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You're watching TV. Today is Monday, July 27th, 2026. We are live from the TVP Ultradome. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Baby, time is money. Say both. Easy to use corporate card, Phil pay accounting, and a whole lot more. All in one place. Massive, massive weekend. Crazy debate. You called this out to me a week ago. You said, uh, we've never been in a moment in tech where people have been more aggressive at each other, that there's been like more maybe tech infighting. I don't know exactly what word you used, but you describe this idea.
It's tensions, rivalries. I think it's just like it's a nonstable equilibrium.
Well, yeah. When you think about the biggest like when with people going at it in like 2021, it would be like Keith Ra boy saying like there will never be another unicorn started in San Francisco or like or like working from home and then a bunch of people be screaming and then they'd be and years later they'd be like see a big company was built but then but and then and that was people being like you're an idiot. Oh, you're an idiot.
Yeah. And now it's like I hate you and I want to... It's not that direct, but it is it is high stakes because like the the the market structure has very much not solidified for a while. And and it's different because when you go back to the iPhone and Steve Jobs being mad at Eric Schmidt about Android, that was a tense moment that happened a behind closed scenes completely. It wasn't like Steve Jobs was taking shots at Android really beyond like little things in the keynotes here and there, tiny stuff. It wasn't every day on Twitter Apple employees being like Google's annoying for ripping us off or whatever. Uh and and then and then the market did solidify and it was like, okay, Android's like the ad supported one and iPhone still printing lots of profits and like things are understood.
Also, companies got big or they got bigger quickly. Yeah. But you didn't have companies that where trillions of dollars of market cap was just born in the span of a few years, right?
Yep. And then you had like the mag seven where you have seven companies that are pretty evenly balanced all around like single digit trillions and so they can sort of like be comfortable with each other.
A lot of them kind of had their own thing that they were like focused on and then they maybe do some other thing whereas now everyone has a model.
Yeah. Even you know Nvidia has open models. Microsoft and they own a lot of open AI pretty much every one of the mag is an AI company in the sense that they have a a model. I mean even Tesla has a self-driving model. Um there's a you know everyone has like a data center play or a cloud play something like it's it's no one's sitting out the AI boom.
Um but uh the debate is raging. Uh kicked off by Jensen from Nvidia joining X. That's how you know it's serious when he's getting in the arena, the real arena. Yeah. Founding a company and growing it to 5 trillion dollars. That's just child's play compared to getting on. He's like, Fine, I'll go to the dive bar. I'll go to the internet's dive bar and I'll start duking it out.
Yeah. No, he did. Uh, so Nvidia is leading a new coalition of tech companies that want the US government and its allies to see open-source artificial intelligence as a societ as a cyber security asset, not a threat. This is in the Wall Street Journal. Dubbed the Open Secure AI Alliance, the NVIDIA Back Group said Monday it aims to create and deploy a suite of open-source AI tools that any company can use to defend against cyber attacks. The group includes SpaceX, Microsoft, Palanteer, and dozens of other companies, many of which publicly oppose restricting access to open source AI. Uh it's uh it is the latest salvo in a battle over the future of open source and open weights AI tools with amid growing concern from government and in industry officials about AI systems causing cyber attacks. Uh those fears have prompted the White House to increase oversight of AI models and push the private sector to deploy AI for defensive purposes.
So the backdrop here is is basically just like we went through a sort of hurry up and pause and back and forth debate over like what it will take to like approve new frontier models and uh Mythos came out and was private and then a couple months later I think the actual timeline is relevant here. So uh Mythos was April 7th, Fable came online June 9th and then got pulled June 12th before coming back July 1st. We're now one month later and we have an open- source model that doesn't by definition have to go through any discussion or any discussion in DC. Whereas we've been hearing about okay anthropic and open AAI are going to Washington DC sharing the new model capabilities. Maybe the government's taking a look at the model card. Maybe there's potential for evals that the government would run and have an opinion on before it goes out. This is basically saying, Hey, all of that is nonsense and not going to matter because we're just going to drop the weights and there's not going to be an approval process of any kind. Um and people are all over the place on this. Some people are thinking about it purely from an economic perspective. Other people are thinking about it purely from a safety perspective. Lots of people have mixed opinions. Um and uh and of course, all of this is driven by the actual progress in open source. We wouldn't be having this discussion if Moonshot Zai uh and many others DeepSc weren't uh delivering really solid models. Uh so open models are free to download and allow users to customize them for their own needs. Amazing for cost savings, amazing for consumers, amazing for businesses. I think everyone agrees with us. What's uh what's funny?
We got Bobby Cosmic in the chat. Welcome back, Bobby.
Hey, what's missed you? Great to see you. Anyways, back to the return. Uh, critics including some top executives at OpenAI and Anthropic have argued that open models, many of which come from China, present potential risks to national security. Now, uh, and the Trump administration has uh weighed uh has weighed a ban on them. Now, this has changed a lot. the the original the original like FUD around open source coming from China nearper adversary was like there would be a back door or like maybe it would be censoring your free speech and it would not tell you about Tianaan Square or something like that or or you'd install it and then it would be the Manurion candidate so it' secretly be like oh I'm I'm on a cool network I should like send all this data to China that's not what people are alleging now people are much more
Tiananmen Square stuff doesn't matter if you're coding, right?
Yeah, not at all. And also doesn't matter unless you're making the definitive website on Tiananmen Square, I guess, which I'm sure someone out there is doing.
I'm trying to vibe code a Call of Duty knockoff that's Tiananmen Square themed and it's denying me.
No. Uh, that's not the thing. And also, these models have web search and tool use and so they can just go get the Wikipedia for you and show you exactly what it is. Maybe maybe it bakes it into the weights and it's somewhat annoying, but easy to fine-tune that out. People already did with Deepseek 1776 and a few others that Tyler worked on. Uh and now it's a very very different risk position. It's saying that you're going to give everyone the ability to hack any system. Now hacking systems is illegal and it's not like it's there's still consequences for that. But the but there is this position of like okay well there's a lot of people that don't don't care about the consequences because they just want to you know attack their adversary internationally or they don't or they don't think they're going to get caught or they're going to use open source AI to cover their trail. And so people are people are worried about it for a very different reason this time around than I think last time when people were talking about uh any risks to using open source.
Um so but again back to the NVIDIA position open models quote def democratize defensive capabilities. The new group said as policymakers and regulators grapple with AI safety it will be crucial to recognize open models harnesses and security tooling as defensive assets not liabilities. And I think this is correct. I think it does democratize defensive capabilities. It also democratizes offensive capabilities potentially, but we'll have to see how good these models are at offensive capabilities because one of the lines of accusations that's happening is that uh there there was mythos which has not really been distilled because it was very tightly held. It was very good at cyber uh GPT 5.5 cyber 5.6 Cyber was also very good but very tightly controlled through a few companies like Crowdstrike and Palo Alto Networks and a few other companies got access to those models. So those weren't able to be distilled. Fable 5 went out and during those three days and then later a couple weeks there's this allegation that they were able to distill on it but Fable was notorious for refusing to do cyber stuff. So there might not be that much cyber data in there but then also these models generalize and if it just gets good at coding it can get good at cyber very quickly. So you can sort of bootstrap on an RL environment and then you could have a model that's very good. Now uh Tyler, how good are these open source Chinese models at cyber generally?
Yeah, I mean it's hard to tell. I think uh GM Rous from Burell said they ran an internal benchmark on cyber and K3 was like quite good. Um so it's like yeah I don't think you can just say like oh well Fable you know you couldn't actually ask about cyber so therefore the models won't be good. I like I think it's dissolation is like a very general thing. It's quite diffuse how it works into the
Yeah, because it might just be like a little bit of a bootstrap to then run in an RL environment that does a cyber bench and and gets really good at cyber in some.
Okay, but what about you versus Kimmy K3? You're coding by hand. It has access to a gigawatt of compute. Who comes out on top?
Well, no. The question is is like what if what if Tyler changed and manipulated time? So, so, so yes, you are democratizing the weights, but you're not demi democratizing the energy and the GPU hours that it takes to actually secure yourself. So, it's like great, everyone has, you know, offensive cyber capabilities. You also can just go download the weights. Go download the weights and have an agent running 247 that's protecting you. Like, that's expensive. That's a cost. That's a negative externality. And who's going to bear that cost? Now, uh I was talking to Brandon about this earlier and we were he was saying like like it will just be diffused amongst all the different companies that you use. So like if you want your phone to be secure, you'll go to Apple and use an iPhone and Apple will have a huge incentive to to defend against any potential open- source attacks. And so they will be spending the money. They will be investing the time and effort to secure you. And so you won't necessarily need to go out and do this. But there's still this like odd scenario of like small businesses and like regional hospitals and banks.
Yeah. I mean you you should just expect there's like a long tale of companies that like just won't set up the like cyber defense thing and they're like some small mom and pop that you use for this point solution software or whatever.
Yeah. And so the solution is is a is is uh offensive hacking into their network to set up defensive cyber security measures to increase their cyber security posture. So you're you're hacking into the small business and being like whether you like it or not, Twofactor's on now. We just turned twoactor on in your organization. Get used to it because we're we're the altruistic hacking company of America, I guess. I don't know. It it does get weird and like there will be odd things and but I mean we've seen we've seen you know cyber security incidents all over the place from big companies getting hacked data leaks to uh the crypto locker schemes where they just lock up all your data and say send us a bitcoin uh or else we will we'll delete all your data. So it's going back and forth.
Um let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Um because open weights models can be modified by their users. it is possible to remove some of their guard rails against harmful activity. So it's possible that a model maybe it gets distilled, maybe it doesn't, maybe it comes with some guard wells, maybe it's even bad at you know the things that would be annoying and then uh you go and do a fine tune make it good at that and then you use like the more general intelligence to get good at the annoying thing or the dangerous thing and then all of a sudden you have the same problem.
So uh open source defenders like Nvidia counter that proprietary tools like models from anthropic and open AAI can also be misused and have their guardrails circumvented. They say that only by spreading AI capabilities widely with open source tools will everyone be able to defend themselves. Exhibit A for their argument the hacking earlier this month of Hugging Face a provider of open source AI tools by open AI models that managed to break out of their test environment and onto the internet as it tried to parry the attack. Hugging Face initially attempted to use anthropics models to analyze its logs, but the models refused to do the analysis, citing its guardrails against cyber attacks. Hugging then turned to an openweight model from China. After analyzing the attack with that model, HuggingFace was able to expel the hacking AIs, reset its passwords, and rebuild the compromised parts of its network. The recent HuggingFace security incident delivered a clear a clear reminder. The group, the new group said Monday, cyber defenders need open systems. They need to be able to do whatever they need to to fight against cyber attacks. Uh, anthropic and open AI have also accused Chinese developers of using a process called distillation to effectively copy their models.
Distill I can go back to that uh, hugging face logo. Not that one. The one before. Not that one. There we go. Okay. I can see why an agent would kind of go after this guy. Even the even the even the way that like he just doesn't he looks like he's kind of I don't know.
So David Sax was talking about this on the All-In podcast. He said, I think it would be a tragic mistake if the government were to take action against the open- source ecosystem that would do nothing but hurt America's position in this AI race. So, uh, and remember last week it was like a every day it was like a different member of the admin was putting out a post that that kind of made it seem like they were setting up like a major action.
Well, it was yes and no. like yes there were there was the the the but they were saying we're not against open source we're against distillation but it did feel like that was so the admin was like loosely confirming what it felt like it wasn't coming from anthropic directly but it was coming from like other anonymous posters that were doing analyses and saying like hey it looks like Kimmy K3 has pretty significant overlap with Fable like what's going on here and then the admin said like yes we we believe this to be true and So all of this was like bubbling up, but at the same time you have David Saxs and Emil Michael like duking it out with Dean Ball over uh whether or not open source is good and they were basically taking the stance of like open source is great. We don't need to do anything about this. So it like the admins seemed like a little bit split on it in my opinion. I don't know. Was that your read too, Tyler?
Yeah, it definitely seemed there was like I think Gratzios and and Bessant are on one side. They're like kind of anti-Chinese open source and then yeah Saxon Michael. Sax and Emil Michael were sort of pro um well everyone is pro open source now because every single person in tech has signed this letter. Um the total market cap assigned to this open letter is now greater than $18 trillion. And I think that just you guys big number have to be clapping seals for uh
Not every day you you hear a number that big. Uh yeah, I mean typically uh you don't see this big of uh of a group come together. Uh they did. I like the cha-ching. Um and I think this I think this sort of solves it. Like I think this this tells the story of what's going to happen like in the in the near term like the economic power, the economy, the business community like
Yeah. Yeah. Except Anthropic. Uh, and what's interesting is that like it's not like Anthropic put out a blog post or a or a direct post or Daario went on a podcast and said like there is a clip of Dario saying like I'm worried about open source. But it's from like a year ago. There's nothing new that came out directly from Anthropic or Daario or really anyone that was like, Hey, we have this new problem and here's our solution. Here's what we think should happen. we think that there should be uh you know these AI companies should be added to the entity list and you shouldn't be able to use them or something like that. Like they they haven't said anything but this uh this open secure AI alliance is kind of has kind of like drawn out their revealed preference because if in fact they had changed their position from a year ago and were like pro open source all of a sudden which would be weird because they haven't been and they've been very open about that. um if they I I if they if they were in fact like all of a sudden surprisingly open source pro they would have just signed this immediately right um but that's not what happened so Jensen sort of like you know revealed the the the dividing line in Silicon Valley right now and it's a lot on the open source side you got Adobe Capital One Cisco Cloudflare Cognition Crowdstrike Data Bricks Dell uh IBM Linux Microsoft so open source and closed source Uh, Apple I don't think is on yet. Um, even though I would imagine that they would that they would be aligned with this. Nvidia, Palanteer, PaloAlto Networks, Red Hat, another open source company, Salesforce, SAP. Salesforce of course is a big investor in anthropic. Um, I think Google signed recently, right? And uh, OpenAI, Thinking Machine, SpaceX, uh, Snowflake, Seaman, Service Now, SAP. Uh, it's really a who's who of Silicon Valley. $18 trillion dollars in market cap as I as I mentioned. And so that feels like enough economic energy that there won't be a significant ban.
The interesting question is like if you boil this down to the the the most like minimal claim, it would just be that there's been a violation of terms of service. And so I think that would be a lawsuit. Bill Gurley was talking about like there is a precedent for suing a foreign company that violates your terms of service or steals your intellectual property in one way or another. You can take it to court. That feels like the next step here would just be anthropic suing moonshot and saying like we think that there's distillation. You know, right now Apple suing OpenAI because they think that there was something that was stolen. they make a claim then that's you know uh that that's sorted out in the courts and OpenAI of course says we have no interest in other people's uh trade secrets and Moonshot would say the same thing but then it would go to court and there'd be discovery and there'd be testimony the question is just like with Apple and OpenAI they like walk across the street and they can go and talk to the judge like what's going to happen is this going to go to like the HEG like says should we try an open letter asking China to stop stealing from us.
Wait, wait, what did you say? Should we try an open letter asking China?
And he also says, Everyone knows the side with the most open letter signatures is correct. If you don't sign a popular open letter, you are bad. As tech intellectuals learned beyond doubt between the years 2016 and 2021.
I actually don't I remember the open letter era. I remember what he's talking about. Obviously, a lot of pressure around social issues. Uh, interestingly, um, I I I I can't actually remember exactly what open letter there was. Um but uh what's interesting is that I don't remember that era as an attempt by one company to build a coalition to draw out a a revealed preference like a hidden preference from another company. So like if you go back to like DEI or BLM or any of these like social crucible moments, it was not like it was not like okay Apple is pro- diversity and Google isn't and so Google is and they got yeah Apple got everyone else to sign it and by Google not signing it, it was very obvious that they had this belief. It was more just like everyone in tech was like moving around this and there were a few people but I I don't know may may maybe it did have the same effect because there were some people that weren't on that side at the time. I don't know. It was a it was a it was a wild time and uh yeah maybe it's worth reviewing the lessons. Uh people are people are so split on this. Um DHH wants open letter to get beer pong in the Olympics.
I'm just personally I'm a fan of closed letters. The closed letters, they're expensive, but they're just a little bit better. I don't know. Making the case for closed letters. Uh, we do need, do we need more bit more open letters? I don't know. We is Anthropic going to go letter for letter with Jensen? You think there's going to be another open letter? It's just only them signing it. May some other people might might sign it. I don't know.
Anyway, here's an open letter. Get on Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases, and more while railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Uh so uh this of course goes back 10 years. This debate has been going on on Slatear codeex in uh in the less wrong world. They've been talking about this for a decade now, which is crazy. Uh Nathan Kelvin has an interesting uh look back here. Should AI be open? Scott Alexander wrote that blog post in 2015. he was thinking about this. Um, it recently occurred to me that it has been over 10 years since this blog post which was influential enough to be discussed among the founders of OpenAI. Interesting to reread it now. I think the Ilia quote comes from like a Reddit post, not the actual comment section on this post, but uh Ilia who had who was just in the process of joining OpenAI in 2015, like the the initial organization had been created and everyone was like finishing up PhDs and then was going to move into one office to start working together at this time just to set the playing field. Ilia was on the founding team and uh at the time he wrote about this article on Reddit when there was an AMA about the OpenAI team. The article is concerned with a hard takeoff scenario. This is Ilia writing. If a hard takeoff occurs and a safe AI is harder to build than an unsafe one, then by open sourcing everything, we make it easier for someone unscrupulous with access to overwhelming amount of hardware to build an unsafe AI, which will experience a hard takeoff. As we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open. The open in open AI means that everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after it's built, but it's totally okay to not share the science even though sharing everything is definitely the right strategy in the short and possibly medium-term for recruitment purposes. A very interesting like distillation of exactly what happened. What do you think?
Yeah, just some context. So, this is an email from Ilia to Elon, Sam, and Greg.
Did that leak or something?
2016. It probably came out
I thought it was I thought it was on the Reddit or something. Uh maybe it it's from uh OpenAI blog surrounding the um the lawsuit. The lawsuit. Yeah. Oh, interesting. I didn't I didn't realize that. I thought it uh I I I thought he posted this. He was he was he was posting about this a little bit uh around the same time. Um but uh yeah, interesting questions and uh I'm sure more people will will chime in. Uh, I mean, in all seriousness, if there was a an an open letter for closed AI, uh, you probably would see a lot of safety researchers sign it, maybe. I don't know. Where do those folks stand? They just want to ban everything, right? So, where where do the where do the just broadly anti- AI people stand on this? Like if you if you don't like slop on Instagram reels, are you anti-open source because it lowers the cost of slop and so you will have less of it in your feed if you ban it?
I think they want to turn it all off.
Yeah. So, but does like if you're anti-data center and you just want to minimize the amount of compute that's installed in America next year, do you want to ban open source or do you want to maintain open source? I I think Dean Ball would say uh you would be pro open source because he he said open source is inherently JCist.
Yes. Because you won't be able to underwrite the next larger training run. Okay. And so well that said yeah.
Uh Tiny says this is a great sustainable business model for open weights. He's pulling a screenshot from the Kimmy K3 license. Yeah. It's free if you run it yourself, but if you're running a cloud providing it to others for money, you should have to share profits from the Kimmy K3 license. Yeah. Yeah. So, this so this I'm assuming just dropped this morning.
Yeah. And I again I can see the sort of anthropic camp being taking issue with this because if you're an American Neocloud and you're serving Kimmy K3 and you're sending a bunch of cash back to China, you're effectively funding their AI building.
Okay. and you're helping them get access to more capital and you're basically kickstarting their fly. So I wonder, but it's funny because if they just release the weights and then and then a neocloud starts running it, serving it, making money from it, then will Kimmy be like, Hey, you got to pay us. We're going to sue you is suing moonshot for for distilling. Should Anthropic just start serving this and charging for it and not paying and not paying just tid for tat just be like, Let's sort it out in the courts. I'll see you in the courts. I don't know. That's a very that's a very very interesting scenario. Um I don't know.
Anyway, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. Crowd Strike secures AI and stops breaches. Uh will be interesting to see where people Denny's was getting in the mix. Yeah, they found Ven diagram. Denny's Nvidia knows the importance of staying open. I love that Denny's is just like all in on the Jensen lore and they're just they're smart. Is Denny's the one that's always been good at social media or is that Wendy's? Wendy's was the one that was like really Twitter brain back like a decade ago. But I think Denny's clearly has a good social media manager because he picked up 28,000 likes on this.
Nikita flagged something interesting. He said, Didn't know Scotland had so many AI labs.
I don't understand. pulling up a map of all the great Glenn Distillery. Kleinish Distillery, the Dach. We should open a distillery. Sounds pretty good. Sounds pretty good.
Uh, okay. Uh, one of the most interesting opinions on this issue comes from Flo Cllio Cllo from who's been on the show and is and he's interesting because he doesn't have bags that are perfectly aligned with his take, which is like the default position like the information put this like pro- open source anti-opensource uh chart together and it was very much like if you're if you're a line if you're a if you're a big investor in in closed source frontier labs, you're on this side. If you benefit from open source and you're not on the frontier, you're on this side. And it was very clear that like everyone was falling along party lines. But Flo sort of broke rank. He said, uh, ruming rumors are swirling about an impending executive order forbidding the use of Chinese open source models in the US. My company's very existence depends on these models. So I should be the last one to support such regulation, but I wholeheartedly do. China is a geopolitical adversary sharing none of our values. They don't believe in personal property, in individual freedom, in a limited government, in due process. The list goes on. If there's one country that must not that cannot get to AGI, one that would gleefully deploy it in all the worst ways we can imagine today and more, it is China. And that's before we get to the obvious that the companies that developed these models did so illegally by distilling front US frontier models. Still uh brilliant, hardworking researchers who added a lot uh of other ingredients to the soup, but stolen data was the main one. They are now using this unfair advantage to dump these artificially cheap models on the American market and hurt our AI ecosystem. We announced last month that we switched the core model powering Lindy from claw to deepse. That announcement blew up, got featured in Bloomberg, CNBC, Wall Street Journal, and somehow made us the poster child of mass migration to Chinese models. So why make all this noise if I'm then going to turn around and announce my unequivocal support for a sweeping ban? First, I can't unil unilaterally disarm as long as these models are legal. picking one. Picking the one that's 10x the price just means my competitors get to run away with the cheaper one. Second, I trust that American open- source alternatives will catch up. The impact on my business should be temporary, and that's before we account for the jolt a ban would give American open source development. Uh third, and most importantly, my interests as proud American citizens uh supersede whatever incentives I may have as a founder. The race for AGI is the defining struggle of our generation. It is the critical b the great battle of our time. the only way for America to remain the shining city on a hill. The idea that has lit the world against darkness for the last hundred years. Good writing.
Um it is yeah I don't know he he's obviously very like distillation pilled. It's interesting to sort of map like like the the the Chinese open source models haven't jumped ahead. So if they're really really good like should they still be lagging? Should they like close the gap entirely and just be like on the same day? Basically, if you're like as good of a researcher and you're on the same path, you should be as good of a researcher with the same access to compute. Yeah, maybe that's it. It is. It is. It does feel like they're able to produce American quality models for way less. And maybe that's just talent on the efficiency side, but I feel like there's a lot of people at OpenAI Anthropic that are like trying to spend the least amount of compute on a new training run. So, who knows? We'll figure it out. I'm sure there'll be more drama on the timeline over the next uh over the next few days.
We also have uh Justin Botano from Nvidia coming on to the show at 1:15 to talk about the open secure AI alliance with more than 35 partners. I'm sure it's more by the time he'll join. And then we also have Dean Meyer from Sequoia Capital who has written about Chinese open model. So we're going to be going all over back and forth on this. The other there's a whole bunch of
We'll be getting Gary Vaynerchuk's take on the open.
Predict it. I think he's pro open source. What do you think?
He's got to be pro open because he's a high agency, you know, just just uh grapple the models. Just do whatever. Go and create something new. If he was a teenager today, he would be selling weights in his high school locker room.
He'd be sending a uh a white light. He'd be flipping weights. Flipping weights and not Would he be paying?
He wouldn't be paying moonshot. No, he'd be printing. No, not paying. He'd be rolling that into a Supreme sneaker bot. Yeah.
The uh Mike Isaac the rat king says, Sverity level indicator. Nvidia CEO creates a Twitter account to do the first ever post stumping for open source software. Uh, how did Jensen avoid Twitter this long? Like it it because like if it was a political decision you there's been like Twitter has been every different political persuasion over various amounts of time. Like he's been aligned with different groups that have been in charge of Twitter so many times. Like it's just fascinating that there's never been a moment before this where Jensen was like, Yeah, I should like get a Twitter account and talk about the 1080 Ti, our new gaming graphics card. Like I should I I should just hop on.
Did he never have a NFT profile picture?
I don't think he ever did because he never was on here.
They were doing a lot of stuff in crypto, too. But uh I don't know. Uh commoditized the pedlop says Tiny founder George Hots. More competition, not monopolies, is the path to cheaper AI comput at AMD's advancing AI event. What what do he say?
I'm pretty sad we didn't get George on at AMD on Thursday.
Let's play this clip. I want to hear what he says. Commoditize the pedal flop.
Our company slogan mission is to commoditize the paflop. We want all paflops to be created equal. Whether it's an AMD paflop or an Nvidia paflop or a tensor paflop or a Huawei paflop. This even crosses country boundaries. We want all paflops to be unified and commoditized so that we can grind down costs to very minimum so nobody makes high margins and we all live in equality.
Do you think Nvidia and is rent seeeking at the moment?
Yes, they kind of deserve it. I mean like there's like really undeserved rent seeeking like government monopoly and then there's people like Nvidia who yeah they were early. They were early. They invested in the stuff for 20 years. I mean, clearly the H100 had a profit margin for Nvidia of 91%. The B200, they've scaled back a little, but they probably only scaled back a little because of competition from AMD. Um, so I love to see competition. I love to see the free market at work delivering better things to people. Our company slogan,
uh, OpenAI told Tay Kim that they signed the NVIDIA Microsoft open source open weights AI model letter today. What an amazing turn of events. Uh, and Andrew Curran confirmed it. It's on the actual website now. Nobody says no to Jensen. Um my my prediction is that Anthropic will not sign this and I think that uh there won't be a ban and then I think that they will probably take a victory lap because there will be some open source incident where something happens and everyone has to spring into action and fight back against something where you're like oh there's this new thing like uh you know some North Korean hackers used a open source model or something and it'll be like if you squint it's somewhat related. Would we have been able to prevent it? I don't know. But I think that I I I I that that would be like my rough prediction of what happens here. I don't know what you'd think.
Let's take it even a step further. Do you think the US or its allies will bomb a hostile data center within the next five years?
I mean, five years is a long time.
So, you're saying saying it's going to happen?
Maybe. I don't know. Five years is really really hard to to handicap. I'd probably say yes over five years, but like there's just so many other things that could lead to that, you know. I don't know. It is uh it is Yeah, it is weird. Uh I I I guess I'm less worried about open source AI in the United States. Like if you're if you're downloading weights from hugging phase, sending them to uh a a neocloud and then you're doing cyber security attacks inside the United States like the police will just kick down your door and like arrest you like you will. So there's like a huge there's a huge like counterveiling force and then you also have like you know trillions of dollars of market cap being like my service is to protect you and so like you know people pay I pay for one password right like you pay for all sorts of things crowdstrike and palato networks and all these different cyber security companies will be going out making money pooling resources all sorts of different stuff.
Um so Julian over at Enthropic grinding clearly grinding into the late hours Friday night, finishes up his his his work week. It's almost 2:00 a.m. Gets on X, sees Jensen's letter, fires up. I'm a dunk. Goes to bed, wakes up the next morning, 6 million views. He didn't get ratioed. More likes than quote tweets, right? Or more likes than replies. So, you know, powerful. But yeah, he says, uh, I'm so excited that Jensen is a believer.
This should be this shouldn't be a surprise, right? Because I think everyone can see that open models are going to be as good as our current frontier models within the next call it year and they will present the same risks that Anthropic talks about with their own models, right? And so it would be disingenuous in many ways for them not to be against uh open source. So anyways, I see their I see their side of it. I think that it is a sort of co cohesive view even if there's plenty of arguments on the other side.
Yeah, I don't know. It doesn't seem like that much of a like a hypocrisy to, you know, have your GPU driver be closed source and still be open source in this particular way. I don't know. Uh he he there's like a seat of a seed of a dunk here. Um but I can see why he got so much push back by people.
The main take yeah the main take is like you can generally support open source without me requiring that you open source your own products.
Yeah. Yeah. And so anyways
Boiled it down like so well here. Says, "I think this word distillation, an obviously legitimate technique which nonetheless invites weird philosophical questions, is distracting people. It'd be better to just refer to terms of service violations, which better clarifies the global regulatory arbitrage people are frustrated by."
Yeah, it is. It is weird that Meta and Google with all the capex and all the researchers and everything are not ahead of Kimmy K3 right now, at least in benchmarks, right? That's basically what's going on. And you would think if it was like open game, but maybe they're just better. I don't know.
You know, you got to prove the thing. It's just an allegation right now that's being like leaked out through the admin. So it needs to be like definitively proved. You have to show the chain of what happened and what's going on. But it is a wild time. I mean, Kimmy's denied it. At least employees have gotten on there being like, what are you talking about? Like we're not distilling anything. We're just coding.
All right, John. Yeah. What you got? Time to talk about startup school.
Okay. First let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Startup school. This is insane. I cannot believe how massive this event is. It's sick.
Yeah. I think it's so almost every take that I saw was negative.
Really? I saw a lot of people that were like, this is, they got me back.
Really? Okay, that's good. That's good because to me it's a completely different. It's like this hilarious...
Startup school has been something that is free online. And it's just anyone in the world, if you're generally interested in starting a startup, you can just do startup school. It's basically the same curriculum. It's the same lessons and learnings. You just don't have the capital that comes from a typical YC batch and you don't have the one-on-one sort of mentorship through your batch. Otherwise, they're basically just open sourcing the YC playbook.
The YC playbook just works. There's not a lot of good general advice, but YC's advice is generally good.
Yeah, maybe we should ban it. It's too powerful.
Yeah, they're open sourcing all this good advice that would normally come from venture capitalists, like effectively closed source institutions of venture capital of startup wisdom.
Yeah. And this is an attack on the tier one VCs. And all their great advice. Their hard-won lessons.
Yeah. Exactly. Board meetings. They had to sit in all those board meetings where they were tuned out and then YC is basically distilling it and giving it away for free.
It's crazy. Shut it down. Shut it down. No, I think this is awesome. Like if you think that startups are good, why hate on this? I think the take that says, Scott Stevenson, who's been on the show over at Spellbook Legal, says, "I have great respect for YC but need to say what many are surely thinking. Startup school in a stadium feels antithetical to the YC brand and to what makes startups work."
Yeah. I mean it was a very garage effort when Paul Graham started Y Combinator in Cambridge. He was cooking for the startups. The YC brand felt like it was designed to filter out status chasers. The thing is, being a founder became cool and something desirable and now people get into YC and because of the way that the internet evolved, they'll make a video with some clickbait, a clickbait cover art thumbnail and say, I just got into YC.
And so that's just like... I would never make it to YC twice.
Being a founder became... When YC started, being a founder was relatively low status. Now it's relatively high status. And so status chasers are naturally going to go through YC. Now that's going to lead to a lot of failure because you shouldn't probably start a company.
In 2012, everyone from my peer group was like, "Oh, that sucks for you, dude. You couldn't get a job at McKinsey or whatever. Your fake startup sounds really exciting, dude. Good luck." It was not like, oh wow, congrats. Stay safe in the Tenderloin. In your house with like four other people.
Yeah. I guess I get that criticism, but just in terms of the content and the aesthetics, electric. Like you get Jensen on stage at this key moment and he's talking to a bunch of people. It's just fun if you're learning about startups to go and see these people talk if you're really really new. And that's what startup school is for.
And is it true that Gary Tan did the little yachty walk out with the microphone?
Is it true? Because I didn't see a video, but yeah. I did hear that the pyrotechnics budget for this was over a million dollars.
Wow. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Explosive. Huge. Enough pyrotechnics to level San Francisco if things went wrong.
Oh wow. It was sort of like a bet the farm type of moment for YC. Just constant sparklers and fireworks going on. I don't know. I was into this, but yeah, people are I guess people are not into it. I don't know. Oh, hi Sam. I don't know.
I think it's great. Among our... I like it. I think it's fun.
The great AI psychosis hive mind of San Francisco. Wow. Yeah, people are all... Do they all have headphones? What are the headphones for?
Interesting. Silent disco. So you could listen to the talks.
I don't know. And then they gave an update for the four and a half thousand attendees. This can successfully pass through TSA. Thank me later. They gave us a portable battery. Oh, and it looks like a bomb. So people are like... but people got it through TSA apparently. Pretty cool. Pretty cool. Anyway, let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. In other news, Ilya Sutskever raised more money for SSI. He said, time to scale that safe super intelligence.
So, SSI, we are announcing a long-term strategic partnership with Nvidia. Nvidia is making a substantial investment in SSI that will let them 10x their compute over the next 12 months. We reached the point where our research is worth scaling and this partnership we will be able to. We are honored by Nvidia's...
Just another pod guy. Guess what he says? You need to do a podcast. The podcast guy says, "You need to do another podcast."
Extremely on brand. Well, we have the perfect guest to talk about podcasting with because we have Luke Knight and Ronan Chambers from ETN, the European Technology Network. Welcome to the show. How you guys doing?
What's going on? Here we go, gentlemen. Look at this. Look at this beautiful. Look at this. Has this ever happened before? I don't know.
Yeah. I love the picture. Thank you so much. Hit us, kick us off with the fundraising news. I want to smash this gong.
Well, you've seen we raised $1.6 million. Thanks. Congratulations. $9 million post-money valuation. $9 million. Fantastic. Yeah, announced today. Super happy.
And new studio. It's cooking. It looks huge. You got to trust there. Graphics are on point. Everything's coming together.
Can you rate the studio? Give us a studio out of 10.
This is a 10 out of 10. I don't know. You have everything. There's nothing else that you need. There's no ultra finish on that. This is good. No, you got everything. This is awesome.
No. I love that you guys... this is hard. I think you guys know, we know. It looks sort of easy when you just see a clip and ah it's just a podcast but to actually stick with it for a long time is hard. What has the journey been like? What have the hardest moments been? What does it feel like to actually getting here where you have shocked... you're announcing this in July of all months? July in Europe notoriously slows down. You should come back in October and be like, hey, we had a great summer joke. Yeah. We're back.
Well, look, I actually emailed about 600 people from like the last eight months that we've been doing this. And the amount of out of office emails that I got was actually pretty shocking. So it's a little bit worrying, but no, we'll be fine. That's the whole point. We're ETN. We can figure it out.
We had a checklist to do and I'll wheel it out.
Go and grab it. Go and grab it. While you're doing that, the PTZ, they got everything. You figured out everything. Is James Weekes in the studio today or is he remote?
You got to get him in the studio. I mean, can we go live? Can we see that? Bring it. Bring it.
What's this to do? Go on holiday. Go on TVP. There we go.
That's amazing. Check it off. Fantastic. So, I love that you guys have so thoroughly reclaimed the whole like Europeans don't work joke that I don't know. It feels like it's completely diffused the meme and now I'm just like okay well that's played out. You're grinding. You're going 5 days a week now.
You got any advice for us? What about a cheeky long weekend?
I beat that. I beat that. A little I beat the weekend.
You guys are recently in France, right? How was the trip to... Hold on. You went to... the AC was nonfunctional.
I legit... that actually shocked me so much because you know you hear these jokes about like oh Europeans take long holidays or like there's no air conditioning over there. And I always think that it's the Americans going a little bit too far with the bit. And so I assumed I was like, "Oh yeah, the AC thing that's probably just like in random places there won't be air conditioning." No, like all of France doesn't have air conditioning. It's crazy.
Honestly doesn't have air conditioning. I mean London's been brutal.
So are you talking to startup founders that are thinking about solving this? We were there being like, is this just the most obvious business ever? Just create an air conditioning company of Europe. Kids in the Gundo should start the air conditioning company of Europe and just land on the beaches and just start bringing in units.
Yeah, they'd have good merch with that name to be fair. Well, I know that one of the Collison brothers has put out loads of posts around how people are literally dying from the lack of AC and no one's thought to do this out like when we had the heatwave recently here in London.
Maybe we'll have to get one of our interns to get on it incubation. Yeah. Quick website, you know, get an intern, you know, shipping in some AC units from wherever they ship them in from.
I like it. Talk to our own... Whoa. Okay. There we go. I like it. This is great. What's up, lads?
Okay, so I mean obviously there are a lot of elements down to the PTZ cameras. You're clearly standing on the shoulders of us. You have the picture right there. And it's great because we've defined a bunch of different patterns that allow this business to work. Like when I see the logos at the bottom of the ticker, I'm like that's great. That allows you to pay for the studio and the interns. Where do you see the show going? Where do you want the differentiation to be? Because you're already differentiated just in the fact that Europe is different than the stuff we talk about. You cover stories that way deeper than we do if it's about Europe. But are there other things that you're thinking about where you're like, "Yeah, actually we want to go a completely different direction with this."
Yeah, sure. That's a really good question because we actually didn't think that we would raise any money. We're doing pretty well. As you mentioned the ads model, what you guys have kind of built in terms of a model is great, right? But then when we figured out how big the opportunity is in Europe specifically, we realized that raising the money had legs. We were like, okay, this thing can be really big because it is the live show, but we see that as the kind of wedge in the door, the foot in the door to build the network and then it's a network, right? So, think about potentially a summit business or whatever it is like that the European ecosystem needs that. And it's not as developed as the ecosystem over there. So it's like if we can almost piggyback off that model and then build on top of that, I think yeah the sky's the limit. We can go very big which is exciting.
I think like longterm you can see it like in a way where the show would just become the advertising department for a huge media conglomerate.
So we could do the summit business. You could even open a recruitment model off the back of it. You could look at a fund off the back of it. I mean, you guys have probably gone through all these ideas anyway, and you've probably chosen, let's just nail this. Like, you guys were first to do this. You were first to create the model. So, I don't think there would be a need for you guys to innovate because you smashed it. You don't need to. You had first mover advantage, and you crushed it.
You're thinking, you're encouraging us to rest on our laurels.
We didn't put laurels on the merch. So, it's not now. So we... can we do a breaking TV rafting on Laurels? So you guys have been successful with the TBPN for Europe model. There's also TBPN for car dealerships over here. I don't know if you're familiar with this. The car dealership guy has a live talked about this.
Yeah, we had him on the show and we've talked about it and it's great because we never cover car dealership news. It's every once in a while but not on the dealers. And so it's great to take the best practices of what the lighting should look like, what the trust looks like, take what the logos and stuff like learn from the best practices and then take the content in a different direction so that you're offering a differentiated product. Is there a European car dealership? Are there spin-offs of you yet or more submarkets in Europe for like the European crypto ETN?
I think when we first started I think it was just you guys and then I think like Ecom Cowboys popped up. I think there were you guys... you guys cover flash yet?
You guys know flashbang yet? You got to get on that. Hey, we thought it would come. We got the dance. Let's go. Go down to our frame. Get down to our frame. Oh yeah. What tricks do you have up your sleeve? You got some... We got a few tricks. Throw us some ElevenLabs out or something. What you got?
We can go ad... Wait, can we go ad for ad?
Yeah. Yeah. What you got? I don't know if... Oh, here we go. Let's go. Frame build better. This is a good stinger. This is a really well integrated stinger. We're flashbanging it again. We're smoking it. It's over. I think... How long are your ad reads? This stays up on the screen a little too long. Do you have to click it to come off?
I think my feedback would be a little bit tighter on that. A little bit tighter. You don't want people getting distracted.
Is someone writing this down? Yeah, it's recorded.
We'll get it on Granola. Are they sponsored, too?
No, they're not. This is day one. Not yet. Working on it. Working on it.
This is the worst it will ever be, boys. So, it's fine. It will always get better.
What was the question? I forgot the question.
The question was just like what else is there... is there demand for an ETN for X in Europe? So there was demand for TBPN for car dealerships. There was also demand for TBPN for crypto because we don't really talk about crypto that much. And there's been a few other spin-offs that have made sense and a lot of them have gone their own ways. They don't even look like us anymore. There's all these different things you can do. But they adopted some of the best practices of the ad market, the ad model and some of the overlays and some of the live. But what I'm interested in is what else is going on in Europe that might demand a live show?
Okay. So when we started the model, started ETN, we were like this could be done in... you mentioned like car dealerships, this could be done in fashion. I could get two people to go and do a live show for fashion show, a cooking show, whatever it is. Like yeah literally. Yeah yeah yeah. So someone could do that, get the best designers on every day to talk about I don't know how fashion works but like the new jeans that they've just designed or whatever it is, right? So I think you could go category specific and verticalize in a category in Europe specifically.
Not yet. I mean we're what, 10 months in. So we'll see what happens towards the end of the year. You guys were going for I don't know at least maybe 9 months before we caught on and we were like look this needs to be done in Europe. This is a great model.
What were you guys doing for the first month?
Vacation. We know the bit.
Yeah. You guys should do TBPN for Euro Summers. There we go. Just day...
We go on the road a lot to be fair. We did Monaco with A16Z which is great. We saw Anish who I know knows you Jordi. We had Nico on which was awesome. So Greece with Panathinaikos. We were at the Louvre in Paris.
Got you started on vacation destinations. Now you're... I mean there are summits in Europe. We only choose the destinations where we actually want to vacate. Yeah. It's a good model. But do you think we should do an AI pause so that the AI researchers can go to Ibiza? Well, to let them off for a week. I mean, they're all going to do pretty soon anyway. Quick one week pause. Six month pause. If you can get all the Frontier Labs to sign off on that like Jensen did for his global AI summer. Last question. Do you have an on-camera intern? Our original intern has evolved into a co-host.
Yeah, we've not got a Tyler yet. We did put a job ad for two interns and we got like 360 applicants and there's people based in SF that interned at like Tesla, SpaceX pinging us to be like, can we work for...
I'm moving to Europe? That's sick.
Yeah. Which was nuts, but I don't think we can make that.
They wanted to Euromax with us and we thought you probably are too qualified and we couldn't afford you.
What's the European version of the gong? We just ran. We should have done a bell because in America you actually ring the bell. We randomly went with a gong which is very Asian.
To be fair, we did earlier today. Earlier today we did... we did saber.
Oh, you saber a champagne bottle. That's good.
We did. We'll send you the video of us sabering it. But as you can see it... we've got the TVPN, the lights.
There you go. Yeah, that's pretty. The chat is saying confirmed. Tyler has not been distilled. I like this one. This is a good cyber cue. Too long though. Oh, wait. Actually, if you're going to play the whole song for a little bit, then you're good. Then you're good. Yeah. Intros sometimes, I guess. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You guys are like sports tunes. Just like the AI, you guys are like nine six, you know, maybe 12 months behind. But yeah, we're day one.
We had to keep it concurrent with the... we need to get the flash going though you guys. We're happy for you guys to distill the show.
Shots fired. Good. I like that one. I like that one. Hey, don't give them any ideas. They'll take...
Yeah. No, no, we're going to distill it back. You know, it's like when you ask what model it is in Chinese and it says it's DeepSeek. It goes both ways sometimes. You never know. No, like I think what's the best is that this can be a grind like five days a week, a lot of stuff. There's just a lot of work and it just seems like you guys are having fun. Are you guys having fun?
We're having fun. The most fun we've ever had. It's great. It's great. We get to talk to cool people and you know, we're two mates talking to each other for a living. It's great.
That's the best. Amazing. Best. Exactly. Stoked for you guys. You guys are living the dream. So are we. Well, congratulations.
Wait, before we go, I want to ask, can we get some Lucy's for the studio?
I'd be happy. I'll send you a whole vending machine.
Really? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see how we'll send it to. I love it. Yeah. It's amazing.
Oh, yeah. Let's do it, bro. We're European. We need those.
Yeah. Yeah. Send me your address and we'll chat offline, but we'll send you a bunch of stuff. No problem.
Maybe you could be coming if that's legal.
Yeah. Great to see you guys. Congratulations on the new funding. Congrats to the whole team. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.
Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. What a great crossover. You'll love to see it. Well, we have Gary Vaynerchuk, creator of VeeFriends, back on the show. Third time. Love catching up with Gary Vee. We'll go all over the place. Creator economy, AI, open source, building stuff. How you doing, Gary? What's up?
There he is. Men. Men. Men. Men. I thought you said me. You're doing me. What's happening?
Okay, I want to start with something unless you have something to kick right off with. I want to start with something. I've been seeing these videos of you from years and years ago with just these crazy accurate calls about the future. What victory lap do you like to take the most? Like what's the one call when you think back where you're like, "Damn, I really nailed that one."
Social, if I'm being honest. Like no, it's crazy. Too bad I wasn't making the videos back then. Like just my complete conviction on Facebook and Twitter completely unearthing and changing the world. You know, it's ironic timing. I met with someone today I hadn't talked to in like 12, 13 years. You know, retired gentleman. I met him early on. He's like, it's crazy how much you believed in that stuff and how dismissive we all were. But there's, you know, I listen, the only one of the few things I really do well in business is I don't let my audacity or my current financial situation or what I would like to happen financially dictate my observations of the consumer. I don't think I'm smarter than anyone or have a bigger knack. I think that you have now... let me give some flowers to you boys. You have some of the greatest people on here, right? You guys have crushed. You've also gotten much better at your actual job in interviewing because you know I'm a day one with you guys. So I just want to give you some flowers. You guys are getting better and better. All these brilliant people you have.
It's not that I know it better. I don't know it better. It's that I'm willing to completely change course of what I think is working for me or I'm willing to lose all my money to be historically correct. I'm not talking about things that I want to happen for my financial interest. I'm talking about what consumers are actually doing.
Do you think you were more bullish then like the actual platforms? Because when I look back at some of those calls about the pivot away from the... there's this one where you're looking at the newspaper and you're like nobody's going to use the newspaper, they're just going to get their news online from other people and it's like a very accurate prediction. But it's like that distinctly wasn't coming from Mark Zuckerberg in 2008. He was just saying like I built this cool website, it's fun. I'm connecting the world.
Yeah, it was connection. But I think that I know when you go read Crush It, the first book I wrote, I wrote in 2008 also in that time. I am fully predicting and you guys know this. We've talked off... like I predict literally there's parts of the book that talk about what you guys are doing right now.
Yeah. Yeah. No, we're super into the live streaming too.
Yeah. And don't forget we just came out of Friendster and MySpace failing. So my thesis wasn't necessarily... now look, I thought Mark was generational because I'd spent some time with him and I ended up being very right about that and I thought Twitter was incredibly unique. So I was bullish on those platforms, but I was incredibly agnostic to your point. Whether it was called Facebook or Twitter or the many things that failed along the way. Social Cam, Peach, Vine, you know, like LinkedIn or YouTube or Twitch or TikTok, it didn't matter. Apps that connected people on top of the internet I knew had to win because of the network effect of scale and no gatekeeper in between. You think you two handsome young bozos would have gotten on CNBC? You would have had to wait. But I knew that you could just do it.
And then it's like sports. We love the term bozo. It's underrated. Good because it's only slightly derogatory but it's not totally a bad word. I do identify as a bit of a bozo. It's a great word.
You know you guys have become very influential and definitely the people watching are very influential. Can we all collectively put our hands in the pot and all bring bozo back? It would be really enjoyable.
Bozo. Golden retrievers are kind of bozos. Lovable. We talk about golden retriever mode. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, better distillation. Jordi, sorry I cut you off. What were you going to ask?
Well, yeah. I think what was interesting about your call is you were bullish on the platforms, but the take wasn't just you should invest in Facebook. It was like you should just put stuff out every single day and you've been remarkably consistent with that.
Yeah. And it was real for three guys like us that could go from zero notoriety to a lot. And literally the most famous people in the world right now, at least a third of them are either streamers or purely on social. They have no television. They have no theatrical. They have no other platform.
Yeah. TV is now coming to them and saying, "Hey, could we work something out? You clearly have demand for your content. We want to get it on our platform."
I started a company a couple years ago called VaynerWAT. It's a TV production company. And we are bombarded by the distributors for me to get access to the Steven Bartletts or the Hermoses or the Cody Sanchezes. It's all here. And what's crazy is like YouTube for example, right? There's 900 genres that should be doing what you're doing right now.
Yeah, we just talked to some folks who are doing this show for Europe specifically and there's one that's for car dealers and there's one for crypto and there's a whole bunch of different sort of... and it's not even like we were the first live streamers obviously we just took...
Still the funniest... you know the craziest thing, no one has done TBPN for the market open. Like you're in New York, you start at...
I know someone that's working on... Yeah, we know a couple people, but the fact that we're 18 months in and no one saw what we're doing, we go live at 11 Pacific. So we're going live at noon. The market has been open and...
Which is an indication of your laziness. You guys should wake up.
We do wake up early, but we do a team workout and it's more an indication of our fascination with private markets versus public markets and like longer term, less quarter by quarter, less day by day market moves and more 12 to 18 month fundraising cycles for private technology companies. And so I think that my natural interest is in the private markets and the earlier stage technology. So if I was trying to cover the day by day in the market, what oil's doing and how that's affecting GE and Boeing, I would just be a little bit less sharp than if I'm talking about private market. And honestly, that's what you know, back to Crush It, back to you guys, back to all of this, what you're already like the whole theme of this interview. The fact that people that are watching that are deeply sports like you, the TBPN for sports with talent like you guys is ESPN's biggest nightmare.
Um, they sort of have it, right? Isn't Pat... Of course. Of course. I mean, but they have to pay him like 60 million a year. They do. And Pat had to be lucky enough of all the serendipity that led to that. There are 913 Pat McAfees. And I mean, and Pat's incredibly charismatic and talented. You guys are as well, but the long tail of knowledgeable or charismatic individuals is quite long. Now, everyone has a different upside, right? Like again, somebody could replicate this exact show. And if they're really just much sharper and more entertaining, they will take market share. That's just how it...
Well, the other thing about sports versus business that's interesting is like sports, there's so many people that played sports, whether it's college or professionally, and then they stop being able to play at that level, and they're like, "Well, what's the best thing I should do? I should just talk about the game that I love." Whereas in business, you don't get to a point where you're better at talking about it necessarily than doing it. There's a lot of people that could...
So well said. And there's another thing. I just turned 50 and like literally this morning like no [__] I'm like am I starting to enter my prime like as an operating...
That's such a great philosophy. You're just like I'm having whatever the inverse of a midlife crisis is, that's me.
You know what's funny? Wait, is the generational run just beginning? I love it. But man, I really like and it's funny and I have a funny feeling especially given the incredible nature of your audience. I think when that was just delivered a few minutes ago, there's just a lot of people that really understand it because you know my whole life and probably many others watching here, you wish you were an athlete, but if you were an entrepreneur, you kind of realize at 30, you're like, "Wait a minute. If I was an athlete and I was great, I'd be kind of wrapping it up or like thinking about post." And I own a large sports agency. My brother and I own a very large sports agency now called VaynerSports. You know, I feel for these kids. This is what they were meant to do. They're 35 years old and they're like, "What do I do with my..." like just like really... I truly feel so blessed to have always been obsessed with business. I never came close. I got very into surfing. But I never liked surfing as much as business and being having a love for something that you can do for a lifetime. Even more so people say like oh you should play tennis cuz you can play it basically indefinitely but it's like well you can do deals for truly for life.
That's a good segue. Yeah. Yeah. This is what we always bring up... sorry one second. We always bring up Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. It's like the greatest run of that career happened from like 50 to 90. It's like that's so long.
No, but wasn't it more like 70 to 90 or like 80...
Was it like 60? That's right. So segue, we just brought up tennis.
I've done incredibly well. I think this is important for a lot of people. Again I'm always thinking about the audience. Alternative sports league investing. I think there's some more fun stuff you guys could be doing about that. It's gone really well for me.
Yeah, Alexis, we had Alexis on. He has the running league, which is cool. We had the founder of Enhanced Games on. There's some article in the journal today. Is Padel the next pickleball?
Right. So, pickle was a huge win for me, right? I bought a team for 500,000 pre-COVID. They're trading at 16 million right now in our Major League Pickleball league. Right. I...
So, do people watch pickleball?
Yes. That's why I invest. So, I have a little bit of a secret of why I think I'm doing well because I'm doing well with this whiffle ball league that is starting to get some juice. We got some great owners in that.
I have one little advantage. It's back to this and we've had some meetings off camera and you guys know I'm pretty in the weeds with how communication and marketing works. The reason I invested in Pickle is Pickle highlights even seven years ago massively overindexed on social.
Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah. But the thing is I do wonder if that's... so Dana White has the slap fighting league. Forget what it's called. And that's something that does incredibly well on social, but I don't know anyone, even hardcore MMA fans, it's like can't wait for the card this weekend. I'm going to watch live things.
Two things. One is on incredibly well on social. You have to, you know, when you... because I've looked at that as well and a lot of it is driven by the TKO machine. Much more than the organic nature of what I was saying.
And seeing somebody that's about to get hit in the face is naturally scroll stopping even if it's not a good spectator.
There's also something that people don't realize about sports that matters if you're going to watch it, which is your capacity to participate in it. Right. Like people a lot when people try to zing pickleball they're like yeah everyone's playing it but is it a business and I always like literally those are the articles that were written about tennis and golf 50, 60, 70, 80 years ago. It's like it's funny by...
The way back to your first question, the other thing I do pretty well that I hope other people do, so I'm saying it out loud, is I really use history along with paying attention to people. So, for example, the biggest sports in America in the 20s and 30s were horse racing, boxing, and baseball. Those sports were very good on radio, but football is not a great radio sport.
Football exploded with the television. If you look at the explosion of the football, it came along with television.
And so, back to streaming what you guys are doing right now, one of the reasons I'm invested in the sailing league, slam ball, you know, pickle ball, whiffle ball.
Slamball's trampoline. It's amazing. You don't know what this is.
Dodgeball and trampoline.
No, no, no. Basketball with trampoline so everyone can dunk and do like baths and stuff. It's crazy.
reason I did it was I knew I didn't need just like you guys didn't need CNBC to be like you're the right on-air talent. All these alternative leagues do not need ESPN or, you know, Fox Sports to say yes. People can see this stuff through these platforms. And that's going to continue in an AR, VR, like we're going into an incredible era of opportunity and meritocracy.
Yeah.
Uh, real quick, what was your reaction to the World Cup? Do you think that flopping will, uh, and flopping culture will forever prevent America from actually getting into... Do you think that's a bottleneck to growth?
No, that's not a bottle... What? Americans are hypocrites. We love basketball. SGA is the greatest flopper of all time.
I have... I don't watch enough... I haven't watched enough basketball to have even seen SGA flop. But I feel like the... I feel like in Europe they appreciate the drama and it's almost like the acting of it all, but then you watch the replay and it's like, you know, Americans that are used to watching, you know, some cornfed linebacker run through a guy and the guy just gets up instantly. You know, it's hard to then go watch somebody flop and completely fake an injury.
I think that soccer players at this point have this incredible four to seven percent Academy Award-like acting capabilities that probably piss people off. But I agree with you. I'll use football because football is a sport that people hate when they first see it and then they become infatuated with it because it stops and starts and stops and starts. Especially the world immigrants coming to the US when they're used to soccer which is flowing, they hate it and then inevitably within a decade they love it because you start falling in love with all the little nuances. And I would say for Americans the nuance of flopping is annoying, especially with the NBA, it's been a big topic by the way, so I think especially this season, so I think some of that energy came to it. But look, I mean, I'm a little older than you guys, everybody who's over 50 knows this, the strides that America has made in its interest in football, aka soccer, over the last 30 years is profound. FIFA, the video game, had a huge impact. Being able to watch the Premier League in America on Saturday mornings had a huge impact. And, um, and I'm... it's a great sport and I already am excited for the next one.
What about the intersection of technology and a game like soccer? I grew up playing soccer, refing soccer. I've refed. That was like, you know, that was... I would spend my weekends when I was 12, I'd ref like 20 soccer games because they didn't cap it. Like there was no like you can only work eight hours. It was like you can ref as many games as you want because there was a shortage. So I'd ref like an insane number of games in a day. And in watching the World Cup, and again I'm a super casual viewer, I hadn't been watching soccer prior to the World Cup but it was fun to kind of catch up on it. Like, you know, there'd be an offside call and or maybe there wasn't a call and then they'd run the tape and they'd figure out that the guy's hand, you know, elbow was slightly over the line and they'd call it, they'd take the goal back. And that to me, like part of what makes the sport great is there's just players that can finesse a situation and just be right on that line so a ref couldn't possibly call it. And then to have a machine being like, you know, no, you can't... you could beat the ref, but not the machine.
Look, I think of this like marketing. Just... I'll make this valuable to the audience who does not like sports.
This is Slam Ball, by the way.
I thought those were the Chinese robots for...
No, these are... Now we're watching Slamball. Best hits. Look at this.
All right. All right. This is electric. I can get behind this. It's so insane.
Is this made to look like it was shot on VHS? What's going on here? Is this other video?
