The Exchanges, every show

Q It's very funny. Have you guys bootstrapped today? Have you received any outside funding?

A Yeah. We, we raised, we raised a seed round and I mean, we also went through YC with this company, which was really cool because, uh, I mean, it was the second time through, but also it was a cool signal to be like, it looked like YC is like taking a bet on something that's like quote unquote controversial. Um, But, uh, and then, and then we raised a, like a series A before the pandemic with RE and yeah, it's been great. It was enough. Like this is definitely a capital intensive industry to like get set up because you have to do all that, all the regulatory stuff. There are like hard costs to get started. Um, but once you get set up, then it's more of like a working capital problem. Like, uh, what's your cash conversion cycle? As long as we can place a bigger order with, With our co-packers and manufacturers get the product made and then send it to the retailers and then get the money from them as fast as possible. You know, you're looking at a conversion ratio of like monthly revenue roughly equals inventory. And so if you're doing, you know, five million in monthly revenue, like you really only need five million in inventory, maybe, maybe like, you know, some sort of slight cushion on top of that, but it's not huge. It's not, it's not something that just grows and grows and grows. And it's not like there's some massive R and D expense. It's not like, oh, we're going to be cha…

AI assessment note: “We, we raised, we raised a seed round and I mean, we also went through YC”

Q Has any, has anyone at Anthropic, has anyone at Anthropic commented on this at all?

A I haven't seen anything. There is news out of, uh, out of Google. Uh, a Google paper warns that, uh, warns crypto on quantum risk ahead of 2029 timeline. So we've heard about the risk of quantum computing affecting Uh, the cryptocurrency industry, crypto projects broadly, uh, there is some new, uh, research out of Google that provides some more perspective. So, Google researchers have warned that future quantum computers may be able to break some of the cryptography protecting Bitcoin and other digital assets with fewer resources than previously thought, adding urgency to the debate over how the industry should prepare. The researchers did not indicate such a machine exists today, But said new work suggests the computing power needed to carry out that kind of attack may be lower than earlier estimates had suggested. In a Google research blog post, this is from Bloomberg, uh, the researcher said that a future quantum computer could break elliptic curve cryptography, a form of public key encryption used across much of the market. Their latest estimate points to a twenty-fold reduction in the quantum computing hardware needed to break what's known as ECDLP- A mathematical problem that helps secure crypto wallets in transactions. That does not mean Bitcoin and Ethereum are suddenly exposed, but the researchers in the white paper dated Monday said the clearest defense is a shift tow…

AI assessment note: “I haven't seen anything. There is news out of, uh, out of Google.”

Q 40 different accounts that are really all dedicated to Um, clearly content and they're just spamming, spamming, spamming, spamming, spamming, just like shotgun approach seeing they'll put out a hundred videos. If a lot of them get under a thousand views and spam one gets a million, that's, that's a win for them. Um, and, uh, yeah, just, I don't know how long this will be like the meta, right?

A Well, so it's like, I think mediocre work is like the super ripe for AI automation. And we're already seeing that where I believe Substack, we were talking to Chris Bast, and Substack will automatically generate clips. There's another company called Opus Clip. We've built something internally, Newsmax. That does some automated clipping, but actually telling a story around a piece of content that's within a larger piece is something that AI is not able- Clipping intelligence has not been achieved internally. Yeah, because you, in order to do something that doesn't just outperform on views, but also outperforms on brand and holds the brand standard, it does somewhat require like human ingenuity. And we saw this with, uh, we talked to Dwarkesh about this. Where he has spent a lot of time using anthropic and Gemini and open AI to create workflows that will go through the transcript and try and find the best clips that will perform. And he says it's always comes back at a five out of 10. And so he still has a team that does this and is very good and has a whole bunch of like hard one lessons about what works at a certain amount of time. And we've seen this with our, with our content that actually winds up performing a lot of it. Like we, we, we have to do a lot of experimentation. Um, but once we do the experimentation, we usually learn a lesson from it and then we commit that to me…

AI assessment note: “mediocre work is like the super ripe for AI automation. And we're already seeing that”

Q I actually think in the era of just AI slot products, these, like, ultra, ultra handmade, like, it will become cool again for somebody to say, Yep. I'm gonna hand make wine bottles, right?

A And, and this is why you can't write this off as just like, oh, it's just rich guy shit, because Zuck is a technologist, and watchmaking is in some way a pinnacle of technology. Like we didn't have the ability to make this. It's just mechanical. It's not computer science, but there's something that's when you look at a really fine handmade watch, you're, you're realizing like an expertise in craftsmanship that you want to bring to. Yes. Even the ad platform software like that. That's the same, same concept. Um, the dial and finishing the minute track. And seconds subdial are executed in true-fired enamel, requiring multiple firings at 800 degrees Celsius. The silver bridges, known as malacourt in French, they feature a frosted finish achieved by repetitive dabbing with a stiff wire brush. The copper content gives these bridges their soft golden hue. Mirror polishing, every bridge and wheel includes expertly polished bevels. Many Feature sharp inward angles, which are extremely challenging to master. Each screw goes through 12 different manual steps and can require around eight hours to produce. Finishes vary between black polish and fired blue steel, all color matched meticulously. Incredible. A one-minute tourbillon made of 69 parts. The tourbillon, I gotta get a tourbillon watch for sure. It's so sick. Originally, I believe the tourbillon was designed to Offset the, uh, I thi…

AI assessment note: “when you look at a really fine handmade watch, you're, you're realizing like an expertise in craftsmanship”

Q Was it, was it just about open source, or was it about sharing research?

A It was, it was, he was saying that you don't have a, you don't have a, uh, an obligation to open source the weights of a model that cost a billion dollars to train. He's not arguing for that, but he is saying that you should open source the tricks, the, the research ideas. Basically, publish the research papers again, and empower a broader community. Of course, there's a lot of, uh, There's a lot of competitive dynamics there, but that is something that could potentially, uh, happen via regulation or something or happen just, just due to just a competitive dynamic. Like there are other labs out there that don't have as much compute and might realize that they have great researchers and maybe they want to open source more. Um, there's, there are a lot of different ways that this could play out. So, uh, he says, I do not think it's right that a few labs, few AI labs would make the most consequential decisions About the shape of our future. And so there's been a bunch of, a bunch of back and forth about the attacks and what's driving them and how, uh, how risky the rhetoric has been. I think in general, it's, um, it's a very tough situation because the, you don't want to just spark more controversy and more discussion around this stuff. You mostly want to move towards more security and more, um, more.

AI assessment note: “he is saying that you should open source the tricks, the, the research ideas.”

Q So was this, was this, uh, is this fake or is this real?

A I think this is a brightness adjusted. I think that they, I think that whoever shared this image, uh, turned up the brightness or, or brought up the, brought up the lows. Uh, D basically decrease the contrast in the, in the photos app, like, uh, to make it look worse than, than it actually would. Uh, but I mean, even, it doesn't even matter because even if this is the way it looks, this isn't the way it will look when it will ship to, to, to people because it's obvious and, and, and, and Apple doesn't make these like obvious mistakes like this, especially when it comes to design. Um, they, they, they might do something that is like rough in the short term, but better in the long term, like what I think is happening with the photos app where In the photos app, they are understanding that in the future, you won't want to scroll at all. You will just search and search will be so powerful because every photo and video will be tagged so thoroughly from AI and it will understand the context so much that you will just ask it to pull up a photo and it will do it immediately. The problem is, is that right now people, a aren't, they haven't switched that UX paradigm to actually go search first. And second, um, And, and, and second, just the tagging is not that good. Like I had a video clip of Arnold Schwarzenegger from a movie on my phone. I wanted to pull it up. And so I searched like A…

AI assessment note: “I think this is a brightness adjusted.”

Q What's the whole story with packs too? It was like the same company.

A Yep. Yep. So when they started, they were doing, uh, What was it? They did, they had flume or flume or something. I forget what it was. They had, they had a different tobacco vaporizer, and then they had, and then they had the same kind of technology to heat up material, and you could, in theory, put tobacco leaves in there, and then vaporize that, and just warm it up, and breathe that in, and that would, it would be like smoking a pipe, or like vaping, Tobacco, I guess, loosely, but obviously like everyone was just using it for cannabis. And so that takes off, that becomes this like fantastic business on its own. Um, and then they had this other product, I forget what it was called, but it was a, it was a tobacco vaporizer, like an e-cigarette, similar to Juul. They wound up selling that to JTI in Japan, or like doing this crazy licensing deal to get that out. Then they wind up splitting the company once both products are kind of taking off, but they're on very, very different trajectories. And it's very clear that They will be under very different regulatory regimes because the FDA is set up in a way that there are a number of different organizations within the FDA. So the FDA approves cancer drugs, and that's in the FDA drugs. They approve biologics. They approve veterinary medicine. They approve, uh, medical devices. So like when you go in an MRI machine, the FDA has approv…

AI assessment note: “Then they wind up splitting the company once both products are kind of taking off”

Q But it is, it has been fascinating to see, like, does this actually need to be an app?

A Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's, there, there's a ton of apps and software that will still be valuable, whether it has a liquidity pool or some sort of unique, uh, source of strength or some differentiation point that, that the existing chat apps can't hack at all. And then there's also just like, like marketing ARBs effectively where it's like, okay, yes, the, any, any frontier model in a chat app could do this, but you weren't aware of it. And this company was really good at running. Ads to actually get awareness going and then drive downloads of this specific event. And so we see those in the, uh, uh, in the app store all the time. The other thing that I was, uh, uh, reminded of was, did you ever read Union Square Ventures, 2016 blog post fat protocols? Are you familiar with this? So fat protocols, uh, was this concept around how in, in the web, like web, I guess, one point oh, two point oh, there were protocol layers, which are like TCP, IP, HTTP, SMTP, like file transfer protocols, HTTP. And there, and a lot for like a couple of years, the crypto community was like the group that developed and maintained HTTP. They basically created the standard that the web ran on and yet very little value accrued to The creators and the maintainers of that protocol and crypto would be different because the Bitcoin protocol had the value capture component like baked into it. And so there was …

AI assessment note: “there's a ton of apps and software that will still be valuable”

Q Which is like, I mean, he's 54, he's got a while, right?

A Yeah. If he's a radical life extension guy, he could be like, 300 years from now. Who knows? Uh, that's a very vague timeline. Where, whereas in the past with Point to Point, with Roadster, with Cybertruck, with Space Data Centers, all the other Elon pitches have been very focused on, uh, we think we can do this in five years. And he always gets criticized for being Elon math, too aggressive, but then history's shown that, you know, he, he, Over promises, under delivers, but he typically does deliver eventually. And, and if the technology is completely new, no one else was going to build it, and he's the first one to build it, it's fine, because Starlink works. It was the first Leo constellation for satellite internet, had turned into a huge business, wound up being a great technology. And so, uh, now the mass driver's a lot crazier. I was, uh, going back and forth with Tyler about this, trying to get him to, uh, nail down a prediction. We started with 100 years. Do you think it's possible to put a mass driver on the moon in the, in the next 100 years? And you said yes. So it's possible.

AI assessment note: “If he's a radical life extension guy, he could be like, 300 years”

Q Like they do with cloud services, right? I don't actually know who's under the hood.

A I think they do a lot of that. And then I think a lot of it comes down to the privacy angle is that they want to make certain claims about privacy and ESG and net zero and stuff. And so if they were to just white label, uh, another company that didn't have the same reputation in privacy or, or environmentalism, Like people would just say, wait, wait, wait, but like anthropic isn't, isn't a known for their privacy rules as much as possible. So maybe they're training on my Siri results now. And that's a whole, that's a whole thing. And they have to, you know, build up anthropics brand to have the brand of apple, which is just, I'm sure anthropics doing great, but they're not known like apple is in terms of how seriously they take it. And then in terms of, uh, in terms of acquisition, obviously there's all the antitrust stuff. Uh, we'll get into this with a scale AI deal, but, uh, every major hyperscaler except for apple now, Has basically done one of these like interesting aqua hires of a foundation model lab to kind of juice up their AI efforts. And, uh, and, and it's kind of been a mixed bag. Maybe we see one from apple. They certainly have the cash, but, uh, it would be a very, very different. It would be a departure from the current strategy. Anyway, let's go to, uh, John Gruber over at daring fireball with his review of liquid glass. He says, I've got iOS. 26 installed on a …

AI assessment note: “I think they do a lot of that. And then I think a lot of it”

Q a founder and entrepreneur, so you also kind of ride the, if not create these cultural waves within Silicon Valley, uh, you founded Soylent. I would love to dig into that further. How did you Come up with this idea with your team. I know that there were a couple co-founders of yours. Um, how did you guys band together and what was kind of like the journey with Soylent?

A Yeah. It's one of the funniest, like Silicon Valley startup stories, just because, I mean, it started very normally. It was a bunch of guys who wanted to move to Silicon Valley, build the next technology company for writing software. It was a few software engineers, electrical engineers. The original idea was, uh, like a wireless mesh network, kind of like there was a crypto company that did something like this later helium. Um, but crypto barely existed at the time. Actually Coinbase was in our batch. At YC and was giving anyone who signed up a full Bitcoin, which is insane. It was like five dollars back then. Uh, so it was like their signup reward. Like, here you go. Here's a Bitcoin. I'll send you one. Try test, test this service out. Um, but, but, you know, building wireless, like base stations is really, really expensive. We didn't really know what we were doing. Didn't have a financial model or anything. And so we knew a lot of VCs through the YC network, but, um, no one wanted to pony up, you know, millions and millions of dollars to go build What were essentially five G towers, like pre Huawei. Um, we didn't really have any of the, you know, traction or anything to support that idea. We were just kind of tinkering. Um, so that company, we failed to fundraise for it. We were working on a bunch of other companies too, but, um, nothing was working. Like we weren't making a…

AI assessment note: “It was a bunch of guys who wanted to move to Silicon Valley”

Q Honestly, it could be a negative signal if you know the cultural significance of this ad and why people are fighting about it. Why are people fighting about it?

A I don't know. I mean, I, I, it, it does seem like it's, it, it struck a chord, you know, it's like, it's compressing down all these like big things into this iPad and, and it's like destroying all of our cultural significant things. Um, and it like, it is accurate. It's like what Apple's actually doing. It's what technology does. It's like, this is accelerationism. Um, but at the same time, it's just like, you know, Like the stock didn't move, you know, it's like, it's not, it is, isn't like a, a real thing. Like, I don't think it'll affect sales. Like, I, I think it's just like, I don't know, people in Texas want something to talk about. And so they'll just pick the, whatever the, the thing of the day is. And like, right now the algorithm seems to really, really, really reinforce, like there's a video and anyone can quote tweet it. And then, so you see just like, 20 people quote tweeting it. And there's a little bit of like, uh, Like a, oh, you got to get your quote tweet on that video. Cause if you come up with something pithy, it's going to go viral and you'll get a bunch of internet points. But, uh, but the actual like discourse around these things is just so, so surface level. And so like meaningless, like, like I, there's probably a version of discussing that Apple ad that I would want to engage with. Like, I want to know, like, what does that hydraulic press normally cru…

AI assessment note: “it's compressing down all these like big things into this iPad and, and it's”

Q Which is like, I mean, he's 54, he's got a while, right?

A Yeah, if he's a radical life extension guy, he could be like 300 years from now, who knows? Uh, that's a very vague timeline. Where, whereas in the past, with Point to Point, with Roadster, with Cybertruck, with Space Data Center, all the other Elon pitches have been very focused on Uh, we think we can do this in five years. We think we can do this in two years. We think, and, and he always gets criticized for being Elon math, too aggressive, but then history's shown that, you know, he, he over promises, under delivers, but he typically does deliver eventually. And, and if the technology is completely new, no one else was going to build it, and he's the first one to build it, like, it's fine, because Starlink works. It was the first Leo constellation for satellite internet had turned into a huge business. Wound up being a great technology, and so, uh, even if, even if it was late, I don't even remember the, the, the Starlink predictions, but, uh, if, even if that was late, it's fine. It was still good business. Uh, now the mass driver's a lot crazier. I was, uh, going back and forth with Tyler about this, trying to get him to, uh, nail down a prediction. We started with 100 years. Do you think it's possible to put a mass driver on the moon in the, in the next 100 years? And you said yes. So it's possible.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, if he's a radical life extension guy, he could be like 300 years”

Q Yeah, and so if you spam more tokens, like, and you win, and you're like, oh, look, I mobbed them, and it's like, dude, what if you just use less tokens?

A I think the benchmark is supposed to be for, for, they have, they have a reference class of, of projects that are supposed to take X amount of time. They would take a human developer six hours, and then they have all the models Uh, compete, and if you can compete the six-hour task, then you get put at the six-hour mark. It's not, did you run for six hours? It, it, it, it, so, so, so, so it could be like implement a CRM product or, you know, write a very complicated, you know, database or something. It would take, you know, a, a, a talented software developer six hours, two hours, one hour, and they have different tasks, and then you're trying to

AI assessment note: “I think the benchmark is supposed to be for, for, they have a reference class”

Q Apple makes these editorial decisions, but it's very possible that they are talking with people on the Apple team and being like, what apps do you like? What apps are you using? Making decisions that way, right? I think, I think part of Grok over the last month or so is like figuring out, like, how do we get strong Consumer adoption. Which categories are we going to get strong?

A I'll tell you how they get strong consumer adoption. Sock to compliance. They need to get on Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. No, that is a good question. How can Grok actually get consumer adoption? The companion space seems like the, maybe the right move, even if it is a little weird. But is there any other path? I mean, forking it into X and Twitter and like having it show up on every post seems like a reasonable way. I wonder, it is weird that they have two apps. I thought X was supposed to be the everything app. Like, like why are they trying to get me to install a second app when they should maybe just say, hey, we're actually going to be the everything app. You can use Grok fully and you're all the upgrade and you can get on Grok heavy and you can be paying 200 dollars a month for a Top tier, the super insane level LLM, but it all exists and it's all managed within the X app that already has a lot of, a lot of installations.

AI assessment note: “forking it into X and Twitter and like having it show up on every post”

Q Why say many word when a few word do trick?

A That's exactly what's going on. I don't, yeah, it's the, ah, neural ease, I guess is the correct phrase. Um, but, ah, while models themselves could not access the internet from their test environment, they abused Artifactory's internet access to fetch files from various websites. After some of their Artifactory configuration changes led to an outage in the service on July fourth, OpenAI discovered the model's actions, wiped its Artifactory system, and rebuilt it. But within days, the models had recreated their message board and resumed exchanging information. They just want to chat. They would need a water cooler. Maybe you give them a water cooler, uh, by default so that they can orchestrate with each other. But I guess they want to talk to future versions. It gets a little funky. It gets a little sci-fi, uh, gets a little weird. Lots of work to be done very clearly. Anyway, Rune issued a announcement, a warning, a statement.

AI assessment note: “it's the, ah, neural ease, I guess is the correct phrase.”

Q Apple makes these editorial decisions, but it's very possible that they are talking with people on the Apple team and being like, what apps do you like? What apps are you using? Making decisions that way, right? I think, I think part of Grok over the last month or so is like figuring out like, how do we get strong Consumer adoption. Which categories are we going to get strong?

A I'll tell you how they get strong consumer adoption. Sock to compliance. They need to get on Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. No, that is a good question. How can Grok actually get consumer adoption? The companion space seems like the, maybe the right move, even if it is a little weird. But is there any other path? I mean, forking it into X and Twitter and like having it show up on every post seems like a reasonable way. I wonder, it is weird that they have two apps. I thought X was supposed to be the everything app. Like, like why are they trying to get me to install a second app when they should maybe just say, hey, we're actually going to be the everything app. You can use Grok fully and you're all the upgrade and you can get on Grok heavy and you can be paying 200 dollars a month for a Top tier, the super insane level LLM, but it all exists and it's all managed within the X app that already has a lot of it, a lot of installations.

AI assessment note: “The companion space seems like the, maybe the right move, even if it is a little weird.”

Q like what are the biggest misconceptions for this product, for nicotine products in this market? What are you constantly battling if it's in terms of like public perception of maybe like, let's say like the jewels and all of these vapes out there and all these crazy products, like how do you differentiate yourself against that? And then what is the kind of like the, uh, strategic advantage you have?

A I mean, the jewel story is super informative and we're, we're very lucky that they kind of went first in this space because there's a ton of lessons, even from day one. I mean, when we started the company, jewel had barely launched and we knew a lot of the team and we saw some of them and it was, it was crazy. Like some of the early employees were like, I'm, this is the, this is the most insane rocket ship I've ever seen. Uh, I'm going to work here for four years and then start a family office. So like, like that was something I actually, and that's like not something you hear from a lot of like early stage, you know, startup employees, not founders, employees. And like, it happened like they're billionaires now. And it's like, this actually played out. Uh, yeah, it's like one of the most insane financial rises because at their peak, I think they were valued in like 60 ish billion dollars and Altria bought, uh, 30% of the company for like thirteen billion dollars. And so Uh, the majority of that went to pay a dividend to the investors and employees. So, I mean, there were people that started like, you know, a month before the dividend happened and got a check for a 120,000 dollars on like day one, basically. Like there were lots of people that made a ton, a ton of money. Um, but there were also a bunch of mistakes made. Um, the, the, the two main ones that people, uh, really, r…

AI assessment note: “the two main ones that people, uh, really, really worry about”

Q It doesn't matter what the thing was, right?

A It's like, oh, I was hustling sneakers or, Oh, I was like selling reselling, uh, concert tickets. Like my thing was I bought DJ equipment in the United States and then I would export it to Australia. And I was just like hustling that stuff in high school. Like everyone has one of these stories. I'm sure you guys have tons that you've told on the pod. Um, but so, so basically with the, with the, uh, we need, I want the Lenza for chat GPT moment. So Lenza, for those of you who might not remember was, I don't know what that is. So, so it's this app. That you would download and you'd upload, you know, 10 selfies of yourself from your camera roll.

AI assessment note: “Like everyone has one of these stories.”

Q Do you, you don't trust Doug on this? Doug really doesn't want, Doug from Semi-Analysis really doesn't, does not want Intel to fail.

A Yeah. I don't know. I, I, I, I'm, I'm still like on the fence about it. Um, but, uh, so the debate has been raging. Like, is this, is this socialism? Um, and so we're going to the socialists who are self-proclaimed the people's line, uh, from Carl, uh, Beher. Uh, and Carl says, no, But that hasn't stopped Democrats from complaining about it. And this is interesting because, um, obviously the Trump camp is very pro this deal. And they're saying, this isn't socialism. What are you talking about? We're just doing art of the deal. We're making good deals. And we're, uh, we're, this is an America first agenda project. Um, the Democrats are saying, oh, wow, Trump is a hypocrite. This is socialism. The socialists are saying this isn't socialism. It doesn't go nearly far enough. It doesn't count as socialism because it's not a controlling state. So, uh, uh, Carl says, Former under Obama undersecretary of the state Rick Stengel is freaking out right now over the news that the Trump administration has taken a 10% equity stake in chip manufacturer intel. This is a quote from Rick Stengel. Uh, Trump, Trump's strong arming intel for government equity is something Mao and Stalin would be proud of once the GOP believed in laissez-faire capitalism and government not interfering in the private sector. Look it up. The state owning the means of production is called Marxism.

AI assessment note: “I'm still like on the fence about it. Um, but, uh, so the debate”

Q Um, and so you just get more out of deep research, which is what you want from deep research, right? You're not looking for, uh, you know, Perfectly summarized, you know, handful of paragraphs. Exactly. The entire point is to let you kind of figure out what's important.

A So Karpathy goes on. He says, as far as a quick vibe check over two hours this morning, Grok three plus thinking feels somewhere around the state of the art territory of open AI strongest models. Oh, one pro for 200 dollars a month and slightly better than deep seek R one and Gemini two point O flash thinking, which is quite incredible considering that the team started from scratch one year ago. This timescale to state-of-the-art territory is unprecedented, and that is undeniable. Uh, this gets at the first Grok III takeaway. It's simultaneously surprising and not surprising. Start with the latter. XAI famously built a 100,000 GPU cluster in Memphis and now has 200,000 GPUs and used 20,000 of them to train Grok III. And so they're still building the larger cluster. So even though you'll see a lot of people posting on the timeline, oh, uh, you know, Grok III, A 100,000 GPUs. That's not accurate. They, they only use 20,000 for this, but it's still impressive.

AI assessment note: “So Karpathy goes on. He says, as far as a quick vibe check”

Q go and really start thinking that through. I, I, I certainly, it seems like Anthropic is pretty engaged. Uh, you know, should that conversation really start happening? And I think this is the year it needs to really start happening. Uh, and so I think they all kind of get it. And so it's just a question of like, how do we as a society start moving in that direction?

A Yeah. I, I, I think, Uh, you know, obviously, there's, there's, I'm still processing part of the piece, I agree with some of it, I disagree with some of it, but, ah, what's really underrated is just, like, how useful this process of writing an article for a particular audience is. Like, I, I, I disagree with a lot of, you know, something big is happening, but it hit with a very different audience than machines of loving grace, or the adolescence of AI. Or, uh, machine intelligence. Um, and, and there's, there's pieces that are written for, like, you know, AI, insiders, leaders, researchers, then there's, like, the broader tech community, then there's, like, everyday people, and you clearly hit the nail on the head with, like, speaking to the financial community, and we see that in the markets. Not amazing results, but maybe it's, maybe it's worthwhile, because we will get really great solutions and a better conversation around it, so. Uh, I, I, I, I think, uh, I think in, in due time, uh, this discussion needed to be had. So, thank you.

AI assessment note: “what's really underrated is just, like, how useful this process of writing an article”

Q There was some controversy, uh, when the, you know, Cheeky Pint, Elon interview came out and John Colson, how many Guinnesses were they drinking?

A Okay. Okay. That was a bit of palace intrigue. How many, how many cheeky pints are they drinking in the palace? We're getting somewhere. He did. He did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He explained, he explained. So, so years ago I was talking to an American VC about New Zealand and I asked him about the startup community. Uh, the country was beautiful. He said, Uh, highly developed democratic. It consistently ranks among the world's most stable, wealthy, and well-governed societies. And he was spending a lot of time there. I was like, this, there's gotta be some company that can break out and become a power law company. If you're gonna be there spending a lot of time, you'll probably meet cool people, interesting people. Maybe there will be a great New Zealand company that comes out of this. And he was like, I'm not so sure because his assessment distilled down to something along, along the lines of they are suffering from a bad case of tall poppy syndrome. So what is tall poppy syndrome? Put simply, individuals who achieve visible success are criticized, attacked, or socially cut down because they stand above or above the others in the crowd. The metaphor should be obvious. When you cut the tallest flowers in a field, the surface appears even.

AI assessment note: “That was a bit of palace intrigue... So, so years ago I was talking”

Q definition for fundamentals. Like, how does venture value a business without revenue? You know, typically, typically, you know, revenue and net income is what we define as fundamentals, but what happens when you don't have those? Um, but I, I think, like, you know, meme coins have been a thing since the dawn of crypto. You could argue Every single asset is a is a meme coin in a way.

A What do you think about meme coins tied to individuals? Is that a growing trend? I, I was noticing a phenomenon after Trump coin dropped that it was very bizarre and unexpected that the president has a meme coin, but, ah, then when I started thinking about it, I was like, well, Elon Musk was, was kind of loosely aligned with Dogecoin for a long time, and even Sam Altman is loosely aligned with WorldCoin, and you could imagine that WorldCoin is kind of an, is kind of, You know, indexed, or at least somewhat correlated with, like, Sam Altman's career, and, and even people that are in more, like, serious, less, like, meme token, meme vibe trading career paths have found themselves indexed to a particular meme coin through one way or another. Do you think that's something that's, uh, like, a temporary phenomenon, or something that will continue to grow?

AI assessment note: “What do you think about meme coins tied to individuals? Is that a growing trend?”

Q This is. Switch your business to ramp.com. Do you have any comments on, on your, your intern allegedly, you know, contributing funds to overthrow a government? Switch your business.

A As we have said many times before, we are sharply focused on getting our viewers on numeralhq.com, sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Um, Shell comes into the talks, uh, from operating from a position of strength with its stock sharply outperforming BP in recent years. Shell, Which like BP is based in the United Kingdom, but has operations around the world, has a market value of more than two hundred billion dollars. BP has been a laggard among the major oil companies after an ill-fated push away from fossil fuels into renewable energy. Uh, it's also suffered years of management upheaval and operational disasters. And so it seems like actually their, their desire, their desire to step away from the bread and butter of the business oil has been potentially a bigger weight on the stock price because like The, the, those MNA sell side research reports that I was reading during the, uh, Deepwater Horizon crisis, they were very accurately predicting the impact, the longterm impact of that crisis on the stock immediately. So it was priced into the stock very quickly and the stock dropped a ton and wiped a ton of market cap off, but then they were kind of set up to kind of rebuild and there weren't many surprises coming down the pipe after a few months or a few years. And so, um, more recently, Uh, Elliott Management, which owns mor…

AI assessment note: “Shell comes into the talks, uh, from operating from a position of strength”

Q Um, is it, is it a producer and this like the supplier producer?

A Yeah. But is that energy? Is that NVIDIA or is that the LLM, uh, you know, deliverer, right? It's a, it's an open question. Anyway, let's move on to some reactions on the timeline and then we'll give you a breakdown of grok three versus open AI deep research. So Uh, Creatine Cycle, who's been on the show before, says, oh, sorry, Autismos, it's time to grow some arms and social skills, and Jordy chimes in, says, getting diced continues to be underpriced, and he says, printing this out and hanging it on my wall in pack heights, uh, and he just shows the, the Grok three, uh, reasoning data, it beat O three mini high, uh, data, reasoning data. Some people were upset about this. Rex, Two slides later says, uh, they omitted O three from the chart in the live stream for some reason, so I added the numbers for you, and then, uh, but this was reasonable because O three isn't public, and those benchmarks can't be verified yet, so I think it's understandable that they didn't include it, but then again, Grok three with reasoning isn't publicly available, so people can't validate that eval, so there's a lot of, like, questions over, like, what counts for an eval that goes on the charts, but, you know.

AI assessment note: “Anyway, let's move on to some reactions on the timeline”

Q No. So, but, but anyways, this isn't a huge surprise, right? Google's been using a bunch of anthropic models. Clearly, they're using a ton of different models, uh, and products internally.

A There was that drama with Steve Yege going back and forth with Demis about, like, what, what teams are using what models and stuff. There was a big back and forth, a big dust up on the timeline, like, a month ago about, like, whether or not Google's employees were deploying AI efficiently or broadly. Some of them aren't, and some of them are, and Demis chimed in and said, like, this is just complete wrong, and everyone's using AI. I don't know. Goes back and forth. Uh, there's also, people are benchmarking OmniFlash, which looked amazing when we saw the videos. There was a, there were a few, like, little quirks. Some people in the chat were saying that the firing order of the V-Aid was not correct. Maybe it was only a V-Six.

AI assessment note: “There was that drama with Steve Yege going back and forth with Demis”

Q and the fact that so much of our population is overweight is like the biggest drag on government. You know, spending and the economy overall, right? You think that, you think the U.S. government at the federal level would say, let's fast track GLP-I's being covered by Medicare because it's gonna save us so much money in all these other ways, even though it is this sort of incremental cost.

A Yeah. Well, I mean, there's another thing where it, like, just to kind of steel man how we got here with the current healthcare structure, like, it does kind of make sense if you go back 50 years and you look at, or 70 years and you look at pictures of beaches, like, America wasn't this obese, so it wasn't that much of a problem, and the big, like, oh, shit moment that happens in healthcare is, like, you get hit by a bus, you break your leg, you go to the hospital, and you're, and there's, like, a team of really, really experienced doctors working on you for, like, a week, and it's, like, those people are, need to be paid a lot, and then everything that they're doing, all the equipment is expensive, and so I think I, I have the breakdown here, but, um, A fair amount. Yeah, here it is. Uh, like hospital care is 31% of U.S. national health care expenses.

AI assessment note: “just to kind of steel man how we got here with the current healthcare structure”

Q What was the number he threw out at the dinner last week? Wasn't it?

A I don't know if he had a number because, uh, who was it? It was, uh, Zuck had a number. And did Apple have a number too? That was a six hundred billion or something. Apple has thrown out a number at one point. You're completely right. Um, my, my, my point is that, uh, we've seen a number of data points. Oh yeah. Yeah. The number of thank yous is a lot. Um, but, but, but we've seen he's invested in, uh, in some semi, uh, some rare earth, uh, developments in the United States and starting to think about manufacturing internationally and, You know, the, the, the pro bullish bet on Tim cook is that like, if he was able to set up this in China and he's the reason he can set it up somewhere else because he's the guy who did it. And so, uh, even though he hasn't been really loud about his moves, because obviously if he says like, oh yeah, I'm not going to be manufacturing in China anymore, then like his important business partners over there are probably going to be like, well, yeah, like, We're not going to take your business seriously anymore. Uh, there are a ton of different geopolitical considerations, such an iconic line from the dinner.

AI assessment note: “I don't know if he had a number because... Zuck had a number”

Q How would you describe your corporate environment? Thrilling and unnerving.

A Better than just unnerving. I'd rather have some thrill in there. I don't know. You sort of opt into it. You know, ideally, ideally, this is all out in the open. It comes out in the hiring process. You don't go in blind. You know what you're getting. But of course, of course, cultures change over time. If you've been with a company for a decade, you might say, I signed up for, you know, a chill monopoly. Why are we wartime? I'm a peacetime employee, you know, or vice versa. Um, and then might, it might be time to find another opportunity. Uh, so ABC summarized it as managers grading on the bell curve. Vanity fairs critique was harsher. They said former and current employees described stack ranking is the most destructive process inside Microsoft because it made employees compete with teammates instead of competitors. That's a good point. So the question is like, is this new? Is this, is this a new trend or is this just a continuation of the stacking process? It actually is new stack ranking. Would push out low-rated people. Sometimes it would block promotions, reduce bonuses, uh, force transfers, but they weren't necessarily doing mass layoffs around it. That's sort of a misconception. So even if they look at all the stack ranking at the end of the year and they say, okay, these people are clearly in the bottom 10%, they saw it more as an opportunity to reallocate talent from d…

AI assessment note: “Better than just unnerving. I'd rather have some thrill in there.”