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Breaking the US government of now officially owns a 10 stake in Intel.

The the Polymarket jumped to a 99% chance.

Crazy.

This this broke over the weekend in

the They didn't think Uncle Sam could get an allocation.

They didn't.

You know, this is technically Intel Series A.

They did a seed round of 2,500,000 on convertible debt in 1967.

Convertible debt.

Convertible debt.

Vintage.

Arthur Rock, not the anonymous poster, not Arfur Rock, but Arthur Rock.

The OG.

The OG.

And and then they raised 6,800,000.0 in 1970, and that was their IPO.

So this is their series a, in my opinion.

Anyway Back

then back then, even if you would you would round down.

Right?

Yeah.

Like, if it was gonna be 6,900,000.0 Yeah.

You the very Elon code Yeah.

Go with that number.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Were close

Yeah.

Yeah.

And decided, hey, let's round down.

Yeah.

We don't need to Keep it classy.

Let's keep it classy.

Yeah.

So over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported, president says US will take big stake in Intel.

President Trump said the government is taking nearly 10% stake in Intel, capping a two week frenzy in Washington over the future of the company and fueling speculation about what else might be done to help the troubled chipmaker.

Trump said in the Oval Office Friday that the company has agreed to give the government the stake as part of discussions about the company's future and billions of dollars in grants it has received from the 2022 CHIPS Act into And drawing

to be clear, I don't think they've actually received it yet.

They've received 2,000,000,000 already.

Okay.

But not there was full something like something like roughly 10,000,000,000, maybe 11,000,000,000 Prompts.

In grants and then another equal amount in loans for an Ohio facility.

And those are are going to be rolling out, and they should draw and Intel should be able to draw down on them.

But they could always be rolled back if something changes and the CHIPS Act kind of goes away.

And so this is all the art of the deal.

This is the pressure.

And so it's very funny the way Trump phrased it.

He says, I said, I think you should pay us 10% of the company, and they said yes, which is not typically how people discuss equity investments.

Government grants too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, people just don't people don't say pay us 10% of the company.

Like, a VC will come to you and say, hey.

I want to invest, you know, $20,000,000, and I want a 15% stake in your company.

In exchange.

In exchange.

And and if anything, I I, you know, I would ask for that stake, or I'm trying to build towards that stake.

I wanna build a position in your company.

Not I want you to pay me, but that that's the nature of this thing.

So there's mean, we've all been tracking this.

There's been a little bit of back and forth between Lip Bu Tan and Donald Trump.

He originally called for the for the resignation.

We can take you through the timeline.

The Wall Street Journal laid it out really well in an article, a deep dive that we'll go through.

But let's kick it off with this Howard Lutnick video.

Let's play it.

The art of the deal colon intel.

And this is Howard Lutman sitting next to Lip Bu Tan in a beautifully appointed room.

If we can go full screen here, that'd be great.

I'm sitting with Lip Bu in my office.

Lip Bu.

And at 03:00, we're going to sign a document together in the Oval Office where United States Of America, will own 9.9% of the great American technology company Intel.

I I can't be more excited for America and for Intel that we get to work together?

Well, first of all, thank you so much, secretary.

And this is a big important historical agreement that we can work together.

And then more important, I don't need grant, but I really look forward to have the US government be my shareholder, and we can work together, make Intel

Have you ever heard Lip talk?

So what

happened is Yeah.

Lip Bu became the CEO of Intel.

And he came to see me and he said, you know, the Biden administration gave this company a grant of $10,000,000,000 and we don't need a grant.

We're a great company.

Maybe not with the best leadership.

This

video is absolutely insane.

He said, you know and and that was the conversation.

And then when we had the conversation with the president Mhmm.

He said, look, we don't wanna take your money away from you, but shouldn't it be fair?

Mhmm.

And we agreed Yes.

That it would be fair that the same money Blogging

they're blogging deals from my house and

banks.

For it because it's just fair.

Mhmm.

And we agreed together.

And and then you went to your board

of directors.

Yes.

And they agreed.

Yes.

It's a giant public company, so it had to be fair.

Yes.

It had to be fair.

Had to be fair.

There's no other way.

And so we did it fair for Intel and for the American people.

And I think this is this is exactly what Donald Trump is all about.

I'm really excited.

Today, we get to do the job.

That's right.

Thank you so much for your support.

What sense?

Is that

botched Shane Handshake?

What happened there?

Woah.

Wow.

I

Lip Bu went for the DAP up.

Yeah.

And what?

Nick hit him with the power the power

Power shake.

The power shake and it just was botched.

Interesting.

Interesting.

Very compelling.

Ben, can we can we put that in slow motion and play that back?

Well, the journal has a timeline here.

Lip Bu Tan was anxiously preparing for the biggest meeting of his life.

Just five months into his tenure as chief executive of Intel, Tan was already fighting for his job.

A few days earlier, Donald Trump had demanded he step down over his past ties to the Chinese military.

The demand sent to Intel's leader the demand sent Intel's leadership into a panic.

They immediately contacted the White House for a meeting and Tan flew to Washington huddling with advisors for hours on Sunday, August 10.

His team reassured him that the president would hear him out because quote, Trump loves meeting with CEOs

Let's go.

Who doesn't?

Even those whom he has attacked publicly according to people with knowledge of the conversations.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He he's

he's been Is it WWE?

Spot in WWE.

He understands.

You call out your opponent.

You hash it out.

You leave it on

the field.

Yeah.

It's good.

The next day, Tan met with Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Besson in the Oval Office.

He sought to convince president that he wasn't a Chinese spy and that the US government has a long term interest in bolstering Intel, one of the only homegrown manufacturers of the computer chips that power the modern economy.

The CEO's argument proved persuasive.

The president also took a liking to Tan, a Malaysia born, Singapore raised US citizen who once considered a career as a professional basketball player Sick.

And backed off I no for the CEO's ouster.

Lip Bu.

Can we get a Tyler, can you actually try to find a highlight reel of

Lip Bu Tan dunking on LeBron James.

But the truce came with a cost.

In return for Trump's support, the administration proposed taking an equity stake in the company.

Mhmm.

It's interesting in that video, they framed it as Lip Buutan was like, you know what?

We don't need the money.

Why don't you take a stake?

Yeah.

But maybe maybe, you know, it's it's kind of unclear who

made the initial move.

Both ways.

So just for context, last year, Intel brought in $50,000,000,000 in revenue, but they lost 18,800,000,000.0.

So they did not do well on earnings.

They missed on bottom line, essentially.

Just a

little bit.

Just a little bit.

They switched CEOs.

Obviously, they've struggled on the founding side the foundry side.

They're not making chips for they can't find customers for their foundry stuff.

So, you know, if that continued for a really long time, yeah, they they they would need the money.

But they technically don't, and you can just look at the you can just look at the stock price.

Like, before any of this, like, it's not like Intel was trading as a penny stock.

Like, it was still it was too rich for Elon to buy with the, what was it, 40,000,000,000 that went into Twitter or something like that.

Like, I I remember thinking, like, oh, I would prefer if he bought Intel potentially because that one seems important.

But but it's always been around $80,000,000,000 company.

And so, like, if if it was truly on the brink of bankruptcy, the the shares would be falling even more, I Yeah.

In my opinion.

So I I I think Lip Bu is not being disingenuous there.

They actually could get by without the money.

But they would they need to restructure, like, very seriously, and Lip Bu Tan's, like, doing that.

Like, he's cutting a ton.

He's gonna cut more.

And if you cut everything that's not additive to that 50,000,000,000 and you just try and hold on to as much of that 50,000,000,000 in revenue as possible and you cut everything that's losing money, yeah, you should wind up with something that actually generates, I don't know, maybe $10,000,000,000 of free cash flow.

Not a bad little business.

No.

Intel decided to convert nearly 9,000,000,000 in grants promised to Intel as part of the 2022 chip sack into a 10% equity stake in the company, an unusual arrangement that makes the government Intel's biggest shareholder.

Mhmm.

Meeting was a pivot point in a frenzied period for Intel.

Once one of America's most venerated technology companies, now stuck in a years long downward spiral.

The companies scramble to control the fallout from the president's demand that Tan stepped down.

Tan, triggered by a Fox Business Network segment underscores the unpredictable environment major corporations face under Trump.

By the end of the two week roller coaster ride, Tom's job appeared to be secure and the company's situation more stable.

Japan's SoftBank Group agreed to invest 2,000,000,000 seeking to curry favor with Trump.

On Friday, Intel and the White House officially officially revealed the terms of the deals.

He came in.

He saw me.

We talked for a while.

I liked him a lot.

I thought he was very good, Trump said of Tan from the Oval Office.

I said, you know what?

I think The United States should be given 10% of intel.

And he said, I would consider that.

Yet a host of questions I

think this might be the gong of the day.

Might be Gong

of the day.

True size gong moment.

This is fundraising

Hit that gong.

Congratulations.

Clean first hit of the week.

We're calling It is good to be back.

We're calling it sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Ventures.

Yep.

White House Capital Group.

White House Capital Group.

Trump Trump.

Tan must resolve core business challenges to get his company on track.

Some analysts say Intel isn't in a much better position without new commitments from customers.

Yeah.

Converting government grants to stock will only leave the company in a worse financial shape by diluting shareholders.

Fair.

Trump will likely need to find more ways to support Intel not wanting it to fail on his watch.

And that's why is it.

And that's why Lip Bu Tan's like genuinely excited.

Yeah.

Because now you're in.

Trump is effectively the SPAC sponsor of Intel now.

Yep.

It's a new era.

Yeah.

He has bags, and so he's aligned.

And so if Lip Buutan needs to come to him and say, hey, you know, we're trying to make this a facility in Ohio.

It's not going well.

We need you to put some pressure on

our customers.

We need align with some customers, all sorts of things.

Like, in terms of

He's on the board.

He he's value add.

He Trump is value is a value added investor.

He's got audience.

Yeah.

He's got business.

He's got he's he's got I mean, he's got his own Yeah.

Social media tech giant.

True.

True.

Could be a potential buyer.

You know, maybe maybe Truth Social becomes a hyperscaler.

Yeah.

You know, it's happened before.

True.

What'd say?

Truth Cloud.

Truth Cloud.

Intel needs a lot of help and The US needs Intel, says to me.

Goodrich, a senior adviser to the think tank.

Rand who focuses on tech issues.

Hopefully, something good is gonna come out of this.

We had we had Jimmy on the show like two days ago.

Yeah.

Jimmy.

It's great.

Jimmy.

Good work, Jimmy.

Intel was founded in 1968 by semiconductor pioneers Robert Noyes who co created the modern computer chip and Gordon Moore, originator of Moore's Law.

The idea that computing power and chip efficiency would likely double every year or two, a guiding principle in the tech revolution.

By the nineties, Intel dominated the market for processors used in personal computers.

Its Pentium line and Intel Inside marketing campaign with dancers and multi colored clean room suits made the company a household name.

Then came a series of tragic missteps.

The company largely missed out on the mobile phone and artificial intelligence booms by overemphasizing short term financial targets, analysts say.

Rivals in chip design like Nvidia and manufacturers such as Taiwan Semiconductor surged ahead.

It's interesting how you if you're a huge tech company, you can miss maybe one platform shift Sure.

And do fine.

But you miss two, you're gonna be Yeah.

Even even Microsoft said, you know, we miss mobile.

Yeah.

We're get into social media.

I mean LinkedIn.

Yeah.

You could.

You I mean, it's a really really stretched metaphor.

But you could say that, like, Nvidia missed mobile more or less.

Like, the like, they weren't really switching into, okay.

Let's be the design arm of because the the

iPhone buying enough chips for your gaming

edition.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No.

It was just gaming company at that time, mostly in scientific computing a little bit.

But there is a graphics processing unit on mobile phones.

It's just part of the system on a chip that goes into the phone, and it was never NVIDIA never really, like, figured out a way to get a piece of mobile.

And and there's a world where, like, the cloud rendering stuff happens, but NVIDIA kinda sat that out, but it didn't matter

Yeah.

Because they

they they crushed AI.

So company is still as keen to reviving US manufacturing.

In his NVIDIA sales.

This is sales by quarter and it's just like and this is what a 30 year old company is just completely completely

Looks to the

right.

Looks like a YC demo day.

Looks like a ramp.

It's crazy.

The company is still seen as key to reviving US manufacturing.

In his first term, Trump touted Intel's plans for a $7,000,000,000 manufacturing plant in Arizona.

Yep.

Trump advisers began discussing what became the Chips Act, wanting to attract companies such as TSMC to The US.

Has Arizona tried to brand, like, what they're doing?

They they have so many different chip manufacturers coming in Arizona.

They mean, like, Silicon Desert or something.

They like,

it Chip really City.

Chip City.

It really feels like it like, there there is a significant

movement there.

Gravity.

That yeah.

That that that will ultimately become, like, a company town type vibe.

Chip city.

As discussion on the chips acts crescendoed during the Biden administration, Intel Pat Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger lobbied aggressively hoping for some of the laws tens of billions of dollars in subsidies.

In 2022, he sat in the first lady's box for the State of the Union speech during which president Biden touted Intel's investment plans.

While the bill was being negotiated, senators including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren pushed unsuccessfully for a version that would see the government receiving equity and companies it backed.

Very interesting.

This is what Mark Cuban was saying last He was saying this is Sanders and Warren's dream.

Yep.

He said it in a little bit less PG language, if I remember correctly.

But Intel became the law's biggest beneficiary, qualifying for roughly 11,000,000,000 in grants and and about 11,000,000,000 in loans for a plant in Ohio, an expansion in Arizona and other projects.

It seemed like a boon at the time, but the law law's slow rollout in Intel's core business challenges led to repeated delays.

Talk about ROI there.

Like, the like, Lip Buuton's saying, like, you know, we don't need these grants.

And I think he's, like, technically correct, but it's an incredible nice to have.

And the ROI on your CEO going to the State of the Union and just sitting in a box and, like, taking some meetings.

And, you know, I don't know what Intel's lobbying budget was, but it probably was less than 10,000,000,000.

Right?

It was probably less than 10,000,000.

It probably wasn't very much at all.

And Yeah.

And and you get a huge So a friend of the show, Andrew Ross Sorkins, said yesterday, should the government start taking equity in every startup for the federal tax incentives we offer or Tesla?

How about the banks?

How about when a state government offers a tax incentive?

Should they get an equity stake in exchange, board representation?

This is a super slippery slope and Bill Gurley said, here's my take.

If the government is a quote unquote lender of last resort, they should take a 100% take equity and arguably a 100% of the equity.

Mhmm.

Failed to do this with GM, Goldman Sachs, United and other airlines.

How do you know if they're the lender of last resort?

Resort.

Resort?

The company takes the deal.

It takes the deal.

Which tracks.

Because otherwise, the the the company would go with the financial investor who says, only want 50% for the same price or whatever.

And so it I it it is a it is a good it's a it's a good point.

It's good point by Phil.

So in reference to the original CHIPS Act grants, the journal says it seemed like a boon at the time, but the law's slow rollout in Intel's core business challenges led to repeated delays.

Late last year, Tan, who had been an Intel director since 2022, left the board in protest of Gelsinger's strategy.

The board also soured on Gelsinger and pushed him out.

Trump's victory presented another curveball.

He had bashed Biden

Quitting in protest?

Deeply underrated.

Deeply underrated strategy just in life.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I I I respect Tan for for quitting in protest.

And then ultimately, getting Coming

back for the top spot.

It's it's pretty it's pretty sick.

Sick.

Under underutilized strategy.

Yeah.

Just amount.

He decided basically in the trough of disillusionment, he quit in protest.

Yeah.

And then he said, yep.

I'll pop back on the the roller coaster for the slope

of enlightenment.

That that's where Intel is.

And we're really, Yeah.

I think we're I think I think we were

Who's who's on the slope of enlightenment?

I thought we were doing three colors.

Me, you, Tyler.

I didn't get Tyler on there yet.

Okay.

But you're on you're you're just I'm just coming up to the peak.

I just went to San Francisco.

I mean,

this is I was talking to AI researchers.

They told me deep learning is undefeated.

They told me that pre training scaling will continue.

And so I'm I'm I have yet to my my expectations can continue to be inflated.

I am looking at the trough.

You're looking at the trough?

Looking at the trough.

You're going I'm headed straight

Tyler, for where are you?

I think I'm where Jordy is too.

The it's the red one The down other side of the of the

Down Slope.

Wow.

I thought you were so AGI pilled, bro.

I thought you're so AGI pilled.

But I I mean, like okay.

Even Dwarkesh Dwarkesh is extending his timelines.

Like, how can you I mean, it's hard to still be

Extending the timelines just means that the the the initial innovation trigger slope is just going like this, but he's still he's still going up.

I I don't think we're in the trough of disillusionment yet.

How about how about I think we need to make the TVPN version of this for the AI hype cycle.

Yes.

And the slope of enlightenment, we need to just like

Another another vertical

line.

Another vertical line.

For the fast takeoff scenario.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's like we get a bubble.

We get a crash.

And then we get a fast takeoff.

That's the most likely, for sure.

No.

Our job is to recognize and diagnose when we are in the trough of disillusionment and re illusionize people such that we can get to the slope of

the I've never been in a trough of disillusionment that didn't one day get to the

Slope of enlighten.

Slope of enlightenment.

Exactly.

So It's impossible.

There's Yes.

Always But anyways

You know what could've made that video better?

If it was streamed on restream now.

That's right.

Live.

One livestream, 30 plus destinations, multi stream, and reach your audience wherever they are.

Lip Buutan.

Howard Lutnick, if you're listening, get on restream.

Anyway, continue, Jordy.

Of course.

So Trump's 2024 victory presented another curveball.

He abashed Biden's implementation of the chips act fueling worries that could he could try to change deals or cancel them altogether.

Intel's financial condition worsened and the incoming administration worried the company might fail.

Even with the recent share price rebound in August followed by reports of the deal with Trump, the company is now valued at 110,000,000,000, a fraction of its .com bubble peak.

The stock is down roughly 50% since the start of last year.

Wow.

Intel has has been left behind, Trump said last Friday.

So around Trump's inauguration in January, Lutnick and administration officials began evaluating CHIPS Act recipients and which tech companies generally could increase their U.

S.

Investments in line with the president's goals.

They asked semiconductor companies receiving CHIPS Act awards to increase their total U.

S.

Investment, but they knew they might need to revamp Intel's deal or help the companies in other ways.

What's interesting there is that when we talk to I think all of this is like like everyone's doing art of the deal on each other.

And meanwhile, like, when we talk to Doug O'Laughlin at Semi Analysis, he's like, realistically, like, all this trailing edge capacity is gonna be done in, like, South America.

Like, it doesn't make sense to do it in America.

Like, a lot of this stuff is just gonna wind up getting offshore because it's easier to build some facility that's just copy pasted down there.

And so it it it's very unclear, like, how, like, how it can actually work in the long term.

And then and then on the leading edge, like, it seems like it's TSMC and Samsung.

Like, Tesla's going with Samsung.

And those will be in The United States.

And those will be, like, cutting edge, like, PhD level jobs, amazing researchers, like, really, really great, like, American innovation.

But, like, we're kind of already on that path.

And Intel's not really the party that you need to be twisting the arm of.

It feels like if you want America to be, like, the leading semiconductor con country, you just need to make sure that you have leverage over TSMC and Samsung.

Not so and maybe AMD, GlobalFoundries, a little bit.

I mean, GlobalFoundries is part of Intel now, but but a lot of the a lot of the trailing edge, like, it seems like it might not be a long term thing that America's ever good at again because it's, like, it's commoditizing so rapidly.

I don't know.

Anyway, clearly, Trump cares about it and wants to keep it here.

So that's what he's pushing for.

The administration began early conversations with Intel's board about taking an equity stake.

The talks didn't move forward in part because the board, which has often been mired in disagreement, wanted more than the administration was willing to give.

Did they want him to take take a bigger position?

No.

They probably wanted, like, 40,000,000,000 in Yeah.

In grants or something.

Like, give us more for that.

Yep.

Former banker, Lutnick, has had in recent months asked other tech executives what can be done to help Intel, even asking other chip companies like TSMC, AMD, and Micron whether they would content consider potential deals

And this is what this is what Doug is Doug has just generally wanted people with semiconductor

Yep.

Manufacturing experience Yep.

To be involved with the company.

Yep.

And so it's very possible

This seems like a step in the wrong direction according to his heuristic because it's like more government people at the board.

But, I mean, to be clear, the US government is not taking a board seat and not having a controlling stake.

It's a purely financial stake, which we'll get into.

So, in March, Intel's board named Tan sixty five as CEO.

One of the biggest decisions he faces is whether to keep the company as one of the few chip firms that does both design and manufacturing.

Some analysts say Intel should consider splitting the business or doing other types of deals to cut costs.

Tan has so far shied away from spinning off the manufacturing segment, which lost 3,200,000,000.0 in the second quarter.

He has told confidence he has inherited a very bad hand In July, Intel said it would lay off 15% of its workers by year end, cancel billions in planned investments, and further delay work on the sprawling Ohio plant.

The new rules of the road were no more blank checks, Tan wrote in a memo to employees.

Tan's early decisions at Intel were aimed at getting the company on more stable ground, but the CEO's past work at chip design software company Cadence Design Systems thrust the company into the spotlight.

In in late July, July, Cadence agreed to pay a $140,000,000 for violating US export restrictions by selling banned technology to a Chinese national defense university.

The sales happened while Tan was CEO.

So, you know, you like, it seems like you probably had to sign off on that in some way.

Of course, it's like, is it a university?

Is that, like I don't know.

I I I don't know how you, like, steel man this or dig into, like, you know Yeah.

Well, what Steel man it, John.

Steel man it?

You're the steel man champion of the world.

Steelman, it would probably be like the up the export restrictions are just, like, super complicated, and it's unclear.

And it's one of those things where it's like there's the spirit of the law and the letter of the law, and they've made some case for, you know, in this particular in the this particular technology did not fit within the export restrictions because the export restrictions might just be like, you know, oh, chips of a certain size or scale, and they had and they had a chip that was, like, slightly under, and then they the the and then the government, like, you know, reinterpreted the export restrictions to include that.

Like, this stuff happens all the time because when these when these export restrictions get get get ridden, it's easy to just don't

hear much about Cadence Design Systems Yeah.

By the way.

It's Huge company.

$95,000,000,000 public company.

Yeah.

And and and that's why people think Libutan's so equipped to run Intel because he took that company to, like, a 100,000,000,000 market cap, basically, from, I think, like, 5 or 10 or something when he when he he joined the company.

So he is a he's a talented operator.

So a week later, senator Tom Cotton sent a letter to Intel's board raising concerns about Tan's ties to China.

Trump was watching this is wild.

Trump was watching Fox Business Network on August 7 when host Maria Bartiromo highlighted Cotton's criticism at 07:34AM eastern time.

Five minutes later, Trump fired off a message on his Truth Social platform.

The CEO of Intel is highly conflicted and must resign immediately.

It's crazy.

He's just watching the news and then posting about it.

Journal says, it was one of the first times in modern history that the president publicly called for the leader of a major company to step down.

Trump's demand was seen by some on both sides as an opening bid in negotiations with the CEO.

The president had already grown intrigued by the idea of government stakes in key industrial companies during his May trip to The Middle East, a senior White House official said.

Though the official added that it wasn't what sparked Trump's post, the president wants to see more such deals in the future.

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imagine that will we be know that Trump is not gonna be on the board and not gonna be sort of directly pulling the strings on the But I imagine one of the first things he wants Lip to do is

Implement beta.

Yeah.

For sure.

Yeah.

So Intel stock price has been on a tear.

Shout out to Leopold Ochsenbrenner at Situational Awareness.

They mocked him.

They said, this guy's fund must have already blown up.

Yep.

Oh, he's long 18 f.

Weird nonconsensus bet.

Oh, well, it paid off.

So Trump called the Tan's resignation mid August.

Then Trump met Tan.

SoftBank invested 2,000,000,000, and the share price rose from under $20 to over $25 a share.

And the deal has been announced.

So anyway, sorry.

I cut you off.

No.

I think I think people were speculating whether Leopold had some inside information or he just viewed Intel as a super strategic

Yeah.

Asset that

There was some post about

this where wouldn't possibly let fail.

There was some guy on on X saying, like, oh, this is like insider trading.

Everyone is insider trading.

Even, like, Warren Buffett made his money on insider trading.

Very black pilled.

And and so he which would just be like, there's no evidence of any of this happening at all.

And and it yeah.

Wait.

What you got, Tyler?

I think also, like, this trade, like, him being long intel totally aligns with the thesis of the of of Of

the fund.

Situational awareness.

Like, his whole thing

is monitoring the situation.

Yeah.

They're gonna nationalize, like, AI.

Oh, yeah.

So obviously, like, if The US is gonna nationalize, like, start a lab, start, like Yep.

Building computing stuff, they're gonna have, like they're gonna take the existing

Yep.

You know, infrastructure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I hadn't even thought about

it from that perspective.

I was just thinking about it from from the perspective of, like, we we we talked to Ben Thompson about Intel.

We talked to Doug O'Laughlin about Intel.

Like, we were kind of, like, noodling on it back and forth as, like, commentators.

And I didn't come away with a super strong, like, bull or bear case.

I didn't really look at the stock price or the valuation or the financials, but it didn't seem, like, crazy to come up with a like a like a an expression of your position in a in financial terms.

And it's very clear that, like, Leopold and his team just, like, looked at Intel more deeply and saw that there was an opportunity there.

You don't need know, like,

need ins.

Not every

good trade needs to be insider trading people.

It's, like, so ridiculous.

Yeah.

And and yeah.

I mean, it's the same thing.

Like, it's like, what what does he know about NVIDIA?

Like, is it possible he just he just knows that, like, every like, he's not in Nvidia.

What does he know?

Is he insider trading?

Is or is he just, like, looking at, like, oh, well, Nvidia is, like, the obvious bet.

So everyone piled into Nvidia.

It's, the biggest company in the world.

Like Yeah.

Maybe not a lot of juice left there.

Yeah.

I'm gonna go where

He'll 20 get percent

I'm gonna go and bet on the things that have high upside potential and yeah.

I don't know.

Anyway Yep.

In the Oval Office, Tan told the president his ties to Chinese businesses were years in the past, and he was loyal to The United States.

He presented ideas for turning Intel around and investing more in The United States.

Lutnick told Tan that he thought it was dangerous to have so much of the global chip making capacity controlled by foreign companies.

Tan agreed and reiterated that he was dedicated to Trump's America's first manufacturing agenda.

By the end of the hour long session, the president was convinced and agreed to lay off the criticism.

I will no longer call for your immediate resignation on my social media app, mister mister Tan.

It's great.

Tan and Lutnick then moved quickly to hammer out a deal for the government to take a minority stake in Intel.

It was complicated negotiation because it was unusual to convert government grants that had already been awarded into equity.

Yeah.

While they were in talks, SoftBank led by Masa suddenly agreed to put 2,000,000,000 into the company, part of his campaign to bet on US firms and appeal to Trump.

Absolutely.

If they were putting together like a pitch deck for SoftBank, I feel like they should have used Figma for that.

Right?

Think faster.

Figma helps design and development teams build great products together.

I would be shocked if SoftBank uses Figma for their the design of their decks

Yeah.

Because they seem to be very PowerPoint coded but they still are powerful.

Imagine how powerful they could be if they would, you know, simply get on Figma slides.

Let's see here.

Did I tell you that my first internship ever was at a SoftBank backed company?

No way.

Yeah.

Doctor drew dot com.

So Doctor.

Drew was a radio host with Adam Carolla on KISS FM in 02/2005.

Wait.

That's crazy lore.

Yes.

This is insane lore.

So doctor Drew was a like a board certified psychologist, psychiatrist, I think.

Wait.

We're pulling up this website, by the way.

And so doctor Drew, during the .com boom, wanted to start his own, like, livestream property, basically, and raised money from SoftBank and built a team of engineers and hadn't had their own data center racking servers.

And one of my job is, like, well, I mean, this is like what it is now because he has,

like, And hot

and you don't really need, like, necessarily, like, a venture backed startup to be an influencer.

But

Great.

So doctor Drew went

to the same high school as me.

And Tyler, I know I was

Every single famous person has gone to John's High School.

Yeah.

It's wild.

But Pretty great.

Like, well, like, one of my, like, you know, pop by the summer office was, like, go in the data center, and it was, like, super cold.

It was, like, not, like, a data center like people think today.

It was, like, a room with a couple racks of servers, but there was no AWS.

So if you wanted to set up a website, you had to like rack a server and like put this put the code on the server and then run it.

I'll put the servers in the bag, bro.

Yeah.

The brand was a little bit different back then.

The first show that they were gonna greenlight was this sort of like it was about a lot of this stuff was like relationship coaching.

So Loveline, people would call in about their relationships.

And so I think I believe they were gonna put two people, like a like a man and a woman who were maybe dating, and they were gonna go on a road trip, and they were gonna like livestream it.

And it was gonna be like some sort of like new new media.

Well, all I can see is I can see why Masa needed to be needed to be in that needed to be in that website, John.

It is it is incredible lore.

Is that part of how you underwrote the internship too?

You're like, look, you

know I wasn't really like technically an intern.

I I was I was so young.

I was just like stopping by the office basically.

But but it it it was cool.

It was like a true startup environment.

Like, a pool table, like, pretty big office, like, very much like

Pool table?

Yeah.

Pool table.

Amazing.

It it was very it was very iconic of like the dot in offices.

No.

No.

No.

It's like ping pong tables.

Yeah.

They've taken over.

We should do you like pool?

I like pool.

Okay.

Yeah.

We should get a pool table back here.

Billiards.

Billiards.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It it was like the classic, like, kind of overfunded venture backed .com bubble company where, like, huge staff for something that, like, would ultimately be

A small media company.

So yeah.

Yeah.

A media company that should focus on, like, the media piece and then and then, like, the YouTube should just be, a platform.

And so it's, like, it's, like, it it didn't make sense to be in, like, the middle.

You either just wanted to be, like, the influencer or the or the platform.

Anyway.

So SoftBank had already pledged to spend at least a 100,000,000,000 in The US on AI and other tech investments, a move announced by Sun at Trump's Mar a Lago Club last December.

SoftBank had also earlier this year discussed a potential deal to acquire Intel's chip manufacturing business.

Intel and The US soon agreed that the government would use 8,900,000,000.0 in grants that have been committed but not paid to take a nearly 10% stake at a slight discount.

The US won't have a say in governance.

It already gave Intel 2,200,000,000.0 in chips, axe, grants.

That was what we were talking about

Yeah.

Earlier.

Some had been given but not all that was promised.

Mhmm.

David Shapiro, a former partner on the Wall Street firm, Watchdull, Lipton and Rosen and Katz drew up the terms including a provision that the government could acquire another 5% of Intel at a discount if the company sells the majority of its manufacturing business.

This is an underrated naming scheme.

I I I really wish startups would do this.

Like, the next, like, AI startup should just be like

No.

This is Kugen and Hayes and Cosgrove and

could be totally a new meta.

It can only be done once Yes.

By a great team.

If we did Kugen, Hayes, Cosgrove, Kohler, that'd be amazing.

I mean, at at some point, we should just add the whole team.

The whole team.

Yeah.

That's the longest.

We can definitely get the .com.

Last names.

Kugan and Hayes and Cosgrove and Kohler just over and over and over.

Yep.

So the administration insisted on this provision

Okay.

This 5% at a discount Mhmm.

As a type of poison pill meant to dissuade the company from fully exiting the manufacturing segment.

And this is this is what people are really excited about, you know, government involvement in the decisions of of of of Highly technical project.

Highly technical complicated businesses.

Government famously good at building things.

Yes.

Yes.

So if Intel were to give the government another 5% it would obviously dilute shareholders and complicate things.

So despite the initial optimism, many analysts say the agreement will only be a boon for Intel if Trump can also find customers and attract more investment for

the company.

Be able to that.

I think he's gonna be able to do both, to be honest.

I think he's gonna be able to strongly encourage companies.

Not gonna be like a VC that just like sits back and like reads the investor updates.

There's one thing

He's gonna

be.

One people can criticize Trump for a lot of things but he is available the week of August 25.

Yes.

He's online.

Well, many Wait.

Allocators.

He's not a burning

man.

He's not a burning man.

Which is crazy.

Interesting.

Which is crazy.

You'd think that he's starting to get into Venture.

Venture.

Yeah.

That he would naturally

he would to Burning Man.

Set up a an Oval Office camp Yeah.

In Burning Man.

But instead of being at Black Rock City, he might be at Black Rock.

That's right.

Doing deals.

Was that was one of our good there's an early episode of TBPN where John and I are riffing out Black Rock City The home of of home of Burning Man.

Burning And wondering if there's a connection to There's almost certainly a connection.

Obviously,

a connection to BlackRock financial institution.

SoftBank's 2,000,000,000 and the 8,900,000,000.0 in government funding that had already been promised aren't game changing for the chip manufacturing business.

In the grand scheme of things, it's it's not

that They lost 18,000,000,000 last year.

Like, we're not even covering last year's losses.

But better to have and not need, I suppose.

Yep.

So the agreement is fueling speculation that the president could lean on other tech companies to work with Intel.

Lean, strongly encourage, demand that they are fired if they are not if they do not

He's gonna rip some posts.

Tan has met with potential customers including Apple CEO Tim Cook trying to win support for Intel's next generation manufacturing process.

This is not the kind of thing I I I see Tim being super interested in.

He's like more expensive, less performant.

Apple has spent, what, a decade getting off of Intel and Intel Macs and going to sell Apple Silicon, which are, like, so integrated, so perfect for the Apple ecosystem.

Like like, now, like, you can run you can run iOS apps on Mac and vice versa.

Like, it's it's like there's a ton of there's a ton of like, they've been spinning up, like, the the ecosystem on top of Apple silicon for so long, like, the different graphics engines and getting developers to go deeper into optimizing for Apple silicon.

Yeah.

They just, like, rugged and roll.

I have a rack on it.

Yeah.

So the journal says many executives say they would need big incentives to use Intel for manufacturing given how badly it trails industry leaders like TSMC.

Yeah.

It is difficult to switch semiconductor manufacturers because the processes are specialized and have to be planned out years in advance.

The government's stake in Intel is the latest in a series of extraordinary interventions in the private sector.

And what's the craziest thing that they could do?

Like, Apple GPU for a cluster at Intel or something, like, of fresh start?

That seems like something way out of their wheelhouse of both companies.

Yes.

I have no idea how they would do that.

But, I mean, if if Amazon can do Trainium and and Google can do TPU at TSMC, like maybe there's a world where that happens.

I don't know.

Anyway,

So they highlight a couple of the other deals.

It's worth covering.

So the president won a quote unquote golden share of control over Japan's nippon steel in return for allowing it to take over US steel.

Yeah.

These golden shares are in reference to what the CCP.

Oh.

I thought it was in reference to the president's toilet, which is gold.

Yes.

And many many of the fixtures in his in the Oval Office.

Yes.

Oh,

yeah.

But And last month, Trump struck a deal with Nvidia and AMD for the federal government to take 15% of their chip sales in China in return for allowing the exports.

Yep.

In early July, the defense department took a minority stake in MP Materials, maker of rare earth magnets.

Days later, Apple, which the Trump administration had long pressured to expand its US supply chain, announced a $500,000,000 deal to buy MP's products.

Yes.

So that's an example of like Trump like acting as, you know, biz dev basically for the companies he likes.

I mean, he's really gonna make a lot of ECs look bad.

Oh, yeah.

Big promises during the deal process when they're trying to win allocation.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then kind of I'll help you ramp your revenue for sure.

Yeah.

I'll help you hire a ton the guys.

I know a ton of founding engineers.

I don't have 50 other portfolio companies that also wanna hire founding engineers.

I got you.

Yeah.

I got you.

But the intel stake is among the most notable notable given Trump called for Tanda to resign then quickly brought him to the negotiating table.

There's this Darth Vader aspect of the whole thing, said Quantum Makunda, a lecturer at the Yale University School of Management, never heard of it, who studies innovation and leadership referring to the Star Wars villain who started as good, became evil, then redeemed himself.

Anyways, Do you wanna read through this post

from The big question is is this socialism?

Maga socialism.

Is this maga socialism?

A lot of people have been saying this.

And and I mean, I think like my default take is that like I don't know that intel is so critical that we need necessarily a backstop.

I don't necessarily know that the government is the right

board You don't trust Doug on this?

I Doug really doesn't want Doug from semi analysis Yeah.

Really doesn't does not want Intel to fail.

Yeah.

I don't know.

I I I I'm I'm still like on the fence about it.

But so the debate has been raging like, is this is this socialism?

And so we're going to the socialists who are self proclaimed the people's line from Carl Behar.

And Carl says, no.

But that hasn't stopped Democrats from complaining about it.

And this is interesting because, obviously, the Trump camp is very pro this deal.

And they're saying, this isn't socialism.

What are you talking about?

We're just doing art of the deal.

We're making good deals.

And we're we're this is an America first agenda project.

The Democrats are saying, oh, wow.

Trump is a hypocrite.

This is socialism.

The socialists are saying this isn't socialism.

It doesn't go nearly far enough.

It doesn't count as socialism because it's not a controlling stake.

So Carl says former under Obama undersecretary of the state, Rick Stengel, is freaking out right now over the news that the Trump administration has taken a 10% equity stake in chip manufacturer Intel.

This is a quote from Rick Stengel.

Trump Trump's strong arming intel for government equity is something Mao and Stalin would be proud of.

Once the GOP believed in the laissez faire capitalism and government not interfering in the private sector, look it up.

The state owning the means of production is called Marxism.

So, Karl, can I

I couldn't find any evidence of Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders taking a victory lap

Mhmm?

On Trump's acquisition of Intel shares Yes.

Which was surprising given that back in in the Biden admin era, they were pushing for this.

Yes.

But the key discussion that's going on right now is is financial financial ownership versus true control over capital, and that's what Carl's gonna get into here.

So he says anyone old enough to remember the phrase government motors, this is from the era of the take of the takeover of GM, should be able to appreciate what a wild line of criticism this is to hear from a former Obama official.

As part of his troubled asset relief program, TARP, Obama took for the US government a 61% equity stake in General Motors, and the right's backlash was entirely predictable.

Rush Limbaugh called this a sterling example of the left's crusade for government control of business that proved the left's enchantment with socialism.

John Stassel complained that this was a move toward more government control of the economy, And in the end, that's pretty close to socialism.

That so many liberals have adopted this line of criticism, Joe car Joe Scarborough took it up on Thursday, and Democratic consultant Jessica Tar Tarlov ran with it on Friday, for example, should probably provoke some reflection among socialists who think of liberals as fellow travelers.

While socialists may share certain egalitarian values and other priorities with contemporary Democrats, American liberals are still reflexively ambivalent to hostile toward the basic socialist agenda of nationalization.

They will opportunistically support it when it's time for Democrats to bail out the economy, but they will aggressively attack it if they think so if they think this will score points against Republicans.

There are a few things that contemporary liberals enjoy more than catching a Republican doing something that they can rightly or wrongly construe as socialist.

In this case, I would say wrongly, Stengel's definition of Marxism as state ownership of the means of production is confused for all kinds of reasons.

But here are the most salient that but here, the most salient is that ownership does not imply control.

Even if this was ordinary equity, 10% would hardly give the government any kind of significant control over the company.

But as Intel made clear in a statement, this deal doesn't even give the government 10% control.

Quote, the Nine government's

point 9%.

But no.

No.

So so there's more.

The government's investment in Intel will be a passive ownership with no board representation or or other governance or information rights.

The government also agrees to vote with the company's board of directors on matters requiring shareholder approval with limited exceptions.

So this notion of passive ownership perfectly illustrates why socialists would would do well to talk about control rather than ownership of the means of production.

A major function of modern finance is to sever the relationship between those two.

To identify control, you have to look past the legal and business terminology and figure out who actually has the final say over any given lot of capital.

In that light, it isn't clear that 10% ownership stake even represents incremental progress towards control of intel, which is what the socialists want.

Convincing a business to give you 10 a 10% nonvoting stake in their company is very different thing from getting a 10% voting stake, let alone a 51% voting stake.

Nevertheless, American partisans clearly aren't interested in litigating the fine details between ownership control, and that's why socialists have an interest in this fight.

If Democrats are going to vilify Trump as a socialist, the best response is to complain that he isn't even doing socialism.

He's not

doing enough.

He's not doing enough.

And so my my my takeaway from this is that it's a good point.

Like, it is not the goal of socialists, but at the same time, it reaffirmed that I do not wanna do the socialist thing here because I don't want the government voting on what Intel should do.

Like, I don't think the government's equipped to make the decision on on how they should position against TSMC, where they fit in Apple Silicon versus TPU versus Tranium.

Like, it just doesn't seem like government's set up to actually run this company more effectively than anyone else.

And so I'm very hesitant about that.

It sounds like something that's, like, very good in some abstract sense to the socialist, but I have no I have no faith that if the government were to get a 51% voting stake in Intel, that we would get a better outcome here.

Well, the better outcome, people were talking about this on the timeline, would be Trump answering questions on earnings calls.

That would be fantastic.

Maybe that's So maybe that's the outcome.

Yeah.

But it'd be odd to have, like I mean, if we went to pure direct democracy and socialism, like, you go to the ballot box and you vote, like, are we gonna do three nanometer?

Like, decide.

You decide.

Like, yes or no.

Like, I think it's I think it's a waste of money.

Or just have the the whoever's the intel CEO just have that as, you know, an elected

Basically.

Official.

Yeah.

Right?

Like, let the people vote on who should be running.

Yeah.

I mean, the question is, like, how much democracy do you want?

You could vote on everything.

You can vote every single day.

California is extremely democratic.

We have ballot measures for all sorts of things.

We tend to not do ballot measures for different things at the federal level.

We have a representative democracy, not a direct democracy.

And but if you if you really play out the direct democracy socialism thing, it's like, yeah, you'll be voting on whether or not Intel launches a GPU.

Like, like, hey, we miss mobile.

What should we do about that?

Okay.

Let's ask the American people broadly at the ballot box.

Like, that is that is the key

issue which is kinda crazy to me.

Should Intel launch energy drinks?

Yeah.

It's not really in our wheelhouse today, but, you know Yeah.

Big potentially large opportunity.

Yeah.

It just it does seem it does seem fraud.

It it doesn't seem like it seems like they're they're It's

potentially one of the slipperiest slopes that we've ever been on as a country.

Well, I don't know.

This is saying that, like, we're like like, his point is that this isn't this isn't a step towards real socialism because it's not real control.

It's it's purely a financial instrument.

Yeah.

But the Intel board said the government also agrees to vote with the company's board of directors on matters requiring shareholder approval with limited exceptions.

What are those exceptions?

So what are the exceptions?

Right?

I'm not sure not sure that we know.

But anyways, the

timeline The analysis says it's a bad idea.

We can vote against you.

That's the exception.

Anyway, first step, I would vote for if I was in a democratic socialist society.

Would vote that Intel gets on graphite dot dev code review for the age of AI.

Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster and get started for free.

In the chat says, I think Intel needs to launch short form content.

Well, make sure your voter registration is up to date because President AOC might just make it happen.

You never know.

I could see

it.

I could see it.

Possible.

I mean, the the the the real wild one is, yeah, Tesla because Tesla's had a number of government incentives that they've taken advantage of.

You can make the same argument.

You put the screws to them, and you say, hey.

We need we need voting shares for this.

For the years and years.

Is what Andrew

and Andrew Sorkin was saying.

Yeah.

He was saying, like, yeah, like, where like, where do you stop?

And I understand that, yeah, there is this, like, slippery slope.

But to Bill Gurley's point, like, Intel could have said no.

They could have said, like, yeah, we're actually gonna be fine without the chips act money.

And so we don't want we don't want an equity stake.

Although

Button is sitting there just on fire.

And he's being like, you don't need help.

You don't need help.

Put it out.

I'll I'll be good.

I'll be good.

Flames are just No.

I'm I'm good.

I'm good.

I'm good.

I'll I'll just

cut more.

He's like, don't wanna I don't wanna give

the Watch me president cut more.

I don't wanna give the president the ick.

Just gonna act all like

Hey.

I mean, BlackBerry is a cybersecurity company now.

Maybe Intel just like pivots all the way down to just like, yeah.

We're we're actually just own real estate at this point.

Like like, all we own

is For REIT.

We're we're real estate, and we just lease to TSMC.

And that's it.

We're we're completely out

of Probably decent business.

I don't

know.

Anyway The timeline was in turmoil earlier.

Daniel Tenrero said the Emily's son Burgification of everything you love continues apace.

I don't know what that means.

Emily fires back and says, keep my name out of your mouth.

If you came to the party I hosted with TVPN and you didn't say hello to me.

He said hello to me.

I don't know.

There were a lot

of There were a lot of people.

But we gotta get some sound effects for that.

I see multiple journalists on the horizon.

Who's the

journalist?

Well, I mean There were multiple journalists.

Another life, Emily could have been a journalist.

Anyways, you guys should Sundberg, if can just debate.

Oh, that'd be good.

Yelp.

Yelp.

That's great.

Andrew Reid is highlighting some small cap sell side research notes under the what what company is this?

I have no idea.

CMRC.

Nasdaq.

There are some things that just go better together.

Austin and live music, Tex and Mex, smoked brisket and just about anything.

And perhaps commerce and the next wave of AI driven agentic discoverability.

Oh, this is for BigCommerce probably.

Big Summit.

Commerce is oh, maybe maybe they just rebranded as just commerce.

But it used to be Big BigCommerce.

Commerce.

And commerce.com.

Yeah.

Bigcommerce.

Bigcommerce.

And there's it was a competitor to to Shopify, I believe.

Yes.

And they did not have a go.

Have a I have a buddy who was like, I think Shopify is overrated.

I'm going long Shopify I'm going short Shopify long BigCommerce because I think that there's like too much of a delta there.

Like and I think that trade went very poorly.

I'm not sure exactly how you executed it.

Down 93.

But this one went way down and Shopify went way up.

Commerce.com though is a pretty hard domain.

It is a good domain.

But you need more than that.

You need you need you need a go to team.

Yep.

Silicon Valley launches pro AI packs to defend industry in midterm elections.

Mhmm.

Andreessen Horowitz and OpenAI President Greg Brockman are among those helping launch and fund Leading the Future.

Leading the Future.

Silicon Valley is putting more than 100 a $100,000,000 into a network of political action committees and organizations to advocate against strict artificial intelligence regulations Mhmm.

A signal that tech executives will be active in next year's midterm elections.

Well, you wanna analyze where all that $100,000,000 will go, you gotta get on Julius.

What analysis do you wanna run, Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds.

We love by 2,000,000 users and counting.

2,000,000,000 soon.

2,000,000,000.

Many are saying this.

So a sixteen z and Greg Brockman are among those helping launch and fund Leading the Future, a new super PAC network focused on AI.

There's been a lot of rumblings around these this idea, but no one's gotten it off the ground to the to the tune of a $100,000,000 yet.

The head of government affairs Colin McCoon and Brockman and OpenAI chief global affairs officer Chris Lahain were involved in initial conversations earlier this year in about the need to help shape industry friendly policies.

Leading the Future hopes to use campaign donations and digital ads to advocate for select AI policies and oppose candidates who the group believes will stifle the industry at large.

One of its goals is to push back against a movement backed by some other tech titans that focuses on regulating AI models before they get too powerful and create catastrophic risks.

This is tech titan on tech titan team

deathmatch.

This is Absolutely.

Love it.

The organization said it isn't pushing for total deregulation but wants sensible guardrails.

So the I mean, the main debate is like is like, is there going to be the AI FDA?

I think this was a talking point that I heard on All In years ago, and I heard repeated in in Washington from a someone in the House of Representatives, this idea that there should be a government organization that, like, reviews and tests models before they get deployed.

And very clearly, that would that would slow down progress, like, significantly, significantly because, like I mean, DeepSeek ships a model without even updating the model card.

And they're just like, yeah, run your own benchmarks.

Like, we're we're not testing this thing.

We're just releasing.

We don't have time.

It's it's on Hugging Face.

And so

imagine Might be wildly dangerous.

Imagine if

you You can figure it out.

Let us know.

Let us

know in the comments if

this is Before you release to Hugging Face, like, you need to go through some sort of, like, FDA style regulation.

That could take years.

That's gonna really, really slow things down, probably be bad for the industry overall.

Maybe it creates a little bit more monopoly power for companies that have the resources to get through that process, but would be would be very, very difficult.

And it would certainly hurt the the rollout of, like, small models depending on how it was because if you just say, like, any you can't deploy any neural network of a certain scale or size.

Like, how are you even defining that?

All of a sudden, like, do you have to approve the latest reels algorithm before you before you, like, update that.

That's something that's updating all the time.

The the the future of these models is, like, much, much more iterative than, like, one big release.

So it seems like it seems sort of

out Equally important, Sheil is on the timeline Oh, yeah.

Now highlighting that Greg Brockman married his wife, Anna, at the OpenAI office on a workday.

Ilya was the officiant.

That's amazing.

Which is absolutely amazing.

Love it.

Love to see it.

If you are a busy executive, consider marrying your wife in the office with your co founder as the officiant.

There's some good precedents here now.

Absolute dog.

I really hope Ilia goes back to OpenAI.

That'd be such a fun twist.

We'll see it.

Anyway, if you're trying to get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT, go to Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brand and brands.

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Crew.

Many tech executives worry that Congress won't pass AI rules, creating a patchwork of state laws that hurt their companies.

Earlier this year, a push by some Republicans to ban state AI bills for ten years was shot down after opposition from other conservatives who opposed a blanket prohibition on any state AI legislation.

It does seem very difficult to deal with State by state regulation when you're running an Internet The

chat is adding some commentary.

QSPS rollover says little language models are threatened.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's We must defend the little language models.

Yeah.

Taylor says, USG doesn't realize the future of proliferation looks more like the AK 47 and less like the bomb.

Well, yeah.

I mean, that mean, maybe that's a bold case for for state regulation since most of I mean, there are some federal regulations, obviously, but a lot of it's state by state.

The California compliant AR 15, the California compliant LLM will be severely nerfed.

It certainly cannot do physics.

It certainly cannot do physics.

Yeah.

That would be too dangerous.

Anyway, Linear's purpose built tool for planning and building products.

Meet the system for modern software development.

Streamline issues, projects, and product road maps.

Leading the Future will generally align with the White House AI and crypto czar, David Sachs, a frequent critic of AI doomers.

The organization plans to start work in four states seen as key AI policy battlegrounds, New York, California, Illinois, and Ohio.

The group said it would support both Democrats and Republicans.

It would include federal and state PACs and a five zero one c four organization that advocates for policies.

The network's AI campaign is expected to start later this year.

One of the best known venture capital firms, Andreessen Horowitz, is also a big backer of FairShake.

Billionaire cofounder Mark Andreessen was one of the most notable tech executives to support Donald Trump last year after previously boosting Democrats.

Part of a swing in Silicon Valley toward conservatives, the shift is worried some Democrats who fear they may be hemorrhaging support without more positive messaging around AI.

Brockman cofounded ChatGPT maker OpenAI along CEO Sam Altman and others, is now one of AI Altman's top deputies.

He is contributing to the new group with his wife, Anna Brockman, who he married.

And, yes, this is the this is the quote on a workday.

Other backers include eight VC managing partner and Palantir Technologies cofounder Joe Lonsdale, AI search engine Perplexity, and veteran angel investor Ron Conway is in the deal.

So certainly bipartisan.

Well, it'll be fun to track that and see what kind of billboards they're buying, what kind of out of home advertising they're doing, what what kind of maybe they should head over to adquick.com.

Out of home advertising made easy and measurable.

Say goodbye to Dan Higgs.

I like this I was actually just talking about, you know, like, lot of these packs, they run, like, attack ads or they run, you know, policy ads.

They put out policy papers.

There's a variety of things that they can do.

But

Let's get a Lead the Futures packs spending.

I would say like at least half, you know, the $100,000,000 on on Adquick.

We'll we'll work on making it happen.

But without further ado

We have our first guest in the restream

room.

Darren, how are you?

Welcome to the show.

How are doing?

We're doing great.

We're doing great.

Excited to have you.

What a fantastic backdrop.

That this is not a virtual background.

Correct?

No.

It is not.

It's a it's a one of one painting of Kobe Bryant called Unfinished Business.

And you know, I was pretty close to Kobe and had them in my office staring at me, making me do my best every day.

That, you know, that's I a good

over the weekend, I rewatched the Kobe Bryant, Wyden, and Kennedy ad campaign, the Kobe system.

Are you familiar with this, Jordy?

Are you familiar with this Kobe system ad campaign?

It is remarkable.

It it's like this bizarre blend of comedy, all in promotion of the latest run of shoes, but we we we we should watch and dig into that at some point because it is fantastic.

Anyway, could you give us a little bit of background introduction on yourself just for those who might not be familiar?

Sure.

I was at ESPN for thirteen years covering the business of sports.

Did that for six years at CNBC.

Then I went over to gambling, the quant kinda gambling side with the Action Network sold to a Danish company called Better Collective.

And for the last year and a half, I've been running Collect, which is on one side pretty much the best journalism source proudly, in covering collectibles.

We also advise teams, leagues, and brands on what to do in collectibles, building their bespoke collectibles.

Have

13 clients and excited about that side business.

What's on the frontier of, like, collectibles?

Like, what's, what what's something where that you've seen, like, a team or a league do that's kind of out of the typical path?

Well, we we actually just helped the the Washington Capitals do a a piece that teams have never done before.

So, like, our our idea is if we're advising you, you're gonna make something cool, we'll stand in the background and be white label.

Mhmm.

So when Alexander Ovechkin broke 895 goals, the the all time NHL record, I literally was shoveling the ice that came off the Zamboni after the second period.

We got a 125 gallons of ice.

We put them in these kind of like receptacles that then looks like it's the real ice.

It's a mini rink, and you get it in a cherry wood box, and the $8.95 on the back has the shavings from the gold stick that Ovechkin was presented with by the NHL.

So $1,500 range, you know, these are high end things that teams have never done before.

So those those type of things we're working on.

That's very cool.

Let's talk about the $13,000,000 card and the buyer that was just announced.

Can you break down kind of the significance of that deal?

How it came to be and kind of what you expect out of

Yeah.

So this is very nontraditional.

When you hear about cards, you think about the most valuable and two cards come up.

The t two two zero six Onus Wagner from '28 no '9, 1911, and of course, the 1952 Tops Mickey Mantle.

For the most part, for all time, that has been one and two alternating with the small exception of Mike Trout for a little bit.

And how often do those actually trade, like reprice effectively?

So it depend it depends on what what grades.

So, like, so a PSA eight, eight out of 10 of a of a mantle will trade maybe twice a year.

A PSA nine will trade maybe once every two or three years.

And a PSA ten mantle, there's three of them.

They're probably in order for someone to trade it at this point among those three guys, they'd probably have to get 40,000,000 for it.

So that hasn't traded in ten years.

The the Honus is there's 60 of them.

They trade usually once a year, And now you have these other cards, these modern cards, which in 2003 upper deck started coming out with these exquisite and logoman cards.

Essentially gives you signed from a couple of players and then patches of that where upper deck says that it's been representative to them that this is a game use patch.

And these cards back then were 35,000 to a $100,000.

In the last five years, they've become easy million dollar cards.

And you know, there's not many of them, most of them are one of ones, so the Kobe LeBron, the Kobe Jordan, And this one was seen as kind of the most coveted.

Couple years ago, probably would have sold for $5,000,000, and now there's a lot of interest.

There's interests from the people that bought it.

Kevin O'Leary and Matt Allen started secure collectibles, which is essentially, we think, a fund to buy into these modern cards.

Previously you've had like funds for like vintage and getting into these vintage cards, but the modern cards seem to be the ones that people

are

into.

And it's hard for me.

I have about a $15,000,000 collection.

I've been collecting for twenty years.

It's hard for me to get into the modern cards.

What is that?

I dropped a I dropped No.

No.

It's just a big number.

So I had to

That's a huge collection.

Congrats.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So but I don't really I collect real one of ones.

To me, this is I'm not trying to to shoot it down, but

Yeah.

This is manufactured scarcity.

Scarcity.

Right?

The car company says it's one of one.

I'm collecting something that's like really one of one, like, you know Well,

is played out somewhat in the in the car world as well, like, you know, I think from from what I understand, like the the sort of true classic Ferrari market has somewhat slowed

It has.

In in that the the younger generation, the Instagram generation, the millennials are probably more focused on some of these modern super cars.

Like they might be more interested in acquiring an SP three

That that has happened.

That has definitely happened.

You know, the question becomes obviously the $13,000,000 card.

So so this card now has surpassed on the price alone, the Honus and the and the the mantle.

You know, the question is like there's there's a lot of people still collecting a lot of these modern cards and they rely on we're in a degenerate economy, and my my friend Howard Linsen, that's his term that he loves.

And, know, my my son opens up packs and he's 11 years old.

And if it doesn't have a number on it, if it's not out of 25 or have a gold little foil or whatever, he literally throws it in the garbage.

It's in the garbage.

And you're having these businesses now that are

So are we getting are we getting the youth hooked on on gambling at a young age?

Is that is that I

think everything is on tilt.

So so if they're not gambling, straight up gambling, they're they they know about Bitcoin already.

They know about things that trade nonstop.

You know, the stock market stops.

And so they're always like these repacks.

Have you seen these digital repacks?

Basically what happens is you open up cards that they've scanned in the system.

Okay?

So they've opened the packs, they have cards they've scanned in the system.

You open it, it spins, it opens.

It's like a slot machine.

And then if you don't get what you love, now you could take that, they could send it to you.

If you don't get what you love, you could sell it back immediately at 80% of the value.

Now, normally you'd say 80%, that's horrible.

Like I lost 20 percent and you know, that's that's so bad.

However, if you come in from a gambling world 80% is great because it's a zero sum game.

Right?

Like if you're gambling when you lost, you lost at zero.

And so if you compare it against the gambling world, so these companies are you know, this company Courtyard July, they did $60,000,000 in repacks and they're making the delta every time someone returns something back or if they're shipping it to them.

And so, yeah.

I mean, we're we're all on tilt right now.

We can't go back.

Yeah.

That makes sense.

What is the give us a read on the overall state of the collectibles market right now.

On absolutely on fire.

I mean, if you go to Fanatics Fest, if you go to the National Sports Collectors Convention, a 125, 150,000 people, kids walking around with briefcases with $30,000 worth of cards.

It it is it is not what it was when I was a kid.

Think I the energy's there, but the the money and the I mean, it's it's outrageous.

There there are going to be things that will pop.

I don't think the whole thing is a bubble, but there are a bunch of things that don't make sense.

I think there's just a lot of very interesting markets.

PSA, which grades everything, just started grading magazines, you know.

So what what magazines do you want to grade?

I I I say, okay, like everyone finds their own niche.

For me, it's it's Hollywood debuts.

The first time someone is has come on a on a magazine.

Right?

And so hold on hold on one second.

Hold on a second.

No worries.

Let's bring this let's bring this bin over here.

We need PSA graded arena mags in Colossians.

So, you know, we got For sure.

Let's see.

I mean, like, this is a

beautiful Forbes.

You know, you got you got the Clawdaddy, you know, Aykroyd, Belushi.

Yeah.

You know, that that that's an early that's an early one.

You got the first time John Candy appeared on a magazine in 1985, a Canadian only.

You know, you got the first Ralph Macchio here.

I I just appreciate how how I know I know I know, like, two out of the 10 names.

Yeah.

Right.

Exactly.

Give it but but talk about the shape of the market and who the kind of key players are.

I know that eBay at at at some point or another, think people were kind of writing them off, but they seem to have

No.

The issue is that live commerce is the thing, know.

And right now eBay live is just not as great as whatnot, which is just doing tons of business.

And and so they're they're a little bit behind.

I think

So to so so the so live live is and and live is is dominating the traditional auction?

Live is dominating.

A lot of it has to do with breaking, which is also gambling.

So I told you about repacks.

Mhmm.

Breaking breaking is essentially I buy a team.

Right?

So like let's say I spend $3,000 and I wanna buy the Golden State Warriors

Mhmm.

And they open up a box and all these people are watching.

Do I get a Steph Curry

Mhmm.

Or do I get And if you don't get one, they have to give you kind of some sort of card because otherwise it's an illegal lottery.

Mhmm.

Again, these things are on the cusp of will attorney general get into these and say this is gambling.

But yes, breaking is just another reason why live is just going crazy.

And what's Fanatics strategy been to date?

I know they've been acquisitive and they now have an advantage, right, in terms of actually

They have all they have all the rights.

They're about to take over the NBA rights.

They have the Major League Baseball rights through Topps.

They're about to take over the NFL rights.

They have Fanatics Live, which is breaking.

They, you know, clearly have a lot.

Fanatics Collect, is their auction house.

So they're really really involved in the game to a point of, you know, almost or definitely monopoly power.

Interesting.

What do think of lil libubu?

We got a question in the chat.

I I I I think it's hard to figure out see, the key to PSA and the key to the growth of collectibles has been population reports.

Tell me exactly how many there are.

Right?

So I can tell you there's only three Mickey Mantle PSA tens.

Mhmm.

Right?

On Lububu, it gives me the odds, but I feel like I need to know live how many have been opened.

How many have like How do we figure out how to have population reports and grading these things?

Because that's what gives you like the the the want and the wish to say, okay, I wanna invest in these things.

Other than just have a again, that's just a these mystery boxes are another way to gamble.

Yeah.

The degenerate economy.

What what about in the business collectibles space?

I know there's there there was this signed Steve Jobs business card that traded, but Yeah.

Like I like jobs.

I was worried about the number of checks that came out.

I am one of two people who own a Steve Jobs signature that says go change the world.

I think that's a that's a cool one that I'm holding on to.

I own the largest Warren Buffett signature in the world.

It's two feet long on 18 uncut, uncirculated dollar bills.

Wow.

I think, you know, when Warren passes, I think someone's gonna want that on on their wall.

I'm gonna I'm gonna hold for now.

Yeah.

Do you think

there's a do you think there's a potential play to build a a kind of vertical marketplace for just business collectibles?

Or is that not the way Yeah.

For sure.

I I I every Berkshire Hathaway meeting passed from 1996 to 02/2025.

That's incredibly cool.

I don't

The hardest one to get is February.

I just got it, so I'm really The excited about business cards are tough though because unless they're signed, it's hard to figure out if they're real.

Yeah.

We're in

a

unique position where we're we're we were recently at the Figma IPO, and we brought a special gong and had the CEO, Dylan Field, ring the gong.

And we were thinking about how we should evolve that maybe

And we have a big studio up here.

We can hang him from the raft Yeah.

We think

it might be game hit.

Yeah.

Game hit gongs or something where they sign the at the IPO.

That that would be pretty good.

Okay.

I I don't know that we're doing it for it's more just for lore at this point than than ROI.

Yeah.

But if you had if you had if you had a 100 Gongs

Yeah.

You know, would be kinda cool.

We'll work we'll work on

I always tell I always tell teams, you know, when you have a concert of a of an important figure in there, you should give them some custom thing and then you should have your own custom thing so that you get it signed.

Yeah.

No.

That makes a lot of sense.

Yeah.

But it's a listen.

It's a it's a fun vertical.

It's you know, if you know what you're doing, think like anything, you should have a take.

Right?

You should

have a strong take and you shouldn't be a follower.

You know, like, why do you think something should increase in value?

And I jump all over the place in terms of trying to get into markets every day.

I think the Beatles, costly, but still has a huge run up.

Right?

There's two guys still alive.

How do you figure all that stuff out?

Is there a cottage industry of people like specifically in music collectibles that are just focused on acquiring assets from artists that are emerging today?

Yes.

Or or do people typically kind of wait too late to start taking an artist seriously?

Well, again, it's like it's it's not too late.

Right?

It's it's it's it's not too late in music because I think, again, we're still so behind.

You know, Billy Joel, right?

Like you could see there's now there's there's a fur fur for Billy Joel type stuff.

You could still get some good stuff.

Now you can't get his own his first concert at MSG because I own the only two in the world and I'll have to sell it to you.

But, you know, you can get into these things, it's not it really is not too late.

It's never too late, you have to just say, okay, at the price it is now, what type of upside does it have?

But in music in general, I think Billy Joel, Bon Jovi, Springsteen, Madonna, all early early days.

How do you, influencers play into the world of collectibles?

I I've I've followed the story of Ed Bollian and the Lamborghini Murcielago market where he kind of figured out that there were maybe less of a certain type.

The I think it was particularly particularly manual transmission l p June.

The the market had estimated that maybe it was, like, you know, 60% people went for automatic when that car came out.

And when he actually put all the VINs together, figured out all the numbers, it was more like 99% of people had selected automatic, and then he popularized that through a series of YouTube videos.

And I believe the market really caught up because of that.

Does that happen?

Do have any stories around that?

Yeah.

I mean, I I boot I controlled the ticket market.

So when when PSA said they were coming out with grading tickets I said, okay, I gotta find the 100 best tickets of all time.

I gotta be really quiet about it.

And then a year later I gotta say, hey, tickets are great.

Now this was not just a pump by me, because I should say that I've only sold about 1% of my collection.

However, I bought Tiger Woods first PGA Tour event for a thousand dollars, and then a year later sold it for 77,000.

So I was able

to Underwrite the entire collection.

So some big yeah.

There were there were definitely some ridiculous pops.

I bought the the the nicest full ticket of Marilyn Monroe singing happy birthday to JFK.

Bought it for 6,000, sold it for a 105,000.

You know, so, like, there you go.

Give me another one.

There we go.

So so, yeah, you you can influence markets, and I do.

But again, I it's genuine.

Right?

I love I love I love tickets.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mean, at certain point, like, what Ed Bolley did with Lamborghini was, very much fact finding.

He wasn't he wasn't manipulating the market.

He was just bringing extra information.

Yeah.

I do I do do worry that do worry that that so many so many different things in our lives have gone digital which just reduces the number of like

Is that a is that positive or a negative?

Yeah.

Right.

No.

It's a good point.

And and I I would say in collectibles, you can't appeal to every audience.

The ticket market is gonna really appeal to the 40 to 65 year old person right now.

And guess what?

Those are the people that have the most money to spend.

So should I feel bad that I'm not that the 20 35 year old doesn't care about my market?

No.

I especially if you have one of ones.

Right?

Like, you know, I have the only 1899 silver certificate that was in the pocket of a guy who died on the Titanic.

Like, okay, my market isn't that liquid, but I need two people.

I don't need 700.

Yep.

Yep.

Right?

And that's really that's really where, you know, for my philosophy, it's like the real one of ones.

Yes.

If you collect cards, you immediately know how much that's worth usually.

If it's not a one of one, because you go on eBay and it sold yesterday.

To me that's not fun.

I like to buy real one of ones where someone says, hey I'll pay I'll I'll pay you $20,000 for Disney paying his $19.62 taxes, his check.

And I'd say, no, I want 30.

You're not gonna go and find it somewhere else.

So you're gonna pay me or whatever.

So you know, the the the real one of one markets are less liquid, but in a lot of ways they're more secure if you really believe in it.

Yeah.

What We have we have some space here in the studio.

Mhmm.

We we would like to acquire a car that has some like, you know, provenance with The business great technology CEO.

I don't know that we were in we'd be in the market for Elon's f one yet.

Yeah.

It crashed with with PT.

Yeah.

Right?

Yeah.

I'm with PT.

But but what is there is there a great is there a great former vehicle of a of a Silicon Valley

bunch of there are a bunch of replica cars that were exact replica cars that sold on Saturday.

There was a Ghostbusters replica hearse.

There was two Jurassic Park Jeep vehicles, which were kinda cool.

I'm trying to think of, like, what normally, if

someone Larry Ellison

Larry eleven.

You know Larry Ellison's McLaren f one just went to auction, 23,000,000.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Just out of the price range for us, but hopefully

Which is interesting because because often if you have houses owned by celebrities

Yep.

Or houses that were used in movies, people think that it ups the value.

It actually decreases the value.

Interesting.

People who are buying these houses Yeah.

At the 3 to $5,000,000 level or the $20,000,000 level, they don't care that a movie was filmed in there or a celebrity had it.

They just care about what are the bones and how much do I have to redo.

There's a there's a the house that was used in Hannah Montana is near me in Malibu.

Okay.

If you owned it, it would actually be extremely frustrating because every single day tourists are taking pictures in front of it, so you'd just be constantly in the background of just random photos.

Yeah.

That's that's kinda that's like what happened with the Home Alone house in, you know, in in Illinois.

You know, it's people just keep coming by, become part of house tours.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Do you think, like, how do you think the Internet and modern technology is changing, like, the creation of collectibles?

Because I when I think about tickets, I feel like almost everything's digital now.

People don't really get the physical tickets.

And so maybe what some of the your work and what you're doing consulting with folks, like, allows for the creation of new unique collectibles that kind of fill that.

But are we seeing, like, net more inventory or less inventory?

There's just so I feel like so many products whether I used to give someone a DVD box set or a book.

Mhmm.

And now it's yeah.

You probably have it on Spotify anyway.

Just go Yeah.

And and and I was I asked generally about this a bit earlier.

But but also, is there did you ever get excited about new technology like NFTs that

I think So so I think there's I think there's actually the shame of it is that blockchain got thrown out with with the NFT Sure.

Decline.

Yeah.

And I don't think they should be together.

Blockchain has great applications, just really really good for future, for counterfeiting, for everything in this space that we've been struggle for, for for friction.

Right?

You can move something frictionless.

You don't have to get it graded then put it on eBay.

So I I do think that that I'm not the NFTs unfortunately, I think a lot of it was just grift and garbage, and it just it it just is what it was and it and because bad actors gravitated to it, I think it got a bad reputation.

Yeah.

I don't think all of them deserve that, and I certainly think that blockchain has significant applications.

I think we just need a little bit more time away, and it and it will emerge.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We we we had a founder or a CEO of an NFT company called Pudgy Penguins on the show, and they've kind of gone backwards where they're focused on creating real products in the real world and and kind of bootstrapping the community that way.

They've already done the NFT launch, and that's kind of been

Yeah.

It's almost going going back through typical licensing going backwards.

Exactly.

And Yeah.

And I think it's worked out really I I just saw one gifted from a from a grandmother to a grandson.

And and and I had no idea that that there was any connection there.

So, certainly, at least that company has kinda figured out a way to

But I do think that the the young population does like physical still.

Yeah.

It when it's available.

Totally.

Perfect.

Well, thank you so much for hopping on.

This is fantastic.

Anytime there's No.

Any anytime No.

There's something in the news, hit us up.

We'd love to have you on to break it down.

Fantastic.

Thanks, guys.

Cheers, Talk

to you soon.

Let me tell you about Numeral sales tax on autopilot.

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

Go to numeralhq.com.

And we have doctor Drew in the waiting room, in the re waiting room.

We're bringing in doctor Drew to hear the real

Price story guest.

Of doctoridrew.

Botched the story earlier on the stream.

If you're turning in, in my defense, I believe I was nine years old at

the time.

But I'm glad

to have doctor Drew here on the show.

Hopefully, let's bring in Doctor.

Drew Pinsky.

How are we doing?

There we go.

Can you hear us?

Welcome to the stream.

Hello?

We are working on audio.

Let's sort that out.

And in the meantime, let me tell you about fin dot ai, the number one AI agent for customer service.

Number one in performance benchmarks.

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Production team, tell me how we are doing.

Hopefully, we can get Doctor.

Drew in a week.

Sounds like we're

having audio issues.

We will jump into the timeline.

Can also just have him call my phone.

I'm hearing something.

Can you hear us?

Oh, hello.

I hear you.

Do you hear me?

Oh, wow.

Looking sharp.

You really really undersought You said you were just gonna do a phone call and now here you are.

No.

I thought I'd I'd

do this

the full warranty here

because This is amazing.

Okay.

So first off, I need to apologize.

I completely botched the story of doctor g dot com.

In my defense, I believe I was 10 years old when I stopped by the office as a as a kid, but please break it down for us.

It's so funny.

The the only thing I found disturbing was how how miserably you did with my credentials.

Oh, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

Let me start with that.

Okay.

Please.

I'm a board certified internist.

A board certified dictionologist.

I'm a fellow with the American Board of Medical College of Physicians.

I'm we had multi I was assistant clinical professor in psychiatry, practiced medicine my whole life.

I'm not a psychologist.

Okay.

Yes.

Yes.

We did do Loveline back in the day.

I love Loveline.

I I sincerely love Loveline.

I wish I listened to it constantly.

It was amazing.

Well, it it was very popular, and it served a function back in the day.

But it's good to this this business spun out of it, and I thought you guys would really like to hear this history because it is a piece of history.

Incredible.

Good friend of mine from high school, Polytechnic High School.

Yeah.

We we went off to Amherst College and then he went to Harvard Business School, I went to medical school and I'm going along doing all these wild things, practicing medicine and then doing radio and he shows up and he goes, I wanna I wanna show you how to form a business.

We're gonna do a .com company.

And of course, I was hearing about all the .com stuff in the in the wind and he'd got some seed capital from a company in Orange County like a million dollars.

And then he put together a little board, and we went he grabbed me by the arm and took me up to Sandhill Road, and we sat at SoftBank SoftBank, rather.

Incredible.

Made a he just said, follow me.

I go, what are we doing?

What are we I had no idea what we were doing.

Didn't know how to start a business.

I didn't Had

you had you boughtyour.com, by the way?

Had you, like, gone out?

Probably had done something like that at that point.

I don't think sitting there without that.

Yeah.

Exactly.

And and he just goes, follow me.

And I was like, okay.

So I followed along.

And they go, what do you wanna do?

And I'm like, I'm you know, well, well So I thought of I don't remember what I said, but the six or seven SoftBank VC representatives marched out of the room and my Harvard Business School friend was anxious and like I didn't even understand what was happening.

Still, did not.

And they came back in and they go, okay, $10,000,000.

That was that.

Let's go.

We went down and we built the company exactly as you described.

Okay.

And in

fact, drove my wife crazy.

She goes, what are people doing here?

Why aren't they why aren't they working there?

It shouldn't it shouldn't be this nice an environment.

But most of was for the tech team, and you pointed out how weird the tech situation was.

You got that part exactly right.

K.

Perfect.

The

part you got wrong is Yes.

Remember, people didn't have any idea what a website was.

Yes.

And so we had an editorial staff.

We had a medical staff.

We had a marketing team.

And they envisioned I kept saying, why do we need a magazine on my computer screen?

Why you're you're building this really great magazine

Mhmm.

But with a chat room and with some feedback.

And they kept they all of all the all these sort of trigger words back now were interaction.

Sure.

And and I didn't understand.

I I saw no value in any of it.

I kept saying I I I kept I we had a 120 employees, and we had a board of directors from from Northern California who were demanding we, quote, get big fast.

This this is interesting.

Get big fast.

Yeah.

This guy this I I came to our first board meeting.

I said, look.

I I'm trying to decide if, we should figure out how to make money, how to make this profitable, or or what we should be doing or how to, you know

Did they tell you, don't worry about that.

Don't worry about that.

Worse than that, this one guy goes if he was manic as hell, and he goes, if I thought you were so stupid, I never would have been on this board.

Up and he goes, here's how you make money a .com company.

And there was a giant whiteboard, and he wrote in huge letters, get big fast.

Yeah.

And they were demanding we burn through capital faster to try to get big fast.

So that became the weird it was the weirdest thing I ever seen in my life.

But the one thing I got right Mhmm.

I kept saying, it's gonna be video.

Why else do we need this thing?

It's gonna be video.

But look look what we're doing right now.

Right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I just kept saying that, and we put together a one night a week television show Yeah.

That was really a high quality show.

We still have some of the tapes from it, and everybody came in.

Paul Rudd, Tommy Lee, everybody came in there on that one night a week show because it was the cool thing to do Mhmm.

Because there's this new idea, this .com company creates a TV show, and nobody could watch it.

You know why?

Because you couldn't stream it.

Because nobody had stream.

Nobody had broadband.

Yeah.

Broadband.

You needed broadband back then.

That's that's how far ahead of the technology we were.

We were the sounds like you weren't making a ton of money, but were you selling the show subscription?

Like, what what did that

Was the was there any business model?

There were, like, any any revenue model?

Just eyeballs.

Just eyeballs.

So get big fast didn't mean revenue or profits.

It meant eyeballs.

Eyeballs.

Get big meant money.

It meant number of people.

And they kept talking about how the curve, you know, how the ascertainty curve would develop around viewership and and engagement and this kind of stuff.

And we literally this was a company I mean, had lots of traction and engagement and stuff.

People were kind of intrigued by it.

So people were stopping by and looking at this thing.

I'm I'm not sure.

We did lots of interviews with celebrity.

It was sort of like e meets teen b meets, you know, it was all these different sorts of things all together in one site.

And we literally were sitting in Goldman Sachs on, I believe it was 03/19/2022 2010.

Wait.

When was that?

2000

I'm sorry.

1989.

Okay.

February.

The day the Nasdaq fell apart.

Oh, shit.

We were

sitting the the day.

Yeah.

We were sitting in Goldman Sachs, and the woman across the table was contemplating giving us $30,000,000 on a 110,000,000 valuation Wow.

For a company that had never made a penny.

Wow.

And I I I just thought it was the dumbest thing I ever saw, but I I knew it was tulips the whole way, and I kept and one friend of mine finally goes, look.

It's Amsterdam, 1680.

It's tulips.

You're gonna grow brussels sprouts or you're gonna grow tulips?

What what are you gonna do?

I said, alright.

I'm I'm gonna grow tulips.

You're gonna grow Well, I mean, it's interesting to think back and if and if if if it was structured as an investment that was actually in you and your name and likeness, it would have been a tremendous investment.

Yep.

But that wasn't a good.com story.

It it was why we got the money, though.

Yeah.

In fact, there's there's an Inc.

Article on my wall here.

I was gonna actually pull down and wave in front of the camera, it'd be almost impossible to do it.

Were that they were sort of saying that's what they were, you know, that's kind of what they were thinking they were doing.

But it it was not it was not a clear thought, but they were looking for brands.

Yeah.

And I don't think they really knew that that that was not a fully developed thought at that time.

Yeah.

So what was the what

was the conclusion?

I was like, going to business school

Yeah.

I saw the entire the entire from from seed to dissolve Yeah.

I saw the entire business cycle in one year.

So did you did you eventually take take over the site again yourself or what did Doctor.

Coop brought bought the site.

Mhmm.

Remember Doctor.

Coop?

You wouldn't.

You're too young.

He was the attorney general and then he he had a website that actually did rather well for a minute.

Did he just redirect the website or was he still using doctordrew.com?

No.

No.

He was a redirect.

Okay.

Cool.

Absorbed everything.

And and he went bankrupt, as everybody did.

Yeah.

And we got we were able to weasel it back.

I forget how we got it back, but we had to we had to do some sleuthing.

We finally got it back.

So, you know, what what what how did the shape of your business evolve then?

And like what like, how do you think about packaging everything that you do now?

You know, there there is I was listening to you guys talk, I was thinking, boy, I don't have any framework.

Mhmm.

This is all very interesting to me, but I but I don't have a framework to sort of understand what I do.

My my stuff is always an improvisation.

Sure.

Right?

I when I started radio in 1983, I had no designs on radio.

I just I was leave me alone so I can practice medicine.

I'll come here in the evenings on Sunday and do community service.

Yeah.

That was my Very good.

Little notion in 1983 when I started doing radio.

Yeah.

Then there's some television guys came along.

I'm like, how do you do a TV show?

I've never I don't even know what you're talking about.

Well, was the same thing with the.com.

My my good friend comes to me.

He goes, we're gonna do this.

And I thought, I I I don't see it.

I don't get it.

But I think we might be able to do something with it.

It'd be interesting.

This was a hell of an education.

Yeah.

And and you're asking how I frame everything I do now now.

Well, yeah.

I was wondering

Well, it's just been interesting how many techno how many different technology trends from media..com to, you know, podcasting, but it all comes back to basic radio and TV.

Yeah.

Like, wait.

Like, what what over over the past, you know, more recent tech boom history, have you been hit with the, hey.

Let's do let's do a

quick Drew.

Or let's do an AI thing.

Is this coming is it rearing its head again?

It that has been that has been I've had conversations like that.

Yeah.

Of course.

Of course.

Exactly what to do with it, nobody knows.

Nobody.

Right?

But it's part of the exploration.

I'm doing streaming shows regularly.

You guys blasted them up there.

It looked like hell.

Wait.

Wait.

Put it up there.

I'm gonna talk to my webmaster.

I

mean, looks really good for conversion optimization.

For sure.

It made me wanna click.

So I think you're I think that's your person's doing a good job.

Not meant to be shown at other people's shows.

But, you know, that's been interesting.

It it happened.

That all happened just because I got canceled for daring to say people shouldn't panic about COVID.

Oh, yeah.

And that caused me to just stop doing everything.

Yeah.

And I had somebody who said, hey.

You should do a streaming show.

I was like, what's that?

Again, that's sort of my it's where I start every one of these projects.

Yeah.

You had a bad experience streaming the first time where you're like, if if I make the show, you're sure people are gonna be able to watch it.

But Well more confidence this time.

I know how it works.

I knew it.

I already knew that.

I already knew I saw what was happening with videos.

I just kept we just kept saying we were so early.

We just we we could have been who knows what?

We could have been you God knows we could have been YouTube or something if we had sort of been the first to

Yeah.

Really advocate for this kind of platform.

But we were way early, and nobody else was quite as much of a believer as I was.

And so the streaming thing has been very interesting, and you just I'm I'm in my own my kids' playroom doing this, and it's the same thing.

Everything here used to require me to go out to a satellite booth booth at CNN.

Yeah.

And now I just do it from here.

So the efficiencies are fantastic.

Yeah.

And so I do television out of the studio.

I do podcasting out of the studio.

I do streaming shows.

And it all started because I got canceled and some of my webmaster said the streaming is probably gonna happen pretty soon.

I said, let's try that.

And I wanted to talk to all the peep other other physicians who've been canceled.

Mhmm.

One of them happens to be the director of the NIH right now.

And so I that that these people had something to say and the cancellation thing was some sort of bizarre aberration, certainly in in science and medicine.

Had you So you gotten, you know, the the opportunities that you maybe lost due to the cancellation?

Have you gotten invited back in the last

Or is it just a different set of opportunities?

Or is it yeah.

Are you looking at totally different?

Or do you not even wanna go back to the to kind of the old

These these are great questions.

I I don't know that I wanna go back, but I probably would because I've taken the position that my opinions have never changed.

I'm happy to express them on any platform anywhere.

What has happened in the meantime is, you know, what I used to do is say all the news outlets, all of them, all of a sudden, the only people that would have me on was Fox.

Yeah.

Now, just last week, CNN called.

So I thought, okay.

Good.

This is a good sign.

Yeah.

That's I couldn't make it, but I would have had I been able

to Nature's schedule healing.

Nature's healing.

Yeah.

We've we've been really obsessed with this idea that sort of a barbell is emerging in modern media where all the value either accrues to the platforms like YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, or the individuals, the Joe Rogan, the Andrew Huberman, the 100%.

100%.

And that it's very hard to actually build anything in the middle.

Would you agree with that?

Would you is this something that you've kind of experienced?

It it feels like something that

No.

I the I I absolutely concur with the on the talent side Yeah.

That because it used to be I would require to do what we're doing right now.

Yep.

There'd be an executive producer.

There'd be a segment producer.

There would be a director in the studio, in the satellite booth.

There'd be somebody directing in the other end of the satellite booth.

There

would be And then you got the union.

The unions involved with it.

There'd be unions.

There'd be sales forces.

There'd be executive structure.

Now it's me.

Yeah.

That's it.

Yeah.

So it's so much more efficient, and it drives that world crazy.

Yeah.

So when Colbert gets gets fired for losing $40,000,000 a year, I just looked at that and I go, well, of course.

Yeah.

That's gonna happen to all of them.

This is just not a

reaction at that point was he could just go set up his own home studio and probably have a fantastic business just with his existing fan base and none of the none One of the

100%.

But they are they are you gotta know how that world thinks.

They're very spoiled.

They're very spoiled and they're used to gigantic infrastructure and dozens of writers.

And, this is this the world we're living in right as we have this interview

Yep.

To them looks sort of cheap and dumb, and people who aren't talented do that.

The real people people back back us with infrastructure and money.

That that is just not so this the other side of the barbell Yeah.

Which I'm wondering how you see it, I just see it as largely nonviable.

So much of it has got to shrink dramatically, and it's resisting.

Yep.

It's resisting like crazy.

Yeah.

I mean, I I would almost put the the traditional media corporations, like, in the center.

When I think of the far big mega side of the barbell, I think of the platforms, Spotify, Facebook, Meta, YouTube, Twitch, LinkedIn, the networks, and they actually accrue a ton of the value.

And and it and it is extremely hard to start one of those companies.

And if you do

Yes.

You're not talent at all.

In fact, you're probably an engineer.

And you probably, at this point, have the backing of, like, a state government because that's the only way TikTok got going was, you know, so much energy and capital flowing in to actually, you know, break through.

The ship has sailed on starting, like, new platforms for the most part, in my opinion.

I think that's probably right.

And and there and they don't need to buy talent.

No.

Not at all.

It just comes to them naturally and they give 50% Right.

Of the revenue or whatever the

Yeah.

We would rather we would rather just have you jump on our show from your studio.

Yep.

Yep.

And you benefit Yep.

Because people are gonna trickle over to you.

Yep.

And and And Axe makes money on and their and not not focused on talent management.

Interesting thing is you you just have to wonder, is there are we somewhere in a business cycle that's gonna lead to some consolidation?

Mhmm.

And when the talent consolidates, are they gonna start negotiating with the platforms?

Is there gonna be some sort of Yeah.

I mean, would be a natural business cycle.

Right?

Yeah.

What was that new left wing Substack publication that just announced?

They said they're living out or something.

Remember this?

Yeah.

What are the

Anyway, there's like a collection the argument.

So there's Yeah.

The argument.

There's a new a new publication that's launching that's aggregating a number of writers who are sort of on the left.

And we were kind of debating, will they have leverage over different platforms because they're all together?

Or does it actually make more sense for Matt Iglesias and Derek Thompson to just have their own substacks and go direct?

And then, you know, and then on the far other side is the is the platform, and there's really no one in between.

But we're still early in the in this development of the the argument.

There there's something very strange.

It says there's a weird confluence of worlds right now.

Yeah.

My son just texted me

Mhmm.

And he's he's been trying to get to you guys.

Really?

No way.

Does he wanna does he wanna

Does he wanna hop on?

We'll send him a link.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We'll send him.

He can join right after you.

Listening.

Maybe call my phone, and I'll put you up to the microphone.

Let's

do it.

Let's do it.

He's consolidating the ad depart you know, the the management, the the lawyering, the

Okay.

Ad services, the distribution.

He's trying to consolidate that onto a tiny little team

Sure.

Because these things aren't all this stuff is not needed anymore.

Yeah.

You need an ad

you need an ad agency.

Yeah.

This is amazing.

The the the chat is going wild.

Everyone's really happy with this.

They're calling they're calling your son the prodigal son.

Well, he

he here, I'm a see if I can him to call me.

He said he emailed he his partner named Jake emailed one of you guys.

Okay.

Okay.

We'll have to follow-up.

But

They're they're having huge success, and he's the one that he's the one that started talking about AI.

He's he's in the middle of all this.

The tech influencers, the the the Google Store, the, TikTok Store, all of everything.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But all of that is more efficient, more efficient, more efficient.

Yep.

Right?

I mean, and the and what you have is these the the talent agencies and the ad agencies and the managerial services and the lawyers holding on.

They're like they're like going into the foxholes Yeah.

As opposed to adjusting and adapting and changing what what it is they do.

They are just insisting the things continue to be done the way that they've always been done.

And it's it's it's I guess a classic business mistake.

Right?

Yeah.

Totally.

Yeah.

I have one I have one one health one health question for you.

Yeah.

What are the John John and I are starting a what we hope to be a multiple decades run of of daily live streaming.

What would you have done when when you were earlier in your career health wise to to better sell you seem to be doing incredibly well now.

So what are the key things to look out for health wise to make sure you can do this for decades?

Be hypomanic.

Mhmm.

It helps, which which a lot of successful business people are.

Yes.

Okay.

You're going it's you know, as I I hear in many of the podcasts, you're gonna suffer, you're gonna work hard, you're gonna lose sleep.

I wish I paid more attention to sleep, but if I had, I couldn't have done most of what I did.

Mhmm.

I'm trying to pay attention to sleep now.

Yeah.

And, you know, you've heard it all before.

It's it's not this is not new.

Trust your instincts.

Explore.

Don't be afraid to fall down.

I for me, the the the big as I look back on all the things I did, it it just the willingness to improvise and to go into dangerous situations.

I mean, a lot of oh, he's calling now.

Let's get him on.

We got the sun on.

Don't know if they can hear you.

He can I'll have to translate

from you.

Put up speakerphone.

Hey.

How's it going, guys?

How you doing?

What's happening?

Good sun, obviously.

But we, my business partner and I actually emailed you a couple weeks back.

Okay.

We rep Roberto Nixon.

Oh, no way.

I love Roberto.

That's amazing.

Okay.

Yeah.

We gotta get in touch.

My dad was on the air.

Fantastic.

I'm flying back from Seattle.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

I do so we did have a little exchange.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Let's follow-up.

Guys.

He's gonna keep talking.

Okay?

He can't I'll tell him what you said.

He can't hear you.

Keep talking, Douglas.

I was gonna say that I so Rob and Jake are going to an Oasis concert next week in Pasadena.

And I

was gonna ask you

Go ahead.

If you

could meet Rob in Pasadena.

Okay.

Yeah.

His sister also his kid her kids are going to Poly.

And Douglas went to Poly too.

That's what to Poly August.

It's a little really Like you said

at the

beginning of the show, only famous people go to Polytechnic school.

Oh, yeah.

That's fantastic.

No.

I I just wanted to say hi and show you that we're not like, the rest of those guys that probably email you randomly asking for things and wanting to to build a relationship.

It's it's very funny that this all happened in a strange way.

So

Yeah.

This is amazing.

Incredible.

Actually have to take a call for this guy named Ror Keith.

He's a Gen AI creator.

Cool.

Because he's in Dubai, and I, you know, I'm just trying to get on the fucking

You gotta get on with Dubai.

We know we know how that goes.

Alright.

Get going.

I I call these guys because they butchered my mymy.com.

And I had to get some free heat.

John, is that which one's John?

I'm John.

John John was actually at doctordrew.com when he was, like, 10 years old.

Yeah.

He interviewed

for one year.

Yeah.

I was in the very cold data center.

Yeah.

Okay.

Racking servers.

That's spectacular.

So there's there's a long history on on on all fronts.

Andy went to Poly.

So okay.

We'll talk later.

Went to Poly.

Yes.

Andy went to

Poly.

Alright.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

I I I have one more question on the house side.

For you.

For you.

Okay.

Sorry,

Douglas.

Later, Douglas.

Yeah.

For you.

Last week, we had Mark Cuban on the show.

He said that drinking raw milk is extremely dangerous and should never be done.

Yeah.

I drank Is there

anything to that?

I'll go on the record.

I drank a liter of raw milk That day?

Every day for two years straight.

Refined?

Yeah.

What's

those Did he explain why?

Did he explain why?

He didn't he didn't give any underlying rationale.

Yeah.

I I doubt he knows why.

Was just saying that that the LLMs might convince you to drink raw milk and that might lead to some sort of doom scenario.

You can get brucellosis.

You can probably get tularemia.

You can get listeriosis.

Okay.

And we can treat that with antibiotics.

No problem.

Okay.

But they can make you very sick, and they're very rare.

Yeah.

I I wouldn't do it, but I don't the fact that p look.

There's something terrible going on

Yeah.

Where people are so fearful of being the biological agents that we are Yeah.

And the reality that we are going to die that they are afraid to live.

Yep.

Living well is the goal.

Not living forever, not living perfectly free of illness.

Yeah.

It's living a good life, and we are off of that.

I can't That's great.

We are so far off of that.

It is disgusting.

And for a nonphysician to have an opinion about milk that contains pathogenic organisms that he's never heard of or he learned to pronounce yesterday is disturbing to me.

It's the same thing with when people went after hydroxychloroquine the day they learned how to say that word, a medicine I've been prescribing for decades.

Yeah.

So it's all we are so out of whack with this gonna live forever, fear of death.

Illness.

Infection.

Oh, shit.

Yes.

We are we we my generation of physicians, we walked into illnesses that had one hundred percent fatality.

AIDS had one hundred percent fatality, and we did not know what we were dealing with.

And we didn't cower in the corner.

We marched in.

Mhmm.

It's the right thing to do.

Yeah.

I don't know what's happened.

I I can't understand this at all.

But here we are.

We need to focus on living well, living a good life, period.

Did you you predict A lot

of stuff comes what may.

Did you predict the decline of alcohol consumption?

It's I

did not.

It's I did not off a cliff.

Right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I did that's still surprising to me, but it fits with the lack of dating and the lack of having sex and the lack of socializing.

It it it that was the that was a prime social lubricant for decades.

I'm glad to see it.

It's a good thing.

You know, the people are starting to understand it's a poison, and it's not good for any tissue in our body ever, but it makes me also I mean, what happens when did we become such pussies?

When did that happen?

That's my question of days.

When did that happen?

I don't know.

I mean,

I I You

kid, have you ever said something like that on CNN?

This is why you gotta stay off the networks.

You just gotta do your own show.

I I guess I'm I'm just I've been through so much lately.

I've just lost all

Inhibition.

I I I'm a huge advocate for freedom of speech and freedom of many sort.

I'm not happy about this flag burning thing.

We freedom, freedom, freedom is what I'm all about now.

So I my mind.

I will pitch you one possible explanation.

I I think that the the fear of very, you know, consequential but low probability events, like the raw milk or the risk from raw milk or the risk from COVID Yeah.

Is tied to a lack of belief in immortality and not in the sense of living forever.

Like, biological immortality, like science will cure this and let you live forever.

That's just one way to think about immortality.

You can also think about immortality in your legacy.

If you are written about and you have lived a great life, you will be remembered and immortalized.

Can also think about it through your children and also through the afterlife.

If you're spiritual or religious, you could think that you're going to heaven.

And if you don't believe in any of those modes immortality, you don't believe that you're going to have kids or do your life's work and be remembered in the afterlife or go to heaven or you don't believe that science will be able to fix you if you do wind up getting sick from raw milk, then even a small chance has the has an incredible, incredible penalty.

And so you you discount it very, very high.

So I agree with you Mhmm.

With a couple of caveats.

I I do agree with you.

Yeah.

Embedded in that observation is a general lack of meaning making.

Is if the meaning is I'm trying to ascend to a afterlife whatever the meaning is of my living, that meaning should be deeply meaningful to me and purposeful.

It doesn't it does not have to include an afterlife.

It can also include just creating a good life for my children.

That's why I'm here.

Let's do that.

That kind of thing.

But but we people are here for their narcissistic needs, and that's when things become fragile.

Yes.

Because we we are not the beginning and the end of everything.

We just are not.

And if we think we're all there is is what's happening to me Yep.

Man.

And then we have people whipping the frenzies and the fear, and they're learning to control us with that, and that that is disgusting.

Yeah.

So what about, have you been tracking, AI psychosis at all?

Any any thoughts there?

Hear about it.

I I don't I don't believe it.

I'll tell you.

I'll I'll I'll take I'll make a bet that that it's over way overblown.

Was somebody who was already psychotic and, you know, whatever.

There and not that the AI relationships are necessarily gonna be good.

I I I worry about that.

But this psychotic episode, I I don't know.

I don't know if you remember back in the nineties, there were news stories every night.

I wasn't born, sir.

Okay.

Do you

have to rub that in?

You have to say.

You just said no.

I don't remember.

No.

No.

Late later nineties, I got into the action.

But

But but there was news reports, like, every night, oh, these parties where all the parents throw their keys in a bowl, and they just they just grab a set of keys, and that's who they go home with that night.

Oh, sure.

Sure.

Yeah.

The press the fake I don't think people are sensitive to fake news.

We have to be very sensitive to reporting these days.

And so much of what's being reported is fake, and it's just to catch your eyes.

It's just to get your attention.

They they the the person that wrote that article was a 23 year old segment producer somewhere who doesn't do any research of of any meaning.

It it just becomes something that they catch on the line.

They saw other people report it.

They report it.

It it's ridiculous.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mean, the the My my read on it is is it seems obvious now that if a large number of people take Ayahuasca, some of them are gonna have some type of psychotic break of sorts and and maybe they were prone to to or or had some some underlying issue that that But enabled but the the issue

with You're you're right.

They already had a psychotic illness, and they just happened to break when they were working with AI.

But you're you're raising you're you're making a very smart observation that the that AI world is populated by people that microdose on acid and do ayahuasca, which I I tell you it categorically causes severe psychiatric problems.

I've seen it my entire career.

Scares the hell out of me.

They should not be doing that.

If you're listening Did you

ever consider If you're listening live from Burning Man, just listen to doctor Drew.

Just keep it.

Did you ever go to Burning Man, by the way?

It doesn't seem No.

We got friends keep trying to get us to go.

It's not it's not my jam exactly.

It's not my jam either.

Well, you could go there and try to try to, you know Yeah.

Talk people out of it.

How about we stick to the Bud Light, buddy?

Yeah.

Let's stick to crushing beers.

Have a couple glasses of wine.

Anyway, this has been fantastic.

Thank you for joining.

Coming on cracking the record.

Come back on anytime.

We appreciate this.

We'd love have

you You guys are great.

I I learned something just listening to you guys.

This talking about the playing card the baseball cards.

That was fast.

And you guys have a great you're obviously extremely well trained in in your in your respective fields.

And it's very interesting to hear you talk about these various markets and opportunities and things.

And I leave with one caveat.

Please.

If you don't call my son, he's gonna kill me.

I know.

We will definitely We're gonna we'll go to this concert with him.

We will.

We will.

Exactly.

And it's in Pasadena.

Yeah.

Live in Pasadena now.

You live there now?

I do.

I live over in Rose Bowl.

Rose Bowl is literally walking distance from me.

So do I.

Amazing.

There we go.

Okay.

We should do

Did you guys just pick up the best friends?

My address, but

I'll I'll I'll

swing by a little

We live well, we

live over here by Rack of Bud Light.

We live by Annadale.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

I'm right over there.

Okay.

So

Just up Lake Vista.

Now.

Excuse.

I don't wanna get too I don't wanna get too too precise, show up with people in my front door.

Anyway, thank you so much for hopping on.

This is fantastic.

Great hanger.

We will talk to you doctor Drew.

Bye.

I'll be

right That's why we leave a thirty minute gap in the middle of

the Exactly.

We gotta start doing that.

Anyway, we are shifting gears.

We're going into the world of Palantir.

We have Colin Anderson coming into the studio.

He's in the really stream waiting room, but we're bringing him in now to talk about running finance at Palantir.

He was there for years.

I actually ran into him on Saturday, got a chance to catch up with him, and he had some fantastic stories.

Hopefully, he can share most of them here.

And we're gonna talk about different force multipliers for finance teams and growing businesses like Palantir.

I mean, what else do you want?

So we will welcome Colin to the studio.

How are doing?

Hey.

I'm good.

Thanks for having me.

Good to see you again.

It's been too long.

It's been almost forty eight hours.

I was gonna say it.

Pretty pretty short, but, good to good to be here with, I guess, more audience this time.

Yeah.

For sure.

Where should we kick it off?

Could you give us a little bit of, just history for the for the listener on your career, your path, particularly, like, the road into Palantir?

I think that that's an interesting story.

You were touching on some of the some of the some of the stories there, then we can kinda take this wherever you wherever you'd like.

Totally.

Let's do it.

Well, maybe just to situate for those I'm I'm meeting for the first time, Colin Anderson, cofounder here at Friends and Family Capital, venture firm we started.

And before that was the the CFO at Palantir for a very long time, led finance there for eight years.

So what does that mean?

Intersection of supporting, great businesses through finance, for two decades and a lot of scar tissue is the other thing that means.

And how do you share that with people?

Yeah.

Getting into, getting into Palantir, that was that was really saying, hey, who's working on a really hard problem that matters?

Mhmm.

And if you look at the time, you had, you know, we were still post nine eleven.

Yeah.

We were still trying to overcome the false trade off between national security

Yeah.

And being able to defend ourselves and also privacy and civil liberties.

Yeah.

And people used to think that that was an impossible trade off and that seemed like a worthy challenge.

We only have so many so many hours in the day, we should work on something that matters.

Yeah.

And talent density was there and I was just really attracted to that.

And it helped having spent time deep in the bowels of an investment bank Yeah.

Where you realize that humans are a very expensive piece of middleware.

And what if you could see all the data you're supposed to see, nothing that you're not, you can probably do a lot of great things there.

Yeah.

How'd you first hear about Palantir?

What was your first day on the job like?

Who was around the table?

I mean, at this point, people know everyone from Karp to Peter to Shamsankar, like, Gary Tan's involved at some point.

Like, people people know who's around the table, but what was your early, like, first days in the job like?

Totally.

Well, I was introduced to the company actually through through Joe Lonsdale.

He he brought me in.

And I was an industrial engineer by training, which means to my English major friends, I'm an engineer but to my engineering friends, I'm an English major.

Yeah.

Cool.

So got pretty deep got pretty deep into the process at Palantir in the early days.

There were probably twenty, thirty people

Yeah.

At the time.

Yeah.

And Joe said, hey, look, I actually think we're not ready for you.

You wanna go work with Peter Thiel and myself up at Clarion Capital.

Sure.

So privileged to to work there, learn a lot.

Yeah.

And fast forward, the company had grown to the mighty number of I don't know just over a 100.

Yeah.

And Peter was like, hey, think I think they might need some some help here.

So great.

And you know, it's really the mission that drives you.

I was like, I don't know what I'm gonna do.

Maybe I'll sell software.

Maybe I'll talk to politicians.

Maybe I'll I'll help with this finance thing and I don't think I was very good at the first two but the last one stuck.

So just just keep doubling down where it works.

Yeah.

What was the what was, like, the day to day role like?

Is it everything from just, like, financial control to putting together projections, thinking about burn rate.

I imagine that the company wasn't wildly profitable in the early days.

It was it's known for being one of those, like, slower compounders and now is, like, one of the biggest companies in the world, but it took a long time to get there.

What was that like at the early stage?

Well, Palantir had its time in the desert.

Right?

Where it's the roughly four years of pre revenue Yeah.

Large expense, you know, wouldn't exist without for, you know, basically Peter Thiel

Yeah.

And the co founders just pushing through and and bringing capital to bear.

Mhmm.

So what does that look like?

And we we see this all the time at at companies now in our portfolio where you spend all this time in the desert Yeah.

Building things and then suddenly you realize, oh, wow.

We actually have a product here and now we have a real business.

What do we do?

And and finances, you know, at Palantir and today, something you you wish you had yesterday once you realize you need it.

And so it was kinda one of these fire hoses that you you keep your head down and build.

What what was the reaction like from venture capitalists around that time?

Because there's there's there's like the this is controversial to be working with the government.

At the same time, it's like, it is an enterprise software company.

It should be pretty easy to underwrite if you're an enterprise software venture capitalist, I would imagine, hopefully.

But then at the same time, like you're out of the you're out in the desert.

And so there's a little bit of like, is the company mature enough to underwrite this particular investment?

It's not this like hot no brainer.

It's kind of secretive.

It's cool, but it's like behind the scenes.

So what what what was the what was the temperature in Silicon Valley around defense tech around that time?

Yeah.

Well, first off, defense tech as a term didn't even

exist.

Yeah.

So we're we got it way back.

I I met the company in 2007

Yeah.

And joined in 02/2009.

Yeah.

And we were very shy because we you know, no one knew what quite what to think of us.

We were kind of in a, you know, a Marvel team up of a bunch of superheroes that had weird peaks but also weird valleys and just kept our heads down and built.

The really in the earliest days, no one no one in the valley, you know, but for a small group understood what we were.

Mhmm.

Right?

And we made every mistake from what they wanted to to invest in.

Right?

At the time, this was Facebook was cool, so you should be doing consumer, not enterprise.

And if you were going to do enterprise, you should sell to big corporate.

Well, it's like, well, we're gonna actually sell to the government.

Yeah.

And well, if you're gonna sell to the government, should go hire a bunch of experienced operators and generals.

We're like, we're gonna go hire a bunch of 20 year old kids.

So like every single on the decision tree was like we were wrong and so that that sort of pushed us out and it really took building a great product and and showing value to customers to to actually prove to to people that worked and it As was great to see what they've been able to an investor now, how do you try to underwrite teams that are still wandering in the desert?

Because there's great examples and survivorship bias that happens when you have a team like Palantir that's wandering in the desert and then you find this, you know, if you find something that works and you can really scale out of it.

But then I've I've, you know, I've ended up I've invested in teams that stumble into the desert and never make it out.

Right?

So it's not exactly

You seem to a a while.

There's no guarantee that

you're gonna

find, you know, some palm trees and water.

Yeah.

You find the skeleton drinking out of the whiskey bottle Yeah.

Decade later.

Not not everyone makes it out of the desert.

That's true.

Where we we spend a lot of our time in the earlier stages here at Friends and Family Capital and we put a lot of our dollars once it's clear it's working.

Right?

So tech is one of those great businesses where when it works, you can run and you can win a whole lot longer.

Mhmm.

So we're we're happy to get involved and, you know, you know, it's kind of the forward deployed engineering model.

We'll we'll forward deploy.

We'll help you.

We're not gonna charge you.

Maybe we'll put $50,100 k, small check-in.

Mhmm.

And but we're really looking for those operational unlocks.

When does it look like Palantir?

Right?

We were there.

I joined.

We had about 5,000,000 in revenue.

Right?

So you you sort of 5,000,000 revenue to 20,000,000,000 valuation.

You see full stack what good looks like.

And so you're you're watching for those inflections.

What are some of those?

Like, getting a 7 figure software contract is really hard.

So if you see that, you should get pretty excited.

Being in an enterprise and going from, you know, let's say a million a year to 3 or 5,000,000 a year, like a a multiple of the initial win, that's pretty hard.

We get pretty excited.

And I think the other thing is just what's the mission?

What's the purpose?

Why are people joining this company?

Why is the, you know, many people said, why is the twentieth person?

Why is the hundredth person?

I say, is the skeptical, you know, engineer when you're a thousand people gonna join you?

Fast forward, why, you know, five years post IPO, why is the skeptical public market investor gonna join you?

It's gotta be you gotta be doing something that's that's worthwhile to dedicate your life to.

So find a big mission.

Yeah.

How do you think about the relationship with the government?

I keep I I I don't know if this is true, but I I I seem to remember that In Q Tel made a equity investment.

This is the this is the venture arm of the CIA very early on.

And so you had this situation where Palantir is like, customer is the government and but the government is also on the cap table.

And we're seeing that today with Intel that there's now the government's taking an equity position, and it feels like this has never happened before.

But then when I flash back, I'm like, wait, actually, this isn't the rarest thing.

There's a world where the capabilities that are brought to bear by Palantir exist within the US government, and yet they don't.

Like, how how should, like, the American taxpayer think about the interaction between, like, public like, private companies and the government?

Like, when should the government be willing to invest?

When should the government be buying a capability?

It's always seemed like Palantir, the the actual technology was something that could not be brought to bear with inside the government even though the government had a very clear set of requirements in front of itself.

It needed to be go it needed to be built in Silicon Valley.

Yeah.

I mean, enter software is really difficult and some people are, you know, it's hardware is difficult too, but building world class software to handle complex things is is tough and often can be built better in the valley than, you know, at the coal face.

And I think Palantir is a good example of that, but we've got, you know, we've got many examples.

But I would I would push back and say, you can't build great software or great business in an ivory tower.

And I think one of the great things about Palantir and you've seen Andoril and we've got a company, Peregrine Technologies, they're they're really breaking down the the the barrier of saying we're gonna go build it in the in an ivory tower and then we'll we'll sell it and people will will just use it.

It's like, no.

If you think of a spectrum of product and services, right, everyone always put Palantir in the services bucket for, you know, the reasons we were misunderstood.

Really, what you're doing is you wanna capture the perfect value delivery of services.

Right?

You're solving one thing for one person that a 100% solves their their problem, but you wanna do it as a product.

But the the product roadmap, the traditional playbook says create distance from your customers, not create proximity.

So Palantir was able to this is that forward deployed engineering model you hear a lot about.

It's like you need the beauty happens when you get world class software talent that's willing to go deep into the the belly of the beast at the coalface.

You're going downrange.

You're sitting in an air gap network with a tie on when you're a and like and that's where you you actually see what's the core problem.

Yeah.

So we we really I think Palantir did that in spades.

I look for that every day at at Friends and Family.

What companies shouldn't be using the forward deployed model?

Because anytime something becomes a meme then everybody starts applying it.

It it sounds it sounds like it makes sense.

This is the whole like, you know, Uber Uber for dogs kind of meme.

People were like, we're Uber for this.

And it's like, wait, there's actually unique things that in Uber's sort of supply demand

Consumer package I want Andrew Huberman to come pour this Yerba Mate into my mouth.

It's a poor deployed Poor deployed.

Caffeine salesman.

Yeah.

Well, it's funny.

Yes.

You should run anytime you hear someone pitch themselves as I'm the x for y.

Yeah.

You just run.

Yeah.

The the FDE model, it's great in certain markets.

It's terrible in others.

Mhmm.

The only reason Palantir could pursue anything with deploying is is you've gotta be solving a hard enough problem.

Right?

So you think of a world class engineer plus their equity dilution.

I mean, is an expensive check.

So you really have to be a capital allocator as as a founder to to wanna pursue this model.

So if you're selling things, small and medium business where your average contract to land is 20 k, 100 k or less, you shouldn't you shouldn't look at this.

Unless you're saying let's get out there, that's r and d, let's productize it and push it out.

When you start to get up into those 7 figure plus contracts, that can support it.

If you're doing 8 or 9 figure, it definitely can support it.

But then even then, you get people think they're doing it.

So I I love these conversations.

I get probably one inbound, two inbounds every week of like, hey, how'd you do or deployed engineering in the early days?

Yeah.

And you can understand if someone's in a position to build it by the questions they ask around it.

So you'll get these, like, figuring out the footwork.

What's the what's the presales?

What's the who who does it presales or post sales?

Is it customer success or is it sales AEs?

Yeah.

And, like, if you're looking at the the FD model through that lens, you've you've lost the plot.

Right?

It's really like, let's start with first principles.

How are you thinking about focusing the firm on stage or or theme or sector?

Do you have any kind of guardrails?

Well, they already have a round named after them.

Yeah.

Well, it's funny on

the the round, so friends and family around, it's usually the early days when it's like a deeply consultative relationship and people who have your best interest at heart and wanna will, you know, do it.

And I don't know, but when we got to the later stages of of building Palantir, right, it was there through the series k, the nature of the relationship changes with your investors around the table.

So the ethos here in the name is how do you extend, Jordy, to your point, how do you extend that friends and family mentality and really partner and and deliver and and sort of, live live your values so to speak.

Like, don't take board seats.

Be deeply consultative.

Forward deploy your finance people if they need help.

All those sort of things.

Do do a lot of Gen AI companies need help with the finance function?

We've heard we we had a we had a we had a video go viral because we had an investor on the show who made an offhand comment about account she said accounting rules aside and a lot of people pick that up on x and we're we're we're dunking.

So accounting rules in fact do matter.

But it was a part of a larger conversation and but but yeah.

I'm curious like, you know, what what you're seeing out there in terms people getting maybe a little too liberal in terms of like what's what's ARR, what's not ARR, all that good stuff.

Like, one of the core functions of finance, there's many, it's hygiene.

Right?

It's hygiene.

It's eligibility.

And if you lose that, then you're you're building your house on sand.

So there's a very important part of the world for for accounting for, for getting those entries right.

Now you can disagree on the exact accounting treatment.

You can do your, you know, your pro form a.

Here's your GAAP to non GAAP reconciliations.

Every company has their own version of how they run the business, but it's helpful to have some standard way of looking at it.

So I think you you gotta get it right, but really with finance, it's what's the past, what's the present, what's the future, and you've gotta do all three.

If you're running your business just on the accounting, you're gonna have some trouble.

If you're just looking forward but you can't pay your bills on time or, you know, pound your the the cell phones in the Nordics went out because we, you know, the credit card bill that we paid didn't apply.

It's like, you gotta really hold that as a first class priority.

And then on the the future, like, there was times where it's like, hey, look, Shyam, who I know you've been on your your your program, the CTO at Palantir.

It's like, look, we're gonna hit our numbers this year and we're gonna hit our numbers next year, but we gotta do more pilots or we might have a problem three or four years out and let me here's the data why.

See finance has to do all of them.

So Mhmm.

It can't just be world class accounting.

It's gotta be world class everything.

Lessons from Palantir's IPO that you think now that the I the IPO window feels extremely open, God willing, it'll stay open forever.

But any any lessons from from the Palantir IPO or or that you could that you would advise a founder that's exploring, you know, opportunities in the public markets today?

Totally.

Well, first off, so I I was not the CFO taking up public.

My my dear friend who I pulled into the finance team, Dave Glazer, he's he's the CFO and and took it through there and and a lot of the team that joined and worked with us back in the day is still running the company which which is refreshing.

I think that's you know, as as you're getting ready for the public markets, I think you really need to be able to articulate, like, why you have a strong core business model.

You have to back it up with data, and you have to have a narrative that says here's why it's gonna keep going for a while.

And we we have a bunch of companies, you know, whether it's friends or it's in our portfolio that are at the scale where they could they could go public.

And I think you're seeing a lot of people start to weigh, you know, is the window open?

Should I run through it?

I think there's still some question marks depending who it is.

But if you're, you know, you're operating at scale, you've got accelerating revenue growth, expanding free cash flow margins, a good narrative, I think we're gonna see a lot more of that, which is exciting.

But if you can't articulate your core business model, it's I I think the window's not open yet.

So you gotta keep building.

And that's probably healthy.

And that's healthy.

Yeah.

How how are you thinking about, like, opportunity in defense tech broadly right now?

There's the the the the, you know, there's the meme of, like, the Andoril for Axis Andoril.

You know, Palantir is, like, this compounder that's gonna take a lot of market share.

And the ship has certainly sailed on a few of like the really big companies.

But at the same time, like, there's a boom and people are starting to, you know, start companies in the space because there's more appetite from investors and it's more more just accepted to hire people.

What's your temperature check right now?

Yeah.

Well, so been honored to be a part of, you know, some of the great names of that people now call DefenseTech.

So Palantir, we've been investors in SpaceX since 10,000,000,000, Andoril since around 4,000,000,000, you know, built Palantir, those guys.

So love that the whole ecosystem is starting to develop.

Mhmm.

Back in the day, there was there was no defense tech.

I think what does the world need?

The world needs a strong America.

Right?

So Pax American, I think, is, you know, we can argue, debate this, many people do, but I think it's good to, you know, to be able to back up at the hopefully, we never have to use it, but just to be able to to negotiate.

And look, we need more of it.

And I think you're also seeing the the intel news from today.

You're starting to see that, hey, vertical integration matters.

Yep.

A saying we had deep in the bowels of of Pounder was trust no one's execution but your own.

Right?

And if you're beholden to someone else, whether it's on the supply chain or whether it's the value delivery to customers, like, the tail might wag the dog.

And so I I I think it's great that we're starting to see more capital flow here.

I think as with anything where you turn on the spigot, not everything is gonna be the highest ROI project.

But let's look at the other truth.

If we do nothing, then then we're we're certainly not at a local maximum.

So we need to do something.

I'm I'm excited with the developments.

Yeah.

There was a post by a founder talking about the state of defense tech.

I wanna get your take on some of this.

The end user is not the buyer in commercial.

The person who uses your product often decides to buy it.

In defense, the operator might love your system, yet it means nothing.

The buyer is a program manager with a budget.

The operator's endorsement is at best a data point, not a scalable purchase order.

I don't care that some e six drum played around with your product and thinks it's cool.

It doesn't really matter.

True?

False?

What do you what's your take?

You know, you're hitting on, this caused as many sleepless nights, months, and years at Palantir.

Ultimately, I mean, it's Palantir had to sue the US army.

You know what Palantir versus US army for should you buy cots versus gots.

Yeah.

There's many That must have been a fun decision for you for you to be weighing in on like How much

spend on

legal is already expensive.

Like, you're going up against your customer.

Yeah.

It's, it's not the preferred let's just say they don't teach that in a classroom.

Yeah.

The

look, I think I think enterprise sales is tough, but enterprise sales inside, the government or any large institution is even more difficult.

Mhmm.

And there's a couple different things you have to do.

And number one, you've got to create the facts on the ground.

Right?

That's that's the mission wins that you're you're referencing there.

But that's not enough.

It's it's necessary but not sufficient.

Mhmm.

At the other side, you have to go and and make sure the the decision makers know what to do.

And then you can do a pincer and say, alright, let's just move it and put some pressure on the middle.

And I like to think it was when is it riskier to not act than to act?

So you're sort of creating this constellation where you can get movement.

But the the advice to anyone embarking on the defense tech journey is make sure you're very well capitalized because it's gonna take you a long it's a long road to hoe.

And so make sure you can withstand it.

I also think and this is a point Shyam Sankar, you know, at Palantir has made is you've got a you know, dual source really helps because it can bring down that cost curve as you scale, especially if you're working with atoms and not just electrons.

And that that can help you survive while you're waiting for the door inside the government to open.

Pounds here would not have had a strong government business if it didn't have a commercial business Mhmm.

And vice versa.

On that note, Chris, in this post says, if you're pitching dual use, you're probably just unfocused.

Real dual dual use companies are vanishingly rare.

The example he gives is Palantir.

Most that try end up with a watered down product, no real defense tech traction, no commercial fit.

Pick a market.

You disagree with that, or does it just depend?

Like, what nuance would you add to actually understand if a company can meaningfully be dual use?

Because you do see founders kind of bolting it on now that it's a little bit trendy.

Oh, we have this thing.

Yeah.

And we also have this office in DC.

And we we have one person who we work out there.

And and yeah.

How how would you how would you how would you lay out, like, if a company can actually get the benefit out of dual use as opposed to it be just being marketing?

Totally.

Well, it's easier to change lines of marketing than lines of code.

Yep.

Right?

So you've gotta start out from a first principle and say, is the thing that ought to exist?

Yep.

And if you look at Palantir or any other class that's that's built dual use, it's saying I can build one product and with a little bit of customization at the end and just the end, then it can be sold to both for a very important but different reason.

So an example, you know, also in our portfolio, we have, Astronis.

Right?

They're building micro geo satellites.

Yeah.

Same same, you know, broad category.

There's a few tweaks Yeah.

But who doesn't want that sovereignty over their data?

Yeah.

Right?

And so if you need that, you can sell it in a defense capacity.

They're they've been down selected on $2,000,000,000 plus programs.

So, you know, a lot of work to do but that's exciting.

So for Astronis,

we love those guys.

Yep.

And then yeah.

They've John's

You had John Debrak on the show.

He's great.

Yeah.

He's great.

And then, like, also on the commercial side, like, let's say you need, you know, more trunking and backhaul and a lot of telcos are turning to this from the disruption they're seeing in the market.

Sure.

So I think that's one of those ones where they're not building two types of satellites.

It's that's a terrible idea.

Yeah.

But if you can build one thing and sell it to both parties, helps bring down the cost curve.

Fantastic.

Totally.

Jordan, do have anything else?

No.

This is great.

Thank you so much for taking the time to hop on.

This is fantastic.

We will talk to you soon.

You're a new finance correspondent.

That sleeping bear dunes behind you?

Close.

But I'll Okay.

Tell you next

You'll tell me next time because somebody in the chat said bullish on the painting of Sleeping Bear Dunes in the background.

I was just trying to take credit for being identifying it but I was wrong because they were wrong.

That's

right.

But anyway, we'll talk soon.

Well, good to see you guys.

Thanks so much.

Thanks for

coming on, Colin.

Cheers.

Bye.

Bye.

We have Truman Sachs coming on in a few minutes.

But in the meantime, let me tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic.

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

And you heard Doctor.

Drew talking about the importance of sleep.

You gotta get an Eight Sleep.

Yeah.

Mean Get up he said that.

I was like, we partnered with Eights Eight Sleep was one of our very first partners.

And we had the foresight to understand that if we wanted to do this for decades, we needed to sleep like

champions.

It really was one of those partnerships where it was like, this is going to be additive in like more than in many many ways.

Right?

'93.

I probably got this.

Back in the nineties, seven hours forty seven minutes.

I put up What did I do?

Deep sleep.

Two and a half hours

of deep sleep.

83.

How did

I do on deep sleep?

One hour of deep sleep.

Oh, no.

You were an absolute mess this morning.

I know.

I was such

John showed up to the gym and the and I was

So sleepy.

I was like, wake up, dude.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Anyway, should we do we we gotta touch on the timeline and turmoil.

Martin Casado said the idea that nonconsensus investing is where the alpha is is actually quite dangerous in the early stage.

Follow on capital tends to be more and more consensus aligned.

He's basically saying being contrarian is bad.

Being consensus is good.

I could not agree more.

I completely agree consensus is amazing.

Do you agree?

He's not just right.

He's he's he's on point.

It's incredible.

Tyler, do you agree?

Yes.

I think everyone agree.

Ben, do you agree?

I agree.

I think everyone agrees.

I think everyone

agrees that agreement is is is good here.

No.

Of course of course, this is it's funny because the the whole contrarian meme has become such a meme that it's now consensus to say that contrarian ideas are better.

And so by saying that consensus thinks it's actually contrarian, you know, but, of course, you know, the the contrarian idea still holds.

This contra this consensus thing

John turned into momentum.

Chu went went on the attack.

Oh, yeah.

Like that.

Sounds more like they overpaid for everything, and their companies are struggling to raise.

So he's asking for help marking things up.

That that that John post is hilarious because And in his name is Coastal Ventures.

And so it it hits as a as like a subtweet.

So it's it's like going to war so much more aggressively.

It's not a it's not a

It's great.

Yeah.

It's

not a sub it's a direct Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's just a direct attack.

It's timeline and turmoil.

But

I mean, I just I just like I mean, this was a way for the entire allocator community to signal that, hey, we're not packing for for for Black Rock City.

We're here.

Oh, yeah.

We're here debating.

Debating.

Debating whether or not we should do consensus deals.

Or non consensus.

Or or or stick to the non consensus ones.

There was there was a really a really funny post earlier.

I don't I don't know if it made it into the timeline.

But there was this somebody who had created a restaurant and they were complaining.

They were like, my my food is so good.

It's all farm to table.

I don't know why people aren't going.

I'm only making

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

$50 a day.

And somebody quoted it with like Peter TLC.

Picture of PD and then the the the excerpt from Zero.

Zero to One where he's like talking about, you know, British food in San Francisco and how you can have the best British food.

Yeah.

It's highly competitive.

Yeah.

So Yeah.

The the the Martin Casado post, there's a little back and forth.

Leo Polowicz says, if you consider the top top few dozen highest alpha bets of the last ten to fifteen years, what fraction would you say were consensus versus nonconsensus at early stage?

Martin Casado says, I suspect more consensus than not.

And Keith Raboy chimes in and says, OpenAI was nonconsensus.

Scale was nonconsensus.

Stripe was nonconsensus.

Wiz, the C round, I guess, was not.

Ramp, DoorDash, RH, Robinhood, Canva, Figma, being non consensus.

He gets quote tweeted then by Martin Casado.

He's like, yes, Keith.

You're right.

I'm very sorry.

You're very original.

And it's an AI image of Keith Ruboy saying, I'm so original.

I moved to Miami.

But like

I like how he was kinda dunking on Keith, but Keith looks fantastic.

He does look diced, Gary.

He looks really good.

Yeah.

That's like but that's the

thing that you

had mind is like, nice picture.

Nice picture.

Yeah.

But the other thing is like, moving to Miami was contrarian.

Like, that was not that was not a consensus thing at all.

So I I don't like, he really is was that was a very original idea to try and build a tech company in Miami.

Like, the and that's the nature of the of the contrarian and, like, the non consensus bets is like, yeah.

Sometimes, you get a you you you get a lot of wild cards.

You wanna be consensus among the contrarian investors Yes.

With with elite returns Yes.

And non consensus with the Yes.

Consensus investor.

No.

I I actually have distilled it.

You wanna be greedy when a 145 IQ people are greedy.

You wanna be fearful when a 101 IQ people are greedy.

That's the real move.

That's the play.

Yeah.

We've cracked venture.

Yes.

That's it.

Cracked the curve.

It's fine to be hypermimetic as long as you're hypermimetic with a genius and you're copying a genius.

This is like the Nancy Pelosi stock trader or something.

Anyway, if you're trying to trade some stocks, get over to public.com.

Investing for those that take it seriously.

They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields.

They're trusted by millions.

When you get on there, remember, be greedy when others are fearful and be fearful when others are greedy.

Do your own research.

Make some good investments, folks.

Well, we should pull up this launch video from our next guest, Truman.

Let's pull up the

announced Cubby Law today.

Cubby Law.

Let's pull it up.

Let's react.

And then we'll bring in Truman Sachs from Cubby Law.

You shared it in the group.

Let me tell you about Bezel while we're pulling that up.

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

Seriously, any watch.

Go to get bezel.com.

And

And here's Truman.

Welcome to the show, Truman.

No.

Stop.

Let's play this.

And how you're graded depends entirely on your professor.

But most students study with generic outlines and flashcards, not the materials they're actually being tested on.

Cubby is the first AI teaching assistant for law students, trained on your professor syllabus, past exams, and student outlines.

So your case briefs match how they teach and your practice exams mirror how they test.

It's like having your professor tutor you every night.

Learn the law, master your professor, and outperform the curve with Cubby.

Good set design too.

I love it.

Well, welcome to the stream, Sherman.

How you doing?

Welcome from the Restream waiting room.

You are muted.

VPN Ultra Dome.

No.

You're you're good.

You're good.

We're good.

Can hear you now.

We can

hear you.

I think we're just being noisy.

What's up?

Good.

Congrats on the launch.

Haven't seen you since workout, Phil.

Was it six months ago?

It's true.

Yeah.

It was about six months ago.

I know.

I like every morning I'm like, damn.

I wish I could steam with the boys today.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So next time you're

in LA, come hang.

It'll be fun.

Every day.

Yeah.

Every day.

True.

So you were telling

us about you were telling us about this play.

Yeah.

So it's glad Yeah.

Great to see it launch.

Thank you, man.

I'm excited for it to go public.

Yeah.

Break it down for us.

What are you launching?

What's the pitch?

And what what what kind of led you to this particular submarket?

Yeah.

Great question.

No.

It it kinda dates back to, like, a conversation you and I were having with, Senra few a few years ago now.

We went on that Runyon hike.

Yeah.

You're telling me how

Runyon hike.

It's like where where where great stories begin.

Yes.

Runyon Canyon.

Runyon Canyon's in in out burger.

Couple influencers doing runyon.

Dude, We got stopped, like, resending.

It was crazy.

Anyways but no.

I mean, John was talking about this idea that just like there are power law people, there are also power law books.

Yeah.

It's a Kugen idea right there.

And Oh, yeah.

Zero to one is the, what we both agreed, is the business power law book.

Yeah.

And there's a quote which I I I think, like, kind of defines my personal operating philosophy, which is, like, the perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrating together and served by few or no competitors.

Mhmm.

So I think that, like, sums up the law school industry in a shell.

Yep.

Law school is three years.

It's curve based, so everyone's stacked right against each other with public rankings.

And

it's, like, directly correlated to the job you get after law school is how you perform with your grades.

Yeah.

So, like, big law firms, everyone's vying for the same big law jobs after law school, which pay, like, $2.20 k out of pocket, like, first year.

Yep.

And there's only a limited amount of them.

And they're literally a day?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The AI research market is just busy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If you don't make that, start chasing ambulances, bro.

That's what happens.

Seriously, it is a knockout, dry guy fight in law school.

Yeah.

You gotta get to the top of the ranking.

But no.

Yeah.

It's crazy.

So, like, everyone's competing each other because there was, like everyone knows there's public rankings.

Like, you're either the top of your class or you're not, and the firms see that, and that's what they're recruiting off of.

So the mindset of the consumer is that of, like, I will invest in my future.

Like, anything that will help me do better in school is an investment, and I will spend money on it.

So I it's a really, like, powerful lever to tap in as a as a business.

You know?

I have to tap into that market.

So what we built was, like, the first AI teaching assistant of law students.

We've, like, trained the model on thousands of practice exams and case sweeps written by, like, a top Georgetown law law student who just graduated.

And we built, like, an entire experience that's almost like a Duolingo style course that calibrates all the material that's specific to your course and your professor all the way through the final exam.

So you could take, like, unlimited final exams and practice throughout the semester, get instant grades, feedback, and it's all kind of built to mirror exactly how your specific professor would, like, teach a grade because that's who decides your grade.

Yep.

Well, what's the business model then?

Do you do you wanna sell to the law school, sell to the

anymore.

Yeah.

It's always tricky.

Anyway, yeah.

Well, who are you going to?

Who's actually putting down the credit card?

So good question.

Right now, like, funny enough, there's already an existing tool in this market from 2007 called Quimby.

Everybody or everybody in law school, like, ask eight out 10 law students.

They buy Quimby for $30 a month.

Mhmm.

So there's around a 120,000 law students in The US Mhmm.

Per year, and, like, they're all spending $30 a month on this software from 2007 that hasn't changed.

Mhmm.

It's like a static company for, like, CliffsNotes for case law effectively.

So we we we plan to come in as, like, a 10x better replacement for that Mhmm.

And think that, like, our tool versus theirs, like, just shape it like the decision will be obvious.

Sure.

So that's kind of coming in what we're trying to stir up initially.

And then Yeah.

Yeah.

Over time, like, we've already had some interest about, like, partnering with schools themselves.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like that.

How how do you see the top of funnel?

Like, how do you reach a

There's so many there's so many fun things that you can do on campuses to make sure that you cannot go to law school without knowing about coming.

Drone show.

Well, as we speak right now, we have hundreds of law students at from Cardoso Law at a Cubby Cafe truck Oh, outside of the office.

Yeah.

There you go.

That's what saying.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Trucks.

Yeah.

Exactly.

So we had free

coffee.

Yeah.

Free coffee, Papa Bagels, ice cream.

So that's like an on campus approach for this week.

I'd like

to Branded propose Adderall.

Dude.

Low key.

Do not do that.

Do not That is do illegal.

Cannot Oh, I'm sure there's I'm sure there's a telemedicine company that that could

No.

No.

The Covey Care Package.

Controlled substance.

It's specifically, you cannot do that.

But it's just so funny because this industry is run by, like like, legacy, like, these, like, massive bar prep companies.

Like, the our biggest got acquired a few months ago.

And, like, the second we launched, like, a small TikTok, like, of just, like, what we're doing, we got seasoned assistant by them.

Oh, wow.

Just like like, hey.

Like, we we think you might be training on our materials.

Like and if you are, like, we're gonna come after you, but, like, we're not sure.

So we were just like, fuck off.

And and they're like, oh, yeah.

Yeah.

We're sorry.

Like, we're gonna countersue you for these anticompetitive practices.

So it's an interesting, like, sleeper market that I like, I think is an interesting wedge as well Yeah.

To go deeper intellectual law, like, legal tech space as well.

Because once you have that relationship with the customer, you know, they're they're the future lawyers of America.

Sure.

You should prove how how how well the product works by personally countersuing the

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Pass the

I learned it all with Cubby.

It it it is it is particularly difficult to pass the bar without going to law school.

You have like, there's one loophole where I believe you can you can, like, mentor under a lawyer, and they can say that you're that you're allowed to.

But in general, you cannot take the bar and pass it just because you did the study.

Like, you have to be in a law school accredited.

Yeah.

All to control the number of lawyers to drive up companies.

Well, maybe we'll open our own law school at this point for kids who just are fed up with the traditional system.

Yeah.

There's like one online law school or there's only a few, like, that that actually let you do it in this particular way.

Like, it's very, like, hacky.

It it it it's a very tightly controlled, like, market in general.

Sounds like you tried to hack it

at some point.

I actually If there's a system I did.

John will try to

hack it.

And I emailed the guy who did it.

And he was just basically credential maxing.

And he was a lawyer, a doctor, and had figured out how to do all of these things because he was really smart and he could take tests really well.

And so he just went around and got law degrees but figured out the minimum time, maximum amount of money.

So you pay a ton of money to do this, get all the test prep, and then take the test.

And I was like, well, did you wind up using the law degree ever?

He's like, no.

But it's a flex.

It's flex.

Yeah, it's a flex.

It's a flex.

I was

like, I like this guy.

I should email him.

Get him on the show.

Yeah.

That's interesting.

Anyway, how big is the actual market?

Like, are you going to go, like, venture mega round, like, Harvey style?

Or is this more something that you want to grind at for a long time and you think you can just, like, find a great wedge, great business?

And then maybe if there's, like, a secondary market that opens up, then that's the venture territory.

Yeah.

Great question.

So the legal education market's five years.

It's from

LSAT through BART, like you mentioned.

Yep.

We have 120,000 plus people going through that every every year.

And I think the average, like, customer spends over over three over five years, $5,000 on on, like, supplemental spend.

Yeah.

Supplement.

So take that times the time.

You're looking at, like, a billion dollar just for the education work.

Sure.

Sure.

Sure.

But at the same time, like so I I do think bar and LSAT's kinda where we take it next.

Yep.

And that we could see some, like, meaningful AR growth from there.

But I I I just I'm really excited about this concept of, like, we we know in the age of AI, everything is, like, distribution and, like, what kind of, like, mode and competitive edge do have on the on the customer acquisition side.

Yep.

And, like, it's so difficult to break into legal tech.

Like, I don't think that's why we see so many rappers in the legal tech space because it's just, like, such an old guard, and you need enough connections.

You need to have, like, specialized models.

The bar for quality is so much higher.

Yeah.

And I think if we can really entrench ourselves and establish ourselves as a meaningful player in law school like I said, like, every single one of these players are going to legal and to to the big law firms next.

And I think if we're able to kind of create that relationship with them, help them start building, like, practicing legal research in their, like, breaching classes while they're in law school, they're gonna get used to that flow just like they got used to Google Docs and brought that to them with work to work with them.

Yeah.

So I do think that there is a really interesting play

by one and a quarter ziplock baggies for for maybe the associates after they moved to New York.

Cubby event at Marquis on Saturday nights.

Yeah.

John

actually threw the horse emoji in the chat.

Is there a plan to do horse branded merch?

You know that humans are huge into horsepower?

Oh.

Do you have horse noise on there?

Of course.

See, like, don't if you guys

see that on my wall.

Oh, yeah.

There you go.

Anyway So

great catching up with you.

Thanks so much for hopping on.

Yeah.

Great to see you.

Congrats on launch.

We will talk

to Good you luck

with the rest of rollout.

Talk to you soon.

Bye.

Let me talk about Wander.

Find your happy place.

Find your happy place.

Book of Wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service.

It's a vacation home but better.

But

Anyway, Paula Ramble says, every day in SF is an opportunity to discover a new type of guy, e g, this guy in a holographic Ferrari with a pet duck and a very loud chihuahua dressed up as a chicken.

Wait.

So the duck is The

duck is real,

but the

chicken a dog.

As

This is wild.

We gotta get this guy on the show.

I'm assuming he already listens to the show.

He pro I hope he made his money in enterprise ass.

That would be incredible.

It has crypto written all over it, but it could be could be driving business value with vertical integration or something.

I don't know.

On Friday, Alexander Wang announced a partnership with Midjourney to license their aesthetic technology for our future models and products bringing beauty to billions.

Yeah.

And David Hole says, bring Sublime tools of creation and beauty to billions of people is squarely within our mission.

Excited to partner with the titans of industry to make this happen.

How much do you think they are paying to license Midjourneys tech?

I have no idea.

Has it leaked or

No.

No.

I'm just purely speculating.

I mean, I I I would I would go out and guess that it's hundreds of millions of dollars?

Yeah.

I I I mean, would imagine it's priced based on, like, inference.

Right?

It's probably like some margin on top of, like, Midjourney's inference infrastructure.

And I believe Midjourney was fantastic at optimizing inference early on.

They were They were known for, because the images take a minute to generate, latency, actual latency, like, to the data center doesn't matter.

And so if you're in America and you're generating an image on ImageJourney, that that generation will happen halfway across the world in a data center that's at not peak load.

And so they're basically always moving, allegedly.

I have no idea if this is true.

I just heard this on a podcast one time.

But they're they're allegedly moving inference around the globe to find pockets of available compute to do the inference.

And I mean, I think the mid journey models are so good, they should be able to do a ton of optimization, bake it onto a chip at some point.

Who knows?

But it's certainly like, having mid journey in Instagram

But this makes so much sense.

The the yeah.

A 100% agree.

The reason this feels like, you know, I would say the mid journey team and Mhmm.

David, I'm sure they they they're they're not interested in in flexing some big number Sure.

Timeline.

I'm Meta at the same time doesn't care to have another Yep.

You know, massive deal even be announced.

Yeah.

This feel in the way that licensing the lot think about when we've been hearing technology licensees in the sort of AI Oh.

Course.

Yeah.

These end up being, you know, Google paid a billion dollars Yeah.

Billions of dollars to license Windsurf.

Right?

And so

on What do you what do you think, Tyler?

How do you think the mid journey partnership will play out with Meta?

And they might need to rename because this is anything but a mid journey.

Yeah.

It's definitely interesting.

David, he he also replied to that post.

Said, He we remain an independent community backed research lab with no investors.

Yep.

So We just now have hundreds of millions of Zuck bucks coming in.

I mean, I'm pretty sure they have hundreds of millions of

subscriber dollars.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I know.

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

Like, they they have to be underwriting this against like Yeah.

Well, we could just go get a bunch more customers.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I imagine Yeah.

That Zac had to back up

It's Yeah.

It's very interesting.

I heard I heard David Holes', like, secret sauce described as just pure taste.

So, like, they would train a model.

They would look at the different, like, benchmarks and evals and what was performing.

And he would just look at the images and be like, we're using that model.

Like, it doesn't matter what it says, basically.

This is

Yeah.

I mean, it's hard to do, like, really good benchmarks in in, you know, diffusion models, like, when you're generating, like, visuals or video or stuff like that.

Mean, it's just like kind of set up, like, a GAN, like a generative adversarial network where you have one model that's trying to detect, is this a real image or a fake image?

And and then you have another so so you're generating a bunch of you you take a bunch of real images, and you take a bunch of AI generated images, and and you keep training the AI generated image image generator until the detector can't detect that it's fake.

And then you have something that produces real images.

But I think his goal has been, I don't just wanna create images that look real.

I wanna create images that look good.

And

so And there's definitely I mean, you can see even, like, different mid journey versions.

There's definitely, like, a a style that you can, like, almost.

It's not like immediately, obviously, you can say, like, that's mid journey v v five or something.

But there is like a vibe that

you images in ChatGPT.

It was, like, clearly nailed Ghibli's, like, out of the park and was probably, like, RL to some extent, like, on that or, like, optimized for that a little bit.

And it was a great user experience.

It was a good decision.

But the flip side is is that mid journey's kind of gone for, like, their own style, and it's great.

Yeah.

Very exciting.

I mean, Jordy, have you heard the story of David Hole's first company, Lean Motion?

Oh, it's fantastic.

Oh.

I

think you've told it before.

Crazy, crazy story.

Yeah.

Probably told it.

I made a whole video about it and stuff.

But basically, it it was a point projector that would track your hand in three d space, so you could pair it with a virtual reality headset to detect hand motion.

And so you could actually put it in an through using this like aftermarket three d printed device like on the front of an Oculus, and then it could track your hands doing hand tracking.

And I believe that there was a plan rumored to sell the company to Apple, and Apple had already, like, printed welcome packages to the to the Leap Motion team.

And then I think at some point, the deal fell apart.

Maybe that was because David Holes didn't want to work at the company or some something happened, and and the deal fell apart, and and he wound up moving on.

But then, like, took clearly, like, all those learnings, everything he had studied, and transferred all of that over to image generation when when the first, like, image generation boom started, and then just, like, absolutely found, like, a rocket ship opportunity with Midjourney.

Fantastic.

Fantastic story.

Very excited that they're

partnered with us.

That we should cover Please.

I don't wanna miss it.

Elon Musk's x AI sues Apple in OpenAI alleging they are, quote, monopolists.

Elon and the team going to legal war.

Musk says the partnership between the two companies has given chat GBT maker access to billions of user prompts.

Interesting.

So Elon Musk's AI company x AI sued Apple and OpenAI Monday Monday alleging the companies are illegally thwarting competition for AI companies.

The lawsuit says the iPhone maker's partnership with OpenAI makes the start up's ChatGPT the only GenAI chatbot that benefits from billions of user prompts originating from hundreds of millions of iPhones.

That enables OpenAI to use the prompts and feedback to improve its model, a significant advantage according to the complaint.

The suit also says Apple is deprioritizing the apps of competing chatbots and App Store ranking.

Is it really billions of user prompts?

That that is crazy.

So I've tried to use ChatGPT.

Same.

I Prompt.

I like ChatGPT.

I use it a lot.

I have it on my home row.

I also I try and trigger it with Siri every once in a while.

I'll go to I'll press the Siri button and bring up Apple Intelligence, which is Siri.

I'll ask it a question, and then I'll go open the ChatGPT app and type in my actual question because it does not work.

I just had this happen where I asked Siri to calculate the hypotenuse, and Siri's triggered, To calculate the hypotenuse of a triangle with a a right triangle with sides that are like 18 feet.

We need to calculate something in the studio here.

And it just says, like, the hypotenuse is equal to the Pythagorean.

It just didn't it didn't answer the question at all.

And then I just had to go over to Chekipi and it actually do the math.

So there's ways to trigger it, but, like, I would just be shocked if people if, like, your average iPhone

I'm sure they're just counting, in this lawsuit, counting all people that have downloaded the ChatGPT iPhone app.

Oh, you think it's that?

Yeah.

Oh.

I don't I

don't think it's Because It's not it's not

Because that.

Yeah.

Gabe Azar who said earlier, he has 15 lawyers in the Azar family says, yet again, lawyers stay winning with these pointless cases.

The lawsuit says in a desperate bid to protect its smartphone monopoly, Apple has joined forces with the company that benefits that most benefits from inhibiting competition and innovation in AI, OpenAI monopolists in the market for Gen AI chatbots.

An Apple spokesman didn't immediately respond to request for comment.

Apple has previously said the App Store is designed to be free of bias and the company has defended the fairness of its partnership with OpenAI.

Apple executives have said they will only partner with what they see as the best products to provide the best user experience.

Yeah.

So I believe the I believe the Apple OpenAI partnership on chat routing Siri queries to ChatGPT is no no monetary value exchanged either way, which is interesting because you could see you could make an argument that both of them would pay, because Apple would be better off if I had Chateappity kind of installed natively within Apple intelligence.

And then simultaneously, ChachiPi benefits from getting more users from Apple ecosystem.

So I I believe that it just netted out where they don't pay each other at anything.

But if you're an if you're XAI and you want that relationship, you could go and say, I'm gonna pay, potentially, And maybe pull it away and say, hey,

now Yeah.

Now Mac has come into Apple Intelligence.

Might be a hard sell.

Yeah.

I mean, the challenge here is I think

The brand.

Apple The brand.

Apple defend just based on the kind of content that, you know, I don't see Apple putting x AI or Grok Yeah.

At the top of With with with the adult content, it's

it's But I do think that x

AI Apple's never been adult content.

They've never been an adult.

XAI has a is should fairly you should should be able to request that Yeah.

Siri route to Grok.

Yeah.

Totally.

Right?

A user should be able to

Yeah.

I mean, you can do that.

The long term scenario, like, I'm pretty sure you can go and select a different search engine for your Safari default in iOS.

You can say, I'm a Bing guy, and I want it to route to Bing.

And it will do that.

The Bing Army.

The Bing Army does that.

Stop talking down on Bing.

They make 4,000,000,000 a year or something.

Wasn't it more?

Was it 16,000,000,000 or something?

Yeah.

Was some crazy number.

Yeah.

And so you you you could imagine that, yeah, you should at least be able to do that.

And that's certainly not a feature.

And so I don't know.

Anyway Yeah.

The chat the chat is saying

the the

the Grok army wants to route Siri

The worst.

Siri to route through to Ani.

Yeah.

It's the worst time to be named Ani, I suppose.

Anyway, congratulations to our buddy John Fiorentino.

These pictures, he says, are about ten months apart.

First picture was the test.

Second

is Yeah.

The

Bullet.

Bullet.

Can move faster than you think.

Experiment.

Find the spark.

Explode

it.

Drinkvolta.com.

I went I went yep.

Roughly ten months ago, I went and got vaulted.

Vaulted.

That's good.

John had a setup outside of jeans Yeah.

In New York.

The the product worked honestly, potentially too well.

Was Yeah.

I was I was jacked up after it.

But he has his flagship in in Nashville now and seems to be packed every single day.

It is Volta.

God wills it.

It's the phrase.

From the Crusades.

Theo saw how quickly Elon is spinning up data centers.

He said, why can't I spin up a flagship a Volta flagship in Nashville in in months?

Let's do it.

It's been a huge success.

Dax said, my wife's water broke so she went to download an app to time her contraction.

I grabbed her phone out of her hands.

What are you doing?

Don't you realize we live in the age of personal software?

We downloaded Replit and vibe coded the perfect app with three JS and super base.

We're naming the bay the baby Grok.

Hi.

2025.

I only I only read the first line.

And so I thought it was gonna be like a meditation on, like, actually like staying in the present during like a beautiful moment in your life.

Yeah.

I put I put this in there.

I'm glad you I'm glad you didn't actually read it.

That's really funny.

I love it.

Yep.

This is a good post from Andrea.

Productivity is a spectrum.

And this we we basically have picked a side.

I Yeah.

Yeah.

I got the Diet Coke here.

I eat McDonald's.

Spent the weekend in my sauna in cold plunge with my

Oh, you're on the left.

I'm on the left.

I'm on the right.

You're very I'm even I'm an investor in Magnet.

Oh, you are?

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I I mean, I'm I I pull from both sides.

I pull from both sides.

I like Heberman Lab.

I like the sauna.

I'm I won't shy away from a Monster Chipotle burrito bowl.

Yeah.

You know, I do a little bit of both.

Never get in

the hard

stop over.

Gotta Don't

like that.

Be get in the middle, you

know.

But

Middle is the the is the

Yeah.

Yeah.

A little bit of both.

Everything in moderation including moderation, folks.

Okay.

So pull up this president or sorry sorry.

Not president.

Picture of the Oval Office.

We have Wait.

Do you wanna start with No.

We should start with we should start with what it looks like Today

today is the third one.

It looks like.

Yeah.

So this is the Biden the Biden Oval Office versus the Trump Oval

1 forward is the Biden Oval Office, I believe.

And and probably every Oval Office for the past, like, three decades.

Pretty standard, comfortable, muted.

It it's opulent, but not over the top.

And then if you switch to the next shot, you will see Donald Trump has really, really brought back the seventeenth century touches

Yes.

With gold accents everywhere

Yes.

On every surface.

Floor to ceiling.

Floor to ceiling gold.

I like how he added those trophies.

Like, I I wanna Yeah.

What are the trophies

for?

It used to just be

some leaves and then Semiconductor world champion.

Edwin says, when a millennial becomes president and it's this ultra minimal Oh, wow.

Design that is it hits it hits hard.

That is a that is a standard that is the standard issue luxury apartment or living space these days for everyone.

First millennial president is gonna be wild.

Yeah.

We need we maybe we go straight to Zoomer.

I've said this for a long time, I want a president with stamina, someone who can just pull an all nighter with his boys and solve the problem, monitor the situation.

Anyway, La la says there's no such thing as taste.

At the signal level, there's only personalization and variance.

When LLM outputs look tasteless, it's a sign of the app not having the right user model or not having tuned the output variety well.

Let's go to our taste expert, Tyler Cosgrove.

Do you believe AI can have taste?

Maybe not right now.

But the post just seems like it it seems like obviously wrong.

Like there's that good Paul Graham post

Yeah.

Where he's like, is there a good art?

Or like, can can is like can you is there an objective like good art?

Yeah.

And like obviously there is because some artists are better than others.

Mhmm.

Right?

Because like I'm a worse artist than

Sure.

Whoever.

Maybe.

That's true.

And like how how who's a better artist?

It's if you make better art which Yeah.

Means there must be better art.

Yeah.

So like taste is the same thing.

There's obvious there's objectively good taste because

I would say there is good taste.

I would say there is not objectively good taste.

There is subjectively good taste.

But I believe that subjective things are true.

I believe that that money is is is a is a construct.

It's an idea.

It's a it doesn't have intrinsic Yeah.

There's many there's people that would say that Yes.

Trump's Oval Office is of poor taste.

But to him, it's the highest of high.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And yet and yet, I believe in things that that have that have an unobjective quality, a subjective quality.

Do you think there's objectively, like, good art and and like art that is better than other art?

I think that there is art that is better than other art, but I don't believe that it is objectively better.

Okay.

Do

you think I don't that's believe I can quantify.

John's been bidding on the banana tape to the wall, by the way.

So

I'm not a big fan of that one.

But but, of course, I think that there's some art that's better than others, but I would not say it is it is objectively better.

Do you think Michael Antelope is objectively a better artist than me?

Maybe.

There's certainly there's certainly like like, the ability to instantiate the art is is an objective quality.

Like, the ability like, a certain person will be able to make a functional vase on a pottery wheel and another person will fail at that.

One person will try and draw a person and it will look more photo real.

But that's not the only thing that I see art being.

Like Michelangelo did not paint the Sistine Chapel himself.

Right?

He had a team that did that.

I'm pretty sure.

I don't know.

We'll have look it up.

Maybe.

Grok, is this real?

Chad, is this real?

But

Well, more

more important But than I do think I do think the two things are separate.

And I think the the taste is different than the skill set.

Can we I want to get on to some more important topics.

Can we pull up this post of Doge employee big balls repping 2 '20 5?

Wait.

Really?

Oh, that's who that is?

I saw the picture.

And this is great.

I saw I saw it it's Edward Corustein.

Is that who that is?

Recovery?

Yeah.

This is this is mister Balls.

Wow.

Just wrapping it out.

Looking great too.

Good form.

He's not five points of contact.

Okay.

But but coming off

Strong men create good times.

Happens to me.

Happens to me.

Wow.

And and and this is, of course, a response to the the mayoral candidate in New York City, Mamdani, who was seen potentially not being able to bench

His big balls running.

But it's possible that he just had an overeager spotter.

We're we're unclear.

But

He didn't look super comfortable under there.

Yeah.

He had to go to a dark place for those reps.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He knew he knew when he stood up that he was cooked

But I I I don't understand why how he wound up in a situation.

He seems very calculated in what he films.

A lot of it's very

apparently, there's other angles of it.

Okay.

He was resistant to doing it.

Oh, he got kind of like yeah.

He got talked into it.

Okay.

That's rough.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's a bit of a of a doubt.

I forgot who was posting.

Somebody was saying like the the real shrewd political, like, if he had if he had taken a step back and said, you know what?

This is gonna be hard for me, but Yeah.

Together, we can we can do anything.

Yeah.

Let's let's let's wrap this out together.

City of New York.

Let's socialize the weight.

I want two guys

I wanna distribute the weight.

Everyone the weight.

10 pounds with me right now, and we're good.

Yep.

Anyway, Nikita Beer went to Starbase.

It was one of the perks of being a executive at X.

I spent the day at Starbase and never really understood the scope of what's happening here.

It's a modern day Manhattan project, an entire city built for the singular mission of going to space.

Rows of nineteen fifties ranch homes, a couple of restaurants, a grocery store, hovercrafts shuttling people around on water.

I didn't know they had hovercrafts there.

That's awesome.

And launch pads and rocket factories everywhere.

He shares a beautiful picture of himself looking up at the Starship, which I believe did not launch.

Is that right?

Or it did launch, and it it was it was not successful.

But, obviously,

the No.

It didn't it didn't It didn't launch the scrapped aborted the

Yeah.

They aborted the launch.

But, of course, the the machinery at Starbase is unrelenting, and I think they're gonna get that thing up there eventually.

They will.

Yeah.

The video the video that Elon showed of of inside the the factory just showed this like incredible scale.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I have a post we can end the show with.

Bucco Capital says, my this is from last night.

My timeline tonight, you need extremely concentrated positions, 10 bagger thread, bet heavy on consensus, stupid to have cash because bear markets are so short, cyclicals pitched as secular winners.

They're gonna run it hot.

Careful out there.

And Zoomer, the legendary Zoomer who is zooming on Chinese text says, Max levered long all in tech bucko.

And of course, Zoomer is is going gigalong on PDD.

How do you even end up at PDD and four?

I genuinely don't get it.

You gotta have them on.

The great

Yeah.

The great Zoomer versus

Buko?

Yeah.

Onk.

Zoomer versus Onk debate.

Buco.

Starship is set to launch today.

Two hours and twenty minutes till launch.

Oh, wow.

I I I'm I'm really Can't

wait.

For it.

Never bet against Elon, baby.

He's gonna get that thing out there eventually.

Well, thank you for tuning in.

Fun show today.

Always Great

great when we can get the doctor to drop to drop on.

Always a

And Fun show.

I cannot wait for tomorrow.

We're working on getting somebody to call in from the Playa folks.

We're working on it.

If you are listening to this from Black Rock City, let us know.

We'd love

to get some live trophy in the the trophy in the White House in the Oval Office is the number one president trophy.

Self glaze.

Thanks for hanging out, guys.

Good.

We will talk to you soon.

Have a good day.

We love you.

See you tomorrow.

Good evening.

Goodbye.