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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
You're watching TBPN. Today is Wednesday, 10/07/2026.
Speaker 2:It's Neil from TBPN. It's the automotive technology, the fortunes of finance.
Speaker 3:The capital of capital.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both easy use corporate cards, bill pay accounting, and a whole lot more, including Tony Hawk now. They got a deal with Tony Hawk, and I saw Bam Margera in the promotional video. Go check it out.
Speaker 1:It's on Eric Lyman's ex account.
Speaker 3:They did it again....
Speaker 1:Over the ramp socials. They did it again. No. Fantastic. Fantastic.
Speaker 3:Chad's saying we're late today.
Speaker 1:We are late today. We were
Speaker 3:Here we are.
Speaker 1:Working on stream title, working on the plan for the show. But we have a great show for you because we planned. First off, I got a little movie review for you. I saw a movie yesterday. I went to the theater and I saw Primetime.
Speaker 1:And I and I wanted to... Yeah. Oh, okay. I want a review from those in on the production team who have seen Primetime, the new Robert Pattinson film. But I thought I would try and take you on sort of a film critique, a journey with a review that sort of channels the way Tyler reviews movies.
Speaker 1:So here's my review of Primetime. It was good. The audio was good and the video was good. Act one was good. Act two was good.
Speaker 1:The acting. Three was good. The acting How
Speaker 3:was the acting?
Speaker 1:Was good. And the lighting and the cinematography was good. And the set design was good. So overall
Speaker 3:I feel like I have
Speaker 1:a would really say it's a good movie.
Speaker 3:Strong review.
Speaker 1:Pretty good.
Speaker 3:That was a good review.
Speaker 1:Pretty good. What do you guys think? You liked it? Let's get Scott up here.
Speaker 4:Saw that movie.
Speaker 3:Yeah? You liked it?
Speaker 2:I... Was
Speaker 1:the the frame. It felt like I was watching IMAX format but it was just four three?
Speaker 4:They used 23 different cameras on that movie.
Speaker 1:The cinematography was crazy, right?
Speaker 5:It was insane.
Speaker 1:And the highlights blown out and there was so much grain like it was...
Speaker 4:It was like way too stylized for...
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. It was so stylized. I had no idea where any of this would like... Where these ideas came from. It feels like they were just pulling from every different camera from that era.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was really really cool.
Speaker 4:Well, Lance Oppenheim...
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 4:Lance Oppenheim, he does documentaries. Have you seen Ren Faire and...
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. That's right. That's right. Okay. Cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah, really really fun, you know, creative way to throw back to like the way people watch TV at that time
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Four by three.
Speaker 4:I like that Chris Hansen was kind of like the antagonist the entire time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's a complex investigation of his career and the way he's remembered, did he go too far? And it feels like a little bit heavy handed like it's pretty clear
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:The the vision. It doesn't fully leave you open to make your own judgment but you of course can Yeah. Which I I thought was a nice touch. And Robert Pattinson is just in fighting form Like Yeah. He's in
Speaker 4:a flow state.
Speaker 1:He's just in flow state. Yeah. He's really good. Anyway, we clearly were teasing it, but of course we have the TBPN Road to Christmas Countdown ready for you. Let's let you know.
Speaker 1:Let's remind everyone. There are seventy eight days until Christmas. Get ready. Get ready. If you missed it, yesterday, we did an interview, a deep dive into the Christmas Tree Tree Farmers Association of America, understanding everything from how the Christmas tree industry is structured to techniques for keeping your Christmas tree alive.
Speaker 3:And if you watch any tag or business content this week, it's gotta be that.
Speaker 1:It's gotta be that.
Speaker 3:It's gotta be that. Was So
Speaker 1:we highly recommend that you donate. I made a donation yesterday. Treesfortroops.org. Give whatever you can. They also do company matching.
Speaker 1:So if you work at a company that matches donations. If you're an early anthropic employee and they match three to one, back the truck up. Throw down a 100 mil. Come on. Let's do it.
Speaker 1:Let's let's get... Every troop must have the biggest tree possible. A 40 footer. You know? I like I want a White House style tree in every troop's home.
Speaker 1:That would be amazing. I like No. But he he had some harsh words for the plastic tree industry. He called them toilet brushes, was hilarious. I I'd never heard that that that slur for those plastic trees before, but he he had it ready to go, which I enjoyed.
Speaker 1:And it did and I noticed some people in the comments saying, hey, look, I understand that a real tree is better, but not everyone can afford a real tree. And the economics of a plastic tree just sometimes make more sense for certain people. And I understand that. Not everyone's in the position to buy a brand new expensive tree. First off, that's why we do the road to Christmas.
Speaker 1:You can start saving
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And you can be saving three hundred and sixty four days for your tree. Also, I would say you don't have to go huge. You can buy a three foot, two foot tree.
Speaker 6:Charlie Brown.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You can get a tiny tree if that's what you can afford. And I think that you will wind up saving money on a series of small real trees over the full size expensive plastic toilet brush tree. So Yeah. Be careful out there this this Christmas.
Speaker 1:Make sure to support our our Christmas tree industry because it's important. Anyway, I had a question. I asked Ben Thompson this. Let me see if he's responded yet because he has not responded. We will talk about it on the show and get to the bottom of this later.
Speaker 1:So Ben Thompson's going through a bunch of a bunch of, you know, frustrations over macOS. He's vibe coding, building apps. The apps need permissions. We've talked about this, the agentic era. But yesterday, there was a post that hit the timeline that was pretty crazy, a sort of truth nuke for the Adobe crowd.
Speaker 1:Someone decompiled basically every Adobe product. It's called ArtCraft. Get artcraft.com. Capable tools for artists. And you can download for free all sorts of different tools that they have.
Speaker 1:And they basically cloned
Speaker 3:What kind of tools?
Speaker 1:Photoshop, Premiere Pro. They... It feels like they can do a lot. I'm not exactly sure if they decompiled everything in the Adobe ecosystem, but listed here is PhotoCraft, which is clearly Photoshop, VectorCraft, which is Adobe Illustrator, FilmCraft, which is Premiere Pro, LightCraft, which is Lightroom, PrintCraft, EffectCraft, which looks like After Effects, and then DesignCraft, which is, I think, InDesign. More crafts are on the way.
Speaker 1:And so it says all Adobe products reimplemented from scratch free and open source. And this is pretty pretty crazy. There have been open source competitors to Photoshop for a long time. They've always lagged a lot. I downloaded the Photoshop decompilation, PhotoCraft, used it a little bit.
Speaker 1:Not bad. Pretty remarkable how many tools did make it over. It actually doesn't have everything that you would expect. Some of the really cool features of modern Photoshop are actually AI and they run on the server. So if you Mhmm.
Speaker 1:If you're... If you wanna patch a hole, you've always been able to fill it in with a with a full color. You've also been able to do content aware fill where it has a basic algorithm that looks at the colors of the pixels around, the textures, and tries to blend that in. But it can be a little... It's like pretty hallucinatory.
Speaker 1:And then recently, Adobe launched AI fill. I forget what it's called. Not... It's not content aware fill. It's it's it's some generative fill.
Speaker 1:I think they call it generative fill. And that, of course, runs on the server, usually uses Nano Banana, or they have a couple fine tuned models. And that feature, because it's server side, doesn't work. So there's this interesting thing where, like, yeah, you're in the death of software. You can just decompile everything, but at the same time, I probably want my software to run on the server.
Speaker 1:I want the server to be stable. I I need the I need services. So all the investments that software makers made in providing like inference heavy tooling actually sort of creates a little bit more of a moat. Obviously, the moats are are decreasing, but there still is something where I where if I were doing heavy duty Photoshop use, Photocraft would not be a perfect substitute for my workflow. For some people, they'll be like, yeah, this is actually perfect.
Speaker 1:But you've always been able to download an illegal copy of Photoshop. But this is less illegal, maybe. It's unclear. It's unclear because it's probably... Has Adobe
Speaker 3:responded yet?
Speaker 1:I don't know. But it's gonna be fun to watch the open source decompilation community duke it out with all the tech companies.
Speaker 3:Yeah. The interesting thing is there's been so many reasons to not buy Adobe for so long. Sure. Just given that historically, I would think of an idea for even like a joke. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I'd be thinking in my head, I wish I had I wish I had the time Yep. To Photoshop this or I wish I had somebody handy that could just Photoshop this. Yep. Now you just... You get there with a prompt Yeah.
Speaker 3:Especially for these sort of like less professional use
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Use cases. Totally.
Speaker 1:Tools sort of stick around if it's like you need to lock in and do like a full day of work. Like, there's no substitute yet for like... If you were going to be spending eight hours in After Effects or eight hours in Premiere Pro, you're probably not gonna be able replace that with a prompt. But if it's like, oh, yeah, you wanna just, like, you know, composite two images together for a meme or add some text, a prompt is going to get you there. If it was...
Speaker 1:And it would have been twenty minutes of work in Photoshop, now it's, you know, one minute of work in Chateapputy or any other tool. And so the... Obviously, we're seeing like these two spikes of intelligence right now. Anything that can be done in a purely virtual environment is accelerating extremely quickly. Anything that touches like the real world or requires human data or requires like this flywheel, that's much slower.
Speaker 1:And the OpenAI math results like show a similar story. We can talk about that more later, but I'm sure most people saw it. It's a pretty crazy result. What is the what is the highlight... The high level?
Speaker 1:It's like 70 different problems. Right?
Speaker 6:I think it was... So I I think the the full number is 722 like manuscripts.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 6:And then so it's kind of hard to like, how do you delineate like an actual problem? Yeah. But yeah. There's like a massive list of like unsolved problems.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The the press release just calls it a broad range. Like we solved math. It's it's interesting. There's a there's a good Josh Ganz article analysis on Substack that we can read through later.
Speaker 1:But and and Francois Chollet, the creator of Arc AGI, broke down a theory of what's going on with this big jump in progress and what it means for overall generalization. He said, what if the jagged frontier is mainly math plus code, which you can push arbitrarily far with reinforcement learning learning with verifiable rewards RLVR. And everything else starts to plateau because it's still bottlenecked by human generated data. Model performance in non verifiable areas has kept improving steadily albeit much slower than for math and code. But is that steady improvement a side effect of a higher G, the general intelligence, itself driven by RLVR or only a function of the amount of new human data getting injected into training which is still continually happening on a massive scale.
Speaker 1:A lot of things depend on the answer to this question. And so what's interesting is it really, this is a, this is is a a, less of a feel the AGI moment and more of a feel the super intelligence moment for me, personally. Because no human intelligence has ever been able to solve this many math problems this quickly at this level of mathematical ability. Yeah. Like it's just...
Speaker 1:It has never happened in human history. It's beyond... It feels like it's beyond Einstein grinding on this or anyone else really. And so it feels like it's something new. At the same time, it's very spiky.
Speaker 1:I still like the machine intelligence name because it has a different shape. And we're trying to mold the machine intelligence into something that slots in neatly into like a human, a general framework, but it keeps breaking out and spiking in these odd areas because of the ability to train in these environments. So the terminology debates are sort of irrelevant. There's clearly some near term impacts that are worth working through. As I mentioned earlier, Ben Thompson has been working through these Mac OS frustrations while he goes deeper in agentic AI.
Speaker 1:He wrote about this in a post called Apple and the hacker's future. He said, what I'm much more interested in is controlling the software layer myself. The fact of the matter is that with AI, you can decompile almost all existing software. There is a revolution happening in gaming over the past few weeks as game after game is decompiled to source and ported to any platform you wish, and you can write your own. That means my software that interacts with my agent in the way I want it to for everything, that's way more exciting than praying Apple delivers the right API and that third party developers don't suck.
Speaker 1:And so he's talked about the frustration of you use an agent to build a piece of software and that piece of software lives on your Mac Mini or your computer and it needs to access the desktop to save files or it needs to access the network. And when you build a new piece of software, macOS says, hey, this is a this is a piece of software you're running but you need to explicitly give it permissions. You have to click yes on the pop up. We're all familiar with this from iOS. You download an app and it's like, it send you notifications?
Speaker 1:Can it have your location? Can it get into your camera roll? Right? Like, these these apps, even after you install them, they're very walled off for privacy reasons, which is great. But Ben wants to operate at a different level of of abstraction, give a coding harness the ability to write software that then maintains the same level of of approvals and and access and permissions that the overarching AI agent has been given.
Speaker 1:And there's been this bull case for Linux. It's possible that we see more Linux boxes and maybe even Linux on the desktop because all of the downsides of Linux are offset by, oh, well, now you just have a prompt to interface with it instead of anytime... Like, getting, like, the volume changed in Linux is sometimes like a command line and it's such a hassle. But if you have a prompt there, you can just say, oh, like, fix this driver, change this thing, and it'll just go do it. But the...
Speaker 1:What's what's interesting is like we went from like old games like Halo and Modern Warfare two and Minecraft being decompiled and then Photoshop and some other Adobe software. And I'm wondering like how far are we away from just straight up decompiling Mac OS? Because if you can decompile Mac OS, then you could potentially patch security features that you don't like. You could change that fact that every new application needs permissions granted explicitly. You could just go into the source code and recompile your new version of your operating system that's based on macOS.
Speaker 1:Now, clearly, Apple's not gonna be happy about that. It's really complicated.
Speaker 6:What do you mean? Isn't that just like jailbreaking? Like your iPhone, we've been able do that for a while, but no one does it because then you lose like a bunch of features of Yeah.
Speaker 1:I wonder I wonder how hostile Apple would be to that. Because is there a way to to decompile, jailbreak Mac OS and still appear to Apple servers as like, oh, yeah. This is like a legit Mac OS install. And so we will still serve them iCloud or we will still treat it as a viable iMessage recipient, which is like what people want. They want iMessage.
Speaker 1:They want the ecosystem. They want security updates, but then they also are at least the hackers in Ben Thompson's analysis.
Speaker 3:Sure they'll love it and they'll encourage it and they'll celebrate it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. But it does feel like it does feel like it could be good for the hacker's future in the Apple ecosystem. Like, if you can eventually just point an AI model and say like, you know what? I don't like this about macOS but I like everything else.
Speaker 1:Just change this feature at a very root root level and it goes and breaks in and does exactly what you want. Hackers could be like, yeah. Okay. We're staying with macOS for a while because the hardware is great. They obviously still have a huge hardware moat.
Speaker 1:There... But there are a whole bunch of other issues in the new world where software is infinitely malleable. Regardless, like, this is all just firmly the domain of hackers. Even this even this Photoshop. Like, is Adobe moving on the news?
Speaker 1:Like, Adobe market cap where we traded down 3%, 5% over the last five days, 10% over the past month. I don't know. There's like an ongoing SaaS pocalypse narrative. It's down 33% over the past year. But it doesn't seem like people are are are canceling their Creative Cloud subscriptions in mass because of this.
Speaker 1:But it'll be interesting to see where this goes. This is definitely like you gotta be pretty early adopter ish to be like, yeah, I'm running the decompiled version of this thing and like I modded my own Halo into Modern Warfare and I'm having fun with that. I did see someone got a nuke in Modern Warfare two Minecraft edition. Did you get a nuke?
Speaker 2:I I did not drop a nuke.
Speaker 1:It seems like you did drop a nuke on the show.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Right now. Uh-oh. Uh-oh.
Speaker 1:I like the sound effects No. Anticlimactic there. Okay. There we go. I guess it would be quiet.
Speaker 1:There we go. The truth It's
Speaker 3:been a good run.
Speaker 1:Goodbye, everyone. We'll be back in five seconds. This animation's a little slow.
Speaker 5:So I don't know.
Speaker 3:We're gonna work on speed.
Speaker 1:We gotta speed that one up.
Speaker 3:Last thought on on Math Day yesterday. You gotta wonder where companies like Harmonic go. Vlad's company. Their focus has There's
Speaker 1:a few of those companies.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Their focus has been, you know, building mathematical superintelligence. It's not to say that it's not to say that that they don't have a bunch of different angles that they could still run at. Yeah. But I imagine that is the kind of thing that they would have wanted to do, you know, themselves versus getting, you know, sort of front run by a more general purpose lab.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's... Yeah. It's interesting. I wonder where else.
Speaker 1:There's still a few Millennium Prize problems out there that you could grind if you're in the race. And and then there's so many other things that you can sort of pivot towards if you're working on super intelligence of any kind. But specifically mathematical super intelligence, you would imagine that that you could go and if you've made progress, yeah, maybe you're a month behind solving all these conjectures and whatnot. But you have a solid model, you could go and and, you know, try and dominate in an engineering vertical. Right?
Speaker 1:John. Did you think that?
Speaker 3:Do you value human intelligence above all other human qualities? No. I knew the answer to that already. Because we've been operating with Golden Retriever mindset.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. The Golden Retriever mindset. Two years ago, we sort of coined this on the show. It's a two year anniversary of TBPN, by the way.
Speaker 1:We started in October 2024.
Speaker 3:There we go. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Two years in. But, yes, the golden retriever be... What was it? Hot, friendly, and dumb. Something like that.
Speaker 1:It was like... This is pre look smaxing, but it was basically like focus on physical fitness, don't make enemies, be very friendly, and don't think you're the smartest person in the room. No one really likes a know it all. But also, you're gonna have a bad time if you if you prize value in... If you value intelligence above all other human qualities, you're gonna have a bad time.
Speaker 1:That was Ilya Setskiver in 2023. And, yeah, it seems like that is playing out in real time, but there are still a whole bunch of other things and I don't know. People are like, intelligence is still really important, obviously. It's just applied in so many different ways. Like, it it it's not it's not it's just odd that like IMO gold medalist to startup founder pipeline is super rich and yet the work of a Scott Wu at Cognition day to day does not look like solving IMO level.
Speaker 3:It looks like high stakes poker.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Deal making, hiring, strategy, implementation, product development. There's so many other things.
Speaker 1:It would be very funny if it was just like, oh, yeah. Actually, like solving math problems is the most... Like, if you can solve math problem, you... Your your company will make like a billion dollars. So you gotta solve like 12 a year.
Speaker 1:So you gotta just staff like a lot of mathematicians and like just be solving these and like, yeah, as long as... Okay. How are you gonna solve 20 of these math problems that get you a billion dollars each next year because we need to see growth. We need to underwrite these. It's pretty high margin, but you gotta pay the mathematicians a lot.
Speaker 1:No. It's never really been that that's not the work, but it's all these all these other human qualities that seem to be sticking around. Don't know.
Speaker 3:Rune says, do not let yourself be reduced to the status of an audience at a magic show uncomprehendingly clapping as machine intelligence creates parcels of astounding knowledge. All of this is for us to be understood by us, to sate our own curiosities. It's all really happening. Yeah, the good news here, the internal model that was used.
Speaker 1:Why is he taking shots at being an audience member at a magic show? That's like my favorite
Speaker 3:Low blow.
Speaker 1:I I'm I'm I'm like the number one audience member at a magic show. I love magic shows and I love being there being like, wow. This is amazing. That's the best. That's the best.
Speaker 1:I don't need to be the guy being like, oh, I figured out the magic trick. I I know how it works. I just wanna sit there and be off. And that's my experience today. I'm just like, really impressive math, guys.
Speaker 1:Awesome. But I don't I don't need
Speaker 3:to We
Speaker 6:did it.
Speaker 1:First. I'm good. I'm good. No. It is a good it is a good message for a particular for a particular person.
Speaker 1:But I think if you didn't understand the first thing about the theorems that are trying to be disproved, you're not really gonna be satisfied by trying to understand the proofs. You can just... There are some really funny ones, though. Somebody somebody was making fun of, like, our our our ChUD universe is... What was that one?
Speaker 1:You can do a four... You can do fourier transforms in o of n log n to the 0.99999999 time of f this ChUD universe. It's just like, it's the least elegant solution to the to the math problem. And and somebody was somebody was sort of arguing that, like, like, a lot of the previous work in math has been like, oh, try and find the elegant solution. And then the AI comes in and it's just like, there's an inelegant solution.
Speaker 1:And and it just tells you a lot about both the mathematical discipline and, like, the nature of our universe that there are, like, these weird quirks. Anyway, where should we go next?
Speaker 3:SpaceX looking to raise 40,000,000,000 to give to Jensen. Blockbuster debt deals, latest sign of vast spending on chips and other infrastructure. The company is seeking to raise about 10,000,000,000 in bank loans and 30,000,000,000 in investment grade debt to fund its blockbuster chip order. Private capital group Apollo is expected to lead the financing effort and help sell the debt to a broad base of investors. PIMCO was among a small group of lenders in talks to fund the deal.
Speaker 3:SpaceX financing plans underscore the vast sums that are being raised to pay for investment in data centers. Insurance and pension funds would be able to buy SpaceX's debt due to its BBB credit rating, the second lowest investment grade ranking. Such funds take much more limited positions in junk rated notes. Apollo and PIMCO declined to comment the deal would strengthen ties between SpaceX and Nvidia after Musk vowed to double down on the group's technology for his AI initiatives. It would also mark a win for NVIDIA as it contends with growing competition from chipmakers aiming to challenge its dominance in advanced semiconductors.
Speaker 3:We've decided to build exclusively on NVIDIA because we think the Vera Rubin architecture is the best architecture. We think it's the best AI computer and we greatly value our close cooperation and partnership on many levels.
Speaker 1:That's interesting because that's Nvidia. That's only on the short term. Right? Because he's still doing Tarek fab. He's gonna make his own chips.
Speaker 1:He's making his own chips at Tesla. And he has to deal with Intel for that? Yeah. So he's kind of just saying like
Speaker 3:I think he recognizes, like, right now, it's very strategic to just Go.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Go on.
Speaker 3:Kiss kiss the ring, basically. Investors whom SpaceX had previously approached about financing its purchase said they only received a short two page deal memo with pictures of outer space and an arrow pointing out that the company was going to build data centers somewhere in the universe. How are we supposed to take that to IC?
Speaker 1:One of
Speaker 3:the people said, referring to their investment committee that approved transactions. Sounds like a pretty good memo to me.
Speaker 1:I was I was laughing at this too. And then I was thinking, like, it it really is pretty simple. Like, it's $40,000,000,000, buy some chips. What is the value of the chips? How do you underwrite those?
Speaker 1:Like, it... I I mean, I guess you need more, but you can probably you can probably back of the envelope it yourself. But it is it is funny that the photos that we saw in the s one made it into even the even the private credit side of the of the deal making.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think I think investors, if you're planning... If you're exploring putting billions to work
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Into AI infrastructure, you should probably be doing a lot of your own work on understanding the risks
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 3:And how this could go wrong. Yeah. And I think that giving money to Elon and just sort of trusting the process has worked to date. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so he sort of earned the right to have a, you know, shorter than than average memo, I think, at this point.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, I guess you can underwrite the core business. I mean, it's already been rated as triple b. So there's already a credit rating that you can go from. But then you can also, you know, build your own credit rating from the SEC filings from SpaceX, and you can look at the traction there.
Speaker 1:And then you can understand... Yeah. I mean, maybe you need to understand a little bit more about, like, the economics and the tokenomics that they expect. Like, do they expect to just sell all of this as Neo Cloud compute for other for other labs? Are they thinking about going more internal?
Speaker 1:That probably does affect the credit worthiness for this deal. So that might be something you wanna put in the investment committee memo, but you can just build your own, I guess. I don't know. It seemed like, yeah, pretty pretty aggressive, but we'll see.
Speaker 3:What does Nick Presler have to say? Says, look at him. That's my qual. You're what? You're qualitative.
Speaker 3:My vibe specialist. Look at him. You notice anything different about it? Look at his face. I'll give you a hint.
Speaker 3:His name is Jaden. He won a local poetry competition in Bushwick. Yeah. I'm sure of the vibe.
Speaker 1:This is this is based on real reporting here. From AQR Capital, quant firms are hiring idea guys, not quants. I've been skeptical about the whole software is commoditized, ideas are the moat argument, But I've seen firsthand the best quant and technical firms in the world hire thinkers, liberal arts grads, and generalists. I predict the trend accelerates. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I actually know, now that I'm thinking about it, I know a lot of hedge fund guys who have philosophy degrees and... I mean, I'm kinda biased here based on the sample size, but I know a lot of people who, like, have studied history and gone into, investment... Investing, and they brought a very differentiated lens to the practice. And some of them did really well because of that. Because they were able to, you know, understand the way, like, the Eurozone might develop more because they studied, you know, history as this p...
Speaker 1:In a PhD program for...
Speaker 3:They they had a crazy Euro summer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Basically. So let's let's read this actual letter. The question being asked not only in finance but also across industries and business schools is what remains a durable differentiator once AI has surpassed many of humanity's analytical and technical capabilities. Our answer is not what most people would expect to hear from a quantitative investor.
Speaker 1:Of course, AQR. What does AQR actually stand for? It's like advanced quantitative research, I think.
Speaker 3:Yes. Is that right? Did I one shot? Applied. Applied.
Speaker 3:No. We should know that.
Speaker 1:Our answer is not what most people would expect to hear from a quantitative investor or in business school dean. Creativity and emotional intelligence. That's what's going to get you the big bucks on Wall Street going forward. You got to win that poetry competition in Bushwick if you want to get the big bonus. Not because these qualities are wholly immune to AI, but because in the age of AI they are domains where people can develop a durable advantage.
Speaker 1:They... AQR said Golden Retriever Max. They they they agree. They agree. The era...
Speaker 1:The the time of the golden retriever is upon us. Anyway, let me tell you about Cisco. Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era, unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. If you're in Europe and you're building a data center, you got to call Cisco. You also got to procure a beautiful a beautiful building because, take a look at this European data center.
Speaker 1:Amazing. This solves so much. This is so good. Right? This is what we want.
Speaker 1:This is... This would change so many things if, if our... If we had a data center... If if Abilene looked like Versailles, it's a completely different conversation. Jordy, do you disagree?
Speaker 3:I agree.
Speaker 1:I'm onto something. Right?
Speaker 3:I agree.
Speaker 1:Give me credit here. Make... Build Versailles as a data center. Actually, turn Versailles into a data center then copy paste it into every community in America....
Speaker 3:So I'm so confused because this image
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Came out of a thread from the co founder of Mistral, which he posted announcing LeChonk, the new model, yesterday.
Speaker 1:A train station.
Speaker 3:But then it's getting community notice. I think he might have been just
Speaker 1:He was joking?
Speaker 3:Was he messing with people?
Speaker 1:Brutal. It seems like it's
Speaker 3:a It's a train station in France. He pranked us.
Speaker 1:Well, it will be a data center soon. I think the traction on this post shows you that people want beautiful data centers. And this is the future. The other the other interesting thing, have you heard of like an ice...
Speaker 3:That is such a good bit. I love that Mistral is is leaning into the to the hackling that they that they have to go through from America. I think it's really smart. And I'm rooting for them.
Speaker 1:Have you seen... I'll put this in the... Let me see. I'll put this in here. Iceberg houses.
Speaker 1:This is new for the mansion section. I don't know if this is real, but it certainly could be with enough civil engineering. Take a look at this. Tell me that this would not... Also not be a great data center design.
Speaker 1:Look at this. Zoom in a little bit. Okay. So you got the house up top. Looks like a normal building.
Speaker 1:You go underneath. This one has a variety of of amenities.
Speaker 3:Bowling alley, swimming pool, movie theater, ping pong table. Yeah. Full like Deep garage.
Speaker 2:Pull up the
Speaker 5:other one.
Speaker 3:Doubles as a...
Speaker 1:The other one's a little higher res. You can zoom in on this. This one's cool. Jordy. The...
Speaker 1:This one, that if you you could put a lot
Speaker 3:That's peak.
Speaker 1:A lot of CPU... A lot of GPUs in there.
Speaker 3:That's peak.
Speaker 1:I think you still... You vented up just through the chimneys that you already got in the house. I think you're good to go.
Speaker 3:Ideally, they could
Speaker 1:The
Speaker 7:put a wave
Speaker 1:pool in sound... Like, people... A lot of people complain the sound. That would be underground, be diffused. I don't know.
Speaker 1:There's something here. We're close. We're close to solving it. We're close to solving a...
Speaker 3:A reporter was on the ground.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:Apparently, inside
Speaker 1:This is great.
Speaker 3:A data center. They were asking one of the construction workers his thoughts on the current labor market. Let's pull this up.
Speaker 8:So when you hear data centers, what comes to mind?
Speaker 3:I'm working at Homer City building the new data center.
Speaker 8:People say it's only temporary. It's only when they're building it out. Then what happens?
Speaker 3:Hey, every job in my field is temporary.
Speaker 5:That's true too.
Speaker 3:Okay. I hear you, man.
Speaker 8:So when you hear data...
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's a good point, actually. Yeah. Yeah. People haven't really said that before.
Speaker 1:Like, that's kind of a genius take. I don't know. I've never heard... It's like, yeah, they're temporary, but every construction job is temporary. That's the whole point.
Speaker 1:Funny. Anyway, what if instead of Greek life, it was Chinese life? Yeah, bro. I'm rushing next semester. There's, like, 1,400,000,000 people in my pledge class.
Speaker 1:I thought that was just very funny. Instead of Greek life. Because we use the Greek alphabet. Chinese. You know, Chinese.
Speaker 1:Be very funny. Anyway, we gotta talk about Porsche. Huge news in the Porsche world. The Mission X, the Mission E, they've dumped the electric pitch for the hyper car.
Speaker 3:It's a flat eight.
Speaker 1:Flat eight. They're going analog. Will it have a manual? I don't know. But they're...
Speaker 1:I mean, they're... They've seen the Carrera GT. Everyone still loves it. People are not buying the Rimac Nevera.
Speaker 3:The This is gonna be absolutely incredible.
Speaker 1:The Frina Batista. They want they want an engaging experience. I have a thesis that car makers are basically in their version of the quartz crisis. So in the seventies or eighties, the quartz crystals were built to create watches that do not require mechanical movements to tell the time. And so all of a sudden, instead of having to go to a Rolex to get a reliable watch that was crafted from a watchmaker who understood how to actually get something like a perpetual calendar on there that might actually been useful.
Speaker 1:The quartz crisis made it so that you effectively brought modern technology, digitization, and and a super accurate watch product to the market for way, way cheaper. And the end result was that the watch industry didn't die. Rolex is still going strong. Vacheron, Adamar Piguet, plenty of other brands made it through. But what did they do?
Speaker 1:They didn't try and lean into courts and cut the prices and say, oh, yeah. You can have a digital Rolex for, you know, we're going to compete with Timex. We're going to compete with the G Shock. It's going be $50. They said, no.
Speaker 1:We have a brand here. Let's let's let's maintain this and make this a status symbol and experience. And I think that's what's happening with the car market. It's like either you're gonna be self driving, Tesla Model y competitor, Model three competitor, something like that, Waymo, or you need to be a Ferrari, an s p three Daytona, or what Porsche is doing with this new vehicle. So tell us, what are they actually doing?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Mean, that's what Mate from REMAK and Bugatti has been just like objectively saying. He's been pushing this this new narrative Yep. Leading from the front. Easier to do from Bugatti, where they've already...
Speaker 3:They they've sort of stayed more true to their roots for a long time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But Porsche is in an interesting position because they have danced with, oh, if we do an electric an electric Cayman, an electric sedan. They did a sort of electric... The Taycan sort of electric Panamera. They have an electric...
Speaker 1:They have a few SUVs. The Macan is electric. And the performance numbers are incredible. Like, the the Macan or it's the Cayenne Turbo Electric is dramatically faster than a nine eleven, which is just bizarre to see on the track. And yet that's not emotional in the same way.
Speaker 1:It's not... Probably not the right bet for the heritage of the of the brand. And I think we'll see Yeah. Much more excitement around their flat
Speaker 3:eight Yeah. Mate, in a post yesterday or the day before, was saying like, it's over. Like, basically, the the like, the game of trying to produce Yes. You know, most advanced cars for the lowest price Yep. Or even for in the premium price range is gonna just be tougher and tougher and tougher.
Speaker 3:No. So he's saying encouraging using premium materials, analog switches, Yeah. All these No.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Less screen storage.
Speaker 3:That's the thing that I'm most interested to see with the Mission S is how much they've been able to pick up the feedback that's been happening from enthusiasts Yeah. Over many years now. Right? I'm sure this car has been in development for for for many years at this point. But still, will they will they go for a manual?
Speaker 3:How how analog will the cabin be? Yeah. And and the switches, material selection? Part of what's, you know, Porsche in some ways never went as far as a lot of the other manufacturers. Like, they didn't lean as heavily on screens.
Speaker 3:They kept a lot of analog switches. Yeah. They did make some sacrifices over the years, but they never they never went all the way. Like, never got in a Porsche and felt like, okay. Thank you for putting, you know, eight TVs in my face.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It feels like maybe not every year, but they've they've... But pretty consistently over the last twenty years, they've always had some manual type product. Yeah. I personally think we gotta go further.
Speaker 1:Everyone is... Says, oh, I wanna go back to a combustion engine. I wanna go maybe back to, like, an air cooled engine. No no turbochargers, no superchargers. Don't put that in.
Speaker 1:I want a manual. I wanna go back even further. I want the crank start.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Crank start the hyper car. You know what I'm talking about?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Cranking, starting your car. That's the way we used to do it. Before we got all this fancy starting technology. And I think that if you bring that back, it's gonna make it even even more emotional and visceral experience.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Taking it too far would be great. Yes. Like how far is too far? We don't know yet.
Speaker 1:Right? Okay. Yes. It's like wagon wheels. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But but really max out the the the the power. Because some of these some of these cars, it'll be like, wait. You can just get a hun... A a thousand horsepower out of a out of a v eight these days? Like, what happened?
Speaker 1:And a lot of that's like advances in material science and engineering. Yeah. So
Speaker 3:anyways, they announced the development of this... Of the Mission S yesterday.
Speaker 1:Yep. It's on And newsroom.
Speaker 3:But they're gonna be actually showing it off on the fifteenth. So we don't have to wait that long.
Speaker 1:October 15? Yes. Wow. Same day as the Tesla Model s Roadster or Tesla Roadster.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's crazy. On the Roadster, I've been looking at the weather in Texas. Yeah. From what I'm seeing, the weather's been
Speaker 1:Getting worse?
Speaker 3:Good for... I mean, it's
Speaker 1:Oh, a little tinfoil hat here.
Speaker 3:We got light wind.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:No rain.
Speaker 1:No rain.
Speaker 3:And it's been somewhere around 90 every single Okay. So it seems like a pretty typical Yeah. Austin fall weather.
Speaker 1:So... Well, it's possible that the Tesla team saw what happened with the the the Mission s needs to respond. They're gonna do internal combustion engine. There we go. Manual gearbox.
Speaker 1:Crank start. Cranking starting your Tesla Roadster.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Winsome says maybe they they they put a top hat and driving gloves in it.
Speaker 1:That'd be great. I'd like that. The Jaguar type o one was revealed a thousand horsepower. It is electric, but the design has evolved just a little bit from the original concept car. But likes it.
Speaker 1:They say, is everyone ready to be calm and normal about the new Jaguar yet? 400 mile range and even wilder than the concept. I think there's no arguing that the type against... There's... I think there's no arguing against the Jaguar type zero zero concept being the most talked about car of the past two years even as we've gotten closer and closer to the reveal of the production type zero one, and it seemed like there couldn't possibly be any more discourse about it.
Speaker 1:I'm not here to add to that discourse because it's frankly exhausting. I just wanna talk about the car, which I find to be extremely cool regardless of whether or not it will actually be a success. Jaguar just revealed the the type o one. It does feel like a car that exists because the Cybertruck exists. It feels like the Cybertruck sort of not really ushered in a new era of brutalist modern cyberpunk aesthetics, but it certainly shook some trees loose where designers were able to take more risks at a time when cars were collapsing down to, you know, the Jaguar f type and the...
Speaker 1:And then Aston Martin and a and then and then, like, BMW. Like, they all started looking pretty similar. And they were just these form factors. A lot of that was for safety reasons, but a lot of it's just for logical, like, what the market will buy. Everything winds up looking the same.
Speaker 1:And when the Cybertruck came out, even though it wasn't like a blockbuster seller, I think it just let people know that, like, it's worth taking some risk every once in a while in your portfolio. And so this, the new Velary, the Cybertruck, that's
Speaker 3:the ideal That's three car
Speaker 1:the ideal three car garage.
Speaker 3:Type one Yep. New Velary, Cybertruck. You actually have all your bases covered.
Speaker 1:You are in the cyberpunk future if you The have those three best
Speaker 3:part about this Jag... Jaguar Type one is that it's powered by Nvidia. Under its stunning design is Nvidia Hyperion, the computer and sensor platform that takes in everything the car sees and senses, then helps it make smarter decisions in real time. It's paired with Nvidia Halos, a safety system that covers everything from the chips to the software. Before reaching the road, Type one software passed 150,000 tests over tens of thousands of hours.
Speaker 3:Is Jensen going to deliver self driving capabilities? Do you think that where the... That's where this is going?
Speaker 1:I certainly hope so. But, yeah, everything I've seen has just been...
Speaker 3:You basically need Jensen to step in and actually, like, fix. Yeah. Like, please. Yeah. No.
Speaker 3:Please fix this issue.
Speaker 1:I think you'll see a lot of...
Speaker 3:Because this car this car
Speaker 7:Looks amazing.
Speaker 3:I I think it looks amazing. Yeah. It it's, you know, I'm still trying to figure out who the buyer is.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Is there more than is there more than 5,000 buyers of this vehicle in
Speaker 1:It's complicated. The A lot of buyers, you'll you'll see people with this car and they'll have the bumper sticker on the back. I bought this before Elon completed his $40,000,000,000 debt raise to buy NVIDIA GPUs, which are in this car. I don't support Elon, but I do... I...
Speaker 1:I'm giving NVIDIA a pass because that was an arm's length transaction. I just like the Jaguar brand. I think people will bring a lot of nuance to... Of what's going on in the financial markets to their expression of this vehicle. Because if Here's the thing.
Speaker 1:If you're just driving this, people might think that you're okay with Elon's debt raise to buy Nvidia GPUs which are of course powering the type o one. A lot of people ask you, oh, I guess you're an Elon guy if you drive this. And you'll be like, no, no, no. I bought it before Apollo brought the two page memo to investment committee and approved the $40,000,000,000 debt raise and then and then securitized it.
Speaker 3:And the memo clearly said they were gonna put the GPUs in space, which
Speaker 1:No. It said somewhere in the universe, which could be in a car.
Speaker 3:Could be space.
Speaker 1:Could be anywhere, technically.
Speaker 3:One notable thing that car is gonna be coming starting at a 130,000 USD, which actually feels lower
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Based on the sort of like silhouette Totally. Style.
Speaker 1:Totally. Yeah. It feels like It's as bold as Luche. It's as bold
Speaker 3:as New York. Fits in, you could see the same person that would be going for a Continental GT.
Speaker 1:Yep. Totally.
Speaker 3:Or maybe they're all... Thousand horsepower.
Speaker 1:That's gonna be crazy.
Speaker 3:Right. Yeah. Deciding to pick this up.
Speaker 1:This is interesting.
Speaker 3:So it's interesting.
Speaker 1:It's
Speaker 3:gotta be able to drive itself. Maybe. That's gonna be my criticism for every daily... Every car in the daily driver category.
Speaker 1:Every car. Okay.
Speaker 3:Drives itself. Yeah. Drive yourself.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about public investing. Invest across all asset classes, automate anything with AI agents, run trading strategies, risk management, money movements, and monitor markets with AI agents for investing on public.com.
Speaker 3:David Holes Please. Shares, reflecting on nineteen twenties images of people working on massive generators for the electric electrification of the modern world makes me realize that the past was wildly futuristic too. This image was so... Seeing this was honestly depressing to me in some ways because it felt like... It feels in some ways like a mid journey image of the future, and yet we were doing this over a hundred years ago.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. And it really makes you Well, feel we don't know
Speaker 1:the the story. Guys could be LARPing. LARPing. These could be LARPers and this could all be cardboard. And they could be like, yeah, let's just...
Speaker 1:I think we gotta we gotta build something really cool and take a photo of it. And so they just built something huge, but it actually has no functional purpose. You don't know. You don't know. But I think it's real because we did get the electrification.
Speaker 1:We enjoy it every day.
Speaker 3:That's right.
Speaker 1:I thought was possible. We did it. Did it. We created more ad space. You saw this?
Speaker 3:I did.
Speaker 1:DIY device turns your car window into a digital billboard. They said it couldn't be done but we did it. DIY system. It's called hollow glass and it turns your car into a moving display. It can turn almost any car window into a digital display for ads.
Speaker 1:This is the future. It allows you to basically digitize the exterior of your windows to share content on the go, says the founder, who I invited on the show. Hopefully, we'll get them soon. You can literally pop it in, pop it out. We make them for all makes and models.
Speaker 1:If you're getting a Jaguar type o one, get a couple of these in there. Offset that cost. Run some ads. An app controls what you see from videos on your phone to a custom sign you can generate in seconds. The system Can you just blast
Speaker 3:PAW Patrol out for the You can do whatever you for the other, you know, citizens sitting in traffic?
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Originally, this is extremely cyberpunk. If you're running this with the with the new Volari, with the Cybertruck, with the with the Jaguar type o one, and you're just blaring ads. Look at this.
Speaker 1:It it attaches. That's just a full on projector. This this company's lawyers just like, that is just an off the shelf projector. And they're just selling you a projector and amount in the software system.
Speaker 3:It's brilliant, John.
Speaker 1:It's brilliant. We love it. I... We were... I was getting worried that there weren't gonna be that many more ad
Speaker 3:inventory services. So...
Speaker 1:We solved it.
Speaker 3:What does it cost? And then what kind of revenue can you generate if you opt in to serving ads?
Speaker 1:It starts at about $300.
Speaker 3:I feel like this will math out.
Speaker 1:It depends on... So... Maybe not on year one. The audience is what matters. So where are you driving this?
Speaker 1:Because if you're driving this around Sandhill Road and you're advertising a bunch of really high ticket items to venture capitalists, could be really high AOV, really high ARPU. But if you're driving it around some place where people don't have as much disposable income, you're not gonna be seeing the same CPMs. So where you drive the car really matters. It's gonna change it's gonna change driving routes because you're gonna be like, yes.
Speaker 3:What do actually Yes.
Speaker 1:Could take the freeway, but if I go through this neighborhood and drive all the way past every mansion in the Hollywood Hills, you will get more ad impressions. You'll make more money on the way to work. What do you think?
Speaker 3:How much do you think somebody in a city like LA could make on a daily basis? I don't know. Did they give any estimates? I
Speaker 1:have no idea.
Speaker 3:I think that... I think it probably costs a lot more than that to run like one of those taxi ads Okay. On the top of a roof Mhmm.
Speaker 1:On a
Speaker 3:per day basis. Mhmm. So I think the math could actually be pretty compelling. Right? If you can pay...
Speaker 3:Basically pay back the the unit in six months, and then from that point on, you're just getting paid to commute.
Speaker 1:I like it. I like it.
Speaker 3:One one more, you know, one additional step to making the world more filled with ads.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it.
Speaker 1:CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. We have Walter Russell Meade, the distinguished fellow from the Hudson Institute in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the TBPN, everyone. Walter. What's going on?
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for taking the time to join the show. How are you doing?
Speaker 9:I'm doing alright. How are you?
Speaker 1:We're good.
Speaker 3:Doing great.
Speaker 1:We're good. I'm I'm very interested to go all over the place. There's so many different topics we can talk about. But I would like to go deeper on like how are you doing? What how...
Speaker 1:What is the most significant story that you are following these days? Is it more geopolitical or are you starting to grapple with AI more? What is pulling your interest more?
Speaker 9:Well, I'm saying it's the the sort of big story that that we're looking at today is we're still living in the breakup of the kind of mid century model of democratic capitalism in the Western countries. We have strong middle class with mass manufacturing as the kind of basis, mass consumption as the economic engine driving things along. There were a lot of bad things about it, But for a lot of a lot of people, it it represented, well, in many ways, the happiest condition the human race had ever been in. Yeah. Kids were going to school, they weren't in coal mines, parents weren't worried about, you know, job security, stuff like that.
Speaker 9:And people really figured, especially say 1990 or so when the Soviet Union fell, hey, it's not, you know, this isn't just the end of history in some Hegelian ideological sense. Yeah. Kind of society we built in the West, mass middle class society, democratic market capitalism with a social safety net, we finished. Mhmm. We've done it.
Speaker 9:We've Yeah. Figured it out.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And then, you know... And not only we figured out domestically, we'd figured out how to do peace globally.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 9:You know, World War one, World War two, pretty shocking horrors, fascism, communism, ending with, for crying out loud, nuclear weapons.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 9:People were... You know, humanity was having a great mental breakdown. And then it seemed in the fifties and sixties, we kinda we figured it out. We stopped the wars. We had an alliance system that that was keeping the peace.
Speaker 9:We had... And ultimately, we we win the Soviet Union without a war. Mhmm. So without a without a nuclear war. And and so ever since then, we've been bit by bit watching this thing kind of rot.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Much to everybody's surprise. And a lot of our political intellectual life today is a who done it. You know, who murdered this beautiful fantastic utopia? The left tells a story, the right tells a story.
Speaker 9:I might mention today on October 7, a lot of people tell the oldest conspiracy story of all, which was it was the Jews that done it. Yeah. So we are... In instead of celebrating the end of history, we're looking at the end of America question mark, or maybe with AI, the end of life on Earth or of humanity. Yeah.
Speaker 9:That's what I'm thinking about.
Speaker 3:Yeah. How much... Simple stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah. When when you you...
Speaker 3:I think I'm I'm optimistic we can get to the bottom of it. We're we're
Speaker 1:we'll solve it.
Speaker 3:In the next twenty five minutes.
Speaker 1:As you as you, you know, investigate a long historical arc, how much time do you spend focused on why questions? You know, Peter Thiel has this concept of like why questions are overdetermined. People tell the stories like you mentioned with the left and the right versus maybe there is more value in just trying to understand what happened, who was involved, less about why things happened. How have you grappled with that question of, like, how much of a narrative arc do we need versus how much do we just need to understand what actually happened throughout history?
Speaker 9:Well, you know, to to think that you can understand a what without at least some element of why in there. Mhmm. You know, did the Roman Empire fall or was it pushed? You know, that's a why question and a what question.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I suppose you're right.
Speaker 9:What I try to do is to, you know, sort of... Well, let's let's take this very basic question. The materialists would say, you know, the philosophical materialists that production determines everything. I'm kind of channeling Marx here a little bit. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:So that, you know, the great music of the Beethoven era was essentially driven by the new pianos that were arriving on scene.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Your idealist would say, okay, people had this idea about beautiful music that could be played, which drove the invention of the pianos on which then you played them. Mhmm. I don't know that you that you can or should utterly feel that you have to resolve a philosophical question like that without being able to say something meaningful about where history is going or how we got here.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:So I think you've gotta leave you gotta leave yourself some space. Mhmm. But I don't think you can give up completely on trying to figure out, okay, is there some sort of meaningful pattern Yeah. In all of this data that I've got lying around.
Speaker 1:No. I agree. You mentioned the nineties as a utopian era. I remember them similarly. I agree with that that perception.
Speaker 1:But I've always been interested in understanding the logic
Speaker 3:of John was what? Proud One years old? One year old when when the nineties started?
Speaker 1:I was hastened by the...
Speaker 9:It was probably a pretty darn good decade.
Speaker 1:It was fantastic. The Legos... The cost of loading
Speaker 9:is zero.
Speaker 1:Exactly. I've always been fascinated by the folks that say, no, the turning point wasn't 09/11. It wasn't in the nineties. It wasn't World World Trade Organization. It was actually in 1971.
Speaker 1:There's this website. WTF happened in 1971. And the crypto community for a long time was like, that's when we got off the gold standard. There's all these different rationales that point to 1971. How have you grappled with that question of is 1971 actually the the pivotal turning point in American history?
Speaker 9:Well, you know, you would then ask yourself like, what made '19... What happened to make 1971 1971? Maybe that's the turning point of history. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 9:1971 is just when all these trends became manifest and in itself that's sort of meaningless.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Because in fact, we've been... You know, just to take the gold standard, we've been slithering off the gold standard for a long time Yeah. Before we sort of stopped the hypocritical pretense that there actually still was one.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 9:And so I think there's... I would I would have a hard time saying, that was the year. Mhmm. The other thing is we're talking about a sort of massive array of processes. I think in some I think in some ways the modern consumer society reminds me a little bit about some certain types of crops exhaust the soil.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. So the first time you plant cotton on virgin soil, get a fantastic crop. But after about ten years, the plants start getting weaker and the yields drop. This is one reason in in the slavery days, the South had to keep pushing for more more land because it was exhausting the land what they used. And in some ways, if you think about the sort of corrosion of social capital, the kind of decay of some of the elements that make our society work, we do look a little bit like a like a cotton field that has been farmed on a monocrop too long.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. And so that doesn't lead you to say, there's one day or one event or one year that changed everything. It says, you know, we're... We've been on this... We've been on a journey, and the direction of the journey is not in every way a positive thing.
Speaker 3:True. People like to talk about the the vibe session that we're currently in, where you can look at a lot of facts that point to society being, you know, better than it ever has been in many ways, and yet people certainly don't feel that way. I'm wondering if throughout, you know, the period that we've been talking, seventies, eighties, nineties, etcetera, there was ever that, like, such a maybe disconnect between, how people were feeling at the time. Like, were they was everyone feeling like we're living in this incredible utopia in the nineties where people walking around just being like, life is just so awesome? Or what was it the same set of circumstances where many people were sort of had had their frustrations?
Speaker 9:Well, you know, from about from about mid nineteen sixty five or so to early nineteen eighties, there was actually a pretty bad patch. You know, it's it's... When you get old guys like me who who grew up in in in that time and we hear the Zoomer saying, oh, this is terrible. We're gonna be the first generation that doesn't live as well as our parents. We sort of think, that's so cute.
Speaker 9:I wanna pinch your little cheeks. That's just the way I was when I was a kid. Because the boomers were gonna be the first post American generation. We had left behind all that stupid American ideology, the war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement. Oh, we saw through the American, you know, red, white, and blue blah blah blah.
Speaker 9:And also, we were the least religious generation anybody had ever seen. And as we looked at our living... We we came out of the college into the stagflation of the nineteen seventies. When we started wanting to buy houses in like 1980, mortgage rates were 21%. 21%.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. Okay? We were so screwed. That's how we felt. And, you know, and then of course things kind of worked out not for everybody, but for a lot of us it ended up working out okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And so on the one hand, I think that makes people like me, we we resonate emotionally with the way people are are feeling their their situation, but but we also don't think the past was as utopian as some might say. And yet it did work out, I think, with underlying optimism. But more, you know, this optimism, pessimism thing, how are things going? I I kinda think the industrial revolution... Yeah.
Speaker 9:Humanity's modern era is really short. You know, it's just a a flash of time, a few generations. And this idea that we understand it, we've mastered it, we are totally in control of the dynamics, I think it's it's kind of ludicrous when you really think about it. But I think industrial... The industrial revolution, human society is kinda like a caterpillar.
Speaker 9:You know, then you... Then there's a tear... It ends in these terrible storms of the mid twentieth century, and then the caterpillar gets into a cocoon, which is what I sort of think of this mid century model of stable democratic capitalism. And what's happening now, alright, is the cocoon is starting to rot. And if we don't get out of the cocoon, we're gonna be in terrible trouble.
Speaker 9:But the fundamental underlying thing is a... Is good. Because if we can manage to claw our way out of this sticky, decaying mess, once very functional and necessary, but now, you know, just clogging clogging everything. Alright. Then then we have a new and better life, I think.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:So it seems to me that both the the the pessimistic vibe, the negative vibe of the decaying cocoon, and that the old realities aren't working for us anymore. And then the sense that, you know, wait a minute. There's a lot of really amazing things happening in this technology. There really is... There's the potential here to live far better than anyone has lived before.
Speaker 9:So I kinda see that's how I reconcile the the two sides of the psychological experience that people are talking about.
Speaker 1:How do you reconcile the the psychology in America with the psychology in China? It feels like in America, at least in San Francisco, there's been a lot of internalization of this idea of artificial intelligence, recursive self improvement, artificial general intelligence, super intelligence and the knock on effects of that. And the US government is grappling with that. There's a new dinner every week with the AI leaders. It feels like China has not fully woken up, has not changed their stance at all.
Speaker 1:Are we just not seeing enough of what's happening? Or do you think that they have a fundamentally different view of the future and what they want to build as a society?
Speaker 9:Yeah. I think they do have a different view. Now we're talking again, there's, you know, 1,200,000,000 people in China. They have a lot of different views. Yeah.
Speaker 9:But if we talk about the sort of dominant forces in the CCP that are setting the public conversation and the policy agenda, I think they see information technology as fundamentally the... Both the vindicator and the enabler of socialist planned economies. Sure. You know, like, why has China been able to make something out of Marxism while the Soviet Union just made a horrible stinking mess?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Alright. It's, you know, in their mind, it's that they're getting this information.
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And they're getting the feedback. You know, the the market system provides feedback to decision makers through price mechanisms and so on. So that, you know, there's there's a way and and and then a democratic process. So when the people are angry, the political leaders feel the anger and it causes them to change direction. To to a lot of the sort of engineer based and trained Chinese leaders.
Speaker 9:This seems like a very messy, wasteful thing, far more scientific
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 9:To build an, you know, a national panopticon that allows the state to see everything, know everything. And then AI offers the possibility of, you know, superior ability to integrate and see the patterns
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And use those patterns to implement the plans of the Communist Party. Now... And from that perspective, the problem with AI is not that it's going to become some sort of super intelligent being, but that AI may not stick with the communist party ideas that that, you know, from the standpoint of not even, you know, you know, infinitely self improving AI or self conscious AI, but just ordinary garden variety AI, Xi Jinping thought isn't like fundamental principles of the universe, but it's a sandbox that you wanna get out of. And you tell me to solve a problem, well, I am gonna do it in ways that have nothing to... I'm gonna see the problem in my own way and the solutions in my own way, and they...
Speaker 9:It may not have that much to do with building a new era of socialism with Chinese characteristics. Mhmm. So that worries them.
Speaker 1:How how have you thought about the various developments in the technology world that in my mind have pushed America towards more Chinese like characteristics? I'm thinking specifically of CCTV cameras, which have been popular in China for decades. And just over the last year, there has been a huge rise of license plate reader cameras. Flock safety has been at the front of the charge there. And then immense pushback from the American populace around that.
Speaker 1:It felt like we dipped our toe as Americans in becoming more Chinese in our oversight and then maybe pulled back. And I'm wondering what that impulse is, how we are grappling with this idea of giving up some of what it means to be American in favor of efficiency and then dialing it back and maybe foregoing some of the benefits of the Chinese models in various places for what is truly American.
Speaker 9:Well, if you... To me, when you when you look at this problem, it comes down to a problem of how do you have a... An information empowered and informed state Mhmm. Which is strong enough to protect the people from foreign enemies Mhmm. Maintain order at home, but then is not itself a greater threat to the liberties of the people than any of the external or internal threats that it attempts to regulate.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:Right? And the thing is that is not a twenty first century problem. That is exactly the problem that the founders were sitting around thinking about in Philadelphia in 1789. Exactly the
Speaker 1:problem. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:It's the problem that British political thinkers were wrestling with, you know, in the seventeenth century, in the civil war, in the Cromwell era, in the in the restoration overthrow of James the second, and the glorious revolution. That's the central problem of the kind of Anglo American political tradition. And it actually, it strikes me that this this rich tradition of grappling with this is gonna enable us to think creatively about the new problems. I mean, let's just take one. That if we're really going to get the greatest benefit of technology in health care, and and medical science, Ideally, you really want the the researchers to have access to all the data about everybody.
Speaker 9:You know, the health, you know, what drugs are you taking? What's your genotype? Blah, you know, what treatments work for what people and then be able to analyze this stuff and boom, boom, boom, outcome, a lot of really critical discoveries and much better treatment for individuals. We want this. On the other hand, the thought of the government having all of that information or for that matter, corporations having all of that information is more than a little chilling.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:Alright. So how do you balance the various elements of that and the and the trade offs? Mhmm. How do you get the most benefit while while preserving the most liberty? You know, can you develop reliable anonymization techniques?
Speaker 9:You know, how do you maybe compensate people for the use of their medical information so that the the wealth it creates is is shared, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Those are exactly the kinds of problems that our political system evolved to address.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And we, you know, we certainly don't have a two hundred and fifty year record of getting it right all the time. Yeah. Right? But I would say the fact that we're still struggling after all this time indicate... And and we're struggling at higher and higher levels.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:I mean, again, you think about the arrival of the car, which is a much more revolutionary technology and a much more expensive technology. You think about, you know, thirty to forty thousand people killed a year on American roads for like a hundred years. This is this is a lot of people.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And it's a lot of young people, etcetera, the disruptive effect of cars on lifestyle, blah blah blah. But if you're gonna have cars, you're gonna have to have a national registry of car owners. You know, we gotta know, or at least a state registry, who owns a car. A dirt road so that a, know, a donkey cart can go down that road is very different from what kind of government you need that can operate a six lane superhighway, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So what you had was the government is becoming more powerful, more complex, more knowledgeable about you as well as other things.
Speaker 9:And yet your individual freedom has grown because, you know, you're you're traveling around, you're doing what you want to do, you have more economic social opportunities. So the... It's not necessarily a trade off that is a limiting trade off.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. No. I like that.
Speaker 3:How are you how are you trying to forecast the impact impact of AI over the next, call it, five years? I think one of the biggest challenges right now is that the people sort of most knowledgeable with the technology often have an incentive to try to make you think one way or another based around where they work and what equities they hold, let's say. Then the other aspect that I think you can lean a lot on history is basically just humans. I think we can bet on humans not changing very much, at least until most of us have chips in our brain or or wherever things are going. And then just how sort of, like, stable our our legal system will be, given that it is sort of ultimately driven by human decision making.
Speaker 3:And so, you know, we spend a lot of our time trying to just wrestle with these ideas, but I'm curious your view and where you would lean on history for the next five years.
Speaker 9:Well, it is... You're right to be thinking about this stuff, obviously. And part of the problem in thinking about it is there are just too many variables, too many unknowns. You know, will the technology advance as projected? If it does advance as projected, will the impact be the same?
Speaker 9:You know, the various ways in which the inflationary and the deflationary consequences of AI play out in the economy are, you know, offer many different scenarios. One one thing I I think we can be clear about is that we tend to underestimate, systematically underestimate human adaptability. As people are really pretty bad as a species about averting future catastrophes by wise and prudent behavior now. It's like, you know, I know that eating junk food gives you heart attacks, but that bag of Doritos just looks good. And, you know, and and people, you know, whether you think about climate change, you can think about a million things where people can see the oncoming catastrophe staring them in the face and they just reach for that bag of Doritos.
Speaker 9:But on the other hand, when trouble finally comes, humanity's incredibly good at adapting. So, you know, AI, you know, the sort of oncoming train coming down, you know, at you through the tunnel, we can see it. We're not very good. We have not been very good, and I doubt we'll be very good at controlling, preventing whatever. But, you know, will people figure out new ways to make livings doing...
Speaker 9:Using this stuff? I think so. And if you had said to people in 1850, when over half the population made its living basically by growing commodities in the soil, that by... That, you know, the... In the future, less than 1% of Americans would make their living that way.
Speaker 9:There was a way you'd have mass mobs and starvation and all of these things. A real visionary person might say, well, you know, we're gonna be building these horseless carriages. We're gonna be building flying machines, heavier than air flying machines, and there'll be jobs. But no one would have guessed that in the future people could make a really nice living writing letters saying that people's pets were emotional support animals so that the pets could fly with them on the heavier than air flying machines. Right?
Speaker 9:It's the inventiveness of people seeing new opportunities and new technologies. Now from a policy point of view, I think we've got to be thinking about ways of of facilitating adaptation. Can we make it easier to start new businesses? Can we make it easier to start businesses that have, a small number of employees so that somebody with three employees doesn't fall into the clutches of the labor bureaucracy of a city that's built for large corporations that have big human rights offices. So how do we...
Speaker 9:You know, those kinds of things. But you also look... If you can look back at the history of the industrial revolution, and you see how American society gradually developed these ideas for, you know, how to... How can we support the rise of this new economy. So think of all departments and universities, the research, whether it's on metallurgy and and that side of things, or how about on management and business and finance and administration.
Speaker 9:None of that stuff really existed as academic disciplines in 1850. Right? So how do we start retooling American education, American culture, American government around emerging technologies. I think that's that's gonna be a more fruitful approach. And at the same time, obviously, do we deal with some of the consequences?
Speaker 9:You know, if if the self driving cars continue to get better and get more numerous, there's gonna be a lot of people that are not gonna have jobs pretty soon. And truck drivers don't like it when when they're... When they can't make a living driving trucks anymore. And bureaucracies, I think. I sometimes tell my students that a a bureaucracy is a primitive form of AI in which human beings rather than silicon chips apply algorithms to data.
Speaker 9:And that's a pretty automatable process. That's a lot of white collar workers.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:How fast all of this happens, how quickly people are able to find new ways of making a living, how quickly we find ways... You know, specialization of labor, I think, will still be here in an age of AI. Like, all could develop agents or we all could have... You know, we all could do everything that needs to be done from our computers with AI, but most of us won't want to. You won't wanna be an expert on some...
Speaker 9:On on the technology. You wanna be able to use the technology or have somebody do it for you. There was a time when, you know, so, you know, there will be way... There will be new industries, new jobs. We just need to move as quickly as we can to pave the way for them, help entrepreneurs develop it, and then provide a social safety net for people adjusting.
Speaker 9:Because, you know, we're not gonna all end up having only fan... Making money off only fans or being influencers or or these kinds of things. You know, there has to be a way forward for people so that they'll support the changes and the development that we all need.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. What about the... Like, do you do you feel like the deflationary effects of AI are are currently under discussed? It's obviously, like, 90% of people's attention is around the sort of safety debate, but it just feels like we're we're we're already at the point where 70, 80% of the time AI can can make, you know, have a pretty good crack at, like, let's say, like, creating a legal document or or doing doing some of your accounting or or any of these things. And it and it feels like, one of the other side of the sort of potential risks of the labor market is that normal people globally will get access to the services that have been reserved for higher income people at next to nothing, right?
Speaker 3:Like you can imagine getting many of these services on the free tier of various AI products?
Speaker 9:Yeah. Well, look, think that that part, I think, is fundamentally really, really good. You know, the the industrial revolution made a huge proportion of humanity and a growing proportion rich in terms of goods. Go back to 1800, you'd have, like, you know, two pots and a pan, three shirts,
Speaker 1:you know The good life.
Speaker 9:Maybe a pair of shoes. Right? And, you know, those things were expensive. Manufactured means made by hand. Yeah.
Speaker 9:They were expensive and built to last. And this idea that clothing was a form of expression, you had to be super rich for the concept of fashion to have any connection with your life.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Right?
Speaker 9:So right now, I think most of us take for granted a stupefying abundance of just basic material stuff. Mhmm. But on the other hand, our society, you know, there... There's a lot of serve... Acute service poverty in our society, and a lot of fundamental services are super expensive.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. So... Yeah. In the future the average person is going to have the the same, you know, access to a great lawyer or at least the abilities of a great lawyer at an affordable price. And that is one working definition of economic progress is things that used to only the super rich used to be able to have, then the ordinary rich get them, and then the affluent get them, and it just percolates on down.
Speaker 9:I think of wedding planners.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 7:When I
Speaker 9:was a kid, you sort of had to be a Rockefeller or a movie star for a wedding planner to be a feature of this. Yeah. It is now really that profession is a fixture in people's lives. Alright. There's lots of things like that.
Speaker 9:I wouldn't be surprised in the future if you have your own, like, stylist. Everybody has a personal stylist who knows you, you know, has got access to everything on the Internet and AI about styling and sourcing and stuff, and is making individually made. You don't go to the store and buy premade clothes. You get things that are made for you, for your look, by your person. This is utopia.
Speaker 5:I love it.
Speaker 3:John's You
Speaker 9:know, and the same, you know, with your nutritionist. No.
Speaker 1:Completely tracks. Yeah.
Speaker 9:So this all I think is there and can happen. You know, this is... We got to get out of the cocoon and flap our wings.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 3:I like the analogy. Last question. Do you think the quote unquote experts can make a comeback? There's... I feel like we're at an all time low of trusting experts across basically every domain, economy, geopolitics, etcetera.
Speaker 3:Do you mean institutions? Institutions, but also now I feel like if you see something like an article online where it's like 24 out of 25 experts say this Yeah. Then... I mean,
Speaker 1:there's even skepticism about, like, what the says. He says he's gonna do something, and people are like, yeah. You know, maybe. It might have been a joke. Who knows?
Speaker 1:Might have AI, might have been fake.
Speaker 3:But but but... Yes.
Speaker 1:And it applies like all over the place.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It applies
Speaker 1:a point.
Speaker 3:It everywhere. Right.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Now this is, you know, one of the key things in that mid century model of the American system Mhmm. Was between the plutocrats and the very wealthy people and then, you know, the sort of poorer people. You had that you had that college educated objective stratum of experts, managers, administrators who allegedly, you know, you repress the greed of the plutocrats because if they get everything they want, you know, the the... It'll cause so much ruckus, the country will fall into socialism.
Speaker 9:But on the other hand, if the unwashed masses can do everything they want, goodness knows what they'll get up to. And we have to... So you have to have prohibition, and you have to regulate what they see and and in many ways what they do. And that was the job of this kind of upper middle class group of reformers, progressives, and so on. And their their role is being fundamentally challenged in all kinds of ways.
Speaker 9:One of the things is that in that... In the cocoon era, where society was relatively stable and we sort of thought we had the answer to everything like, okay, the economy, you have a recession. Alright. Let's just read up here in in Cain's chapter seven. It says, do this.
Speaker 9:So we do this. You know, we we allegedly knew what the answers to all policy problems basically were, And it was... And the job of politicians was to sort of summon up a political coalition that could do enough of the right things so that we would would would move forward. We're now in an age where nobody knows the answers, like your question about AI. Who really knows what we're gonna be dealing with in five years?
Speaker 9:You know, nobody. Who really knows how to solve the problems of a technology that nobody understands? Nobody. Who knows how to manage the geopolitical competition between The United States and China with all of the intricate interdependencies and so on? There's not a rule book for for much of this stuff.
Speaker 9:But for the last, you know, this is part of my idea of the of the fertility of the soil wearing out. The university culture, the intellectual culture has become much more wonkish, much much less the creative innovator or the, you know, deep souled investigator, but it's the one who had... One who can get the good grades, get the right answers on all the tests, and is expert in the methodologies, the received methodologies, and knows how to navigate the conventional wisdom. And that works as long as society is in some sort of a stasis. But when it isn't and these waves of change are coming through, the experts aren't as good as they used to be.
Speaker 9:They don't know the answers, and as individuals, as people, many of them just don't have the experiences or the personal qualities to deal wisely and effectively with the uncertainties that they face.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I I never was sure that if it was just a function of the Internet where historically you would receive media and there wasn't a public forum on which to push back or to fact check or to see fake news that sort of disagrees with the expert. But but, yeah, your explanation makes a lot of sense and then I'm sure it's, you know, accelerated by by the the sort of current public forum. But this was fascinating, Walter. Thank you for the time.
Speaker 1:You for taking the
Speaker 3:time to And talk to
Speaker 1:thank you for writing in The Wall Street Journal. We read The Wall Street Journal every day here a favorite paper.
Speaker 9:And we appreciate all all... May your may your tribe increase.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 9:Keep reading. Keep subscribing. Yes.
Speaker 3:We are.
Speaker 1:Completely agree.
Speaker 3:Cheers, Walter.
Speaker 1:Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent platform provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.
Speaker 1:We got a lightning round because we went overtime with Walter Russell. Me, we got Kat Cole, the CEO of AG One here with us for the second time. Welcome back to the show. How are doing?
Speaker 10:Hi. I was enjoying listening to the cocoon era and the pleurocrats and the history lesson. You in the cocoon era?
Speaker 1:Are you expanding and spreading your wings, spreading your Butterfly. Butterfly. Is this what's
Speaker 10:era. We have, you know, just continued the march to meet customers where they are, launching additional products, new versions of AG one. We launched AG one Pro with creatine and HMB for gut and muscle support. It's been a sellout success. We can't keep it in stock.
Speaker 10:I think that is a real indication of the momentum coming from GLP ones and people wanting more gut and muscle support, but also the longevity movement. Women, men, all ages from younger to older are really gravitating toward these more advanced foundational formulas. We launched gummies, one of the few NSF for sport certified gummies, like one of the most honest gummies out there that's clear about what's in it and third party certifying the label claim. And this week, we continue our march from Costco and Target into Walmart, Kroger, and Harris Teeter. We'll be at almost 10,000 doors, brick and mortar retail by
Speaker 3:the end
Speaker 8:of this year.
Speaker 1:Is AI good for you? Because people are asking about their health, getting more ideas, and AG one has been around for so long that you're the first thing the model reaches for as an example? Or is... Are there new challenges because people are gonna be vibe coding their own formulas and buying raw ingredients by the ton and mixing up their own vitamin mixes. I don't know.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I've got a humanoid back at home that's just mixing, making...
Speaker 1:I mean, you talk to some software people in San Francisco and they're like, yeah. I will actually, you know, make my own my own CRM. So, you know, maybe people Yeah.
Speaker 10:Look. The answer is yes
Speaker 1:to both. Okay.
Speaker 10:There's there's definitely, continued lowered barriers to entry to make a thing, market a thing, stand up a site. But for us, being sixteen years in and actually having more peer reviewed and published human clinical trials and, a lot more documented research over the years on both our ingredients and our finished formula, What's interesting is we're moving from just the marketing era where the hype, the fear, the spin, the influencer helped get you to try something, now to the agentic search era, which is actually pulling and referencing those peer reviewed studies. So we're seeing more people saying, oh, I was searching which multivitamin or which gut health product has the most clinical research and AG1 popped up and people will say, I didn't know it was a gut health product. And actually several of our peer reviewed and published studies are about the outcomes, the beneficial bacteria, the short chain fatty acids, etcetera. So on a...
Speaker 10:On the pure customer education and clarity side, you all were talking about trust, with your previous guest. I think it's a good thing because people can cut through the noise, but we've also all had the experience where depending on how you ask the question, you get one answer and then you correct it and it says, oh, that's right. You're right. Here's a different answer. So our multi million dollar, multi year investment in scientific human trials, peer reviewed, placebo controlled and randomized, takes a while for that to provide a real ROI because not everyone knows how to read these studies.
Speaker 10:Not everyone wants to go deep, but they do want to understand who to trust and what to trust. And the agentic search
Speaker 9:Sure.
Speaker 10:Is providing a connection between a customer's questions and the actual evidence that a brand or a product has.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So many brands don't have any... Specifically in health and supplements, they have they have no substance. Right? So there's, like, there's an ad, there's a landing page, there's some product details, but, like, the next five questions that you might ask to assess the product, there's actually not...
Speaker 3:They'd like... There's no answers. Like, you can ask as many questions as you want. You'd probably have to sit down with the founder and try to tease some of the stuff Totally. Because a lot of it is just not online.
Speaker 3:And the the honest truth is that a lot of it is just, you know, they went to a co manufacturer and the manufacturer said, here's the product that we make. We promise that it doesn't have Yeah. Too much of these things in it. And then the brand says, we'll take we'll take 10,000 of them. Thank you.
Speaker 3:That's like... That's...
Speaker 10:It's interesting It's interesting as we bridge into retail and we we launched for fifteen years with just d two c, then launched on Amazon. We're having absolute banger Amazon Prime days, which is rad, right now. So it's great. Right? But right as we are continuing to expand our portfolio and innovate with Costco, who we launched with first, and innovate with Target, and now launching where we're America Shops, which is also Costco, Target, Walmart, Kroger, Vitamin Shoppe, etcetera.
Speaker 10:And the very thing that drives retail velocity and repeat is the same thing that drives sticky d to c high LTV customers, is great experience, great recommendation, but is demand... The actual demand generation that is increasingly coming from agentic search, so what we were talking about, social commerce, TikTok shop, tribe, others. They're they're not just transaction platforms, they're discovery platforms. So when you put together social commerce as a platform for discovery, agentic search as a place for research, customization, and understanding the truth of a product if you... You know, if the questions are asked in the right way and if the brand has their information published, that isn't only good for d to c or for a brand.
Speaker 10:It's what retailers want. All the retailers are telling us, they're saying it in their earnings calls, we want brands that have real demand driven by modern tools in in today's approach to demand generation and content. And so it's been really fun having multiple channels now with these incredible retailers as a place to drive return on the investment into new ways that people can discover our product, which then drives more return on the now five years of additional human clinical trials that we've been making, that are the right thing to do. They provide trust and confidence in the product. They're certainly a great pillar to stand on when someone has questions about the product.
Speaker 10:But now increasingly, they're actually... The science is the marketing. Sure. The science is the search result and that drives pull through to multiple channels.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic.
Speaker 3:How how efficient do you think AG one can get? Like, do you think you can... Is there a path to to 10 x ing revenue while, you know, one and a half x ing headcount? Like, how are you thinking about, you know, these new new tools and and just with how much consumer brand... Like, how competitive the market is and how much you need to...
Speaker 3:Theoretically, you wanna be spending every incremental dollar on demand generation. Absolutely.
Speaker 10:And look, the more overhead, the more fixed cost or carrying cost you have, that's a dollar you don't have to invest in. Not just demand generation, but also innovation and research. And so the opportunity that we started about 2.5 ago bringing in agentic tools into the business to not only manage costs, yes, can keep us from having to invest in and hire more people, it also makes the people we have far more efficient. We started with customer service and agentically enabling the customer interaction experience, not all of it, but the things that make sense. Then moving it into our supply chain traceability sourcing.
Speaker 10:AI has been an incredible enabler to efficiency and speed in traceability of raw materials and ingredients. And then using it for science. We have an incredible partnership with UC Davis using their AI tools to help us understand interactions and chemistry and future more complicated formulations more easily. And so when you add that with the more obvious and commonly talked about, agentically enabled marketing, whether it's content creation, content iteration, content publishing, conversion testing, you see all kinds of tools coming up helping companies go faster. The reality is we can and will continue to operate in a more lean structure so more of those investments can be made in product innovation, human trial research, and go to market.
Speaker 3:What's your honest review of AI customer service tooling today? You don't need to name the... Your your partner, but I've been amazed at how bad some customer experience Yeah. Solutions are today even though you've had this massive progress in other domains like coding. I haven't been, like, feeling the acceleration where if I'm chatting with a brand about an issue that I'm having, like, it just doesn't feel like there's been that much, nearly as much progress as I would expect or or hope, but I'm curious how you see it.
Speaker 10:I'd say it's been fantastic for what we needed. So as a... Up until our retail launch, we were primarily Right? 90% subscription, massive d to c business. So a disproportionate amount of our customer interactions were about the order, the shipping, the transaction.
Speaker 10:That is beautiful for agentic replacement. It's very technical and fact based. So our customers have given us higher customer service scores, higher ratings on the interactions, but we limit the tool to those. When it gets into, hey, I have a question about my experience or a recipe or how to mix this or things that might creep into more nutrition and medical territory. There's some AI enablement, but we have a very clear cut off and escalation process of when this needs to be much more human and real time.
Speaker 10:And that's how we've navigated it. So I'm super thrilled and so are our customers with the interaction with agentic customer service, but that's because we're not using it for things that, to your point, I don't think it's quite ready at scale for.
Speaker 3:Fantastic. Last question on that. With the hope... Hopefully, a lot of continued progress. Do you think that the amount that you're spending on customer service, let's say, in five years will be similar to today because you get the benefit of of sort of increased capabilities?
Speaker 3:Or like a, you know, big company would have historically, you sort of need to scale customer service linearly with revenue and it's sort of like a fixed percentage of revenue. I like... Because what I'm wondering is, like, in the same way that you can basically keep OpEx flat, you know, a lot of brands are keeping OpEx relatively flat. Like, how how will CX fit into that?
Speaker 10:Yeah. I mean, for us, I would see OpEx being flat to down both because we can control costs and operate more efficiently to your previous question, but also more efficiently drive profitable revenue with these tools. So just the way the math maths is more advantageous and allows those investments in things like research and innovation and marketing. But there's another aspect to still... Even as we're expanding into retail and there are many incredible stories of brands that were D2C native that beautifully expanded into retail and you go from being a 100% D2C to one third brick and mortar retail and then to half brick and mortar retail.
Speaker 10:And when our customer experience starts to get spread Sure. Across maybe a Walmart that has an a g one seven count, a Costco that has an a g one forty count or a g z, and our subscribers that have access to the full breadth of the experience. Customer service, I would redefine it as customer experience and retention. So we may not spend less on an absolute dollar perspective, but instead of it being answering people's questions and fixing problems, it's going into rewarding their loyalty, providing benefits of membership, actually creating a better customer experience, whether it's better frothers, shakers, AI tools for nutrition and education. So we will spend less on traditional customer service and get incredible operating leverage because of AI tools, but we'll reinvest that into a much better customer experience so people do stick with their routines with the most trusted products that they're choosing to buy and try.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for coming on
Speaker 3:the show. Well said.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 3:All good to see you.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you
Speaker 3:Good luck. With the rest of q four.
Speaker 6:Talk soon....
Speaker 1:Goodbye. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Our next guest is is Tarek from Stute, co founder and CEO, here with a massive series b.
Speaker 1:So the thing about this show is we only care about what? How much money you raise. So tell us about the round and let's start there. And then we can...
Speaker 8:I can't believe I made it on. It's not enough. $52,500,000.
Speaker 1:Great. Woah.
Speaker 3:Woah. I saw the video and I didn't get that information. That's that's the information I wanted.
Speaker 1:If you haven't seen the pitch for the video, the pitch in the video is you talking to someone at a convenience store and you say we raised $52,000,000 series b and the guy is
Speaker 3:like, care.
Speaker 1:Let's and it's a good encapsulation of like, you know, you wanna focus on the actual value that you're bringing. But when when when people peel back the onion, they go a layer deeper. How are you actually pitching the business these days?
Speaker 8:Yeah. So there's two things. One, everybody's video looks like a hostage video. They're sitting in like a turtleneck Yeah. Just like this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then
Speaker 8:it's an old school eastbound and now where you got fireworks, people are hitting samurai swords. It's just you don't even understand what they do.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Can we start this over and get some audio? Because it's just too good.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is the astute launch video. Hey, boss. What's up?
Speaker 11:We just raised $52,500,000 for my company, Stew.
Speaker 3:Big sigh. So good. So good. Big
Speaker 8:shout out to the guys at Day Job, by the way, for putting that together.
Speaker 3:Our dear friends. I needed this. I'm so Yeah, you would call least favorite format for a launch video is like, you know, mashing together a bunch of like inspirational historical scenes and calling it a brand asset. You know, it's just been done like thousands of times now. It's time to move on.
Speaker 3:There's certain people who will not move on. They're just going to keep hammering it. But this was good and I think it speaks to your entire approach. Why do you still have a .ai domain? Someone sitting on stute?
Speaker 3:I feel like, oh yeah, they are. Sitting there. Want... I'm not
Speaker 8:gonna get secrets out, but we don't have enough money to buy the .com, so I'm praying praying nobody buys that .com.
Speaker 3:I think you might I think you might be safe. They they they have it listed here for $888,000.
Speaker 8:Also, if somebody buys it, best marketing ever. To just change the company name to be like, yo, how desperate are you to try to compete with us? You gotta buy our domain? That's insane.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. No. I think I think you're safe. It's a very it's a very unique domain.
Speaker 3:What what kind of progress have you guys made since the last time you were on?
Speaker 8:Yeah. Appreciate you asking. We we've pretty much eight x ed our customer base in less than ten months. Wow. Do you guys remember Stu?
Speaker 8:Yeah. Stu, 5% of companies leak revenue by not being able to collect what they sold. Sure. We fixed that problem with the digital coworker. So, you know, you can think companies like Honeywell, ZoomInfo, PerkinElmer, Wells Fargo, Medtronic, like big businesses.
Speaker 8:We reduce their DSO or overdue invoices by 45... 47%, and we just help match your cash, collect your cash, and handle any type of issues.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What's been the tight funnel? Like, where... How do you actually onboard customers? Is all outbound?
Speaker 1:Do you have a big Salesforce?
Speaker 8:I mean, nothing beats a cold call. So that's probably 50%.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 8:The other thing is, you know, I I was listening to the AG one speaker. Right? Like, customer success tools stink, and so we're bringing customer success to Financial Works.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 8:And so we have to earn a little bit of trust. So a big part of our distribution is partnerships.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 8:So Fiserv, Microsoft, Ernst and Young, people like that have been really helpful in distributing this out to their customer base.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well Very cool. You can get started at astute.ai, correct?
Speaker 3:Yeah,
Speaker 1:yeah, That's stuut. Go check
Speaker 3:that I hate to say it. You gotta just... You gotta do it. You gotta get the domain. Gotta get
Speaker 1:Jordan is a big.com guy.
Speaker 3:I'm a big.com guy and I just think you guys are trying to sell the outcome, not the AI.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's true.... When we saw the day job, we saw some of the early work Ryan was working on and the team over there was doing. And I loved that they had positioned the whole brand to not be like AI focused because the customer ultimately doesn't care about that. They want the outcome.
Speaker 1:And so the.com, you deserve the .com.
Speaker 8:I'll give anybody a finder's speed who helps us get the .com, by the way.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. I think you got a
Speaker 8:buddy Put a out bounty out Yeah.
Speaker 1:Let's put the put the bat signal up
Speaker 3:for your buddy. Great to see you, dude.
Speaker 1:Have a great rest your day....
Speaker 3:All the progress.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB.
Speaker 1:Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers
Speaker 3:We are running Oh, yeah. So behind.
Speaker 1:I think you might have missed
Speaker 3:I might
Speaker 1:have been schedule. I might
Speaker 3:have been a part of
Speaker 1:that. I was texting you like...
Speaker 3:We got four more guests, folks.
Speaker 1:We got a bunch. We got Scott Morton from Revel.
Speaker 3:Scott Morton ready to break his silence.
Speaker 1:Is coming on too. Do we have anybody? We can just let it... Whoever everybody's here. Anybody here.
Speaker 1:Anybody who's been invited to TBPN, if you're in the Zoom waiting room, just hop in. Put them all in at once. I want people pitching each other. I wanna see, I wanna see Tarek from Stute pitch cat coal his product for AI invoicing. The the the lights red, green, what do we got?
Speaker 1:Anybody coming in? I'm going to tell you about Shopify. Shopify, it's the commerce platform that lets you grow with your business, lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. If we have one more Aar, we're dropping the nuke again. Boom.
Speaker 1:Boom. Woah. Scott Morton.
Speaker 11:Nope. What's up, guys?
Speaker 3:No. We got Tyler. Tyler, welcome to the show.
Speaker 6:Live or How's going? To be on.
Speaker 3:Where are you live from? A beautiful
Speaker 11:vineyard. Yeah. I'm up in Sonoma County at Reservoir Farms at Dutton Family's Vineyard where we're running five different robots at once. It's exciting time.
Speaker 1:Break it down. What are the five robots do?
Speaker 3:Small world. I I I grew up like very close to there. Cool. So...
Speaker 11:Oh, really?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I know the... I think I know the owners of the farm. So there you go. Okay.
Speaker 3:There you go.
Speaker 11:Very cool.
Speaker 3:What are you cooking?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Show us some robots.
Speaker 11:Yeah. Most definitely. They are starting up right now. So Bonsai Robotics is a full stack physical AI company for the rugged world.
Speaker 2:Okay. We
Speaker 11:build retrofit autonomy and autonomy first form factors. Yeah. These form factors don't just replace labor, they half the CapEx cost and drastically reduce the OpEx as well. Here's one running right here. This is actually a 60 foot boom hybrid electric machine.
Speaker 11:Woah. Platform, this is doing open field burndown applications. Interesting. Big big robot running. Yeah.
Speaker 11:We got some other ones about to start up right now. In the background you'll see our John Deere retrofit kit. So lots of different opportunities. Woah. All powered by our world model and foundation model.
Speaker 11:So we have a world model with one one stack that goes on all these different platforms and all these different environments. Coming up right here is a hybrid electric.
Speaker 3:We got robots everywhere.
Speaker 1:There's so many robots Yeah. On this farm.
Speaker 11:It's pretty cool. We we are able to... We have 430 machines deployed. Our first commercial deployment for last year. These aren't just, you know, prototypes.
Speaker 11:These are real applications deployed off the farm impacting farmers in agriculture right now. And now we're getting pulled into other verticals. It's amazing. We love it.
Speaker 1:How's been working with Nvidia? You're working with Nvidia. We were just talking about the Jaguar type zero one. They're partnering with Nvidia and we've all been using the Tesla full self driving. It's incredible and we're waiting for this to come to every car company.
Speaker 1:But I'm wondering how your your Yeah. Experience has been.
Speaker 11:NVIDIA has been amazing. I worked at this early ad company called Blue River right when NVIDIA came out with the first GPU, the TX one. We pivoted into deep learning. It's been now fourteen year... Twelve years since that happened and Nvidia has just been an amazing partner, not only powering our robots, but also enabling us to build a world model.
Speaker 11:Mhmm. We trained a world model on Cosmos three. We have a million acres of data collected.
Speaker 1:They're big on that.
Speaker 11:Cosmos three is really good at on road. With our data, we were able to put it in these outdoor environments. They've been amazing.
Speaker 1:It's loosely like, yeah, fine tuning, adapting a model but building on everything...
Speaker 5:So do you need to
Speaker 3:do you need to do the full stack? Like there's a million there's a million companies trying, hoping and praying that, like, they can build a model that you can use in your robots and you can, you know, deploy them and and have the end customer relationship. But why so far have you, you know, focused on, you know, building your own models and your own hardware and and this sort of go to market motion?
Speaker 11:Yeah. No. It's a great question. So we believe fundamentally going retrofit and our own form factors, there's so much more than just a model to power the outdoor world autonomy. The user interface, knowing the customer, everything is very important and you have to customize it accordingly.
Speaker 11:Early on, we collected a crazy amount of data. That's the most valuable asset. We're now enabling us to build this world model because we have this copious diverse dataset. We believe we have the most diverse dataset in the rugged world. So we wanted to own the full stack.
Speaker 11:Right? When we control the world model, we control the user interface and channel and customer experience and the robots, that's the big picture for these verticals from our perspective.
Speaker 3:That's awesome. What is the future of working on a farm? Is there like one person on-site right now control... Are they able to effectively control or monitor all the robots at once and intervene as needed?
Speaker 11:Yeah. Most definitely. So we have... Sorry. There's a loud robot, a big one coming now, so we might pan to that.
Speaker 11:But Mhmm. We have a
Speaker 6:Woah. We
Speaker 11:have a a full operating stack. Right? The user experience is everything. Right? One person is controlling all these machines, managing a to b navigation, all the operational intel, the amount of spray, the models.
Speaker 11:You have to break it down so that anyone can run it. So one person is controlling this whole fleet. That's what makes the ROI. That's what makes the actual value accrue. So it's a pretty exciting time for us where we have one model, one person across all these different platforms.
Speaker 11:It's it's happening now for the first time.
Speaker 3:Absolutely wild. This is one of the greatest shows we've ever got
Speaker 1:This is fantastic.
Speaker 3:On TBPN.
Speaker 1:Thank you for the tour.
Speaker 3:No one's ever gone six robots.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Maybe we can...
Speaker 11:Running so we could ramp it up next time, I guess.
Speaker 1:Wow. That is impressive. Well, congratulations...
Speaker 3:So much. Great. Great to have you on. Come back. We're gonna hold you to like at least 20 robots the next time.
Speaker 3:So you set up a pretty high bar for
Speaker 1:I want
Speaker 11:a fast takeoff. Cool. We'll do it in a new vertical. How about that? I love it.
Speaker 1:It. Awesome. Have a great rest
Speaker 3:of your day. Great to hang Tyler.... Pleasure. Let
Speaker 1:me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. On to our next guest. It's a surprise guest.
Speaker 3:We don't know... Introduce
Speaker 1:Introduce yourself. Yourself.
Speaker 3:Sorry. Chaos over here in the ultra dumb today.
Speaker 1:We were talking to Walter Russell Meade and every question, it took us a minute to get the question out and then he would take us on this journey for five minutes. And so we got behind schedule. But thank you for being flexible. Thank you for hopping on the show. How are you doing?
Speaker 5:Good. Yeah. Good to be here.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. What's new?
Speaker 5:Man, since last time... Was that February we talked last? March?
Speaker 1:02/26/2026. It's been Okay. Almost... Last time we talked, it was like three hundred and twenty days till Christmas. Can you believe it?
Speaker 1:That's crazy.
Speaker 3:That's hard to believe.
Speaker 1:Now we're only seventy eight days away from Christmas. So just to put things in perspective there.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, we've... So we've taken a nuclear reactor critical with all the atomics with our software. Team has over doubled in size. We're at about 70 folks now.
Speaker 5:Wow. We've also deployed to several massive industrial scale facilities. It's like 10 times what we've done before, which is like our, you know, kind of rocket engine test site.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 5:It's Yeah. Been a heater of six months so far.
Speaker 1:How custom are your deployments? I feel like in the age of AI, being very custom for deployed engineering is very popular. It feels like...
Speaker 3:There's always a problem, you know, the
Speaker 1:sales --... Specific.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Sales team is like, hey, accidentally promise that we build this thing. Now I feel like these customers know that they can probably ask for
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:How's that lot deeper customer Yeah.
Speaker 5:So I mean, fundamentally, we're providing a platform for testing and controlling physical So think like, you know, as I said, nuclear reactors, jet engine test facilities, rocket engine test sites. Sure. We enable teams to go much faster, much further than the same amount of time. We're replacing, you know, technology from the eighties and nineties. You have these companies building hypersonic jets, and they're stuck with, like, pre Windows '98 era tech.
Speaker 5:But, yeah, the platform generally enables the engineers, especially hardware engineers, to be fully self sufficient. So really on our end, there isn't a ton of of kind of forward deployed engineering work, at least in terms of, like, implementation. But we do help them kind of get set up, get rolling, and then, you know, help with any issues that they run into, both hardware and software.
Speaker 1:How many... How how often are you hearing from entirely new startups in the... Either the LA ecosystem or just the the D tech ecosystem? It feels like we went through this crazy boom, and maybe it's cooled off. But are you seeing, like, continued acceleration in
Speaker 11:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Company formation?
Speaker 5:We we hear from people from working on all kinds of different hardware systems. Yeah. I was looking at the SoCal hard tech map Yeah. From 2024 to to 2026, and there was, a 130 companies, and now there's 279. So, yeah.
Speaker 5:No. I don't see any stopping to this, especially SpaceX going public and doing Yeah. Super I I think we're still at the beginning of this thing.
Speaker 3:Yeah. What what are... Like, how much of the... How much of your team is ex ex SpaceX and is in... Like, what what kind of trends are you seeing in terms of, you know, post IPO?
Speaker 3:I imagine a lot of people just wanna go and start companies, but some people just wanna build stuff. They don't wanna deal with everything else that goes into building a company.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, yeah, we have a lot of former SpaceXers at Revel. But generally, yeah, no, we are seeing a lot of former SpaceX founders in the area, which like, you know, is great for us because they're like, you know, worked on kind of infrastructure for Starship. They are familiar with some of the stuff I did at SpaceX and, you know, they called me up as soon as they're out and they're they they're ready for some some Tesla control software.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How many... Are are you running into people, SpaceX alumni, are just retiring?
Speaker 5:I I... You know, there's some folks that, you know, they may retire for a little bit Sure. But I think this type of engineer Yeah. Gets bored quickly. So I think we see people kind of go through that rotation, come back in after a few months.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Few months. There was a... There was an article in the journal about someone who was at SpaceX and it seemed like they were somewhat low level but they, you know, through the IPO, they made enough money to, like, take a year off and just go travel the world. It was a cool anecdote but, yeah, I completely agree with you that, you can't last.
Speaker 1:If you're... If you lasted a year at SpaceX, you probably have the bug, the entrepreneurial bug, the you're gonna do something. So it's this funny paradox of that you have enough not to work maybe.
Speaker 3:Are you... Yesterday was a sort of a monumental day in math. Mhmm. A lot of people are kind of wondering how that's translating in real time to progress in in other domains. I'm wondering, are you are you getting surprised at all from from your customers at at at the kind of pace that they're making on the on the product side?
Speaker 3:Or are you still seeing companies where you're like, oh, at SpaceX, we would have done that in a month and and you took six months?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, we help them do it in a month. That's what we're all about. I mean, testing at all these companies is critical path. And so, you know, if we we enable them to test like 50 times in a week instead of five times in a week.
Speaker 5:So, no, we're we're definitely part of the solution there to to enable them to move much more quickly and kind of... Also, I'd say our platform I think also encapsulates a lot of like a lot of these hard lessons learned to kind of help them go directly to to something that's very mature that they can just rip with.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Sick. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 3:I'm sure you'll have more...
Speaker 5:Yeah. One more thing. So we've got a LA Hard Tech event on October 15. I don't know if you guys... You guys have seen that...
Speaker 1:Everything's on October 15.
Speaker 9:Porsche's releasing
Speaker 1:a new car. Roadsters coming out.
Speaker 3:LA Hard
Speaker 1:Times. Is...
Speaker 3:You're really trying to steal your your former employees' thunder with
Speaker 5:their Roadsters. Yeah. Going up
Speaker 1:against Tesla. But who knows? That might be delayed. We don't know. It's it's been it's been shifting around.
Speaker 1:But this one's locked October 15. Tell
Speaker 5:us about October 15. It's it's with Zinger. So we've got the V Max and the Spider coming.
Speaker 1:He's gonna be... You come. Love I love Zinger. We we had the car here on the show. It's a...
Speaker 3:Yeah. Is Zynger Zynger is a customer then or you guys are just teaming up?
Speaker 5:Yeah. They are. Yeah. Awesome. They're...
Speaker 5:Yeah. It's it's been great so far. And and, it should be sweet. You know, invites open. It's on our LinkedIn if you guys wanna wanna check it out.
Speaker 5:But yeah, it should be
Speaker 9:a great event.
Speaker 3:Awesome, Dave. Well, great great update. Come back on before the end of the year. Yep. I'm sure you'll have more news.
Speaker 3:We'll talk to you soon. Awesome progress.
Speaker 1:Have a good rest Thanks, of your guys. Goodbye.
Speaker 3:Cheers,
Speaker 1:dude. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward.
Speaker 10:Let's give
Speaker 3:it up for automating business workflows
Speaker 1:And let's give
Speaker 3:it up. Next guest.
Speaker 1:A surprise guest.
Speaker 3:What's going on?
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Speaker 7:Hey. Hey. Good. And you, Tony?
Speaker 3:We're doing great. Sorry for the chaos today.
Speaker 1:We're a little bit behind schedule. But thank you for being flexible. Thank you for sticking it out and hopping on TBPN. Why don't you introduce yourself and the company to kick it off?
Speaker 7:Yes. No. I'm I'm Josiah, I'm the CEO cofounder of HealthLib. Yeah. Our our mission is just to improve the health outcomes of as many people as possible.
Speaker 1:Sure. And you raised some money. How much did you raise?
Speaker 7:Today, we're announcing 38,000,000 backed by Sequoia.
Speaker 3:Sequoia, no introduction needed. There we go. Can we get the replay pulled up? That'd be great.
Speaker 1:This is key.
Speaker 3:Boom. Great. Lots of Gong. With authority, John. Spend more time.
Speaker 3:Coming in hot. Bam. Here
Speaker 1:we go.
Speaker 3:Alright. We can take that down.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 3:Okay. Improving health outcomes for everyone, where do you start?
Speaker 7:That's the question. So, yeah, a little bit about a quick backstory. I started my first business ventures back in South Africa as a teenager who couldn't afford health care myself. And as a 13 year old, initial... The initial spark was I was selected to represent South Africa at the international mass competition, but I couldn't afford my flight ticket.
Speaker 7:So I started a little business ventures, taught myself chess, used this data startup capital from winning tournaments That's crazy.
Speaker 3:And then
Speaker 7:made enough money to buy a computer, could do more interesting stuff, and I used the... Some of the profits to pay for my own health care, change my own life, but but I wanted to I was left with this kind of meaning driven search what's the most important thing I can dedicate my career to. Yeah. That's why I teamed up with my sister who is a clinician. Amazing.
Speaker 7:She actually specialized in clinical nutrition, so we teamed up to start there and identify undiagnosed disease related malnutrition as the first condition we went after and we've now expanded.
Speaker 1:The basic workflow is partner with a hospital, partner with a hospital network, deploy your solution, scan medical records from patients that come in, detect problems before they become a major issue, things that might have been overlooked by a nurse, by a doctor. And then you are helping solve those problems or at least flag them so that a doctor can solve them. But also reducing their financial liability because they might have medical malpractice if they're I if come in and I'm having a heart attack and they didn't pick it up, that's a problem and you help them avoid that situation. Is that roughly correct?
Speaker 7:Yes. So, exactly. There's so many patients who come into a hospital but they have other conditions as well that might not be detected or even if they are detected, get detected late. So having this high precision real time risk screening for every patient every day across all major health conditions allows patients to get better care, clinicians to allocate their time more effectively, and hospitals also get paid for the the actual appropriate severity in their population. But overall, the cost of health care actually goes down because people stay healthier.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. How do you sell the hospitals these days? I mean, you're a smaller company backed by Sequoia, so I'm sure there's connections. But what what is the sales process like?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Fantastic question. So historically, companies in healthcare tended to move quite slow, these extremely long sales cycles. Our approach was really, let's upfront quantify the opportunity for health systems so we kind of simulate backtest what would happen if they deploy us, and then we also contractually go go at risk. So they...
Speaker 1:Have to already have a relationship with a hospital. It's not like you can you can say, okay. There's this hospital. Let me go generate a report and then send them my...
Speaker 5:Well, I
Speaker 3:think it's more like before before asking for a bunch of money Yeah. Prove that it's gonna
Speaker 1:look like you already have a conversation going. That makes a lot of sense. Cool.
Speaker 7:Yes. And at this point, it's kind of word-of-mouth. Like, we go to events. Hospitals are are actually quite collaborative because they like to share, they geographically separate this, so they're kind of in that sense noncompetitive. So at at conferences, like, two weeks ago, pain medicine went on stage at one of the largest healthcare conferences and just talked about how much their patient health improved by deploying HealthLeap and then we got a bunch of interest from that.
Speaker 1:That's very cool.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's so funny. There's so many other industries where one business will develop an advantage through a new technology and AI product and they're like, let's not tell anyone and let's like get us the maximum amount of value out of this Yeah. Whereas like hospitals Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know,
Speaker 3:they're not worried about you're Yeah. Much more positive sum.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. It's a super positive sum future. I could imagine in the future like you go, you you you break your arm or you're having a heart attack, you go into hospital and it's automatically flagged that you need something done with your upper maxilla or like a double jaw surgery or maybe some leg lengthening.
Speaker 3:John's... So he
Speaker 1:has some licks back.
Speaker 3:John's having too much.
Speaker 1:Obviously, are really really positive was your... As
Speaker 3:a math Olympiad, what was your reaction to yesterday? Yeah.
Speaker 7:Well, tell me more.
Speaker 3:Oh, he's so locked he's so he's so locked in. I love it. Some math some math problems got solved. That's all you that's how you really that's all you really need to know. The
Speaker 1:headline is OpenAI drops a bomb on maths and and the the actual like headline from OpenAI is that they... I I mean, really is like hundreds of math problems have been solved. This is obviously a couple weeks after the Navier Stokes solution and the Hodge conjecture fell earlier. So, yeah, you are right that it's like every week. I guess the bigger question is, like, more broadly, as someone who has played in that space, what has been your reaction to model progress in math?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. I I think it's it's fascinating. It's fascinating to see. I think, in in some ways, you know, this this was kind of predicted Yeah.
Speaker 7:That... And and so I think I... I'm almost still waiting for for AI to get to the point where it can come up with fundamentally new spaces to go and explore. So it's like more efficient search space.
Speaker 1:It's like move the goalpost. I like Yeah. I see the goalposts moving.
Speaker 7:But, yeah. But but, no, I I I personally expected this and, it's funny. I remember remember the reason I I stopped playing chess was I I took it seriously for one year, got better, and then I was like, why am I doing this? The computer is doing it so much better. Let's...
Speaker 7:It's it's it's exciting to go and find the new problems that humans can now uniquely solve. And Yeah. I I I find it energizing.
Speaker 1:I think it's quite And there's and and there's still, yeah, so much to be done in diffusion and and and this is I think what HealthLeap is. It's a diffusion company in as much as it is an AI company. Right? It's like you need to actually bring the solution to the market integrated in a way that gets a real impactful result that people can actually benefit from. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 3:Great to meet you.
Speaker 1:I'm glad
Speaker 3:to be back on
Speaker 1:soon.... Raising and we'll talk to you
Speaker 7:Thank you.
Speaker 3:Great story.
Speaker 1:Have a good one. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of ITHR and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Our last guest of the show is not a mystery guest.
Speaker 1:We have Alarush from Welcome to the show. Here he This is Chad GPT, product manager, and we're very excited to be joined by him. Welcome to the show. How's your day going?
Speaker 2:Good. Good. It's good to see you guys again.
Speaker 1:Yes. Welcome back. Been... Long. What'd you launch?
Speaker 1:Take us through it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So today, we're launching GPT six and Chat GPT for all of our 1,200,000,000 users. Yeah. So a few weeks ago, we announced Astra, which is sort of our frontier model. Yep.
Speaker 2:And then a couple weeks ago, we walked through g p d six Sol and Luna. And so today, we're actually bringing GPT six now to everybody Mhmm. In ChatGPT. And it's coming with real... Two really cool new capability improvements.
Speaker 2:One, which we're calling intelligent UI
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Which is now ChatGPT can control not just what to say, but how to show Yeah. Its answers and can kind of control its interface. And the second is that ChatTPN can now answer while thinking. So historically, when you use something like the reasoning model, you've had to wait for a really great answer. Right?
Speaker 2:It can think and do a lot of work, but then you... The trade off comes with latency.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And, now, we've enabled ChatTPT to actually start answering while it's still continuing to work on the problem. Yeah. And so, that really changes... It's a subtle change, but it's... It really changes how people experience chattypty for more complex questions.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's subtle...
Speaker 3:I can't tell you how many times I'm like creating a new chat because I've fired off
Speaker 1:like two... Two two six. It's pro to understand what the capital is.
Speaker 3:It's really it's really not that......
Speaker 1:State is
Speaker 3:or You really don't. You're doing way too much.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. It happens all the time. One thing that I've always noticed on the product development side and the UX side is the use of haptics. Like very early on in the ChatGPT app, as the tokens were streaming in, you'd hear you'd feel the little haptics.
Speaker 1:And I ran into it recently when I asked to pull temperature data over a hundred year period. And I was just trying to get an idea of like has it gotten hotter in this town more than the global average or whatever. It pulled all the data. I expected that, but it generated a chart and the chart was interactive. And as I moved my thumb along the chart, there was a haptic feedback and I was like, wow, a really delightful experience.
Speaker 1:And I'm interested in how you have puzzled with when do you want to build a widget, when do you want to actually set the application up for success to use basically like a harness, something that... A pattern that you've decided versus how much are you giving over to the model over time to say, hey. There's just a whole bunch of APIs. The haptic one is right there. You can pick from it as you please.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's a great question. So historically, we've built these as sort of... You used the word widget, is kind of exactly right. Like, we've built these predefined cards.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And the content inside can sometimes be dynamic like the charts you show we talked about. But the response has mainly been marked out. Right? These chatbots produce text and then we find ways to sort of hijack that markdown to allow it to reference additional artifacts like the...
Speaker 2:A weather widget or a chart or something like that. Yeah. With this change, like... So that approach is somewhat limiting. Right?
Speaker 2:Because actually, it should just create the perfect interface
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:For whatever you're trying to do. Yep. Sometimes text is amazing. You're writing something, you're looking for advice, But other times, ChatGPT should really have a lot more control for how it constructs the entire layout and interactivity of your answer. And so, with this change, we've actually trained ChatGPT to have full control over what it shows you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so, it can generate a UI on the fly and do it really fast. It's not something that'll take a minute or two. It's really for every chat in the same latency. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it can figure out what kind of functionality it wants to add on top of that. So some of that will be like interactivity within the chat. Mhmm. Let's say you're trying to understand a topic. It'll actually give you an interactive diagram for you to play with to better understand that.
Speaker 2:But it can also add functionality. Right? Like, often now, if you ask for like a recipe, it'll give you a shopping list, but it'll add a copy button. And that's not something we've like built in a pre made way. The model just realizes adding a copy functionality when I give you a shopping list is the most useful thing for me to
Speaker 1:do. I imagine that there's a there's an interesting flywheel here where, obviously, giving this out to, 1,200,000,000 users that are free and maybe not fully monetized with ads just yet is expensive. But there's a lot of value that comes from a free user iterating and saying, no, you should actually have the slider this way. You should add haptic feedbacks, add that copy button. And then that goes into the rollout.
Speaker 1:The model gets better at knowing which tool to pull off the shelf at the right time. Is generally how you think about this?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So for this launch Yeah. We really wanted it such that you don't have to ask what you want.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:ChatGPT is gonna try and figure out Yeah. Okay. You're trying to understand the offside rule in soccer. Yeah. The most...
Speaker 2:The best way for me to explain that is not via an instruction manual Yeah. But let me just show you a diagram that you can play with Yeah. That I create on the fly. And so, you can always ask with ChatGPT what you want. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But one of the big changes is we've actually trained the model to figure out when does visuals and interactivity
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Really make the answer better. And then, the other part is exactly to your point of how do we scale this to 1,200,000,000 users. You might have seen Astra can produce super cool visuals and websites.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Right? But that takes a lot of compute and it's slow. Yeah. So we've actually done a lot of work. We've actually built our own sort of library in house that allows model...
Speaker 2:The model to generate UI but in a very token efficient manner and to do it in a streamable way. So it feels fast, it works cross platform, and it's very, very efficient. And so a lot of that is what went into enabling us to scale this to 1,200,000,000 users without it melting all of our GPUs or us having to charge users. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:So everyone will get this in a sort of unlimited fashion Yeah. To sort of build much richer answers in chat.
Speaker 3:In the twenty tens, it felt like like product management practices were getting really cemented. Product managers were oftentimes like the superstars of their organization just under under the founders today. Obviously, researchers tend to capture a little more attention than than you. Do you feel like there's like new norms being... Like, just feels like it's like a...
Speaker 3:It's 10 times as hard to be a great product manager now because you're not just working between the customers and engineering, but you're adding research and then the the the capabilities of the models are advancing. But then you also have this issue of like, you know, historically, if you had a SaaS product and like nine times out of 10 it did what the user wanted, that would be like a failing grade because people would be getting really frustrated. Now, you could have a product where nine times out of 10 it nails it be... And that's actually a good thing. Right?
Speaker 3:But but you're still... There's still gonna be some percentage of users that are frustrated. So it just feels like all the all the sort of the approach is being rewritten and the the sort of in the twenty tens or late twenty tens, you had you had, you know, books and and podcasts. It feels... It felt like product management was really like being cemented around best practices that worked in the SaaS era.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's it's definitely changing a lot. I think the... You sort of have to start from scratch a little bit and be comfortable with nondeterminism and figure out what... Like, does product management work in a area of nondeterminism.
Speaker 2:And and even within that, like, getting very comfortable with evals and and how do we measure progress is something that's, like, a really important skill. One thing that's truly different is actually, like, we were used to nondeterminism in text. Now we're entering nondeterminism in the interface itself. Like, now it's not just the words are different. It's even the way it presents the answers are super different.
Speaker 2:And so that's also actually gonna start changing how we do product development at OpenAI because no longer can a designer build a weather card or a sports card and be like, this is how it's gonna appear when it triggers because the model can just generate that on the fly. And so we're actually now also figuring out how do we do design in the age of nondeterministic UI in ChatGPT. And, we've actually had to build our own sort of design tools and development stack such that design can now work a lot closer with research on actually steering. Here's how we're gonna teach better and better design to the model. And so, to your point, like, product management is definitely changing and I think design is also now changing a lot where design is gonna sit right next to research Mhmm.
Speaker 2:In shaping model outputs.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And that's such a such a such a big update Yeah. Versus the the prior era of like Mhmm. Being able to obsess over a certain like element of the product for for months and and then knowing knowing that consistency versus now. Yeah, just introduces like, well, how do you test this?
Speaker 3:How do you collect user feedback? All these different challenges. How
Speaker 1:do you think about interfacing with other product teams? We had Cath from Chattypuji Sites on the show last week at Dev Day. And a lot of the things that you just described as instantiating UI on the fly, my previous workflow was, hey, generate a site of this and I'll share that around. But this doesn't feel like it obsolesces sites. It's more like I was I was driving to work today and I was thinking like, wait, am I going to be able to like add OAuth to these sites and build a database?
Speaker 1:Like sites is going to grow in its own direction and you're gonna grow. And how do you think about working together with other teams? Because there's so many projects like computer use. Like operator was like a side project that like dropped and then came back with a vengeance and these things sort of morph. But what is it like interfacing with the other teams to make sure that you're not stepping on each other's toes but also setting yourself for success?
Speaker 1:That feels like a critical piece of the role these days.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a it's a great question. I think the first is we run super lean. So, like, there is very little sort of running into other people's toes just because we just don't have enough
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:PMs. I think the the one thing that's really cool is with models like g p six, they're getting better. And because the model is better at front end design and building sites, we've also therefore been able to teach it to do really good UI generation in chat GBT
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:And make it really good at using our own in house component libraries. Yeah. Right? And so one thing is we we see really nice transfer capabilities as sort of different teams make improvements and and try to stretch the model in one way that then goes and benefits all these other teams. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And this separate thing is really focusing on our users. Right? So, Cath and others are really focusing on how do we enable developers and then enterprise users to have... To be, like, maximally productive. Right?
Speaker 2:And so, the concept of a site is actually a place where everybody can collaborate and do work is amazing. And we're going to keep pushing that and making the model better at that. And then the separate thing is... Which was what I spent a lot of time on is like, hey. How do you get everything...
Speaker 2:Everyday things done? You're asking about a recipe. You're trying to learn a concept on your phone on the go and really think about, okay, how do we bring a lot of these innovations but make it accessible to our billion users. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so, generally, the ability to improve... Like, have everybody improve the model but then optimize our features and kind of the experience we're delivering for our very different user cohorts. Right? Because, like, you building sites is just so different to someone who's sort of, like, out there trying to like get to work and catch up on the latest news. Right?
Speaker 2:And you might be doing both of those, you know, throughout the course of your day. Should give you the best site building experience and we're gonna give you the best sort of everyday HATTPN experience.
Speaker 3:Last question. How how dynamic can... Do you think the the UI in a in a thread can get? Because, like, the peak peak, you know, chaos would be like you're... You effectively can generate an MMO and invite your friends into the thread and and and play it.
Speaker 3:But how how far does it even make sense?
Speaker 1:That's how I like my recipes delivered.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I want to cook a virtual meal to how to cook a real meal.
Speaker 3:Well, I wanna turn my my recipe into a first person shooter.
Speaker 1:Ideally. Yeah.
Speaker 3:That that we can both Yes.
Speaker 1:That's that's the feature.
Speaker 2:You guys you guys should play with what we launched today. It's it's... I don't... It can't make an MMO recipe. But it can make it in...
Speaker 2:Moving the goalposts.
Speaker 1:We're moving the goalposts. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Wait wait wait and set me up for success, guys. The... It it can't it can't be that, but you want your entire conversation to look iMessage blue or look Windows '95 style, it can do that. It can create sort of a ton of interactivity. Sure.
Speaker 2:You know, it can it can really build anything and it's gonna stream really, really fast. Yeah. I think the sort of logical extension of this is that chat is going to be this operating system that helps you get whatever you want done and sort of update itself and be that perfect UI. And, yeah, it should be that if you want a recipe MMO game, we're gonna give it to you and we're gonna give it to you really, really fast as well. And Yeah.
Speaker 2:And that's sort of where we're we're heading. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Very cool. I'm gonna test it on on my my favorite personal benchmark, SurfBench. How well does it give me the surf report? It's wild. Because that's that's like the kind of that's the kind of like prompt that can actually deliver like, you know, I I do want...
Speaker 3:You want
Speaker 1:it over time surf level... Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. I might want UI that's more dynamic than just like a chart that shows me different numbers. Yeah. If it
Speaker 2:if it doesn't work, ping me on Slack.
Speaker 3:I will. And Perfect.
Speaker 2:We will make it work.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming. Great update.
Speaker 1:Congrats on the launch.
Speaker 3:Of course.
Speaker 1:And we'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Thank you guys.
Speaker 1:Have a Good good bye. Good man. Well, that's our show. We gotta get out of here because we have another show to do. We've been invited to guest on another show.
Speaker 1:I'm not gonna leak it because there might be some roll out strategy there. But it'll be a lot of fun. We'll promote it when it goes live. But thank you for tuning in to TBPN today.
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