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Out with her. And, I mean, it was. We had to go dress up and get. We did have to dress up. It was. It was definitely the most. By far, the most intense shoot we've ever.

Card. Yes. Yes. I. I saw a poster who Bringing gambling into debt. There's someone who like vibe codes. Different UX mock ups for funny concepts. There's that famous one.

Year. I'm going to try to pull. Pull one up. Well, you do. Let me tell you about Crowdstrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. Crowdstrike secures.

We had to go dress up and get photos. We did have to dress up. It was definitely the most. By far the most intense shoot we've ever been a part of. Two cameras, medium format. Medium format film. Well, I just mean more like the team that actually went into it. Right. There's so many different people working on. It was extremely professional, as you would expect out of Vanity Fair. And I like that Julia still called us the technology brothers. She's not fully brand. No. It doesn't mean keeping it alive. Yeah. They call us the G J team. John Coogan and George had an off mic moment. There's a bunch of funny moments in here. Yeah. What'd you like? What'd you like? I like the. She said, there are no saints. One of them runs a nicotine company, but they have not just any nicotine. What kind of nicotine is it? It's addictive nicotine that I personally am addicted to. But they have drawn certain lines in the sand. They don't swear on air, they try to avoid vulgarity, and they don't promote alcohol or drug use. Mostly because they're not big drinkers themselves. It's cool that we get credit for not promoting alcohol use. Even though in the early days, the doubling, you know. Yeah, we were doing the Dom episodes. But it was funny because we actually really didn't enjoy it. Yeah, it was funny. But I remember I'd be. I'd tell my wife, oh, it's a Dom day today. I gotta go drink a bunch of champagne at 11am I'm not looking forward to it. And then Julie says, perhaps most importantly, and then a quote from me, the show is never gonna promote Burning Man. I can't believe you said that. I mean, it's factually true. It really is so funny when you are talking to a serious journalist where everything you say, even the jokes were gonna get written down and recorded and printed. So some of the odd little stylistic flourishes you. Yeah, I'm just riffing. I'm doing bits. And then it gets written down and it looks way different in that cont. It's good, it's real. It's the actual beliefs. There was a funny moment. So we were getting breakfast with Julia at our usual spot, and she says, while in line for coffee that morning, Hayes dashed off an expost. This was right after the Coldplay saga. I said, Startup CEOs can't even hug their chief people officer at a concert in this country anymore. And Julie says, as he watched the likes pour in, he predicted they would top 10,000 or so. When I checked the next morning, there were. There were over 70,000. And you were saying, imagine, imagine if it flopped, it would be in here. It'd be like. He said he predicted it would 10,000 and only got 200. Yeah. But wow, lucky day. Yeah, it was a good day to come see the show. It sort of took us all over the place. I think at the end of the show, I sort of stood up and said, you know, what was that? Are we journalists? Are we analysts? Are we comedians? I don't know, but we're going to figure it out, and we're not going anywhere over the next next decades. Was funny. We were blasting Coldplay's Fix you in the studio that morning, which is a. Is a fantastic song. It's a great song. Also, at that. At that lunch, she didn't put this in, but you ordered some food, and you put so much salt on it, you just kept shaking the salt shaker. And I was like, this is gonna go in the piece. Oh, yeah. I've never noticed that you put. I love salt. I have this amazing story. My grandpa was making my brother and I hot chocolate when we were kids. And, like, my grandma was away at the time, so it was just us hanging out with grandpa. And he's like, I'm gonna make the kids hot chocolate. He makes a hot chocolate, brings it over to us. He's drinking it, he gives us a couple cups, and we're like, oh, grandpa, this is really rough. Are you sure you made it right? And he's like, yeah, I made it right. It's totally fine. Oh, I know what happened. And turns out all the sugar that he meant to put in, he meant to put in salt. But his taste buds were. Were so cooked that to him, it just drinks normally pure salt. Mix up hot chocolate sugar, you notice immediately. So anyways, I'm like him in that sense. There's almost no amount of salt, but. It'S a very funny story. They also did this little video interview with.

Over 70,000. And you were saying, imagine, imagine, imagine if it flopped. It would be in here. It'd be like he predicted it would. 10,000. It only got 200. Yeah, but.

Julia at our usual spot, and she says, while in line for coffee that morning, Hayes dashed off an expost. This was right after the Coldplay saga. I said. Startup CEOs can't even hug their chief.

100 billion, let alone trillion dollar companies. But it turns out basically each individual 10x is actually easier than the last one. Basically, once you're trillion dollar, once.

Conclusion at this point? No, I think that you're going to have a big set of IPOs. I mean everybody sort of knows the names off the tip of their tongue. But yeah, probably six to 10 companies I think this year have such high demand. They've so far been rewarded by basically saying no and waiting and having ever higher rounds and lower cost of capital. I do think you even look at Palantir and the valuation of Palantir and Alex and the team are amazing. But to me it is less about Palantir and more about huge amount of pent up demand for next generation defense tech. I think if and when you ever do see a debut from Anduril, no idea on the timing, size, all that kind of stuff, but the demand is going to be really high, you know, and you see it in the private markets now just as a proxy. We used to get bids on the secondary market for a lot of our companies either sort of at last round price or maybe at a discount to nav, you know, to the discount to last round price. Most of the bids we get for our companies now, particularly the ones that could be or will be going public, are at premiums. And so I think the demand is really high. It will usher in a next generation of companies and it will happen in AI compute, you'll see it in some of the big foundation labs, you'll see it in biotech. I think you're going to see a window over the next six months where you see a ton of really interesting biotech IPOs and it'll happen in aerospace and defense in this next generation. And this whole confluence will just make a ton of sense. This arc from Google having its employees protest working on project Maven, to seeing the rise of Anduril, to seeing Trump's lashing the existing bureaucratic primes and then you see mega IPOs and these next gen companies that didn't exist 10 years ago being worth more than some of the existing primes. I think it is going to be a bellwether for the industry and it is great to be American. It is great to have American capital markets. Capital wants to go where it is welcome and stay where it is well treated and it is here. So super.

The secret to success. I think it's right. I think the headline is right. We all spoke, I want to say, back at Hill Valley. Yeah, and we were talking about the minnows and the megas. And I had made this thing that maybe was like a sort of prediction but in anticipation that basically you were going to have this bifurcation where you had to have a long tail of the small funds that were going to basically disappear. And I know you guys hit on that earlier, but I was with one of my large LPs and I was like, I think you're going to see 30 to 50% extinction rate, sort of involuntary exit. And this is, yeah, that idea of like a lot of people are on their last fund, they just don't know it yet. People never been through a cycle, they have inadequate reserves, they haven't invested in succession planning. They're in the wrong sectors. They are in sectors that have too much capital, they don't have enough. And they were basically in a market where everything was going up and to the right and they looked really smart and they're not idiots. But usually in up markets people look smarter than they are. In down markets they look dumber than they are. And in this particular case the prophecy was like 30 to 50% would end up disappearing and going extinct. And this LP laughed at me and he's like, Josh, it's going to be 90%. So he was even more aggressive. And I think that's going to happen. Some will join bigger platforms and get absorbed. And you're seeing that GC bought a group out of Europe and you'll see other people sort of tuck into some of the other big platforms. Those are the minnows at the other end you got the megas and the Megas, you know, there's probably five or six firms that are basically like 80, 100 billion a day and growing. And I actually think that they will voluntarily exit. So you will actually see IPOs probably from Andreessen, GC, GA, a handful of others that are basically gearing up to be multi asset platforms. And they're amazing investors, they're great people, but it's just changing the game. So you've got small fries that are basically exiting and people that are emerging managers. A few will enter and grow. We were once an emerging manager and entered and grew. And then you have large guys that are basically gearing up, I think, to go public. So it's probably, I don't know, 12 firms in the middle that are between 1 and $3 billion that can do early 100k checks and late 150 to $200 million checks. And I think for the next few years, that's going to be the place to.

Mover in that space. Yeah. How do you think about dual use technologies? When I look at the legacy primes, almost all of them have wound up at least with some sort of commercial business. Palantir obviously famous. Anduril, not yet, but I'm hoping for a consumer drone that I can fly around maybe with a camera on it. They have General Dynamics, they have Gulfstream and it's sort of just. Sometimes it just happens over time, sometimes it feels deliberate. And you see it in pitch decks at a seed round where the, the company says hey, we're going to do this military thing. But then eventually there's this obvious add on in commercial or oil and gas or something else. Do you think the dual use can be a distraction? Do you like thinking about it in the near term? How are you processing the dual use nature of some of these technologies? I love this question. I think it's a distraction. Honestly for Palantir it was critical. And really when you think about Foundry and those platforms, those are meant to be for any use case in the world, like yeah, you know, so the fact that it is dual use makes sense for them. But I think today, you know, traditional venture incentivizes your products to become dual use because that makes you, that means your TAM is so much greater. And again this is why I think 80% of the government market is like being left untapped because most of the use cases are single use. And like honestly that's really critical too. And I think if you, your products over time can become dual use even if you are thinking that they have a single use focus initially. And I think if you start your products in government, you have a much greater likelihood of making them dual use for commercial versus vice versa. If you start your product in commercial and you try to move to government, it's incredibly difficult. You know, when you think about compliance, you have to like re architect your entire platform for it to become fed ramp high or to meet impact level accreditation status. So I'd much rather see our products, if they like they don't have to become dual use. They can be single use. And I think the government needs single use products. But many of them are already dual use. You know, some of our initial buyers were actually commercial customers and like that's valuable too because it establishes commerciality, but it has to be focused like your first customers have to be in government, in our, in our ecosystem. And I just think dual use is way overhyped. Talk about the fundraising.

That's right. I mean I when I think about the market like I think we could be one of the ways many of these companies are able to be sustainable and endure after the hype goes away. I always like to say like we want to be the most sustainable company in this market or platform of companies in this market and yeah I think earlier you said so what about like is this like are we looking at like a $50 million TAM here for this product? I mean I like to think a lot of what we're working on they're like hundreds of millions of dollars tams behind them they just don't have to be 10 billion right like they don't need to be and oral they don't need to be Palantir right now everyone's getting pitched to be like like I'm the Andrew of X I'm the Palantir why Y and there's really only going to be a handful of those companies speaking of.

Yeah. We're trying to be Berkshire Hathaway for defense tech. Right. And so for us, we're holding product companies, and that's usually software, software defined hardware. We started a little over a year ago. And Today we have five publicly launched product companies. We have 10 in the in the works. So we're actively working on 3 more, and we likely will add 2 more before the end of 2026. So we're moving pretty quickly here. And we're tackling everything from power systems for unmanned autonomous systems to combat casualty care. So think about parts of the market that are really, really critical. But again, like, there hasn't been innovation there in decades. Yeah.

And the space update. But first, I want your advice for Patrick Collison. He's interested in Miami. What does it take for Patrick to have a great experience in Miami? There is something a little surreal about the sets of people right now tweeting about Miami. Were the people probably most strongly critiquing it in 2021? And so there's something surreal about being like, huh, maybe I was like, right idea, slightly wrong time. Just needed to wait for California, not just to get hit with COVID but become communist, basically and start seizing property. And that's the thing that convinces people. On the Miami thing. What do you think about this idea of not moving Silicon Valley to Miami, but moving Sandhill Road to Miami? Like, all the big GPS will be domiciled there. And yes, if you're raising a big round, you'll probably go to Miami, go to someone's house, meet them in person. But a lot of the investors who are not subject to that tax will be operating out of San Francisco. A lot of the labs, a lot of the individual contributors, the academic institutions. You're not trying to move the entire network, but you're still embracing Miami as a important tech hub. Yeah. I think if there's something to be proud of in the time period where I feel like I contributed to Miami the most, call 21 through 24, I do think that it established itself as a fundraising destination. Absolutely. Between everybody from dan Sondheim at D1, Ken Griffin from Citadel, Peter spending a decent chunk of the time there, et cetera, has now very much so become a destination where. Yeah. If you're ready, raising a later stage round, or you're even like, you know, not Peter level gp, but, like, you know, up and coming. I mean, also. Also, you have. You have Keith, Catherine, Sachs. Like, there were. There were. It wasn't just ff that there was a nice network emerging where you could go and take meetings with five different funds pretty quickly. You know, obviously that evolved. Yeah. I think it's just like, it built a base that is now much easier to build on top of where like, now that you have this, like, you know, sort of second wave that's happening because it's like California sort of regulation. I think it's like, clearly, you know, sort of cementing itself in it. And I think it's probably what Miami is best suited for anyways. Right. Like, you know, Francis Suarez would always say, like, look, ultimately what we're best at is, like, the capital of capital. Yep. And I think that is, like, you. Know, that's one of our taglines we refer to. Oh, yeah, but he can use it. It's fine. Give us the update on Jared Isaac, man.

We should talk about the title of the stream. Julia Black's TVPN expose in Vanity Fair just dropped today. If you go to vanity fair.com, we're right there. And it's been a lot of fun working on this piece. We got to do a very fun. Well, to be clear, there wasn't. There wasn't a lot of work for us. We got to hang out with her. Getting interviewed, hanging out with her. And I mean, it was. We had to go dress up and get photos. We did that. Dress up. It was definitely the most, by far the most intense shoot we've ever been a part of. Two cameras, medium format. Medium format film. Well, I'm. I just mean more like the team that actually went into it. Right. So many different people working on it was extremely professional, as you would expect out of Vanity Fair. And I like that Julia still called us the technology brothers. She's not. She's not fully developed. No, it doesn't. Keeping it alive. Yeah. They call us the J Team. John Coogan and Geordi Hitch off mic moment. There's a bunch of funny moments in here. Yeah. What'd you like? I like the. She said there are no saints. One of them runs a nicotine company, but they have. No, not just any nicotine company. What kind of nicotine is. It's addictive nicotine that I personally am addicted to. But they have drawn certain lines in the sand. They don't swear on air, they try to avoid vulgarity, and they don't promote alcohol or drug use, mostly because they're not big drinkers themselves. It's. It's cool that we get credit for not promoting alcohol use. Even though in the early days, the doubling. Yeah, we were doing the Dom episodes. But it was funny because we actually really didn't enjoy it. Yeah, it was funny. But I remember I'd tell my wife, oh, it's a Dom day today. I gotta go drink a bunch of champagne at 11aM I'm not looking forward to it. And then Julie says, perhaps most importantly, and then a quote from me. The show is never gonna promote Burning Man. I can't believe you said that. I mean, it's factually true. It really is so funny when you are talking to a serious journalist where everything you say, even the jokes were gonna get written down and recorded and printed. So some of the odd little stylistic flourishes you. Yeah, I'm just riffing. I'm doing bits. And then it gets written down. And it looks way different in that cont. Good. It's real. It's the actual beliefs. There was a funny moment. So we were getting breakfast with Julia at our usual spot, and she says, while in line for coffee that morning, Hayes dashed off an ex post. This was right after the Coldplay saga. I said, Startup CEOs can't even hug their chief people officer at a concert in this country anymore. And Julia says as he watched the likes pour in, he predicted they would top 10,000 or so. When I checked the next morning, there were. There were over 70,000. And you were saying, imagine, imagine, imagine. If it flopped, it would be in here. It'd be like. He said he predicted it would. 10,000. It only got 200. Yeah, but wow, lucky day. Yeah, it was a good day to come see the show. It sort of took us all over the place. I think at the end of the show, I sort of stood up and said, you know, what was that? Are we journalists? Are we analysts? Are we comedians? I don't know. But we're going to figure it out, and we're not going anywhere over the. Next decades was funny. We were blasting Coldplay's Fix you in the studio that morning. Which is. Which is. Which is a. Is a fantastic song. It's a great song. Also, at that. At that lunch, she didn't put this in, but you ordered some food and you put so much salt on it. You just kept shaking the salt shaker. And I was like, this is going to go in the piece. Oh, yeah. I've never noticed that you put. I love salt. I have this amazing story. My grandpa was making my brother and I hot chocolate when we were kids. And, like, my grandma was away at the time, so it was just us hanging out with grandpa. And he's like, I'm gonna make the kids hot chocolate. He makes a hot chocolate, brings it over to us, he's drinking it, he gives us a couple cups, and we're like, oh, Grandpa, this is really rough. Are you sure you made it right? And he's like, yeah, I made it right. It's totally fine. Oh, I know what happened. And turns out all the sugar that he meant to put in, he meant to put in salt, but his taste buds were so cooked that to him, it just normally pure salt, hot chocolate. Sugar, you notice immediately. So anyways, I'm like him in that sense. There's almost no amount of salt. But it's a very funny story. They also did this little video interview with us, and they asked us bullish or bearish on a number of things. And one of the things they asked us was blue sky. And we both look at each other and we're like, oh, we love blue skies. Like, it's a nice day. No clouds. Most of the days are blue skies in California. And they had to clarify, like, no, like blue sky, like the app. And we're like, oh, yeah. We don't actually think about it at all. We're mostly on X. But it really does give you a little bit of flavor of how we think about the business and whatnot. So it was a fun. Yeah. Also, the outfits, of course, unfortunately, were not ours. They dressed us. They brought a whole wardrobe team and stuff. But you got to get that suit. I do. That suit is. You gotta get yours, too. Unbelievable. The 1980s theme was very fun, very throwback, and it feels like a return to the early brand. Very much what we were doing. It feels like it captured. It might be the last story that gets told about that era before we go into whatever we're doing next.

Were you surprised about the Manus acquisition? Did that trigger you, or are you kind of licking your. It's so good that a company like Manus got acquired by a former Founders Fund portfolio company. Let's give it up for Founders Fund for making it happen. Facebook, you know, seeded by Founders Fund, and now going around and acquiring great companies like Manuscript. Right. You know, it's funny. I had, like, probably, like, 30 people text me being like, when are you gonna tweet about it? What are you gonna say about it? I just, like, sitting there, and I was just like. I don't even know what I'm supposed to say. It's just like, I'm like, you know, I'm like a disappointed father. You know what I mean? I just can't believe that this is, like, you know, what the world has come to. How has this happened? Well, you know, my favorite meme about it was like, you know, there was somebody that, like, had, like, a fake text chat between Zuckerberg and Alex Wang, and Zuckerberg going like, hey, can you go buy Mantis for me? And then Alex is like, sir, yes, sir. And Zuckerberg goes, okay, well, thank you. Did you get me the freemium or the premium one? And I was like, no, I bought Man.

Has only basically continued since then. And I think you're seeing it first on the company side of things. Right? I think we've talked about this before, but like, you know, if you look at it on like a deal count basis, we're basically just on a strict linear decline since the peak of 2021 in terms of total deals done by all VCs across the globe that I think basically like north of $5 million, it's like just strictly going down in terms of number of companies basically, you know, sort of per year that are looking like that. So company formation is down, deal count is down. And so by default you basically have obviously sort of fewer logos that you can chase. And so you're getting more aggregation into a much smaller set of logos on the company basically side of things. At the same time you're seeing companies stay private for much longer. And so like the liquidity in the public markets is getting vacuumed up by an even smaller set of companies because like there's just a small set that are the mega ones that are raising these like, you know, sort of huge, huge rounds. Right? I think it was something like if you basically added up SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic and Xai, basically. I think if you added up basically those four companies, it was something on the order of like 60% of like the total dollars deployed by VCs in that year were scooped up basically by those like, you know, sort of four or five companies. And so I think that's like the dynamic that's then flowing through on like the VC basically side of things where if you're one of those companies and you need to now raise like, you know, $10 billion, are you really trying to go out and do that with like a bunch of $10 million checks? It's like, no, you prefer to like, you know, find capital providers that can actually give you billion dollar checks. So you just like have fewer sort of mouse around the table. You need to manage some of this regulatory. Right. Like, I think you can't have more than like, I think it's like 6,500 like you know, institutions on your cap table before you're public. And so you literally have to make sure that these sort of things, you know, aggregate and then there's a part of it that is, yeah, just the like power law of venture and tech only continues to be like more and more true. Like, you know, you're dominated by the big. It's like, yeah, there's this like, I'm probably going to butcher it a little bit like, you know, Peter's had this, you know, sort of like, you know, thing that he said for sure privately, I'm pretty sure publicly too, so I don't think you'll mind me saying it. But he like his like biggest error, you know, that he says of like his 20 sort of tens was, you know, his impression was just like, you know, there's not going to be that many like, you know, you know, 100 billion, let alone like trillion dollar companies. But it turns out basically like each individual 10x is actually like easier than the last one. Basically like once you're sort of trillion dollar, once you're $100 billion company, it's actually much easier to go to a trillion than it was to go from like 10 to 100. And it's actually much easier to go to 10 to 100 than it is from 1 to 10. And it's much easier to go from like 1 billion to 10 billion than it is to go from 100 million to 1 billion, etc. And so in some ways that momentum beginning momentum is just making so that these companies get bigger faster, they're scooping up capital faster and the venture firms are getting bigger.

Near term and what the commercial industry is capable of. So I don't know if you guys saw, but I tweeted this that you know, basically this year we're gonna four separate totally net new commercial lunar landers basically land on the moon this year. It's intuitive. Machines has one, Astrobotic has one, Blue Origin has one and SpaceX does SpaceX? No, it's not SpaceX. They don't have a plan for humans this year. Firefly. Duff. Oh yeah, Firefly. And you know, for it's worth the like Blue Origin, you know, Mark one lander is like the size of like, it's like a two story house. It's like it's going to be the biggest man made object that we've like ever landed on the moon. And I will say like, you know, until a quarter ago I was probably a little more skeptical that like, you know, Blue Origin was actually going to like land this thing. Now it's like, you know, you see that New Glenn is actually like launching, landing. It's like, man, they maybe have like really turned a corner on like, you know, their engineering systems design. But the cool thing is, even if Blue Origin Fs it up, there's also like three other companies that are aggressively pursuing it, are getting like paid commercial revenues to go do this. And to me it's just like this breakout year that I still think is like, I don't know, underpaid attention to and under discussed like, you know, this is the analogy that I tried to provide is like this kind of feels like 1968 where it's just like you have like the, you know, basically year before where it's like, I don't know if you know, but in February we're going to be sending humans basically back to the moon for the first time. Not on the surface but to like orbit the moon. So like that's going to the moon. Four different landers basically on the moon. It's like all in preparation for if that all goes well. There's like a really decent likelihood that like next year we both have like boots on the moon and like 10 landers landing per year on the moon and dropping off robots and supplies and shit like that. Which is just like, I don't know, 15 year old Delian would just be like, so, yeah, so excited. We gotta sponsor the biggest moon landing conspiracy theorist for a trip. They gotta go up there, we gotta just put them on the moon, settle it once and for all. Jordy's getting the tinfoil hat on. He thinks that it's. What kind of evidence would you need to see from these missions to kind of finally determine, finally believe it?

So excited about all that. That's amazing. It's sort of a bad time to start to become a venture capitalist. We are seeing this K shaped dynamic. A lot of small funds. Well, not necessarily a bad time to be, maybe not the best time to start your own fund. But I want, but I want some advice for someone who is, who can't be talked down from it. Maybe the person who's going to join a great fund. Join a great fund. Is that your advice or what if someone says, I want to start a box, I want to start a fund. When we started Lux, it was at the tail end of the dot com boom bust. And I was like, let's carve a niche out that nobody else was doing. They're going to be brilliant people. I mean, I got to be honest, whether personally, some of the partners or the firm, in some small ways, there are brilliant people that I know that are going to be launching funds. And they have networks and access and kinetic activity. And there is this barbell. You have older folks in the industry who have access and influence, but you have younger people that every night they are out and pulling together incredible engineers and developers and entrepreneurs. And I would never count those people out. Now they're going to need capital over time, and there'll be people that we partner with, but over time they will go from a small fund to a big mega fund. So I'm actually, I would never discourage anybody from starting a fund. It is one of the great entrepreneurial things to do. Totally. But yeah, if you go back to 2021, where the numbers that we're referencing and that the Journal is referencing, it's like, if you knew founders, people would be like, well, here's 20 mil. And it's like, I don't think we need that many more funds like that. It's like, you want the, you want the life's work allocator who has a differentiated view, copy, et cetera. Look, if somebody was saying in 2023, 4, 5 that you're gonna start a media business that is gonna become like lightning in a bottle and compete with CNBC and be more relevant to a younger generation and be broadcasting on Twitter, you'd be like, what? But you guys are crushing it. You have found a niche. You've got a vibe. It's incredible. And so why shouldn't somebody be able to do that venture? I will never discourage anybody that wants to start a venture firm as long as they are thinking about how do I do this in a really distinguished, differentiated way. And I can be so good that they can't ignore me. You're.

Okay. Limited to 5 million or less. So Palmer actually sort of agreed with this. Let's play the clip of Palmer Luckey on Bloomberg the Close digging into this. This is clips. They were at the Consumer Electronics Show. Yeah, I think he was there for Mod Retro, but they got him to comment on defense technology. So my motivation is to try and build it the biggest thing possible. I will say people have barely critiqued and said, but Palmer, you know, are you really a neutral party here? Are you really in a position to comment given you're competing with these companies? I'd say two things. One, these measures do apply in equal measure to me. I now cannot pay dividends. I now cannot do stock buybacks if I'm not investing in new plants, if I'm not doing these two things. The other thing is it's always tricky when you want it. You know, I'm in defense because I wanted to help solve these problems. Right. It's actually the same thing with like Mod Retro in the gaming space. Like, oh, of course Palmer would criticize these other game companies. After all, he's in the gaming space. It's like, but, yeah, but I'm in the gaming space because I want to solve these problems. It's kind of this, like catch 22. Like, like, if you're outside of it. They'Ll say, good point. Well, why don't you do something about it then? And you do something like, who cares what you're doing? You're just part of the problem. It's always been emotionally difficult for me. We also have posts that President Trump is thinking, more than a trillion should be invested in the area of defense. The budget should grow anti defense or anti defense company. That's not for sure. That's for sure. What's interesting is your company is, dare I say it, considering going public. Yes. Would you CEO? Do you think the CEO that leads the business when it's gone public should be under these sorts of restrictions from an executive order? Do you think that. I think that when you are on the dole and when you're effectively run on the public's wallet, that the public should be able to impose whatever restrictions they want on you. I think you're not asking whether it should be like, like, you know, if I am getting paid by taxpayers, they should have the ability to elect people, elect representatives, elect who will then nominate people who can hold me to account in any way they wish. If they want to say that I only pay myself $5 million until I'm caught up with my schedules, they should be allowed to do that. If they say that I'm not allowed to pay myself $1 until I get caught up, I think they should be allowed to do that. When you are working on the, when you are working on Taxpayer nine, there is no level of oversight or intervention that I am against. Conceptually now, I think some of these might be bad moves. They might not necessarily help the defense base, but in concept, I think everything should be on the table and I think it's even good maybe to scare some people sometimes. You don't necessarily go to people and say this is the way it's going to be forever. You say this is how it's going to be until you get your act together. You remember being a teenager, your parents say you're grounded until X, Y and Z bring up your grades, solve your problems and then we will talk about altering the deal. You say, but this deal has so many problems. If it's like this my whole life, if I'm grounded for the rest of my life, that means I'll have no social life. And your parents are not necessarily looking to grind you for life. It's so funny. I think that that's what you're seeing right now. It's not. That's great. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think using it as an incentive to get these companies to hit the schedule that they agreed to as part of these contracts could be effective. Right. Especially. Especially if it's, especially if it's temporary. Yeah. You know, you can see this, you can see this kind of executive order setting a precedent that could over time be abused or have a bunch of negative effects. It's hard to say now. So this kind of thing is concerning. But you know, I was talking to a defense tech founder the other day who's trying to take over a program from a big prime where the prime had gotten like a multi hundred million dollar contract years ago and had actually not even set up a space to make the things that they were, that they had signed up and were getting paid to make. They're being lazy bones. Lazy bones. Lazy bones behavior. And so yeah, in that situation you. Can'T be a lazy bones. In that situation if you have a management team that is just like printing regardless on if they're actually delivering on what the government is asking and paying them to do, that's inappropriate. And so I think, and I think. Palmer is sort of wrestling with, you know, libertarian ideas. How much, you know, should private companies be able to do? And that's a separate issue. It's like a private company. If you're just selling to normal customers, you can do whatever you want. But it's different when you have a contract with the government. Then who decides the government's claim? Well, it's the people, it's the democracy. And so that's what's happening. Yeah. And Palmer in another clip was talking. They asked him, how much do you make? He's like, I make $100,000 a year. Right. That's my compact. And he also said, I have a bunch of stock because I started this company. Now, the concern is if you actually ended up in a situation where defense executives, anybody that works for the government cannot make more than $5 million and you're factoring in comp packages later, you could be in a situation where a company says, well, like, we can't hire the best people. Yeah. Because they have an offer to make $10 million a year over here and we can only pay them 5. I mean, the AI researcher thing is crazy because I don't know that this is a dynamic that's actually happening. But it would be very tricky if Andrew could not compete against anthropic OpenAI, Google, DeepMind. If they need a super talented AI researcher and maybe they're not paying him a billion dollars, but they're just like, yeah, like the market rate for this role is 15 mil. And like, we can't hire them right now because we didn't check some box on the level of deliveries on this thing. And that would be little bit.

Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So my proposal, Puerto Rico, 3% tax rate. Greenland, we do a 97% tax rate. Why would anyone go grandfathered in to the Puerto Rico the 3%? I don't think. Yeah. For a long time you could just go. But now I think it's closed. You need to be there. I think they close it. I'm sure it's still solid. There's still probably a way. Not what it was. But Puerto Rico, famously, people go there because it has a low tax regime. You pay just 3% of your income. Greenland, 97% taxes. That's what they should do. Why would anyone go there? It's cold. And now you have high taxes. Well, but a lot of people want. Desperately want to raise taxes. Basically. I mean, I'm assuming some people actually want to take it to 100%. And so if you could create. You go there, you zero yourself and then you. If you're in favor of over ultra high taxes, you could go to Greenland. That's a good idea. I like this idea. You just land in the country. Yeah. And then you lose all your money. Connect all your accounts with plaid. But everyone knows you're throughout everything. And then figured out. And then Tyler, you had a different proposal. What was it? Well, so the, the bull case for just 97 is. Is that like. It's a flex. Right. I can live in Greenland. I'm so. I make so much money that. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm still balling. It is hard. I can still afford. Every billionaire has a plane. They all have boats. It's like, who really got money? Well, if you can go to Greenland, lose 97% of your wealth and still be flexing, it's like, okay, that guy's actually really rich. Yeah. But then really made it. But then if you're. If you're not. It's the new Lamborghini Urine. Yeah. Yeah. If you're not Uber. It still makes sense. If you basically just have the 97% tax rate. The first year. The first year. Then maybe it's. Maybe it's. If you look at 10 year increments. Right. So first year you're basically zeroed out. Yeah. But then you got. Then you got a super low tax rate. Then you. Then you grind for five years so you lock in. It's almost like a. You get dropped on an island and you got to fight your way out. Yeah. Sort of Lord of Flies situation. Do you see.

I see multiple journalists on the horizon. You're watching TVPN. Today is Thursday, January 8, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Ramp time is money save. Both easy use, corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. I wrote about Cha Ching, the Apple card minor news yesterday. Oh yeah, please, you have to ask. Somebody sent us a bunch of weights and this one is a 10. There's quite a few of these. Are you trying to say something? Is this, you think the upper limit. But either way, whoever sent these, please let us know because there was no card, so we don't know who to thank. We're just bumper plates. They're very nice Nike bumper plates. What a funny thing. Big sign of respect in our culture. It is, it is, it is. Anyway, there was a minor headline, breaking news. Actually learned about it from the chat, we discussed it right after we talked to Pat and Ravi from Sequoia that the Apple card program is moving from Goldman Sachs to JP Morgan. Nothing's really changing about the Apple card yet. It's merely the bank backend that's always been sort of behind the scenes, behind the fold. But even though it's a minor headline, I think, I think it's an interesting story of just how Apple got to the point where they have a credit card, what that means, what the decisions, what the trade offs were. And I wanted to go back all the way to the Steve Jobs era and think about how would he be down with credit cards. You're giving leverage to your customers, you're giving credit, you're in the debt business. It's a different business. How did he think about it and how did we get here? The headline is that the Apple card program has millions of cards issued. There's $20 billion of debt that's accumulated across all the cards and the portfolio is doing well. So normally if you are to, if you have a co branded credit card like a JCPenney or Macy's credit card and it's aligned with a brand, typically those get paid off pretty well. They have strict underwriting rules. And so when those trade hands, other banks will typically say, I'm buying a $10 billion portfolio and I'll give you 8% on top because most likely I'm going to be able to recoup all of that from the creditors. And also, you know, they're going to pay interest, so they're going to pay 15% interest, 25% interest. Now there will be some defaults, but in general you typically make money off of owning a portfolio of consumer credit card loans. Not in this case. Goldman is like, we got to get this off our balance sheet. They've already lost $1 billion. Their consumer bank overall, which includes Marcus, has lost 3 billion. Like they're not doing well over the last few. So is this a repayment issue or just an operational issue? There's a little bit of both. A lot of it is the. Do you think this is potentially because Apple's made it more difficult to actually have Morgan Stanley go after the clients? Is that Apple making certain decisions? Because I don't know, I have to imagine it's not like their underwriting criteria was wildly different than any other credit card category. It wasn't wildly different, but I'll get into some of the, some of the pitfalls that led to this place. So the, the, the $20 billion card balances, that's trading, JP Morgan's acquiring that at a $1 billion discount. Instead of an 8% premium, you would expect that they would pay 21.6. They're actually paying 19 for this. And then they're going to have to go and recoup some of it. It's not, you know, by any means a disaster. And Goldman's a large company. Yes, I said Morgan Stanley. Yeah, yeah, but, but it's, it's interesting to figure out the history here before we do. Let me. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of it. HR and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. You can see we have our consoles here branded on the laptops. Very fun. So Steve Jobs actually thought about launching a credit card at Apple at least two times that we know of. There's two key stories about Steve Jobs thinking about getting in the credit card game. The first was in the late 1990s. He met with Capital One to create a joint credit card that would have worked a lot like the Apple card. So but the main problem, and I think the four that like there's a lot of things where Apple has a particular brand. I want to talk to you about Apple's brand and what it means, like how it fits into the consumer credit card, consumer financial landscape. But the, the North Star that Jobs laid down was always amazing customer service and no rejection. So I tend to think of most high end brands as beneficiaries of exclusivity. You can't just buy an Hermes Birkin bag. You can't buy a Ferrari SB3 Daytona. You have to be invited. You need a relationship, you have to get an allocation right. Apple. For some reason I feel about Apple the same way I feel about Ferrari. And yet it is a wildly different experience. It's a premium brand. It's a premium brand. But because of the design and because of the value of the technology and how innovative they are, I put them in a different category than Equinox, which I put as like a premium thing. I've thought of them as luxury and they've done a good job with the materials that they use. In general, it's always felt like a luxury brand to me. Even though I agree with you, it's technically not. It doesn't really fit in there. They don't run their business like they're a luxury brand. They're not trying to say, oh, we only have 10,000 new iPhones in gold, so who knows what the market, market price will be on those. They don't run that like that. But Jobs wanted Apple to be a no rejection company. So anyone can walk into an Apple store, buy the most expensive iPhone that they make as long as they have the money for it. People want to give us money. They can, they can. Which is, you know, it's a standard business practice, but not always in luxury goods. Yeah, which is why I said it's premium. It is more premium luxury. Even though Apple often presents itself as a luxury brand. Yes, yes. Quickly, let me tell you about Linear. Meet the system for modern software development. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Let me also tell you about the linear run of show today. The linear lineup. We got Delian Asperuhoff. He's back on the show. He's back. We're going to dig 18 appearances last year. Yeah, 18. And he's starting strong in the first 180. Would love that. We're going to dig into sticker box this viral kid's toy that was tearing up the timeline. Very cool use of AI for consumer product. Then we have Julie Bush at Valanor and a bunch of other folks, Harvey and Josh Wolfe from Lux Capitals coming on. So it should be a fun show anyway, continuing. So because of credit risk and underwriting, every credit card has to have an approval process and not everyone can be accepted. That's just the way it works. You cannot underwrite everyone or else you'll just have massive loss losses. So it was surprising. So Apple, when they launched the original card, they actually set the credit score requirement fairly low. And even though it launched in 2019, it felt like a Holdover from the Jobs era. That Jobs philosophy of even though we're Apple, even though it feels it's going to have the patina of an Amex, it's going to have this premium look and feel and we'll get into the design of the card in a minute. But it really was accessible to a lot of people. I think you needed a credit score of around a 600, which is pretty accessible. And so that philosophy carried through even from the 90s. The second time Apple was really thinking about doing a card was in 2004. And I will tell you about this after I tell you about figma. Figma make isn't your average VOD coding tool. It lives in figma. So outputs look really good, feel real and stay connected to how teams build, create code back prototypes and apps fast. So they actually staffed this guy, Ken Siegel, who is the creative director on the Think different campaigns, like one of the most iconic marketers in history, in tech history, certainly. And they came up with a name. Jobs said, if we launch a credit card, it's going to be called the Apple card. And they actually wound up using that name. But it had a weird twist. So most credit cards, they'll give you airline miles or cash back. There's Diners Club. It's usually you get points and then you can spend those points on travel. You've always been a huge points guy, right? I'm actually not a points guy at all. I usually meet whoever the most elite management consultant in my friend group is and just ask them because every management consultant is obsessed with credit card points maxing and I just ask them which one should I get? And then I just get that one. And then five years later, 10 years later, I still have it. And it's probably a bad deal then because it's always a great deal in the first couple of years and then it gets worse and worse and worse as they like retain you. Anyway, so instead of airline miles or cash back, this proposed Apple card from 2004, you would get points and you could only spend the points at the itunes store to get free songs. What a funny. I mean, at that moment in time, that was pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of a cool idea. At the same time, I mean, I. Was a child at that time, so 99 cents was somewhat of a considered purchase. Yeah, sometimes I'd just play the preview of the song. Yeah, I'm good with the 30 seconds. Sure. This is enough rocking out. This is enough. Play it again. But it is somewhat genius because there's sort of zero marginal cost on music, certainly on the distribution of music. Now they do have to pay royalty fees, but there's already a built in margin there. So that 99 cents, a lot of that went to Apple. Remember they take 30% so they're giving you psychologically a dollar worth of value. You go and spend $100, you get 100 points. One point is one cent. You buy the 99 cent song, but they are taking home another 30% on top. So the economics would have been really, really good. But it is sort of gimmicky because people want to spend points on a lot of things. And I'm happy to get free flights. Yeah, and hotels. I think there's something psychological about having a credit card that you spend money on for a couple years. You get a whole bunch of points and then you're like, wow, I got a free flight to a vacation that I'll remember forever. That's a very good association with whatever credit card brand you had as opposed to, okay, yeah, I bought a bunch of my favorite music and then four years later Spotify came out and actually my library is basically useless. Right. Tyler? I was just going to say it's like the same thing because it's like instead of a trip, it's like, oh, I bought this Chief Keef album off my Apple card. I'll always remember that. Now my life is a movie. I will remember that. I hate being sober. We got to watch that clip. I need to pull that up. So they were going to use they called them I points and you'd be able to redeem them at the itunes store. Seemed like crazy timing considering that Spotify was about to launch four years later in 2008. So if they'd actually done this in 2004, launched the iPoints program, when did. Apple music actually launch? Much later. Much later. I want to say like 2016 or something. 2015. 2015. Boom. Got it. Wow. Gusto. The unified platform for payroll, benefits and hr built to evolve with modern small and medium sized businesses. So the other key feature that Apple always wanted, and this went back to Steve Jobs that they always wanted with the Apple card, which you don't often think about with credit cards, but is amazing customer service. And so most people, their credit card just works. Apple did a couple of unique things where it integrated with the wallet, but mostly they just wanted extremely high levels of customer service. When you have a problem with your iPhone, you go into the genius bar. There's someone who's friendly. They are very good about Getting you in at the right time. Imagine one of the people at the Genius bar breaking your kneecaps. Have a room where they're just like, okay, you know, we're very customer friendly here, but you need to pay your paid and we have to break your kneecaps. We're going to take you back. You know how Apple, they have like the back of house. It's like almost invisible, right? It's like built in behind, like the big. Just get taken back there and they. Just like nicely just like pay your Apple card bill. Well, I mean, that was another thing. They want to be so customer friendly, they didn't have any late fees, no application fees, and no international fees. No fees at all. That was the whole pitch. No fees, which sounds really nice, sounds really delightful to just be like, okay, I don't even have to think about fees or whatever. But the fees exist to incentivize people to pay on time. Because not only does the interest start accruing, but when you pay late, if you're not paying the balance, the minimum balance to maintain the card, then you get a late fee, which increases also the yield on the debt. But it also just attracts like a lower quality customer who's maybe just on their fifth credit card and is just like, oh, this one doesn't have fees and I need an extra 500 bucks this month. I'll just grab this one. And it's a less considered decision to bring into their financial life. So the customer service thing was really an issue because with Apple they have years and years. I mean, since, I don't know, probably the 80s, like the Christmas time was when people would gift each other MacBooks or Mac computers. And they built up, built up, built up. And so they have a whole workflow for how do we hire a lot of people around the Christmas time? How do we staff the Genius bar? How do we educate people? How do we pay them? They're in the tier one cities so they can have great people working there. It's a very high dollar revenue per square foot in those Apple stores. So the whole model works and they've built it up very slowly. Goldman didn't have experience in consumer banking. The default customer service experience is I'm calling my banker, my Goldman banker, and I'm like, I need to sell my company for a billion dollars. Get your M and A team ready or I need to go public potentially on the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Whether you use Goldman, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, whoever's lead left. Make sure they're ringing that bell with you at the New York Stock Exchange. But seriously, Goldman, like, it's a trading, it's the highest finance, it's the most premier, it's the most elite. And so when you call them and you're like, yeah, I got billed for $25 and it should have been $23, can you fix this? Well, they need a new team for that and they need to build up that team. And that's not, that's not rocket science. Like I do think Goldman should have been able to figure that out. But Apple also wanted another consumer friendly feature. They wanted all of the bills to drop on the first of the month, every month. And normally credit cards will stagger it out. They'll be like, your bill comes on the 10th, Tyler's comes on the 15th, mine comes on the 20th. We don't really care, we don't really know. And so if you have a problem with your credit card, you check the statement and you're like, wait a minute, that's not the right charge. I gotta call and sort this out. You're calling on the 10th, Tyler's calling on the 15th, I'm calling on the 20th. They do it intentionally. Yeah, they do it intentionally because if they have a customer service organization, I. Always assume, I stupidly assumed that it was just sloppy and annoying. No, I'm like, oh, you're just genius. Trust the process, trust the process, trust the process. Never lose faith. So Apple insisted, hey, everyone's got to get their statement right on the first. That's the best customer experience. But what that means is that you need like 10,000 people ready at the phones because you're not just doing, oh, you know, send us an email and we'll have some automated system get back to you and do this. Like Apple customer service, that level that Goldman wanted to bring was very high. And so you need a ton of people staffed on the first of the month and then they're not really doing anything in the back half of the month. And while you can maybe do temp work at an Apple store in December and say, hey, we're going to hire you from November 1st to January 15th, you're going to deal with some of the returns. It's a three month gig. People sign up for that. No one's saying, yeah, I'm good to work at Goldman Sachs on the 1st of every month and the first week of every month and then I'll just find something else to do on weeks two, three and four. Of the month. That doesn't make any sense. So they ran into a bunch of problems there, obviously more cost. And all of this was just making the actual program less profitable for Goldman, less of a problem. And we talked a little bit about the fees of any kind. Now there was an opportunity. Goldman was the whole reason why they jumped at the opportunity to work with Apple. And they kind of bent over backwards because Apple had tried this with. They went to a whole bunch of other banks, remember going back to Capital One and every bank had said like now are you crazy? You can't do this. You can't give everyone in the world a no free credit card with great customer service, you're gonna lose money. Apple and Apple, they're like, no, we. Want to give everyone a free lunch. Exact. And so what Goldman should have done with the customer service is they should have got to Fin AI, except it didn't exist in 2019 but does now. And Fin is the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Fin AI. Maybe Goldman should become a client, maybe JP Morgan should become a client. It might already be, but so the Goldman, they were making a push into Consumer. They built Marcus internally, which was always sort of a funny name to me. I don't know if it resonated with you. I don't know. People names can either be so good or so bad. Yeah. And I don't know, I have a childhood friend, a family friend named Marcus. His name Marcus? Yeah, it's a great name. He's a great dude. Do I want to trust him with all my money? I don't know. Oh yeah, you might be like, yeah, my smartest friend is Marcus. I love this brand. Or it's like. Anyways, I texted a buddy who has some context on this whole deal and so he is in a meeting but he fired off some notes. He asked him like, why, why did, like how did this happen? Basically he says GS effed up the plan. DJ D Soul was told to shut down Marcus and Consumer or get, that's. David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman or. Get out of the job. So he cut all of Marcus except for savings. Then GS had a multi year process to find a bank that Apple would approve. Right. They're not just going to say like some, some smaller, not systemically important bank, et cetera. Then they had to figure out price, which includes opportunity cost of selling for a discount compared to running out the contract to 2030. GS effed up because they probably couldn't transactional org Not a longitudinal org and really thought they were smarter but never focused on the fundamentals of running the business. So the questions like what happens next? JP Morgan obviously has way more consistency here. The other hard part for Goldman was that they were trying to build their consumer facing brand so they wanted the Goldman name in more places and the Apple card would have been a great co branding thing. They were fighting to get like the front of the card which would be the prime real estate next to Apple. Apple. Goldman would have been really cool. They didn't. They got relegated to the back. Absolutely not. And the card looks awesome. I was reflecting on it. I don't know if you actually seen it. Maybe we can pull up a picture but I don't know if it's still the case. But originally it was CNC milled from a single sheet of titanium alloy. Like the same way they make these MacBooks they would use to make the cards. So it didn't have those laminated layers. I don't know if you have a Chase Sapphire reserve but those things kind of like fall apart after a couple years because there is a metal piece and the metal card is typically more prestigious but they add laminate on either side. The Apple card went a different direction and it had. And I think they delivered on the branding side. They just didn't quite deliver on the, on the, on the financial design. Did you ever have one Apple card? No. And it's so, so interesting because I think that if you were trying to do an analysis on the Apple card, you were like every high value credit card customer in America. Not every, but the Vast, vast, maybe 99% has an iPhone. Apple's going to put this everywhere. Yeah. This is going to be one of the biggest credit card business lines of all time. Yeah. And it just, it's been interesting to see, you know, this entire saga because it hasn't really turned out that way. Even though, even though. How many times has Apple kind of promoted to you in some way or another? Right. So many different. And still I'm just like, I have, I have a credit card, I don't need another. Right. Yeah, totally. Well, let me tell you about TurboPuffer serverless vector and full text search. Built from first principles on object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Well, it'll be interesting to see where this goes. I think it's always been sort of like a minor business for Apple but some opportunity. I do think that there was an interesting opportunity to make it more exclusive, more of a status symbol, more of something that you pull out and it says something about you, has some badge value. But that would have been sort of. Issue in a lot of circles. An iPhone doesn't actually say anything about you. No, no, no, no. It's too generic. Yeah. It's not like. And then also there's just the fact that people don't pull out credit cards anymore. I do. Yeah. I really wonder how the, how people know people using Apple Pay will affect the premium people put on different credit cards. Right. When you're just like, I'm going to just pay the bill at this restaurant. I mean, just go like this. The true points Ma do care about using the right card for the right time because some cards will be better for dining, others will travel. Others, like the Apple card gave you 3% off if you're buying Apple stuff. And then 2%, I believe, if you paid for something with Apple Pay, using the Apple card in Apple Pay. Like you open up Apple Pay and you select the Apple card, you get 2% back and there's 1% on everything else if you pull out the card and you just pay for gas at the gas station. But then there's like the Costco card that gets you a better discount at Costco and the Amazon card that gets you better discount at Amazon. And so a lot of the points maxers and the card maxers will get the specific card and they're like, when I'm at Amazon, I use this card. When I'm at Walmart, I use this card. I never got. Gabe says this is a project for Billy McFarlane to lead. Remember he had like a members. I saw his magnesis, I saw his latest like Instagram reel or something. He's just walking down the street talking about doing some event. He's still new festival. New festival or something along those lines. I don't know. Good luck to him. In other news, US venture capital fundraising falls 35% as firms stay private longer. Of course, Josh Wolfe is not letting himself be a statistic. He's coming on later today to talk. About massive fundraiser, the biggest one ever. One and a half billion in new funds for Lux Capital. But Kate Clark in the Journal says money is flowing to the most trusted investment firms as startups stay private longer. Before we read this, let me tell you about Vibe Co, where DTC brands, B2B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences and measure sales. Just like on Meta, fundraising for US venture capital firms dropped 35% in 2025. The most anemic stretch in at least six years. With money flowing primarily to the most trusted investment firms as companies stay private longer. The $66 billion raised last year represents a 70% drop from the 2022 record. The slowdown reflects a continuing liquidity crunch. Startups have been flush with venture funding. Startups that have been flush with venture funding have opted to remain private rather than exposing themselves to public market scrutiny. A prolonged IPO drought that has returned little cash to investors, now complicating efforts to raise new capital. And there's a graphic here that we can pull up. You can see the chart. The fundraising climate is challenging, said Beezer Clarkson, a partner at Sapphire. I invited her on the show. We got to get her at some point. She's great. Focused on investments in venture funds, investors are concentrating capital on the most trusted VCs. Rather. Look at this chart. Hate to see it. It is funny that over the last 18 months, two years, it felt like, I feel like a lot of people were looking around and being like, wow, our industry can exist in a high rate environment. And then you look at this chart. I don't know that that's actually what's going on. I mean, it does coincide with the interest rate thing perfectly. I think the bigger piece of the narrative is just the IPO market. The fact that a lot of these funds are sitting on massive nav, massive gains, but not a lot of liquidity. And so if you are an allocator in LP and you've put a bunch of money in a fund and you're like, yeah, I'm read to double down as soon as you give me the money back, I'll give it back to you. But like, let's give it back to me so I can reinvest it until, you know, oh, okay, you got 10 billion over there. Like, show me the money. And then. And this is the year the IPO windows open. Yes. There's a bunch of names that we're expecting to go out if it starts to close. You and I will do our best. We're going to hold it open. Hold it, yeah. Back to back. I'll push one door. Yeah. Well, it's going to be an exciting year for anyone on public.com investing. For those that take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more. With Back to the article. As a result, the largest firms are becoming more powerful. Anthropic investor Lightspeed Venture Partners secured more than 9 billion across new funds in December. In one that was an organic soundboard. In one of the year's largest raises, while PT's Founders Fund closed 4.6 billion in April. New fund managers, by contrast, are facing an increasingly tough fundraising environment. The drop in fundraising helps explain why cash intensive AI businesses are looking beyond traditional venture firms for capital, such as the deep pocketed sovereign wealth funds, family offices and hedge funds. Collectively. The venture market doesn't have the firepower to do this investing, clarkson said of the largest AI rounds. It must be coming from other sources as well. Yeah, and kind of left out the hyperscalers too, out of this, which have been a key player in some of these later rounds. Funding for USAI startups reached a record 2222 billion in 2025, more than double 2024 level. So we have 66 billion in new funds raised, 222 billion actually going into startups. And of course a lot of that again is non venture capital firms. Still seems like a good time to build a company. Still seems like there's plenty of always. A good time, always a good time. Should we talk about there's some interesting concentration dynamics that are happening because you often see that chart of the decline in venture funding raised with also the decline in new venture fund formation. There just aren't as many new funds getting spun up. Obviously we talked to some folks that are getting new funds off the ground, but a lot of it's not 2021 anymore where there were like a new fund every single day. The top 30 funds secured 75% of fundraising, with Andreessen Horowitz alone capturing roughly 10% of the year's entire year's capital. Mega rounds of $100 million or more accounted for about 70% of venture funding. So you have this bifurcated market. Elite funds and sovereign wealth are doing huge AI deals, while the broader VC ecosystem, emerging managers, seed funds, Series A specialists are getting crushed. It's the best time for tech ever is real, but concentration is maybe in 20 to 30 companies. Everyone's just riding their winners. Well, Speaking of deals, Reuters has an exclusive. They trump admin mulls payments to sway Greenlanders to join the U.S. greenland says they're not for sale. European leaders are standing behind Copenhagen, but Greenland talks in the White House have intensified in recent days. U.S. officials have discussed sending lump sum payments to Greenland stimmy time stimmy time to Greenlanders as part of a bid to convince them to secede from Denmark and potentially join the United States. While the exact dollar figure and logistics of any payment are unclear, U.S. officials, including White House aides, have discussed figures ranging from 10,000 to $100,000 per person. Doing the math. Even at $100,000 a person, Greenland only has like 57,000 residents. So we're talking about basically a seed round five, 5.7 billion. That's doable. That's an AI. That's actually like three AI researchers. Three AI researchers in Greenland. For all of Greenland. I mean, I get that they have a ton of natural resources and whatnot, but I wonder how much like this would actually sway them, because I doubt that you can just actually buy the votes. You probably couldn't make the payment contingent on them voting. They would have to either vote and then they get the payment because we promise. Or the payment happens and then whether or not they vote, I think just. Start planes with cash. Yeah. You know, just dropping it out of the air. Because then wouldn't they. Wouldn't the game theory be just that they hold strong. There's going to be another plane. We want. Here's my thing. Here's my thing. If I'm a citizen of Greenland. Yeah. Or resident, I'm sitting there being like, okay, we know they're willing to. We have an idea that they're willing to spend up to around 6 billion. We think we're worth 60. Let's let them keep, you know, the Paramount Sky Dance, the Ellisons, they'll just bid and then say, yeah, well, it's not our best and final offer. And then what is. What does Warner Brothers do? They, of course, again, they rejected another bid or recommended against it. Greenland's Prime Minister, Jens Frederick Nielsen wrote in a Facebook post. Facebook, let's go. Okay. They are really a decade behind over there. He says enough is enough. No more fantasies about annexation. He's not a fan. You got to get on reels, buddy. You got to do a front facing video. Use some AI, get some vibrio music in there. You got to. Yeah, get the. Get this. The Sigma male. Yeah. You know, grind set. Yeah. It's just his statement going, enough is enough. No more fantasies about annexation. And it just cuts to like the joker. Leaders in Copenhagen and throughout Europe have reacted to comments by Trump and other officials asserting their right to greet their right to Greenland in recent days with disdain. Disdain particularly given that the US and Denmark are NATO allies bound by a mutual defense agreement. On Tuesday, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Britain and Denmark issued a joint statement saying only Greenland and Denmark can decide matters regarding their relations. So this is. Yeah, but they can, you know, Trump can make his case. Hey, if you alone on your own decide to come over and Hang out with us. We got some cash for you. Apparently it's wild. Let me tell you about graphite code review for the age of AI graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Trump has long argued that the US Needs to acquire Greenland on several grounds. One, it is rich in minerals needed for advanced military applications. He's also said the Western Hemisphere broadly needs to be under the geopolitical influence of Washington. While internal deliberations regarding how to seize Greenland have occurred among Trump's eye aides in since before he took office a year ago, there has been renewed urgency after his government captured Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro in a daring snatch and grab operation. Not an invasion, apparently, according to sources familiar with internal deliberations. One source said White House aides were eager to carry over the momentum from the Maduro operation toward accomplishing Trump's other long standing geopolitical goals. It feels like wildly different scenarios though. Like they're not going to go and send in Delta Force. I don't know. Maybe they will. I don't know. We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security and Denmark isn't going to be able to do it. It so average gross income in Greenland is 40 to 45,000 USD. So people could be looking at that 100k saying I'm going to retire a couple years early. 100K is big. Yeah, I don't know. Among the possibilities being floated by Trump aides, a White House official said on Tuesday, is trying to enter into a type of agreement with the island called a Compact Free Association. Compact of free association CofS the precise details, which have only been extended to small island nations of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau. Palau interesting vary depending on the signatory, but the US Government typically provides many essential services such as mail delivery and military protection and Amazon prime from us. What else can we offer you in exchange? The US Military operates freely in COFA countries and trade with the US Is largely duty free. No no tariffs. I wonder what Greenland is exporting these days. COFA agreements have previously been inked with independent countries, and Greenland would likely need to separate from Denmark for such a plan to proceed. In theory, payments could be used to induce green lenders to vote for their independence or to sign onto a COFA after such a vote. While polls show an overwhelming majority of Greenlanders want independence, concerns about the economic costs of separating from Denmark, among other issues, have kept most Greenlandic legislators from calling for an independence referendum. Do you have stats on Greenland or do you know? I was Just gonna say Tyler Cowen had a good piece on this yesterday in the Free Press. What do you say? Read it, Tyler. It's pretty long. I don't want to read the whole thing, but. Okay, then. Sing it. He doesn't want us to actually, like, buy it. Right. It's like bad. You need to convince them to come over. But he does, like, I think he wants to. Greenland to become in possession or the US to become in possession of Greenland. Right. Maybe like a Puerto Rico situation. Yeah. So it's like a little bit above Palau. Yeah, it's above Palau. It's not a state, though. It's not like, you know, and we're not getting the military in. Yeah, we were pitching, so. So it's. It's such a tough. I mean, it's such a. It is a tough sell. As much as I love this great country. You mean to live in Greenland or. Yeah, just if you're in Greenland and you're kind of looking over at the US with binoculars, I want that crazy stuff over here. Yeah. Massive, massive infighting. Governors, you know, going to war with Washington constantly. Right. It is interesting. The US Is like one of the most entertaining countries. It feels like a lot of people are obsessed with our national politics. People don't really follow our local politics or our state level politics or global politics. They mostly follow American national politics. So I don't know, maybe they get it on it. I have another idea for Greenland. You're saying maybe they're just bored out there and they want to get in the. Get in the arena. Yeah, get in the box. Get in the label box. Delivering you the highest quality data for Frontier AI. Get in the label box. So Puerto Rico famously has just a 3% tax rate on income. So a lot of people go there. And when. And this is why when Jake Paul fights for $90 million, he's actually fighting for. I didn't think about that number. Wow. Yeah. He has one of the few jobs that you can actually do very well from Puerto Rico, which is just train in boxing, you know, a team that you build yourself. So, yeah, his, like Jake Paul will actually be a billionaire just from boxing fairly quickly, simply because he's going to do a handful more fights, I imagine then he needs about a 2x from there and he'll be good to go because he's like keeping, you know, 97% of every. So when you see those headline numbers for boxing events, $100 million is that to the winner who? No. And then someone actually gets Jake Paul Anthony Joshua fight. I think Jake got 90 something and Anthony Joshua got just under that. Oh, around the same. But you know, I think Jake was a bigger draw. So it's more about how much you're drawing. It's like starring in a movie almost. So. Yep. You know, your star power dictates how much you'll sell. It is crazy that I mean obviously very dedicated to the sport, but it just crazes me that you could, you could be such a big celebrity that you can go and do a one night event and draw that much economic opportunity, that many ads and that many pay per view sales. That's a lot of money. Money. That's remarkable. Anyway, let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So my proposal, Puerto Rico, 3% tax rate. Greenland, we do a 97% tax rate. Why would anyone go grandfathered in to the puerto Rico the 3%. I don't. Yeah. For a long time you could just go. But yeah, now I think it's be there. I think they close it. I'm still, I'm sure it's still solid away. Not what it was. But Puerto Rico, famously people go there because it has a low tax regime. You pay just 3% of your income. Greenland, 97% taxes. That's what they should do. Why would anyone go there? It's cold. And now you have high taxes. Well, but a lot of people want, desperately want to raise taxes. Basically. I mean I'm assuming some people actually want to take it to 100% and. So if you could create go there. You zero and then, and then you. If you're in favor of ultra high taxes, you could go to Greenland. That's a good idea. I like this idea. You just land in the country. Yeah. And then you lose all your money. Connect all your accounts with plaid but everyone knows throughout everything and then figure it out. And then Tyler, you had a different proposal. What was it? Well, so the, the bull case for just 97 is. Is that like it's a flex, right. I can live in Greenland. I'm so I make so much money. That yeah, Yeah, I have 3% left. And I'm still balling. It is hard. I can still afford. Billionaire has a plane. They all have boats. It's like who's really got money? Well, if you can go to Greenland, lose 97% of your wealth and still be flexing, it's like, okay, that guy's actually really rich. Yeah. But then really made it but then if you're, if you're not. It's the new Lamborghini urine. Yeah. Yeah. If you're not Uber. It still makes sense. If you basically just have the 97% tax rate. The first year. The first year. So then maybe it's. Maybe it's. If you look at a 10 year in commensurate. Right. So first year you're basically zeroed out. Yeah. But then you got, then you got a super low tax rate. Then you, then you grind for five years. So you lock in. It's almost like a. You get dropped on an island and you got to fight your way out. Yeah. Sort of Lord of Flies situation. Yeah. Do you see? Jensen came out yesterday and said he doesn't care about California's proposed billionaire tax. Is it. I don't know. He's just, he's low growing David Sack. He's lowbrowing everyone. It's funny. Jensen Huang said he wasn't worried about a potential tax on billionaires in California breaking from a cadre of ultra wealthy residents who have spoken out against the first of its kind proposal. We chose to live in Silicon Valley and whatever taxes I guess they would like to apply, so be it. This is, I'm going to say it. It's kind of a pick me behavior for a beaner. He says, I'm perfectly fine with it. It never crossed my mind once I get. I mean, does this mean you should be even more bullish? On Nvidia, they go to 40 trillion for sure the ballot. Initially he's like, actually definitely do this right now. And then stop, stop. I got another 10x in the bag. I want to pay this now and then move on. Lock the rate. Now let's head into the comments section and put a hazmat suit. It's not really relevant what he thinks. According to Jeff, it's a question of what the policy effect impact is. If all the billionaires want to stay in the state and don't mind giving up 5% of their wealth each year or whatever nuts that thing the state cooks up, the state government will certainly not invest the money as intelligently as the average billionaire. It will largely go to fraud, waste, lazy government employees, et cetera. So Huang can have whatever opinion he wants. It's a free country. But that doesn't make it a wise policy. I agree. Gemini 3 Pro. Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning. Next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding. You see, Larry dumped his place in sf. He did. He's moving Out. Well, I don't know if he's getting out entirely. Definitely making. He still has plenty of homes in Malibu. In a somewhat related story, there's now a salary cap in defense tech. You saw this? So apparently this is from President Trump. He said that. What was the actual. What was the actual quote from Trump? Because Palmer had a clip. Let's head over to Truth Social. I think you actually do. He said, I've been informed by the slowest. He's talking about. Okay. So also, if Raytheon wants further business with the United States government, under no circumstances will they be allowed to do any additional stock buybacks where they have spent tens of billions of dollars until they are able to get their act together, our country comes first. And can you find the actual Trump quote about the salary cap? He said, what, 5 million per year per executive at a defense company. He also said that. He said, I have determined for the good of our country, especially in these very troubled and dangerous times, our military budget for the year 2027 should not be $1 trillion, but rather $1.5 trillion. That is a huge increase. 50% increase, but obviously there's a question of where that money comes from. Okay. Yes. Yeah. So the. Oh, I have the quote here. Yes. Okay. Well, executive pay packages, they're exorbitant and unjustifiable. So they should be limited to 5 million or less. Okay. Limited to 5 million or less. So I. So Palmer actually sort of agreed with this. Let's play the clip of Palmer Luckey on Bloomberg the Close digging into this. This is clips. They were at the Consumer Electronics Show. Yeah, I think he was there for. For Mod Retro, but they got him to comment on defense technology. So my motivation is to try and build it the biggest thing possible. I will say people are barely critiquing. Said the Palmer, you know, are you really a neutral party here? Are you really in a position to comment given you're competing with these companies? I'd say two things. One, these measures do apply in equal measure to me. I now cannot pay dividends. I now cannot do stock buybacks if I'm not investing in new plants, if I'm not doing these two things. The other thing is it's always tricky when you want it. You know, I'm in defense because I wanted to help solve these problems. Right. It's actually the same thing with, like, mod retro in the gaming space. Like, oh, of course Palmer would criticize these other game companies. After all, he's in the gaming space space. It's like, yeah, But I'm in the gaming space because I want to solve these problems. It's kind of this, like catch 22. Like, like if you're outside of it, they'll say, well, why don't you do something about it then? And you do something like, who cares what you're doing? You're just part of the problem. It's always been emotionally difficult for me. We also have posts that President Trump is thinking, more than a trillion should be invested in the area of defense. The budget should grow. Anti defense or anti defense company. That's not for sure. That's for sure. What's interesting is your company is, dare I say, considering going public. Yes. Would you CEO? Do you think the CEO that leads the business when it's gone public should be under these sorts of restrictions from an executive order? Do you think that could be an issue? I think that when you are on the dole and when you're effectively run on the public's wallet, that the public should be able to impose whatever restrictions they want on you. I think you're not asking whether it should be like, like, you know, if I am getting paid by taxpayers, they should have the ability to elect people, elect representatives, elect, you know, who will then nominate people who can hold me to account in any way they wish. If they want to say that I only pay myself $5 million until I'm caught up with my schedules, they should be allowed to do that. If they say that I'm not allowed to pay myself $1 until I get caught up, I think they should be allowed to do that. When you are working on the, when you are working on taxpayer dime, there is no level of oversight or intervention that I, I am against conceptually now, I think some of these might be bad moves. They might not necessarily help the defense base. But in concept, I think everything should be on the table. And I think it's even good maybe to scare some people sometimes. You don't necessarily go to people and say, this is the way it's going to be forever. You say, this is how it's going to be until you get your act together. You remember being a teenager, your parents say you're grounded until X, Y and Z bring up your grades, solve your problems, and then we will talk about altering the deal. You say, but this deal has so many problems. If it's like this my whole life, if I'm grounded for the rest of my life, that means I'll have a social life. And your parents are not necessarily looking to grind you for life. It's so funny. I think that that's what you're seeing right now. It's not. That's great. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think using it as an incentive to get these companies to hit the schedule that they agreed to as part of these contracts could be effective. Right. Especially. Especially if it's, especially if it's temporary. Yeah. You know, you can see this, you can see this kind of executive order setting a precedent that could, could over time be abused or have a bunch of negative effects. It's hard to say now. So this kind of thing is concerning. But you know, I was talking to a defense tech founder the other day who's trying to take over a program from a big prime where the prime had gotten like a multi hundred million dollar contract years ago and had actually not even set up a space to make the thing that they were, that they had signed up and were getting paid to make. They're being lazy bones. Lazy bones? Lazy bones behavior. And so yeah, in that situation, you. Can'T be a lazy bones in that situation. If you have a management team that is just like printing regardless on if they're actually delivering on what the government is asking and paying them to do, that's inappropriate. And so I think, and I think. Palmer is sort of wrestling with, you know, libertarian ideas. How much, you know, should private companies be able to do? And that's a separate issue. It's like a private company. If you're just selling to normal customers, you can do whatever you want. But it's different when you have a contract with the government. Then who decides the government's claim? Well, it's the people, it's the democracy. And so that's what's happening. Yeah. And Palmer in another clip was talking. They asked him, how much do you make? He's like, I make $100,000 a year. Right. That's my compact. And he also said, I have a bunch of stock because I started this company. Now the concern is like if you actually ended up in a situation where defense executives, anybody that works for the government cannot make more than $5 million and you're factoring in comp packages later, you could be in a situation where a company says, well, like we can't hire the best people because they have an offer to make $10 million a year over here and we can only pay them $5 million. I mean, the AI researcher thing is crazy because I don't know that this is a dynamic that's actually happening. But it would be very tricky if Anduril could not compete against anthropic OpenAI, Google, DeepMind. If they need a, a super talented AI researcher and maybe they're not paying him a billion dollars but they're just like yeah, like the market rate for this role is 15 mil and like we can't hire them right now because we didn't check some box on the level of deliveries on this thing and that would be a little bit tricky. Really quickly let me tell you about Restream and then we'll go to Tyler1 livestream. 30 plus destinations. If you want a multi stream go. To restream.com I was just going to say you can already see this phenomenon, you know, in some ways. You know Tim Cook. Yes. He it's not a salary cap. Right. But it feels like there is a cap. It feels like something's going on. He should be paying paid way more. Yeah. What does he make? 75? Yeah, it's barely scraping it. Imagine if he was only five. I mean it'd be terrible. He would have no incentive to show any of that. One of the greatest operators of all time can barely make a buck more than a guy who throws and hits balls. Yeah, right. Yeah. I think instead of a $5 million individual cap on defense tech executives, it'd be much better to do a team based salary cap because then that injects an interesting dynamic. Like instead of 5 million per executive, how about 20 million for the entire executive team? So then you have the idea of team construction. Where do you have cap room? Okay, we got an all star. We're bringing in Brian Schimpf as the CEO. He's the CEO of Anduril. Right now we're poaching him, we're getting him 18. But his team is going to be mostly interns. Or you go and you get okay, we got four people, they're all making five. They're all decent operators. But you create much more of a sports like dynamic. That's the way we can't get Brian Schimfield, but we can recreate him in the aggregate. In the aggregate, exactly. Dodd in the chat says the best way to force them to deliver what they promise is to choose another vendor. I agree. You could fix a lot of this at the contract level. If you sign a contract with somebody and then a year, in year, two years, three years, etc. They're not delivering. Like making it so that the government can like more easily reallocate those funds and actually, you know, make these companies have some accountability. Yeah. More importantly, near before we move on. Just I think this whole thing is very interesting because you have this dynamic where very clearly it feels like Hegseth went and gave Trump some sort of update and then he just like posted on True Social and like kind of crashed out. And there's a weird thing where it's like, why is this happening like this? This is not. It's not even an executive order at this point. It's just like this entire news cycle around the new defense budget and this is all just truth Social posts. Just like Trump's thoughts, his shower thoughts, basically. But this stuff does actually have an impact on. I know, it is funny that you said this happened with Intel Truth Social post and you just assume it's an executive order. It feels like law. It feels like, oh, okay, this is. Is law. But it's not. But it does have an impact and it brings people to the table. And we saw this play out with intel where he was saying like, lip Bhutan's gotta go. And basically calling for the firing of this guy who just got hired to turn around Intel. And then. And then a few days later, he's like, lip Bhutan's amazing. I love this guy. I'm actually going to Invest. I own 10% of the company now and now the stocks. And so these things are like, aggressive, but it's with this whole, like taco chickening out. But that's part of the plan art of the deal. I don't know. It's a very weird, interesting new dynamic and I wonder how much it'll carry forward in the next administration. But we will see. It's certainly entertaining at the moment. Before we move on, let me tell you about Railway. Railway simplifies software deployment. Web apps, servers and databases run in one place with scaling and monitoring and security built in. That's right. Sorry. NIR says the term carry in venture capital actually comes from video games. You just need to find one good one founder good enough to carry your entire career. That is fantastic. This is a banger. And it's a banger because it's so true. When I look at across 60, 70 different investments at this point. If you take out two or three of these founders Power Law games, it's. Just like much like being on Rust with an absolute killer who you're absolutely 360 no scope while you're still figuring out how the sticks work. But you're getting carried. You're like, we won't 2v2 on rust. And you're just in a corner and the game's over. You load into Counter Strike on Dust two and one random guy you're queuing with just knows all the smoke lineups and you're just ready to rock. You're getting carried. You're carried to the top. Did I ever tell the story of how I got my Overwatch account carried to, like, the absolute top? My account was, like, ranked one of the best in the world for a little bit, but it was very interesting. It was me who was. So I played the first season of. I played the first season of Overwatch. Then my password was included in some sort of hack or some sort of leak from another maybe like, you know, some other company had my password, leaked it and I'd use a generic password on Overwatch. And so some hacker figured out how to get into my Overwatch account, which is not important because, like, what are you going to do? You're just going to like, my credit card information isn't there. You can't do anything with it. You just play Overwatch. But Overwatch was like a $60 game or something. And. And so if you were hacking, you didn't want to buy $60 every time you got banned. So this hacker played on my Overwatch account for like multiple seasons and ranked way up and was like a sniper. I think he played Hanzo Main and was like, really, really good. And then years later, I got back in with my friends and I'm like, oh, let's play some Overwatch. And we queue up like, John, what. Have you been up to? And I'm like, oh, I need to do placement matches. And so I do the placement matches and I'm just like, losing because I'm playing with all these incredible, like, you know, the top tier. And. And everyone's like, why are you guys like, like, we know you're good. Why are you. Why are you sandbagging? Like, why are you trying to derank your account? I'm like, I'm not. I'm playing as hard as I can. I'm doing my best. And they're. And they're like, no, we can see that. You're, like, one of the greatest Hanzo players ever. Like, you're the greatest sniper in Overwatch. We've seen your account history. You're amazing. Why are you playing poorly? And I was like, I don't know. And then I finally figured it out, out that my account had been stolen and then rocketed to the top of the rankings. And then the game remembered that and was putting me in these really high tier games. So finally I had to make up a lie because Whenever I'd hop on a game, everyone would be like, you're terrible and you're supposed to be good. And I'd have to say, ah, like, I broke my hand. So I just, I'm not as good as I used to be. Like, please go easy on me. Like, I'm relearning everything. Give me a break. Anyway, before we move on Applovin, profitable advertising made Easy with Axon AI. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. Jordy, one more thing that was funny about this truth social saga from yesterday. So he starts dunking on the execs, talking about salary caps. Lockheed Martin stock was like falling off a cliff. Raytheon, et cetera. I think this was right after the close, in after hours. But then immediately after that, Dodd in the chat says, the funny thing is that the $1.5 trillion announcement came after talking down on them. So then just a little bit later, Trump said, after long and difficult negotiations with senators, congressmen, secretaries and other political representatives, I've determined that for the good of the country, especially in these troubled and dangerous times, our military budget for the year 2027 should not be the one trillion, but rather one and a half trillion. This will allow us to build. This will allow us to build the, quote, dream military that we have long been entitled to and more importantly, that it will keep us safe and secure. And so anyways, you can imagine what happened to prices after that if it weren't for the tremendous numbers being produced by terrorists from other countries. And then keeps ranting talks about Sleepy Joe. I think we, I think it's time to retire Sleepy Joe. Just let him, let him be. Just retired. It's Joe. Anyways, over to Warner Brothers. Warner Brothers has rejected Paramount's latest $108.4 billion hostile bid and remain committed. I called it loyal. I knew nothing about this deal, but I just randomly said that I think Netflix is going to run away with it. But we'll see in the Journal. Paramount defends its hostile bid for how. High can they go? Can they go to 200 billion? It seems like Paramount has. They're holding out for one trillion. Endless coffers. I don't know. Paramount continued pushing its $77.9 billion bid for Warner Brothers Thursday, a day after Warner said it plans to stick to its existing deal with Netflix. Yeah, the photo really did it for me. The aura farming together of the, of the Warner Brothers team with the Netflix. Team on the lot. On the lot. It feels like these guys are absolute dogs. They're ready to partner up. They're adding a new brother to the Warner Brothers. And so they're having fun. And it feels like unless the price gets really crazy and they appeal directly to shareholders and shareholders go crazy or something, it feels like it's in the bag. And meanwhile, Paramount has traded down almost 15% in the past month. Well, still making some moves in CBS and stuff. Still making waves with Barry Weiss at the helm. Anyway, Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces. And now with AI agents, Anthropic raising 10 billion at 350 billion. Target talked about this a little bit yesterday. We'll get into it more. EIC, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund and CO2 plan to lead. Spencer, you absolute dog. Spencer. Get in the Ultradome. Explain this to us. This is great. The funding round in the third mega deal in the past year follows a 13 billion investment in September that valued the company at 183 billion billion. So they're raising less money at almost twice the valuation. Good for dilution. The round's expected to close in the coming weeks. The total amount of the deal could change. The new financing kicks off what is likely to be another banner year for AI startup funding in 2025. We're going to the Axon. We're still warming up this new map. Mallet kind of splintered. Okay. I don't know if you've noticed this. Maybe. You know what we need? We need some athletic tape to wrap around gloves, too. Batting gloves. I do. I would like an even longer mallet. Like a full baseball. Like a staff. There's something about a baseball bat that's just the Platonic ideal for swinging things. Maybe. Maybe big bigger mallet. Maybe some. Maybe some athletic tape on there. Wrapping it like it's. Like it's a baseball bat that's hit 1,000 home runs. Do you think they. Do you think they end up doing another round before the ipo? It's hard to imagine this is actually the final. The actual pre IPO round just because there's so much incentive to just raise again in a few months. I saw a couple of people doing polls on. Would you rather own OpenAI at 1 trillion or anthropic at 350 or XAI at 220 or whatever. Whatever the valuations were, and at least a lot of the small polls that I saw, people were very excited about Anthropic's valuation relative to the Magic that's happening in Claude code and all the glazing that's happening. Finally we have a second AI glaze gate, but this time the AI is getting glazed by the humans. Triple glaze. It's a triple glaze. But Cursor is not getting glazed. Shaquille says he's bearish on Cursor, says that Cursor's not feeling the AGI. We'll have to talk to Michael Truel about whether he is set the record straight on how AGI pelt he is. But this is from Bre Wolfson on Dialectic with Jackson Dahl. The context, Shaquille says is Wolfson is the newish head of employee experience at Cursor. And much of this interview is about how to build great companies and how, how this is changing in the AI era. She's written a good blog about Cursors culture specifically. It sounds fantastic over there. All of this is very interesting and there are some good insights here. Wolfson started working, worked at amazing companies and has lots of interesting lessons to share from them. But when it really comes to thinking about the future, there is a failure to really engage with what advanced AI capabilities will mean for the future of work. All the hypothesized changes are incredibly minor. From brief. She's not telling this fast takeoff, crazy total disruption story and Shaquille doesn't like that. And I think this goes back to what we've been talking about, about the narrative. What is the right tone to match? Should you just be financial maxi and just be like, look, it's just autocomplete and it makes money and we sell tokens profitably? Or should you be like it's gonna cure cancer? Or should you be like, it's so important that if we don't do it right, we're all gonna die. Like, there's so many different narratives that you can tug on and a lot of people have been tugging on a bunch of them and it gets confusing. Some people play one note consistently and sometimes that can work, sometimes I can't. I'm kind of down with Cursor. I like this. I like that Michael is just like, he's a builder and he tells a good story about that. And like there are other AI leaders that are telling the doom story or telling the fast takeoff story. I don't think the Cursor needs to necessarily tell that same story. But Shaquille disagrees. But we'll have to dig into this more. What do you think, Tyler? Yeah, I mean, it is interesting because anthropic they make such an emphasis on coding. Yeah, they're like of the, of the big labs. People think of them probably as like the most AGI pilled, but it's like cursor is. I mean, all they do is coding and there's a very different, like people see them very differently. Yeah, well, it's a, it's much more of a centaur adoption and much more of a co pilot. Much less of this drop in replacement for labor. Yeah, that's true. But I mean you've definitely seen a lot of the recent cursor features are getting more and more agentic. Totally, totally. Like the actual product isn't like so completely different, at least like ideologically. Right? No, no, no, I agree, I agree. Yeah, there's something. Cursor has an advantage which is they have tens of millions of active developers using their product and so they have a data source on a lot of this that people that are just kind of speculating and on X and reading science fiction essays about takeoff scenarios. There's something to just playing the game as you see it on the field. And I think that trying to obsess too much over what the world could. Look, it's, it's very important to try to plan and build your business around what the world's going to be like in one year, two years, five years, et cetera. But at the same time, if you're building and your business is accelerating and customers are using your product more and more and more like that doesn't. It's hard to just say, oh, I'm bearish on this company, because they're not of this one podcast interview. Yeah, well, let's move on to some generative AI traffic data. But first, let me tell you about 11 labs. Build intelligent, real time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with eleven Labs, the makers of our theme song. So Rihard Jark says you can feel the code red here. Google is absolutely crushing it with Gemini 3. Gemini's market share is now at 21.5%. Three months ago it was at 12.9%. Twelve months ago is at 5.7%. And I remember a year ago when it launched, it felt like, it felt like a lot of the numbers that we were hearing out of Google were big, but it was because they were including generative AI snippets in Google search or they were sort of bending it into other products that already had big dau numbers. And it was not people going to Gemini, installing the app, really daily driving it. It was More demo, more testing. Will this similar web data seem to show that Gemini has been growing and taking share? Yeah. It's also worth noting that this is just, just like site visits. And so not every visit is created equally. Right. Somebody can land quickly on a site that's very different from them being in the app multiple times a day. So this is not looking at app traffic. That's what I love about the semi analysis chart that shows that you have users or accounts that are signed up, then you have the active users, and then you have. Have how many interactions those users have. Like how many new chats do they actually kick off over the course of a day? And then also how many interactions, how long are they spending time? And so ultimately the value that's created will probably be more of a proxy for time on site attention at the end of the day. And so there is a little bit of a gap there where when they ran, when Semianalysis at least ran the numbers maybe six months ago, it felt, felt like while there were other AI apps and chat apps that were maybe taking a little bit of share on DAUS or maus in terms of total tokens, total interactions, total back and forths, OpenAI was really, really dominant. And so maybe the narrative's overstated, but it's still some interesting data. And it does show that the code red is real and it shows that Google's been taking, taking the distribution of Gemini very, very seriously. And they've gotten more traffic, which is good. Nier is back. Yes. LM arena has raised an evaluation of 1.7 billion coming in with a Michael Burry shot. We're gonna have, we're gonna have the founder of Elle Marina on hopefully in the next 24 hours. We have to respond to this viral. A thousand likes on this. Why do people not like Elamarina? It seems like. Well, I think business, I don't know. Well, yeah. How much revenue are they doing? Sure, sure. What kind of products are they releasing, can they get? If you're. I'll tell you this right now, you build up a huge reputation. The sterling example of what is the best LLM, the best benchmark possible, can't be gamed. And then you go and you hold an auction and you sell the best arena, the best LLM award to the highest bidder for a billion dollars, for $10 billion. And you return money to shareholders after you do that and you give them good vibes for one week and then you burn your entire credibility. No, clearly there's some model routing, some infrastructural level. I think we've talked about this before, but increasingly I think the bull case is not just deciding which model is the best in an Ellen Marina, it's which model is better for this specific type of marketing copy. You're going to to Nike and you're asking them which one aligns with that particular business process. How do they evaluate? How do they bring in those models and then how do they measure uptime, how do they measure all these different things that could result in a pretty significant business decision. And if you can take a cut of that, that could be valuable. I don't know, but we'll have to talk to the founder about it. Do you have any take on LM arena fan? I don't have a take on the business side, but as a product it's very useful. It's. It's always cool to look at. I mean because they always get the new models before. So you can always see. Sure. Like whenever a new image model comes out. Oh yeah. Always there first. You can kind of see what are the vibes. But yeah, it's a good. I enjoy the product a lot. In the vibe economy, it's potentially dramatically undervalued at. In the leaderboard economy. Yeah. I think the vibes. I think over the past few months you've definitely started to see like, okay, this exonon is like likely being paid by a labor. I think you're starting to see that. Yeah, it definitely happens. Anyway, they probably, I don't know, there's a bunch of stuff here. Do you use Tailwind? Yes. Did you have you heard about the Tailwind drama? This whole thing? Tailwind laid off 75% of their team. I read the post. Pretty rough. Yeah, the post. The reason is so ironic. Their CSS framework became extremely popular with AI coding agents. 75 million downloads a month. That meant nobody would visit their docs where they promoted paid offerings, resulting in a 40% drop and in traffic and an 80% revenue loss. And people are really, really upset about it. Very sad. It feels like regressively figure out some. Other way to the founder posted a video or basically a mini podcast yesterday. He just said he went for a walk and just was talking for 30 minutes. I listened to half of it this morning. Sad story. They have a small super talented team. He had to lay off a number of their engineers. So now it's the three owners in the business plus one one other engineer. There's four of them now trying to maintain it. He's optimistic, but he basically was saying he was Just looking at his revenue go down a fixed amount every single month, which means that it was a greater and greater percentage revenue. And so he was like, we're just going to be dead in a year. Because a lot of what they did, I think, I think their paid offerings were like selling components, pre assembled code and all of the chat, all of the LLMs can just one shot a component. If you need a pop up or a modal or a button, you don't. Need to pay attention. Dology was saying it'd be great if like a big lab just said like, hey, these are talented teams. Oh, that's a good idea. Join an anthropic. Yeah, I mean I don't know much about the founder, but it does feel like time to go into deals guy mode and find just a completely different, different mode of operation. I have to imagine that these folks are talented and I imagine that if they landed at some big corporation doing front end transformation of a massive surface area. Yeah. Or going to a place like Lovable. Or Figma, that would be great too. But even just going inside of like, you know, a salesforce or some sort of like, you know, some product where they have a ton of surface area and they're working on modernizing it. But you have this new team that comes in and they. Yeah, but I'm sure they want to, to keep building. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, yeah. So maybe inside. But yeah, the saying lays off 75% of their team is dramatic. They did lay. Oh, they laid off just three people. Out of a four person team that were not the owners of the business. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So sort of law of small numbers sounds more dramatic than maybe it is. But still I'm optimistic that they'll find a good outcome here. It was. The founder was upset. Apparently people were just like commenting. Yeah, people were really mean to him. Mean to him being like, hey, I can't prioritize this feature right now because my business is dying. And they're like, you're going against, you know, the philosophy of open source. He's like, John Ludig wrote this in his piece on open source AI. Like the open source community is beautiful in many ways. It gives these like incredible technologies that people can build on, but people also like for freebies and they get very mad when you take them away and they get mad when they don't get them. Everyone loves free stuff. Everyone loves a free lunch. And everyone loves plaid because 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 Dylan. Wait, wait. Really quickly. Ryan in the chat recommended that we have Mike Vining on the show, which I would love to have Mike Vining on the show. Do you know who Mike Vining is? I do not. Well, guess what? He inspired the guy who you just saw in your new favorite movie, Sicario. Wait, he works for X? No, he's on X. No, no, he joined the platform, but he does. I read that as you. He's an incredible military hero. He has fantastic stories. I've listened to him on a few podcasts. Very, very interesting fellow. And, and he's very viral because he has these iconic images of him on Delta Force missions. But he's wearing what looks like an IT guy outfit. So it's like a starched white button down with a pocket protector and he has these big glasses and he's not. He's walking out of the Blackhawk. Yeah, exactly. So he's not wearing the normal like military camo with the bulletproof vest. He's just there to clean up and stuff. It's crazy. So he's a personal hero of mine. All time. The all time aura farmer. All time aura farmer. That is for sure true. Would love to have him on the show. He's done other shows, so it would be very interesting to hear from him. This company, Flip said. Flip is hiring. We're hiring posters, engineers, product growth ops designers, interns and roles that do not yet have names. And then 24 hours later they quoted their own post and said, you've just deleted half the applications at random. We do not want unlucky people working for Flip. Well, they already have a poster on staff because that is very funny. Wait, it says it's the lucky company. So I'm assuming it has to do with gambling. Of course. I actually. Yeah. So I think it. I think the product, what they're trying to do is basically you pay more for a product or get it free. Oh, it's that. It's that meme. I've seen. I've seen people joke about that. And then I saw there's this poster. They're bringing gambling into credit cards. Yes, yes, I saw a poster who. Bringing gambling into debt. Debt. There's someone who like vibe codes, different UX mockups for funny concepts. There's that famous one by Aidan of like the Google Maps with a fog of war. So as you move around the map, it shows you where you've been and you unveil the map like it's a video game. There's A whole bunch of these and one of them is like the double or nothing on your checkout, which is a crazy idea. I don't know. On the topic of luck, at one point very early in my career, I wanted to create a direct to consumer product called five hour luck. And the whole concept would be like, it'd be a five hour energy shot. But the promise, the pitch was that it would make you lucky, it would increase your luck. Just because people, you know, energy is a stat, why not increase luck? And I was going to formulate it, have some vitamins in there, have some things that could potentially increase luck. Was not thinking about the gambling application. Placebo out. Yeah. I mean that product would crush in Vegas. Yeah. Imagine just taking it, being like, okay, I have the stat boost. I'm left feeling good. Snake oil in it. Yes, yes. Well. But Brian Johnson, he sells a product, it's olive oil. It's literally called snake oil. It's sort of riffing on that concept. Before we move on, let me tell you about MongoDB. Choose a database built with flexibility and scale in mind. With best in class embedding models and re rankers, MongoDB has what you need to build. What's next? So moving on to Citrini. Asking someone, asking someone, asking someone, long memory. Oh, who's long memory? If they got any new ideas for 2026, it's already rich. Yes, memory has been on a tear. Yeah, Bubble boy on over on X had had some pretty great calls late last year. I'm going to try to pull one up. Well, you do. Let me tell you about crowdstrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. We can also pull up, I want to watch this, this intro from this week in startups. Can we move on to this? Pull it up. Pull up the video of Jason Calacanis finally answering the question we all had. What is his dream purchase? I saw this clip on this week in startups. Jason's ultimate dream mega purchase. And I clicked instantly. This is on this week in startups. His co host asks him. And the best part about this show is that I was expecting it to be like they tease it in an intro and then they make you listen to. And then they cut just short of him saying, oh, the one thing I want to buy is. And then boom, the start of the show and then 20 minutes later he gives you it. No, watch the clip. Now that you're doing so well financially, what is a purchase that you'd like to make but can't bring yourself to do so because it feels too extravagant. Answer this honestly. Tell the people what you even Jason Kyle Canis will not break out the checkbook for. It's definitely private aviation. Let's go. I've been trying to hold it. J. Kyle, you deserve it long time. He deserves it. Great. Unjustifiable expense of spending, you know, $50,000 going somewhere or 100,000 on a round. Trip that seemed absurd to spend that. The other one I would say that I sometimes sweat is buying a really expensive sports car. He loves Corvettes. He's a Corvette guy. Get a ZR1 like a big open fancy barn. That's kind of like a. But do I buy this ZRX one. For $250,000 or do I do it? Do it, do it. Jcal $50,000 Corvettes. I like that things become cognitive load. This week in startups is brought to. You by. To their sponsors for making it possible. I love that. I love that he's a Corvette guy. Jake Howell deserves it. He deserves it. He's worked really hard. One of the greatest to ever do it. Been in the media business for decades. My welcome to was doing TVPN like in the early 2000s. You know whose first guest was ever David Sacks. It's the craziest thing. And they go and they do calls from entrepreneurs and you can actually track what those entrepreneurs do now. It's very interesting. And my first welcome to Silicon Valley moment was I flew to Silicon Valley. I went to the launch festival, his conference. Heard a bunch of tech people talk, talk. Met a bunch of YC founders. It kind of introduced me to Silicon Valley. Went to the sound bar on Silicon Valley in Palo Alto next to Stanford. It was a lot of fun. He was very nice. Also in that era, Sam Altman went on Charlie Rose. You were talking about this. We gotta watch this. Should we pull this clip up? Oh, do you have it ready to go? Yeah, it's on charlierose.com it is. It's not on YouTube, which is fascinating. I saw a clip of what looked like Sam Altman on Charlie Rose and I was like, we gotta dig up the actual footage. While we do, let me tell you about Lambda Lambda is the super intelligence cloud. Building AI supercomputers for training and inference at scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. So do you have it? Let's pull this up. Where is it? I put it in the team chat. Okay, well, while we pull that up, let's look for what's next Next, unintended AI close. I can do another ad read while we do that. Let me tell you about Vanta Automate Compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. How are we doing. Pulling it up? Nikita Beer. Finally met someone. Oh no. Charlie Rose. The video actually does not load. Oh, it doesn't load? Oh no. Well, you know what we can do? We can export it and we can play it tomorrow on the show. Let's make a note to do that. Let's move on to the real biggest launch, the biggest tech news in years. There's a new monitor out from Dell Big. And I love this. So Michael Dell said, big news. The world's first 52 inch 6K monitor is here. If you love big displays, this is for you. Jordy. Did you ever have one of these elite multi monitor setups or were you always like a sort of do business by phone? You've never been an iPad guy, have you ever been? I've got a, I've got an Apple monitor at home. I find it hard. I mean as like a guy who has been building companies and investing. You're basically an email phone. Email zoom. It's not, it's not code over here, this and that. Monitoring situations. You're an amateur when it comes to monitoring situations is what you're saying. But I do enjoy. I have an Apple monitor at home, I enjoy it. But it's nothing like. This is incredible. So it's much bigger than the Apple Pro display xdr. Is it curved? It is curved. It has to be curved at that size because you're basically sitting right. Your face is right up against a TV 52 inches. And it's funny in many, many ways because let's. So first let's play the clip from Rob Moore where he says Dell just released the product that Michael Dell and David Senra alluded to in the David Senra podcast podcast episode. After 42 years, Michael Dell's enthusiasm coming. Out of the thing that we're most excited about is just a bigger screen. It's awesome. It's awesome. So let's play this. That obsession has not dulled. We were just in your office and you were showing me one of your new unreleased products that we can't film or photograph. But you were like, I was like, this is. This is like a kid on Christmas. Like you're still super cool product. Yeah, I'm very excited. I told you I'll buy one. I think it's cool too. I'm going to buy one as soon. As it comes out. But I just love this enthusiasm that is just not dulling. That obsession has not dulled. That's great. Heartwarming. And what's really, really funny is that. So there was that sort of like tease. Michael Dell just posts it and says it's out here. You can just buy it. And then this poster. Ben Bajarin, CEO and principal analyst at Creative Strat, says this monitor from Dell is amazing. And I have had one for a few weeks. Easily the best monitor I've ever used. And even at 120 hertz, still capable to game on. So it's like, when did this thing release? It doesn't have the fanfare of a normal product release cycle where there's pre orders, but it's very fun and it's been very hyped and I think we should get some because we have a whole host of screens arrayed randomly and it's not very aesthetic. And you have the opportunity to simplify. You can actually distribute display four different full computers, I think at fairly high res, just tiled on one screen. So you can run four different displays separately. $2,900. Not bad. I thought it was even less. I don't know. Anyway, phantom cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the phantom card. We have major white pill. Oh, we do. Drew Tuma is reporting for the first time in 25 years, not a single square mile of California is dry on the US Drought Monitor. The rain is back. Thank you, Augustus. Have to go back to December 2000 to find a similar situation. If you're 25 or younger, you've always lived in a world where California has been entering or recovering from drought. So we are incredibly, incredibly back. Yes, we should, should talk about the title of the stream. Julia Black's TBPN expose in Vanity Fair just dropped today. If you go to vanity fair.com, we're right there. And it's been a lot of fun working on this piece. We got to do a very fun. Well, to be clear, there wasn't. Yeah, it wasn't a lot of work for us. We got to hang out with her. Getting interviewed, hanging out with her. And I mean it was. We had to go dress up and get photos. It was definitely the most, by far the most intense shoot we've ever been a part of. Two cameras, medium format. Medium format film. Well, I just mean more like the team that actually went into it. Right. So many different people working on it was extremely professional as you would expect out of Vanity Fair. And I like that Julia still called us the technology brothers. She's not fully rebrand. No, it doesn't. Keeping it alive. Yeah. They call us the J team. John Coogan and Jordy Hayes. A bunch of funny moments in here. Yeah. What'd you like? What'd you like? I like the. She said, there are no saints. One of them runs a nicotine company. But they have not just any nicotine company. What kind of nicotine is it? Company? It's addictive nicotine that I personally am addicted to. But they have drawn certain lines in the sand. They don't swear on air, they try to avoid vulgarity, and they don't promote alcohol or drug use, mostly because they're not big drinkers themselves. It's cool that we get credit for not promoting alcohol use, even though in the early days, the doubling the Dom episode. But it was funny because we actually really didn't enjoy it. Yeah, it was funny. But I remember I'd tell my wife, oh, it's a Dom day today. I gotta go drink a bunch of champagne at 11am I'm not looking forward to it. And then Julie says, perhaps most importantly, and then a quote from me, the show is never gonna promote Burning Man. I can't believe you said that. I mean, it's factually true. It really is so funny when you are talking to a serious journalist where everything you say, even the jokes, were gonna get written down and recorded and printed. So some of the odd little stylistic flourishes, you. Yeah, I'm just riffing. I'm ripping bits. And then it gets written down. And it looks way different in that context. But it's good. It's real. It's the actual belief. There was a funny moment. So we were getting breakfast with Julia at our usual spot, and she says, while in line for coffee that morning, Hayes dashed off an expost. This was right after the Coldplay saga. I said, Startup CEOs can't even hug their chief people officer at a concert in this country anymore. And Julie says as he watched the likes pour in, he predicted they would top 10,000 or so. When I checked the next morning, there were over 70,000. And you were saying, imagine. Imagine if it flopped, it would be in here. It would be like he predicted it would. 10,000 and only got 200. Yeah. But wow, lucky day. Yeah, it was a good day to come see the show. It sort of took us all over the place. I think I. I think at the end of the show, I sort of stood up and said, you know, what was that? Are we journalists? Are we analysts, are we comedians, I don't know. But we're gonna figure it out, and we're not going anywhere over the next decades. It was funny. We were blasting Coldplay's Fix youx in the studio that morning, which is a fantastic song. It's a great song. Also, at that lunch, she didn't put this in, but you ordered some food and you put so much salt on it. You just kept shaking the salt shaker. And I was like, this is going to go in the piece. Oh, yeah. I've never noticed that you. I love salt. I have this amazing story. My grandpa was making my brother and I hot chocolate when we were kids. And, like, my grandma was away at the time, so it was just us hanging out with grandpa. And he's like, I'm going to make the kids hot chocolate. He makes a hot chocolate, brings it over to us. He's drinking it, he gives us a couple cups, and we're like, oh, Grandpa, this. This is really. This is really rough. Are you sure you made it right? And he's like, yeah, I made it right. It's totally fine. Oh, I know what happened. And turns out he. All the sugar that he meant to put in, he meant to put in salt, but his taste buds were so cooked that to him, it just. Normally pure salt sugar, you notice immediately. So, anyways, I am. I'm like him in that sense. There's almost no amount of salt, but it's very. It's a very funny story. They also did this little video interview with us, and they asked us bullish or bearish on a number of things. And one of the things they asked us was blue sky. And we both look at each other and we're like, we love blue skies. Like, it's a nice day, no clouds. Most of the days are blue skies in California. And they had to clarify, like, no, blue sky, like the app. And we were like, oh, yeah. We don't actually think about it at all. We're mostly on X. But it really does give you. You a little bit of flavor of how we think about the business and whatnot. So it was a fun profile. Yeah. Also, the outfits, of course, unfortunately, were not ours. They dressed us. They brought a whole wardrobe team and stuff. But you gotta get that suit. I do. That suit is. You gotta get yours, too. Unbelievable. The 1980s theme was very fun, very throwback, and it feels like a return to the early brand. Very much, much what we were doing, it feels like it captured. It might be the last story that gets told about that era before we go into, you know, whatever we're doing next. Anyway, we have Delian as bruja from Founders Fund and Varda in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVP and Ultradome. Delian, how are you doing? Hello brothers. Welcome back. Good to see you. First. First appearance. You did 18 last year. We're hoping to 10x this year. We got to keep on a trajectory. So 180 hits this year. Welcome to the show. I hope your 2026 is off to a good start. Any New Year's resolutions? Do you like New Year's resolutions? Do you have any meta commentary about New Year's resolutions? My goal is to just wear only quarter zips for the entire year. Just lean into my new stylist recommendations on just.