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The Arsenal One project in Columbus, Ohio is running incredibly smoothly. We've got about the first 30 and change Ohioans hired already. We hired them about six months ago and then brought them out to California. So they've been at headquarters. We've been building the first few tails of the Fury line. Then they're coming back to Ohio this month. And then we're doing the stand up and provisioning of the line. So the ultimate Arsenal One campus will be about a dozen buildings totaling in the neighborhood of about 5 million square feet total. The first building that's about just shy of a million square feet. It's like 800,000 square feet is fully built. The internal is being constructed now the inside and the production line and all the equipment, all of that test rigs and all of those things are being provisioned and we'll start production on Fury this summer. Building two is the walls are vertical. So that's going up. And then building three is immediately thereafter and building four right thereafter. So we'll be rolling out a new building about every year. Ish. For about the next seven, eight years. You said the Fury Tails are being built one place. Is this. Is this a matter of like building different pieces then bringing them all together? Is there an assembly line? Is it like a manufacturing of. Sorry, A term of industry. Tail. Tail being the full plane. Like a tail number on the plane. Oh yes, yes, yes. Got it, got it. Yes, yes, yes. So the first four or five I'm going to get in trouble for not remember, the first four or five will be built, will be assembled at hq. Yeah. And then test flown at our test range nearby. And then the next one will be the tail number. The whole plane. But then from there on out they'll. Be manufactured in terms of assembly lines. Are we still paying homage to Henry Ford with a. With a plane that moves down and gets things added? Or is it a more integrated process? For Fury's line, it will resemble something in the neighborhood of. Okay. Kind of moves along. Yes. So it'll move from station to station. More like the Grim method. There you go. There you go. There you go. We'll coin that one. We need a gong hit for that. Give it up for perfect. Thank you. Thank you. But the line will resemble closer to that where at station one we do the hydraulics. At station two, do the electronics. At station three you do the fuel system. Something along those lines. And then it's ultimately the Fury line will be 22 stations. And then where the Fury line in particular gets complicated is that we have to do a number of very complicated coatings and paintings on it. So that's a little bit tricky and specific. And then, of course, the propulsion element of it is just very, very complicated. Talk to. I was going to say testament to how far out Mr. Matt Grimm thinks about has been thinking about Fury. Two years ago, when he initially reached out after seeing our demo of buildos, his initial outreach was, hey, I saw what you guys are working on. Can you use it to build robotic fighter jets? And I said, yeah. I mean, depending on how cool they are, of course. And then two years later, here we are. Here we are. Yeah. And what a moment, too, and how validating this is for Dirac. I mean, I feel like part of why you guys are coming out and talking about it together is, I imagine.

Sets. Let's go over to Ben Affleck. Ben Affleck. You know, I, I had a premonition. I had a little preview that this was going to happen. He went on Joe Rogan and gave some very good takes on AI. There's some discussion over how good of takes they are, but I ran into somebody that said that they met Ben Affleck. They were like a proper AI researcher and they said that they met Ben Affleck and he used compute as a noun and they were like, yeah, that was impressive. Like he's talking about like scale and compute. He's actually very, very deep in this, which, you know, he went to Harvard. It's not, it's not shocking, but I think, I think there's just a general vibe that like Hollywood is behind or out of the, or out of the loop to the point where they wouldn't know the big models. They wouldn't have tested them. It's like, no, this is their business. I mean there are some like Joseph Gordon Levitt is pretty chapped in this. Is his wife on that board of OpenAI back in the day? She was, she was, yeah. How you can't get more tapped in than that. Well, hasn't he just been spewing like a safety nonsense? Yeah, he's a big safety guy. He's a doomer or just a safety guy. He's a doomer. Doomer, he said. Today we're announcing a new organization called the Creators Coalition on AI. Well, fortunately we have the counterpoint to that because Ben Affleck is not a doomer. He's actually pretty white pilled and it seemed like a really good interview. Let's play this first clip from Forrest who says that Ben Affleck has great takes across the board. Ryan says, what if he's just Action. Or Claude or Gemini to write you something? It's really shitty. And it's shitty because by its nature it goes to the mean, to the average and it's not reliable. And it's, I mean, I just can't even stand to see what writes now. It's a useful tool if you're a writer and you're going, oh, what's the thing? I'm trying to set something up. Or somebody sends someone a letter, but it's delayed two days and gets. And it can give you some examples of that. I actually don't think it's very likely that it can. It's going to be able to write anything meaningful or in particular that it's going to be making movies. Like, from Holcomb, Like, Tilly Norwood. Like, that's bullshit. I don't think that's going to happen. I think it's. I think it actually. It turns out the technology is not progressing in exactly the same way they sort of presented it. And really what it is, is plateau build. Just, like, sort of visual facts. There was a line in here where. Yeah, there was a line in here where I was like, that is a Carpathy line. Like, he definitely heard this from Carathy. He's listening to Doorkesh for sure. For money. I can't. You can sue me, period. It kind of feels to me like, thing we're talking about earlier, where there's a lot more. The whole idea of, like, these models being mid. That's not quite true. I mean, it's hard with, like, to develop a reinforcement learning environment with a verifiable reward for, like, a great script that will break through. Because even the great scriptwriters have flops that are unexpected. Literally everyone thinks it's great, and then it goes out and it just is a box office bomb. We can pause this for a minute. But later, he actually makes a stronger case, I think, because they're talking about Dwayne the Rock Johnson in the film the Smashing Machine. And Matt Damon is recalling an interview that he did with Dwayne Johnson about his, you know, one of the most climactic scenes in the Smashing Machine that's very emotional. And they. And they. And he asks Dwayne, you know, how did you pick this, you know, motion? He pulls up a sheet because he's sad. And, like, what were you conjuring? What were you drawing on to create that experience as an actor and bring that emotion to the screen? Because Matt Damon's saying, like, I love that. I love that scene. I loved your performance. Where'd that come from? Cause you're. Is he thinking about content without ads in order to draw on the sort of, like, deep, sad emotion? Yes, yes. That might be what does it for you. But, I mean, Dwayne Johnson gave, like, a very emotional response about a family member who was diagnosed with cancer. And he was in the room when she got the news. And so her reaction, he was, like, channeling that. It was very emotional. And then the other one was, I think, about another family member who had substance abuse issues. And so it was just this very unique, unique blend of human experiences that he was able to bring to bear. And I continue to think that the lore and the storytelling that happens outside of a piece of content is as important as the actual content. In many cases this was the same thing with art and the NFT boom. It's not like the scarcity is important, but the storytelling behind the art piece is a lot of it. People like a Van Gogh because they know about him cutting off his ear and all this history and he's in all the history books and everyone just knows Van Gogh. And yes, you can go even with cars, right? It's a car is worth more if the previous owner was significant in some way. Yes, yes, yes. Steve McQueen is going to sell for more. And I think that for certain storytelling elements, for certain stories, that lore of like who this person is and their likeness. And then he also makes a really good point that it's like yes, you can, I mean you can obviously generate something that looks exactly like a Van Gogh right now. You can paint it with someone who knows exactly how to paint like Van Gogh. It's not gonna have anywhere near the value. And when he gets to the idea of just AI generating a Dwayne Johnson movie, it's like, well, he'll sue you immediately. And that's very easy. And you've been able to Photoshop Dwayne Johnson into marketing materials for years. And we've had a system for counteracting that. Like you have to pay licensing fees and that will happen. So he has a good balance. We can go into this second clip from Barely AI. I think that's Trung Fan's company because it's a little bit longer. It's about a four minute piece. So while we pull that up, let me tell you about Label Box. RL Environments, Voice Robotics evals and expert human data. Label Box is the data factory behind world's leading AI teams. Get in the box. Label Box. The Label Box. Let's pull up Ben Affleck diving a little bit deeper and we might have to skip ahead. Yeah, we've been spending time looking at this like my belief is sort of like what's going to happen. So we can skip to like gonna happen with electricity. And it's. And it's don't think it's very likely that it can. It's gonna be able to write anything meaningful or. And in particular that it's gonna be making movies like from whole cloth, like Tilly Nor. Like that's bullshit. Can you pause this? So I think that he, he basically says that like he doesn't think that like an iconic, amazing movie is going to be generated by AI And I sort of agree with that. But I think it's important to consider like what are we defining as a movie? Because we don't really watch movies anymore anyway. People watch content and if you think about it like decades ago people might see one movie a month or one movie a week and that's like two to eight hours a month of screen time. Well now people are doing two to eight hours of screen time a day. But it's these fragmented pieces and so if, if AI seeps into the cracks of. Within the cracks within the cracks and you're. And it's. The goal is not to create the experience of a two hour movie that you show in a theater and you get everyone to come and buy. Joe Rogan's really turned into Dwarkesh for a listers to just come on and talk about AI. Right. It's really. McConaughey. Yeah. Is talking about wanting this like personal LLM. Oh yeah. Where you can log data in. Yeah. That one was a little bit rougher than this. Affleck's got it dialed. Let's continue with that. I think it's. I think it actually turns out the technology is not progressing in exactly the same way they sort of rich side presented it. And really what it is, it's going to be a tool just like sort of visual effects and yeah. It needs to have language around it. You need to protect your name and likeness. You can do that. You can watermark it. Your. Those laws already exist. You can't. I can't sell your picture for money. I can't. You can sue me, period. I might have the ability to draw you, to make you in a very realistic way. But that's already against the law. Yeah. And the unions are going to. The guilds are going to manage this where it's like okay, look, if this is a tool that actually helps us, for example, we don't have to go to the North Pole. Right. We can shoot the scene here in our parkas and you know, whatever it is and but then make it appear very realistically as if we're in the North Pole. It'll save us a lot of money, a lot of time. We're going to focus on the performances and not be freezing our ass off out there and running back inside. Pause for a second. Just like Matthew Tracy. And what if. What were you rebut this? Let me tell you about that Vibe Co where D2C brands, B2B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences and measure sales. Just like on Meta. Continue. Small chance that AI saves Hollywood as. As a Place, right? As a place. Yeah. And the reason for that is one of the issues right now is filming is so expensive in L. A there's so much red tape that people have to go to Atlanta, Canada, Europe, whatever, international. But all the talent, the writers, directors, producers, the platforms, they're still here. Right. It's very depressing, it's a bad vibe. All the restaurants are shutting down, everything's cooked. But if you can start to generate the content here just on your computer, there's a chance that you see a kind of resurgence in, in Hollywood, the place. Right. Yeah. And I think that realistically that is the strategy that, that the industry should take because like having this concentration here, there's already so much talent. Keeping it here and actually embracing AI is much more likely to revitalize the city. Yeah, there's, there's an incredible quote in here. Hopefully we can get to it. Let's. Let's skip ahead and play because he has a line that truly is directly out of Andhraj Karpathy's mouth. That's the thing we were talking about earlier where there's a lot more fear because we have the sense this existential dread, it's going to wipe everything out. But that actually runs counter in my view to what history seems to show. Jevin's paradox is slow, it's incremental. Let's go. I think a lot of that rhetoric comes from people who are trying to justify valuations around companies. We're going to change everything. Literally a carpathy line. Well, the reason they're saying that is because. Because they need to ascribe a valuation for investment that can warrant the capex. He didn't just watch Carpathian. Oh you know Ben Affleck, he's sitting. There taking notes make the Social Network 3. But it's just about Dwarkash and carpathy hanging out and Ilya, it's just about AI research. It's about an exciting neurips and that's it. Applovin profitable advertising made Easy with Axon AI get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today people are already having fun with the memes out of this. I like this amend and pretend Ben Affleck on AI software. I suspect many AI native software companies are misrepresenting their growth and quality of revenue. Use of credits, annualizing proof of concept revenue and lack of annual contracts lowers the overall quality of revenue and ultimately the multiple. I mean this is a joke. You didn't actually say that. But he's not that far off from What? This is a great template. I hope this meme runs way further. Cause it's so good. Banger. I love it. Oh, Forest also clipped Ben Affleck talking about the GPT 4.0. People, let's play this because this is interesting. And while we pull it up, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. We are very pleased to be partnered with Cisco, AI's new frontier, the edge. Let's do it. Early AI, the line went up very steeply and it's now sort of leveling off. I think it's because. And yes, it'll get better, but it's going to be really expensive to get better. And a lot of people were like, fuck this, we want ChatGPT4. Because it turned out like the vast majority of people who use AI are using it to like, as like companion bots to chat with at night. And so there's no work, there's no productivity, there's no value to it. I would argue there's also not a lot of social value to getting people to like, focus on an AI friend who's, you know, telling you that you're great and listening to everything you say and being sick. But that's sort of a side issue. Tyler's just engaged over there. What's your, what's your rebuttal? Let's give Tyler, let's give Tyler rebuttal. Defend AI. I think most of these takes are like, pretty outdated. Okay. Like, writing is actually AI writing. You can still tell that it's AI, but it's like, it's good. It's good. Yeah. Videos are like, I think, like, okay. Okay, sell a screenplay then. Sell a screenplay. Yeah, yeah, shop a screenplay. Do it. Do it. Yeah, but why would I, why would I sell a screenplay? I could just make the whole movie myself. Okay, like, so just make the movie. He has this idea, like, make the finished movie. Call it Netflix instead of. And get a million dollar advance for your movie. Instead of filming in Antarctica, you can just get in the parkas and film it here. Right. You don't need the Parkers either because you can just have them be in normal clothes. That's true. And then it's like, well, you don't actually need the people because you can just maybe fine tune a model so you get consistent characters. And then. Yeah, I will say, I will say just in the last two weeks, I am getting served AI content. That's pretty good. Pretty good. Pretty good. There's some pretty good stuff out there now. A lot of it's like, a lot of it still has that, like, creative human element. Like someone will take an iconic movie scene. Still all about the idea. It's about the idea. And the idea didn't come from the model. It's a bull market for ideas. Yeah, that does feel like the next breakthrough. This idea that Ben saying. I would push back a little bit on Ben saying, like, you're not just gonna be able to generate a film. You will, but it won't be a film in the sense that it won't be Titanic. Won't be something that everyone goes to the movie theater, sits down, watches the same film. It will be a lot of films that are for different people. I don't think there'll be anything. Yeah, but I'm just saying, like, people are gonna. People are gonna create like insane fan fiction style hero's journey, kind of like. Like standardized plot, but for a specific sub community. You'll have like one subreddit where everyone totally watches. And I mean, there is a lot of just slop movie content on streaming platforms right now. You can just go and watch Gap Year. Tyler put Aflac in the Truth Zone. Not everything is. Yeah. Not every movie is according to is. John is Titanic is, you know, Sicario. Like a lot. Look on Netflix. There's a lot of stuff. Yeah, they spent a million dollars. But every time I. Every time I look on Netflix, I'm like, is. These are. These are films. I know there's a lot of slop on there.

Get that into Anduril's kind of way of doing business. There's just a big transition there, but. It seems that's exactly right. There's been this maybe kind of sentiment or joke shoot for nice. Even if you miss, you'll land at Anduril. This idea of like, maybe I don't build a multi billion dollar company as a new neoprime, but I have it, you know, maybe like the not the next outcome is I land at Anduril. Can you reality check that? Because I feel like in practice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no. And I'm just saying I think it's like for founders to understand like what is the actual bar. Because you guys, every, every company that's built a great product, but maybe the business side isn't like fully working yet and they're thinking like, okay, like my product's great, our team's great, I bet we could fit in there. Reality check that. Yeah. So the reason I'm pretty dismissive of it is the. That implies that Andrew will acquire anything or any company that's struggling or not. Yeah. Because Adam's logging all these miles, but he's not exactly doing it. No, no. We do like two a year on average, if that. Right. So he's, he's, he's saying no a lot. A lot. But what we look for in acquisitions is really a sweet spot of two things. One is a very strong engineering team. Like they have to have something that's very compelling and very unique and very interesting. And then the second is a area where we can add a lot of value or accelerant or fuel to their go to market. How do we speed up the timeline? Exactly. And you guys talk a lot with defense founders and you've had a lot on. And folks will consistently talk about how hard it is for the go to market engine. And there's a lot of nuts and bolts around that, that get underestimated around what formal government proposals look like, how to do formal government contracting, security clearances, the government relations kind of lobbying side of this, to be, to be a player on these bigger deals. Then relationships within your customer that are. So you're not just pitching, you know, the guy flying the drone out in the field, you're pitching the whole chain and how it fits into their ecosystem, outfits in the program. There's a whole lot of that infrastructure that to be blunt, like, we're pretty good at. Yeah, we've gotten pretty good at this. So when we find a company that has an incredible team building a really cool Product that's like really unique and interesting, but is maybe struggling there. They haven't seen kind of the ramp that they want. And we see that and say, hey, look, we can help with capital, obviously. We can also help with this go to market engine we've built, this legal infrastructure, this facilities infrastructure, this government relations infrastructure, all of that that will then take your product and can help really accelerate and get it deployed both to the US and to friendly governments around the world. That ends up being the sweet spot. So the reason I would say that the base question that you started from is just completely off base, is like, we're not going to go look and try to find a company that isn't clicking. They don't have a great product, they don't have a strong team, and they haven't sold a lot and then be like, yeah, let's go get them. My sense is that if you're doing. A couple deals a year, it's like, usually like you're going in and being like, we want to buy this company. Yes. Less like, hey, like, things aren't working that well. We should try to sell. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Right. And, and the last point I would make on that is that to date, we've done exactly zero turnarounds. And I think this is a kind of a mental model for us is that, like, in general, we don't really want to be in the turnaround business. So take a. Take something that's struggling and come in and fix it. Like, deploy our team of operators to go fix it. Like, there are plenty of PE firms who are very good at doing that. There are plenty of other organizations who are honestly better positioned to do that for us. We really look for that strong team, strong product, and then where we can really accelerate sales and go make an impact. Very cool. Do you have a favorite? I know I don't want to put you in hot water. There's no chance I'll answer that question.

Is landing. Yeah. Give us an update on the secondary wars. Spicy. Are you the head of investment relations? I'm not, I'm not, I'm not. Alison Lazarus is our. You're the guy she calls to live Smackdown. Yes. To be honest, at some point there's going to be some enterprising young SPV slinger that's like, if I make a really heinous memo, Matt Grimm is going. To pump it, the grim reaper is going to come. So give us some backstory first. Okay, so first I would say that our investor relations is run by this incredibly talented woman named Allison Lazarus. She's great. She works closely with Trey on kind of managing the cap table and all the inbound and interested investors and all of that. So not really my turf anymore. That said, I've had a long running battle against what I would call the Wildcats in the secondary market who have absolutely zero respect for any sort of control of the cap table, like who our investors are, information rights, any of that. And they're just out kind of slinging offers at early investors, early employees, at share prices that are completely insane. And those people don't care whatsoever about the impact that has on the company. Whether that's around 409A valuation or RSU pricing or any of those kind of internal dynamics, they don't give a shit. So they just kind of create headache for us by then, us having to field this inbound. So beyond the headache, the point that I'm really worried about, and I think the SpaceX IPO will be very, very interesting because this is going to be a situation where there are, you know, the tide goes out and there's going to be a lot of people without trunks on. That's just people have been out there slinging, in our case, access to Anduroll or I have limited access to their next round at some insane price that is nowhere close to what the actual price is as set by the market. And then people are buying and that's. Not even factoring in the fees, which. Are sometimes kind of crazy layered fees. So there was this one situation of someone slinging an offer around that was an SPV into another SPV that was buying a chunk of an investor's, an early investor's holdings. So there's like layers and layers of fees and carries on top of that at a price per share that was something like 70% above what the last round traded at. So it's just an insane thing where they're pitching access to a deal they don't have. And I know for a fact that there are. There was a recent indictment announced in New York around a case where someone was, was out slinging and oral SPV that did not have access to Anduril and the guy was just pocketing the cash. And then he was just indicted and arrested at jfk. So like this is a thing that happens. And the reason I bring up SpaceX is not to create more work for them, but that the world of SpaceX. Trillion dollar IPO because the legal fees of unwinding all these wild. It's wild, right? Because there's, there's just, there's a lot of this nesting. And SpaceX is a fantastic company that's been in business for a long time. So there's so many of these nests. Of who owns these types of like Main street investors. It's totally possible that they're thinking, well I got into SpaceX at 200 when you didn't. And then it goes out at 1.5 and that's my retirement. And then it goes out and you're like, where are my shares? And the guys skip town. And the guy skip town just out. Whatever you put in. And not only did you lose the whatever you put in, but you also lost the mental of where you thought you were and what you were planning. You might have been planning a certain. Lifestyle, of course, and the opportunity cost of deploying that capital somewhere, somewhere else too. Right? It's a very big problem. And I've used this joke before, but my joke is that how many investors in America think they own a chunk of SpaceX when they're actually funding their ex roommates boyfriend's coke habit in Miami? And it's like probably a non zero amount. Right? What do you think? What do you think the solution is? Can the community police itself? It seems like obviously like you have a legal team that's working on this stuff, but there is an element of going direct, like you need to get the word out that this is happening. And that's important too. But so this is why we as a company have been more public about this is cause we're specifically trying to send a message to the market that's like we see you, we're aware of you. And like secondaries of course have their purpose. Of course there are early investors who need to liquidate funds or fund life cycle problems, of course. So. So it isn't a blanket comment that all secondaries are bad. They're not. They're not. There is a category of these people who just have like really no respect and are basically just fraudsters, hucksters. And what I think needs to happen is two things. One, the investor community needs to be better at policing ourselves around just who these bad actors are and kind of shining a light on them. And then second, sadly, I think it's going to take law enforcement action, whether the SEC or the FBI. You know, thwacking enough of these folks that that community starts to see like this isn't good for me. And it just kind of puts a damper on that side. As last question for me, Adam Porter Price has been on a tear doing deals buying companies as coo, the best in the biz as coo. What is the key to a great post merger integration? The.

4 million views just on x5000 likes. This is a massive. And so anyways, I'll start by saying that this is fantastic content, beautifully shot. Well that Ty Morse, fantastic team, very well done and great content. Right. People are so curious about what's happening at xai. Right. We want to understand how they're approaching different problems. And Elon talks about it in such high level. He's talking about, you know, AI AGI, super futuristic and then he'll give little details on like some massive build out that he's working on. But he's not in the nitty gritty. One small problem. Yes. Usually a $200 billion company likes to control who's going to go out and do a tell all about the company. Yes. And specifically with Elon companies, if you hadn't noticed, there's not a lot of people that work for Elon companies that, that go and do the podcast circuit. Go talk about everything going on behind. No, I mean at SpaceX, Gwynne Shotwell has given a few speeches mostly at like commencement speeches, like inspirational speeches to colleges and that type of stuff. She's not going on Rogan or different space podcasts or tech podcasts. It's very rare to see content with her. And then Kiko Donchev is their head of launch and he will do engagement with NASA and if there's a real heavy industry focused panel, he might attend. But he's not also, he's also not just hopping on stuff. And then beyond generally he's not trying to create like thousands of superstars. No. Right. He does, he wants you to work for him forever. Yeah, I saw a post in here. But when a company, when, like when somebody, when some, someone super talented leaves, it's not like Elon in general is lining up and saying like, let me do your first round, let me do your first like you know, 10 million, 20 million, 50 million bucks. Right. He's actively trying to incentivize people to not develop big brands. He wants people to stay. Yeah. And he wants to be able to control the messaging. Wait, speaking of that, look at this, look at this Sam Sheffer post he went and found 15 years ago. He did a SpaceX office tour. It is so like, it's just, it's crazy. It just looks like a cubicle office. But in there, Sam Sheffer finds that there's someone who works on propulsion named Matthew McKeown McCune and he's been on propulsion for 17 years and eight months. Like that's exactly, that's exactly what Elon wants a true believer who's riding with him through thick and thin and has probably done extremely well financially, worked on really interesting problems. Is he going to be a household name? Is he going to be a podcast circuit? No. But does Matthew really want that? Probably not. He wants to propel the rockets and that's exactly what he's done for nearly two decades now. So that's the Elon Musk strategy. And you should know that going into that environment, maybe it should be more explained. But it certainly ended in disaster in this. Yeah. The funny thing is I didn't catch all the interview, but they talk about how HR in general is not super formalized at the company and so you can also imagine that PR and the media relations team is not super active. Maybe nobody in HR said, hey, don't go do it an hour long podcast. You know, if you're anybody but Elon, maybe don't do an hour long podcast telling all. And so of course people what happened. Ultimately, Suleiman, he said he's laughing. We don't actually know what happened, but it is odd to go do a to go do an hour long interview. And then quit anyway. So I think like good intentions potentially took the concept which he talks about in here. No one tells me no a little bit too far. But I posted earlier, you can't even share the internal secrets of your AI lab on a cinematic podcast in this country anymore. Brutal. Andrew Curran had some good context here. He said the speculation.

Quality part that you get at the end of the day. Good question. So there's a couple parts, a couple reasons why I'm here in particular to, to support the announcement here. First is that Anduril's on a mission to save the West. It's kind of the, the name of the company baked into that. And it is my firm conviction that part of that journey will be re industrializing the west and re industrializing America. And part of that is getting supply chain teams and get manufacturing organizations, production operations to be more tech forward and be more tech enabled. And just like accounting software and sort of like traditional kind of big, big software platforms, a lot of the core technology in that ecosystem is pretty hard to use. It's almost user hostile. It's just very difficult. So part of the mission here is that like, yes, of course we want to adopt it. Then we want the supply chain that supports us to adopt it. And then in the long run we want more and more and more and more factories operating this way. Because if we're going to compete with China and the rest of the world on the large scale manufacturing, we need to get faster at this. And part of, part of the lag in western manufacturing is exactly that. To your point about the work instructions of a kid's playset that aren't quite right, what happens on a line then is it's like then the line is stopped at Station 7 because the Station 7 instructions. So then you just get like, okay, well then it stopped here, stopped at 6, stopped at 5, stopped at 4. Because that guy is like, I don't know what to do, I can't fit this. So then extrapolate that out across industries and there's just so much wasted time and effort that gets spent on problems like this that I think can be solved with technology. It's a perfect application of where AI can be very powerful to help accelerate the development and the shipping process. So that's one point. And then the other point I want to bring up is that we've seen this very fascinating and honestly unpredicted outcome of our work with Dirac is that by talking to our customers, so talking to the Navy, the Air Force, et cetera, about, about how we are going to scale manufacturing and talking to them about how we go from designs into PDRs and CDRs and MRRs, the whole engineering process to get something designed and fielded, we've been specifically pitching Drock's solution as part of that ecosystem to help them understand exactly this question about how we get from that idea to that work instruction to the factory floor to help us accelerate. And it's been pretty good ahead of sales. In a bizarre way, it's been an accelerant for our sales to help our customers see that we're leveraging this, this newfangled technology, this AI because the government customers are like, what is this AI stuff? How am I going to use it? And we come in and say, here's how you're going to use it. We're going to use it on Autonomy on your end products. You're going to use it in the manufacturing line, you're going to use it in the back office. And here's how it's going to ultimately get you better products fielded for cheaper. Yeah, I want to.

Once or twice a year, flipping through, say, oh, it's this version. No, wait, get that binder off the rack over there to make this different model. On the way that we think about it, right, the way that we've seen it on the design side of things, right, we've seen 15, 20 years of an explosion of excellent software in the design side. And because CAD is so advanced, what we've seen is an explosion in the variants that people are able to design, right? Think about the increasing complexity, the different modular builds. Company like Anduril has modular products where they have different payloads that are reconfigurable. Now think about that from the design perspective, great, we can swap out a bunch of different modules. Now from the manufacturing perspective, that means that you have to have, when you can have thousands of different combinations of things, you now need thousands of different work instructions. Where if one picture is off and one step is off, you have somebody building a completely different thing. And thinking about that from the top level build perspective, that makes sense, right? That's a ton of different configurations. But when we're looking at all the people who make up the supplier base of the companies that make planes, cars, trains, everything in between, we're talking about companies that make pumps and valves, complex mechanical sub assemblies, right? Think about how many different variants those guys have to have now. They're in deep trouble because when they lose the ability to not only have folks on their shop floor that are 30 year veterans who just know off the back of their heads, you know, okay, this is, I remember how we built this last time. I don't really need instructions because all those folks are also retiring. Our entire industrial base and our supplier base is also at risk because we haven't codified all of that tribal knowledge. And that is a key mission of ours as well. Not just to be a rubber band around the variants, but to also codify and capture basically like how do we used to do it, why did we stop doing it that way? Like making sure that's maintained so if a guy doesn't retire, you're not calling him up. Like, what did you used to do in this situation? Exactly. Similar to McKinsey analyst who put together a spreadsheet or a PowerPoint that was like 150 slides. They're like, hey, how did you, what macros did you use? What formulas did you use for this thing? That's another framing to think about it. Except that guy retired. How many products does Anduril have now? Because I think.

Pretty excited to see those messages landing. Yeah. Give us an update on the secondary wars. Spicy. Are you the head of investment relations? I'm not, I'm not, I'm not. Alison Lazarus is our. You're the guy she calls to lay the smackdown. Yes. To be honest, at some point there's going to be some enterprising young SPV slinger that's like if I make a really heinous memo, Matt Grimm is going. To pump it, the grim reaper is going to come. So give us some backstory first. Okay. So first I would say that our investor relations is run by this incredibly talented woman named Allison Lazarus. She's great. She works closely with Trey on kind of managing the cap table and all of the inbound and interested investors and all of that. So not really my turf anymore. That said, I've had a long running battle against what I would call the Wildcats in the secondary market, who have absolutely zero respect for any sort of control of the cap table, like who our investors are, information rights, any of that. And they're just out kind of slinging offers at early investors, early employees, at share prices that are completely insane. And those people don't care whatsoever about the impact that has on the company. Whether that's around 409A valuation or RSU pricing or any of those kind of internal dynamics. They don't give a shit. So they just kind of create headache for us by then, us having to field this inbound. So beyond the headache, the point that I'm really worried about, and I think the SpaceX IPO will be very, very interesting because this is going to be a situation where there are, the tide goes out and there's going to be a lot of people without trunks on. That's just the people have been out there slinging, in our case, access to Anduril or I have limited access to their next round at some insane price that is nowhere close to what the actual price is as set by the market. And then people are buying and that's not even factoring in the fees, which. Are sometimes kind of crazy layered fees. So there was, there was this one situation of someone slinging an offer around that was an SPV into another SPV that was buying a chunk of an investor's an early investors holdings. So there's like layers and layers of fees and carries on top of that at a price per share that was something like 70% above what the last round traded at. So it's just an insane thing where they're pitching access to a deal they don't have. And I know for a fact that there are. There was a recent indictment announced in New York around a case where someone was, was out slinging Anduril SPVs that did not have access to Android and the guy was just pocketing the cash and then he was just indicted and arrested at jfk. So like this is a thing that happens and the reason I bring up SpaceX is not to create more work for them, but that the world of. SpaceX trillion dollar IPO because the legal fees of unwinding all these. Wild, wild, right, because there's, there's just, there's a lot of this nesting and SpaceX is a fantastic company that's been in business for a long time. So there's so many of these nests. Of who owns these types of like Main street investors. It's totally possible that they're thinking, well I got into SpaceX at 200 when you didn't and then it goes out at 1.5 and that's my retirement. And then it goes out and you're like where are my shares? And the guys skip town. And the guy skip town just out. Whatever you put in. And not only did you lose the whatever you put in, but but you also lost the mental of where you thought you were and what you were planning. You might have been planning a certain. Lifestyle, of course, and the opportunity cost of deploying that capital somewhere, somewhere else too. It's a very big problem. And I've used this joke before, but my joke is that how many investors in America think they own a chunk of SpaceX when they're actually funding their ex roommate's boyfriend's coke habit in Miami? And it's like fair amount, it's probably a non zero amount. Right. What do you think the solution is? Can the community police itself? It seems like obviously like you have a legal team that's working on this stuff, but there is an element of going direct, like you need to get the word out that this is happening. And that's important too. But so this is why we as a company have been more public about this is cause we're specifically trying to send a message to the market that's like we see you, we're aware of you. And like secondaries of course have their purpose. Of course there are early investors who need to liquidate funds or fund life cycle problems, of course. So it isn't a blanket comment that all secondaries are bad. They're not. They're not. There's a category of these people who just have like really no respect and are basically just fraudsters, hucksters. And what I think needs to happen is two things. One, the investor community needs to be better at policing ourselves around just who these bad actors are and kind of shining a light on them. And then second, sadly, I think it's going to take law enforcement action, whether the SEC or the FBI. You know, thwacking enough of these folks that that community starts to see like, this isn't good for me. And it just kind of puts a damper on that side. As last question for me, Adam Porter Price has been on a tear doing deals, buying company.

Like, I'm not even. I'm like, I'm spinning out a lot. I'm spending my time. Yeah. The cool thing with a CEO is like, they're playing the game of capitalism and whatever they're saying, you know, at the end of the day, for the most part, that they just want to make their company bigger. Yeah. Whereas with a politician like Ro Khanna is talking about, you know, these insane policies that will, you know, make California, you know, descend into, you know, a tourism and agriculture based economy. And I don't want that for California. I've lived here my whole life. My family has been in California for over 100 years. Like, it's very important to me. But. And I'm not even like, I'm not tapped into this whole Washington thing. And it makes sense when you say, like, okay, he's just doing this to like, prove that he stood up to the tech guys and so that he can go on his presidential run. But I have no interest in, like really engaging in that specifically. Cause there's enough enterprise SaaS to talk about and there's also.

Well, he's also. He's also asking if we should buy. If he should buy Ryan Air. Have you seen this? Yeah, I've seen that. But. But. But I have another. I have another way. Resolved the lawsuit. Okay, so when. When Elon was beefing with Zuck, do you remember when they were going to go in the Octagon? They were going to do. They were going to fight it out. They were going to do ufc, mixed Martial Arts battle. Do you remember what they were fighting over? No. Isn't that hilarious? Do you remember what they were fighting over? No, I can't remember. I can only remember the fight, but I looked it up, and they were fighting because Mark Zuckerberg was about to launch Threads, and it was. And Elon was in this vulnerable position where he levered up to buy Twitter, and he bought it sort of at the top, and Twitter and the whole market was down, and he was legally obligated to buy it. And so there's a lot of debt. There was a big question of, like, what is he going to do with Twitter? Is he going to be able to juice it and get the ad product working? All the advertisers were leaving. He was in a vulnerable position. And that's when Mark Zuckerberg was like, I'm jumping in with my competitor Threads and I'm leveraging the Instagram network. I'm really piping everyone in. It's a shot across the bow. And so Elon said, connor Hayes, absolute dog. Absolute dog. He put Conor in charge. And Elon took it personally and said, we got to settle this in the Octagon. But it never happened. They were thinking about doing the Coliseum. Dana White said, I'll officiate. I'll make it happen. I'm down. I'm into this never happened. But I was thinking, how can Sam and Elon settle their lawsuit that doesn't require a bunch of jurors in Oakland wasting a bunch of time in the courtroom. They got to settle in on the track. They got to get the track pay per view as well. No, no, no. Obviously they're not getting in the Octagon. That's not going to happen. Track is good. Tesla versus F1 starts their own Formula One team. Sam's got his McLaren F1. Yeah, I want to see Sam in the McLaren F1, Elon in the Tesla plaid. I want them around the Nurburgring 24 hours, Le Mans style. They got to go for 24 hours. And then. And then they got to do. They got to do a 0 to 60 they gotta do a quarter mile race. They gotta do an illegal street race for sure. That's definitely gonna happen. They also gotta do a drift track. I wanna see them both drifting. And they probably gotta do a Pikes Peak as well. I wanna hear both of them racing up Pikes Peak. And then you do sort of like best of five. Like you do a 24 hours of Le Mans, see who does best there. Average that with whoever's quickest off the line in a quarter mile. Then the drag race too. Maybe throw in an Indy 500. I want like a month of Elon and Sam just racing various vehicles against each other. And this would satisfy the people that are saying, yeah, the AI. This is great. Okay, we'll pause. Yes. And it's a month of live streamed races between Sam and Elon. It's like Tour de France. Yes, yeah, exactly. They go from one place to another. Do every, every different circuit. Yeah. Bobby says, and a cannonball. And they definitely have to do a cannonball. Just whoever gets from New York to LA faster, we drop the lawsuit. They win the lawsuit. That would be ideal anyway.

That the firm was founded around. So how's your thinking evolved around the whole flipped model and doing R and D on your balance sheet? Yeah, a couple of thoughts there. First is that we spend an inordinate. Amount of money on our own internal. Research and defense irad type research development rather spending just an absolute inordinate amount of money. And we're grateful to have the support of our investors who believe in this business model. So for us we haven't not at all seen a like let's just shift back to that way. It's a lot capital, you know, less, less risky capital, safer, all of that. So no, I'm not surprised. Like this is to your point. This is exactly the kind of thesis, the mission of what we're trying to do. If anything, we've been very happy to. See venture capital funding to the SEC. To the sector increase to fund more. Companies approaching it this way. Because I think that for us to win a great power conflict, we're not going to need one Andoril, we're going. To need five or eight or ten of them. So we're excited to see new companies. Get started with this kind of mindset and go out and chip off parts of the parts of the ecosystem here. The last point I would say is that to date something in the neighborhood of 85, 90 ish percent of our. Revenue has not been from these kind. Of cost plus traditional like customer funded models. The vast majority of it comes from us selling our product to our customers at a fixed price and then the bit of recurring revenue tied to that for kind of think of it like. An extended warranty kind of concept where. We are doing the maintenance, we're providing the support, we're doing the security upgrades. The patching, the only, all of that. Which from our perspective really aligns incentives for us to deliver the best possible product. Because to be blunt, like we will have a higher margin if we don't. Have to send repair guys out and keep replacing things. But then also gives the customer a more reliable product and then importantly gives the customer predictable pricing. So they know what their total 4. Year, 5 year cost of ownership for a product will be. Because they know that within that number. We'Re responsible for anything that breaks any. Sort of problems or maintenance that needs to happen that aligns everybody and we're. Seeing a broader acceptance of that business model within both the Dow and with dhs. So we're pretty excited to see those messages landing. Yeah.

Little known fact, Sequoia was an early investor in IL for NIO, owning 6.3% of the company at its 1997 IPO. I love that the Sequoia team in the early days was like doing pizza joints and restaurants and software, you know, didn't they own Chuck E. Cheese? Right, Yep. That was a funny one. So, yeah, this is From Andrew Reed, IL for NYO owns and operates 13 full service white tablecloth Ital Italian restaurants serving creatively prepared, premium quality Italian cuisine based on authentic regional recipes. What a fantastic business. And Sequoia Capital got a huge slug. 6.3% at the IPO. Yeah. So sad news. El for nio. How do you say it? Il for nio. El fornayo. As they're closing their restaurant in the bay. Il for now was like the cool spot to go before high school dances. When I grew up, it was like the. I think there's one in Pasadena. It's really good. I hope that they can keep it open somehow or someone can. This feels like ftx, You know, shutting, you know, shutting down. Closing locations. Sure, yeah. So much history. Sequoia involvement. Sequoia involvement. Ridiculous. Now that was obviously years and years ago. Anyway, these guys love violating narratives. It is so funny to think about Sequoia getting a deck for a restaurant. Being like, this is right. We gotta get into. This is right down. You gotta get in. Right down the fairway. Right down the fairway. This is our sweet spot. We've been waiting. We had a market map of restaurants. We had Italian, authentic Italian carved out. There was no one there. We did a two axis graph. Italian, authentic. You're in the sweet spot. You got a deal. We're taking. You're not going to believe this. The founder for the. For the partner meeting invited us to the restaurant. The food was fantastic. You know, they actually did another restaurant later. They did the melt. Are you familiar with this? No. Yes, Sequoia did the melt, which is a grilled cheese spot. It's still going. It's all around L. A. I enjoy the melt. That is, Yeah, I mean, grilled cheese. As if I needed a reason to love Sequoia more. I know. Amazing. They're supporting the grilled cheese. It's a really funny story because the founder, I believe, was like a amazing physicist, like a genius mathematician or someone really, really quantitative. And they were like, you're the one that can solve fast, casual grilled cheeses. And I think he scaled the business. I think it's done pretty well. Wall street journal article from 2014. Sequoia backed the moves. Beyond grilled cheese. Yes. Yeah, they have burgers now. They have soups. I used to go there. They got burger milk, chicken, mel, Mac and cheese. Get a grilled cheese and a cup of tomato soup. It was delicious. It was amazing. Anyway, Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store.

Talk about Ohio. Is it? How far along are you with the project? Is Trey vindicated in every. In all of his Ohio? You know I'd be. Don't want to take swings at Trey here, but the Arsenal One project in Columbus, Ohio is running incredibly smoothly. We've got about the first 30 and change. Ohioans hired already? We hired them about six months ago and then brought them out to California. So they've been at headquarters where we've been building the first few tails of the Fury line. Then they're coming back to Ohio this month and then we're doing the stand up and provisioning of the line. So the ultimate Arsenal One campus will be about a dozen buildings totaling in the neighborhood of about 5 million square feet total. The first building that's about just shy of a million square feet, like 800,000 square feet is fully built. The internal is being constructed now. The inside and the production line and all the equipment, all of that test rigs and all of those things are being provisioned. And we'll start production on Fury this summer. Building two is the walls are vertical, so that's going up. And then building three is immediately thereafter and building four right thereafter. So we'll be rolling out a new building about every year. Ish. For about the next seven, eight years. You said the Fury Tails are being built one place. Is this a matter of like building different pieces then bringing them all together? Is there an assembly line? Is it like a manufacturing of 150? Sorry, a term of industry. Tail being the full plane. Like a tail number on the plane. Oh yes, yes, yes. Got it. Got. Yes, yes. So the first. The first. The first, the first four or five. I'm going to get in trouble for not remembering. The first four or five will be assembled at hq. Yeah. And then test flown at our test range nearby. And then the next one will be the tail number. The whole plane. But then from there on out they'll. Be manufactured in terms of assembly lines. Are we still paying homage to Henry Ford with a plane that moves down and gets things added? Or is it a more integrated process? For Fury's line, it will resemble something in the neighborhood of. Okay. Kind of moves along. Yes, that's right. So it'll move from station to station. Actually more like the grim method of. There you go, there you go, there you go. We'll coin that one. We need a gong hit for that. Perfect. Give it up for the perfect. Thank you. Thank you. But the. The line will resemble closer to that where at station one we do the hydraulics at station two, do the electronics. At station three, you do the fuel system, something along those lines. And then it's ultimately the Fury line will be 22 stations. And then where the Fury line in particular gets complicated is that we have to do a number very complicated coatings and paintings on it. So that's a little bit tricky and specific. And then, of course, the propulsion element of it is just very, very complicated. Talk to Testament to how far out Mr. Matt Grimm thinks about has been thinking about fury. Two years ago, when he initially reached out after seeing our demo of Build os, his initial outreach was, hey, I saw what you guys are working on. Can you use it to build robotic fighter jets? And I said, yeah. I mean, depending on how cool they are, of course. Yeah, yeah. Two years later, here we are. Here we are. Yeah. And what a moment, too. Yeah. And how validating this is for Dirac. I mean, I feel like part of why you guys are coming out and talking about it together is I imagine you want your supply chain to probably get on Dirac. Is that a part of it? Like, wanting the whole supply chain to. Monetize the quality part that you get at the end of the day? Good question. So there's a couple parts, a couple reasons why I'm here, in particular, to support the announcement.

Updating it maybe once or twice a year, flipping through, say, oh, it's this version. No, wait, get that binder off the rack over there. To make this different model. The way that we think about it, the way that we've seen it on the design side of things, we've seen 15, 20 years of an explosion of excellent software on the design side. And because CAD is so advanced, what we've seen is an explosion in the variance that people are able to design. Think about the increasing complexity, the different modular builds. A company like Anduril has modular products that have different payloads that are reconfigurable. Now think about that from the design perspective. Great, we can swap out a bunch of different modules. Now from the manufacturing perspective, that means that you have to have, when you can have thousands of different combinations of things, you now need thousands of different work instructions. Where if one picture is off and one step is off, you have somebody building a completely different thing. And thinking about that from the top level build perspective, that makes sense, right? That's a ton of different configurations. But when we're looking at all the people who make up the supplier base of the companies that make planes, cars, trains, everything in between, we're talking about companies that make pumps and valves, complex mechanical sub assemblies, right? Think about how many different variants those guys have to have now. They're in deep trouble because when they lose the ability to not only have folks on their shop floor that are 30 year veterans who just know off the back of their heads, you know, okay, this is, I remember how we built this last time. I don't really need instructions because all those folks are also retiring our entire industrial base and our supplier base is also at risk because we haven't codified all of that tribal knowledge. And that is a key mission of ours as well. Not just to be a rubber band around the variants, but to also codify and capture basically like how do we used to do it, why did we stop doing it that way? Like making sure that's maintained so if a guy doesn't retire, you're not calling him up like we again, what did you used to do in this situation? Exactly. Similar to McKinsey analyst who put together a spreadsheet or a PowerPoint that was like 150 slides. You're like, hey, what macros did you use? What formulas did you use for this thing? That's like another framing to think about it. Except that guy retired how many people.

There's, there's an incredible quote in here. Hopefully we can get to it. Let's. Let's skip ahead and play because he has a line that truly is directly out of Andrej Karpathy's mouth. That's like the thing we talk about earlier where there's a lot more fear because we have the sense that's existential dread. It's going to wipe everything out. Right. But that actually runs counter, in my view, to what history seems to show. Kevin's paradox. Slow. It's incremental. Let's go. I think a lot of rhetoric comes from people who are trying to justify valuations around companies. Everything. Two years literally a Carpathia line. Well, the reason they're saying that is because they need to ascribe a valuation for investment that can warrant Capex. He didn't just watch Carpathia. Oh, you know. He'S sitting there taking notes. Make the Social Network 3. But it's just about Dwarkash and Carpathy hanging out. And Ilya. It's just about AI research. It's about. It's about an exciting neurips and that's it. Applovin profitable advertising made Easy with Axon AI get access to over 1 billion daily apps.

And so anyways, I'll start by saying that this is fantastic content, beautifully shot. Well that Ty Morse, very well done, fantastic team, very well done and great content. Right. People are so curious about what's happening at xai. Right. We want to understand how they're approaching different problems. Elon talks about it in such high level. He's talking about AI AGI, super futuristic and then he'll give little details on some massive build out that he's working on. But he's not one small problem. Yes. Usually a $200 billion company likes to control who's going to go out and do a tell all about the company. And specifically with Elon companies, if you hadn't noticed, there's not a lot of people that work for Elon companies that go and do the podcast circuit, go talk about everything going on behind. No, I mean at SpaceX, Gwynne Shotwell has given a few speeches mostly at commencement speech like inspirational speeches to colleges and that type of stuff. She's not going on Rogan or different space podcasts or tech podcasts. It's very rare to see content with her. And then Kiko Donchev is their head of launch and he will do engagement with NASA and if there's a real heavy industry focused panel he might attend. But he's also not just hopping on stuff. And then beyond generally he's not trying to create like thousands of superstars, right? He does, he wants you to work for him forever. Yeah, I saw a post in here. But when a company, when, like when somebody, when someone super talented leaves, it's not like Elon in general is lining up and saying like, let me do your first round, let me do your first like you know, 10 million, 20 million bucks. Right? He's actively trying to incentivize people to not develop big brands. He wants people to stay and he wants to be able to control the messaging. Wait, speaking of that, look at this, look at this Sam Sheffer post. He went and found a. Fifteen years ago they did a SpaceX office tour. It is so like, it's just, it's crazy. It just looks like a cubicle office. But in there, Sam Sheffer finds that there's someone who works on propulsion named Matthew McKeown McCune and he's been on propulsion for 17 years and eight months. Like that's exactly, that's exactly what Elon wants. A true believer who's riding with him through thick and thin and, and has probably done extremely well financially, worked on really interesting problems. Is he going to be a household name. Is he going to be a podcast circuit? No. But does Matthew really want that? Probably not. He wants to propel the rockets and that's exactly what he's done for nearly two decades now. So that's the Elon strategy. And you should know that going into that environment, maybe it should be more explained, but it certainly ended in disaster in this. Yeah. The funny thing is I didn't catch all the interview, but they talk about how HR in general is not super formalized at the company and so you can also imagine that PR and the media relations team is not super active. Maybe nobody in HR said, hey, don't go do an hour long podcast. If you're anybody but Elon, maybe don't do an hour long podcast telling all. And so of course people what happened. Ultimately, Suleiman, he said he's laughing. We don't actually know what happened, but it is odd to go do an hour long interview and then quit anyway. So I think like good intentions potentially took the concept which he talks about in here. No one tells me no a little bit too far. But. But I posted earlier, you can't even share the internal secrets of your AI lab on a cinematic podcast in this country anymore. Brutal. Andrew Curran had some of kind.

To match it with the money that's coming from the government on the sales side. Yeah, yeah, we're definitely software first. There is a supply chain in Canada. It is pretty extensive. It's actually built pretty. I mean, most of Canada's defense hardware is American, about 80% of it. And so they're integrated into large American platforms. But we are a software first company. We're taking a similar approach to a lot of the other neoprines, where you start off with software, you realize you need to do hardware, you vertically integrate, you push platforms, that sort of thing. Yeah. What's exciting on the connectivity side?

Dynamic, which we hadn't really seen in the trade. In the trade war arc of Trump one and then in the Biden administration. The one thing that I do want to flag to you guys a little bit is this saga currently going on between Japan and China, where the new prime minister of Japan made some not super offhanded remark, basically saying, like, a problem that China has with Taiwan is a problem that we have, and it's very likely that we would be involved in any kind of sit scenario. And this has basically been the goal of American presidents for decades now to kind of get Japan off of its butt, get its spending more on its military and get it, you know, really part of the equation to dissuade, to, like, make the balance of military power in the region such that China has no interest in going into Taiwan. And what you sort of saw in response to the Trump administration was kind of nothing, no big statement, no saying, hey, we're here to support you. Basically, Trump called Xi and then Trump called Takaichi, saying, hey, chill out. And look like they just had a nice visit. The defense minister, Koizumi, the son of the old prime minister, who, like a Hotshot 37 or something, you guys should have him on. They had a nice meeting. We say that the alliance is okay, but I did find it a little disappointing that, like, we're not kind of cheering them on when the whole thesis of the Trump administration is like, we want to step back and have our allies do more of the heavy lifting. So you're famous for the watch.

From my perspective, it feels like it's been kind of quiet. All of 2025 was sort of quiet. I don't know if that's just me focusing on US Tech and AI race stuff, and I'm out of the loop, but would love just sort of your lay of the land on U.S. china, Taiwan negotiations. Sure. So I think the big story of, I mean, there were. There was a lot of drama over the course of 2025, Liberation Day. We forgot there is a whole nother arc, which of course included 150% tariffs on China, negotiated down and then got ramped back up. Then you had rare earth controls. And then finally we've sort of seemed to reach a bit of a equilibrium. Trump's supposed to go there, and I think March or April, nobody really wants to rock the boat. But specifically on the Taiwan issue, no blockade, no invasion, no like, you know, firing back and forth or drones or conflict that I remember seeing anything like that. And that was sort of like the worst case scenario was that maybe they were going to start with some sort of soft blockade and it wasn't going to be violent, but it was going to really escalate the situation too. Like, we're repositioning ships. Yeah. I mean, this has been one of my polymarket trade recommendations over the past few years is no war invasion. I'm not particularly surprised. We've had something crazy. Look, I think Xi sees a lot of upside in the direction of travel of a lot of things. And yes, China has problems, but like starting World War III or I mean, right now he has like a pretty good equilibrium with the US and that all of the kind of like we had a sort of slow but steady creep up in controls over the course of, you know, really starting towards the second half of Trump won. And that with what Xi has been able to do by kind of throwing the rare earth thing back in America's face is stop that. And you know, I think, who's the really old guy who does trade in the White House, but who. Who like, had the. Says like dumplings are bad or something. I can't remember his name. Anyways. You'Re like, you guys are ready to cover D.C. we're like, couldn't tell you who works there. Dumpling man. Google this dumpling quote while I'm like, Peter Navarro Dumplings. Okay. I have heard of him. I'm sure he's a nice guy. He said, look like it's a different chessboard me from when it was a while ago. And the fact that China both has leverage and is willing to and more importantly, is willing to use it and understands that using it will get the US to back down. I think is a new dynamic which we hadn't really seen in the trade war arc of Trump one and then in the Biden administration. The one thing that I do.

Handle your customer support. Go to Fin. AI, we should pull up some of the new livery that was announced Gabe was sharing earlier. He said that Zinn made it on to Ferrari this year. They're allowing a nicotine sponsorship. No. No way. And Haas, if you pull up this post, somebody was showing off Haas new livery from above. I'm in the timeline. You can see it looks almost uncannily like the top of this toilet. What you see? No. Oh, wait, no. What is that? I mean, it's just part of the arrow. Okay. On the top part. Anyways, I think that. I think the Haas car looks fantastic. Yeah. I also like that it's a. Yeah, it's an American machinery company. Right. Haas. And. And, yeah, it's just. It's just a cool little, you know, obviously not a car maker. You can't go buy a Haas and drive it around. But still, a lot of lineage and logic to it. I mean, Red Bull's been so good that it sort of tracks for me anyway. It doesn't seem jarring or anything that you have an energy drink car on the grid, but I feel like I still like the Ferrari. I'm excited that Audi and Cadillac are getting in. I like when Cadillac's livery looks go and. Have you seen it? Go and get it. I haven't seen the livery. I saw Vincenzo Landino posting some absolutely hilarious images of sort of what he thinks the Cadillac should look like. I don't know if we can pull up his post. I know he replies to all this stuff. What did he post? He posted some hilarious Cadillac livery. That was an AI Image here. My neighbor sent me this photo of the new Cadillac F1 car. You got to see this journey. It's amazing. It's got the. Drop it in. I think it might be already in there. I think I got it. But if we can pull this out. So my neighbor actually did send me this photo that his friend sent him. I have no idea whose credit goes to. If this is yours, let me know. Is this in the bottom of the timeline? Did it go through? Let's see. Yeah, it's here. Look at that. That's incredible. So funny. It has to be AI or did they actually race something like this at one point? I don't know. I sort of assume AI at this point. Who else is in the news? Three teams have now revealed their 2026 red liveries. Red Bulls looks a lot less shiny. When we saw them in Vegas, it felt very pearlescent, very like almost pink sparkle to it. This looks like a little more classic to me. Well, we should do.

But we won't speculate anymore. What else should we in the Journal. In the Journal why the Tech World Thinks the American Dream Is Dying Silicon Valley fears this is the last chance to amass generational wealth before AI makes money worthless. People are really into the underclass. This doesn't really make. Thousand comments on the WSJ it's kind. Of a confusing subtitle because why would you. If AI makes money like the people that think AI is going to make money worthless are the ones that are just going to go sit in the park, right? Is that the whole point? Potentially. Potentially. Let's get into it. Silicon Valley is filled with all sorts of dreams. But one of those wild eyed ideas long debated on subreddits and in hacker houses is becoming a real life nightmare. Will the AI boom be the last chance to get rich before AI makes money essentially worthless? One note, there's some people that love making money so much they will keep doing it for the love of the game. It's just going to be like a sport. It'll be like going and playing, putting on the cleats and playing a little soccer. Right? You just want to run up the score sometime. Even if money becomes worthless, you know, people are still going to be looks maxing, it's going to be all status games, it's all going to be height maxing, various levels of inserts in the shoes. It's going to be a whole. No, I think what I'm saying is like in that scenario it would actually just be like a video game. Like, yeah, I made a unicorn. Did it change my life? No, I just wanted to prove that I could do it. Sure, sure, right. It's like somebody that's running a marathon. And grow a unicorn. Like the bio company we talked to. What do you mean make a unicorn? Oh, like actually build a company just purely for the love of the literal unicorn. Yeah, yeah. Because in this AI abundance area, you could potentially go to Claude code and say, don't make mistakes, make a unicorn. Make a unicorn. Genetically modify a horse. Anyways, continuing, the argument is that tech companies and their leaders will become a class unto their own with infinite wealth. No one else will have the means to generate money for themselves because AI will have taken their jobs and opportunities. And in other words, the bridge is about to be raised for those chasing the American dream and everyone is worried about being left on the wrong side. It's the kind of FOMO that on first blush seems to require a huge suspension of disbelief. But the idea's mere existence helps. Explain some of the increasing class worries in California, where a growing movement to tax billionaires. We're calling this the Business Elimination Tax is the new branding, according to Lulu, is roiling the Democratic Party. Affordable housing is real concern and the idea of the middle class seems out of reach. Yet it smacks of sci fi thinking. But in San Francisco it feels real and it's made more believable by the exploits of Elon Musk, the rise of OpenAI, Sam Altman, and warnings by Anthropic's Dario about great Depression like worker displacement. The transition will be bumpy, musk said this month on a podcast. We'll have radical change, social unrest and immense prosperity. Look, bit of a roller coaster ride, he said. Universal high income is his term for it, and that's Musk's best case scenario. History is filled with technology booms that create new winners and losers. AI optimists like to point out that a rising tide has tended to lift all boats. What's being talked about now, massive job loss to automation and the need for public safety nets in the form of universal basic income paints a dramatically different future. It's still not clear if there's an appetite for so called UBI which runs counter to many Americans bedrock ideals of personal achievement. Quote I used to be excited about ubi, but I think people really need agency. They need to feel like they have a voice in governing the future and deciding where things go, Altman OpenAI's chief executive, said last year when they asked when asked by a podcaster about how to create how people will create wealth in the AI era. Quote if you just say okay, AI is going to do everything and then everybody gets a dividend from that, it's not going to feel good. You gotta lock in, you gotta grind. He didn't say that part and I don't think it's what would actually be good for people. If money is out, scarce assets like art could become key. We saw some massive results at a Ferrari auction this weekend, a bunch of Ferraris trading for maybe 3 over what people thought the market was gonna be. Lots of speculation about what's going on there, but people are certainly getting in on luxury goods. If you don't have scarce a scarcity of resources, it's not clear what purpose money has, he said at a conference last year. More recently, Musk suggested people shouldn't even worry about saving for retirement, predicting AI will provide health care and entertainment. You like that? Tyler? No, I was going to say I think I've heard at anthropic at least a lot of people don't contribute to their 401k for these reasons. Interesting. Still, it looks. I mean, it also helps that if you've been there a while, your company went from sub $10 billion valuation to 500 in the span of a few years. You're not like, oh, I better. I'm so worried I haven't added much to my 401k. Okay, that's fair. Maybe you don't want to contribute to your 401k, but if you want to change the world, you got to raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We're very pleased to be partnered with the New York Stock Exchange where you can go and change the world by raising capital. Let's finish this out. Weeks later, social media posts on X and LinkedIn and Facebook began claiming Nvidia's Jensen Huang said something similar. The CEO of these breathless posts claimed was warning Quote the period from 2025 to 2030 may be the last major chance for everyday people to build wealth through technology. Scary stuff. Except Jensen, he didn't say it. Rather, his numerous public appearances in the past few months have been filled with talk about the potential for AI to be more of an equalizing force for technology. Quote we're going to have a wealth of resources, things that we think are valuable today, that in the future are just not that valuable because it's automated, he told Joe Rogan last month. It can afford, it can. It can be hard to sort fact from fiction in an era of technology that seems pulled straight from a Ian Banks novel. And backers of AI companies have billions, if not trillions, of reasons to hope their gambles aren't just once in a generation jackpots, but once in human experience, once in a human existence. Further contributing to the FOMO in San Francisco is the expectation that local AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic will soon go public, minting many more millionaires. After the New York Times ran a headline this past week about a wave of mega IPOs expected this year, local real estate agent Rohan Dar posted on X May I humbly suggest you buy your house in San Francisco before this? It is interesting. I feel like the SF housing market has really been through some crazy gyrations. It was way down for a little bit. And yes, I mean, I agree. I expect it goes way up. The tech entrepreneur who was once part of Y Combinator years ago told me he was drawn to real estate in part because of a belief new AI wealth will fuel a housing boom. Or as he predicted last year. The mother of all tech booms is coming. Get some while you can. Well, thank you to Tim. One of the comments here is interesting somebody Jason Barger says when I graduated college in 1999, I remember those pursuing teaching being mocked for going into an obsolete field. The Internet was going to replace teachers. Some thought it would replace educational institutions themselves.

I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Founder, You're watching TV BI today's Monday, January 19, 2026. We are live from the TVP and Ultradome. The temple of technology, the fortress of. Finance, the capital of capital. Ramp time is money save both. He's used corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Ramp.com we have a great show for you today, folks. We're talking about the article apocalypse that's happening on X. Will it stop at the timeline? The million dollar slop fight? Will it slop up the table timeline? Will the algorithm handle the flood of AI generated content that will be slopped up in the timeline? We will see, we will dig into it, we will discuss it. We'll also try and understand what is going on with Nikita Beer Strategy. What's the strategy at X? Will this growth hack work? This competition? Of course. This all started with an Akita beer pulled up. We got Main street summit in the X chat. Hey, what's up Main Street Summit? Shout out to Brent and the whole team. Love you guys. Cheers. Cheers. So this all started with Nikita Beer on X. He said, ladies and gentlemen, we are giving $1 million to the top article posted on X. You have two weeks. It's time to write. And very, very different structure. I thought there's already. There's so much AI generated essays on X. Why not make AI generated essays? Lottery tickets. Lottery tickets. Let's turn them into lottery tickets. I like it. I mean they're definitely paying out more than a million dollars in creator payments across all the little $100 thousand dollar checks that go out to folks. You have to imagine. But running a sweepstakes, I mean, that's time honored. What's not to like about a sweepstakes? It's great. I think it's a lot of fun. Obviously, people are worried that this will create some perverse incentive. There was already a incentive for slop on the timeline because if you engagement farmed, you could potentially get a big creator payout. We've seen some people that get $20,000 randomly sent to them just because they went mega viral. We've seen a bunch of people that have just built up accounts where they're getting a couple thousand dollars every month. There's always been an incentive and that incentive exists on YouTube where you can get creator payouts. There are plenty of platforms where you can go and get attention and convert that into ad dollars or rev share. Back in the day there was a huge Inc do listicles and clickbait to get visitors to your website that you would put Google Ads on. Some of it made a decent amount of money, some of it didn't stick around. Most of the bad stuff eventually went away. Eventually people stopped showing up. Eventually the audience quality got so bad that all the advertisers said, why am I paying to show up on this listicle of the cutest dogs in America or something? I don't know. Maybe that one actually rips. Who knows? But. So Nikita's kind of taking two sides to this. He says it's time to write, but also he tells everyone else, please bear with article Armageddon. My question was, what's the strategy here and what will the outcome be? So before we dive into it, let me tell you about Vanta Automate Compliance and Security. Vanta is the AI trust management platform, the leading AI trust management platform. So it's sort of crazy to me how long Twitter went with. 140 characters. Yeah. Do you realize Twitter launched in 2006? They held the line on just 140 characters for over a decade. It wasn't until 2017 that they doubled it to 280, which now feels still a little tight to get a Tweet in under 280. But 140 was truly a constraint. You needed to be extremely terse and extremely concise. And even that was a relic from the SMS era. Like, the default text message that you could send was 140 characters. And so Twitter was very much built on, hey, if you verify your phone number, you can just send a text in and it will post it on your Twitter account. And so a lot of people in the early days were using it that way, although obviously people were also using it on web. And, you know, it's always been an important watering hole for tech power players. The tech elite have always liked hanging out on Twitter, but it's never captured the value that it created. Like, it was very, very hard because people are not in the. They're not in the same frame of mind as when they're scrolling Instagram. Scrolling Instagram reels. You're basically shopping when you're on a meta platform and then you see ad for. To be clear, meta captures a lot more value, but certainly not all the value it creates. Right. That's the point of a platform. Yeah, create more value than you capture. But in the case of Axe, it's like, you know, they were capturing a very small, very, very, very tiny percentage. And there were lots of stories about people building businesses that basically exported audiences from Twitter, went viral There Ben Thompson talks about LinkedIn actually being a big early growth vector for him because links did very well. They would convert to his newsletter, shrutakery.com but people have done this all over the place where they've been consistently viral with threads, build up an audience and then they take it somewhere else to monetize it, either with subscriptions or ads. But they don't really do that commercial activity on the platform. And so there's always been a question of like, could X or, or Twitter capture more value? And a lot of that big turning point happened when Elon made the acquisition. So the Elon taking over felt like, okay, it's an entirely new day, everything's moving way faster now. Some of those projects had actually been in the works for months or years before. I think Community Notes was the big one where the Twitter team had been building that infrastructure for a while, but. They were moving forward 5,000 people working on it for over five, hopefully something like that. But so Elon, it's not like he kicked off a lot of the, that many of these projects, but he definitely like greenlit them, shut things down, just sped things up, moved more. It's a speed thing. Exactly. 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, secure our wide angle camera, because the Ultra Dome is secure, secured by Okta. So 2023 was a big year for expanding character limits. They'd also previously acquired this Dutch startup, Revu, which was a direct competitor, Substack. But that product was shut down in less than two years. Like January to January. They only made it two years. Never really got it off the ground. And I think it was because it was sort of counter positioned with Twitter. It was kind of like always, oh well, if we get people on the review platform, they'll leave or they'll take their audience elsewhere. It never really felt, yeah, and I. Don'T know that a lot of people, some incredible faith that, hey, I want to build my business on a Twitter. I mean even pre Elon, there had been companies, startups that had built on the Twitter API, which had gone through a number of version changes. Elon made some more extreme changes to that. But there were plenty of times when people would build businesses too closely to any platform really. And then they get steamrolled, whether you're Zynga building farmville on Facebook and then they change the algorithm or they change the integration and all of a sudden your Growth engine's just go. This happened with Teespring. They were selling custom T shirts. So they would go and figure out a specific profile, like people who run podcasts with the last name Hayes. And then they would like print a custom. They would generate an image of a. Shirt and it'd be like, yes, my name is, my last name is Hayes. Yes, I'm a podcaster. And I'd be like, I gotta have it, I gotta buy it, I gotta. Have to have it. It was like, who is buying this cringy, cringy nonsense? But it really sold a ton of shirts and Teespring was on like an absolute, absolute, like meteoric rise. And then they changed the algorithm and they stopped a lot of those advertising because they felt creepy, because it was like, wait a minute, like, why am I seeing an ad with my last name and my job title in the image? Like, it's too much. And so Facebook put a kibosh on that and the rest is history. But they've been working on making X a more literate, long form platform for a while. 2023, we need to teach our users the English language. We need them to read more than 180 characters. So they've obviously done a ton in video. They've never really leaned into a video library like YouTube. Like I used to cross post my YouTube videos on X. Sometimes there were length limits for a while, then they got rid of those. So I could just actually copy a 25 minute YouTube video, put it on X and it was cool. People wouldn't watch nearly as much as they did on YouTube, but. And there was no catalog value. That was like. The really weird thing was that on YouTube, like my old videos that I haven't uploaded in over a year and my old videos are still probably getting like, I don't know, half a million views a month. Just because people are, every day they search like, what's the history of Anderil? Or what's the history of Ramp? Or what's the history of Xi Jinping? Well, they're evergreen content. So just continuously get served. Exactly. And then once someone watches one of my videos, they watch five more. Well, part of that, if you want to be a serious video platform, you need to be like heavily, you know, actually incentivizing people to watch on TV. Like so much of YouTube watch hours happen on TV and X, I think has a streaming TV app, but it's certainly not. Doesn't get a lot of love. Yeah, I actually made a whole documentary about El Segundo, went around with Augustus and toured everything and it just didn't really work for my YouTube channel. So I only put it on X. It got a ton of views and actually the response was probably better than anything that I would do on YouTube because it was very tech insider. A lot of VCs were getting up to speed on what was going on in El Segundo. We're having some of the El Segundo folks on the show later today. Well, he's not truly El Segundo, but Phil is like spiritually Gundo. We know that. And Anduril in many ways is spiritually Gundo. Let's take you through the Linear lineup. Who we have on the show today. We got Jordan Schneider from Chinatalk coming on at 12:30. Then Dan from T1 Energy, Elliot from Dominion Dynamics. We're in hard tech land kind of all day. I'm very excited for this. And then we have Matt Grimm, the co founder of Anduril, and Phil from Dirac coming in person at 1:30 together to break it all down for us on what's going on in building hardware, building defense. And remember, T1 Energy is a company that we talked about in Q4 of last year. It was a unique situation. I believe it was a Chinese company, solar manufacturing plant that was forced to sell and now it has a cool brand and new management and the stock is absolutely ripping. I love it. Very excited to have them on the show. It is up 433%. I love that we get to do six months, just find some random company and then all of a sudden we're talking to the CEO. Anyway, of course, if you've forgotten, Linear, it's the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on Linear are using agents. You should be too. So continuing with the long post journey that X has been on, 2023 was a massive year. February took it from 280 characters to 4,000 characters. That's more than I need for most of my posts. I don't think I've ever posted anything longer than that. April expanded it to 10,000 characters and finally in June, they maxed it out at 25,000 characters. That's longer than most blog posts. That's around four words, maybe a little bit more. And you can still thread these posts together. So I was always wondering, like, why does articles exist if long posts are so long that you can put 4,000 words there? In fact, I took, you know, that one super viral article that everyone, they're all joking that like, oh, he should have waited a Couple days to post it because then he would have won the million dollars. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like how to change your life in one day. And wasn't that effectively inspired? Like my view was like that post, they were like, we should do more of this. Let's incentivize a lot more of this. Totally. Yeah. It seemed like Reed Nikita saw that and was like, okay, articles are creating satisfaction on the platform. People like them. It does seem like the algorithm is. It seemed like at one point the algorithm was maybe misaligned. Not that it was punishing articles, just that it wasn't really processing the time that people would spend in articles and the way they would engage. Because if there's a viral post, people might be more inclined to like it than a long, long essay that you read 45, 75% of and then you get out of it. You actually spent multiple minutes with it, you really enjoyed it, but you forget to like it because that's way down at the bottom. Or you forget to retweet it or whatever. Or you're not commenting on it, you're just kind of enjoying it reading. And then you close your phone because you're like, oh, wow, I just spent 20 minutes reading this thing. I'm moving on with my life. Or I got a phone call and so they needed to dial the algorithm in. And I think that's what's happened. And now I think that essentially articles are first class citizens in the algorithm and there's really no downside to posting articles. But that post, that article, how to change your life in one day or something, is like 30,000 characters. So it almost would have just fit if you just edited a little bit more. It would have just fit into a long post. But it worked as an article. There's something about the title and thumbnail that really works there. Maybe, maybe X should do a deal with our partner 11Labs and let you listen to these articles. 11Labs, of course, build intelligent real time conversational agents, reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs. Zach Vole had a great idea. He said, grok, summarize this article in 280 characters or less. Don't make any mistakes. Thanks. So if you really yearn for the days, the pre article era, just respond and tag grog on a post and have it turn it back into just. Regular 140 characters, even shorter. I mean I think somebody did that with how to change your life in one day because a lot of it was like from atomic habits, I guess, which is a Very popular book. But all this like lifestyle stuff is always recomposed from various previous prior art. It's all just reformatting essentially with some new flavor and new spice. So when articles launched in March of 2024, it didn't really hit for me like I was not like oh I got to jump on this, I got a post. You know, we started doing The Newsletter In 2025 mid year we started cross posting articles were available. I think we might have tested one or two as an article. Didn't really see a difference, so just kind of stuck with the long posts. But last year, so my pieces are usually around 5,000 characters, they fit fine in a long post. I was doing long posts until I saw Lulu Maservi, friend of the show posted standing out in 2026 as an X article. Now she's been viral before for Going Direct, the Going Direct manifesto, which was a thread of long posts. And I like, I think it was maybe just a really long post or maybe a thread of long posts, but I really like that format and I would actually use that format as sort of a template for if I wanted to communicate something in a few paragraphs. I would sort of look at what she did with the Going Direct post and use that as like the backbone obviously not taking specific words, more just like okay, you want an intro paragraph, an opening paragraph, a couple bullet points, a summary, a takeaway. And what's really interesting is that her standing out in 2026, it's an X article, it has a header image of these robots and it grabs you so you click on it and it was dropped January 5th. Good timing. Kick off the year it went super viral. Millions of views, thousands of likes, but it's really really short. It's only 443 words, it's under 3,000 characters. So it easily would have fit in a long post. But she went with article. It worked. And when I saw that I was thinking okay, maybe we should do. Maybe we should do articles for our pieces. And I've been doing that and it's been fine. Hasn't been. Honestly the metrics are exactly the same so maybe I need to work on the titles and thumbnails or something. But it's not like articles have been some magical cure all or oh yeah, we're getting 10x more views now that we're using articles. It's kind of the same thing, but it does seem like an interesting format that maybe they will surface. I think it's a better experience as a reader maybe. I think so. It's hard to tell. I mean you can definitely, if you take advantage of the formatting maybe and you're doing bullet points and bolding and italics, you can write embedding posts. Yeah, embedding posts is cool. And also images in the. I saw one that had like graphics and it read almost like a strathecary piece. It had embedded images and stuff. It was cool. Gabe in the chat had an interesting idea. He said above X should acquire Beehive, which would be kind of interesting because one of the issues with the Revu acquisition is that I didn't know anybody that was building a business on Revu. Yeah, that's true. It seemed like Twitter had done a. Couple of these like early stage acquisitions. Like I mean vine was very early pre monetization. They did, I think Periscope, the live streaming video platform that was maybe pre revenue, like pretty early. We talked to one founder who sold his company to Twitter before they even launched. And so the, the, the previous Twitter management was very quick on these like smaller acquisitions of like pre launch but venture funded. The team's been building for six months. They go and show the Twitter team and the Twitter team says hey, how about we take it for 100 mil or something like that? And it's a great outcome for the founders. And then years later they gripe that they should never sell the company. Like, like the Vine. Yeah, that, that era I feel like taught San Francisco that like some of these smaller scale acquisitions were just relatively straightforward, commonplace. And then in the 2000s people realized that, that that era just kind of went away. Yeah, it either turned into like these mega aqua. Apparently Twitter. Twitter had done approximately 79 individual acquisitions. Wow, that's a lot. They did teleport, which was digital advertising was half a billion. Magic Pony 2016 for around 150 million. Nip Social Media Data Aggregation, 134 million. Tap Commerce, which mobile ad retargeting for 100 million. Periscope, if you remember that vine tweet deck. So bunch of different deals. Yeah. Before we move on, let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro. It's Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding. So strategically this big article push it feels like another shot at Substack, Chris Best's company. I didn't put substack in my article because I'm up on the algo speak unalived. I'm not afraid of the real word, I guess. No, I am terrified of the algo and being punished and shadow banned. So I said, Chris Best's company, this is best practice if you want to talk about Substack. But I don't know that anyone's going to be rushing to get off of Substack based on this. Because the value of Substack, the value prop is that you own your email list so you have a direct relationship with your, your audience and you could take that anywhere. You could leave at any time. You can even take your Stripe account with you, which is a crazy thing. It's so creator friendly. And Substacks made that their brand and they built a great business around it. And long term, I think Substack should probably figure out how to build some sort of ads product that can run across all of the different substacks because. That would probably be a total TVPN victory. It would, it would very, very. Anti ads. Anti ads. But I just see like, what does it take to get Substack into the Snapchat Pinterest Reddit category? Sort of like DACA Corn category. And you imagine that for a lot of these, like if you're, they're clearly trying to push people into the Substack app. But even just embedding ads here and there, it could be done tastefully, I think it could be done in a way that's not too abrasive. And you're getting a lot for a little now, of course, like, you know, we use Substack, we don't charge for our newsletter. Tvpn.com you should go sign up. So if they put ads on ours, we'd be like, ah, that's sort of a downgrade. We want to put ads in ours. But I think just from a business perspective it would make sense and really open them up to some big, big dollars at a certain point because there's a very high value audience across the. You had kind of a rough theory that maybe there was some logic to doing this just for having new training data. Yeah. So there's this idea that somebody untitled YouTube chat says the data is worth 10x more than 1. There were a few people that were mentioning this. Before we dig into that, let me tell you about 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. Now with AI, talk about a company that feels very immune to vibe coding. You don't want the somebody comes to you and they're like, I got plat, but I'm gonna charge you half as much. Yeah, it's like well, I'll take the, I'll take the real one for storing and processing my customers financial information. Yeah. Anyway, Noah in the chat says, I don't want to read substack without ads. So that's. There we go. Thank you. That's advertising. Strongest soldier. But so the question is like, you put out this million dollar bounty, how many people will show up? How many articles will actually get posted? I am seeing a lot of articles in the, in the feed. It's also hilarious when you see like a Fortune 500 CEO post an article because you're like, oh, damn, are you really down? And you need a mill, like, what's going on, buddy? And it's like, no, they're just, like, they're just posting news and they just need to get something out. So they use an article. But it's funny to imagine that they're like, oh man, the million would change everything for me. It's what I need. It's what I need. But Tim Cook starts ripping articles. He's just like, he's like, I need to. I can't be within the same. We're not going to do a keynote this year for the new iPhone. We're dropping an article and we're releasing it nine months early. No, the question is, is the data valuable? So a million dollars, how many people will show up? How many people will play the game? How many people will buy a lottery ticket by writing original articles that go viral, generating articles. There's already a lot of allegations of AI slop in the articles feed. Every time I see an article, somebody tags that AI detector. Pangrim Labs. Pangram Labs. I mean, I've been seeing so many people quoting articles, sharing them and say, you need to read this. It's incredibly well written. And then I tap in and it's just obviously slop. Slop. Some people love slop. I mean, we're gonna get into this with the Hollywood reaction to can we. Get a pig sound effect. Thank you, Scott. To the latest Joe Rogan episode. But some people just. There is more and more content on the Internet where I see it me. And you can clock it as AI, but you read in the comments and everyone loves it and they're happy. This is what Sam Altman told us. One person's slop is another person's treasure. Some people like this stuff. Also there's the interesting counter dynamic, which is I don't use AI to write. I don't even put the final draft through an LLM to reality check it or do anything. I just Sort of hammer on the keyboard and type and if there's typos or weird phrases, that's my style. You're just hearing it from my brain. It's like a brain dump. But that doesn't stop people from commenting on all my art, on all my pieces. Like this is AI or did you use AI or how do you write so much? Blah, blah, blah. So there's a little bit of inevitability. Honestly, we should just live stream you writing. That would be good every morning. Yeah, you could see me lock in with the actual doc right here. I should livestream the. Or at least I should put a time lapse out of my screen while I'm doing this. I mean obviously I use LLMs to research like for, like for this article. I needed all of the dates of different changes to X's and Twitter's like character limits. That's obviously something I'm going to go to an LLM for, do the research, pull it together, find the sources for me. It's super powered Google search. It's great. But the question is strategically it doesn't seem like anyone's going to be bailing on Substack today to move over, but there is just valuable. And then there's also the question of like. So you're probably not going to get your own audience list on X, but will you even be able to monetize with subscriptions? X does have subscriptions, but Substack has a way more like built out. I wonder what the, I wonder what the monthly revenue is for the person that's utilizing subscriptions the best, right? Oh yeah, that's the highest earning subscription driven creator. I have a couple people that subscribe to me and pay me just because they're like, cool, we like you. And I've never posted just to subscribers, but they're just like, they're just like, shut up, keep doing what you're doing. Riding with Coogan, I think it's public. So I can say like Gary Tan has just been ride or die for like years. Just sending me five bucks. I'm like, thanks Gary. This is not an ad to go and do that by the way. No, no, no, no. You will get nothing. But the interesting thing is that Substack offers more than just a one time subscription monthly. You can pay annually, get a discount. You can also do like VIP tiers, different tiers, access to discords, access to different things, participate in the live stream, get the chat. And then there's also like business plans, group plans. So they just have A way more mature product catalog when it comes to monetizing a customer list or an email list. And then obviously you can take them elsewhere. So if you ever don't, if you want to, if you're like, look, my newsletter product has grown so much that I have like enterprise level needs. I have to be off substack. You can go and build something from scratch that does exactly what you want and has all the different integrations. And you know, some companies have done that. Other companies, I mean, Free Press has scaled immensely with substack. And you go to the Free Press's homepage and it's like, it looks like the New York Times. Like there's like 25 different articles popping up little subsections. Like it is a full featured CMS for like a newspaper, for like a modern newspaper. Anyway, MongoDB choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best in class embedding models and re rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build. What's next? Let's Mongo. So how did you conclude? So what was your takeaway? My question was, so I don't see anyone who's a writer online who's on substack being like, okay, now's the moment. A million dollars on the table. I'm shutting down my substack and I'm going over to X exclusively. But a lot of people cross post. That's what we do. I think a lot of people, if you have a free. If you have a substack that's part free, part paid post, the free part on X, why not? It's all upside. It's just more attention that can actually get you into funnel. I believe that the posting of the articles on X has been additive to our substack list because at the end of the post we follow up and say, hey, this post is emailed as well. You want to go check it out, go to tppn.com and so we. I think this has been net growth. I don't think people have been like, oh, I'm unsubscribing from TVPN's newsletter because I'm getting it on John's random Twitter feed. That may or may not surface to me in the algorithm, but I don't think so. I don't think X needs writers to go all in. I just think that they want more copies of the best writing to make their way to X. And so if you have a great YouTube video, they want you to share it on X as well. So then they can surface that to people, if you have a great piece of writing, put it on X as well. And I think this does that and I think they'll be successful there and I think they can. Yeah, the question, I mean if they're really successful and you have like YouTube for long form writing, like the UGC platform for long form writing, it's probably a solid business but it's not going to be a juggernaut like YouTube specifically because it's not going to monetize nearly as well. Right. You have like they don't put ads in articles today. It's such an. They could add them in but you're like locked in reading an article versus like when you're watching something totally. Like if somebody's watching football and yeah. You can put it, you can put a two hour YouTube video on your smart TV and it will just play an ad and you just won't. You don't need to do anything. Whereas if you're scrolling an article and then all of a sudden an ad pops up like you, that breaks the flow of like what you're doing. It's not, it's not a passive experience, active experience. So yeah, I completely agree with you. I want your take on whether on the actual article experience. First I'm going to tell you about 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 code back prototypes and apps fast. So I was chatting with some folks who have really, really big on Twitter. A little group of folks who are all well over 100k. Gotten there back in like the thread era they were like thread guys basically. And, and they were saying like I don't think Naval's how to get rich without getting lucky thread would have worked as an article. That the fact that it was all these bite sized pieces like that's, that's, that was what was special. Now I think personally that meta has sort of died and we haven't seen that work. But what do you think coming back and just unironically ripping threads? Why not? Zig, do you miss threads? You mean just like do you miss. That error at all? Can you remember any iconic threads other than Lulu's and Naval's? And apparently Lulu was just a long post someone corrected in the chat. Okay, so no, Naval is the main one that I remember. I probably scrolled a few threads. I actually did have a thread that actually blew up my account. So I was at 10,000 followers. Is this the Alaska one. No, that was not. That got me unfollows because I posted about bringing tech. I was early on the let's leave California train and I said, we gotta go to Alaska. We're not going to Miami, we're not going to Texas, we're going to Alaska. Because if you have runaway global warming, it's going to be beachfront property up there, baby. It's gonna be 72 and sunny every. Day in Alaska palm trees. Alternatively, if we solve global warming, we will have unlimited nuclear power. You will be able to heat air condition, do whatever you need in your Alaska compound because you will have a 1 megawatt nuclear reactor dropped on your doorstep and you will have unlimited power. And you'll be lounging in a beautiful scenic mountain retreat, perfectly temperature controlled. Alaska did not like that. They did not like that. I got a lot of DMs from a lot of people showing me their guns, saying, if you come up here, California boy, there will be consequences. And it was a rough day on the Internet. I had to lock my account. It was very funny. But anyway, I survived that. But the post that blew up my account was I had written a. So Chris Miller had kind of popularized the idea of TSMC and Taiwan as an important geopolitical football in the US China battle. And I'd read the book, really enjoyed it. I had done a YouTube video all about US China competition that had done very well on YouTube. So basically what I did was I recontextualized everything that I'd learned and pieced together for that YouTube video into a thread. And I gave it a very salacious title. I said, because FTX was collapsing at the time, something else was going on. Crazy. There were like two major current things happening. Launching, I don't know is ChatGPT launching. But basically I was like, FTX is a distraction, you know, Elon Musk is a distraction. Like you need to be focusing on, on US China policy or whatever. And I, and I just sort of like contextualized why Taiwan is important for the semiconductor supply chain in the AI Boom. And it wasn't anything revolutionary for anyone who was paying attention, but there were a lot of people who just hadn't really learned what ASML was or TSMC was at the time. And so just having that in a nice digestible feed, it went super viral. And because it was so like authoritative, it took me from 10,000 followers to 20,000 followers in like a week. And it was, it was like really, really gross. Really, really. It's like the clearest Jump in the follower graph. And then everything else has just been, like, slow growth. And we know this from posting like, you post like a viral funny banger. It doesn't, like, double your account, but if you posted a really, really great thread, people would follow you. And I think that's true for the articles, too. The guy who wrote the how to change your life in one day, he has almost a million followers now. And I imagine that he had way less than that because I'd never seen his account before. Yeah, because he's providing, like, insight. Yes. You know, people could critique the article or say it's, you know, a lot of these ideas have been talked about before, but. But for better or worse, he summarized some key insights. He shared it on how to improve your life. That is value that somebody is like, I want to keep improving my life, I'll follow. Or they didn't read the article. They just saved it and followed him. Because they don't have time to improve their life. I'm busy right now. We didn't say which day they were going to use. It could be any day. So they'll circle back on. Circle back. Whereas if you just make somebody chuckle. And then there's also the fact that if you spend an hour with someone, or it takes half an hour to read that piece from start to finish. If you spend half an hour with someone, you feel like you know their perspective, you've learned more about them, as opposed to you just see some funny post and you're like, ah, that's funny. They made me chuckle. Okay. I don't need to, like, be in. I don't really have a relationship with that person. But once you've spent a half an hour sort of cohabiting with them, you're more likely to hang out. So I closed out saying that, you know, maybe there's a, you know, article apocalypse. I'm not really seeing it. I think the algorithm is pretty well equipped to handle stuff like this. People always seem grumpy with X generally, and honestly, Nikita specifically a lot of times. But I've always felt like the sloppy algorithm changes that happen, like, they sort themselves out really quickly. Like, there's plenty of times when we will come in on a Monday and we'll be like, wow, the algorithm was really brutal over the weekend. Like, I was just seeing, like, just junk that didn't feel at all tied to what we're interested in. It just seemed like they made some change and someone hacked it and it's all just like viral videos or some quote tweet meta, or some meme format. There was an era where you'd get eight Elon posts in a row. That happened. So there were like a whole bunch of different. There were just a whole bunch of different, like, crises where people were like, it's over. And then a week later the algorithm sort of adjusts and learns that people don't actually like all that slop or they don't like this thing, and then they adjust and it's fine. And so the other little, like, quick tip is that if you ever really get sick of the for your page, you can actually disable it by uninstalling the app, bookmarking X.com as like a homepage icon that just opens in Safari if you're on an iPhone. And then you can install this extension called Social Focus that will allow you to turn off the for your page. So it opens to your following tab by default. And you just can't even access the for your page. So you can always do that. I've done that for like a month here, a month there. Honestly, it's not that much better. And it's one of those things that's classic. Stated preference versus revealed preference. Stated preference is, oh, I just want to see who I follow. I don't want to see these random viral posts. And then the revealed preference is like, actually some of these viral posts are pretty good, they're pretty funny and I enjoy them. And the problem with the for you, with the following tab is that you is that there are some people that post a ton and there are some people that post very rarely. And you want to see some sort of even balance. And you don't realize that there are some folks that you follow who post a lot, A lot, a lot. And then it's like, really, I just want to see the cream of the crop. I just want to see their best posts. But then I want to see every post from certain people. And it's hard to fine tune long term. I think we'll get to a point where you can define your algorithm a little bit more, but for now, you're subject to the whims of Nikita Beer. Should we talk about graphite? Absolutely. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. What should we talk about? We should talk about Xai. Oh, yes. What's going on with Xai? So Ty Morse did a podcast with. I'm going to potentially not pronounce his name right. Suleiman. Suleiman Khan Gorey, who was previously at the time when the podcast was done, yes, he of course was working at xai came in, he talked about WTF is happening at xai, Predicting bottlenecks, bootstrapping off the Tesla network, how Elon deals with fires, what it's like working at xai. Cybertruck bet with Elon, how they built Colossus, how XAI hires experimentation, how Elon recalibrated his timeline estimates. No one tells me. No, that's important. Wild one. Why the fuzziness between teams? That is an advantage. Testing human emulators as employees biggest blunders, what a meeting with Elon is like, how Elon gives feedback, figuring out what is truth for Grokopedia, what happens when Elon sees wrong Grok outputs on X, what it's like operating in X AI's war room and a number of other things. So massively viral, by the way. 4 million views just on X, 5000 likes. This is a massive. And so anyways, I'll start by saying that this is fantastic content, beautifully shot. Well that Ty Morse, fantastic team, very well done and great content. Right. People are so curious about what's happening at xai. Right? We want to understand how they're approaching different problems. And Elon talks about it in such high level. He's talking about AI AGI, super futuristic and then he'll give little details on like some massive build out that he's working on. But he's not nitty gritty. One small problem. Yes? Usually a $200 billion company likes to control who's going to go out and do a tell all about the company. Yes. And specifically with Elon companies, if you hadn't noticed, there's not a lot of people that work for Elon companies that go and do the podcast circuit, talk about everything going on. No, I mean at SpaceX, Gwynne Shotwell has given a few speeches, mostly at like commencement speeches, like inspirational speeches to colleges and that type of stuff. She's not going on Rogan or different space podcasts or tech podcasts. It's very rare to see content with her. And then Kiko Donchev is their head of launch and he will do engagement with NASA and if there's a real heavy industry focused panel, he might attend. But he's also not just hopping on stuff. And then beyond generally, he's not trying to create like thousands of superstars. Right. He wants you to work for him forever. Yeah, I saw a post in here. But when a company, like when someone super talented leaves, it's not like Elon in general is lining up and saying, like, let me do your first round. Let me do your first, you know, 10 million, 20 million, 50 million bucks. Right. He's actively trying to incentivize people to not develop big brands. He wants people to stay and he wants to be able to control the messaging. Wait, speaking of that, look at this Sam Sheffer post he went and found 15 years ago he did a SpaceX office tour. It is so, like, it's just, it's crazy. It just looks like a cubicle office. But in there, Sam Sheffer finds that there's someone who works on propulsion named Matthew McKeown McCune, and he's been on propulsion for 17 years and eight months. Like, that's exactly, that's exactly what Elon wants. A true believer who's riding with him through thick and thin and has probably done extremely well financially, worked on really interesting problems. Is he going to be a household name? Is he going to be a podcast circuit? No. But does Matthew really want that? Probably not. He wants to, he wants to propel the rockets. And that's exactly what he's done for nearly two decades now. So that's the Elon strategy. And you should know that going into that environment, maybe it should be more explained, but it certainly ended in disaster in this. Yeah. The funny thing is, I didn't catch all the interview, but they talk about how HR in general is not super formalized at the company. And so you can also imagine that like PR and media, the media relations team is not super active. Yeah, maybe nobody in HR said, hey, don't go do it. An hour long podcast. Yeah. You know, if you're anybody but Elon, maybe don't do an hour long podcast telling all. And so of course people what happened. Ultimately, Suleiman, he said he's laughing. He laughs. We don't actually know what happened, but it is odd to go do a. To go do an hour long interview. And then quit anyway. So I think good intentions potentially took the concept which he talks about in here. No one tells me no a little bit too far. But I posted earlier, you can't even share the internal secrets of your AI lab on a cinematic podcast in this country anymore. Brutal. Andrew Curran had some good context here. He said the speculation is that this is the result of the interview he gave where he said xai intends to run one million human emulations, a digital version of Optimus for online work, which will be powered by leasing Compute from Tesla owners when the car is parked and charging. So that's an interesting development that we actually haven't heard about before. This idea that you have a pretty advanced AI chip doing self driving in the Teslas. They're just sitting there overnight. Why not do some inference and lease. That Back to the why is it a digital version of Optimus? Is it going to be sitting there in the corner like Flippy? I mean I think realistically it's probably just like agentic rollouts. So if it's for online work, it's like what are a bunch of tasks that you could turn grok loose on? Everything from the classic order doordash simulation. Try and buy something on Amazon in a simulation. All these things that require moving around on a screen, doing computer work, using Excel, building stuff, writing code. All these things that require a lot of heavy inference to roll it out, create a plan, write some code, test it, go back, double check, test it again, blah blah blah. Oh, Raghav says no, I somewhat remember but maybe not quite in as much detail. I feel like when I remember him talking about this kind of thing it was like, yeah, we have like distributed compute that we can leverage. Yeah, this might be in more detail, but still again, if you're at a company, any company, you should probably clear the public speaking engagements with. Solomon didn't just read Lulu's going direct. He studied and he sat down. That's wild. And I actually DMed with him briefly this morning and I think he's going to work on a startup. Okay, cool. We'll have to have him on at some point when he's ready to talk about certainly. Honestly, kind of benefit of like going and working at a Google or meta is they'll straight up tell you don't talk to the media unless you've been. Explicitly trapped or go. I mean there's different strategies at different companies. Some companies are totally cool with a bunch of people going out and talking about their business. But yeah, this seems like one of the more secretive or organizations. So a life lesson there. Anyway, console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of it. HR and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Let's go over to Ben Affleck. Ben Affleck. You know I had a premonition, a little preview that this was going to happen. He went on Joe Rogan and gave some very good takes on AI. There's some discussion over how good of takes they are but. But I ran into somebody that said that they met Ben Affleck. They were like a proper AI researcher and they said that they Met Ben Affleck and he used compute as a noun and they were like, yeah, that was impressive. He's talking about scaling compute. He's actually very, very deep in this which he went to Harvard. It's not shocking but I think there's just a general vibe that Hollywood is behind or out of the loop to the point where they wouldn't know the big models, they wouldn't have tested them. It's like, no, this is their business. I mean there are some like Joseph Gordon Levitt pretty chapped in. I mean isn't his wife on that board of OpenAI back in the day? She was, she was, yeah. You can't get more tapped in than that. Well, hasn't he just been spewing like a safety nonsense? Yeah, he's a big safety guy. He's a doomer or just a safety guy. He's a doomer. Doomer. He said today we're announcing a new organization called the Creators Coalition on AI. Well fortunately we have the counterpoint to that because Ben Affleck is not a doomer. He's actually pretty white pilled and it seemed like a really good interview. Let's play this first clip from Forrest who says that Ben Affleck has great takes across the board. Ryan says, what if he's just Action. Try to get ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini to write you something. It's really shitty and it's shitty because by its nature it goes to the mean, to the average and it's. And it's not reliable and it's. I mean I just can't stand to see what writes now. It's a useful tool if you're a writer and you're going ah, what's the thing? I'm trying to set something up. Or somebody sends someone a letter but it's delayed two days and gets. And it can give you some examples of that. I actually don't think it's very likely that it can. It's going to be able to write anything meaningful or and in particular that it's going to be making movies like from whole cloth like Tilly nor like that's. I don't think that's going to happen. I think it's not. I think it actually, it turns out the technology is not progressing in exactly the same way they sort of presented it and really what it is just like sort of visual facts. There was a line, yeah, there was a line in here where I was like, that is a carpathy line. Like he definitely heard this from Carvathy. He's listening to Door Cash for sure. For money. I can't. You can sue me, period. It kind of feels to me like things about earlier where there's a lot more. The whole idea of, like, these models being mid. That's not quite true. I mean, it's hard with, like, to develop a reinforcement learning environment with a verifiable reward for, like, a great script that will break through. Because even the great scriptwriters have flops that are unexpected. Literally everyone thinks it's great, and then it goes out, and it just is a box office bomb. We can pause this for a minute. But later, he actually makes a stronger case, I think, because they're talking about Dwayne the Rock Johnson in the film the Smashing Machine. And Matt Damon is recalling an interview that he did with Dwayne Johnson about his, you know, one of the most climactic scenes in the Smashing Machine that's very emotional. And he asks Dwayne, you know, how did you pick this, you know, motion? He pulls up a sheet because he's sad. And, like, what were you conjuring? What were you drawing on to create that experience as an actor and bring that emotion to the screen? Because Matt Damon saying, like, I love that. I love that scene. I loved your performance. Where'd that come from? Because you're thinking about content without ads in order to draw on the sort. Of, like, deep, sad emotions that might be what does it for you. But, I mean, Dwayne Johnson gave, like, a very emotional response about a family member who was diagnosed with cancer. And he was in the room when she got the news, and so. And so her reaction, he was, like, channeling that. It was very emotional. And then the other one was, I think, about another family member who had substance abuse issues. And so it was just this very unique blend of human experiences that he was able to bring to bear. And I continue to think that the lore and the storytelling that happens outside of a piece of content is as important as the actual content in many cases. This was the same thing with art and the NFT boom. It's not like the scarcity is important, but the storytelling behind the art piece is a lot of it. People like a Van Gogh because they know about him. Him cutting off his ear and all this history, and he's in all the history books, and everyone just knows Van Gogh. And yes, you can go even with cars, right? It's. A car is worth more if the previous owner was significant in some way. Yes, yes, yes. Steve McQueen is gonna sell for more. And I think that for certain storytelling elements, for certain stories, that lore of like who this person is and their likeness. And then he also makes a really good point that it's like yes, you can, I mean you can obviously generate something that looks exactly like a Van Gogh right now. You can paint it with someone who knows exactly how to paint like Van Gogh. It's not going to have anywhere near the value. And when he gets to the idea of just AI generating a Dwayne Johnson movie, it's like, well, he'll sue you immediately. And that's very easy. And you've been able to Photoshop Dwayne Johnson into marketing materials for years. And we've had a system for counteracting that. Like you have to pay licensing fees and that will happen. So he has a good, he has a good balance. We can go into this second clip from Barely AI. I think that's Trung Fan's company because it's a little bit longer. It's about a four minute piece. So while we pull that up, let me tell you about Label Box. RL environments, Voice robotics, evals and expert human data. Label Box is the data factory behind Tyler. Leading AI teams. Get in the box. Label Box. The Label Box. Let's pull up Ben Affleck diving a little bit deeper and we might have to skip ahead. Yeah, we've been spending time looking at this like my belief is sort of like what's going to happen. So we can Skip to like 50. That's going to happen with electricity. And it's. And it's. Don't think it's very likely that it can. It's going to be able to write anything meaningful or, and in particular that it's going to be making movies like from whole cloth, like Tilly nor like that's bullshit. Can you pause this? So I think that he basically says that like he doesn't think that like an iconic, amazing movie is going to be generated by AI And I sort of agree with that. But I think it's important to consider like what are we defining as a movie? Because we don't really watch movies anymore anyway. People watch content. And if you think about it like, you know, decades ago people might see one movie a month or one movie a week and that's like two to eight hours a month of screen time. Well now people are doing two to eight hours of screen time a day. But it's these fragmented pieces. And so if AI seeps into the cracks within the cracks within the cracks and you're. And it. The Goal is not to create the experience of a two hour movie that you show in a theater and you get everyone to come and buy tickets. Joe Rogan's really turned into Dwarkesh for a listers. Just come on and talk about AI. Right. It's really. McConaughey is talking about wanting this like personal LLM. Oh yeah. Where you can log some data in. Yeah, that one was a little bit rougher than this. Affleck's got it dialed. Let's continue with Affleck. I think it's. I think it actually turns out the technology is not progressing in exactly the same way they sort of presented it. And really what it is, it's going to be a tool just like sort of visual facts and yeah, it needs to have language around it. You need to protect your name and likeness. You can do that. You can watermark it. Those laws already exist. You can't. I can't sell your fucking picture for money. I can't. You can sue me, period. I might have the ability to draw you, to make you in a very realistic way, but that's already against the law. And the unions are going to, the guilds are going to manage this where it's like, okay, look, if this is a tool that actually helps us, for example, we don't have to go to the North Pole, right. We can shoot the scene here in our parkas and, you know, whatever it is and. But then make it appear very realistically as if we're in the North Pole. It'll save us a lot of money, a lot of time. We're going to focus on the performances and not be freezing our ass off out there and running back inside. Pause for a second. Just like Spencer Tracy. And what if you rebut this? Let me tell you about that vibe. Co where D2C brands, B2B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences and measure sales. Just like on Meta. Continue. Small chance that AI saves Hollywood as, as a place, Right. You're getting claps as a place. Yeah. And the reason for that is one of the issues right now is filming is so expensive in L. A. There's so much red tape that people have to go to Atlanta, Canada, Europe, whatever, international. But all the talent, the writers, directors, producers, the platforms, they're still here, right? It's very depressing. It's a bad vibe. All the restaurants are shutting down. Everything's cooked. But if you can start to generate the content here just on your computer, there's a chance that you see a kind of resurgence in Hollywood, the place. Right. Yeah. And I think that realistically that is the strategy that the industry should take because having this concentration here, there's already so much talent. Keeping it here and actually embracing AI is much more likely to revitalize the city. Yeah. There's an incredible quote in here. Hopefully we can get to it. Let's skip ahead and play because he has a line that truly is directly out of Andre Kathy's mouth. That's like the thing we were talking about earlier where there's a lot more fear because we have the sense this existential dread. It's going to wipe everything out. Right. But that actually runs counter in my view, to what history seems to show, which is slow, it's incremental. Let's go. I think a lot of rhetoric comes from people who are trying to justify valuations around companies. Literally a carpathy line. The reason they're saying that is because they need to ascribe a valuation for investment that can warrant. He didn't just watch Carpathia. Oh. You know, then after sitting there, he's. Sitting there taking notes. Make the Social Network 3. But it's just about Dwarkash and Carpathy hanging out an Alia. It's just about AI research. It's about. It's about an exciting neurips and that's it. Applovin profitable advertising made Easy with Axon AI. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. People are already having fun with the memes out of this. I like this amend and pretend. Ben Affleck on AI software. I suspect many AI native software companies are misrepresenting their growth and quality of revenue. Use of credits, annualizing proof of concept revenue and lack of annual contracts lowers the overall quality of revenue and ultimately the multiple. I mean, this is a joke. You can actually say that. But he's not that far off from what this is a great template. I hope this meme runs way further because it's so good banger. I love it. Oh, Forrest also clipped Ben Affleck talking about the GPT4O people. Let's play this because this is interesting. And while we pull it up, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. We are very pleased to be partnered with Cisco AI's new frontier, the Edge. Let's do it. Early AI. The line went up very steeply and it's now sort of leveling off. I think it's because. And yes, it'll get better, but it's Going to be really expensive to get better. And a lot of people are like, fuck this, we want ChatGPT4. Because it turned out, like the vast majority of people who use AI are using it to, like, as, like, companion bots to chat with at night. And so there's no work, there's no productivity, there's no value to it. I would argue there's also not a lot of social value to getting people to, like, focus on an AI friend who's, you know, telling you that you're great and listening to everything you say and being sick of you. That's sort of a side issue. Tyler's just enraged over there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What's your. What's your rebuttal? Let's give another. Let's give rebuttal. Defend AI. I think most of these takes are, like, pretty outdated. Okay. Like, writing is actually AI writing. You can still tell that it's AI, but it's like, it's good. It's good. Yeah. Videos are like, I think, like, okay. Okay, sell a screenplay then. Sell a screenplay. Yeah, yeah, Shop a screenplay. Do it. Do it. Yeah, but why would I. Why would I sell a screenplay? I could just make the whole movie myself. Okay, like, so just make the movie. He has this idea, like, make the finished movie. Call up Netflix instead of. And get a million dollar advance for your mov. Instead of filming in Antarctica, you can just get in the parkas and film it here. Right? You don't need the parkas either, because you can just have them be in normal clothes. That's true. And then it's like, well, you don't actually need the people, right? Because you can just maybe fine tune a model so you get consistent characters. And then, yeah, I will say. I will say just in the last two weeks, I am getting served AI content. That's pretty good. Pretty good. Pretty good. There's some pretty good stuff out there now. A lot of it's like. A lot of it still has that, like, creative human element. Like someone will take an iconic movie scene. Still all about the idea. It's about the idea. And the idea didn't come from the model. It's a bull market for ideas. It'll be good. That does feel like the next breakthrough. This idea that Ben saying. I would push back a little bit on Ben saying, like, you're not just gonna be able to generate a film. You will, but it won't be a film in the sense that it won't be Titanic. It won't be something that everyone goes to the movie theater sits down, watches the same film. It will be a lot of films that are for different people. I don't think there'll be anything. Yeah, but I'm just saying, like, people are gonna. People are gonna create like insane fan fiction style hero's journey, kind of like. Like standardized plot, but for a specific sub community. You'll have like one subreddit where everyone totally watches. And I mean, there is a lot of just slop movie content on streaming platforms right now. You can just go and watch Gap Year. Tyler put Aflac in the Truth Zone. Not. Not everything is. Yeah, not every movie is. Is. You know, is Titanic is, you know, Sicario. Like a lot look on Netflix. There's a lot of stuff. Yeah, they spent a million dollars. But every time I. Every time I look on Netflix, I'm like, is. These are. These are films. I know there's a lot of slop. On there anyway, so I think, like, in Hollywood, at least, like, I like a lot of movies. Like, there's certain writers that I like. Yeah, but you like movies. Wait, you said you like movies. All right, name every film. Name every film on the TVPN chat. Best film list. Movie list. Okay. But you always hear about, like, certain writers. They have a hard time getting their films made because maybe it's like kind of a weird concept or something, like, it's hard to market, but this is like, AI is actually much better for them, right? Because if you have someone who's like, actually has some like, unique look at the world or they're like, very creative or something, like, AI is like, super good for them, but kind of only for them. Right? So maybe the industry, it's not super great, but for the people, like, if there's a certain director that I like, really love, they're going to be, you know, they're going to be able to make way more of their movies or whatever, you know, instantiate all their ideas. Why are people saying that the Papa Tai is AI generated? This song's from 2013. Someone's saying that the most viral song of the year so far is a. Is an AI generated song, but it must be based on another. It's an AI cover of a human written song. Okay. Yeah. So it's like style transfer on top of. It's like a filter. This still feels like tool level, not to push back. I mean, that is an interesting watershed moment that something that involves AI could be so dominant. But there is a lot of, like, human work at. At play there to build the original song that then was edited with AI Anyway, Cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Anything else on Hollywood, or should we move on to the battle between. Chad is calling Tyler based Zoomer. He's Zoomer. It's good. Good times. Okay, so there's an update to The Elon Musk OpenAI lawsuit, which is sitting at about 60% chance that Elon wins on Kalshi right now on the prediction markets. But Elon Musk is now seeking. So on the day that the Brockman files went out, started going viral, OpenAI put out a release. They countered some of the narratives, added some more context, but they also sent out a letter to their investors saying, hey, look, we think it's going to be $34 million or something. worst, we'll have to pay him back for what he donated. But it's not going to be. Well, they said, we think, we think this is the most, but it could be more. It could be more. And Elon said, yeah, it's going to be more. It's going to be $134 billion in damages is what Elon is seeking. Elon Musk's legal team argues that his early funding and involvement materially contributed to OpenAI's rise, which is now valued at the.

A little disappointing that like we're not kind of cheering them on when the whole thesis of the Trump administration is like we want to step back and have our allies do more of the heavy lifting. So you're famous for the Mandate of Heaven tier list amongst AI labs has. Have you been feeling that China labs have been falling off? It feels like they've certainly been making less sort of like dramatic breakthroughs like the original Deep Sea Manus is now an American company. Let's go. Let's hear for Zuck. There was an article and the Quin. Models are great but you know, it just doesn't feel like it's in the conversation as like this is an existential risk to OpenAI or anthropic or Google. Like the real heavy hitters are like the main labs in America and then even XAI and MSL are doing exciting things. And so you have like five significant efforts and it feels like the open source narrative has sort of like fallen back. It's still there, but it's not nearly as existential or as just as embarrassing as it used to be where, when you know, a hedge Fund could spend 10mil and defeat Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah, I mean I think the big thing that folks need to remember when it comes to the US and China is on the talent side, roughly equivalent. Maybe the US has an edge because we can pay higher salaries on the data side, you know, still probably a wash. But when it comes to compute and the ability to deploy these, these models, there's really no contest as well as capital able to be put behind this whole, this whole arc. There's really not a contest between the US and China. I think current numbers are like TSM like SMIC and Huawei. Production is like 1 15th what Nvidia plus TSMC plus all the Asics can pump out. And this matters less in a future where you aren't using all the available compute. But look, people are going to come up with ways to use this stuff. I'm doing so much dumb shit on Claude code every day. How optimized is your Claude code setup? I'm sure you spent all at all. I just use the terminal and like fun apps. But, but the fact of the matter is like I think it is, it is. This is why the AI chip exports are so concerning is I really do think like the, the, the ecosystem with the compute and the capital is going to be able to drive ahead because then you'll, you'll have these great kind of reinforcing loops of productivity gains and growth then leading to kind of more development, more compute, and so on and so forth. And the fact of the matter is that China, even though it has really good engineers that can train good models, is compute constrained when it comes to development and deployment. We just translated this really interesting panel that happened in China with, I think it was like the CEOs of four of the top labs, so Jerpu, Quinn, Minimax, and someone from Tencent. And basically all of them were like, look, we are so jealous of OpenAI and Anthropic. Like, we have to use all of our compute to deploy stuff just to kind of keep the business going. Like, the amount of, you know, the scale at which they can deploy compute, the amount of data they're getting from their users, and then the ability of these firms to run experiments, to kind of put into the next stuff and get to the next breakthrough really means that in the current paradigm, America and the broader kind of Western AI ecosystem has a real edge. And throwing that away to export a handful of chips to China. And my idea, Pyrrhic vision, that we can still hook them on Nvidia, seems a little silly, but overall, yeah, it's been a pretty good six months for American AI. Let's go. Well, one more question. Can you give us a take on. Can you.

Of Trump won. And then in the Biden administration. The one thing that I do want to flag to you guys a little bit is this saga currently going on between Japan and China where the new prime minister of Japan made some not super offhanded remark, basically saying, like, a problem that China has with Taiwan is a problem that we have, and it's very likely that we would be involved in any kind of scenario. And this has basically been the goal of American presidents for decades now to kind of get Japan off of its butt, get its spending more on its military and get it, you know, really part of the equation to dissuade, to, like, make the balance of military power in the region such that China has no interest in going into Taiwan. And what you sort of saw in response to the Trump administration was kind of nothing, no big statement, no saying, hey, we're here to support you. Basically, Trump called Xi and then Trump called Takahichi saying, hey, chill out. And look, they just had a nice visit. The defense minister, Koizumi, the son of the old prime minister, who, like a Hotshot 37 or something, you guys should have him on. They had a nice meeting. We say that the alliance is okay, but I did find it a little disappointing that we're not kind of cheering them on when the whole thesis of the Trump administration is like, we wanna step back and have our allies take. Do more of the heavy lifting. You're famous for the mandate of Heaven.

Equilibrium. Trump's supposed to go there. And I think March or April, nobody really wants to rock the boat. But specifically on the Taiwan issue, no blockade, no invasion, no like, you know, firing back and forth or drones or conflict that I remember seeing anything like that. And that was sort of like the worst case scenario was that maybe they were going to start with some sort of soft blockade and it wasn't going to be violent, but it was going to really escalate the situation too. Like, were repositioning ships. Yeah. I mean, this is. This has been one of my polymarket trade recommendations over the past few years is no, no, no, no war invasion. I'm not particularly surprised. We've had something crazy. Look, I think she sees a lot of upside in the. The direction of travel of a lot of things. And yes, China has problems, but like starting World War Three or I mean, right now, he has like a pretty good equilibrium with the US in that all of the kind of like we had a sort of slow but steady creep up in controls over the course of, you know, really starting towards the second half of Trump won. And that with what Xi has been able to do by kind of throwing the rare earth thing back in America's face is stop that. And, you know, I think who's the really old guy who does trade in the White House, but who. Who like, had the. Says like dumplings are bad or something. I can't remember his name anyway. Peter Guevara. Peter Guevara. You're like, you guys are ready to cover D.C. we're like, couldn't tell you who works there. Dumpling man. Google this dumpling quote while I'm like, Peter Navarro Dumplings. Okay. I have heard of him. I'm sure he's a nice guy. He said, look like it's a different chessboard me from what it was a while ago. And the fact that China both has leverage and is willing to and more importantly is willing to use it and understands that using it will get the US to back down. I think is a new dynamic which we hadn't really seen in the trade war arc of Trump 1 and then in the Biden administration. The one thing that I do want to flag to you guys.

It's Operation Paperclip. You know, here's my analogy. Okay, so like talking about invading Greenland is what Trump wants you to do. I don't think he's going to do it. But like the thing that gets him jazzed up is people being upset about crazy ideas he has in the pushback. And this, I think the fascinating analogy here is the whole Ro Khanna saga that we've had over the past month or two because like the amount like this is what he wanted to happen. He is not dumb. He is a politician who has a national presence and has ambitions. And what he wants to do is as the Silicon Valley representative, like there is a risk for him in a potential 2028 Democratic primary of saying you're just in the bag for these guys. So having like being able to sort of manufacture this enemy of all these like rich billionaires who hey, by 2029 when no one has jobs, or 2028, 2027 when no one has jobs anymore, like, and we have two more years of tech bros running the White House, like the Q score of that segment of society may be down. Like having all these people on the record saying we're going to take him down, we want to run against him, he's going to take our money. Which by the way, is something a lot of Americans I don't think would be all that upset about. And like, yes, your median TVPN listene the nuances of taxing unrealized gains may not be the best thing for innovation, but like, the ease at which this entire ecosystem was baited I just found to be fascinating. And it's a kind of thing. I think that's a good, I think it's generally a good take because if you actually press, you know, anybody that's actually press Roe like he has no defense for his political, you know, policy stance on this. Like he, he actually cannot defend it and stay logically coherent. Right? Like it's like he's running. He really is. It seems like he's running like a bit. But since, but since when has that mattered in politics? I don't know, like the Kennedy Nixon debates or something. Like, yeah, he is now setting himself up against billionaire capitalist overlords who are apparently on the other side of him and hate him and want to do everything to bring him down. And like that is a winning play for him. And these folks are so scared of their bags and they're so confident that they say something and then it will happens and no, there won't be second order consequences that I don't know. It was a fascinating saga to watch from the sidelines. Yeah. He's on a whole media tour now. He's done a ton of. He's popping up everywhere, and he's definitely taking advantage of the moment. He's done really well because he's got some haters. Cause he's smart. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's playing the heel. He studied. He sat. He sat down. He watched a bunch of WWE game tape, and he's like, okay, I know what I gotta do.

Movie myself. Okay. Like, I. So it's like, just make the movie. He has this idea, like. Make the finished movie. Call Netflix instead of and get a million dollar advance for your movie. Instead of filming in Antarctica, you can just get in the parkas and film it here. Right. You don't need the parkas either, because you can just have them be in normal clothes. That's true. And then it's like, well, you don't actually need the people, right. Because you can just maybe fine tune a model so you get consistent characters. And then. Yeah, I will say. I will say, just in the last two weeks, I am getting served AI content. That's pretty good. Pretty good. Pretty good.

A screenplay. Yeah, yeah. Shop a screenplay. Do it. Do it. Yeah, but why would I, why would. I sell a screenplay? I could just make the whole movie myself. Okay, Like I. So just make the movie. He has this idea, like. Make the finished movie. Call up Netflix instead of and get a million dollar advance for your movie. Instead of filming in Antarctica, you can just get in the parkas and film it here. Right? You don't need the parkas either because you can just have them be in normal clothes. That's true. And then it's like, well, you don't actually need the people, right? Because you can just maybe fine tune a model so you get consistent characters and then. Yeah, I will say, I will say just in the last two weeks, I am getting served AI content. That's pretty good. Pretty good. There's some pretty good stuff out there.

Let's give another rebuttal. Defend. I think most of these takes are, like, pretty outdated. Okay. Like, writing is actually AI writing. You can still tell that it's AI, but it's like, it's good. It's good. Yeah. Videos are like, I think, like, okay. Okay, sell a screenplay then. Sell a screenplay. Yeah, yeah, Shop a screenplay. Do it. Do it. Yeah. But why would I. Why would I sell a screenplay? I could just make the whole movie myself. Okay. Like, I. So just make the movie. He has this idea, like, make the finished movie. Call Netflix instead of. And get a million dollar advance for your movie. Instead of. Instead of filming in Antarctica, you can just get in the parkas and film it here. Right. You don't need the parkas either, because you can just have them be in normal clothes. That's true. And then it's like, well, you don't actually need the people. Right. Because you can just maybe fine tune a model so you get consistent characters and then. Yeah, I will say, I will say just in the last two weeks, I am getting served AI content. That's pretty good. Pretty good. Pretty good. There's some pretty good stuff out there now. A lot of it's like, a lot of it still has that creative human element. Like someone will take an iconic movie scene. Still all about the idea. It's about the idea. Idea didn't come from the model. It's a bull market for ideas. It'll be good. But that does feel like the next. Breakthrough, this idea that Ben saying. I would push back a little bit on. Ben saying, like, you're not just gonna be able to generate a film. You will, but it won't be a film in the sense that it won't be Titanic. It won't be something that everyone goes to the movie theater, sits down, watches the same film. It will be a lot of films that are for different people. I don't think there'll be anything. Yeah, but I'm just saying, like, people are gonna. People are gonna create like insane fan fiction style hero's journey, kind of like. Like standardized plot, but for a specific sub community. You'll have like one subreddit where everyone totally watches. And I mean, there. There is a lot of just slop movie content on streaming platforms right now. You can just go and watch Gap Year. Tyler put Aflac in the Truth Zone. Not. Not everything is. Yeah, not every mo is gone, you know, is. Titanic is, you know, Sicaria. Like a lot. Look on Netflix. There's a lot of stuff. Yeah, they spent a million dollars. But every time I. Every time I look on Netflix, I'm like, is. These are. These are films? I know there's a lot of slop on there. I think, like, in Hollywood, at least, like, I like a lot of movies. Like, there's certain writers that I like. But you like movies? Wait, you said you like movies? All right, name every film. Name every film on the TVPN chat. Best film list. Best movie list. Okay? But you always hear about, like, certain writers. They have a hard time getting their films made because maybe it's like, kind of a weird concept or something, like, it's hard to market, but this is like, AI is actually much better for them, right? Because if you have someone who's, like, actually has some, like, unique look at the world, or they're, like, very creative or something, like, AI is like, super good for them, but kind of only for them, right? So maybe in the industry, it's not super great, but for the people, like, if there's a certain director that I really love, they're going to be able to make way more of their movies or whatever, instantiate all their ideas. Why are people saying that?

Let's give another rebuttal. Defend AI. I think most of these takes are, like, pretty outdated. Okay. Like, writing is actually AI writing. You can still tell that it's AI, but it's like, it's good. It's good. Yeah. Videos are like, I think, like, okay. Okay, sell a screenplay then. Sell a screenplay. Yeah, yeah. Shop a screenplay. Do it. Do it. Yeah, but why would I. Why would I sell a screenplay? I could just make the whole movie myself. Okay, like, so. Just make the movie. He has this idea, like. Make the finished movie. Call it Netflix. Instead of. And get a million dollar advance for your movie instead. Instead of filming in Antarctica, you can just get in the parkas and film it here. Right? You don't need the parkas either, because you can just have them be in normal clothes. That's true. And then it's like, well, you don't actually need the people, right. Because you can just maybe fine tune a model so you get consistent characters. Sure, sure, sure. And then, yeah, I will say, I will say just in the last two weeks, I am getting served AI content. That's pretty good. Pretty good. Pretty good. There's some pretty good stuff out there now. A lot of it's like. A lot of it still has that, like, creative human element. Like someone will take an iconic movie scene. Still all about the idea. It's about the ide idea didn't come from the model. It's a bull market for ideas. It'll be good.

Startups and AI companies advertise on streaming tv, pick channels, target audiences and measure sales, just like on Meta. Continue. Small chance that AI saves Hollywood as a place. Right. You're getting claps as a place. Yeah. And the reason for that is one of the issues right now is filming is so expensive in la. There's so much red tape that people have to go to Atlanta, Canada, Europe, whatever, international. But all the talent, the writers, directors, producers, the platform, platforms, they're still here. Right. It's very depressing. It's a bad vibe. All the restaurants are shutting down, everything's cooked. But if you can start to generate the content here just on your computer, there's a chance that you see a kind of resurgence in Hollywood, the place. Right? Yeah. And I think that realistically, that is the strategy that the industry should take, because having this concentration here, there's already so much talent. Keeping it here and actually embracing AI is much more likely to revitalize the city. Yeah, there's. There's an incredible quote in here. Hopefully we can get to.

That we can leverage. Yeah this might be in more detail but still again if you're at a company any company you should probably clear the public speaking engagements with. Solomon didn't just read Lulu's going direct he studied and he sat down. That's wild. And I actually DM with him briefly this morning and I think he's going to work on a startup okay cool we'll have to have him on at some point when he's ready to talk about it I mean he certainly now honestly kind of benefit of like going and working at a Google or meta is they'll straight up tell you don't talk to the media unless you've been explicitly. Trapped or go I mean there's different strategies at different companies some companies are totally cool with a bunch of people going out and talking about their business but yeah this seems like one of the more secretive organizations so a life lesson there anyway console console builds AI agents that automate 70.

Figuring out what is truth for Grokopedia. What happens when Elon sees wrong Grok outputs on X what it's like operating in X AI's war room and a number of other things. So massively viral by the way. 4 million views just on X. 5000 likes. This is a massive. And so. And so anyways, like I'll start by saying that this is fantastic content, beautifully shot. Well that to Dai Mort. Fantastic team, very well done and great content. Right. People are so curious about what's happening at xai, right. We want to understand how they're approaching different problems. And Elon talks about it in such high level. He's talking about AI AGI, super futuristic and then he'll give little details on some massive build out that he's working on. But he's not in the nitty gritty. One small problem. Yes. Usually a $200 billion company likes to control who's going to go out and do a tell all about the company. And specifically with Elon companies, if you hadn't noticed, there's not a lot of people that work for Elon companies that go and do the podcast circuit. Go talk about everything going on. No, I mean at SpaceX, Gwynne Shotwell has given a few speeches, mostly at commencement speeches, like inspirational speeches to colleges and that type of stuff. She's not going on Rogan or different space podcasts or tech podcasts. It's very rare to see content with her. And then Kiko Donchev is their head of launch and he will do engagement with NASA and if there's a real heavy industry focused panel, he might attend. But he's not also, he's also not just hopping on stuff. And then beyond generally, he's not trying to create like thousands of superstars. No. Right. He does. He wants you to work for him forever. Yeah, I saw a post in here. But when a company, when, like when somebody, when someone super talented leaves, it's not like Elon in general is lining up and saying like let me do your first round, let me do your first like you know, 10 million, 20 million bucks. Right. He's actively trying to incentivize people to not develop big brands. He wants people to stay and he wants to be able to control the messaging. Wait, speaking of that, look at this, look at this Sam Sheffer post. He went and found a. Fifteen years ago they did a SpaceX office tour. It is so like, it's just, it's crazy. It just looks like a cubicle office, but in there. Sam Sheffer finds that there's someone who works on propulsion named Matthew McKeown McCune, and he's been on propulsion for 17 years and eight months. Like, that's exactly, that's exactly what Elon wants. A true believer who's riding with him through thick and thin and, and has probably done extremely well financially, worked on really interesting problems. Is he gonna be a household name? Is he gonna be a podcast circuit? No. But does Matthew really want that? Probably not. He wants to propel the rockets, and that's exactly what he's done for nearly two decades now. So that's the Elon strategy. And you should know that going into that environment, maybe it should be more explained. But it certainly ended in disaster in this. Yeah. The funny thing is I didn't catch all the interview, but they talk about how HR in general is not super formalized at the company. And so you can also imagine that PR and the media relations team is not super active. Maybe nobody in HR said, hey, don't go do it an hour long podcast. If you're anybody but Elon, maybe don't do an hour long podcast telling all. And so of course people what happened. Ultimately, Suleiman, he said he's left. We don't actually know what happened, but it is odd to go do an hour long interview and then quit anyway. So I think like good intentions potentially took the concept which he talks about in here. No one tells me no a little bit too far. But. But I posted earlier, you can't even share the internal secrets of your AI lab on a cinematic podcast in this country anymore. Brutal. Andrew Curran had some good context here. He said the speculation is that this is the result of the interview he gave where he said, xai intelligence.

And the rest is history. But they've been working on making X a more literate long form platform for a while. 2023. We need to teach our users the English language. We need them to read more than 80 characters. So they've obviously done a ton in video. They've never really leaned into a video library like YouTube. I used to cross post my YouTube videos on X. Sometimes there were length limits for a while, then they got rid of those. So I could just actually copy a 25 minute YouTube video, put it on X and it was cool. People wouldn't watch nearly as much as they did on YouTube, but. And there was no catalog value. That was like. The really weird thing was that on YouTube, like my old videos that I haven't uploaded in over a year and my old videos are still probably getting like, I don't know, half a million views a month. Just because people are every day they search like what's the history of and. Or what's the history of Ramp? Or what's the history of Xi Jinping. On their evergreen content? So just continue. Exactly. And then once someone watches one of my videos, they watch five more. Well, part of that, if you want to be a serious video platform, you need to be like, have, you know, actually incentivizing people to watch on TV. Like so much of YouTube watch hours happen on TV. Yeah. And X, I think has a streaming TV app, but it's certainly not. Doesn't get a lot of love. Yeah. I actually made a whole documentary about El Segundo. Went around with a.