Mind The Gaps + Packy McCormick Is Winning The Great Online Game
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A warm welcome to the Risk Reversal Podcast. Guy Adami, always joined by the great Dan Nathan. By the way, you had a great conversation with Paki McCormick. I did. One of our first guests on the On The Tape podcast going back to 21. I think he's a brilliant thinker. He's been all over generative AI and some of the disruptive sort of situations going on. We hit Tesla. We hit a lot of the big hyperscalers and a whole host of other things. So stick around for that conversation. I really enjoyed it, Guy.

Well, not boring was the Knick game last night. I think NBA teams were 970-0, leading by 14 points with two and a half minutes left in a playoff game. Now they're 970-1, and not boring also is

is U.S. stock market. And I want to start with Jamie Dimon because for the last couple of years, you know, this is somebody that's been extraordinarily measured in his tone. I would say he has been less than optimistic. And now he's talking about the renewed risks

of stagflation here in the United States. And it's playing itself out right before our very eyes in a number of different things. Yeah. And the word stagflation is not something that's been used a whole heck of a lot, despite the fact that we had that really bad Q1 GDP print, which was kind of explained away by all the imports in front of expected tariffs. But when you talk about deflation, and you've been saying this is pesky and persistent, even though that we have

what, 2.3% was the CPI last month. What I find interesting, Guy, is that go back to June of 2022, I think the CPI was 9.1, right? The highest reading that we've had, I think, in decades. Yeah, I think you have to go back to like the 70s or so. Fed funds rate at the time was maybe getting up above 2% or so. So here we are, we have a 4.5% Fed funds rate. The CME Fed funds tracker is not

pricing meaningful cuts until september and i say meaningful like the probability of a 25 basis point cut and here we are despite the fact i mean i just look around and i look at the s&p 500 at 58 50 and i say something is mispriced here you know like that's the only way i'm thinking about yeah and what's interesting and this is a quote from jamie diamond i don't agree that we're in a sweet spot you hear people talk about all the time how the market's in a sweet spot the economy

And he does not agree with that. I agree with Jamie Dimon. We are anything but in a sweet spot. And he talked about the Federal Reserve doing the right thing by sort of holding firm. And I agree with that as well. But one thing that hasn't been holding particularly firm are U.S. 10-year yields, which everybody got concerned about a few weeks ago when we had that huge spike to 4.5%.

The president came out the next day and talked about an interview he saw with the aforementioned Jamie Dimon and Maria Bartiromo. The bond market took a few days of sort of, I guess, their concerns were assuaged and only to have yields now go north of 4.6%. And I think more and more people are going to start to come to the realization that, wait a second, the bond market is telling a story that

Japan just had the worst bond auction they've seen since 1987. So a lot of things globally here that are playing into the bond market. And I don't think people fully realize the implications of higher yields. Doug Cass talks about the equity risk premium. I think David Rosenberg has been writing about it. We've been talking about it, but you have razor, razor thin, um,

risk levels right now in terms of what the market seemingly is pricing in. Yeah, and so 24 hours ago before Jamie made those comments, we were talking about an 18 VIX while it didn't melt down to the mid-teens as you might have expected as we were a few percent from those prior all-time highs in the S&P 500 made in February. But the fact that it was sticking around, and we made that point on many occasions over the last couple of weeks,

it kind of speaks to what Jamie's talking about. He's talking about a level of complacency. The other thing I'd say about 10-year treasury yields here is that, yeah, we've gotten back to that level where Trump and Besson and all those folks got really nervous. I guess maybe it was the speed in which we went to four and a half, but I think the

point that you're making right now about Japan. I mean, it's not just here in the U.S. We are seeing pressure on treasuries, on JGBs. We're seeing this upward movement in yields. And, you know, it brings me back to the move index. And, you know, we've talked about this. This is like basically the VIX for the treasury market. And it got as high as 140. And that number might not mean anything, but it was trading at, you know, 95, you know, at

the highs of the stock market when we saw the 10-year yield much lower at 4% or whatever. And now it's trading at 102. It looks also very complacent, the way in which we saw the VIX over the last couple of days. So I think that's something to keep an eye on. If you start seeing that inching up and at the levels where the 10-year treasury is right now, I think it's 459, that would be the thing I think alarm bells would start going off across risk assets.

In the wee hours of the morning, I think part of this is what happened last night. The House passed this tax bill. It's going to go to Senate now, but it narrowly passed. But if you look at the numbers and depending on who you listen to over the next 10 years, it's going to add approximately 4%.

$4.8 trillion to the debt. Now, the optimists will say we will get growth on the other side to sort of offset that. That remains to be seen. But I think one of the reasons that yields continue to go higher is what we're seeing sort of on the debt front. And it continues to grow. And it is a confidence game. And not only are yields going higher, which typically means the dollar follows to the upside,

but yields have been going higher and there's been this reacceleration to the downside in the US dollar. And I absolutely think that's something that I know we've talked about and it's definitely worth watching. Yeah, so talking about confidence games or just con games, look at Bitcoin, it's making a new all-time high, 111,000 right here. It's rallied guy.

50% off those April lows. And so this is one of the things that is interesting to me is that the dollar in early April was going lower. It was breaking levels we hadn't seen in a couple years, but also Bitcoin was, right? And gold was making highs and we were highlighting at the time. So wait, what was the divergence between gold and Bitcoin? Well, Bitcoin is just a correlated asset

to the nasdaq right so the nasdaq was down more than 20 at that point and you know you saw bitcoin sell off from i want to say 100 000 down to like 75 73 or something like that filled in that gap going back to the election and you look at this rally that we've had right now despite the dollar you know what i mean not doing a whole heck of a lot now you would say that

weak US dollar, strong Bitcoin, but to the extent that it's done right now, and now it's massively outperforming gold over the last couple of months. I mean, this is something that to me also should get your antennas up because I don't think it's bullish for many other risk assets.

I agree with you. And Bitcoin clearly has a bullseye in terms of what people are looking for. And MicroStrategy continues to add to their position. And at all time high, Michael Cera looks like a genius. By the way, we're going to get him on the podcast in the next few weeks. So stick around for that. But

The other thing that seemingly has a bullseye is Apple in terms of this current administration and the hits keep coming. And listen, there are a number of reasons, in my opinion, to be bearish of Apple, valuation being one of them. But the other is the fact that, you know, there's seemingly a problem now between President Trump and Tim Cook for a myriad of different reasons.

Yeah, great headline. I think it was in the Wall Street Journal or maybe Bloomberg. But, you know, they said that, you know, Trump's little problem with Apple is a huge problem for Apple. You know what I mean? It's basically he's basically suggesting that bring the manufacturing here. Don't leave China and go to India, that sort of thing. So it'll be interesting to see how this plays out. You know, we've talked about this a lot.

over the last couple of years, really going back to the first Trump administration. I mean, Tim Cook has been, you know, really to perfection, been able to play footsie with President Xi and President Trump and, you know, throw Biden in there, too. You know, he's gotten everything that he's wanted from the manufacturing

manufacturing standpoint, from the demand standpoint of Chinese consumers. Obviously, they own the high end market here in the US and in Europe for smartphones. But this is something that this is not going to go away in the first few months of the Trump administration. When he gets something under it, you know what I mean? Like he's going to keep pounding on this sort of thing. But I think at the end of the day, nobody wants $2,000 iPhones. You know what I mean? And people here in America

don't wanna make 'em either. And I think that's like one of the most important points. And it seems like that's something that we haven't been talking about since mid April, a whole heck of a lot. I think a lot of these CEOs, when we talked about price increases because of inflation related to tariffs, a lot of these guys

who came out and I don't think they thought they were gonna get their heads chopped off by saying, we're gonna have to raise prices. We just went through a bunch of retail stuff, Target, which is doing worse than any other retail we can think of, right? They basically said, oh, we're gonna leave prices. We have other, this is what they, Cornell said,

have other levers to pull to keep prices low guy do you believe that that cornell has other level well i mean i think he would listen i mean i'm not looking to pick on brian cornell or target but i will tell you that this is a stock that has now been more than cut in half since i think the fall of 2021 don't at me if i'm off by a couple months but there's clearly something going on no they don't have other levers to pull and they had the benefit of

of watching Walmart reports saying what they said and then seeing the aftermath of Walmart saying we're going to raise prices and then the wrath that was incurred. So they're not going to make that mistake and say the same thing. And you know what? Good for them. But the reality is they don't have any levers to pull. And that's been playing itself out right before our very eyes in terms of the stock performance or lack thereof, which, by the way, leads me to something I think everybody should be watching as well, because so much in this country is predicated on

the home sector, right? The home real estate market, the home market, how robust it is and what higher interest rates could potentially mean and what potentially higher unemployment rate means. Look at the XHB over the last, call it six months. This is something that made an all-time high in the fall, north of 126. As we're sitting here, yes, we have bounced off of levels that we saw in early April of about 84%.

But seemingly the home builder index and the home builder stocks are rolling over. I think this is something that people should absolutely be paying attention to. Yeah. You know what else helps make that case? So Home Depot reported earnings just a few days ago, right? And the stock gapped up. It traded almost as high as 390. The stock is trading at 366 right now. So not only has it reversed that gap move, but it's gone on and filled in the gap.

going back to the pullback of the Chinese reciprocal tariffs or whatever. So mind the gaps here, people. You just mentioned Apple, similar sort of situation. It's filled in that gap going back to two Mondays ago. So a lot of things are not acting, or at least they're losing steam. Some of the excitement about this 90-day pause with China, because I think it's really important to remember, we don't have a deal with Mexico.

We don't have a deal with Canada. We don't have a deal with EU, despite, I think there was some rumblings of, you know, a formative or something that's going on there. And which leads me to, you know, one area that actually is acting well, and that's the Google. We talked about their user conference IO yesterday at this time, we were talking about a stock that opened up 2% was trading up 5%. It's been a massive underperformer relative to some of the other generative AI names. Well, guy we're doing, uh, we're recording this 20 minutes after the opening, uh,

on Thursday morning, Google's up 3.5% right now. So there is money finding areas in which that maybe they just underappreciated or whatever the hell it is. If you can come up with a good story that changes the narrative of what's been prevalent in the market, I think Google's a great example of that. I think Microsoft's also a great example of that, trading up today 1% very near its prior all-time highs from mid last year.

Before we get out of here and move on to PACI, what's not trading up is crude oil and OPEC's talking about another output hike this summer, specifically in July. And this to me is be careful what you wish for, because I know most people listening obviously want crude oil prices to be lower for obvious reasons. But I don't think what a lot of people understand is the move in crude oil is not necessarily going to be commensurate with the price of gasoline. And that remains to be seen. But at a certain point,

Lower crude prices really start to hurt some of the U.S. producers, and we're getting precariously close to that. So crude oil continues to be a story worth watching. The energy stocks along a myriad of different industries have not traded particularly well.

And there's going to be a real line of demarcation where crude goes too low and then the market starts to get concerned. Yeah. One of our loyal listeners, viewers, guy, Ballroom Blitz, you've probably seen him in the past. He sent me a photograph the other day by email. It was Chevron. It was like, you know, the pricing sheets that you, you know, you pull into a Chevron, you see what's going on. All right. You ready for this? It was regular at $5.75 a gallon. Okay. So he's in the Pacific Northwest. I'm not going to dox him. Okay. But you can.

Then you had Plus at $5.95 a gallon. You had Supreme at $6.15. Okay, he

He sent this to me. I was like, dude, like that's Photoshop. You know what I'm saying? And I went to the Google or went to Perplex and I said, what is the average gallon of gas cost in America? It was $3 and 15 cents. So we've had all this conversation about price gouging and inflation and, you know, input costs and, you know, what it means for consumers. And you just said it, you know, gas is on the top of most consumers mind, right? Like, and I said to him, like,

you know, it's Photoshop. He said, no, that's it. I went to that Chevron station. So when you see that in a part of our country and, you know, AAA has this kind of heat map, you know what I mean, of pricing, go check that out. It's kind of interesting. It would not take much to get crude oil back

nationally above $4. And then the question is, what does that mean for consumers? We've already seen consumer confidence really get to like multi-year lows. What was that 50.2 print last month? I mean, that's a real low, small business confidence, real low. Now I want to say something right now. I mean, I'm not

not pounding the table like I think the economy is about to go into an R. You know what I mean? I don't want to say the full name. I'm not an economist. What the hell do I know? You know what I mean? But if the rhetoric gets dialed up again with China as we get to midpoint of this 90 day thing,

We don't have substantive deals with some of these other big trading partners. I mean, you might see these costs going materially higher, you know, and that's the thing that, you know, the market, the stock market is not appreciating. But you're saying that the bond market is. Yeah, it definitely is. And before we go to Paki, you know, I'll say this, this administration, but all administrations do it, by the way, they pick and choose what they're going to look at. But what they're looking at when they say that gas prices are lower are not gas prices at the

pump. It's the futures prices in the futures world, in the commodity world that we talk about. And the two do not necessarily trade in tandem. So you could see gas prices in the futures world, in the commodity world at one, and then what you're paying at the pump is entirely different. And you're

You know, that's neither here nor there. What is here and there, as you said, the bond market, you absolutely have to continue to watch this. I think you're going to hear more and more people start to talk about the bond market in a concerning way. And I think Japan is going to be a story that nobody but us seemingly has been talking about. The more and more people are going to start to come around to, Dan.

Yeah, no doubt. Again, you and I were saying this yesterday. We thought 18 in the VIX was probably mispriced. If you look at that move index, keep an eye on that. If it's not something you're focused on. I mean, one of the things that I find interesting about that, you know more about the Japanese bond market than I'll ever know. And I just mean that sincerely. It's not something that is, you know, I have too much acumen in. But the fact that, you know, we're seeing yields do similarly there.

what they're doing here. And usually we focus on the differentials, right? That is something that I think to your point, I think you have to pay attention to. Find someone smart who knows about it and figure out what that means for US risk assets and the like. And I'll also say the thing in Bitcoin, unless you're long it and you're enjoying these gains, it should be slightly worrying about other things that you own outside of crypto, in my opinion. Agreed. When we come back, Dan's conversation with Paki McCormick.

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All right, welcome back to the Risk Reversal Podcast. I'm Dan Nathan. I'm joined by a very special guest. He was one of the first guests on the old OK Computer podcast. It is Paki McCormick. He is all things not boring. Paki, welcome back to the podcast.

It is so good to be back. Thanks for having me. All right, man. This is kind of fun because it's not kind of fun. It is fun. Like I said, you were one of our first OK Computer guests. You were also, I think, in the beginning of On the Tape, you were also one of our early guests. I came to know you, the predecessor of Not Boring. What was it called? Not Boring.

Per my last email was like the newsletter before Not Boring. It was kind of Not Boring from the beginning. Okay, fine. I'm sorry. All right. What is Not Boring now in mid-2025? Yeah. Not Boring is a newsletter where I write about tech companies, about 250,000 subscribers, a little less than that, and a fund, Not Boring Capital, where I invest in a lot of the types of companies that are

write about. Yeah. And that's something that you've been doing now for years. And you were a very influential writer on Web3. And we can go into a whole host of, you know, the posts that you're at. When I say influential, I mean, you used to move some of these crypto things by doing deep dives. Is that fair to say or no? I got interested. I always think of myself as like

very like kind of average Joey on things where like maybe I can see things like as they're about to inflect like a day before somebody else. I get interested in things that I think were, you know, about to do well. Yeah.

But yeah, there's no you had your finger on the pulse. You were never like a laser eyes kind of guy. You weren't like all into the crypto punks and the bears or whatever the hell. Were they monkeys or something? Apes? They were apes. I thought and still think that it was fascinating. It's funny looking back on a lot of that, that stuff, you know, I read about Solana and Ethereum and I wrote a bunch of pieces about crypto and I got dunked on for a lot of it when things went south, like totally fairly. And I think now the

the really interesting thing that is happening is, you know, when the markets were volatile recently for the first time, I was like, you know what? I'm actually just going to like move a lot of my QQQ or TQQQ, if I'm being honest, into Bitcoin because I feel a lot safer in this like asset. And it's like finally doing what it's supposed to be doing. Stablecoins are on an absolute tear and everybody wants a piece of stablecoins and they're incredible.

I want you to explain that a little bit for our listener, because we've kind of not that we don't like crypto or talking about crypto here. And I know that crypto meant something kind of different back in 2020 and 2021. And I think that what's happened now is to your point about stable coins. Stable coins were one of the first sort of things to blow up. Right. When you think about Tether and some of this other things.

But now it seems like that's the thing where if you are a scammer, you're really interested in the stable corn market. If you are legitimate trying to build out DeFi, like that's a main pillar of it. Right. And so. But way more now. Right. So I think the big thing that happened, stable coin volumes kind of even throughout the bear market kind of started to pick up. You had people like Tyler Cowen writing about how stable coins were becoming useful. A bunch of kind of.

Financial institutions were starting to get interested in them. Essentially, they're just programmable money. They're digital dollars that can go cross-border without fees, that are just more frictionless than working with the banking system. There are things that are good and bad you need to add on top of that, all the protections that you get in the banking system. But they're this unbelievably smooth primitive for moving

You know what's really smooth is when I go to Citibank and if the number is $50 or $50,000, paying $17 to Citibank to have it wired and show up within... I mean, that's what I don't really understand. You know what I mean? In America, we don't have a whole heck of a lot of friction, right? We have sometimes some junk fees and stuff like that, but the bigger account you have, the more important customer you are, there's really not a lot of friction.

There's not a lot of friction in some cases, particularly if you're an American trying to send money in America. And I think there was a whole narrative around stablecoins that they were just going to be good for cross-border payments and remittances. And that was the big narrative around them then. I think since then, so the big thing that happened with stablecoins is that

I guess it was six months ago at this point, maybe a little more, Stripe announced that they were acquiring Bridge, which is a stablecoin infrastructure company, one of our portfolio companies, for $1.1 billion. And Patrick Collison in the announcement said that they're the high-temperature superconductors for finance, meaning that they're just these smooth, frictionless payment rails.

Yesterday, Ben Thompson wrote a piece kind of talking about what happens to ads in the age of AI when instead of SEO and trying to capture human eyeballs to get them to buy something, you have agents going to talk to each other. And Ben Thompson, who's never been bearish on crypto or never totally dismissed it, but has never been its biggest advocate, was kind of like, look, honestly, to get agents to transact with each other and to kind of

remake the open web and make the web better, the thing that all this is going to run on is stable coins, agents interacting with each other. Why couldn't agentic AI work on the US dollar? That's what I don't understand. Try to get your agentic AI even a bank account. It's not a human being. You can give it a wallet with a certain number of dollars in it with programmable. It can spend X on this. It can spend Y on this.

I don't know about your city account, but I would imagine you'd have a hard time kind of programming your city account to say like, here, go let my agent. No one's going to do this. Give me, give me the overrunner people. No, no, not in 2025 or 2026 or probably even 2027. Like all about agents are all about trust.

And if you think about how long it took for people to trust putting their credit card into Amazon or eBay or something like that, I just don't believe that a financial institution that has so much regulatory oversight and then you put that together with basically people and just like the way in which we do things. I think I'm taking the over on all of it.

But it's interesting to me now you are moving some of your NASDAQ. And listen, I've been talking to you for five years and you, whether the market was up, the market was down, you were always buying the QQQ. And I think this is a pretty good segue about a lot of the stuff that you've been writing about. I think the through lines have existed for five years. It's about innovation. It's about those kind of, you know, really hunker down and not thinking about next quarter or a year from now, but thinking forever.

five years from now. And this is a good example, I guess, of Stripe, what you're just talking about. This is obviously a massive private company that has no intention, not in '25 or '26, of going public, but they are doing some things that are really, they're thinking out five years and stuff like that.

So give me a sense for how you're thinking about technology as a whole right now, because some of the hardest hit stocks in this like little bit of a shakeout over the last few months were like the ones with the biggest moats. They're basically near monopolies. They have the best managements, you know, all that sort of stuff. So how are you thinking about it right now as we're like

really within a few percent of the all time highs. Yeah, I mean, it'd be good for everybody in VC if Stripe and the rest went public. But at the same time, they can buy a stablecoin company when people are like, what is going on with crypto? OpenAI just announced they're buying Johnny Hive's company for six and a half billion dollars, which as a private company, you can just go do that as long as you have liquidity and people are more than happy to give them to give them capital to go do things like that. And so I can see the argument for them for them staying private.

I'm still in like, you know, my second biggest holding now is TQQQ as opposed to my biggest, but I moved a chunk over to Bitcoin just for safety. Just explain what the TQQ is. This is not investment advice, anything that we say on this podcast, but it's trip along now, Zach. And it's in Composer, which is the investment software that I use, and it switches back and forth. And if things get oversold or overbought, then it... So it's an algo that readjusts your portfolio? It's an algo. Like it's very...

- I gotta check out the Composer. - Composer's really cool. Full disclosure, portfolio company, but it's where I put all of my public equities 'cause I'm not a good trader and so it'll just switch me back and forth. The one trade that I did make was just getting out of anything that I thought could go down 50% in a day around Liberation Day.

But still very, very bullish on NASDAQ and technology long term. And I think there's a bunch of different ways to look at it. I was talking to a portfolio company that's working with a lot of the Fortune 500 on AI stuff last week. And just hearing the numbers that they were ripping off in terms of

what companies were both making and saving by using their product. And this is a private conversation, like not a sales pitch at all. It was the first time that I was like, wow, I should probably actually just buy the S&P like the margin profile in a lot of these companies could improve significantly if you can do more with what sectors in particular do you think are going to be like affected, positively affected right away, like within a year or something? This is.

I don't know if it's a year or two years that it actually starts showing up. Cause I think there's a lot of experimental budget that companies are playing with right now. Um,

But this was broad based. They were talking about like CPG companies and kind of big food companies all the way to the financial institutions. When you go financials, you know, insurance, some industrial processes first before like CPG or because is that logistics? Like, you know what I mean? Not to get too bogged down. What I'm talking about here is like just very specific stuff. Like they have a team of 100 people who are doing marketing stuff on a certain project.

product and like watching their Amazon pages and seeing how they're positioning against competitors. And all of a sudden this thing can track all of that for you, write the own copy, change up your PDP so that it's more competitive with your competitor and increase sales and do that with a 10th of the people that you, that you normally have.

That, to me, I think is probably where the impact shows up first in this broad-based, small, maybe you're talking like a point of margin kind of way that the next time you have to go out and hire, you're not hiring those 10 people, but you're just doing more with the people that you have. That one, to me, just feels like a good for kind of the whole market kind of thing that the companies are just going to get more efficient and smarter there.

I also think, and this is me probably being over-optimistic about young tech companies and the nature of my job and what I write about and what I do,

I think this is an unbelievable time for companies that are newer to take over kind of the incumbents and to jump up. Yeah, so you had a post about that. Why don't you just, you want to run through that a little bit? Because I think that is the story of innovation. I think it's the story of the U.S. economy for the most part. If you go back 100 years, too, I mean, I think some of the stuff then wasn't as sexy. It was probably pretty sexy back then.

when you're going from the, you know, a horse and buggy to, you know, just the Model T or something like that. But it just seems like there's so much now and it's happening so quickly, even if you go back 25 years, even during the internet bubble, it all seems so rudimentary back, you know, like thinking back now. Totally. I mean, the way that I view the world, kind of, you know, the history of economic development, and this is oversimplified and dumb, but is...

For most of human history, we innovated in the physical world and we did it slowly. And then that got faster with the Industrial Revolution.

for 50 years pretty much we just built software and kind of forgot about everything else and I think that's a really really great thing because now we're in this period where we're combining hardware and software and giving stuff capabilities that it's that it's never had before the most the easiest example would be you know a Tesla that can update over the air and I know we have differing differing views on Elon but like

That has inspired, I think, a whole kind of wave of new companies that are going out. So speak about that because, again, you just mentioned that there's a whole group of really innovative private companies, upstarts that are set out to disintermediate or disrupt, you know what I mean, existing incumbents, which has really been the story of tech. I mean, I think, put to your point, the focus on software, now we're getting into kind of real-world stuff, whether it's EVs, whether it's rocket ships, whether it's satellites, all that sort of stuff. Yeah, and I think the point of tech for the past 50 years largely, like,

Microsoft wasn't replacing an existing incumbent, really. It was just a net new-- - They created a category. - They created a category. Or Facebook, maybe it displaced phone calls a little bit and certainly advertising. - I love my MySpace page. - If you count MySpace. But it's not toppling a big-- It's like a bunch of these net new things where it's not replacing the whole SaaS industry, which has made a ton of money, nibbles around the edges and makes a bunch of things more efficient but doesn't go out and replace companies.

For that piece that you talked about, I looked back, you mentioned the horse and carriages and the Model T. There's a picture of Fifth Avenue during the Easter parade in New York City in 1903, and it's all horse and buggies and there's one car. And you fast forward just a decade and that same picture and that same location is all Model Ts and all cars and one horse and buggy. And in an eight year period from when Ford started producing, or the 10 year period from when Ford started producing the Model T to a decade later when the next kind of census came out,

Ford's model T sales were twice as big as the entire horse and carriage industry in the country. So these things, even then, can happen really, really fast. And even like Ford famously said, you know, people ask for ask me what if I ask people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse and not the car. And so you see these things that have been around for thousands of years that are Lindy that nobody thinks are going away. And then even back then in ten years, they get replaced. And I think we're seeing that

across a bunch of different industries now. So Tesla, SpaceX doing something very hard, had it easy in terms of the competitive side because the US aerospace industry. - Thanks a lot Boeing. - Yeah, thanks a lot Boeing. Boeing is I think emblematic of the type of company, like these things just happen where over time you are innovative. Boeing did the same thing to the other airline companies with the jet engine and kind of just won that industry kind of coming out of the war and a decade later.

And then you focus on the process, you focus on your margins, you financialize and outsource a bunch of different pieces to the point where you have a really hard time innovating anymore. And sometimes that works and sometimes you can get away with it. And sometimes now there are these triggers where you have AI, you have, I think, better electric motors are a really, really big one. Batteries are a really, really big one. I think the electrification of everything to me is like almost as big as,

as AI. And so now there's just another maybe example of a Tesla-like company that's younger but still known would be walking down the scale like an Anduril going after the defense primes.

500 billion or so, 400 billion of market cap up for grabs. They're starting to actually, you know, compete for some of these big competitive programs. And they're actually defining a lot of that new tech as far as like military applications and like, because like the incumbents, right, to your point, they have to defend their moat to some degree. And they have these big, chunky contracts and they're always late. And then they're, you know what I mean? That sort of thing. They're late. Not only are they always late, but they're always late by design and they make more money.

when they're late. Because it's a cost plus contract, if you go over time and over budget, you make more money. And so somebody comes in and says, we're going to take the capital risk ourselves. We're going to develop technology before the programs are even announced and kind of guess that this is the way that the world is going. And we're going to design these kind of like small, cheaper, attributable systems as opposed to these big, exquisite F-35 or, you know, like

massive, massive ships or these things that take decades and tens and tens and tens of billions of dollars to develop.

we're going to just design a bunch of stuff that the hardware is nowhere near as robust, but because it's all connected with software, the whole system works together better than some of that does for where warfare may be going. And they came out before Ukraine, and now I think everybody sees that that's where warfare is going. And that's just not something that you can easily do as a Lockheed or a Boeing is say, okay, great, we're a software company now that is doing a bunch of small things that all work together. First, good luck hiring the software talent that

an angel can hire. And second, to your point, you're just never going to give up on those big contracts. So this stuff doesn't happen overnight. But you see a program like Golden Dome, whether it happens or not, there's going to be a trillion dollars kind of up for grabs for American made products that are kind of net new. And so there's going to be a bunch of activity there.

You remember when Tony Stark gave back from, I think it was Infinity War, one of the final ones, he said, "I wanted to build a dome around the Earth." I was thinking about that. That was probably like a $25 trillion project. That was really stupid. But don't laugh at me, Bill.

I'm just saying when he said the Golden Dome, I just thought about it because I just saw one of those. I watched those Avengers movies every time on a long plane ride. They were always on the choices. So I really love them. I was really late to all that stuff, the MCU. I have not gotten deeply into the MCU. You were like the new tech guy. Let's go back to Tesla for a second because I really, this is one that's like, I'm curious how you think about this. Was Tesla...

Was it disruptive to the auto industry? Because like last year in 2024, like 12 million internal combustion engine cars were sold in the US. Last year,

Tesla sold 1.8 million cars, half of them here in the US. So you can do that math and you could say, well, you know, we also have GM, we also have Ford. I used to have a Mach-E that I loved. Okay, we have the German selling EVs here, that sort of thing. And you start saying to yourself, I don't know how disruptive it is and I don't know how innovative those cars are anymore. And yes, you're excited about over the air, like updates and that sort of thing. But if you like get into a fender bender with your Tesla,

Good luck trying to get that fixed in a week. I mean that sincerely. So like I think about it and you know how many cars they're supposed to sell this year? 1.6 million down from 1.8 and it's down from 2 million three years ago. And so I say to myself, I don't know how disruptive it is. And then I think about the CEO, which we could all agree what the best thing that he did about EV and I know you're excited about electrification and stuff like that. He really pushed

for that to disrupt the initial, you know, like the, but I don't know if it's working because he also went against some very simple principles of economics. He thought there was price elasticity, right? Based on when there was starting to be a trade war,

a price war, I think in late '22, he's like, "Well, let's lower the prices. We'll gain market share. We'll then kind of topple some of our..." And it just didn't work because the cars, the pricing got killed. And then all of a sudden you see the rise of BYD and some of these others. And I think Tesla, I think they're screwed from an auto standpoint. And I think that's why he's saying,

Don't look over here. Look over there. Have you seen the robots? Have you seen the robo taxi? That sort of thing. And I got to tell you, robots, I'm taking the over and the cyber cab with two seats yours. Like I don't you know what I'm saying? All right. There's so many good points in there. One, I don't think that the, you know, like Anderle in five years is not going to be the only defense company. They'll they'll all be there. The defense budget is going up. And so, you know, there's just room for for somebody else on top. My thesis is more about

you know, faster growth, better margins, sexier. Hold on, Tesla? We're talking Andro. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm talking Andro. Tesla's margins are below that of like traditional autos right now. Yeah. Sorry, sorry, sorry. No, no, we're talking, we're talking, where your margins are, you know, the incumbents margins are locked because they're doing cost plus and Andro gets to, you know, earn, uh, earn bigger margins to the extent that it's able to deliver, uh, you know, on, on budget. Um,

But Tesla is really interesting in a bunch of ways. So obviously it's the most valuable automaker in the world. We have the meme conversation. Maybe it's just the longest-lived meme stock of all time. But it's worth twice as much now as the entire auto industry or the top 12 companies market cap was, twice as much as all the auto industry's market cap in 2003 when it was born. My favorite example of kind of new versus old here is during COVID when there were the chip shortages,

all the incumbents, Ford, GM, Chrysler, whoever, cut production dramatically, took $2 billion, $3 billion write-offs because they couldn't produce cars because they couldn't get the chips. Tesla, because it owns the full stack, rewrote all of its firmware to be able to use fewer chips and actually doubled its production over the next year or so during COVID.

And so there's a speed advantage there, but it doesn't mean that you have to kill. Well, he also refused to stop production, which a lot of other, you know what I mean? So the thing for me, and you wrote this great piece. I can't remember a few years ago. Maybe you'll talk about it a little bit, but like how Elon won. Which game? The online game? The great online game. Honestly, we're going to put that in the show notes because I fucking...

I fucking loved that. It was so good. And I think, like, I remember thinking, yeah, I'm not an Elon fan, but I agreed with like 96% of what you said. But he doesn't think the rules apply to him, right? And that's one of the reasons why I think he's been able to be, you know, like push to the edge some of these sorts of things. But at the end of the day, we have a rules-based culture.

There was a rules-based stuff, but people were allowed to go into factories and do all of that, and they would have shut down Tesla if he was breaking the law there. It really was. I was going back and rereading all the articles from the time. It really was...

all the big automakers saying, look, we can't get chips and we can't make cars without chips. And Tesla went back and said, well, we actually control all of our software and all of our hardware. We still import chips, but we can rewrite our systems to be able to use fewer chips. And they redesigned the thing from scratch. Even after COVID, they just used fewer chips in the car because they were able to do that. So more nimble there, bigger market cap.

even at a smaller kind of market share on the car front than a bunch of other folks. I think that's interesting. On the self-driving cars, I think it's really TBD now that I think Waymo is doing more rides than Lyft in San Francisco. They just did 10 million paid rides. Yeah. And it's amazing. Have you ever? Oh, they're awesome. I got into an Uber afterwards because to leave the city, you had to get an Uber. And I really felt a little bit nauseous driving in the back of the Uber coming from the Waymo. It was a smooth ride.

there's a lot of people who think that Waymo is like the right now solution and that actually Tesla, and this is not just like Elon fanboys, but that by using kind of cheaper hardware and better AI and having cameras and, you know, having like being able to use kind of normal cameras as opposed to LIDAR and all of that type of stuff that over time, that advantage kind of compounds and that you'll see the same thing that you see in the LLMs that just data and compute end up

winning and so maybe they can do that down the line. If robots are big, you steal a lot of the stuff from what Tesla did. You'd see a lot of that expertise and put it in robots and a lot of the stuff that you need for self-driving, like it all kind of fits together.

Maybe we wake up in a decade, and Elon could screw all of this up, but maybe you wake up in a decade and it's worth $10 trillion because now they're selling 100 million robots and everybody wants them and they're getting cheaper and it makes all of their products better. - Yeah, I buy that. I guess my point is I'm just gonna take the over on most of that stuff. The fact that it's literally a trillion dollar meme stock

And, you know, so many folks really believe it's going to be the first five trillion or whatever. Like, yeah, if robots take off, if he redefines, if Uber goes to zero because what he's been able to do, you know what I mean, on that front. I just don't.

I just don't believe that the cyber cab and the way that they are doing that relative to LiDAR, and again, I'm not a technical guy or anything like that. A, these things have to scale, right? And I would see that, okay, if you're going to use

AI and you're going to use cameras like that probably scales to the point like what you were just saying, the way that they've been building EVs much better than Waymo having like $100,000 of equipment on these cars. Like I. And the OPEX of having to keep buying updated maps and any time there's like if you just have a camera,

You just drive kind of like a human. You see what's going on. If you don't... Unless it's dirty in front of it. Unless it's snowing. It has been so funny to see that these are very susceptible to just pranks because there's no driver in it. So you can put a thing in front of it and it just won't drive anymore. So there are plenty of things to work out. I just think it's a reasonable approach. I doubt the cyber cab is going to be the final form factor. But the Teslas themselves can mostly...

drive themselves. Yeah, but he says ridiculous things. Of course. So no one wants to own the fleet to these things, right? They're depreciating assets. They're, you know, like, yeah, there's companies that have been born out of just buying like a hundred thousand Teslas from Hertz and then renting them out at usury rates to, you know, folks. And then those guys are barely making a living driving Ubers. You know what I mean? Like, it's really sad. Have you ever talked to these guys? Like some of these guys pay $800 for

a week to rent cars, you know, and the first $800 of the, you know, that they earn on goes, you know, right to these fleets and stuff like that. So when I hear Elon talk about, well, if you were a consumer and you own, you know, a model three or model Y, you're going to be able to put it in the cyber cab network. Well, you've done Waymo. They, I was just in Atlanta actually. And I know they haven't rolled out in Atlanta yet, but I saw this whole depot and I saw a bunch of the Waymos, you know, the lack, uh,

what are they? The whatever the trucks are. Yeah. The Jaguars. And I saw them all lined up and you can look at a depot. You need electrification stations. You need people there to clean them. You know what I mean? All that sort of stuff. I mean, it's not like, you know, like you just like open your garage and let the model three just roll out. You know what I mean? Like it's going to be really complicated. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. I don't, I don't know. I don't have a strong view on the, the,

or the Uber-like business itself, as much as self-driving is gonna be cool and I wanna have a car that drives itself. You know, when...

It's funny, you don't even hear about FSD anymore. Like one of the reasons why the stock went from 250 to 500, you know, the whole idea was that they were going to get quicker to FSD. Right now it's supervised FSD, right? And then they're going to be able to sell that for $10,000 and that's pure margin for all intents and purposes on the cars and that's how you go from...

you know, 13% auto margins back up to 25 where they were just two or three years ago. The only problem is your biggest competitors outside the U S B Y D are giving it away for free. You know what I mean? So like, so FSD, um,

Not particularly interesting in my opinion. So you got to get to robots and you got to get to cyber cap. You know what I mean? And so my question to you is with a trillion dollar market cap right here with, you know, auto gross margins in the shitter with growth just halted, they're actually, you know, like, like deliveries are going down. Yeah. Would you buy the stock, not investment advice right here for five years out thinking like Ron Baron or Kathy would like, they think this is going to be a $10 trillion company. That's not,

It's not what you do. That's not what I do. Yeah. Um, but you get asked, you sit around and you talked a lot, like a lot smarter people than me on tech. You don't even mean a lot of people are on. I think it's like pretty fully priced. I don't know. I think you're probably, uh, paying for a lot of that, you know, that stuff coming true. Um,

I hope that all of it does and I hope it becomes more valuable, but I don't have a strong view on Tesla. But you're also your point about the piece that you just wrote is that there is going to be some amazingly innovative companies run by people who have been inspired by Elon who are set out to disrupt that company. Yeah, I think it's the that company, although people in the US at least have been scared to go

you know, do a Tesla competitor directly. You know, we've talked about Rivian before and super, super cool product, but it's not going like it's going for a different piece of the market and not trying to. What piece of the market? I'm just curious because it's still a high end and we know that like Tesla, for instance, you know, less than 5% of their sales now are the Model S and the Model X. You know what I mean? So they are literally mass market, but for some reason they can't go low end. You know what I mean? They don't have a $25,000

Rivian, this is totally anecdotal. I was out in Boulder visiting my brother over the weekend. And oh, this is a great story. I think I told it already on a different podcast. So my brother lives a block away from Elon's brother, Kimball. And in his front, you know, in his driveway, he's got two Teslas and they're both Model S's. I think I'm not trying to dox him or anything like that.

But like two doors down a house that's just as nice as Kimball's there's two Rivians in the driveway. Like that's a pretty good flex, right? Totally. And I saw a lot more Rivians again, purely anecdotal in a town like Boulder, pretty liberal. This is probably one of the towns where Etsy is sending a lot of those bumper stickers. I bought this, you know, Tesla before Elon went crazy sort of thing. Yeah. But,

and we did talk about Rivian a few years ago. You wrote a great piece. You came on CNBC talking about it pre-IPO, and you weren't making investment advice, but you made the argument why this could be one of the first real competitors to Tesla, and it's a good car. It's a great car. It's a hard business, all of the above. Yeah.

I would probably drive a Rivian. I mean, certainly over a Cybertruck if I didn't live in the city and had someone actually plug in, I have to do an ICE because we don't have... It's hard. I had... Well, that's... I bought the Mustang Mach-E a couple years ago. I loved it. It's a great car. It's, you know, it wasn't me. It wasn't my, you know what I mean, sort of thing. The biggest problem I had was range and charging, you know? And so the city right now is just not set up for tens of thousands of, you know, EVs. Like, so that's a problem in places like...

like this, especially when you're paying $800 a month just to park your car in the city. But imagine when it can drive itself to Jersey City, plug itself in, and then pick you up in the morning. Well, you know, I hope I'm around in 2075. So when that happens, you know what I mean? But, you know, we don't have to get bogged down. I get bogged down a lot in Tesla. These guys know that.

But I just think it's a really interesting debate because I meet so many smart people, whether it's in public markets, clearly in the VC space, and then just entrepreneurs in general. There seems to be like everyone's convinced that, you know what I mean? He's the guy. He's the golden god in this or whatever. But there's going to be another guy who comes along, or gal for that matter, who's just kind of less crazy. But the thing is, so many people love the crazy. But...

I think you can be because Elon exists. I think the thing that I think is probably underrated still, even if you appreciate Tesla and appreciate SpaceX, I think the thing that's underrated is one, how many founders are just inspired by the types that I'm talking to who are trying to build these kind of big physical things and complex systems.

by SpaceX and how many have been trained at, I mean, SpaceX in particular, Tesla to a lesser extent, but how many people now are going to attack every piece of the economy kind of using what they learned there where you don't actually need to be as crazy anymore to be the one who follows kind of Elon breaking through. You have to be a little bit of like a promoter and all to raise money for this type of, you know, he has went bankrupt personally a couple of, or

a rocket company. Well, that was in the Ashley Vance book. It was amazing. He had a handshake deal, I want to say in 2013 with the Google guys because he couldn't make payroll. Yeah. I love that about him. You know what I mean? Yeah. I love it that he's willing to put it all on the line. And he also said something really interesting on

on the January call, which was a Q4 call and the stock was trading horribly. I mean, it was like, like maybe $200 or 220 or something like that. And a lot of folks were asking, or at least one analyst asked him about his time and how he's allocating it and this and that or whatever. And he said, well, I think he said, I'm paraphrasing, obviously, you know, he's built great teams of all these companies. You know, a lot of folks were kind of worried about what he was doing during the transition and how much time he was going to spend. And he said, I go to where the problems are.

Yeah. And I thought that was a really interesting thing, but we've never seen a human being who presides over so many important things. Right. And you could say that, you know, Tesla is an important company largely because it's market cap, largely because all the stakeholders, largely because what he's trying to, you know, disintermediate or disrupt. And then you think about SpaceX, Starlink, X, XAI, um,

Neuralink, am I missing any here? You know what I mean? - Boring Company, yeah. - Boring Company, is that where Not Boring came from? - No, but somebody did make me a hat with the Boring logo with a knot on top of it. - Well, Boring Company seems like not a real company for whatever it's worth. Like the whole tunneling thing, it doesn't seem particularly interesting. Remember when you were selling like flame throwers on Boring, you literally could buy a flame thrower on-- - Was that on Tesla.com or was that-- - It might have been. - I think that was a Tesla.com thing. I mean, to your point on him going to where the problems are,

I went out and visited SpaceX a couple of years ago and was talking to one of the engineers there. It was like, this was in the middle of the Twitter thing. And so he's like, Elon hasn't been here as much, but he'll fly in, you know, after two weeks gone into a meeting with the world's top rocket scientists and

and tear them apart and get to the core of their issue. And I think that's how he's able to gain so much respect from-- - It's funny, I'm calling bullshit on that, and I know you heard that direct from somebody who's there. - I heard it from multiple people. - I think for every one of those people, there's probably 50 people that worked at his companies that would say something very different. I mean, maybe I'm wrong about that. - I think. - Yeah. - I think so. I think you are, actually. I've talked to my job now. - You think I'm wrong. - It's talking to a lot of these people. - That could be. - Yeah, I think a lot of them-- - And it wouldn't be the first time.

- There's plenty to criticize. I think that the people from his company are, his companies are incredibly bought in on the mission and understand how insanely difficult it is and have respect for his ability. - It's funny, I was talking to a very senior guy at Facebook, he's pre-IPO Facebook,

And I was asking him about Elon and he basically said every one of his companies has essentially ring fenced most of the major decision making away from him because they don't have access to him. Sure. Point he'll fly in, he'll do that thing. He's the crazy genius. He'll pinpoint the problem. And then it's like that scene in Jerry Maguire, you know, when he's like gets fired and they're trying to get all his clients and he walks out, he gives this huge speech who's coming with me. And you know, the goldfish,

And then everyone stopped. You know, they've been there for two minutes. They're listening to his rant. He gets in the elevator, the doors close and everyone just goes back to doing what they're doing. You don't, you don't, I'm saying like, I, but again, Oh, we don't have to get bogged down in that. And maybe they'll cut this whole bit. I don't know. Um, all right. Uh,

I want to get, we've been going for a while here. What's, what most interests you right now? Like when you think about this, you've had this amazing purview, I think of what's gone on specifically in the private tech markets, disruptive technology. I know you talk to a lot of brilliant builders, investors, both public and private markets. Like what, what drives you each day? And again, this is important. You do deep dives, you research stuff, you invest in the companies, that sort of thing. So what are you most focused on right now?

It is this trend. I think the most exciting thing about this time is that there's not just cloud or mobile. There's 12 different things that are all happening all at the same time that people are able to just pick and choose from as they're building new things. There's a four-minute mile effect from SpaceX happening and then Android starting to make progress against incumbents that are making people go out and build things in all sorts of

categories. To me, that is the most energizing thing in the world. Like I sound super cheesy when I say this, but like my passion for this stuff has always been the intersection of the business model and the technology. Yeah. Why is that cheesy?

It sounds very MBA to say my passion is at the intersection of business model and technology. But I do think like, I think there is some like unbelievably cool sci-fi tech happening that like has no business model to support it yet. And that stuff is really cool. We write about it every week. We do this like weekly dose of optimism where we talk about just like the cool science and tech stuff happening. And that stuff is awesome. But like what gets me excited both to write about as an investor is

How is this changing? By the way, you mentioned Ben Thompson before. It's one of the first things I read every morning, Stratechery. And, you know, he's got a lot of passion about what he does. It shows in his writing, but you actually go much deeper. He, this guy, he's one of the most brilliant guys in technology. I mean, you know, like,

He's forgotten more than 98% of the people who are practicing in his space. And the fact that the other day, Jensen Wong was on his podcast and he's writing about it. I mean, the list goes on. Satya was on, I think, a few months ago. I mean, it is pretty amazing. I love your passion. I think...

You do, I've noticed on some of your pieces now you're starting to do TLDRs. You know what I mean? Because they're deep, man. And like, once you get through, like what you think is like, you know, halfway through, then there, it keeps going and going. But that, that is passionate. Like, I mean, like you couldn't do that if you weren't passionate about the thing. Cause you don't get paid by the word. No.

I should. I've written deep dives on two companies this year. Meter, which is kind of, you know, think of it as like modern Cisco fully vertically integrated. That was a 25,000 word piece. It's like a hundred pages. And then base power company I wrote about for the second time. And that was like,

15,000 words. I think base by the way is like the perfect example of this. One of the co-founders Justin is, is a X space X. They're building residential batteries in, in Texas and we can get into a whole long conversation. All right. So base and what was the other one? Meter. Okay. We'll put them both in the show notes. Cause again,

Think about this. If you don't know who Packy is, you're listening to this podcast and you're always looking for new stuff. What's the next thing? You got to start reading him. You got to start listening to his podcast. And I mean that. I felt this way for like five years. Exactly.

You gotta go back to that, the Elon winning, which one is it? - The Great Online Game. - All right, give us the TLDR on that one because I feel like if anything, three or four years later, it's probably more true now than it was then. Is that fair? - It is, but I like it less now. - Oh really? - I mean, I like the piece. I think it caught the moment in time really, really well.

I'm not like as bullish on spending so much time on the Internet. Like, you know, this was written in the middle. I don't think you were making the case why, you know, why you spend so much time in the Internet or why it's, you know. The argument was was really this was like kind of around the time we were emerging from our homes. But like still people spending a lot of time online, spending a lot of time on social media. And the argument was really.

We live in this wild world now where like you can hit certain keys on your keyboard and like kind of win the lottery. And not just like, you know, now I think one of the reasons I don't like it is because people have kind of figured out this system and hacked it. And now there's just so much engagement farming and just like kind of crap and threads and all of that kind of stuff. But what I love about the internet and why I called it the great online game is like

If you put out and put in good work on the thing that you like really, really care about one, there's like the Kevin Kelly idea of like a hundred true fans and like there's, there's riches in, in niches. And so you have 250,000 true fans. I have 250,000 fans, but like, you know, can I get, how many of them can I get to pay me, you know, $10,000 a year? Who knows the internet for me at least was this magical place where I could like write about the intersection of technology and business models. Just tell people like in 2020,

'Cause I remember you telling me this, you did have 10 fans, right? - I had 400, so I kind of wrote the thing on the side while I was at my last job for a year, but it was really just the links round up. And I think over the course of a year, I got to like 400 people. And so the beginning of 2020, it started taking off and got to like a couple thousand. And then it just kind of grew.

grew from there. But it was really like I get to write these long essays on tech, business, and pop culture at the time. And there's people who find that interesting on the internet. And I think there's a lot of it that was just like if you do the thing that you really actually are interested in, one, maybe it'll lead to something career-wise. But two, you're just going to find a bunch of other people in the world who are interested in the same stuff that you are. And it's just like this really magical thing that we all get to be a part of.

So that was kind of the argument. And Elon was in it just because, you know, it talked about the fact that he had just been on SNL. Tesla was doing what it was doing. And it's kind of when he became in the beginning of COVID, like really became a celebrity. And he was awkward as hell on SNL. It was cringy. It was really cringy, but became a celebrity and like really became the first person to figure out how you use the internet to like really affect these massive,

It is interesting, though, that these last two years, I think, have really taken a toll on the way a lot of folks think about them. Let's put the builders and the engineers, you know, all that stuff out of there. And it's interesting how quickly this stuff can come down. But Trump shows you how quickly you can rise again. You know what I mean? Using the Internet in that regard. Well, that's interesting stuff. I want to finish here because I... And I want to...

Who really excites you on the internet now? Because this woman who came on the podcast a year ago, Kyla Scanlon, have you followed her? She's great. And she's the one who coined this vibe session. And that was something to me about the economy. And to be very honest with you, I actually never got the vibe session. I don't get it. I think it was like really elementary. And what I'm here to say is,

Like you just admitted that there was something that you wrote, and I'm sure there's a dozen things that you wrote a few years ago that you think is a bit cringe or you don't agree with anymore. I bet you because she's doing such great work now that she might look back and say, oh, that's kind of dumb. You know what I mean? Was it...

I think it was Scott Besson who said vibe session the other day. Well, I know. So the name is part of a lexicon. I think it's like one of those things. I don't think you mean it the way it was originally meant. You know what I mean? For whatever reason. I mean, that is the thing that she bubbled up on. And now what she's doing on a day-to-day basis, I think is so good. And I think she's such a great communicator. And I don't mean to like... I'm not dunking or shitting on that whole thing. I didn't get it really then, but I got...

like who she is and who she's trying to connect with. And she did make a connection. And now it's just like it's done. Paki McCormick 2021. She's just blowing up in a way that is useful to people. Does that make sense? 100%. Yeah. Yeah, she's great.

Have you watched all the TBPN stuff? Oh, yeah. That's just gone crazy. It's gone absolutely crazy. I literally heard about it like two weeks ago. And just explain what that is really quickly. So it's a daily kind of live show. These two guys, Jordy Hayes and John Coogan, both friends, both like excellent at what they do. John had a...

YouTube channel with half a million subscribers doing these like really in-depth documentaries on companies super well done Jordy was a founder a founder that we backed actually out of the fund and like one of the most creative guys you know I've ever met the two of them wear suits every day and interview kind of

everybody. They're like Lex Friedman sort of people? No, very short form. So it's like, it's Twitter based. It's live on Twitter every day. Then they'll put it up on the channels, but they'll just have like five guests kind of, it is like modern. Do they get a lot of engagement on Twitter is like, yeah, I'm not on Twitter anymore. I literally don't look at it. I haven't for like a year really. Well, you could probably guess some of the reasons. I just don't find it particularly interesting. I think a lot of the stuff that goes on there and,

you know, is not interesting. And I think like when I think about like Grok, this like white genocide thing that was trending last week. That was incredible. Somebody sent me a tweet the other day and I just went to go look at the comments. You know, I saw the engagement. There was really none. But then there was like 10 bot responses. Oh, yeah. You know what I mean? And people are saying that's all that goes on there and they don't see the engagement so they don't see the reason why to, you know, be on the platform. But these guys are proving otherwise. They've hacked it. They've done a really, really good job. Oh, so you think it's been a hack?

No, no, no, in a good way. One, they're incredibly likable. They have a bunch of things that almost feel like rituals at this point that people keep kind of coming back to. And if there's a big story happening in tech...

in a given day, the people who are part of that are coming on the show. - Oh really? - And like they're getting, you know, they had people from senior leaders at the Army on the show last week. They went live from Andreessen Horowitz's. - Do you think the timing of this when they think it was like the podcast election and all that sort of stuff, like you know, in '16 it was the social media election and then I don't even know what the hell it was in 2020. But like now, like it seems like this combination

of virality, but also the ability to kind of use these, like YouTube is a new thing in my opinion for these purposes. I mean YouTube's been around for 20 years, but-- - But now it's becoming everybody's like you must be on YouTube if you wanna grow type thing. And they're doing well on YouTube, but they're doing better on Twitter I think. - But that is likely to change I would think. - I think the catalog will build up over time and the algorithm will find it and all of that kind of stuff. What's interesting though is that the podcast selection stuff was like

long form you know like four hour interviews with all the people involved and this is everybody comes on for 20 minutes at a time they're doing stories it does feel it feels like texting NBC is what it feels like and it's just like now something that people have on in the background at the office does it go live the same time every day I think it's like

I want to say 11 to 2. That's why our live 11 o'clock thing has just gotten absolutely destroyed. No, I'm just kidding. All right, so that we got to check out. What are you reading? I'm actually reading a bunch of like...

if I can find random people writing about different things. I started like a mini podcast experiment called Hyperlegible where I'm just interviewing the people who write my favorite essays of the week. It is, you know, it's going to be audience limited forever because it's like, oh, you read the essay. Do you also want to hear from the author of the essay? But for me, it's been really, really fun. But trying to have just like a bunch of different people on there. There's not,

to me i mean i love the the pirate wires stuff maybe the one thing that i read every morning other than ben thompson is they just have like their three daily takes which are short and well written but mike solano who runs that uh is an excellent writer and has pulled together a really good staff i think patrick o'shaughnessy's team has started doing really good stuff with colossus on the the writing side oh they're writing now because i know that like their podcasts have been epic for you and so i mean just like really really really good uh

And he's hired a few excellent people. Brie Wolfson on the marketing side, Jeremy Stern as editor-in-chief, who wrote Palmer Lucky American Vulcan, which was like the best tech profile last year. He just wrote a great profile for Colossus, which is their magazine, on Neil Mehta. And I just love the profile for him just generally. And so that's been really fun to watch.

On the video side, Jason Carman has been doing these kind of, they started as S3, but now StoryCo videos on tech companies and now doing these like longer documentaries on different industries.

So there's a bunch of good stuff out there. - How do you have enough time in the day? You got two young kids, right? I know you're a great husband. - Of course. - Of course. - Well, this is my job and that's why I probably don't read as many things religiously, but I look for the really good stuff and try to watch it. Or at night instead of watching Netflix, I'll watch a Jason Garman video. - You should watch Mobland if you're not watching it.

I haven't. What's Mobland on? It's on Paramount+. It's like Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren, and Tom Hardy, which Guy and I will watch anything with Tom Hardy. It's so good. So check that out. Just put one of these blogs down for like, you know, seven hours and power through it. You know,

You know, listen, we don't do Lex Freeman. We don't do Joe Rogan. I could literally sit here and talk to you in like this kind of manner for hours. I've always thought you're one of the most brilliant thinkers about new technology. I've enjoyed reading you, watching your stuff. You've been on our pods, I want to say five times maybe or something like that. It's been great. So I really appreciate you coming here. I hope we'll do it more frequently. Anytime you want.

I would love it. I really enjoy this. Thank you so much, man. I appreciate you being here. Thanks for having me.