Yeah. There's a lot of cool projects working on longer context windows. Mhmm. I I would just kind of give as as one point, which is, it's interesting. You know, if you think about human human human thought, which is which is not always the best parallel, but but is is is obviously is is the one example that we do have. Speaker 4: 02:40:12 You know? Humans actually have terribly small context with this. You know? It's like when you get, like, the six digit code, you know, it's like like I don't know. It's, like, pretty hard to remember what Speaker 3: 02:40:20 the six digits Speaker 5: 02:40:21 were and type those in. Speaker 6: 02:40:22 Goldfish mode. Speaker 1: 02:40:25 Yeah. Even recoding. It's like it's like once you have to remember, like, the three different files that it takes you a while to spin up the context window, and then you don't wanna get pulled out of coding. You wanna be in the flow. Right? Speaker 4: 02:40:36 And so the thing that humans are, like, really good at, I would say, is almost more like intelligent retrieval, right, to your point, which is, like, you pull up this file and you're looking at it, and you're like, oh, yeah. Like, I remember why we did this, like, two months ago. And then you're kind of like you can kind of like replay it in your head almost. That's kind of the thing that's that's that's really interesting. I I don't think it's so so I I guess, long story short is, like, I I think long context is gonna help a ton. Speaker 4: 02:40:58 It's gonna make things a lot better. But but I think there are some kind of, like, fundamental things of, like, how do you access all of the information that you need access to to make this decision that's right in front of you right now, which is, like, context alone doesn't solve that problem. Speaker 1: 02:41:10 Sure. Well, thank you so much for coming on. This is fantastic chat. We'll talk to you again soon. This was great. Speaker 1: 02:41:15 Have a great rest Speaker 3: 02:41:16 your day. Speaker 1: 02:41:16 We'll talk to you soon. Speaker 4: 02:41:17 Alright. Speaker 6: 02:41:18 Take care. Speaker 1: 02:41:18 And up next, we have Joe Wiesenthal, the stall award. Speaker 3: 02:41:21 30% week over week. Pretty big. Wednesday. It's Wednesday. Speaker 1: 02:41:26 Well, welcome to the studio, Joe. Bring him in. Bring him in. Bring in Joe Wisenthal. Speaker 3: 02:41:32 Wanna wait anymore. Speaker 1: 02:41:33 Oh, welcome to the show. Speaker 7: 02:41:36 Thank you. Speaker 1: 02:41:37 How are you doing? Speaker 7: 02:41:38 For having me. I'm really good. I'm thrilled to be back here. Speaker 1: 02:41:42 How are you holding on? Speaker 3: 02:41:43 What are doing? Are you holding Speaker 2: 02:41:44 on with the the market's Speaker 1: 02:41:45 was flat on Monday, we didn't know what to do. Normally, we're either depressed and praying for something to change and then or celebrating a big update. We've seen these, like, 5% swings, and it's just been boring. Speaker 7: 02:41:57 It's so painful. I thought Yeah. Like, you know, the market stopped moving, and I was like, the technology brothers will never have me back. They'll never have a reason to call me again. My I had I had one month of relevancy. Speaker 7: 02:42:11 People were listening to my podcast because the the lines were moving up and down, and then they stopped. And I'm like, okay. Well, I enjoyed it while it lasts. Speaker 1: 02:42:19 It's all over. Security. Speaker 3: 02:42:20 So Yeah. We're have we were having you on to Speaker 7: 02:42:22 move have you back on the show. Speaker 3: 02:42:23 We're having you on to move the

market. Speaker 1: 02:42:25 Yeah. Yeah. This will drive the market. Speaker 3: 02:42:27 We'll see what we can do. Create some volatility Yeah. Just off of Yeah. Let's do it. Let's do it. Speaker 3: 02:42:31 Yeah. Speaker 1: 02:42:32 Well, I mean, so so with the trade war, we RIP. We yeah. Yeah. I I I kind of had this, like, somewhat controversial take that, like, the the trade war was not like COVID or the or the interest rate crash because the the person who caused it could immediately undo it. Yeah. Speaker 1: 02:42:51 Trump could roll it back. Speaker 7: 02:42:52 Which he did. Speaker 1: 02:42:52 Which he did. And I was talking to Jordan Schneider trying to talk about this. Like, he was saying, like, no. This time is different. It's not gonna be like the trade war from Trump won. Speaker 1: 02:43:00 We're gonna look back on this as, like, the beginning of the end. It's terrible. Yeah. He was very doompilled. But it feels like now if we flash forward four years, we could be looking back on this and being like, that was a crazy month, but it wasn't that big of a deal in, like, the world historical context. Speaker 1: 02:43:12 What do what what's your read on it now? Speaker 7: 02:43:14 It's a really tough call because I was very sympathetic to that. And then as soon as he walks back, you're like, of course, he was gonna walk it back. Speaker 3: 02:43:20 You're so stupid for everything at this time. All Speaker 7: 02:43:22 that being said Speaker 1: 02:43:24 We have a laugh track now. Speaker 6: 02:43:26 I love that. Speaker 7: 02:43:27 It's so professional. All that being said, a 10% baseline tariff on the rest of the world is not nothing. We are now a high tariff country. Speaker 1: 02:43:34 Oh, yeah. Speaker 7: 02:43:36 There is this pause, but a 50% tariff or whatever it's gonna be is not nothing. These are not complete nothings. Yeah. And I do believe that they will change the economy in some ways that they anticipate. Look. Speaker 7: 02:43:50 When he unveiled that chart on April 2 Mhmm. I thought it's like, well, he's basically unplugging the economy. We can't function with these levels. Yeah. And he sort of realized that too. Speaker 7: 02:43:59 He said the bond market got yips. He went back. And then he probably heard stories about potential empty shelves at places like Walmart and Home Depot and stuff, and then he dialed it back further. We're still in a new era though Speaker 1: 02:44:12 of Yeah. Speaker 7: 02:44:12 Trade. It might be more like Brexit where it's like, yeah, if you go to was in London a few weeks ago. It's still the same old UK. It's still a pretty, like, rich country. It's doing well, but it's they haven't grown that much. Speaker 7: 02:44:24 It hasn't been particularly good. So it might be the kind of thing where we don't notice it dramatically except maybe it's we don't grow as much as we could. Who knows, though? Speaker 3: 02:44:33 Can you tie this to the I don't know if it's the weather, but

when I'm in when I'm in The UK, it's something about the slow growth of the economy that's just You can just feel it. You can smell it. Speaker 1: 02:44:43 Ugh. Well well, hopefully, it doesn't cover America. Can you can you tie this to the credit downgrade? How serious is that? Should we care about what Moody's thinks Speaker 7: 02:44:52 about us? I don't I don't care about credit ratings. I mean, I'm sort of a strict view that we borrow in currency. We borrow in dollars and print dollars, so we'll never default. But Sure. Speaker 7: 02:45:01 There is a you know, I would say there's two things, which is one that, you know, it looks like we are gonna get some sort of inflationary mix potentially between tariffs and tax cuts. Speaker 1: 02:45:13 Yep. Speaker 7: 02:45:13 So I that tends to not be very good for treasuries. Mhmm. And to the extent, you know, that, like, policy changes in The US are now everyone understands that they can be unilaterally changed on a whim, probably not great, all things being all things considered for the perceived institutional stability. So that's probably also not great at the margin for the international proclivity to invest in The United States. You know, the one thing that's really notable is that a lot of markets clearly have rebounded to an extraordinary degree, most notably the stock market. Speaker 7: 02:45:44 Yeah. Bitcoin All time Speaker 3: 02:45:46 Bitcoin all time high. Speaker 1: 02:45:48 Bitcoin all Speaker 7: 02:45:50 dollar has delayed me. Speaker 3: 02:45:51 Pump. It has Speaker 1: 02:45:51 of that. Speaker 7: 02:45:52 Well, can I by the way oh, pump was on earlier? Speaker 1: 02:45:55 Yeah. Yeah. He was on Speaker 3: 02:45:55 a surprise guest. Speaker 7: 02:45:56 That's can I just say, the the first time I was on this show, one of the questions the two of you asked me was, will SPACs have to come back? Yeah. Yeah. And I said, well, in my lifetime, they will definitely come back. Pumped it as a new SPAC. Speaker 7: 02:46:10 And when when I said when when I said that SPACs would come back, was thinking, like, five, ten, fifteen, twenty years. I did not think Speaker 3: 02:46:18 that when we get a rebound They said Pompe doesn't have the balls to launch a SPAC in the year 2025, and he Speaker 2: 02:46:24 proved him wrong. Proved wrong. Speaker 7: 02:46:25 Proved him wrong. I've never had a prediction come true that fast as that one. So I appreciate Pomp vindicating, my last appearance on TBPN. Speaker 3: 02:46:36 Yeah. It's great. Vindicated. Speaker 1: 02:46:38 I wanna talk about, like like, The Middle East deals. The Yeah. Yeah. What what was your read on on all of that? It didn't seem like it was super market moving per se, but it was very big and tack. Speaker 1: 02:46:51 And it seems like there's this new era of cooperation there. It seemed like like amid all of the the turmoil of the tariffs, there was, like, this bright spot of, like, some really strong new alliances. Obviously, there's some controversy there, but what what was your read on the on the Mideast news? Speaker 7: 02:47:06 You know, I I I've been posting about this a lot, you know, ever since I hit, my mid forties. I've been reading a lot about the Cold War and mid twentieth century history because that's what you do at my age and so forth. But one of the things that I've been reading about lately is that one of the you know, every time The US and The Soviet Union appeared to have some period of detente, so to speak. Mhmm. One of the entities or one of the forces that pushed the countries apart were the sort of, like, the human rights groups, etcetera, that really didn't like, you know, various activities going on in the Soviet Union and that often made it difficult to have peace. Speaker 7: 02:47:41 It's an interesting thing to think about, well, if foreign policy just became a little bit more transactional? We sort of accept that, like, there's, like, a very different system in this country Speaker 1: 02:47:51 Mhmm. Speaker 7: 02:47:51 Than, you know, this other country. But you know what? Maybe we can have stable relations if we agree to sell them cutting edge GPUs to set up an AI. It's an interesting thought. And I don't have, like, extreme or strong views on foreign policy. Speaker 7: 02:48:08 It's not my wheelhouse. Yeah. But it's an interesting thing to think about, you know, for so long, there was this view that, you know, like an important aspect of stable relations was some sort of common ground in governance and values and so forth. And maybe we are entering this era where stable relations are who we agree to sell chips to. Speaker 1: 02:48:31 Mhmm. On the other side Speaker 7: 02:48:33 of It's an interesting thing to think about. Speaker 3: 02:48:35 Jensen. Another hundred billion for Jensen. Speaker 1: 02:48:38 Yeah. He's been on a tear. Speaker 7: 02:48:39 Jensen keeps winning. Yeah. Except in China. Speaker 1: 02:48:41 Have you been tracking how many conferences he he's been going to? He's he's it feels like he's in a different conference every single day, and yet, normally, that would be very, very distracting for a CEO. But every time he goes to a conference, he leaves with a hundred billion dollar deal, so it seems like it's working. Speaker 7: 02:48:57 It's really it's really remarkable. And, you know, again, I don't know how much like, I've been trying to think about this, like because the way people are talking about AGI and you guys have probably a lot of guests who know way more and being out there is like, you know, the race to achieve AGI Mhmm. Is something akin to, like, which country will develop the nuclear bomb first. We must get there. I don't know. Speaker 7: 02:49:19 It feels a little sci fi to me. I don't know how much to take that seriously. Other people are better equipped to talk about that. But there is this sort of, like, simple business story Totally. Which is, like, ecosystem that powers AI, or

could it be the Huawei ecosystem which is coming on strong? Speaker 1: 02:49:36 Yep. Speaker 7: 02:49:36 And so to the extent, like, just from a business standpoint, Jensen going around the world, making all these sales, potentially boxing out Huawei from The Middle East. Just from a business standpoint, seems to be doing very well. Speaker 1: 02:49:49 Yeah. We were just talking to Scott Wu and from Cognition. They have an AI coding agent. And this idea that we have AGI, but it's just fifteen minute AGI. Like, you can you can get an agent to go and do Yeah. Speaker 1: 02:50:01 Fifteen minutes worth of research for you and compile a little, a little dossier for you and deep research. You don't have AGI to the say extent that you can just say, go create economic value for the rest of your life like you can with human. Speaker 3: 02:50:13 Right. Speaker 1: 02:50:13 And the economic incentives just lead to a person finding their way in the economy and finding a job and buying things and consuming things. Speaker 7: 02:50:21 I still haven't had, like, a great experience yet with any of the agent tools. Mhmm. I was someone asked me, they're like, do you have a list of all of the Twitter handles of guests that have appeared on OddLots? Mhmm. And I was like, no. Speaker 7: 02:50:35 But let's see if I could do that. So I went to Manus, the ChineseManus.im, and I said, can you put this together? Oh, yeah. Sorry. I know. Speaker 7: 02:50:42 And then Speaker 3: 02:50:43 It's pronounced Manus too, by the Manus. Speaker 7: 02:50:46 And then it it worked for, like it was, like, thirty minutes later, I went back and checked, and it said, oh, you're out of credits. Speaker 1: 02:50:53 Oh, Speaker 7: 02:50:53 no. I did I never even got to see if it worked yet. Yeah. I don't know. I have yet to experience Speaker 1: 02:50:58 Well, the question for me is is how long would do you think it would take, you know, like a like an intern to do that job? Well, it'd take a Speaker 7: 02:51:05 really long time, but, like, I don't even like, but, you know, like, my experience I think we may have talked about this last time. Like, my experience like, I'm still not totally convinced that they're, like, reliable. Yeah. I don't know. Like, I I just think yeah. Speaker 7: 02:51:20 I need to Speaker 1: 02:51:20 keep experimenting. I I I think you make a good point. It's just that when I think of fifteen minute AGI, I think that what's a fifteen minute job? It's look at the most recent Odd Lot show notes and find me the one Twitter handle for the guest. Yeah. Speaker 1: 02:51:34 And now if you wanna do that 200 times, that's not fifteen minute AGI. That's that's one week AGI. And you need to spawn all these different processes and orchestrate them and and fact check them and build that up. And so, yes, management should be able to Speaker 3: 02:51:47 do that, but not I think it's just wildly unreliable right now. Yep. And so sometimes you get an output that is 10 times faster and better than your best employee. And sometimes it just completely fails. Yep. Speaker 3: 02:52:01 We're not really equipped to like process. Is the agent good? Okay, well sometimes the agent is incredible. And then other times, it's like yesterday I wanted it to count a bunch of boxes, and it, like, worked on it for fourteen minutes and failed. Speaker 7: 02:52:14 I completely agree. Like, I'm I'm every day still. And by the way, I've Suno, the music app Speaker 1: 02:52:21 Oh, yeah. Speaker 7: 02:52:22 I'm the songwriter. That's incredible. That actually of all the AI tools that I've played with, that might actually be the one that's most incredible. I've been doing this thing where I just sing a song into my phone. Cool. Speaker 7: 02:52:34 And then I say, produce this to sound like an eighties country song, and it actually works. So that like, some of these things just, like, absolutely blow me away. Speaker 1: 02:52:41 Have thesis for that because with with music, there's no right answer. Like, the the there's no there's no Yeah. Oh, you got one character wrong in the Yeah. In the Twitter handle, and it's not gonna resolve. Right? Speaker 1: 02:52:53 Right. Right. One note slightly wrong, but it still sounds like music, you can kind of chalk that up to the vibe or or slight differences. And so I feel like that's why the image generation Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 1: 02:53:05 It's less, like, binary. Or you have code where it compiles and it can work against itself and check, okay. Does the code work or not? Try again. Speaker 3: 02:53:14 Let's try. Speaker 1: 02:53:14 Try again. Try again. And so you either need to be when you're in the messy middle of, like, human management decision making, analysis, that's where AI is really struggling right now. Speaker 7: 02:53:23 So just going back to the question of, like, can can AI compile all of the Twitter handles from every guest? I'm guessing the answer is yes. Yeah. On the other hand, if that's what AGI is, I'm not really sure it's existential Speaker 1: 02:53:36 whether like Totally. Speaker 7: 02:53:37 You know, China the Chinese model is better than OpenAI's model. Speaker 3: 02:53:41 AGI is when you can ask ChatGPT to bring down the long end of the yield curve. Because it's really getting up And right now, if I could just go to ChatGPT and say, hey Speaker 1: 02:53:52 Let's do something happening. Help us out Speaker 3: 02:53:53 here. Let's do something happening. Speaker 7: 02:53:54 That we need develop right away. Speaker 3: 02:53:56 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let's talk about this. I know you have a Speaker 7: 02:53:59 And having project level urgency there. Speaker 3: 02:54:01 Yeah, yeah. I know you have a podcast episode coming out tomorrow about bond yields globally, what's happening. Could you give people a little teaser preview on on on that, then they can go listen to the full thing? Speaker 7: 02:54:16 Absolute thank you so much for letting me plug our

episode tomorrow. Steven Englander, Standard Chartered, one of our favorite thinkers. We actually never had him on the show. You know, the story, there's there's a there's a few moving parts to what's going on. But a big thing is this combination of countries around the world are spending more money. Speaker 7: 02:54:35 They kind of have to because, you know, like, again, talked about US foreign policy. Germany doesn't know if The US is gonna be the same type of ally. Trump for years, even going back to his first administration, obviously encouraging the NATO countries to sort of more formally meet their commitments. So you have increased spending. At the same time, you have tariffs which are going to make business more costly, less probably less efficient because you're not gonna have the most optimally designed global supply chain that would exist in a world of Speaker 3: 02:55:08 Free trade. Speaker 7: 02:55:08 Sort of pure free trade. So you have this combination of every country sort of having to become a little bit more self reliant, at least in some respects. And you certainly see that in a lot of, like, tech areas, weapons, probably food even as well, energy and so forth. Combined with the fact that, you know, you're having sort of less efficient supply chains, that's probably all things considered means, you know, more inflation and for to hit inflation targets, central banks are gonna have to, generally speaking, keep rates up. We might get rate cuts in The US in the short term. Speaker 7: 02:55:41 That's what Steven Englander thinks. That's certainly what the market is pricing. But he thinks the window for that will be pretty short, and maybe even by next year, could be talking about rate hikes again. Yeah. I know. Speaker 7: 02:55:52 I know. We need that AGI. We need that AGI to bring down rates. Speaker 1: 02:55:56 How do you think the big tech companies have been changing their tune around how they talk about AGI? It used to be all about safety, which you you know, I think a lot of people have kind of just gotten sick of the safety argument. Yeah. Now it's all product, and all of a sudden Yeah. It's we're not moving fast enough. Speaker 1: 02:56:11 You know, Siri isn't good. Speaker 7: 02:56:14 Yeah. It's confusing. It's a little bit confusing because I mean, first of all, I agree. The safety story feels very yesterday. This is such a business story. Speaker 7: 02:56:24 The market, just for better or worse, and I don't really have a view on safety, but the market for better or worse seems to be dictating to the companies. It's like, no. You gotta race ahead as fast as you can. You do not have an alternative to this and so forth. And you even see it, you know, obviously, like when Deepsea came out and it displayed its reasoning. Speaker 7: 02:56:45 OpenAI had to respond and it started displaying some of its reasoning models. So there's the sheer competitive aspect that like you just sort of gotta do what you gotta do for like the product side. On the other hand, there are things that the tech companies are doing that do not sort of seem to me, oh, within a year, they're gonna build or within a couple of years, you know, they're gonna have these brains that are thousands of times more intelligent than the than a human. I saw there was something about open AI, think about a social network. They hired a CEO for, like, product and revenue. Speaker 7: 02:57:18 There was that news today about buying a Speaker 3: 02:57:20 heart attack. Speaker 7: 02:57:20 Funny eyes. Email. You probably already Speaker 1: 02:57:22 talked about this. In. Yep. Speaker 7: 02:57:24 This does not these sound like ventures or these sound like investments that are about making money for a business, Speaker 1: 02:57:31 which is Speaker 7: 02:57:31 great, and do not sound like we are building something insane in a lab that is going to change the world. So it feels like there is this impulse among the big AI companies of various flavors to basically build good businesses and profitable things rather than this technology that, you know, is going to render human existence obsolete in some way or another. Speaker 3: 02:57:56 Yeah. Yeah. And it feels like OpenAI as a lab, there there there could come a time when OpenAI could kind of, what's the right phrase for it? But but effectively, like, OpenAI will be in a position where they can be like, yeah, we're a consumer Internet company. Yeah. Speaker 3: 02:58:15 There will be other there there will be other lab there'll be other labs that Yeah. Don't have the luxury of saying that. Yeah. And it'll be interesting if there's like this kind of divergence in I mean, the tough season is have to keep the AGI narrative Speaker 1: 02:58:27 I think the steel the steel man on the AGI narrative is that, like, would we have gotten this amazing consumer technology and enterprise technology and all this value without the crazy AGI narrative that drove Yeah. Nonprofit investment in highly unprofitable research. And it's it's kind of like I feel like everyone makes the con the the comparison to nuclear. But when I play back the story on nuclear, it's like America did this incredible Oppenheimer Manhattan project to develop the bomb, which I don't see as really, like, a good thing. Like, the bomb, obviously, it's just like Rate stake. Speaker 1: 02:59:03 It only destroys things, and then it immediately becomes this, this arms race and this equilibrium is just that you have to build a ton of them, but none of them get used. They create no real economic value. Right? But the good ending of nuclear would have been energy too cheap to meter, nuclear power everywhere. We didn't get that. Speaker 1: 02:59:21 And my hope is that we're in this situation where we have the panic scare around AGI as a weapon, but we don't go the nuclear path where, oh, you can't possibly have chat GBT. It's too dangerous. Speaker 7: 02:59:33 No. I I agree with you. And I think if you

look at, like I mean, it is absolutely extraordinary. The rate of growth that big temp big tech companies are growing from. I mean, this is what's sort of breaking the brains of everyone in the market Yeah. Speaker 7: 02:59:48 Which is that everyone's been long, big tech forever. They're the biggest companies in the world, and they're still putting up some of the biggest earnings growth that you've that you can find anywhere on the market off of a gigantic base. And I do think part of that story is gotta be that the CEOs really believe to some extent. And I don't know what exactly what they believe and I don't know exactly what AGI is and they probably all have different definitions. But they probably all believe it's like, no. Speaker 7: 03:00:16 Like, we're not gonna slow down our spending on this stuff. Yeah. Because we haven't achieved that thing that would that's out there that will be so special if it's achieved. Speaker 3: 03:00:26 Well, I gotta ask, Joe, would you rather would you rather own Costco at 59 times earnings? 59 Costco at 59 times earnings or Google at 19? What is the chickens? Speaker 7: 03:00:40 You'll never get Speaker 3: 03:00:41 me to Blizzies. Speaker 1: 03:00:41 You know. Never get give Speaker 7: 03:00:44 finance. Why is every you tell me why is everyone so negative on Google these days? What's the story? I don't know. Speaker 3: 03:00:49 I I think it's I think it's it's really hard Speaker 1: 03:00:51 to access. Like, they they they're an incredible research lab, but they but they haven't communicated very effectively around the product. So they introduced the product, and it's in a research preview. They have a paper. But in order to access it, like ChatGPT, when there's a new feature, you go to chat.com and it just says use this thing. Speaker 1: 03:01:09 And with Google, it's like there's the Gemini app and then there's Gemini Smart Responses and then there's No, it's so confusing. Speaker 3: 03:01:15 But that's a product experience. And then there's obviously, like, the Yeah. The threat to the core Speaker 1: 03:01:20 Core. Right. Business model. Core search. The golden goose. Speaker 1: 03:01:22 Searching in chat GPT, you stop Speaker 3: 03:01:24 They got a knife they got a knife on the neck of the golden goose. Speaker 7: 03:01:28 Yeah. No. It's true. The Google AI products, some of them are extraordinary. I've played around Speaker 1: 03:01:32 with some Speaker 7: 03:01:33 of the coding tools. I've put Notebook LM is a very useful Speaker 1: 03:01:36 Very cool. Speaker 7: 03:01:37 Tool for Yeah. Research. It is true that, like, no one would ever know how to find any of Speaker 1: 03:01:43 this stuff. It's really hard, especially Speaker 3: 03:01:45 Well, it's in the App Store now. Notebook. LM's in the App Store. It's in the it's it's charting. Speaker 7: 03:01:49 Book. LM, what kind of name is that? Who would even know what that is? It does seem I don't know. Speaker 3: 03:01:52 What kind

of name is Joe Weisenthal? Speaker 7: 03:01:54 Yeah. But what kind of name what kind of name is, like, o three mini? Speaker 1: 03:01:59 Yeah. They're all bad names. Speaker 3: 03:02:01 They're all bad. Names won't the names won't matter. Speaker 1: 03:02:03 The names don't matter, I think. But, yeah, there there there's something about, like, Google is if they really, really went full tilt into AI, they would just say Google.com is our AI product. Right? Instead of using there's a separate app, Gemini, and, like, you can go over here and win an extra thing instead of being like, no. Like, we are an AI company. Speaker 7: 03:02:23 Could you see that happening? Speaker 1: 03:02:25 No. No. I don't I don't think the company's set up for it at all, but I think that Yeah. On a Speaker 3: 03:02:29 long enough time horizon, I see. Speaker 1: 03:02:30 If it's if it's Mark Zuckerberg and he owns a % of the shares, and he can just do whatever he wants. It's private company, and there's no investors that can sue. Like, there there are different structural dynamics at Google than at a small start up. Speaker 3: 03:02:41 I I I can just see it being more as a spec Speaker 1: 03:02:43 guys? Yeah. Yeah. Please. Speaker 7: 03:02:44 Can I ask another question to you guys? Do you have a clear way to articulate the benefit that Meta is getting from all of its AI spending? Speaker 1: 03:02:54 I mean, yes. Because the first like, the the the the the base use of AI at at Yeah. At Meta, the number one, like, just energy cost in GPUs is ads, delivery of But isn't Speaker 7: 03:03:10 that just good old fashioned machine learning algorithm stuff? Like, what is it if they Speaker 1: 03:03:13 do a lot generative ad? It's the same thing. Yeah. Like like, the the algorithm that decides what ad to serve you when you're scrolling Yeah. Instagram is a big transformer now. Speaker 1: 03:03:23 And so it's a bunch of weights just like an LLM. But instead of taking in text and putting out text, it takes in everything that you've looked at, how long you looked at it, what you liked about it, whether you commented So it's getting better and better and then Exactly. And so that's huge training run. They never talk about this because it's not sexy and it's not the new hot thing. But but but you can think about, like, the the meta ads training run is similar to, a GPT three, GPT four level training run. Speaker 1: 03:03:48 And and then the Reels algorithm for what content to serve you, not just what ads, that's also another huge vertical. And so when Zuck went to build out the Reels algorithm farm, the server farm that would power the Reels algorithm, because it's billions and billions of data points, right, He said, I don't want to get caught flat footed again like I did against TikTok because when TikTok came up and they and the whole algorithm shifted to, I need to rank every piece of content across the entire network and match billions and billions of of videos with billions and billions of users. He said, I don't wanna get caught flat footed again. Build me two data centers that are the same scale. And then he had he had extra capacity thinking about, okay. Speaker 1: 03:04:29 I have two data centers because I just built double. Let's train an LLM. And then the more and then the more tactical reason is that LLMs are gonna get stuffed everywhere in every enterprise. Speaker 7: 03:04:39 I've noticed. And sometimes I just accidentally wander into an LLM. Speaker 1: 03:04:43 Yeah. But not even from the consumer perspective. Speaker 7: 03:04:45 Like Oh, I see. Speaker 1: 03:04:46 Think about within within Facebook, they have to process payments from their from their advertisers, and they might wanna run those through an LLM to say, we being defrauded? Or Okay. Yeah. Or there's a consumer, there's customer support that's happening or any little internal thing, even just like, should we censor this comment for a user who's under 18 years old? Right? Speaker 1: 03:05:11 Like, that that is an LLM that runs in the background. It's not consumer facing. Why would they have to pay OpenAI for that? Why would they have to pay Google for that? Speaker 7: 03:05:18 No. This makes a lot of sense. Can I say one more thing? Speaker 1: 03:05:21 Please. Speaker 7: 03:05:22 I I need a for anyone who's watching, I have a lot of dear friends. Please never send me a reel. I never watch them. Really? Like, someone's like, oh, they send you a reel. Speaker 7: 03:05:32 Was like, I'd I'd rather not. So I would like Speaker 3: 03:05:35 to use your platform. Carrier Carrier pigeon? Speaker 5: 03:05:38 Yeah. What's the best Speaker 3: 03:05:39 way to get Speaker 7: 03:05:39 touch? Know. I love them. Yeah. Send me a DM. Speaker 7: 03:05:42 Whatever. I'm just not gonna want watch your reel. Speaker 1: 03:05:44 But I'm gonna mail I'm gonna mail you a DVD of the best reels. Speaker 7: 03:05:46 Yeah. That's fine. Speaker 1: 03:05:47 I'm gonna mail you a DVD, a Blu ray of just all the best reels. Speaker 3: 03:05:51 Well, what about taking it a step further? Vinyl, and it's us describing reels to Jeff. Speaker 1: 03:05:56 That'd great. Speaker 7: 03:05:57 No. I love it. I would do that. We would do that all day. If someone sends me a DM to me a reel, I'm like, do we Speaker 3: 03:06:02 really have to do that? Speaker 1: 03:06:02 Imagine a bunch of colorful marbles falling down the stairs endlessly, or imagine Subway Surfers in the background while Joe Rogan talks about weightlifting with Elon Musk. Yeah. That's a really high performance stuff, but you'll get it on vinyl for sure. Speaker 7: 03:06:19 Thank you. I appreciate it. Speaker 1: 03:06:20 Anyway, this was fantastic. Speaker 3: 03:06:21 Anytime, guys. Let's make this Speaker 1: 03:06:23 let's make this a regular. We this Speaker 7: 03:06:24 is such fun conversation. Anytime. Love chatting with y'all. Speaker 1: 03:06:26 We're gonna Speaker 3: 03:06:27 just put

a calendar. Hold on. Yeah. We'll throw you something. If you ever just if you ever if any part of you ever thinks, man, I'm I'm not excited to talk to John and Jordy today, Speaker 1: 03:06:35 then Speaker 1: 03:06:35 we'll catch excited to talk Speaker 3: 03:06:35 Jordy Speaker 1: 03:06:37 Yeah. Yeah. Well, we'd love to have you back. It's great. Alright. Speaker 7: 03:06:39 I'll be back. Speaker 3: 03:06:40 This is Thank you for moving the market. Speaker 1: 03:06:42 This is great. He moved the market on our stream numbers. We're up at 10.8 k today. Good day on X. The livestream is popping. Speaker 3: 03:06:50 Popping. Google's up Google's up 58% today. Speaker 1: 03:06:54 Is that that because Speaker 3: 03:06:56 said why why is everybody bearish? He just had to ask that question, and the stock popped almost 3%. Speaker 1: 03:07:02 He's reading tea leaves. Hey, ChatGPT. Take this transcript from Joe Weisenthal and turn it into financial advice. Make it make it ultra opinionated. No. Speaker 1: 03:07:11 Obviously, no financial advice on this show, especially from us. Speaker 3: 03:07:14 The question of, like, what is what does Zuck get from llama? We obviously did our LAMA deep dive. Yeah. But it's like such a history an appreciation for open source and so many different platforms. Yep. Speaker 3: 03:07:27 Right? He just Yep. It would be hard to take Meta seriously as Yeah. A hyperscaler. As a hyperscaler if they didn't have any type of AI play. Speaker 3: 03:07:38 They also get the benefit of learning from other people building on llama, even if there's not some massive direct revenue benefit. Speaker 1: 03:07:45 And I think what Joe is really heading on, which is correct, is that the LLM chat based chatbot UI paradigm is not a perfect fit for what Meta's products are right now. Speaker 3: 03:07:58 But Speaker 1: 03:08:00 as the UI paradigms mature, you can imagine just, okay, we know that images are moving from diffusion to token based So you can imagine that maybe I don't want to constantly generate AI slop and throw that up on my story, but I could totally want to take a selfie and say, hey, just with natural language, can you make the sky clearer? It's a little gray today. Can you just make it blue back there? Speaker 3: 03:08:26 Also just to hedge against as AI companions just people develop relationships effectively the models, that is a threat to Meta's core business of connecting regular people that have conversations in the app that Yep. Totally. That bring people back to the app so, you know, they can serve more ads. Yep. Anyways, today was a very fun show. Speaker 1: 03:08:50 Very fun show. We got to go take some photos. Speaker 3: 03:08:52 We had range from Eric Prince to Joe Weisenthal. We really covered everyone. Speaker 1: 03:08:56 I got I got some text messages. Someone said, great lineup today. I'll read this up. Where is this? Great lineup today. Speaker 1: 03:09:05 Blackwater. Blackwater for software engineers, Cognition. Blackwater for Sam Altman's haters, OpenAI. Lots of Blackwater folks. The Blackwater of Podcasting, Joe Wassenthal. Speaker 1: 03:09:17 Yeah. Senra. I think David Senra is more Blackwater coded when it comes to how Ruth Speaker 3: 03:09:21 is listening. Efficiency He prods. Speaker 1: 03:09:23 He prods. Anyway, thank you for listening. This is fantastic. Switch your business to Ramp.com. Check out Polymarket. Speaker 1: 03:09:31 Talking about Speaker 3: 03:09:32 Using Ramp. Ramp. Ramp. Ramp. Ramp. Speaker 3: 03:09:35 Wanna get I'm gonna Speaker 1: 03:09:36 board for Speaker 3: 03:09:37 on getting a Polymarket set up on Yeah. Pump SPAC. Oh, yeah. Like, does Speaker 1: 03:09:41 it actually Does it happen? When does it happen? When does it go out? Like the IPO markets that we've been having a lot of fun with. Speaker 3: 03:09:46 And then as the rumors start circulating That's really cool. Who's the target? This is all great. Speaker 1: 03:09:50 This is great stuff. Speaker 3: 03:09:51 I'm gonna be going to hit up all our boys, all our group chats. Hey, who's got a profitable financial services company that they want to take Speaker 1: 03:09:58 public this I want to highlight one timeline post before we get out of here. Leonard Haim, he's coming on the show next week. Jordan from China Talk recommended him. He talks about chips and AI, and I love this because there's a there's a screenshot that he's quote tweeting from, I believe, the Financial Times. It says, we still don't know how much energy AI consumes. Speaker 1: 03:10:19 Companies must give us the chance to understand the environmental impact of the tech we use. And he says, yes. We do. It's '21 gigawatts. You count all the AI chips produced, factor in that they're running most of the time, add some overhead, and you got your answer. Speaker 1: 03:10:33 It's a lot, and we'll only get more. But you know what? Probably worth it. And I loved I loved it. Like, there's so many of these opinion pieces that are like, we could never know. Speaker 1: 03:10:41 We could never know. And he's like, no. You can just add it up. It's pretty easy to understand how much energy it's producing. So I saw this post after I already invited him, but I'm super excited to talk to him next week because clearly, banger. Speaker 3: 03:10:53 Banger. Anyway because it takes Smith. Speaker 1: 03:10:54 Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts, Speaker 3: 03:10:57 has been really explicit about this. Yes. If you like watching the show, our jobs are on the line. Our jobs are on Speaker 1: 03:11:04 They will recast us. Ben is Ben someone else. Speaker 3: 03:11:07 Ben is making menace giving us a menacing look right Speaker 1: 03:11:10 His his his thumb is over the purchase button on an Audi r eight, and he can only do it if you leave us five stars. You don't leave us five stars, we're never gonna get there. Speaker 3: 03:11:19 Help them. Speaker 1: 03:11:19 Thank you. Speaker 3: 03:11:20 Alright. Cheers, folks. Speaker 1: 03:11:21 We'll talk to soon. We'll see you Speaker 3: 03:11:22 tomorrow. Bye.