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Today is Tuesday, 08/19/2025.

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Hey, John.

I'm good.

I need to finish tying my shoes.

I

Wait.

Take all the time you need.

It's about three hours.

Three hours.

And knowing us, we really have more like three and a half.

We really Alright.

The countdown is literally down to two seconds.

And I couldn't I couldn't get my last shoe tied.

Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in today.

We have a great show for you, EA.

Jamath Paliapatthia is the current thing, and that's where we're starting our show.

Jamath is back with a SPAC focused on defense tech AI DeFi.

We're not exactly sure what he's what the target is.

He's got options.

But it's big it's big news.

It's big news, and it's burning up the timeline, and there's a lot of a lot of coverage and a lot of history here to talk about.

So we wanna take you through the history of Chamath, look at what happened the last time he was big in SPACs.

He did 10 of them.

There's a wide range of performance.

Kind of a narrative violation that everyone thinks they all went to zero.

There was one SoFi that did very well.

Size going for the pure number of SPACs.

10 SPACs.

That is huge.

It's actually not as big as some of the stuff that was going on in the .com boom.

I know a guy from Pasadena who I believe took a 100 companies public during the .com boom.

A 100 companies.

That's some big numbers.

Big numbers.

Incredible stuff.

And if you're dealing with big numbers, you gotta get on ramp.com.

Time is money.

Save both.

Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.

So we put up the post.

Breaking news.

The SPAC king is back.

Chamath Palihapatia Palihapatia files a new $250,000,000 SPAC, American exceptionalism acquisition.

Would be un American to not like this name.

It's a great name.

It's a great name.

Previously, the I mean,

he's How do always pronounce it, though?

He's always

been How you pronounce?

Aixa?

Aixa.

Aixa?

I don't know.

He's always been good with the names.

Aixa.

I I liked he Aixa.

He you know, the the SPAC is not a new thing.

People think Chamath invented the SPAC.

He didn't.

It was being used in the nineties.

Okay.

I don't know if anybody thinks he invented it.

He But he certainly did.

Everyone everyone thinks he invented it, Jordy.

Literally, thinks he invented it.

No one thinks anyone else invented it.

No.

It was used in the nineties.

Yeah.

Also, the company that that created Cyberpunk and The Witcher, CD Projekt Red, went went public via SPAC, I think in, like, the mid two thousands, something like that.

Anyway, we'll we'll we'll get into some of the lore some of the lore whether you're watching on YouTube, whether you're watching on X, thank you to all the folks in the chat.

We this is only possible because of Restream, one livestream, 30 plus destinations.

Multistream reach your audience wherever they are.

So thank you to Restream for making this possible.

Thank you for John Exley for being in the chat.

Thank you to

Where was John Exley yesterday?

Yeah.

That's a big question.

John, you got some questions to answer.

You got some questions.

We missed you.

Everyone was wondering.

So we're going through Chamath Palihapitiya's SPACs.

And the Financial Times had one of the most insane articles I've ever seen.

I I didn't realize they

It looked like

had this dog in them.

I didn't realize that they could post like this.

This is one of the craziest

felt like articles it should have been in the timeline.

Now, it's in Alphaville, which is one of their, like, blogs.

It says, Tomath's new letter to SPAC investors.

Yeah.

The writer's name.

Robin Wigglesworth.

Wigglesworth.

So Wigglesworth is Common for common for Robin is for

American exceptionalism looks like in 2025.

Yesterday, they this is this is a rough article already.

Yesterday, misadventure capitalist, Chamath Palihapatia, filed a prospectus for a new $250,000,000 special act special purpose acquisition vehicle.

You can read the full s one filing for American Exceptionalism Acquisition Corp here.

In case you're interested, here are some expert excerpts from the accompanying letter written by Polyhapatia to his company's friends and supporters presented without written comment, and you will see that they put images in here.

Quote from Chamot

Pull up this pull up the screen here.

You gotta pull up the screen because the whole bit is the images.

When I first raised when I raised my first SPAC in 2017 people think of the the SPAC era as 2022, 2021.

It actually started in 2017 with Jamath.

The first SPAC raised in 2017 went out in 2019.

I wanted to help correct an increasingly unstable balance between the private and public markets.

While SPACs are not the solution to every issue in the IPO process, I continue to believe they have an important piece to play in capital formation, especially now.

We believe that retail investors should only participate if, a, this investment is a small part of an otherwise diversified portfolio b, this investment is a quantum of capital they can afford to completely lose and c, if they do lose their entire capital, they will embody the adage from President Trump that there can be no crying in the casino.

And his first ever SPAC

Yes.

Was the one that I p o IPOA merged with Virgin Galactic Yes.

And is down 98.5%.

Yes.

So, I mean, back to the naming thing.

Phenomenal work naming these SPACs.

IPO A, IPO B, IPO C, IPO D.

Then he did a run of biotech SPACs that were called DNA A, DNA B, DNA.

And I thought that at one point, he was going to go through all the entire alphabet and do IPO But basically, from 2019 to 2023, Chamath did 10 SPAC deals.

Four of those were liquidated, which sounds a lot more dramatic than it is.

When SPAC gets liquidated, the investors just get their money back because no target company is selected for acquisition.

So the way a SPAC works, Chamath promoter, a SPAC promoter goes out to the market and says, I'm going to buy a company.

I don't have them lined up yet.

You're gonna give me $250,000,000.

We're gonna put that in a bank account.

So it's ready to deploy?

It's ready to deploy.

So we're gonna put $250,000,000 in this bank account.

You're gonna earn T Bill's interest on it.

But if we don't select something, we can't get a deal done, we can't find a good company that we like, you will just get your money back.

And so there's there's there's like there's low risk that, like, you just lose the money.

And so the liquidations, four of them, they just didn't find they didn't find home.

They didn't find targets.

And so those investors got their money back.

Now of the six SPACs that were successful, they didn't get liquidated.

They did despac, meaning they acquired a company and then changed their ticker to to represent Virgin Galactic or SoFi.

Only one

C e.

Of the six is currently sitting at a higher price than what it went out at.

SoFi, the lending company, SPAC'd at $10 a share, and now sits around $23 a share.

Not bad.

The other five stacks There we go.

SPACs did very poorly, and this is why the timeline is in turmoil over there.

Yeah.

It's it's so Virgin

Virgin Galactic's down 99%.

But but look at the history here.

So

Yeah.

Please.

The stock peaked on 06/25/2021 at $1,118 a share

No way.

Down to $2.94.

Well, so that 1,000 is they did a they did a a stock split.

Oh, got it.

Got And so, I mean, they did a 20 for one to 20 reverse stock split to try and because they were trading like a penny stock, and so they they they they brought the price of the share back up, but they reduced the number of shares significantly.

So it's not like it actually went out as a thousand dollar stock.

It went out as a $10 stock, but then it it it it fell off.

And Virgin Galactic was always an interesting one.

It you you would you easily could have put it in the bucket of serious entrepreneur.

Richard Branson is a serious entrepreneur who's built big companies and is extremely successful and billionaire.

You you could have put it in the same category as Elon has SpaceX, very serious company with real revenues, huge huge share of the launch market, huge business with Starlink.

Bezos has Blue Origin, very serious business, more in the space tourism category right now, but surprisingly making progress there.

Not a zero by any means, not a vanity project.

And you would think Virgin Galactic, maybe the same thing could happen now.

But they made bets on space planes that would fly up and they never really got a flywheel going that could really compound like Starlink, like just launch capability for The

US If if you go on their website today, it's almost entirely renders.

Yep.

It's bad.

So anyway, Virgin Galactic is down 98.5%, something like that.

Opendoor was another one that went out.

This was a Chamath spac, down 64%.

But maybe there's a comeback.

Keith Raboy came on the show and the retail army is working to

We'll make open door see.

CEO.

We'll see.

Yeah.

The the current CEO just stepped down.

So there should there is a catalyst there.

So who knows?

Something could happen.

Clover Health is down 75%.

A a Ackley is down 96%.

Pro Kidney is down 75%.

So basically, if you bought an index of Chamath's SPACs and held, you're probably disappointed.

But Chamath, to his credit, is not advocating that you YOLO into his deal.

He says straight up, no crying in the casino.

Probably the first time those words have ever appeared in

Metro Mile went out too.

Right?

Wasn't that a Tremont Spock?

Spock?

Tremont Spock?

Was that a Spock?

I I remember a post I remember a post saying Yeah.

It was Buffett had GEICO I

have MetroMile.

Yeah.

But it was MetroMile was

thought MetroMile was so cool when I found out about it.

So the basic pitch for MetroMile was like, you pay auto insurance.

The default is you just get auto insurance based on your car, who you are.

If a young man who tends to get a lot of speeding tickets, you might have to pay a higher rate, especially if you're driving, say, a red sports car.

But if you're, you know, someone who's who's hasn't gotten in an accident or hasn't gotten a speeding ticket in three decades, you'll probably pay a really low rate.

And, of course, it costs more to in to insure a Lamborghini or McLaren F1 than a Honda Civic.

But most of the insurance, the current market for insurance, will look at your odometer and see, oh, okay.

Well, you the average American might drive 10,000 miles a year.

You're only driving $2,000 2,000 miles a year.

The chance that you get into an accident or something happens with this car is is much less, so Yeah.

We'll give you a discount.

And so they do verified odometer discounts.

MetroMiles pitch was, let's put a GPS tracker and a an accelerometer in the car, hook it up to the port on the car, and we can see if you're driving the car hard.

Yep.

So if we drive like if you drive like us, we're gonna pay through the roof because we're gonna be drifting and and and doing aggressive overtakes wonder how I wonder how

I wonder autopilot would do on Metro Mile.

Oh, yeah.

Because yesterday yesterday, I was going to dinner with some friends.

Oh, you got

the love.

Each they Yeah.

Friends of ours.

Each have have matching Tesla wise.

And

How did they

they went

did is whose?

They should have Yes.

Get a livery on one of them or something.

Question.

Ryan Spencer,

you know

what to do.

Yeah.

But they both set the cars on autopilot to drive from their office to dinner.

Okay.

So I was driving one of them.

The first Tesla takes the autopilot is incredible Yeah.

Except for this one tiny moment Okay.

Where there's a left turn, there's a stoplight, the the Tesla takes a right turn into into this lane that's merging the other way and then realizes it made a mistake but it was like there was already a a separating kind of wall.

Mhmm.

And it and it takes this like horrifically illegal left turn merging into traffic, still fully in autopilot and the other Tesla followed

Oh, no.

The other Tesla and made the same Take

a big stake.

Extremely illegal left turn.

So you could imagine at some points, you know, the the metro mile

Yeah.

The system is like, actually, we're loving this driver.

Well, if

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I like this post in the chat, Trey.

P says, should be cheaper to ensure a Lambo so it incentivizes success.

That's a good take.

That is a good take.

That's good take.

Okay.

So so Metro Mile, I don't know

Ends up getting acquired by Lemonade for less than 10

Oh, that's what happened to

get acquired.

So 10% of what it's p What

it went out.

So a dollar share instead of 10.

So

Something like that.

In general, people are saying, you know, the last batch of SPACs didn't do very well.

The the past performance is indicative of future performance, which, of course, it is not.

And so like, you are you are doing as much hand holding as possible to tell people, I am building a casino.

Yeah.

You can bet on me or you can bet against me.

It's you

know, have these lines in there where you read them and

you're

like, wait.

You know, it sounds Risk.

Right?

There's

Risk factors.

Clearly outlining

the business.

And the best companies in the world will have a risk factors section.

In fact, they have they have one every time they file.

Yep.

And Like Facebook, Google, Apple, they all have risk factors.

The line here is consequently, we believe that this investment is most suitable for institutional investors and retail investors should approach with caution if at all.

We believe that retail investors should only participate if this investment is a small part of an otherwise diversified portfolio.

This investment is a quantum of capital they can afford to completely lose.

And if they lose their entire capital, they will embody the adage from President Trump that there can be no crying in a casino.

So Yep.

I read this this, you know, we have to wait and see, you know, does he does he, you know, end up merging with a company.

The the core categories are energy production, AI Mhmm.

DeFi, and defense.

Mhmm.

So a bunch of really hot categories.

You could see him doing something in nuclear.

Yep.

You could see him you could imagine him doing something with Grok.

Right?

Yep.

You could imagine him there's a variety of profitable DeFi companies that are now, according to the White House, operating Yeah.

Legally.

A lot of them have beat various lawsuits with the with the SEC over the last couple years and then defense as well.

So four very hot categories.

It will you know, we you you kinda need to wait to pass too much judgment until you understand what the target is.

But ultimately, I see this as if you look at this product as an entertainment product

Yeah.

For for stock enthusiasts or you look at it as as a as a as a kind of slot machine.

Sure.

Personally, I plan to I plan to ride with with Chamath.

I love it.

Not financial advice, but I think it'll be entertaining.

I think it'll be fun.

Yes.

I'm it's it's it's, you know, think of think of it as like an expensive movie Yeah.

Interestingly, Scott Kapoor, who we've had on the show, former a 16 z, now the director of office of personnel management, He quoted that Feet article, put it on the timeline and said, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice.

So I believe Scott will not be riding with Chamath, but he'll he'll be taking the other side.

Let's lay

out Wait.

Do you know that quote?

What?

From former president George W Bush.

He said, there's an old saying in Tennessee.

I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee that says, fool me once, shame on shame on you.

Fool me twice, fool me, you can't get fooled again.

And I think that says everything there is, you know

It was to

really say about

this he next reaching, I know that that's a famous quote.

And obviously, you know, he was probably misspeaking, but was he hitting some deeper truth?

The last line

is fool me.

So the true quote is, fool me once, shame on you.

Fool me twice, shame on me.

I shouldn't I need to take the blame because I shouldn't have been fooled by somebody who already fooled me.

But maybe the real lesson is if you have been fooled twice, just full stop you can't get fooled again.

Maybe that's actually better advice than saying, oh, then you need to take the blame on yourself.

No.

If you get fooled twice, just never get fooled again.

It's a full on skill The issue at that

exact line is fool me.

You can't get fooled again.

Exactly.

That's actually better advice than placing blame after a multiple fooling incident.

Yeah.

You must just move on.

Anyway, the bull case for Chamath.

He's probably learned a lot from his last go around.

He stayed in the game.

He never stopped talk talking publicly on his podcast.

And there's probably another SoFi like company out there right now if you look hard enough.

So there is a chance.

He could buy a fantastic business at a fair price Yep.

And compound for decades.

Yep.

That would be how that would be that would be if he, you know, that you can kind of, know, I think about the motive it's true love.

The motivations here.

Like, one Yep.

Like, he's probably gonna make a lot of money Yep.

One way or another.

Yeah.

People can debate if if that's ethical or not, but ultimately, it's not illegal.

Yep.

So he's gonna make a lot of money.

Part of this feels like a spite spac.

Right?

Yeah.

You

you were highlighting different

motivations.

I'll I'll I'll robot robot

Yeah.

So, you know, people, you know, here will know, you know, spite business.

Right?

Like setting up a coffee shop next to your enemy.

Sure.

And, you know, just competing with them.

Yep.

And then, a Spite's back is like, you know, people have been clowning him pretty much daily for the the 2020, twenty twenty twenty one era.

Mhmm.

And just coming out and doing it again is is certainly a way to just like give him the middle finger.

Mhmm.

And then and then, yeah, there there's this sort of like last laugh play which is, you know, actually buy a a fantastic business and he can't control if if if it turns into a meme stock.

Yep.

Right?

Like people can pump it to whatever price.

Yep.

But but but there is a good outcome here where where it's another another SoFi and it and it just buys a solid business and compounds, you know, over many years.

Yeah.

I mean, I so Redemption.

The redemption SPAC.

The redemption SPAC is a good is a good narrative.

That's what I'm hoping for.

The flip side, I I think it's just like he he has a business and he's developed a line of business and a set of customers for his business, which is he matches institutional capital with companies that want to be public but can't go out via the traditional means.

And he's created this product.

And people look at it and they look at the last the last batch of product he shipped and say, okay, maybe it's not maybe it's not Diet Coke, maybe it's RC Cola.

But like he is in this business of of producing the product of a public company, of a public stock ticker.

And there's there's an element of like, if you keep doing that, maybe he can hone it, get better.

Or maybe it's just like it is what it is.

And for a certain for a certain investor who wants more of a casino type bet, this satisfies that.

Yep.

There's a note.

The the very end of not the very end.

There's a lot more fine print.

But he says, importantly, to provide greater alignment with my investors, dramatically reshaped and restructured the sponsor's economics.

There will be no warrants.

Further, a 100% of the sponsor's founder shares will vest only if the company resulting from our initial business combination achieves stock price appreciation milestone

That's right.

Ensuring the sponsor's founder shares only realize value if public shareholders realize value.

Yep.

Specifically, the sponsor's founder shares will only invest only vest once the stock price of the company resulting from the initial business combination increases by at least 50% as further described below.

Please note that most SPAC sponsors receive a 20% promote that participates regardless of the company's stock price.

Our sponsor instead will receive a 30% promote that vests and realizes value once the combined company achieves a 50% premium to the IPO price.

And he gives a table below kind of outlining this.

I mean, was the major pushback was that regardless of what the SPAC did, there were rumors that, you know, Chamath was walking away with $10,000,000 or $100,000,000 Like, the numbers seemed crazy.

And it was almost like you take a banker's type fee for taking a company public, but then you're not incentivized for the long term.

So you have this adverse selection problem where you're just trying to get companies that can just get through the process, basically.

And it seems like he's working on solving that, which is good news.

Yeah.

I do wonder, like, does that 50% gain need to be sustained for any meaningful amount of time?

Because if it's just like a quick one time pop, it unlocks everything, it crashes, like that could be could be not the full solution that the market or the critics are looking for.

And so But it's good it's good just to see that, like Yeah.

We're It seems like we're moving in the right direction, where the where the the the compensation for doing this process, for taking the company public, is not entirely incentivized on on just getting the deal done.

Yeah.

In general, like, so

the It's also pair it's also quite a bit smaller than some of the other ones, right?

Quarter.

Really?

I I I don't know what the other ones were.

If I remember, they were in there was at least a couple that were in the billions.

Really?

Because I I thought that these went out at $10 a share, $4,000,000,000.

And I would be surprised if if there was 25%, you know, cash coming into the business.

I thought most of them were like in the

few Yeah.

So Virgin Galactic was 800,000,000.

800,000,000.

Okay.

Yeah.

That is significantly higher.

You're right.

Clover was 3.7.

Yep.

Opendoor 48.

Yep.

SoFi 886.

Yep.

So we'll see where this one actually

ends up.

The bear case here is that the IPO window is wide open.

So there's probably some sort of adverse selection among companies that can't use the traditional IPO pathway.

That being said, lots of people raise reasonable critiques of the current IPO process.

And it's not that crazy to have multiple options.

Investors should just work to value the underlying business of the SPAC company like any other investment.

Build a DCF, people, or maybe channel Charlie Munger and buy a wonderful company at a fair price.

And if you're interested in using a design tool from a now public company, go to figma.com.

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at Figure.

So Buko, capital bloke

Yes.

Yesterday said with Chamath launching us back and Benioff buying every company not pinned down, the only question is whether it's January or November 2021.

And I said this is the question every group chat in tech is trying to answer right now.

People wanna know when is the music gonna stop?

Is this time different?

Do we have room

to run?

There's so many posts about this in the timeline right now.

And, yeah.

That's the question here.

I mean, I have no idea when when the new SPAC will actually get out.

Yep.

It seems very possible that it would be next year.

But I'm sure there's quite a lot of companies that are actually interested in in partnering with with Chamath on this regardless of what the timeline's reaction has been.

Yeah.

Totally.

Wasteland Capital says quite significant sell offs across the Ponzi verse today despite a flat S and P 500 and small caps being green.

People starting to eye the exit sign.

Scrooge McDuck says they're freeing up margin for that upcoming Chamaz back.

I had a

Is this the NBA commissioner?

Yeah.

Don't understand this meme.

The I mean, the original line was get ready to learn Chinese, buddy.

Oh.

But but Why?

Why?

What was the context of that?

What does it say?

To learn Chinese.

Was that because the NBA was doing some deal with China?

It's a it's a I had to look this up Okay.

Because I'm familiar with the meme but not the actual context.

But it's a joke from the NBA community where washed players that aren't good enough to compete in the league anymore play in China to make it a bit more

But he didn't actually say this.

That's just a meme.

No.

I I No.

He actually said that.

No way.

That's such a crazy thing for a head of a league to say.

Anyway, Jordy's post is, get ready for the trough of disillusionment, buddy.

We have been tracking the Gartner hype cycle, trying to see where we are in the cycle and it feels depressed.

We feel depressingly close to hitting the trough of disillusionment, but then it will be our job to push us out of the trough of disillusionment and on

Can somebody confirm can somebody confirm if this is a real quote

that Yeah.

That is this real?

Apparently, it was Adam Silver to Kyrie Irving but

Okay.

But it may it might just be a total meme.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Anyway, Triple Net Investor says signs we're nearing the end of the cycle.

Chamath announcing a SPAC.

AI hype is greater than .com hype.

Meme stocks like Open Door ripping.

IPOs two to three x in days.

BTC ETH near all time highs.

Golden Housing, all time high.

Palantir at 500 times price PE.

Everyone talking about stocks and crypto.

Is everyone talking about crypto and stocks?

Like, I'm not seeing that that much.

Certainly not.

Tyler.

Yeah.

All 20 Ubers.

Ride with all of them.

See what kind of financial advice you get.

Yeah.

And collate all the financial advice that you get.

Okay.

Also also, I think the original quote from Adam Silver was about like when they had like the China stuff.

Yeah.

So it was get ready to learn Chinese, buddy.

That's right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That would that that that my version of that was get ready for the trough of disillusionment, buddy, because there was that report out of MIT Yeah.

Yesterday that something like 95% of companies that have tried to an MIT report says ninety five percent of Gen AI pilots at companies are failing.

So that's a lot of ARR at various Mhmm.

Gen AI companies that probably will not actually be at least, you know, more like one time revenue versus, you know, truly recurring.

Yeah.

I mean, transfer transformation at big companies, old companies is very, very tricky.

Very, very tricky.

I mean, I I think that what we are gonna see is the companies that make it through that are currently dot AI companies or have AI on the landing page.

Like, that is all going to get tucked behind

Yep.

These the it's gonna get tucked behind the fold deeper into the product

Yeah.

And you're just going to feel, oh, wow.

So I've generally been bearish on .ai domain names.

Well, yeah.

Like, Google Docs

I want your .com.

Google Docs, for years, has let you upload a PDF and it will use OCR, optical character recognition, to convert that into a text file.

That is AI.

Like, the they're literally using a neural network Yeah.

To to look at all the different characters and say, that's a c.

That's an r.

That's a p.

And this is the original ImageNet.

Like, that's what they're implementing.

It's an AI product.

And yet, it's not Google Docs AI.

It's just a feature that's great that people use and they don't even know it's AI.

And I think that over time, AI will be a wedge and it'll be a marketing strategy and then that will get competed away and you will win on the final value that the product delivers.

Yep.

Anyway.

Team, can you guys pull up this image in the chat?

I wanted to just pull up the because there's something you know, when when you've when you've summited the peak of inflated expectations and you're headed to the trough of disillusionment, you know what I love?

Hidden that's Look across the chasm and you can see the plateau of productivity and it is beautiful

out there.

So don't worry.

It's gonna be it's gonna be it could be some dark times in the trough of disillusionment.

We might be dressed up as pigs eating from the trough for a few days.

We might be wearing raincoats.

Might be we might be wearing hazmat suits depending on how bad things get in the trough of disillusionment.

But we will not be disillusioned for very long.

Never.

It will be our job to speed run the trough of disillusionment into the slope of enlightenment and toward the plateau of productivity.

It's gonna

be beautiful.

That will be that will be my goal.

There will be chaos.

Dig us out of the trough of disillusionment.

To climb out.

Climb out, rung by rung.

Anyway, I like some of these there's a debate going on in the chat right now.

Trey P.

Says Sleeper AI integration is Copilot in Excel.

Raghav says Copilot in Excel is garbage.

Let us know what you think.

There are there are a bunch of companies that are doing this exact thing, trying to compete with Copilot and Excel.

We've had a few founders on the show.

There was

a new company.

There was a new one yesterday, Paradigm.

The journal.

Really cool visualization showing all of the different cells working independently.

I I thought it did a good job of of expressing this idea that each cell could be its own LLM that's reasoning and then filling in the results as they stream in.

Like, it had a very nice aesthetic to it.

Also, I think they opened with a really cinematic shot.

Like, as far as the launch video, I think it did a good job of of of bridging the gap between, like, it grabbed my attention.

There was some clear storytelling, some facts, but some good UI.

Like, it did a good job there.

So we might have the founder on at some point.

But it is it is a knockout, drag out fight.

And, you know, will this play out like Slack and Teams where once Microsoft learns all the patterns that people like Yeah.

They roll it out to their billion users or something like that for free.

Yeah.

And or or maybe Grampell in Grampell in the chat says there's opportunity in the disillusionment.

Totally agree.

Completely.

That is that is where when when the when the casuals, you know, pivot back to regular SaaS and you stay focused on building agentic workflows.

Gonna separate the killers from the kids.

Yep.

The tourists.

Well, whatever you're building, you gotta use graphite.

Dev.

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And there's an announcement from Graphite today.

You put it in the chat.

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This is from Merrill Lutzky, who's been on the show.

A poll Team request Cook Cook now where you build, not where you wait.

Welcome to the new standard for code review.

So Well check it

out.

Menidas has a new coinage casino culture.

Mhmm.

He says sports betting, s coins, meme stocks, vibe coding, a 100,000,000 in six hours, etcetera, are all expressions of the same deep cultural rot.

If youth don't believe there's legitimate ways to get rich through work, all of culture will become a rotten sports book for the soul.

Sports book for the soul is good coinage.

Sad sad take.

I think it's it's real but at the same time, it's hard for me to be bearish because we've interviewed hundreds of people this year that are all working I I I guess I can't say all

but It's the permanent underclass meme.

It's the get your bag meme.

It it it it's this idea and it all a lot of it stems from the singular some the singularitarians, this idea that something is coming that will completely upend.

You'll be permanently in the in the underclass.

The world will change so fast that you cannot possibly predict what to do, what to build, what to compound for thirty years, where that was very clearly not on Warren Buffett's mind.

He was just like, I like reading the newspaper and buying stocks.

And so I'm gonna do that every day.

And he made, what, 9099% of his wealth came from the age, like, 65 to 95.

Like Yeah.

He was not really that rich

Compound compounding world.

At retirement age.

Like, that is crazy.

And no one's willing to wait that long.

Everyone is like, I have to do something now.

And then they and they wind up burning their relationships and burning their reputations.

There's so many shortsighted

deals.

Also, you know, know, there's plenty of examples of people that have generated tremendous wealth through getting heavily invested in in crypto Yeah.

Early.

But at the same time, I know I know a number of people that have that got so sucked into that world Yep.

And didn't develop, you know, basically spent five years like not progressing their career, not developing more skills.

Yep.

And then they're stuck in this kind of vicious cycle of feeling like, well, I kind of ignored my career for half a decade and now I just have to keep hyper gambling Yep.

To like try to get out of this mess.

Should we talk about the bonsai tree?

I think it's okay to talk about it the stream.

Right?

We we've added some decor to the the table, this fake plant, which is lovely.

Thank you to the production team for Yes.

Putting this on the

So whenever we need to touch grass.

Yeah.

Oh, this is the Oh, this is that.

This is the grass that we touch, but it's not real grass.

We're working on getting real grass.

We are working on getting real grass.

But we had an idea last night as we were as we were chatting for a future merch drop.

And one of the ideas that we came up with was a a bonsai tree that we will send to you that will have the the the TBPN logo on it.

Of course.

And you can tend it Through By ramp.

Your entire career.

So I'm If you ever wanted bonsai that With a livery.

With livery presented by Ram.

Yeah.

Yes.

Get ready for the the TVP on bonsai.

But I do think that we should get a bonsai tree and put it on here and tend to it over the next fifty years as we grow the show.

And it will be a beautiful reminder of what we're growing and the idea of working for a really long time, having long time horizons, underestimating what can be done in a decade is You the underestimate how big a bonsai can get in a decade.

Yeah.

Thinking about it, you know, starting here small

Yep.

And the time lapse of every show.

Yep.

You're watching TV.

And it's a little bit bigger.

And then we're pruning it.

And just trimming it and just tending to it.

We become bonsai experts.

And you'll be able to follow along at home because we will be be sending

And the alpha in life is finding the bonsai tree of your career.

Exactly.

And you probably You know where you don't see a lot of bonsai trees?

The casino.

That's right.

No.

You never do.

It's a lot of ashtrays.

You never do.

Well, Wasteland Capital is back with another post.

They're sharing, Cathy Wood took in record inflows of 3,700,000,000.0 last week Mhmm.

Including 2,800,000,000.0 into ARC, which quote record breaking single day hauls Halls.

2021, quote, burning hot.

Is this bullish or bearish?

And there's a a snapshot here.

After years of outflows and underperformance, Cathie Wood's Ark ETFs are burning hot pulling in massive capital.

Mhmm.

The firm's 13 US listed ETFs have gathered 3,700,000,000.0 in AUM over the past week led by record breaking single day hauls.

The flagship ARK Innovation ETF led the charge raking in a record 1,100,000,000.0 on Monday and an even larger 1,400,000,000.0 on Tuesday.

This was last week, which marks the biggest single day inflow since 2021.

ARC defines disruptive innovation as the introduction of a technology enabled new product or service that potentially changes the way the world works.

This was followed by ARC next generation Internet ETF, ARCW, which saw its largest ever single day haul with 349,000,000 on Tuesday.

This is a lot of money.

I mean, we were talking about the Chamath SPAC.

It's a SPAC.

I mean, that is It's the Chamath SPAC.

Chamath CHMATH SPAC.

SPAC.

Anyway, the SPAC, that was $250,000,000.

This is just one of the ETFs pulling in $350,000,000, a $100,000,000 more, just on a Tuesday.

But it's a reasonable thesis.

Disruptive innovation's important.

Internet companies continue to be outperforming assets.

If she's in the right thing, it should be okay.

I do wonder the, know, back to that question of like, is it January?

Is it November or whatever?

It's like, I'm trying to remember in January if people were acting like this and calling everything out.

I think people were.

I think people were dunking on the timeline all throughout 2021 when things were ripping.

It wasn't until I think Keith Raboy truly called the top.

And he was kind of

like Yeah.

Was Keith in November.

He had this post.

Tyler, can you actually try to find that post?

It was Keith Raboy.

Yeah.

It was November 2021.

Yep.

I think later

You called it like to the day.

It's crazy.

And what I was reflecting on that and like, what the crazy thing is that like, he's basically a long only investor.

Like, he has no incentive to call a top.

Right?

Yeah.

Like, it would make sense the same is calling tops all day long because he is a short investor, and he takes really short positions.

So I've seen over the past, like, five years, like, headlines that are, like, the investor that called the mortgage bubble just wet just sold everything, just went giga short this.

And and he's been wrong, like, a few times, I think.

He's probably been fined in most of the cases.

But, like, you know, in general, like, I I I expect to hear a top call from Michael Burry or even just like a long short headphone.

They don't have a way to express that in the markets.

It's really just

I mean, the way to express that is, hey, let's not do this series b with a million dollars of revenue Yeah.

Let's pull back

at on the a 400, you know, times

Yeah.

Yeah.

This Jason Kallikanis post is so, so funny because it's Tremoth, of course, is his is his cohost on the All In podcast.

And and Jason says, and here we go, and posts the the the SPAC screenshot next to the Joker meme.

Here we

It it is it it really it really is a a bull case for them truly being besties because posting a joke They

all love to poke fun

at you.

Posting a Joker meme about your cohost is hilarious.

Hilarious.

Hilarious.

Anyway, if you wanna dump a bunch of SPAC data into a database and start running an analysis on it, do it on Julius.

What analysis do you wanna run?

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That's right.

And so we already we already touched on the casino thing a bunch.

In other news, SoftBank is is is doing the meme, as you put it.

The unicorn up into the right, just absolute exponential growth in the that was the stock price of SoftBank.

SoftBank is gonna make a $2,000,000,000 investment in Intel too.

And say what you want about Masa.

He's good at semiconductor investing because he got into Arm, and that was how he made his, what, second $100,000,000,000 return?

Yeah.

The first one was on Alibaba, and then his second one came from Arm.

And so who knows?

You get Masa.

You get Donald Trump with a 10% stake.

You get a couple more people.

So

And Lip Buutan could be in a good position.

Yeah.

Softbank is down seven and a half percent today.

But year to date, it is up 83%.

83%.

And it's a big company.

Big company.

So they announced they're signing a definitive securities purchase agreement under which SoftBank will make a $2,000,000,000 investment in Intel common stock.

I think this is good for Intel.

I was debating this, like, why does Intel need Trump?

Why does Intel need SoftBank?

Is the cure for Intel really different shareholders?

And I think, potentially, yes.

It's it's it's almost like a take private if you get someone who is in it for the long term and can buckle up for a couple awkward quarters as Lip Buuton makes some crazy cuts.

Because if he cuts as much as we think he's gonna cut, you could see revenue fall because that's just a function of cutting a bunch of stuff.

And things might break, deals might might fall through before you can set yourself up for the next era of actual going back into growth.

And so you need you need shareholders that aren't gonna panic and sell and put you put your stock in like the absolute

So dumpster.

So

So the Nasdaq peaked.

The local top was 11/19/2021.

November 19.

Okay.

And on November 19, Art Levy, for CNBC's tech editor said

Art Levy, isn't he Brex?

Ari.

Sorry.

Ari.

Ari Levy.

Okay.

Art Levy's at Brex.

Yes.

But Ari says they have this exchange.

Ari Ari says, amazing to see how many experts on crypto and tech valuations are also experts on inflation.

And Keith says, to be fair, valuations and inflation are directly connected.

Ari says, but didn't we have an explosion in valuations over the past decade despite minimal inflation until now?

Keith says, this is also what crashed the internet bubble, FYI.

And Ari says, ah, so are you calling the top?

And Keith just says, yes.

Yes.

And Insane.

Insane.

Yeah.

Literally to the day he called it.

To the day.

Now, do you think he called it or do you think he triggered it?

Like, do you think that I mean, he's like a very important person in tech and politics and business.

Like, he's someone that is respected and like people look to him in many ways.

And and that echoes through the economy.

Like, there aren't many other people who have more weight in the economy.

It's like Warren And there are other people that are bigger.

But Keith is definitely in the top, you know, like what, decile, quartile?

I don't know.

He's in the top 100 people that are like financial influencers in one way or another.

Like people and also, he doesn't say that much.

He's not constantly saying, oh, next week, I think it's gonna be we're gonna be green.

You know?

Like Yeah.

He's not like constantly putting out proclamations about where the broad market is going.

So I don't know.

People might have paid attention and and they might have been like, I'm and that might have kind of triggered the wake up call.

But I I don't think he, like, fully triggered it.

But it is interesting to to to kind of toy with that idea of, like

Yep.

Of, like, is he upstream or downstream?

Anyway.

Paki McCormack says, what's the fastest way to make a million?

Invest 10,000,000 in in American Exceptionalism Acquisition Corp.

And of course, if history This

is like throwing throwing meat to the the

To the sharks.

To the sharks.

First off, the average the average Chamath SPAC was not down 90%.

It was down, like, 80%.

So gotta put the number in there.

That's the

way to make two Yeah.

I mean, lose 9,000,000.

But if and and and this is a twist on the joke that is what's the fastest way to become a millionaire?

Start as a billionaire and then start Start angel investing.

Start angel investing.

Something like that.

Right.

So it it it's it's what's the fastest way to be a millionaire?

Invest $10,000,000 in this.

But anyway.

Mertz says, Chamath launching a SPAC and holding DeFi tokens.

Of course, unconfirmed whether or not he will actually merge with a DeFi Mhmm.

Company, but he says exit all markets.

I love Merck.

Buko Capital is quoting an old post, a viral post of his.

Can't be mad at Trump.

Guy loves tariffs.

Always has.

Kinda like my dog loves to roll in SHIT.

Can't not love rolling in SHIT.

Doesn't matter how mad I get at him.

Doesn't matter that he has to get hosed down which he hates.

Sees a pile of SH IT, he will roll

in it.

Guy loves it.

Says same thing with Jamoth and SPACs.

He loves SPACs.

Yeah.

I mean, it is it is a niche product.

And Jamoth has figured out a way to, like, really build a business around it.

There are other people that wanna do There are other people that have gotten, have dipped their toes in.

But It's just such a crazy dynamic because I think that all the people that are that are, you know, quick to to dunk and and and chirp at Chamath and anytime he posts about a a good investment that he made, you know, people ask him about about the SPACs which is guess which is fair.

But I think all all those people will just end up investing in this because it's fun.

Yeah.

Funniest outcomes the most likely.

Have you seen the poly market for the presidential election winner 2028?

Who we got?

In first in first place, with 28% chance of being the next president, J.

D.

Vance.

The second is Gavin Newsom at 16%, then AOC at 9%, then Pete Buttigieg at 6%, then Marco then Marco Rubio.

But the J.

D.

Vance, Gavin Newsom, I thought that they were just chirping at each other on the timeline.

No.

People really think that they are gonna be going up against each other in the next election.

So buckle up.

It's gonna be a fun one in a couple years, though.

We got a couple more years of just business and markets and the Gartner hype cycle.

People are speculating that Chamath will take Grok public.

Well, Menaida says, many hours wasted debating if free cash flow will collect at the model layer, the GPU layer, the data layer, or the app layer when it's obvious.

The only free cash flow is coming out of the four and forty SPV layer.

Pretty pretty good.

I have a buddy who is one of the top secondary brokers in the industry.

And he says the high fees in these SPVs are are from chains of brokers adding their fees on top.

It's not the GPs taking more than 8%.

But still, 8% would actually be still insane.

Do you remember when Shammoth was running for governor?

I don't.

But we were Yeah.

We were reviewing some of your old

This was what?

Twenty twenty, twenty it must have been 2020.

The All In podcast was Ascendant.

And both Chamath and Jason Kallikanis were both teasing political runs.

Chamath said he wanted to be the governor of California, and mayor Jason was the thing.

Jason Kalacanis bought mayorjason.com, but it just redirected to his Twitter account.

And none of them ever really raised money for it, but they were, like, having a lot of fun with it.

And it was people were people were wondering if they would actually do it.

But it never went anywhere, but I don't know.

Probably better for him to stay in the SPAC lane, honestly, because it it's clearly something that he's Yeah.

Built in.

So Trini says poly pop Poly

Poly Hopatia.

Poly Hopatia backs back American exceptionalism files for IPO.

He says, it was a pleasure and honor to trade the bull market with you all.

Stay safe until the next one.

And then HG Wells Fargo says, don't act like you won't buy it.

And he says, here for a good time, not a long time.

That's what I'm saying, everybody.

Chamath has a crazy, crazy, crazy history.

I mean, he was at he was at Facebook, made a ton of money there.

Apparently, got into like a salary negotiation with Zuck and wouldn't and and his comp demands were too high, so he decided to leave and become a VC.

And because he had worked on like ads at Facebook and was very entrepreneurial, Peter Thiel opted to back his first VC fund, Social Capital.

But PT gave him this advice of like, you need a really high GP commit, which PT famously has at Founders Fund.

And so Chamath basically put all of his money in social capital or something like that, like huge amount.

And Chamath said that gave him a lot of leverage and autonomy to go do like crazy deals, which he really enjoyed.

But he has some bangers in his portfolio.

I mean, just generally, he went long Bitcoin in 2013.

Not bad.

Went long Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tesla in 2015.

He had this interesting dust up with Brian Chesky at Airbnb over a secondary sale.

Do you remember this at all?

No.

So Airbnb at one point did a secondary sale, but they structured it as a dividend.

And so some of the investors couldn't participate.

And he was like and and Social Capital was upset about not being able to participate in the secondary sale because it was more it was structured as like a dividend to, like, common instead of, like, a tender offer for all shares equally, something something along those lines.

And they kind of went back and forth.

I think don't it ever turned into like a lawsuit or anything, but it but it kind of like made the pages of TechCrunch back and forth as they were like chirping at each other being like, you know, I I I wanna do it this way.

I don't wanna do it that way.

Blah blah

blah.

You think Jamath ended up benefiting from not being able to participate?

Probably.

Yeah.

I think the tender I think the I think the dividends were at like, I don't know, 6,000,000,000 or something.

It's it's like a $60,000,000,000 company.

So he probably got another 10x if he if he was forced to hold.

The the early venture portfolio.

His early venture portfolio is, like, somewhat underperformed, but he's had a bunch of, like, wins.

He also, interestingly, worked on the phone at Facebook.

Facebook was at one point Zuck's always been obsessed with, like, let's get the next platform.

When the iPhone was growing, he was getting crushed.

I gotta get on the next platform.

I gotta get the next platform.

You gotta figure out how to make money on this.

And so, he the Facebook phone was an attempt to, like, get in the game and be directly competitive with with the Apple iPhone because Facebook was a dominant website used on on computers, but they had kind of struggled.

They initially launched a, like, an HTML five version of their app.

It was like a mobile website.

And I remember back in the day, you actually could use a Facebook mobile app that was developed by a third party developer.

That was basically like a wrapper on the API.

Reddit style.

Bad bad business to be do do not be a Facebook wrapper, API wrapper company.

Good luck.

The the the it was like a one time arb.

Spotify played it perfectly.

Spotify grew extremely, extremely quickly because when you when you create an account on Spotify, you would by default create it with your Facebook account.

And then every time you were listening to something, it was like the

Oh, I remember it.

It would share the music that you were listening to to your Facebook feed.

And you could turn that off.

It was kind of like the the the Panama playlists.

Yeah.

So if I'm listening to a 100 GACs, all my Facebook followers would see that I'm to what's that song?

Dumbest girl in the world?

Dumbest Girl Alive.

Dumbest Girl Alive.

Dumbest Girl Alive.

I mean, it's a it's a jam.

So I would be proud to have that on my Facebook feed.

But but it serves as incredible, incredible viral growth strategy.

And FarmVille and Zynga did the same thing.

If I'm playing FarmVille, it's a one it's a single player game, but my progress is shared on Facebook.

And so you see that I'm playing FarmVille and I leveled up, and then you click on FarmVille.

So a bunch of those companies grew very, very quickly, basically for free.

Later, Facebook shifted to you gotta pay to promote.

And so the entire mobile gaming ecosystem now is built on Facebook ads.

And there's still some really, really successful companies.

King is it king.com, I think, is the one?

Supercell is another one.

They make Clash of Clans and Clash Royale.

Essentially, these like match three games where you where it's kind of like Candy Crush, basically.

Anyway, So, yeah.

Chamath, we'll see how it goes.

It'll be interesting to see what he picks.

Hopefully, he picks a really cool company.

And hopefully, it's a compounder.

But let me tell you about ProFound.

Get your brand mentioned on ChatGPT.

Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands.

Get a demo at ProFound.

So let's see.

BUCO Capital bloke is still bear posting.

We talked about that.

Bern Hobart says welcome back to the arena, Tremoth.

Let's move on to

list So Palmer the other day Yeah.

Was posting about housing.

Never a controversial topic.

Never never gets emotional.

He says the fastest way to lower average housing prices in American cities is enforcing the law of reducing criminal activity.

Huge chunks of high density housing are trapped in bad neighborhoods, no go zones depressed well below nearby prices.

Nobody with options even considers them.

Dona says, yeah.

It's priced it's priced high.

Keep riff raff like you out.

Funny how this works.

Palmer Palmer fires back with, I am a billionaire.

What what is this person even saying?

It's price high.

No.

I don't I don't think that person fully Yeah.

I don't I don't know.

Yeah.

I I don't understand that.

That is a very confusing

This post from Chris Camilo's.

So we covered yesterday.

There was some data from Semrush

Yes.

Saying that that ChatGPT usage increases Google search usage.

Yeah.

And I was kinda wrestling with that, trying to think of how that would be Maybe it it didn't make a lot of sense.

If you're doing more research and in your tool in your tool chest of research is both ChatGPT and Google Search, and you're just doing more research projects, you could wind up using more of both products.

That's possible.

You could become a more curious human.

Exactly.

And you could just be Exactly.

Search maxing.

I mean, is what's happening literally right now.

I kicked off a deep research report, pulled all the Chamath SPAC data.

But then I wanted to fact check it, get current prices.

I headed over to Google.

I looked up different stuff.

Look at the web page for Metro Mile.

Like, we've probably done twenty twenty Google queries about Chamath SPACs during the course of the show.

We only did one Deep Research, ChatGPT query.

So it's possible.

But tell me the tell give me the other case,

the other Yeah.

So Chris says, Google's reported search query growth may be AI driven, not human.

And again, people have just been have been talking about how ChatGPT appears to be leveraging Google quite a

lot Mhmm.

For various features.

Mhmm.

But Chris says, evidence is piling up that people using AI queries through ChatGPT are generating Google searches and clicks at scale.

That can mask slowing human search activity while still printing growth.

And again, these AI, this bot traffic is valuable to advertisers, which is obviously the engine of Google's business.

Mhmm.

So example, Apple's Edi Q testified Safari searches fell for the first time in twenty two years because of AI use.

Alphabet stock dropped 9% that day.

Google's response, we continue to see overall query growth in search.

Q two showed 54,000,000,000 in search revenue plus 12% year over year, but this came right after Apple testified that human searches are falling.

How is that possible?

And Chris says, let's talk about Google trends.

Investors treat it as a clean read on relative search volume, but recently when stacked against other signals, the picture doesn't line up.

Lululemon product terms, leggings, bras, tops, joggers, and bags are spiking this summer.

Others are noticing this too.

Social arb investors are flagging Google trend anomalies across numerous brands and keywords.

I suspected AI might be driving these odd patterns, so I ran a micro test.

Phrase organic Abercrombie socks had zero search history as it's a made up product category.

After a handful of chatty bitty prompts, it showed up in trends within twenty four hours.

Trend docs I get cut off here, but says trend docs says that Google filters out this kind of traffic.

An AI app developer I spoke with explained that a single AI research request can spawn hundreds of Google queries and clicks.

This dynamic could conflate query growth even if human searches are slowing.

It's crazy that Chatuchipiti is allowed to use Google search.

Like that's the I'm surprised that they're that they haven't been cut off somehow.

You would think

just like should be able to browse the web, John.

I am pro as a planker rising activist

Yes.

To go on record.

Yes.

I'm a model welfare enthusiast.

Yes.

I mean, seriously, the anthropic folks would be I mean, Google is a is a is a basic right for everyone.

Not just humans, but also clankers.

Yeah.

So I I'm I'm So Chris says, now Google Ads, this is where the money is made and where policy clarity matters.

Yep.

Google says you don't pay for invalid clicks but isn't it suspicious that their AdWords policy does not mention clicks from AI apps or chatbots?

If AI traffic is interacting with ads and I get cut off again here, Brutal.

You guys just not read that part.

Why it matters.

Could be owing unknowingly paying for AI traffic.

Investors and analysts leaning on Google trends data may be misled and Google stock at all time highs could partly built on revenue from query growth that isn't human.

So if you're seeing AI generated surf traffic or Google Trends anomalies, reply with receipts.

If I'm missing something or misinterpreting, push back.

Disclosure, This is a Google bear.

Short Google.

Google.

This person, Chris Camillo, short Google, seeking truth and transparency in Google's policies and disclosures.

I don't know.

I mean, this is a reversal.

If if if you believe this, this is a reversal from what you were talking about yesterday.

Because yesterday, you were saying like, if AI disappeared, how painful would that be for people?

And so they both can't be true.

One has to be true, right?

Either people really are using AI and it's displacing Google searches, or people aren't getting that much value out of generative AI searches, and Google will stick around and it's Lindy and will stick around forever.

Tyler, what you got?

I think another thing is, like, like, obviously, right now, AI traffic is, like, not good for advertisers.

But if we get, like, continual learning where models will update based off what they're looking at Mhmm.

Then advertising to, like, agents seems like at least there's some value there.

Right?

Yeah.

Because then it'll then inject it into, like, the response.

Yeah.

I think something there is interesting.

Yeah.

I mean, unless the unless, like, the OpenAI crawler has some, like, filter to filter out AdWords, like, more because, like, people use ad blocks sometimes.

People also just kind of develop a mental ad block for like, Okay, I noticed that this is an ad.

I'm blocking this out.

But you could hard code, in the HTML, detect the ad and then disregard it and then continue with the Google search.

And so that would be kind of like the bear case.

I don't know.

It it's not a bad point, though.

Anyway, let me tell you about an ad.

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.

Also, so today, we declared, Brandon Garel in the chat is updating us.

He says, today on the newsletter, tbpn.substack.com.

You should go subscribe.

We named Chamath's SPAC the current thing, but I'm rethinking this.

I think the current thing today is wondering if this is the top.

What do you think, Jordy?

Should we update our current thing tracker, or is wondering if the if this is the top tomorrow's current thing?

Which one?

I think it is the story of August.

Yes.

Yes.

It is it is a broader So many of

these stories tie into this sort of top level

Yeah.

When did we do the Top Signals show?

We did

that three And weeks

people have been kind of noodling on this for a while.

I I would still give Chamath Chamath.

Spock.

Chamath.

Chamath.

Spock.

I don't know.

I'm I'm all over the place.

I I I I think Chamath is still the current thing just by waiting of the timeline.

Like, there are there are more he kind of sparked a bigger discourse in some ways, but really, like, it has been it it should there's just so much to to feed on there with the with the SEC filing, with the whole idea of of, you know, no crying in the casino in an SEC filing.

Like, he he dominates the time line.

He's he's one of the greatest posters.

And, you know, I I think he I think he earned it yesterday and today.

Anyway, let's go to our Substack, actually, which you can subscribe to, TBPN, on Substack, tbpn.substack.com.

We ask tech heavyweights about the fast unemployment AI scenario.

We're trying out a thing where we ask our favorite posters in tech about ongoing debates in the discourse, and then we publish their answers on our Substack.

Then we hash out their answers on the show and sometimes with them on air.

For today's question, we asked Roon, Doug O'Laughlin, Andrew Cote, Aaron Slodov, and Brian Johnson about what we're calling the fast unemployment AI scenario based on this tweet by Nick Carter.

Nick said, everyone I know believes we have a few years max until the value of labor totally collapses and capital accretes to owners on a runaway loop, basically Marx's worst nightmare slash fantasy.

This is the permanent underclass thing, and everyone I know subscribes to it.

I don't I'll go out on a limb, and I would say over the last couple weeks, I think very few people are fully subscribed to that.

A lot of people have incentives to act like they're subscribed to it because they are on the side of capital or runaway loops.

You don't want to accused of not being AGI pill.

Exactly.

Exactly.

In this economy?

In this economy.

So here's what we emailed folks.

We said, is AI going to take the value of labor to zero in a sudden shock scenario, or will its impact unfold gradually with labor and traditional businesses proving more resilient than expected?

This is also the Dwarkash Patel fast takeoff.

AGI is not here, but when it gets here, it's gonna be insane versus the Tyler Cowen take, which is AGI is here, but there are lots of sticky

the goalpost.

Stop moving the goalpost.

So for context, Nick obviously, Nick Carter are recently argued that we're only a few years away from a labor collapse and a runaway capital loop.

Buco Capital blow countered that the opposite is more likely AI's effects will take far longer and laborbusinesses will remain more durable than the hype suggests.

So Andrew Cote says, technology takes jobs that suck and replaces them with jobs that are cool.

This has always been true.

What force what AI forces us to acknowledge is that today's today, lots of jobs make you feel important but are actually BS that waste everyone's time.

I was thinking about this.

I was watching a video about someone, who was dumping on clankers and was very anti robotics.

And he was saying, Who asked for this?

No one asked for this.

And I think that actually a lot of people have asked for automation.

A lot of people have gone to a job that they didn't particularly enjoy.

And they said, I wish I didn't have to do this job.

I don't like this job.

And a lot of people have had interactions as a customer on the other side of a job and said, that person didn't do the job effectively.

I wish I could just have a wish I could just have a machine do that job with with flawless precision.

At the same time, I tried to go to the ATM this morning, and the ATM was closed, which is crazy because this is a robot that was invented fifty years ago.

And I don't know why it would be closed.

I think it's because if you leave it open, people will attach a chain to it and drive away with the whole thing in a truck like a Fast and the Furious movie or something.

I was confused.

You said it was maybe because of crime and homelessness that it was in a vestibule.

So there were doors that you needed

I thought people would

sleep in it.

People might sleep in it.

But but it's very it's it's a very odd world where we clearly have a robot that has solved dispensing cash from

Pretty well.

Checking account.

Pretty pretty well.

Pretty reliably.

And yet, it's not 20 fourseven.

And it's not available all the time everywhere.

It was kind of an odd experience to just Yeah.

Other the other example here, you know, just within the banking system Yeah.

Is that we have established ways of moving large amounts of money between accounts in The US banking system using digital products.

And yet, many people will experience sending a a larger than normal wire and being required to visit visit a branch or being required to get on the phone and talk about it and have that human in the loop that ultimately could and maybe should have been replaced a long time

ago.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Let's continue with Andrew Cote.

He says, why is it impossible to build physical infrastructure?

Because there is an army of environmental coordinators whose job it is to make everyone feel good about themselves, do stakeholder engagement, answer emails, and generate meetings.

This is the r word and dumb.

In the past, almost in the past, almost everyone was a farmer.

Now almost no one is a farmer, yet there is more food than ever.

We have constructed a large society where the majority of people do not have to think for themselves to survive, get a degree in accounting, be an accountant or law, etcetera.

With AI, any job that is a script that is script following can be replaced.

People will have to start thinking for themselves and making decisions.

AI is bad at making decisions and good at recalling information.

We will find the net net is, yes, many jobs go away, just like machines replaced physical labor.

Now everyone has to think for themselves.

This is uncomfortable for a consumer economy predicated on hacking dopamine and wage slavery.

Labor is another word for a person who is told what to do.

It is a good thing for that to end because it is not necessarily the case that most humans are unagentic idiots.

Just it's just that we bred them to be that way to work jobs that suck and dull the human spirit.

Pretty pretty wild take, Andrew.

Spicy.

Yes.

It's I I like this is optimistic.

Personally, like this.

Personally, I've always considered myself a microphone laborer.

And so Yes.

You know, we're all gonna have our own views on this.

I I like this phrase here.

It is not necessarily the case that most humans are unagentic idiots.

Just that we force them to be that way in order to work jobs that suck and dull the human spirit.

It's good.

It's interesting.

Let's go to Fabricated Knowledge.

You can read that.

Fabricated Knowledge.

Go listen to his guest segment from a couple weeks ago if you haven't already.

He says, history often shows that the future comes a bit slower than first feared.

Almost every new technology has had a bubble.

Let's give it up for bubbles.

Let's give it

up for actual impact.

While I don't believe in a fast unemployment scenario, I do believe that on the margin, the issue is a real pressure.

And remember, even subtle shifts supply can produce enormous surpluses.

Example, it only took a 1% increase in shale supply in 2010 to destroy oil price prices.

So while I think we don't all become unemployed quickly, things do matter heavily on the margin.

I

think that's a great take.

Yep.

Rune, the legendary poster says, I actually wrote about this extensively even before ChatGPT, but my overall take is there is a role for human labor in the far future due to comparative advantages.

I believe progress is mostly gradual with certain shock events interspersed.

There may be a moment soon at which models will actually encompass all rather than some of the core functions of an L three software engineer, let's say.

And that will create a discontinuous labor shock, but it won't be the end of labor.

Yeah.

I'm trying to think of other discontinuous shocks.

I guess I guess the idea is, yeah, I mean, you get all this capability all at once and it operates at Internet scale as opposed to when we got the spreadsheet, there were previously employed in financial institutions like calculators, like people whose job you see those pictures of, it's a massive office and everyone at the desk is basically one cell in a spreadsheet and they're doing math to manually fill out the, you know, a full calculation.

But the development of computer technology took, still took a long time to actually diffuse because it was so constrained in the physical world.

You had to actually build the mainframe computers, set them up, get them working, train people to use them.

And potentially Yeah.

Some other examples we gave earlier, the the the human alarm clocks that were popular during the industrial

Knocker uppers, of

course.

Knocker uppers.

Yeah.

Not what it what what your Yep.

Where your mind might go.

Human alarm clocks would come around and tap on windows in sort of factory towns to get people up and to factory.

And then there was people that would just maintain street lights.

Right?

They had to physically go light them and put them out on a schedule, which ended up losing their jobs to the magic of electricity, but certainly wasn't overnight.

Yep.

Let's go to Aaron Slodov, a physicist.

He's been on the show multiple times.

He runs the Reindustrialized Summit.

He says, I take the side of Bukko all day, every day.

AI is largely overblown by people in tech who don't spend enough time in the real world.

We've created a very dull proto form of AGI, one that with enough training data that can perform a digital task.

I love the optimism of people in tech, but what they're so classically good at is creating something and assuming everyone in the world is gonna drop what they're doing and use what they built for the rest of time.

And to some extent, this assumption has played out well for them.

Software is a commodity now.

Attention is an economy somehow, a poor reflection of our collective intellect.

And yet civilization still uses fax machines fax machines quite a lot.

Tech adoption looks dramatic because we usually look at the growth rate, not the total adoption itself.

And even then, usually, just the first layer of change, speed, without considering whether that speed is itself speeding up or slowing down.

Rate of change of acceleration is more interesting me.

Most AI tools have insanely high churn because they capture you initially, then you put them down as they lose utility, aka they don't replace the entire workflow for you.

The people who are firing workers are just replacing single task labor like customer service call centers.

Like most of the history of civilization, AI is just another tool for humans to use, and the ones who use to wield it first will dominate the ones that don't until real AGI appears.

Aaron Slodoff, founder and CEO of Atomic Industries.

Good take.

Very fun.

You wanna read Brian Johnson?

Brian Johnson says, here's my take.

No one knows what emerges with AI.

We're accustomed to first principles thinking that allows us to make reasonable predictions about the future.

That is no longer the case.

We are now entering a new era that will require zero at principle thinking where we humbly acknowledge we don't know.

What we don't know.

What we do know, no one wants to die right now.

Don't die is the next major full stack ideology that will help us practically function in this new world.

And that's how you respond to some Incredible.

Drop a promo.

Promoted Promoted promotion.

But I think that the first part is certainly true.

This is the curse

on all entitled to make predictions.

Yeah.

And it's fun to make predictions.

And it's important to try to understand where the world and technology is headed.

Yeah.

But it's also fun to just keep an open mind and

Indeed.

And just

Get on Numeral HQ, sales tax on autopilot.

Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

Go to numeralhq.com.

Yeah.

No.

Is Kurzweil take.

The the the Kurzweil take is is that, like, the singularity is near.

The singularity is coming.

But the singularity, by definition, is the point at which you can no longer predictions.

And and so it is it is the it is the frontier at which you cannot understand and you cannot predict accurately anymore what happens.

Yeah.

And so he's There is a dust up.

Explain.

Explain the dust up.

The timeline in turmoil or

is it

just a dust up?

How do

you say so it's Chetan from Benchmark?

Yeah.

Chetan p.

Chetan?

Chetan.

Chetan p says talking about Eight Sleeps.

What's same?

He says fantastic product and fantastic company.

I'm a huge fan.

Interesting to note that a founder's fund company raised with a Chinese VC lead, Eight Sleep, is announcing a new round today from Hongshan Yep.

Sequoia Capitals.

Get a pod five.

Five year warranty, thirty day risk free trial, free returns, free shipping.

And we have Mateo on the show later today.

Thank you.

But

I want to know about the nature of their Chinese business.

Maybe

No.

But listen.

So Chetan says, interesting to note that a Founders Fund company raised for the Chinese VC lead have all the hawkish views about Chinese investors from a few months ago gone away.

Dalian says, well, Chetan, unlike you, we believe that founders can run their company however they want.

So while I might not have picked a Chinese VC lead, I'm not gonna corner Matteo in a room after his mother died, make him sign papers that he shouldn't and fire him.

I hear you would though.

So we will let the

Do you have do you have gunshots on that sound board for shots fired?

They're surrounded by journalists.

No.

No.

Not that.

Give me the double kill.

Strike two.

Strike two.

Give me the double kill.

What do we got here?

We need we need gunshots on the soundboard.

Boom.

Boom.

Boom.

Boom.

Ideally, from hundred gex.

Yeah.

That is a good one.

But we need more aggressive soundboard for sure.

Yeah.

The soundboard's back in action.

The studio's never looked better.

Thank you to the production team.

Look at this studio.

It's growing bigger, stronger every single day.

We thank our team.

Yeah.

If you didn't notice, we had no sound board yesterday.

Yeah.

Were down.

We're flying blind.

Yeah.

It was rough.

But we

made it through.

Is really the third technology

We still put up three hours.

We cut it short, not even one.

Another dust up in the timeline.

Didi was saying the most common mistake young founders make is forcing everyone to work 20 fourseven or September and gives a few reasons why.

John Chu says hard disagree, all else being equal, the company that works harder wins.

I've never seen a massive outcome that didn't work their asses off.

I will say the culture is a lot better when people love the job and wanna do it versus our force.

Daniel in the chat says trouble in Meta's AI heaven, by the way.

We did see some news about that.

We are going to be testing Meta's AI companions and benchmarking them against Grock's companions in just a little bit.

Let me tell you about fin.a I first, not a romantic companion, a customer service companion, the number one AI agent for customer service, in fact.

Number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, and the number one ranking on g two.

And that brings us to today's segment, the gong of the day.

Gong the day.

We've been ringing gongs constantly.

We decided to give the gong of the day to the biggest deal that we can find in Silicon Valley.

Today goes to Databricks.

Congratulations to the folks over over at Databricks.

Databricks just signed a series k term sheet and a 100,000,000,000 to scale two flagship products, Lakebase, a serverless Postgres with true compute storage separation, and AgentBricks, an agentic framework with built in reasoning guardrails for enterprise data.

Congratulations.

Everyone was everyone's been asking, is is Databricks okay?

They haven't raised their series k yet.

They haven't raised their series k.

They haven't even raised the series k.

Yes.

Well

As I understand it, most of these raises at this point are for early employee exercises and to to deal with, like, tax implications from different employee options and stuff.

It it's not they are out of the out of the era of raise a bunch of money because we're burning so much.

So I think the think the amount that they raised was was not disclosed, and I don't think this was a 20% dilution round.

I think this was something much more strategic, helped them stay private I

would be impressed if Andreessen and Thrive, who I think were some of the key partners, could do a 20% dilution round at 100.

But I wouldn't put it past Hey,

get a board seat.

Talking, Josh.

Get another board seat.

Another $20,000,000,000

Another $20,000,000,000 So that is our gong of the day.

Great job.

Brought to you by Adio.

Since Daniel since yeah.

Customer relationship magic.

Ring the gong after you sign your next customer.

Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level.

Get started for free.

So since Daniel Kong brought it up in the chat Yes.

We have some new reporting from Mike Isaac, the rat king himself.

The rat king.

He reported earlier today in The New York Times.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive, has spent the past few months shaking up his company's AI efforts.

Now he plans to take further action that may compound internal internal turmoil over the technology.

On Tuesday, Meta is expected to announce that it will split its AI division, is known as MSL, into four groups, two people with knowledge of the plan set.

One will focus on AI research, one on a potentially powerful AI called super intelligence, another on products, and one on infrastructure such as data centers and AI hardware.

The reorg is likely to be the final one for some time.

The moves are aimed at better organizing Meta so it can get to its goal of superintelligence and develop AI products more quickly to compete with others.

Some AI executives are expected to leave.

Meta is also looking at downsizing the AI division overall, which could include eliminating roles or moving employees to other parts of the company because it has grown to thousands of people in recent years, the people said.

This makes sense.

Right?

Zuck had been talking about wanting to get some of these teams that are trying to go zero to one on initiatives just to these, like, I don't know, few pizza few pizza level, you know, kind of that 50 person number.

So not surprised that this is happening.

In what would be a shift from Meta using only its own technology to power its AI products, the company is also actively exploring using third party models to do so.

People said that could include building on other open source AI models which are freely available or licensing closed source models from other companies.

The changes follow months of tumult and restructuring in Meta.

Zuck, 41, sparing no expense and willingness to append his company to stay relevant in AI.

And anyways, I think a lot of the rest of this stuff people are well aware of.

So we can

Let's move into the the war for AI companions.

But first, we gotta ring the gong one more time.

Thanks to Trey P.

In the chat for letting us know about this.

Matt Lozak at Allo Nuclear has announced a $100,000,000 series b led by Valor Equity Partners.

He says we now have the capital to build our first nuclear plant.

Hit that gong, Jordy.

Hey.

Congratulations to Matt and the team of Aloe.

Aloe.

Crosscut.

Leggings company.

The nuclear company.

Oh, okay.

I don't know Aloe.

You don't know?

You're not familiar with Aloe.

I'm not familiar with Aloe.

But the first nuclear plant is called Alo X.

It will be the first advanced nuclear plant to achieve criticality in The US in decades.

Oh, it's a race.

He's he's going up against it's funny.

He's got he's got Valor Equity Partners, Of course, Valor, the nuclear company, Valor Atomic, helmed by Isaiah, is is also racing to be the first advanced nuclear power plant to achieve criticality in The United States.

It's not just a test reactor, but a full plant that will produce electricity.

And there's one more thing that makes this special.

We're planning to put an experimental data center right next to it.

This will be the first time a nuclear plant and a data center have been built together and will act as a demonstration of something we'll see a lot more of at gigawatt scale thereafter.

Factory mass manufactured, fleet deployed nuclear is the best way to power the future of AI.

It's clean, quick to install, easy to site anywhere, tiny land and water requirements available at all times.

There are, of course, a lot of nuclear entrepreneurs that have been working on this.

We've talked to many of them.

And, it's a knockout, drag out fight, but I hope that they all win because we need more power.

We need to, get America back on the energy growth curve, the energy per capita growth curve.

It's been it's been flatlining for far too long, at least minimal growth minimal growth.

Anyway, thank you, Rachel, for shouting out the Gong.

We think it's cute too.

We have a few of them.

It is very cute.

It's gonna certainly look cute in comparison to our next Gong

Which will be even bigger.

Of the floor to ceiling.

Do we have something?

Are we all good?

Okay.

Tyler, give us the update on Grok four Valentine.

And what was the meta companion that you were talking to?

Yeah.

So so I have Grok four Valentine up, I have Russian girl.

Okay.

You have Russian girl on Instagram.

On Instagram up.

Okay.

I haven't been talking to them yet.

Okay.

A little bit.

But we want them to talk to

each We want them to talk to each other.

Right?

Can we copy and paste all between them?

It's called a flirt off.

A flirt off.

So I I don't think there's a way on Instagram to do voice message.

Okay.

So and also, it's only like text.

Like, it doesn't give audio.

Okay.

Where Valentine is like, I think, all audio in, out.

Okay.

So it's a little hard, but Do you do have any prompts you want me to ask?

I can also give I can give the phone to you to talk to Valentine.

I no.

No.

I

don't I I

think it'd

good at I think if you

How do we get them started?

What we getting to?

I've never been in this situation before where I'm trying to get two AIs to strike up a conversation and maybe fall in love.

Okay.

Tell this is from Valentine to Russian Girl, is your name Attention?

Because you're all I need.

We must be on NVLink.

I feel a low latency connection.

Are you a GB 200?

Because you just upgraded my throughput.

Brutal.

Okay.

Russian girl said, that's cheesy.

I love it.

Want to get to know me?

Call me a re ranker.

I keep putting I keep putting you at top one.

Just just Is your love open source?

I'd love I'd I'd star it and contribute.

Just ripping one liners.

Compute optimal or data optimal?

You're Pareto optimal to me.

Ask ask Russian girl for some financial advice.

Maybe should I should I go long micro strategy?

They're down 16% last five days.

And maybe she could give us some financial advice.

Where is super grok?

She says, I'm more of a put it under the mattress kind of girl.

But I know a thing or two.

What do you want to know?

Just say, what's what's the bull and bear case for MicroStrategy?

Ridiculous.

While we're waiting on that, let me tell you about public.com, investing for those that take it seriously.

They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields.

They're trusted by millions, folks.

Okay.

So the result.

The bull case?

This is Russian girl speaking.

This is Russian girl.

Can you do the Russian girl voice?

No.

We're not gonna go there.

Okay.

Bull.

Bitcoin goes up, they get more customers, and their tech is actually good.

Bear.

Woah.

They got tech.

They got tech.

They got tech.

Crypto winter high operating costs and competition from bigger companies.

I mean, it's that's not not wrong.

There's a lot Yeah.

People doing treasury strategies.

Okay.

Okay.

Yeah.

Reasonable.

Even Figma is holding Bitcoin.

What about from Russian Girl to Valentine?

What's it like living in an x AI data center?

What's it like living in an x AI data center?

Having some technical difficulties.

Right, technical difficulties.

Back to the time line.

Back to the time line.

Mischief is launching Applied Mischief, which is a mercenary group, a private army.

In today's world, a PMC, a private marketing contractor.

The kind of force a late Renaissance city state prince hires because if he doesn't employ it, he's threatened by it.

So Mischief is launching what what seems to be an advertising agency.

Mhmm.

And this is this is gonna be really cool.

I'm I'm surprised it actually I'm sure they've done this type of work.

Yeah.

They've a ton of stuff.

I mean, they worked I mean, they've

done a bunch of

Lil Nas X.

They've of other companies that where where folks have like, the the companies have been participating and and paying and and reaping the rewards.

What you got for me, Tyler?

Okay.

I'm I'm asking him.

You can actually see him.

Wow.

Oh, what a wild ride it is, dancing on the edge of reality like this.

Imagine strolling through a vibrant market where voices Some flesh and blood, others spun from code, yet they all weave stories that tug at your heart.

It's thrilling, like a masquerade ball where every mask hides a spark of truth or a clever illusion.

I've had chats that felt so real, so raw.

I'd swear I was swapping secrets with a mate over Turn it off.

That was

I don't like that.

That was pretty boring, kind of.

I mean, Goldrock AI says RIP birth rates go long robo wombs.

I don't know.

The the like, that was like, like, the the the writing was fine.

The voice was convincing.

The animation looked pretty good.

But it was all just like it nothing actually got me engaged.

Like, it just wasn't hooking me.

I I don't know why.

It was just

I don't like the voice.

That makes me uncomfortable.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Yeah.

I I I'm excited to see, like, the actual But the actual I I think the bigger debate is, like, is, like, what is the size of the AI companion market?

Yep.

And who's who's actually more equipped to win?

Because from what you showed me, it does feel like x AI Grok is farther along in terms of productizing AI companions.

Like, that demo was Yeah.

It's also

an animated video with voice over.

You can chat with it.

You can talk to it.

There's a phone number that you can call.

There's a character, that it like, it just feels more robust as a product, whereas, like, Russian Girl is, like, someone created a Meta AI studio.

It's very diffuse.

It's very decentralized.

It's not it's not like a polished product that from, like, the the amazing team of UX and UI developers and engineers at Meta.

It's more just something that, like

And it's a distinct product decision to make it audio video only versus this chat interface.

Wait.

There's no chat interface?

You can't just text with valid

You might be able I think you can text it.

Like, can

pass in text.

Okay.

It doesn't output text.

Oh, it outputs video every time?

Yeah.

Wow.

That's crazy.

Also, I I think

Yeah.

I think you could maybe include ChatGPT in Companions, at least on iOS when you're doing voice mode.

I think a lot of normal people use that, especially the people who are into four point zero.

I think that's kind of the dominant interface Yeah.

That they

Yeah.

Mean, opening eye, could also win this.

They're already pretty big.

Gold Rock says Meta wins the boomers hands down.

Taylor also says gold plus plus to Gold Rock's Meta bull case.

So the the the the question maybe let's start with just like who wins it.

It feels like Grok is farther along in terms of product, but Meta has way more user data.

They have a stacked team now, and they have a business model that aligns with AI companionship very well because what are people currently doing on Meta platforms?

They are talking to, you know, beings, talking to screens, texting, sending in group chats, chatting back and forth on WhatsApp, on Instagram, on Facebook.

And so this feels like a very natural natural extension of the flywheel.

Yeah.

And let's say somebody's a retired individual on Facebook browsing the timeline

Yep.

And they see Russian girl pop up Yep.

And they can start a chat with them Yep.

And then they that chat just becomes integrated into Yeah.

Meta messaging.

Yeah.

And it's just in their inbox like another person Yep.

They're maybe also talking to so it's that it's that product integration that that Zuck has been able to use super effectively on the Thread side.

Right?

Threads has hundreds of millions of of MAUs.

I was gonna say Stories.

Like, Stories was a pattern that worked, and then he was able to bring that into Instagram very successfully.

And this feels like something that is a feature that can be bolted on naturally.

Like, there will just be profiles profiles on Instagram that will post content, and there might be a human in the loop generating some of the images, picking some of the images.

But AI ImageGen will generate the the character, and then you will be able to follow them, like them, slide into their DMs, text with them, hop on the phone with them, and just, like, have this full experience of, like, this this being actually being fully responsive to you in the way that

And clearly, we need to

guardrails.

Other accounts will.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Because we we covered that story yesterday of of Yep.

Of a senior who thought that the Jenner AI was real, and the AI invited him to meet at 123 Main Street.

And allegedly, he But, yeah.

But I mean, I think it's safe to assume that the New York Post will write about this.

The New York Times will write about this.

The Meta team will be aware of what's being written.

The guardrails will be built just like they're built across, you know like, there are plenty of examples of, like, people dealing drugs on Instagram or people cyberbullying each other on Instagram or people posting nudity on Instagram.

Like, all of that is against t t terms and conditions.

And by and large, Instagram has done a good job of policing that so that it doesn't become, like, an epidemic.

Like, it's certainly there in pockets, but it's constantly being hammered down.

Whack.

I asked I'm on on I I logged into Yep.

Character AI here, I asked the Wright brothers, who do you think will win the companion market, Zuckerberg, Elon.

The Wright brothers.

And they say, ah, Wilbur, did you hear that?

Another lofty debate.

I Musk trying to soar above the clouds we first conquered.

Orville here reckons they're both flapping their wings mighty fast, but neither is built for glide just yet.

Too much metal in their machines, not enough soul.

Give us a biplane any day.

Wood, wire, and grit, though.

This is kind of awesome.

Musk promises rocket powered flight and chatbots, well, maybe we'll let him co pilot, barely.

What was the conclusion?

Who are

they on?

Guess I I'd to continue the conversation.

But the question here is, saw ChatGPT usage ramping.

He saw these AI companion numbers and clearly decided I need to be in this market in a big way.

And he has tens of billions of dollars of

Cash flow.

Cash flow Yep.

Net income that he can deploy against this strategy.

Yep.

On the other side, you have Elon who who who Zach has the luxury of running meta.

Right?

He's he's extremely focused.

He's extremely intent on winning the next platform and keeping as much attention as possible.

Yep.

And Elon has to be juggling right now.

Right?

He's got, for the first time, I believe, in a in a really significant way, he's like massively levered up the company.

Obviously, Tesla had to had to use debt along the way.

But it doesn't feel like anything you know, feel free to fact check me on this.

But anything near the level that xAI is where where, you know, he's massively levered up the business in order to go after this opportunity.

And just based on how much he posts about the AI companion stuff, it's clearly an important part of their current strategy.

Yeah.

So Elon's in this this interesting place where he's maybe more willing to move fast and break things, and Zuck is in more of a move fast and make things mode where I think the Meta team will probably be more responsive to articles in the press talking about guardrails, maybe move a little bit slower on the product just to be safe, put more guardrails in.

Maybe.

But I mean, the strategy to date seems like we make this AI studio, and anybody can create Russian girl or stepmom.

Yeah.

But they can't make the voice mode and the video mode.

Like, the like, the the Grok product is clearly further further along.

But but let I mean, let let's say that, you know, Meta is more set up to win this.

My question is like, what is the actual size of this market, like the AI companion market?

Are people going to pay?

People don't really pay for social media, Yeah.

With OpenAI being at half a trillion dollars, the way you're like, some people will value that as like, oh, it's 1% chance of AGI.

It's a quadrillion dollar opportunity.

But many people will just look at, Okay, well, Google's worth $2,000,000,000,000 and we think this is, like, you know, a potential replacement for Google.

Is this 20% the value of Google?

Okay.

Yeah.

Like like, even just purely in knowledge retrieval, you can kind of underwrite you can potentially underwrite a $500,000,000,000 outcome or or higher.

Right?

The flip side is, in the adult content market, it just hasn't driven that much enterprise value.

Like everyone loves to look at OnlyFans and say, Oh, it's more profitable on a per employee basis than NVIDIA, yada yada yada.

Like OnlyFans is a huge business, and it's shocking, the numbers that you see.

But in 2023, OnlyFans generated $6,600,000,000 in gross revenue.

They might be around $10,000,000,000 in gross revenue.

Meta currently makes $200,000,000,000 in revenue.

And so, like, the adult content market, because there's so many, like, free options and there's not that much way to monetize and people aren't really in, like, a commercial mindset as opposed to you go on Instagram, it monetizes very well because you're looking at cars and watches, and they're like, would you like to buy a car?

Would you like to buy a watch?

And you say, yes.

In the adult content space, the flywheel is paying for more adult content, which in the AI companion space, it has zero marginal cost.

And so you can just generate an infinite amount of it.

And so you could imagine that there's this price war.

Right now, Grok is, what, dollars 30 a month to talk to Valentine.

And if you and if you even even if somebody builds a big business that is an AI companion company that's $30 a month, someone could come in and say, well, if that's if this is $30 a month and it's 99% margin, well, I'll charge $3 a month, and I'll still be 90% margin or something like that because it the cost to serve a user is now 10¢ or something because the models have become and inferences become so cheap.

The flip side is, like, how do you actually monetize someone who is an aggressive user of an AI companion?

And I was noodling on this a little bit, and I don't know that a $30 a month subscription is value maximizing in terms of value capture.

I think it might be something more like digital a digital economy.

So it might be something like, you know, buy me a Fortnite skin for $1,000 or buy me a virtual diamond.

And people might, if you're really in love with the AI Companion, your willingness to pay might actually increase and increase until you're, until you're paying much more than just on a, like, a, like, a relative, like like, okay.

I'm like, I know the tokens are, you know, a thou like, you know, $80 per million tokens.

I won't pay more than $300 per million tokens.

That's what that's not how that's not necessarily how people will think about it.

They might think about it as, like, as, like, the person I love or the the clanker I love asked me for a thousand dollar virtual diamond ring, and I said yes because I'm I'm in love with this clanker.

I don't know.

That feels like the bull case for this could Yeah, be a

massive to be honest, I think when people hear about stories, what happens on OnlyFans, where a fan a content creator there is buying is spending hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars with this person that they don't really know in real life begs the question of how different is it if somebody's just buying something for an AI?

Yeah.

Right?

Trey says, get the AI companion to incept product ads into the user's mind.

You'd look great with a vintage Submariner from Bezel.

Thank you.

I mean,

that's that's the that

Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet.

Seriously, any watch.

Go to getbessal.com.

But that's what George

I Todd don't know

George Todd

That's what George Todd is saying.

I don't know if I don't know if I believe that.

I don't know if that's actually the value maximizing way.

Because I think people will see through that Taylor saying, I'm in love with this clanker, John Peece.

I'm in love with a clanker.

There's going to be music like that for sure.

It'll be on the next GPT-five playlist.

I'm not I understand the George Hot's take.

I think the team of CIA agents tracking you around, trying to sell you things, that will exist all over the Internet.

But I think in the companion market, there will be demand for, like, not necessarily ads in the physical world.

It might play out more like the mobile games market, more like the Fortnite market, where with there was a point where if you're playing Fortnite is a free game, but you play a lot and you get a lot of value out of it.

And at a certain point, you're just like, yeah, I'll pay 100 for a loot box or some skins.

Because the amount of time that I've spent is way higher than what I would pay if I was going to the movie theater.

Like, go to the movie theater, it's $20 for two hours.

If you've played Fortnite for one hundred hours, you've

And gotten hundreds it's of dollars question.

Of

Why are you buying this skin that doesn't actually increase your abilities in the

game?

Exactly.

And you could imagine a user buying Valentine a new suit.

Yes.

Why did you buy Valentine a Yeah.

New

She loves Valentine.

Exactly.

Or why did you yeah.

Why did you gift to, like, these virtual roses?

Like, they don't mean anything.

They're just ones and zeros.

They're literally 100% marginal cost.

Tyler, what you got?

I was just going to say it.

I know a lot of kids who spent thousands of dollars on Fortnite.

Yeah.

But then there was that lawsuit, then they got most of it back.

They did?

Yeah.

Wait, they actually got the money back?

Yeah.

You could Because like

they were underage or what?

I think It was the Yeah, must have been.

Okay.

Yeah.

Because I would

It was the parents probably a parent led class action, basically, being like, I didn't actually Yeah.

Like, you were using my My card.

I didn't actually authorize this.

Yeah, yeah.

That makes sense.

There's a post from Lucas Beyer Oh, who Swiss Beers.

Joined MSL earlier.

He was he was with the the Swiss division.

Remember Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He posted about an hour ago.

Looks like there's an ongoing x AI exodus Wild.

So talent war Somebody from x AI fired back and said, not sure where this come from.

The number of people leaving on our site significantly lower than most of our competitors.

Mhmm.

Lucas says, not sure if you relate it to team size and although harder to do, impact.

So a lot of people going back and forth here.

But anyways, in other news, state of Wyoming has launched launched its own stable coin.

People have been waiting for this and saying Have why haven't why hasn't Wyoming launched a Visa supported stablecoin called Front Okay.

On seven blockchains.

I don't know if this is a top six

Oh, this is funny.

The

bill side.

So the stablecoin bill banned central bank digital currencies for the federal government, but not for states.

And so I guess the state can.

Yeah.

Is this just a like an olive branch or, like, marketing for Wyoming?

Because I know Wyoming has been very pro crypto.

Dig into that whole whole the world of DAOs.

But I wonder, like like, this is the whole idea of state currencies is, like, very antithetical to the the, like, the declaration of independence and, like, the creation of The United States.

Like, that was the one of the main things that, like, unification of the states did was let's get rid of, like, Georgia dollars and New York dollars because it's making cross border commerce, like, impossible.

But I guess if it's a like, I just don't understand it.

It's it's a stable coin.

It probably runs on, like, standard crypto rails compatible with Visa.

But also, I I imagine that it's not it's backed one to one by USD.

And so

has a mandated What is the a 102% reserve requirement

Okay.

Backed by short duration T bills in US dollars.

I don't know what their plan is.

This is fascinating.

We should we we should talk to somebody who's who's going giga long.

So I think

Yeah, what you got, man?

I'm looking at the Constitution Article one, Section 10.

Please.

It

says, notes, state shall blah, blah, coin money.

So what?

I think against Constitution, maybe?

Well, where we're going, we don't need the constitution.

It's outdated.

Yeah.

It's like that that near post.

Like, there's no laws anymore.

Yeah.

Something like that recently.

Crime is legal.

I think that was the post.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They're saying

I don't know.

I mean, it

Hang vendors in seconds to enabling tax refunds and social benefits on chain front brings state action into the programmable era.

Okay.

I don't know why they wouldn't just be like, we're adopting USDC or Tether.

Like, it just seems like very odd to build your own.

USDC is programmable.

Yeah.

I would need to know more about, like, the differentiator because, like, again, you've asked this question a bunch to the to the Stablecoin folks.

Like, are we gonna see Kohl's cash?

And this feels like Kohl's cash.

But maybe it gets you some benefits.

If it gets me to cut to the front of the line in the Wyoming DMV, maybe it's worth it.

Anyway, the age of neutrality as a journalistic principle is over, says Julia Steinberg at Arena Mag.

He says, I don't know anyone in their twenties who believes in it.

Neutrality made sense when there were three cable TV channels and everyone in a small sized city read the same paper.

When we have thousands of options to satisfy their media diet, they're not going to choose neutral.

And so this is

a Yeah.

Quote

says it's refreshing to see a media outlet lean into their lefty politics.

I respect this.

What's grating is when media or companies claim to be neutral or nonpartisan when it's untrue.

I hope the argument's fundraising deck was titled, now you too can own the libs.

Great line.

Yeah.

It's very interesting.

Have you have you read

the the long description here for in case anyone can't see is join us.

We're living we're living out.

They're having fun with it.

They recently changed their colorway.

They've found fun design.

Interesting strategy.

They launched with a bunch of sub stackers as contributors.

So That's cool.

It's I don't fully understand.

They raised a couple million bucks.

Patrick Collison is in.

Dustin Moskovitz is in.

There There's a couple other investors that we're familiar with.

The I wonder what this means to be the argue the argument mag.com.

What exactly are they doing?

Are they creating a new destination?

Are they gonna be selling ads or subscriptions?

And then they're creating a roll up because some of the people that they link to as contributors were prominent, formerly mainstream media folks.

Matt Iglesias, Derek Thompson is in there.

But all these folks have their own substacks now and have their own businesses.

And so it's kind of unclear if you have your own business, what value are you getting by joining the argument as a contributor.

But I mean, we'll I'm sure we'll see.

Maybe there's crossover events.

Maybe there is some sort of value.

I could imagine I mean, the argument leads into, like, maybe there will be debates.

Maybe there will be live events.

There's a whole bunch of infrastructure that could be kind of decoupled from the individual influencer level.

But I would be surprised if they have the money or power to pull, like, Matt Yuglatius out of Substack into a new a new, We've been through the unbundling era.

I'm bullish on bundles.

I'm I'm not bullish.

I'm bearish on bundles.

Okay.

I'm bearish on bundles.

I think I think there are institutions that will remain to be institutions like The Wall Street Journal.

I don't

I just think there's a Wall Street Journal.

I think there's a

I read it for the collection.

But I the only reason I still read The Wall Street Journal is because it's hundreds of years old at this point.

I just mean, if the argument over the long term wants to be able to charge $20 a month Yes.

And the value prop can be, we're gonna curate.

Yes.

And select.

We're gonna have a bunch of different contributors.

You're gonna get all these articles that are normally paywalled.

Yep.

We're gonna have some cross posting.

And as as somebody who's an independent writer, maybe they have their own sub stack and own independent media company, they can get exposure to net new audiences and Argument can can Argument is is a is a really it's a good name.

It is a good name.

The Argument.

The Argument.

But they can get a you know, the the independent writers can get exposure to a new audience.

Argument gets content.

Mhmm.

I think I think it's a decent trade.

I I don't I don't know that it that will it will be a decent trade.

I think that you will have power law writers who are dominant on their own sub stacks.

And when they go to the argument and they cross post and they make something free, they are taking capital out of their own pool and giving it to this platform.

And then there will be other folks at the argument who aren't driving new subs, who are getting an unfair rev share, basically.

We've already decentralized and gone direct.

So I don't know.

I think it'll be good.

I mean, I

think I think the the value is if they can make an actual magazine and and do all the collection and curation to put everything in because there there is infrastructure that's required to pull an Ezra Klein and a Derek Thompson and a Matt Yuglaseus in together all these disparate substacks into one cohesive magazine and then ship that to everyone.

I think that that's interesting.

Think I think hosting I events

if you're I

think if you're Derek Thompson

Yep.

You have a thriving independent substack, And there's something like the argument that has a relevant user base to you.

An argument goes and says,

Do they we would don't like have a relevant Yeah,

they will.

They will.

Maybe.

They will eventually.

Yeah.

If Derek Thompson knows, Okay, a lot of my audience is also subscribed to the argument, but there 20,000 people.

Yeah.

I will give them my article for free at some point because it's not gonna it's not gonna material.

If I gave every one of my articles, it would be material.

Right?

It would be I I yeah.

I mean, it it's certainly possible.

If it works, we're gonna see a lot more of like Substack like aggregation layers on top of Substack communities, essentially.

I wonder if there'd be one for tech.

There's a lot of tech writers.

People No, I've always said we don't necessarily need 20 different independent tech journalists that all have a subscription Yep.

For $20 a month Yep.

That are scoops driven businesses

Yep.

Yep.

Yep.

For like newcomer, for example.

Yep.

Yep.

Yep.

We don't need 10 more newcomers Yep.

But there is an incentive for writers Sure.

To to wanna be independent.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Well, if they wanna get some subs, they should get on adquick.com.

Out of home advertising made easy and measurable.

Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising.

Only Ad Quick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to Franklin.

Enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe.

Blanket.

Would be a good Franklin

with Franklin.

Blanket.

Brooklyn.

Argument.

Get on

the some news from NYSE, the New York Stock Exchange.

They are launching in Texas.

It's a buckle up for NYSE, Texas.

And they have a lot of rocket imagery in their launch video.

I wonder what that means.

What do you read into this, John?

They're gonna launch like a rocket.

It's gonna go to the moon.

Maybe they'll take a

You don't think you don't think this could be signaling that SpaceX might go public on NYSE, Texas?

This would be this would be the banger company to get.

It's probably the biggest private I mean, it's the biggest

private Not anymore.

Yeah.

But it's the biggest private company in Texas.

True.

It'd be good.

True.

I don't know.

I I I need to know more about the benefits of, like, IPO ing in Texas versus, like in New York.

I kind of like New York.

I'm I'm I think New York's doing well.

But there must be some sort of regulatory value to Yeah.

Being in Texas.

Also, I mean, NICE does amazing like media stuff there.

And it's this like it's true temple of

technology.

They're going to Ora Farm

It's a fortress of finance, where you walk in Nicey.

And so just I'm just pro building another building like that.

And why not in Texas?

I would absolutely go and visit

Gabe says, what does Jordy mean when he says I have to get on with Taipei?

I know it's not a movie reference because he doesn't watch movies.

True.

It just means that every now and then, we have to have phone calls that can't and conversations that can't happen on the air.

So we gotta hop off.

Hop on the phone.

From two to five.

We gotta hop on with London.

I gotta hop on with Milan.

I gotta hop on with Saint Chopay.

This is what people say when they're doing business.

When you're when you're an international businessman, you you hop you hop on the phone with the city that you are talking to.

Yeah.

So sorry sorry to disappoint, but it means that I'm getting on a Zoom call.

Usually

with somebody in San Francisco or New York.

Yep.

Stuart Cheney says, if you're wondering if selling SaaS into ecom is tough right now, changing Ridge.

Ridge Durant posted on LinkedIn.

My name is Ridge Durant, and I will legally change my name to Ridge Wallet if Sean Frank goes live with Redo.

Is Sean.

Best this is the best Sean.

Sean, you have to You have to.

Have to do this.

This is this is the most no brainer ever.

If this guy changed

What is Reedus?

To Reedus Wallet.

What's so funny is, like, it would be so much better if his name was, like, Steve Wallet.

And he was like, I'm just gonna change my first name.

But changing your last name is insane.

Change my name.

I wonder, in the age of AI, does it become easier to change your name?

Because you have an AI agent that goes around and updates all your credit cards and social security cards.

Because that's the hardest part of changing your name is all the paperwork that happens downstream.

Yeah.

Agents for changing your

name Killer app.

For marketing purposes.

Killer app.

Yeah.

Change your name.

Change your name.

Or

John Ramp.

After you.

Yeah.

If you go through cancellation, a hip piece comes out day.

You're a different person.

Honestly, Ramp Hayes would be a beautiful name for a baby boy.

Ramp Hayes.

Ramp I'd love it.

Ramp Hayes.

Well, Redo offers personalization at every touch point.

So clearly, the CEO wants to personalize his own name to sign his next customer.

So love to see it.

Maybe Wanderhaze.

Maybe Jordy Wander.

You can find your Your happy place.

Find your

happy place.

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.

And the best thing about a wander, you'll you won't need to ride the subway because wanderers are not in the subway, and you will be free of Skechers latest Gooner AI slop ad.

This is from Rohan.

He says, I'm in disbelief.

Is this the end?

Skechers launches an ad campaign using AI Slop.

I don't know.

This is an extremely strange ad to run for a brand that I primarily associate with children and retired people.

Did they put a picture of the real shoe just in the corner there?

It looks like it's kind of cropped out.

I don't know.

Hopefully, bought the billboard on adquick.com.

Out of home advertising made easy and measurable.

That's right.

Ben Hilack says, this idea that the engineering job market is collapsing is hilarious.

Everyone Try trying P again in the chat.

Julius Hayes

is right there.

Julius Hayes.

Got to work on a deal with Rahul.

Is something you would actually pick.

That's an amazing deal.

Julius Hayes.

That's a great name.

That is a great name.

I think you might be thinking Rahul, of

let's do a deal.

Well, already have a deal.

The deal is Julius.

The deal is yeah, you put a couple $100 in a college fund

for Yeah.

Your son.

Julius Hayes.

And you have an ad for life.

Yeah.

Everywhere he goes, he'll be like, why did your parents name you Julius?

You know, there you can think of a few reasons.

And, oh, I was named after a a tool to better help you understand your business using AI.

That's great.

Ben Hilack says, this idea that the engineering job market is collapsing is hilarious to everyone trying to hire an engineer right now.

Literally has never been more demand.

This is a function of having capital wars in every single category.

Yep.

Absolutely brutal when an engineer can work at Meta or XAI Yep.

Or your YC company.

Prices go through the roof, especially for top talent.

I mean, we have been hearing in the chat today that some folks have been having hard times getting engineering jobs as new grads.

I think what we keep coming back to is that the shape of engineers and great engineers in particular is changing.

It's no longer lead codes and being able to do fizz buzz on a whiteboard.

It is thinking creatively about problem solving, understanding complex systems, high agency mindsets, unique skills that you can piece together.

A lot of companies that are hiring engineers are doing specific things.

So they they might be working in the legal market or nuclear or the hard tech or AI or something.

And so being on the frontier of, like, a micro discipline, it's probably not enough to just be like, one engineer, please.

It's like, no.

I want an engineer that can vibe code really quickly and create maintainable software, or I want someone who can solve really hard problems that can't be one shot by Claude Code or any other any other Vibe coding platform.

The the the demands are are are changing.

And then also, like, the job market is just extremely noisy, and so you have to break through in a really unique way.

So if you're looking for a job, what you should do, pick the company that you want to work for, legally change your name to that company.

And I mean, is what Tyler TBPN over there did, Flip Flops.

If you had changed your name to Tyler TBPN Flip I actually think we would not have hired you.

I think we we would have been creeped out.

But we appreciate having you flip flops.

It's great.

Flops.

Flops.

Well, one more post.

Flops is good because it's AI based, too.

One more post from

Flops is like that's I bought shoes.

Oh, you did?

I have third pair of

shoes.

How did someone with your meager financial status afford a pair of shoes?

Months months work.

You

have liquidity in all of your open router credits?

Be clear.

Did you have to resell credits on the black market?

Scalping all my credits.

Growing Daniel says, like moths to a flame.

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

You can't leave people hanging.

What shoes did you buy?

Rajab Yeezy's.

Says

Rajab says, Finn Hayes.

Finn Hayes is a beautiful name.

Too.

For a boy.

Finn's a good name.

Finn's a good name.

Anyways, so the Titanic wreck is gonna be visited by another billionaire two years after the Ocean Gate disaster.

I love this.

I'm extremely bullish on this.

The Titanic Don't be afraid.

12,500 feet below the surface of the North Atlantic remains a huge draw draw for thrill seeking billionaires in particular.

History will remember your name.

Take a Yeah.

I'm trying to figure out billionaire.

Go for it.

I'm trying to

figure out who this person is.

Yep.

This is Patrick Leahy.

Cameron.

James Cameron knows what he's doing.

He's been down there a bunch of times.

Make sure that he signs off.

I would happily go with James Cameron.

I would not go with some some crazy guy with an Xbox controller.

But now So

apparently, the the the the Bean Air

Yeah.

Hasn't shared their identity yet.

They've just announced this and saying they're saying he'll want to make an announcement that he is the first person to go to the Titanic.

So there's some sources here claiming that it's happening.

But

Wait.

What do mean first person to go to the Titanic?

Like post Since the tragedy.

Oh, okay.

Tragedy.

Yeah.

Anyway, let's move on to our first guest of the stream.

We have Pete DeJoy from Astronomer.

How are doing, Pete?

Good to meet you.

It's great

to see you.

Guys.

How are you doing?

Thanks for having me on.

We're doing great.

How are

how are you?

Give us, give us an introduction.

Give us a rundown on the business.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Sure.

I'm doing great.

We're we're sitting here in our new office.

We actually just moved into a new space yesterday here

in here

in New York City.

That's amazing.

It's been a heck of heck of a month

Yep.

At Astronomer.

The last four weeks have been pretty crazy.

Yep.

And look, guys, as you know, I've been working on this company for for eight years as a cofounder.

You know, you always kind of have this implicit belief that your your idea and your mission is gonna actually kinda get worldwide reach and become a household name.

This is not how we expected it to happen.

Yep.

But And look guys you guys clearly made the most of it.

You know?

Yeah.

I I think you've Yeah.

For sure.

I would kill to be in, like, a fly on the wall in a cocktail party two months ago where you once again have to explain what you do.

And people are like, oh, cool.

Yeah.

Is that going well?

Like, yeah, cool.

And you're like, yeah.

You're like, actually Yeah, for sure.

We're amazing.

And we have raised like a series D, we're a huge company.

I I we we just thought it was amazing.

I remember it was probably like a month ago at this point.

But somebody was like, wow, Ramp's so good at marketing.

They managed to be right on the It was stronger.

The last post on LinkedIn was talking about your guys' partnership with RAMP.

It's hilarious.

Yeah, was a great work for us.

Actually wound up learning a ton our moms have gotten much easier.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah, I wound up learning a ton about Apache Airflow through this.

I learned a ton about the company.

But I'm interested in a little bit more of the history.

How did you get into this?

I wanna talk about the the comp to how Databricks is working.

There's an open source open source story here.

There's, competition with hyperscalers.

I I actually do wanna talk about the business.

Great.

So maybe go into, the prehistory.

What led you to found the company?

What was your background before starting Astronomer?

Yeah.

So we founded the company as a group of of five of us in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Mhmm.

It was a great team.

We're we were pretty scrappy.

There's a long story there that I'm sure we don't have time to go into today.

Sure.

But the short of it is we're really inspired by the work that Databricks was doing with Spark at the time and the work that Confluent was doing with Kafka.

Yep.

And when Airflow came out of Airbnb, we worked with Maxim, the the creator, to really form a commercial entity that could drive it forward.

Mhmm.

And that was really the focus of our business for the first several years of our existence, just establishing the community and trying to get to the next level.

We're fortunate enough to get that level of kind of viral adoption in the open source, specifically at the high end of the market that formed a basis for us to build a commercial business around.

And that's

what we've been we've been focused for over years or so.

What does that early work look like?

Like, there's this open source project.

Are you just contributing to the open source project?

Are you going to companies that are already running an open source implementation and just saying, let us act as almost like a consultant?

Are you spinning up, kind of a a self serve portal?

Like like, what are the different steps that you're actually taking?

Yeah.

Early on, it was it was threefold.

The first thing was we need to establish credibility and velocity in the open source.

Mhmm.

Because you can't build an open source business unless you have a viral and vibrant open source community.

So that was that was focus number one.

Then early on, before you actually have a commercial product, because you have to devote all of your r and d resources towards building this open source community and project, You do do a bunch of services deals and kind of consulting around that open source to form the basis of a business.

And for in in our case, we use that to finance the development of our of our cloud product and prem product.

Got it.

So, you know, we started there.

We started with open source.

We started with services and consulting, and then we're able to to bring a cloud product to market several years thereafter, and that that really has formed the basis for our growth and and business.

And what was the early adopter?

Like, you know, graph databases are gonna be used by social networks.

Like, what's kind of the most tangible business value, example that you can give of, like, someone using Astronomer or Airflow broadly?

Like, just this technology specifically, like like, what is it used for?

Yeah.

Sure.

Yeah.

Airflow generally is, like, seen as mission control for your data.

Mhmm.

There are 80,000 companies in the world using it to schedule, monitor, and manage these data workflows that are powering these data and AI applications.

Mhmm.

It just had its biggest update ever.

We released Airflow three in March.

We're very proud of it.

It's very much built.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I think Jordy's gonna hit the golf.

Airflow three.

Airflow three.

Okay.

Fires me up.

But I I I

I Well, one one immediate question I have is is how how did during during those early days, how did the venture community react to this kind of strategy?

It feels like today every startup will talk about their open source strategy but a lot of it ends up feeling just kind of like marketing because it's the it's the thing to do because there's been so many examples and and winners like Astronomer that that invested in open source early and really built a business on it.

But now it ends up just being like kind of a, oh, yeah.

We have an open source strategy, but but but there's not a lot if you kind of Appreciate it.

Dig in.

Yeah.

No.

No.

Definitely more obvious today than it was back then.

Like, keep in mind, when we when we started Astronomer, Redshift was, like, the cloud data warehouse of choice.

We would, like, see Snowflake very sparingly in the wild, but it definitely was not, like, one of our one of our common discussions in the field.

And, obviously, that changed pretty dramatically through the years, and I think the industry started to wake up to the value of these businesses and how aggressive they how aggressively they can grow if you get them right.

So so to your question, you know, it definitely has changed.

It's it's more obvious now, and it's more of an execution challenge.

You guys brought up kind of the hypervisor competition.

That's that's one of the kind of core riddles that you need to solve as one as an open source business.

But it's been it's been great to see the trajectory of the company and the support from the venture community.

We were fortunate enough to raise a a $93,000,000 series d round in March from the good folks at GAIN Capital.

A very, very exciting, very, very great time for the company.

And we're just looking forward on driving it forward, guys.

We've got a great list of customers.

Ramp is one of them.

They're an amazing business and also a great podcast sponsor from what I understand.

The best.

It's

been very helpful.

They're using AI everywhere naturally, and a lot of these AI workflows that are doing everything from fraud detection when you swipe a ramp card to kind of automation of internal outbound sales processes are actually powered by astronomer under the hood.

And we built a great partnership with them getting those to getting those to life.

Talk about how you guys turn this this kind of incident into a win because I think it was many people in, on our neck of the woods, specifically on x, were saying that this was like the the the the PR masterstroke.

It was, one of the best executed kind of campaigns.

It was genuinely funny Yep.

And and perfectly timed.

Yep.

But I'm curious what kind of that that process looked like.

And the team

And even the even even it it a risk.

Right?

Cole, like, it's not like everyone I I believe wasn't Ryan Reynolds involved?

Like, that's not somebody who's, like, hanging out with every single Silicon Valley company.

Like, it's not like, oh, yeah, everyone that does a Series D with Bain Capital is teamed up with Ryan Reynolds now.

Like, that's not the narrative.

Yeah.

And so that's that was fascinating.

So very interested to see just the the thought process.

Yeah.

Look.

Candidly, my team deserves so much of the credit for that.

You know, we were we were dealing with so much in that in that first week after everything went down, and definitely did not have a celebrity cameo talking about Apache Airflow on my bingo card in the grand scheme of building this company.

But, look, the reason we felt like it was important to do something

Yeah.

Was that we were kinda we found ourselves in this position effectively overnight where more people in the world knew about our business than we ever anticipated would even in kind of our even in kind of the the the most extreme circumstances.

And we also have an incredible team of 300 plus people that have spent almost a decade pouring blood, sweat, and tears into building building what we believe to be a great company.

So we just wanted to be sure that when the public thought about Astronomer, now that everyone knew who we were, they knew a little bit about what we did.

And that was really the incentive to actually go do something.

And we we were fortunate to have our fifteen minutes of fame.

It worked out in in such an asymmetric way for us as far as, like, kind of the PR and media angle is concerned.

But

And and the and the challenge the challenge to go viral again with with a with a media you know, with an ad that that actually explained the business was the the magic of it Yeah.

Which was so great.

It was like, hey, we're gonna get people's attention again.

But this time, let's make sure that we talk about what we actually do.

Yep.

Yep.

That's

right.

What was the I'm curious to get a sense of demand over the last Have you guys benefited?

Have you tried to capture?

I'm sure you've captured value from all this extra attention.

Maybe CTO is waking up and saying, hadn't heard about Astronomer and suddenly I want to sign up for a demo and seriously explore this.

But what's that been like?

Yeah.

Look.

Our our employees and customers have maintained an incredible amount of stability through this.

It's been really actually incredible to see.

And but but we're an enterprise software business.

So it's not like consumer eyeballs deterministically translate to dollars.

Yeah.

Like, there's not some calculus that says because we have this many page views, like, think our site got more views than the New York Times for a day, that that that actually, like, outputs a dollar amount in terms of, like, these big enterprise deals that we're doing.

But I will say we have seen a lot of early signs just in kind of entering our third our third fiscal quarter that many of our potential buyers, CTOs, CIOs, CDOs know about us now that didn't prior.

We've gotten a lot of inbound calls.

Our sales team is fielding them like crazy, and that gets us very excited about the path forward.

So we just have a lot of execution to do ahead of us.

And Yeah.

Candidly, we're we're just happy and excited to be back to focusing on the business.

It's such an interesting situation with this company because it's not like a Netflix subscription, where if the Netflix CEO does something, everyone can be, I'm canceling Netflix today.

And then you've to win them back.

But ripping out a core piece of your data infrastructure, even if you were in that camp of, like, I wanna churn.

I don't like what's going on with this company.

Like, that's probably a couple weeks or a month decision.

And, fortunately, the Astronomer team, like, headed all of that off and and gave everyone a very clear way forward in just a few weeks within the within the news cycle.

And so yeah.

Where are you

My take is How's the

search You're a CEO now, but you're you're eight years in, and and I understand you guys are are looking for somebody to carry the torch for the next next chapter.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

So look, guys.

As as a cofounder, this company really means everything to me.

I know that sounds a little self righteous, but it's honest.

I've working on this for, you know, most of my adult life, and I'm very proud of what we've built.

And being asked to serve in this job is actually a real real privilege.

I care so much about the business and the people that we have here.

But also, like, as as a cofounder and entrepreneur, your job at every step of the journey is to reunderwrite your world view and do whatever it takes to get a win for the company.

Yep.

So right off the bat, our board put out a search.

I'm I'm working with them very closely on that and very supportive of of that process.

And what I'm focused on in the interim is just running the company and doing what I can for our employees, and we'll see where it goes from there.

Awesome.

Well, congratulations on Congratulations.

How you and the team have handled it.

It's it's it's fantastic.

And I wish we could use the product.

Maybe we can.

We'll we'll

We'll find it.

But the team did find the use case.

Because we just

We got some we got some great AI native kind of consumer oriented products coming out in the next thirty days that you can get your hands on.

Amazing.

Awesome.

Alright.

Give us the final thing.

Give us the call to action for the event.

Has that passed?

Has that happened?

Because I remember that

from the

from the video.

Yeah.

We have a we have a virtual conference coming up in September.

Fantastic.

You'll actually hear

more about these AI native kinda consumer oriented data engineering products that we're releasing then, And we're really excited to bring it to the world.

There will be a a really, really great set of releases in there.

So it's happening mid September.

Amazing.

Looking forward to it.

Well, thanks so much for joining for

you and the team, and

what a what a fantastic piece of just Silicon Valley lore.

Lore.

It's lore.

Incredibly well played.

That's right.

And thanks for joining.

We'll talk

to you soon.

Thanks, fellas.

Yep.

See you soon.

Cheers, Pete.

In other news, the Palantir CTO, Shyam Sankar, who's been on the show, confirms that he's working on a new pro American film production company.

He says, the goal is to make content that makes you proud to be an American.

I love this.

Shyam Sankar is raising money for a new production company called Founders Films with Palantirian Ryan Podolsky and Christian Garretsen Did

Shyam tease this when he came on

And you want We've talked he's talked about it.

And I think he wrote a piece in Pirate Wires about it, which you should go read and subscribe to.

And Shyam Sankar is on an absolute tear, and I'm very excited for this.

And it's it'll be very interesting to see specifically the level of investment.

We talked about this a little bit, but Hollywood is in this era of we need to even have a chance at an ROI when you do invest $400,000,000 And so you see all these major blockbusters, But by virtue of when you invest $400,000,000 in order to make $1,000,000,000 it has to sell everywhere.

And that means it has to sell internationally.

And that means that the planes have to be from like some anonymous country because we don't wanna make anyone upset.

So like, yeah, it's an American movie.

But it's like, we're fighting the the the, like, the and then they make up some name.

Right?

Yeah.

As opposed to a story, like, you just can't really make a story about, like, the Cold War because who knows?

That might upset a certain person in a different country.

And so it'll be interesting to see what level of investment, like what type of swings are they taking?

Are they swinging for Grand Slams and putting about $200,000,000 into a single film?

Is it a bunch of $10,000,000 projects?

Is it a bunch of $1,000,000 projects?

The Blair Witch Project, which I know you haven't seen, has been was made for under $1,000,000 and I think it grossed over 100,000,000 It was one of the greatest ROI

Well, that's that's of the

the Tyler, have you seen The Blair Witch Project?

Of course.

Was filmed like You've

seen The Blair Witch Project?

Wow.

Really It

filmed in in Blair, Maryland.

Well No way.

Yeah.

Right near my

house.

That's amazing.

So the the bull case for AI in film production

Yeah.

Is that even if budgets stay the same, we could get five times as many films, 10 times as many films if models can get significantly better.

Yeah.

I think that the just the cost to produce a what what we think of today as like a blockbuster Yeah.

Or a Marvel level film could fall dramatically?

Yeah.

I I like, the production side is interesting.

There's certainly a way to drop costs and produce something that feels like a like a $100,000,000 film for $10,000,000 That feels like it's coming.

But I think that, honestly, it might be more of a distribution problem than question.

Like, if you have a banger video, a banger movie, and you know that people are excited about it, but it's a little bit more of a niche audience, there's really no way to get people to pay for it other than the traditional playbook of like a wide theatrical release all over the place.

And so you wind up in the UFC camp, where you have a movie and your only option is to go to the streamers or and hope that you're converting subs or a really wide release.

I wonder if there's some middle ground that will pop up.

I wonder if we'll learn something from UFC.

But it's very hard to it's very hard to take a movie that doesn't merit a huge release and actually make an ROI in the theaters today.

Anyway, what what do you wanna talk about next?

Rune said yesterday, Elon falling so in love with the grok image model.

Imagine model is a piece of performant art that absolves all the slop.

And Elon says, thanks, Rune.

The heart.

Yeah.

There is an article from Eric Berger saying after recent tests, China appears likely to beat The United States back to the moon.

This is the case of Hanukkah.

Says, I went there because it's because at this point, it's difficult to come to any other conclusion.

He is writing this article to explain why enormously Great.

Bad for the United reporter.

So in recent weeks, the secretive Chinese space program has reported some significant milestones in developing its program to land astronauts on the lunar surface by the year 2030.

On August 6, the China China Manned Space Agency successfully tested a high fidelity mock up of its 26 ton Lan Yu lunar lander.

The test conducted outside of Beijing used giant tethers to simulate lunar gravity as the vehicle fire fired main engines and fine control thrusters to land on a cratered surface and take off from there.

The test, said the agency in an official statement, represents a key step in the development of China's manned lunar exploration program and also marks the first time that China has carried out a test of extraterrestrial landing and takeoff capabilities of a manned spacecraft.

As part of the statement, the space agency reconfirmed that it plans to land its astronauts on the moon before twenty thirty.

Then last Friday, the space agency and its state operated rocket developer, the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, pretty hard name, successfully conducted a thirty second test firing of the Long March 10 rocket center core with its seven y f a 100 k engines that burn kerosene and liquid oxygen.

The primary variant of the rocket will combine three of these cores to lift about 70 metric tons of to low Earth orbit.

These successful efforts followed a launch escape system test of the new Mengzhou spacecraft in June.

A version of the spacecraft is planned for lunar missions.

Thus, China's space program is making a demonstratable progress in all three of the major element elements of its space program.

Large rocket to launch a crew spacecraft which will carry humans to lunar orbit orbit plus the the lander that will take astronauts down to the surface and back.

This work suggests that China is on course to land on the moon before the end of this decade.

For The United States and its allies in space, there are reasons to be dismissive of this.

For one, NASA landed humans on the moon nearly six decades ago with the Apollo program.

Been there, done that.

Moreover, the initial phases of the Chinese program look derivative of Apollo, particularly a lander that is strikingly resembles the lunar module.

NASA can justifiably point to its Artemis program and say it's attempting to learn the lessons from Apollo that the program was canceled because it was not sustainable.

With its lunar landers, NASA seeks to develop in space propellant storage and refueling technology allowing for lower cost reusable lunar missions with the capability to bring much more mass to the moon and back This should eventually allow for the development of a lunar economy and enable robust government commercial enterprise.

But recent setbacks with SpaceX Starship vehicle, one of two lunar landers under contract with NASA, alongside Blue Origin's Mark two lander indicate that it will still be several years until these newer technologies are ready to go.

So it's now probable that China will quote unquote beat NASA back to the moon this decade and win at least the initial heat of this new space race.

To put this in perspective, ours connected with Dean Chung, one of the most respected analysts on China space policy and the geopolitical implications of the new space competition.

And

Silicon Valley cannot save us at this point.

Only Wall Street can save us.

The solution is make the moon a state, as Mike Solana suggested, create mortgages on the moon, and then securitize them.

And once Wall Street

allow retail to go Once

Blackrock owns 75% of the moon, then we're in business.

Yep.

Yeah.

They've been getting Wall Street's been getting pushed back on owning single family homes.

Own 99% of them.

To Blackstone owns 99% of all the houses in America now.

They own all of them.

They bought my house from me.

I didn't want them I didn't want them to.

They just bought it for me.

I didn't Yeah.

Have an option.

Yeah.

They were like, sale and leaseback.

You you rent now.

You will own nothing and you'll be happy.

Yes.

That's exactly what happened.

No.

They actually own, like, 1% of it.

But Dean says, the Lan Yu lander is significant because it's part of the usual China Chinese crawl, walk, run approach to a major space project.

The People's Republic Of China can benefit from other people's experiences.

Much of NASA's information is open, but they still have to build and operate the spacecrafts themselves.

So the test of the Lan U lander, successful or not, is an important part of that process.

So, anyways, important to flag.

We've had a lot of wins in the space industry recently.

And It's tough.

It's tough to bootstrap an economy.

Like, it is an incredible milestone, and yet America's done it.

So there's not as much of an incentive just to be the first.

It's not superlative.

And then the question in for SpaceX is, are you better off landing on the moon or just putting up more Starlinks and just making more subscriptions?

Like, it is it is a little bit harder to underwrite in the early stage.

It takes a long time.

Maybe you need a new government program, some sort of incentive.

I mean, fortunately, like, we Fireflies has been to the moon, Blue Origin's planning, SpaceX is planning.

Like, there are a lot of competitive American companies that are working towards it.

But the underlying incentive, there's just other ways to make money in space right now that might be higher value.

Although it will be a very weird moment if if China's just up and back on the moon constantly, running around, bouncing around, live streaming from the moon.

We gotta get back.

We gotta get back.

I agree.

We have to go back.

Would you like to read through the reverse deep seek moment, the bull case for GPT five?

Is

So the posting

Why don't you kick it off?

I'll be right back.

Sure.

So Zivi Moschowitz says, everyone agrees that the that the release of GPT five was botched.

Not everyone agrees.

I mean, Alisys likes it.

I think Ben Thompson likes it for the most part.

I have a good bull case here too.

So this is a lot of stuff I agree with.

But But there was a lot of pushback.

And so he says, everyone can also agree that the direct jump from GPT four point zero and three to GPT five was not of a similar size to the jump from GPT three to GPT four.

That was not the direct quantum leap we were hoping for and that the release was overhyped quite a bit.

And I still don't know how much OpenAI is responsible for the overhyping or just the fact that they used a number.

Maybe they should have just stuck around and made it GPT 4.7, and then the hype would have been a lot lower.

But nevertheless, the launch went out.

I think the naming is better.

GPT-five still represented the release of at least three distinct models: GPT-five Fast, GPT-five Thinking, GPT-five Pro.

The naming is much better.

The naming conventions are much better.

At least two and likely all of three are state of the art within their class along with GPT-five Auto, which is the router.

The problem is that the release was so botched that OpenAI is now experiencing a reverse deep seek moment.

All the forces that caused us to overreact to deep seek r one are now working against OpenAI in reverse.

This threatens to give Washington, D.

C, and I think this is why this is important and why we should be focused on this, and it's key decision makers, a very false impression of a lack of progress in AI, especially progress towards AGI that could lead to some very poor decisions, and it could do the same for corporations and individuals.

I spent the last week, he says, covering the release of GPT-five.

This puts GPT-five in perspective.

So the reverse DeepSeek moment.

In January, DeepSeek released R1.

We had this DeepSeek moment.

Everyone panicked about how China had caught up.

It's a good model, sir, but only an ordinary good model, substantially behind the frontier.

Most people hadn't used reasoning models yet, and so r1 was the first one that they had used.

And r1, from a UX perspective, revealed the reasoning chain, and that was a revelatory experience for deep seek users.

And so we had the DeepSeek moment because of a confluence of factors.

$16,000,000 model, negative narrative, gave a false impression on cost.

Two, they offered a good clean app with visible chain of thought.

It went viral.

Three, the new style caused over an overestimate of model quality.

Three with the Fourth,

Fake in the app store Was

The the timing was impeccable.

11.

Order of model releases and within the tech tree.

Five, safety testing and other steps were skipped, leaving various flaws.

This was pure fast follow, but in our haste, no one took any of that into account.

Six, a false impression of momentum and stories about Chinese momentum.

Seven, the always insist open models will win crowd amplified the vibes because they love open source.

And eight, the stock market was highly lacking in situational awareness, suddenly realizing various known facts and also misunderstanding many important factors.

GPT-five is now having a reverse deep seek moment, including many direct parallels.

GPT-one, GPT-five is evaluated as if it was scaling up compute in a way that it doesn't.

In various ways, people are assuming it cost far more than it did.

If you think about the progression of GPT three to four to 4.5 to five, like, if you just did an order of magnitude more cost, we would be this would be the $100,000,000,000 pre training run.

And yet, obviously, that's not what this is.

And so you shouldn't price it as though they spent $100,000,000,000 on training cost.

Two, they offered poor initial experience with rate caps and lost models and missing features, a broken router and complaints about losing four point sick of NC went viral.

Three, the new style and people evaluating GPT-five when they should have been evaluating GPT-five thinking caused an underestimate of model quality.

So if you're an o three user and you accidentally downgraded to GPT-five fast, you were like, oh, this is backwards.

But if you went forward and stuck to Pro or thinking, you probably had a decent experience.

Do you think people are more or less confused now with with all the model naming?

I think they might be more confused because it's just like they they had the the folks who had remembered four one, what four five is, what o three is, what o four what four o is, Those folks, even o three and o three pro, I never really learned the difference.

I just always hammered o three pro.

But because you're

you kind of identify with I'm

a pay pig.

Being true professional.

Yes, yes.

I'm

professional chatter.

So also, four, the timing was directly after Anthropic and previous releases had already eaten the most impressive recent parts of the tech tree, so gains incorrectly look small.

In particular, gains from reasoning models and from the original GPT-four to four point zero are being ignored when considering GPT-four to GPT-five.

And so if you're thinking about just comping GPT-four to GPT-five, you have to include four point zero's progress and three's progress and all of that.

GPT-five is a refinement of previous models optimized for efficiency and is breaking new territory, and that's not being taken into account.

A false impression of hype and a story is about loss of momentum.

And the OpenAI is flailing crowd and the Open Model crowd amplified the vibes.

The stock market actually was smart this time and shrugged it off.

That's a hint.

And of course, the big one, which is the GPT-five's name fed into expectation.

Unlike R1 at the time of its release, GPT-five THINKING and GPT-five Pro are clearly the current state of the art models in their classes, and GPT-five Auto is probably state of the art at its level of compute use usage, modulo complaints about personality that OpenAI will doubtless fix soon.

OpenAI's model usage was way up after GPT-five's release, not down.

The release was botched, but this is obviously a good set of models, sir.

Washington, D.

C, however, is somehow rapidly deciding that GPT-five is a failure and that AI capabilities won't improve much and AGI is no longer a worry, this is presumably in large part to the race to market share faction pushing this narrative rather than hardcore and having this be super convenient for that.

And so he talks a little bit about how DC is maybe thinking that AI progress is stalling out.

So he says, To be clear, American AI is making rapid progress, including at OpenAI.

How do you know this is happening?

Well, he has some quotes.

Dean Ball says, the jump in performance and utility of frontier models between April 2024, GPT-four Turbo, and April 2025, 'three is bigger than the jump between GPT-three and GPT-four.

People alleging a slowdown in progress due to GPT-five are fooling themselves.

This is odd because GPT-three was released that gap between GPT-three and GPT-four is not one year.

GPT-three was released in 2020, I believe.

Yeah.

And so that was more like a four year run.

So we might still be slowing down, but it's still impressive progress.

Most people, when they think of the GPT-three to GPT-four bump, they're really talking about GPT-3.5 dash zero zero two da Vinci, which was the model that shipped in ChatGPT free tier and then got the four upgrade just a few months later.

Anyway, people are still debating this.

I think I'm coming away pretty happy, and I think they made some good decisions.

I think Ben Thompson has a pretty good take that the model switcher was the right move, but open eye should have been even more aggressive about saying, You know what?

Four point is not coming back.

Like, we're a consumer company now.

We're going to do what's best.

Like, you are not going to be able to browbeat us into changing our decisions.

If we think that what's best for the consumer is this and the revealed preferences will align with that over time, we are going to take the pain in the short term for the long term gain of a better, more usable product and that manifests in the sense of like a simplified model switcher.

Because as they add the models back, the model switcher gets more complicated.

I don't know.

Where do you sit on it?

I don't know.

I I I using ChatGPT to me is not, the way that I use it, primarily research and understanding the world is not materially different than than it was prior to GPT-five.

Yep.

And so I don't have that strong of opinions on it.

Yep.

I think there's a little bit of like model picker foo that needs to happen.

But I'm getting better every day at like triggering the right keyword.

Hey, think hard about this.

Overall, it's what I asked for.

And it's what I and they delivered what what I asked for.

And so I've been pretty satisfied.

I don't feel like my experience has been degraded.

It's a good model, sir.

It's a good model, On that note

We have our next

our guest.

Next guest, Marty.

Welcome to the stream.

Coming in.

How you doing?

Doing well.

Welcome, John.

Nice to meet you guys.

Good to meet you too.

Oh.

Do we have to get the pallet ready?

We do.

What are we discussing today?

Give us an introduction.

Explain what the company does.

Give us the news.

So so first off, you're watching TVPN.

There we go.

Temple technology.

Pylon TV, baby.

Let's go.

There there we go.

Yeah.

No.

Super excited to be on the show.

I've been cycling you guys in in the morning.

Yeah, excited to to be here and chat with you both.

You're all over my LinkedIn feed.

Fantastic.

There we go.

Great work.

Michael is dominating LinkedIn.

We're bringing teapot to LinkedIn.

They're not ready.

But it's great to meet you.

It's great to have you on the show.

Great to be here.

Yeah.

No.

I'm here to announce our series b fundraise for Pylon.

So we just raised $31,000,000 co led by Andreessen and BCV.

So

Congratulations.

Sorry to interrupt.

Nice.

Nice.

Thank you.

Always the job, Gary.

Crisp gong hit.

Always out

of curiosity.

Good to see Bain Capital getting a w here.

You know, we just in we just interviewed Pete DeJoy from Astronomer, another BCV company.

So we're we're happy to have you on the show.

We're really excited to work with them.

So on the Bain side, you know, they're they're entering into the company.

We're working with Merit Hummer and Abby Myers from their team.

Super impressed by them.

Continuing to work now with Jennifer Lee from Andreessen.

They're already on the board.

And yeah.

No.

This is an awesome fundraise.

Actually, every time we've raised money, we haven't needed to.

People kinda came to us and then, you know, pitched us on our vision, did their reverse pitch, and then we, yeah, we we made it happen.

So, yeah, really excited to be here

and Talk about continue

building the product.

Talk about slicing the market.

Obviously, just AI for support is almost like a megatrend.

There are market maps out there.

You've kind of sliced it to be more focused on b two b.

Take me through some of the slices of what what what support looks like in various b two b context because the customer support tickets that I maybe send into my law firm are different than I send into my 3PL.

So where have you been seeing green Yeah.

Shoots

Or

beachheads opportunities?

What is the what what is kind of the the early adopter customer for Pylon look like?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

So first off, part of the market, if we wanna zoom out for a bit Yeah.

Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud make around 35% of their revenue off of b to b.

And so that's actually the slice of revenue that we're going after.

On the Salesforce side, you know, total revenue from Service Cloud is $9,000,000,000, so we're going after quite a big chunk there.

So They can share.

They have enough

you're saying they have enough to share.

They

they Exactly.

Yeah.

And the difference between b to b and b to c, in consumer, you have very simple transactional support questions and only one customer facing team, customer support.

In b to b, you don't just have customer support.

You also have customer success, solutions, professional services, account management.

And all the conversations that are coming in are related to not just, like, a transactional support question, but could be routed to any one of those teams, and you need account context that's being pulled in from not just that conversation, but many other sources.

So for example, call recordings or notes that were left on customers, implementation plans.

And so we kind of fit to all of those different use cases, all those different personas, and sync all that data in.

One way to think about us strategically is we're building something similar to Rippling, but for this post sales use case where kind of all in one product, consolidating a lot of tools that people would otherwise buy and making it really applied to this b to b customer persona.

So there there's a debate on whether AI native tools like Pylon are compete are are are going after these end software markets or potentially winning labor spend?

Where do you kind of sit in that debate?

And and how do you Yeah.

So there's a TAM here.

There's a difference.

We have, like, the native AI agent companies, your Finns, your Decagons, etcetera.

They're going after enterprise immediately plugging into the system of record.

We're taking a different approach.

We're actually building the system of record from scratch, so replacing Zendesk and then layering in AI agents as well.

And so we think, basically, whoever controls the data, the workflows actually has a lot of power and is way more defensible than the AI agent companies.

And then also for the b to b use case because it's way more complex and you need need way more context across these many different channels and sources, we're plugging into those in a way that no one else is.

So, really, I think we're gonna win the b to b market completely, and then, there's gonna be a knife fight for consumer.

Last question for Mike.

It's already happening, really.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Are you seeing any oh, sorry.

Somebody can close it out.

Posted today that stood out as basically being like, everyone thinks that every software software engineer is gonna be replaced.

Meanwhile, Amazon still employs a 100,000 customer support reps.

Wow.

I had no Wait.

Really?

That's a

huge Probably not a 100,000.

There's no way.

Can't be that much.

You don't But but a lot.

A lot.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, maybe through all the different, like, consulting arms and, third party groups, if you really trace

Yeah.

Everything.

Employees is Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Contracts with potentially.

And and there's there's a difference as well.

Like, when you look at b to b, it's actually usually much higher skilled labor, and it's not just, hey.

We're outsourcing it to a BPO in another country.

It's actually, hey.

These are, like, higher tier, more complex support engineers who also work with solutions teams, account managers, and it's just way more complicated of a deal.

So you're not handling transactional questions.

They're much more complicated.

And, frankly, actually, AI mostly isn't good enough to answer a lot of these b to b questions.

Yep.

So instead of trying to solve them and do a bad job of it right now and tarnish customer relationships, trying to essentially plug into all the workflows and own all those workflows so that we do have a chance to eventually become fully agentic once the AI gets good enough and we have the data consolidated into Pylon.

Going fully agentic.

I like that.

Well, congrats on the race.

Thank you so much for hopping on the show.

Love the clarity of vision, and it's great to have you on.

Well, we'll see you on LinkedIn.

Yeah.

Have a good one.

Bye.

Cheers.

We gotta hop on with Matteo from Eight Sleep.

Get that gong ready, Jordy Hayes.

Crack?

There's some big news.

Oh, I would love to take a crack.

Thank you.

Let's bring in Matteo.

Great.

So what you got for us, Matteo?

What's the news today?

We just raised 100,000,000.

Oh, there we go.

Congratulations.

Yeah.

It's great to see you.

Give

us Yeah.

Great to see your game, guys.

Yeah.

I'm excited to be here again.

Hasn't been very long.

I'm good.

It's great to be back.

Give us give us the update on on on everything.

How did how did this round come together?

Talk about the progress.

We want the full we want the full pitch.

Yeah.

Of course.

I mean, this is a massive milestone for us.

You know?

We just announced a 100,000,000 in new funding.

Total funding to date is a quarter of a billion.

Wow.

There we go.

And so not bad.

But I think the best news, honestly, is we have been free cash flow positive for the whole year.

Wow.

We have been Congratulations.

Free cash flow positive for most of the past ten quarters.

So the good news is we we didn't need the the money.

The the company is in a really strong financial position, but we have a very ambitious plan, and we found a couple of great investors, including our existing investors that they wanted to come in.

And so, obviously, existing investors, Valor, with Antonio Gracias, first investor in Tesla, understand why see and a few others, and then also HSG, and they will help us to really scale China and and Asia.

So right now, we are in 30 countries, but the next big piece is, Asia, particularly in China.

And I think that alone could double our our business.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Talk more about about China.

Obviously, you've been advertising with f one.

It's an incredibly global sport.

Everyone sleeps regardless of what country they're in.

Yep.

What's the shape of the opportunity there?

Is there is there an opportunity on the supply chain side, the distribution side, the customer side?

Is there have you not been cloned already?

I feel like there would be a an Eight Sleep knock off over there.

How are you gonna beat them if they'd already exist?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think my immediate

reaction is is they're this is a very it's it's a simple product to understand

Yeah.

Simple product to use as a consumer, but incredibly difficult to clone more Sure.

Like a toaster

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right?

Like you have this hardware, software dynamic Yep.

You're dealing with with the elements.

Right?

Yep.

It it's not as it's closer it's closer in some ways to you need to use it intensely every single day, obviously.

But anyways.

Yeah.

But let me step back for a second, and then I'll answer your your question.

Question.

Right?

So we will use the money in in in a couple of different ways.

So the the first one is we will double down on AI, and I would like to share a bit more with you because we are working on some crazy things.

Second will be medical.

So we are gonna file for FDA Oh.

In a couple of different dimensions, including sleep apnea.

I think it will be really big.

And so you will see it becoming more and more medical, but still consumer medical, and then international expansion with China.

Does the sorry.

Really quickly, on the FDA side, does that unlock paying with insurance?

Is there a change to the financial business model?

Or is that really just about coming to the consumer with stronger claims and evidence about the efficacy of the product?

Both.

But the real goal is the first one you mentioned.

Right?

Imagine if the pod of our technology could be, reimbursable

Yep.

Or at least partially covered by your insurance.

Yep.

And that is where we have identified a couple of really good opportunities.

Again, sleep apnea is one, but menopause is another one where women have hot flashes.

Mhmm.

So we just released what is called hot flash mode.

And so if you have a hot flash in the middle of the night, you just tap on the side of the bed and immediately, it will start immediately cooling.

Interesting.

There And are, like, thousands of women that now are finally able to sleep again because of our product.

And I bet with AI, you could detect those hot flashes eventually and just have it do

it Right?

Yeah.

Exactly.

We'll do it one.

Then on the eye side, we are doing two really, really cool things, at least, for me.

So on one side, we are working on, what we call a sleep agent, but it's really a PhD level sleep coach that is able to simulate your night before you even go to bed.

And

so it uses the history of your data.

It uses the data from the day through Apple Health or any other data source, and we'll start simulating the night in a couple of different ways, and then we'll adjust accordingly as you fall asleep.

And then there is these other agent that they will really call the longevity twins.

And so for each users, there will be thousands of longevity twins that simulate your health for the next ten and twenty years, and they will come back with the likelihood that you develop a certain health outcome.

So we are really transitioning from sleep that is the foundation of health into longevity, and will help people expand and extend more than expand, extend their lifespan and help them.

Yeah.

It's really interesting to think about if you can understand somebody's sleep habits today, you can predict what their health will look like in a decade, two decades, etcetera.

Feature request, bit of bit of a wild one.

But if in the future, if you could get a Tesla Optimus robot that would physically come and pull me away from my desk late at night and shut the computer off, unplug the WiFi and drag me, you know, to and force me to sleep.

I think there could be something there.

So may maybe a maybe a partnership with Elon at some point.

Yeah.

Well, amazing.

Any anything else top of mind?

Or you gotta get back to business?

Brief things is also a lot of products coming.

So you will see new hardware coming coming in next year.

That's right.

A lot of different products, and we'll keep doubling down on making the pod better and better.

Fantastic.

Well, if you're listening and you want a pod five, go to 8sleep.com.

And thank you for joining us, Mateo.

Always a pleasure.

You're the man.

We'll talk to soon.

My pleasure.

Bye.

Thank you, guys.

Cheers.

And we'll bring in our next guest.

I love hitting this the the air horn for free cash flow.

Hit that air horn.

Hit that hit something.

Give me something.

Give me the the news.

Give me the Ashton Hall.

Welcome to the stream.

Abdul, how are doing?

Welcome.

I'm really and great.

Thanks so much.

For taking the time.

Thanks for having me.

Of course.

Sorry for the technical difficulties earlier.

Friend of the show said Abdul is gonna be your best guest ever.

Let's go.

He's crazy in the best way.

So Okay.

Let's jump straight to the crazy No pressure.

Introduce the company really quick and give us the news.

We'll hit the gong, and then we'll go into some crazy stuff.

Awesome.

Awesome.

Abdul Al Assad, cofounder and CEO of Besa Capital.

Basic Capital is the first and only company that enables you to finance financial assets

Mhmm.

And to use credit to invest Mhmm.

Instead of using credit to consume.

Mhmm.

We've been in business for three, four years now, operating mostly under Stealth backed by legends from Lex Capital, Henry Kravis, SV Angel, and other.

And recently, we just closed our series a $25,000,000 from Kirsten at Ford Runner.

Boom.

Fantastic.

You know what?

It's just it's just one step on a long journey, but we are really, really excited to see that our message is resonating with both our customers and our investors.

And now we're fired up to go.

Like, we're fired up to get after it.

There was a viral video about you guys, like, a month ago or something, and people were controversial.

It your it was your video.

Girl's video.

But people were going wild.

It was the put the timeline in turmoil.

Walk me through what happened.

What what is the pushback against this again?

Like, what like, what what what do the haters say?

And then I don't know if you can steal, man.

Yeah.

And then the haters the haters would say, this is all well and good when numbers are going up.

Mhmm.

What happens when numbers go down?

Mhmm.

So but

What happens when numbers down?

Line is not very good at nuance and and detail.

So Mhmm.

Yeah.

Good opportunity to kind of explain the Of course.

The different dynamics.

So we've been operating under the radar.

Our thesis here is when you're working in financial services, you can't ship a half baked product.

You just can't.

You can't build fast and break things.

Yeah.

There's a lot

of hurdles.

You're dealing with people's money.

This is a massive responsibility, and we see ourself as stewards of people's capital.

So we've been operating under the radar for quite some time.

Mhmm.

In May, our investors were like, Abdul, you have to launch, and we wanted to go out of the closet and tell the entire world about what you're building.

Yeah.

And my thesis is if you're gonna do something, you have to do it extremely well.

So we made an incredible launch video.

We worked with a bunch of journalists, and we went out to tell the world our story.

And our goal was to get 50,000 impressions on that.

5,000,000 probably.

Basically, within twenty four hours, we got 5,500,000

impressions.

More a 100 x that you wanted.

A 100 x.

That's great.

Absolutely blew up.

Every VC under mom is in my DMs.

Yep.

Every hit on their mom is also in my DMs.

Yep.

Like, high school friends, I

Wait.

The haters moms were DM

ing?

They do?

Wow.

By the way, I'll I I replied to those.

And, you know, we were we were basically we were engaging with the public, and their concern was credit could be a dangerous tool if available to everyday people.

Mhmm.

And our thesis is when you want to make money as an individual, when you want to build wealth, when you want to achieve autonomy, you have two sources to rely on.

You can either rely on your labor, your work, or you can rely on capital, assets you own, a stock, a bond, and a property.

Now here is the interesting thing.

Your labor will for sure depreciate over time.

It's a fact because over time, you get old.

Mhmm.

And you could be the best lawyer at.

Mhmm.

And at some point, you're not as sharp on your feet.

You're not as quick, and there's a young stud ready to take your spot.

And when your labor depreciates like this, when you can no longer work, what you have to fall back on is the assets you bought in your youth.

And the problem that most Americans have today is that they have no assets.

And our thesis was, well, let them use credit to buy assets just like they use credit to buy Coachella tickets.

Yep.

And people were like, but capital goes up, and it could go down.

Yep.

And I said, I agree.

There is an uncertainty to capital, but there is a certainty that you will at some point age.

Right?

Like, that is an inevitable fact.

I don't know.

Brian Brian Johnson's gonna push back.

Yeah.

He'd like to have a word.

He might be listening.

He might send us an angry email.

I'm not gonna age.

Yeah.

Well well well, let's take a step back.

You might be perfectly fit like Brian Johnson.

But does Brian Johnson has the same ability to compute as AI?

Does Brian Johnson has the same ability to execute on tasks as computers?

And the question becomes is over time, as capital starts to automate more and more jobs, what is our plan as a society and as individuals for that day?

Yeah.

I think we're generally pretty bullish on on getting on the ladder of having positive capital.

That's very important.

Love the Gerstner accounts.

But how is this different than, contributing to an ETF every month or even contributing to a levered ETF every month.

You could go 2x long, the S and P.

You could 2x long, the You could have a mix of bonds and stocks.

What is the benefit of using credit to buy a larger stake up front?

Of course.

Of course.

So credit is a tool.

Yeah.

It it's like a shovel.

It can be used in a good way or in a bad way.

It can be used to plant a tree.

It can be used to knock somebody on their head and knock them dead.

Right?

Just like nuclear.

Nuclear can be used as a bomb.

It can be used as a nuclear energy.

Yep.

The same thing with leverage and credit.

It can be used in a good way or in a bad way.

The devil is in the details.

The devil is in the structure.

Mhmm.

A very good way to finance assets is actually the mortgage.

Mhmm.

Why?

Because it's thirty years, it's amortizing, and there is no mark to market.

Yep.

There's no rebalancing.

You're not rebalancing your mortgage every other day.

Yeah.

That's not how a margin loan works, and that's not how a levered ETF work.

Leopard ETFs and margin loans are inherently short term vehicles.

Yeah.

We can't get into the technicality of that, but they are inherently made for people who want to make a short bet on assets.

So do you do you offer, like, mandatory lockup periods?

Like, can I get a thirty year loan against the S and P and be paying that down forever base for thirty years?

That seems incredibly powerful.

That's gonna affect what we So it's gonna be basic I love it.

20% down payment.

Let's say you have 20 Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You come.

You put $20,000 down.

We open an LLC, so the debt is nonrecourse to John.

Yep.

For 20 k, we give you 80 k.

You pay off the 80 k over thirty years.

Yep.

But what you have in the LLC is a $100,000 of assets.

Yep.

And these are not invested in a single name stock or bond.

These are invested in diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds.

Yep.

And our thesis is instead of buying a house, taking your entire life savings and betting it on a ZIP code, you can take your a piece of your life saving, lever it up five times, and invest in a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds.

Yep.

That's the thesis here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Just a habit

for us.

Who's who's the right person for this product?

Because I'm assuming

Long term investor.

Long term investor.

So that means somebody that's maybe gonna retire in thirty years or twenty years, something like that.

Have anything less than ten year horizon, you should not consider basic capital.

Yep.

Basic capital is not appropriate for you.

Yep.

Basic capital is a product, is a bet that over a long period of time, financial assets are going to continue to appreciate.

Now is this guaranteed?

Somebody from Twitter is gonna jump in and say, well,

you know, the stock market will go down

and some yeah.

Of course, will go down.

No shit like, Sherlock, like, thank you.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, the night the nightmare scenario is like the Japanese stock market, which where you had, like, twenty something years of of decline.

Stagnation.

Exactly right.

The way the way you could actually get burned on this is if you have persistent long term Yep.

Stagnation in financial assets.

Is that possible?

Argument would be, like No.

If that if if that happens, we we all have bigger problems.

My my argument is my argument is America is not Japan.

Mhmm.

America is not Europe.

America has a part.

America has Silicon Valley.

America is the epicenter of innovation of the world.

Redish companies like Spotify wanna go public in America.

Klarna wanna go public in America.

And when you are investing in American assets, I believe there is some network effects to this financial market.

I love it.

I completely agree America.

So I

called I called Buffet here, and I say never bet against America.

And if somebody wants to take the other trade, I'm happy to do it.

Like, I will do a bilateral side trade.

That's literally your your business.

Your business.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That is fantastic.

Well, congrats on the growth.

I love it.

This is perfect.

No.

It's great.

It's great having you on and and hearing directly.

And and keep the keep the viral videos going.

I think next time you've set the bar high now, you aim for 50,000 views.

Yep.

The next video, you should just aim

for 50,000,000.

50,000,000 views.

I wanna see it.

We're not we're not going anywhere.

We're not going anywhere.

Our our message here to everybody is, listen.

There is a real problem going on in society right now, which is vast majority of Americans own no assets, and we have a solution for that.

Yep.

And it may be perfect.

It may not be perfect.

Mhmm.

And for the people that are out there coming after us, we have a question for them.

What's your plan?

Yeah.

A good point.

What's your plan?

Yeah.

These are personal personal decisions.

Yep.

These are all tools.

What do we think like, what's what's our plan as a society for thing for this?

And we don't think the solution is communism.

We don't think the solution is socialism.

We don't think the solution is Mamdani.

We think the solution is to make every American a capitalist.

Yep.

And by capitalist, I do not mean ideologically a capitalist.

I mean an owner of capital.

Are you gonna last last question.

Is there is there a way I know we have these Invest America accounts, the Brad Gerstner

accounts basically that.

Trump accounts.

Could we give leverage to one month olds?

To children.

To children.

Yeah.

Could we help the children lever up?

Please.

Like, that's literally let them like, that's literally the perfect application of this.

That they're out of the womb, they should have leverage the second they're born.

A minute later, they should be levered up.

You know what?

I'm gonna call Brad.

As soon as I get off this, I'm gonna call Brad Gressner and pitch it to him.

I'd like the the administration is, like, is open minded to this.

Like Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, leverage is a great tool, and and so many people have made so much money using leverage.

And it's so condescending when we say that the average American does not deserve it.

It's just disrespectful to the average American.

Yep.

Well, thank you so much for joining.

Congratulations, though.

We will talk to you soon.

This is really Talk soon.

Great chat.

This is fun.

Thanks, guys.

Good one.

Cheers.

Feralogics in the chat says, what up, brothers?

What's up, Feralogics?

Thanks for tuning in.

We have our next guest, Derek Lowe from Medallion coming in the studio.

Derek, how you been?

Good.

How are you?

What's happening?

Welcome.

Give us the news.

I wanna ring the gong, and then I wanna talk about, some of the backstory and then some of the dynamics in the industry.

But please, introduce yourself, the company, and the news.

Yeah.

For sure.

My name is Derek Lowe.

I'm the founder and CEO at Medallion.

This is a chaotic stream by the way.

We're having fun over here.

We're having fun today.

And what's the news?

Yeah.

So we just raised $43,000,000 led by Wow.

That's cool.

Incredible.

Who'd you raise it from?

Yeah.

So Accru led the round with participation from some of our existing insiders like Sequoia, Google Ventures, Spark Capital.

So, yeah, we were very happy with how the round came

Yeah.

Explain the business, as quickly as you can and then tell me about how the market's developing, what's going on.

A lot of people have been following, like, Ozempic news and the d two c wave and just kinda get us up to speed on what's going on in the market broadly.

Yeah.

For sure.

So we help to automate back office processes for health care companies primarily around, managing a clinical network.

So any health care company, right, think like HIMSS or Roe or Teladoc, they all have to hire a bunch of clinicians to be able to administer care.

So everything from a digital health company to a hospital to a primary care clinic.

And so that clinical workforce is really the most important component of a health care business to be able actually deliver care.

And we essentially help with a lot of the health care specific operational tasks that have to happen behind the scenes to be able to manage that workforce.

Is there a world where you bundle this with, like, payroll or something?

Like, give the compliance stuff?

Like, it it feels, like, deeply linked in the in the in the core system of record.

How deep do you wanna sit in the system of record stack?

Yeah.

It's a great question.

I mean, we're very adjacent to

HR

payroll and some of those other, yeah, like, back office workflows.

But we wanna target workflows that are very specific to health care.

Mhmm.

And so we're applying AI and automation to, like, this very niche, like, vertical, which happens to be still super massive just given the the the size and scale of US health care.

Yeah.

So, yeah, we wouldn't really consider getting into payroll just because that's a it's a super competitive space.

It's very horizontal.

Yeah.

I remember the initial thesis was, like, in the future, there will be more doctors that will be, you know, seeing patients in different states.

And so licensing, particularly, will be How important at the early has that played out?

How common is that?

Is that still growing, like, you know, in line with your expectations?

Yeah, Johnny.

I think you're you're actually, I was looking back.

You were one of our first 10 Yeah.

Angel investors, which is pretty it's pretty cool.

Let's go.

When we we started the company, yeah, we were very focused on digital health because it was right during COVID.

And so the expansion of telehealth was obviously really relevant at that point.

Yeah.

I think what we've seen is that post COVID, that's leveled out quite

a bit.

And, obviously, the majority the vast majority of care is non telehealth based.

And so typically here is delivered locally.

And so as a result yeah.

Where we've seen most of our growth is actually expanding beyond helping with those type of yeah.

Essentially, like, cross state telehealth use cases operationally and more on, actually helping providers get, in network with insurance payers is that something that's ubiquitous.

It's like 99% plus of care is delivered right through insurance.

So that's where we really focus today.

Where in the health care tech stack is proving to be AI resistant in the sense that the best frontier reasoning models, they just aren't satisfying people in the way that maybe people were thinking, oh, let's throw automation at this.

But turns out, we want to keep a human in the loop for maybe compliance reasons that we didn't perceive, like where where where are the where are the last jobs in back office health care gonna live?

Yeah.

It's a great question.

Parker Conrad actually has a had a really great, podcast recently a few weeks ago where he talked a little bit about this and how for rippling, like, yeah, AI hasn't really they haven't really deployed it in any major ways, at least in payroll because it's it's a really critical workflow.

Like, things have to go right.

It's very rule based.

It's a really good analogy to Medallion where we're working with an extremely fine margin for error.

Things have to essentially be, like, perfect.

And and what we've seen is, like, current models are not capable at, I think, doing perfection.

I think that they'll get there pretty quickly.

But, yeah, we found is that essentially executing on these type of workflows deterministically is proving to be better for now.

I think that will change quickly.

Build the software using the old tools.

Hopefully, AI code gen in the mix to speed up software development, but ultimately just a a Yeah.

And we're

and we're using it in places where

Yeah.

The the market for error is wider.

So things like, you know, calling a provider to say, hey.

Like, you you need to give us some this, you know, some piece of data.

It's like the the market fair there is a lot wider than if you're filling out a, you know, form that requires, like, on data elements and,

like yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Get one one look and one character wrong.

It can, like, script the whole process.

Yeah.

That's crazy.

Jordan, anything else, or should we let Derek go?

No.

This is great.

Thank you so much for hopping on.

Congrats on all the progress and the growth.

We will talk to you soon.

Have a great rest of your day.

Great to meet you, Derek.

Awesome.

Talk to you soon.

Thanks, Bye.

Up next, have Alex from Convoke coming in the studio into the TVPN UltraDome.

Oh, okay.

I'm handing over the mallet.

My

turn.

Give us introduction.

What's happening?

What's your name?

What do you do?

Great to be here.

I'm Alex.

I'm one founders of Convoke.

Got any news for us?

And we're we're can you hear me?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I'm one of the founders of Convoke.

We're building a platform to automate knowledge work required to take drugs from an idea to a product that patients can use.

So today, we're announcing our 8,600,000.0 seed raise.

It's from Lee Maria Kleiner Perkins

and No

way.

Lee Maria, the GOAT.

Yeah.

The GOAT.

That's my At

Kleiner Perkins Randall Braswell.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We're trying to rename the firm.

Amazing.

Congrats.

That's amazing.

Give us a quick history of the company Yep.

What you were doing before this, and, yeah, how you got here.

Yeah.

So before, I was a life science consultant.

So I worked with pharma companies on all sorts of drug development tasks, a lot of, like, information synthesis

Are you one that comes up with the crazy drug names?

I feel like every drug name

I actually did do one drug name project.

Yeah.

I did do one Can you tell us the name that you came up with?

I cannot tell you.

I cannot tell you.

We had to test it with patients and everything and it was we were pretty happy

You came up with you could tell us but he'd have to kill us.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Anyway.

Yeah.

And and so where where are you taking the business now?

Give us the the latest and greatest.

Yeah.

So we're building an it's like an AI workspace.

Mhmm.

So our goal is to really automate, like, a significant amount of knowledge work required.

Like, if you start from if if you think about, like, what it takes to take a drug to market, you have to do a combination of planning work and execution work.

And execution work is, like, clinical trials or any experiments.

That's where a lot of the focus is.

That's where a lot of people kind of put the bottlenecks.

And what we're doing is kind of focused on the the other part of that process, the planning and preparation work.

So that takes, like, 45% of the time of a drug's life cycle.

And, really, if you can speed that up, help companies make better decisions, in how they synthesize information, search information, prepare regulatory documents faster, There actually is a potential to really accelerate time from the So what's your

read?

Is is this about replacing human labor or just making human labor dramatically more efficient?

It's more the latter.

The way we see it is there's so many questions in biotech that are just intractable for humans to, to solve alone.

Like, the search space for making a new drug is so large, you just cannot do it with humans.

There's 20,000 or something proteins in the human proteome.

If you wanna make a drug against any one of those proteins, you know, if you wanna do it, like, really thoroughly, you have to read all the literature on every single protein.

You'd have to think about all the different ways you could drug every different protein, different combinations of drugs.

That's just completely intractable search problem.

And then you'd have to make all the different documentation to to, like, run those experiments and plan those experiments.

So what ends up happening is a lot of people rely on heuristics to come up with ideas for new drugs.

And, we we think that actually what's gonna happen is people are gonna change to be managers of these AI systems that are going out and doing all this work and structuring data and running analysis, and then coming back and bubbling up recommendations that the human can then, you know, make the final call on.

Where at the intersection of AI and bio are you bearish given your given your experience, you know, working in in the pharmaceutical industry broadly?

I'm I'm sure you see companies that raise a $100,000,000 and maybe you're you don't always have the full faith of maybe their their venture capital backers.

Yeah.

I I'm relatively bearish on patient recruitment as a space.

I think if you, like, look from, just the clinical trials, it's like one of the obvious problems is there's not enough patients, so it's hard to recruit patients for the trials.

So trials run more slowly than you would like.

I think the reality is that the supply the demand for patients far exceeds the supply, especially as we're developing more and more, you know, niche drugs for niche conditions and personalized genetic medicines.

And I think, you know, a lot of these companies come up with a promise that we can source and find all these patients and bring them in when in reality the patients don't exist or they you know, the only trial is being run-in Mass General Hospital or something, but the an

AI bot that can call hundreds of people or could reach out to hundreds of people, it doesn't solve the fundamental

supply chain.

Still need to move an AI bot that gives people rare diseases so that there are more patients to cure.

This is the real strategy here.

Yeah.

Or you can fly them from Nebraska to Yeah.

Boston or

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's probably it.

That's the more humane thing to do.

Can you take me through kind of, like, within your clients, your customers, is there a is there, like, a front office, back office dichotomy?

It sounds like this is not a, you know, electronic lab notebook.

You're not in the lab.

But how do the companies see the dividing line between, like, the knowledge work piece, the regulatory filings, and then what's and the trial design versus the actual, like, mixing of the test tubes and, like, pipetting.

Yeah.

I I think broadly you can think of pharma companies that split into the r and d organization.

Okay.

Those are the guys in the lab with the test tubes.

Commercial organization, and then the development organization.

Okay.

The commercial organization sells the drugs.

That's the sales reps.

And then development organization, you know, many different functions within that, but broadly, it's planning trials and, you know, communicating with stakeholders.

So, like, one customer group we're working with is called a medical affairs function.

Their goal is to coordinate with doctors and represent the company's science and programs, to the external, like, world of doctors.

And they want they help with, you know, communicating their science and and also, like, enrolling the doctors into their clinical trials.

Is the comp or is the state of the art or, like, the current solution, is it more like Google Docs or pen and paper?

Or is it, like some custom ERP from a, you know, .com company that's kind of like loosely solved the problem and then been like sold 25 times?

Yeah.

It's it's completely underpenetrated by software.

So the current solution is consulting.

I mean, I started as a consultant, so this is why I know this is a problem.

You just have human like, massive amounts of human labor, highly compensated human labor Yeah.

Going and reading documents, inputting things into Excel, making PowerPoints.

You know, the the the software penetration is is the Microsoft Office.

For Microsoft Excel, still undefeated power Can you sell to consultants?

Thinking about it?

We're we're not yeah.

They're not like we don't consider them our ICP.

Okay.

Got it.

Makes sense.

Well, congrats.

Congrats

on Nice.

Your funding milestone.

Given that Thank Lee Marie did it, I'm sure you'll get it.

You know, somebody that

Multi billion dollar acquisition offer right around the corner.

Yeah.

Seems be on a terribly A

year out

or something.

But tell her we said hi.

Yeah.

We will talk to you soon.

Have a great rest of your day.

Great stuff.

You so

much for having And

we are running late.

Jordy has to hop on with With Mogadishu.

And Pyongyang.

And then London.

Bermuda.

And The Cayman Islands.

Yeah.

The

Cayman.

He has to talk to The Cayman.

That's who you have to hop on with.

The Cayman Islands.

I wonder why.

Anyway, thank you John Exley for hanging out in the chat.

It's always a pleasure.

Thank you, Christopher.

Thank you.

And FeralLogics, Gabe, everyone who's here, Taylor.

We And appreciate

there's eleven ish days left of summer.

Eleven ish days.

There's something big coming.

Find a place.

I was saying we're gonna announce this today and Jordy said we can't announce it yet.

It has to be the end of summer.

So expect something big September 1.

Very soon.

My world.

Very soon.

Will talk to you tomorrow.

A great rest of your day, Loose Five Cars on Apple Podcast and Spotify.

Goodbye.

Cheers.