LIVE CLIPS
EpisodeĀ 3-20-2026
Game. I'm more, I'm more asking, like, yeah, you've made bets on neolabs. Those make sense. Great teams. Are you expecting to make a whole bunch more neolab bets that are like, truly, we're not on top of any open source model. We're going to do the full thing in 2026, 2027? Or has that ship sailed? More or less? Yeah. I want to, I want to be careful with what I say here, obviously, to, to remind myself that this is all about exceptions, but I think what we're seeing is the bar is way, way higher. Yeah, yeah, right. And so everyone talking about sample efficiency, everyone talking about continual learning, I mean, these are things that the large labs are very, very focused on as well. But I also think that there's a pretty valid argument to be made that the bureaucracy of these large labs is real. Like in the same way that OpenAI was able to exploit Google's bureaucracy by scaling a transformer before they could. I think you can argue that such opportunities will exist in the future for, you know, for OpenAI and anthropic being distracted by making the products that earn them all this money better. Sure, sure. Yeah, that makes sense. What about, like, much deeper.
Big weekend. I will see you all on Monday. Leave us five stars on Apple, Podcasts and Spotify. Is there anything else we got to do? No. Sign up for the newsletter.
Inference vertical, you might have a very different semiconductor supply chain. Yeah. And I think one. One interesting thread to pull on there is if you start to relax the latency constraint when it comes to inference. So, for example, like, if I'm just telling my software agent to go do work and come back to me in a couple days when it's done, I probably don't care as much about latency, I care about throughput. And if that's true, then you start to look at these chips that intel and AMD have and they look really, really good, they're cheaper and really stand up. Yeah. And you can imagine that for like. Like if there's. If there's. If I'm doing like blood work or something and I have to physically mail blood and there's like no AI that can short circ. So I'm going to be waiting a day or two to get the data back and the model that processes the data or sequences it or something takes an hour instead of a minute. Like that's not going to be mission critical to. You don't need Blackwells for that. Exactly, exactly. Whereas if I'm doing a Google search or I'm on my computer, like actively doing work, throwing that on Cerebras or something, or Grok is going to speed things up and specifically in the developer workflow too. Yeah. And I think where this starts to get really interesting is like, if you ask yourself, like, will there be more of those types of workloads or less? I think it's quite obviously more, if we're moving to these long horizons, sort of more autonomous agents. And so I think there's a world in which the sort of latency constraint that drives a lot of the hardware purchase and design decisions today starts to be relaxed and we see a much more heterogeneous ecosystem there. Makes sense.
Base power style opportunities. I think we're probably rate limited by capital going into that industry right now. That's just my intuition. The other area that I think is like more core to where I spend my time that I still think is underrated is inference. Right. So like the GPU supply crunch that we're seeing right now is, is largely in part as Dylan has said on the show before, like due to the fact that not only these consumer products but the B2B products like, like Cloud Code and Codex are just really taking off and creating like insane demand for inference. I actually think that in the end inference, if you look at it as a market, will be much, much bigger than cloud computing was pre chatgpt. And if you think about like, I mean we're talking like hundreds and hundreds of billions of spend every year. And if that's true, like, I think there will be very, very large inference platforms built in each modality. So there will be an inference platform for real time video models, there will be an inference platform for, you know, open source and custom language models. There will be an inference platform built specifically for long running agents. So I think we're just going to see that industry, which today looks like one industry, break up into many because of how big it is and how much room for specialization. Yeah, I mean there was some, some le, like fall this week, right. Who's just been on an insane trajectory and they've done a bunch of rounds back to back, but going that quickly from a zero to eight billion dollar valuation while staying relatively out of the.
But we'll let that one play out. And right now what we're seeing is people downvote it, they complain about it, communities maybe ban it. Yeah. But at the same time, for every, for every, for every post there when, when a human with AI was, you know, writing something, posting it and it's getting negative feedback, there has to be like a number of them that used AI, that people don't even know they used AI. And it is just being additive. Right. Like it's not possible. It's possible. In which case it's probably okay. I think the question is, is there a human behind the prompt? Is it a human's idea? Like, I'll give you an example of AI content that's totally acceptable, translated content, like, I'm a non native speaker, like, help me, help me write better. Like that's just the world we live in now. Yeah. And so for us, like Reddit is for humans, like that is our platform, that is our product, it's human connection and community. So we're going to start actually talking about this more. So this is a really apt time to have this conversation. This idea of humanness and human verification and what I call ass in seat because they're actually human using Reddit right now, regardless of the tooling that you're using. Yeah. How do you think about delivering on that? I think the most light way, I think there's various technologies, the most lightweight way is with something like Face id, Face ID or Touch ID broadly. It's in the family of technology called passkeys, which I actually didn't appreciate about these like a year ago. They actually require human presence. Like a human has to touch or do or look at something. And so that actually just proves that there's like a person there or get you pretty far. And so I think that's very lightweight and accepted. I think there's heavier versions like the ID checking services, which we have to use for regulations here or there. And I think there's in between technologies that the Internet really needs, like third party individual, no ID required, decentralized. I don't want to say identity, but information providers that there's a need for on the Internet because not just Reddit, every platform wants to know, is this a person? Now Reddit's version is is this a person? But we don't want to know which person. This is part of our promise to our users is we don't know your name, but we do want to know that you are a person. And so it'll be an evolution for us, I think, for a while, and probably every platform, I think, to find the right kind of middle ground here, seed stage or series a startup wants to unlock.
I would love for you to sort of just set the table for us for how 2026 is going over at Reddit. What are the biggest initiatives that you're working on? How are you spending your day? Just give us, get us up to speed. Okay, 2026 is going, going fast. Actually, man, I'm looking at the date now. It's March 20th. It's insane. So right now we have a, I think, single minded focus on making Reddit more successful for new users. I think that's the part when I think about the Reddit machine and the Reddit business, that's the part that I think has the most potential or the biggest gap to close. So taking a step back, Reddit's got content communities for literally everyone. I think we've proven that Reddit can work for anyone, you know, men, women, young, old, nerds, normies. And so now our task is, can we make it work for literally everyone? Yeah. And making Reddit successful for those new users in that first session, that's the thing that I spend almost all my time thinking about right now. What, what, what are the qualities? Like, what is the, what is the experience that someone has when they join Reddit?
Side are very busy trying to figure that out. Then on the other side of the stack, the application layer, what advice do you give to founders? What are the green flags for? Okay, you're building in the application layer. You're never going to compete in training a foundation model. Maybe you do some fine tuning, but there's other secrets in the business. There's other sources of moats and strengths that you will see compounding. And you, you don't think you're gonna get steamrolled by an OpenAI or an Anthropic anytime soon. Yeah. What's interesting right in this moment, I mean this week it's been top of mind over the last couple weeks is like, I expect that the dynamic we're seeing right now between Cursor and the labs is what we'll see for pretty much every other vertical. Right. I expect to see that in Legal, like Plod has come out with like plugins for legal, but you can imagine them just saying like, yeah, we now have 100 people working on just the legal application of our technology. And so I think that every across. That doesn't mean, you know, doesn't mean these companies can't still do well. Yeah, but I'm trying to think through like the timing where, where OpenAI and Anthropic just like, just like basically go all in on, on some of these bigger categories. Yeah. So I'm glad you brought up Cursor and like the software engineering space because it's obviously the most mature. So I think it's very illustrative as is legal and, and interestingly today you guys, I'm not sure if you guys covered this in the beginning of the show, but like the model that Cursor launched. So first off, it's very obvious now that these companies are going to be training their own models and it's also the case that they're going to be starting with one of these open weight models, which today are Chinese, which as an American citizen doesn't sit super well with me. We are investors in a company called Reflection AI that aims to change that. But on the other hand, I do think what Cursor is out to prove is that the user data that they're capturing is going to allow them to set up this reinforcement learning loop that does allow them to build something that is like frontier quality. At the same time, it appears as though these companies are still sending a lot of their most complex queries to Codex to or rather GPT into Claude. And there's obviously a margin problem there that is Pretty hard to compete with when you think about the competitive products that OpenAI and Anthropic have. And then when you shift gears to legal, my assumption would be that like Harvey and Lagora will have to do the same thing that Cursor's doing. And so I think this is kind of an elephant in the room right now as to whether post training open models allows you to combined with like unique user feedback that you get from being an app application provider is defensible enough. And so when I think about the companies that we're looking to invest in, I would actually say that I think that is just going to be an inevitable challenge for any of these industries that hit a maturation point of AI adoption like legal and software engineering have. But on the other hand, I think there's some industries where they're very large, they're far enough afield from where the model providers are today and probably will continue to be. And the context engineering to actually get the customer data into the model is just so messy. It requires going across different business functions. It requires a lot of like hands on forward deployed engineering. I think those are the kind of companies that we get really excited about because I think just being really good at that is not only defensible, but it also allows you to start to generate this like feedback loop with your customers where you hear a lot of their secrets and those secrets allow you to feed that back into how you make your product better at the expense of anyone else playing in the space. Because if you're serving the customer, they're only telling you those secrets, right? Yeah. And I think Palantir is like a good example of this in sort of the pre AI era. And I think we're going to see many companies ascend in that same way. And so the companies that we're investing in, the application layer, I think have a really clear story around how that is hard and defensible enough that they can make it a core competency. Let me throw at you that sort of riffs off of that and you can tell me if it seems like a fit like Amazon. Obviously the goal is to be the everything store, but.
Sort of latency constraint that drives a lot of the hardware purchase and design decisions. Today starts to be relaxed and we see a much more heterogeneous ecosystem there. Makes sense. Fundraising timelines today faster than ever for venture or for startups? Early stage? No, no, no, yeah, yeah. I'm talking about startups like if you back something at speed. How long? How long? Eight companies in the current YC batch that are raising over at over 100 million valuations, which is crazy because demo day is next week. And so how do we even know that this is happening? Usually you wait until after demo day. Not if you have the kind of momentum. The average price is around 40 and clearly deals are getting done very, very quickly. Yeah. And then like any, you know, is the global conflict that we've entered into, is that slowing things down at all yet? Is there any kind of like pullback that you're seeing? So I'm not seeing the geopolitical impact early stage fundraising in any way, but coming back to kind of the velocity question. Look, I think right now we. So first of all what I've learned is that you don't really get to decide how much of the best companies you get to own and you don't really get to decide the valuation they decided and you have to decide whether you want to be involved with them or not. Right. And right now I think early stage is in this tricky place where like for a seed round like you're really generally getting around 10% ownership. Right. For the most competitive rounds. And as a result if you go back to kind of like what made the early stage model work, it was like owning somewhere between like 15 and 20% of companies that become really, really valuable. So the way you kind of have to play this now as a multi stage firm is you get the 10% in the seed and then you effectively have to be in a position to buy up in the next round, the Series A. But at the same time the Series A's are also ballooning in price and there's really not a lot of de risking because the valuation or because the velocity is so fast. Right. By comparison to even like a couple of years ago. So right now what you see a lot is like you get 10% in the seed, the series A happens somewhere between 150 and in some cases like 300 post and then you end up kind of trying to co lead that or lead that and you end up in the low to mid teens. And so it's just a different time. But that's what it takes nowadays, and there are obviously exceptions to that. And I'll gladly buy more than 10% of a company at seed if I'm excited about it and the founders are open to it. But that is the reality that we live in. And I think what that means is you're building a basket of companies that tend to be kind of in that low to mid teens ownership more often than not. Are ghost ship zombie acquisitions affecting venture economics at all? Or has it been so these are like legacy software companies that are slow growers and not going no more. Like licensing super fast growth startup with a bunch of venture capitalists that then a bigger company comes along and says we want to buy you, but we're public.
Apps working. So Bernie Sanders had a conversation with Claude. Video was posted yesterday. Justine Moore says he did the meme. He did the meme. Bernie says pretend to be a scary robot. I'm a scary robot. Yeah. Yeah. Taylor Lorenz timed on this, too. This reminds me of that tweet that was like typing I'm evil into a Google Doc and getting scared. Yeah, there's a little bit of that. Will Menidis had another take. He said a trillion dollars was spent on AI Risk teams and no one thought to hard code into the model to not tell Bern Sanders that you do crimes. Very funny. But this is the correct way to disclose that you're talking to an AI model. Yeah. Do you think he was inspired by the Vanity Fair piece and then immediately shipped this? The Vanity Fair piece, like, buried the lead and, like, it was. It was. It was surfaced in a bunch of screenshots later that made it look like the entire article was AI generated, which it wasn't. Like, the Vanity Fair article did have access to a bunch of people, and there are some interesting vignettes in there. But this is very clear from day one, what's happening. Like, he's talking to Claude and he's investigating and, you know, sharing his fears. And I think this is a great way to actually share what you're doing and make it very clear, and so people are mixed on this. Miles Brundage says worst part of the Bernie video is using sonnet. Not sure why folks are so mad about the other stuff. That's very funny. Delicious tacos. Delicious tacos. I also smoked a grok. It's Bernie. Like this. No, don't click that. But you can imagine what happened.
Building AI supercomputers for training and inference to scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Okay, so the snakes post. We're not doing the snake post. We're skipping. No, I hate snakes. We're not. We're not doing it. I refuse to pull up a snake post. We're skipping straight to Bruce Lee. Okay. We're skipping way down. Okay. I'm not gonna make John watch a snake video. You wanna close your eyes? I saw it. I saw it. This video is definitely, like, terrible to watch. It's also fake. It doesn't exist. I'm Irish. No snakes in Ireland. Tvpn snakes are banned. We got to do that bit where snakes are banned. Attaches like a rubber nose. You would not do that to me. Under no circumstances. We will be watching Bruce Lee fight Chuck Norris in the.
Yeah, we love F1. I'm sorry, but the super micro thing is awful, but parts of it are genuinely hilarious. They literally used a hairdryer to move serial numbers from real servers to dummy servers to throw in a warehouse and got caught on camera. And the pictures have actually leaked. Literally caught red handed. Yes, it's a red. It's a red hair dryer. That is remarkable. Trung fan says do things that don't scale. Classic founder energy. Yeah, definitely.
So the company, smic, Super Micro Computer Inc. They caught him red handed. Walley. He's arrested today or yesterday. He personally holds half a billion dollars of Super Micro stock. Still risked it all. And now he's facing 30 years in federal prison. That is crazy. Who's charged with smuggling billions in Nvidia servers to China? Used Southeast Asian shell company to funnel two and a half billion in servers to Chinese buyers. 500 million worth shipped in just three weeks in spring of 2025. That's a lot. Two and a half billion in servers feels like enough for like a frontier training run. Like, that's a big big. That's a big push. Built thousands of fake dummy servers to fool US compliance auditors caught on surveillance camera using a hairdryer to swap serial number stickers. And so Ox Geegee says this man is a billionaire and was removing labels with a hairdryer. Personally. You're simply not grinding hard enough. There's always a grind. Set lesson in any story. Let's take this over to LinkedIn. It's also notable because there's the export tax or tip that you're trying to bring chips out of the country. The U.S. government kind of flips over the square terminal.
I don't think the project is done by any means. And so the question about like, you know, Jeff Bezos role, like, he's a great operator and I think he's the right person to take the reins and actually deliver here. So like Masa, Jeff Bezos has been through the ups and downs of the dot com boom and bust. At one point, Jeff Bezos lost 85% of his net worth in like two years. But he made it back. He did make it back and more. He was worth like 8 or 9 billion and got down to his last 1 billion basically because of the stock drop in Amazon. But he built it. But he not only kept Amazon alive, which I think everyone knows that Amazon went up during the dot com bubble and then crashed and then built back up, but he also kept Blue Origin alive during that time because he's founded Blue Origin in 2000. Wow. Before the crash. I didn't know that. Yeah, before the crash. So he was. Was it before SpaceX? Yeah, before SpaceX. Whoa. Yeah. So, because I Elon. I assume that Blue Origin was just memetic with Elon. No, no, he did it earlier. Wow. And so he. So he kept Blue Origin alive. And can you imagine how stressful it is? You're like, okay, I'm worth 10 billion. Certainly I can have a little side project as a treat. And you're like, okay, I just lost 85% of my money. I deserve what was. I deserve a side project that loses. Yes. 20 million a month. Exactly. Yeah. I don't know how much they really, but that doesn't seem unreasonable. But he was able to keep it going. Of course, Blue Origin was a slow story all the way up until last year when they landed New Glenn. And so he kept both alive and he's never given up on the project Blue Origin that always has felt behind space.
Three, export. We were debating the. The flipping the iPad around, asking for a tip earlier today. And I think our joint stance was if the iPad is turned around, you got a tip. Yeah. It's just the etiquette is that you got a tip, but is there any. Is there anywhere where that line crosses and you say, I can't. I can't possibly push something. Funny thing is, Erewhon asks for tips. Really? On online orders. Online orders. Wait, but there will be a human delivering it or. No, there's two separate tips. Okay. There's the person in the store who puts the things in the bag, and then there's the delivery person, and they flip it over twice. Yeah. The game theory of this stuff is always hard because I feel like, I don't know, there's regulations on, like, taxes on tips, but it's very unclear if companies actually funnel how they distribute the tips. Like, are you tipping the person or the tips grouped together? Were your tips pooled when you were. Yeah, they were pooled. So even if you did a great job, jobs at the hotel, the valets, they pool. Yeah. Bell staff, the people that, like, take you down to your room. Do not interest pool. Huh. And that was just the rules. Oh, it's because I might be the one who parks the car. You might be the one who gets. Well, in a dynamic. In a dynamic where you have a bunch of valets that are waiting for cars, it would be a bad experience for the guest if the valets are like, they see a nice car pulling and they're like, fighting over themselves. Sure. To deliver a service. Right. It should just be like, whoever's available. Deliver the best possible service. Whereas Bell work is much more one on one. Okay. It's like, I'm kind of your guide on the property. I'm going to like, you know, you might have the person's cell phone, they might be texting you, et cetera. Interesting. And so it makes more sense to not pool. Well, tip your export control, tip your federal. I did there. I did have a funny story where there was a guy, a bean air, who used to come to the property. And everyone knew that every. Every single thing. Word. We still have. We haven't successfully kind of welded into existence. Not at all. I think we're the only. I think we're the only people. We didn't come up with this term. It was delivered to us. We appropriated it. Anyway. There was a guy who would come to the property. Any single thing he got help with on the property, he would tip. He would tip A hundred. And so it did cause chaos. Okay. Because then people are supposed to be like, oh, I'd love to refill your diet code. Be, like, waiting around, like, trying to be in the right spot to open a door. Because they knew it was. It was a bit. It got a bit adequate. I saw a piece of alpha Instagram reels that suggested that you tip the front desk person when you're checking in. Before you check in. Yeah. That always feels like a bribe, but it is the right move. This is a big thing in Vegas, right. You're supposed to put it in between when you give them the card. Oh, I saw this. Yeah. You stack the credit card and the ID and you put the $100 bill in there. That's even more likely that then they have plausible deniability. And they can be like, oh, like, here you go. Or they can be like, okay, thank you. And I'm upgrading you. And I think if at least this person on Instagram was making the case that if you average out, you're tipping $100 for every room, and you're buying, like, a $400 room, but you get $1,000 room upgrade every five. The only durable alpha is, like, you. You want to tip before the service occurs. Yes. If you tip the valet when they bring you your car. Yes. How do they know what kind of service? So if you're ordering a Starbucks and you want to make sure that they're gonna enter your order correctly and get your name right, you gotta tip up front and then say what your order is. Walk up to the counter, say, flip it over. Flip it over. I'm tipping you first. Now let's start the transaction.
Five coded. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Standby. Uav online. Glaze. Double glaze. Triple glaze. Double kill. Five kill. Wrong. Win. Team deathmatch. We are experts. Triple blaze. Let's just roll right. Market clearing order inbound. Come get. You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Strike 1. Strike 2. Activate. Go, go. The retriever mod. Market clearing order inbound. Vibe put it. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. You're watching TVPA. Today's Friday, March 20, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com time is money save. Both easy use corporate cards, bill pay accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. We have a massive show. Two in person guests today. Let's pull up linear lineup. Linear of course. System for modern software development. Enterprise. 70% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents. We have rf. Ken Moore from the Menswear Industry Insider. No, he just is a menswear. He's an insider of the menswear criticism. Mitch Lee from arcboats is coming on. Bucky Morse coming in person from Lightspeed. Steve Huffman, the co founder and CEO of Reddit coming on. Then Quaid from Bezel, who you know and love. He's been on the show many times. Ankur, Jane from Bilt's coming on to talk about credit cards, consumer cards, all the fintech stuff he's working on. And then Michael Kratzios from the White House. He's the science and technology advisor. He's coming on to talk about the new policy proposals that the White House has put forward around artificial intelligence. But first I wanted to chat more about the breaking news from yesterday. Jeff Bezos is in talks to raise $100 billion for an AI manufacturing fund. There was a funny post that was like he has $200 billion. Why does he need to raise more money? No conviction. No conviction. No, it was funny. It was like this, this broke containment and got into kind of the anti capitalist people are not part of acts. And they were like, wait, why are you asking people for money? You have all the money. Yeah, yeah, but of course, but of course he, he wants to let other people in on the action. I do wonder what his like GP commit will be. That's what I was saying yesterday. I was like, I would expect him to be like, yeah, I'm good for 20. Yeah, yeah, 20 or 30 or something like that. I don't know, maybe he'll go even longer. But in general, I think the idea of going around the globe because he's an international person at this point, hoovering up money from all over different sovereign wealth funds and then deploying that to help rebuild the American manufacturing base is a good thing. I wrote about it today in the newsletter tvpn.com and I also tried to do some searching and think about what do you actually buy for $100 billion? What does the portfolio look like if it's a private equity style roll up? If you're just taking out the market caps and you're sort of assuming the debt and continue to operate the business, but then bring more efficiency to bear, what are some of the top options? What are some of the options look like? The other thing is I saw a very viral post about someone that seemingly read the headline and thought like, don't you have enough money already? Why all these companies and fire like they saw automation and assume like job loss. Yeah. And when I look at this, I'm like, okay, if he's successful, we will, you know, create. We will actually start adding a bunch of new manufacturing jobs which we've been shedding. Yep. Over the last year. Yeah, yeah. So, exactly. So headline numbers. Funny. If he had done 99 billion or 101 billion, I don't think people, people would be making as many SoftBank comparisons. But of course, as soon as you hear $100 billion for a mega fund, you think, this guy's soft. He's got vision. It's a vision fund for America. I like the idea of an American softbank, an American vision fund. So I'm generally pro and. But of course people are going to make comparisons to SoftBank, which has had some huge winners and a few black eyes. Moss is a high volume guy. He's been the world's richest man briefly. During the dot com boom, it was reported that he was worth more than Bill Gates. It was pretty temporary, unclear exactly how much and of course there was no liquidity at the time. But he's also held the crown for the man who lost the most money in human history after losing $76 billion in two years. You're supposed to do the wamp wamp for that, but he made it all back. I was preemptively hitting it. Okay, yeah, he did make it all back. He's made almost $100 billion twice. I think maybe there was a moment when he had the title of making $100 billion twice. One on Alibaba and then the second one on Arm. He's made money on Nvidia and lots of other things. But the idea of an American softbank, especially one focused on revitalizing American manufacturing, I like that idea. There are a million reasons why this is an important project. Job creation, economic independence, national security, et cetera. And you might just get more cool stuff like as manufacturing gets cheaper, like the tools that you use, the cars that you drive, the washing machine in your home, the tires on your cars, all these different things get better, not just cheaper, but actually unlock new capabilities and new things that people enjoy. And so I'm in favor of more manufacturing, more economic development, basically. I don't think the project is done by any means. And so the question about like, you know, Jeff Bezos role, like, he's a great operator and I think he's the right person to take the reins and actually deliver here. So like Masa, Jeff Bezos has been through the ups and downs of the dot com boom and bust. At one point, Jeff Bezos lost 85% of his net worth in like two years. But he made it back. He did make it back and more. He was worth like 8 or 9 billion and got down to his last 1 billion basically because of the stock drop in Amazon. But he built it. But he not only kept Amazon alive, which I think everyone knows that, you know, Amazon went up during the dot com bubble and then crashed and then built back up. But he also kept Blue Origin alive during that time because he's founded Blue Origin in 2000. Wow. Before the crash. Yeah, before the crash. So he was, Was it before SpaceX? Yeah, before SpaceX. Whoa. Yeah. So Elon Soldier, I assume that Blue Origin was just memetic with Elon. No, no, he did it earlier. Wow. And so he, so he kept Blue Origin alive. And can you imagine how stressful it is? You're like, okay, I'm worth 10 billion, certainly I can have a little side project as a treat. And you're like, okay, I just lost 85% of my money. I deserve, I deserve a side project that loses. Yes, 20 million a month. Exactly. Yeah. I don't know how much they really. But like, but that doesn't seem unreasonable. But he was able to keep it going. Of course, Blue Origin was a slow story all the way up until like last year when they landed New Glenn. And, and so he kept both alive and he's never given up on the project Blue Origin that always has felt behind SpaceX for two, the two decades that's been operating, but is now sort of unlocking new capabilities and is they were going turtle Mode, Yeah, Turtle mode for sure. But it's working. And so like, regardless of the fact that, you know, SpaceX is still ahead of Blue Origin, you have to give him credit for like operating that company efficiently and actually delivering a product that we all saw go up and come back. And so like the rockets did go up and land and come back and he's delivered people to space and back. And so he's, he's, he's like achieved the goal and not lost all the money and not put the company in jeopardy. And so like, clearly there's some operational. That's a narrative violation. It is a narrative violation. What makes Bezos uniquely equipped to take on this type of project is the nature of his business over the last few decades. So he's never really had the zero marginal cost luxuries afforded to other pure play Internet founders. You think about Mark Zuckerberg, it's always been his ads business. Yeah, he has that now, but that's very new for a long time. Very real contributor, very real contributor now. But even then it is much thinner margin than a Google or a Meta. And it always has been because they've always operated in the real world and they've been competing with Walmart and Barnes and Noble and Vroman's and all the other big gross margins. Scare me. Yeah, he's always had thin, thin margins until aws. Really? AWS was the first. Like, okay, this is like a monster cash cow. And even aws doesn't have 80% gross margins. It is a cash cow, but it's a different shape. And of course you go back to the Jeff Bezos lore and he had the door desk and the whole business was very scrappy for a long time. And Amazon's just always interfaced with the physical world. So it's been, even though it's a software company and a tech company, it's always interfaced with the physical world. And they've had to focus on operational efficiencies to scale. So in 2012, Amazon bought Kiva Systems, which turned into Amazon Robotics. And that's a big risk to buying a big company. And we think that, you know, if this turns into, if this hundred billion dollar fund turns into sort of a private equity roll up, you're going to ask the question, can Bezos buy a company for $1 billion, $5 billion, $10 billion, $50 billion, who knows? And operate it and scale it and actually continue to deliver value. And he certainly did that with Kiva Robotics, which turned into Amazon Robotics, which delivered over a million Robots that are deployed across the operations network. So from fulfillment centers, warehouse automation, inventory flow, last mile delivery, all of these require tight integration between hardware and software to run smoothly. Bezos clearly loves this stuff and you can actually see it when you look at his face. Whenever he gives a tour of an Amazon warehouse or an or blue origin facility, he's just beaming. And he's absolutely obsessed with this technology and the physical world. And so the question I had was like, what should he buy? Yeah. The other thing is like, you know, seeing all the different volume across Amazon and being like, well it'd be pretty convenient if that was made here or this was made here or at least some of the components were made here and it wasn't, you know, you didn't just have assembly here. Yeah, I mean, yeah, there isn't, I hadn't considered that narrative. But there is a different flow where you're, he's not sitting there being like, great, I love that so much of our volume is having to be shipped or flown across the ocean. Ton of that. Yeah. And then also he's seen attacks from TEMU and Shein and Alibaba and AliExpress and a whole bunch of direct from manufacturing plant to customer. And how do you respond to that? Maybe getting into the deeper in the supply chain makes sense. Although I'm not entirely sure that there's so little reporting at this point. The only line is that he'll be buying manufacturing companies. So there's a lot in the supply chain. So I wanted to dig through some stuff that could potentially be in the crosshairs for Bezos. The first is Lear. They manufacture seats and electronic systems for the automotive industry. And a lot of these companies have huge revenues and small market caps. So Lear did 23 billion in 2025 revenue. The market cap is around 5 billion. And so the business is operationally complex. I mean on a PE ratio it trades at like I think 13 priced earnings. And so like you have these high revenues because you're in the manufacturing business, but you're low margin. But yeah. And this has been some of the concern around VCs investing in manufacturing businesses. Yep. Are they used to it? And just a general concern that, you know, they might today be getting valued on a revenue multiple. But as they get to the public markets, people will expect them to be valued on earnings and that is very different story. Yeah, Lear, interestingly not the maker of the Learjet which sold to the Gates company which is not affiliated with Bill Gates. I was like, is there a link here? But there's not. But Learjet and Lear are two different companies, although they both make physical things. But there's an opportunity here for, for the Bezos thesis that we are sort of gesturing towards. The business is operationally complex and AI can be applied across plant scheduling, supplier forecasting, visual inspections and more. This whole thesis of like the colors get less blue, there's upskilling that happens in the facility and you're able to produce more at scale. Borgwarner is another example. They're a scaled auto supplier. 14 billion in 2025 revenue. Market cap is 9.5 billion. They're more focused on propulsion and power related systems. They literally make turbochargers for internal combustion engines. Although they've, they have shifted their business a lot to be focused on electronic components, both in terms of making battery packs, motors, but they're actually already getting into selling turbine generator systems for data centers. They're part of the AI boom already. And there's more opportunities to grow into different industrial power applications. Hexcel is another company. They're a leading producer of carbon fiber reinforcements and resonance systems for aerospace. They're guiding to 2 billion in revenue. But the market cap is 5 billion. So a little pricier on a price to sales ratio. Here's a fun one. Good year. Not only do you get blimps, which has got to be important, if you're trying to go blimp for blimp with Sergey Brin, you just, just jump to the front of the line. It's only a 1.8 billion. This revenue multiple is criminal. Yeah. So the market cap for Goodyear is 1.8 billion and revenue was 18 billion. So they're, they're trading at a point somewhere out there there's like a VC funded tire company. It's like 100x revenue and they're like we're going to go through 1000x multiple compression over the next decade. Yes, you will. But Goodyear's sort of the classic AI for manufacturing. They got to focus, they got to get investors thinking about their advertising blimp monopoly. In scaling that business, quality control is really critical. There's opportunities for downtime optimization. So if you can have better systems that limit downtime, you can produce more tires. The tire market is extremely competitive. You see Chinese tires on cars more and more. And so these are thin, thin, thin margin companies and that's why the multiple's so low. But getting good. Scariest moment of my life in a car. Chinese tire. Chinese tires. Old Chinese tires. Old Chinese tires. But a lot of people Go in, they say I need new tires. Just give me whatever's cheapest. And so if you're competing on price and you're a low cost supplier, every dollar counts. On the bigger side, you have Rockwell Automation. I don't know if you've ever seen those videos for The Rock Rockwell TurboEncabulator. Have you ever seen these? We should pull this up. Let me find Discombobulator. It's one of the best marketing videos. Turboencabulator. Let me find this, the Rockwell retroencabulator. I got it here. We'll watch this. It's a two minute video and we'll see if you can. Yeah, any of these. Yeah, we got these. If we can pull this up. And let's, let's play Here at Chrysler Motors, Automotive Operations research has been proceeding to develop a line of heavy duty transmissions that establishes new standards for reliability, durability and quality. With customer needs as our primary focus, work is proceeding on the crudely conceived idea of an instrument that would not only supply inverse. I think this is Chrysler's like joke. Let's play the one that I, that I shared from Rockwell. This is the good folks at Rockwell Automation who. That was a cool video. Headquarters Research has been proceeding to develop a line of automation products that establishes new standards for quality, technological leadership and operating excellence. With customer success as our primary focus, work has been proceeding on the crudely conceived idea of an instrument that would not only provide inverse reactive current for use in unilateral phase detractors, but would also be capable of automatically synchronizing cardinal gram meters. Such an instrument, comprised of Dodge gears and bearings, Reliant electric motors, Allen Bradley controls and all monitored by Rockwell software, is Rockwell Automation's retroencabulator. Now basically the only new principle involved is that instead of power being generated by the relative motion of conduct conductors and fluxes, it's produced by the modial interaction of magnetoreluctance and capacitive directance. Passive interaction. The original machine had a base plate of pre famulated ammolite surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two spurving bearings were in a direct line with a panametric fan. The lineup consisted simply. It's just like such a funny in joke for electrical engineers because it's just a whole bunch of like slop basically like oh, none of those terms mean anything but it really, I don't know, good startup launch video concept. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It really, I mean it helps you like detect. Like, are you in group, out group? Basically very, very fine. But they are. What? Well, were you able to clock it or were you like, oh, that sounds good. Yeah, I mean, it sounded silly. It sounds silly. So Rockwell Automation's on the bigger side, but they sit right at the intersection of factory automation software and control. So although that video is a joke, Rockwell does. Does work on, on factory automation already. So the thesis with this one is that the business is already, already dedicated to industrial automation. And so it's less of a turnaround, but it's a control point for pushing AI to thousands of other factories. So you're deeper in the supply chain. It's expensive at 40 billion, but potentially in the budget. Do you think there's a world where he just buys a Ford Motor company? It would obviously. I mean, he would have to lever up. Yeah, but what is Ford now? I thought 40 is 45, but. But I'm not. But he's not going to just drop like raise 100 billion and then, and then buy a company for entirely with equity. I feel like it will be deeper in the supply chain than a brand, but I don't know. It's possible. It's possible. But he might say, isn't he already a big investor in Rivian. Yeah, sure. So, like looking deeper into that supply chain and there's a few other car companies that have been involved in. I just don't know that there's that like, that's where the big opportunity is. It might be deeper in the supply chain, like bending the metal that goes into the bumper, that this and that. And like, you know, it's 12 steps deep, it's more boring, but it's even thinner margins, less brand risk and brand value, but really focused on applying that actual commercial excellence. But I mean, truly your guess is as good as mine. There's very little to go off of. Also there's a link to Project Prometheus, which is the AI project. And so there's a chance that this whole project is more aligned with the software singularity. Software only singularity. And you wind up with, you know, buying a lot of things, but everything's in line with like more data centers. And this is more of like, let's put the $100 billion to work towards building, you know, compute capacity for Project Prometheus. That feels like not what we're hearing, but it is, it is one. I wonder if he would do anything on like the solar side. Right? Yeah, yeah, that'd be interesting. And then there's also the option that we get some sort of Elon style megacorp with Blue Origin involved at some point, like, you know, Xai and SpaceX merged. It's possible that Blue Origin and this vehicle come together with Project Prometheus in some, in some way and then that goes public as a new entity. A lot of these. He's, he's actually mentioned the whole space data center thing before. I think a while ago. Wasn't it like more than a year ago? I don't. Yeah, I think they also just filed something with the fcc. Okay. Yeah. For the new cloud. Yeah, yeah, for the new cloud it was like 50,000 satellites. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so he wants like a direct Starlink competitor. And so when you think about the full AI stack, if he's really, you know, off, off planet, you know, pilled and thinks he can get, thinks he can get there even if it's like a year or two behind or I guess what's the timeline for his Starlink competitor? That would be like three years behind. Four years. Yeah. I mean for, for the moon. He's supposed to be ahead, right? Oh yeah. So maybe this will all go on the moon. Well, either way, it's a big move from an experienced operator with lots of opportunity ahead and it'll be fun to follow along. And I'm glad he's back in the game in a big way. Not just doing random, you know, side projects. Bottle service or bottle service. He's got to be spending more time and energy securing America's future. Securing bottle service. Well, you know, I mean the, the guy can take a weekend off, but one photo from his weekend flies a lot further than he could be completely locked in and just grinding 80 hours and then he goes, gets bottle service. Just one time he was just there for 30 minutes grinding on the yacht. Maybe. You never know. Anyway, let's first tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium sized businesses. And let's also tell you about Figma. No matter where your idea starts, Figma may clog code, codex or a sketch. The Figma canvas is where ideas connect and products take sh. Build in the right direction with Figma. And let's go over to Jensen on the all in podcast. $5,000 engineer. At the end of the year I'm going to ask him how many token, how much did you spend in tokens? And that person said $5,000. I will go ape. Something else. Yeah, right. If that, if that $500,000 engineer did not consume at least $250,000 worth of tokens. I am going to be deeply alarmed. Okay. And this is no different than one of our chip designers who says, guess what? I'm just going to use paper and pencil. I don't think I'm going to need any CAD tools. This is a real paradigm shift. Thinking about these All Star employees, it almost reminds me of what we Learned in the NBA when LeBron James started spending a million dollars a year just on his health of his body, like, maintaining it. That's right. Here he is at age 41, still playing. It really is. Hey, if these are incredible knowledge workers, why wouldn't we give them superhuman abilities? That's exactly. Where does that go? If we extrapolate out two or three years from now, what is the efficiency of that All Star at Nvidia and what they're able to accomplish, what they look like? Well, first of all, things that, wow, this is too hard. That thought is gone. This is going to take a long time. That thought is gone. We're going to need a lot of people. That thought is gone. This is no different than in this, in the last Industrial Revolution. Somebody goes, boy, that building really looks heavy. Nobody says that. Nobody. Wow, that mountain looks too big. Nobody says that. Right. Everything that's too big, too heavy, takes too long. Those ideas are all gone. You're reduced to creativity. That's right. What can you come up with? Exactly. Which means now the question is, how do you work with these agents? Well, it's just a new way of doing computer programming. In the past, we code. In the future, we're going to write ideas, architectures, specifications. We're going to organize teams. We're going to help them define how to evaluate the definition of good versus bad. What does it look like when something is a great outcome? How to iterate with you, how to brainstorm. That's really what you're looking for. The Internet is having a lot of fun with this. Nuno says, guy that sells shovels says you should spend 50% of your salary on shovels. But of course, Jensen's point is generally correct, which is that you should give your best people a lot of leverage. Yeah. I do wonder what the leverage ratio is in other industries. Like if you're a crane operator and you're making. I don't know if you should give him the best possible crane. Yeah. Like, is it possible that. That if you're operating a $10 million crane or something, I don't know how much crane costs are like. Or a cargo ship. Cargo ship. That's, that's ferrying oil across the world. How much does that crew cost and then how much does the ship cost and then what's the depreciation on that ship? Because it might be like $100 million ship that will last 20 years. So you're looking at $5 million a year. And if the crew, total cost of the crew is like 1 million, well then you're actually spending more on the capital asset than the underlying talent and you're getting leverage on top of that. And for a long time software engineering has not been that. It's been $100 worth of Internet and a, a couple thousand dollars on a MacBook and a lot of open source software because you're using Python and Linux and these things. I mean I guess you could maybe burden your cloud budget once you actually deploy the app. Like if you think about, if you're a Facebook engineer, Instagram engineer, you could push a feature that consumes a ton of compute. But this is also going back to the AI talent war where you get back into if you're an elite software engineer and you're like look, I'm going to be in charge, I'm going to be managing half a million dollars worth of token budget over the next year. Well, I want comp that's higher than that or something like that. It'll be very interesting to see how the value works there. A reasonable ballpark for the annual cost of a fully loaded cargo ship is around 4 to 18 million dollars. So including the cash operating cost plus the depreciation. So I don't know. Yeah, the. This certainly isn't like the first industry to be hit with something like that. But it'll be interesting to see how it changes. In other news, the U.S. department of justice announced yesterday three charged with conspiring to unlawfully divert cutting edge U.S. aI technology to China. The indictment unsealed today details alleged effort to evade US export laws through false documents, staged dummy servers to mislead inspectors and convoluted trans shipment schemes in order to obfuscate the true destination of restricted AI technology, China. Said John Eisenberg, Assistant Attorney General for National Security. These chips are the product of American ingenuity and NSD will continue to enforce our export control laws to protect that advantage. So the company smic, Super Micro Computer Inc. They caught him. They caught him red handed, Wally. He's arrested today or yesterday. He personally holds half a billion dollars of Super Micro stock. Still risked it all and now he's facing 30 years in federal prison. That is crazy. Who's charged with smuggling billions in Nvidia servers to China? Use Southeast Asian shell company to funnel two and a half billion in servers to Chinese buyers. 500 million worth shipped in just three weeks in spring of 2025. That's a lot. Two and a half billion in servers feels like enough for, like, a frontier training run. Like, that's a big, big. That's a big push. Built thousands of fake dummy servers to fool US Compliance auditors caught on surveillance camera using a hairdryer to swap serial number stickers. And so Ox Geegee says this man is a billionaire and was removing labels with a hairdryer. Personally, you're simply not grinding hard enough. There's always. There's always a grind. Set lesson in any story. Let's take this over to LinkedIn. It's also notable because. Because there's the export tax, or tip, that, you know, you're trying to bring chips out of the country. The U.S. government kind of flips over the square terminal and they say, tip, please, 25%. So you're looking at hundreds of millions of dollars if these were. Even if these were chips that were able to be exported. We were debating the flipping the iPad around, asking for a tip earlier today, and I think our joint stance was if the iPad is turned around, you got a temp. Yeah. It's just the etiquette is that you got a tip, but is there anywhere where that line crosses? And you say, I can't. I can't possibly push something. Funny thing is, Erewhon asks for tips. Really? On online orders. Online orders. Wait, but there will be a human delivering it or. No, there's two separate tips. Okay. There's. There's the. The person in the store who puts the things in the bag, and then there's the delivery person. Yeah. And they're asked. They. They flip it over twice. Yeah. The game theory of this stuff is always hard because I feel like, I don't know, there's regulations on, like, taxes on tips. But it's very unclear if companies actually funnel how they distribute the tips. Like, are you tipping the person? Are the tips grouped together? Were your tips pooled when you were a ballet? Yeah, they were pooled. So even if you did a great job at the hotel, the valets, they pool. Yeah. Bell staff. The people that, like, take you down to your room do not pool. Huh. And that was just the rules. Oh, it's because I might be the one who parks the car. You might be the one who gets. Well, in a dynamic where you have a bunch of valets that are waiting for. For cars. It would be a bad experience for the guest if the valets are like, they see a nice car pulling and they're like fighting over themselves. Sure. To deliver a service, right, it should just be like, whoever's available should deliver the best possible service. Whereas bell work is much more one on one. Okay. It's like, I'm kind of your guide on the property. I'm gonna like, you know, you might have the person's cell phone, they might be texting you, etc. Interesting. And so it makes more sense and not pool. Well, tip your export control, tip your federal. I did there. I did have a funny story where there was a guy, a bean air who used to come to the property. And everyone knew that every, every single thing we still have, we haven't successfully kind of welded into existence. Not at all. I think we're the only. I think we're the only people. We didn't come up with this term. It was delivered to us and then we appropriated it. There was a guy who would come to the property. Any single thing he got help with on the property, he would tip. He would tip a hundred. And so it did cause chaos. Okay. Because then I'd love to refill your Diet Coke. Be like waiting around, like trying to be in the right spot to open a door. Because they knew it was. It was a bit. It got a bit adequate. I saw a piece of alpha Instagram reels that suggested that you tip the front desk person when you're checking in before you check in. Yeah. That always feels like a bribe. But it is the right move. This is a big thing in Vegas, right? You're supposed to put it in between when you give them the card. Oh, I saw this. Yeah. You stack the credit card and the ID and you put the $100 bill in there. That's even more likely that then they have plausible deniability. And they can be like, oh, like here you go. Or they can be like, okay, thank you. And I'm upgrading you. And I think if at least this person on Instagram was making the case that if you, if you average out, you're tipping $100 for every room and you're buying like a $400 room, but you get a thousand dollar room upgrade every five. The only, the only durable alpha is like you. You want to tip before the service occurs. Yes. If you tip the valet when they bring you your car. Yes. How do they know what kind of service? So if you're ordering a Starbucks and you want to make sure that they're going to enter your order correctly and get your name right. You got to tip up front and then say what your order is. Walk up to the counter, say, flip it over. Flip it over. I'm tipping you first. Now let's start the transaction. Anyway. When a broker who had bought Nvidia powered servers from the Southeast Asian company. Walk up to the. Walk up to the counter and say, what's your tempo address? Yes. Yes. Send him a machine payment. Yes. Automatically. When a broker who had bought Nvidia powered servers from the Southeast Asian company sent Sunny a text message containing a link to an announcement about Chinese nationals being arrested for smuggling AI chips into China, Sonny allegedly responded with sobbing emotions. Scroll up. Scroll up so people can see. Morning. Bruce says, hey man, you're probably going to jail. Super Mo co founder Cry, cry, cry emoji and scroll down and you'll see Nick Carter. Literally this. Your son has passed away. It's the warthog explosion. Oh, okay. I guess we can't find it. It's weird. My ex is Jordan Schneider apparently was all over this back in August of last year. He said a super micro ad in the middle of a Reuters piece talking about how tracking devices and AI servers, just priceless. Whoa. What did Jordan know? What did Jordan know? Divalpha in chinatalk. Head over to Chinatalk and subscribe. He's got some amazing content, some amazing interviews, and is a good friend of the show. And so there's clearly secrets to be unveiled through the Chinatalk archive. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And let me also talk to you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. Thank you to the Cisco team for sending us these mini McLaren helmets. Their sponsor McLaren. And we are honored. Yeah, we love F1. I'm sorry, but the supermicro thing is awful. But parts of it are genuinely hilarious. They literally used a hairdryer to move serial numbers from real servers to dummy servers to throw in a warehouse and got caught on camera. And the pictures have actually leaked. Literally caught red handed. Yes, it's a red. It's a red hair dryer. That is. That is remarkable. Trung fan says do things that don't scale. Classic founder energy. Yeah, definitely. Definitely that. What else is going on? Let's pull up this video. I don't know if this bone six minutes long. The Legend Bone but Chinese entrepreneur boasts receipt of 200 Nvidia H200 GPUs in Beijing despite the US export ban. And then explains how he circumvents the export ban. Wow. In January of posted by Beijing based entrepreneur Sudi on the Chinese social media platform Daene has sparked. Wait, it's literally. You can see, Watch this, Watch. Look at that. Access to rewind for a second. You can see a super Micro logo. Sudi on the Chinese social media platform Douyin has sparked significant discussion. In the video sue boasts of. Oh my God, that's like the biggest logo for Super Micro ever. Wow. Bone. Bone is, Bone is absolutely. And this is from January. No, I, I, I'm telling you, like a lot of I, I mean I'm, I'm, I'm sure the, the Justice Department were working on this like wow, this. But a lot of times like legal action will happen like downstream of like YouTube drama videos, like there will be some like you know, fake guru who's out there like running a Ponzi scheme and people will be dunking on it on social media and then it will get picked up by the. So almost a year and a quarter ago, somebody responded to Bone and says it's SMIC packaged and Bone says, do you think SMIC is smuggling chips? Wow. And family owned business in Taiwan. I won't be surprised if there are some family members who want to make this money by setting up fake shell entities and smuggling chips for business partners in China. Wow. It's good money. Wow. Wild. This is crazy wild. Kevin Kwok has a good meme that everyone enjoyed. They expect one of us in the wreckage, brother. And it's not Jensen. The Bane meme. It's very, very funny. And yeah, the SMIC founder I believe was at GTC just a few days ago. Oh, really? Hanging out. No way. He was. I saw a picture of him with Jensen. Yeah, until the music stops playing, I suppose. Let me tell you about Label Box. RL environments, Voice robotics, evals and expert human data. Label Box is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. And let me also tell you about public investing for those who take it to stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. Speaking of going insanely hard, says Joe Weisenthal, I'm obsessed with the name of the rocket that will take the first Chinese astronauts to the moon. It's called The Long March 10, the next generation crewed launch vehicle. Long March is a great, great name for just locking in the Lock in the. Lock in rocket. Lock in Rocket. And it's time. What are we talking about for Kimmy Gate? Kimmy Gate. What's going on here, Finn? So cursor yesterday announced Composer 2, which apparently was composed of other models. Did very well on Cursor Bench. Little bit odd with the charts on the higher cost, lower cost, but seemed like it did well for Cursor's use case. Cursor fans were satisfied, I suppose. Finn says that he was messing around with the OpenAI base URL in cursor and caught this account anysphere model kimik2p5rl and then some other numbers. So composer 2 is just kimik2 with rl. At least rename the model id. Well the co founder I believe or someone from Cursor chimed in and said it is in fact rl'd kimik2. And this is why open weight rules. We the consumers get new improved models with minimal cost. And it's Lee Robinson who is teaching developers at Cursor. Lee Robinson says, Yep, Composer 2 started from an open source base. We will do full pre training in the future. That's an interesting claim. I'm wondering if they even need to. I don't know that there's any problem with using an open source model here. He says only 1/4 of the compute spent on the final model came from the base. The rest is from our training. So they took whatever compute went into K2 and then they 4x that or 3x'd it and dropped that into RL. This is why evals are very different. And yes, we are following the license through our inference partner terms. So I don't know, they're staking out their claim. They're making their strategy known. Jack Morris says people are taking this the wrong way. Look at it like this. Composer 1 deep seq probably composer 2. Kimi certainly composer 3 likely will be the first Frontier base model pre trained from scratch for a single domain coding. It's a scary thought, isn't it? And so people are taking both sides. Tyler, do you have a take on this? Yeah, I mean I think it's like very reasonable to do RL on like some open source pre train. Like that makes a lot of sense. Right. Because like you can kind of imagine that there's this dynamic where there's a post about this we can talk about. Yeah. But like, so there's all this stuff about how, okay, Claude Anthropic trains a model and then Chinese open source labs kind of still on it. Yeah. You know, the actual Implementation of highly distillate doesn't maybe doesn't matter that much, but you're kind of getting some form of like a little bit that's open source. Yeah. And then you take that and then you can do RL to do like a specific hill climb on some tasks like this coding. And that's like a very good way to make good model. Right. So Prime Intellect, their most recent release was, I think it was GLM, like 4.5. Yeah. And then so, so they take that base model and then you do RL and then you get this really great model because like RL is like where you can get a lot of these, like small, small gains. Small gains on specific tasks which, which can build up over time. Yeah. I think it like makes a lot of sense. It's not like a big dunk to be like, oh my gosh, they were just doing RL on open source model. Like it's a very logical strategy. Yeah. That like makes a lot of sense. Yeah. I think the criticism of. I think they probably should have come out and said they did it and not tried to position it as like we did a. They said what? This was our first continual pre trained. So they kind of like using that, using that word. Like it would have been easy to be like we took world class open source models and improved them in order to create for our specific problem. Yeah. And I think people would have been like totally fine with that. Right. Yeah, it's probably meant to like, I mean a lot of, you know, American labs have done this, said it and everyone like, wow, this is great. This is a great model. Yeah. I, you know, use it. Yeah. Didn't Perplexity at one point create like Deep Seek 1776 or something like that where they were like, we specifically made it more American after. I will say after I actually. Oh, after you did that. Okay. Yeah. So funny that you did that. Zephyr says Curse are treating Kimmy like Voldemort. I don't want to say the name. He did in fact put it in a post. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Accelerate Harder says the funny bit is training from scratch. Impresses investors and Twitter, but it makes little sense for most teams while still while strong open source options exist. So Cursor actually did the smart thing but pretended they did the dumb thing and it nearly worked. So more of maybe a comms issue than a business strategy issue. But yeah, I think there are some concerns maybe about the actual license of the model because technically you are supposed to say that it is like Kimmy Yeah, usually you have to pass through these things like Android is built on Linux and that's in the release. Likely to be some deal behind the scenes. That actually means it's fine. Yeah. Also I would not be surprised if people have just not read the Composer 2 license doc yet or something and it's actually just fully disclosed there and the people are like I found in the URL. It was also in the terms of service, it was just in plain text somewhere that you just didn't find. Who knows? So let's see. So 3x Ellie is giving some comps on this. So 3x the training compute gets you a 1% improvement on swe bench multilingual and 21% on terminal bench 2.0. But K2.5 is in non thinking mode. If those benchmarks are useless, it's weird that they're the ones reported in the Cursor blog. Then something is wrong. So people are going back and forth. But ultimately I think this, where the rubber meets the road is arranged like Cursor has been growing, Cursor continues to grow even while they've been steamrolled and the vibes have shifted. If people love this and people are using the product and it's a growing business and the market is growing so fast that they have a great business that seems like business continues as usual. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world, Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Let me also tell you about vibe code where DTC brands, B2B startups, AI companies, advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences and measure sales just like on Meta. So should we delve? Delve gate. Another gate, Another gate. Delve gate. So what happened here? Where should we start? Anonymous substack pops up. Yeah, these anonymous substacks are interesting. Deep delver clearly created just to share this particular story. No idea who's behind it. Yeah, incredible. Incredibly profound professional. Okay, in their presentation, right. They're putting backups of the article. Yeah. On day one saying reporters who want to get in touch whistleblower. And so yeah, they, they make an argument that Delve has had a bunch of kind of nefarious activity, kind of duplicating reports. Not basically just like a lot of their value prop I think was on the fact that they were using AI and speed and yeah, it doesn't look good at all. I don't believe we've had Delve on the show, but I searched the calendar and I got one hit for Delve and it's in A summary. It's in a summary of Bill Gurley's book that says it's a page turner that delves deep into the surprising, often zigzagging career paths of exceptional performers. There's something inspiring. On every page is a quote from the New York Times bestselling author that he gave to Bill Gurley's book and just got sort of wound up in our notes. Anyway, so what actually happened? What is Delve? Let's start there. Delve does SOC2 compliance and HIPAA compliance. They've worked for a number of companies like Lovable Clulee, et cetera, et cetera. And yeah, you can kind of. I mean the article is like very, very, very long and detailed, but it just goes into Aaron Griffith shares like the key claim. Aaron Griffith, of course, is over at the New York Times and she quotes this. Dell built a machine designed to make clients complicit without their knowledge to manufacture plausible and deniability while producing exactly the opposite, opposite. And a lot of people are having fun with the fact that the Dell founders were in the 30 under 30, which of course has surfaced. A lot of people. I think there's. Are there really 180030 under 30 every year? That's true. Or is that like. Is that like Doc DocuSign? I thought you were saying. I thought you were saying all in. Oh, maybe, maybe. Overall, I know that there's multiple categories. So there's more than one. I think it used to be that there was just. There was actually 30. Yeah. And then Forbes realized like, what if we scaled this? Yeah, this is the plan. Scale the Midas list, hundred Midas lists. So you get 10,000 VCs paying you top dollar to rank. It should be an auction. So Austin Petersmith says, not going to lie. As we've been going through a grueling SoC2 process with Vanta, one of our sponsors, I have felt a lot of FOMO reading about Delve customers getting it done in three weeks. If all this is true, then no mo fomo. So he's Milo. There are some things that you just can't short. Milo pulled up a post from the CEO from April of last year that says the CEO says when you step into the office and your founding AI engineer is on his third all nighter, his team never stops shipping. Milo says third all nighter of what? Compliance. I don't want my security company shipping 3am code. So very unfortunate situation. Not going to make any real assumptions, but this story's definitely not over. Well, let me tell you about Mongodb what's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB? Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. And let me also tell you about Lambda Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference to scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Okay, so the snakes post. We're not doing the snake post. No, I hate snakes. We're not. I refuse to pull up a snake post. We're skipping straight to Bruce Lee. Okay. We're skipping way down. We're watching the first John watch a snake video. Even though you want to close your eyes. I saw it. I saw it. This video is definitely. It's like terrible to watch. It's also fake. It doesn't exist. I'm Irish. No snakes in Ireland. TVP ad. Snakes are banned. We got to do that bit where snakes are banned. Hatches like a rubber. No, you would not do that to me. Under no circumstances we will be watching Bruce Lee fight Chuck Norris in the Way of the Dragon because this is the way that we pay our respects to Chuck Norris, who of course passed away at the age of, I think. I think 86. Norris. He was 86. And this is one of the most iconic fight scenes in movie history. Have you seen the Way of the Dragon? Of course. Of course not. This scene was unique. It was set inside Rome's Coliseum and it was often cited as a turning point for how martial arts were portrayed on screen, particularly because they didn't use actors. So both Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris were legitimately high level fighters. Norris was world karate champion at the time. They cast him in part because of that. And it has a much more like, grounded, credible feel as opposed to like previously more stylized kung fu films. And you can see this with the. Bruce Lee actually directed and choreographed this himself. So Lee had full control. So the director didn't say anything. And they do these cool, like, punch in shots. Look at this. So you're seeing nice wide. You can see exactly where he is. There's no body double. And then we're gonna zoom in. And then what are we gonna do again? We're gonna zoom in again. And so we see his face and he's just sitting there waiting. Brilliant shot. So so much time to breathe and understand and feel what he's feeling. The music, footsteps, breathing, clothing, movement. The cat, of course. Any snakes? Yeah, no snakes. I don't think I haven't watched the whole thing. The camera often stays wide. This stands in contrast to something like The Bourne Identity. Very like fast cuts, close ups. Much easier to get something that feels, feels intense when you're cutting and chopping. It's much harder to make something like this where you see the full body. You see, now we're in slow mo. They're, they're, they're shotting back and forth. The empty arena gives a gladiatorial vibe. A sense of ritual. Combat visually frames the fight as mythic, not just physical. Bruce Lee is learning mid fight. Norris has the edge with his rigid karate form, but Lee adapts. He loosens his stance, increases his mobility, switches his rhythm. We got to talk over it or else we get demonetized and banned. So I gotta, I gotta figure it out anyway. We're very, we're very sad that he is no longer with us. But he leaves behind a massive legacy and a portfolio of films, including the, you know, TV shows as well. Walker, Texas Ranger, which was constantly on TV when I was a kid. Well, rest in peace to a legend. Let me tell you about Applovin. Profitable advertising made Easy with Axon AI. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. And let me also tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. So Bernie Sanders had a conversation with Claude. Video was posted yesterday. Yes. Justine Moore says he did the meme. He did the meme. Bernie says pretend to be a scary robot. I'm a scary robot. Yeah, yeah. Taylor Lorenz Time chimed in on this too. This reminds me of that tweet that was like typing I'm evil into a Google Doc and getting scared. Yeah, there's a little bit of that. Will Menidis had another take. He said a trillion dollars was spent on AI Risk teams and no one thought to hard code into the model. To not tell Bernie Sanders that you do crimes. Very funny. But this is the correct way to disclose that you're talking to an AI model. Yeah. Do you think he was inspired by the Vanity Fair piece and then immediately shipped this? The Vanity Fair piece, like, buried the lead and like it was. It was surfaced in a bunch of screenshots later that made it look like the entire article was AI generated, which it wasn't. Like, the Vanity Fair article did have access to a bunch of people and there are some interesting vignettes in there. But this is very clear from day one, what's happening. Like, he's talking to Claude and he's Investigating and, you know, sharing his fears. And I think this is a great way to actually share what you're doing and make it very clear. And so people are mixed on this. Miles Brundage says worst part of the Bernie video is using sonnet. Not sure why folks are so mad about the other stuff. That's very funny. Delicious tacos. Delicious tacos. I also smoked a grok. It's Bernie like this. No, no, don't, don't click that. But you can imagine what happens there and then. Yeah, Hope's Revenge did. Made the card for us. Thank you. Signed, signed in there. It's great. Anyway, let's move over to Montana. One and only Moonlight Basin. There's a property that made it into the timeline. Ooh, indoor pool. New. Okay. This is a new hotel. Got to visit the property a few weekends ago with. I saw some promotional material from. It is. It is absolutely stunning. Okay. I want to have Sam, the founder of Cross harbor, the developer on the show because he is, he's basically in my view, felt like he was the mayor of Big Sky. He's developed and all these incredible properties. Donated a hospital to Big sky too. Just said, here's the hospital. That's cool. For the local community, which is amazing. Does it have zebras? No zebras. Does it have tortoises? For 5.1 million, this safari like estate comes with zebras. Oh, you got a solution to my problem? I need zebras. Animals realm three at California's 137 Oak Hill Preserve, which has a five bedroom lodge and a helipad. I'm loving. This is. This is crazy. Okay, wait. I can't believe the value here. I feel like anything that has zebras and tortoises should be be up in the double digit zebra. I don't know how much it costs to get a zebra, but you should get like a 10x multiplier on it. Yeah, for sure. So it's like, it's like having an AI researcher visited Africa for the first time in the 80s, he said. But his heart never left. He. He proposed to his now wife, Bernadette Kraft in a hot air. In a hot air balloon that's elite above the Serengeti National Park. The couple got married in Nairobi, Kenya in 1990. In 1988 and two decades after, two decades ago, after taking their three sons to Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, Brian started wondering how he could bring some of the African experience closer to home. Can I recreate a mini Africa that's a short distance away from our house? Thus began a years Long process of developing a roughly 137 acre safari like sanctuaries in Ione, California. Is that Ione or Ione? I don't know. With a helipad and a collection of animals including tortoises, alpine alpacas, East African plains zebras and cattle. Oni aoni. Okay, so. Now approaching the age of 70, Kraft, who is a commercial real estate broker, entrepreneur and aspiring screenwriter, is listing the vacation property for $5.1 million. Approximately 15 animals are included in the offering. That's only less than a 10x multiple per animal. Known as Oak Hill Preserve, the estate is about 40 miles from Sacramento where the crafts live. The animals roam freely on the property with access to plenty of water and grass. Kraft likes to drive around the estate in an old pickup truck he outfitted with benches in the back and lights in the front and rear. The idea is to go looking for animals like you would on a safari. Craft assembled the property by buying three separate parcels over a five year stretch starting in 2007. It had the right amount of open space, like a savannah and the right amount of trees like you're in a thicket. Craft improved the land, a former cattle ranch, bit by bit, starting with no climb. Fences, roads and underground power lines throughout the property. Kraft said he tried to evoke Africa with curved roads and buildings with rounded edges. One of the first structures he built was a bunkhouse for a group of friends. I've got a group of knuckleheads, he said. I did it with them in mind. It was a guy thing. The wives put up with all of us. Someone says knuckleheads, knuckleheads. And you don't immediately think of a specific group. This is amazing that this is California. Just driving around this California city state and just seeing zebras roaming is amazing. Ostriches. This is. This is a treat. This is a treat. A few years ago, Kraft said his friends chipped in to buy him a Jeep with animal print paint. We were all having breakfast. All of a sudden I hear the theme of out of Africa, he recalled. Then one of the guys pulled up in the jeep. It was quite a surprise. He completed the main lodge on the property around 2018. Spanning around 4,200 square feet, it has four, five bedrooms. There's a cafe for dining near a creek in the property, as well as entertaining space that Kraft calls the cigar bar. John, you have to get this place. This is extremely me. This is so you. This is extremely me. Kraft said that he is at the estate every week. It's basically just A family getaway. His children and their friends spend time there too. And his oldest son got married there. Wow. Why is he selling? Why is he selling? What's wrong? This has got to be some Jurassic park style thing where he's been doing some rare zebra crossbreeds that are about to take over. He's like, yeah, the electric fence works well. It's no climb. You're like. But they've learned to fly. I'm not exactly sure. The property has as many outdoor amenities, including a basketball court. That's going to be big. Basketball's making a comeback. Craft selling has been sweet, but he promised his wife to list the property when he turns 70. Oh, okay. That's when. That's when you should be selling your primary home, moving to the. To your. To your ranch. Okay, I'm. How far is it? I own. Ione in Amador county is home to wineries and equestrian properties. And it has become a second home market for people from the Sacramento area. The local luxury market. Strong. Yeah, it's really far, but it has a helipad. Yeah. Six and a half hours straight shot, maybe seven hours straight shot in a car. But if my plan to ban speed limits happens and you can drive there 200 miles an hour instead of 65, you'll get there in two hours. It's a flat two hours right now from San Francisco. But get this by train, it'll only take you six hours. Wait, did you guys miss this line? It says one of his friends discovered what he believes to be a century old gold mine. Wait, really? Okay, he's just prank. He's pranking everyone right now. This is crazy. He just. I think he wanted to just show off his. I think he just wanted to show off his ranch. So he's like, yeah, I'm selling. I'm selling. He's not selling this. There's no way. Zero. He just wanted the. He just wanted the journal feature. We do. We do need to get this guy on the show, though. He seems like he's just had a great life and great time. Seems like a good, good person to learn the ins and outs of commercial real estate from. Quickly, let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely. Connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud and improve lending. Now with AI and somebody who is selling is Orlando Bloom. He put his longtime Malibu home on the market for $12 million. He spent millions redoing the four bedroom house. Now it's for sale. It can be you. It is above El Matador State Beach. You're going to have to tell me if that's a good beach. Is this. It is a fantastic beach. Okay. It was the primary home for a full decade. A lot of tourists there. A lot of tourists. Okay. Which is somewhat of a downside. Somewhat of a downside. Okay. So it's in a gated community. Stunning. It's in a gated community. Only Jordi can tell us if it's a goated community, though. The Malibu house has interiors by the artist and furniture designer Roy McMaken. Blum did an extensive renovation that cost more than twice what he paid for the house. He bought the house in. Where he bought it in. Sold. He sold its separate Malibu house in 2024 for 4.1 million. How much did he actually buy the house for? I forget. But 2.5. 2.5. And then I guess he spent more than 5 renovating it and now he's looking for 12. So he said he's reluctant to let go of the Malibu house, but he rented it out last year and realized that he likely was not going back there. It felt like it might be the right time to let it go, he said. And he's somebody that picks up the phone when the Journal's calling, which we love to hear. Listing agent is Chris Cortazo. No way. Again, Cortazo. Basically, Chris has almost half of all the high end listings in Malibu. Do you know how he described the ground floor when Orlando Bloom bought this house? He described the ground floor as a bit higgledy piggledy, which is a great line. It was a bit higgledy bigglety, but I needed it for my knuckleheads. I needed it for my knuckleheads. He said he's got the most amazing drives through the Malibu Canyons. He's very. That is true. It has a pool, a jacuzzi and a sauna, I believe. And so you can go check that out. There are some other amazing properties in the mansion section, but we will have to get to those later. First, let me tell you about Vanta Automate Compliance and Security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And let me also tell you about graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams and GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And without further ado, let's bring in our first guest of the show. RF Kenmore is in the restroom waiting room to the TBPN Ultra Dome. He's a menswear insider and we can give him a couple minutes because There is a Tequila billionaire who is selling a Balinese style Hawaii home for $32.5 million. It's designed to look like a temple. The house on Kiholo Bay was built in Indonesia, disassembled and then rebuilt in Hawaii. That is crazy. Billionaire John Paul DeJoria's Hawaii home has traveled almost as much as he has. I like this home. Just take the home, bring it to another. That's pretty remarkable island. So in the 80s he had the Balinese style Bali from Bali, that home designed and constructed by artisans in Indonesia, then disassembled and shipped to Hawaii's big island where it was rebuilt on a waterfront lot. The process cost a couple million dollars. He's a co founder of the Tequila brand Patron and the hair care products company John Paul Mitchell Systems. Now the property with a shingled roof designed to resemble dragon skin is coming on the market for 32.5 million. What a remarkable property. You really haven't lived until you've gotten food poisoning in Bali. I've never been. Have you been to Bali? Couple times. Surfing? Yes. A couple times. Isn't it a really, really long flight? It's a terrible flight. It's a terrible flight. Right. It's very inconvenient. Especially when you're a college kid and you're broke. Yeah. And you're just like I used to with surf trips. I'd go and I would just search the rough dates that I'd want. Yeah. And then I would just buy the cheapest possible flight. Yeah. Which would usually involve like a 17 hour layover and like the worst place on earth. Amazing. But I would do it because my time was basically worth nothing. And it was worth it. But shouldn't you have just gone to an island that has similar like features? Closer. Like we have the Caribbean. Is there not good surfing in the Caribbean? No, no. That's actually. Yeah. You can't surf in the Caribbean. Great school. No, no. It's not to say there isn't good surfing in the Caribbean, but the Caribbean, all areas are seasonal. Right. So different times of year, it's gonna be better conditions. But the Caribbean, you have situations where like it's really good for six hours and then it's flat. Okay. Whereas Bali, you're gonna have like more consistent surf and it's an island, so you.
No, you would not do that to me. Under no circumstances we will be watching Bruce Lee fight Chuck Norris in the Way of the Dragon because this is the way that we pay our respects to Chuck Norris, who of course passed away at the age of, I think, 86. Norris, He was 86. And this is one of the most iconic fight scenes in movie history. Have you seen the Way of the Dragon? Of course. Of course not. This scene was unique. It was set inside Rome's Colosseum and it was often cited as a turning point for how martial arts were portrayed on screen, particularly because they didn't use actors. So both Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris were legitimately high level fighters. Norris was world karate champion at the time. They cast him in part because of that. And it has a much more like, grounded, credible feel as opposed to like previously more stylized kung fu films. And, and you can see this with the. Bruce Lee actually directed and choreographed this himself. So Lee had full control, so the director didn't say anything. And they do these cool, like, punch in shots. Look at this. So you're seeing nice wide. You can see exactly where he is. There's no body double. And then we're gonna zoom in. And then what are we gonna do again? We're gonna zoom in again. And so we see his face and he's just sitting there waiting. Brilliant shot. So much time to breathe and understand and feel what he's feeling. The music, footsteps, breathing, clothing, movement. The cat, of course. Any snakes? Yeah, no snakes. I don't think I haven't watched the whole thing. The camera often stays wide. This stands in contrast to something like the Bourne Identity. Very fast cuts, close ups. Much easier to get something that feels intense when you're cutting and chopping. It's much harder to make something like this where you see the full body. You see, now we're in slo mo. They're shotting back and forth. The empty arena gives a gladiatorial vibe, a sense of ritual combat. Visually frames the fight as mythic, not just physical. Bruce Lee is learning mid fight. Norris has the edge with his rigid karate form, but Lee adapts. He loosens his stance, increases his mobility, switches his rhythm. We gotta talk over it or else we get demonetized and banned. So I gotta figure it out anyway. We're very sad that he is no longer with us, but he leaves behind a massive legacy and a portfolio of films, including the TV shows as well. Walker, Texas Ranger, which was constantly on TV when I was a kid. Well, rest in peace to a legend. Let me tell you about Applovin. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon.
That is remarkable. Trung fan says do things that don't scale. Classic founder energy. Yeah, definitely. Definitely that. What else is going on? Let's pull up this video. I don't know if Bone six minutes long. The legend Bone but Chinese entrepreneur boasts receipt of 200 Nvidia H, 200 GPUs in Beijing despite the US export ban. And then explains how he circumvents the export band. Wow. In January, twisted by Beijing based entrepreneur Sudhi on the Chinese social media platform Douyin has sparked. Wait, it's literally. You can see. Watch this, watch this. Look at that. Rewind for a second. You can see a Super Micro logo. On the Chinese social media platform Douyin has sparked significant discussion. In the video, sue boasts. Oh my God. That's like the biggest logo for Super Micro ever. Bone is. Is absolutely crazy. And this is from January. No, I'm telling you, like a lot of. I mean, I'm sure the Justice Department were working on this like earlier in this, but a lot of times, like legal action will happen, like downstream of like YouTube drama videos. Like there will be some like, you know, fake guru who's out there like running a Ponzi scheme and people will be dunking on it on social media and then it will get picked up by the. So almost a year and a quarter ago, somebody responded to Bone and says it's SMIC packaged. And Bone says, do you think SMIC is smuggling chips? Wow. And the possible family owned business in Taiwan. I won't be surprised if there are some family members who want to make.
Three, export. We were debating the flipping the iPad around, asking for a tip earlier today. And I think our joint stance was if the iPad is turned around, you got a tip. Yeah, it's just the etiquette is that you got a tip, but is there anywhere where that line crosses and you say, I can't. I can't possibly push something. Funny thing is, Erewhon asks for tips. Really? On online orders. Online orders. Wait, but there will be a human delivering it or. No, there's two separate tips. Okay. There's the person in the store who puts the things in the bag, and then there's the delivery person and they flip it over twice. Yeah. The game theory of this stuff is always hard because I feel like, I don't know, there's regulations on, like, taxes on tips, but it's very unclear if companies actually funnel how they distribute the tips. Like, are you tipping the person? Are the tips grouped together? Were your tips pooled when you were. Yeah, they were pooled. So even if you did a great jobs at the hotel, the valets, they pool. Yeah. Bell staff, the people that, like, take you down to your room do not pool. Huh. And that was just the rules. Oh, it's because I might be the one who parks the car. You might be the one who gets. Well, in a dynamic. In a dynamic where you have a bunch of allays that are waiting for cars, it would be a bad experience for the guest if the valets are like, they see a nice car pull in and they're like, fighting over themselves to deliver a service. Right. It should just be like, whoever's available should deliver the best possible service. Whereas Bell work is much more one on one. It's like, I'm kind of your guide on the property. I'm going to like, you know, you might have the person's cell phone, they might be texting you, et cetera. Interesting. And so it makes more sense to not pool. Well, Tip your export control, tip your federal. I did there. I did have a funny story where there was a guy, a bean air, who used to come to the property. And everyone knew that every. Every single thing. Word. We still have. We haven't successfully kind of welded into existence. Not at all. I think we're the only. I think we're the only people. We didn't come up with this term. It was delivered to us. We appropriated it anyway. There was a guy who would come to the property. Any single thing he got help with on the property, he would tip. He would tip a hundred. And so it did Cause chaos. Okay. Because then people are supposed to be like, oh, I'd love to refill your diet code. Be, like, waiting around, like, trying to be in the right spot to open a door. Because they knew it was. It was a bit. It got a bit adequate. I saw a piece of alpha Instagram reels that suggested that you tip the front desk person when you're checking in before you check in. Yeah. That always feels like a bribe, but it is the right move. This is a big thing in Vegas, right? You're supposed to put it in between when you give them the card. Oh, I saw this. Yeah. You stack the credit card and the ID and you put the $100 bill in there. That's even more likely that then they have plausible deniability. And they can be like, oh, like, here you go. Or they can be like, okay, thank you. And I'm upgrading you. And I think if at least this person on Instagram was making the case that if you average out, you're tipping $100 for every room, and you're buying, like, a $400 room, but you get $1,000 room upgrade every five. The only durable alpha is, like, you. You want to tip before the service occurs. Yes. If you tip the valet when they bring you your car. Yes. How do they know what kind of service? So if you're ordering a Starbucks and you want to make sure that they're gonna enter your order correctly and get your name right, you gotta tip up front and then say what your order is. Walk up to the counter, say, flip it over. Flip it over. I'm tipping you first. Now let's start the transaction. Any.
70% of enterprise workspaces on LINEAR are using agents. We have RF Ken Moore from the menswear industry. Insider. No, he just is a menswear. He's an insider. Insider Critic Mitch Lee from arcboats is coming on. Bucky Morse coming in person from Lightspeed. Steve Huffman, the co founder and CEO of Reddit coming on. Then Quaid from Bezel, who you know and love. He's been on the show many times. Anchor Jane from Bilt's coming on to talk about credit cards, consumer cards, all the fintech stuff he's working on. And then Michael Kratzios from the White House, he's the science and technology advisor. He's coming on to talk about the new policy proposals that the White House has put forward around artificial intelligence. But first I wanted to chat more about the breaking news from yesterday. Jeff Bezos is in talks to raise $100 billion for an AI manufacturing fund. There was a funny post that was like, he has $200 billion. Why does he need to raise more money? No conviction. No conviction. It was funny. It was like, it definitely this, this broke containment and got into kind of the anti capitalist people are not part of acts. And they were like, wait, why are you asking people for money? You have all the money. Yeah, yeah, but of course, but of course he, he wants to let other people in on the action. I do wonder what his like GP commit will be. That's what I was saying yesterday. I was like, I would expect him to be like, yeah, I'm good for 20. Yeah, yeah, 20 or 30 or something like that. I don't know, maybe he'll go even longer. But in general, I think the idea of going around the globe because he's an international person at this point, hoovering up money from all over different sovereign wealth funds and then deploying that to help rebuild the American manufacturing base is a good thing. I wrote about it today in the newsletter tvpn.com and I also tried to, you know, do some searching and think about like, what do you actually buy for $100 billion? What does a portfolio look like if it's a private equity style roll up? If you're just taking out the market caps and you're sort of assuming the debt and continue to operate the business, but then bring more efficiency to bear. What are some of the top options? What are the some of the options look like? The other thing is, I saw a very viral post about someone that seemingly read the headline and thought like, don't you have enough money already? Why all These companies and fire like they saw automation and just assume like job loss. Yeah. And when I look at this, I'm like, okay, if he's successful, we will, you know, create. We will actually start adding a bunch of new manufacturing jobs which we've been shedding. Yep. Over the last year. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So a headline number is funny. If he had done 99 billion or 101 billion, I don't think people would be making as many SoftBank comparisons. But of course, as soon as you hear $100 billion for a mega fund, you can see, you think, this guy's got vision. He's got vision. It's a vision fund for America. I like the idea of an American softbank, an American vision fund. So I'm generally pro, but of course people are going to make comparisons to SoftBank, which has had some huge winners and a few black eyes. Moss is a high volume gu. He's been the world's richest man briefly. During the dot com boom, it was reported that he was worth more than Bill Gates. It was pretty temporary, unclear exactly how much and of course there was no liquidity at the time. But he's also held the crown for the man who lost the most money in human history after losing $76 billion in two years. You're supposed to do the for that. But he made it all back. I was preemptively hitting it. Okay, yeah, yeah, he did make it all back. He's made almost $100 billion twice. I think maybe there was a moment when he had, he had the title of making $100 billion twice. One on Alibaba and then the second one on arm. He's made money on Nvidia and lots of other things, but the idea of an American softbank, especially one focused on revitalizing American manufacturing, I like that idea. There are a million reasons why this is an important project. Job creation, economic independence, national security, et cetera. And you might just get more cool stuff like as manufacturing gets cheaper, like the tools that you use, the cars that you drive, the washing machine in your home, the tires on your cars, all these different things get better, not just cheaper, but actually unlock new capabilities and new things that people enjoy. And so I'm in favor of more manufacturing, more economic development, basically. I don't think the project is done by any means. And so the question about like, you know, Jeff Bezos role, like he's a great operator and I think he's the right person to take the reins and actually deliver here. So like Masa, Jeff Bezos has been through the ups and downs of the dot com boom and bust. At one point, Jeff Bezos lost 85% of his net worth in like two years. But he made it back. He did make it back and more. He was worth like 8 or 9 billion and got down to his last 1 billion, basically because of the stock drop in Amazon. But he built it. But he not only kept Amazon alive, which I think everyone knows, that Amazon went up during the dot com bubble and then crashed and then built back up, but he also kept Blue Origin alive during that time because he's founded Blue Origin in 2000. Before the crash. I didn't know that. Yeah, before the crash. So he was. Was it before SpaceX? Yeah, before SpaceX. Whoa. Yeah. So, because I. Elon. I assume that Blue Origin was just memetic with Elon. No, no, no, he did it earlier. Wow. And so he. So he kept Blue Origin alive. And can you imagine how stressful it is? You're like, okay, I'm worth 10 billion. Certainly I can have a little side project as a treat. And you're like, okay, I just lost 85% of my money. I deserve. What was. I deserve a side project that loses. Yes, 20 million a month. Exactly. Yeah. I don't know how much they really. But like, but that doesn't seem unreasonable. But he was able to keep it going. Of course, Blue Origin was a slow story all the way up until like last year when they landed New Glenn. And so he kept both alive and he's never given up on the project. Blue Origin, that always has felt behind SpaceX for the two decades that it's been operating, but is now sort of unlocking new capabilities and is going to. Yeah, Turtle mode for sure, but it's working. And so, like, regardless of the fact that, you know, SpaceX is still ahead of Blue Origin, you have to give him credit for like operating that company efficiently and actually delivering a product that we all saw go up and come back. And so like the rockets did go up and land and come back and he's delivered people to space and back. And so he's, he's like achieved the goal and not lost all the money and not put the company in jeopardy. And so like, clearly there's some operational. That's a narrative violation. It is a narrative violation. What makes Bezos uniquely equipped to take on this type of project is the nature of his business over the last few decades. So he's never really had the zero marginal cost luxuries afforded to other pure play Internet founders. You Think about Mark Zuckerberg. It's always been, except with his ads business. Yeah, he has that now, but that's very new for a long time. Very real contributor. Very real contributor now. But even then it is much thinner margin than a Google or a Meta. And it always has been because they've always operated in the real world and they've been competing with Walmart and Barnes and Noble and Vromen's and all the other big gross margins. Scare me. Yeah, he's always had thin, thin margins until aws. Really. AWS was the first. Like, okay, this is like a monster cash cow. And even aws doesn't have 80% gross margins. It is a cash cow, but it's a different shape. And of course you go back to the Jeff Bezos lore and he had the door desk and the whole business was very scrappy for a long time. And Amazon's just always interfaced with the physical world. So it's been, even though it's a software company and a tech company, it's always interfaced with the physical world. And they've had to focus on operational efficiencies to scale. So in 2012, Amazon bought Kiva Systems, which turned into Amazon Robotics. And that's a big risk to buying a big company. And we think that, you know, if this turns into, if this hundred billion dollar fund turns into sort of a private equity roll up, you're going to ask the question, can Bezos buy a company for 1 billion, 5 billion, 10 billion, 50 billion, who knows? And operate it and scale it and actually continue to deliver value. And he certainly did that with Kiva Robotics, which turned into Amazon Robotics, which delivered over a million robots that are deployed across the operations network. So from fulfillment centers, warehouse automation, inventory flow, last mile delivery, all of these require tight integration between hardware and software to run smoothly. Bezos clearly loves this stuff and you can actually see it when you look at his face whenever he gives a tour of an Amazon warehouse or blue origin facility. He's just beaming and, and he's absolutely obsessed with this technology and the physical world. And so the question I had was like, what should he buy? Yeah, the other thing is like, you know, seeing all the different volume across Amazon and being like, well, it'd be pretty convenient if that was made here or this was made here or at least the, some of the components were made here and it wasn't, you know, you didn't just have assembly here. Yeah, I mean, yeah, there isn't. I hadn't considered that narrative, but there is A different flow where you're not sitting there being like great. I love that so much of our volume is having to be shipped or flown across the ocean. Ton of that. Yeah. And then also he's seen attacks from TEMU and Shein and Alibaba and Aliexpress and a whole bunch of direct from manufacturing plant to customer. And how do you respond to that? Maybe getting into the deeper in the supply chain makes sense. Although I'm not entirely sure that there's so little reporting at this point. It's the only line is that he'll be buying manufacturing companies. So there's a lot in the supply chain. So I wanted to dig through some stuff that could potentially be in the crosshairs for Bezos. The first is Lear. They manufacture seats and electronic systems for the automotive industry. And a lot of these companies have huge revenues and small market caps. So Lear did 23 billion in 2025 revenue. The market cap is around 5 billion. And so the business is operationally complex. I mean on a PE ratio it trades at like I think 13 priced earnings. And so like you have these high revenues because you're in the manufacturing business but you're low margin. Yeah. And this has been some of the concern around VCs investing in manufacturing businesses. Yep. Are they used to it and just a general concern that you know, they might today be getting valued on a revenue multiple but as they get to the public markets people expect them to be valued on, on earnings. And that is very different story. Yeah. Lear, interestingly not the maker of the Lear jet which sold to the Gates company which is not affiliated with Bill Gates. I was like is there a link here? But there's not. But Learjet and Lear are two different companies, although they both make physical things. But there's a, there's an opportunity here for the Bezos thesis that we are are sort of gesturing towards. The business is operationally complex and AI can be applied across plant scheduling, supplier forecasting, visual inspections and more. This whole thesis of like the colors get less blue, there's upskilling that happens in the facility and you're able to produce more at scale. Borgwarner is another example. They're a scaled auto supplier. 14 billion in 2025 revenue. Market cap is 9.5 billion. They're more focused on propulsion and power related systems. They literally make turbochargers for internal combustion engines. Although they have shifted their business a lot to be focused on electronic components, both in terms of making battery packs, motors. But they're actually already getting into selling Turbine generator systems for data centers. They're part of the AI boom already. And there's more opportunities to grow into different industrial power applications. Hexcel is another company. They're a leading producer of carbon fiber reinforcements and resonance systems for aerospace. They're guiding to 2 billion in revenue. But the market cap is 5 billion. So a little pricier on a price to sales ratio. Here's a fun one. Good year. Not only do you get blimps, which has got to be important, if you're trying to go blimp for blimp with some Sergey Brin, you just, just jump to the front of the line. It's only a 1 point. This revenue multiple is criminal. Yeah. So the market cap for Goodyear is 1.8 billion and revenue was 18 billion. So they're, they're trading at a point. There's like a VC funded tire company. It's like 100x revenue. Like we're going to go through a thousand x multiple compression over the next decade. Yes, you will. But Goodyear's sort of the classic AI for manufacturing. They got to focus, they got to get investing about their advertising blimp monopoly and scaling that business. Quality control is really critical. There's opportunities for downtime optimization. So if you can have better systems that limit downtime, you can produce more tires. The tire market is extremely competitive. You, you see Chinese tires on cars more and more. And so these are thin, thin, thin margin companies and that's why the multiple's so low. But getting good. Scariest moment of my life in a car. Chinese tire, Chinese tires, old Chinese tires, old Chinese tires. But a lot of people go in, they say, I need new tires. Just give me whatever's cheapest. And so if you're competing on price and you're a low cost supplier, every dollar counts. On the bigger side, you have Rockwell Automation. I don't know if you've ever seen those videos for the Rockwell Turboencabulator. Have you ever seen these? We should pull this up. Let me find this combobulator. It's one of the best marketing videos. Turboencabulator. Let me find this. The Rockwell retroencabulator. I got it here. We'll watch this. It's a two minute video and we'll see if you can. Yeah. Any of these. Yeah, we got these. If we can pull this up. And let's play here at Chrysler Motors, automotive operations research has been proceeding to develop a line of heavy duty transmissions that establishes new standards for reliability, durability and quality with customer Needs. As our primary focus, work is proceeding on the crudely conceived idea of an instrument that would not only supply inverse. I think this is Chrysler's like joke. Let's play the one that I, that I shared from Rockwell. This is the good folks at Rockwell Automation who. That was a cool video. Headquarters research has been proceeding to develop a line of automation products that establishes new standards for quality, technological leadership and operating excellence. With customer success as our primary focus, work has been proceeding on the crudely conceived idea of an instrument that would not only provide inverse reactive current use in unilateral phase detractors, but would also be capable of automatically synchronizing cardinal gram meters. Such an instrument, comprised of Dodge gears and bearings, Reliant electric motors, Allen Bradley controls and all monitored by Rockwell software, is Rockwell Automation's retroencabulator. Retroencabulator. Now basically the only new principle involved is that instead of power being generated by the relative motion of conduct conductors and fluxes, it's produced by the modial interaction of magnetoreluctance and capacitive directance. Passive interaction. The original machine had a base plate of pre famulated ammolite surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two spurving bearings were in a direct line with a panametric fan. The lineup consisted simply. It's just, it's just like such a funny in joke for electrical engineers because it's just a whole bunch of like slop basically. Like oh, none of those terms mean anything but it really, I don't know, good startup launch video concept. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It really, I mean it helps you like detect like are you in group out group basically very, very fine. But they are. What? Well were you able to clock it or were you like. Oh, that sounds good. Yeah, I mean it sounded silly. It sounds silly. So Rockwell Automation is on the bigger side, but they sit right at the intersection of factory automation software and control. So although that video is a joke, Rockwell does work on factory automation already. So the thesis with this one is that the business is already dedicated to industrial automation and so it's less of a turnaround, but it's a control point for pushing AI to thousands of other factories here deeper in the supply chain. It's expensive at 40 billion, but potentially in the budget. Do you think there's a world where he just buys a Ford Motor company? It would obviously, I mean. Yeah, wouldn't. He would have to lever up. Yeah, but what is Ford now? I thought Ford is 45, but, but I'm not, but he's not going to just drop like raise 100 billion and then, and then buy a company entirely with equity. I feel like it will be deeper in the supply chain than a brand, but I don't know. It's possible. But he might say, isn't he already a big investor in Rivian? Yeah, sure. So like looking deeper into that supply chain and there's a few other car companies that he'd been involved in. I just don't know that there's that like that's where the big opportunity is. It might be deeper in the supply chain, like bending the metal that goes into the bumper, that this and that. And like you know, it's 12 steps deep. It's more boring, but it's even thinner margins, less brand risk and brand value, but really focused on applying that actual commercial excellence. But I mean truly your guess is as good as mine. There's very little to go off of. Also there's a link to Project Prometheus which is the AI project. And so there's a chance that this whole project is more aligned with the software singularity. Software only singularity. And you wind up with, you know, buying a lot of things, but everything's in line with like more data centers. And this is more of like let's put the $100 billion to work towards building, you know, compute capacity for Project Prometheus. That feels like not what we're hearing, but it is, it is one thing on like the solar side, right? Yeah, yeah, that'd be interesting. And then there's also the option that we get some sort of Elon style megacorp with Blue Origin involved at some point. Like, you know, Xai and SpaceX merged. It's possible that Blue Origin and this vehicle come together with Project Prometheus in some, in some way and then that goes public as a new entity. A lot of these. He's, he's actually mentioned the whole space data center thing before, I think a while ago. Wasn't it like more than a year ago? I don't think. Yeah, I think they also just filed something with the fcc. Okay, yeah. For the new cloud. Yeah, yeah. It was like 50,000 satellites. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so he wants like a direct Starlink competitor. And so when you think about the full AI stack, if he's really, you know, off, off planet, you know, pilled and thinks he can get, thinks he can get there, even if it's like a year or two behind or I guess what's the timeline for his Starlink competitor. That would be like three years behind. Four years. Yeah. I mean, for, for the moon. He's supposed to be ahead, right? Oh, yeah. So maybe this will all go on the moon. Well, either way, it's a big move from an experienced operator with lots of opportunity ahead and it'll be fun to follow along. And I'm glad he's back in the game in a big way. Yeah. Just doing random, you know, side projects. Bottle service or bottle service. He's got to be spending more time and energy securing America's future. Securing bottle service. Well, you know, I mean, the guy can take a weekend off, but. But one photo from his weekend flies a lot further than he could be completely locked in and just grinding 80 hours and then he goes gets bottle service. Just one time. He was just there for 30 minutes grinding on the yacht. Maybe. You never know. Anyway, let's first tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll, benefits and hr built to evolve with modern small and medium sized businesses. And let's also tell you about Figma. No matter where your idea starts, Figma may cloud code, codex or a sketch. The Figma canvas is where ideas connect and products take shape. Build in the right direct with Figma. And let's go over to Jensen on the all in podcast engineer at the end of the year I'm going to ask him how.