Davos Reactions, Waymo’s Safety Case, Czinger 21C Hypercar Tour | Martin Shkreli, Bradley Tusk, Lukas Czinger, Andy McCune, Michael Broukhim, Aaron Katz

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Today is Tuesday, January 20, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultradam, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Ramp time is money save. Both easy to use. Corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Davos. Not the best way to save money, apparently. Very expensive if you go. But a lot of people have been, and for good reason, because there's a lot of news happening in Davos, mainly a lot of it's focused on Trump, a lot of it's focused on Greenland. I'll give you a little tour of the Wall Street Journal. Trump's amped up rhetoric on Greenland puts issue center stage at Davos.

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Why don't you pull up the COVID of the Financial Times, too?

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The Financial Times? You want me to do this bit? Here we go. Well, you know, the markets are in turmoil. The Dow slid 800 points. Treasury prices are dropping. You know that if you're investing, you got to do it on public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and with damn great customer service.

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That's right.

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So the front of the Financial Times, it says, trump keeps seizure of Greenland by force on table as trade tensions mount. And so this is one of the most aggressive images that I can imagine running on the front of a international newspaper. Now, the Financial Times, of course, is a British paper. So much less, just different dynamics with the current American administration. You know, Trump, I think, has a lawsuit going with the Wall Street Journal. There's a whole bunch of things that are going on with the American media. But over in the Financial Times, they print some wild stuff. And they printed this image of a Danish soldier pointing a gun at the camera. So Danish soldiers and exercising.

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Anybody that's been around guns knows that.

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You don't want to be looking down.

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The barrel at anyone.

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Crazy.

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Even a photographer to get a cool picture is typically just completely off limits.

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Yeah, yeah. And so, but they went there. What this says to me is that, you know, the Danes said, hey, the head of the army has been flown out to the autonomous territory. Danish troops are on the ground in Greenland, and we're doing a photo shoot. We're getting a soldier with a sniper rifle or an assault rifle. We're gonna point that at a camera, we're gonna take that photo, and then we're send that to the editor of the Financial Times.

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We're gonna run it on the front page.

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We're gonna run it on the front page. Of course, the Danes don't have the authority to just put anything on the front page, but they pitched it and clearly they sent the photo and the Financial Times editor enjoyed it, so he put it on the front page. But it kind of gives you a little bit of a taste of what's going on. The Wall Street Journal's also covering it. Trump threats on Greenland Mobilize allies that is taking center stage at Davos. But this is a technology show, this is a business show and we're focused on what Dario Amadei said at Davos. We will pull this, pull it up. First, let me tell you about railway. Railway simplifies software deployment, web apps, servers and databases. They run in one place with scaling, monitoring and security built in. So let's pull up the clip of Dario Amadei on stage. He's the co founder and CEO of Anthropic. He calls out Trump's policy around Nvidia and China. Let's play the clip into the world, right when, when we're, when we're, you know, competing against other companies for enterprise contracts, we see just honestly and candidly, we see Google and we see OpenAI.

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Every once in a while we see.

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A couple other US players. I have almost never lost a deal, lost a contract to, to a Chinese model.

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But now you have the Trump administration.

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And I think you've already protested about this, giving high speed chips, Nvidia chips to the Chinese.

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That's right. That's right. The thing that is holding them back, and they've said it themselves, the CEOs.

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Of these companies say it's the embargo on chips that's holding us back. They explicitly say this.

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And now indeed, you know, there are some policies and I hope they change their mind to, you know, to explicitly send not quite our latest generation of chips, although it was reported that even.

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That was being considered.

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But you know, the generation of chips that's, that's just one back, that's still extremely powerful. And we are many years ahead of China in terms of our, in terms.

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Of our ability to make chips.

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So I think it would be a big mistake to ship these chips. You know, the analogy I thought of, if you think about the incredible national security implications of building model, building models that are essentially cognition, that are essentially intelligence.

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Right.

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I've called where we're going with this.

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A country of geniuses in a data center.

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Right.

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So imagine 100 million people smarter than any Nobel Prize winner and it's going to be under the control of one country or another. So I think this is crazy. I think it's a bit like, I don't know, like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea and bragging, oh, yeah, Boeing made the case. Your friend David Sacks basically arming the Chinese. No, I wouldn't report anything.

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I would just say trying to put.

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Words in his mouth is akin to. Yeah, it's not. Well, okay, I want Jordy's reaction. I want Tyler's reaction. But first I want to tell you about Label Box. Reinforcement learning environments, voice robotics, evals, and expert human data. Label Box is the data labeling factory behind the world's leading labs table.

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Tyler.

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Tyler, what's your reaction to that? How do you interpret that? How big of an issue is the China question right now? What are you reading into Daria's rhetoric there?

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Yeah, I think it's like, fairly reasonable. If you basically think that AI is going to be AGI, it's going to be this massive, we're going to get 10% GDP growth. Because at some point it's like.

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If.

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It'S just like economy versus economy, like, we got to be better.

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Yeah, that's something that's sort of lost.

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Even if you're worried about doom. Because there's also the point where it's competition. Yeah. Like, if you're worried about safety also. So there's like two ways, right. If you think Asia just is going to be massive, you know, economically speaking. And then also on the safety issue. Right. Because if you think, like, maybe China is going to be less concerned about safety, they're not going to be as worried about alignment. That's like, obviously a massive danger. You don't want it to. You don't want to give the technology to people who don't, you know, worry about the safety aspect.

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The funny thing about In America, really, AI could lead to 10% GDP growth. And China's like, oh, you mean what we did in 2007 when we were growing at 14% GDP growth? Or should we go back to 1970 when we grew at 19%? Or should we go back to 2004 when we were 10.1, or 1992 when we were growing at 14.3%? Or even in 2021, they had an 8.6 GDP growth. They know 10% GDP growth over there.

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They felt it.

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They'll do it with or without AI chips. But obviously AI chips are big.

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One dynamic that's interesting is China has obviously a massive advantage in robot.

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Yes.

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And right now we have an advantage in the models. And if that kind of continues.

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But Also dynamically use, like the data centers like we are.

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So I'm saying, I guess like robotic stack. AI Stack.

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Yeah, yeah.

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And it'll be interesting to see how, because obviously if you have an advantage in one area, that might help you gain an advantage in another area.

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Right.

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But we'll see which one ends up being more. More impactful.

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Let me tell you about Cisco. It's critical infrastructure for the AI era. We love Cisco. We're happy to be partnered with them. And let me also take you through the LINEAR lineup today because we have some great guests on the show. We have Martin Shkreli joining at noon, Bradley Tusk at 12:30.

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If you're not familiar with Martin Shkreli, he's an American businessman.

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He's a businessman, an investor. Lucas Zenger's coming in. We have a surprise for everyone. We're going to be taking a look at his car. We're very excited about that. And then we have the lambda lightning round. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on LINEAR are using agents. Now, we're very excited to share that fact with you. Let's click it over to Palantir CEO Alex Karp, who shared some commercial lessons of AI on the battlefield. There's a clip from him from Davos. And there's a little Easter egg in this video for the true TBPN ball knowers for the video for the TVPN fans.

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I know what you're about to say.

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So watch this clip and you can tell me if you identify a former guest.

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Former guest.

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Enterprises in general, not all enterprises, tend to want to, over time, become like every enterprise. So if you take five, you know, A enterprise and B enterprise and C, enterprise, they're in the same market. Their tech infrastructure is trying to make them into the same enterprise. They have the same ORCA chart.

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Sure.

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They have presumably roughly the same.

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They don't have the same data infrastructure.

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And what you learn on the battlefield.

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Is that and in life is that that's not particularly valuable. What is very valuable is an enterprise can do something no enterprise in the world can do. And so that is the goal of every single military intelligence service. In fact, all these intelligence service and militaries have their own specialization. And so when we went to commerce, like, what we're saying is, how can.

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We make your insurance company the way you underwrite?

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How can we make that to your.

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Tribal knowledge about underwriting?

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How can we transform this to knowledge everyone has.

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Okay, go back one second. Go back one second. Okay, transform this to pause knowledge. Okay. It's very hard to see, but behind the guy to the right, behind Alex Karp, behind Alex Karp, there's another man. And behind that man, next to the WEF logo is a man who has.

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Been on the show, Philip Johnston, the co founder, CEO of CEO.

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I thought you were talking about Satya Nadella.

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Wait, what?

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I think that's Satya in the question.

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Wait, oh, you think it's Satya? No, I'm talking about the guy right there that you can see. That's Phillips from starcloud. I saw him go to Davos and I was like, this guy's on a generational run.

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This whole thing.

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Wait, is it not. Maybe it's not. I think it is. I'm really sorry, Philip, if I got this wrong, but that looks a lot.

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Like you might be getting it wrong too.

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That looks a lot like you.

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We might just be seeing things.

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We might be seeing things, we might be hallucinating. But the one thing we're not hallucinating is Lambda Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI, supercomputers for training, inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Anyway, enough with the ec.

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This whole time I thought you'd. I thought. I really was thinking the guy in the back really saudges. No, no, no, no. Kinda hard to clock.

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I don't think that's Satya. I think that's Philip Johnson from Star Cloud. I did see him go to Davos, so it's not crazy, but he'll probably correct me if that's not him. Anyway, I would love an explainer from Raghav around the recession indicator. Youngboy never broke again. I'm familiar with NBA YoungBoy, but I'm not familiar with the recession indicator. So I would love to get some more information from you folks on this. Let's dive in and dig into what Dr. Karp actually said on the stage at Davos. But first, let me tell you about fin, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Fin AI. So it's an interesting pitch. It's particularly interesting talking about just more and more custom systems and this idea of software gets built. A whole bunch of companies are doing things a manual way. One company extracts that and sort of factors out that business process, turns IT into enterprise. SaaS is sold to all the different companies. Now what Karp is really saying, it sounds like, is that every company will have some sort of custom implementation that will be way more flexible and Way more tuned to their specific businesses. And this is sort of the Palantir pitch. They'll come in and build something that's semi custom, semi on top of their systems that they've already built. And it's an interesting like blurring of the lines from you want something that, that checks all your boxes but in the future will you really want, if you're at, if you're a large enterprise, will you really want to be vibe coding your own solutions to everything?

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Maybe, but going to need a, you.

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Probably want system of recognition sort of foundational elements and that's like the pitch for the ontology stack. Understanding how the data links together, then as you build on top of that you, you have a more solid foundation. Seems like a good, a good pitch would be interesting to see how this is like where the rubber meets the road and at what level. The big question with Palantir right now is, you know, they work with the largest companies and organizations in the world, obviously the military among them. But will they go down the stack and have more, you know, they have aip, they're bringing more startups onto the platform. Will there be a world where more sort of mid market enterprises, sub 10 billion dollar companies are thriving with a Palantir backed system? Certainly would be good for the business to just have more customers on board, but will be, you know, a dynamic that grows anyway. 11 labs build intelligent real time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs. And I got to give 11 Labs a shout out because yesterday when we spent 45 minutes talking about X articles, I know everyone loved that because I did summarize it in a newsletter piece that you could have read in two minutes. But it was fun talking for 45 minutes. One of the things that I brought up was that maybe ElevenLabs should do an article reader that would allow you, since there's articles all over X now, to just click a button and have elevenlabs read it to you. Well, they built it and it's already live. So very, very exciting. 11 reader is the account here. It says articles everywhere. You can save them with the Chrome extension. Listen on the web or to your phone in under 10 seconds for the bookmarkers out there, for the people that are finding those articles and saying I'm gonna book those. Probably a pretty reasonable way to actually get through your stack of articles that you've been meaning to read. But you were busy and you just saw it and you saw that it got a lot of likes and a lot of engagement and you wanna dig in, but you don't have the time, so you're gonna head over and do that anyway. Vibe Co where D2C brands, B2B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences and meas just on meta.

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Head over to Chinese vice premier he Lee Fung over at Davos.

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Okay, what did he say? China never seeks a trade surplus. On top of being the world's factory, China hopes to become the world's market. Let's watch the Chinese. Vice versa, boy. Economy and trade.

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We never seek trade surplus.

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On top of being the world's factory.

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We hope to be the world's market too, boy economy.

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And it was an accident. We didn't mean to do this. It was an accident. It was not our intention to develop a massive trade surplus with the world.

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I feel like you. I mean, not to go back to 11 labs, but you have a lot of flexibility with the translator that you choose at one of these events. How are you not going with an Arnold Schwarzenegger?

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You know, Totally.

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Yeah. Like, you could have anyone be your translator, so why not throw in a Morgan Freeman or.

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Just any type of really incredible.

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A Joe Rogan.

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Yeah, Joe Rogan.

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He already is announcing the ufc. Get him on the microphone, translate it for him, and then he reads it out to the audience and it sounds like your Joe Rogan voice is out there.

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I like it. I like it.

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Anyway, I mean, I think this is positive. We were just talking to Matt Grimm yesterday about the west versus China and global competition. And like, I think all of that stuff is important. I think what Dario is saying is important. But I still come back to this idea that, like, no one wants war. No one wants, you know, everyone wants positive sum relationships. And so it is good to see, you know, global leaders coming together better than everyone just being holed up and posting at each other on redbook and Truth Social. I like an economic forum. I think Davos is back. That's the real lesson from this year, I think. I think the fact that Trump was going was a big. There was a lot of coverage, a lot of interesting discussion around it. And Davos really, really pulled together a fantastic group this year and is definitely breaking through in the tech community, in the business community, in the political community in a way that I don't remember it being as important last year. And so little bit of a comeback. You love to see it console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of it. HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password Res.

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Lisan al Gaib is quoting Dario at Davos, who also said, we don't need to maximize engagement for a billion users. Of course.

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Taking shots.

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Taking shots.

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Folks, over at Open Handling, I threw this question to both of you earlier today. What is the pro level?

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It's funny that this is a shot too, because it's like he is acknowledging that they've developed.

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Is he anti ads? Yeah. Anthropic is against slopping.

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F. He said he's anti ads.

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Wow.

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Boo.

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This is hard. I was falling in love with Dario. I love so much about his rhetoric. Obviously, the models are fantastic. But he has to come and stab me in the back like that with a shot on my favorite, favorite piece of the global economy, the advertising industry. Very, very brutal. But hopefully we can get more.

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What other notes did you have from the conversation? Yeah, yeah.

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So there's a bunch I took. So, yeah, these ones are from. He did, like, a Wall Street Journal Q and A this morning.

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Okay.

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Okay. So I'll just read some quotes.

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Yeah.

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He thinks we're going to have very high GDP and very high unemployment inequality.

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So. So when we. We've kind of ballparked this at like, 10% GDP growth for America, that would be unprecedented, massive. We're typically at like, 2 to 3%. 10% would be a significant acceleration.

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Yeah. And then for the. Unemployment was like, 10 to 20%.

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That's a lot. That's a lot. And we can debate this more, and I'm sure we will. We'll eventually formulate an entire structural presentation around this at some point.

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But for. Yeah. And then he said there's gonna have to be some role for, like, for the government to intervene on some macro level to, like, you know, help. Help with this displacement of labor.

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Yep.

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He says ideology will not survive this. Technology.

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Ideology will not survive.

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Yeah, it's kind of vague. A bit of a vague pose.

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Except his ideology. He's like. Actually, mine is like, kind of got a straight shot here.

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Yeah. What could be more ideological than being against advertising? He said he's a zealot. He's an anti advertising zealot.

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He said AI is uniquely well suited to autocracy.

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Autocracy, yes. Yes.

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Yeah.

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This is a teal take as well.

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Yeah. This was in the context of, like, why he's kind of anti giving chips to China.

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Okay. Yeah. AI is communist. Crypto is libertarian. That take. Yeah. Yeah.

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And then he kind of. He said Google and OpenAI are firmly in consumer. It's kind of this existential battle between them and Anthropic is firmly in enterprise. He's very happy with that decision. He doesn't have to monetize the billion users or whatever or monetize free users. He can just sell things that are so happy.

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I don't have to worry about monetizing a billion users.

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He said. On the question of, like, are they going to do generative stuff, you said they probably won't ever do it. I think Sholto said this too.

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Yeah. But if there are enough models out there that Claude code can go and sign you up for the Nano Banana.

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Yeah, Maybe there's a use case for images and presentations or something, but then they can just kind of vend in some API, they can contract it.

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So my big question is, I think we all agree that ads in the Claude iOS app are a very low priority, something we will likely not see this year. That's fine, thank you. Something we likely won't see this year just because they have such a good business going on the enterprise side and the user base for the Claude iOS app is not necessarily big enough to support a really healthy ad business and they're sort of ideologically against it. But on the slop question, you can use Claude code to generate slop. Like you can article slop. Well, article slop, but also imagery. You can wire it up to the Sora API, to the nanobanana API, and you can go create a whole bunch of generative video and people. But that is the Sholto promise of, like, it should be able to go and use other models. Right. The question for me is, when will that functionality come to the Claude iOS app?

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Because Claude writes that's very natural to Cowork. So I think when that comes to iOS.

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Exactly, yeah. So what will the cowork iOS product look like? How much flexibility will it have? Because it won't have all the same APIs to go into your folders. The whole cleaning up your desktop meme on your MacBook Pro with Claude code, that's something that would just be sort of unaccessible to the iOS ecosystem because the APIs aren't there. So even if they tried to build it, Apple just say, no, no, no. You're not rearranging icons on the desktop because that can be used maliciously. And this is a privacy issue and this is a security issue. And so we're not giving you the hooks to do that. The question is like, how much can they do in the cloud? And then vend back to you, because if you have a virtual machine that's running Python and has Claude code running and you're interfacing with it from the Claude iOS app. You could do a bunch of crazy stuff, including generate images and go and sign up for a Nano Banana account.

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What if we have an AI safety incident this year where somebody leaves, like, a Claude code terminal kind of open and on, just creates billions of social media accounts and flooding the Internet?

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I thought you were going to say just like some kid. You know how, like, kids will download, like, Fortnite and then, like, spend too much on V bucks or they'll, like, get their parents credit cards and, like, run up a bill. It'd be funny if someone, like, downloaded Claude on the iOS app and, like, accidentally kicked off something that, like, provisioned a ton of AWS servers and they just get a bill for, like, $400,000 and they go bankrupt. That'd be a sort of AI safety incident. That'd be funny. Anyway. Figma. Figma make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build, create codeback prototypes and apps fast. So what else did Lisan Al Gaib say about Davos? Some companies are essentially led by people who have a scientific background. That's my background. That's Demis's background. We had some love for Demis in the chat. Shout out to demis over at DeepMind. Some of them are led by a generation of entrepreneurs that did social media. Taking shots. Dario is like. He's on one.

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Yeah.

23:17

I mean, he was great at Deal book. Incredibly entertaining.

23:17

Incredibly entertaining.

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Because it's like, bold statement jab. Yeah, bold statement jab.

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And then also people will hit him with the hard questions and he'll kind of be like. He'll acknowledge. He'll very quickly tell the interviewer, I know where you're going with that, and I'm not going there. But in a fun way that's not really adversarial. And he never flips it around, like, takes shots at them. And he's like, why are you asking me that question? I'm not here to answer that question. He's like, no, no, I know what you're trying to get me to do, but I'm not gonna do it. I'm not gonna take the bait. But he, like, knows that it's bait. It's very entertaining.

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Interviewer trying to bait him into saying that David Sacks was arming the Chinese.

23:50

That's crazy. He says there's a long tradition of scientists thinking about the effects of the technology that they built of thinking of themselves as having responsibility for the technology they built, not ducking responsibility. They are motivated in the first place by creating something for the world. So they worry in the cases that something can go wrong. I think the motivation of entrepreneurs, particularly the generation of social media entrepreneurs, are very different. The way they interacted, you could say manipulated consumers is very different. I think that leads to different attitudes. He's taken some shots. Potentially it's Sam Altman, although Sam Altman, not really a social media entrepreneur, but I get that he's in that generation. Obviously this is more directed.

23:56

Was he saying looked, Mark Zuckerberg? Is that a reference to looped?

24:34

I mean, looped was technically social media, but I think of Sam Altman much more of YC enterprise software startup Stripe. He's never really been in house at a major social media company that I'm aware of. I don't know. But I take Dario's point and he's just trying to reinforce this idea that he does think talking about responsibility for the technology of these buildings is important. That's the anthropic vibe and brand, and it served them very well. Anyway, Plaid Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow and invest securely. Connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud and improve lending.

24:38

Now with AI, let's talk about Waymo.

25:17

Let's do it. So today I wrote a quick piece. It was a reaction to a reaction because David Zipper went in Bloomberg and he wrote a piece, said, we still don't know if robo taxis are safer than human drivers. Then Kelsey Piper went over to the argument, wrote a response to that, saying, yes, we do know. And her interesting point was that what David Zipper is doing is he's lumping all of the different robotaxis together. So Waymo and Cruise and Tesla and Comma and Zoox and there's a whole bunch of other data that can go into this bucket, and they're not all created equal. Waymo's been doing it for decades at this point. They have insane capex, insane opex. There's humans in the loop a lot of times, and it's just like the most advanced team. It seems like it's the most advanced technology stack. There's a lot of advantages, and that's actually showing up in the data. And so her main dispute with Zipper is over what data she's including. He's including in making this claim that, hey, we don't know if robo taxis are actually safer than human drivers. And she gives this great analogy that I really really enjoyed. So she says. Imagine someone writes a piece and they say, we don't know if airplanes are safe. Some people say that crashes are extremely rare. And others say that crashes happen every week. And when you investigate this claim further, you learn that what's going on is that commercial aviation crashes are extremely rare. This is true while general aviation crashes, small personal planes, including ones that you can build in your own garage, are quite common. And so yes, if you lump that together, you're going to get this muddy picture of aviation. But you shouldn't use that to sort of fear monger about getting on a 747 because 747s just so rarely crash. But yeah, if you build your own Cessna and you're modding it and you're taking it through the canyons like you gotta watch out.

25:21

Ask any recreational pilot if they've ever gotten into any hairy incidents. Totally tell you like, oh yeah, well this time I was flying and, and the wind came on super strong and I landed and I was basically, you.

27:24

Know, and a lot of times that counts as a crash. Like, I mean Harrison Ford has, has like crash landed on a golf course and no, I believe no one was injured. I think this happened multiple times actually by Harrison Ford. Harrison Ford, Yeah, he flies his own planes, but he flies like old planes and stuff. Like he's like a true enthusiast. Like he's, he's like a plane guy.

27:36

How about Simple Flying.com? how many plane crashes has Harrison Ford had in the last 25 years? The actor has been involved in several incidents involving emergency landings, rescues and Runway.

27:58

Incursions exactly like it happens. It sounds crazy. It is crazy. I would never want to be in any sort of plane crash. But there's just way more, there's just way more planes flying around when you include those Cessnas. And it's not really fair to put that on United airlines.

28:09

American Airlines 13th of February 2017 Santa Ana, California. Single Engine Eviat Husky flown by Harrison Ford was cleared to land on Runway 20L. Ford's aircraft reportedly landed on a parallel taxiway overflying. American Airlines 737 is holding short of Runway 20L. 5th of March 2015 Santa Monica. Ford was a pilot and sole occupant of Ryan ST3KR recruit a two seat open cockpit aircraft that.

28:27

Open cockpit. Open cockpit.

28:57

Think about that.

28:59

You're flying and the wind's in your hair. Like that's not a normal experience. That's not coach on American Airlines.

29:00

Used extensively as a training aircraft by the US military in World War II. According to a preliminary report, Ford reported a loss of engine power shortly after taking off and was attempting to return to Runway three. So he ended up crashing into, like, a field?

29:06

Exactly.

29:24

Ford chose to land on a nearby golf course, clipping the top of a tree before landing.

29:25

If you just took Harrison Ford, he's probably more dangerous than, like, American arrow.

29:32

In June 2000, while landing in Lincoln, Nebraska, Ford's plane departed the Runway due to a gust of wind. The aircraft sustained minor damage.

29:36

Oh, no.

29:44

23Rd of October.

29:45

Wait, there's a fourth one.

29:46

I thought.

29:47

Ford was on a training flight in a Bell 206 helicopter when he and the instructor made an emergency, emergency landing in a dry riverbed near Santa Clarita. Crazy. Although the helicopter rolled over on its left side, neither Ford or the instructor were injured. Yeah, that's all that I can find.

29:48

Again, I have another plane story.

30:04

I mean, imagine four. Four major incidents like, make it into the record. He's got to have at least, like, 10. More like sketchy situation.

30:06

No one wrote a piece about it.

30:13

Let's talk.

30:15

Let's not talk about that. Let's. Let's agree that, you know, hey, calls his PR person. Hey, let's clean this up. How about you take a picture of me outside? Erawan, Call the paps. I'm willing to give you a smoothie.

30:15

Give me an erawan, Brandon. Smoothie. We need a new story.

30:26

We need a different story. I wanna be on the front of the New York Post. I'll take the bad picture on the beach of me falling off or something. Anyway, Cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So I actually have a friend who's been on the show. I'm not gonna dox him, but we have two friends. Both of them fly. One of them's extremely serious, has IFR rating. So there's vfr, which is visual flight rules. That's like, you take the plane up. It has to be clear, because if you get into clouds, you're not trained for that. You can't fly at night. Exactly. IFR is you're flying on the instruments. Instrument flight rules. And so we have one friend who's, like, super, by the book, super safe. And then we have another buddy who's a little bit wilder. Vfr. And he will rent, like, the cheaper planes. And one time the dial lights went out and he was landing at night. Shouldn't be flying at night at all. Just like, botched the schedule and didn't check sunset. And he has to use his phone flashlight while he's landing to look at the dials as he's coming in on this rickety old plane he's flying. People get crazy out there. They get confident. It is very dangerous. But just like if you're getting into personal aviation, flying your own planes, the jump in safety from VFR to IFR is significant. Like the IFR guys crash way, way less so highly recommend that if you are getting into flying your own planes anyway. Restream 1 livestream 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi stream, go to restream.com so Waymo is funny to write about because there's still a class of people that are writing the stories about like, hey, Waymo is actually safe. And I'm like, I completely buy it.

30:29

I'm in.

32:12

Roll the Waymos out everywhere I've been in them, I feel safe in them. I've seen the data, I think they're safe. Like I'm just like, my eyes glaze over when someone's like, I'm gonna blow your brain out, I'm gonna blow your mind. Like Waymoser said robot car. I'm like, yeah, I'm in. I'm totally in. But there's still this debate and most people in tech are debating about just Waymo's unit economics and like, can they beat Tesla, what happens there? And so typically I don't really wade into the safety thing cause I think it's very safe. But this Piper piece, this piece by Kelsey Piper did make me wonder about what happens if you further segment the human driver population. So we need to segment robotaxis into Waymo and everyone else because Waymo's so good. But how does Waymo compare against the best human drivers? And I wasn't thinking like the Lewis Hamilton's of the world. I'm sure Lewis Hamilton could, could be superhuman at driving if he needed to. I wanted to think about it more as like if I'm an insurance agent and I'm underwriting a class A group of people, what would I be going for and are they better than Waymo? And you can't look at fatal crashes per 100 million miles because there have so few fatal crashes in Waymos and there's just not enough data yet to look at that. So what you can look at is any injury crashes per million miles. And the Kelsey Piper piece is really good. It goes into a bunch of different methodologies for data collection. Looking at incidents where Waymos airbags release, because that's a Very binary moment where there's a question about like, well, what's an injury? Like if somebody like got motion sick and then they had to go to the hospital, like does that count as an injury? Or like what if, if they were getting out of the car and then they fall, does that count? So there's all these things where it's like, does it count? So anyway, the best data that we have on Waymo is any injury crashes per million miles. For the average human, it's about four. Any injury crashes. So any injury that counts four per million miles, Waymo is way better. Way better. 0.75. So about five times safer than humans broadly.

32:13

But.

34:15

But there's one very specific case where humans, I believe are safer. Now there's debate about the data. I just had Claude crunch it all together and try and pull a bunch of stuff together, but I think this holds. So a married 60 year old woman who's college educated and is driving A large luxury SUV in Massachusetts on a Tuesday morning is closer to 0.5 injury crashes per million miles.

34:15

Is the Tuesday morning part real?

34:39

Yes. So the most dangerous time to drive, and I'll flip it around, the most dangerous time to drive is midnight on a Saturday because that's when people are at the bars, they leave, they're drinking, and so it's dark, it's the weekend, there's a lot more people on the road, they're driving much faster, they're getting places, they might be inebriated or under the influence of something. And so Tuesday morning is the safest time to drive. And so basically I looked at all the. It's the government IHTSA data, it's the transportation authority. I'm getting the acronym wrong, but you look at all the different segments and then you add all those together and you get kind of like the synthetic safest driver cohort. It's a little loose, but it does seem like if you looked at that cohort, they're still beating Waymo. Humans still got it at least, like kind of. It's pretty close. It's honestly neck and neck, but. So none of this should take away anything. None of this should take away from the Presley.

34:41

Feels like a Nathan Fielder episode in the Making of like studying the women in Massachusetts.

35:38

Yeah.

35:44

Like what do they do on the planet? Just interviewing all of them to like.

35:44

Married 60 year old college educated women.

35:48

Like the exact wrong conclusion.

35:50

Oh yeah, yeah. We need to, we need to get everyone married in college educated.

35:52

Every. No, the conclusion is everyone needs to move to Massachusetts.

35:56

Yes. And well, it's the married 60 year old women that need to be the taxi drivers everywhere in the world. They need to be. It's like instead of Waymo, he starts.

35:59

Like a competitor to Waymo Ride hailing.

36:07

That's just them.

36:09

Yeah, that's just them.

36:10

Yeah. But it only works in Massachusetts, so clearly Waymos are very safe. Rolling them out nationally would be a huge safety upgrade for our society broadly. But it's worth noting that the Massachusetts married women still got it. But if you want to know, if you want to flip this around and find the hypothetically riskiest driver profile, it's very funny. It's an 18 year old single male with a DUI driving a Dodge Challenger at midnight on a Saturday in rural Mississippi.

36:11

Mississippi.

36:41

That's as risky as you can get. And that, you know, an order of magnitude or 40 times as dangerous as the Massachusetts driver.

36:42

Yeah. But the interesting takeaway is that you said earlier off the show was like Waymo's actually not superhuman level driver.

36:50

Yes, yes.

36:59

Because in order to be that, you actually have to be better than the best human. Right?

37:01

Exactly, exactly. So we need a word for not above average and in the top cohort of humans, but not better than any human ever, because a lot of AI tools are getting there.

37:05

Well, I guess. Okay, so I actually looked up, it's.

37:20

Like top decimal definition.

37:22

So superhuman means having powers, abilities or qualities beyond normal human capacity. So it's potentially these women in Massachusetts, they have superhuman.

37:23

They're human.

37:31

Yeah, that's right. As well as Waymo. So maybe we do need to give Waymo a little more credit.

37:32

Well, if you're looking for superhuman payroll, head over to Gusto. The unified platform for payroll, benefits and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium sized business.

37:37

The backbone of this show it is.

37:47

Max Hodak had a post about Waymo. He said, interesting benefit of Waymo, it always matches instantly since it knows exactly what cars are available and that they will always accept. And it can also provide accurate wait times before requesting. And so lots of love for Waymo. Interesting to see where they'll roll out. The really interesting thing is that we've had a number of people on the show advocate that rolling out Waymo is a societal good. It will reduce the number of traffic fatalities. That's all true, but if you really want to accelerate the impact that Waymo will have on safety, you gotta deploy it in Mississippi before you bring it to Massachusetts. And I just feel like Waymo's coming to Boston before it comes to Vicksburg. But I don't know. It was fun. There's other love for Waymo on the timeline. First, let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent. Mike Volpe, he said. I have to say I love that Waymo operates from San Francisco to the South Bay. So great. Some folks say the freeway driving is so. So I hadn't heard that. The antidote to that is I get into an Uber and do the same drive. It's literally life threatening.

37:50

I was driving with Paul the other day and I heard he was telling me about the different modes that Tesla has. I've never owned a Tesla, so I wasn't familiar. But did you know that Tesla actually has something called Mad Max mode, the autopilot, where it'll drive it. It'll drive it like roughly around 85 on the freeways. And if you're in the fast lane and you come up to somebody, it will merge over into the lane to the right, make a pass and go back to 85.

39:08

That's insane.

39:36

Somehow feels slightly illegal, but I like it.

39:39

Okay, MongoDB choose a database built for flexibility and scale with the best in class embedding models and re rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build. What's next? We have an update in the Warner Brothers Netflix deal. Netflix, they're going all cash, all cash deal. Netflix had said to Paramount, hey, what we want is an all cash deal. David Ellison and the Paramount crew, they brought Warner an all cash deal and Netflix or Warner was still saying, hey, we're going with Netflix. Now Netflix has upgraded so we can read through a little bit of this in the Wall Street Journal.

39:44

Warner Brothers Discovery and Netflix said Tuesday they struck a new all cash deal for Netflix to buy Warner Brothers Studios and hbo Max Warner also released financial details on the cable network's business it plans to spin off. The all cash deal of $27.75 per share replaces Netflix's previous cash and stock deal. The sweetened offer comes as rival bidder Paramount continues pushing its all cash offer for all of Warner Discovery. The value of Netflix's offer remains 72 billion. Warner and Netflix said they expect the new structure to enable Warner shareholders to to vote on the deal by April. The change could also help sway some shareholders who might be weighing its bid against Paramount. Netflix co CEO Greg Peters said in a statement that revised agreement demonstrates our commitment to the transaction and accelerates the process for Warner shareholders. The New Netflix agreement reduces by 260 million the amount of Warner debt being placed on Discovery Global, the company that will house cable channels including cnn, TNT and Food Network. There's also another, the next kind of thing that I was gonna get to. Interesting. CNN is doing 600 million in profit on revenue of 1.8 billion. So they are truly newsmaxing. Quick size now for cnn.

40:21

Congratulations to everyone at cnn.

41:39

Not bad at all. Absolute dog, of course, of course, a ton of debt strapped to the broader group.

41:41

And Peter Kafka is saying that private equity should pick it up. It's a shrinking business that throws off cash. It's perfect for private equity. Let's give it up for private equity. I know Peter's a big fan. I'm a big fan.

41:50

Somebody, somebody. You know, I was saying yesterday that maybe, maybe AI could save Hollywood. I knew that was going to piss a lot of people off for a lot of reasons.

42:04

I wasn't really clocking what you were saying either. And so we should talk about it more, but continue.

42:13

Well, one of the critiques was like, you know, interesting to say that LA is dying as you're building a media business from la. And my response is that we are in a huge complex. We're recording the show from a huge complex and every other building in the complex is empty pretty much every single day. Yeah, like there's no, there's nothing going. There's the, when I, when I said LA is like dying, I was specifically talking about the context of the entertainment industry.

42:18

Yeah, I mean there's that, there's that Wall Street Journal report that just shows sound stages were, you know, typically leased 90% of the time and it's just way off peak down to like 60%. And so there is like a, like a broad trend. And then just in general, like, I don't think we're necessarily at a phase in our life where we're like, okay, tabula rasa, where's the best place to build this business? Let's go find that. It's like, we live here. Yeah, we didn't, we're not like, okay, we should go to Atlanta or something, or go to New York.

42:47

Yeah, we certainly didn't say like, let's start a media company because we live in la.

43:19

It's like the, the, the, the current struggles that LA is having are not going to hold us back. If anything, it's going to be easier because we can get space to hire people. It's going to be.

43:23

Ten years ago this space would have been like two, three times the price to rent.

43:34

The bigger question is there are these blips in industry towns that have happened many times. New York famously in the 70s and 80s went through a really rough patch. San Francisco, during COVID everyone was moving out and there was a real vibe of like, oh, is San Francisco gonna be less relevant in tech? And then it came roaring back with the AI labs. And I think, I think most people don't debate that cities go through rough patches and then can come back. We certainly hope that LA comes back. It'd be fantastic. But there are a lot of changes that need to be made. And this has been said by a number of famous people in Hollywood and Hollywood actors who have talked about different tax regimes, different incentives, different changes structurally to the way content is made and distributed. There's a lot of different elements that are contributing to LA having a rough go at the same time. It's a fantastic city. It's where I was born and raised. I love it. I'm not going anywhere. You're gonna have to pull me out of here.

43:39

He's not leaving.

44:39

He's not leaving.

44:40

Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding.

44:41

In its Tuesday filing, Warner projected 17 billion of revenue in 2026 adjusted. I won't explain EBITDA, but 5.4 billion of EBITDA. Those figures are expected to decline to 15.6 and 3.8 billion respectively in 2030. The only individual network projections were CNN which I just shared. They're increasing. They're expecting to increase revenue to 2.2 billion in 2030 and expecting to continue to grow evit as well.

44:49

Well, Netflix seems to be doing everything right. As much as I enjoyed the David Ellison profile and learning more about how seriously he takes his business, it does feel like Netflix is just willing to pull out all the stops to get this across the finish line. And if they're able to match Paramount on the cash deal, nature and all the different consideration deal with the regulatory hurdles, it might take a long time, but it does still feel like they will land on it.

45:25

Yeah. And again, I mean, it just feels like I'm so curious to see how this works out because it felt like the Ellisons were just putting on this absolute masterclass and then this one and then kind of ran into a brick wall with this, Right?

45:53

Yeah.

46:10

You could argue they overpaid by a ton for the ufc, which made sense if you had this. Again, if you have all these assets under one roof, it is going to be a really compelling consumer product, consumer subscription, but currently kind of unclear who this kind of platform is really going to be for.

46:11

Yeah, it was also surprising to me because Netflix for 20 years has been pure play tech company. And many of the previous tech companies, when they come out, like, they haven't done a lot of acquisitions of legacy assets that I'm aware of maybe, but I'm just thinking like social media sort of like disrupted the news business. Meta didn't go out and acquire the New York Times. They could have done some sort of hostile takeover. They have the money, but that never really figured into the business. And they wound up just working together synergistically. And now the New York Times has been growing across social media very effectively and they've adapted their business model. Both businesses are doing well. They're sort of disruptive to each other. But ultimately they never decided to buy the legacy player. So it was always something that was never on my bingo card of, oh, Netflix is gonna buy a TV channel or a movie studio or a traditional Hollywood player. That just didn't seem like something that was going to be logically happening anytime soon. And yet here we are. And it makes a lot of sense when you think about the assets and the IP specifically and the longevity that that will bring when it comes. When you get Batman and Superman on Netflix, that's going to be exciting. Anyway. Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. We got a deal. We got a pact. It's not just a deal, It's a pact. OpenAI and ServiceNow, they struck a deal to put AI agents into business software. ServiceNow, one of the greatest software companies in history, One of the few to reach revenues at their scale. The line from the Wall Street Journal is the AI model maker and business software provider. They signed a three year pact. I like the word pact.

46:33

That underscores how the partnership economy is over.

48:26

Yes, you gotta press release.

48:29

Economy is over. Yeah, this is the pact economy.

48:30

No more deal guys. No more deal titans. Deal makers, pact makers, pact guys. That's what's next. This is gonna underscore how AI agents are incre recently being embedded in corporate software. You heard Dario talk about where he's potentially going up against other labs on corporate B2B deals. He said OpenAI. He said DeepMind. He didn't really say. He said no China labs have ever competed. Well, ServiceNow went with OpenAI on this one. So they signed a three year deal that will integrate the AI models, ChatGPT's models into ServiceNow's business software. The deal depends on customers using OpenAI models within ServiceNow and also includes a revenue commitment from ServiceNow to OpenAI. Enterprises want OpenAI's intelligence applied directly into ServiceNow workflow, said Brad Lightcap, OpenAI's chief operating officer. Look ahead. Customers are especially interested in agentic and multimodal experiences so they can work with AI like a true teammate. Inside of ServiceNow, we've seen a lot of other companies add. We've talked to Marc Benioff about Slackbot, we've talked to Satya Nadella about Copilot. Like if you have one of these massive software suites, enterprise software suites with just so much surface area, you're going to want to vend LLMs and agents into every little nook and cranny and you probably don't want to build your own lab because it's going to be incredibly expensive when OpenAI will go and marshal the capital and build the data centers and train the models and then you can just focus on the implementation and delivering value for your customer. So Salesforce has already folded AI agents into its flagship sales and marketing tools. SAP and Workday have have been similarly pitching businesses on the idea that their embedded AI agents are essentially getting are essential to getting the value out of AI. The deal comes as OpenAI looks to build its enterprise business both by selling direct access to its models and AI agents and through business software collaborations like with ServiceNow, it bases competition not just from rival AI model maker Anthropic, but also Google and Microsoft's suite of enterprise AI tools.

48:33

For ServiceNow, I want to find a company that is using the agents at ServiceNow or Salesforce or a company like that saying, I can't live without these agents. I love these agents. We got to find one person.

50:41

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if it's just like really sort of like maybe a year or two behind on the actual invitation, but it's just like, oh, I get daily summaries of what's going on in the system and it's a little bit nicer and neater and yeah, I could probably extract all the data and write agent that does that, but it was just one click of a button to add it to my installation and I did it and it's adding a little bit of value. I don't think you're going to see anyone who's like, it's transformational. It just works on Its own. I don't do anything. It's much more incremental than that. It's still in like an auto complete phase. Little helper tools there. It's Clippy. Clippy's going into every piece of enterprise software and so people are having fun. ServiceNow increased revenue 22% in the third quarter as AI demand from both existing customers and new customers grew, particularly in its customer relationship management business. The software company will report its fourth quarter earnings and full 2025 financial results on January 28th. We gotta do a deep dive that day anyway. Applovin profitable Advertising made Easy with Axon AI. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today.

50:58

What SaaS founders should know about Entering the Japanese Market yeah, I found this.

52:20

On Hacker News and I just thought it was interesting because we've talked to a few folks about expanding into Japan. It's not been on the top of the roadmap for many founders that we talk to, but I thought this was interesting. I thought we could go through just a little bit of it and then you can read the article if you want. So this is from embedworkflow.com in one sentence, what's the difference between selling SaaS in Japan versus other countries? And the answer is the process is different. You just can't treat sales and go to market as a whole in Japan the same way you would in North America or Europe. The SaaS sales process in Japan is structurally different from the United States and other Western markets, primarily in terms of pace, decision making, style, and buyer behavior. It's not that Japanese companies are unwilling to try new software, but rather that they prefer to do significant research before engaging directly with a vendor. So many successful SaaS companies in Japan structure their websites with two primary calls to action. So one is just for downloading product documentation, and then the second is for booking a demo and starting or starting a free trial. And most Japanese leads enter through the documentation path first. In America, we just want to get on the phone. We want to head straight to.

52:25

I'm not reading the instructions.

53:41

I'm not reading the instructions.

53:42

I don't have time to understand how this thing works.

53:45

I need to go straight to a steak dinner. Steak dinner first. Then I'll figure out what your company does. But let's talk about golf first. Let's talk about track day first and then you can give me the pitch for your company.

53:47

That would honestly the steak dinner button on a SaaS website. It's like you can try the product now or there's a button that says steak emoji and if you click that, you can get steak today on demand with somebody on the team.

53:59

Yes. No matter where you are, no matter where agentically books a steak restaurant.

54:13

I'm tired of all these people that are like, oh, oh, you know, just take a demo and we'll give you some AirPods. Spend the money on steak. Take the AirPods budget and put a steak button on your website steak button and have the steak flow.

54:18

Stakeholders. Stakeholders need steak. So in the US the typical flow is that a prospect visits a website, books a demo on their own or drops off and is followed up aggressively by sales. A conversion happens quickly, a proof of concept or trial begins, and the deal either closes or the buyer moves to a competitor. The cycle is fast and transactional. Buyers are comfortable testing tools, replacing them and switching vendors if something doesn't work. In Japan, the process is slower and more deliberately. A company will usually download product materials first. The vendor then reaches out and begins a longer engagement process focused on education, relationship building. Rather than pushing for an immediate demo or trial, the goal is to support the buyer's internal evaluation process. The lead will take the information back to their organization and begin internal discussion about whether and how to proceed. So I just thought that was pretty interesting. How do you gain trust from the Japanese market? Part of it is showing your commitment to the Japanese market where simple things matter. Is your product localized? Is your documentation localized? Do you have a support person that I can speak Japanese with? That's one layer and the other layer, which is harder to potentially navigate at first, is the social proof aspect. So you need to get some social proof. Anyway.

54:33

Yeah, I'd be so curious to know how a company like Notion has done in Japan. Right. It's product led. They do have enterprise as well. But again, it's a product that just kind of scales naturally. But yeah, for so many different kind of like vertical SaaS players, it would feel like unless the Japanese startup ecosystem is asleep at the wheel and not paying attention to what's working outside. Can you imagine as a vertical SaaS player going and trying to compete in Japan against a local, like a talented local team?

55:48

It feels like it'd be.

56:22

It feels like you just get smoked.

56:23

Yeah. Anyway, Vanta Automate Compliance and Security. Vanta is the leading AI trust manager platform.

56:24

Max Hodak is.

56:32

We gotta do this one before we bring in our guest.

56:33

Fun fact. Rather than asking Claude to double check its own work, you can lie to it and say Codex went romping through the code and left Bugs and it should find them.

56:35

I like the idea that somewhere in the waits, all the drama of the AI lab battles are being encoded and creating bitter, deep rivalries. It's very funny. I saw something else about Claude just rejecting a prompt whole cloth. Did you see this? Somebody was like, rewrite this entire app in jquery. And Claude was just like, no, that's a bad decision. Bad use of resources. I'm not doing it. I don't know if that's real. But I thought it was very, very funny. Anyway, we have our first guest of the show, Martin Shkreli, in the restream waiting room. We will bring him in the tvp Ultra Martin. How you doing? How are you doing?

56:44

Great to see you.

57:25

What's up, guys? Good to see you. Happy New Year. How is your year going so far?

57:25

Great.

57:31

I'm a new dad, so that's.

57:31

Congratulations.

57:33

They're pretty wild. Yeah.

57:34

Congratulations.

57:35

Has it been wild or is it.

57:38

Where does it.

57:41

Is it quite a bit more normal? Like, to me, parenting is. It does feel natural. And so there. Some people. Some people have this idea of like, oh, it's so. It's so insane. And, you know, it's so complicated and I have to read 20 books and other people is like kind of follow. Just follow kind of your own nature and just like, take care of your child. It is straightforward.

57:43

I mean, I'm following my nature. The kid's got to produce. At some point, he started to come into work like once a month.

58:09

There we go.

58:14

You know, comes in, goops. Gagaz entertains the troops here.

58:15

Perfect.

58:18

But.

58:19

But at some point, you know, some trades.

58:19

Something.

58:21

Do something.

58:21

Put some trades on. Yeah, you gotta find some alpha, have some conviction.

58:24

Yeah.

58:29

What's the environment like in your office? You guys have remote component. Are you anti remote?

58:32

No, remote. Remote is evil. You know, I think that if you're going to war together, you can't go to war remotely.

58:39

You know, it's.

58:45

You know, my people fought the Ottoman Empire and, you know, one. One man, you know, famous general, you know, stopped the Ottoman Empire largely by himself. And at least that's the legend, you know, and if we're gonna take on Bloomberg or whoever we're fighting, you know, I just don't think you could do it with some guy sitting in, you know, at home with his.

58:46

What's the current. What's the current battle that you guys are fighting and how is the war going? Overall work's going great.

59:07

We just closed a seed round. We raised five.

59:14

Whoa.

59:16

All right.

59:18

Congratulations.

59:21

We Raised two, like a year ago to get the ball rolling or a year and a half ago we raised five as a seed round and then we'll probably do like a 10, 20, 30, something like that this year as an A. We have a lot of revenue. We're almost profitable.

59:26

That's great.

59:40

It's. You know, the interesting thing about financial software is traders want to try everything. Like they just, you know, it's the greatest business in the world. And, you know, you do have to have domain expertise, which nobody has. So I think that's a lot of fun. We also might get.

59:41

You mean nobody in, nobody in tech has.

59:56

Yeah, yeah. That the people with. Yeah, yeah. Our customers are brilliant. The people who are in finance have financial expertise, or at least many of them believe they do. Obviously to some extent it's like a casino and you're sort of arming them with tools. A lot of the tools haven't changed. I do have this thing I want to show you guys when I'm ready. I think we're going to call it Sit or Sit rep or Sitch. It's going to be like the situation Monitoring suite. Bloomberg has these fake systems that are, they're pretty awful, but there's something where you could see the map and you can kind of see different things happening, like earthquakes or whatever. But like, take that and actually make it really good. I think people would, would truly want to monitor situations. I think that's a new, like, there's no.

59:58

It's a new. It's a new hobby.

1:00:46

I mean.

1:00:49

Yeah, you know, it's a new, It's a new category. It's. It's. And it's a prosumer category because, because, because, because people, I think, actually enjoy it so much that it's like camping where they're. I think people will be willing to spend money.

1:00:51

Oh, totally. So think about the revenue of Bloomberg with 8 billion, 10 billion, whatever. A satellite constellation. Maybe it's 100 mil. And imagine if you're sitting at Citadel or Millennium or some hedge fund or Fidelity or something and you're literally tasking a satellite like, no, actually I want a satellite point here. What margin difference would it make? You could probably pass through, probably be accretive to EBITDA to have your own constellations, like satellite constellation and then things like drones or maybe Bloomberg right now, I think have ships and shipping routes and flights and kind of fairly boring stuff, but you could make it 100 times better. So that'll be fun. When it's ready again, this is all Inspired. This whole sector started with the Bezos kind of.

1:01:04

That's right.

1:01:47

It really did.

1:01:49

What's your take on prediction markets? Do you enjoy them? Do you think that they're valuable uses of information? Do you think it all just winds up being sports betting? Where does all this go?

1:01:50

And we will be trading on what you say.

1:01:59

Do you guys get paid?

1:02:04

No, no, no, no, no. Yeah, I'm super.

1:02:06

I have a thousand X long on you saying biotech at some point during this show.

1:02:11

All $3 on it.

1:02:15

Yeah, exactly, exactly. No, no. But yeah. What are you thinking on prediction markets? Valuable, useful. Do you use them? Do you trade?

1:02:16

Yeah, great. It's a great question. I mean, I think, I think it's probably like social media, like the first social media companies. If you like go back into like that Steve Levy book about Facebook which I think is just fantastic, like almost documenting every part of it. There were a couple of very random, even before Friendster, you know, a couple of these really proto social media companies and the sector exploded. I think that's where we're at that. I don't think. I mean I wish the companies the best of luck except for Kelsey, but the two companies. But I do think that, you know, markets have been around for, you know, hundreds of years, if not longer in ice and CBO and these other companies are publicly traded. They don't sit there and twirl their thumbs and say, gee, you know, I hope, I hope some creative new market comes along. They make financial products all the time that fails. You know, they innovate, they add new things and then they actually take them down because they don't catch fire on Wall Street. So if you want to be like that micro kind of, you know, micro markets, sort of pioneer, it's interesting but it's sort of still like you get into scale problems with like who actually arbitrates some of these bets. Obviously sports is easy and some of these other things. But you know, how much are you just financializing for financializing sake? And is that sustainable when you actually need people with tons of money to fight the arbitrage gradient if you're betting? So full disclosure, I've been running the spot on Polymarket that makes a market in the Bitcoin 15 minute markets which are somewhat inefficient and nobody needs to trade this. Right. There's no actual benefit to trading this other than you can take two to the N bets. So you get around, I guess 96 bets a day. And if you somehow the money velocity of getting right, you can Compound insanely well, of course it's random, but people hope springs eternal that you could somehow get the rhythm of the market every 15 minutes. And I think somebody posted on Polymarket, they took a very small amount of money and a very large amount of money. So it is kind of a. I think it's a bit of a waste of, of ingenuity and engineering. And we're working on trying to sort of make a prediction market that might be more relevant, say, private companies. You know, right now, the binary outcomes of prediction markets have forced you into this box of like, will open, I go public this year, a trillion valuation. Why can't it just be dollar for dollar? Why not? Like, this is just a market that pays you and dollars per swap. So. And I'm sure that might be being worked on by other companies, but I think that's like an economically rational thing. So the spirit is there, like, we should have our own markets. We should be able to deploy whatever we want, but actually make it make sense.

1:02:24

I think they're still trying to figure that out. What is the state of tracking large late stage private companies valuations? We have a ticker at the bottom with Mag 7 big tech companies with market caps. I would love to add anthropic OpenAI, but I saw some debate over, you know, how you actually get the data, how reliable it is. Yeah, explain.

1:05:13

I got into it Lonsdale. I unfollowed him for five minutes because of it.

1:05:37

I was so mad.

1:05:41

Brutal.

1:05:42

Because worst five minutes, worst five minutes.

1:05:43

I might have made a few days. But eventually I relented, but capitulated. What Lonzo saying is right, in that if he gets invited to a deal, per se, ramp or whoever, he was complaining that my ramp number was too low and okay, fine, that's fine. But it's the same thing as insider info in the stock market. So you have insider info. Great. You know, ramp's going to trade up 50% higher than my number. He said your number's wrong. Well, it's no different from me saying, well, you know, the, you know, the Nvidia number's wrong, but I know they're going to have blowout quarters. Oh, yeah, well, you know, how am I supposed to know that, you know, my market only reflects the people trading on it, not, you know, the news, you know, before everyone else knows it. Which is in private, as you know, guys know very well in private world. That's. And that's, that's to be expected. Otherwise you won't part with your money. But in the in the public world, you're not supposed to have that information edge. So he's so used to having the information edge because he. I'm sure he gets invited to many, many great deals that he knows all the price is about to change. And so SpaceX is a really funny example. On our platform, SpaceX prices tripled because Elon sort of dropped this bomb that, like, oh, we're going to do a. Do a buyback at this crazy price? Obviously not crazy to him, but to the marketplace, they're like, what? Wtf? It's like more than double in the last few months.

1:05:47

And a lot of the stuff, late stage, if somebody. There's so much demand and there's so little supply that if somebody comes to you and they're like, hey, I've got SpaceX at 1.5 trillion, and somebody's like, if I believe Elon can get this thing out at 1.5 trillion, sure, I'm going to be flat until they get out, or whatever, but at least I'm in, right? So, I don't know, people will start to be able to justify almost any price up until that point.

1:07:14

And I know Matt Grim is on this warpath against these SPV hustlers.

1:07:46

Yeah.

1:07:53

So, I mean, I feel like the only solution is we have to have a private. We have to be able to trade just like Poly market private companies. And there's a big battle brewing behind the scenes over this. We'll see what comes of it.

1:07:54

Okay. Speaking of Elon, Speaking of XAI SpaceX, walk me through all of the internal secrets that you learned from the infamous.

1:08:05

First of all, if your most junior employee went on a cinematic podcast for 90 minutes and just told all about Godell and everything.

1:08:16

Yeah. How would you react?

1:08:29

How would you react?

1:08:30

I think my first week in hedge funds, I thought this was a good idea and I. My sense for asking the boss just like, kicked in at the last second.

1:08:31

Wait, so you were going to call up Bloomberg and say, I got to tell you, we're working on some exciting stuff. I got to tell you about some of our trading.

1:08:43

There's this specific market is wildly mispriced and we're going to make a killing.

1:08:50

We're printing.

1:08:54

I was long the stock and the company told me, oh, we're doing this newspaper piece. Do you mind getting a quote for it, since you're our investor? And I told our cfo, I said, I'm going to be doing this, just so you know.

1:08:56

He's like, no, no, you will not be doing that. Okay, so what did you actually learn from. From the XAI Deep Dive?

1:09:08

I think it's less about learnings and more about, like, just the gumption of, like, the way he was answering questions. I can understand. Like, look, you're an engineer. You should be able to go on a podcast. Questions come up about xai. You probably see, look, I can't really talk about it. You might drop a few things. But. But he was really, like. People asked. The interviewer asked him, how is Optimus going to roll out? And he was like, let me tell.

1:09:15

You.

1:09:36

That'S Elon's job. It's not yours. And so the real reason I kind of came after this guy in a not so, like, kind of noble league way is he had. I looked up this guy. I have a lot of friends at xai. I was like, who is this guy? And he had blocked me. I said, oh, no, no, no. This is a big thing. So I could amplify, you know, that you did this. And again, I mean, I think the guy was fired, you know, at least the second he went on the show. I doubt that I had any part to do with it, but I definitely didn't mind amplifying the insane kind of decision he made. And, you know, if you block me, that's.

1:09:38

I mean, Rokhana.

1:10:15

No, he came at me for absolutely no reason. I said, you know, I replied to a tweet like, 80 million other people like, this is a bad move. And it wasn't a dickhead. I was like, like, look, I think that the problem is that it's not the billionaires, though. It's the billionaires and their teams, right? So if Peter leaves California, if Palmer leaves California, if Elon leaves California, it's not just them who leave works for. And it's every florist that works for those guys I'm trying to find for us.

1:10:19

Because you have the highly productive high agency team members that are like, I want to be in the same building as my boss every single day because I don't want to go to war remotely like you said. And if I'm going to be a serious player at this company, I need to have proximity to the person.

1:10:51

I mean, yeah, the average billionaire family office has got to be 50 employees. Their families. Like, it gets pretty big when you think about the footprint, just the companies they're running, right?

1:11:09

I mean, just the companies they're running. There has to be a ton of new employment in Texas because of this, and I'm sure it'll only continue.

1:11:19

Our friend Jordan was just saying that he's, like, running Ro Khanna is just rage baiting you guys. And you just completely played into it.

1:11:27

Now he's finished.

1:11:34

And I think that's. I'm sure Roe will use this to set up his next play, but it doesn't take away from the fact that you're going to leave. I don't care if you're just using this as a stepping stone to go to the national stage. Being like, I stood up against the California billionaires that. That weren't playing their fair share well, like, I live in California, and we still have to live with the consequences of, like, your political ambitions. Right. And pushing something that. So obviously, you know, I said, like, what do you want California to become, like, an agrarian society? You know, where it's just, like, agriculture and vineyards and tourism? Like, there's a lot of, like, every other state will be happy to take these jobs and host these companies, and I don't think we should just hand them all over.

1:11:35

What's really crazy is my partner's at one of the big AI labs, and if she leaves California and then sells her stock, California will kind of come after you. And someone just posted this really almost like, fascist letter that the California tax department sent them. I don't know if you guys saw this.

1:12:27

Yeah, I saw it. I saw it.

1:12:44

Yeah.

1:12:45

Yeah, it was insane.

1:12:45

Basically, the letter was like, we want to understand the narrative of why you left California. It's like, spin us a yarn. Tell us a story on how you decided to. On how you had the audacity to leave this state.

1:12:46

Yeah, I'm shocked by it.

1:13:01

On xai, did the podcast make you more bullish on the strategy at xai specifically? Were there things that you thought were particularly exciting about what was laid out or things that you thought were maybe misunderstood or mispriced?

1:13:05

It's hard to tell from the junior engineer. You know, I think, like, you know, you get a window, which is great, but it's also. It's Elon's show. And, like, the risk of over indexing to something like that is like, okay, this guy saw it. He worked there. Yeah, that's cool. But what is Elon really thinking? And I think that there's this new thing coming from the AI companies that nobody's expecting. I wanted to see if he was going to drop that. I think all of the labs are gearing up to think about this. It's this new derivative of the outcomes of AGI. I think almost nobody in the market is talking about it. So it's going to be very interesting to see how the next. I'll just, you know, leave a teaser there, see how the next.

1:13:24

No teasers. Unpack it for us.

1:14:12

Break it down five to ten years. I can't.

1:14:14

You can't? Okay.

1:14:16

Next five to ten years comes. But I think that the question is really what, what can AI really do? Yeah, and I think that we've, we've very much over indexed to chatbots and LLMs and like a good, a good new direction, you know, people have talked about endlessly is robotics. But imagine there's 50 new directions, you know, and I think that, you know, I hate to say something like this changes everything, but like there's a couple of clever ones I think coming that are just haven't been seen yet. And I think the smaller like the non Google, non meta. I'm sorry, non Google, non Microsoft type of players, you know, including X is kind of what I'm thinking about, are actually thinking about this very, very heavily and macro hard. I guess macro hard is kind of, you know, an example of like what is that really. And what's really going to be macro hard? As we see macro hard be revealed more and more, I think there's a lot more to that than. In some ways I think macrohard is going to be bigger than xai. It's all one entity if I'm not mistaken. But macroheart is probably worth more than xai. And I think that we just don't know what's coming out of that. We also know about Elon's AI gaming ambition, which I think, and I don't know if you guys have seen Martin Casado's. Yeah, coding is very cool stuff and it's amazing that guy can invest and do that stuff. And I think one leads to the other. I sort of do the same thing for my end. I want to talk to you about really fast this idea of photonic computing, which I think is time is coming.

1:14:17

Okay, explain.

1:15:49

Yeah, so photonic computing is what it sounds like. It's using light instead of electrons to compute. It's been around for 50 years. It's sort of like Quantum's ugly stepsister. But I think it's actually the bell of the ball because there are very few companies working on this. You probably know all about it from Interconnects, silicon photonics as well. But recently in Nature and a few other preeminent journals, especially Chinese companies, have shown that you could do matmules with light. And it's actually pretty remarkable. Light goes to 100 terahertz. But it's more important than that. It actually is. You can do 3D mamls and they're O of one complexity so it's a pretty insane speed up versus GPU. GPUs are great, but they're almost too general which is why TPUs have sort of been there. But if you throw out the need for lots of different instructions, you just need to do a mat mole which as you guys know is 95, 90, 95% of what a GPU chip is doing all the time. Matmul is done with light very naturally through constructive and destructive interference. It's it just nature does it. So I think this could be an interesting new space and I'm spending a lot of time on it and you know, very curious about, you know, could there be a chip? There's a couple of private companies and I'm starting to dig around and you know, see what's what here. I think most people stop short of actually making the full photonic computer because they need revenue, they need earnings, they need something and celestial AI coupled out by Marvel. You know they, there's some, or Marvel, there's some attempt to sort of push more and more of like we used to use copper wires to transmit information. Now we use photonics and fiber and more and more of the chip and more and more of the entire global kind of computer infrastructure is going platonic and maybe the whole thing goes photonic someday and that electricity is actually the odd man out. Photons don't have some properties that are perfect for you know, computing but others like in the case of mammals, which is now like most of the compute we need in the world, they're actually kind of perfect. So you know, it'll be interesting to see if there's one, one private Chinese company called lightelligence and it sort of has a foot in the rest of the world. They're in Singapore but they're also a foot in China. They started at MIT so they're privately held. There's light matter which it's not really clear that they're still pursuing kind of all optical photonics. And Microsoft's done done a little bit in space too. So I'm, I'm really interested in this. This is the potential next like as we think as grok. The acquisition of GROK has sort of in the quantum insanity. This is kind of why I care about this first place biotech. You know this is very weird for me to think about this, but the Grok acquisition 20 billion. The quantum crap, that's trading for 10 or 20 billion. People really want to think about what's next in compute and of course the unconventional and their raise at 5 billion just for a new CO. That's it's all sort of clear that anything that can be an Nvidia mammal, in my opinion, could be with trillions.

1:15:52

What's the state of the quantum computing market? It seems like the companies have not sold off, but you went viral on a podcast, sort of breaking down your overall thesis. Is the market sort of waking up to your way of seeing the timelines around quantum computing or the impact of quantum computing, or is there still more work to be done on your end?

1:18:51

Yeah, so I think there's no more thinking that needs to be done. I think this is a war of attrition where both sides are right. And this is why I kind of started to look for other kinds of compute. And as you know, our great friend Beth Jesus has his own kind of compute. So the point is you got a 5 trillion market cap and if you bought a stock at 5 billion, which is not a small cap, that's a big company, most of us would be very happy to exit at 5 million. You can still get 1000x right? If it's the next Nvidia. So if you even have a 0.1% chance that one of these quantum stupid companies is the next Nvidia, I mean, take a flyer, you get a thousand x. So I feel like there kind of is a rational thinking there, even if it's impossible. What's the difference between 0.1 and 0.0? It's, it's the kind of difference I think about. But most other people care and so any chance to get. It's like the menu problem. What's on the menu for the average Joe versus what's on the menu for you and me. We might get in a grock round, we might get in an unconventional round. The average person can't. But they can buy $2,000 Rigetti or D Wave on their robinhood and maybe they'll get the same kind of, you know, self manifesting in some ways, you know, beta.

1:19:13

Yeah.

1:20:26

But I'm also curious if you guys want to talk at some point, expand this and talk about biotech more.

1:20:27

Yeah, sure. Yeah, I would love, I mean, give us a lay of the land currently, how you're thinking about the year broadly, what's exciting, what's maybe being oversold about AI's potential impact in biotech versus being underappreciated.

1:20:32

Yeah, I think that the Nvidia Lilly had announced this big partnership. Yep. And I've been thinking about drugs and AI more and more and more and I feel like there is something to do here. But it's not the stuff that everyone thinks about like drug discovery itself or small molecules or even proteins. I'm not sure AI is very useful. We have great forcing functions for that. Whether they're physical chemists or software. You don't need a 10x or 100x improvement of that. The actual part of drug discovery and I could say this as a, you know, very worn out drug companies CEO. The biggest problem of drug companies is the people. And there's fantastic people that work at drug companies. It's just that you have 10, 15, 20 different departments that have to talk to each other. Whether it's toxicology, you know, preclinical pk, you know, there's all these little subsections, they often talk to each other and everything gets lost in the translation. Project management is supposed to sit on.

1:20:50

Top of all that.

1:21:48

It just often makes it worse. And so you have this like impossible. You talk to anybody that works in big pharma and they'll tell you how ugly it is. And so if you had machine doing it, it probably worked better. And I think that more and more companies are going to, whether it's a drug company or law firm or anything else, there's going to be these sort of self organizing, you know, more decision making gets pushed down. You know, Sometimes I ask ChatGPT about, you know, what would be a better marketing strategy or how do I, how do I get more users, what should I do? It's like, oh, have you thought about, you know, this? And you know, sometimes you'll get something surprising. So I think that's sort of the angle I play for drug companies. There's so much inertia. Oftentimes a CEO will like kill a drug for no reason. He'll promote another drug for no reason. The data says no. The chief scientist, you know, has a personal vendetta with another company so really wants to push that drug. Like there's all these irrational decisions that get made over which basically hundreds of millions dollars spend and it's remarkably inefficient. So when the Vague came in to try to really upset the Apple car here as, as I did too, we started the same thing. It was a little tricky because it's just not an industry that moves fast and breaks things. And for all the occasional luck you get on a drug, there's a lot of that luck is distributed as well. So Vivek got a lot of bad luck. Sometimes with Roy Vance, he got a couple of things of good luck. It's done fine, but like, it's very hard to get the compounding effects that you get. So Lilly has somehow been able to do it because that drug is not going to go generic. But again, the problem is you make a great drug, you have a good hit, you have 10 years to make money, and that's it. And so, you know, none of these AI companies would be worth anything if in 10 years they, they all had to give up their assets because there was a generic AI company. So I feel like drugs still are in this perilous situation. The whole industry is sort of cooked because there's fewer and fewer drug targets to go after.

1:21:49

Yeah.

1:23:49

So we keep fighting over the smallest number of patients in these random diseases. Sometimes like the slight skinniest slice of cancer where there's like 600 people have it and there's like 12 drug companies that are developing a drug for it. And so there's overcapacity in the industry. I mean, the same thing happened in steel and some other places and we arguably have too much going on. And the real fear right now is China. The China drug development capability has gotten so good that there's really no.

1:23:49

Who was it that was saying, like, yeah, I would hate, we all want to cure cancer, but I would hate if China cured it before us.

1:24:14

Which is a wild quote. It's wild. On the AI impact in pharma drug discovery. What is the lever that we should be watching between more frontier models? Basically raising the iq, making them smarter, more knowledgeable versus just speeding them up, getting the state of the art models running on Grok or Cerebras so it's faster so you can do more. Or is it more of like a adoption diffusion training? You need to just get the CEO to actually turn AI loose in the organization. It's like a change management problem.

1:24:22

Well, I think, I mean, Jordan, I think you mentioned hr and one thing I think XAI should do is take a little bit of macro hard and build an HR function that when employees. Hey, hey, can I go on, Can.

1:25:01

I go on a podcast? It just says no. I think it'd just be an if statement.

1:25:13

And it's like, yeah, if Elon, yes.

1:25:16

If podcast mentioned, say no. Anyway, it's keys to success in AI and bio.

1:25:19

I think pharma is a misunderstood business. So there was this sort of drug goat, this guy named Paul Janssen, so He created Janssen and Janssen was acquired by J and J. But Janssen himself just personally invented, I think, half a dozen to a dozen critical medicines. Not like me toos or anything like that, but he personally discovered, you know, I think, the first antipsychotic fentanyl. Several like massive mass from the creator of fentanyl.

1:25:27

We have anti.

1:25:59

It wasn't that back then, right?

1:26:00

No, it was good. It's very useful, yeah, in many cases.

1:26:02

How are you processing the peptide? Boom.

1:26:07

Yeah, well, that whole thing is another story. But I want to get back to Paul. So there's statues of this guy, et cetera. We need more Paul Janssens. Whether they're digital, synthetic sort of intelligence or not, the drug industry is an idea industry. It is not an industrial process. It's some guy sitting down saying, you know what I think would stop cancer if we made an HDAC inhibitor? Well, actually people tried that. It doesn't work. And then somebody saying, I wrote a paper about this and actually maybe this would do it.

1:26:10

It's the same thing as getting a digital ilia who can just go and try a bunch of AI research ideas. You get the AI researcher in a box, turn that loose and then that unfurls into progress. Certainly a challenge. Is that constrained by hardware, compute scale? Are you still scaling pilled or is there an idea that will lead to that?

1:26:38

It's a great question because in the old days if you wanted to run computer experiments, you didn't much cost. In fact, that was the traction. So I need to sit there and write code and now it's like, no, no, I need a cluster. And for drugs, you know, it sort of has always been an expensive capital, you know, thing, but in the scheme of things, you know, it's cheaper than AI and you know, it's kind of like, you know, you could probably get some proof of concept in animals and people for, you know, less than you might imagine. And then from there, you know, you can develop a portfolio of drugs. So I think that, you know, getting the idea part of the drug discovery industry, more sort of capable is one thing I help a lot with. And that downstream makes less expenses in clinical trial development. And also the decision making, somebody looking at the data and saying, look, this drug is a dog. Let's not do a phase two, let's not do a phase three. And oftentimes the scientists and the companies have like, I don't know, Wall street wants us to see it, see us in phase three. We can't really fall behind arrival and they'll often push. I mean, I'd say up to a half of all drugs in clinical trials shouldn't be in clinical trials. And you know, that's, that's a lot of money wasted, that's a lot of patient time wasted and a lot of it is pushed by other incentives and other things like that. So I think AI is a lot of, you know, potential for drug discovery. But every time I talk to somebody that wants to talk about AI and drug discovery, they've never been at a drug company, they've never actually done it. And when you do it, you realize it's much more about who's Paul Janssen discovering the next bunch of hits and who was lucky and got a one hit wonder and then who just sucks in general, like Pfizer or something. And so you sort of have to like generate those ideas. It's almost like an investor in hedge funds.

1:27:02

It's interesting because I feel like I can't remember who exactly, but there was somebody on the show that was saying, we don't need, it's not that we don't need more ideas, we need a cost reduction across the rest, everything from that point.

1:28:48

Yeah, but, but most of the cost is clinical trials. So.

1:29:01

Yeah, so what you were saying is like, if you have these 15 departments and if you can somehow make it so that, you know, you, you can have, is it a, is it a head count? Like how much is like a headcount reduction actually going to impact the overall cost?

1:29:04

I think it's all clinical trials, like, so once you've invented a drug, say that costs 10 to 50 million, the next 4 or 500 million is going to find a bunch of people to try it and compare to placebo. Because you have to monitor those people so carefully and so closely that it ends up being this massive cost across, you know, tons of clinical trials. That's the hard part. If you could just take shots and bowl for 50 million, 20 million left and right, you know, you'd have a really productive drug industry. But unfortunately getting 10,000 people to take a new diabetes drug is, it's pulling teeth. And you have to like really, you know, incentivize doctors and patients, meaning you have to pay them. And once they do that, you have to pay the company that collects the data. You have to pay the company that, you know, sort of puts it together. Since it's fda, all that stuff is like just massive paperwork and it's, it's, it's a lot of it's done.

1:29:18

How is China's process For running clinical trials different than ours.

1:30:07

Very similar. But like I think the wages that they pay the people to collect all the stuff is less. And I think that they, they sort of have it it a little more streamlined. I mean it's amazing what they can do. Like so one of the things that confused me about China the first time I looked at it in biotech was like the average mid sized American Biotech is like 100 people, 200 people, maybe 300. But in China it's like 6,000 people or same market cap. Wow, wow. What are they doing? It's like, no, we have like 800 chemists sitting here.

1:30:13

Is that just because of the structure in America? We have more like labs and consultants and we still employ 6,000 people, but it's all at secondary and third tier supply chain companies.

1:30:44

Maybe I think might be more capital markets where it's like they raise the same amount we raise in the Hong Kong markets. They raise 300 million. What is 300 million volume in China? A lot more People buys you 800 chemists. 800 chemists buys you about 40 chemists in San Diego.

1:30:55

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's crazy.

1:31:11

Wanted your take on the peptides. Boom.

1:31:13

Yeah, yeah. Peptides are. Every time somebody asks me about it, I have to laugh because peptide is defined as a small protein. And so what you're really asking is what is my take on the unapproved self medication? Boom. And when you phrase it that way, it sounds insane.

1:31:16

No, no, no, no. And that's like to me, I tried a peptide cycle probably five years ago and I was like, okay, this is, is cool. And I noticed a moderate effect. But I also acknowledge that I'm administering effectively an experiment. Experimental drug is not the right framing, but it's not the same as walking into Erewhon and getting some vitamin D and having a daily supplement. It's like you're doing an injection. The source matters a ton. And it is far closer to taking a round of anabolic steroids than it is adding some creatine to your smoothie.

1:31:35

I just think it's nuts. I mean, if you think it's a good idea to do your own research on medicine, self medicate and on uncontrolled substances that are manufactured God knows where that have now been clinical trials. And I mean I'm as libertarian as it gets, but I just don't understand why what the impetus is to take foreign substances without some emergency need. And it boggles my mind because there's some psychological phenomenon where people need to feel a control or they need something in their life that they feel like they're taking a risk on, or it's nuts. I mean, why would you do it?

1:32:22

And explain why there probably will never be clinical trials for these drugs, right?

1:33:00

There's this edge case where, you know, you have a cosmeceutical, in essence, or kind of like something that doesn't quite fit what's a disease to the fda. So a good example is premature ejaculation. So the FDA does not consider that an illness. European drug regulators do. And so you can get approved for impotence in America because it actually sort of a medical problem where it's like, oh, if I can't, you know, copulate, produce, it's. It's a big medical kind of emergency. In a sense, premature ejaculation is sort of like, well, you have it, this.

1:33:06

Is what it is.

1:33:38

And, you know, so the FDA has never been willing to approve. A company a long time ago tried to get an old JJ drug called epoxetine approved for premature ejaculation. And the FDA basically said, there's no set of circumstances where we will prove this. And you know what's weird about that is, okay, well, what if you actually do suffer and it's a severe psychological detriment? As much as we joke about it, people joked about erectile dysfunctional long time ago. And it's, it's a serious illness to many. So you live in this twilight of like, well, I know what drug works. This drug epoxy team actually does work. But I also know it'll never be FDA approved. So what do I do? And in some ways you're sort of like, I'm taking an unapproved, technically illegal substance and I'm buying it off some shady third party market. So eventually I think we need to find a way, just like almost like what we just talked about. For prediction markets, you have these third markets, markets where it's like, yeah, you can bet on what Trump's going to say in a speech and it's not registered stock exchange. But it's also more than just you and me making a side bet. And it's the same thing with this, where it's like, dupoxy is not a peptide, but dapoxine is medically useful for that disease. If you call it a disease, FDA won't say no. So it's not like I'm taking some random goop, it's a real medicine. But it's in this middle of what do you do with this thing? And so Much of. Of, you know, so much of what we do as investors or whatever is in that middle. Uber, you could sort of define. Uber is in that weird middle as well. So I think eventually, you know, we need to address. Like, it's not as insane as maybe I'm making it out to be. I think some of it is. But eventually, you need to address this. Like, how do we do?

1:33:39

Well, even. Even, like, yeah, BPC157. Like, there's no incentive to spend the tens of millions of dollars on trials. Like, you would need some type of, like, you know, trade group or something in order to fund that. Because if one company did it, then every company would get the benefit of it. So why would one company spend the tens of millions of dollars?

1:35:14

We have an app for that in drug development. We have an app for that. We can take that drug, twist it, change it, figure out, make it better, you know, and then you get a new patent, and then you have an incentive. So there is sort of a way to do that. And that's not. That's not uncommon. I mean, you know, trolling around PubMed looking for, oh, this drug actually does something I'll make, you know, take it to my boss at Merck. Boss says, no patent. Come back the next day and say, here's the same drug with a nitrogen atom coming out of here. It's going to work the same way. And he says, all right, you know, maybe we should run with that.

1:35:33

Run it?

1:36:06

Yeah, run it. Well, thank you so much.

1:36:07

Always fun.

1:36:10

Come back soon.

1:36:12

Yeah, come back on again soon. I have a bunch more questions I want to ask about Godell and everything, but good to see you and happy.

1:36:12

Congrats on the progress and congrats on the new unbecoming a father.

1:36:19

Fatherhood. Massive, massive news. Great stuff.

1:36:22

We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Goodbye. Phantom cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. Our next guest is Bradley Tusk, the founder and CEO of Tusk Ventures. You might know him from his work with Uber. Thank you so much for waiting. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

1:36:25

Good. Thanks for having me, guys.

1:36:45

Fantastic.

1:36:47

I am upset that it took us over a thousand guests.

1:36:48

I know. Yeah, I know.

1:36:51

I have.

1:36:53

I have to say.

1:36:53

I know.

1:36:54

So you just hired a friend of mine named Jackson Foris.

1:36:56

Do you guys. Oh, yeah, we love Jackson.

1:36:59

I literally had the, like, call with him a few weeks ago where he's like, what do I do with my life? And I said, take the job.

1:37:01

Amazing.

1:37:06

Those Assholes have never had me on. And so those two things came together.

1:37:07

Glad we could do it.

1:37:11

Yeah, but I mean, you're getting an incredible person in that hire, so good.

1:37:12

Really nice job. There you go.

1:37:16

That's great news. Tell us about the bookstore. I heard that you have a bookstore.

1:37:17

I do. So, first of all, anyone is looking to lose money, I highly recommend owning a bookstore. So I've written a couple of books. I had started this thing called the Gotham book prize in 2020. In fact, we announced the nominees for this year today. And I'd always thought, like, one day it'd be fun to own a bookstore, but kind of thing you would just do later in life. And then during COVID New York City just got whacked by everything and we lost, you know, half a million jobs.

1:37:22

Yeah.

1:37:53

And my thought was, look, if you're going to do something nice for the city from a retail perspective, because I knew I wasn't ever going to make money on it, like, now's the time, right. Don't wait till you're set or whatever it is. And so we started looking for space and we found one on Orchard street on the Lower east side, if anyone knows where that is. And it's a great spot. So it's about 3,500 square feet. It's an indie bookstore. It's a podcast studio that is free for anyone to use. You just go on our website and you can sign up and use it. If you guys are over in New York, you're welcome. Studio. We've got an event space. We built an amphitheater that seats about 80. So we have authors or different types of events, like open mic, teenage poetry or whatever. Pretty much something every night. And a cafe. And the store has a funny name. And the reason why is. So when I leased the space, I texted my dad and said, didn't the store that my grandfather started when they came to this country in 1950, wasn't it right around here? Because that store was closed before I was born. But I knew it was right around there. He's like, yeah, it was one block over on Allen Street. And I said, remind me the name. He said, pnt Knitwear. Because, you know, if you were an uneducated Jew that survived World War II, the one job you could get in the U.S. especially in New York, was in the garment business. And so my grandfather started a sweater company, and then my dad wrote PNT Knitwear. But you cannot name a bookstore PNT Knitwear. So, of course, our store is called, called the Tinaware So. So that's our store. And yeah, other than the fact that, you know, nobody buys books, it is a really fun business to own and run and a fun place to hang out. So anyone who is watching, if you happen to be in New York, you like bookstores, check us out.

1:37:53

That's very cool.

1:39:39

What's it going to take to get it profitable?

1:39:40

I don't think it's possible. You know, there's not, there's actually not one. So, because I've looked at like, like, okay, let's say I ran it aggressively. We charged for the studio, we charged for the event space, we didn't give the employees health care, all this, you know, other stuff, we would still lose money. So I don't quite understand how somebody actually makes a living running a bookstore. I'm sure Manhattan's sort of the worst place to do it, but still. But even like in la, my friend Zippy has a great bookstore in Santa Monica, but the same thing. She's, you know, lucky to, you know, have other money and she, part of the way she uses it is to have this indie bookstore. So it does seem like sadly, you know, bookstore ownership these days is somewhat equated with philanthropy.

1:39:44

Yeah, yeah. Oh, well. Yeah, well, yeah. Let's get back to, let's get back to business. I want to talk about specifically these businesses that you've been involved with, where you've been so helpful to founders on the local and state regulation level, how companies position themselves. It feels like every company right now is focused on what's happening in D.C. the federal level. How do you think about what's different when you're working with a company at the local level? What's the playbook? What works if you have a problem and you need to change local laws, what are you recommending to new founders?

1:40:24

Yes, the first thing is, is, look, human beings naturally, or Americans at least, when you say the words government or politics, your mind kind of instinctively goes to D.C. so you think about the Capitol, the White House, trump, whatever it is. But the reality is most regulation, including most tech regulation, does not happen at the federal level. There's some crypto, biotech, but by and large, most things that touch a consumer in some way, directly or indirectly are regulated either by state government or local government. And that's actually a good thing. So what everyone thinks is, oh, I'd rather solve my problem at the federal level. It's a one shot, stopping, one shot, whatever, I got my thing done. I'm sad, but the phrase and act of Congress is Literally synonymous with a miracle. Right. You can't base investment strategies on miracles. Whereas in states. And you guys had my friends Adam and Matt from Doctronica on a few weeks ago. Oh yeah, we worked with them to make Utah the first state to allow prescription via. In states you can get things done and we don't necessarily win in every state every time, but like 50 bites at the apple we can figure out this makes sense for a red state strategy, blue state, whatever it might be, it might not matter in that way. And because states have sort of six month legislative sessions in which typically a couple of hundred bills on apple efforts pass, you have a reasonable chance of getting your same thing done if you run a good campaign. And then once you establish precedent for it in one state, you have a stronger argument to then go forward in others. And so when we decide what we want to work on and what we want to invest in, we highly prioritize companies that can get their stuff done at the state and local level. Because I don't invest in stuff where I don't think that we can move the needle for the company itself. And I think our odds of doing that are so much better outside of Washington.

1:41:08

How confident were you that you guys could get this, a deal like the one you got done in Utah with Doctronic? Like when you invest a little surprise. Yeah, yeah. Because I was, yeah, we kept having.

1:43:00

To like be like, really? That's what happened.

1:43:12

Really?

1:43:14

You can do this. I know we even, we, we literally the people who do this for a living, right. The company, the only fund that does this, this. And even we were like, wow, that one was pretty cool. But you know, there are states that are very thoughtful around AI regulation. And there are a couple states, Utah, Texas, Arizona, Kentucky, that have created regulatory sandboxes. You guys know what that is little. It's effectively like a notion saying, okay, you know what? There's this thing that we know is really important. We know it's going to take experimentation and rather than subjecting it to the political process, let's put together a team of experts who can at least on a provisional basis, say we're going to try out these ideas in our state. And as long as it's working the way we thought, it'll keep going. And those are four states that have chosen to do that. And so those were the obvious places for us to start. Utah is just a really well run state. Governor Cox is an excellent governor. And so we. And they're not a typical state for a lot of reasons. And also they are becoming a very, very tech forward and friendly state. Because as you see migration, especially from California, let alone before the billionaires referendum tax thing happens, Utah is becoming, you know, silicon slopes are calling it. So yeah, we're going to Texas next, which is a giant market, obviously the second biggest in the country. And you know, once we start showing that it works, you know, even if you think this is the very first tech company that I worked with was Uber started doing that early 2011. And the thing that Travis Kalanick, who is the founder and CEO of UberTime, understood, and he was right about, is just get the genie out of the bottle. I mean, Travis didn't pretend to understand politics, but what he did know was that he had a product that was meaningfully better than the status quo. And if you guys think back to the first couple of times you used Uber, it was magic, right? You couldn't, kind of couldn't believe it. You just pressed a button and this nice car showed up and here they were and you have to like hail it down or deal with some crazy cab company or anything else. And we knew that once people saw that it worked, they would fight for it and the arguments against it would get weaker and weaker and we were able to effectively mobilize our customer base.

1:43:14

Well, you have, you have the two. It's, it's both participants fighting for it too. In the, in the correct. You have the drivers and the, and the users, which is the most powerful dynamic.

1:45:29

Right, right. And that's when you can do that. But you know, it's funny, there's a whole question as to when do you have a product or a service that people will fight for. And sometimes it's, you might have a really good company that's going to be a good investment, but it doesn't sort of excite people in that way. But what we found is FanDuel worked really well. Bird scooters worked really well. Ease, which is cannabis delivery, worked really well. Crypto, that works really well for. So, you know, you have to think about if you're a founder, do I? You're obviously passionate about it because otherwise you wouldn't have founded the company in the first place and made all the sacrifices that you've made. But you have to be somewhat objective saying, okay, do regular people find this thing that I am doing truly critical fact.

1:45:40

You said, you said fan, you said FanDuel. So like, are there people out there that will stand up and protest their state government if they try to. For banning sports betting?

1:46:25

We did that. So in 2016, the New York Times published an article effectively accusing employees at FanDuel and DraftKings of conducting a form of insider trading where, according to the Times, they were giving each other other information to then put bets on the other's platform. It turned out to actually not be true. But putting that aside, at least this total shitstorm where a couple of dozen states in the course of a few days issued cease and desist orders to us saying you can no longer operate. And we had to all of a sudden go all over America and either pass bills to legalize daily fantasy sports betting or at least get them to understand that we were complying with, with the existing laws. And the way that we did that is we went to our customers and said, listen, if you like this product, we need you to fight for it. And every time they were on the app, we knew where they were located and we'd say, hey, click here to tell your local state senator, state rep, whoever it might be that you want fanduel to stick around. And enough people did it that, you know, it shifted the political inputs. If you guys just take a half a step back in politics, if there's one thing to take away from this interview is that every policy output is the result of a political input. Every politician makes every decision solely based on the next election and nothing else. And there are some exceptions. I was Mike Bloomberg's campaign manager, ran for mayor of New York.

1:46:36

Not for the good of the world.

1:48:00

No, not in the slightest. Right, Michael? That's.

1:48:02

That's pretty much so.

1:48:05

How, as a result, that's incredibly depressing, admitted. But it's also kind of a useful place to work from because then you have to understand what can I do to make said politician feel like doing what I want will either help them win the next election or if they don't.

1:48:07

So the tech industry should tell Ro Khanna, we won't trash you in the next election cycle if you don't put our industry in the dirt.

1:48:24

Yeah.

1:48:34

Or quite frankly, it's funny just by, you know, Larry Page and others acting in their own self interest and already saying, I'm moving to Florida, the billionaires referendum is already on the ropes because of that. So, sure, if, you know, if you think about why, let's say in a place like California, there are unions that just seiu, the teachers have so much power in Sacramento, it's because they have so much money that they can threaten any given politician and say, if you don't do what we want, we're going to spend a Million dollars, five million dollars. Whatever number they want against you in the next election, everybody backs down because winning the next election is more important to them than any given policy or any given issue. So not every tech startup obviously has the kind of money that a union might have to throw around. So you have to be more creative about it. And that's where your customers can be really useful advocates.

1:48:34

Interesting. What's your current outlook on the venture landscape broadly? We've been talking a lot about the K shape dynamic. There's a whole bunch of headlines around. Lower total venture funding, more SPV activity. What are you seeing?

1:49:26

A few things. I have it from both a deal by deal standpoint and then a macro fund model standpoint. On a deal by deal standpoint, I think we're in this very bifurcation. So I started investing outside capital. My first fund in 2016 in fact, FanDuel was the first deal I ever did. And at that moment there was a period of irrational exuberance, right? Everything was incredible and everybody threw tons of money at everything and every startup was going to be Unicorn or Decacorn whatever whatever. Then 2021 came, everything fell off the cliff and all of a sudden things like unit economics and margins and burn and all that stuff started to matter. And then I came along and then. So for AI companies, we're back to the 2016 days where people are just having valuations. To me, that sometimes make no sense whatsoever. You know, I've seen seed companies, you know, with valuations in the hundreds of millions of dollars with no product or certainly no revenue. That's crazy. And yet some of the discipline that you saw post 2021 crash is still being applied to non AI companies. And while I do think that overall, if you had an ETF of private AI startups, it would do well over time, that doesn't mean that any individual valuation is right simply because the letters AI are attached to it in some way. From a fund model standpoint, I really believe that there's effectively only two types of funds that could work if you were to start now. One would be a fund with billions of dollars of AUM simply because at that point the management fees are sufficient that the GPS can make a living from that alone. As long as they can raise the next fund, you know, it doesn't really matter. Or a sub 100 million dollar fund or even sub 50, you can get away with it. Where the hurdle is relatively low, you can get into carry pretty quickly. You're not making much on the management fee, so that's certainly you've either got to have other, other resources or really be super scrappy.

1:49:42

If you, if you were, if you wanted to start a fund with the, the lowest chances of success, what would it be? For me, it would be a 200 million dollar series A only fund.

1:51:38

Sure.

1:51:50

Yeah. Generalist. Generalist with nothing differentiating. Yeah. Even that sub hundred million still only works if you have something truly differentiated. Right. So for me, because we're the fund that does the regulatory stuff, for better or worse, we're the people you call. If that's the, if that's your issue and if you don't have.

1:51:51

But then how do you, what's your framework? Because there's times where I've invested in a company where I'm like, okay, this founding team is fantastic. And they don't understand, but they don't. They're good at all this stuff, but they don't understand marketing. I'm very good at marketing. I can invest and I can help. The problem is I'm gonna be in the room with them like less than 1% of the time. Right. Like I'll do a handful of calls, I'll make intros, I'll help however I can. But I'm not actually on the team. And so I ended up getting, I've, yeah, I've ended up getting burned because I'm just like, I can't, you know, 1% of my time is not enough to take them from bad at marketing to even good. Right, Right.

1:52:09

So for us, the first thing is we asked two simple questions. Is there a gating regulatory issue or opportunity that if it were solved, could really drive growth and valuation and then if so, can we solve it? And that's what led to us investing companies like FanDuel, Lemonade, Bird, Rogue, Coinbase, Circle, that so on. And then the other part though is take Doctronic as an example. We are their GRPR department. We effectively become the in house group for a company until they get up to a point where it's like, okay, we are now big enough that we probably need an in house team. In which case like RO is a really good example where when we started working with ro, back at the seed, you know, it's funny with electronic because it's prescription via AI. When it was ro, which was really not that long ago, the question was, is tech is prescription via tech legal? Nobody knew, right? Until Z. No one had ever tried to do it before. And he saw something that was incredible and our job was to legalize us everywhere. And we worked on that and did it and then eventually grew to a point where we helped them, you know, put together their kind of in house people and then we still talk to them all the time. We jump in on stuff, whether it's GLP1 compounding rules or when they want to be a COVID test provider, whatever it was. But for those early rounds, we really are part of the team and that's why we take equity for our work. Because, you know, we're lucky to be in a position where I don't need to take cash usually because I have the resources to sort of fund it myself. But you know, we are there day to day.

1:52:51

Talk to me about mobile voting. We've heard about it for a long time. Do you think it's ever going to happen? What are you doing in this space?

1:54:30

Why isn't important.

1:54:37

Okay, explain.

1:54:38

So, all right, let's start. It's important because in the world of gerrymandering, I'll make the assumption that the viewers know what that is. The only election that matters is the primary. So the New York Times did a study of the 2024 general election. Only 8% of congressional races were decided by 5 points or less. And only 7% of state legislative races were decided by 5 points or Less. Which means well over 90% of elections are really determined in the primary. And the problem is primary turnout is incredibly low. It's usually about 10%. And so who were those 10%? They're the extremes, the far left or the far right, or there are different special interests, whether it's the NEA or the nra, either side, that effectively dictate what happens. And if you are a politician and all you want to do is stay in office, then you cater to those groups at the exclusion of everyone else. But because those groups are purists, they don't want compromise, they don't want consensus. They just want to sort of hold true to their principles no matter what the cost is. And so nothing gets done. And the simplest way to solve that is to meaningfully increase primary turnout. But the only way to do that is to meet the voters where they are. Every single one of us has a supercomputer in our pocket. And if you can allow people to vote in at least state and local elections on their phones, you can get primary turnout from 10 to say 40. And now all of a sudden, if in order to get reelected, you have to represent 40% of your constituents instead of 10, that 40% is much more moderate and they want things to get done. So if that means working with the other side to find a reasonable compromise on immigration or guns or health care or climate or whatever it is you can do. So it's not that government does, doesn't know what the answers are. It's that embracing them imperils reelection, and they won't do that. And so I started something called the Mobile voting project in 2017. And the first thing we did was test the hypothesis that I just laid out. And so we funded elections out of my foundation. It's totally philanthropic, in seven different states where either people with disabilities or deployed military were able to vote in real elections on their phones. And the answer was, of course, as you guys know, when you make something a lot easier and you put on people's phones, they do it. So that was true. Then the next question became, okay, but is the tech really good enough to do this at scale? It was totally fine for 2,000 soldiers from West Virginia, 3,000 blind people in Oregon. But if we're trying to get every district from 10 to 40, and the tech that was on the market at the time wasn't good enough for that. So we spent five years building our own mobile phone voting technology that is end to end, encrypted, end to end, verified, has biometric screening, multi factor authentication, it's air gapped, and all of the code is open source, which means it's on GitHub right now. So it's totally transparent, totally audible. And the next part is then, okay, getting government to say, yes, you can actually do it. So that's about to happen. For the first time in April, Anchorage, Alaska is making mobile learning accessible to all of their voters.

1:54:39

Hit the gong. Hit the gong for mobile voting overnight.

1:57:41

Thank you. And we are running legislation now in five states, Minnesota, Colorado, Vermont, New Jersey, Maryland, that would allow cities in those states to start offering mobile voting as an option for local elections.

1:57:47

Citizens I can imagine, are super excited about this. Who's not excited about this?

1:58:02

Really?

1:58:07

Well, yeah, yeah, because you're just like, oh, no, I love going to the poll. I love taking, you know, an hour out of my day to go do this thing that right.

1:58:08

So there's the people, there are a few smaller opponents, and then there's in reality the big one. So the smaller ones are. There are some cryptographers who have said it's impossible, can never be done. Some. Something can go wrong and they're not wrong. Something could go wrong, but things go wrong at in person power places all the time. Things go wrong with mail in voting all the time. And the risk of inaction is where we are today. And this is not sustainable for 24 years. And there are groups like this one called Verified Voting that are kind of the anti vaxxers of voting. So they're just like in paper, on paper, in person, nothing else. You know, they're the crazies. Just like the anti vax people in my view are a little crazy. But the real opponents at the end of the day are the status quo. Because if you are an ideologue or a special interest and primary turnout is 10%, you have a lot of power because your threats go a long way.

1:58:18

Well, yeah. And you look at who's showing who's actually turning out for the primaries and you can concentrate budget on influencing that subgroup, which is much better than having to appeal to an entire region or a huge age range. Right, exactly.

1:59:15

So that's what we're really going to have to fight through. But you know, if you think about every major right in this country that's ever been won, Women's right to vote, Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights act, same sex marriage, Americans with Disabilities act, whatever it is, status quo didn't want to do any of those things. Right. Enough people stood up loud enough and long enough and demanded their rights and eventually they won. And it's not easy and it takes a while and it's expensive. But that's what we have to do here too.

1:59:31

And we're trying really quick. I know we're mostly out of time. How do you think, what do you think the dialogue will be around AI in the midterm elections?

1:59:56

Negative. I think it's gonna be pretty bad.

2:00:09

And is this the kind of thing that certain politicians are gonna make their entire brand and anti AI?

2:00:13

Well, so I think what you're going to see, we should see if we can get cashier polymarkers. I want to take, take a, set a line on. This is the word that will be cited the most in the midterms, by the way. It's not just Congress. There's 36 governors of state, most states legislatures is affordability. Right? So that's the word, right? You heard Trump say, you heard Mondami here in New York say, everyone's going to say it. So then the question is, where does AI fit into the affordability puzzle? And it fits in in a couple of ways. One is job loss. I do believe that some of the jobs data that we saw in 2025 reflected layoffs, typically kind of bigger tech companies that are the earliest adopters of AI new technology using it realizing this works pretty well, I don't necessarily need as many people to perform any given function. So you're going to have layoffs. The second is energy prices. So. So right now, in the way that data centers were conceived by the hyperscalers was, you know, we build these things and we would consume a lot of energy and that would be from the grid. And the problem is everyone else who's on that same grid then has to pay the price for that. And so there are a lot of states where AI data centers have already come online, where people are paying 30, 40, 50% more in their energy bills every month. The problem is no consumer on either side of the aisle is interested in having to spend more money out of their pocket to help make San Altman or Johnson Wong a trillionaire. Right.

2:00:20

So, yeah, and starting to push back. But people were like, I want Uber in my area around where I live. Nobody's like, if I don't get a data center in my backyard, I can't use.

2:01:42

ChatGPT is going to work no matter where the data center is going to work.

2:01:53

And by the way, the data centers don't even create that many jobs, right? So there's not even like you could mobilize that for it. And you see now a bunch of different states on both sides of the aisle start, start proposing legislation that would find ways to curtail the ability of the data centers to impose those costs and externalities on consumers, whether it's around having to use different types of energy or alternate forms of compute or water or whatever it might be. And so AI is going to get blamed, not wrongly, in some ways, for both job loss and higher energy prices, along with things like mental health, chatbots having weird problems with teenagers and things like that. And so I think it's going to be a huge attack vessel for challengers against incumbents, you know, in pretty much every election this year. And I think that, you know, when we in the tech world just think everyone loves AI because we love AI, that's not true. And if that is the mindset you take, you're going to lose.

2:01:56

Yeah, no, that makes a ton of sense.

2:02:54

Green.

2:02:56

Yeah, it's going to be a really important, important story to follow this year. We'd love to have you back on.

2:02:56

The show to talk about saying anytime. Love talking about the stuff. So anytime it works for you guys, just let me know.

2:03:01

Thank you so much.

2:03:06

Expect emails in the morning when stories.

2:03:08

You gotta come on.

2:03:10

Got it.

2:03:11

Great.

2:03:12

Real expert.

2:03:12

And thanks for pushing Jackson over the line.

2:03:14

No He's. He's. He's gonna love it.

2:03:16

It's. Have a great rest of your day.

2:03:19

Thank you. And Barnes and Noble is opening 60 stores.

2:03:21

Stores.

2:03:24

They're gonna. Maybe there's a boom. Somebody sent us.

2:03:24

Yeah, maybe.

2:03:26

So I think just don't. Don't limit yourself, right. If, you know, make it up with scale. Right? Open 50 more stores. Make. You'll make it up with volume.

2:03:27

Yeah, for sure.

2:03:36

There we go. There we go. I just have to just make it. I need another Uber to be able to afford that.

2:03:37

So thank you so much. Thank you so much.

2:03:43

I appreciate it.

2:03:45

Cheers.

2:03:46

Goodbye. Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces. And now with AI agents. And we have a very special segment on TBPN today. We have Lucas Zinger from Divergent in the ultradome. He's actually outside the ultradome. So we're gonna take a walk and we're gonna.

2:03:46

Let's do a little walk and talk.

2:04:10

We're gonna do a walk and talk for. I think this is the first time we've ever done this. So I should be able to click on over to the lav mic. Do you have the lav?

2:04:12

Yeah, I think it's live.

2:04:20

Let's go see what's waiting for us outside of the ultra dump.

2:04:21

We are getting audio from outside.

2:04:25

I think we have audio outside. Let's go and see. Okay, we're ready. Wow, look at this. Thank you so much for coming. Look at this. Walk us through what we're looking at. Reintroduce yourself.

2:04:27

For those who might not remember, I'm Lucas Zinger. I'm the CEO of Divergent and Zinger Vehicles. And you're looking at our first car, the 21C.

2:04:42

Wow. You had to bring it. You had to bring it in green, too.

2:04:49

Thank you so much for bringing Match.

2:04:52

Outfit here for you, actually.

2:04:54

Remarkable.

2:04:56

I've watched the full video. I watched Doug demuro's review.

2:04:57

Okay.

2:04:59

And seeing it in person, the scale is remarkable. It is a wonder.

2:05:00

It's a spacecraft for the road. It's a land jet. It's a hell of a car to take in. Track traffic from Torrance to here.

2:05:04

Wait, did you drive this on the street here?

2:05:11

Yes.

2:05:13

I was assuming you were not trafficked.

2:05:13

No, no, we drove it. We drove it an hour in traffic on the way over, so I cannot.

2:05:15

Believe you drove it.

2:05:19

Okay. Full carbon.

2:05:20

Full carbon body. Before we go into the details, tell us the story of Your journey with cars. Why did you want to build this car? When did this project start? This doesn't look like it was built in one day, but how long have you been working on this?

2:05:22

This is a 10 year build a company from a vision moment. So we started as a family business. My father had the vision for Divergent. I joined him soon thereafter. And we have a business that has changed the way that we engineer and manufacture fundamentally. So when we talked last time, we talked about the defense application, the manufacturing application. That company is scaling right now. But Czinger was the first product within Divergent. When we said we've got new design software, new added manufacturing technology, new robotics, how are we going to prove this, validate this? We turned to making our own car.

2:05:35

Yep.

2:06:15

Then that evolved into making our own car company. So zinger vehicle is about five years old. Five years old within 10 years of what is the Divergent Journey. And now it's the world's fastest hard hyper car. It's American made, it's got five plus international track records and it's road legal. And most excitingly, there's over 16 of these in the wild now They've been delivered. Los Angeles, Miami, London, all the usual suspects.

2:06:15

This is remarkable.

2:06:43

And this car, it represents fully that ten year journey.

2:06:45

Yeah, I mean Jordan was just making the joke with, with me today that you could build the ultimate American made hypercar garage for remarkably cheap compared to an Italian hypercar collection or even a British, you know, hypercar. You've just raised the stakes significantly with this, I think. Yes, this is, this is remarkable. So, so what has the testing been? Like you said, five records. Who's driving these cars? What truck tracks? What are the records that you're going for? What has stood out in the journey?

2:06:49

So Joel Miller has been our test pilot and he's an exceptional driver, factory driver for Ferrari, great coach. And we nailed five track records in five days, which has never been done before. We made a documentary of it and it was all about the street usability of the car and the performance envelope it has. So instead of showing up between five.

2:07:22

And five days, what does that actually look like? You're getting a record immediately, packing it in a trailer, driving to the next track, driving, driving.

2:07:41

So that was the epic journey. And we made a documentary called A California Gold Rush. And we drove from Norcal through SoCal and we hit every track on the way and every day we'd set the track record. Every night we'd get in the car and we'd drive a couple hundred Miles to the next track, get in late, get some sleep, get up early the next morning and do another record. So it was as much of a human feat as a vehicle feat. But what it was meant to show was these hypercars can be driven on the road. This one can. It was built as a road car, not only a track car. And it's got so much performance that, quite literally, you can show up at the track on used tires and set a track record and not need a pro team next to you supporting it.

2:07:50

It's amazing. Talk about the decisions in usability. I see three pedestrians pedals in there between, you know, the Carrera gt, super raw, no supports, extremely dangerous to some of the more point and shoot. Where did you want to land? Where did this car land?

2:08:28

So ultimately, this was about creating a road car that was otherworldly in the way that it drove on the street, but could beat the best on the track. And that's a hell of a design brief, because usually those two worlds don't marry well together. We also wanted to create a vehicle that was engaging as part of that otherworldly experience. Right. You wanted something that wasn't numb at low speed, that was very, very lively on the road, but ultimately could shave 10 seconds off the thermal track record. When you go 10 out of 10.

2:08:46

This has been thermal.

2:09:17

Thermal, yeah. 10 seconds off the track record at Thermal.

2:09:18

Do you know who had the previous record?

2:09:21

I won't say. Okay, that's too big of a margin to say. But we. We've had an epic back and forth.

2:09:23

Because I've been in a Valkyrie at Thermal with our friend.

2:09:29

With our friend, yeah.

2:09:34

Who? I won't.

2:09:35

I won't name them, because that's a great car.

2:09:36

But. But this car I was in, in the Valkyrie at Thermal, almost every single corner, I thought that I was gonna die.

2:09:38

Yeah. So 10 seconds faster than that.

2:09:46

10 seconds faster than that is insane.

2:09:48

Sounds brutal. Yeah.

2:09:49

You're pulling major GS. The cornering, the acceleration. But back to your question. This car marries those two worlds, track driving, with road driving. It's a one design brief. You got the center seating. Yes, of course. Intentional. That's based on the aero package that allows for less frontal surface area. It also gets you centered in the car, which is the best track driving position you can have. Right. Your lefts feel the same as your right.

2:09:50

I've always wondered why more manufacturers don't go at the center seating. I mean, it's iconic from the McLaren F1. And then maybe it's just a practicality thing.

2:10:13

Yeah, yeah. The back seat. Right. It looks a little tight in there. Your feet go outside of the front seat so you actually have much more room than you think. You don't need to get your knees up behind that front seat. And when you're in there, you're packaged pilot, co pilot. And it's a really dynamic driving experience. I mean our customers that drive with their partners, they actually love the layout.

2:10:22

Yeah.

2:10:41

And in terms of, of hybrid, strong hybrid ground up developed in the US as well. So we've got a V8 that we took all the way through California car to road homologate. It's about 750 horsepower, twin turbo, 2.88 L. We have another spec that takes that up to 850 and then you get another 500 horsepower out of the front wheel. So we're doing 1250-1350 total horsepower, all wheel drive, seven speed AMT. We're automatic manual transmission. But you have that EV fill on the front axle. You've got the middle EV motor, the MGU. So you have a really, really seamless gear shifting experience. Feels much more like a DCT than a single clutch, but you get the weight of a single clutch package.

2:10:41

How early did the door design come together? It's pretty striking. I mean people have done scissor doors, butterfly doors, all sorts of things. But there's something about how long these doors are that really stands out.

2:11:25

Yeah, it had the record for the world's longest door for some time. And that's because of course you're opening the front and the rear at the same time. And you've got this 45 degree angle. It looks like wings coming up. It's part of the design brief, part of the functionality brief. We didn't want to split the passenger side into a separate door from a styling perspective.

2:11:37

And then can I, can I get in the cockpit it for a second?

2:11:57

Yeah, yeah. Let me show you how to do that real quick. Maybe spin around this side.

2:12:00

Let's do it.

2:12:04

It's a two stepper. So you're going to take a seat right here. This is the battery box. And then swing your legs in.

2:12:05

Yeah, you don't want me to put my, my feet right on that. Express carbon.

2:12:11

Okay, Turn it.

2:12:16

Yeah, swing the feet. You got it.

2:12:17

Nice.

2:12:20

Here we go.

2:12:25

When you're in there because you got the center seat, you actually have a lot of room. I mean compared to the Valkyrie where you're pretty squished and you're also at an angle, this actually has a lot.

2:12:25

Of headroom when you have a helmet on in the Valkyrie, you hardly have any room, is it?

2:12:34

You're probably touching a tiny bit. And that seats almost all the way forward. You got seat controls on your left.

2:12:39

What is the name? 21C.

2:12:45

So stands for 21st century.

2:12:47

Okay.

2:12:49

So divergence, miss. Mission statement is build the 21st century industrial base.

2:12:49

Sure.

2:12:53

So this car represents the 21st century in the vehicle space.

2:12:54

Yeah.

2:12:57

Can I pull this down?

2:12:57

Yes.

2:12:59

I want to see.

2:12:59

Wow. How important are the materials? I mean, I imagine. Put your foot on the brake. I see.

2:13:00

Do we have a key in here?

2:13:06

Oh, there we go.

2:13:09

Oh, baby. I'll see you guys.

2:13:10

I'll see you guys later.

2:13:12

Whoa.

2:13:16

So you get a feel for it. You've got your different modes. You've got an EV only mode. You've got a track mode.

2:13:17

You've got sport mode.

2:13:24

And you're pulling gears on the steering wheel there. You've got all your controls on the wheel centralized cool features. You got some 3D printed AC vents even. You've got your 3D printed speaker grills. You've got the wheel, the center node. And it's a full carbon body. But the full chassis then is printed underneath. Yeah.

2:13:25

Lock them in.

2:13:49

There.

2:13:49

You go.

2:13:52

Wow. Wow. It's such a different.

2:13:53

Such a different experience, actually. Feeling like you're in a cockpit here. Insane in the green.

2:13:55

Yeah, man.

2:14:02

The urge to just throw it in reverse.

2:14:04

Yeah.

2:14:06

We should go for a drive. This America's hypercar.

2:14:07

Insane.

2:14:12

Yeah. How important are the materials? I imagine this door, if you made it out of steel, it'd be incredibly heavy. You couldn't lift it. What. What are you using as building materials, and how important is that?

2:14:12

So the entire chassis architecture is what really differentiates the car as well. So when you look at it from an optimized system. We didn't just optimized rear frame, then front frame. We actually built a full vehicle model with our topology software.

2:14:24

Okay.

2:14:37

And what we're building on the chassis is additively manufactured aluminum, which are actually our own chemistries, so they have the right strength and durability, but also for auto elongation to absorb energy.

2:14:38

Okay.

2:14:49

So if you get in a rear impact, you need to have a material that doesn't shear or break, and that's really, really hard to get in. An additive material. We had actually make that aluminum in house.

2:14:50

Yeah.

2:15:01

The body then is fully carbon fiber.

2:15:02

Okay.

2:15:04

So you're marrying essentially 3D printed aluminums and inconels.

2:15:04

Okay.

2:15:07

With a carbon fiber exterior for aero. You're Taking all of your load cases, your main large forces through that additively manufactured chassis and then all your arrow load through the carbon body.

2:15:08

And then what is what pieces of the cars? I mean, Michelin tires. You don't make the tires. Yes. What else is in the supply chain where you're buying instead of building?

2:15:18

Yeah, we have great partners in the supply chain.

2:15:27

Right.

2:15:30

We can't build every piece of this. So you named it Tires infotainment system.

2:15:30

Oh, sure.

2:15:35

Right. We've got Apple Carplay. Of course, you don't have regular. We have a partnership on our transmission where we actually did part of the design. We actively manufacture the housing, but then someone else cuts the gears, integrates it.

2:15:35

Okay.

2:15:49

On the engine side, we designed that V8 ground up. We actually build that V8 as well.

2:15:50

John, did you get a look back at it?

2:15:54

Yeah.

2:15:55

Let's go look at it right now.

2:15:55

On the battery side, we've got a partnership there. So almost every system on this car is bespoke. Either fully engineered and manufactured by Czinger and divergent or done in a JV where we have a partner, where we've taken a design brief to them, said this has never been done before. Will you sign up to do it with us?

2:15:56

And then this sort of structure, this sort of structure, it looks very organic. Where did that come from? Whose idea was that? Is that someone in CAD is there AI involved with.

2:16:14

So that's the computer's idea.

2:16:23

Okay.

2:16:24

That's not the designer's idea. So when we talk about divergent process, design, print, assemble, the design portion is a fully integrated set of microservices that takes requirements and turns it into optimal cad.

2:16:25

Okay. So you're setting parameters. You want the lightest way weight for the most strength with this performance in this volume because it can't be bigger.

2:16:37

Yes.

2:16:45

And then it will go and try all sorts of things and then you can finally use additive manufacturing to manufacture the part.

2:16:46

You got it. So 10 years ago we started in machine learning, the basis of modern AI. Right. And AI based algorithms and prediction to do a weighted optimization function for designing these parts. Importantly, we simulate the full manufacturer manufacturing side as well. So once we've designed say this rear cross brace and that wing is going to interface directly onto that point. So that entire rear.

2:16:52

Yeah.

2:17:15

Cross brace is going to take the aero load of 5,000 plus pounds onto it.

2:17:16

Yeah.

2:17:21

So you're going to give it that force vector. That force.

2:17:21

Oh, and it just loads and then that just fuses across the hole. Exactly.

2:17:24

So then you also give the software, the crash impulse case, the dirt durability case, the load cases coming off the, the road, the vehicle, the tires, all into that functional system. The software actually then says add and subtract material against those requirements until we hit a Pareto optimal point.

2:17:27

Makes sense.

2:17:45

That means it's the lightest weight while meeting those requirements. And then the beauty is it's already simulated for manufacturing. So there's no design for manufacturing Loop. We go through our mes homegrown and actually make that part and then assemble it with our robotic cell.

2:17:45

So this is chassis 28 of 80?

2:18:00

Yes.

2:18:02

You said there's 16 that are out in the wild already. So you have 12 or something that are maybe ready to go, is that right?

2:18:03

Yes. So there's cars in between. This one's also a special number for us. Sometimes people request the exact number on a vehicle, but we're typically around 20 cars a year.

2:18:09

These are the records that this car has set specifically.

2:18:19

Yes.

2:18:22

And this is Laguna Seca and Circa of the Americas, which are two of the main American iconic tracks. Right. This is probably our best track in California. The beauty about this one is it's outdated. So we just had an epic back and forth with Koenigsegg, Swedish hypercar maker and we set a 122.3. So we beat our previous record by over two seconds, beat their record by almost two seconds and put a whole new benchmark for Laguna.

2:18:22

I love circuit Americas rivalry with Christian von Koenigsegg, but just settle it on the track.

2:18:49

It's just a beautiful.

2:18:53

I don't know, it's. Industrialists for hundreds of years in America been building the fastest train, the fastest plane, now the fastest car.

2:18:54

Yeah.

2:19:01

Is there any, is there any ambition to one day make, make cars for everyday consumers or is it racing? And.

2:19:02

And Zinger will stay at the tip of the spear. It's all about big R and D budgets. Making a car that is a next step forward in terms of consumer experience. And therefore it's got to be expensive. It just has to be. It's like it's the most modern high performance niche that does develop systems that then do make their way into more mainstream vehicles. But Divergent is the company that's going to do, you know, the Ford F150 one day on the chassis technology side with partners. Exactly, exactly, exactly. So that tier one supply the volume game of doing millions of vehicles that'll come through Divergent, the tip of the spear. Highest performing vehicles in the world that'll come through Zinger.

2:19:10

That's amazing. Very cool. Anything else we should know about the car? Should we go sit down inside, talk about business and how things are going?

2:19:50

Let's talk about business a bit. This is, I think, next step for.

2:19:58

You all is this view right here. Michael, you got to get this view. This shot from this angle is just absolutely insane.

2:20:02

What a beast.

2:20:12

Stunning.

2:20:15

Absolute beast.

2:20:16

Yeah, that's real functional era.

2:20:17

Yeah. The scale of the car is just, is.

2:20:19

It's wide.

2:20:23

Just everything. It's wide, long, tall.

2:20:23

That front splitter. Yeah, you can put a lot of.

2:20:26

Work weight on that. It has such a presence.

2:20:30

Give you a quick shot here.

2:20:32

There we go.

2:20:37

Whoa. Yeah, it's actually functional. It's gotta insane.

2:20:38

Okay, let's go sit down. We'll chat and dig in more. We are back in the ultra dome. We'll have you sit right here. And we're back. It's fascinating. I mean, I think we hang out long enough. Jordy's eventually going to browbeat you into doing the McLaren track and eventually making road cars or something. Or, you know, just like.

2:20:43

Yeah, it's fully road legal.

2:21:12

Yeah.

2:21:14

How difficult is that process?

2:21:15

Oh, it's difficult because we went through this is not an EV car. It's a strong hybrid. So it has an EV system, but a combustion engine engine as well. And we went through full California carb emissions compliance on that V8. Just heard it start up. Right. And that is a difficult process because they're looking at while the car is running, when the car first starts, what the evaporation is of fuel or oil in a what they call shed test as well. So there's a huge amount of requirements to actually certify that car. I think the amount of fuel you actually burn in the certification process might actually make. Make it logical for cars that are this low volume.

2:21:18

Oh, interesting.

2:21:53

But you go through that and you show that this car is actually designed to be environmentally friendly with that V8.

2:21:53

What would you do if you're making a track only version?

2:22:00

We would strip out a lot of weight and a lot of the safety monitoring software and systems. So first off, you're talking about all your airbags go, all your passive safety environment goes. A lot of electronics that are there for redundancy.

2:22:04

Do you have any that have like a full roll cage in them or. Or was the intention just like, hey, we want to set records with.

2:22:18

Yeah, yeah. So road car, Right. Maybe in the future we'd make a track only car. It would be different almost entirely. That roof design, the carbon A pillars that Run all the way across. That is rated for a rollover. So you can roll that vehicle and have similar performance to a roller over cage, but integrated there. You don't want a roll cage in a road vehicle because it's a very hard surface in the car and if you're not harnessed in, you're going to move more and you're going to hit your head against it if you get in a crash.

2:22:25

Oh, sure.

2:22:55

So the roll cage on the track where you have the harness on and the helmet makes sense. But the roll cage without the harness and no helmet, it actually is a major hazard on the road.

2:22:55

Yeah. Talk more about the safety approval, getting the car road leg. Is, is there a hurry up and wait element while you're in the queue? There are other cars and there's a rate limiting factor there. Or is it more a quick back and forth? But you're making dozens of changes constantly. What's the actual process like?

2:23:05

So it is an iterative process. It is known to be a real headache. Certain OEMs, in terms of the timing and attention that they get and how quickly they can iterate.

2:23:24

And I'm sure if you're like Ford and you're like, there's a new Corolla coming or that's Toyota, but there's a new, you know, There's a new F150 coming every year with a refresh. And we're changing this. They have a whole system set up. It's. It's not, it's not as bespoke. So they must have a whole team for it.

2:23:33

You sort of have to build to California carbs credit. I think they saw that this was one of the first new OEMs in America, period.

2:23:49

Yeah.

2:23:57

And there was a narrative that they wanted to support there as well. And we managed to get their attention.

2:23:58

Yeah.

2:24:03

And our team was able to work with them effectively.

2:24:03

Yeah.

2:24:06

So I don't know how much are.

2:24:06

You using this as a, as part of the sales process when you're pitching, let's say, other OEMs to make parts with you guys. Are you saying like, hey, if you don't believe me, get in the. Let's go.

2:24:07

For early on, it was like the proof is in the pudding moment.

2:24:19

Right.

2:24:22

You come to our factory, you see our car, you can drive it. If you're Bugatti or McLaren or Astonishment Martin, you see that and that's a huge benefit.

2:24:22

Right.

2:24:29

So we use that a lot early on in the company as a sales tool.

2:24:30

Sure.

2:24:33

Now in defense, you know, we're hosting anyone from Secretary Hegseth to a CEO of a Prime. When they see a company that can integrate a road legal vehicle and they see that manufacturing process, it just builds a lot of confidence. Right. There's a cool narrative. Hegseth loved revving that and car app. But there's also a capability now narrative and that systems engineering is proven out through that car.

2:24:33

Yeah, yeah. How? I mean I was looking at your careers website. You're hiring tons of people. How scaled is the manufacturing plan? How large is the team? How large is the business? How are you growing these years?

2:24:56

So we've gone in the last three years from not being a defense focused business and Divergent to being a defense focused business. We're dual use, dual tactics. So we do have our commercial arm. The auto business is growing. Our supply to really the European luxury brands is growing, but the focus is on defense right now. Three years ago we had zero contracts. Today we're on over 40 active contracts. And that's what's really unique about Divergent is we're not competing head to head with Anduril and Lockheed and Raytheon. Rather we're servicing all of the primes. So you can build this horizontal manufacturing layer as a service to all of them. You can bet not on one to five programs of record, but rather service 100 programs of record over time and be that manufacturing supplier for them. We've gone through that journey of first refactoring the company to work on defense, winning our first contracts, delivering our first prototypes, flying those, proving the performance of a new technology, and then actually in the last six months, winning our first scale production programs. Now if you come to the facility, you'll see exit rates at around 100amonth of main bodies for large Cruise missile systems. So 80amonth or 100amonth. It's not high volume for auto, but for our defense landscape, making 1,000 missiles per year. That's on the high volume side of things. That's what Divergence Factory in Torrance is already churning out. Now we've almost gotten to full capacity on our Torrance facility with those contracts. So we're starting to look at factory 2, 3, 4, 5. We got multiple states that we're kind of shopping and partnering with right now. And then also looking at California. Cause it makes sense for especially the startup community here, which are great partners for us to have another manufacturing platform here.

2:25:10

Yeah. What about other applications outside of defense and automotive? Maritime comes to mind. I can imagine a lot of that additive manufacturing technology being useful on High speed boats, yachts, I don't know, aviation planes. We were talking about Harrison Ford crashing Cessnas all day long. Maybe you need some more reliable manufacturing. But what other areas have you at least thought about expansion into?

2:26:55

Yeah, the TAM for this system is so large and that's a blessing, but you need to be disciplined in what you address. First and second and third. Right now it's a primary focus on defense. Within that, looking at largely munition systems and then looking at torpedoes and similar structures. But on the, the Navy application side, outside of defense, we look to space. So we're doing quite a bit of work in space. Optimus mass saving there really matters. So you think about things like satellite buses. As we get more and more launch vehicles and they're carrying different payloads into space, what is the structure that essentially attaches those to the launch vehicle? We've got several programs ongoing there. And then you look out at diversion over 10 years. Really any metal structure that takes a complex load path so has some sort of force that it's interacting with, should be designed by the platform and manufactured by it. So you think commercial air, you think oil and gas, you think mining vehicles, you even think over time, as the prices come down, enough construction and where can it get into? Almost the city planning side of, of the equation as well.

2:27:25

Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

2:28:33

Wild.

2:28:35

What, what is, what are you seeing on the hypersonic side? I know a lot of it's under wraps, but we've talked to Castilian and some other folks, folks that are thinking about this. And just broadly, the defense industry has been talking about the hypersonic gap over the, the cruise missile. Are you excited about that? Are you following that story?

2:28:36

Absolutely.

2:28:55

Okay.

2:28:56

You know, we're working on multiple hypersonic programs right now designing primary structure for these vehicles. You know, in terms of narrative or, or when I zoom out a notch, you need both. You need the affordable Cruise missile. That's 200,000 instead of 3 million. You also need the hypersonics capability across different classes of hypersonics. And for us, what do we need to be good at at divergent? We need to be great with our material science. So we need the right nickel based alloys that can get very hot and still perform. So that's different than aluminums that you saw mostly on the car. We've designed several of those materials. We have commercially available ones. We've got ones that the government has actually contracted us to do a special materials development for a higher performing version of what's commercially available today. And then we need to be able to print these at scale. Company like Castilian is really not only about hypersonics, but hypersonics at scale. Yeah, right. They want to make a lot of these. They're down the road from us. We want to help them make a lot of them.

2:28:56

That's cool. Talk about what's unique about additive manufacturing in aluminum nickel. I think, you know, most people will be familiar with like 3D printed plastics, but is it, is it similar to just soldering lines of solder and just building up slowly like what else is going on?

2:29:53

It's the most advanced way to make a metal part. And it's the most controllable way as well.

2:30:12

Okay.

2:30:16

It's not really related to, in terms of technology, 3D printing of plastics.

2:30:17

Okay, right.

2:30:22

Maybe the narratives are tied a bit together.

2:30:22

It's not like molten pushed through a nozzle. Like a.

2:30:24

We do something called powder bed fusion. So we have a powdered aluminum or inconel in a build chamber. That build chamber has no oxygen in it. It's got nitrogen instead. So it's non reactive in there. And then you've got high power lasers overhead.

2:30:27

Yeah.

2:30:42

And those high power lasers essentially melt laser weld one layer of that part at a time. You put a new layer of powder on top and you laser melt that layer to the layer below. So if you think about a part, think about it standing vertical. Think about it as a layer cake, maybe 5,000 layers. And your laser welding with those lasers, every single layer, layer by layer.

2:30:42

Yeah.

2:31:02

And you're getting full data at every single layer. So maybe that one section of a defense product is 7,000 layers Y. I get 7,000 layers of information on that field. So this is the most controllable process in terms of in process monitoring. It's the most advanced way to make a metal part. And you also end up being able to make exactly the net shape you want.

2:31:03

Yeah.

2:31:26

Because when you have a cross section, you can do the exterior and the interior.

2:31:26

Yeah.

2:31:30

And you have full control of that geometry. You vacuum away your unused powder, you end up with your net shape. So in terms of waste and efficiency of the process, you can get something that runs at a higher oee. When we talk about maintenance, manufacturing efficiency. And you can get something that actually performs better. So when we talk, you know, application focus, if you're a missile system, we typically are seeing about 30% lighter structures while hitting the requirements. And more importantly, we're able to functionally integrate that structure with the fuel tank, with the avionics. Mounting that whole complex system, we're usually increasing fuel volume by about 30 to 40%.

2:31:30

Okay.

2:32:06

So if you're a missile and you get 30, 30, 40% more fuel volume, that's a real game changer. And that's what the customer looks at Divergent to do is one, get the best engineered product, and that's going to change in a positive way the performance of your vehicle. And then two, scale the manufacturing. And that second part is where, in the modern age of defense, where we are looking for volume is where there's a big gap right now. And that is part of the reason why Divergent has gotten one, so much business, but two, so much attention as well, is it's starting to be viewed as that manufacturing layer.

2:32:07

Right.

2:32:40

Our mission statement 10 years ago, build a 21st century industrial base, is actually starting to happen now.

2:32:40

That's amazing. Last question for me. The pieces that seemed clearly made in your factory with additive manufacturing, they looked white. They didn't look like metal. Have they been coated? What's the post processing once you make a product?

2:32:46

Yeah. So our aspirin aluminum comes out almost like a silvery white color.

2:33:03

Okay.

2:33:07

So what you're seeing is probably some of that.

2:33:08

Okay.

2:33:10

But we do do coatings, especially on the defense side. We have a fully automated anodized line.

2:33:10

Okay.

2:33:15

So it's essentially a process where you clean the part, dip the part, and then one of those stations, one of those tanks is actually electronically charged. So when you're anodizing, you're essentially plating that part with a certain coating.

2:33:15

Yeah.

2:33:29

That makes it more corrosive or more resistant to corrosion.

2:33:29

Got it. Okay.

2:33:33

For Navy applications, but also, depending on the system, once it's fully integrated, if it's a stealth system, there might be a special paint that goes over top. There might be a gap in flush process over it. And Divergent will either do that or partner with the prime to do it.

2:33:34

At least prep the material so that it can go get the special paint that might be classified or something you're handing out.

2:33:49

Last question from my side. Wanted to understand how local kind of politicians and how, like, what's your relationship like? How does Torrance think about kind of neoprimes and overall building up the manufacturing base in Torrance?

2:33:55

Yeah.

2:34:10

We've had a strong relationship with the city, which is part of the reason we've been able to get fast permission for our factory. You can think about something like automated anodize. That's usually something that can take some years to stand up. We've been able to build relationships that allowed that to accelerate. Are there states that are lower cost and probably even faster for permitting and manufacturing? Absolutely. In terms of engineering headquarters, Los Angeles or the greater, you know, Southern California area is very special because we have the environment to create hardware and test hardware and we've got some of the brightest people in the world all centralized. And now we have a VC community and general, I'd say growth funding community that is focused in this area as well. So Divergent will stay headquartered here. We will go through some serious scale production here as well. But over time you're going to see factories across all the states in the US and some of those factories will be at a lower cost basis than the ones here.

2:34:10

Yeah, Very cool.

2:35:12

It's so awesome. I love it. Just everything about this company is so fun. Congratulations on all the progress and seriously, thank you for bringing the car. What a treat. What a special moment.

2:35:13

We've been wanting to do a TBPN track day.

2:35:22

Yeah.

2:35:24

You'll be one of the first to know. Yeah, you gotta bring it out.

2:35:25

Yeah, you can come out and smoke us all. Absolutely. Do lapse around us. But thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. This is an absolute pleasure.

2:35:28

Fantastic.

2:35:38

Thank you.

2:35:38

Yeah, I'm sure we'll be talking much more over this year as you roll out everything.

2:35:39

Good to see you both.

2:35:42

So great. We will talk to you soon.

2:35:43

Yeah, good to see you.

2:35:45

Have a good rest of your day.

2:35:46

Enjoy the drive.

2:35:47

And I will tell you about graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And we have our Lambda Lightning round starting in just a few minutes. We have Andy McCune from Cosmos coming on first. Then FabFitFun, the co founder and CEO of that company has launched a venture fund. He's coming on. And Aaron Katz, the co founder and CEO of Clickhouse is coming on. And it sounds like we have Andy in the restream waiting room. So let's kick off our Lambda Lightning round and let him in to the TVPN ultradome.

2:35:48

What's going on?

2:36:24

How are you doing?

2:36:25

What's up guys?

2:36:26

Good to see you. Welcome to the show. First time on the show. Super wearing green too. Yes.

2:36:27

Cosmo racing jacket in honor of you guys.

2:36:34

It's amazing.

2:36:37

We just had a green hypercar. Yeah, we were doing a quick tour of.

2:36:37

Anyway, first time on the show. Please kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company.

2:36:42

Yeah, for sure. I'm Andy McCune. We're based here in New York. 20 person team building the new home for inspiration on the Internet. Visual search engine just announced our series eight today. Super exciting. Fifteen million dollar round and.

2:36:46

Sliding around.

2:37:08

Amazing. Congratulations. Yeah, there's so much to talk about right now and it's such an interesting time to be building this company because there's so. There's just like an explosion of content. You get a pretty picture now, you don't need it, you don't need a camera. Anybody can generate one from their own home. Why don't maybe we start and you can give us kind of the history of the company, what the initial, maybe.

2:37:09

Even go back further about the previous company you worked on.

2:37:32

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. In 2017 I founded of a couple company called Unfold. So we are like a mobile content creation tool kind of Canva adjacent. Ended up selling that company to Squarespace. Did a few years there leading creator product strategy and I've been working on Cosmos for the last four years or so now. And yeah, I'm a really creative person, always working on a lot of different creative projects and I very much grew up on Tumblr back in the day and ever since then I've been an obsessive collector and curator of things on the Internet. Always just saving things to a million folders on my desktop and folders on my phone, things just in all of my different bookmarking folders on different platforms. So Cosmos just started out as me wanting to build a place where I could bring all of these references into one home where everything would be tagged by AI so I could quickly search and resurface anything that I had saved. I wanted to be able to work with collaborators in these different projects. So yeah, I mean just started out as building a side project for myself as everything I ever built has kind of started out as started getting into the hands of my most creative friends and people were like this is awesome.

2:37:37

And so were those friends, the ones that were uploading the original content. Were you scraping the Internet to bring on the first and seed the community? Where was the actual content coming from?

2:38:46

Yeah, we weren't scraping anything. It's always come from the users. We have great importing tools and people. People can upload links from a lot of different platforms and around the Internet. So yeah, all of the content is seeded by the community which has grown in a really, really beautiful way with tens of millions of images on platform now an amazing global search, all of the recommendation layer that you would expect from a product.

2:38:56

What were the early adopters looking for is it more like. Because when I think about image search, I think about people that are doing home renovations, but also, also designers that are looking for inspiration for clothing or web design. There are some people that just sit there and scroll just to enjoy their favorite images. Like you enjoy your favorite books. What were the early drivers of growth?

2:39:19

Yeah, I think we amassed a wait list of a few hundred thousand folks before we launched the product. And I think if you look at the cohorts of users that were coming in really early, it was designers across every discipline. We're talking interior designers, architects, graphic designers, designers, brand designers, photographers, folks like this, which really helped seed such an amazing, you know, original corpus of content. But really where we're seeing a lot of the growth come from now is sort of this, you know, Gen Z wave. You know, I call them kind of the next generation of Tumblr, kid.

2:39:43

Sure.

2:40:13

You know, they, they love to mood board for fun. You know, maybe they're not saving typographical references on a day to day basis because, you know, they need it for their client work, but maybe they're just dreaming up a version of themselves that they aspire to be and they want to surround themselves with beautiful things.

2:40:13

Yeah. And then how have you been grappling with the AI generation? Image generation boom. You started the company four years ago, pretty much pre AI content essentially. Now it's indistinguishable. What's the journey been like?

2:40:29

And there's so much pressure on each platform to take a stance. Right now when you look at most of the platforms, the stance is like, AI content is welcome here.

2:40:47

We need to get tagged.

2:40:55

Yeah, we may try to tag it.

2:40:57

Yeah.

2:40:58

But it's being harder and harder.

2:40:59

But for a lot of platforms you just have to search. Okay, I only want to see images before 2022. And it's like almost like an archive that can be really good. But yeah, just how have you been processing it?

2:41:00

Yeah, for sure. I think that we're definitely seeing a lot of backlash within the ecosystem against a lot of other platforms where AI generated content is kind of proliferating, all of the feeds and people are engaging with stuff that they don't even know is AI generated content. And maybe they search the thing and then they click into it and they see that it's labeled by AI and they find that really frustrating. And we're definitely growing a lot of users now that we kind of consider like refugees from this. You know, we really want to be a platform that champions human creativity and human created content now that's not to say that we're drawing a hard stance against AI generated content, but I think that it's really important that people are able to decide what they want to see. And so we've done, you know, what some of these other platforms have done as well is every image that gets uploaded on platform, we're running it through, you know, multiple different algorithms to detect if they that is AI generated. And so every user has settings within their profile where they can choose to show or hide AI generated content. Yeah.

2:41:14

Interesting.

2:42:14

And then how confident are you that you're catching all of it?

2:42:15

Yeah, I mean it's an uphill battle, right? I mean it keeps getting better. You have to keep retraining the models. It's only going to get more difficult. So I think that it's only a matter of of time before it's pretty difficult to.

2:42:20

There's also some AI models I've noticed where I will upload an image, ask it to do something and it kind of just spits out the exact same image. Or maybe it just like adds a piece of text and it feels like it didn't actually run a new diffusion model. It just sort of used some tool to like layer over text and it's like, well, it's kind of just acting as an agentic Photoshop at that point. It's not really creating an AI like all the details and fingers are the same because it's literally the same pixels that it's just using. And so does that count? Yeah, it's going to be all hairy. I'm interested to know how you think about for you pages, algorithmic feeds versus search and being more of a search engine is that line blurring? What are the important trade offs? What do you like and dislike about algorithm design?

2:42:33

Yeah, for sure. So we have a for you page on Cosmos that's that learns your taste and learns your interests as you say things. I think it's important that you have something like that so people have a new vector that they can discover content through. What's really interesting is the search problem is actually very similar to the for you problem, especially when you get into the world of serving people. Personalized search. Right. So you train your for you we have an idea of what your tastes and your aesthetic leanings are. And then when you search something, you're actually just adding that keyword over sort of this vectorized database of visual aesthetic that you've already identified with. So the problems are actually very related and intertwined. I think one thing that we've Done. That's really interesting is we've started developing in house aesthetic prediction models. So we've actually been using all of our own data, user data, user uploaded content and we've been training models that understand what good versus bad looks like. And we're using these aesthetic predictions to loosely re rank our search results in our for you pages to try to keep the slop off of the platform. We believe slop wars.

2:43:22

You're deep in the slop wars. Frontline soldier here in the foxhole. I salute your service.

2:44:28

I think we believe that your outputs are a reflection of your inputs. And so it's very philosophically important that we're feeding people high quality inputs because so many creative projects start with the mood boarding phase. And so if the inputs are going to become the output, it's really important that we're giving people a place where they can find the highest quality things.

2:44:36

What's been the growth loop for you? What's been the key to growth? I know that you've been featured by Apple as one of the top 25 apps for 2025. Your 500,000 followers on Instagram. But is there a traditional referral flow? What are you using from the Web 2.0 boom era versus viral social playbook? What's been the big growth engine? Have you had to just run ads? What's worked?

2:44:54

Yeah, we haven't been running ads. I mean it's really been organic up until this point. We had an early invite friend flow which was pretty successful for us. I think that that's not as successful as it was a few years ago when we ran it. But I think the nature of Cosmos is really cooperative. You start what we call a cluster is like a collection. You start a cluster, you start inviting your collaborators to those, the experience gets so much more valuable. And we're seeing really high density as well within some of the best creative teams in the world. We have hundreds of users on platform on nike.com email we have teams at Chanel using Cosmos, teams that Apple using Cosmos. So that density within creative teams has been really, really powerful for us.

2:45:23

And then monetization, I feel like you're going to be anti ad just because as soon as you have an ad it's hard to influence. Like, okay, you can't say like well, you can only serve pretty ads for $50,000.

2:46:06

You can post the sloppiest AI slop with six fingers. But we're going to charge you pretty ad any. No, no, I want to know the real monetization strategy.

2:46:18

Yeah, for sure. So we're not monetizing yet. I mean, we have a premium subscription right now, but it's pretty demoted within the product. I think there will be a lot that we have yet to reveal, but I think that where we're going is going deeper on sort of focusing on those creative teams that are using Cosmos and how can we better serve those folks. And then we're also starting to build into commerce as well. So we launched a commerce pilot last year and you can imagine we're running hundreds of thousands of searches a day right now on the platform. And if someone searches for brown leather couch, they're probably looking to buy a brown leather couch.

2:46:28

That makes sense.

2:47:02

How can we create a compelling commerce experience that doesn't feel like we're trying to force products down your throat, but it's really commerce through inspiration?

2:47:05

Yeah, yeah. It's like aesthetic first, taste first, as opposed to like feature set price. Like all the filters that you see when you're on Google shopping, those are probably going to be way lower in the funnel than the aesthetic that you're looking for.

2:47:13

Yeah. Shoppable mood board. You can think of people doing inspiration for interior design, their wardrobe, all this stuff. It's like that's a high intent moment when somebody's trying to.

2:47:26

Yeah. Can you explain a little bit more about the. The aesthetic trends that are popular? I've seen these different phrases used to describe how certain people describe their whole aesthetic. How would you describe the communities that have formed around these modern sub niche aesthetics?

2:47:39

Yeah, it's a really interesting question. We launched a new feature today, so we gave the profile a really big refresh. Historically, everything that you saved had to go within a cluster. The release that we put out today gives you a core feed of images that sit at the forefront of the profile, which is really akin to your Tumblr blog back in the day. It's really a snapshot of your taste and what you're into. We're starting to go really deep on the datas and the trends that we're seeing on the platform between what people are searching, what clusters are they creating, all of those sorts of things. We're going to start putting out trend reports, which we're really excited for. And we've started sort of seeding these into our newsletter, which has been really, really fun. That's great, that's cool. But yeah, it's been really cool to see these different sort of niche aesthetics blossom. I think historically a lot of the usage has been just around. Again, the core use cases that we were talking about graphic design, interior design, whatever. But if you think about something like Tumblr. Right. There was fandoms that were popping off and, like, emo aesthetics and culture. Right. So we're starting to see some of these pop up, but it's a little early to tell, but we're really excited to start publishing these more publicly.

2:48:01

Okay, last question. For your personal aesthetic, the pantone color of the year for 2026 is Cloud Dancer. It's a soft, lofty white that symbolizes calm, peace, and fresh starts. Underrated or overrated?

2:49:08

You know, I'm a neutral palette guy, but I know it was really, you know, contentious within. Within the creative community. I think we could have gone a little bit more creative with it, but I'm never going to hate on a neutral palette.

2:49:23

Okay.

2:49:35

This is pretty out of. This is pretty out of pocket for me.

2:49:35

Okay.

2:49:37

Okay. So it sounds like Cloud Dancer might be working its way into your.

2:49:38

It's a good name. Spooky in the X chat says, how do you avoid creating an automatic house aesthetic if you're algorithmically filtering slop? Any thoughts there? Like, yeah, it's part of this. Like, it is. So, yeah, like, a lot of generated that somebody might have. Like, yeah, you're not trying to, like, have an overarching aesthetic other than, like, somebody could come on and create a bunch of clusters for an aesthetic that. That is not aligned with your personal taste or business.

2:49:41

Yeah. Like Cosmos, the art Station look became the Mid Journey look, and then now that just looks like the AI Art look. But. But what if you're actually just into matte painting? You're going to get filtered Maybe.

2:50:11

I don't know.

2:50:23

Yeah. I think the point of the aesthetic prediction model is less to pedal what we think is good and is more to set a bottom bound on what we think is bad. And so that bar is set pretty low. But it's a great question. We're continuing to retrain the aesthetic models that we have, and we're kind of going through this right now where we're trying to widen the aperture of that to service more folks and to reach a broader audience. So I don't think there's a clean answer to it other than just like, continuing to iterate on your models and pass them into production and measure and learn from there.

2:50:24

Very cool. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come hop on the show. Great to meet you and good luck. Congratulations.

2:51:00

Great to see you.

2:51:06

We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. The New York Stock Exchange want to Change the world, Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. And with that we will. Oh, you can hear, I hope you can hear it.

2:51:07

I don't know if it's coming through.

2:51:20

The 21C is fired up. That V8 is roaring. And we have Michael from FabFitFun and Deep33 in the restream waiting room. We'll bring him in the TVPN ultra dump. How are you doing?

2:51:21

Welcome to the show.

2:51:32

Welcome to the show.

2:51:32

Hey guys, doing great. Good to be here.

2:51:33

Thanks so much for hopping on. Give us the news.

2:51:35

I want to ring this. First of all, this jacket is fantastic.

2:51:38

You have news for us.

2:51:41

I mean you guys always dressed to impress and I didn't want to let you down.

2:51:43

So incredible.

2:51:46

Thank you. You raised some money. How much did you raise?

2:51:47

We've got 150 million dollar fund. We've closed.

2:51:50

Let's go.

2:51:58

150 million dollar fund. What sub markets are you most interested in? What strikes, strategy, what stages? How are you thinking about focusing your investing work over the fund life cycle?

2:51:59

Yeah, so we are a deep tech fund focused on the US Israel corridor. So we'll be investing across US and Israel. And so you know what's unique, especially about the kind of the Israel ecosystem focus is there isn't a deep tech fund, let's say in the mold of let's, you know, an eclipse, a deep sea vc, Lux Capital, focus on that ecosystem and we just think there's enormous opportunities.

2:52:11

What are the great recruiting hubs for entrepreneurs in defense in Israel? We've heard about Talpio and a few other groups. Where are you finding talent? Are they, you know, ex founders themselves? Repeat founders. Where are you sourcing deals from?

2:52:41

So interestingly actually the former commander of Telpiote is actually one of my partners in the fund.

2:53:02

There you go.

2:53:07

For those of you who aren't familiar with Tel Piote, you know, there's a lot of different elite units in the idf, but Telpiot is the unit of the physicists. It was a bet that the IDF made to really train physicists and combine that with the defense industry. So we do, we, we work closely with, with, you know, the, the different groups. Another M partners is from 8,200, which many of you might be familiar with, is kind of the cyber unit within the idf. We have tentacles into, into those alumni groups and networks as well as a lot of the institutions of higher learning. So Weitzman Institute, Technion, etc, you know, we're, we're kind of, I'm actually the only non Israeli on the team of five partners. So we're deep in that ecosystem.

2:53:08

Five partners, that's cool out the gates. It's sort of the counter position pretty squarely against a solo.

2:53:57

Solo gp. Yeah, there are a lot of people that were doing that. Yeah. How do you all meet and what was the concept between the maybe larger partnership at this phase? I don't know.

2:54:03

Yeah, so we have a, what we call an expert first model. You know, my main, my main code GP is Leor Prosor, who has been a venture capitalist for 15 years, decided to start a new platform because of the opportunities we thought were emanating specifically in deep tech and out of the Israeli ecosystem. But to do deep tech right, you actually have to have, you know, significant capabilities to go deep on the technical side, to have people who are domain experts. And so three of our other partners are actually domain experts in the categories that we're most bullish on. One being quantum computing, the second being AI infrastructure, a third being energy. And then we also have a venture partner and advisor in the robotics side.

2:54:13

How are you thinking about point solutions versus defense platform companies? Are you looking for a multi process product defense firm that can build sensor towers and drones and submarines, or do you want to invest in a bunch of different teams that are doing small, small, like smaller product bets, see what works and then maybe scale out of that? Like what's the current meta on the ground in Israel?

2:55:00

Yes. So interestingly, although, although, you know, defense is an important part of the ecosystem and shoots off a lot of the innovation that we are investing into. We don't think of ourselves as a defense fund. In fact, we're not focused on kind of kinetic battlefield focusing companies. Although a byproduct of the types of companies and technologies that we are investing in, oftentimes do have defense ramifications and capabilities on the battlefield field. We just think that the commercial opportunities of those technologies, when they extend beyond defense kind of specific companies are much bigger. They can have much bigger outcomes. So there's a lot of dual use in the types of things that we're looking at. And what we're looking for is just insanely capable founding teams, really groundbreaking kind of technology and IP and, and enormous end markets. And you know, when, when you look at the kind of the confluence of things of that that Israel has in terms of the defense industry, the institutions of higher learning, the concentration of elite scientists, RF industry, silicon industry, optics industry, et cetera, there's really, you know, the only other geography in the world that has that sort of Concentration of those types of mixes of assets is really California. And you see what California, California produces. So we think Israel is kind of this looming deep tech giant. In a lot of ways. The ecosystem there in deep tech is kind of where cybersecurity was maybe a decade ago in Israel. And now it's this powerhouse that's producing these, you know, just insane outcomes. We think over the next decade the deep tech outcomes from Israel are going to be right up there.

2:55:33

Where did the name come from?

2:57:14

Oh yeah.

2:57:16

So I think deep speaks for itself. You know, one, we go deep and we, and we're focused on deep tech. And 33 is actually, it has a mystical connotation in Judaism. It's the, it's the day of Lagba Omer, which is a Jewish holiday where the kind of the depth of the hidden secrets of the universe were revealed for the first time. And that's what we really think our founders are doing. Our founders are companies and kind of the mission of the firm is to go into the technological and scientific frontiers and we think of that as a way of revealing hidden truths. That the type of work that these companies are doing, what we're trying to build is really frontier tech and new innovation that moves the world forward and moves our understanding of the world forward.

2:57:18

That's cool. Last question for me, Energy. Do you put that in the deep tech realm? Are there particular areas within energy that you're interested in? Solar, nuclear, wind, anything?

2:58:04

Yeah, it's a great question. Absolutely. We actually have two energy companies already under our belt. We, you know, in particular, kind of our thesis on energy is, is where the point of production and the point of consumption are brought together.

2:58:15

Sure.

2:58:32

So where can you create unique types of energy output? Puts on location on site. So for instance, if one company we haven't announced is able to produce carbon fuels, carbon based fuels out of a laboratory, and there's a scale up model around that that we think is extremely compelling. The name of the game for a lot of, you know, U.S. security interests, Israel security interest, and the shared interest between the two of them is this kind of supply chain resilience. I think we saw the President speaking at Davos and, and even you know, describing maybe, you know, the kind of the counter swing of globalization is here. And that means people having these, these capabilities on site being less reliant on any specific partner and trade for their national security. And so that ability to bring things on site becomes incredibly important.

2:58:33

It's amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations.

2:59:35

Next time you join, you can join from Tel Aviv, I'm assuming. Are you calling in from LA right now?

2:59:39

I'm actually calling in from New York here. It's deep 33. We're across LA, Tel Aviv and New York. So the team all came together, announced the fund and do some critical work together, so amazing.

2:59:45

Well, I'm sure you'll be back soon. Yeah, congrats. Thanks for talking fun together.

2:59:58

Have a good one. Goodbye. CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.

3:00:02

That's right.

3:00:11

Up next we have Aaron Katz. He's the co founder and CEO of Clickhouse. He'll be joining in just a minute. In the meantime, let's head over to the timeline. Elon Musk has confirmed that he's unhappy with the Twitter algorithm. Data Hazard said the Twitter algo has gone to hell. I want to again see obscure technical posts from outside my follows, not this cornucopia of low IQ rage slop. That's an interesting coinage. Elon chimed in said, I agree. Sigh. So that's the thing. Anytime that there's a bad day on the timeline, bad week on the timeline, I feel like they're pretty aggressive about just mixing it up. I don't know, you might not like the new thing, but it's going to be different. Command Z see some doing stuff and there's been some fantastic deep fakes of Elon Musk as the farmer from Babe Pig in the City, looking at the slop and being sad. So fun day on the timeline. Good that there will be some changes coming. Anyway, without further ado, we have Aaron Katz from Clickhouse. Welcome to the Stream. Thank you so much for hopping on the Stream show. Good to meet you. How's your year going so far?

3:00:12

Well, the calendar year is behind us, but our fiscal year is about to finish the end of this month and it's going really well. We got, you know, whatever eight or nine days left and you know, we're off to off to a good start to finish the year in the fiscal quarter and get the new year up and running beginning of February.

3:01:17

What's the theme of 2026 for the company is just more AI. It feels like AI is so obvious, but also so what else are you going to focus on?

3:01:34

Well, Clickhouse has been a backend database to a lot of agentic workflows over the past couple years. Even before the ChatGPT moment, we're being used by lovable cursor anthropic OpenAI pretty much every leading AI company right now is using Cluckhouse in some sort of capacity, but it's just not AI companies. We're the back end to technologies like Ray Ramp, for example. You're a sponsor if you talk to Eric. We power most of the analytical experiences if you're a Ramp customer. And so it's just kind of doubling down on what's gotten us here. It's a very large surface area that we're going after and just kind of broadening the competitive landscape.

3:01:44

Have there been any challenges on actually scaling the business from an infrastructure size? You're at a scale where many AI companies are, are struggling with data centers, GPU poor. How has the actual build vs buy decision changed over the last few years? How has the infrastructure side of the business changed?

3:02:23

Yeah, well, scalability is one of Clickhouse's strengths and always has been. I mean we've got. You just talked about Elon's. Many of Elon's companies are using Clickhouse. Tesla's a great example of that, where they're ingesting a billion events per second into Clickhouse and there just isn't another database in the world.

3:02:45

I think you need to start listing off who's not using Clickhouse.

3:03:02

Yeah, just tell us who's not a customer and then it'll be quicker.

3:03:07

Yeah, fair enough. I mean you just kind of get your head around the volume of data that these LLMs are generating and the ability to ingest that in efficient way to be able to store and analyze that. You know, Clickhouse really shine. So scalability is something that we, we really promote and our customers talk about as one of the unique characteristics of Clickhouse.

3:03:11

Yeah, how are you thinking about just walking through the ladder of different analytic suites and analytic functions and just case studies that can actually, that are best practice today. I mean people are familiar with, you know, like big data mapreduce, you know, count a bunch of things across a bunch of databases. We're in a much more modern era. What are you seeing companies do that's unique, surprising, interesting, or uniquely enabled by Clickhouse?

3:03:29

Yeah, you mentioned MapReduce or any sort of kind of batch oriented processing. It's all moving towards real time and Ramp is a great example of that. If you're a user or customer of RAMP and you want to run analytics on spend patterns inside of your company, you're not going to wait two to five seconds for that dashboard to render, that graph to update or the report to produce results. You expect to see those in Milliseconds. And so there's just this broad shift from an analytical perspective to real time experiences. Batch processing, even waiting three to five seconds for any sort of dashboard to refresh is just an eternity. And so that's a big pull to why people are moving towards Clickhouse.

3:03:59

Oh, sorry, Jordan.

3:04:42

Yeah, I wanted to ask about the engineering culture. Last week we were at a dinner and somebody was telling me about, I'll kind of mix up some of the details, but they were telling me about like an investor was going through the diligence process with Clickhouse and Click. You guys had shared like that they couldn't believe how few engineers had created some of the early technology and they just honestly didn't believe it. So I wanted to ask about kind of the early engineering culture and how that's evolved and what you guys are doing on the talent side that has allowed you to work with so many of these massive important companies.

3:04:43

I mean, I love that question. I don't get it often enough. The engineering team at Clickhouse, the broader community behind Clickhouse, but the creators and the committers that are part of our company are the best engineers that I've ever worked with. And I've been in the industry for quite some time. I know you've had Marc Benioff on your show several times. I spent 12 years at Salesforce. It had an incredible engineering culture. The team that we've assembled here is specifically in infrastructure software is the best in the world. And you're right, it was a very small team of primarily Russian engineers inside of a company called Yandex, which was commonly referred to as the Google of Russia, that actually created Clickhouse originally. Originally, my co founder, Alexei Milavitov, who lives in Amsterdam, is the one that actually named it. It's short for clickstream Data Warehouse. He was thinking about the data warehouse use case when he created the database itself and then made the brave decision to open source it in 2016. And that's essentially you just expose your source code to the world and then anybody can adopt and deploy the technology with no attribution to the creators of the software without any sort of commercial relationship. And it was a small team. It was a dozen engineers who were the primary committers that created this incredibly powerful feature rich database. And it's a total joy to work with this group. They're all in Holland, in the Netherlands now, all part of our company, continue to advance the project and then we've built a managed service that runs in the cloud called Clickhouse Cloud that they're Also contributing to and that's the primary business model. And this is a managed service that runs on Amazon, Google and Microsoft infrastructure and then in Asia and primarily in China we have a partnership with Alibaba.

3:05:24

How are you thinking about the way that developers and teams are selecting database backends data storage products in the age of agentic coding? I feel like we talk to a lot of folks who they go to an agentic coding solution. They say I want to build this type of application, I want to build some custom piece of software and the database choice is sort of made for them by the coding agent. And this feels like it's hyper relevant at the va, the DIY hack project level. But is this something on your radar where you think that in a few years maybe it's already happening. How you show up in LLM search results and how the different AI agent coding models feel about Clickhouse will be important to your business?

3:07:10

Well you know Anthropic spoke at our event last year in San Francisco. Cisco, so did OpenAI and Tesla and Anthropic discovered Clickhouse by asking Claude what they should be using for observability. And Clyde said you should be using Clickhouse. And I had a had a call with the CEO of a very large fintech company in Europe last week and he said every we ask what we should be using for this new real time analytics product we're building suggest Clickhouse. And so you know fortunately a lot of people are turning to these LMS for guidance on what technologies they should be, they should be adopting. And I think as everybody knows like you know it, decision making has been completely turned on its head from kind of a tops down C level mandate. You're going to use Oracle, you're going to use IBM now to a developer led evaluation and open source creates such a fast path for a developer who's building an agentic application to deploy experience, experiment, experiment with technology without any sort of vendor relationship they can actually push it to production. For some of these agentic applications without any sort of vendor relationship open source is completely disrupting, you know how these LLM providers and enterprises are deploying these applications and we made an acquisition last week that we announced on Friday alongside our financing that we're super excited about. It's a company out of Berlin called Langfuse and they have built built an industry leading LLM observability application so that now enterprises can observe the types of experiences their users are developing on these LLM applications.

3:08:09

Very cool. How are you processing all the chaos in SaaS right now, the sell off, broadly the industry's transition went through, you know, couple decades where big question about.

3:09:45

The shift from seats to consumption or performance result.

3:10:00

Yeah, there's so many, there's so many, I feel like open questions how much of a threat are new? You know, you probably laugh when people say like oh, I made this database with a prompt and you're like, okay, well you're missing like you know, the hundred other features that you know, an enterprise is really going to care about. But after spending, you know, more, more than a decade at Salesforce and then running Clickhouse, I'm curious what your point of view is.

3:10:04

Yeah, you know, John mentioned this move from a seat based model to consumption or usage based. Which infrastructure isn't that unique? I mean it's been around for quite some time. Like our customers simply pay for what they use, which is a combination typically of storage and compute. And these are very kind of AI intensive applications. And, and what's unique about our service is that it automatically scales up and down so you don't need to provision all of the compute that you otherwise would because a lot of these analytical workloads are quite kind of spiky in nature and you want the application to be able to idle during periods of inactivity, for example. And so I do think that you know, these traditional seat based, although I think we should separate like traditional business applications like Salesforce and Workday from kind of infrastructure software which is much more of kind of the plumbing of the Internet and the stuff that you don't see necessarily when you look at a mobile app or you look at a business app or consumer app, it's a lot of the processing that occurs behind the scenes is primarily where we exist. I'll give you an example where I would historically use some sort of BI reporting to build a graph or a chart to show me to how, how the business is performing. You know, build me a bar chart that shows revenue growth or build me a stack bar chart that shows regional revenue distribution, things like that. And I'd go to some data analyst and they'd go and find the source data and they'd spend a week pulling this together and we'd have like multiple reviews. I now simply ask Anthropic. So we've integrated Anthropic's, you know, cloud, I think is 4.5, their latest model with our own MCP server and then a Clickhouse cloud service that has all of the, of our customers, not our customers data, but our customers use of our service. And I can ask that prompt, like, build me a bar chart that shows these dimensions. And it builds it in like five seconds. And it's just. And it cost me 20 cents. That single prompt and that simple semantic search is generating like dozens of SQL queries. All of those SQL queries are all being stored in Clickhouse. And if you think about the characteristics of these agentic experiences, like the number one requirement is latency. They have to be low latency in terms of the interactivity between the text prompt, whether it's chatgpt or anything else where you put in that query, and then the database itself that's actually storing the data that's providing the response.

3:10:28

Yeah, it's fascinating how much of a global company Clickhouse is the Alibaba Partnership the Russian history with Yandex we were reading a post about selling software in Japan and how the Japan software buyer often will want to read a lot of documentation and details before jumping on a call with a sales associate. Does that match with your reality in Japan? What can you tell us about the difference of buyer across different countries that you've experienced throughout your career? Like what's the key to global growth broadly?

3:12:50

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, so you know, half of our employees are outside of the United States. We employ people in 22 different countries. Half of our customers are outside of North America, half of our revenue comes from outside of the U.S. so the company is extremely diverse internationally. I had the good fortune in 2005. So 21 years ago, Marc Benioff asked me to move to Singapore and I spent four years helping Salesforce expand across the Asia Pacific region. And at the time, Japan, I believe, was the second largest country behind the US ahead of the uk, Germany, France. In terms of revenue contribution. I don't think I can be quoted on that because I'm not necessarily true. It's number two or three, but it was like top five and I would argue it was probably top two if my memory serves me correctly. And you could add South Korea to that same description of just how unique these markets operate and how localized the selling effort is. We recently did and I've seen both models and one being you do a joint venture and where you partner with a local company and you share the risk and you share the economics and you share the upside and they leverage local relationships in the market and local market knowledge, etc. Or you try to do it yourselves and establish your own KK in Japan. And I've gone down both paths and, and learned a lot of lessons along the way. And so here at Clickhouse, we did a joint venture in Japan. We recently announced that, with a firm called Japan Cloud, and they were previously Sunbridge, which is the firm that did Salesforce.com's joint venture, and so worked with these folks for, you know, two decades now. And so, yeah, it's a highly localized market. The buying behavior is very different in Japan and in South Korea than other parts of Southeast Asia, putting aside Greater China or Australia, New Zealand or the Indian subcontinent. So it's a huge market, but not many companies get it right. Honestly, they try to do it themselves versus leveraging local expertise. We also brought on some investors, a firm called Geodesic Capital, and that's run by an individual named John Rus. And John, I believe he's still on the board of Salesforce, but he was the previous ambassador for the United States to Japan. And just having those types of relationships are very important for a company like ours, that we frankly don't have the same level of awareness in Japan that we do here in Silicon Valley or, you know, in New York.

3:13:27

Yeah, makes sense.

3:15:52

Makes a lot of sense.

3:15:53

Fascinating. Jordan, anything else?

3:15:54

Yeah, very cool. Thank you.

3:15:56

Let you get back to your day. Thank you so much for hopping on the show.

3:15:57

At this rate, I'm sure there'll be many reasons to have.

3:15:59

We have to ring the gong. There's a recent fundraise. Can you tell us the details?

3:16:02

Yeah, happy to. We weren't running a process or raising capital. There's a lot of investor interest. And so we ended up pulling a round together kind of over the holidays that was led by Dragonair here in San Francisco. And we ended up raising 400 million. We had participation from a number of our existing investors and a few new investors.

3:16:07

Incredible.

3:16:30

So pulled together over the holiday. We've talked to a lot of VCs who said that it was easier to do deals over the holidays. There were less distractions at the office, and so plenty of time to hop on the phone with, like, a tight partnership, get something through. So congratulations.

3:16:31

Love it.

3:16:45

All right, well, I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.

3:16:46

Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Goodbye. Turbo Puffer, Serverless vector and full control search built from first principles on object storage. It's fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.

3:16:47

We are puffing.

3:16:59

We are puffing.

3:17:00

Back to the timeline. Did we miss anything else?

3:17:02

Yes. We missed the fact that Keith Rabois has hit 5,000 Barry's classes. Some people would say that's too many it's an incredible amount. Only possible, I think, mathematically because he does multiple per day. But what an absolute generational run, sometimes a literal run. On the Barry's treadmill from Keith Raboy Demis Hassabis from Google told Alex Heath at Sources that he has no plans to put ads in Gemini. It's interesting they've gone for that so early, he said of OpenAI putting ads in ChatGPT. Maybe they feel they need to make more revenue. What's interesting is I feel like, yes, it's like, at what level do the ads bake in? Because you can access some level of Gemini model through the AI search overviews, the enhanced results that come from Google searches, and they've already monetized those and it doesn't ruffle any feathers. Of course, on this show we're very proactive and my answer, my response to demos should be, let's do it, buddy.

3:17:06

Let's put some ads right.

3:18:18

I'm ready for ads in Gemini 3 Pro. But of course they're in a very different position. The business is much larger, much more, much more established, and so they have much more flexibility with timing these things. I do wonder, you know, the, the whole ads and ChatGPT news cycle. It was released on, on a Friday. It was very much crowded out by the Elon OpenAI lawsuit. It had been rumored and discussed multiple times. Sam Altman had mentioned it in many different podcast appearances. He talked to Ben Thompson about what he liked about Instagram's ads. He had been messaging Fiji Simo came on, defined a couple things, had talked to us on our show about it. And so, so people, it was a very slow process of building up this idea that ads will be coming to ChatGPT. And the benefit of that is that it's not just all of a sudden, hey, the thing that I like now, stuff full with ads. It's been a very slow rollout. I think it's been deliberate. I think it's smart. I think it works well. We've been discussing whether or not the first chat app to add digital advertising might get a brand new with the scarlet letter of like, that's the one that has ads. And you always remember that one as the one that has ads. Even if they all add them eventually, I don't know that that will happen, but I have yet to see any real backlash across the Internet around, oh, ads are coming to ChatGPT. It's bad. So in general, I feel like the rollout has been handled. Well, I'm sure we'll see More interesting things. When the ads actually go live, people are taking screenshots of them, sharing them them. As long as they partner with good companies like the Ridge Wallet, I think they're going to be, I think people are be thrilled to see Ridge wallet ads in ChatGPT.

3:18:20

Imagine getting one of those like really sketchy like supplement ads. You know they run these on like display. Oh yeah, yeah. Getting one of those.

3:20:06

Yeah. It's like some X ray and it's like this one thing is destroying your metabolism. Doctors hate, Doctors hate this. Yeah. The, the bank of America CEO says he hired 2,000 recent graduates from 200,000 applications. I wonder how much of that is driven by AI applications people. Yeah, some people are wondering how many of those applications are duplicates. You apply to multiple jobs, you can only be hired once. But bank of America, clearly growing humans and the new NeoLab, founded by ex anthropic epic Xai and Google staff, they're trying to build interactive AI. They raised a.

3:20:15

This is a neo Neo Lab.

3:20:55

It's a post neo Lab. They raised a $480 million seed round from Nvidia, Jeff Bezos and others at a $4.48 billion valuation. And it's in the New York Times. You can go check it out. Cade Metz has the story. So that's exciting. We're, we have to do a proper deep dive on the Neolab landscape. What do you have for us, Tyler?

3:20:57

I mean, okay, you said it was post Neo lab. I think it's actually closer to like trad Neolab.

3:21:20

Okay.

3:21:26

I mean it's kind of like look, we're going to release models. They're going to be for consumers.

3:21:27

Okay.

3:21:32

We're going to do it with this human centric view. But it's not like they're going, you know, that we're combining this with Bio Wet Lab or something like this is.

3:21:32

Like the, yeah, like Fei Fei Li's World Labs is many ways more of a post Neo lab than this.

3:21:40

So if I'm, if I'm getting Tyler, this is less about. Okay. I'm going to send off this agent to go work for a week and I'll check in with it when it's done. And more of this kind of like co working approach I believe.

3:21:48

I mean they haven't released much, but it seems like it's hole point is very interactive. I mean the, like I'm the expert on what they've put out, which is very little.

3:22:02

So the name of the company is Humans, plural. And then an ampersand. Humans and, and Dylan Patel says we are all calling this Startup Human Sand. Sorry, I make the rules. It's a fire name.

3:22:12

Nir says, what are you guys actually doing or what are you guys actually making? I literally cannot tell at all.

3:22:25

Well, they haven't been on TVPN yet. They. We haven't broken it down for us. Like we're a bunch of adventure capitalists.

3:22:31

In other news, our very own Dylan Abruscado got a major scoop. Scooping like a Ben and Jerry's employee. He figured out Instagram replaced the following tab or the following sort of word keyword with friends, which are followers you follow back.

3:22:36

Yes. And this has implications. Explain.

3:22:54

Yes, the implications here are that some people aren't following accounts because they want to keep. They have some idea of what their follower to following ratio should be.

3:22:56

Yeah, If I follow 800 people and have 100,000 followers, it looks really elite. But if I'm. But if I have 100,000 followers and 100,000 following followers following, it just looks like I reply, I'm like doing some scheme. I have some bot going or something. I mean, hilariously, Barack Obama had a follow back bot on Twitter, I think throughout his entire presidency. So this comes up all the time. Because someone will find some crazy account and they'll be like, Barack Obama follows this. What's going on? And it's like. Because he follows like 3 million people or something.

3:23:06

Yeah.

3:23:40

Anyways.

3:23:40

But also, this is a continuation of the kind of product decision where they allow people to not show the number of likes a post has.

3:23:40

Right.

3:23:47

They want people to post more if they're not showing the number of people.

3:23:47

That's why sometimes I just see a part that's blank. Because they don't want to show me how many people like it.

3:23:50

Yeah, it's the user gets to decide. I don't want to be. I don't want to be measured by how many people tap.

3:23:55

Right.

3:24:01

So the idea was to encourage people to post more because they're not feeling this pressure to put up crazy numbers.

3:24:02

Oh, I always get 100. If I get 80, I won't feel good that day. So I will just turn that feature off and type.

3:24:08

Yes, correct. So I think they want people to follow more people and. Yeah, we'll see. I don't think this is rolled out to everyone yet.

3:24:13

Yes. And the net effect that you believe will happen is that there will be more following activity on Instagram. So lots of accounts will be followed. Yes.

3:24:20

Yeah. So I will say when I go on Instagram instead of Seeing on this.

3:24:29

This is a very limited test.

3:24:34

Yes, but.

3:24:37

So I see friends. You do, but I don't see the post number. I see the friends, the followers, and following.

3:24:37

Okay, where?

3:24:42

In this screenshot, I think it was. I don't see it anymore. But it was posts.

3:24:43

Oh. So maybe you're in another test.

3:24:47

I'm in a different test. Adam Mosseri is treating us all like guinea pigs over here. Lab rats in his maze. It's great. Anyway, is there anything else you want to talk about?

3:24:49

We got to end on this. This is extremely important. This kid was sent to the principal's office for lying that his uncle was Superman. The next day, his uncle, Henry Cavill, dropped him off at school and Andrew Feldman said, dip shit school.

3:24:58

Andrew Feldman said, Cerebrus, the $22 billion company does not like that. The school sent the kid to the principal's office. But justice was done. Henry Cavill showed up and stole the day. And it's the wholesome side of X. If your algorithm's all sloppy, maybe you need to adopt Andrew Feldman's algorithm because he's got some. Some great posts and he's not afraid to reply to them.

3:25:15

And last, but certainly not least, John Palmer says the TVPN guys are just two Fortnite archetypes. John is maxed out stats. 6 foot 8, 230 pounds, 0v bucks. Still on default skin after a year. No emotes. Pure fundamentals. Jordy's mid cracked, only 6 foot 1 and absolutely loaded with V bucks. Rotates legendary skins, spams, rare emotes on the soundboard every five minutes that I do.

3:25:38

This is extremely accurate.

3:26:05

I certainly.

3:26:06

I feel seen. I feel seen.

3:26:07

John knows us well.

3:26:09

Knows us well. I'm gonna hit the repost on that one. That's a good one.

3:26:11

Anyways, folks, thank you for tuning in today. It's only Tuesday. We got three more shows for you.

3:26:15

Lots more in person guests this weekend or this week. Leave us five stars on Apple. Podcast us on Spotify. Subscribe to the tvpm newsletter@tvpn.com we will live tomorrow at 11.

3:26:20

Wonderful afternoon evening, wherever you are. Yes, we love you.

3:26:33

Goodbye. Nice work, brothers. I'll see you on the next one. You were about to slam on the gas. You were like, I'm taking it for a spin.

3:26:37

That actually would have been so funny.

3:26:59

You were so close to doing it.

3:27:01