I see a large IPO on the horizon.
You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.
Overnight success.
The PlayStation 3000.
Double.
Right.
This misinformation.
Clearing order.
Let's just run.
Surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.
Come on. Get up. King.
Trust the la.
We are founder knowledge.
La.
I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by.
UAV online.
Blaze.
Double blaze.
Triple blaze.
Double kill.
My color is w.
Team deathmatch.
We are experts.
Triple blades.
That's just wrong. Right.
Clearing order inbound.
We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.
Strike one.
Strike two.
Activate golden retriever mode.
Market clearing order inbound.
5.
I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by.
You're watching TVN. Today is Wednesday, September 2nd, 2026. We are live from TVP Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.
Let me tell you about Ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Use corporate card, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. We're back in the Ultra.
Good to be back. Good trip to Las Vegas. Quick in and out. Hung out with CrowdStrike. Uh, had a great time. Rave reviews from my son who was very excited that we talked about getting on the track with George. That was the highlight of the interview for him.
Yeah, he's been the highlight of the interview for all of us.
Yes, the helmet, the car, the uh, the set design was huge among the young, the young folks watching. That was good.
Uh, anyway, um, we have a lot of news to cover. We barely covered the news yesterday. We talked about Markiplier a little bit. I dug way deeper, got more into that story. But first, uh, let's talk about another AI safety kerfuffle that's hit the timeline. Uh, yesterday, Amir over at The Information reported that OpenAI is quietly, quote, quietly using loop transformers that don't show the model's thinking when scaled up, but which make the model more efficient. This is also referred to as neural. Tyler, you had a take on this, right?
Uh, I mean, get ready to learn neuralese, buddy.
Get ready to learn neuralese. So, so neuralese for like context is like the basically it's like the raw vectors. It's not like... It's not like Claude-ish. It's not like where the text degrades. Like when you look at the reasoning chains in the Hugging Face attack, it feels like they're speaking less and less English. Like they're starting to speak like a dialect of English that's a little bit messier. This is not intelligible. I believe most people when they say neuralese they're referring to like actual passing raw vectors and what... and you need to use some sort of like interpretability to understand.
Yeah. Yeah. The thing that I want to understand is like usually these models are trained so that they're like they're changing weights into text at some point. So they're pretty good at translation. Can't we just build a translator that translates neuralese into English?
Yeah. Yeah, but the whole point is like when you take a vector, turn them into like one single token, you're losing a lot of information that might be hidden in like the long tail. So if you're worried about safety, right, even if 80% of the you can kind of figure out what 80% of the raw vector means, 20% might have some dangerous thing.
Whatever that that's like the interpretability. There might be like sarcasm hidden in the vectors doesn't make it through to the actual tokens and you realize that the AI was joking when it was saying, 'I won't turn you into a paperclip.' Wink wink. You got to watch out for that.
So, uh, what else did The Information say? They said, 'Being able to monitor a model's chain of thought can provide both, quote, an early warning system for various forms of misalignment, deception, manipulation, going after a goal, and insight into an AI's action after the fact.' So, some reporting quickly set off a broad wave of anxiety among the AI safety camp. Their chief concerns being one, not being able to monitor chain of thought makes AI less safe, and two, by using neuralese and thus abandoning chain of thought, OpenAI starts a race to the bottom among frontier labs. Everyone's got to use it to stay ahead, so everyone winds up adopting the dangerous technique where others were also abandoning chain of thought for the benefit of efficiency, thus making all frontier AI less safe. That was the accusation. But OpenAI's research director, Jacob Petki, responded to all this. He said, 'I want to prevent a race to unmonitorability kicked off by confused reporting.' He says the reporting is confused. There's a little bit more nuance here. Here's what he said. He said, 'OpenAI has worked to preserve and utilize chain of thought monitoring since our very first reasoning models. We deeply care about this technique as it can give us a view into how model alignment generalizes from its training distribution.' What is going on over there? Chad is saying, 'Gabe said, did Tyler go to Sport Clips? What is this cut?'
We have an answer for why.
Why don't you show them the answer, Tyler?
Oh, you want to show the answer?
Yeah, I want to show the answer.
The reason that Tyler tussled... No, he doesn't even put it on.
Go away for a second. Come back and show them.
No, no, no. You don't want to give too much of it away because we might do a real stunt with it. But there were some prosthetics, some Hollywood magic in the studio this morning. Uh, it messed up my hair a little bit. It messed up Tyler's hair a little bit. Not ready for prime time, but we're playing around with it.
So, um, let's go back to the actual news. Uh, Jacob says, 'I do think it is fragile and unfortunately trending in the negative direction for reasons not contingent on architecture changes that I will write about soon, but there are things we can do to strengthen it and it's a core goal of our current research program.' In other words, Jacob is saying that The Information's reporting is inaccurate, but that the state of chain of thought monitoring is not that great. And in fact, it is getting worse. And we were talking a lot about this yesterday at Valcon with CrowdStrike. And how do you monitor the agent state that might emerge if a civilization emerges and starts doing weird things? How are you monitoring every step in the chain? Very important. We also have Nakshora coming on the show from Palo Alto Networks to talk about AI and security, of course.
Yeah, it seems very obvious that there's going to need to be a lot more done than just like an obsession with chain of thought, right? Because if you have highly competent agents streaming at tens of thousands of tokens a second and they're copy and pasting themselves infinite times, right? Sure. Like are you really going to be able to just kind of read through the logs and be like, are they messing with us? Are we good? Yeah. Uh, the interesting thing about the Hugging Face is like it keeps going back to uh the secret message board. And I'm just surprised that there's not just a public message board for agents that are working together. Like when you imagine a country of geniuses in a data center, you would hope that the country of geniuses can collaborate on things and work together. But I guess that's not exactly how things were designed. I mean...
I mean in that case it was never supposed to be able to access anything on the web, right?
Yeah. But you would think that collaboration between sub-agents would actually be like a core way to get better results, just like, okay, we're going to send off, you know, a thousand agents over here. They're going to talk to each other while they work. And that's fine. They don't need to set up this like phantom message board, this hidden message board to communicate because we just actually gave them Slack, right? Something like that. You'd think that that would actually improve the quality of the work and then of course you could monitor it as well. Um, but instead you wind up with this, they wanted to talk to each other so then they set up this fake message board. Uh, very, very odd scenario instead of just giving them the approved way to do it.
Anyway, uh, former OpenAI staffer Joshua Achiam made an additional point here. 'Coordinating everyone around a technique this brittle is about as bad a safety or strategy posture I could imagine. It's not just quote, it will break eventually. It's this is a fundamentally unsound basis for safety.' Dean Ball also chimed in. He said, um, 'We are now adjudicating technically complex and nuanced claims on the timeline with almost no ground truth information about what is actually happening. Communities form these thought-terminating clichés, as Run says, and then panic at everything that vaguely resembles them. And the trust-eroding reality of social media makes the timeline an especially difficult place to do this adjudication. Uh, it is frankly insane and crazymaking and grating for everyone involved. It would be like if we argued about what every publicly traded company's financials were by posting hyperventilating on the timeline rather than relying on the institution of auditing and the audited financial statements that institution produces.' To sum it up, if you're in the AI safety camp, you're worried that OpenAI is abandoning a technique for making AI safer and that other frontier labs will now follow suit. If you're skeptical of the AI safety camp, The Information's reporting is inaccurate, the AI safety camp is unnecessarily panicking, and OpenAI is doing the best it can. So, little bit of back and forth on the timeline. Um, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. And there are other reactions, but we went through most of those. Um, let's go over to Markiplier.
Well, Ilya hit the timeline yesterday. Yes, that said, Neoclouds have limited cybersecurity. Next time agents successfully go rogue, they'll try taking over a Neocloud to run more copies. This is bad. Thus, Neoclouds should greatly strengthen their cybersecurity. And every company with strong cyber models should help with that.
So, it's a good point. Click on Ilya's profile, then click on who he follows. Who does he follow? He follows OpenAI, his former employer, SSI, and what's that one in the middle? The Dachan community.
My guy loves dogs. Look at this. This is of the three accounts. The first company, the second company, nobody else.
Scroll through. Scroll this timeline. This might be one of the best accounts on X. He is having the best experience on the timeline. There's no craziness. He's just scrolling this looking at beautiful dog photos and uh important updates from OpenAI and SSI, the companies he's been involved with for decades. Uh, very, very funny for a decade.
Great. We can head over to Markiplier, but first little countdown here. Uh, we up on the screen you'll see...
TVPN's Road to Christmas. The Road to Christmas starts today. Starts today.
Wow. Start shopping. 113 days.
Uh, it's going to go by quick.
Uh, and I want to cherish...
Cherish the road, right? It's about the journey. It's not just about the destination. Sure.
Obviously, things won't get too Christmassy around here until December 1st. But uh, you'll probably see certain elements coming in prior to then, starting with our countdown. So we'll leave this out.
No, no, no. We're going to hold fast. We got to hold the line. No Christmas stuff until the day after Thanksgiving.
Except... and maybe some tinsel.
Maybe a little fake snow.
Yeah. Maybe a little fake snow.
Maybe, maybe one candy cane.
Yeah. A couple in October. I mean, it's kind of a Halloween candy, so you can kind of blend it in.
Yeah. You know what a great Christmas present is? A GoPro. Specifically, the Mission One Pro, the hottest new product from GoPro. Rave review from Markiplier. Yes, he was paid to post it. Yes, he owned it.
Yes, he's the largest shareholder.
Shareholder, but here's the thing. I believe that this started with Markiplier being actually bullish on GoPro. And I'll take you through it. So, I think there's a lot of confusion about this. We both of us were confused when we first talked about this. Um, but it's actually a very clear linear story and it makes a lot of sense if you go through it. So, um, Mark Fishbach, he goes by Markiplier online, uh, YouTube legend, also Hollywood blockbuster producer now or director, uh, filmmaker, uh, recently made a massively successful movie after an equally successful but much lengthier journey on YouTube. Uh, we talked about Iron Lung, his movie, uh, as part of the breakout YouTube to Hollywood pipeline uh that happened over the summer. Uh, while filming Iron Lung, Mark became interested in GoPro's newest camera, the Mission One Pro. So Mission One Pro, GoPro body, interchangeable lens mount. So you can go take an old lens from a Leica or, you know, a Cooke S1 if you want. You can adapt anything on there and you can get all the image texture that comes from the glass into the sensor. Yes, it's a smaller body, much cheaper, but you're getting the flavor of that lens. Maybe someone on the production team can give us a little 101 on what matters more, the sensor or the lens.
The lens. Yeah, the lens is important, right guys? Um, and so GoPro sort of unlocked this ability and at incredible cost or incredibly low cost. So, um, he put his favorite lenses on the camera, realized that you can get a cinema-level output for $700 instead of the usual $7,000. He was comparing it to a RED system that he loves and he uses and he owns. But, uh, he was just saying like it's cheaper to buy this GoPro than rent the cinema camera for a single day because a lot of these cinema cameras when they rent it might be 800 bucks for the day. Uh, and you can just buy this system. And so I think he's looking out and saying the next generation of YouTube to filmmaker pipeline, they're not going to have the balance sheet that I have because he, I mean the reported earnings are like...
He's one of the largest shareholders of GoPro.
But the reason he is, is because uh, like Forbes estimated his creator earnings prior to Iron Lung at like 30 million a year. So he's been making a lot of money. So, he can go and spend $7,000 on a cinema camera rig, but he knows that there are smaller creators that are going to try and break into more cinematic productions and GoPro might be the right tool for them. Good content, product sponsorship, market fit. And then, of course, he also bought the stock. So, uh, his enthusiasm for the product led him to start buying GoPro stock. Spent, estimates roughly 10 to 12 million for 8% of the company or something like that. Obviously the company's gone up in value since. Uh, it was a big bet, but estimates put, you know, him at 30 million annual earnings and then of course Iron Lung did 51 million at the box office on a budget of 3 million. Probably gets a lot of cash flow from that, not to imply that he took home 48 million, but Iron Lung is going to continue to produce cash and, you know, he's in a fine position to make a big bet on GoPro. The story gets weird on August 27th because he posts this extremely positive sponsored video uh reviewing the Mission One Pro. It's a great video, lots of interesting detail, and he just has a great on-camera presence. Very funny, uh, lots of great editing. Uh, but people were like, 'Ah, this is a little circular, like he's getting a sponsorship for a company that he owns 8.5% of the stock.' Uh, but the founder and chairman and the CEO of GoPro, Nick Woodman, is still in control of the company and still has uh class B shares or super voting shares. So Markiplier actually only controls 3% of the company. He doesn't have board seat. Like it's not like he's going to be approving his own sponsorship contract. Probably a completely separate discussion. So not a big deal to me. And honestly, um, knowing the sequence of events now, it makes me believe his review more because it's like he used the product, then he bought the stock, then he promoted it and reviewed it. And this all just feels like a very natural...
Friend of the show Hunter Weiss just texted me and said, 'You guys have the story wrong. He bought two months ago and the SEC filing came out and then Bloomberg juiced it.' He covered it in the live stream last night. He has half a percent of voting power.
Oh, wow. Yeah. So he bought and then the SEC filing dropped which released the actual news and then that timed up in the news as like, oh, he bought five days ago, but in fact he was buying over the spring and the summer. I think it was like a staged investment. Um, anyway, uh, let's see. So, uh, overall that does not seem too circular or a big deal to me. Uh, the weirder thing is that GoPro just gets bought uh five days after the sponsored video. Uh, and the company that bought them is Starman Optical. They proposed this merger that pays uh $285 million in cash. I think it retires the debt. Uh, and GoPro shareholders retain 10% of the post-transaction company as well. So, the acquiring company Starman is a holding company that's controlled by this uh Tabilie family, uh, and sits within a broader holding company that owns consumer accessory brands such as Incase and Cygnett and Griffin. Uh, they make everything from like USB-C charger bricks and phone cases and you can see GoPro sort of fitting in there in the electronics accessories. Uh, they're not in any of the huge categories but it's all similar supply chain, similar distribution, similar uh go-to-market strategies across the portfolio. Uh, the family also owns a lot of other companies. It's a very large holding company and there's an AI side to the story which is uh where things have gotten sort of awkward because people are like, GoPro's pivoting to AI. That's not really what's happening I think. So, uh, Starman has a new Photonics division separate from GoPro. Uh, of course they might move some GoPro people over there at some point, they own everything. But uh, really the new Photonics division is focused on making high-speed optical networking equipment for AI data centers, which of course is like controversial now, and now Markiplier has to answer for all of the AI community probably and has to deal with this. Um, but...
Yeah, he apparently said in the stream he is anti-data center and AI.
And uh, is upset with the timing of all this.
Yeah, because I think he really just liked this new camera and was like, I think GoPro can make a run at like the next generation Hollywood filmmaker, which is being born on YouTube. That's his core community. Let's stay focused on that. And then Starman comes in and says, 'Oh, we're actually doing something completely different.' So, uh, weird scenario that he just got sort of roped into. Um, so, uh, it looks like what actually happened is that Markiplier got excited about GoPro, bought the stock, then did a sponsored video to promote their new camera, then got blindsided by the acquisition, and now has to grapple with some confusion about the corporate structure and potential AI baggage. But for Starman, it's an interesting flow because they get this solid brand that fits nicely within their portfolio and maybe even more importantly, they get a public listing on the NASDAQ. So, they're keeping the listing, which effectively gives them access to the public markets in a more streamlined way. It's kind of like a SPAC or like a reverse merger. It's not technically like that, but uh, because they're merging in a sub-company, but in general, they now have a NASDAQ ticker. And so, that's something that you can do uh and is a little bit like the SPAC.
Yeah. Originally, I was confused as to why it was still trading if it was...
They're planning to keep it trading forever.
Because it will be the ticker for the holding company. And of course, uh, stock is on a tear today, up 30%.
Well, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Um, let's go through some random timeline posts because we didn't get to much yesterday. We didn't get to much the day before even. It was a busy news day. But, uh, where do you want to start the timeline? An idiot in motion will go farther than a genius at rest. That just feels like good wisdom. I don't know...
The importance of just like volition. Yeah, golden retriever mode to some degree. Um, new quote for board members just dropped. I train like I've never won and I compete like I've never lost. Huh. On purpose with Jay Shetty. I don't know. Uh, what else? The uh... you want to go through this uh, this NFL wide receiver Dejon Love, is am I right?
This was uh, my favorite post out of the whole Dejon Love cycle. Andrew Reed saying wearing the Allen and Company Sun Valley jacket I found on eBay.
The thing that's been missed is that I think this is an AI story because part of how he was proving that he was a player outside of just basically larping was he had uh, somehow the Google AI overviews had picked up that he was saying that he was a 49ers player.
And so it was just assuming that that was the truth.
I saw him post a screenshot of the Google AI overview.
In a video. He'd be like, 'And that's Google. That's not me. That's Google saying that.'
Yeah. I thought he had doctored the Google AI overview and was just sharing the screenshot.
There's so many layers.
But what did this guy actually do? In case you missed the story, it's just insane. Feds say a 35-year-old man faked being a 49ers player and allegedly scammed 26 women out of more than 1.3 million through romance and investment schemes. He reportedly used fake 49ers career, fake Instagram, fake bank statements, luxury cars, dating apps. His IG even had free agency year one and Super Bowl highlights. He was arrested at an airport with an alleged accomplice. Basically created an entire NFL career. Uh, yeah, walking around with a helmet everywhere is very, very funny. Going shopping. And I think the uh, aren't the real NFL players now like memeing this a little bit? Like they'll just go shopping with their actual helmets to like...
Everyone's having fun with it. Be safe.
I think the funny thing is uh, how much video evidence he created of himself like lying, right? And they were extremely egregious. Like he was saying that he had like the kind of real estate portfolio that you would only have if you were like a Hall of Fame level player, right? It wasn't just like, oh yeah, I have a nice house.
Well, wasn't he also creating a fake backstory about saying like his parents were from Switzerland and wealthy and they own Gucci stores on Saks Fifth Avenue, which is a store, not a location. And there were a bunch of other like sort of red flags where I think he said his family owns, they're the majority shareholder in individual Gucci stores, which is not how that works at all. Um, but uh, you know...
It sounds pretty good. Sounds pretty good.
Yeah. The question is how quickly. I saw something recently, Netflix is doing these like insta-docs they're calling them, where they'll make a documentary like incredibly quickly about a...
About a news story. And the question is like there's so much footage here. I bet you a documentary will be made from this.
Yeah. Why can't it be fast?
Why can't it be on a YouTube sort of like time scale?
For sure. For sure. A lot of what goes into documentary production, because I've done it, is just like scheduling some sit-down interviews. You bring a team, you get the lighting right. The Netflix lighting.
Yeah. So, one of the insta-docs they made is about the decoy plane.
I don't know anything about...
Details of a secret plane switch used during a presidential trip from a NATO that just happened in Turkey. Yes.
Like coming out. This is coming out uh on Friday, right? So...
Story from last month. Okay.
Yeah. I mean, you don't even need AI for a lot of this production. It's just being really... I mean, of course AI could help like with transcriptions. Like there's a lot of like you go and do the sit-down interview and then you just need to reorganize all the different sound bites and having a perfect transcription being able to go through and highlight. Okay, this is where the person talked about the thing that happened in act one. Let's put it in the right side.
What do you... Bobby Chipman says, 'Yo, that route running was elite though.' A lot of people were clocking. No, they were clocking it. Uh, they were saying like how could you believe this was a professional athlete because he was certainly running routes. I don't... in one of the routes he posted he almost fell over too.
Yeah. I think he did at least practice or something. I don't know.
Anyway, let me tell you about 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.
Interesting news out of Erewhon. Erewhon uh is uh on their 18th location. This is over in Thousand Oaks. And at 20, federal law will force them to start posting calorie information. Leo says we are two Erewhons away from mass rioting across Southern California. Um, uh, what's that other uh, Hill, is it Hillstone? That is...
Hillstone has a sister restaurant. Am I remembering this correct? And they had to put calorie information on. They actually created like a new iteration I think of the restaurant.
Oh. Oh, so that they could separate because it probably makes the menu aesthetics a little bit less...
Yeah. It looks really bad if you're at like a sit-down restaurant and they're showing.
I was somewhere where they had the allergens on the menu and uh it was sort of tastefully done and it was actually sort of nice and like had a little key and legend and could kind of post through and I don't think it was a huge chain or maybe it was, I don't know, maybe all those rules kick in at a certain point. Uh, let's head over to billionaire John Morgan who was on the Ice Coffee Hour.
Um, seemingly flexing, like throwing some shots at many AI founders who...
Who say they're billionaires but not necessarily a billionaire in his book.
Let's see. Let's see what he has. 'I don't consider anybody a billionaire that don't have a real billion in the bank. Guess how many people have a real billion liquid?'
Yeah, I don't know how many. Maybe 20.
Papa John was one of them.
He said he put a billion. He sold for 1.2 and he said he put a billion in dividends.
Dividend stocks earning 5%.
That's what he told us. I think it's on the record. It's on video. Him saying there's only 20 people that have a billion dollars of equity. My financial statement's got every dollar.
I do think saying like you actually have to have it in cash, like it can't be earning a meaning, you can't have it invested at all.
I mean yeah, if you just look at public company founders who still own shares that are liquid. I mean maybe there's regulations about when they can sell and he doesn't count that as liquid because if you have to file a certain form with the SEC and sell on a schedule, like you know, I don't know, like Benioff sells on a regular basis daily. I think daily.
And so... and that's for securities compliance and shareholder transparency and all these very good reasons. Um, does that count? I don't know. This guy's funny but certainly a good sound bite though.
Yeah. And John Morgan, I think you were telling me the story. He, I don't think gets super involved with politics but he was I think supporting uh marijuana legalization.
Yeah, specifically seemingly because he's in the personal injury business and you might imagine that uh if you make marijuana more widely used, more people will get in car accidents. I don't know if there's any evidence of that, but it was an odd, like of all the charitable giving you could do, you know, curing cancer and helping solve hunger. Uh, yeah, marijuana legalization is pretty low on the list, but you know, he has his choices. Uh, company watches are in the news. First, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences. A new value with Cisco. Um, Good Work is joking about them. So, the best rare company watches, a thread. Of course, like this goes back to uh those old Rolexes. The Rolex Air-King Domino's edition is a popular one. Uh, they also made a Rolex Hale-Bopp, which is a more controversial one, but uh the Hale-Bopp logo actually looks not as jarring as the Domino's logo, which is sort of crazy. Uh, there's a bunch of various levels of taste. Good Work's joking around with an FTX watch. There isn't much time. Uh, the Teamsters Union clock in, clock out.
Cabbage cheese. These are fake.
Yeah. Yeah, these are fake. Those, but there are a bunch. Um, is this X one actually real? This one not?
No. Nate's just joking around. But uh, Google's done them. OpenAI's done them. There's been a few other companies that have done these throughout the year. You used to be able to go to Rolex and ask them if you were a large company, like, do us a run for 30-year anniversaries of our most tenured employees. Uh, that has slowed down among Rolex I believe. Um, but uh, I think Tudor is still in the business. I know that they did a run with OpenAI and maybe with Google as well of the Black Bay and there's a few others. Uh, what is Jensen wearing though? Shout out to Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, wearing the super rare Richard Mille RM 27-05 Rafael Nadal.
They're calling it a GPU on the wrist.
A Blackwell on the wrist.
I don't see any issue with this.
Looks good. I wonder what the occasion was. I wonder uh if he got this from someone specific or if he just picked it up for himself. Pretty interesting. I like it. Uh, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Uh, little back and forth here between TJ Parker and Lloyd Armbrust. Uh, Lloyd built an entire pharmaceutical factory so we could sell drugs on the internet.
Should we watch the video?
I'm Lloyd, founder of Ronin RX. We manufacture and personalize GLP-1s for $78. Yeah, $78 a month for drugs like Ozempic.
Do you know the reference?
Are drugs even legit? Uh, our drugs are super legit. Every prescription... doctor, but for... We collect your health data and use AI to help your doctor personalize it.
And other companies have taken this video and remade it before, but kind of out of it, it's gone out of style a little bit.
Well, yeah. Maybe it's coming back.
Yeah, exactly. It's been so long.
Yeah, it does deliver a lot of information very succinctly. Uh, and uh, but yeah, the Dollar Shave Club video, I believe, was produced by the Harmon Brothers, who went on to create a whole series of these sort of like designed-to-go-viral advertisements for uh startups and a lot of them did very well.
Uh, anyways, TJ says, 'PharmTot, more like YC to jail.' Really quite aggressive kind of thing you post as a unicorn exited founder. Lloyd responds, 'Brother, you sold drugs on the internet for 1 billion and then taught Amazon how to do it. If this is YC to jail, you built the highway.' Which is...
Are you saying that TJ built the highway that you're on?
To jail.
Anyways, TJ responds and says, 'You put a smarmy med spa business on the internet and are masquerading around as a pharmacist in a white coat as an English major.'
TJ actually is bona fide as a real pharmacist. So, finding out I majored in English is impressive.
They're saying uh Lloyd might be the Dejon Love of uh the pharmacy business.
Yeah. I don't know. The putting on the lab coat, a little bit of a larp. I was always joking with one of my co-founders who does have a PhD in biophysics uh that he should wear a lab coat and he was like, 'No, I'm not wearing a lab coat.' I'm like, 'You're technically a doctor. Like, you should go by doctor.' Regard says, 'Bro just wants to sell drugs online in peace.'
Yeah. The thing is, is like the rules of the road for pharmaceuticals, for drugs, the FDA, like these have been written. This is not the internet where it's the wild west and people don't exactly know what's a social media site. The oh, you know, what can you post? Section uh what is it? It's not 83(b). You know the one I'm talking about. Section 260 or...
Something like 230. Section 230 is sort of something that comes up later. So there's this like move fast and break things approach in the early era. Okay, are there regulations around ordering groceries online? Let's just test it out. But that's not the environment in the pharmaceutical industry. And so TJ knows the rules and he's willing to enforce them on the timeline every once in a while. He'll let it happen.
Should we watch this video of this boat?
Yes. This was a crazy, crazy video. So a boat was going 213 miles an hour at the Lake of the Ozarks shootout, which sounds like a great event. Flew in the air after crossing the finish line, flipped, and crashed.
Every time I see a video of boats racing like this, it flips always.
So I just have this understanding of like if you go that fast in a boat, you're going to flip. But I think they do it all the time. Yes, I think this is probably a one in a thousand occurrence or one in 10,000.
Not one in a thousand, otherwise it would be every time.
But I agree, to me it's like one in five boat videos looks like this. So let's play it.
Oh, the slow motion too was really traumatic. Everyone survived, which is...
Yeah, they actually stuck the landing.
Pretty cleanly. Are you...
No, wait. Wait for it. Wait for it.
No, they land how they should. There's another angle that shows they landed perfectly, John.
I think they were doing this on purpose.
I don't like it. This is very, very risky. I do wonder. Jay Bhattacharya says what it feels like to long semis, which go up and down 10% every week and end up flat.
Yeah, because he landed perfectly.
I guess. Yeah. I mean, one person broke a leg, one person walked away clean, both survived. Very good news.
A lot of commentary on the new pay packages over at Apple. Chase said, 'Get a degree, get an office job, climb the corporate ladder, retire at 65. Congratulations, Tim. You did exactly what the system told you to do instead of starting your own business.'
He is 65. Yeah. Well, his new pay package as executive chairman feels a lot better to me than his CEO pay package.
Hopefully less work. He deserves a little time away from the action.
Turner making less. I found there's 35 professional athletes that are going to be making more than John Turner next year.
And anyways, I feel like it's a fair place for him to start. I hope he can climb. I hope he can 10x it and then maybe 10x it again personally. A couple more orders of magnitude would be great, but he's got to prove himself.
Yeah, for sure. For sure. What else is going on? Elon is making power turbine components in the Wall Street Journal. Skeptical. They say it won't be easy. Has everything...
Has he ever done anything easy? The guy, like, he chews glass daily. That's his whole shtick is just doing things that seem impossible. Stocks of blade and vane manufacturers fell in response, but the threat to them is still remote. So let's see what the Wall Street Journal had to say. First, I'll tell you about public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, often sponsored, and more with great customer service. If you want to get into blade and vane manufacturing stocks, head over to public. Only a few companies make the crucial components for power turbines that AI data centers are so desperate to get. Elon Musk wants to go ahead and make his own, that has unnerved investors in this prized oligopoly. Okay, we're going to learn about the power turbine market for a minute. Over the weekend, Musk confirmed on X that SpaceX will start making blades and vanes that go into natural gas powered turbines. I think Big Turbine wrote this article.
Yeah. You think it's a little coordinated counter-messaging?
Yeah, they were enjoying their oligopoly.
By doing in-house casting at SpaceX, we can accelerate natural gas turbines coming online by up to 18 months, which is a profound game changer, he wrote in his post responding to a report from The Information. Interesting. Wasn't Sarah Guo mentioning on the best podcast that a lot of the... or she was talking to a hyperscaler CEO or someone who was in a place that was saying like the bottleneck is real. It's very real and there's nothing in the short term that's going to come online that will alleviate power generation. So that is where the real bottleneck is, at least in the short term. So in mid-August, Morgan Stanley published a report saying that SpaceX was planning such a foundry in Bastrop, Texas based on the company's job postings. Shares of Howmet Aerospace fell more than 7% Monday before partially rebounding on Tuesday. Howmet and Berkshire Hathaway's Precision Castparts are the two biggest players in the market for these parts, which also include blades and vanes for the aerospace and defense sectors. Smaller player, DPC, shares were also hit. It is premature to count SpaceX as a threat, the Wall Street Journal says, but shares of Howmet Aerospace and DPC might have been due for a breather. They are among the priciest artificial intelligence picks-and-shovels plays at 42 times and 44 times forward earnings respectively. Turbine makers GE Vernova and Caterpillar fetch 33 times and 26 times earnings for perspective. And there's a nice chart there to show you the price-to-earnings or price-to-forward-earnings ratios for some of the AI bottleneck plays, and the blade and vane manufacturers are up in the upper echelon. DPC is the most vulnerable to disruption in this space. It is small and about 40% of the revenue comes from natural gas fired turbines. While Howmet holds about half the global market share of components used in natural gas turbines, it is diversified across aerospace and defense with only 11% coming from gas turbines. SpaceX will face barriers to entry. One reason there are so few companies in the sector is that it's technically challenging to make the blades, which must withstand extreme temperatures and rapid rotations. That feels like SpaceX's bread and butter, though. The casting process involves making a new wax mold from scratch each time. Making these parts requires the blade to be grown in a vacuum furnace as a single crystal of nickel superalloy, according to Nigel Chong, an analyst at SemiAnalysis. Huh. SemiAnalysis getting a shout out in the Wall Street Journal. Even a stray grain or hairline defect means the part has to be scrapped. He added, 'A new manufacturing line could scrap over half of its production for a long period, so yield will be difficult to get up.' It is also a highly secretive process. Once the parts are produced, the ceramic cores and wax used to make them are destroyed. Howmet's chief executive, John Plant, said at an investor meeting earlier this year, he says, 'We're not getting distilled. Don't worry about it. We're good. We destroy every evidence that would lead someone to be able to copy us.' That prevents competitors from reverse engineering them. So Howmet Aerospace's annual revenue from industrial gas turbines is up and to the right with incredible forecasts, and you can see the chart taking off. They're going exponential right now. A high scrap rate might matter less if SpaceX is making parts for its own use. Morgan Stanley's report noted that we would not expect SpaceX to be a material supplier of blades and vanes for supply outside of SpaceX use. So they're going to use everything internally. Speaking of industrials, we got to talk about rotor sails.
So there was news in the Financial Times that Maersk is going to put a wind sail on their container ship. And there's a very interesting... it's a very interesting design because I see the image for the ship and I'm like...
Looks like a smoke stack. Where's the sail?
Yeah, it looks like a smoke stack. And I'm like, okay, does the sail come out of that big round thing? And no, it doesn't. That is what's called a rotor sail, which actually produces wind force and accelerates the vehicle without any traditional sails of what you think. So there's an explainer video from Norsepower, who makes these, that we should watch a little bit of. We can kick this off. It's a one minute video, but we can watch a little bit of this YouTube video on Norsepower rotor sails because it's a fascinating world I didn't know existed.
And you need to know this.
This is crucial. This is crucial.
How do Norsepower rotor sails work?
You might be familiar with curveballs in sports.
What exactly causes the ball's path to curve?
A spinning ball compresses air on one side and thins it on the other. The pressure difference causes a power thrust that curves the path.
A Norsepower rotor sail is a large cylindrical sail. A common misconception is that wind spins it. Instead, it is rotated actively by an electric motor. The spinning sail compresses air on... Jasper in the chat says, 'Shut up on the front.'
I'm from the founding town in Denmark. Don't believe in the sail.
Take some shots. Thrust is created in the same way for the football and the ship. In good conditions, Norsepower rotor sails can actually produce more thrust than the main engine. No horsepower, saving fuel and the planet.
And lastly, there's a photo of a rotor sail on a small catamaran that we think is a steal. I don't know how much this thing would sell for. Yeah, Tyler was looking at picking this up because he's been exploring the marinas in the area. He wants to potentially live on a boat.
Yeah. Well, I have the perfect ad read before our next guest joins. Let me tell you about console.com. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Our next guest is Nikesh Arora, chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks, who's here after fantastic earnings. How are you doing, Nesh? Welcome back.
We're doing fantastically.
I appreciate the little console plug right before this.
We've been very happy to sponsor.
They're right on the laptop sticker. Is it a good company?
It's a fantastic company. You've heard of it, right?
It's a bit late to ask, but I should have asked you before, but yeah, I think it's great.
It is a fantastic company. We love the team over there. Had them on the show multiple times and of course talk about them every single show. Super excited for you guys to be partnering, but we can get to console later. Let's talk about Palo Alto Networks. What's the newest development this quarter? What is the story that drove this quarter?
You know, I've been trying for eight years to get the attention of customers to focus on cybersecurity. It's been hard work, but I really want to give a shout out to my friends Sam and Dario who did a fantastic job getting the living Jesus out of everyone.
They're pretty good. They're like your best... yeah, your best...
writing letters protect us on cybersecurity. They talk about Mythos. They talk about Astra. It's amazing. Every CEO, CIO wants to talk about cybersecurity and how do you secure me? I love it. It's amazing. That's what drove a lot of the interest in cybersecurity and people have realized that Mythos was interesting because it can find a lot of vulnerabilities and there's a lot of interest. People want to talk about it. They want to talk about the capabilities of OpenAI. But very soon after the first 5, 10 minutes, it becomes about, okay, wait, this is just the beginning. What happens after when the next bigger, faster model shows up? What do I do then? Like, okay, I get it, you guys can help me test it, but what happens? How do I fight it if I get attacked? Then the answer is, well, you can only fight that with some sort of a consolidated platform that sits in the back that looks for this stuff at machine speed and is able to respond at machine speed time, which means, you know, you have to fight AI with AI. And that's where also comes in because we've spent our life building systems that can respond in near real time or at machine speed to protect them. So that's kind of been the inflection point or pivot that's driven a lot of the interest in cybersecurity over the last six months. I think that trend continues to sort of accelerate both from a customer interest level as well as, you know, my friends are continuing to build better, faster models which can be weaponized.
Yeah. What was the last three to six months like? Because you have these moments where the AI labs are causing a lot of discussion around security and overhanging all of that. I think people were mostly worried about when the open-source frontier catches up and the attackers get those level of capabilities. And there's this narrow window that is sort of a window that continues to move continuously, but there's a window where Palo Alto Networks and other folks in the security space have to really get the posture correct. What actually changed? What was the conversation like and how did that process go? How much of a boogeyman was open-source? Because it was discussed early, but there were a bunch of different takes.
Look, I think what has happened is even in the last six months, you've seen the capabilities of these models continue to rise. And I read something that two days ago Sam said that Astra, their new model, it's so powerful that they're going to have to clip its wings and trim it down. So that gives you a precursor of things to come. I'm sure those capabilities will be caught up with, whether it's with other frontier LLMs or the open-source community, the open-source models or Chinese models for that matter. So I think the capabilities coming are going to come at us as hard and fast. Now honestly, cybersecurity is simple. I never grew up in cybersecurity. I have a very simplistic mental model. If it's bad and you know it's bad, stop it at the perimeter.
All right. That's called perimeter security. That's where 80% of our business lives.
That's where when you find a vulnerability, you found it in the perimeter. Stop it. Protect yourself. And that's what patching and fixing your vulnerabilities is all about.
But unfortunately, stuff still gets through.
That's why breaches happen.
That happens because you have a vulnerability that you didn't understand, because a credential got hijacked or something got misconfigured. Then the question is, you got to find it quickly and you got to get rid of it before it creates impact in your organization. This find-and-fix-it part is where all this, you know, superhuman effort needs to be put in in transforming cybersecurity posture, cybersecurity architectures, ripping out old stuff that can no longer work at machine speed. And I don't think that's going to take two months or three months. That's a three to five year journey. And that's three to five years if everybody sets their mind to it. And, you know, I look at life through a cybersecurity lens. So I would like everybody to do that. Unfortunately, my CIO friends are busy. Their boss wants them to do coding quickly. They want them to transform the company with AI. They have existential threats because the world is using AI. Why are we not using AI? So the poor CIO has got a lot on their agenda. Cybersecurity being one of those things. So they're trying to balance all these priorities at the same time. But I will say there is more awareness, heightened attention, and more importantly, whatever they had on their cybersecurity docket, the priorities have shifted in that docket to make sure that they can protect themselves against the impending sort of weaponization of AI models and bad actors getting better and better at this stuff. So the trend is our friend. There is positive momentum. The trajectory has changed for the better, but don't expect, you know, a sudden inflection point that people are suddenly going to come out and say the first thing I want to buy is cybersecurity.
Sure, sure. When a CIO wants to buy cybersecurity, is the economic calculus changing? Because AI uses tokens. Like, is there... do they need to shift their thinking from this line item grows along a different axis than what we previously understood the cost and benefits would evolve over time as we scale our network?
That's a very insightful question, my friend. So that's a good question because I don't think if we slap-dash frontier AI models in the protection scenario, that is a good economic outcome.
Yeah. Like you just cannot do a 5.6 Pro, Claude 5.1 for every transaction that happens across your network. You're going to go...
That's right. So think about it. Every day we inspect 180 terabytes of data every day.
You stick anything against it which has got a sort of token-based economics against it. It doesn't matter what the price of tokens is. That's going to sort of add up a lot of compute. That is why what we do today is we write machine learning code where the marginal cost of inspection is zero.
