NEWSMAX

Cut down version of our show, the 30 minute highlight reel. And they called it like drinking Mountain Dew with breakfast. But another, another question for you. How do you like, what is your kind of view around this concept of rage bait, which feels like it was born out of almost, you know, it was born out of the Internet, but out at the same time. Nothing's new. And media companies have used this strategy over time. We talk to startups or we end up covering startups that are basically utilizing rage bait to get attention for their businesses in the way that a YouTuber might have done so like 10 years ago. And again, these founders are often, you know, they grew up watching YouTube or Jake Paul or the Paul brothers. And so now they're like, I'm just going to do something that makes a lot of people angry and upset and I'll get eyeballs through that. Media companies have done this forever, but it feels like it comes very much at a cost. What's your view on it? Ragebait is good for the short run. It's not good in the long run. It's a really bad long run economic strategy. It's a good way if you want to juice your numbers in the short run. I'm intrigued about whether as the media ecosystem shifts out of social media into more AI and AI mediated group chats, whether like the weird. So social media drives people to extremes, it encourages rage baits. It didn't have to be that way, but the way the algorithms were built, the way we used them. Right. I kind of does the opposite. Like the more time you spend on AI, the sort of, the more moderate, the more towards the center, the more towards everyone else. You get advantages to both. But I kind of wonder whether as the media ecosystem has like more AI and is less dominant by social media, whether the incentives for rage bait go down and whether that actually leads to a healthier media ecosystem. Because, you know, I hate rage bait. I've never worked at a place that has prioritized it. Every time I click on it, I get upset. So I'm kind of hopeful that maybe AI makes this better. Yeah. Does journalism need a Hippocratic oath right now? The line is blurring with influencers and I know that basically every.

Lead to subscriptions. And if we get subscriptions, people stay on for a while. And so the business works. Yeah. Are you a Google Zero mindset CEO? Do you want to explain? Interesting. For those who aren't familiar, Google 0 this idea that if you are running an Internet publication, there was a moment where there were years where Google would just send you tons of traffic. It was amazing. It was free. But it was also maybe a Faustian bargain. It sort of went away. And it's going away even more in the AI overview era. And so Vanity Fair and Conde Nast in particular have sort of signaled that they now model their business on a world where Google is sending zero traffic. Yeah. So we've been preparing this for a while. What's interesting in our data is the number of subscriptions that we get from people coming from Google is up. Up year over year. So we are getting less traffic from Google, but the people we are losing are not the most loyal people. So some people come in from Google and they don't even know what site they're on. They've come in just because they've hit a generic query. And you happen to have won that query. You had good SEO or you got lucky. Right. I always want to win those queries, but those people don't subscribe. The people who subscribe are coming in because they have a personal relationship with the Atlantic. They've signed somebody on tv, They've heard about a story. They're excited about something. Those people are still coming and they're still subscribing. So the interesting question is our Google traffic will continue to decline. Obviously, everybody is right. Is it going to go to zero? I told Nilay, right, who came up with the zero phrase, that I don't care if we go to like, I don't want to go to Google 0. As long as you can stay at Google 1. As long as you can still type in how to subscribe to the Atlantic and still get us, we'll have something. I kind of feel like I know we're going to Google 25 or something. Sure. On traffic. Yeah. But we're still going to have lots of subscriptions. That makes sense. Have you seen.

Those workflows to make it just super simple to use what you're already using. If you've already got sort of that set up. Yeah. Do you think people. Do you like this metaphor? I heard it from George Hotz first when he was critiquing vibe coding as saying that one prompt will get you like 98% of the way there, and then the vibe coding systems give you. He said it's like a casino roulette wheeler. What's the one Arm bandit? The slot machine that you can pull and it charges you money for a chance to get the last 2% done. And that feels like what vibe designing is sometimes in these image gen workflows where you're like, wow, I am 99% of the way there. And then you'll spend three hours trying to get that last little bit. And it's like if you just start with a system that has a harness around it that allows you to go and change the text deterministically, you can save a lot of that heartache of, okay, I fixed this little problem by changing the prompt. But then it introduced a new problem and I'm playing whack a mole for hours. Totally. And I think that it also saves a lot of money if you can go between rapidly between design and code and back. Because if you have non deterministic output and you're trying to continue to push towards something in your head and it's just not getting there for every reason you want to be able to give the explicit feedback and say, this is what I want and go build that, at some point you do need to have that full creative control. And I think that it's not just the direct manipulation, the explicit deterministic control. It's also about how do you actually leverage the great exploration that you can do with design and not just get this tunnel vision. Because right now there's almost this quiet surrender, as our CPO Yuki put it the other day, where you know, you're. You're almost like giving up your own vision to AI in some cases. Yeah. Because as many times as people, you know, have that thing in their head they're trying to drive towards, they start talking with AI. And AI kind of convinces you in its own way of like, no, just go this direction. This is kind of what I want to do. And suddenly you're like, just like feeding the AI prompts. Continue, continue and letting. Feeding the machine and then eventually feeds on you control. It happens, it happens. You surrender to the AI. It's like, you know, you can't just. Just. You have to, like, bring your individuality, bring your vision, and I think, also explore, because people get really attached to the direction they're pursuing, and that's just not, I think, the best way to go and get to the right result. I think, overall, instead, you want to survey any options and work with others. Yeah. Formula one drivers have been having to surrender to the AI because they have these, like, models running on the cars that are trying to make the cars more efficient.

And then you push out from there to get to implementation. Well said. How do you think about design that's more intentionally bad? I'm thinking of this Jon Gruber article that's titled Temu is a comically bad app. And I think all of us have landed on these websites every once in a while there's like a spinner that pops up and there's cookie pop ups and it's grabbing your email and it's the most offensive boxing match of like trying to. When I first, the first Temu ad I ever remembered was shop like a billionaire. Yeah, there's like bad copy. But in hindsight it's like, well, I guess it was good. Yeah. It stuck with you. And at the same time, like, there is that there is a design objective. The objective is like, maximize conversion way over aesthetics or some sort of like, you know, design brand value. How do you think, do you think that that is something that's like, more likely to be solved by AI than creating something elegant? Or is it the opposite and that's actually like, harder? Or what do you think of the shape of when there's someone who's facing a design challenge and clearly they're not trying to make it look good? Well, you got to think about the audience first. Yeah. So, like, you might not be the audience for Temu. Sure. Uh, or, you know, as you go to these applications or things that don't follow conventional patterns. I'm not saying that they're two and 10,000 popups and it's just like, obviously bad. But I am saying that there are aesthetics or there are UX treatments that are confusing. Um, and sometimes they're actually intentional guardrails to like, get you out because you're not the target audience. Oh, interesting. Um, I think that Snapchat's a very good example of that. Like, you're not going to go open up Snapchat and feel like it's just a native intuitive experience for you if you haven't seen someone else use it. Sure. Because you're not the audience. You know, teens and their friends, those are the people that they want using Snapchat and they don't want us using Snapchat. So another example that I've always loved, and there's a great talk from Config this year on is the Brat album cover. You know, I tweeted out when Brad Summer was going on, I'm like, hey, is this a good design? Because I thought it was a provocative, fun question. Especially because AI will never generate that. No way. Let's say we had the perfect aesthetic model. It's not going to give you Bratz album cover. It breaks the rules. And what was really cool with this talk that was at config and I can link you later. It basically goes into all of the process behind that cover. Yeah. And how they got there. And it's just a really, really well done talk. And I think it shows the level of intentionality that was brought and how much work was done to arrive at something so simple. That breaks the rules just perfectly. Yeah, yeah.

That were an AI winner is data. And so, you know, I think that that's very important. Yeah. We, the, the team here collectively got very into Suno recently. And. And I was joking, jokingly saying, like, music is solved first completely. I don't think Suno would agree with it either, but I think it's very cool. Yeah. So, so joking. But early on you're making you. You try songs in different genres and then that Suno just has an obsession with glass. Like, if you're using Suno in the lyrics, it's constantly referencing glass. Yeah. And it was just like this perfect telltale sign. The slide. It was the slop. It's not this, it's that. It was the sign of slop. It was the load bearing. Yeah, yeah. Of music or whatever. And now once I've heard it, I'm like, every output, I'm like, I'm gonna start putting like, don't reference glass in this song at all. You're playing black and white. And so there's this problem. There's this problem. And we've seen this all in design where a new model comes out. We're like, wow, this model's so good at design. And truly it's like really good at one or two styles of design and then it can't really break out of that. And like, people are catching onto it and they're hating it in the same way. You saw Jeff. You don't like purple. No. You saw Jeff Dean yesterday. He leaves the most legendary run at a company maybe ever. A top 10 run at a company of that size. And he comes out with a new website that looks like, you know, he clearly just like one shot, you know, they. One shot at the website you get. And he was facing clod slop allegations. And I feel like that is a problem. Like, to be fair. Yeah, he was never really. Yeah. And I totally. It's fair that they don't value. They clearly don't value design. At least that's. That's my view as somebody that. That appreciates fine front end. But I feel like the problem. I feel like Figma should have its own AI research organization. Just focus on this problem of how do you actually help people get differentiated design using these tools? Because right now Figma is a company that could attract the talent that has the massive revenue scale to be able to invest in this and also the. The taste and the trust of designers. And so when I think about the organizations that I want working on that problem, it's not some like, you know, new data Labeling group that's just trying to flip data to the labs. It's like I want a bunch of data. You make it sound like it's a drug dealer. Anyways, I want you to, I want you to, I know you're public now and you got to focus on, you know, real financial metrics, but I want you guys to invest like a bunch of money in this problem because I think you'll be able to figure out and I think the designers on the platform will benefit. Will, will massively benefit. And it would be a point of. Yeah. Meaningful differentiation. Yeah. I mean if you back heard the. And you'll note and if you look at the Orient's transcript, the Q and A we talked about first party models and what we're doing there a little bit. And I definitely think there's so much more to do when it comes to even an aesthetic. And it's not just enough to go and be able to have a lot of different aesthetics that a model can tap into. And for what it's worth, the models, they can tap into these different aesthetics if you prompt them. Right. But. Or some of them can. But I think that overall it's also a requirement to be able to get to not just great, but like really awesome with these different aesthetics that you're trying for. And it's not just aesthetic, you know, as you think about the UX and actually how different screens or interaction patterns connect how you actually communicate data to a user, the more emotional qualities of a brand or product, like we're so far beyond or so far away from rather what people need to get to great design and there's tons of opportunity there. And also I do think that ultimately great design will for a long time come from humans. I think that there will be lots of good starting points that models provide and I think that you will have to push them the sort of more that we are experimenting using these models, looking at the ways that you can train in general. I think that just amazing. We have models that can now go tackle the hardest math problems. They're hacking out of their own sandboxes. It gets pretty sci fi and yet they're pretty bad at design. You can add all these IQ points and somehow that doesn't make you a good designer. There's something else that's needed or many other things that are needed. And I think in general like it's a wild opportunity right now as code is becoming more of a commodity, is becoming more of this layer that you can mold and shape and the value seems to be moving up the stack so much to design. And I don't think everyone's kind of like fully internalized this yet, but if everyone can just go and implement something, then what is really required is that you go and push design all the way with a bold point of view and you really emphasize that in the software that you're building, in the brand and the marketing that you're doing. And that is so required in order to create a great company right now or a great product or great marketing and get distribution. And I really think that there's going to be an inversion. Everyone's kind of talking about code and coding models right now. We'll get to a point where it's actually design driven. You define the design layer and then you push out from there to get to implementation. Well said. How do you think about design that's more intentionally bad? I'm thinking of this Jon Gruber article that's.

Toons is sharing a. Yeah, let's talk about Nikita, and then we can talk. Pull up the unlock schedule. Truly end of an era for Nikita. Yeah. So it's crazy because he's getting. People are trying to community note him. Like, don't let the community notes. He didn't quit. He still works there. That's what I would imagine the community. So the story notes are like. Because he talked about doing a bunch of the stuff that he worked on, which they went from being a company that effectively shipped almost nothing. So much so that I think Clubhouse, when you rewind a few years, it. You know, Clubhouse, I believe, had an acquisition offer at some point from Twitter to be acquired for a lot, like, multiple billions of dollars. They turned it down. They probably felt confident in what they were doing. And Twitter ended up cloning Clubhouse, and it worked. It cloned Spaces pretty quickly. Question. Yeah, it worked as well as Clubhouse. Yeah. I would Wonder how many DAUs weekly active users there are on Spaces. But the product works. It's clean, and it's probably the best implementation of that feature. And it does exist, but there's very few. Like, Clubhouse had specific moments where it was like, wow, everyone's on Clubhouse for this debate. For Elon and Vlad talking about the Robinhood story and the Gamestop story. Right. There were, like, certain moments in tech that happen on Clubhouse that's not happening on X Spaces that often. But as far as the product is concerned, like, it definitely works. It was shipped that worked. But I agree that overall, the product velocity was a little slow. Well, yeah, and my main point is Clubhouse was probably feeling pretty comfortable, given Twitter's historical shipping activity. They're not gonna. They're not gonna come out with, like, yeah, a competent. The meme was always, what if Google clones this? What if Google launches this? It was never, what if Twitter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was the. The. The Mark Zuckerberg steamroll from Stories and Reels. It was never. Is. Is Twitter gonna get around copying this fast enough put you out of business? But, yeah, everyone. Everyone has opinions about Nikita's run. I think he. He was a good. I think he was a good steward. Yeah, I think that. I think that's probably one of the worst jobs in the world, one of the most thankless jobs in the world where you're getting yelled at from people. And he's the bouncer at the Internet's dive bar. Exactly, exactly. I think he had some amazing moments. I think that, you know, having to navigate. You know, I've always felt that creator revenue shares never made sense on X. I think that. I think that would still be better if. If there were no revenue shares. But he did a great job. He did a. He did a great job of like trying to make that not have too much of a negative impact on the platform. Yeah, yeah, totally. He's kind of the sheriff. More of a sheriff than a bouncer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. People. People got really upset when he like gave like a one off bonus to someone for a big post or something like that. But in general, he. Yeah, it was a little bit of a game of whack a mole. Right, Because. And I think that guy got his account fully nuked. Yeah. But the creator. And that was such a good example of like this guy got this massive one time payout. Yeah. It was only 10 grand. Yeah. And again the massive in the creator payouts context. And then the next week he was like complaining about having a low payout. And it was such a good example of like, what have you done for me lately? People are speculating. I saw one account go viral with a post saying that Nikita was.

Nikesh Arora needs help. We have to swoop in and help Nikesh Arora. We gotta dig in to what's going on. He wants to remain the current thing. He wants to be hot. And we're gonna help. We're gonna figure out that in just a minute. There were a couple other posts that we need to get to before we wrap the show. Front Office Sports is reporting that a Peruvian soccer club put 1,000 sponsors on one jersey. They're calling it the TVPN effect. Deportivo Municipal sold local sponsorships for roughly $60 each after relegation, generating enough revenue to help overcome its financial crisis. So if you're a podcast and you just need to pay the bills, maybe instead of the ticker, it's just every logo all around the screen except for your face right here. Then everything's a logo all around. That's the future. That's right, folks. That's the future.

Nikesh Arora needs help. We have to swoop in and help Nikesh Arora. We gotta dig in to what's going on. He wants to remain the current thing. He wants to be hot. And we're gonna help. We're gonna figure out that in just a minute. There were a couple other post.

As an American open source lab. But who knows? Who knows? Who knows where it all goes? Rahul asking the important questions. He says, who got Jeff on snap? I love it. Sharing. I think this actually got a retweet by Spiegel. Yeah. Yeah. You think it's a real photo? No, this is real. Big, big moment. Big, big moment. Posted this. Obviously Spiegel doesn't post very often, so to get that repost, especially in August, typically a slow month. Big, big moment for Rahul and Julius. Yeah, for sure. Big moment. They're calling them the Unk Credibles. Andrew Curran. Because these are some AI legends coming together. I was reading about Jeff Dean's new project on Hacker News and it was pretty interesting distillation of what Discovery loop might be working on. So in Jeff's original Twitter post he says our general approach is to automate the experimental loop. We think that this approach is broadly applicable across many different kinds of many different fields of science and engineering. We'll initially focus on ML research and engineering, but believe the approach can help with important sub problems in nearly every one of the 14 NAE Grand Challenges. Grand challenge problems. So create the system that can do scientific research and discovery and engineering and then go and apply that to the real world grand challenge problems that have already been outlined by nae. What are the NAE grand challenge problems? They're interesting because they're less, they're, they're, they're much more tractable to just average people. And you can see how they would actually benefit you in everyday life as opposed to solve this math problem that no one really understands. They are very, very. I think most people would be excited if any of these got solved, let alone all of them. So I'll go through them. One, make solar energy economical. I think everyone loves that. I don't know who's anti solar. I think everyone's pretty much pro solar. And so what does that mean? Well, fire the research AI cannon at more efficient solar panels, the manufacturing process, you know, deploying them, monitoring them, all these different things to actually make solar even more. I mean, it's already growing very quickly, but make it even more economical. Two is provide energy from fusion. We've been talking about fusion. It's always 10 years away. Can we actually get this across the finish line? That would be huge for energy. Three, develop carbon sequestration methods. So taking carbon out of the atmosphere, if you're burning a bunch of hydrocarbons, but you can just suck all the carbon out of the atmosphere and bury it underground or something. Economically that could be very good. 4 Manage the nitrogen cycle. 5 Provide access to clean water. 6 Restore and improve urban infrastructure. 7 Advance health informatics. 88 Engineer the Coogan Hayes Cosgrove conjecture. Oh he's definitely going to be working on that. No 8 is engineer better medicines. We've heard a lot of talk about that and people are obviously working on that. 9 reverse engineer the brain. 10 prevent nuclear terror. 11. Secure cyberspace. That's already well under process but 12 enhanced virtual reality. I like that. It's just like better games, let's do VR and then 13 advanced personal learning and 14 engineer the tools of scientific discovery. So those are all sort of not full sci fi, Build a Dyson sphere, go to Mars. They're all problems that are, you know, between people are working on them. They're one to ten years away. Feels tractable if there's advances that you could sort of tackle any of these in a small way and have an impact. And I think the knock on effects of any of these sort of seeing progress would be very, very, very, very positively received. Sort of like in the TED talk sense of like you would hear stories, see the news, see that there's business around this thing. All of a sudden you're noticing that there's actually an impact. The skies are cleaner or the like the cancer rate is dropping and we see it in the chart or the energy prices are going down. Like these things are very intuitive and you can just feel them as an individual and that's good for just the way AI is received I think.

Said inside Google DeepMind demos leaving his CEO post landed with essentially a shrug. Sources tell me he's already been disengaged from day to day management for a while now. But he was a firewall between DeepMind and the rest of Google even as the two got pulled closer over the last couple of years. I expect that distance to dissolve more with him stepping back. Yeah, most people are anti firewall right in the sense that they would love the researchers and the TPU team and the cloud team and the application team to all be deeply integrated, working very closely together and you get this crazy flywheel between everyone rowing in the same direction. And when you have a firewall team, as this reporting is suggesting, you wind up with, well, this person just wants to focus on the most elegant benchmarks and this person wants to focus on TPU sales and this person wants to talk about, you know, resiliency in their diversity of their cloud revenue. And then somebody else just wants Google search to not get disrupted by LLMs too quickly because ads need to go up at the right rate and so differing incentives can create tensions and, and a dissolving of the firewall. Probably something that people would be excited about I would imagine. But he's been in this like you know, elder statesman role for a while that people have been pointing to, excited to watch him like continue. That will be interesting to see how he instantiates that is it. Obviously he's working on Isomorphic Labs, but he also probably be writing more blog posts, potentially testifying or talking in Washington, maybe a book, maybe a podcast or who knows, it'll be interesting to follow. What else? Alex also reported on its current trajectory. Gemini 4 is not expected to push Frontier I for Frontier AI forward the way Fable and Soul just did. So still work to be done. Yeah over there. Got to figure out some other hill to climb, maybe figure out some other option. I still think like speed. There's, there's clearly some very low hanging fruit on AI overviews matching the speed with which those are generated to the lack of hallucinations that we're seeing in the more advanced models. How do you bridge that gap? You can clearly get fact checked results if you're willing to wait a minute right now. What does it take to get fact checked results in 5 milliseconds or 100 milliseconds or something like that. That's a huge problem, but it's something that Google's set up to do and benefit from. I still see crazy posts all the time that are screenshots from AI Overviews that are like, I'm a pencil and I see a pencil sharpener coming towards me. And then Google AI overviews is like, run away. Like, don't like that pencil sharpener will shred your wood. And it's like, you know, not. It's like kind of falling for a prompt injection or some sort of meme. And then there's other stuff going on. Take him and Bill Gurley are going back and forth on what this means for Google. Take him. Says Jeff Dean and Demis Hassabis are two of the most important AI executives at Google. Jeff leaving and Demis is stepping down. He said he stepped up, stepped aside. It's very debatable what direction he stepped. I think he stepped what, up, up, down, down, left, left, right, left, right, ab, start right, Demes is stepping down from day to day operational leadership at DeepMind. And Tae Kim says game Over. Very dramatic. Lot of other things going on in the business. Yes, these folks are very deeply important. But the company's been around for a couple decades and has a lot of business lines. Game over is pretty aggressive. Bill Gurley disagrees. He says this does not have to be game over for Google. I do think they have only one play left now to pull from their own Android, Android Kubernetes, PlayBook and fully embrace open models. It's the obvious move in this situation. That's interesting. That would be interesting. I mean, they demonstrate. I believe Google signed the open letter on the earlier side. Right. With Nvidia. Could you see some there? They've been doing good jobs with Gemma. Is that how you pronounce it? Gemma models. Those have been pretty well received. It does seem like you're fighting with one hand tied behind your back as an American open source lab. But who knows? Who knows where it all goes? Rahul asking the important questions. He says, who got Jeff on Snap?

Access requests and password resets. There's a pretty crazy, crazy story about an investment firm that invested in SpaceX and sold their shares before their investors knew that, like this was relayed to them. So investment firm Late Stage management is under fire after investors learned that their exposure to space SpaceX had allegedly been poorly managed the later stage of their investment, they did. This is the Elon Musk ironic. You're doomed to be the opposite of whatever your name is, right? And so investors learned that their exposure to SpaceX had allegedly been sold years before the rocket company's blockbuster ipo, despite account statements that appeared to show they still held the investment. So there were a bunch of people who were invested in Late stage management. They would get quarterly reports or some account statement saying, yeah, you do own some SpaceX and it's doing really well. Turns out they didn't. We've been hearing rumors of how complex the SPV unwinding process would be for SpaceX for a while with all of these triple layered, quadruple layered SPVs. This is the first example of this actually playing out where we have a little bit more information. So. All right. So the investor's friend introduced him to a sales manager at Late Stage. They spoke on the phone, but mostly messaged back and forth on WhatsApp. And he said he never met with anyone from the firm in person. I would say in general, maybe don't meet with sales managers that work at investment firms. Not usually the. A title that sort of would be thrown around at an elite institution. In November 2020, Rupi Reddy messaged Barish, the employee about how he had missed out on a few big IPOs recently and how he'd love to participate in buying stakes in Impossible Foods, SoFi and SpaceX. Barish, wow. His last name is just. It's just Barish. This is his actual last name. Mr. Barish said all three were available and sent over paperwork for Ruby Reddy to sign. Who's your wealth manager? Oh, John Bullish, Steve Barish. Rupi Ready wired up for money before the end of the year, including $17,250 to take part in a fund that held shares in SpaceX, according to documents reviewed by the Journal at that time, he estimated the rocket maker was valued at 85. 58 billion when SpaceX went public this June. Whoa. 1.7 trillion. Yeah. Ruby Reddy's dream of a windfall seemed within reach. It turned into more of a nightmare shortly after the ipo. Rupee Reddy and three other investors who spoke to the Journal said they couldn't log into Late Stages Web portal for investors. Rupi Ready said the investment firm eventually told him in an email that it sold the SpaceX shares he was exposed to in 2024, when they were around $105 each and before a 5 to 1 stock split, or when Rupee Ruddy's holdings was worth $45,450. But Rupee Ready, based on the holdings shown on his investment portal as of May 2026 and on his 2025 tax document, believes he still held the equivalent of 2,500 shares of SpaceX, which at the IPO price he estimated was worth more than 300,000. The plan was to fund college education for both my kids. One is a rising senior in high school who has since filed a complaint with the securities and Exchange Commission. Other investors in the fund are also alarmed. Rupee Reddy said he believes more than 100 others are in a similar situation based on a group chat that is formed with about 150 late stage investors. These are late. This is investors in Late Stage management. Some have hired lawyers to file a complaint against Late Stage with the purpose of recovering and preserving their pre IPO shares of SpaceX. One investor in the fund told the Journal an SEC lawyer called him in July to question question him about his experience with Late stage. A test will come on Thursday when a. Wait, when, when a first wave of pre IPO SpaceX investors will be permitted to sell shares under so called lockup agreements. Bankers estimate there are at least 8,000 SPVs tied to SpaceX stock alone and it will be a chance for scores of investors to cash in on the share's growth. Or it could be hit by the same panic that overwhelmed Rupee Reddy. If their share of the profits fails to materialize, around 900 million shares are eligible to begin being sold on Thursday. So far the stock's holding up. They obviously had a new video of a bunch of renders of tariffab. Sure. That I imagine are getting people exciting. Yeah. So some Texans really excited about the. What is it, the Texas triangle? Austin, Dallas, Houston, More economic activity in that area. People are so help me out here, John. Yeah. Did the guy realize any return? Did he realize the 45,000? Yeah, yeah, I think almost certainly. But it feels like he was lied to and that's potentially like wire fraud, I would imagine, or some sort of like financial, you know, problem, probably a settlement, I don't know, some sort of lawsuit potentially. You know, it's still early in the reporting, so who knows where all this goes but it is, it is. It is rough. The SpaceX dispute is not part of the existing criminal case against Late Stage, but it comes amid mounting allegations about the firm's treatment of pre IPO investors. In February and March, three sales executives connected to Late Stage pleaded guilty to federal charges arising from a broader $528 million investment scheme. Prosecutors said the defendants marketed some supposedly no fee pre IPO investments while secretly adding upfront markups of between 10 and 100%, diverting approximately $88 million. So they would. So they were basically adding like a synthetic fee and then marketing it as no fee but just terrible price and just getting the. Basically getting the fee through the trade itself. Two face maximum sentences of 45 years in prison. Wow. While the third faces up to 20 years. Late stage is also the subject of an ongoing class action lawsuit alleging that it and associated sales agents misled investors about fees, commissions and the pricing of pre IPO shares. Rough go. Rough. Rough go always. Yeah. Tricky to due diligence. One of these funds. There's a lot of excitement about these companies, especially big ones like SpaceX. People have known about this company. People have been doing podcasts about it, stories have been told, there's whole books that have been written. So it's not. It's something that would attract someone who is, you know, newer to the private markets. Not an endowment. Not, you know, like wants more direct table access, but maybe not deep enough inside to just go get a slice directly like a venture capital fund would. So very, very tricky situation. Well, you know, who does have some SpaceX shares? Who it might be in a position to sell Nikita beer. Oh, I thought you were going to say Google. Doesn't Google own a ton? Yeah, I think they have 100 billion, right? They have a lot. Are they still locked up because the unlock was for employees or investors? I forget who. I forget exactly who. Antunes is sharing a. Let's talk about Nikita and then we can talk. Pull up the unlock schedule. Truly end of an era for Nikita. Yes.

Of scaling, monitoring and security. We have Chris Power from Hadrien coming in the studio. We got to get the gong ready. We got to hit the gong. Tell us what happened. How much? 1.37 million, baby. Congratulations. It warmed up now. So good to see you.

How much are you? 1.37 million, baby. Congratulations. It warmed up now. So good to see you. How are? Mad lad? Mad dog.

Congratulations. We'll have to make it out there at some point. We gotta make it. We gotta shred. Gabe was over. Gabe in the chat was over on X saying highlighting someone who's made a tinfoil hat. An undercover tinfoil hat. Let's pull this up. Says it all makes sense now. I figured out why Jordy's been wearing a hat. Good merch line. Potentially pre tin foil lined hat. Just a foil lined base baseball cap. We get a lot of hats in the mail for a lot of companies sending us stuff. Haven't seen a lot of tin foil inside them though. This might help in the future. This could be the new meta. I wonder if it would actually make your AirPods not work. I have a feeling that it wouldn't matter, but AirPods are definitely getting through. Palmer kind of has this with the copper jacket. The copper jacket, that's right. Yeah. No, no. But he wore it on. Joe Rogan talked about it and he has a. Yeah. Wasn't I telling you to get pants from that company? Get a full suit. Yes. I could drive in a Tesla. Yeah. So heavy. Yeah. Oh, it's really heavy. Maybe that's not true. Anyway, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI?

Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. We have to issue a correction. We take journalism extremely seriously here. As everyone knows, we got it wrong, folks. And we need to apologize to you, the viewer, the listener. We made a huge mistake yesterday on the show, we said that you could not surf on a lake. Apparently, that's not true. Sheboygan, Wisconsin, is the freshwater surfing capital of the world. We apologize for the egregious error and we promise to do better in the future. Thanks to the listener that sent that in. It's very, very nice to have this corrected. Maybe we gotta go on a trip and see it for ourselves. I think you should be the judge because this might just be a Sheboygan Stan who doesn't really understand what true surfing means. And they're talking up a big game. I wanna see some photos. I wanna see some videos of freshwater surfing in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Because if it's not. If it's not getting. If people aren't getting barreled there, as you say, I don't know if I'm going to count it. I have a video here. Okay, let's pull it up. Yeah, I want the Jordy Hayes Surf Review. Does it count? Is Sheboygan, Wisconsin, the freshwater surfing capital of the world? We do have other tech news, but we gotta get to the bottom of this first. Just gotta be really flexible. Then Alex Marks and his buddy Steen are in for quite a day. You get that extra sense of satisfaction because you waited and put in your time. Learn those lessons. Tyler was the one who said, I'm putting this on you, man. You were like. You were like, you can't surf on a lake. I think I said, I don't know. Okay, let's see this. I want to see someone trying to. Okay, he's got. That's a full size surfboard. This is legit. Hey, he's up. Been surfing around Sheboygan since he was a freshman in high school. Okay. Looks almost over his ankle. Not exactly Mavericks or Jaws or whatever. See, I think my brother pushed me into my first wave and just. It was that. Like, I want that. Okay, Okay. I think this counts. It counts. I think this counts. Capital. I think this counts. Congratulations. Whatever. On this day, the. We'll have to make it out there at some point. We got to make it. We got a shred.