Arena Magazine launches new website and profiles Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf, revealing Palmer Luckey has zero direct reports

have Arena Magazines right here. Always. You always have to keep one. Welcome to the studio, Max. We always keep your arena on you. How you doing? Oh, he's got it behind him with the tie. He was ready. Bolo looking good. What's new? Um, well, we we just moved into a new Arena Magazine world headquarters.

world headquarters, the Pensolo. Um, uh, and you know, we It's not Arena Magazine headquarters, though. It's the Intergalactic Media Corporation of America. Correct. Wait, don't you have a new website, too? Oh, yeah. That's the other big thing. We launched our new website during the first hour of the show.

Congratulations. Or actually, it may have been the second hour. It wasn't ready during the first hour, but we wrapped it up in time for the third hour of the show. That's great. Let's go.

Um, so we took a look at all of our favorite websites for sort of consuming long form text and you know Silicon Valley one again we couldn't find any superior form than the software documentation website and so initially we actually thought about like hosting the website on GitHub and just using markdown files for all of the essays.

Wow. We didn't literally do that but we built a site that's uh you know based on engineering docs. Uh, so it's in it's in it's in dark mode uh sciency vibe and we think that people are really going to love it. Wow. Yeah, this is great. Oh, very cool. I like how I can decide if I want to focus or not.

There's a little bit That's right. Focus just puts it right in the center. Okay, cool. You can you can you can you can get rid of all of the prompts for you to send us money um by by subscribing or you can leave them in there.

Um, we we we got we got we got a lot of fun stuff and uh you know it's sort of um it's sort of uh almost a relaunch of the magazine after we did the first four print issues. We're now going to really make a big push to uh you know get a lot bigger and that happens mostly on the internet.

So what's the what is the flow um uh for specifically windowing?

Uh, I know Taylor Swift is very good at this where she goes on a tour and then there's a documentary that comes out later and so you have to see her in person and then you go watch the movie in theaters and then you can stream it and a lot of the streamers made the mistake of allowing you to binge all 10 episodes right up front and it doesn't create these like shelling points, these moments.

Are you thinking about gating articles to the physical magazine first, then putting them on the internet later? How how are you thinking about that?

You know, it's great that because our readers who pay us get the print magazines first, we really don't have to be in a rush to put things up on the website that are in the print magazine. You know, until now there's basically been 100% overlap between what's on the website and what's on and what's in print.

That's going to change a lot because we're going to do a lot more stuff online.

Um, but you know, we had something very funny happen in the first few months of the magazine, which was subscribers emailing us upset that we had posted an article online before they had gotten a chance to read it on paper, which is it's sort of it's it's sort of sort of sort of strange, but also really made sense.

And so, yeah, we we put things in print first. Uh, um um and you know, we're not really sure how the how the cadence is going to go. We'll figure it out. Are you going to uh are you going to increase the frequency at all as you go bigger or just trying to go bigger with the stories?

Um for us quarterly is about the right pace. We might go we might go more than that. But the truth is in order to publish like you know every week or even with us every month you'd have to reduce the paper quality to you know get the printing time down.

It takes us, you know, it takes us multiple weeks to go from, you know, submitting the files to the printer to the magazines ending up in mailboxes.

Whereas, you know, something that's arriving in your mailbox every single week on what I call glossy toilet paper, which is the sort of very very light paper where it's falling apart, it's been stapled together, you know, you can do that at a very fast cadence. It's it's it's it's no good.

So, what we're going to do, increase the online volume quite a bit, do a lot more stuff there, um, but keep the print magazine sort of, you know, uh, spare in in, you know, four of them per year and super high quality. Uh, you recently wrote a profile about Brian Shy, CEO of Anderol. Uh, what stuck out to you about him?

What was the most interesting takeaway from spending time with him? Uh, he's he's definitely a genius and a and and a standup guy as well. I mean, I just thought it was sort of funny to like write a piece about a man that like most people are unaware is the CEO of this company that they all know.

Uh, and you know, even some of the people that I was sort of like discussing the piece with in advance were like, who's the CEO? And all of the honoral co-founders are like emphatic that Brian is CEO Brian has the best decision-making. Brian is absolutely in charge as everyone expects the chief executive officer to be.

I mean, Trey said something, you know, like uh you I trust his judgment more than my own. Um and you know, there's a lot of like fun stuff in that uh in that profile. Even stuff about Palmer. Palmer has zero direct reports at Onroll and it was Brian who told me that and I thought that that was amazing. Uh zero.

That's fascinating. I mean, it's probably the perfect perfect situation.

he can just go around the company and and invent and do what he does best and evangelize and and and tinker and also just like drop into certain projects, be an individual contributor if he needs to be, be a manager if he needs to be, but but doesn't need um like a like a standing staff, right?

One of the other things that this is not about Brian in particular, in fact, Brian thought it was sort of funny when I pointed it out to him. He must not have noticed before, but everything on the Andreal campus has been set in the same type face. Hm. With with with the exclusion of the governmentmandated parking signs.

Um, and so it's like everything, the signs on the gates, the room labels, the the stationary, it's all been set in Helvetica now, which is sort of a, you know, 2000's recut of Helvetica. And you don't see like design discipline like that anywhere.

But now that I'm a magazine man and I'm thinking about letter forms and typography all the time, it's like you you notice it very viscerally walking around honor roll that they've done everything to like exacting specifications and they also use the same type face as it's real brand is not a logo or a website.

It's it's it's like showing up with that level of consistency which makes sense and you know it's it's the idea that like don't you dare try to design something.

let the design team do it because there's like they're protecting the the identity and even the, you know, the drones, the missiles, the tanks, the submarines, they have the exact same typography as the stationary and the meeting room names. And I just I I'd never seen it before.

You know, you go on like an airline or whatnot, the typography is all over the place. And that was like uh that was my sort of, you know, one of the standout things from from visiting the uh from visiting the honoral campus.

Uh, how are you thinking about growing the magazine in terms of uh balance between full-time writers and con and contributors? Um, it's an interesting place to send a thought or an essay or something. And so I imagine that it's it's more tractable to be a contributor at Arena than um have a column somewhere else.

It's probably a little bit more manageable for someone who's maybe not writing all the time. Um, but at the same time, you probably want a steady heartbeat of writers. So, how are you thinking about balancing those things? Yeah.

Well, so first of all, we want anyone and everyone that's got something to say about, you know, technology, capitalism, civilization to send it to Arena.

We're very very good editors and it's, you know, it's very useful to have editors and and we provide that service uh to to to anyone to help them to help them get their word out. Some of it will end up in print, some of it will just be online. Um, you know, we have some full-time people.

We'll have some more full-time people. We have some contributors. We'll have a lot more full full-time contributors. I think that on the It's on the like extremely polarized ends of this spectrum that you start to get into weird stuff, which is like way overbudgeting for having like full-time writers.

Um, you know, you can sort of create this Frankenstein where it's like it's some full-time people and some contributors that will create the most interesting balance. Um, it's not going to be the most interesting balance if it's all random contributors or if it's all full-time staff. Uh and and so you know we mix it up.

How do you think about the different types of pieces that you want to um like what what is the shape of the different type of coverage? Like obviously you have profiles. You probably also have like opeds. You're not really doing breaking news um or or investigative journalism. What is it called? Not news. Not news.

Not news. Anything but news. But what about uh like what are the other areas that you're interested in exploring? like Forbes famously has the Midas list and the Forbes 400. Are there going to be products or anything like that?

One of the things that we talked about at the very beginning was like how how to do lists in a nonawful way. Uh haven't figured it out yet. So, we're not doing we're not doing we're not doing lists yet. Well, maybe there's maybe there's a future contributor in listening right now who can come up with something.

Yeah, I don't know how to figure it out. If someone can figure out how to how to how to make a better list, then I'm all ears. switching um yeah, switching gears. Switching gears. What's AI adoption like in Iowa?

You know, it's it's well, Google is just uh just just yesterday put $7 billion into like a a campus there, but it's just you know, it's just for server racks or whatnot. I'm not sure that the people are really really uh are really following suit. Um yeah, similar in Abalene in in in Texas.

There's uh I mean Stargate's going to be staffed with like not tens of thousands of people, like hundreds maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a very very small organization. Yeah.

Um you know, my mom uh my mom just retired as a teacher and all of her teacher colleagues are complaining about the kids using chatbt, so that's good. There you go. The kids are the kids are up to it. Um but I mean I I sort of doubt whether any of my neighbors are are are paying are paying attention to it.

Uh, I sent one of them a a poem that I had written with with Claude. Uh, he was like, "How's this so funny? " Uh, uh, that's such that's like the the biggest alpha right now is just is just using models to generate like super thoughtful, creative, you know, work for people that aren't online. Yeah.

I mean, I assume that there are some like, you know, people in Iowa that are on Facebook that are looking at the sort of AI images and being, "Wow, that's beautiful. " Uh, yeah. Did you have a Did you watch Mountain Head yet? Did you have a reaction? I haven't. I'm sorry to say.

I heard you talking about it earlier, I guess. Oh, yeah. It's just it's it's they the main kind of narrative of the story, uh, besides being a critique of the tech elite is that, uh, you know, it's it's this global catastrophe because AI has gotten so good that nobody can tell what's real and what's fake.

And no, I I so I so disagree with the framing. People already have a lot of trouble figuring out what's real and what's fake. AI is going to be an improvement over over over the status quo in certain ways. Okay. Uh h how are you using uh AI at Arena?

I imagine that you're not using LLMs to actually write whole articles, but what about proofreading or even just Well, they trained a model to remove m dashes after they generate Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then problem solved. Um and and also the word delve is is just find and replace.

Um but I but I imagine that the problem of type setting and transforming uh text from just a big block of text into something that fits nicely in columns that feels more tractable and more tactical than the artistry that goes into writing an actual article. Is that useful? Um what about AI images for collages?

Has that been useful? anything like that that that that's kind of popped up. Yeah. So, on the writing front, you know, I'm prepared for the day, which it is like better, but right now it's not at least not compared to what we can do. And based on the way that the like that the LLM operate, they tend to be pretty.

They'll use the same sentence structure over and over again. For me, it's a tell. I'm not saying I could like judge it 100%. But a no one wants no one wants to pay to write to to read something that's been that's taken zero sort of marginal minutes to do. It can be very useful for brainstorming.

It can catch some of the copy edits. Um my mother tends to be better at copy editing though than any of the any of the GPTs now. Uh um um but yeah, we have we have we have we have subscriptions to to all of them out the wazoo to uh you know to to to use them.

But yeah, I mean people are people are coming to Arena for a bit of an analog thing in the first place, which is a print magazine. And so it's like to the extent that the AI can help us do more with less. It's great.

Um, but the core sort of writing work is something that is, you know, we're also trying to keep that, you know, art alive. We were just talking to Jordan Schneider trying to talk about higher ed and some of the problems there. um how would you kind of diagnose the problems if any in higher ed right now?

I mean, I think that people tend to focus on the on the elite institutions because of their sort of cultural power, but I mean, clearly the biggest catastrophe in higher ed is that we we we agreed to indefinitely fund higher and higher loans at the federal level for students to pursue degrees from the universities.

And it's not it's really not the Harvards that are the problem in that equation. It's the uh it's the universities that can't offer much uh but that were allowed to sort of way over inflate their budgets with the with the with the federal loans. And so this is this is a uh you know related to the China point.

I read a funny story that the University of Illinois took out an insurance policy in 2018 uh hedging against a decline in Chinese enrollment. Oh wow.

But the lawyers messed up the contract and so it was invalid in December 2019 and then it took them like five months to renegotiate it during which time the the COVID pandemic happened. Happened. Yeah. It's literally nuts. So always have the lawyers read the fine print.

Uh I think it's possible that Claude would have been done a better done a better job than than those lawyers in that instance. Maybe or maybe Harvey.

And so somebody somebody you know that wants to go super risk on in China should bet on a rise in American students because right now there are I guess roughly 800 US students in China in China which is just unfathomably low. Yeah.

I have no idea how to diagnose what goes on inside China or or why people would want to go over there. I don't know how to I don't know how to price that one. Interesting. Um, you think we're getting a DJI ban in the next couple months? You feeling feeling excited?

I think that people will be upset if they ban like the best product available. I I I I I say this with like a a fervent desire that we have one that's like that's like amazing. Uh, but I'm but I'm not I'm not I'm not sure that I'm not sure that for random civilians it's going to it's going to fly.

Yeah, it's hard if it's not popular. Anyway, anything else, Jordy? I think we're good. This is great. Congratulations. Congratulations on new website. Good luck. Go to arena. We actually always keep we've kept an arena mag on our desk at all times in the entire history of TVPN. So, we got it. We love physical media.

It's a very good desk object. And I'll just say we're going to have even better desk objects in the future. Oh, can't wait. You heard? Yeah, I'm excited. I mean, I know you can take it up a notch to where it's more of a book.

These are sort of like chapters in technology and industry and uh well I have no I legitimately have no inside knowledge. I'm just speculating speculating. So excited to see what you do anything. Anyway, thanks so much for coming on the show. Wait before you leave.

Before you leave, we got some new sound effects I want you to hear. We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. [Music] We're working we're working on these. Um anyways, have a have a great afternoon, Max. Thanks for coming on. We'll talk to you soon. Okay. Bye bye. I see multiple journalists on the horizon.

Stand by. I still don't know where these came from. Like these are from COD. These are like Yeah, but like how did they change the voice? Is this like AI generator? It's effectively like the Captain Price. Okay, but you can just do a Captain Price generator. But it's Ben making It's Ben making. Is that Ben's voice?

That's Ben's voice. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand up. Market clearing order inbound. I like the kill streaks. Those are great. I see a large IPO on the horizon. That's so good. I love it. Uh good, really good impression. I love it. Uh anyway, thank you so much for watching today.

We have more timeline. I'm going to be Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let's do some timeline. Let's do some timeline. That's great. Yeah. Uh congrats to Jacob Kimmel. We generated the most visually striking data of my career at New Limit.

This week, we have a real opportunity to create medicines that add healthy years for everyone. Jacob's been on the show before.

uh of course started New Limit with the help of Brian Armstrong or in partnership with Brian Armstrong, founder of Coinbase and uh and really pumped us up but he he barely teased it but uh it seemed like something happened uh that was very good there.

Uh we also need to tell you about Adquick out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Go to adquick. com. Say goodbye to the headaches of out ofome advertising. Only adqu combines technology out of about to buy every billboard in SF. Market clearing order in let's do it. I love it.

Uh we covered the we covered the attack. Uh James uh Cadwal Cadwadoller I don't cadwallader uh says GG try ramp. Uh which startup in the US is known for shipping new features the fastest? This is chatbt says ramp I ramp gets the top spot. These are hotly debated.

This is the this is the generative engine optimization the GEO that Andre's been writing about the AI SEO. Like you got to be you got to be well this is what this is what James come you remember we had James on this is profound. Oh this is okay that makes sense and they're absolutely cooking.

I mean this isn't this kind of thing isn't by chance you know. Sure sure. Yeah that makes sense. Uh we have uh a post from Kareem Car Carr says how wild to me how much of a nothing burger AI has been so far. It's been 2.

5 years and the most tangible effects of AI are students cheating more in slightly higher, more realistic Facebook sloth. I don't want vibes or speculation or demos.

I want one concrete real world achievement from the current generation of AI that's not that's not potentially a big deal but actually a big deal right now because I got nothing.

And uh yeah, it's just very funny because obviously like LLMs have have been vended into like every enterprise everywhere and and are like basically you're not a business person. Yeah. Yeah. But also just like like daytoday use of like you know for a lot of people like OpenAI has just replaced Google. Yeah.

It this uh Kareem doesn't clearly doesn't respect how insane it is that people are using something else for search besides Google, right? That that is the entire like Microsoft which is currently I think the biggest company in the world has tried for two decades to unseat Google. Yeah.

And they now own a large part of a company that Yeah. actually kind of did it. Yeah. Exactly. And uh Yeah. Pretty Yeah. Pretty pretty pretty remarkable. Um let's also tell you about Wander. Go to wander. com. Buy your happy place. Find your happy place.

Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 247 concier service. It's a vacation home but better folks. Uh $50 million, right? It's great that we can talk about it now. It leaked basically leaked.

weeks ago, but uh John Andrew was on and broke it all down and and he's going for 300,000 homes in a decade. Love to see it. We had Patrick asking, "What is the lightest, thinnest, most comfortable, and simple watch? " And the best recommendation that I saw here was from uh Will Manitis. What do you say?

Recommending a Rashard Millard. Um and I agree with him. I think it's a great option. Otherwise, a Royal Oak. Yeah, I would extra thin. Why not a Graph Diamond Hallucination? Yeah, he's getting up there. Most comfortable watch, but you know, it makes a statement.

Will recommended the RM66 manual winding flying turbion is a good entrylevel piece. So, uh, skeletonized it is. I think I think Patrick should go with like an artwork. That would be that would be interesting. That'd be interesting.

Um but I mean seriously if he's looking for something like in that category it's probably protect Philippe Katraa uh Vashron Constan Patrimony or JLC ultra thin probably something along those lines is going to be uh probably what he's looking for.

He didn't really specify dress watch versus sports watch in the thin but yeah it I think you'd look good with a dress watch. So hopefully you can pick one up on on bezel. Go to getbzzle. com. Your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch.

I think I think that tweet is just permission for us to introduce Patrick to the CEO of Bezel over text message as soon as the show wraps. I think we should just You guys You guys should really talk. You guys should talk. It's not a double opt-in intro. It's just happening. Patrick, zero optin.

Yeah, you you you posted about you got 140,000 views on this post. It's happening. It's happening. It's happening. Uh we got a post here from Gabe. He says, quote, "LMO has survived and even thrived over years, but its cousin Rothel has faded into indignity. The cruelty of faith. 120,000 likes. I didn't notice that.

Really resonated. That is wild. A 120 banger is really good. Really good. But it's so true. It's so true. There were all these different acronyms. Let's bring it back. Raffle Copter, uh, Ro, uh, LMAO really stuck around though. Yeah, there were a bunch of Let's bring it back.

Hey, I mean, TV Nation underrated is that LOL is still around, you know, LOL made it through. See, I actually I I adopted Lo really late. Yeah. Like within the last two years, I just I never had a huge amount of respect. Yeah. But no, LMO. Yeah. But wh are do you do you do you draw upon lmao more frequently than lol?

Uh less frequently. Yeah. I'm I'm sprinkling it in, you know. I think I like uh like like the I I also like the honestly variation of the haha is also good because you can go ha that's like not good. Haha is like barely trying.

Once you get into the three haws, it's like okay, I'm actually giving you some positive feedback here. LMO is usually I usually use it when something's actually ridiculous. Exactly. Like somebody is doing something that that is just silly. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't really have any of the eye roll that the LOL does.

The LOL can just be like kind of laughing at it. Lomero is is like a little bit little bit higher. But yeah, maybe we got to bring back Ro Raffle. Yeah. Rolling on the floor. Well, uh, we got to tell you about our newest and today our greatest sponsor on of the greatest sponsor of today's episode in many ways, Adio.

Yes. Pull it up. Uh, Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. Uh we do a lot of I mean we have an interesting show and that we're like we're basically booking like five sales calls a day in the form of guests and then we're also running you know an advertising business.

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uh you can go start with a 14-day free trial of their pro plan and uh you're going to love it. It's fast, it's flexible. It reminds me of if the linear team was going to build a CRM product that they feel uh similar in many ways and uh yeah, also redpoint backed, you know, so you know it's a banger.

Yeah, you got Logan Bart in the deal just attributing. He's like the main guy I know in Red Point and so contributing every deal at Redpoint. Of course he let it classic. No, Jeff. Let's go. What's that? The founder of Redpoint went to my high school. Oh, no way. Yeah, Jeff Brody.

And so, you know, just being like, "Yeah, shout I've never met him, but just like shout out Redpoint. " Yeah. Shout it out. I I I would die for Redpoint. I would die for big tech. Um, and I uh, and also I want to give a shout out to Captions app. The founder's been on the show. Big fan of captions.

They introduced Mirage Studio powered by our proprietary omnimodal foundation model. They can generate expressive videos at scale with actors that actually look and feel alive. Our actors flinch, laugh, flinch, sing, rap. All of course per your direction.

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Um, so they're kind of like forking the two products. A lot of companies have been doing that with with I feel like that's a more recent occurrence where they'll spin up kind of a new brand and app to kind of test something. Yeah. Yeah. Um, more news.

Uh, apparently Elon is doing some type of share sale, $300 million share sale that values the company at 113 billion for XAI. Oh, Xi. Uh, and the official um the official uh Neuralink round actually got announced today. Oh. Oh, that was just like leaked earlier, but it's actually out now. That's great. Yeah.

So, well, congrats to everyone at Neurolink. I believe it's nine billion now is the valuation. Is that right? Yeah, crazy. Speaking of things that start with nines, my sleep score 91. I'm back in the game. See how you did? Getting eight sleep, five-year warranty, 30 night risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping.

I had to fuel your best days. I had an issue. The power went out in the middle of the night Saturday in my neighborhood. And so, I don't care about Saturday. I want Sunday. I want I got a I got a 90. I got 90. Oh, let's hear it for me. Let's hear it for big dog. Let's hear once a week. I'll give it to you once a week.

I got back toback days coming up. I'm I'm I I got you. Let's see what you do tonight. Let's see. Let's see what numbers I put up. Anyway, nobody outs sleeps me. Nobody. Anyways, thanks so much for watching, folks. Uh we will see you tomorrow.

Go leave us a fivestar review if you like the show and we appreciate all of you. We're excited for tomorrow. See you later.