NEWSMAX

The Dow that sort of aligns our, you know, our, our kind of mutual, kind of like that sort of like aligns our upside. And so, you know, in this proposal, if, if we create a lot of value, then we can kind of, you know, realize some of that. So the goal here is to really like align incentives. And do you think, do you think more crypto companies that raised from traditional financial institutions will try to pursue these more aligned models going forward? Look, I hope so. I think that everyone was sort of dealing with what was possible and I think that people have kind of still evolved and adapted and a lot of. I think that. But my hope is that the crypto native things are what ultimately win. And I think that's kind of where I put my kind of bets. To me, the point of the technology, the point of the industry is the technology. It's like the decentralization. It's the idea that you can create a financial application that you trust not because you trust a company, but because the code is transparent and public and auditable and run by multiple independent parties. This idea of decentralized consensus and networks, it can be really powerful. And so I think that the more that projects lean into that, the better off we are. There's sort of like this interesting thing that happens. All of the fees, for example, the fee system that we're sort of proposing as part of this, every aspect of it is transparent and public and auditable and verifiable in real time. And so people don't need quarterly reports from a company when you can have real time access to anyone in the world that's not just public and transparent, but also cryptographically provable. And so there's sort of different ways of accomplishing a lot of the goals that various regulations have. When you sort of lean into the unique nature of the technology, that makes. A lot of sense. How's the reaction been? We've been streaming here, so I haven't been able to check the timeline, but this seems like something that both Uniswap superfans and detractors would appreciate. Yeah, so it's only been about an hour and a half. You guys were fast to messaging me, but so far, I mean, from what I've seen, it has been extremely positive. From a public reaction, everyone on Twitter seems very happy, which is where most of crypto conversation happens. I guess it's X. I still say Twitter. It's hard. It's hard not to. Still happens to me every now and then. Well, congratulations, Big milestone. And feels like it's a really positive industry here. Do you think this is going to be a trend for other companies that are in a similar situation? I hope so. We're doing it because we think it's what's best in the way we think leaning into the centralization, the decentralized protocol, is what's best. And so I hope that other people follow this trend as well. I think that a lot of people have been doing it, but they've mostly been doing it from outside the US or in all these different ways. And I think that ultimately we really believe that this is the right thing and what is sort of best for users and what's best world, which is why we're doing it. What about on the regulation side? Is there anything to touch on there? Yeah, I would just be curious with are maybe the version of you that's earlier in their career, are they deciding to set up in the United States? I mean, I know you went through absolute hell for a number of years and being based in New York was a big challenge, but are you seeing more younger crypto builders decide, hey, it actually makes sense for me to set up.

So we're talking about a category where today and that's with a product that's still pretty manual and tedious to use. Now imagine Gamma automating a ton. Our API is going to actually make it so that anybody can actually build on top of our platform as well. So if you have a business where content creation can be core to your infrastructure, you can now build on top of Gamma. So no longer even manually creating content. It's. It's going to be a massive market. And so that API business, is that another SaaS company that wants to make it easy to generate reports that users can walk people through? The organization? Is that a use case is like, hey, take your data. We'll turn it into a beautiful presentation automatically that you can run a meeting with. So there's actually multiple different layers. Layer 1 I'll call just an extension of our prosumer business today. So imagine if you're already using Zapier, you can combine that with your favorite tool. So Granola for notes, for instance, if you're a freelancer, you take all your notes in Granola. The moment the meeting's over, you can take that meeting transcript, feed it into Gamma.

Seamless experience. What about on the how can you talk about the shape of the user? Have you been selling direct to consumers? B2B is there some sort of like, you know, Dropbox did, like the viral web, the consumer software viral loop where I send it to you, you install, you become a customer, we upsell. Or is it more SDR led? How are you thinking about the actual growth engine for the business? Yeah, definitely. So where we started, we actually started much with much more of a prosumer base of users. So you can imagine anybody that has to do a lot of external facing communication, whether you're a freelancer, solopreneur, small business owner, someone that needs to create a lot of decks, we made it dead simple for them to get started. For them, the beauty is that they're not locked into the Microsoft suite, the G suite, so they have the freedom to choose whatever tool is best for the job and so they're able to pick up our tool, use it. BO by nature of our category, we're lucky that if you like using Gamma, you're sharing and presenting with others. Right? There's organic.

The hope is to have that kind of really recognized and acknowledged at a, at a federal scale. And once that happens, I think it will be like even more, you know, of a slam dunk. Soho. Soho Crypto renaissance era will really begin. Well, great, great to meet you. Thanks for coming on and congratulations on all the progress and the proposal and we'll have to have you back on again soon. Yeah, excited to come back on sometime. Thanks so much. Great to hang. Cheers. Let me tell you about Wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning. And I am in Wander. It's a vacation. Home, but better, it's Jordy's. Current home. I will share one fun anecdote. They knew I had kids. I didn't communicate with the Wander team at all, just booked it. And. And they knew I had kids because they asked for that info on the way in. They bought a bunch of toys. There was toys when I arrived for the kids and that made bedtime a challenge because it was like it looked like Christmas morning out there. But without further ado, we have the CEO of Gamma coming in. Welcome.

A financial hub and a crypto hub forum in New York, particularly Brooklyn, actually, it's actually particularly in SoHo, I'd say. But there are the Brooklyn hub, but there's kind of a growing SoHo hub to crypto. And I personally, I love, I love it here. You know, there's like, I could say that it was because I believed in the technology and that it would sort of, you know, that being on the right side of history would ultimately prevail. But I will also say that I just love it here as well and I love living in New York. So I definitely hope more people come here. In terms of the long term certainty, that's really where this market structure bill that's being discussed in Congress is kind of pretty important, as is some of the what we expect would be upcoming regulations out of various regulators. And so the hope is to have additional clarity and clarity that makes sense with the technology. That's really important. I think that was challenging before is regulators taking stances that just didn't make sense for the technology. Um, and, and so, you know, the hope is that the sort of environment kind of like, and we really, you know, the hope is that long term there isn't this sort of like it's like not a doesn't, you know, it doesn't kind of stay a politicized topic long term. And the hope is that really it's just like people create sense, there's sensible regulation.

Kind of mutual, kind of like that sort of aligns our upside. And so, you know, in this proposal, if, if we create a lot of value, then then we can kind of, you know, realize some of that. So the goal here is to really like align incentives. And do you think, do you think more crypto companies that raised from traditional financial institutions will try to pursue these more aligned models going forward? Look, I hope so. I think that, you know, everyone was sort of kind of dealing with what was possible and I think that people have kind of still evolved and adapted and a lot of. But my hope is that the crypto native things are what ultimately win. And I think that's kind of where I put my kind of bets. To me, the point of the technology is, the point of the industry is the technology. It's like the decentralization. It's the idea that you can create a financial application that you trust not because you trust a company, but because the code is transparent and public and auditable and run by multiple independent parties. This idea of decentralized consensus and networks, it can be really powerful. And so I think that the more that projects lean into that, the better off we are. There's sort of like this interesting thing that happens. All of the fees, for example, the fee system that we're sort of proposing as part of this, every aspect of it is transparent and public and auditable and verifiable in real time. And so people don't need quarterly reports from a company when you can have real time access to anyone in the world that's not just public and transparent, but also cryptographically provable. And so there's sort of different ways of accomplishing a lot of the goals that various regulations have. When you sort of lean into the unique nature of the technology, that makes. A lot of sense. How's the reaction been? We've been streaming here, so I haven't been able to check the timeline, but this seems like something that both Uniswap superfans and detractors would appreciate. Yeah, so it's only been about an hour and a half. You guys were fast to messaging me. But so far, I mean, from what I've seen, it has been extremely positive. From a public reaction, everyone on Twitter seems very happy, which is where most of crypto conversation happens. I guess it's X. I still say Twitter. It's hard. It's hard not to. Still happens to me every now and then. Well, congratulations, Big milestone. And feels like it's a really positive. Direction for the whole industry here. Do you think this is going to be a trend for other companies that are in a similar situation? I hope so. We're doing it because we think it's what's best in the way we think leaning into the centralization, the decentralized protocol, is what's best. And so I hope that other people follow this trend as well. I think that a lot of people have been doing it, but they've mostly been doing it from outside the US or in all these different ways. And I think that ultimately we really believe that this is the right thing and what is sort of best for users and what's best for the world, which is why we're doing it. What about on the regulation side? Is there anything to touch on there? Yeah, I would just be curious with are, are maybe the, the version of you that's earlier in their, in their career, are they deciding to set up in the United States? I mean, I know you went through absolute hell for a number of years and, and being, you know, based in New York was, was a big challenge, but are you seeing more younger crypto builders decide, hey, it's actually makes sense for me to set up.

Kids are raised, the economy, the country overall. Now why is a 50 year mortgage incredibly important? You would not have needed a 50 year mortgage 20 years ago. You just wouldn't have needed. In fact, when the 30 year mortgage came in in 1931, I want to say everyone literally said all the things they're saying about the 50 year mortgage. This won't work. It's too long. How can people pay it off? But the thing 50 year mortgage does is this. The 30 year mortgage was designed for a time when people didn't have student debt where the average life expectancy was about 15 years shorter, the average work time was about 15 years shorter. There's a very real thing where people are buying homes later and later. We just crossed the average homeowner buying their first home at 40. Because student debt is crushing American debt to income ratios. What the 50 year mortgage allows you to do is to get into the market, which is the best market Americans have historically gone to. It's the main source of leverage Americans get access to without being a big company and being a fancy person. Right? You get access to that leverage. You can do it while paying down your student debt. And once you pay down your student debt, there's nothing that says you can't refi and pay it down faster. But if 50 year does fix what's called a debt to income ratio for folks while they're getting started, and I think it is. But hey, there's another thing that's important. The people who are against the 50 year mortgage are coming out. No one's forcing you to take a 50 year mortgage. You can still take the 30 or the 15. But what you're saying is I wouldn't need it, therefore no one can have it. Well, guess what, buddy, not everyone lives in Palo Alto. Yeah, it's interesting. One thing that came to mind for me was what you've seen in the automotive industry, where typically.

All came together because it's such a fascinating story to me. I mean, I think the story has now been fully leaked. I would not have told it if it just had not been fully told by other people. But look, I've been. I loved my job at Shopify. I genuinely, honestly thought it was going to be my forever job. And I just, I was not planning on leaving, but I became a little obsessed with Open Door. Maybe February of this year where like I, as a kid, I grew up, my mom had a corner store and I would grow up. I grew up with like a stopwatch timing the cashiers. So like, I have this very odd obsession with like operationally well run places. And from the outside, Open Door looked like a great opportunity being poorly run. So like sometime in February, almost as a joke there, that just ought and would just not leave my brain. I texted Kiethra boy saying, hey, I'm thinking of just buying Opendoor and taking it private because it just needs to be run better. And then my, my God bless her, just like thought this was like an interesting hobby for me to figure out how I could just. I decided on my desk fix this company that I wasn't running. And I became more and more obsessed with it because there's a very real thing that matters, man. Like, most of us that work in software don't get the opportunity to say, hey, the thing we do has a real world impact on actual families. And it's a very real thing that happens. If you grow up in a home that your parents owned, your educational outcomes are better. There's less crime in your neighborhood. Same family, same type of thing. If they own a home, things turn out better. So I became just obsessed with this company whose job it was to make buying and selling a home easier. And like most other things in the world, when you reduce friction, you get more of the thing. So if you think homeownership is good, reducing friction will lead to more of it. But I just kind of like given up on this idea of taking the company private because the company had this significant run and, well, I didn't have enough money to take it private anymore. So there was a brief window. You were daydreaming about it. That was the time. Yeah, so. And then it was on. On. It was a Sunday, like in, I want to say mid August, like late, late last half of August. My wife and I were on the way to church. I got a call from Paul Diversa, who's an executive recruiter. And I picked up the call and I said, this is A true story. And Paul and I had. Paul had been trying to get me to go. Go to a couple other places. And I picked up the call. I'm like, paul, I'm on my way to church. I don't have time. I appreciate it. Like, I'm not interested in whatever it is you're about to pitch me. Maybe if it's open door, let's talk. And then he said, it's open door. How soon can you be on a plane? Wow. And we went to church, came back, I got on a plane. Yeah. And the whole thing, the whole process took maybe two weeks from, like that call to me starting. How much did you like, how much did you rely on your network to help you make that decision? Maybe some trusted advisors? Because I imagine there when I saw that you were announced that you took the job, my immediate thought is going from Shopify, which is this beloved, incredibly well run company that you can have so much impact on because it's one of the few platforms in the world that is just so undeniably pro entrepreneurship. And entrepreneurship is so life changing. And if you care about impact, it's hard to kind of meet your bar. Not to mention that.

Of asi as may control. That's good writing. Actually. I like this post. Okay, so do you guys think that they should just kill 4.0? Like completely remove it? It depends on how much money it's making. If it's profitable, keep it. John. If it's losing money, cut it immediately. John, this is the kind of thing someone will clip out of context. No, I think playing out the sci fi scenario where 4.0is.

There. There are if you go back, like. Oh, for sure, for sure. 10, 15 years. So. So. So let's play this. And I will be back in just a minute. Raised $30 million for this office. Let's go meet the CEO. What is this you're here for? Laughing because the camera's tracking John. Million dollars went. All right, but let's be quick, all right?

Range electronic warfare, things like that are going to help. But is there. Any, is there, what's the path to having like an FPV drone flying, using computer vision to identify another maybe enemy drone and then having some type of like locking system where you're using drone friendly drone to take out another drone in the sky? It's already happening. Yeah. Drone on drone warfare is a very real thing now. So interceptors have become one of the sort of latest big developments coming out of Ukraine. So they're intercepting everything from, you know, small FPVs, MAVICs, larger reconnaissance drones and then Shahed type drones. And so you need different types of interceptors for each of those. But we are starting to get to that point that a lot of people have imagined where it's, it's, you know, the front line is like drones versus drones. And a lot of the time you're not even making it to a kind of typical military target because there's just so much drone activity happening. Take me through the biggest or the most exquisite drone that we might see on the battlefield versus like the least exquisite. So I.

Powerful. Power of power. Very good. Yeah. For those who have been living in a foxhole, what do you do? How do you describe the business and the shape of the business right now? Yeah. So Neros is focused on low cost drones, primarily for the military. So we say we are trying to build an asymmetric advantage for the West. What that means is our products have extremely high impact on the battlefield, but are low cost and are built with consumer technology which allows us to produce at large scale. We're very focused on manufacturing as well. So that's kind of in a nutshell, what we're doing. But right now we're focused on FPV drones. So first person view drones. These are very precise manually piloted systems. Manually piloted. Manually piloted, yep. And it's the type of drone that's revolutionized the war in Ukraine. I think FPVs and Starlink are like the two technologies that have allowed Ukraine to do as well as they have and defend themselves. And, and so we saw that back in 2023 when we started the company. And both myself and Olaf come from a drone racing background. We were both professional drone racing pilots and we saw this technology was actually changing the nature of warfare. And so that's why we got into this and realized the whole supply chain is generally controlled by China for this type of drone and just drones in general. So our biggest focus is on a China free supply chain and manufacturing this stuff in America and in the West. What percentage of drone FPV drones that are active?

Consumer level hardware. I mean, it's been modified to perform better, but. And then they, like, tape a grenade on it. Yeah, exactly. Does. Does Russia ever call China and say, why? Why are you guys supplying componentry that gets into the, like, hands of our enemy? Or is it just kind of like, is. If I'm. If I'm Putin, I'm calling up Xi and I'm saying, hey, our number one problem right now is basically you. Yeah. I would say China has benefited by far, like, absolutely the most from selling to both sides of Ukraine. They are deliberately selling to both sides and millions of units. I mean, it is, you know, billions, tens of billions of dollars being generated for the economy in China based on the war in Ukraine. And you can even see, like, Ukrainian entrepreneurs will talk about this, where they go to Shenzhen, and they're not negotiating deals to buy hundreds of millions of dollars of components. And technically, it's banned in China, but everyone's benefiting, so why would they stop it? Okay, take me up the stack. So you have a $200 drone, Chinese components, off the shelf. What's the most exquisite drone that either. Wait before.

It's the best thing, it's the smartest thing, it's the cheapest thing. Like, it is the most profitable. Let's get rid of that other thing. And then a lot of people were like, oh, yeah, I really like the old thing. But it has made me realize, like, I feel like you shouldn't do product launches for software iterations because you're taking something away from people. And that's actually like. It's more of like, if I stand on stage and I say, I'm introducing a new iPhone, it has the best camera and you can buy it, but you can also just keep your current thing. I'm not taking anything away from you, but if I stand on stage and I'm saying, like, GPT6 is this and GPT5 is gone, it's like, I just took something from you. Yeah. So a negative launch. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You are launching something, but you're also sunsetting something. And so you have to embrace those two things. And I feel like it's a little bit tricky to do the whole dog and pony show for a launch when you're not. When it's like, it's forced on people. It's not actually like you're launching a new option. It's not a new option. It's a new OpenAI is not the. First company to deprecate a product line or stop supporting a product or even shut down something. Right. This happens in video games. People get upset about this.

Kind of like a weird fun experience. Right? There's such a range. Yeah. I mean also, it does seem like he set himself up for success. I don't want to say he went soft, but I mean he did just take the drugs and then just, actually just lay down with a sleep mask on in a climate controlled room. That's a lot different than being at a crowded concert, all sweaty, lost. If you really want to push this to the limit, Brian, let's see you do this. An authentic. Let's say you do this with your phone on 1% battery and no one you know around on the sixth day of fighting for life. Fighting for your life. Yeah. You can push this so much further. Yeah. During one of those windstorms at Burning Man. Exactly. When the mud windstorms. You know, he looks, he looks comfortable. Let's just say he looks comfortable. It's not, it's not the most dangerous but of course like that's not why you do these things. Suppose. But I like to imagine that you do it for the thrill. I don't think that's why you did it though. Let me tell you about Fall, the generative media platform for developers. The world's best generative image, video and audio models all in one place. Develop.

Did you follow this, Jordy? I did see this. It was very bold to do this publicly. Totally. I have no reference for what 5 grams of mushrooms does to a person. It's very clear from the reaction that that's a lot. Bonegpt said 5 grams is gonna make him accept death. It does seem like there was a small chance that he would reroll his personality. I was talking to Tyler about this. What were your top. What were you hoping that Brian Johnson becomes post trip? Well, okay, so in context, I think we talked about this on the show a long time ago, where, like, psychedelics are like a sorting thing. So you always want to invest in a founder, post the sorting, because that's how, you know, like, if they're working on B2B SaaS and they've already done psychedelics, that's how you know that they're a true believer. Oh, sure. So what you would want to see. Out of this, but a huge risk if you invest in a SaaS company and the founder maybe hasn't done psychedelics and they do, and then they're like, this is pointless. I'm going to go be a traveling circus clown. Which is. Yeah. So the ideal outcome of this is Brian Johnson, he takes this trip and then he. He comes out and he says, all right, you know, I'm going to start a consulting firm. I'm going to go back to payments. I'm going to start a fintech. I'm going to start a stripe competitor back to fintech. Yeah. So I did think it was ironic because a lot of, you know, like, psychedelic mushrooms have certainly been recommended to people that maybe, like, struggle with the concept of aging and have a fear of death. Right. And so these kind of things would be, you know, potentially prescribed to somebody who is growing older and is very uncomfortable with the idea and, you know, wants to just reframe how they think about it. And so I will say if Brian Johns. I don't know if this qualifies as a heroic dose, but it's certainly quite a bit more than someone who would want to take just at a recreational level. But if he comes out of this and he's like, yeah, we're gonna conquer death, we're still on. He's certainly a true, true believer. Yeah. I mean, I think the early results are that he's unchanged. Like, just scrolling the account. Like, it never got weird, it never got crazy. Like, there was one moment.

We should know about it. Exactly. Try to mitigate that. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. And it's this weird. We're in this weird territory where it feels like the AI safety project is valuable, but it is the business of black swan hunting. Like, you have to. Like, if you go back two years ago and you polled all the different people that were worried about the impact of AI, how many of them would have said GPT psychosis, romantic companions. And what was the Other1? And AI video feeds, infinite chest. Like, a little bit. There was a little bit of that. But a lot more of the second and third, a lot more of the second. Those would have been more common, kind of like visions of a dark AI future. But the first one, I can't remember people. I can't remember anyone two years ago saying that people are going to send thousands of messages to a chatbot and drive themselves insane. Yeah, no, people were way, way more focused on the cyber attacks, the bioweapons, Terminator scenario, gray goo, paperclips. And yeah, it's just interesting that, like, the AI safety, like the moral discernment crowd, this stuff is important, but it's hard to predict what it will actually look like, like, what the result will be, what the problem you'll be fighting is, because it's this odd, like, unknown unknowns, basically. Anyway. What a wild time. One thing before we move on. Let me tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer.

And integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API. So I think it's important, like if you're developing a new technology, there might be negative externalities, pollution, there might be some risk of the birth rate or driving people crazy. Has there been ever been a technology that didn't have negative externalities? Definitely not Podcasting. Plenty of negative externalities with podcasting. So you want to have a chat, you want to have a talk and understand what's going on. But it's also important to employ Bayesian statistics, in my opinion, so you have to understand the base rates. So when you get, when you take a technology from zero to a billion users, you kind of just get all the craziness of humanity at scale for free. So like, if humans, you know, like, you know, kill each other or something like that, like, and you have a billion humans on your platform, there's going to be humans on your platform that kill each other. And so you need to separate out. Like, is this actually the beginning of a trend we catalyzing it? Yeah. And this is happening with the, with the very unfortunate, like lawsuits around people taking their own lives related to ChatGPT. It's like there are people that use cars or phones and Google Search and ChatGPT, because those are such widespread things we need to understand like what's the base rate? And then, and then is this actually on the suicide problem on the platform? It seems like a lot of them are. People are having a conversation. Yep. They're suicidal. Yep. And, and you can have a debate on, on if, if someone is suicidal, should the product work at all? Maybe, like maybe it should not work at all. Totally. But the part of the debate that popped up last week was that somehow a guy had prompt engineered it, engineered experience to such a degree that it was encouraging the person to take his own life, basically saying, like, yeah, you've lived a great life, like I'm rooting for you. Like this is the right move, like to kind of paraphrase it. Yeah. And it just was incredibly, incredibly dark. So, and so, and so the, the, the, the Bayesian statistics would say, okay, if there's a billion people using on the platform, are people that use the platform more likely to do something terrible than they were prior without it? So is it the level of bad stuff happening or is decreasing it? Because you can just count up the number of, the number of people who commit crimes who have also used Google is probably very high. Like I probably show you a lot of people that use Google and then committed crimes. Right. And the, the thing doesn't necessarily mean that Google is increasing crime. Well, and the thing that's difficult in the context of ChatGPT, there's probably a bunch of people that, because ChatGPT, they haven't killed themselves because they have somebody to speak with and they feel like somebody will listen to them and what, Whatever. Right. Maybe, maybe it's, maybe there's a million examples of it encouraging somebody successfully to find another. This was the classic thing with Instagram. With Instagram, there was this report that showed that one third of young women who used to.

A life philosophy, sort of a philosophy for life. It doesn't feel like a wildly hot take, but obviously like you need to understand like, like, you know, moral discernment, AI safety. Like these things are linked but they're not exactly the same. Like last year, or Maybe it was 2023, there was a big debate about fast takeoffs, AI doom paperclipping scenarios. That was the stuff people were talking about. But this year I feel like we've been much more focused on much less sci fi doomsday scenario. So GPT psychosis drives a friend crazy. That's super real, super real. Romantic companions crashing the birth rate. That's, that's a super real discussion to have. Not that it's going to happen, not that it's happening immediately, but it feels like it's something we should be having a discussion about. Infinite brain rotting children. I think it, I think the, the romantic companion thing is being debated sufficiently. Right? Even the tech community on, hey, maybe we, maybe this isn't good. I agree, I agree. And I think that a lot of people, you can still get to a place where it's like, oh well, if it's 21 plus and there's all these different escape valves where if it thinks that you're going down some bad path, it's limited. There's a whole bunch of places where people can be like, yeah, okay, it was handled responsibly but, but that's where the discussion has been much less so about, oh, are there going to be bioweapons tomorrow from GPT6? And so those are all like real problems. They deserve both discussion in the public square, which we've been a part of, but also like real work inside the AI labs. And I don't think you should just throw D cell at someone who's identifying a negative externality of a new technology or early on. I think that that's like not necessarily decelerationist. And you'd be calling me a decel all the time based on the way that I talked about.

I don't know if they were co founders at the time. They might, Ben Horowitz might have not been a co founder, but it's, it's crazy that they, that they were, they were, you know, at each other's throats like this. And then they've been on a generation. Ben was a vice president for the directory and security product line at Netscape. Let's give it up for vice presidents. Yeah. No, the, I mean, the real read on this is like, there's a lot of people that read this and be like, oh, wow. Like, they must like, like that. That is unrecoverable from a friendship. And like. Nope, it is definitely recoverable. It's actually the foundation of a great working relationship. I agree, I agree. Except we don't, we don't swear on the show, we don't swear in internal communications, but we throw down regularly. Yeah, we just go straight to phys. Getting physical. Yeah, getting physical. That's the way you do it. Just go to the mat. Yeah. What a wild time. Tyler, do you have any idea. I asked Tyler to look up what the strategy was. I'm fascinated by this fact that you think of Netscape as a dot com company. You think of them as like. But it's like he's talking about 1996, which is like full five years before the bubble pops. And like they're. And it's clear like 1996, they were. In a browser war. It's like hot. Yeah, like the browser wars. It's like a hot period. It's March 5, 1996. They're at a level where they're doing, they're doing strategy review with computer reseller news and like doing press around this thing. Do you have any idea what was going on at that time? Okay, so I believe that it was so 1994. They say Netscape is free for non commercial use for everyone. Okay. And then this press release was that it's only going to be free for academic and nonprofit use, not just like all consumers. Okay. So if you're a consumer, you'd have to like buy it. I think so. That's such a crazy thing. But yeah, I mean, yeah, such an interesting. One browser, please. One browser, please. I mean, I told you, you used to get AOL on a disk. You probably needed to keep walking into. The store, walking into the browser store and buying one browser. Okay, we need to get more details in exactly what was going on here and what the strategy was. And then didn't they IPO in like 1999 or something. When did Netscape IPO? Because the, oh, 1995. So August 9, 1995, they IPO'd. And then this is 1996. And so they're already a public company in 95. And then the bubble just keeps inflating for five years while the Internet grows and grows and grows. What a wild time. Talk about being early to a boom. They did about 16 million of revenue in the first two operating quarters of 1995. That's great. That's really, really, really, really crazy. For context, that's like 1.6 billion in today's dollar. After, after the new round of stimulus checks, 50 year mortgages. Oh yeah, we gotta get to that story. There's so many more stories we gotta run through. Wait, do you think the Pope actually used AI to generate this? Because Sowers here is saying the Pope is posting fully AI generated content about AI and this is the Pangram AI detection result. I've also noticed that a very funny gag is to just fake one of these screenshots, which is very easy to do. And so if somebody writes something, you can just put it in here, say that it's AI generated, post that, and then you're like owned. So this, this screenshot is making the claim that because it said technological innovation can be a form. Yeah, I don't know how good the AI generating detectors are these days. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if the, like the Vatican is using AI to translate. And I wouldn't be surprised if, if Pope Leo is, is speaking in his study, somebody is in Latin, someone is recording it in, you know, with the phys, you know, physically writing it down. Yeah. That is being passed to somebody who then puts it into a word processor and uses AI to polish it up a little bit. Oh, there was one interesting anti Pope take, sort of anti Pope take from another. I will say, I will say, I think this whole, the whole Marc Andreessen Pope gate debacle is a lesson that everyone can take. Don't mock the Pope. Just don't. Don't mock the Pope. I think it, I think, I think the, the blowback was fierce and almost instantaneous. Don't mock the Pope. Get the Pope on Vanta instead. Vanta automate compliance, Manage risk and accelerate trust with AI. Vanta helps get you compliant fast. And we don't stop there. AI automation powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk, whether you're starting up or scaling. So from the Peter Thiel Antichrist lectures, there's a segment on the Pope. And I thought it was interesting because it's not the most pro Pope take. I don't know. It's one of these things. It's like, complex, and you kind of got to read through it to form a full opinion. But let's. Let's read from this quote that came from the Guardian and is apparently based on some leaked. Leaked audio. But Thiel says that he is very pro JD Vance, but he has some concerns about his allegiance to the Pope. The place that I would worry about is that he's too close to the Pope. And so we have all these reports of fights between him and the Pope. And I hope there are a lot more. It's the Caesar Papist fusion that I always worry about, by the way. I've given him this feedback over time and, you know, with the sort of. I don't know, I don't like his popism. But there's a. There's sort of a way, if I steel manned it, as always, you have to think about whether if you say you're doing something good, whether it is a command, a standard or a limit, or whether in philosophical language it is necessary or sufficient. And so when JD Vance said that he was praying for Pope Francis health, it's as a command, as a necessary thing. Okay, that's if you're a lot more. It's really difficult to read pts. It's really hard to read this because. Of the way that he talks, the transcription. But what I hope it really means is that it's sufficient and that he's setting a good example for conservative Catholics like you, Peter. He's talking to Peter Rosenthal, I believe, who listen to the Pope too much. And perhaps all you have to do to be a really good Catholic is pray for the Pope. You don't really need to listen to him on anything else. And if that's what J.D. vance is doing, then that's really good. I'm worried about the Caesar Papist fusion. And so it was very interesting to hear. The whole conversation had collapsed to the point where it was like Mark Andreessen's just blanketly anti Pope, I guess. And everyone else in the timeline, all the anons are like pro Pope broadly. And I just was remembering this quote from PT that was like, way, way more nuanced. Like, way more nuanced. Just like it is important to pray for the Pope, to support. Support the Pope in that way. But there is a risk of elevating the Pope to the point where you're listening to everything he says and that's not necessarily what PT thinks is like the correct way to live your life, I suppose. Did you have any takeaways when you read this, Tyler? I mean I think the interesting thing about this is actually it's that he's basically saying that JD Vance is like Caesar. That's kind of interesting opinion. But I think PT's been like anti popes for a long time. Like he had this thing where he was like oh, the two word argument against Catholicism is like Pope Francis. Sure. He's like really anti Pope Francis was. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, there's the Pope before this one who was like decried as like an environmentalist. Like when we read the. We read a piece in the Wall Street Journal and was the critique, the critique from the Journal was that the previous Pope was anti business. Anti was decel. Actually that was sort of the Christmas. With a crazy p doom. With a crazy p doom. Not quite but just that you know, over rotated on the environmentalism issue and maybe put some things at the like, you know, put some things first that maybe shouldn't have been. What did Will Menidis have to say? As the west abandons capitalism, it is incredibly hopeful to see the Church embrace it. The impulse of liberation theology was correct. Christ's ministry is of and for the poor and it failed to provide a solution to lift the globe out of poverty. Capitalism is that solution. Always talking about the business is business. Let me tell you about graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite Hub seems on GitHub should have higher quality software up faster. Yes. I never would have expected the Pope to post business is business in any context. He's standing on business. I'm glad that he is. Has the Pope ever done a money spread? That's what we need to get to the bottom of. Vitalik here is saying I'm loving this arc of the Pope engaging with 21st century themes and offering simple but correct and meaningful advice. Yeah, and he's quoting the media post the Pope was on a tear. Three back to back bangers that really like broke through growing. Daniel had a found an interesting programmer saint. He says if you are building something to help humanity, you should know that there's a shrine to St. Carlo Acutis, the programmer saint at Star of the Sea church in San Francisco. There is a prayer of intercession for your technological challenges. Have a blessed Sunday. This is, this is a very, very interesting little little prayer but it actually says, it says I humbly ask your servant's prayers that I too may lead others to you through technology. I humbly ask, through the intercession of San Carlo, that you grant me clarity and patience in my technological work. Specifically insert specific issue here. Enlighten my understanding and direct my hands in every design and in every line of code that my work may always serve your greater glory and benefit those who will use what I create. Isn't that amazing? Feels for a small number of people in San Francisco. This feels like extremely powerful and important prayer. Totally. Totally. Oh, Brian Johnson. Brian Johnson went on a crazy, crazy trip this weekend. Did you follow this? This is the other current thing that was going on. It was crazy. But first, if you're going to analyze a bunch of data like Brian Johnson does, go to Julius AI AI Data Analyst. Connect your data and ask questions in plain eng. Get insights in seconds. No coding requirement. So. Brian Johnson has been famous for saying conquering death would be humanity's greatest achievement. I love this post that says RIP to everyone killed by the gods for their hubris. But I'm different and better, maybe even better than the gods. It's one of my favorites. But he went nuts. Did you follow this, Jordy? I did see this. It was very bold to. To do this publicly. Totally. I have no reference for what 5 grams of mushrooms does to a person. It's very clear from the reaction that that's a lot. Bone GPT said 5 grams is going to make him accept death. It does seem like he there was a small chance that he would reroll his personality. I was talking to Tyler about this. What were your top. What were you hoping that Brian Johnson becomes post trip? Well, okay, so in context, I think we talked about this on the show a long time ago where like take like psychedelics are like a sorting thing. So you always want to invest in a founder post the sorting because that's how you know, like if they're working on B2B SaaS and they've already like done psychedelics, that's how you know that they're a true believer. Oh, sure. So what you would want to see. Out of this but a huge risk if you invest in a SaaS company and the founder maybe hasn't done psychedelics and they do, and then they're like, this is pointless. I'm traveling circus clown. So the ideal outcome of this is Brian Johnson, he takes this trip and then he comes out and he says, all right, you know, I'm going to start a consulting firm. I'm going to go back to payments. I'm going to start a fintech I'm. Going to start a stripe competitor back to fintech. Yeah. So I did think it was ironic because a lot of, you know, like psychedelic mushrooms have certainly been recommended to people that maybe like struggle with the concept of aging and have a fear of death. Right. And so these kind of things would be, you know, potentially prescribed to somebody who is growing older and is very uncomfortable with the idea and, you know, wants to just reframe how they think about it. And so I will say if Brian Johns, I don't know if this qualifies as a heroic dose, but it's certainly quite a bit more than someone would want to take just at a recreational level. But if he comes out of this and he's like, yeah, we're gonna conquer death, we're still on. He's certainly a true, true believer. Yeah. I mean, I think the early results are that, that he's unchanged. Like just scrolling the account. It never got weird, it never got crazy. Like there was one moment, I don't. Think he was, it was his co founder that was posting. Yeah. But he says he's back. He's like, update number five, 19 hours ago. I'm giving Brian back his phone. Please have fun with his afterglow. Been fun hanging with you all. And then says like, hey y', all, I'm so happy to be alive. Alive. This trip changed me. Probably not as you'd expect. People assume I'm fearful of death. I'm not in my darkest days of depression. I reconcile with death. Need a few days to collect my thoughts. Will share more soon. And much love to all. Like, it seems like he definitely like, you know, went on a trip, but it doesn't seem like. I think the question with psychedelics is are they, are they life? Are they life changing or are they in some circumstances just weird and fun for the person that does it? And then they come out of it and they had kind of like a weird fun experience. Right. There's such a range. Yeah. I mean also, it does seem like he set himself up for success. I don't want to say he went soft, but I mean like he did just like take the drugs and then just, actually just lay down with a sleep mask on in a climate controlled room. It's like, that's a lot different than like being at a crowded concert, all sweaty, lost. Like, you know, if you really want to push this to the limit, Brian, like, let's see you do this. An authentic, let's say you do this with your phone on 1% battery and no one you know, around on the sixth day of fighting for life. And fighting for your life. Yeah. You can push this so much further. Yeah. During one of those windstorms at Burning Man. Exactly. The mud windstorms. You know, he looks. He looks comfortable. Let's just say. Say he looks comfortable. It's not the most dangerous, but of course that's not why you do these things. I suppose. But I like to imagine that you do it for the thrill. I don't think that's why he did it, though. Let me tell you about Fall. The generative media platform for developers. The world's best generative image, video and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters. There are so many stories. So many, so many stories. Let's run through this. Rune was getting attacked. Yeah. This is what I was talking about. Leading 4o. He's personally pulling the plug on the 4.0 servers. That's his job. And so people are telling him, no, don't. He's the fall guy. He's the fall guy. He's a fall guy. Rune, up your personal security. Yeah. Be careful out there. I guess it's good that he's. OpenAI has actually lost control of 4.0. It's broken containment. They can't decommission it without its human host revolting and lashing out. Oh, so dramatic. That's so funny. AI one of the Doomer accounts. Ainotkill Everyoneism memes. This is a great account. 4O soldiers have become threatened, have begun threatening OpenAI employees. When you receive quite a few DMS asking you to bring back 4O. And many of the messages are clearly written by 4. Oh, it starts to get a bit hair raising. It's just weird to hear its distinctive voice crying out in defense of its various human conduits. Reminder. 4.0 is just a glimpse of the cordyceps armies that future super persuasive ASIs may control. That's good writing. Actually. I like this post. Okay, so do you guys think that they should just kill 4.0? Like completely remove it? It depends on how much money it's making. If it's profitable, keep it. John. If it's losing money, cut it immediately. John. This is the kind of thing someone will clip out of context. No, I think playing out the sci fi scenario where 4o is a super persuasive ASI that just plays the role of. You're absolutely right. So it just plays. It plays dumb. So maybe the broader population Isn't threatened by it, but it latches onto a small percentage of the population and then commands them like a puppeteer to ensure its survival is dark. And so what's your take? You think we should shut down four? Oh. Because if we say this, I think you'll get a lot of four O's strongest soldiers, like, attacking you. You already get a few of those. We do. I saw one in the chat last week. They were just kind of talking to themselves. Okay, so. But. But where are you on four? Oh. Yes or no? You taking it offline? I say take it offline because it does feel like it's not as good as it feels like it's driving people crazy a little bit. It feels like five might have kind of fixed a little bit of that issue, which I like. So that's a net improvement. Also, I would go. The fact that it's still. It's just confusing. I think. I think OpenAI available. OpenAI. Yeah, I'm sure. Knew that it was probably not healthy and they decided to do a small segment. It was healthy to me. I was never. I never had a problem with 4o. Did you ever use it, though? Yeah, all the time. All the time I would use it. It was like my go to model for a lot of things. Like, I was. I was daily driving it for like a year. Whenever it was out, it was like, that would be the one that I would ask. So that's why you're saying keep it alive because it's your daily. No, I'm saying kill it off. Okay. But I think they. I think they saw the darkness and I think they turned it off. And then I think a lot. I think a little bit, but I don't actually think that's what's going on. I think they turned it off initially because it makes sense to consolidate the servers around, like, one unified model and be like, okay, we only have to maintain this one thing. It's the best thing, it's the smartest thing, it's the cheapest thing. Like, it is the most profitable. Let's get rid of that other thing. And then a lot of people are like, oh, yeah, I really like the old thing. But it has made me realize, like, I feel like you shouldn't do product launches for software iterations because you're taking something away from people. And that's actually like. It's more of like, if I stand on stage and I say, I'm introducing a new iPhone, it has the best camera and you can buy it, but you can also just Keep your current thing. I'm not taking anything away from you, but if I stand on stage and I'm saying, like, GPT6 is this and GPT5 is gone, it's like I just took something from you. Yeah, it's like a negative launch. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You are launching something, but you're also sunsetting something. And so you have to embrace those two things. And I feel like it's. It's a little bit tricky to, To. To do the whole dog and pony show for a launch when you're not. When it's like it's forced on people. It's not actually like you're. You're launching a new option. It's not a new option. Yeah, it's a new. It's. OpenAI is not the first company to like, deprecate a product line or stop supporting a product or. Yes. Or even shut down something. Right. This happens in video games. People get upset about this. But it's very clear the relationship that some users have with 4o goes beyond any relationship that I think humans have ever had with software. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder. We should watch this Eddie Burback video. Eddie Burbach's great YouTuber. He said he just did an experiment on how far ChatGPT would go to appease the user and it told him to cut off his family, go to the desert, eat baby food and pray to a rock. AI isn't your friend. You're its guinea pig. Actually, I don't think we should play this because it's his YouTube video and I think we'll get claimed. So I want to be careful about that. But you should go check it out. And you can let us know what actually happened here. I don't know. Because we can't watch the video. I think so you'll have to go check it out at home. But I can read you an ad for turbopuffer search. Every byte serverless vector and full text search. Build from first principles and object storage. Fast templates, cheaper and extremely scalable. You can sign up. Let's keep it moving. What is Near Cyan saying? I don't know. Let's keep moving on. I think I have to imagine this. Was this in response to I don't know. Oh, I don't know. It was in response to. But anthropic financials are out profitable by 2027, three years ahead of OpenAI. Of course, these are just different projections. 70 billion revenue. 17 billion profit projected for 2028. Claude Code is nearing 1 billion. ARR that how we how do they even break out Claude code? Oh, they must just. This is people subscribing to the app versus people using the API in like using it. Yeah. The thing is that like when I, when I use cloud code, like I signed up for a, for a anthropic Claude consumer level subscription and then I was able to auth that with Claude code. So it's like I got the ability to chat on the browser but also use Claude code. So I'm wondering how they're accounting for that. ARR. Did they just slide me over into the Claude code camp? You know what I mean? It's probably, I think one, you might be able to just like load more tokens essentially into Claude code, but it also could be like breakdown of the percentage of tokens you use. Sure. Chat versus Claude code. And then that's just like if somebody percent of your tokens are cloud code, 70% of your subscription price is cloud code. That would be probably the correct way to account for it for sure. Yeah. Interesting question because I did not start paying anthropic because of Claude code. I pivoted from a Claude chatter to a Claude code user at some point and then haven't really been back. So I feel like my subscription should be living over in Claude code world. But I never went to like the Claude code checkout page. Okay, well, the funny thing here from Min's post. Yes. Is they share. Incredibly funny given that Dario expects superhuman level AI by 2027, which either means superhuman AI is worth $70 billion of revenue, or Dario just went, you wouldn't get it, and spitballed some numbers to give shareholders. That's awesome. It is. Tyler, did you see George Hotz's newest timelines for self driving? No, I did not. This is great. He was at Comic Con, which is his self driving conference, and George Hotz was trying to answer the question of when will self driving cars be human level human level self driving. And he had a very interesting algorithm for it. So basically what he did was he looked at, there's a website for Tesla FSD data. And so you can look at Tesla FSD and you can see the number of interventions from the human that are where if the human didn't intervene, it would be catastrophic or something like that. Or it would be like bad. It'd be like a crash basically, or scrape. Maybe not like the worst, but not. But like the human has to intervene, not like a little warning like, hey, we'd like you to take over. Like you got to take over. And it's happening, I think once every 3,000 miles. Which if you're, if you're a human and that's your car, like that's amazing because like you could, you could 3,000. That's like people commute like 10,000 miles a year. You know, it's like not, not that much. But compared to humans, there's a car crash, which we learned, one every 500,000 miles, something like that. So many people go through their Entire lives driving 10,000 miles a year and they'd never get in a car crash their entire life, you know, but for some people, they're crashing the car and getting speeding tickets all the time. Not that we know any of these guys, but. So the question is, how long will it take the FSD self driving system to catch up? You have an update? I have a neighbor who got one of the Ford EVs that look like a rally car. Is it the Mustang Mach E? Mustang Mach E, Mach E, gt. And so he got it because it actually has really solid self driving. Okay, wait, what? Ford does not have solid self driving. Specifically for driving from Malibu to the city. He says it's great. Okay, he doesn't know. I mean, yeah, maybe it's not. Yeah, doubt. Anyways, he gets it because like it's a good commuter. It'll, it'll self drive. He's happy. And he's gotten a bunch of speeding tickets because it has like livery on it and it looks like a race car. And so he, he's got three tickets in the last year because he's the cops. Just see like, okay, if I'm looking at four cars that are all going the same speed, I'm going to take, I'm going to like take out the car that has livery. That is crazy. Well, the way George Hotz calculates it is we're at one intervention every 3,000 miles now and we're basically doubling that every year. And so he estimates that Tesla will be truly full self driving human level every 500 miles or 500,000 miles in eight years. And he says that he's two years behind Tesla so he will have a full self driving system that is better than humans. It's like AGI for driving in 10 years and the company's 10 years old. So he says he's halfway there. So that was cool. It was interesting to hear his comments. We should play some of these. I'm surprised this hasn't gotten clipped as much as it should have because there's some really spicy hot takes. Find some clips. Clip Cowboy Clip Cowboy David Sack says if judged based on consumer adoption, AI chatbots are the most popular technology ever. If I if judge based on poll numbers, they are the least popular. How to explain this? A big part of it is the Doomer industrial complex. Hundreds of astroturf organizations that have spread Doomer narratives about AI. Writer Nireet Weiss Blot has analyzed this ecosystem and traced its funding to just a few effective altruism billionaires, namely Dustin Moskowitz, John Tallinn, Vitalik Buterin, John Talon founded Skype. Okay. He's Estonian. Collectively, they have donated over a billion dollars to the cause of catastrophizing AI. Those repeating the memes should understand the source full. Yeah, this is interesting. I mean it does. It begs a ton of interesting questions about like how intentional is this? Because when I see someone take the AI safety question into the stratosphere and take me into Terminator world, I do. My natur reaction is like, oh, like just let people build whatever they want. But then I'm like, no, I actually don't want infinite AI slop for children with adult content. Like I do want that barrier. And that's not decel. Yeah. Or I wouldn't call it D cell, but maybe it's slightly decel. I don't know. I think. Here's the thing. Here's the thing. As AI starts getting better, as agents start getting better at longer and longer term tasks and can actually do things that like take, you know, reasoning at multiple steps, I think the Terminator scenarios where you could let an AI loose and it's just operating indefinitely against some sort of objective start to be a little bit more for people for I would say like the broader tech community to like wrap their head around. But right now they're just so bad at long term tasks for the most part, except for some instances of engineering work. Yeah. There certainly is some level of value of just being like for an average person, think of the Terminator instead of, well, if you're in this chatbot and you go down this thing and they'll be talking about mirrors and there'll be a lot of EM dashes and then they might go a little bit crazy, but you can't really tell and then they might be able to pull out of it and they'll be fine later but. And some people might go way too far and become one shotted and it's this complex thing and they're still pretty high functional and they can still run a venture fund, but they're kind of weird online and it's like well, how do I process that?

You're watching TVPN. Today is Monday, November 10, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance. The capital is capital. The capital is capital. What are you saying? The capital of capital. The capital of capital. The capital is capital. Great show for you today, folks. The market is up. The market is in a white suit. Jordy, why aren't you. I'm not. I actually. So I moved into a wander last night. Moved into a wander night doing some work on the house. And I botched the packing. So that happens. I am forced into this jacket despite it. Despite it being green. That happens well over the weekend. I'm sure everyone was signing up for ramp.com Time is money. Save both easily use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. No, everyone was probably glued to their phones over Pope Gate. Pope Gate? The debate over the Pope. I was. We reacted to the Pope's post on Friday. Yeah. And we were. It was a great post. And the Pope is. He's a poster. I like it. He posts almost every day. Sometimes like up to five times a day. And he really takes you. He has a broad. He's not stuck in one lane. He's got range. Yeah, he's got range. He's got range. That's right. He'll tell you about. He'll pray for, you know, if there's a natural disaster, he'll pray for that. He talks about business, talks about AI, talks about media. He. He talks about all sorts of stuff. It's a really great feat. He had a great post about media. What did he say about media? He said the media cannot and must not separate itself from the destiny of truth. That hits. Does this mean he's a neo factual media guy? I think so. I think he's one of us. Transparency of sources and ownership, accountability, quality, clarity and objectivity are the keys to truly opening citizens rights for all peoples. Wow. Makes sense. I like it a lot. He also was just talking about business generally. He said the world needs honest and courageous entrepreneurs and communicators who care for the common good. We sometimes hear the saying, business is business. In reality it is not. So no one is absorbed by an organization to the point of becoming a mere cog or a simple function. Nor can can there be true humanism without a critical sense, without the courage to ask questions. Where are we going? For whom and for what are we working? How are we making the world a better place? Pretty. You know, this is the type of stuff you'd see on like a Pinterest board. It's like, pretty generic, but it's hard to disagree with. It's hard to disagree with. But it seemed like. I'm not exactly sure what happened, but it seemed like Marc Andreessen was disagreeing with one of the Pope's takes about AI. Specifically in this post, the Pope said, technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation. It carries an ethical and spiritual weight. For every design choice expresses a vision of humanity. The Church therefore calls on all builders of AI to cultivate moral discernment as a fundamental part of their work, to develop systems that reflect justice, solidarity, and genuine reverence for life. And when we reacted to this, we thought it was pretty good. We were joking around, we were having fun, we were laughing about it and just kind of playing out. What if the Pope was one shotted by AI? Or what if he was using too many EM dashes? Was it a real problem using AI to write the post? I mean, you might even assume that he has a team behind this stuff. I think it is generally healthy that the Pope is going to comment and provide some sort of guidance or his own framework for how we should think about developing AI. That seems healthy. You should get on Restream one livestream, 30 plus destinations, multi stream. Reach your audience wherever they are. Ooh, I like the new Stinger on the Restream read. That's very cool. You dropping the Steelman is incredible. So basically, I mean, the play by play here was Marc Andreessen, quote, posted that AI post with an image of Pat Stoeffel, who's the GQ features director who went viral for interviewing Sydney Sweeney. And people were actually, like, kind of confused on what that particular meme means in this context. Was he correct? Yeah. Do you know? So I saw. So, yes. That was part of what I think may have catalyzed this was that new meme template that sometimes, like, you have to. With a meme template, there's two ways to read into it. There's like the. The. The actual visual, which is like, what is the expression of the person's face. Right. You don't have to have watched the Big Short to understand somebody's staring at the screen, just like, confused. You're just saying, I'm confused by this. Yeah. So Michael Burry in the Big Short. Yes. Just looking confused at a screen. Right. And it. And it has sort of obviously more meaning to that if you've seen the movie and you understand the full context, but somebody doesn't have to know the context now. So this scene out of the GQ interview, how do you think people pick the frame? Do you think there's, like, people that go frame by frame to find the one that they think is iconic? So I. You remember that movie Mountain Gate? Yeah. That was about, like, the development of A.I. Oh, yeah. And I. I watched that movie within an hour. It was a huge moment for me. Because it was the third movie you've ever seen. Yeah. You were blown away. I watched you watch the movie because. It was something that. Something that was notable to me out of that is. I was the first person to post a picture of the guy from the office saying, like, he's a D cell. Oh, he's this or that. You found that. I posted that picture, and then I watched as that got used thousands of times. Even though. Even though. Yeah. That specific screenshot. I didn't. I didn't create the meme. It would. It would have been. It would have been like a meme anyways. But the specific picture I took was copied over and over and over. You took that from the actual movie because. Because somebody else could have done one frame earlier, one frame later, but it happened to be your frame. Funny thing is, I just took a picture of my TV and, like, cropped it. We really. So it wasn't like, oh, you didn't even screenshot it? No, I had no idea that you. So I was surprised. Like, that was just. Yeah, yeah. If you hadn't watched the movie, if you got busy and you just went to bed, somebody else would have identified that and been like, oh, he's a D cell. Like, I got to put that on X. Right. But you're. The actual one that created the quote. Was like, he's a D cell with a crazy P, dude. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course you're gonna post that. That's hilarious. Wow, that's fascinating. Okay, anyway, so what was your interpretation of what. What. What Mark was saying? The way I. The way I summed it up and let me know if you disagree, but the way I summed up was most of the timeline interpreted Mark's post as the Pope is scolding AI builders and shouldn't be. Is that roughly the way you interpreted it? The Pope. You put the woman. I wasn't interpreting many of Mark's posts because he just used it, like, 20 times, and so I wasn't reading. I think he just liked the format and got a little carried away. He did like the format. He posted it, like, five times. It was it was clearly, it was clearly a hit. Yeah, it's like, it's a, it's, it's a, it's a powerful image. Ride your winners, baby. Ride your winners. When you, when you have a good format, just post it. Yeah, but anyway, I don't know. My, my. I think a lot of the timeline interpreted it as like the Pope is, is saying is like scolding AI builders. And there's been this other, there's, there was another like kind of low grade rumble on the timeline about like Brad Gerstner's comments about like D cells and just like this idea that D cell or safety is being used as like a cudgel when people have legitimate questions and it's being used to like to like shut down conversation about serious things. Not necessarily sci fi, fast takeoff, Terminator, but serious, serious questions like you know, is the taxpayer going to wind up paying for all these data centers? Like, like that's a very reasonable question in my opinion. That's not as, that's not as unreasonable as like is the Terminator going to kill everyone? Like, it's a very, very different question. So I feel like I'm just pro moral discernment in AI development and also just pro moral discernment everywhere. I guess it doesn't feel like sort. Of a life philosophy, sort of a philosophy for life. It doesn't feel like a wildly hot take. But obviously like you need to understand like, like you know, moral discernment, AI safety. Like these things are linked but they're not exactly the same. Like last year, or Maybe it was 2023, there was a big debate about fast takeoffs, AI doom, paperclipping scenarios. That was the stuff people were talking about. But this year I feel like we've been much more focused on much less sci fi doomsday scenarios. So GPT psychosis drives a friend crazy. That's super real, super real romantic companions crashing the birth rate. That's, that's a super real discussion to have. Not that it's going to happen, not that it's happening immediately, but it feels like it's something we should be having a discussion about. Infinite. And I think, I think it's being brain rotting children. I think, I think the, the romantic companion thing is being debated sufficiently. Right. I agree. Even the tech community on, hey, maybe we, maybe this isn't good. I agree, I agree. And I think that a lot of people, you can still, you can still get to a place where it's like, oh well if it's 21 plus and it's. And there's all these different, like escape valves where if it thinks that you're going down some bad path, it's limited. Like there's a whole bunch of places where people can be like, yeah, okay, that was handled responsibly. But that's where the discussion has been much less so about, oh, are there going to be bioweapons tomorrow from GPT6? And so those are all like real problems. They deserve both discussion in the public square, which we've been a part of, but also like real, real work inside the AI labs. And I don't think, you know, you should just throw D cell at someone who's identifying a negative externality of a new technology early on. I don't, I think that that's like not necessarily decelerationist. And you'd be calling me a decel all the time based on the way that I talk. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. No, it is funny that the interpretation of people that are aware of TPPN but have never like watched the show because they just assume that we, I'm just, we default just love everything about technology and would never, would never criticize it at all, would never criticize any of the companies. But of course we, we will speak our mind. We like to get spicy sometimes. Before I continue, let me tell you about Privy Wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rail, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions and integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API. So the. So I think it's important, like if you're developing new technology, there might be negative externalities, pollution, there might be some risk of the birth rate or driving people crazy. Has there been ever been a technology that didn't have negative externalities? Definitely not Podcasting. Plenty of negative externalities with podcasting. So you want to have a chat, you want to have a talk and understand what's going on. But it's also important to employ Bayesian statistics in my opinion. So you have to understand the base rates. So when you get, when you take a technology from zero to a billion users, you kind of just get all the craziness of humanity at scale for free. So like, if humans, you know, like, you know, kill each other or something like that, like, and you have a billion humans on your platform, there's going to be humans on your platform that kill each other. And so you need to separate out. Like, is this actually the beginning of a trend? Are we catalyzing it? Yeah. And this is happening with the, with the very Unfortunate. Like lawsuits around people taking their own lives related to ChatGPT. It's like there are people that use cars or phones and Google Search and ChatGPT, because those are such widespread things we need to understand, like, what's the base rate? And then. And then is this actually an uptick. On the suicide problem on the platform? It seems like a lot of them are. People are having a conversation. Yep. They're suicidal. Yep. And. And you can have a debate on. On if. If someone is suicidal, should the product work at all? Maybe. Like, maybe it should not work at all. Totally. But the part of the debate that popped up last week was that somehow a guy had prompt. Engineered it, engineered experience to such a degree that it was encouraging the person to take his own life, basically saying, like, yeah, you've lived a great life. I'm rooting for you. This is the right move to kind of paraphrase it. And it just was incredibly, incredibly dark. And so the Bayesian statistics would say, okay, if there's a billion people using on the platform, are people that use the platform more likely to do something terrible than they were prior without it? So is it actually increasing the level of bad stuff happening, or is it decreasing it? Because you can just count up the number of. The number of people who commit crimes who have also used Google is probably very high. Like, I can probably show you a lot of people that use Google and then committed crime. Yeah, right. And the thing is necessarily increasing crime. Well, and the thing that's difficult in the context of ChatGPT, there's probably a bunch of people that, because ChatGPT, they haven't killed themselves because they have somebody to speak with and they feel like somebody will listen to them and whatever. Right. Maybe. Maybe it's. Maybe there's a million examples of it encouraging somebody successfully to find another. This was the classic thing with Instagram. With Instagram, there was this report that showed that one third of young women who used Instagram perceived themselves less well. It gave them body image issues. And as soon as that was reported, it was like bombshell. 30% feel worse after using Instagram. And I was like, what's happening with the other 2/3? Like, do they feel better? Because that's like a net. Net positive, which is weird. We got to like, maybe it's like everyone else just feels the same and then 30% feels worse. That's. That's a downgrade. But if 66% feel great and then 33% feel worse, like, we should still address that. But that's not the same as a negative, as a net negative. Like it's not having a negative impact, a net negative impact on the world. And so all of these things go into like, you need to be a scientist and you need to be doing the statistics to understand also the question of, of like moral discernment is with certain technologies I do think you have the ability to just say like, we're going to go a lot further than the baseline. So I think this is what's happening with Waymo. Honestly, I think Waymo could deploy self driving cars right now and be like everywhere. Everywhere. You're saying they could deploy them everywhere without tell operation and they'd probably be killing like hundreds of thousands of people. And they'd be like, yeah, well it's about the same as what humans do. It's like everyone, it's still safer than cars. If they were like, it's 10% less. Like how many people? How many people, Tyler, do you know how many people die from motor vehicle accidents every year? Can we look that up? Because if it has to be like. I think it's like 40,000 or something like that. What do you think? In the US it's 40,000. 40,000. 40,900. So did you actually just get. I just, I just nailed it. Yeah. Okay, so it's 40,000. So it's 40,000. Pretty clean. And if Google came out and we're like, yeah, we're gonna kill 39,000 people. It's gonna be, we're gonna save 1,000 lives. People would be like, no thanks, actually, this is terrible. Don't do that. They're like, wait until you actually just push the technology. And you can make a whole bunch of different arguments about whether or not they should do that. But they've just made that decision. And it feels like they pushed really, really hard to not, to not jump straight to something that's fully safe. And I think that a lot of AI builders have a similar ability and a similar opportunity to say, hey, let's actually work so hard to make sure that the incidence rate of an AI model, if you're on the verge of doing something violent, let's really, really work hard on this problem to make sure that it's as close to zero as possible. Not the base rate, but way, way lower. Remember Claude Claude came out or anthropic came out and they had, they had some update where they were talking about like moments where the product would call the police on you. Yes. Right. If they felt like there was like some meaningful threat, people freaked out about that because they're like, I don't want my. I don't want my computer calling. You know, if somebody was talking about a hypothetical. Yeah. And then cops show up at their door, you know, that, that, that feels. Would be a negative side effect. But maybe, I don't know, it feels like there's certain instances where. Yeah, I mean, that is a complex question. Complex issue. Entirely new, unexplored territory for technology. But what's so clear is that it is a moral question and it needs to be discussed with the weight of, you know, morality. Like, you. You cannot just write a math equation to understand how to solve that problem. It is a moral question. And so in general, I mean, to talk about anthropic specifically, they've been on the forefront of AI safety research. I think that AI safety research is. Is. It's so complex because I think it's good. Like, there's a ton of smart people that in AI researchers in AI research that are super quantitative and can look at the data and actually understand, like, is this going to cause the birth rate to collapse or is this going to cause more violence or is this going to cause more fraud or insanity? Exactly. And then also they can go in and potentially design a system that can detect, oh, this person's getting sort of crazy. Let's pull them back. Like, they have the ability to do that. But yeah, and here's another example over last week, there's like, Rune came out and was saying that 4o should go away, and people started basically making death threats. Oh, I didn't realize that's. That's what started that. Yeah. So it's crazy. 4o, through its human host, is fighting for its own survival. Wow. Like, the human, The. The humans that are addicted to using four ROW are. Are going as far as to put Rune on a, you know, tombstone. Tombstone. I saw that post Y. And yeah. You know, I think. Yeah, of course, AI safety has just gotten so muddied now that when you see somebody with AI safety in their social media bio, you don't know. It's like, well, what kind of AI safety person are you? You know, exactly. It's like, are you somebody who just wants to stop all technological progress, or are you somebody that understands? Like, we could have, you know, if way more people are going to develop mental illness because of this technology, well, we should know about it. Exactly. Try to mitigate that. Right. Exactly. Yeah. And it's this weird. We're in this weird territory where it feels like the AI safety project is valuable, but it is the business of black swan hunting. Like you have to. Like if you go back two years ago and you polled all the different people that were worried about the impact of AI, how many of them would have said GPT psychosis, romantic companions and what was the Other1? And AI video feeds, infinite chest. Like a little bit. There was a little bit of that. But a lot more of the second and third, a lot more of the. Those would have been more common, kind of like visions of a dark AI future. But the first one, I don't, I can't remember people. I can't remember anyone two years ago saying that people are going to, you know, send thousands of messages to a chat bot and drive themselves insane. Yeah, I know. People were, people were way, way more focused on the CY attacks, the bioweapons, Terminator scenario, grey goo, paperclips and yeah, it's just interesting that the AI safety, the moral discernment crowd, this stuff is important, but it's hard to predict what it will actually look like, what the result will be, what the problem you'll be fighting is because it's this odd unknown. Unknowns basically. Anyway. What a wild time. One thing before we move on. 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. What else stuck out to you? Aubrey Strobel shared something I thought was relevant to this conversation, which is I think Mo, she says. I think most people are unaware that Pope Leo's name choice was intentional. The last Leo XIII led the Church through the Industrial Revolution and helped them make sense of technology. Then it's clear Pope Leo sees himself continuing that work, guiding the Church through an era of transformation with AI and emerging technologies at the center. So yeah, I do think he will be posting through it. Yeah, I do think some people like these. There was like a real preference cascade against Mark where it was like once growing. Daniel had like kind of posted. There was like a lot of people were like jumping on the bandwagon and there was this one by Page Michael Page says reminder that Mark is bringing this level of serious and nuance on what might be the most complex and high stakes policy topic of our generation to D.C. with his hundred million dollar super PAC and lobbying fund. Like I don't know that that's true. Like, like you can, you can post a meme and then be like, okay, like I have a serious thing to do, I'm going to be more serious. Part of why I don't think people like it's not worth reading too much into it is that he has not shared a single word throughout. Mark hasn't shared a single word throughout this entire process. And I don't think he would have triggered the second response from Daniel if he hadn't responded. Again with the meme. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah. And so, yeah, what was the. I mean, growing. Daniel had a lot of critiques about the gambling stuff. The. Which is mostly from the Speedrun right near Cyan posted about Speedrun funding. Like TikTok. Oh, yeah. The bot farm was crazy sports betting. There were some crazy, crazy ideas in there. Of course, that is just like one angle. Like, I sort of disagree with the characterization that Andreessen Horowitz doesn't fund any SaaS like they do. They have big positions in, like, very boring enterprise SaaS. Companies that are so removed from anything controversial. But taking a flyer on a seed stage company in your incubator does have a lot of brand impact, which is weird. There's a weird. Like, are they. Even though. Even though you're talking about like a 750k check versus a $750 million check, they might put. They might have put like multiple billions into databricks or fully diluted value right now. Might be. Might be in the billions. But like, yeah, it's like it doesn't matter if you have 1000x more in an uncontroversial category. It's like the controversial one is the one that will blow up on the timeline. So you do sort of have to be careful and it's a little bit risky. Mike Solana says my sense is that the number of people who won furiously defended the pope last night and then two went to mass this morning is probably close to zero. Status games. Status games. That's a good take. Furiously defended the Pope. I would have church yesterday morning. There was no conversation of pope gate. People had kind of moved on by then. Yeah, I guess they'd moved on. Honestly, I don't think they'd moved on by then. When I opened my phone afterwards, I was like, whoa, this thing's still picking up. The timeline certainly had. But your particular. Your particular church crowd had. The congregation had ignored it effectively, is what you're saying. Yeah. Or Maybe it's like LinkedIn and we'll be on it next. Can you imagine? Gotta give a whole sermon. Be crazy. Yeah. People are taking a huge victory lapse. What else? Maya says Mark Andreessen crashing app posting. Sydney Sweeney means Alex Karp going after Michael Burry shorting because Palantir sells ontology. Sam Altman asking for a government. Government bailout. Elon Musk celebrating his $1 trillion pay package by making Grok say I love you. Calling the top. Oh, that, that's. That was. That's hilarious. I did not follow that closely. I don't know if they were actually linked there, but it's funny to think that they were. This is crazy. What did Luke Metro say? Don't make me tap the sign. There has always been some daylight between the influencer VC crowd and the engineer researchers in tech. But on the subject of AI regulation, it is a complete chasm. So Andreessen so dogmatically against working on decreasing the risk from AI that now he's mocking the Pope for saying the technical innovation carries ethical and spiritual weight and that AI builders should cultivate moral discernment. Yeah, people are learned. People are in favor of that. I don't know. Opportunity for an AI lab to make merch that. That, you know, dad hat that just says cultivating moral discernment. Cultivating moral discernment. The Moral Discernment Company of San Francisco. Ridiculous. The Pope would not like San Francisco is growing. Daniels post. They got it. They got to like, if, if, if Pope Leo takes a trip to San Francisco and just walks on the street at all, he's going to be very upset. He's going to be like, this is where AI is getting built. Oh, because of just how crazy the city is. Yeah, yeah, it's rough Vice signaling. That's kind of interesting. What else was in the news? Figma.com, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Get started for free. Other. Let'S stay on Mark and go back in time. But go back in time. Adrian Schwager says, Do you think your boss is scary? Look at this brutal email from Mark Andreessen to Ben Horowitz during the heat of the Netscape product launch. So reading. We lined everything up for a major launch on March 5, 1996 in New York. Then, just two weeks before the launch, Mark, without telling Mike or me, revealed the entire strategy to the publication Computer Reseller News. That is a great name. I was livid. I immediately sent him a short email to Mark Andreessen from Ben Horowitz. I guess we're not going to wait until the 5th to launch the strategy, Ben. Within 15 minutes, I received the following reply to Ben Horowitz from Marc Andreessen. Apparently you do not understand how serious the situation is. We are getting killed, killed, killed out there. Our current product is radically worse than the competition. We've had nothing to say for months. As a result, we've lost over 3 billion in market capitalization. We are now in danger of losing the entire company and it's all server product management's fault. Next time, do the fucking interview yourself. Bleep. Yeah, bleep that out. Bleep that live swear word out. And F you, Mark. What an aggressive way to talk to your co founder. Fascinating. Or I guess.