Conductor AI is automating the Pentagon's 20,000-page classification paperwork backlog

excited to uh invite Keller on to the show and give us a breakdown on what Zipline is up to these days. Keller, welcome to the studio. Hey, thanks for having me. Thanks so much for joining. Uh I I have to say first fantastic launch video.

There are so many launch videos these days that I I mean I'm you know uh suspect number one in propagating this type of content that's uh oh let's pull Top Gun footage and uh oh like like let's put Freeird over it and we're hard techuck and it's us welding and there's a lot of that and it's really cool but it was getting a little played out.

you went a very different direction with this announcement and so uh I just really enjoyed the launch video but can you take us through exactly what you're launching, what this means for the company and where the company stands today. Sure.

Um yeah, day before yesterday we officially launched our next generation service in Dallas. So as you mentioned, you know, Zipline has been operating these autonomous delivery services across eight countries over the last 11 years.

Um, but really this is the first time we're seeing like major metros start to launch and scale in the US. Our first customer is Walmart.

We're, you know, we've already announced a number of other partners like Chipotle and Sweet Green, Mendescino Farms and and a lot of the biggest health systems in the US who are all relying on this technology to automate uh and accelerate their deliveries from uh businesses or hospitals or warehouses directly to homes.

Mhm. Uh do you feel like this opportunity is underhyped today?

It felt like there was a time when drone delivery, you know, maybe it was I'm sure it was when you started the company, you believed in the vision, but then it actually took years and years and years to like get to the point where we are today, which is like it's a reality. You're partnered with Walmart.

I'm going to be able to drop a burrito on John's backyard if I want. Um I mean, they start you guys started in 2014, right? So complete overnight 2013. Really? Yeah. Yeah. We love a 10. We love an overnight success on this show. So congratulations. You're going to be a household name soon.

Everyone's going to be like, "Oh yeah, he just did so quickly. Maybe I should get into that market. Maybe I should. " No. Hope hopefully it makes hopefully it makes sense.

But I think there's this trend in technology where people get excited about the potential of an opportunity and then the reality sets in that it's really really hard to do and then there's this period where you know it gets less attention.

and it actually is good for you because there's less people going into it and then now I can just imagine a future where we're just seeing zip lines everywhere in the sky. Um so yeah, I mean talk about your maybe excitement today. I'm sure it's more than more than ever.

Yeah, I mean you know I I agree and there's so much to say on that front but I think you know there is this obvious hype cycle curve of you know ex extraordinary you know excitement this is coming tomorrow.

I mean, when we started, you know, the CEO of one of the largest tech companies in the world was on 60 Minutes promising that they were going to be doing drone delivery to every home in the US within 2 years. And so, we always assumed we would be a fast follower to them.

You know, we thought they were going to lead and we would be a fast follower.

Had you told me that 10 years later, Zipline would be crossing 100 million commercial autonomous miles, would be the largest autonomous system on Earth of any kind, and you know, that big technology company would be less than 11 one,000th of the scale. I mean, would have seemed impossible.

I think that the main takeaway for me is that you know that 10 years because then you you have the hype and then you have the trough of disillusionment I believe is what it's called.

And I think for especially for hard tech or hardware companies that trough of disillusionment might be like 5 to eight years and so for us it was really important to walk rather than talk.

It's really easy to talk and maybe that's you know apppropo of what you were talking about on the launch video side John but you know yeah if you just focus on walking and and focus on these small use cases I mean you know we started by delivering just blood to 21 different hospitals it was such a very narrow clear thing that we needed to do um and we're also willing to do very unfancy things like operate in countries that are hard to get to and uh get our hands dirty and figure out really hard unfancy problems like how do you operate in all kinds of gnarly weather, you know, rain, thunderstorms, snow and icing conditions.

These are hard problems. It's probably a bit similar to autonomous cars in that way, too. You know, that there's a lot of hype and then and then the reality sets in of what it's going to take to make these systems work at scale. Can you talk a little bit about the regulatory environment?

It seems like you probably couldn't have just gone straight to the American market because of the regulations. Uh, but you found a way anyway, and I love that.

Uh, is is that actually a bullc case for the regulatory regime in America working as intended and we should have companies that can go test things elsewhere and then bring it back when it's mature and the technolog is ready or are there specific regulatory changes that you'd like to see over the next decade to either spur more innovation or just make what you do easier?

Yeah, it's a good question. When we were launching, we really had this sense. There was such an unclear regulatory environment with regard to what we were proposing. You know, we thought someone would build an automated logistics system for Earth.

That seemed like a really important idea, but it was so unclear from a regulatory perspective that I think we really just concluded we have got to go do the most obvious life-saving thing imaginable because that would maximize the chances that we could, you know, I mean it was both powerful because it was an amazing mission and because it would maximize the chances that we could innovate and get started and operate in the real world.

And so, uh, we needed a public health care system to do that.

uh we didn't want to work with a whole bunch of you know helter skelter health systems which you kind of have in the US we thought it'd be good if we could have a public healthare system and so that immediately caused us to go to certain parts of the world um and then I think also there's just a lot of you know people think oh the regulatory environment must be so different in Africa than in the US actually not true pretty much the same regulatory regime when it comes to airspace because planes fly back and forth between them so you need the same rules I think the difference was finding a government that behaves more like a startup a small agile government that is willing to make decisions um and exhibit more like yeah just executive decision-m so th those were really the things that made Rwanda such a powerful place for us to to to get started and it was about 6 years later you know at that point we had about 50 million commercial autonomous miles and zero human safety incidents that's the moment when we thought hey this is a good time to bring this massive data set to the FAA and and kind of help them see like this technology is ready for prime time it's safe.

Once we did that, it then took about 5 years from then until you know where we are today where, you know, Zipline's the only company um in US history that's been awarded full permission to fly beyond vigilant sight in all 50 states.

So, I think part of it was building that data set showing that it can be safe and then part of it was working directly with the regulator in the US um to to help make sure that the US doesn't fall too far behind in this core area of new technology. Yeah. the uh immediate benefit, you know, as your network rolls out.

I love the idea of just being able to press a button and get, you know, an item uh you know, in in minutes. Uh you know, it's obviously been a dream, I think, for so many people for so long. Can you talk about some of the second order effects that you're anticipating? We we're here in LA.

I can imagine like a lot of traffic on the roads is just like items being delivered and it just so happens that it's a human in a car right now. And so with Zipline, you know, when Zipline rolls out here, I can imagine that there would just immediately be less congestion.

Um, but that's just me um, you know, making a bold uh, you know, potential prediction, but I'm curious how you think about it. And the cool thing is we're already seeing this. I think people don't necessarily appreciate how massively instant delivery has scaled in the last 5 years.

I mean, it was obviously accelerated by co, but you know, we're going to do 5 12 billion instant deliveries in the US this year alone. And we're using 3 to 4,000 lb 3 to 4,000lb gas combustion vehicle driven by a human to deliver something to your home that weighs 5 lb.

So, you don't have to be a physicist to realize like this is actually a bizarre solution. you know, we're essentially we're using technology that's 100 years old to solve a problem that's like 5 years old and and to to serve a market that's growing super fast.

So, we think it's super obvious that, you know, if you want to deliver something fast that weighs 5 lbs, you probably want to do that with a vehicle that weighs 50 lbs and you want the vehicle to be electric and autonomous.

As soon as you realize that, then I think you know the future you you have this you you know a secret about the future most people don't know. The other thing is like I personally if if I'm ordering delivery it's like do I really want this person to have to go to CVS and get Advil.

Like technically that it's like you know a form of employment. They're they're opting into it but like it's like oh I'll just do it myself. Like it's a bit of a hassle but when it when it's fully autonomous and it's literally like an extension you know of of the service that I'm using to get the item.

It's you'll use it a lot more. And and actually just just on that front, I mean, you know, the customer behaviors we're seeing just in the last year in the US are quite mind-blowing.

I mean, first of all, you know, I may have thought, oh, maybe it'll be these like tech adopters and some of these um some of these, you know, I don't know, you know, nerdier. No, no, it's like moms and grandmas who are like our power users.

And, you know, more important than that, I mean, you talk to you talk to them and we have we have users who have ordered 300 times in the last 12 months. So, this is like a part of their daily. It's way different. It's like, you know, I was I was talking to um a woman who said, you know, she's she's 78 years old.

She orders uh you know, she she goes to the grocery store once a week and then she orders about three to four she orders from Zipline three to four times a week. Wow. And you know, as I was, you know, as I was talking to her, she's like, "Yeah, you don't get it. I mean, this saves me like 5 hours a week.

It's totally priceless. There's no way I go back to the old way of doing things when the weather is bad. you know, I don't want to risk my health or I like fall down and get hurt.

You she has a lot of friends who might, you know, either single moms who it's not as easy to get out of the house or, you know, older people who it's not that easy to get to the store. I mean, I think people underestimate Yeah.

If you make it super fast and convenient, this is something people actually use every day, not every week or every month. Yeah. Even just thinking parents, right? I think every parent's had the experience. It's bedtime and like you realize there's no diapers, whatever.

And so then it's like, well, are we going to like get the the kids and go to CVS or whatever to like get diapers and they don't have the brand.

So it's like I just think of I can just think of so many use cases where it's just like, oh yeah, we're all, you know, we're going to delay bedtime by 15 minutes on the Jordy as as someone who has a, you know, one-year-old and three-year-old at home, like these kinds of systems operate 247. Yeah.

Which is also pretty gamechanging relative to the way we currently think of logistics. It's a really big deal to have something that is always available whenever your kid happens to wake up or isn't feeling well. Yeah.

On the on the topic of the evolution of the actual technology that you're building, I always thought the name was interesting because obviously it's a metaphor for a zipline that just goes from one place to another, but then you were catching the drones with something that looked kind of like a zipline and now that you have the mother ship drone dropping a a smaller drone with something that looks like a zipline.

Um h how uh I guess when in the evolution of the company did you come up with the mother ship and uh baby ship I don't know what you call it uh like system the delivery zip is what we call it. What do you call it? We we call it a delivery zip. Delivery zip. Okay.

And yeah so so how did you how did you come to the the the pairing system and why is that important and what's the evolution of the technology been? Yeah I mean I think it's a really good question. So, first of all, you know, Zipline spent 10 years operating uh these kind of more long range systems at platform one.

You can actually see some of them sitting right here waiting to out and begin making deliveries and swing, right? Um yeah, it's a plane and so this aircraft can fly, you know, 300 kilometers on a single battery charge. So, it's all about range and serving like very rural hospitals and health facilities.

For platform 2, you know, it's becoming obvious to us that home delivery is, you know, it's by far like the holy grail. I mean that's what automated logistics really has to solve globally. And the most important thing is you want to be able to deliver quietly like silently. You want to deliver silently.

It needs to be extremely safe. You need to be able to deliver gently uh and with dinner plate level accuracy is kind of how we describe it. That's actually super hard to do.

And you know you see a lot of other companies talking about you don't have to you don't have to you know stress that sounds very hard to do if you if well if you if you I mean if you see the way other companies are talking about solving this problem a lot of times they're talking about like descending you know an octoopter of death.

I mean it looks like a lawn mower you know that like within 10 ft of your home. It's incredibly loud. It's incredibly disruptive to your neighbors. It's not really a part of like we we think you know new technology it needs to be part of a beautiful serene world that we would like be proud to hand to our kids.

And so you know the big advantage of of designing the system in this way is that the you know the uh uh the aircraft is staying 100 meters in the air. The aircraft is first of all designed to be extremely quiet and then on top of that it is far safer because it is staying far away from you, your family, your pets.

Only thing that's coming close to your home is the delivery zip, which you can see behind me. This thing is, you know, inspired by Eve from Wall-E. I was gonna I was gonna ask, was there a specific sci-fi that you and the team just love that you you kind of reference? Uh, I think we're really into solar punk.

Have you guys heard of solar punk? Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah.

I think I think that really to me is nobody talks about that and you know so much of I mean a huge sci-fi nerd and obviously so much of it is kind of apocalyptic and the robots are out to kill you and we're like well what if the in the future robots are trying to save your life you know that's that's a different take and I think that completely came across in the video the video was very saturated very orange very like sunny day and it was just so pastoral and lovely I I really like that as like a different vision of the future it was cool and to and to Jord's point you know I think that uh these kinds of systems people people are often like oh it's going to be so loud and it's you know the star the sky is going to be darkened with drones.

It's like it's kind of funny. It's the same way people actually originally felt about cars. If you go and like read the you know if you read the newspaper articles from like 1910 people thought you know cars were going to be the scourge of cities.

Um but I think the reality is actually this is going to take a lot of delivery vehicles off of the roads. This is going to reduce traffic in our neighborhoods. This will reduce pollution in our neighborhoods. improve air quality. It'll reduce noise because these systems are ultimately much quieter than cars.

Um I think there are a lot of you know pretty exciting advantages when you just Yeah, I think I think the the you know the world 10 or 15 years from now can actually be far more beautiful like we can hand space back to humans like your kids could be playing hockey in the street again which I think today you just don't do anymore.

You don't want you know between all the cars zipping. Yeah. Could you talk about any thoughts, you know, ideas around larger payloads?

Like, you know, we've seen like airship uh airship startups emerge that are, you know, basically building like big blimps that could deliver, you know, something closer to kind of a competitor to the cargo ship almost.

Yeah, the cargo ship or some of these bigger, you know, but even like the flying car startups that are trying to f individuals around, I'm sure you're like loosely aware of the technology there. Yeah.

In many ways, like you know, doing these like ultra small drones and with super precise delivery feels a lot harder than just like lifting up, you know, basically an air airship bus and going from point A to point B, but is that at all? I'm sure you guys have thought about it. Any any immediate thoughts?

You know, the market that Zipline is focused on, instant delivery, is one of the biggest markets on Earth. And it's just such a huge problem. And keep in mind really today it's only available to rich people in the US. You know, it's way too expensive. Like even even just in the US it's not universally available.

Not to mention the 7 and a half billion people who don't live in the US globally. So we actually think that as you automate, as you decrease the price, as you expand access and make it universal, I mean you we're going to continue to see you 10 or even 50x growth in instant delivery globally. So whereas 5.

5 billion deliveries might seem like a lot in the US, we actually think there's probably demand for 50 billion deliveries, instant deliveries in the US. So I guess long story short, we've got our work cut out for us. Just spoke on logistics. I think you know that we deliver uh this this system delivers an 8 lb payload.

It's designed to deliver an 8 lb payload. 8 lb is actually a lot. You know, that's like a big grocery bag. Um it's it's dinner for, you know, four to eight people depending on what you're ordering. Um and small dogs.

I think I think ultimately these kinds of systems if you can if you can get a system that can do say a billion you know instant deliveries of these kinds of packages it is actually likely that you would be able to then scale that autonomy up autonomy stack up relatively easy to carry humans for example.

I mean, I think humans is a farer problem and it'll be interesting to see, you know, where that plays out over the next 10 or 15 years. Well, last question, then we'll let you go if you have time.

Um, I would love to know about obviously everyone's thinking about tariffs and whatnot, but how are you thinking about scaling up manufacturing? It seems like you, you know, you have product market fit, you've solved the regulatory risk, the technical risk. Uh, what's next in terms of scaling up manufacturing?

Are you building like a gigafactory for these things at some point? And is that just like an entirely new challenge that you foresee on the future? You know, Zipline has always manufactured everything in the US.

And so one of, you know, one of the advantages, you know, obviously there's this huge competition playing out between, you know, it's kind of great power competition between the US and China.

And I think that a lot of that competition is going to revolve around key areas of technology and everybody's talking about drones.

I think the current perception is that zip uh that that China dominates drone manufacturing and that you know that is true for like DJI quadcopters that you know are plastic and take pictures. But the good news is there are you know there are a few companies that are completely focused on manufacturing in the US.

Uh there are US companies driving different classes of vehicles. Um, you know, Anderl would be another good example, Nuros.

And I, you know, ultimately zipline isn't even, it's not even because it's more efficient from a global supply chain perspective to, you know, manufacture in the US, which in our case it is, but actually the most important consideration is if you're a truly innovative company, you want manufacturing and engineering to be right next to each other, like zipline.

So, you know, I'm I'm actually downstairs at our headquarters. This is now kind of like an engineering prototyping space about a third of a mile away. We have a very large factory and we're scaling that to build about 55,000 aircraft a year in their first full year of production. You guys should come visit if you want.

But I think you know that uh and by the way that's in South San Francisco. So I think people are often surprised that you can like achieve that level of scale in California. You're doing the re-industrialized meme. You're doing love it.

But it's it's just all about it's all about um engineering and manufacturing together. like the the ability for engineers to go get hands on their own parts to start to understand but how does that part actually get built? What does quality look like?

Um and to be able to rapidly change parts of the assembly process if necessary um to achieve reliability, safety and cost. These things are so much easier to do if you do them all in the same place. Sorry, I have so many more questions. We'll let you go, but I have one more.

Um uh are are there any like huge developments in either like open source technologies?

uh you you know see all this development with AI uh that's getting better and better or even just like partners uh for a while there were companies that were thinking about drones as uh we'll build the the operating system for drones and we'll vend into a company like Zipline.

Uh have there been any other key partners or technologies that have really you've kind of built on the shoulders of giants so to speak or has it really just been like you got to build everything from scratch? Yeah, it's interesting.

I hoped that what you just said would happen and in fact when we started we were using a lot of off-the-shelf components. You know we used an offthe-shelf um IMU off-the-shelf GPS system. We used we we're using something called RTK differential GPS.

We uh were using even for the first few uh months we were using off-the-shelf autopilot. Like all of these systems kind of failed. And I would say it's actually very similar.

You know, when Tesla got started, they were like, "Oh, we're going to use an off-the-shelf Lotus Elise chassis and an off-the-shelf battery pack that we're buying. We just combine them together. We're gonna have a good product. " Yep. Turns out like they were wrong.

Like to actually build a great electric vehicle, they had to design the battery pack from scratch. They had to design the entire car around the battery. Zipline found itself in a very similar position where no one is building electric aircraft at commercial scale.

Zipline is the only company that is operating a full fleet of commercial aircraft at this scale. And so it means we had to design the battery completely from scratch. We had to design a flight computer completely from scratch. We had to design the motor completely from scratch.

Um because you know ultimately what all of our customers care about is just teleportation. They just want something to go from point A to point B fast enough to save a human life. And that means we have to make it safe, reliable, cost effective.

And the way to ultimately do that has been to design every component around the use case really.

And so that that's well and it's amazing too that you started in this like ultra high stakes use case which is blood delivery where if you mess up there's like you know massive you know the the biggest consequences and then now everybody else every other American can get their burrito or their cheeseburger you know reliably with the same reliability right yeah no it's it's fantastic well I we'd love to have you back on soon fantastic so fun to watch the strategy play out I'm just genuinely so excited to be a DAU, a zipline DAU.

So, I think you're going to be more than DAU. Three times a day. Be doing a thousand deliveries a day. As soon as you get average H AU. Yeah. Yeah. Hourly. Yeah. As soon as you get AON on boarded, it's game over. You're going to be profitable.

Don't No, I just don't think I don't think this is priced in yet to be honest. I think I think it's going to be like imagine people, you know, shopping like, you know, the whole like drunk drunk shopping meme. It's not just like instant delivery on uh you know you want food or groceries.

It's like imagine being able to like see an item on an Instagram, you know, shopping or whatever, get an ad and get it like 30 minutes later. That's going to change. It's going to change everything. This is so awesome. I'm I'm really excited for you. So, congratulations on the overnight success.

Thank you for your service. Yeah. Thanks for the 11 years of hard work. You make it look easy. And uh but yeah, we really appreciate you coming on the show and sharing all that with us. This is very fascinating. Thank you. And seriously, congrats. Thank you guys. Really appreciate it. We'll talk to you soon. Talk soon.

Bye. Oh, I would almost invest in that company at any price. Yeah. Who who is in this company? Because they've just been grinding for so long and it must be super capital intensive. So there's probably pretty not not a lot of very well-known funds. Seoia recent Google Ventures. Yeah. That happens sometimes.

Another 10 trillion to the to the Holy Trinity. What do you Now? Of course. Of course. Anyway, uh that's great. Yeah, Sequoa got in the series A. Let's see it. You love to see it. Uh anyway, let's move on. Let's do some timeline and then get out of here. We started late, so we're ending late.

Uh, you already heard from Quaid at bezel, but I just wanted to let you know that at getbbezzel. com, your bezel concierge is available to source any watch on the planet. This is this is an interesting fact that people might not know about bezel.

So, they have auctions, they have uh prices like buy it now prices, but also you can chat with a real person who works for Bezel and say, "I want this exact watch. Uh, maybe I saw it in a movie, maybe I'm hearing rumblings about it at Watches and Wonders.

" you can tell them this is the one you want and they will actually go out and source it for you and and and bring it to you which is great. Um anyway, let's move on to uh the OpenAI announcement.

Starting today, memory in chat GPT can now reference all of your past chats to provide more personalized responses drawing on your preferences and interests to make it even more helpful for writing, getting advice, learning, and beyond.

Seems like a nightmare because I've been lying to ChatGpt for about three years now about my expertise. Well, every time because of the prompt engineering, I'll always say like, you know, I'm interested in trains, but treat me like a train expert. I work in trains. I'm I actively own trains.

So, I because I want to I want to prompt engineered to give me like the best data. And so now when I talk to it, it's going to be like as a train conductor, you probably want to go with this train. I was lying. I wasn't actually a train conductor. Explain this like I'm five for. Yeah. It's like, oh, you're five.

Oh, turns. I didn't know you were five. John Gaga. John, the 5-year-old. The 5-year-old. Oh, yes. Like as a 5-year-old. Yeah. So, uh, now I have to go back into Chad PT and tell it, "Forget that I'm five. Forget that I'm a 5-year-old, uh, industrialist who owns trains.

" And, uh, let me tell you about my real history and get you up to speed on the real memories that I want you to save. But, obviously, this is a very cool product release. Makes a lot of sense.

uh they go on in this thread saying in addition to the saved memories that were there before it can now reference your past chats to deliver responses that feel noticeably more relevant and useful. This happens a lot because you have so many different chats going.

You want to reference another one and you have to go in the search bar, copy paste. Obviously, that's a product feature. And this is a testament to OpenAI uh expanding from nonprofit research foundation lab into product consumer. No, and this is the thing people have been saying, oh, the models have no moes, etc.

This is this is one of the modes that will come up. And I'm sure other foundation models will will build this and copy this, but what the name of the game is staying just a little bit ahead forever. And that's what Google did.

And and no one ever pivoted to Bing because Google Google search is always just a little bit ahead, right? Well, if you want to stay ahead, you should get an eightle. Yes, you should. And uh let's take let's do a quick score check here. I think I did pretty well.

Uh I was going to cover eight during the F1 breakdown, but we'll have to do that tomorrow because uh Charlotte is an eightle ambassador and we love F1. I got a 94. Little low on the time slapped 96. You You have an uncanny ability to beat me by like two points. How much did you sleep though?

I slept 6 hours and 49 minutes. Brutal. I slept I mean I slept 8 hours and 11 8 hours and 11 minutes. You put up big numbers, man. But I get in bed at like seven. Yeah, you do. You do. I got to get to bed earlier. I got to get to bed.

It's It's so the the key to sleeping well is like you have to go to bed when you don't feel like going to bed. Yeah. And then you actually get your eight hours. Yep. And you can go to eightleep. com/tvpn. Yeah.

Uh anyway, uh there was an interesting interaction between uh John Carmarmac uh quote tweeting someone named Devin uh about SpaceX. Uh Devin says, "I'm going to call it right now. A lot of stuff is going to break on this mission. " Talking about a new SpaceX mission. It's by design. It's just part of the plan.

Don't get upset. I'm not saying SpaceX plans to fail. I'm pointing out that SpaceX has taken an ultra important principle from software engineering and realized it applies to all engineering. Feedback beats planning. This is a good good lesson. And that you see is why SpaceX doesn't do things the NASA way.

The NASA way was to goldplate everything, plan and test and plan and test and generate mountains of paper detailing every contingency with every scenario planned. SpaceX just shrugs, says it's unmanned and sends it. Half the time it blows up. That's the whole point.

They don't actually want it to blow up, of course, but they're anticipating that it might. That possibility is part of the plan because one rocket blowing up or crashing is is an actual endto-end test. This beats many, many man years of planning and plotting.

The key realization here is that knowledge only comes from empirical observation. Everything else is just speculative. The sooner you get into that feedback loop, the faster you run it. The more iterations you can do in less time. This means while others are planning and speculating, you actually learn something.

Relevant data is the most precious thing in the universe. And it's worth blowing up any number of rockets to get it because rockets are just stuff. They're just made of stuff. And you can always get more stuff. You can never get more time. It's a great insight. It just means we're doing it cowboy style.

And uh I the post is good. You should read the full thing. But John Carmarmac endorses it and says uh I have never seen it expressed exactly like that, but I wholeheartedly endorse it. Feedback beats planning. My plea at Meta was no grand plans, follow the gradient of user value.

And uh I I was uh chatting with John Kellmarmac years ago on on X about this uh talking about how just getting the VR cost curve down just every single headset just slightly lighter, slightly cheaper, slightly better. Like that's what I wanted.

I was pitching like I I pulled up this video of the N64 and you turned on the N64 with put the Golden Eye cartridge in, turn on the N64. This is like way before your time. Um, but uh you turn it on and it would just blink on and you'd be ready to play. And it was it was crazy.

There was no login screen, no off, no no intro, no credits. It was just turn it on and you're just playing. It was amazing. And and I was like, they need to get there for uh for VR. He, you know, agreed and gave some other feedback that was really interesting, but uh interesting uh speed of execution stuff.

Anyway, um speaking of VR, if you're trying to sell VR headsets all over the world, maybe you're uh big screen VR, you got to get on numeral sales tax on autopilot. spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. It's that easy. Yeah, thousands of companies rely on Numeral.

Um you can go to Numeral HQ to uh get onboarded. Uh they'll do a white glove onboarding. Oh yeah, they are just absolutely fantastic over there. 25 states are now taxing software sales. John, I didn't know. Did you know that? No. Yeah, actually you did. They did because you said it yesterday.

Well, Vtorio says, "Thank you to numeral for supporting the show. " Vtorio says, "It's so over. They automated Italians. I saw you put this in there. I like this. You put it in the show notes. I like it. You see the uh the hand movement, which is crazy. It's the Italian. I think Victoria, he's Italian.

Yeah, he's having fun. But uh very interesting art installation. Good viral video. Lots of fun. Um I I I like this one from Framer. Thanks to AI, every meme can be turned into a cartoon easily. And it's Yeah, it's so funny because you remember I we joked about this early on.

It was, yeah, we there needs to be like, you know, South Park meets Silicon Valley where something happens on the timeline, it just immediately gets turned into a cartoon. Yep. And we kind of looked at that and we were like, h it's like funny to do. Seems really expensive. Super expensive. It wouldn't make sense.

It's just like it at the end of the day, it might just be a viral video. It's not really We have a friend who's already using voice AI to make these like incredible deep fakes. Incredible deep fakes. And they're very funny because they're not funny because of the AI.

They're funny because he puts so much thought into the punch line and how it leads into the punch line and he's so creative with it and it's really his life. Completely copies the like the the I can't believe it is. It's really really good.

And so this framer thread is interesting because uh not only do they share this video of the Paris Olympics, that crazy breakdancing video, but uh Framer actually breaks down exactly how to do it, so you can kind of follow along with all the different uh prompts.

You go into chat, turn the images into into uh cartoons, and then obviously change those into videos. But uh it was remarkable. it it's a very watchable video and I think this will be part of like the meme stack going forward when an iconic event happens. Uh it will be instantly turned into a cartoon.

You'll be able to enjoy it as anime if you want. Uh but the real creativity will come from uh that human insight of what would be particularly funny to do in a uh in a cartoon setting. Um it' be very funny. Uh anyway, let's tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously.

Multiasset investing, industryleading yields, trusted by millions. Go to public. com to get started. And thank you to public. They are the ones that power our ticker down at the bottom. Uh stock market immediately. It's all driven by what the hosts of the All-In podcast are tweeting apparently.

Uh every time they tweet phone away from him, but it's going up, it's going down. Today is not as bad as other days. We had a pretty pretty big dip in the middle of the day, but we're doing okay now. Yeah. I mean, we almost hit the circuit breakers today, but we didn't. So, I guess that's a win.

Any day where there's not circuit breakers is a is a Dom Perry day in my opinion. It's great. Uh, should we talk about the OpenAI lawsuit? This is, uh, kind of interesting. This is developing. Um, so Elon has has sued OpenAI, I believe.

Uh, and there's been kind of back and forth about Elon being a co-founder of OpenAI, uh, putting a lot of money into the nonprofit via donations and then not getting equity in the forprofit when that conversion happened and the investment started uh, rolling in. Now, uh, OpenAI is suing, uh, Elon or counter suing.

And OpenAI newsroom writes, uh, Elon's non-stop actions against us are just bad faith tactics to slow down Open AI and seize control of the leading AI innovations for his personal benefit. Today, we counter sued to stop him. Uh, he's been spreading false information about us.

We're actually getting ready to build the best equipped nonprofit the world has ever seen. We're not converting it away. And so, that that's an interesting take. basically saying like the nonprofit is not going away. That actually isn't new. Sam did address that in that it's new positioning, but it's new positioning.

It's getting out there. Yeah. And so they've never they've never been really leading with, oh, we're actually making the best nonprofit ever since. Well, yeah. Because the VCs are like, look, we don't care about the nonprofit that it's going to continue. We only care about the for-profit.

But uh obviously if you're a nonprofit and you have some insane equity position in this like banger consumer tech company uh that's going to be very good to for funding your nonprofit. And so what will the nonprofit do?

Probably continue to work on AI safety and AI research and all this all this stuff which you know I think can be very valuable. And so uh they they want to they want to make it loud and clear that uh the the philanthropic efforts at the OpenAI nonprofit are not uh going away anytime soon.

and uh and you can expect to for them to keep fighting. So uh you know hopefully that all just resolves. My take has continually been mom and dad are fighting. Let's try and get them to sort it out and uh build a glorious future together with uh amazing chatbt and Grock functionality for all of us to enjoy.

Yeah, I feel like if Grock and Chat GBT actually sat down just the two chat bots, they could resolve it with enough back and forth. Well, chatbot arena to sort it out. Yeah. Yeah. Two bots enter, only one can leave. No, no, they should be able to work it out.

They should be able to like, you know, do enough iterations on the situation to like, you know, run a million simulations.

And you know that's actually kind of the scenario laid out in AI 2027 like this whole there's this whole nationalization push and the and the and the three scenarios that are proposed are essentially one the government just says we're nationalizing you we're taking the complete control because we're afraid of you know runaway AI.

The other one is like the the open brain, the leading lab kind of like turns inward and kind of goes offshore and really fights it and doesn't doesn't you know get nationalized but they actually advocate for the third which is kind of a truce and uh and a deal gets broken gets brokered and uh the government winds up working very closely with the leading lab but the lab is not entirely nationalized and uh and that's kind of what you're describing where yeah we will will better AI models that can go and do crazy simulations and get to more reliable truses that actually might be a great outcome instead of instead of this, you know, dystopia where everyone's fighting, everyone's suing each other constantly.

It's like, no, actually everything's just balanced out because we have a million PhD lawyers talking at all times to make sure we have the perfect deal struck at any moment. That's right. Who knows? Anyway, scale AI founder Alex Wang proposes a national AI data reserve to bolster US data.

I don't know what this means, but it sounds awesome, John. Let's push it forward. Aiming to secure a competitive edge over China in the AI race. Uh, very interesting. Uh, we used to have gold reserves. Now we've got data reserves. Big data reserves. Yeah, I wonder what that would look like.

I mean, certainly like sequestering some of the data and protecting it seems extremely valuable since Deep Seek seemed like it was completely reverse engineered from CHP. Esoteric PDFs with forbidden knowledge. Yes, I think Nat Friedman should be the one on the case.

a national AI data reserve should be should be the scrolls cannot be ingested into the next LLM training run. They must they must live in Natan's house forever. Anyway, uh there's some other news, but first let's talk about wander. Find your happy place. Find your happy place.

Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 247 concier service. It's a vacation home but better, folks. It is just delightful. Yeah, Brad Gersonner, who uh recently led the round that we discussed on the show today, uh says, "Google is holding the line on capex.

As I said tonight on CNBC, tech CEOs are ready to run. That's why today's tariff clarity was critical to maintaining our leadership in global AI. Smart targeted tariffs plus a trade deal with China, plus a tax deal will extend US national advantages.

" And uh so this is on the back this is on the back of uh Google CEO uh Synindra Pachchai reiterating their $75 billion capex guide for 2025 despite the tariff uncertainty.

Uh we've been hearing that Microsoft might cancel a certain it was kind of a big headline because it was like I think it was framed by that one poster is like it's so over Microsoft c canceled a1 billion dollar data center.

this is so terrible and it's like well they're still spending 74 billion then you know it's like on capex like the capacity is going to increase maybe they're slowing down a little bit but uh it still seems like and then also like there's just the dynamic between all the none of them want to get caught you know flatfooted here and so and there's also the amazing story about Zuck being yeah we reels we got caught back we caught we got caught flatfooted on reels we didn't have enough uh AI AI data centers to train uh reals recommendation algorithms at scale for a billion Instagram users.

Uh so we built out a re a reals training AI data center and then we were like let's just do two of those and and it worked out perfectly because then they were able to train Llama and uh and add LLM functionality all over the place.

And so I think every uh Mag7 CEO has to be taking that seriously and thinking about well yeah maybe we don't want to get over our skis on capex but we got to be in the game and that means double digit high double digit billions of capex every single year. We're scaling our capex here at the show as well.

We are scaling up. Um well let's close with is there anything else you want to do or you good? Let's save this this next piece for tomorrow. important and I think we should give it some real I agree attention. Anyway, fantastic show, some really great interviews. I had a great time today.

Uh and just thank you for listening and thanks for dealing with the uh cyber attack that happened on the show earlier at 11:00. We had to start late as we fought off just an absolute nightmare for Ben and the whole team. They were stressed, but they got through it and they're feeling good.

And I'm sure tomorrow will be a banger episode. So, tune in right at 11 on the dot. We're going live narrative first. We've been pretty good about going at 11. Yeah, we used to be all over the place. So, uh, the general trend line is is is more accuracy, more professionalism on this show. And so, thank you.

If you've enjoyed the show, leave us five stars on Apple Podcast, Spotify. Fun fact about Spotify. You can't just go leave us five stars there. You got to click listen to the episode on Spotify. Let it play for a while. You can put in the background low and then it will let you leave five stars.

Spotify knows don't spam us, but we're gonna get through that. We're going to get through that first. Thank you to Ramp, Poly Market, Public Bezel, Numeral, Adqu Wander for sponsoring this show. Uh we are entirely corporation supported and we will never forget that. Thank you. Thank you. Have a great day deck.