I see a large IP on the horizon.
You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.
Overnight success.
The place 3000.
Right.
There, misinformation.
Morty, clearing order inbound.
Let's just roll.
We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.
Come. Get up.
Trust the experts here.
Five.
We are excellent.
Founder Mel.
Five, good.
I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by.
UAV online.
Double blaze.
Triple blaze.
Double kill.
Fight.
Cop is.
Wins.
Team deathmatch.
We are experts.
Triple blades.
Let's just roll.
Right.
Marky, clearing order inbound.
You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.
Strike one.
Strike two.
Activate golden retriever mode.
Mark, clearing order inbound.
Five could.
I see more journalists on the horizon, founder?
You're watching TBPN. Today is Thursday, January 8th, 2026. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.
Ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use. Corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Um, I wrote about Ch-ching, the Apple Card. Minor news yesterday.
Oh, yeah. Please, you have to ask. Somebody sent us a bunch of weights. Yeah. And this one is a 10. There's quite a few of these. Are you trying to say something? You know, is this, do you think this is the upper limit? Uh, but either way, uh, whoever sent these, please let us know because there was no card, so we don't know who to thank.
Bumper plates. They're very nice. Uh, nice Nike bumper plates. Very fun. What a funny thing.
Big sign of respect in our culture.
It is. It is. It is. Uh, anyway, uh, there was a minor, uh, headline, breaking news actually, learned about it from the chat. Uh, we discussed it right after we talked to, uh, Pat and Ravi from Sequoia, uh, that the Apple Card program is moving from Goldman Sachs to JP Morgan.
Nothing's really changing about the Apple Card yet. It's merely the bank backend that's always been sort of behind the scenes, behind the fold. Um, but it's, uh, even though it's a minor headline, I think it's an interesting story of just how Apple got to the point where they have a credit card, what that means, what the decisions, what the trade-offs were. And I wanted to go back all the way to the Steve Jobs era and think about how would he be down with credit cards. You're giving leverage to your customers, you're giving credit, you're in the debt business. It's a different business. Um, how did he think about it and how did we get here?
Uh, the headline is that, uh, the Apple Card program has millions of cards issued. There's 20 billion dollars of debt that's accumulated across all the cards. Uh, and the portfolio is not doing well. So, normally if you have a co-branded credit card like a JC Penney or Macy's credit card and it's aligned with a brand, uh, typically those get paid off pretty well. They have strict underwriting rules. And so when those trade hands, other banks will typically say, I'm buying a $10 billion portfolio and I'll give you 8% on top because most likely I'm going to be able to recoup all of that from the creditors and also, uh, you know, they're going to pay interest. So they're going to pay 15% interest, 25% interest. Now there will be some defaults, but in general you typically make money off of owning a portfolio of consumer credit card loans. Um, not in this case.
Goldman is like, "We got to get this off our balance sheet." They've already lost a billion dollars. Their consumer bank overall, which includes Marcus, has lost three billion. Like, they're not doing well over the last.
So, so is this a repayment issue or just an operational issue?
There's a little bit of both. Uh, a lot of it is the.
Do you think this is potentially because Apple's made it more difficult to actually have, uh, Morgan Stanley go after the clients? Like, is that Apple making certain decisions? Because I don't know. I have to imagine it's not like their underwriting criteria was wildly different than any other credit card in that category.
Was wildly different. But I'll get into some of the pitfalls that led to this place. So, uh, the $20 billion card balances that's trading, JP Morgan's acquiring that at a $1 billion discount instead of an 8% premium. You would expect that they would pay 21.6. They're actually paying 19 for this. Uh, and then they're going to have to go and recoup some of it. Uh, it's not, you know, by any means a disaster. Uh, and Goldman's a large company. JP, I said Morgan Stanley.
Yeah. Yeah. Uh, but it's interesting to figure out, uh, the history here. Before we do, let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. You can see we have our consoles here branded on the laptops. Very fun.
So, uh, Steve Jobs actually thought about launching a credit card at Apple at least two times that we know of. There's two key stories about Steve Jobs, uh, thinking about getting in the credit card game. The first was in the late 1990s. He met with Capital One to create a joint credit card that would have worked a lot like the Apple Card.
So, uh, but the main problem, and I think the form that, like, there's a lot of things where Apple has a particular brand. I want to talk to you about Apple's brand and what it means, like how it fits into the consumer credit card, consumer financial landscape. Um, but the north star that Jobs laid down was always amazing customer service and no rejection. So, I tend to think of most high-end brands as beneficiaries of exclusivity. You can't just buy an Hermes Birkin bag. You can't buy a Ferrari SP3 Daytona. You have to be invited. You need a relationship. You have to get an allocation, right? Uh, Apple, for some reason, I feel about Apple the same way I feel about Ferrari. And yet, it is a wildly different experience.
It's a premium brand.
It's a premium brand, but because of the design and because of the value of the technology and how innovative they are, I put them in a different category than Equinox, which I would put as like a premium thing. I've thought of them as luxury and they've done a good job with the materials that they use. In general, it's always felt like a luxury brand to me. Even though I agree with you, it's technically not. It doesn't really fit in there. They don't run their business like they're a luxury brand. They're not trying to say, "Oh, we only have 10,000 new iPhones in gold, so who knows what the market price will be on those." They don't run that like that.
Um, but, uh, Jobs wanted Apple to be a no rejection company. So anyone can walk into an Apple store, buy the most expensive iPhone that they make as long as they have the money for.
People want to give us money, they can.
They can, which is, you know, it's a standard business practice, but not always in luxury goods. Uh, and yeah, which is why I said it's premium luxury, even though Apple often presents itself as a luxury brand, right?
Yes. Yes. Uh, quickly, let me tell you about Linear. Meet the system for modern software development. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Let me also tell you about the Linear run of show today. The Linear lineup. We got Delian Aspuhof back on the show. Uh, we're going to dig into appearances last year.
Yeah. 18. And he's starting strong in the first week.
180 this year.
I would love that.
Uh, we're going to dig into Sticker Box, this viral kids toy that, uh, was tearing up the timeline. Very cool use of AI for, uh, you know, a consumer product. Uh, then we have Julie Bush, uh, at Valinor and a bunch of other folks, Harvey and Josh Wolf from Lux Capital coming on. So should be a fun show.
Uh, anyway, continuing. Um, so because of credit risk and underwriting, every credit card has to have an approval process and not everyone can be accepted. That's just the way it works. You cannot underwrite everyone or else you'll just have massive losses. Uh, so, uh, it was surprising. Uh, so, uh, so Apple when they launched the original card, they actually set the credit score requirement fairly low. And even though it launched in 2019, it felt like a holdover from the Jobs era, that Jobs philosophy of even though we're Apple, even though it feels it's going to have the patina of an MX, it's going to have this premium look and feel. And we'll get into the design of the card in a minute, but, uh, it really was accessible to a lot of people. I think you need a credit score of around a 600, which is pretty accessible. Uh, and so, uh, that philosophy carried through even from the '90s.
The second time Apple was really thinking about doing a card, uh, was in 2004. And I will tell you about this after I tell you about Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma. So outputs look really good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build, create codeback prototypes and apps fast.
So, um, they actually staffed this guy, Ken Seagull, who is the creative director on the Think Different campaigns, like one of the most iconic marketers in history, in tech history certainly. Uh, and they came up with a name. Jobs said, "If we launch a credit card, it's going to be called the Apple Card." And they actually wound up using that name. Uh, but it had a weird twist. So, most credit cards, they'll give you airline miles or cash back. There's Diners Club. It's usually you get points and then you can spend those points on travel.
You've always been a huge points guy, right?
I'm not, I'm actually not a points guy at all. Uh, I usually meet whoever the most elite management consultant in my friend group is and just ask them because every management consultant is obsessed with credit card points maxing and I just ask them which one should I get and then I just get that one. And then five years later, ten years later, I still have it and it's probably a bad deal then because it's always a great deal in the first couple years and then it gets worse and worse and worse as they, like, retain you.
Anyway, um, so instead of airline miles or cash back, this proposed Apple card from 2004, you would get points and you could only spend the points at the iTunes store to get free songs. What a funny, like.
I mean, at that moment in time, that was pretty cool.
Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of a cool idea at the same time.
I mean, I was a child at that time, so 99 cents was somewhat of a considered purchase.
I'd be playing, I'd sometimes I'd just play the preview of the song.
I'm good with the 30 seconds.
For sure. This is enough rocking out.
This is enough. Play it again.
Um, but it is somewhat genius because, uh, there's sort of zero marginal cost on music. Certainly on the distribution of music. Now, they do have to pay royalty fees, but there's already a built-in margin there. So that 99 cents, a lot of that went to Apple. Remember, they take 30%. So they're giving you psychologically a dollar worth of value. You go and spend $100, you get 100 points. One point is one cent. You buy the 99 cent song. But they are taking home another 30% on top of that. So the economics would have been really, really good. But it is sort of gimmicky because people want to spend points on a lot of things.
I'm happy to get free flights and hotels. I think there's something psychological about having, you know, a credit card that you spend money on for a couple years. You get a whole bunch of points and then you're like, wow, I got a free flight to a vacation that I'll remember forever. That's a very good association with whatever credit card brand you had. And as opposed to, okay, yeah, I bought a bunch of my favorite music and then four years later Spotify came out and actually my iTunes library is basically useless. Right.
Tyler, I was just going to say it's like the same thing because it's like instead of a trip, it's like, "Oh, I bought this Chief Keef album off my Apple Card. I'll always remember that. Now, my life is a movie."
I will remember that.
I hate being sober. Um, the, uh, we got to watch that clip. I need to pull that up. So, um, they were going to use, uh, they called them iPoints and you would be able to redeem them at the iTunes store. Uh, seemed like crazy timing considering that Spotify was about to launch four years later in 2008. So if they had actually done this in 2004, launched the iPoints program.
When did Apple actually launch?
Oh, much later. Much later. I want to say like 2016 or something.
2015.
2015. Boom. Got it. Wow.
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Um, so, uh, the other key feature that Apple always wanted, and this went back to Steve Jobs, uh, that they always wanted with the Apple Card, which you don't often think about with credit cards, but is amazing customer service. And so most people, their credit card just works. Apple did a couple of unique things where it integrated with the wallet and, uh, but mostly they just wanted extremely high levels of customer service. When you have a problem with your iPhone, you go into the Genius Bar. There's someone who's friendly. They are very good about getting you in at the right time.
Imagine one of the people at the Genius Bar breaking your kneecaps.
Just a.
They have a room where they're just like, "Okay, you know, we're very customer friendly here, but you haven't paid and we have to break your kneecaps. We're going to take you back." You know how Apple, they have like the back of house, but it's like almost invisible, right? Just get taken back there and they're just like nicely just like.
Pay your Apple bill. Well, I mean, that was another thing. They wanted to be so customer friendly. They didn't have any late fees, no application fees and no international fees. No fees at all. That was the whole pitch. No fees, which sounds really nice. Sounds really delightful to just be like, okay, I don't even have to think about fees or whatever. But the fees exist to incentivize people to pay on time because not only does the interest start occurring, but when you pay late, if you're not paying the balance, the minimum balance to maintain the card, then you get a late fee, which increases also the yield on the debt, but it also attracts like a lower quality customer who's maybe just on their fifth credit card and is just like, "Oh, this one doesn't have fees and I need an extra 500 bucks this month. I'll just grab this one." And it's a less considered decision to bring into their financial life.
So, um, the customer service thing was really an issue because with Apple, they have years and years, I mean, since I don't know, probably the '80s, like the Christmas time was when people would gift each other MacBooks or Mac computers and they built up, built up, built up. And so they have a whole workflow for how do we hire a lot of people around the Christmas time? How do we staff the Genius Bar? How do we educate people? How do we pay them? They're in the tier one cities, so they can have great people working there. It's a very high dollar revenue per square foot in those Apple stores. So the whole model works and they've built it up very slowly.
Goldman didn't have experience in consumer banking. Like the default consumer customer service experience is I'm calling my banker, my Goldman, and I'm like, I need to sell my company for a billion dollars. Get your M&A team ready. Or I need to go public potentially on the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Whether you use Goldman, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, whoever's lead left, make sure they're ringing that bell with you at the New York Stock Exchange.
Um, but seriously, Goldman, like, it's a trading. It's the highest finance. It's the most premiere. It's the most elite. And so when you call them and you're like, "Yeah, I got billed for $25 and it should have been $23. Can you fix this?" Well, they need a new team for that. And they need to build up that team. And that's not rocket science. Like, I do think Goldman should have been able to figure that out, but Apple also wanted another consumer-friendly feature. They wanted all of the bills to drop on the first of the month every month. And normally credit cards will stagger it out. They'll be like, "Your bill comes on the 10th. Tyler's comes on the 15th. Mine comes on the 20th. We don't really care. We don't really know." And so if you have a problem with your credit card, you check the statement. You're like, "Wait a minute. That's not the right charge. I got to call and sort this out. You're calling on the 10th. Tyler's calling on the 15th. I'm calling on the 20th intentionally."
Yeah, they do it intentionally because if they have a customer service organization,
I always assumed, stupidly, that it was just sloppy and annoying. I'm like, oh, you're just.
Genius. Trust the process.
Trust the process.
Trust the process. Never lose faith. Um, so, so Apple insisted, hey, everyone's got to get their statement right on the first. That's the best customer experience. But what that means is that you need like 10,000 people ready at the phones because you're not just doing, oh, you know, send us an email and we'll have some automated system get back to you and do this. Like Apple customer service, that level that Goldman wanted to bring was very high. And so you need a ton of people staffed on the first of the month and then they're not really doing anything in the back half of the month. And while you can maybe do temp work at an Apple store in December and say, hey, we're going to hire you from November 1st to January 15th, you're going to deal with some of the returns. It's a three-month gig. People will sign up for that. No one's saying, "Yeah, I'm good to work at Goldman Sachs on the first of every month and the first week of every month, and then I'll just find something else to do on weeks two, three, and four of the month." That doesn't make any sense. So they ran into a bunch of problems there. Obviously, more cost and all of this was just making the actual program less profitable for Goldman. Less, more of a problem.
Um, and we talked a little bit about the fees of any kind. Now, there was an opportunity. Goldman was the whole reason why they jumped at the opportunity to work with Apple and they kind of bent over backwards because Apple had tried this with, they went to a whole bunch of other banks. Remember going back to Capital One, um, and every bank had said like, now, are you crazy? You can't do this. Like you can't give everyone in the world a free credit card with great customer service. Like you're going to lose money, Apple. And Apple finally.
Like, no, we want to give everyone a free lunch.
Exactly. And so, um, what Goldman should have done with the customer service is they should have got to Finn.ai, except it didn't exist in 2019, but it does now. And Finn is the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Finn.ai. Maybe Goldman should become a client. Maybe JP Morgan should become a client. It might already be.
Um, but so the, uh, Goldman, um, uh, they were making a push into consumer. They built Marcus internally. Yeah. Which was always sort of a funny name to me. I don't know if it resonated with you.
I don't know. The name, like, people names can either be so good or so bad.
Yeah.
And I don't know. I have a childhood friend, a family friend named.
Marcus. Yeah.
It's a great name. He's a great dude. Um, do I want to trust him with all my money? I don't know.
Oh yeah. Funny. Like, you might be like, "Yeah, my smartest friend is Marcus. I love this brand." Or it's like.
Anyways, I texted a buddy who has some context on this whole deal. And so he is in a meeting, but he fired off some notes. I asked him like, uh, why did, like, how did this happen? Basically, he says GS effed up the plan. DJ D Soul was told to shut down Marcus and Consumer or get out.
That's David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman.
Or get out of the job. So he cut all of Marcus except for savings. Then GS had a multi-year process to find a bank that Apple would approve, right? They're not just going to say like some smaller, not systemically important bank, etc.
Um, then they had to figure out price, which includes opportunity cost of selling for a discount compared to running out the contract to 2030.
Yeah.
GS effed up because transactional, not a longitudinal org, and really thought they were smarter, but never focused on the fundamentals of running the business.
Yeah. So, um.
So the question is, like, what happens next? Uh, JP Morgan obviously has way more consistency here. Uh, the other hard part for Goldman was that they were trying to build their consumer-facing brand. So they wanted the Goldman name in more places and the Apple card would have been a great co-branding thing. They were fighting to get like the front of the card, which would be the prime real estate next to Apple. Apple Goldman would have been really cool. They didn't. They got relegated to the back. Absolutely not.
And the card looks awesome. Um, I was reflecting on it, like, I don't know if you've actually seen it. Maybe we can pull up a picture, but, um, I don't know if it's still the case, but, uh, originally it was CNC milled from a single sheet of titanium alloy, like the same way they make these MacBooks, they would use to make the cards. So it didn't have those laminated layers. I don't know if you have a Chase Sapphire Reserve, but those things kind of like fall apart after a couple years because there is a metal piece and the metal card is typically more prestigious. But they add laminate on either side. Uh, the Apple Card went a different direction and it had, and I think they delivered on the branding side. They just didn't quite deliver on the financial design.
Did you ever have one?
Apple Card? No. And it's so interesting because I think that if you were trying to do an analysis on the Apple card, you were like every high-value credit card customer in America, not every, but the vast, vast, maybe 99% has an iPhone. Apple's going to put this everywhere. Yeah. This is going to be one of the biggest credit card business lines of all time. Yeah. And it just, it's been interesting to see, you know, this entire saga because it hasn't really turned out that way. Even though, how many times has Apple kind of promoted to you in some way or another, right? So many different ways.
And still I'm just like, I have, you know, I have a credit card. I don't need another, right? But.
Yeah, totally. Um, well, let me tell you about Turbopuffer, serverless vector and full-text search built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable.
Um, well, uh, it'll be interesting to see where this goes. I think it's always been sort of like a minor business for Apple, but, uh, some opportunity. I do think that there was an interesting opportunity to make it more exclusive, more of a status symbol, uh, more of something that you pull out and it says something about you, um, has some badge value. But that, in a lot of circles, an iPhone doesn't actually say anything about you.
No, no, no, no. It's too generic. Yeah. No, totally.
It's not like.
And then also there's just the fact that people don't pull out credit cards anymore. The Apple Pay for everything.
I do. Yeah. I really wonder how people using Apple Pay will affect the premium people put on different credit cards, right? When you're just like, I'm going to just pay this bill at this restaurant. Just go like. The true points maxers do care about using the right card for the right time because some cards will be better for dining, others will travel. Like the Apple card gave you 3% off if you're buying Apple stuff and then 2%, I believe, if you paid for something with Apple Pay using the Apple Card in Apple Pay. Like you open up Apple Pay and you select the Apple Card, you get 2% back and there's 1% on everything else if you pull out the card and you just pay for gas at the gas station. But then there's like the Costco card that gets you a better discount at Costco and the Amazon card that gets you a better discount at Amazon. And so a lot of the points maxers and the card maxers will get the specific card and they're like, "When I'm at Amazon, I use this card. When I'm at Walmart, I use this card." I never got.
This is a project for Billy McFarland to lead. You remember he had like a members.
I saw his, uh, Magnesus, I saw his latest, uh, like Instagram reel or something. He was just walking down the street talking about doing some event. He's still new festival.
New festival or something along those lines. I don't know. Good luck to him.
Uh, in other news, uh, US venture capital fundraising falls 35% as firms stay private longer. Uh, of course, uh, Josh Wolf is not letting himself be a statistic. He's coming on later today.
Massive fund, the biggest one ever, 1.5 billion in new funds for Lux Capital. Uh, but Kate Clark in the Journal says money is flowing to the most trusted investment firms as startups stay private longer.
And before we read this, let me tell you about Vibe.co, where DTC brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta.
Uh, fundraising for US venture capital firms dropped 35% in 2025, the most anemic stretch in at least six years, with money flowing primarily to the most trusted investment firms as companies stay private longer. The $66 billion raised last year represents a 70% drop from the 2022 record. The slowdown reflects a continuing liquidity crunch. Startups that have been flushed with venture funding have opted to remain private rather than exposing themselves to public market scrutiny. A prolonged IPO drought that has returned little cash to investors is now complicating efforts to raise new capital. And there's a graphic here that we can pull up. You can see the chart.
"The fundraising climate is challenging," said Beaser Clarkson, a partner at Sapphire.
I invited her on the show. We got to get her at some point. She's great.
Focused on investments in venture funds. Investors are concentrating capital in the most trusted VCs.
Look at this chart.
I hate to see it. It is funny that over the last 18 months, few years, it felt like a lot of people were looking around and being like, "Wow, our industry can exist in a high rate environment."
Oh, yeah.
Then you look at this chart.
I don't know that that's actually what's going. I mean, it does coincide with the interest rate thing perfectly. Um, I think the bigger piece of the narrative is just the IPO market. The fact that a lot of these funds are sitting on massive, like NAV, massive gains, but not a lot of liquidity. And so if you are an allocator, an LP, and you've put a bunch of money in a fund and you're like, yeah, I'm ready to double down as soon as you give me the money back. I'll give it back to you, but like, let's give it back to me so I can reinvest it. Uh, until you know, oh, okay, you got 10 billion over there, like show me the money and then I'll.
And this is the year the IPO windows open. There's a bunch of names that we're expecting to go out. Uh, if it starts to close, you and I will do our best.
We're going to hold it open.
Hold it back to back. I'll push one door.
Back to back.
Well, it's going to be an exciting year for anyone on Public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more.
Back to the article. As a result, the largest firms are becoming more powerful. Anthropic investor Lightspeed Venture Partners secured more than 9 billion across new funds in December in one of the year's largest raises, while Peter Thiel's Founders Fund closed 4.6 billion in April. New fund managers, by contrast, are facing an increasingly tough fundraising environment. The drop in fundraising helps explain why cash-intensive AI businesses are looking beyond traditional venture firms for capital, such as the deep-pocketed sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and hedge funds. "Collectively, the venture market doesn't have the firepower to do this investing," Clarkson said of the largest AI rounds. "It must be coming from other sources as well."
Uh, yeah, and kind of left out the hyperscalers too out of this, which have been a key player in some of these later rounds.
Totally. Uh, funding for US startups reached a record 222 billion in 2025, more than double 2024 level. So we have 66 billion in new funds raised, 222 billion actually going into startups, and of course a lot of that again is non-venture capital firms.
Yep. Still seems like a good time to build a company. Still seems like there's plenty of.
Always a good time. Always a good time. Uh, should we talk about.
There's some interesting concentration dynamics that are happening because you often see that chart of the decline in venture funding raised with also the decline in new venture fund formation. There just aren't as many new funds getting spun up. Um, obviously we talked to some folks that are getting new funds off the ground, but a lot of it's not 2021 anymore where there were like a new fund every single day. Uh, the top 30 funds secured 75% of fundraising with Andreessen Horowitz alone capturing roughly 10% of the year's entire capital. Mega rounds of 100 million or more accounted for about 70% of venture funding. So, uh, you have this bifurcated market. Elite funds and sovereign wealth are doing huge AI deals while the broader VC ecosystem, emerging managers, seed fund, Series A specialists are getting crushed.
It's the best time for tech ever is real, but concentration is maybe in 20 to 30 companies. Everyone's just riding their winners.
Uh, well, speaking of deals, uh, Reuters has an exclusive. They say Trump admin mulls payments to sway Greenlanders to join the US. Uh, Greenland says they're not for sale. Uh, European leaders are standing behind Copenhagen. Uh, but Greenland talks in the White House have intensified in recent days. US officials have discussed sending lump-sum payments to Greenlanders.
STEMI time to Greenlanders as part of a bid to convince them to secede from Denmark and potentially join the United States. While the exact dollar figure and logistics of any payment are unclear, US officials, including White House aides, have discussed figures ranging from $10,000 to $100,000 per person. Uh, doing the math, even at $100,000 a person, Greenland only has like 57,000.
Basically a seed round. 5.7 billion. Doable.
That's an AI. That's actually like three AI researchers.
Three AI researchers in Greenland for all of Greenland. I mean, I get that they have a ton of natural resources and whatnot, but I wonder how much this would actually sway them because I doubt that you can just actually buy the votes. You probably couldn't make the payment contingent on them voting. They would have to either vote and then they get the payment because we promise, or the payment happens and then whether or not they vote, you know.
I think just start planes with cash. Yeah. You know, just dropping it out of the air.
Because then wouldn't the game theory be just that they hold strong? There's going to be another.
Here's my thing. Here's my thing. If I'm a citizen of Greenland,
Yeah.
Resident, I'm sitting there being like, you're okay, we know they're willing to, we have an idea that they're willing to spend up to around six billion.
Uh, we think we're worth 60. Let's let them keep, you know, the Paramount Skydance, the Ellisons. They'll just bid and then say, "Yeah, well, it's not our best and final offer." And then what does Warner Brothers do? They of course again, they rejected another bid or recommended against it. So.
Greenland's prime minister Jens Frederik Nielsen wrote in a Facebook post.
Facebook, let's go.
Oh, okay. They are really a decade behind over there. Uh, he says, "Enough is enough. No more fantasies about annexation." He's not a fan. Uh, you got to get on Reels, buddy. You got to do a front-facing video. Use some AI. Get some vibe reel music in there. You got to.
Yeah. Get the Sigma male, you know, grindset.
Yeah. It's just his statement going, "Enough is enough. No more fantasies about annexation," and it just cuts to like the Joker and just.
Leaders in Copenhagen and throughout Europe have reacted to comments by Trump and other officials asserting their right to Greenland in recent days with disdain. Uh, particularly given that the US and Denmark are NATO allies bound by a mutual defense agreement. Uh, on Tuesday, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Britain, and Denmark issued a joint statement saying only Greenland and Denmark can decide matters regarding their relations. So this is.
Yeah, but they can, you know, Trump can make his case. Hey, if you alone on your own decide to come over and hang out with us, we got some cash for you, apparently. It's wild. Let me tell you about Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Um, see the average in.
Trump has long argued that the US needs to acquire Greenland on several grounds. One, it is rich in minerals needed for advanced military applications. He's also said the Western Hemisphere broadly needs to be under the geopolitical influence of Washington. Uh, while internal deliberations regarding how to seize Greenland have occurred among Trump's aides since before he took office a year ago, there has been renewed urgency after his government captured Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro in a daring snatch-and-grab operation, not an invasion apparently. Uh, according to sources familiar with internal deliberations, one source said White House aides were eager to carry over the momentum from the Maduro operation toward accomplishing Trump's other long-standing geopolitical goals. It feels like wildly different scenarios though. Like they're not going to go and send in Delta Force. I don't know, maybe they will. I don't know.
We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security and Denmark isn't going to be able to do it.
So average gross income in Greenland is 40 to 45,000 USD. So people could be looking at that 100k saying,
"I'm going to retire a couple years early."
100k is big. Yeah. I don't know. Uh, among the possibilities being floated by Trump aides, a White House official said on Tuesday, is trying to enter into a type of agreement with the island called a compact of free association. COFA. Uh, the precise details, which have only been extended to small island nations of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and Palau. Uh, Palau, interesting. Uh, vary depending on the signatory, but the US government typically provides many essential services such as mail delivery and military protection. Get an Amazon Prime from us. What else can we offer you? In exchange, the US military operates freely in COFA countries and trade with the US is largely duty-free. No tariffs. I wonder what Greenland is exporting these days.
Uh, COFA agreements have previously been inked with independent countries and Greenland would likely need to separate from Denmark for such a plan to proceed. In theory, payments could be used to induce Greenlanders to vote for their independence or to sign onto a COFA after such a vote. Um, while polls show an overwhelming majority of Greenlanders want independence, concerns about the economic costs of separating from Denmark, among other issues, have kept most Greenlandic legislators from calling for an independence referendum. Do you have stats on Greenland or do you know?
I was just going to say, um, Tyler Cowen had a good piece on this yesterday in the Free Press.
Read it, Tyler. He's.
Well, it's pretty long. I don't want to read the whole thing, but, um.
Okay, sing it.
Anti.
He doesn't want us to actually like buy it, right? It's like bad. You need to convince them to come over. Um, but he does, like, I think he wants Greenland to become like in possession or the US to become in possession of Greenland, right? Maybe like a Puerto Rico situation. Yeah.
So it's like a little bit, uh.
Above Palau.
Yeah. It's above Palau. It's not a state though. It's not like, you know, and we're not.
Sending the military in.
Yeah. We were pitching. So, so.
It's such a tough, I mean, it's such a, it is a tough sell as much as I love this great country.
You mean to live in Greenland or?
Yeah. Just if you're in Greenland and you're kind of looking over at the US with binoculars and.
I want that crazy stuff over here.
Yeah. It's just massive, massive infighting.
Uh, governors, you know, going to war with Washington constantly. Right.
It is interesting. The US is like one of the most entertaining countries. It feels like a lot of people are obsessed with our national politics. People don't really follow our local politics or our state-level politics or global politics. They mostly follow American national politics. So, I don't know. Maybe they get in on it. Um, I have another idea for Greenland.
You're saying maybe they're just bored out there and they want to get in the arena. Yeah. Get in the box. Get in the label box. Delivering you the highest quality data for Frontier AI.
Get in the label box. Um, so Puerto Rico famously has just a 3% tax rate on income. So a lot of people go there.
And when, uh, and this is why when Jake Paul fights for $90 million, he's actually fighting basow president. He has one of the few jobs that you can actually do very well from Puerto Rico, which is just train in boxing with a team that you built yourself. So yeah, his PE, like Jake Paul will actually be a billionaire fairly quickly simply because he's going to do a handful more fights, I imagine, and then he needs about a 2x from there and he'll be good to go because he's like keeping, you know, 97% of every.
So when you see those headline numbers for boxing events, $100 million, is that to the winner who someone gets?
Jake Paul, Anthony Joshua fight. I think Jake got 90 something and Anthony Joshua got just under that, around the same.
But you know, I think Jake was.
A bigger draw. So it's more about how much you're drawing. It's like starring in a movie almost. So, you know, your star power dictates how much you'll sell. It is crazy that, uh, I mean, obviously be very dedicated to the sport, but, uh, it's just crazy to me that you could be such a big celebrity that you can go and do a one-night event and draw that much economic opportunity, that many ads, and that many pay-per-view sales. That's a lot of money. Uh, that's remarkable.
Uh, anyway, let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.
So, my proposal, Puerto Rico, 3% tax rate. Greenland, we do a 97% tax rate.
Why would anyone go?
Grandfathered in to the Puerto Rico, the 3%. I don't think.
Yeah, for a long time you could just go, but now I think it's.
Be there. I think they closed it. I'm sure it's still solid. Not what it was.
But Puerto Rico famously people go there because it has a low tax regime. You'd pay just 3% of your income. Uh, Greenland, 97% taxes. That's what they should do. Why would anyone go there? It's cold. And now you have high taxes.
Well, but a lot of people desperately want to raise taxes, basically. I mean, I'm assuming some people actually want to take it to 100%. Um, and so if you could create a new zero territory and then if you're in favor of ultra-high taxes, you could go to Greenland.
That's a good idea. Zeroed out.
I like this idea.
You just land in the country and then you connect all your accounts with Plaid, transfer out everything and then zero it out.
And then Tyler, you had a different proposal. What was it?
Well, so the bull case for just 97 is that, like,
It's a flex, right? I can live in Greenland. I make so much money that I only have 3% left and I'm still balling. It is hard. Every billionaire has a plane. They all have boats. It's like, who's really got money? Well, if you can go to Greenland, lose 97% of your wealth and still be flexing. It's like, okay, that guy's actually really rich and really made it.
But then if you're not.
It's the new year.
Yeah.
If you're not Uber, it still makes sense if you basically just have the 97% tax rate the first year.
So then maybe it's if you look at in 10-year increments, right?
So first year you're basically zeroed out, but then you got a super low tax rate. Then you just grind.
For five years. So you lock in.
It's almost like a, you get dropped on an island and you got to fight your way out.
Yeah. Sort of Lord of the Flies situation. Do you see Jensen came out yesterday and said he doesn't care about California's proposed billionaire tax?
Uh.
Is it? I don't know. He's just low-broing David S.
He's low-broing everyone. It's funny. Jensen Huang said he wasn't worried about a potential tax on billionaires in California, breaking from a cadre of ultra-wealthy residents who have spoken
out against the first of its kind proposal. We chose to live in Silicon Valley and whatever taxes I guess they would like to apply, so be it. He this is this is I'm going to say it. It's kind of a pick me [laughter] for for for a bean. He says, "I'm perfectly fine with it. It never crossed my mind once." Um I guess I mean does this mean you should be even more bullish on Nvidia? They going to 40 trillion
>> for sure. >> Uh the ballot initially actually definitely pay definitely do this right now and then stop
>> because he's [laughter] like I got another 10x in the bag. I want to pay this now and then move on. Lock the rate now.
>> Let's head into the comment section and put a hazmat suit. [laughter]
>> Uh it's not really relevant what he thinks. According to Jeff, it's a question of what the policy effect impact is. all the billionaires want to stay in the state and don't mind giving up 5% of their wealth each year
>> or whatever thing the state cooks up. The state government will certainly not invest the money as intelligently as the average billionaire. It will largely go to fraud, waste, lazy government employees, etc. So Huang can have whatever opinion he wants. It's a free country, but that doesn't make it a wise policy.
>> I agree.
>> Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. [applause] State-of-the-art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. You see Larry dumped his place in SF.
>> He did. He's moving out. Uh
>> well, I don't know if he's getting out million. Uh definitely making making
>> he still has plenty of homes in Malibu.
>> In a somewhat related story, there is now a salary cap in defense tech. You saw this. So apparently uh this is from uh President Trump. Uh he said that uh what was the actual what was the actual quote from Trump? Uh because Palmer had a Palmer had a clip. Let's head over to Truth Social. [laughter]
>> I think I think you actually do. Uh he said uh I've been informed by the slowest. He's talking about um he's talk Okay. So uh also if Rathon wants further business with the United States government under no circumstances will they be allowed to do any additional stock buybacks where they have spent tens of billions of dollars until they are able to get their act together. Our country comes first. Um and we c can you find the actual Trump quote about the salary cap? He said what five million per year per executive at a defense company. He also said that uh he said I have determined for the good of our country especially for the in these very troubled and dangerous times our military budget for the year 2027 should be not should not be $1 trillion but rather $ 1.5 trillion. That is a huge increase 50% increase. Um but uh obviously there's a question of where that money comes from. Uh
>> okay. Yes. Yeah. So the uh
>> oh I have the quote here. Yes.
>> Okay. Well, uh, executive pay packages, uh, they're exorbitant and unjustifiable. So, they're they should be limited to 5 million or less.
>> Okay. Limited to five million or less. So, I I So, Palmer actually sort of agreed with this. Let's play the clip of Palmer Lucky on Bloomberg the Close. Uh, digging into this. Uh, this is clips.
>> They were at the Consumer Electronics Show.
>> Yeah, I think he was there for uh for Mod Retro, but they got him to comment on defense technology. So my motivation is to try and build in the biggest thing possible. I will say people have fairly critiquing and said, "But Palmer, you know, are you really a neutral party here? Are you really in a position to comment given you're competing with these companies?" And I'd say two things. One, these measures do apply in equal measure to me. I now cannot pay dividends. I now cannot do stock buybacks if I'm not investing in new plants if I'm not doing these new things. The other thing is it's always tricky when you want to you I'm in defense because I wanted to help solve these problems, right? Um, it's actually the same thing with like Mod Retro in the gaming space. Like, oh, of course Palmer would criticize these other game companies. After all, he's in the gaming space. It's like, but yeah, but I'm in the gaming space because I want to solve these problems. It's kind of this like catch 22 like like if you're outside of it, they'll say good point.
>> Well, why don't you do something about it then? And you do something like who cares what you're doing? You're just part of the problem. It's always been emotionally difficult for me. We also have posts that President Trump is thinking more than a trillion should be invested in the area of defense. The budget should grow. The budget should not anti-defense or anti-defense company. That's not for sure. That's for sure.
>> What's interesting is your company is, dare I say it, considering going public.
>> Yes.
>> Would your CEO do you think the CEO that leads the business when it's gone public should be under these sorts of restrictions from an executive order? Do you think that that's going to be an issue? I think that when you are on the dole and when you're effectively run on the public's wallet that the public should be able to impose whatever restrictions they want on you. I I like and you're not asking whether it should be you know like like you know if I am getting paid by taxpayers they should have the ability to elect people elect representatives elect you know who will then nominate people who can hold me to account in any way they wish. If they want to say that I only pay myself $5 million until I'm caught up with my schedules, they should be allowed to do that. If they say that I'm not allowed to pay myself $1 until I get caught up, I think they should be allowed to do that. When you are working on the when you are working on taxpayer, there is no level of oversight or intervention that I am against conceptually. Now, I think some of these might be bad moves. They might not necessarily help the defense base, but uh in concept, I think everything should be on the table. And I think it's even good maybe to scare some people sometimes. You know, you don't necessarily go to people and say, "This is the way it's going to be forever." You say, "This is how it's going to be until you get your act together." You remember being a teenager and your parents say, "You're grounded until X, Y, and Z. Bring up your grades, solve your problems, and then we will talk about altering the deal." You You say, "But but this deal has so many problems. If it's like this my whole life, if I'm grounded for the rest of my life, that means I'll have no social [laughter] life." And your parents are not necessarily looking to ground you for life. It's so funny. Imagine that.
>> I think that that's what you're seeing right now. It's not a lifetime. Let me jump.
>> That's great.
>> Yeah. I mean, I think I think using it as an incentive to get these companies to hit the schedules that they agreed to as part of these contracts could be effective, right? Especially especially if it's especially if it's temporary. You know, you can see the you can see this kind of uh executive order setting a precedent that could uh over time be uh abused or have a bunch of negative effects. It's hard to say now. So, this kind of thing uh is concerning, but you know, I was talking to a a defense tech founder the other day who's trying to take over a program from a big prime where the prime had gotten like a multiund million dollar contract years ago and had actually not even set up a space to uh make the things that they were uh that they had signed up and were getting paid to make.
>> They're being lazy bones.
>> Lazy bones. Lazy bones behavior. And so yeah, in that in that situation, if you have a management team that is just like printing regardless on if they're actually delivering on what the government is asking and paying them to do, that's inappropriate. And so I think
>> and I think I think Palmer is sort of wrestling with uh you know, libertarian ideas. How much you know should private companies be able to do? And and that's a separate issue. It's like a private company if you're just selling to normal customers, you can do whatever you want. But it's different when you have a contract with government. Then who decides the government's claim? Well, it's the people. It's the democracy. And so that's what's happening.
>> Yeah. And and and the the you know, Palmer in another clip was talking. They they asked him, "How much do you make?" He's like, "I make $100,000 a year." Right? That's my comp package. And he also said, "I have a bunch of stock because I started this company." Yeah.
>> Defense executives, anybody that works for the government cannot make more than $5 million and you're factoring in comp packages later. You could be in a situation where a company says, "Well, like we can't hire the best people because they have an offer to make $10 million a year over here and we can only pay them5 million." I I mean the AI researcher thing is crazy because I don't know that this is a dynamic that's actually happening but it would be very tricky if Anderal could not compete against anthropic open AI Google Deep Mind if they need a super talented AI researcher and maybe they're not paying him a billion dollars but they're just like yeah like the market rate for this role is 15 mil and like we can't hire them right now because we didn't check some box on the level of deliveries on this thing and that would be uh little bit tricky. Really quickly, let me tell you about Reream. Then we'll go to Tyler. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multiream, go to reream.com.
>> Uh I was just gonna say you can already see this phenomena, you know, in some ways. Uh you know, Tim Cook.
>> Yes.
>> He it's not a salary cap, right? But it feels like there is a cap.
>> It feels like something's going on. He should be be paying paid way more.
>> Yeah. What does he make? 75.
>> Yeah. It's
>> barely scraping it. Uh the other
>> imagine if he was only five. I mean, it would
>> Oh, it'd be it'd be terrible. He would he would have no incentive to shoot any
>> the greatest operators of all time can barely make a buck more than a guy who throws and hits balls.
>> Yeah.
>> Right.
>> Yeah. Uh I think instead of a $5 million individual cap on defense tech executives, it would be much better to do a team-based salary cap because then that injects an interesting dynamic like instead of 5 million per executive, how about 20 million for the entire executive team? So then you have the idea of team construction. Where do you have cap room? Okay, we got an all-star. We we're bringing in Brian Shy as the CEO. He's the CEO of Anderol right now. We're poaching him. We're getting him 18, but his team is going to be mostly interns. Or you go and you get, okay, we got four people. They're all making five. They're all decent operators, but you create much more of a sports-like dynamic. That's the way
>> we can't get Brian Shy, but we can recreate him in the aggregate.
>> The [laughter] aggregate. Exactly. Dodd Dodd in the chat says the best way to force them to deliver what they promised is to choose another vendor. I agree. You could fix a lot of this at the contract level. If if you sign a contract with somebody and then a year in year, two years, 3 years, etc. they're not delivering like making it so that the government can like more easily reallocate those funds uh and actually you know make uh these companies have some accountability. Um, more importantly near
>> before we move on, uh, ju just I think this whole thing is very interesting because you have this dynamic where very clearly it feels like he seth went and gave Trump some sort of update and then he just like posted on true social and like kind of crashed out. Um, and there's a weird thing where it's like why is this happening like this? This is not it's not even an executive order at this point. just like we're we're this entire news cycle around the new defense budget and this this is all just truth social posts just like Trump's thoughts his shower thoughts basically. Uh but this stuff does actually have an impact on the funny
truth social post and you just assume it's an executive order.
>> It feels like law. It feels like oh okay this is law but it's not. Um but but it does have an impact and it brings people to the table and we saw this play out with Intel where he was saying like Lip Bhutan's got to go and basically calling for the firing of this guy who just got hired to turn around Intel and then and then a few days later he's like Lip Bhutan's amazing. I love this guy. I'm actually going to invest. I own 10% of the company now and now the stock my boy [laughter] and so uh these things are like aggressive but it's this whole like taco chickening out but that's part of the plan art of the deal. I don't know. It's a very it's a very weird interesting new dynamic and I wonder how much it'll carry forward in the next administration but uh we will see. It's certainly entertaining at the moment. Before we move on, let me tell you about railway. Railway simplifies software deployment. Web apps, servers, and databases run in one place with scaling and monitoring and security built in.
>> That's right.
>> Near says the term carry in venture capital actually comes from video games. You [laughter] just need to find one good one founder good enough to carry your entire career.
>> That is fantastic.
>> This is a banger. And it's it's it's it's a banger because it's so true. Like when I when I look at across you know 60 70 different investments at this point if you take out like two or three
>> of these founders it's just like okay
>> much like being on Rust with a with an absolute
>> killer who 360 no scope while you're still figuring out how the sticks work.
>> But you're getting carried. You're like, "We won."
>> 2v2 on Rust and you're just in a corner and the game's over cuz you're cuz
>> you load into Counterstrike on Dust 2 and you one random guy you're queuing with just knows all the smoke lineups and you're just ready to rock. You're getting carried. You're carried to the top. Did I ever tell the story of of how I got my Overwatch account carried to like the absolute top? My account was like ranked one of the best in the world for a little bit, but it was very
>> So I I played the first season of I I played the first season of Overwatch. Then my password was included in some sort of hack or some sort of leak from another maybe like you know some other company had my password leaked it and I'd use a generic password on Overwatch. And so some hacker figured out how to get into my Overwatch account which is not important because like what are you going to do? You're just going to like my credit card information isn't there. You can't do anything with it. You can just play Overwatch. But Overwatch was like a $60 game or something. And so if you were hacking, you didn't want to buy $60 every time you got banned. So this hacker played on my Overwatch account for like multiple seasons and ranked way up and was like a sniper. I think he played Hanzo main and was like really really good. And then years later I got back in with my friends and I'm like, "Oh, let's play some Overwatch." And we queue up
>> like, "John, what what are you up to?"
>> And I and I'm like, "Oh, I need to do placement matches." And so I do the placement matches. I'm just like losing because I'm playing with all these like incredible like you know the top tier and and everyone's like why are you guys like like we know you're good. Why are you why are you sandbagging? Like why are you trying to derank your account? And I'm like I'm not I'm playing as hard as I can. I'm doing my best. And they're uh and they're like, "No, we can see that you're like one of the greatest Hanzo players ever. Like you're the greatest sniper in Overwatch. We've seen your account history. You're amazing. Why are you playing poorly?" Uh and I was like I I don't know. And then I finally figured it out that my account had been stolen and then rocketed to the top of the rankings [laughter] and then and then the the game like remembered that and was putting me in these really high tier games. So finally I had to make up a lie because whenever I'd whenever I'd hop on a game everyone would be like you're terrible and you're supposed to be good and I'd have to say ah like I broke my hand so I just I'm not as good as I used to be. Like please go easy on me. Like I'm I'm I'm relearning everything. Give me a break. Anyway, before we move on, app loving profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. Jordy,
>> uh, one more thing that was funny about, uh, this truth social saga from yesterday. So, uh, he starts dunking on the exacts, talking about salary caps. Uh, Loheed Martin stock was like falling off a cliff. Uh, Rathon, etc. I think this was,
>> uh, it was right after the close, so it was in after hours. Uh but then immediately after that uh Dodd in the chat says the funny thing is that the $1.5 trillion dollar announcement came after talking down on them. So then very uh just a little bit later Trump said after long and difficult negotiations with senators, congressmen, secretaries, and other political representatives. I've determined that for the good of the country, especially in these troubled and dangerous times, our military budget for the year 2027 should not be the 1 trillion, but rather 1.5 trillion. This will allow us to build this will allow us to build the quote unqu military that we have long been entitled to and more importantly that it will keep us safe and secure. Uh and so any anyways you can imagine what happened to um [snorts]
>> prices after that if it weren't for the tremendous numbers being produced by terrorists from other countries.
>> Uh and then and then keeps ranting uh talks about Sleepy Joe. I I think we I think it's time to retire Sleepy Joe. Just let him let him be retired. Just Joe.
>> Uh anyways, uh over to Warner Brothers. Warner Brothers has rejected Paramount's latest $ 108.4 billion hostile bid and remain committed.
>> I called it loyal.
>> I knew nothing about this deal, but I just randomly said that I think Netflix is going to run away with it. But we'll see.
>> In the journal, Paramount defends its hostile bid for
>> how high can they go? Can they go to 200 billion? [laughter] It seems like Paramount has
>> they're holding out for the one trillion
>> endless endless coffers. Uh I don't know. But
>> Paramount continued pushing its 77.9 billion bid for Warner Brothers Thursday a day after Warner said it plans to stick to its existing deal with Netflix.
>> Yeah, [snorts] the photo really did it for me. the aura farming together of the of the Warner Brothers team with the Netflix team on the lot on the lot. It feels like
>> these guys are absolute dogs. They're they're they're ready to partner up. Uh they're they're adding a new a new brother to the Warner Brothers. Uh and so they're they're having fun and I and it feels like like unless the price gets really crazy and they appeal directly to shareholders and the shareholders go crazy or something, uh feels like it's in the bag. And meanwhile, uh, Paramount has traded down almost 15% in the past month. So, um,
>> well, still making some moves in CBS and stuff. Still making waves with Barry Weiss at the helm.
>> Anyway, Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.
>> Uh, Enthropic raising 10 billion at 350 billion. We talked about this a little bit yesterday. Yeah,
>> get into it more.
>> GIC, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund and coou plan to lead
>> you absolute dog.
>> Spencer, [laughter] get in the Ultradoo. Uh, explain this to us. This is great. Uh, the funding round in the the third mega deal in the past year follows a 13 billion investment in September that valued the company at 183 billion. So, they're raising less money at almost twice the valuation. Good for dilution. Uh the rounds expected to close in the coming weeks. Uh the total amount of the deal could change. The new financing kicks off what is likely to be another banner year for AI startup funding in 2025. We're going to the Axon.
>> We're still warming up this new mallet. Kind of splintered.
>> If you've noticed this,
>> maybe you know what we need? We need some athletic tape to wrap around like a baseball bat. gloves, too.
>> Batting gloves.
>> I do I I would like an even longer mallet, like a full baseball.
>> There's something about a baseball bat that's just the platonic ideal for swinging things. Uh maybe maybe big bigger mallet, maybe some uh maybe some athletic tape on there wrapping it like uh it's like it's a baseball bat that's hit a a thousand home runs.
>> Uh do you think they do you think they end up doing another round before the IPO? Like it's hard it's hard to imagine this is actually the the actual preip round just because there's so much incentive to just again in a few months. I I I saw a couple people doing polls on uh would you rather own OpenAI at 1 trillion or Anthropic at 350 or XAI at 220 or whatever whatever the valuations were and uh at least a lot of the a lot of the small polls that I saw uh people were very excited about anthropics valuation relative to the magic that's happening in claude code and and all the all the glazing that's happening. Finally, we have a second AI glaze gate, but this time the AI is getting glazed by the humans instead of vice versa. The triple glaze. Um, but Curser is not getting glazed. Shaquille says he's bearish on Curser. Says that Curser is not feeling the AGI. We'll have to we'll have to uh talk to Michael Truel about whether he is set the record straight on how AGI pelt is, but this is from Brie Wolfson on uh dialectic with Jackson D. Uh context. Shaquille says is Wolson is the newish head of employee experience at cursor and much of much of this interview is about how to build great companies and how this is changing in the AI era. She's written a good blog about cursors culture specifically. It sounds fantastic over there. Uh all of this is very interesting and there are some good insights here. Wolson started working worked at amazing companies and has lots of interesting lessons to share from them. Uh but when it really comes to thinking about the future, there is a failure to really engage with what advanced AI capabilities will mean for the future of work. All the hypothesized changes are incredibly minor from Brie. She's not telling this fast takeoff, crazy, total disruption story. And Shaquille doesn't like that. And I think this goes back to what we've been talking about about the narrative. What is the right tone to match? Should you just be financial maxi and just be like, "Look, it's just autocomplete and it makes money and we sell tokens profitably." Or should you be like, "It's gonna cure cancer." Or should you be like, "It's so important that if we don't do it right, we're all going to die." Like, there's so many different narratives that you can tug on and a lot of people have been tugging on a bunch of them and it gets confusing. Some people play one note consistently and sometimes that can work, sometimes that can't. I I I'm kind of down with Cursor. I like this. I I I like that Michael is just like he's a builder and and he tells a he tells a good story about that and like there are other AI leaders that are telling the doom story or telling the fast takeoff story. I don't think that cursor needs to necessarily tell that same story. Uh but Shaquille disagrees but uh we'll have to dig into this more. What what do you think Tyler?
>> Yeah, I mean it is interesting because anthropic they make such an emphasis on on coding. They're like of the of the big labs. People think of them probably as like the most AGI pilled, but it's like cursor is I mean all they do is coding and and there's a very different like uh people see them very differently
>> aesthetic. Yeah. Well, it's a it's much more of a centaur adoption and much more of a co-pilot uh much less of this drop in replacement for labor.
>> Yeah, that's true. But I mean you've definitely seen a lot of the recent cursor features are are getting more and more agentic. Totally. So it like the actual product isn't [snorts] like so completely different at least like ideologically right.
>> No no I know I I I agree I agree.
>> Yeah there's something uh cursor has an advantage which is they have tens of millions of active developers using their product and so they have they have a data source on a lot of this that
>> uh spec you know pe people that are just kind of speculating and onx and and reading like science fiction essays about takeoff scenarios. It's like there's something to just like playing playing the game as you see it on the field. And uh I think that uh trying to obsess too much uh over what the world could look, you know, it's it's
>> it's very important to uh try to plan and build your business around what's what the world's going to be like in one years, two years, five years, etc. But at the same time, uh, if you're building and your business is accelerating and customers are using your product more and more and more, like that doesn't, uh, uh, it's hard to just say, "Oh, I'm bearish on this company because they're not they're not of this one, you know, podcast interview." So,
>> yeah. Uh, well, let's move on to some generative AI traffic data. But first, let me tell you about 11 Labs. Build intelligent real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs, the makers of our theme song. So, Rehard Jark says, "You can feel the code red here. Google is absolutely crushing it with Gemini 3. Gemini's market share is now at 21.5%. 3 months ago, it was at 12.9%. 12 months ago, it was at 5.7%. And I remember though a year ago when it launched, it felt like uh it felt like a lot of the numbers that we were hearing out of Google were big, but it was because they were including uh generative AI snippets in Google search or they were sort of bending it into other products that already had big DAU numbers and it was not people going to Gemini, installing the app, really daily driving it. It was more demo, more testing. Uh well, this similar web data seems to show that uh Gemini has been growing and taking share. Yeah, it's also worth noting that this is just like site visits and so
>> not every visit is created equally, right? Somebody can land quickly on a site that's very different from them, you know, being in the app multiple times a day. So, this is not looking at app traffic.
>> Well, that's what I love about the semi-analysis chart that shows that uh you have, you know, users or accounts that are signed up. Then you have the the the active users and then you have um how many interactions those users have like how many new chats do they actually kick off over the course of a day and then also how many interactions how long are they spending time and so ultimately the value that's created will probably be more of a proxy for time on site you know attention at the end of the day and so there is a little bit of a gap there where uh when they ran when semi analysis at least ran the ran the numbers maybe six months ago. It felt like while there were other AI apps and chat apps that were maybe taking a little bit of share on DAUs or MAUs uh in terms of total tokens, total interactions, total back and forths, uh OpenAI was really really dominant. uh and so you know maybe the narrative is over overstated but uh it's still some interesting data and it does show that uh the code red is real and it shows that uh Google's been taking the distribution of Gemini very very seriously and they've gotten more traffic which is good
>> near is back
>> yes
>> Ella Marina has raised a valuation of 1.7 billion coming in with a Michael Bur shot uh we're going to have we're going to have the founder of Marina on
>> uh hopefully in the next uh 24 hours.
>> We'll have to respond to this viral. A thousand likes on this. Why do people not like Alam Marina? It seems like a fantastic business.
>> I don't know.
>> Well,
>> yeah. I I you know, how much revenue are they doing? What what kind of products are they releasing? Like, can they get if you're
>> I'll tell you this right now. You you you build up a huge reputation. The sterling example of what is the best LLM, the best benchmark possible can't be gamed. And then you go and you hold an auction and you sell the [snorts] best arena, the best LLM award to the highest bidder and for a billion for for10 billion dollars and you return all the money to shareholders after you do that and you and you give them good vibes for one week and then you burn your entire credibility. No, clearly there's some like model routing, some infrastructural level. Uh we I think we've talked about this before, but uh the increasingly the I think the bull case is not just deciding which which model is the best in an LM Marina. It's it's which model is better for this specific type of marketing copy. You're going to Nike and you're asking them which one aligns with that particular business process. How do they evaluate? How do they bring in those models? And then how do they measure uptime? How do they measure all these different things that could uh result in a pretty significant business decision? And if you can take a take a cut of that, that could be valuable. I don't know, but we'll have to talk to the founder about it. Do do you have any take on LM Arena?
>> Uh fan.
>> I don't have a take on like the business side, but as a product, it's very useful. It's it's always cool to look at. I mean, because they always get the new models before, so you can always see like whenever a new image model comes out, it's always there first, so you can kind of see what are the vibes. But
>> yeah, it's a good I enjoy the the product a lot. The vibe economy is potentially dramatically undervalued uh at uh in the leaderboard economy. Mhm.
>> Yeah. I think the vibes I think over the past few months, you've definitely started to see like, okay, this Exinon is likely being paid by a lab. [laughter] I think you've starting to see that.
>> Yeah, it definitely happens. Uh anyway, they probably uh I don't know there there's a bunch of stuff here. Do you use Tailwind?
>> Yes.
>> Uh did you have you heard about the Tailwind drama? This whole thing. Tailwind laid off 75% of their team.
>> I love the post.
>> Pretty rough. Yeah, the post. Uh the reason is so ironic. Their CSS framework became extremely popular with AI coding agents. 75 million downloads a month. That meant nobody would visit their docs where they promoted paid offerings resulting in a 40% drop and in traffic and an 80% revenue loss. Uh and people are really really upset about it. Very sad. It feels like they pivot aggressively and figure out some other way to
>> the founder posted a video or basically a mini podcast yesterday. He just said he went for a walk and just was talking for 30 minutes. I listened to half of it this morning.
>> Sad story. They have a small super talented team. Uh he had to lay off a number of their engineers. So now it's the three owners of the business plus one uh one other engineer. There's four of them now. Uh trying to maintain it. He's optimistic, but he basically was saying he was just looking at his revenue go down a fixed amount every single month, which means that it was a greater and greater percentage
>> of the revenue. And so he was like, we're just going to be dead in in less than a year. Because a lot of what they did, I think I I think their paid offerings were like selling components pre-assembled code and all of the chat uh all of the LLMs can just oneshot a component if you need a popup or a modal or or a button. Uh you you don't need to pick
>> was saying it'd be great if if like a big lab just said like hey these are your talented teams you know join like an anthropic
>> yeah I mean I I don't know I don't know much about the founder um but uh it does feel like time to go into deals guy mode and find just a completely different uh mode of operation. I [laughter] I have to imagine that uh these folks are talented and I imagine that if they landed at some big corporation doing front-end transformation of a massive surface area like Lovable or Figma
>> that would be great too. But but even even just going inside of like you know a Salesforce or some sort of like you know some product where they have a ton of surface area and they're working on modernizing it but you have this new team that comes in and they have
>> Yeah. But I'm sure they want to keep building.
>> Sure. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So, so maybe in
>> uh but yeah, the saying lays off 75% of their team is dramatic. They did lay off they laid off people out of a four person team that were the not not uh the owners of the business.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so sort of laws small numbers sounds more dramatic than maybe it is.
>> Yeah. But but still I'm optimistic that they'll find a good outcome here. It was it was the founder was upset. He apparently people uh were just like commenting. Uh
>> yeah, people were really mean to him. mean to him being like being like, "Hey, I I can't prioritize this feature right now because my business is dying." Yeah.
>> And they're like, "You're going against, you know, the philosophy of open source." He's like,
>> John Ludig wrote this in his piece on open source AI. Like the open source community is beautiful in many ways. It gives these like incredible technologies that people can build on. Uh but uh people also like freebies and they get very mad when you take them away and they get mad when they don't uh when they don't get them. Everyone loves free stuff. Everyone loves a free lunch and everyone loves Plaid because Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. Um Dylan,
>> wait, wait, really quickly. Uh Ryan in the chat recommended that we have uh uh Mike Vining on the show, which I would love to have Mike Vining on the show. Do you know who Mike Vining is?
>> I do not.
>> Well, guess what? He inspired the guy who you just saw in your new favorite movie, Sakario.
>> Wait, he works for X.
>> No. Uh, he No, no, he he he joined the platform, but he does.
>> I read that as you I I He's an incredible uh military hero. Uh he has fantastic stories. I've listened to him on a few podcasts. Uh very very interesting fellow. And uh he's very viral because uh he has these iconic images of him uh on Delta Force missions, but he's wearing like what looks like an IT guy outfit. So it's like a a starched white button-d down with a pocket protector and he has these big glasses and he
>> walking out of the Blackhawk.
>> Yeah, exactly. So he's not wearing the normal like military camo with the bulletproof vest. He's just there to like clean up and stuff. It's crazy. So he's uh yeah he's a he's a personal hero of mine and
>> all time aura farmer
>> all time aura farmer. That is for sure true. Uh would love to have him on the show. He's he's done other shows. So it it would be very interesting to hear from him.
>> Uh this company Flip uh said Flip is hiring. We're hiring uh posters, engineers, product growth, ops, designers, interns, and roles that do not yet have names. And then uh 24 hours later they uh they quoted their own post and said, [laughter] "You've just deleted half the applications at random. We do not want unlucky people working for Flip."
>> Who? Well, they already have a poster on staff because that is very funny. Wait, it says it's the Lucky Company.
>> So, I'm assuming it has to do with gambling,
>> of course. Uh I I actually
>> Yeah. So, I think it I think it the product what they're trying to do is basically you pay more for a product or get it free. Oh, it's that it's that meme. I've seen I've seen people joke about that and then I saw there's this uh poster that
>> they're bringing gambling into credit cards.
>> Yes. Yes. I I I saw a poster who
>> bringing gambling into debt.
>> There's someone who like vibe codes different UX mockups for funny concepts. Uh there's that famous one by Aiden of like the uh the Google maps with a with a fog of war. So, as you move around the map, it shows you where you've been and you unveil the map like it's a video game. There's a whole bunch of these and one of them is like the the double or nothing on your checkout. Uh, which is a crazy idea. I don't know. Um, on the topic of luck, at one point, very early in my career, I wanted to create a direct to consumer product called fivehour luck. And the whole concept would be like it'd be a five hour energy shot, but the promise, the pitch was that it would make you lucky. It would make it would increase your luck just because people, you know, energy is a stat. Why not increase luck? Yeah. Uh and I was going to formulate it, have some vitamins in there, have some things that could potentially increase luck. Uh was not thinking about the gambling application element. Yeah. I mean, that that product would crush in Vegas.
>> Yeah. Imagine just taking it being like, "Okay, I I I'm have the stat boost. I'm feeling good."
>> Put snake oil in it.
>> Yes. Yes. Well, but Brian Johnson, he he sells a product. It's olive oil. It's literally called snake oil. is sort of riffing on that concept. Before we move on, let me tell you about MongoDB. Choose a database built with flexibility and [applause] scale in mind. With best-in-class embedding models and rerankers, MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. So, moving on to Citrini. Uh, asking someone asking someone asking someone long
>> memory.
>> Oh, who's long memory? If they got any new ideas for 2026, he says already rich. Yes, memory has been on a tear.
>> Yeah, bubble boy. on uh over on X had had some pretty uh great calls late last year. I'm going to try to pull
>> pull one up.
>> Well, you do. Let me tell you about Crowd Strike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. Crowd Strike secures AI and stops breaches. Um we can also pull up I want to watch this this intro from this week in startups. Can we move on to this?
>> Pull it up. pull up the video uh of Jason Calacanis finally answering the question we all had. What is his dream purchase? I saw this clip on this week in Startups. Jason's ultimate dream mega purchase and I clicked instantly. This is on This Week in Startups. Uh his co-host asks him. And the best part about this show is that I was expecting it to be like they tease it in an intro and then they make you listen to and then they they cut just short of him saying, "Oh, the one thing I want to buy is" and then boom, the start of the show and then 20 minutes later he gives you. No, watch the clip. Now that you're doing so well financially, what is a purchase that you'd like to make but can't bring yourself to do so because it feels too extravagant? Answer this honestly. Tell the people what you even Jason Khanis will not break out the checkbook for. It's definitely private aviation. I've been trying to hold it. You deserve it for a long time.
>> Great unjustifiable expense of spending, you know, $50,000 going somewhere or $100,000 on a round trip.
>> That seemed absurd to spend that. The other one I would say that I sometimes sweat is buying a really expensive sports car, a Corvettes. He loves Corvettes. He's a Corvette guy. Like a big open fancy barn that's kind of like a manave but style. Do I buy this ZRX1 for $21
>> $50,000 or do I buy it $50,000 Corvettes collection [laughter] these things become cognitive load
>> this weekend startups is brought to you by
[laughter]
>> shout out to their sponsors for making it possible I love that I love that he's a corvette guy
>> Jake how deserves it
>> he deserves it he's worked really hard one of the greatest to ever do it been in the media business for decades uh one of my welcome to TVPN was doing TVPN like in the early 2000.
>> You know who his first guest was ever? David Sachs. It's the craziest thing. And they go and they do calls from entrepreneurs and you can actually track what those entrepreneurs do now. It's very interesting. Uh and my my first welcome to Silicon Valley moment was I I flew to Silicon Valley. I went to the launch festival, his uh his conference, heard a bunch of tech people talk uh met a bunch of YC founders. It kind of introduced me to Silicon Valley. went to the uh some bar in on Silicon Valley and in Palo Alto next to Stanford. Uh it it was a lot of fun. He was very nice.
>> Uh also in that era uh Sam Alman went on Charlie Rose. You were talking about this. Should we pull that should we pull this clip up?
>> Oh, do you do you have it ready to go?
>> Yeah, it's on charlie rose.com.
>> It is it's not on YouTube which is fascinating. I I saw a clip of what looked like Sam Alman on Charlie Rose and I was like we got to dig up the actual footage. While we do, let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud. Building AI supercomputers for training and inference at scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. So, do you have it?
>> Uh, let's pull this up.
>> Where is it?
>> I put it in the team chat.
>> Okay. Well, while we while we pull that up, let's look for what's next. Um, AI close. Um, I can do another ad read. While we do that, let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. Um,
>> how are we doing?
>> Pulling it up. Uh, Nikita Beer finally met someone.
>> Oh no, Charlie Rose. The video actually does not load.
>> Oh, it doesn't load. Oh no. Uh, well, you know what we can do? We can export it and we can play it uh tomorrow on the show. Uh, let's make a note to do that. Uh, let's move on to the real biggest launch, the biggest tech news in years. There's a new monitor out from Dell Big.
>> And I love this. So, Michael Dell said, "Big news. The world's first 52 in 6K monitor is here. If you love big displays, this is for you." Jordy, did you ever have one of these elite multimonitor setups, or were you always like a sort of do business by phone? You've never been an iPad guy. Have you ever been? I've got a I've got an Apple monitor at home. Uh I I I I find it hard. I mean, as like a guy who has been building companies and investing, you're basically an email.
>> Phone, email, Zoom. It's not It's not code over here, this and that, monitoring situations. You're you're an amateur when it comes to monitoring situations is what you're saying.
>> But I do enjoy I I have an Apple monitor at home. I enjoy it, but it's nothing like this.
>> This is incredible. So, it's much bigger than the Apple Pro Display XDR. Is it curved?
>> It is curved. It has to be curved at that size because you're basically sitting right your face is right up against a TV. Uh 52 in. And uh and it's a very it's funny in in many many ways because uh let's uh so so first let's play the clip from Rob Moore uh where he says Dell just released the product that Michael Dell and David Senra alluded to in the David Senra podcast episode. After 42 years, Michael Dell's enthusiasm products
>> coming out of studio. That's the thing that we're most excited about. It's just a bigger screen.
>> It's awesome. It's awesome. So, let's play this.
>> That obsession has not dulled. We were just in your office and you were showing me one of your new unreleased uh products that we can't film or photograph, but you were like I was like, "This is this is like a kid on Christmas." Like, you're still
>> super cool product. Yeah. I'm I'm very excited.
I told you I'll buy one. I think it was cool, too. I'm going to buy one as soon as it comes out. But I just love this enthusiasm that is just not dulling. That obsession has not dulled.
That's great. Heartwarming. Heartwarming.
And what's really funny is that there was that sort of tease. Michael Dell just posts it and says it's out here, you can just buy it. And then this poster, Ben Bodgerin, CEO and principal analyst at Creative Strat, says this monitor from Dell is amazing and I have had one for a few weeks. Easily the best monitor I've ever used and even at 120 hertz still capable to game on. So, it's like when did this thing release? It doesn't have the fanfare of a normal product release cycle where there's pre-orders, but it's very fun and it's been very hyped and I think we should get some because we have a whole host of screens arrayed randomly and it's not very aesthetic and you have the opportunity to simplify. You can actually display four different full computers, I think, in fairly high-res just tiled on one screen. So, you can run four different displays separately.
$2,900. Not bad. I thought it was even less. I don't know. Anyway, Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card.
We have a major white pill. Drew Tuma is reporting. For the first time in 25 years, not a single square mile of California is dry on the US drought monitor. The rain is back. Thank you, Augustus. Have to go back to December 2000 to find a similar situation. If you're 25 or younger, you've always lived in a world where California has been entering or recovering from drought. So, we are incredibly, incredibly back.
Yes. We should talk about the title of the stream. Julia Black's TBPN Expose in Vanity Fair just dropped today. If you go to vanityfair.com, we're right there. And it's been a lot of fun working on this piece. We got to do a very fun... to be clear, it wasn't a lot of work for us. We got to hang out, getting interviewed, hanging out with her, and I mean we had to go dress up and get... We did have to dress up. It was definitely by far the most intense shoot we've ever been a part of. Two cameras, medium format, medium format film. I just mean more like the team that actually went into it, right? There were so many different people working on it. It was extremely professional as you would expect out of Vanity Fair. And I like that Julia still called us the technology brothers. She's not fully in the rebranding keeping it alive. Yeah, they call us the J team. John Kugan and Jordy, the J team, had off-mic moment.
A bunch of funny moments in here. Yeah. What do you like? What do you like? I like the... she said they're no saints. One of them runs a nicotine company, but they have... not just any nicotine. What kind of nicotine is it? It's addictive nicotine that I personally am addicted to, but they have drawn certain lines in the sand. They don't swear on air. They try to avoid vulgarity. And they don't promote alcohol or drug use mostly because they're not big drinkers themselves. It's cool that we get credit for not promoting alcohol use even though in the early days the doubling, you know, doing the Dom episodes. But it was funny because we actually really didn't enjoy it. It was funny but... I remember I'd be... I would tell my wife, 'Oh, it's a Dom day today. I gotta go drink a bunch of champagne at 11:00 a.m.' Yeah, I'm not looking forward to it. And then Julie says, 'Perhaps most importantly,' and then a quote for me, 'The show is never going to promote Burning Man.' [laughter] I can't believe you said that. I mean, it's factually true. It really is so funny when you are talking to a serious journalist where everything you say, even the jokes, were going to get written down and recorded and printed. And so some of the odd little stylistic flourishes you throw out a bit and then it gets written down and it looks way different in that context, but it's good. It's real. It's the actual this.
There was a funny moment. So we were getting breakfast with Julia at our usual spot. And she says, 'While in line for coffee that morning, Hayes dashed off an exost.' This was right after the Coldplay saga. I said, 'Startup CEOs can't even hug their chief people officer at a concert in this country anymore.' And Julius says as he watched the likes pour in, he predicted they would top 10,000 or so. When I checked the next morning, there were over 70,000. And you were saying, 'Imagine if it flopped, it would be in here. It would be like he said he predicted it 10,000. It only got 200.' Yeah. But wow, lucky day. A banger. Yeah, it was a good day to come see the show. It sort of took us all over the place. I think at the end of the show I sort of stood up and said, you know, what was that? Are we journalists? Are we analysts? Are we comedians? I don't know, but we're going to figure it out and we're not going anywhere over the next decades.
It was funny. We were blasting Coldplay's Fix You in the studio that morning, which is a fantastic song.
