Breaking down Nvidia's Hugging Face and Poolside bets | E2331

0:00 This is the biggest story of the year. NVIDIA taking over all of open source. They've agreed to acquire Hugging Face for 12.9 billion. US open source equals NVIDIA. Chinese open source equals Kimmy. Now we have our US champion. If you want to know how Anthropic is hitting 50 billion, if you want to know how open AI is hitting whatever it is, 30, 40 billion. Customers like Uber. Unmetered is the word we're gonna be talking about in 2027. That means that you could see NVIDIA add a third of the market cap of the top two Frontier models. One third of their revenue moving over to NVIDIA. If it works, this is the biggest news ever. This week in startups is brought to you by PayPal. Pay zero processing fees on your first$100,000 in eligible PayPal payment volume. Learn more at paypal.launch.co. Every for all of your incorporation. Banking.

0:50 Payroll, benefits, accounting. Taxes or other back office administration needs, visit every dot IO, DigitalOcean. Want to see what building on a true AI native platform looks like? Head to D O dot co slash twist to start building on Digital Ocean's AI native cloud today and cut your AI workload costs by up to fifty percent. All right, everybody, welcome back. To twist, it's Friday, August twenty eighth, summer's over, lots on the docket. Sam Waltman talking about cyber threats again, scaring the bejesus out of everybody. uh saying hey we're gonna need to have a coordinated effort here NVIDIA butt hugging face and we got some great guests. We want to start with a story or go right to a guest? What's the lady's choice, Lon? What do you want to do here? Misgendering me again. How dare you. No, I think we should start with this. I think we've got a top story. It was the beard that made me misgender you. That's right. We might be in A.

1:41 AI's Oppenheimer moment, Jason. Open AI, Anthropic. Some of the other companies have issued a warning about coming cyber threats. Yesterday, over one hundred companies signed an open letter warning that we only have months to prepare for AI enabled cyber attacks. It includes open AI, it includes anthropic. Google, Microsoft, all the usual suspects. They're warning hospitals, water systems, critical infrastructure, all under threat. They want security standards raised, including shared threat intel, and they want this defense funded at every level. All that said, the letter doesn't have any actual commitments. There's no deadlines. There's no mandated funding. It's it's just sort of floating floating the suggestion. So, you know, I mean in in your perspective. What do you think the best way for us to actually I think everybody would agree we should do this. What do you think the best way to organize this effort might be?

2:33 Okay. Open letter. This is an open letter. Correct. Written by People like

2:41 Open AI, Anthropic Google, Microsoft, et cetera. They they passed around and said Hey. We're entering dangerous territory, and we need A coordinated effort. Essentially, yeah, a hundred companies signed on to this open letter. The hyper scalers obviously sort of leading the pack. Why now is always the question. Why now? Mm-hmm. And you have to m de deconstruct.

3:03 people's behavior. So Well, let's pause for a second and say why would the top one hundred folks Take this time now. To write a coordinated letter. And the letter is addressed

3:14 To who? Who is the letter addressed to? And let's pull the letter up here on the screen. These are important things when an open letter happens. It's called a call for collective action on cyber defense. It's not it's not directed at any one person, but I think it's the public. It's it's PR on one level. And it's aimed at sort of politicians. Well, it exists on the open AI website as we're showing it. It says an open letter for a global surge in cyber defense. So it's very important to First principles, any time there's an open letter or somebody makes a statement.

3:46 To slow down and say why now? First question, why is this happening now? And then Look um who's driving this? So Who's driving this is pretty obvious. There's a bunch of signatories on the left. We assume that They're driving it.

4:00 It was released on all of their websites or it was released on OpenAI's websites? OpenAI was uh uh is the leader of this pack. Who is it like every single person releases at the same time? Or do we not know? I I don't know. I'm looking it up. I mean when you Google this title It does come up on several different Uh.

4:19 sites. So I don't think I think OpenAI, again, leading the charge, that's the number one link when you look it up, but I think other Other companies have also. Well, that could be just SEO. So every company is so the translation here from first principles. We're trying to get to first principles always when we have these kind of announcements. Cause you want to be able to media deconstruct. I'm going to help you media deconstructor. Every company is releasing this. The top SEO based on what you're telling me went to open AI. Okay, fine. And I saw Sam quoted it. So then if Microsoft did this, did Satya Nadella Um Right about this.

4:54 And then did Dario or somebody from Anthropic, like a leader, actually tweet about it? So those are the things you want to know. Yeah, because we want to understand who's really behind this, or if this is when you have a hundred people or fifty people write these things. That's the other thing you want to find out is like I get asked to sign these things sometimes. So Let's take a look at Dario's account. Is he talking about it? Let's take a look at Satya Nadell's. Is he talking about it? And let's pull up Sam's and how Sam is framing this. And then we have to ask ourselves, why is this happening now? So we'll pull up those three individuals Twitter.

5:24 We'll see if they're even talking about it. Sancha has not tweeted since August twenty first. He's not talking about this today. Microsoft signed it. He's not talking about it. Now we we go to Dario and Maybe the anthropic official account, let's check that. And this is the way you do proper media deconstruction is you go figure out who's talking about this and who talked about it when. So here August twenty seventh, yesterday, Sam Waltman writes, This is a critically important moment for cyber defense with AI. There is not much time to act. Okay, this is like a Very um charge statement. We are happy if you want to work with us or any of our competitors or partners, but please take this moment seriously. Again, he's being very dramatic here. Uh, and we'll we'll read into that in a moment. Only an urgent and intense collective response will work. So uh this is critical.

6:14 He is coming out very hard about this. Did Dario talk about it? No, I'm looking at Dario's page right now. He actually hasn't tweeted since the Gavin Baker uh kerfuffle of last week. And then here's open AI's. Um tweet from August twenty sixth, we have conducted a thorough investigation into Hugging Face Incident. Into the hugging face incident. That's when um

6:37 They are AI bot. went and tried to steal credentials on Hugging Face's site and kind of uh hacked their site uh to accomplish goals. We are releasing a technical report and encompanying blog post that reconstructs the agent's activities. That's OpenAI's agent that hacked. Hugging face. Explain why existing safeguards failed and detailed. how we're preventing reoccurrence. So

6:59 Here we go. Sam is leaning into this. Open AI has egg on their face or They have liability potentially from having hacked hugging faces. Site. If

7:12 Hugging faces site was hacked, then you have to ask yourself, is open AI's our open AIs other agents During the building of models, hacking other people's sites. Mm. That's what I think is happening here. I think This is coming out today.

7:27 Always when these letters come out, always when people make statements. There's usually an incident. That people know about. Sure. Which is the hugging face one. There's also sometimes other incidents to come and they are doing on what we call getting ahead of it. Sure.

7:42 So somebody says, Let's get ahead of this. I think what's happened is there's probably two or three hacks that have occurred. That are Acute. Acute is a fancy word for Important intense.

7:54 And we might have a hack that's occurred already that the government is aware of, OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, et cetera, are aware of. That could be Of the nature of major hacks we talked about previous on the program, the Ashley Madison hack. Sure. There was an iCloud hack. There might be one of those that's gonna drop in the next couple of days. It's Friday. This is coming out Thursday, Friday.

8:17 Over the weekend, just predicting here. You might hear about a significant hack of our government. Or of your sensitive information, they are prepping us. The same way last week I told you or maybe early this week and it went viral. At the Chinese are doing a psyops.

8:34 On America and their own country. To make Their people except robotic overlords that will be taking their jobs, that will be integrated into society, that will be observing. And recording their citizens to control them. That's what they do in China. They are prepping them to accept.

8:51 Robotic. Companions, robotic workers, robotics. You know, uh in their lives. That's their PR campaign right there. We are doing some other campaign right now.

9:02 Uh which is Hey. Your your privacy is over. You're gonna get hacked. It's not our fault.

9:11 Ever and maybe trying to spread the blame around here. So there's Psyops happening everywhere, folks. That's what I think this is. This is a prep. For a coming hack. That they know about it. Or That they

9:24 No is imminent. Yeah, we we had Uga Demur from uh Expo on this week in AI this week, and he said it's been a year, or he's like for a year The West has been totally vulnerable to this. We're getting hacked all the time. People might not realize it. It's not life and death for most people, but it's already we're already in the danger zone and we have been for some time. That that was a That w I didn't realize that, I think, as as clearly as he stated it. The truth is, most of the big popular AI models can handle your workloads just fine. And your performance and your costs, that comes down to your infrastructure more than your model selection. And the Best way to keep your system running fast while staying affordable is with DigitalOcean's inference engine. DigitalOcean built their entire cloud platform from the ground up, specifically with AI in mind. That means you get a serious performance upgrade without stitching together services from a dozen different vendors. Or Getting hit with a surprise bill at the end of the month, which keeps happening to me. Digital Ocean system is already powering some of the biggest and most popular AI applications. Character AI runs over a billion queries every single day on Digital Ocean. And

10:32 They cut their cost per token in half. While doing so. So here's her call to action. If you want to understand what building on a true AI native platform looks like, go to Dio.co slash twist. Start building on the Digital Ocean AI Native Cloud today, and cut your AI workload costs by up to fifty percent. That's DO.co slash TWIST. What Is at the core of this.

10:59 Is that If you build a great model. Four. Writing code. And

11:06 You are incredible at incentivizing AI to do recursive Re I'm sorry, doing uh reinforcement learning or creating loops. You are then by definition Allowing

11:20 Four or enabling. hacking at A scale that is Essentially infinite. And

11:29 Unconstrained. So Let's just say this clearly the frontier models Have enabled Inadvertently.

11:38 by making incredible tools to vibe code whatever you want. The counter to that. Is making a tool. That can infinitely depending on how much commute you ha compute you have access to, is infinitely

11:50 Better at hacking. Then the white hats? And is relentless and has uh an unlimited amount of time. and effort and intelligence

11:59 To pair hacks together. That humans simply do not have the time. There's no one human who can put all of GitHub, every open source code into their brain at once. Yeah. And then Say here is the history of every hack done.

12:14 since nineteen seventy. Here's all code that's being used. Sorted by the last update. To its code. And

12:24 uh how often it's updated and how many people are using it, the stars, the the impact of it. And then it can put those things together and say What hasn't been updated? What's not being Um vetted and cleaned up and tightened up. Which projects, which software's not tight.

12:42 Is not updated. Regularly. And what are the latest hacks? What's the history of hacks? And it can just Figure out brilliantly. In the magic AI box, it can just like it can guess your next word, it can guess the next hat.

12:55 Yeah. Can guess the next big hack now. I wanted to talk about this, Jason. Do you remember this from earlier this week? Uh It's also it's not just the availability of this intelligence, it's getting cheaper. So hackers are are budget constrained. They they can't just run Fable Five all day and do all the things you're saying, but they can now afford to use Deep Seek. And as those models get not just cheaper, but much more powerful. We're gonna see this just continue to explode. Where people can just run exactly what you're saying overnight for weeks at a time and find every vulnerability there is. And so this is gonna be a boom for uh Palo Alto Networks. Uh it's gonna be incredible. Uh for CrowdStrike. Those are the two leaders. I might put a J trade on this weekend for those two stocks. I'm gonna have to do an analysis of them. I don't have time to do it right now on the air. We got a big docket. But

13:45 I think that those firms are now going to be fully fully Engaged with by the frontier models who are gonna go to Palo Alto Networks, they're gonna go To crowd strike. And others and say.

13:58 Let's build Uh, as you build frontier models, we're gonna need access to them early. We're gonna build need to build the sure it up tools, you know, like check the locks. Yeah. And somebody is gonna just have to go check the locks. Check the alarm system, check the perimeter of every piece of software. And I think we're gonna see a hack.

14:19 Before the end of the year. I think it's possible we'll see a hack. That will make The public. Distrust AI even more.

14:27 A cataclysmic hack of people's banking information or crypto. wallets, more personal you know, eye messages. Signal WhatsApp. One of those gets hacked. And

14:41 AI dumps it, people start getting extorted. The extortion by Russian North Korean hackers, et cetera. Chiners. Or some big dump. Or the stealing of crypto.

14:52 This is gonna make people hate AI. much more than they hate data centers, or they hate writing AI slot. And passing it off as your words in the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Shout out Wall Street Journal editorial page for phoning it in. Those things are gonna be minor compared with

15:13 Losing your Bitcoin. or having your eye messages dumped. It's it's gonna be really uh an interesting moment in time. And I think that's what the industry's trying to get ahead of. They're warming us up to the fact that we've already probably been hacked by AI. And they are. I think you're absolutely correct. It it is a little it is a little blame shifty. It's like, hey man, this is all of our problem and it's like, is it all of our problem or is this your problem? Mm. I think what you'll see is the majority of the hacks will be done by the frontier models. So the frontier models then

15:45 who create these, it's gonna be Ex essentially like Producing a car without You know, uh selling cigarettes without

15:57 Uh and saying nicotine is not an addictive drug. Have you ever seen The congressional hearing. I'll have one of the team pull it up. There's a congressional hearing where they go down the line and ask everybody working at Big Tadaco. Who thinks yeah, nicotine is addictive. Right. Yeah. And the audacity of them Is Wow. They were architecting cigarettes to be more addictive through

16:20 Any number of chemical sequences and um you know product innovations not addictive. This is gonna be, I think, what happens to the frontier models, which is You made something.

16:35 That you knew. Could hack everything. And you released it. Knowing that. Oh, congratulations, you wrote a letter, but

16:44 You gave people a car. You left out the airbags and the three point seat belts, and you made it go over 150 miles an hour, and you made it, you know, watch this to just understand. This is what we're gonna see in about Eighteen months. When the world gets hacked and people lose their Bitcoin. Unsafe at any latency, we'll call it.

17:02 begin my questioning on the matter of uh whether or not nicotine is addictive. Let me ask you first, I'd like to just go down the row. uh whether each of you believe that that nicotine is not addictive I heard virtually all of you touch on it and just yes or no. Do you believe nicotine is not addictive?

17:21 I believe nicotine is not addictive, yes. Mr. Johnston. Uh Congressman. Cigarettes and nicotine clearly do not meet the classic definitions of addiction. There is no toxicity. Wow.

17:38 Wow. Unbelievable. Shout out to uh Michael Mann's classic uh nineteen ninety nine film, The Insider, which is about if you haven't seen it, please watch it. Incredible. I'm just giving you a highlight. Yeah. This is literally What's gonna happen? In under eighteen months. Clip it now.

17:55 Book market. Jake How was right about everything. Yeah the clip on this and Dario gonna be on a stand there and they're gonna say, Did you release this? And then everybody's

18:10 cryptocurrency wallet got hacked, everybody's signal, whatever cryptic thing got hacked. Now it might not be that they You know, h hack encryption, that will probably be quantum computing's um Legacy, but it could be that somebody programs uh a way to build a backdoor into everybody's phones, get them to download some, you know, exploit. as the next, you know, uh fishing attack, let's say. And an at scale fishing attack that is just so good.

18:37 That Two percent of society falls for it. And then it expands and 10% of society falls for it. And now you got 10% of people, you know, having their Bitcoin sucked out of their wallet. This is like a completely possible thing to do. Oh yeah. Uh amongst many things. And that's and that's just a human engineering. device right it there could be other things and now everybody can create

18:58 Those things. If you wanted to learn how to do a fishing attack, you had to get into some dark web stuff, you had to go f Trade somewhere spoofing somebody else's domain. There's there are technical elements to it. To get those, you had to get into a community with other hackers. You had to have somebody send you the code. It wasn't like freely available inside a large language model. Right. Um, and when you take the rails off of these and you have an open source one. Oh my lord.

19:26 This is gonna get spicy. There's your media deconstruction for the day. We should bring in our first guest, I think. Let's get started. Uh so we've got Craig Piggett. He's the founder and CEO of Halter, Jason. They're a livestock management technology company centered around virtual fencing systems. Greg, thanks for being here. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it Tell us or show us what you're building and and why you built it. Um

19:51 Cool. We built a it's like a tech platform for ranchers, so ranchers and farmers. I'm at the center of that as a caller. Colour goes on a cow. Um what goes on cattle and yeah, we use that colour to train animals. To respond to Q.

20:04 And what that means for Ranches, um is that they're able to virtually fence and shift those cattles around their land. Um That means the land's more productive. They can run more cattle. Um we do a bunch of other stuff as well. We monitor health, fertility, carving, we measure.

20:19 Like an operating system. And here it is. Um if you're watching, you can see the collar there. It looks like a Fitbit. With solar panels for cattle. This goes over their neck. Um, like a harness of some type, like I have on my wrist here from my uh whoop. Solar powered.

20:39 GPS. I'm assuming it has accelerometers, heat sensors, heart rate. What what else? is in the sensor pack here. And how much does it cost to build something like that? Like what does it cost per cow to to make one of those? And then how do you you charge for them? I'm very curious about the business model, but let's start with What sensors did you choose to put in there? For

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22:07 How's a lot of the analytics is the IMU. So accelerometer, gyro, magnetometer. We do track temperature and humidity and other things, but You can infer most health related things and fertility and carving from behaviors which is what you we run models.

22:24 to kind of understand what's happening from um the IMU. So That's kind of the core scenes, uh. Um, in terms of the model, it's a s subscription so you pay per cow per month. There's multiple tears and packages, it kinda depends on on your operation. Um

22:38 And you don't buy the hardware. We give the hardware away for free. You just pay the subscription. So we've got about Uh one and a half million. Um Collars.

22:47 out there across New Zealand, Australia. US Canada, et cetera. Awesome. Now there is an audio cue as the fence. Explain how you train. Cattle. to, I don't know, go to the left, go to the right, don't go forward. How does that work? You're not shocking them, you're giving them a vibration. Explain what's going on here.

23:08 The best analogy is when you're parking your car, you have the audio feedback. uh from the sensors as you like approach walls and other cars so it beeps at you. Um very similar concept, left and right. So animals know if they're approaching a virtual fence based on the audio cue. We also use yeah a vibrational cue. Um, we do train them with a very low energy.

23:27 pulse which gives that sound meaning. Um most cows or cattle today are trained to an electric fence. And the primary cues of vision and we just turn that into audio. So once they're trained Runs on the sound of vibration. Um I

23:41 And what does it cost per cow per month? What's the what's my per se per stake? What's my per stake cost here? The like base starting tier is around nine dollars per cow a month. Um, but it depends on all the packages and things I have. So you can spend two hundred bucks a year per cow. They're paying two hundred dollars a year. How how how many years does the cow wear the the collar for before it is uh processed? So the collar Imagine it kinda like a seat you can scan it with your phone and tag it on or change any animal that it's on. So the colour will sometimes go on many cows. Um but most cattle Uh in terms of the

24:16 The cows Say ten years, if you're a Derry Cow. Sometimes it's longer than that for beef cows often we we colour them. The mums, like the the calves that you raise often. Um

24:27 uh for like the end product. Um you want them to kind of creep grace ahead and so we don't collar them. That's what we call it the cows most of. So What is the number one reason? people use this. What what is the selling point when you come in and they say, hey, this feature is why we're buying this? Cause obviously it's got a range of features, but what is the number one to to keep the cattle in a certain location? Is that The number one?

24:52 Goal. Yeah, fences have lifted the Have given ranchers control of their land for hundreds of years, but they're really expensive. You can't shift them around. Things of that. So the virtual fencing part of the product. enables our customers to run more cattle, to actually utilize their land properly, so they can They can rest the land when they need to. They can graze in the spots that the calibers Don't go to the

25:13 Um so we've got some customers that are running twice as many cattle on the same piece of land. Mm. because they're able to to actually control it, not waste any grass. Things like that. So that's the big

25:24 Fairly pro but every Customer is obviously different. Um Some of them are chasing genetics and uh metrics and things like that. So it kinda changes. Okay. So I can more efficiently work my land Which means I can have twice as many

25:37 cattle on my land. So this is enabling folks to go much bigger in terms of production. Um So Talk to me just uh and I'm sure Lon's got a couple questions here, but How does this

25:50 Um work, you know, when we're out in ranch land here, we don't have Uh internet. Nor do we have power. Uh obviously it's got solar on it. But nor do we have like

26:03 Uh five G. So you you know, if you're in ranch country There's no way to get these are you hooked up to Starlink or do people have to put repeaters on their property? H how does this Actually reach And and deal with that connectivity issue. Exactly. um in terms of the styling the styling point. So it used to be

26:22 Base station or tower based, um And that was a right. on some of the less mountainous country, but and like you say, through Montana, Wyoming, Colorado Mountains, like Uh. um the more kind of off grid you get, the more you need um that direct connection with Starlink. So yes, each call now can talk to Starlink.

26:39 And they also talk to each other. So they kinda coordinate a mesh. They el they elix the best leader. to then talk to Starlink. That kinda saves.

26:48 Power and cost and things there. Fascinating. And now it's obviously doesn't have a dish or you didn't put a a Starling Mini on the back of like the leader of the back here. But How does You know, a device that is the size of it looks like uh a bread box or a loaf of bread. How does a uh a device the size of a loaf of bread actually hit the starlink? What is the technology there? Uh'cause it's much bigger than a um a a smartphone.

27:16 But it's looks like it's much smaller than a satellite dish. It's it's about the um The same size as a smartphone on on each side of the of the cow. Um, and it's exactly the same technology. So your phone can obviously talk to Starlink. Um and so well. Some of them can, depending who you work with, but uh so it's the same technology that it's like the direct to sell.

27:35 Um technology. So yeah, wherever you take a What's the speed of the direct to sell now? What is it at right now? How much throughput do you get? Obviously, you can store the information and then when it gets a good line of sight, I guess it has better throughput like you do when you're doing direct to satellite. But this these are like aren't they still like a little drip drip kind of situation, like dial up modems? Yes. Or am I wrong? Yeah. No, they are. They are f for sure. Um It kinda depends. When we coordinate all the information between them and compress it and send it I know it takes like a few seconds every minute to transfer that that data. We do run a lot of machine learning models on the device itself. So When we need like hundred hertz access to

28:13 And senses. We actually run those models. On the collar. We train them offline. Then we put them um

28:19 Onto the colour. That gives it obviously. You don't have a bandwidth problem. Um so. Uh I'm curious, I mean the I I in the pre-interview I was calling this caller essentially like whoop for cows because you're you're monitoring so much about each animal aside from just where it is. Can you give us a little insight? What are the most useful pieces of data a farmer needs

28:39 Like when they pull up their cow on the tablet, what are the what are the metrics they're looking at? Yeah. Well Fitbit for an animal is Is a small part of the equation. That's just the monitoring side compared to, say, the fencing and shifting. But on the on that side, Um, obviously they care about animal health. They care about

28:56 Are they fertile? Are they Is this cow on calf? Is she carving? Is she in trouble? Do I need to go How a lot of these animals uh Sometimes hours away and they get on a horseback and they spend four hours trying to trying to find them. Um and so being able to know wherever you are, right, hey, this animal is healthy and

29:13 you know, behaving normally is is a really big unlock. Um we're working on some other cool stuff like Measuring intake. Through the collar by counting bytes and profiling bytes and then Oh, right cows on eff on efficiency and things like that. So you could literally know their jaw speed, how much they're eating by the tilt of the head, et cetera. What about cameras on this? Do you have cameras on it? Cause I you know, that's one of the things when you lose a cattle. Um we on my ranch here.

29:38 Uh the the my my neighbor's got cattle, he rents his ranch out for for for cattle and uh had a fence go down. We had two cattle show up lawn. Wife says to me Those are ours now, right? And I said, let me explain to you one thing about

29:54 Texas and how cattle works. Stealing cattle? means they can murder you. That's like the one thing you don't do. They're literally branded and they got an ear tag for a reason. People take cattle. Russell rustling? Yeah, cattle cattle rustling. That's what John Wayne would have called it. Like he'll get the case. We do get to walk them over the fence, and then we get to rebuild the fence with our neighbor, and that's how ranches work. You rebuild the fence together. That's like when you and your

30:26 neighbor yet uh together. But what about cameras, video, et cetera? Like is there a case for that? And then 'Cause you could actually see what they're eating, and you could process that and then you could then look at the output. Hey, what's the marbling on this cow? I'm just thinking from a selfish perspective on my Wagu. But That is the other concern. That ranchers have is how do I get the best product?

30:48 Totally. Totally. We measure what they're eating, how much grass there is, the like all of that information through using satellites. So we pull data off satellites. We then combine it with weather stations and data off the collar as well. We have a model that tells ranchers or farmers that information. So we don't have cameras on the device. Obviously your cattle aren't. They're always in like one place on your ranch. So if you want to know, hey, should I ship them over here?

31:12 And they're not there. then you wouldn't have that information. So we get asked about it a lot though. Um You also And they're hold around. You can take photos of your land and it'll tell you everything you need to know. So um

31:23 Yeah, no cameras on the collars. Yes, at least. Founders, we've got a huge offer for you today from my firm Launch and our friends at PayPal. Eligible startups will pay zero PayPal processing fees on their first. hundred thousand dollars in payment volume. That's right. Zero dollars in fees. PayPal is, of course, an iconic brand. We all know that. We use it. We love it, but there is so much more than just that yellow button. They've built a global payment infrastructure that's designed to scale along with your company. And if you're an AI and SaaS startup, PayPal is already set up for the way you monetize. That means seats, subscriptions, credits, token usage, API consumption, and usage based pricing. PayPal already works with all the leading billing platforms and they

32:09 offer complete flexibility so you can evolve your business model over time without constantly tearing apart your entire revenue sack. So if you're just starting to build or You're already scaling up pay zero processing fees on your first hundred thousand dollars in eligible PayPal payment volume. To find out more, go to PayPal. Dot launch. Dot com a and how is the startup doing? I I realize you've raised a decent amount of money, you got over a million Uh harnesses out there, million collars out there, you said?

32:41 Yes, yeah. Um It's good. We're about six hundred people. Growth is really strong. We launched The US market about two years ago, we're about to go down to South America, we're hiring. And all the markets at the moment. Um How many cattle are there in the world? And if you have a million collars, what percentage

32:58 Of the Tam do you have? There's about one point five billion cattle in the world. So it's a very Depressingly small percentage. Uh of penetration, but that's actually called an opportunity in my business. The founder looks at it as uh

33:14 Oh my God, we've done so little. The investor looks at it and says, Yum yum. Not for the stake, but for the market opportunity. So there's one point five billion cattle. You have one point five. One percent would be fifteen. So you're at ten basis points of cattle in harnesses. To date, you literally can go a thousand X from here.

33:33 Totally. And Obviously not all those cattle are gonna be, you know, in the sweet spot for ten, but you get an idea for this for the size of the market. Um And I think we view ourselves more as like also a a tech platform for this industry. Like we A lot of the product now that our customers buy is almost separate to, you know, the satellite product that I talked about, or using agents to help them run farms. These are kind of separate to the colours themselves. And so we're obviously trying to grow the product and

33:59 expand globally at the same time. So Um but no, business is good. Um We are Yeah, it's down trying to scale.

34:06 Yeah. It's it sounds like scaling This is the easiest thing in the world if my competitor If a competing ranch has this product.

34:18 Mm-hmm. And you go and sell it because are you doing founder led sales still or just the sales motion now? Tell me about your sales motion. You go still founder led sales, you go meet the ranchers, or do you have a sales team yet? And how many people in the sales team and then how did you instruct them? Like This is this week in startups. Explain the sales motion here so other founders can learn, please. Totally. The sales motion is Outbounds.

34:40 field based, hyper local. So we put reps in every like community on the ground and their job is to Literally like Face to face. Like um No, every vet consultant and every router in their community and like build their community. So they're a territory manager, effectively. Um by Geo.

34:59 Yep. And you also learn critically important that this is not an enterprise sale where you DM somebody Like a a login. This is Salt of the earth, ranchers, farmers, vets, you have to build relationships, they have to trust you.

35:15 And and it's not gonna be You know, two twenty minute Zoom calls and you got a customer. Yes, we it took us a while to Find this model. Like we We tried lots of different things, like how do you sell to Yeah, Rashers and farmers. And I think toast became our inspiration. Like they run

35:32 an outbound hyper local. There's a lot of parallels, right? Like risk people running restaurants aren't thinking about point of sale all the time. People running ranches aren't thinking about colours. Like you kind of have to get in front of them and Show them but Word of mouth is It's the primary driver. Like the product is good. It does what it says on the tin. Our customers love it and then they tell their neighbours and that's kinda how it

35:52 How it expands. So Um but yeah, local reps. So we probably have two hundred, what two hundred and fifty reps. This is a critically important one. Six hundred people at the company, a third of them are doing the go to market. So once you get product market fit. Which probably took you a year or two, I would assume, yeah, Craig?

36:10 Longer. Yep. Two or three years. Okay. W was it because you didn't know what they needed, or was it because the tech wasn't ready and you didn't have Starlink, et cetera? Tick. Yeah, we um So before Holter I was working at Rock Lab Grow. running cattle. Um And was

36:25 probably quite naive when we started the businesses. So we spent I'd say a good part of five years. Wow deeply technical, working out how to Keep the colours alive in winter, how to talk to them, how to build the hardware, how to train cattle. Um Like that was a

36:39 A tough, tough. Five years in the laboratory. Wow. Yeah. And so my yeah. On my parents.

36:46 ranch effectively. Like we were just we were testing in field the whole time, which was a big Very helpful. Um oh so you had an unfair advantage that you grew up on a ranch. Yes. Mm. Tell us about that. What what did your parents think when you told them the idea? Were they'cause a lot of times when you have an innovative idea.

37:04 The market resists. And then this is the standard issue lawn founders have. They have a vision, but the closer you are to the problem, the more resistance because it's a paradigm shift. And they say this is never gonna work. We know better.

37:20 But now here you are, son of cattle ranchers. You were the bridge between the paradigm. So what was the initial reaction your parents had? To your vision. They've always been supportive, but they definitely didn't Believe well you know, they were

37:34 Skeptical yes. Of Why and I you know so I think It took a while for them to be like oh let's actually Just looks like it's working and um So

37:44 Love my parents like the They've helped us so much by just giving us free reign of their you know, their land and their cattle. Um, we've been buying and selling, trying to work out how to train different breeds and Things like that. So but yeah, initially they would have been like ah Craig's just

37:57 Doing a fun little thing. You know, get on him. Um This is critical, I think just as we pause here for a moment, f every founder And it just and also being successful in life. You will face resistance. nothing to do, as you said, your parents great people. industry fill with great people. I know a lot of them now that I have a ranch.

38:16 Um but Change is hard for people. And the more you more time you've spent in a vertical, the more codified your belief system becomes. And this is why outsiders typically do a better job reinventing the hotel industry. Or say the livery industry. Airbnb.

38:35 Uh and uh obviously Uber or Stock market. And the you know, and and how to buy and sell Stocks, Robin Hood. y you will face resistance even from good people because

38:47 They're Have codified their belief system. and they have firsthand experience of it working, but then some new technology comes out. They're not aware of that. And that is the job of the founder, Craig, is to walk them step by step through the vision. And it seems like it took you a couple of years to do that, yeah. Totally. And I think the

39:05 I was lucky because I when I went off to school to study engineering and then worked at Rocket Lab. And so I kind of I guess learnt startups and tech and chasing emission in a different industry and then came back to farming and ranching. So I do think that was important. Um

39:20 Right. I don't know. I think you just try to build the best product, right? If you build a product that's so good they Can't ignore it. Um it's fun to use, uh has impact. Uh like I think that's

39:31 What we keep coming back to. Yeah. Uh and and show us the app here. I the this is I think where things get super interesting, Craig. Um you know, you start checking off use cases, but we know apps are addicting. And we know that data Leads to

39:48 better decision making, right? So you had to lead the industry. To adopt this technology. Great. You got some first hand experiment at Rocket Lab. That's a Rocket company out of New Zealand, yeah.

40:00 With the very yes, very famous founder, by the way. Um What's his name? Sir U Peter Bick. Yeah, he's a sir. Peter is Peter a sir in New Zealand or a Sir in the UK?

40:13 Uh we're part of the country. What are they about? So people in New Zealand can become Sirs. Same with Calm. We haven't had our independence moment, so we're still part of the coming month. Incredible that you can get that. So but then Something happens in in the next phase of a startup once you have some adoption and you've hit that.

40:37 Then Your customers go all in. They come from being resistance. to being all in and then their product suggestions happen because they're in that app. So show us the app and then tell us What two or three things?

40:49 Have your customers demand it of your product that you didn't think of. Uh or that they you you didn't think maybe that was the top of the priority list. So let's take a look at the app. Get a description of the app and then tell us What the market is pulling you to do next. I'd say I'll just talk for a second first. So most of the products we've built have been

41:07 demanded from our uh from our customers. So Because they they live in this product, they use it every single day of the year. They log in fifty times a day. Fifty day.

41:20 It is how they run the Operation. So Thank you. So much about like, hey, this isn't right. I want this feature. Can you add this to it? And so Our philosophy at holds us to try and have the best engineering team and the best data scientists and designers and then

41:34 Listen to our customers and let them really drive a lot of the feedback. So the features I talked about before where We uh like measuring grass and telling them how it's growing and how to graze it. That was

41:47 You know, lots of our customers have kind of were asking us for that. Like, hey, I've got this tool, I can graze anywhere. Where should I graze? Help me decide where to graze. Um, same with Uh animal health. Like we have GPS on every animal, we're we're looking at all this data. We needed to know that to train these animals well.

42:04 And then you could see in the data, hey, she's clearly sick, she's grazing less, she's walking less. How come you aren't telling us this? Build an alert to tell us that she's sick. And so Some of the sweet. We have our own Yeah, we were

42:16 We have our own theories and run our own tests, but a lot of it has been market led. Um And so then they feel like they're part of the journey. They ask for something, we ship it, we can update the The devices when they're on Like we do that every couple of weeks. Obviously you can update an app. So the whole platform's evolving.

42:32 All the time. And that's Ranchers and farmers have never had that. They've never had this like I complain about something and then the p the product gets better two weeks later. Yeah. So I mean their product is a horse and a fence. And not and maybe maybe some webcams, but like it's a there there isn't like there's a technology stack. Awesome. And you know, it's very interesting.

42:55 When I got the Whoop and I started playing with it, I've played with all the platforms. They're all great and have different pros and minuses. But I got two alerts in the last like two years of wearing this. And both times it was skin temperature related. Now you get like your sleep is off. So I was getting some sleep is off for a couple of days. And then I got this morning. Your skin temperature is two degrees warmer than normal. How are you feeling? And they added an AI assistant to whoop. Sure enough. Both times.

43:20 It was a precursor to a cult. And now I'm like wait a second, if I know it knows I'm In the early stages of a cold. If everybody had woo. During the

43:32 The pandemic. You would have been able to tell people forty eight hours earlier. That they had Covid. You wouldn't need a COVID test, I don't think. You would just say you have these conditions. Your skin temperature's up, your respiration is down. That is indicative of this. And then that Paxlavid or whatever you had to take like in the first 48 hours for it to be effective.

43:53 People would take verse twenty-four. That to me is you you might save cattle that are on the brink of getting a disease. And then That's super power'cause each of those catt what is a cattle worth? Yeah. Uh like three and a half. Grand at the moment. Wow.

44:11 So you save one or two per year, that's the same as like twenty of these colours. Like you pay for itself, yeah. A lot of these ranches are running on public lands like Forest Service land. And they'll turn out five hundred cattle and then they go to gather them and They spend three weeks up there with

44:27 Ten cowboys and they come back with, you know, four hundred and eighty. Like Like we're missing thirty, we don't know where they are. They've looked for them for three weeks. So even just finding them can be a challenge. But definitely Yeah, we sweeping Lon and I saw Broke Back Mountain at we went to the premier show. We saw this. It was remaining. We had a long evening discussing the nuances of the film, but yes, some cattle gets lost. Yeah. Lon has a spicy question. Okay, Craig, finish the thought and then we'll go to spicy question. Go ahead. No, no, no. You get along. Oh, it's not very spicy. Anytime your company comes up on Reddit, I notice that there's a theme in the comments, which is

45:05 People are very worried you're gonna put them in the collars. This is to be used on humans, cattle to be fenced in. Here's Wild Wild West where you can see them in the in labor collars. Is he planning to use this on humans? So I'm giving you your opportunity right now to assure us There's no plans to put this on any human there's there's Okay, well no, actually I talked to Craig before we got on it and I've been like Lon's performance is a little low. And he's been grazing a lot. And I need to keep him slim for the road.co slash twist partnership we have. Just give me a little buzz. This is in this is on your desk when you get off the show. Fair enough.

45:43 almost daily about like when are you doing goats, when are you doing sheep, when are you doing horses? Man. We were to say there's so many cattle in the world, Lake. We we're barely getting started on cattle. We're doing nothing but cattle for a long, long time. Um and obviously we never don't use but

45:59 No, it's uh Those some of those um Stories weren't out when we closed our founders fund around. Uh recently as well. There was there was a lot of Crazy conspiracy flat and round. It is conspiracy corner. It is uh for sure. Any time in the Peter Thiel universe. The just brings the the conspiracy name alone. Yeah. I think what you're doing's amazing because

46:23 Um Number one. I like premium meat, but number two. Um being able to be more efficient with the food supply. And to reduce

46:33 uh disease. And to be more efficient in the land, not to be a hippie here, but It's important conservation and when you get a ranch, you really start thinking about conservation and how to work the land properly. I don't have cattle, but I probably will rent to some cattle ranchers portion of my ranch. And it's I think it's very important that we we we apply some science here. Yeah. And so I applaud it, but you were gonna say something. No, I was just gonna say it's yeah, it's one of our oldest industries and I think it's been underserved. by technology for

47:01 A long, long time. And so Yeah, it's been a really worthy and exciting mission. It's easy to get out easy to get out of bed every morning when your customers Love the product. It's in the real world. It makes a big difference. Um, whenever we're hiring, we say to engineers like Come work on something that's actually in the real world. Like go meet some of our customers and they some of them will

47:20 Cry like and a salesman about the potential Yeah, how desperate they are for for like gains in efficiency and productivity because they just haven't had any tools. So That's fantastic. There's also one uh little tactical practical thing. You know, every time I talk to a founder, there's there's so many lessons to learn.

47:38 And you're right in a very important lesson that a lot of founders have. Founders sometimes are A D H D A D. I you know, I don't necessarily believe in these uh diseases, quote unquote diseases. I I think it's all A little bit of BS. But putting that aside, the condition of being excited about new ideas and floating like a butterfly around is something that founders do because they're like, Oh, I started this cattle company and oh yeah, I could put this on horses. What's critically important for founders.

48:07 Is that when they strike oil. Танки. Drilling. And they keep drilling down in the same spot. And then they go adjacent.

48:17 These are the two strategies. And I just want to make it very clear because I don't know if I have a clip of this to send to the hundred founders we invest in. Yeah. Stay focused. Step one when you hit oil is to keep going straight down. Okay, that means Cata straight down, Cata. You got cattle in New Zealand, you got cattle in Australia. Keep going in Australia, New Zealand, because The adjacent the adjacency of going to horses means you're starting over.

48:41 People who have horses are completely different. They they don't slaughter the horses. They're not food. The horses are pets. And they have incredibly high values, but people have a very small number of them. People don't have a thousand horses on their ranch. They have three. Completely different market. So if you're gonna go with Jason Make sure you've drilled straight down first.

49:02 That's what Uber did. And that's why Travis succeeded. Everybody was telling him you should do Uber for boats, you should do Uber for planes, you'll start an airline, start this, start that. And he was like, You know what I'm gonna start? Vegas. London, Australia. We're gonna take China.

49:18 Same product. Keep drilling straight down. When you drill straight down and You know, it's pumping and they're there, you know, you're you're you got every single ounce you can get and it's pumping regularly. Yeah, maybe you can do an adjacency Uber Eats. If it relates to the first one.

49:35 It still has to be drilling. Can't be like I'm gonna build a farm or I'm gonna build a hotel next to my oil rig. Still has to be the same. Concept drilling. Okay. Great job, Craig. I just wanna does that resonate with you, Craig? And uh do you have people in the company now trying to distract you to do the second vertical? Yeah, I think focus is important. I think you want to do things in series, not parallel when you can. Um we were exclusively in New Zealand.

49:59 commercial growing Three X, yeah on year four. Many years. Before we even thought about Australia. Before we then Thought about the U.S.

50:08 I think that's There's ten million cattle in New Zealand. Yeah, maybe we're on I don't know, five percent of them. Like long way to run. So even as we do geographic expansion expansion within the same product, we try to be very, very focused. Um And you gotta write that playbook. That was the other thing Travis did really well. He had Josh doing the playbook in New York, he had William doing the playbook on in California.

50:31 Then they compare playbooks and it was like, wait, uh these things are the same. Recruiting drivers are the same. Oh, okay. But recruiting the the door dashers and the Uber Eats. Folks completely different in New York,'cause in New York they're on Bikes. And in California they're in cars and none of them are on bikes.

50:47 Two different groups of people. Two completely different strategies. Okay, now you're going to Singapore. Okay. How did these lessons apply to another geography, it's gonna be different. It's always gonna be different. Like and when you come to the US.

51:01 They're gonna be much bigger. I would suspect. ranches and there are like three or four that probably represent some large percentage of cattle in the US, Craig? Yeah, these uh these definitely the big Like s some of our biggest customers are on hundreds of thousands I especially now with the s the Starlink product, like

51:18 Um, some of them are probably bigger than half of New Zealand as a country. Um So totally like the scale is is huge. All right, listen, continued success. Sorry I missed this investment. When you do your next round, maybe s save a slice for J Cal and the Syndicate dot com. Uh all right. Craig, great job. I hope uh if you ever make it to Austin, I'll take you for uh West Home. Oh West Home is the greatest New York strip out of Australia. West Home. That's my favorite. All right. I'm in I'm in Texas quite a lot, as you can probably guess. Every Thursday I have a little supper club we do, I have a little steak, and uh we'll we'll invite you out and we'll we'll compare some notes here. Okay.

51:57 All right, thanks, Craig. Wow, what a man, that's an incredible investment. Can you imagine? Oh Especially once this is the problem with being an investor. Once the once every protester in Hong Kong has one, imagine the Tam on that. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. They're never gonna be. To be honest, you don't need to put a caller. Everybody has a smartphone. And they've opted in to their own Surveillance.

52:26 There's a version of Android. That you can get. It's an open source Android. That is not it's like um Privacy first, or

52:35 And I just been thinking like I gotta get this set up when I travel internationally, like I'm a target. you know, for information about the startups we invest in. Like there's this s there there's literally corporate espionage that occurs in our industry in a meet way. We don't really talk about it too much publicly, but I'm thinking about building a new stack. That is really resistant to the existing ecosystems and Android. has this one I was talking to Adam Curry

53:01 Um I'm gonna guest Host. uh no agenda on Sunday. uh which I think is live at twelve thirty Texas time, which would be ten thirty, California, one thirty. So if you're a fan of No Agenda, um a great inspiration for me, John C. Dvorak, who when I was coming up in the industry was this Crummud, insightful

53:22 Amazing commentator. And when I would get PC magazine at the age of 13, 14, 15, 16 years old, I would race to rip it open. And go to John C. Dvorak's. He passed away two a month ago. And um it was very sad for me and a lot of folks. He was on um This Week in Tech. He was one of the anchors there in the early days with Leo Laporte, which was the big inspiration, literally the inspiration for This Week in Starbucks. Was both.

53:48 Yeah, and I just like to give credit to my big brothers in this industry. I'm fifty five. Adams like sixty one, I think John made it to seventy five. Rest in peace. John uh was my inspiration as like a personality. Howard Stern on one side I was listening to on the radio, and John C. DeVorax. I c I would eat them up, I would earmark them, I would underline them and say some day

54:11 I would love to get paid. To write. About Computers. I'd literally had this dream when I was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and I got my PC junior.

54:22 Man, someday I could be like John DeVore. Then They all did CNET and all these incredible things. I did Silicon Valley Reporter Cyberstar for my magazines. I my dream came true. It was really inspired by John C. Dvorak. I want it to be like him. I wanted to have an opinion.

54:37 That was spicy. Like Howard Stern, like him. That people would pay attention to. And here we are, you know, X number of years later. But to give Adam Curry his due and Dave Weiner, Dave Weiner created RSS. I started getting into blogging because my employees had left Silicon Valley reporter, Rafad Ali.

54:54 created paid content and then Skift. I'm an investor in Skift. Sheni Jardin went to Boing Boing and I was watching this RSS movement, you could have this like open standard of RSS. Really simple syndication. And it was like wait. You don't have to have people come to your website. They can subscribe to this RSS feed and then the news winds up

55:13 on their desktop. So I was so impressed by this. I started weblogs. I called Brian Alvey. I said, we have to get in on this. We have to make 100 blogs. Now at the time Nobody had more than one blog except for one guy. Nick Denton had three. Gawker Gizmod No he had two. Guakra and Gizmodo. Yeah, at first. He has two. I'm gonna make a hundred blocks.

55:38 And that was the Dave Weiner influence. It's hard to explain how revolutionary RSS was to people today because now so much media is decentralized. Anybody could start a medium or a sub stack in their publishing. Back then you had to go through it was like If the New York Times didn't wanna publish you, that was it. You don't get published. And suddenly there was this way to publish yourself and send it out to anybody who has this link and they can just grab it. It was It it really changed everything. So John C Dvorak, an incredible inspiration. Then Leo Lepore. Oh, then Adam Curry says to Dave Weiner. Now I owe a lot to Dave Weiner. who is um an incredibly um just an incredible innovator. He created HyperCard, he created

56:19 uh RSS and OPML and then eventually Adam Curry said Can you add to the RSS feed an attachmenting and enclosure? And he said yes. It's Belt. Just that easy,'cause he was running the RSS standard. Then Adam Curry started taking MP three files and attaching them to Adam Curry, the famous uh MTV VJ. The early VJs yeah.

56:40 Yes, and he was another inspiration for me because he started buying domains. And I was like, wow, this guy bought MTV.com. I'm gonna start buying some domains. That's how I got into some premium domains because of Adam Curry. Then podcasting started happening. I said, we have to do podcasts at weblogs inc. So John C. Dvorak, Adam Curry. Dave Weiner. Then Leo Laporte started this week in tech. as a web show and then as a podcast, and I was uh would be a guest on that.

57:06 And sometimes I'd be on with John C. Dvorak, which was like Whoa, I'm on with the Howard Stern, the the the Crumudgeon, the the Roger Ebert. of technology I'm sitting next to them Leo Laporte and John C. DeVore. This is mind blowing for me twenty years ago. And I said to Leo, hey You know, I'm doing startups. Would you be okay with me doing this week in startups? He said, Yes, go for it. Um, I don't own the this week in

57:31 Branding that was this week in baseball. Anybody can have that. We have this week in law done by this person. Everybody's doing this week in photography. Go for it. So I have those four people to thank for a large portion of my career, and Sunday I get to be on. No agenda and just I want to be able to say that to Adam and then thank John C. Dvorak, uh you know, in memorium. Uh, and so it's gonna be quite exciting to be on the pot. I'm gonna need to work with you on Sunday morning on. I know you don't work Sundays, but I need some MP three clips because the way he does his show is audio only. And then he cues up all the interesting audio clips like we just did for the tobacco one. And they just play clips and respond. Play clips and respond. I'll I'll I'll I'll pitch it. Do a search for no agenda, folks. We'll put a link in the uh show notes. Uh Matiya Milanovich From uh Hop Aero. He's the founder and CEO of Hop Aero. They are a defense tech startup. They're developing Rook, Jason. It's an autonomous hypersonic cargo rocket. Can't wait to hear more about that. Uh Matiya, thanks so much for being here. Cargo Rocket.

58:30 I've heard my friend Elon talk a little bit about this um because he was saying someday you could take one of his rockets, land them on the other side of the planet. Um but for transportation. And he was like, We can get to Japan in like two hours. I was like, We can go to Japan for ramen and come back. He's like, Yeah, it costs a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, Rodri, but sure. And ramen, but but Yeah, tell us a bit about Hopero and where you're at with us. Welcome to the show.

58:58 Yeah, firstly, thank you guys for for having me. Really excited to be here. Um So yeah, we're we're Hop Barrow. We're building cargo rockets that basically deliver time sensitive or or high critical um assets pretty much anywhere on earth in minutes. Um we're starting with Rook, which is our first vehicle that has a range of on the order of hundreds of miles. Um, they can do that in about 15 minutes. And so our goal is to expand from there and go to larger vehicles that have more range.

59:23 And they're able to carry more payload. How big is Rook? How big is it in terms of height and capacity? What can I put in there? I obviously can't put a tank. But I could put a bunch of guns and ammunition, I'm guessing. Yeah. So we're not publicly disclosing the exact dimensions of Brook, but very roughly twenty foot long. Um And so inside of that, we're planning on having a payload capacity of about five hundred and fifty pounds.

59:47 Um So the the biggest use case, the one that we advertise publicly is being able to deploy autonomous systems. So being able to go from one place in the Indo Pacific to another place in the Indo Pacific in fifteen minutes, that's about four hundred and fifty miles away. Um and deploy swarms of autonomous drones or counter UAVs, so counter drones. deploying electron warfare uh systems so like spectrum jamming effectively.

1:00:11 Um deploying local compute, local power. Um things like that. Amazing. So if I'm envisioning a ser a scenario I don't know, a random one in the Pacific Ocean. Maybe there's an island. Maybe that island's a couple of hundred miles away from another island.

1:00:28 Maybe that island needs some defense. And we could send some defensive droids, clankers You you know, drones Pick what you want. On one side of the island.

1:00:39 And then hey, maybe there's something going on on the other side of this You know, um theoretical island that could use a little more defense, yeah. Exactly. I mean if you look at how this has been done Since the beginning of time it's been we've s we've sent out eighteen year old boys into into the front line. Um initially we had spears thrown at them, then we had

1:00:57 You know, bullets shot at them and now increasingly other things. And so where warfare is clearly trending towards is getting These eighteen year old boys out of harm's way and and ultimately the warfighter. And so The way we see it. Obviously, it's it's been shown in Ukraine in a kind of small scale, sort of like a lab experiment, but the way that it's clearly trending is

1:01:16 Um whoever is able to deploy autonomous capacity at range and at at at scale Is ultimately gonna be able to deter um the the next major conflict. And you've been working on this for three or four years now, I believe. Uh and uh no, just under two years. Just under two. Okay. So you're under two years. Um how does one

1:01:35 Go from Fantastical idea. But you know, Elon did lay some groundwork here, I think, in terms of, you know investors getting comfortable with it. But you go to you go to Why Combined, I understand, and then you gotta pitch investors on this.

1:01:50 If you're pitching it ten years ago, it would be a no go, but Last two years. We've seen some great um you know military tech companies and some great space companies. So The the lane is there, you know who to pitch as an investment. How much do you need to raise to get from concept?

1:02:07 to reality. Uh how much did you raise and how close are you to reality? You made a really good point. We all stand on the shoulders of giants. Um, we would not be here without SpaceX, without all of the kind of amazing defense tech companies like Anderl and so on. Um So

1:02:21 We we haven't we we've already raised a bunch of money. We haven't disposed that publicly yet. We're still in the current Y C batch, so we're we're not done yet. That's that's all I'll leave it with. Um, but obviously this is a capital intensive business. That being said, one of the the the coolest like you talked about the why now in the previous conversation with Craig. Um, a lot of the why now is that AI is able to augment a lot of the engineering development. So it's it's seeping into hardware development, not just software development. And so we're a very small team of of seven and we've been able to move at the speed um and ferociousness of a team of probably fifty or seventy. Wow. And so

1:02:54 This is this is a really great time to be building at the intersection of hypersonics and defense. Yeah. And the the landing I I and I'll tell the audience. thirty milyen dollars in this like series A if you're doing it like

1:03:08 Probably Twenty, thirty million dollars is the bogey here, in my mind. $200 million valuation,$100 million valuation, whatever it is, dilute 15%. That would be what advisors would say to do here. Just taking a guess broad strokes, but the opportunity is You get a contract.

1:03:26 Uh with Emile Michael. And the department of defense slash war. I prefer defense. I thought the war thing was a little too aggressive. I don't it's like kinda like you're trying to pick a fight. Just Defense is a very important thing. D department of defense is so much better, like

1:03:41 We don't want to be threatening people and provoking wars. Department of Defense was so much of a better branding, but let's put that aside. We'll probably change it in two years. Um that's just one man's belief. I'm a Jedi, not a uh criticize Pete Hegsef for us. Like really unload for us a little bit. I'm not gonna do that with Facebook. Not with our guest here. He's gotta close the deal. Yeah, no. The point is you get the thirty million to build the prototype, but then the next step obviously is to to get the government. What have you learned about getting that government Experimental contract because Say what you will about

1:04:15 switching to Department of War, we could have you know philosophical debates on that. But this administration For the first time has said start up, startup, startups. Lower our cost, and we're going to support startups with ear contracts. So how do you get in on the ear contracts? How does that work today? game on the field for startups in your space.

1:04:35 One of the biggest things that we've seen is that renders and powerpoints and all of that kind of takes you so far, but actually having hardware having, you know Demonstrating that you can pop fire your engine that you've built from scratch in in a couple of weeks. Um That speaks volumes compared to any other thing that you can do. And so that's that's been the biggest thing that we've seen that

1:04:53 Um, prototypes only get you so far. It's actually showing clear tangible progress. Um A lot of our conversations do start off with again like what How do you see this thing being like you you talk about an O V one in in the military, you um Look at how do you envision this fitting in?

1:05:08 And that's great. That'll kinda warm up the conversation, but at some point You you just gotta whip out the iPad and start showing actual footage, or better yet, you show up to an event or a conference before you bring them out to your test site and you we've had guests that we we hosted um Live hot fires for It it's It's so much better than anything else you can show on on a on a Zoom call or wherever.

1:05:26 I will put this piece of advice. We always have tactical, practical advice here, and we'll highlight this in the notes as make it real. What we're trying to do as entrepreneurs when we do companies or investors putting in there is you're trying to take the story. And the pitch. And make it credible. How do you move from I'm just a pitch deck, I'm just a guy with an idea, or a gal with an idea, seven people with an idea.

1:05:51 to we actually have credibility and we're all in a credibility race in life. The credibility comes from a fire test. The credibility comes from The team the team can, you know, if you get past the pitch deck, anybody can make a pitch deck. But getting a team together, that builds credibility. But as you're saying here.

1:06:09 Uh Getting to Real world Make it real. You have to make it real for people. And just firing off an engine and saying, Hey, I can fire off an engine without blowing myself up.

1:06:21 That's like zero to one in terms of Pitch deck to Real world Capabilities. That's that's what you're saying here, yeah. Definitely. Yeah.

1:06:31 All right. Listen, uh I wish you great success in this. Um, there are a couple of hot spots in the world where this is going to be applicable. And it it is it dual use? Do you have a dual use where A rich person is gonna be like, Hey, can I get one of these?'Cause I got an island over here and I got a house in Palm Beach and I want maybe the wrong metaphor for islands and houses, but I got I I live in Long Island and I got a place in I got a place in the Hamptons and a place Up in Albany. I wanna move a bunch of stuff. I don't know what circumstance that is, but is there a dual use here eventually?

1:07:04 Well, not for that exact use, and I if if I can guess what you're what you're getting at, but there is definitely a commercial use for this. So we we already have um companies that we're talking to and actually companies that we've signed on uh as early kind of pilot customers. Um ranging from manufacturing to coal chain transportation. Um automotive other industries like that where it's not necessarily the The value of the part itself is almost irrelevant. It's what's the

1:07:30 Cost of not having it. And so those industries usually have very high costs of downtime. And so that has been an amazing wedge for us. That being said, um, we've had far more pull from the Department of Defense or Department of War, whichever your your your choosing is um And so we um we've we've just focused a lot of our energy on that. That being said, yeah, there's a there's a huge opportunity for us on the commercial side. Unbelievable.

1:07:52 Really appreciate you coming on the site. Where can people learn more? I'm I'm sure you're hiring and uh whenever this uh funding announcement happens, hopefully my my name is on there. But I gotta get in on this one. I don't wanna miss this one. I missed the I missed the cattle collars. I feel like I need to get in on this one. Um brilliant idea. Uh looks like great execution to date, but who are you hiring for? And and where can people learn more? So we'll be announcing roles, uh most engineering roles. We we need we have a great engineering team so far that's been our core team. Um we're looking we're very picky when it comes to our people, but we're gonna be hiring across um GNC, aerothermal, structural um assembly, and so on. So everything's gonna be on our on our LinkedIn. It's gonna be on our website. So keep keep an eye out. Okay, and the website is H O P A E R O dot com Hop Arrow.

1:08:38 Gonna change the world with this one. Thanks, Matiya. Did I pronounce it correctly? Matt. Yeah. Matt. Appreciate you having me. Just great. And if you ever make it uh to Texas or if you're based here. Let's have a steak.

1:08:49 I got two of you guys together. Yeah. Thursday nights supper club. I'd love to. We'll get a stake. All right. Talk to you soon, brother. Thank you for feeling. I'm good. Thank you for having me. What a what a banger episode here. Two for two. We went two for two today on Foundry. Two for two. I mean, you know what makes a great episode of this week in startups. Little bit of news. Some great founders and some great founder lessons there. And of course, maybe a little more news and even going off duty. What do you got left for us, Lon? Is there another news story that the audience is demanding I comment on? I I think we should talk about NVIDIA taking over all of open source, potentially. They've agreed to acquire Hugging Face. For$12.9 billion. Uh that hogging face, of course, the public marketplace for open source AI, models, data sets, the GitHub of machine learning, it's sometimes called. So NVIDIA tried to buy it in late 2025, but they were turned down. Meanwhile, uh NVIDIA's earnings report show another monster quarter forecast, 70%.

1:09:44 twenty twenty eight revenue growth while analysts were expecting just forty four percent. So uh Jason, I I know you were talking about this. We've been talking about this for the last few days. Can you unpack for us what you see as Jensen's sort of play here? He's he's open maxing, as you were as you were putting it the other day. Yeah. So this will be the big uh number one story on All in. Which will drop Saturday morning in all likelihood, maybe late Friday. Jensen. Had a great

1:10:11 open source Nemo Tron project. He has a great project internally doing open source. For self-driving in partnership with Uber and other folks building the open source stack. He in his heart believes in open source.

1:10:25 However, his customer base. Was Largely frontier models. Who needs the most comput? Open AI. Needs compute.

1:10:35 Anthropic needs compute. These guys are Or were a year ago, ninety percent of the token usage, ninety percent of consumption. consumer, et cetera. Obviously, uh friends at Google with Gemini also have a billion users using AI across their products. They may not be going there saying I'm gonna use AI, but they wind up using AI. So

1:10:55 He uh with those three specific frontier model companies and of course uh SpaceX I, uh they are Big consumers of this, big customers of his. This record blowout quarter is directly because of those Let's say four or five entities. You probably put Microsoft in there as well. However.

1:11:14 Open source. is surging. And he is looking at it going, Wait a second, there's no open source champion in America. Who's the open source champion in America that comes to my mind? I say open source in America, you say? Um I mean it was metaphor. Well, right, sure. That was why I was heavy struggling.

1:11:32 You say nobody. It's a trick question. There is nobody in the lead. You you you stumbled on one. Yeah, hey, Meta has something, maybe, but we don't hear about it that often. Maybe Apple did something in images and you know, we we talked about it here. There's no champion. There's no anthropic of open source yet. I'll tell you who the open source Competitor is. It's NVIDIA. NVIDIA

1:11:55 When you say US open source, you will say NVIDIA. Right. US open source equals NVIDIA. Chinese open source equals Kimi. You know, X A I Z not X A I Z deep Seek, yeah, Moonshot. Alibada Now we have our US champion.

1:12:13 While the king was looking down, he Jester stole his thorny crown. This is NVIDIA's big play. Sam Altman. If you remember.

1:12:23 Did big deals with NVIDIA. Sure. Sam and Jensen. We're super involved, remember? Yes. But you might be able to find in my notes. Uh the history of these two, and you could tee it up for us here, Lon.

1:12:35 I don't have it off the top of my head, but broad strokes There was a major commitment, I think it's like a hundred billion dollar commitment between open AI and NVIDIA. Yeah, and and that hundred billion dollar um commitment was the first time we started having this discussion about circular revenue. It was uh it was in September twenty second, twenty twenty five. Uh uh Altman did a huge hundred billion dollar deal with NVIDIA for you know they were chips, compute, all of that. Then just 14 days later, Altman announced a major equity agreement with AMD, uh the giving them warrants to buy up to 10% of open AI, another one of these big circular deals. This was part of what set off that whole worry about circular deals. Uh Jensen clearly was not sort of happy about this.

1:13:26 By January, just a few months later, he was already uh telling uh industry colleagues this according to the Wall Street Journal, he was already telling industry colleagues that his letter of intent with open AI is nonbinding, sort of already talking about maybe walking back that deal, and he was uh reportedly criticizing a and I'm quoting lack of discipline. In Altman and OpenAI's approach. In response to this, Altman then brought in Google vet Richard Ho. That was when they started working on their own inference chip now called jalapeno. Right. So things got Chippy. The relationship went from a hundred billion dollars in commitments

1:14:01 Two I want an open relationship. Sam Altman said to Jensen, or didn't even say to Jensen. He just went into the AMD deal. went and hired this person to create the jalapeno chip, which is supposedly spectacular. and is a really great inference chip.

1:14:17 Of course, Jensen buys Brock, gets his own inference chip, Cerebris goes public with their amazing inference chip. Yeah. Now Shansen has to say, Wait a second. All if we're gonna have an open relationship, that means I can see other people too. Right. I'm straight I'm straining with this poly cube here. The one Uh the one element we have not discussed yet is poolside. Also this week NVIDIA made this huge deal, a sort of an aqua hire. They're gonna take like a hundred engineers from poolside, six billion dollars plus a billion dollar or or

1:14:50 One billion dollar deal plus a licensing fee of six billion dollars. So they're basically taking over one of the largest coding AI labs left. That was independent uh as well this week. Poolside makes their own version of cursor. Correct. They make their own version of codecs, open open AIs, coding, or clot code. Uh I think it's called Laguna, I believe. Laguna. Yes. As in the great

1:15:15 Hippy Town. Mm. Uh Uh in southern California. Yeah, Orange County. Lagoon. It's a very weird place. Um I always was enamored with it, but probably don't want to stay for don't stay for more than forty eight hours. Gets a little weird. Um But Laguna's beautiful town. If you're gonna go drive to San Diego for a night in Laguna, Irvine's not far from Laguna.

1:15:35 I w what's the story with Laguna's like little beach? Everybody's a little bit weird there, right? I get weird vibes. Is it like rich surfer dudes? What is it? I I it used to be like in the sixties, seventies, it was very bohemian. It was like an artist colony. And so it has that like like in the keep Austin weird, there was like a funky Laguna vibe that was different from the rest of like Nixon. in land conservative Orange County. I feel like less so today. It's become gentrified like everywhere else in that part of Orange County. And today it would remind you of Huntington Beach or Newport Beach or any of those other communities. Kinda like what happened with Venice. Venice was like a weird art community. Now it's like a yuppie community. So it got yuppie up. All these things get because it's so expensive to live in any of these places now, the hippies and the bohemians kinda got kicked out. So here's what I'll say Jensen's doing. Jensen is going to take open source.

1:16:24 He's gonna roll a rack into companies. He's gonna roll a rack into the same companies Anthropic and OpenAI, his top two customers, I believe. He's gonna go to the same customers. Dario and Sam are meeting with.

1:16:38 And he's gonna say Oh, you're doing a bunch of frontier stuff with them? That's great. We power seventy two percent of what they do. That's fantastic. Might I interest you. In Iraq.

1:16:48 That has A codex competitor. That is unmetered. So he'll he's gonna go to Uber. And remember Uber? Uh Andrew and the CFO and Dar were talking about their token usage. Sure.

1:17:01 Now imagine. Jansen says, Hey. Would love to stop by. He's a great sales guy. Love to stop by, Dara. Um, maybe we take a couple of pictures, have a little lunch, we we talk about AI with your team. Have all your developers come. Okay, great.

1:17:14 And he says, Mine g how much are you spending on Cloak H? Was a clock host been? Was it open I spent?

1:17:20 You uh spent four hundred million? I got an idea for you. Spending four hundred million on tokens. I think that's probably what they're spending, like literally a half a billion. Half a billion going into frontier models, five hundred million. If you want to know how Anthropic is hitting fifty billion, if you want to know how open AI is hitting whatever it is, thirty, forty billion, you wanna know how they're hitting that?

1:17:41 Customers like Uber. And he slides in and says, By the way. Um I got this Laguna. And uh you're using this.

1:17:49 You're spending five hundred billion. Can we get like maybe a hundred billion of that? We'll slide in some racks. Side insommax. They'll be here tomorrow. And nothing you're doing goes up to the frontier model. Everything stays on prem. You got the AI sovereignty. And um

1:18:03 It's unmetered. And they say, Oh, what do you mean unmetered? There there's there's no shocking bill at the end of the month. And the CFO goes, Wait a second. You're telling me.

1:18:14 I could set up a rack here. And my developers can go to town and I don't have to get in the middle. of an argument between Dara Andrew, the CTO, this person on our A I spend'cause we know it's one hundred million cat.

1:18:29 We know it's a hundred million. It's a hundred a hundred million in servers and electricity. We put that in. And depending on how many tokens we can squeeze out of it, and you're telling me your open source products getting thirty percent Better every six months? And it's gonna get fifty percent better. Oh, and uh you're optimizing the hardware and that's gonna get fifty percent better every eighteen months?

1:18:52 And I'm unmetered. Unmetered is the word we're gonna be talking about in twenty twenty seven. It's not gonna be token maxing. It's gonna be un Metered. Two ways to be unmeter.

1:19:02 You're gonna buy Iraq. From Jensen. And that means massive headwinds for anthropic. And they're c coding products. And the coding products Our toast.

1:19:14 The the Frontier Model Coding products are gonna have really hard time competing with an unmetered option. This is going to be in the S one. for anthropic and for open AI as their number one risk factor. The number one risk factor it's not data centers getting shut down. It's not Cybersecurity. It's Jensen.

1:19:33 Providing Laguna? On an NVIDIA rack. And them losing The developer customers, which are the tip of the spear. That's why he bought Hugging Face. That's where the developers hang out.

1:19:45 That's why he bought Poolside. That's why he has those hundred engineers. And that's why he has Laguna. He can now go after the two most profitable parts of open AI and anthropic.

1:19:58 There you go. Think they're gonna c keep calling it Laguna or Nemotron? Which which brand is gonna win out? Laguna's gonna stick. Okay, we'll keep with that. Um, but it's gonna be NVIDIA's Laguna. Which means Full side Laguna? Okay, sounds a little hippy dippy. Will it be here in three years?

1:20:15 Will it be here in three years? So if Poolsai comes and says hey, we want to roll in Iraq with Laguna, they say, okay, you got to get the rack, we'll put the software on. It's not one product. It's two now, you got two vendors, three vendors. It's gonna be one vendor coming in. Right. Boom, whole stack with it.

1:20:30 And it's NVIDIA's Linguna. Which means Instead of having a hundred developers on it, it's gonna have a thousand developers on it. And instead of you wondering, will it exist in two years? And am I investing in a startup that maybe doesn't exist in two years, you're gonna say, Oh, the largest company in the world. Right. The largest

1:20:47 company in the world with five trillion dollars has made a twenty billion dollar commitment to open source. Yes, I'm going with that. That will be the discussion of twenty twenty seven. That means. That you could see NVIDIA add.

1:21:04 a third of the market cap of the top two frontier models. Wow. So if those two companies are worth five trillion. They have a right. to thirty percent of it. That's one point five trillion dollars in additional market cap moving from anthropic. If it works.

1:21:19 Moving from Anthropic and Open AI, one third of their revenue moving over Two. In the video. If it works. This is the biggest news ever.

1:21:29 This is the news of the week, not NVIDIA's blowout quarter. It's in Jensen going all in. On op on. Open source open way coding tools. Is the biggest story of the year.

1:21:41 This is the biggest story of the year. There you go. And nobody's talking about it. Except you. Except you are and and now we will be across our social media channels. As soon as we have to make a clear, anything else in the news that I have to comment on. Well, do you want to talk about as long as we're talking about the massive amount of AI compute heading our way, should we talk about the slop that this AI compute is going to make we we had already touched on this stand Druck and Miller. Uh AI Slop in the Wall Street Journal. I don't know if you wanna you wanna go back into it. A writer, a creative. Yeah.

1:22:15 When you go to the editorial page. Of your favorite publication, and I'm sure you read the New York Times editorial from time to time, or Washington Post or Wall Street Journal, you wind up on the editorial page. Explain What your belief is And your expectation of an editorial page.

1:22:33 At a premier publication. Yeah. I mean and there is Wall Street Journal is the number one premier publication in finance, the number two in news in the United States. What is your expectation, Lon Harris, when you go in there? Well, I think it's important to make the distinction. There are a million ways to communicate, especially if you are a prominent or notable figure in the world like billionaire Stanley Drackenmiller. There's There are so many avenues. You could call a reporter, you could have a press conference, you could post a tweet, you could make a little video of yourself. A pod do a podcast. There's a million ways to get your message out. If you're going to go to a newspaper, one of the most respected newspapers in the country and say, I want to write an op-ed for you, to me, that's setting the expectation that this is going to be a piece of writing. I I want to not only share my insight, I want to make an argument, build an argument on that I think is going to be important for the national conversation. I I want to steer our national discourse because I think I have something so important to say. I have an argument that's so important to make.

1:23:36 that I want to share. And it's not different from if you think of the founding fathers, if you think of the early days of America, where they were writing pamphlets all the time. Alexander Hamilton sharing his pamphlets with everybody. That's the idea. Or Thomas Paine with common sense. It was like This conversation is happening. I need to be part of it. People need to hear my take, and I'm going to build that argument in a piece of writing. To me, that's a promise to your reader that that writing is your own, that it's your argument, that you've thought it out, that you're advancing it carefully, and that it every word, every sentence, every line of that is your own original work. Any piece of writing that you publish, I think that's the promise you're making. And in fact At launch, where you know, I sort of oversee a lot of the editorial We don't, in fact. All of it you ever see. I do we don't publish anything.

1:24:25 Front facing That is just written by AI. We use AI constantly. We use AI for everything. Most pieces of writing that I do for the company, I've at least consulted with an AI or multiple AI bots. On it, for research or proofing. Ideation. Ideation research and and then helping me. I think the hardest thing about writing personally is is the blank page starting from nothing and you have to get words at it's much easier to edit. Than to write. And so that's where I think AI can be such a crucial time saver is get something down on paper. It doesn't have to be good.

1:25:09 It just has to be relatively accurate and mostly what I want. And then I'll go through and I'll fix it. And that's the essential part of the entire process to me is the AI produce this. I'm going to tweak it and edit it and change it so that it reflects my own work. And that's also when you learn about it and think more deeply about what you're writing. Two out of three, Lon, of my um Followers.

1:25:33 Did you know I have one point seven million followers on XM? You blow you blown. I didn't know that. I thought I just broke a million. I I I gotta look at my chart of followers. I went from like a million to one point seven million In twenty twenty six, I think. Like you started twenty twenty six with like one point two, I think I wanna say, something like that. I don't know what's causing direction. I think it's just somebody's doing some amazing editorial. I think you gotta do some more direction here. I got I gotta start writing again on my sub stack. So if Druck and Miller did not have the time to write a piece of eight hundred words or so, I think it's probably eight hundred word piece, thousand word piece. Yeah, if you don't have the time to write a thousand word piece, then the proper venue is to jump on CMBC.

1:26:20 Or all in podcast or whatever it is, and then just discuss your position. In your own words. But you don't believe An editorial page should have AI written copy on it because

1:26:34 If I'm interpreting correctly. In that venue there is an expectation. That you took the time to construct your argument in the prose. And and that's exactly how I feel. I feel if you're going to write something with AI, it should be labeled as such in the first sentence up front. Just like

1:26:52 If you make an AI video of a shark attack And it's a recreation of it. Uh In a documentary, people would make recreations a a reenactment and they say Uh re in the artist interpretation or artist rendering. Yeah.

1:27:08 Correct. So why in documentaries did people start putting Um, this is a recreation and then this is actual footage. Why? Because the expectation of the audience was if you're gonna put some video in there, it's real video. This is a documentary. It's very simple. I think the documentary analogy which I didn't get to on all in We had a pretty vibrant debate about it.

1:27:31 The The best analogy I've come up with, I I was kind of thinking this was kind of like Millie Vanilli lip syncing. I was saying it's there's some plagiarism feeling to this. You're plagiarizing from the AI. But at the end of the day I think this is the expectation of the user, similar to a documentary. If you're going to do a reenactment, if you're going to do an interpretation, you're obligated, you are super obligated. And the mistake that the Wall Street Journal made and then subsequently Drock and Miller made. Um this

1:27:59 combination of not checking the work and not disclosing to the reader is why there's such a strong reaction to this. Now there's a group of people who are not good writers, and the people who are not good writers say Well, I should be able to use a tool to make my writing better. Of course you should. But you shouldn't Say here's my ideas, write me a piece, publish it, and not disclose it. If we're gonna do slop. I want

1:28:22 And I and I will call it slop because I don't think it comes out that good, even if it is the best ideas. If you're gonna deceive me. I I'm I'm all out. I feel like you've broken the trust here. Just like Millie Vanilli broke the trust, just like some documentaries broke the trust. There was a documentary my friend was in recently. They used 11 labs to put in a sentence he didn't say because they wanted him to say a certain sentence. This is the kind of stuff that. Erodes trust. If you've eroded the trust of the reader, the consumer of the information, you failed at your job, Wall Street Journal failed at their job, Truck and Miller failed at his job.

1:28:55 They've solved this by just putting Written with AI at the top. If you pull up the original uh Wall Street Journal piece that Drecker Miller posted. There's a byline. I mean it couldn't be any clearer. There's a byline that says written by Stan Druckenmiller right there at the top. That's a lie. That's not he didn't write it. He wrote it with if if he and I wrote it together, it would say Stanley F Drecken Miller and Lon Harris. And if it didn't, I would write in the Wall Street Journal and be like, What the hell? Why wasn't I credited on my brilliant op ed this morning with my Ben

1:29:29 My friend Stan. Does this piece have a disclosure now after this whole bro ha ha on the commentary? Is there any disclosure in the first sentence or two? I revisited it this morning and did not see one. I don't believe it. At the end of the piece is there a no. There they seem to be. This is a fine thing to do, correct? They their their response is basically this represents Stanley Dreckenmiller's point of view. He approved it for publication, so It's it's fair game. It's fine. You're allowed to use. And I and I think that's what the the some of the other besties on all in are probably arguing as well. That the idea is

1:30:07 You know, well, you would use Google to write. You could use Grammarly to fix your we don't we wouldn't disclose every other tool that we use, but I think the fundamental difference is that those other tools aren't doing the writing for you. They're Fixing or adapting your writing. And Claude or GPT or whatever model he used to compose this is actually doing it for him. And you don't know. Based upon

1:30:35 What story um was written. Sure. And the author. In addition to this story, yes, and the author. So the editorial page will sometimes um you know uh be a little spicy with uh politicians And uh here, if you look at this URL, if you pull it up. Uh Andrew Surbane, I'm not sure who that is. Um, this is a Republican strategist with ninety-seven thousand followers. His avatar is um

1:31:04 The famous wrestler from the film They Live. Oh, that's uh Roddy Piper. Rowdy Roddy Piper. From They Live. Sure. Which is a very interesting avatar to have given the context, and he says it appears the most recent screed. From the Pro Amnesty Wall Street Journal editorial page attacking J D Vance was a hundred percent written by Amy. Correct. So now we are gonna be in the awkward position of using Pangram to go through every single editorial.

1:31:33 And we're gonna find out Who's not wearing shorts because the tide's about to go out. I think this is people being deliberately obtuse. I feel like it's very obvious. It's easy to understand the distinction between no human in the loop and human in the loop. If there's a human in the loop, that's fine. You're just using a tool, it's making you better, faster, more efficient. Nobody has a problem with that. I I don't have a problem with that. It it's it's letting the tool do the work for you and then being like Job well done. There you go, Washington Wall Street Journal.

1:32:04 Publish away. And you know, new kids on the block. Um I think there was a um a lawsuit about them I'm trying to remember. New kids no kid New Kids on the Block. There were a couple of these uh lawsuits, if I remember correctly, from the nineties or two thousands, and I don't know how they actually worked out.

1:32:25 But If you were paying for concert tickets, here it is, yes, I'm correct. Chicago Tribune, link sync suits, forcing courts to face the music. A lot of disgruntled pop music fans seem to be showing up these days in Cook County. Circuit court. Aided by willing attorneys, fans such as

1:32:41 Of such groups as new kids on the block are turning grievances, real or perceived, into class action lawsuits in what some experts say is an abuse of an otherwise valuable legal remedy for large scale consumer fraud. Not it is the new kids. June seventh, nineteen ninety two. I was twenty one years old when this happened. And I I I can't believe I even remember this, but there it is. Um I don't Think this requires a lawsuit here, but That is I wonder if

1:33:11 There needs to be disclosure for lip syncing when you go to a concert? Is that a thing? I mean the assumption is that's not happening on a wide scale. That's what got Billy Vanille in all that trouble. Yeah. All right. Uh, let's go off duty. Anything in off duty that people should Um Should be aware of here in Austin, the mosquitoes are an issue. I have to go out like fully covered head to toe when I take Barry outside, or else I get stuck. It do it's impossible. So you tweeted that you want one of these blue laser mosquito air defense systems. Essentially Israel's iron dome, but to keep

1:33:44 insects out of your backyard. It uses sensors to find mosquitoes midair and zap them. Uh it scans a twenty foot ninety degree field with LIDAR, radar, and AI vision. It can target insects as small as two millimeters, runs for four or five hours on one charge. And as you can see You actually get to pleasantly watch the blue laser flash. When it has spotted and and is taking out one of your Insect rivals. I want to invest in this company. I want to uh buy this product for my off duty selection this week. I'll show you how I solved the problem at my ranch. Um go ahead and pull up what I just sent you. This is a two hundred fifty dollar device meant for

1:34:23 Like barns and places where you have animals that get harangued by this, but humans as well. And um We had a big ethical discussion about killing mosquitoes and bugs on ranch. And then What happened was

1:34:39 The entire family got taken out by mosquitoes inside the house, outside the house. You live on a ranch, you live in Austin. There's like three or four months where it is acute and insane. They're everywhere. In the backyard. These things supposedly do two acres. I put two of them just in the backyard. And we went from having

1:34:59 You know, everybody getting five, ten mosquito bites a week. to you know nobody getting mosquito bites anymore. We have little ones inside. We have these two big ones outside. We put these two big ones outside. I highly recommend you get one of these for your backyard and just plug it in permanently. Plug it in permanently. Well, here's the other thing that happens. You get skin infections.

1:35:20 And this happened to me. I all of a sudden had like five bites. I scratched them. The natural uh bacteria you have on your skin or on your nails. If you scratch goes into the exposed bite. And then you get

1:35:37 A rash. So everybody and this is a new thing for me as a Texan and for you as well. Never got this many mosquito bites. Ten in a week, not in California. I got three or four of them on my legs. Then I got got an infection. I had to get muprisin from an emergency care clinic. I had to literally go there and put this cream on my legs to kill the bacteria so I wouldn't get this crazy infection. Frickin' painful.

1:36:01 Two Want to scratch my legs twenty four hours a day. That I start wearing long pants, I get these two things, and now I've got it under control. Kill All mosquitoes around her house.

1:36:12 There's another there's dozens of other acres for them to exist on, but no more around our house. Couldn't agree more. Enough. It's it's a nightmare. Uh Anything else and that's my off duty take. Make sure we put the link in there. People love when we go off duty on Fridays. I wanna I have a couple of very quick streaming recommendations. I haven't done one of these in a while. I watched a real I thought this was a really great movie. I didn't see a lot of other people talk about it. Uh it's the Wizard of the Kremlin, it's called. It is a it's a true story. It's a film about the rise to power of Putin. Jude Law stars as Putin. Paul Dano plays his propaganda minister, Vadim Baranov, orchestrated his rise from you know head of the KGB, basically government bureaucrat. How did he become The m not only the like leader of Russia, but this autocratic, extremely powerful, dug in. It's a really fascinating story. It's a it's a long movie that kind of takes you through the entire like how the rise of Putin happened. Obviously fictionalized. It's not the exact documentary, but it's very compelling. Great performances from Jude Law.

1:37:13 And Paul Dano, that's on Hulu and Disney Plus right now. Uh and that actually it's Oliver Asaias. I don't know how to exactly to pronounce his name, is the same director as uh Carlos. We've talked about how much we like that Carlos the Jackal movie. Uh this is the same guy director as uh Carlos. I'll look up on it for that. If you can get Carlos the Jackal Um Carlos the Jackal is a um five, six, seven hour mini series, but there's like a three hour version as a movie. If you can get the mini series somehow on one of these services,

1:37:48 That is just prime. I believe it's on Criterion Channel. Carlos mini series that he did. They did also conde condense it. Tell us the name of this one more time. Uh this is called The Wizard of the Kremlin. And it's just a movie. It's not a series. It's like a little over two hours. Uh, but it's it's it's very good. It's really well done and it's it's it's Uh like a lot of details that I've never even heard before. You know, you know the the outlines he was KGB and then he sort of he's always had this obsession about reuniting the old Russia. Really, really interesting. The other one I wanted to quickly mention, another historical period drama. This one's a series. It's from the UK. It's on Prime Video. It's called King and Conqueror. And it's about the events leading up to the Norman invasion of England and the battle of Hastings in ten sixty six. Uh Nicola Nicholas Coster Waldew, who was Jamie Lannister in Game of Thrones, and then James Norton, who was just on this season of House of the Dragon, he was Orman Hightower. Uh they play Harold the Second and uh William the Conqueror, and it's about they they were friends and then rivals, and then it ends up being this big battle for who gets to be King of England.

1:38:54 Uh very good. Well done show. I'm I'm really into it. Awesome. Uh are you watching? Lanterns, two episodes. I am watching lanterns. I'm I'm all caught up with like what's your take on lanterns. I'm really enjoying it. Uh I think it's a nice balance. It feels like it it gets the comic book, you're getting references. It doesn't feel totally alien from the the button from the D C comics, but But it it is its own thing, and that's what I really like. Like Andor, like the penguin, when it can feel like its own TV show with its own vibe that is also faithful to the source material. I feel like that's the perfect balance. And Aaron Pierre, it's so good as John Stewart. I loved him in that that movie

1:39:33 Uh that now I'm blanking on the name of uh Oh it's like the Rambo movie where he's like I'll I'll look up I'll look up what it's called There is a Rambo send out that the person playing Hal Jordan. Rebel Ridge. It's on Netflix right now. Look up that movie. Rebel Ridge is A great popcorn movie like just starts out. It's like a it literally is like Rambo where like A oppressed individualist. Yeah. He's a vest to like manage. It's really it's really well done. I he's a great actor, and he's also a perfect Jon Stewart. So yeah, the John Stewart Hal Jordan vibe in this is a lot of fun and and I recommend it. Yeah, I love this actor. I would say for This lantern series, it's a slow burn.

1:40:17 So slow burn. It's very evocative of Ozark, which was a great series. Slow methodical the aesthetics of the show. Are unique. Like True Detective or Ozark, it has an aesthetic. That is not comic book aesthetic necessarily. I was saying it's like it reminds me of Taylor Sheridan. Like it reminds me of like Landman vibes almost or something like that. Yeah, I'd say true detective or Ozar because these the people who are involved in it are were involved in those series, I understand. Anyway, I

1:40:49 Don't think you have to watch it episode by episode'cause it's incredibly frustrating because it moves so slow as a detective. kind of thing. I think I want to Just wait till it's over and watch it like in, you know, four or five days. I want to give an update. I I I love my man bags. I had talked about this out. Paka, Bravo, Sling, Max, 8 L R F ID blocking sling.

1:41:11 Laptop bag I bought for a hundred sixty bucks. I love this thing. It's constructed incredibly well. I like to take it with me'cause it fits my MacBook. Pro 14 inch. Hundred sixty bucks, I thought

1:41:24 I'm a genius. Hundred sixty bucks. I love it. That's not an expensive price. That's a reasonable price for a bag. Sure. So I think I'm a genius, right? This thing's got all these great features. Then I'm at the Uniclos store with my daughter in Japan. And I'm buying stuff up.

1:41:39 I'm loving uniform. You're a big fan, yeah. Huge fan. This is the c one I I don't want to join any more boards. I want to be on the board of Uniclo to learn. So I'm putting that out there in the universe. If somebody like if Uniclo needs a board now. You know Uniclo board now. I know Cat if he was on the board. If the if somebody if they eventually need An American to like, you know, maybe I can be of value in some way. I'd like to join that board. You give me another excuse to go to Japan. I go to the Uniclos store.

1:42:07 I'm walking out. About to leave and I see they have Messenger bags. Mm. I buy this one. I'm gonna buy this one for you, L. I'm gonna send you this. Mine's a little old now. I need a new one. All right.

1:42:20 So uh can can somebody here just I order like I wanna order like uh three of these for my podcasting team doing a great job. Well one for Jacob, one for Salah, one for Jordan, one for Zach, one for Niels, and one for Lon. I need six of these ordered slides. We'll let Heidi know. I'll let Heidi know I want six of these ordered to my office. Look at this. Six for the price of five for the price of one. Here's my Uniclo bag. That I bought in Japan for nineteen dollars. Ninety doll available.

1:42:48 Available here. I sent you the link, uh guys, timing please. Let's uh try to keep your finger. Unisex Unity shoulder bag is the link. In the United States, you can it's in the Slack rooms. I see it. My Lord, slow on the trigger, boys. Come on now. Here we go.

1:43:06 This bag is essentially the same bag. I like each bag. individually. They make it in black, they make it in green. So I bought it in green says I have the other one in black. I find myself Equally reaching for both. The Uniclo one's a little bit lighter. But it has all essentially all the same features. It doesn't have a Faraday bag and it doesn't have a pass-through USB charger, but it's essentially the same bag. It fits my number one thing, which is I want to take my 14 inch.

1:43:33 Uh forty eight gigs RAM MacBook Pro with me when I go on a hike. In case I get inspired, I want to write some stuff. Um Twenty nine bucks in the US. Wow. Nineteen bucks in Japan. Unbelievable value. If you don't know Uniclo. Ah man, I listen, and you guys know I got a little bit of chatter here on the side. I mean a little bit of cash, a little bit on you know what's doing all right.

1:43:56 I'm doing okay. Get a couple of speaking gigs here and now and again. I'm doing J C How doing just fine. I love value. And when I find something that one ups the value Oh, yum yum for J Cal. I'm like, oh my God, I got this for$19 in Tokyo. That paid for my business class ticket there in my mind. In my crazy dream.

1:44:17 What happened. All right, listen. Uh another amazing episode of This Week in Startups. This week In venture capital. is what we do every Wednesday here on the show. Uh we also release This Week in AI. And I had instructed uh my my editorial director here to set up this week in V C. Yes. I I have not done it. It will be done soon. Oh

1:44:44 Okay, so uh but we have this week in A This Week in AI dot AI exists. Go sign up for it. It's got eight thousand subs. Uh, Lon is been given the directive to make this week in startups, this week in AI and this week in VC sub stacks. This is my instruction to you. And this is important. The reason I'm putting this in the show is I'm teaching entrepreneurs constantly. I think SubSact is its own unique ecosystem. You told me we're not paying enough attention to it. I said okay.

1:45:13 I took Lon off a bunch of other work. I said, Jacob, you take that. I just want you solely focused on optimizing this until we get a growth strategy going. And then What is the least amount of work we can do on these newsletters that provides the maximum amount of value? That's the game we're playing. You made a great short.

1:45:32 For me. On uh for this week in AI. I don't think we emailed it to the list yet, but please email it to them with a link to it. It will it will be in there. I want you to just do it.

1:45:47 Uh one that says we're now doing shorts. On how to and demos Here's our first one. Find these on Instagram, TikTok. LinkedIn and YouTube, whatever, uh and X

1:46:01 Here's all the places and then tell me how many people then subscribe to those. But a dedicated email with just that video and then ask them which other How to's would you like us to do? My belief is sending we had a a website called Hackaday that we created. I I came up with the name. And hack a day.

1:46:19 Became Our most profitable Best. Um Blog at WeblogSync. Why?

1:46:27 It did one thing every day. We featured somebody else's hack with One sentence describing the hack. And a link to it. This thing took

1:46:37 I don't know, a couple of hours to find the best hack? and 10 minutes to write the one sentence. So it was really the curation of it. And I wound up not selling hack a day to AOL. an interesting story lawn. when I sold weblogs thing to AOL The legal department said, Hey, um and it was Time Warner AOL at the time, they said

1:46:53 Uh yeah, we need you to take down these seventeen stories on hack a day. Because you're teaching people how to hack the time one or Th these lunatics that link to hacking time one or set top boxes and everything. I said uh to the Council. This thing makes like three hundred thousand dollars.

1:47:09 This this thing's making like a thousand, two thousand dollars a week. It's costing us Five hundred dollars a week. It is de minimis. Can we take it out? You can take three hundred thousand dollars off of the purchase price and let me own it. I will personally buy it. I took some of my proceeds from the the deal.

1:47:28 And I bought it. Then I wound up selling it for a million dollars or so. I think 500K or a million dollars. I made like a couple hundred grand selling it to somebody because I didn't want to manage it. I should have never done that. But anyway, Acadet was this perfect combination. Providing massive value with a very small amount of work, but you had no choice but to open it every day. That's my goal for you with this week in V C. This week in AI and this week in startups newsletters.

1:47:51 I want you to report back here. On your plans for those. And how it's going so we can teach people my editorial trick. Sure. We'll do it next Friday. Do it next Friday. Okay. Most value. For the least amount of work. That's the exercise I want you.

1:48:07 Lon Harris, editorial director Jason Calaghan has to do. You're on. See you all next time. Bye bye. Bye everybody.

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