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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 TVPN.
Speaker 2:Today is Monday, 02/09/2026. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, mechanical technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.
Speaker 1:It is great to be back.
Speaker 2:It's great to be back. We went to the Super Bowl with none other than ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 2:We're breaking down our Super Bowl experience. You know, people call us the sports center for the LinkedIn crowd. It's always been funny because we mostly focus on x and RSS feeds and Well,
Speaker 1:now is the first football game we saw this season. Yeah. Was Yeah.
Speaker 2:It actually was. It was the first football game I've been to in maybe a decade. I don't know. It's been a while. But we do try and bring that sports center energy to the show.
Speaker 2:We like ring in a gong. I don't know if they have a support rep. They have a gong on sports center, but we try and bring the high energy to tech and business reporting. And and now we're we're officially sports fans. We're officially football fans.
Speaker 2:Converted. Converted. No. Was it was a fun experience going to Super Bowl.
Speaker 1:Apparently, it was not the most exciting game. Yeah. We did we did have to leave to catch a flight Yeah. At in the fourth quarter, and then it got and then it started being more exciting.
Speaker 2:But also just a weird experience seeing it in the stadium because there's so many there's so many ads, but they don't show the Super Bowl ads in the stadium. And so they'll run a couple of plays, then you'll just take a five minute break, and then you just get distracted and get sucked into a conversation because we were there with a bunch of fun people. And so it was it was a little bit trickier to actually follow the game. You mean follow the ads? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well well, you didn't follow the ads at all. I didn't see a single ad. I I I would open up my phone and see people reacting to the ads, and and I had major FOMO because I wasn't getting to enjoy the ads in the stadium. Of course, there were some branded integrations in the stadium, but those are separate from the ads that NBC sells. Of course, we, you know, we had this we had this running joke for a while.
Speaker 2:You know, we're most excited about the ads. It's a little it's a little played out at this point, because some people say that just as a reflection of, like, they don't like sports. We say it because we actually like the ads. Right? Because we like advertising and commerce.
Speaker 2:But, you know, we we participated in the Super Bowl hype train. I was very happy with the success of our campaign. It was a Super Bowl is, like, a relatively minor event in the calendar for tech people, I feel like. You know, WWDC, you have Davos, you have Sun Valley. Like, of the things that everyone collects around, Super Bowl's on the calendar for a lot of people, but not top of mind for everyone.
Speaker 2:It's not you gotta be there. But we were able to run a new regional ad in the Bay Area, which we mentioned on the show.
Speaker 1:And I guess it was all over California.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Was all over People text me from Yeah.
Speaker 1:Southern California too.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But it was it was fun. I mean, see the We had this one guy. I gotta
Speaker 1:pull I gotta pull up his post because somebody yesterday Yeah. Thought that they were hallucinating. Oh, guy, Chip Rogers on X, said, hallucinating? And then he said, at Jordy Hayes, at John Kugen, at TBPN on the pregame Super Bowl commercial. And I was like, no, it's real.
Speaker 1:It would have been insane to just be like watching NBC or watching the Yeah. And then it's you just get, you're watching Yeah. TVPN. Which is He probably was like, did I sit on the remote or
Speaker 2:something? Yeah. And I accidentally clicked off the stream or something. But no. The intro was the intro to our ad was exactly our intro to our main show, which is funny.
Speaker 2:But but it was it was a cool moment because, obviously, people see view numbers on clips and they see follower counts. We just hit 200,000 on x. We're very excited about that. And they see the guest lineups, but there's something different about actually seeing the patchwork of all the different logos of everyone who's participated in the show in one way or another as a guest. And that was just very cool.
Speaker 2:And I think people really sort of understood the scope of how crazy 2025 was. I went from interviewing, like, one or two people a year for videos to, like, a thousand. And it it was great. It it it was a lot of lot of fun. Let's pull up the linear lineup because I want you to meet the system for modern software development.
Speaker 2:70% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents. We have Jason Fried, the co founder and CEO of thirty
Speaker 1:seven about this one. Jason's gonna come on. We're gonna have a conversation about the new Johnny Ive Ferrari designs that got announced this morning. We'll go through it in a little bit.
Speaker 2:Maybe Bill Bishop.
Speaker 1:To him. Bill Bishop. Talk about the about
Speaker 2:what's going on in China broadly risk to TSMC, Taiwan, what's going on with the leadership changes and shakeups over in the CCP. Have next Jason Jason Kelly,
Speaker 1:co founder and CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks coming on. What
Speaker 2:could go wrong if you hook a bio lab up to GPT five.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and if you saw OpenAI shared last week, have a that like a basically BioLab integration. Jason is powering that via Ginkgo. And then we have Dan Romero, who's joining Tempo Yeah. The project between Stripe and Paradigm.
Speaker 2:I saw a big billboard for it up in SF.
Speaker 1:Very cool. And then Boris from Bedrock Robotics, Sarah Hooker from Adaption Labs, and Ed from Machina Labs. Yeah. It's gonna be Coming in in person. So great show today.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The other Super Bowl little tomfoolery we engaged in was we launched Claude with ads. Obviously, we've been joking back and forth about Anthropic, launching a Super Bowl ad, kind of taking a shot at OpenAI or other LLMs that might put ads in there. What does that mean? Is it gonna be bad?
Speaker 2:And so, course, we had to create a wrapper, thanks to the Opus 4.6 API and a lot of tireless work from Tyler Cosgrove over there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Really amazing execution went from idea Friday morning to Yeah. Product that thousands.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Actually, like a lot
Speaker 3:of like
Speaker 1:used it, played around
Speaker 2:people signed the petition to bring Claude to bring ads to Claude. Was your line. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:It's also I I think this is actually important for a lot of safety people to think about. Right? Because this is actually a very good example of of misalignment from Yes. Bot. Right?
Speaker 4:Because I used I used Claude to build this. I used bot code. Yes. Right? And so this is Claude acting in defiance of Anthropic stated principles.
Speaker 2:Yes. Anthropy is anti ad.
Speaker 3:And yet Claude, the model they built, allowed you
Speaker 2:to add ads to Claude. That's textbook misaligned.
Speaker 4:I think the safety people need to be
Speaker 2:They need to study this.
Speaker 5:In the
Speaker 1:chat says, Sholto has left the chat. We are with Sholto yesterday at the Super Bowl.
Speaker 2:He had fun with He he
Speaker 1:was having fun with A lot of people were asking, like, is
Speaker 2:this illegal? Is this violation? A lot of people were saying A
Speaker 1:little bit too seriously.
Speaker 2:We're Just just having some fun on the time And it is it is just tomfoolery. So the the site will be going down later today. So your last chance to give it a whirl is today. Your last
Speaker 1:chance to get totally free access to to Anthropic's most powerful model.
Speaker 2:Yes. As long as you have unlimited email addresses, I think, because you can technically only get one prompt. And the the first prompt break it down. The first prompt comes
Speaker 1:so so the concern was if we launch this, somebody sets up an agent Yeah. Effectively sign
Speaker 2:up Yes.
Speaker 1:And Yeah. Like millions of times Yeah. And, you know, run up a crazy bill.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But how does that
Speaker 4:actually work? If you usually use it, like, you send a message and then it it responds, it calls the API.
Speaker 2:Why are you asking them? And then so so it actually
Speaker 4:calls the API in the first message. Yeah. But then after that, it's just, like, it's just hard coded in. Like, it'll just give you an ad and there's no actual response. Yeah.
Speaker 4:It just says, like, that's a great question. Also, have you heard about
Speaker 2:So so for for for in the ex in exchange for one email address, which is somewhat scarce, you we give you one prompt of
Speaker 1:four points.
Speaker 4:But in that prompt, there's
Speaker 6:still
Speaker 2:There's still an ad. Yeah. Yeah. And then and then everything subsequently.
Speaker 4:I mean, you can make new chats, but you still Yeah. On each, like, conversation.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay. So you can make new chats Yeah. And then that would that would allow you to to hit open four
Speaker 4:points. Could kind of have a conversation if you basically add the context of the in the new one.
Speaker 2:Every time. Okay. Yeah. So So a little prompt engineering and boom. Opus 4.6 intelligence too
Speaker 4:cheap for Opus four six.
Speaker 2:We love it.
Speaker 4:If you can figure it out.
Speaker 2:We love it. Let me tell you about Figma. Figma make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build, create code back prototypes and apps fast. And so, I was very surprised by how well Claude with ads.com did given that we tweeted a link.
Speaker 2:There's been debate over how nerfed our links on x. We got a ton of likes and views on this, and it seemed to work very well. So maybe that bodes well just for, like, it's a weird link and it's worth clicking on. But also, I just think that the the whole x algorithm is less punishing to links these days, which is exciting. And, you know, we've always had the shtick that we're extremely pro advertising.
Speaker 2:I've been very aggressive about finding funny ways to integrate sponsors all over TBPN. We have the Turbo Puffer. We have our console laptops. We have all sorts of stuff. The Axon Gong, the the Lambda Lightning round, etcetera.
Speaker 2:And and and I've always thought I'm I'm working on this metaphor for the show, like, what what how do we think about the show? And I I I like the metaphor of, like, if we think of it like an f one car, like, an f f one race.
Speaker 3:Like, there aren't all that You've always said
Speaker 1:it's an f one team.
Speaker 2:F one team. But I I I think the metaphor can be extended because, like, the number of people that actually go to every single race in person is pretty small and so is so is our community of people here. We in the chat, we love all of you.
Speaker 1:Ryan says, I put my dad on the TBPN. I got excited seeing the ad. He started asking me about it. Hashtag convert it.
Speaker 2:There we go. There we go. And so but, you know, the number of people that watch a little bit of an f one race or the highlights or the drive to survive, and you can think about diet TBPN as sort of the drive to survive of TBPN. And, you know, you're not sitting there watching the whole thing live. It's a little bit more condensed, a little bit more editing.
Speaker 2:And then the clips are sort of just, you know, you're aware that Red Bull has a team and you're aware that Ramp sponsors TBPN. What's this?
Speaker 1:No. I'm in the chat. Rookie Tyler was learning to money spread when Chad's Jordy and John were beer maxing with the Patel's. Turns out Tyler vibe coated Claw with ads but can't money spread yet.
Speaker 2:Oh, he can't. Oh, he botched it.
Speaker 1:He botched botched botched He's because they're like brand new
Speaker 2:builds, so it's harder. Oh, there we go. Get get those glasses on. You gotta look the other direction. There you go.
Speaker 1:Rookie. Rookie. Rookie. But he's learning quick. Anyway No.
Speaker 1:I can't. I mean, Tyler, just incredible incredible work. Should we should we get into some of the ads Yeah. From the show?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I yeah. I think I think the big meta point from the the tech's response to the Super Bowl, which we'll dig into, is, like, it's very fun and we spent most of last week, like, obsessing over the interlab vibe wars, like, how is OpenAI responding to Anthropic?
Speaker 2:And as we'll see, like, this was not the story of the Super Bowl at all. The story of the Super Bowl, even from a tech perspective, it was much more about how is tech communicating what AI can do broadly to, you know, the largest swath of Americans and, like, broad stakeholders and voters possible. And so people were you know, there's debates over data centers, crypto, gambling, weight loss drugs. Like, There's new technologies and and society's grappling with those, and the Super Bowl is actually like a very interesting place to go and make a case for how you want this technology to be integrated into society. You're making a case for how it can be used positively, all of these different things.
Speaker 2:And even though it's fun to focus on like, oh, should Claude have ads or should Chad GPT not have ads or whatever, like, there's a much bigger discussion that's happening at the Super Bowl. I think that's what we should be running through as we react to these Super Bowl ads. When we while we pull the first one up, Jordy, you you can pick whatever you wanna you wanna talk about first. I will tell everyone about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform.
Speaker 2:So do want to read
Speaker 1:this reaction
Speaker 2:to the Claude Super Bowl ad? Yeah. We can go through let's go through
Speaker 1:Claude first. Orin Orin John over on X was posting a bunch of good a bunch of good kind of reactions analysis. He says ranking the Claude Super Bowl ad in the moments surrounded by people that aren't all terminally online. Mhmm. 80% of the people here don't understand the chat GPT speak when the second speaker talks and were confused or tuned out.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That Had
Speaker 7:to be
Speaker 2:explained. It's like it's sort of iconic to me because I've used chat GPT voice mode. Yeah. So And it I've seen those reels where it's like
Speaker 1:It was like perfect execution for a good question. For X. Yeah. One of the other challenges is, again, we weren't seeing it live, but apparently the ad was much shorter. There was Yeah.
Speaker 1:Ad during the game. I I kind of expected them to run to really
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Try to
Speaker 2:Twist the really
Speaker 1:mog and do like four thirty second
Speaker 2:saying it might be like an $80,000,000 buy, which Yeah. Would be like insane. But
Speaker 1:Anyway, so they they toned it down a bit. And for instance, had to be explained by the AI bros which was as bad as it sounds. While this ad speaks well to the early bell curve, this might have been too early for a mainstream investment like this. Overall, I think I think they had a lot of fun with it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Clearly was not like, the creative was, like, can't have been that expensive Yeah. Because it was, like, four scenes. Yep. It was, like, four one day shoots Yeah. Probably.
Speaker 2:I think we're gonna get the team on who did it Mother Yeah. Because it is beautifully shot, and it's and I I think it's funny. But but, yeah, it's it it is a little early. But so was the like
Speaker 1:but but in in they they basically made OpenAI way overreact. Yeah.
Speaker 2:A little bit. It's like their cortisol.
Speaker 1:Actually, seeing the way that the ads went yesterday, it was almost like maybe they didn't Sort of been nothing Maybe they didn't need Sam and this and And the entire the team. You know, Streisand affecting it Yeah.
Speaker 2:Basically. Well, this was what Rune was posting. He was like, it's the it's the blue shell and it like it successfully like rage baited everyone
Speaker 1:got rage baited.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But I mean, they've they've known OpenAI has known that they've had to like be very very clear about the way ads will get integrated because when you when you stink ads and LLMs, you immediately think what we built with Cloud with Ads, which
Speaker 1:is And then like they did update it. They said there's a time and place, instead of ads are coming to AI but not to Cloud, they updated it and said the new copy is there's a time and place for ads. Your conversation with AI should not be one of them. So I wonder what, you know, I wonder what pushback they got. This this comp this doesn't hit Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Quite as hard even though it is probably more Yeah. Authentic.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 8:Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:It it almost sounds like it's like a lobbying firm or something.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. It does feel like something you'd see from a like a think tank almost. Yeah. Again, no QR code, no call to action. Where did Claude land in the App Store?
Speaker 2:We were wondering about that. Right? We were thinking that it was at thirty six or something when we were looking at it last week in the lead up.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's at 23 right now.
Speaker 2:That's not bad.
Speaker 4:So it's like up up maybe 10.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's too bad. There's a bunch of stuff that moved. I mean, just looking at the top, it's like Peacock. Okay.
Speaker 2:That's watching the big game. NBC app, that's the same thing. NFL app, obviously, that's sport Super Bowl related. Same with NBC Sports. So there were prize picks.
Speaker 2:Like, there's a whole bunch of things that move. FanDuel is up there. I I there's just a number of apps that jumped just by default. In terms of free apps, there actually aren't that many others that ran I see Duncan. Duncan is is it feels like it's up in the App Store that I I think they ran a big ad that we'll look at.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, the stuff that's below it doesn't seem like it's higher than Timu. Last year, Timu ran a big Super Bowl ad. I don't know exactly what they did this year, but you would expect that
Speaker 1:My first time seeing a Timu ad was crazy. Yeah? It was like the copy Shop Like a Billionaire
Speaker 2:It was funny.
Speaker 1:Was so insane. And yet, I think it actually in hindsight kinda works because everything's so cheap. People don't have to look at the price.
Speaker 2:I guess that's the that's the thesis is But it like sounded to a billionaire, a couch feels like $5. So here's a $5 couch. An apple or something like that. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It is funny because like I don't think like, the real way that billionaires shop is like, oh, my my real estate guy bought a mansion.
Speaker 4:Your real estate desk.
Speaker 2:My real estate desk bought a mansion and then the interior design desk will furnish it and I will have no input in any of And and they will just magically know exactly what I want before I even ask for it.
Speaker 1:One thing I'm interested to see oh, the way the Super Bowl buys work, they make you buy ads in the Olympics as well. Yeah. And so if you're watching the Olympics today or tomorrow You're be in it. Right? I guess we're gonna have an Olympic event because we are forced to, like
Speaker 2:We should go a whole another victory lap. We we're taking our it was so successful. We're taking it to this to the Olympics.
Speaker 1:Taking it to the slopes.
Speaker 2:The slopes.
Speaker 1:Yes. But I'm but I but we'll we'll be interesting is if if various labs or other companies run longer ads because it's not quite as expensive. We'll see. It'd be interesting.
Speaker 2:Bryce said anthropic ads were a total flop in his house despite having a highly tech literate family. They took a bunch of explaining. And yeah, it is
Speaker 1:But that makes sense, right? So like they hit so hard on X.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Oh, yeah. Totally.
Speaker 1:I remember the morning of
Speaker 2:You were like, Woah. Shot across the bow. Can't believe. I can't believe they did. It like a mic drop.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Mic drop, so unpredictable. There was no way to come back from it. Sam lost as soon as he was writing up like a word salad trying to respond. But again, there's some data coming back from Adweek.
Speaker 1:Morgan is sharing audience didn't like Anthropix ad placing it in the bottom 3% of all Super Bowl ads from the last five years.
Speaker 2:Like Anthropix?
Speaker 1:But it makes sense, right? It's like a barbell. Like for people on acts that are like really following tech closely, it was incredibly It's
Speaker 2:a pretty small sample size. 500 people, they asked.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But you're running you're running that, like, in real time
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:After the ads go.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.
Speaker 2:Let's look at how OpenAI responded. Obviously, this is not a response. This was probably months or weeks in the making. This is called You Can Just Build Things, and let's take a look and see if it tells a more optimistic story about AI, one that's maybe less confrontational with their rivals. I like building things.
Speaker 2:Making cardboard stuff is underrated. You get a lot of Amazon boxes, cut those things up, take something. Very cool. Become a hacker. Read more.
Speaker 2:Learn Bayesian probability. Become a scientist to play chess. I don't think if chess is something you build necessarily. Sick. Job displacement.
Speaker 2:No more no more sweeping. Somebody said this is a this is a Windows computer running a running Mac or something.
Speaker 1:Is that real? Think people would tune out for this.
Speaker 2:Build things. Why? It's just too So long. And this Do they actually run the full thing? A full minute?
Speaker 1:The other thing is I don't know. I I'm still It is a little trying dark in codex to to consumers Yeah. Which I think is smart.
Speaker 2:I think it's very smart.
Speaker 1:But introducing codex when every single person in the audience is familiar with ChatGPT
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then just trying to I don't know.
Speaker 2:Well, this is cool. So that that robotics stuff was actually Easter eggs of the robotics team at OpenAI. Like, just brought the cameras in and filmed their team. That's very cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Dan Chipper says huge. OpenAI runs a Codex commercial, not a ChatGPT commercial. So was that a Codex commercial? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Go to the very end.
Speaker 2:Because I just felt like a general, like, AI is cool commercial, like and just, like it felt very in line with the previous Super Bowl ad of just the the eras of technology. Let's go to the end. Oh, okay. So it's showing you Codex desktop. That's cool.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty subtle though.
Speaker 1:Everything about it
Speaker 4:is too says Chat should be teed.
Speaker 2:What's the final slide? Because it says you can just build things and then And then goes Codex OpenAI. Oh, okay. So it's not okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Can just build things.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I don't know. It's just not it's it's again, it's kind of cool for axe. People are like, oh. But I think both both both Anthropic and OpenAI are both using the same reference material
Speaker 7:for
Speaker 1:their ads. Yeah. Like, they're all going back into the Apple archives, like, trying to trying to pull inspiration from the same fishing from the same pond.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They should've they should've just done a parody of the Budweiser. What's up, man? Is on? And it's just people talking to ChatGPT voice about, what's up?
Speaker 2:That was I was like, we're doing Clydesdales actually for Chad GBT. Chad GBT, find me a
Speaker 1:somebody somebody on X, Grace said, Super Bowl commercial's so evil this year, seeing a Bud Light commercial felt healing. Like, oh, yes. Bud Light, tangible a object unrelated to AI or crypto. Ridiculous.
Speaker 2:Let me tell you about MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best in class embedding models and re rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. So, obviously, we went to the Super Bowl with Eric Lyman from Ramp, the CEO of Ramp. And The whole team.
Speaker 2:Ramp did really, really well with their Super Bowl activation. They had a whole bunch of different touch points, so they didn't just, like, lob an add in and then call it a day. They were there. They sent the Brian's. We can kinda go through the whole plan, but there's something interesting.
Speaker 2:I mean, we certainly experienced this with our Super Bowl ad. Obviously, we bought a very small ad, but but, like, the why we got a good result out of our Super Bowl ad was we wasn't we we didn't just go to NBC and said, like, here's money and thank you. We went and told Adweek and gave an interview and you gave some interesting quotes to the reporter on the record. So there was an article around it. That's valuable.
Speaker 2:Then we emailed people who were featured in the ad. Hey, we're posting about this. Like, do you wanna know that you're in this thing? Cool. Like, you can go see it if you wanna watch it.
Speaker 2:Like, there's a whole bunch of different flywheels and I think Ram did a really good job of understanding that, like, it's the Super Bowl campaign not Yeah. An ad. Totally.
Speaker 1:And Yeah. So I mean, and one they had, obviously, they'd work with Brian
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:With during the box stunt in New York last year. Yeah. That went really well, so they built off of that. Yeah. They we showed up we showed up to the to the tailgate party that they had.
Speaker 1:By the time we showed up, there was already like thousands of people there. Yeah. It was insane. Bunch of bunch of TBPN listeners came and said hi, which was awesome.
Speaker 8:Yeah. But great group
Speaker 1:of people. They had a big yellow skateboard ramp with people like actually going pretty hard.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. Really good skaters.
Speaker 1:A bunch of different like contests running around Yeah. We're super food coffee shaved a guy's head Yeah. On a livestream to look like himself. To and that kind of up getting
Speaker 2:Some people were like were were showing up and being like, I I like, this takes six levels of, like, understanding to get all the jokes of, like, the ramp is yellow because the brand and the ramp is the name of the company and the skater. And then, like Brian's here because he was in the office and he plays an accountant. But like, I think that's fun for people. I think people actually do like Easter eggs and they like going down the rabbit hole. But at the same time, you got you can't just be pure Easter eggs.
Speaker 2:And I think when you actually watch the ramp commercial, which is right there, it's like staring you in the face obvious what this does. It's like the brand name yellow in your face. What does it do? You you you have to do things that takes you ten hours. Now there's 10 people.
Speaker 2:There's 10 copies of you that do the thing that you do.
Speaker 1:You can do it in five minutes.
Speaker 2:And so you can just do it much faster. And so you can watch this and not know anything about ramping, you know, okay, corporate card, multiply what's possible. Like, I have a I have a task in accounting. It looks like an accountant. I'm triggered on that.
Speaker 2:I'm familiar with this character. And so all of that is like clarity at the top and then tons of depth. And even in that video, there's a whole bunch of Easter eggs in the video. It was directed by someone who directed The Office and, there's different actors from The Office in there and there's layers and then you go on social media and you see other stuff. So really, really great like three sixty execution.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What what worked well was like classic Yeah. Super Bowl ad. Right? Easy to understand celebrity popular character
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Plus a bunch of the super internet native stuff Yeah. Like physical activation and then localized activation. Yeah. So you had people the Super Bowl's NSF.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You have thousands of people NSF participating Yeah. Like on the ground. And so there was, again, like
Speaker 2:Dylan Field. I love it. And this was so crazy because Anne Anne Kong from Ramp told, told me at one point, like, oh, we're having we're sending all the Bryans. And then she was mentioning, like, oh, well, they'll they'll also be, like, Ramp people there with, like, like, prospective clients and stuff. And I was like, oh, they'll probably do, like, one or the other.
Speaker 2:And they wound up doing everything. So, like like Brian and a whole bunch of look alikes were just there in basically the front row of the Super Bowl. And like, how can you not take a picture of that? It's so innately viral. It was very, very funny.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Insane insane production.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it's just like these multiple touch points all have different shots on goal and they all have different probabilities that you can sort of wait and be like, okay. Well, if the ad is really loved, we'll jump to the top of the rankings in this. But then also there's a chance that this photo gets mega viral or this someone cool goes to the tailgate and they post about that. And so there's, all these different all these different touch points that have, like, different shots on goal as opposed to just, okay.
Speaker 2:We we sent the big check to NBC. We hope the ad goes well. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was pretty funny. I on the way on the drive from the tailgate to the to the game Mhmm. I was sitting with Eric Yeah. And he and we were just catching up on life Yeah.
Speaker 1:Business and all that stuff. And he's wearing the bald cap the whole time, which which I should I should have here, but he
Speaker 2:was just like
Speaker 1:stayed in it the whole time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was really fun. It was wild. Really quickly, let me tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations.
Speaker 2:If you wanna multistream, go to restream.com. There was Brian Lookalike spotted at the Super Bowl. They were just random people who I think went to the tailgate or got their head shaved and like went and stuff. It's like, there there there were there were really like people all over the place.
Speaker 1:We were we were sitting across, looking across the entire stadium and we found the public team. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And we were Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:We were zooming. We could zoom in enough to to to wave.
Speaker 2:It was very funny. The testament to the new iPhone camera, like the Powerful. Eight x zoom. You go 40 x and you can actually see people all the way across the stadium.
Speaker 1:Says OpenAI ad flop. Didn't like Live with the normies. Didn't really get it. Thought they were Nine likes. Tied
Speaker 2:What what? I didn't really get it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It is it is
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was just like a bunch of cool things and then a product and a name for a product that nobody knows about. That's the issue. Yeah. If if you have a very popular product like Budweiser, something like that, you can just show a bunch of random images and then show your logo.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But if you don't if you're if you just show a bunch of random like cool scenes or whatever, it's inspiring, it's it's like uplifting Yeah. And then you flash a logo that nobody knows, you end up with something like Sure. That that doesn't really like leave that much of an impression.
Speaker 2:Do we have the the Google ad? Because I I believe Google went way more practical on this.
Speaker 1:Pull it up, Tyler. Let's Let's about the Okay. Before we get to that, we can talk about the Coinbase Super Bowl ad. This was probably the most controversial.
Speaker 2:I still need to see exactly what they did. I saw some images of them putting something on the sphere, which was
Speaker 1:Pull this one up and then
Speaker 2:surprising to me because they didn't put the like, the the the Super Bowl is not in Las Vegas. So the Sphere is like a different advertising surface, but I guess it's cool to be, like Yeah. Multiple touch points in that way. I did like
Speaker 1:the Pull up Jack the one I'm on in the in the chat.
Speaker 2:We ran into Brian Armstrong and Fred Ursson, the cofounders of Coinbase, they had these really cool leather Letterman jackets. They're fun. Wait. Is this the is this somebody watching the ad? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay. Let's let's watch this.
Speaker 1:Sound on. So it's a sing along. Okay. They like switch up the it's like a state change. Right?
Speaker 1:So it's like you're paying attention. And
Speaker 2:then you just see Coinbase. That's funny. Oh,
Speaker 1:that's really funny. That that Anyways, really I mean, the Coinbase team responded to the criticism and said, if you're talking about it, it works.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Crypto is for everybody. A lot of people were not fans, but I don't know. I thought it was fun. I like that they I like that they do something different
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Each time.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's like a couple years back to back. Was the QR code last
Speaker 2:QR code in the DVD thing was very cool. I I think there was a there was also a dust off about that because I think it crashed the servers because there was so high demand because everyone scanned at the at the same time or something like that. But but I I I liked the QR code. I like the direct to the direct calls to action. I like, I like the introductions, the very clear statements.
Speaker 2:Unless, you know, I I think Apple, Google, like, the really established brands do have the permission to sort of go higher higher abstraction and just sort of do like these brand films. For the for the AI labs who are trying to push a particular product, it's it's it's it feels like a little bit too soon, little bit too risky, but I don't know. Anyway, yeah. Yeah. Some people like the Coinbase ad.
Speaker 2:But
Speaker 8:some Yeah.
Speaker 1:It was like very fifty fifty polarizing. Yeah. Anyway Let's pull up the What we do?
Speaker 2:Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automate automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.
Speaker 1:Alright. Let's pull up the Gemini. I wanna see the
Speaker 2:Gemini ad. I wanna see the Gemini.
Speaker 1:It went with the full sixty seconds.
Speaker 2:Okay. Full sixty seconds. Yeah. I saw some people reacting to this, like, it's very clear. It's like, what you see is what you get.
Speaker 2:Like, this is the actual experience of using the product.
Speaker 10:It's my view. Yeah. It's next to mine.
Speaker 2:And Google does a great job of,
Speaker 1:like, pulling on heartstrings, like And and integrating with Google Photos. Demo. Yeah. Features.
Speaker 6:And Charlie's bed can go right there.
Speaker 2:And a banana. Killer feature. Yeah. Cool. That's cute.
Speaker 11:And look, here's the yard.
Speaker 6:Oh, we could have a trampoline.
Speaker 2:This is actually how a lot of people have delightful experiences with AI. What about Like, is, like, what a lot of families are using AI for. We're doing a remodel and we're using AI for this stuff and you you you put in what you have and edit it. And it's cute, and like the kids love it. You talk you always go back to the example of like make me into a dinosaur.
Speaker 2:Like, that's delightful. That's sweet. Sweet. That's just like a nice sad. I don't know.
Speaker 1:I think a win if you're an A
Speaker 2:David Ross doesn't like it, though. Not gonna do that. That's funny.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Nava says Google's focus is a lot on multimodal as expected. Yeah. Smart. They had a lot of success obviously with Nano Banana.
Speaker 1:You should lean in.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Totally.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That that ad
Speaker 2:It also works for an AI company running
Speaker 1:if you're running an ad yesterday and you're an AI company and people didn't viscerally hate it
Speaker 2:Yeah. If you want yeah. No. Totally. And and also leading into the visual stuff works super well, you know, visual format like a Super Bowl ad.
Speaker 2:Like, Codex, like, even if even if you had, like, a million do overs, it's a hard product to explain. It's like, it's a desktop app with a lot of text, and it's in dark mode. And it's gonna write code, but only behind the scenes. And you don't really have to know how to write code, but it's gonna write code, which is not very aesthetic on the screen at the Super Bowl. Like and, yeah, there you could, like, maybe puppeteer a robot arm, but that's probably gonna be a little bit harder because it's where you're a robot arm, then you have to figure out how to hook that up to your laptop to run codecs.
Speaker 2:So there's, an extra step there. It's a little bit tricky, but, you know, Google knows how to just, like, deliver, you know, here's here's a heartwarming experience. Here's a positive experience. Let's focus on that. Let's not talk about any of the any of the complexities of the technology necessarily in this format.
Speaker 1:Anyway. What else we got? We Mike Mike Duda was
Speaker 2:Live live tweeting.
Speaker 1:Live tweeting his reactions. He let's see. Okay. I don't know which of these
Speaker 2:State Farm tried really hard. Okay. DraftKings, good spot but not built for the Super Bowl. Toyota continues its long tradition of kind of kind of off Super Bowl commercials. Not good.
Speaker 2:I
Speaker 1:We gotta talk about the Svedka ad. We should pull that up. Should pull that up. You pull
Speaker 2:it up, Tyler. Svedka, let me tell you about Phantom. Find your wallet without exchanges and middlemen and spend with the Phantom card.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I Yeah. Svedka is the one that had a fully AI generated came out and wanted to be the first company
Speaker 2:We're not an AI company, but we heard there's a backlash to AI and we would love
Speaker 1:a backlash. People are calling it the worst ad of all time.
Speaker 2:Of all time. Not even just in the Super Bowl.
Speaker 1:They're just saying it's the worst ad ever.
Speaker 2:I do love when a brand just like rolls up to the Super Bowl with whatever the whatever whatever their stock ad is. Like, think that Timu ad was not a Super Bowl spot.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was just like a
Speaker 2:It was like a It's performing pretty well. Been smoking TV. Yeah. It's thrown on the Super Bowl. Okay.
Speaker 2:Here's
Speaker 1:They're calling the worst
Speaker 2:AI vodka ever. Let's watch it.
Speaker 1:Like, if I'm watching the Super Bowl with my kids Yeah. I'm just turning it off.
Speaker 2:That's Right? Really bad. Also, like, what's the meaning of the robot drinks the the the like the the the mixed drink and it just pours out all over.
Speaker 1:The issue is it tastes kinda like it should be used in like machinery, heavy machinery.
Speaker 2:It does feel like
Speaker 1:Like as like robotic like fluid or something. Yes. It's rough. Anyways, rough. I that
Speaker 2:doesn't that doesn't even feel like like I feel like if you're gonna go all in on AI generated video, I want you using the latest and greatest. You gotta be Nano Banana Pro, Goldrag. You gotta be marketing budget,
Speaker 1:$6 of
Speaker 2:Exactly. No. I agree, Goldrag. Like like, there there are very I've seen these videos where they will take two perfectly generated images and then they just use clang to, like, interpolate between them and they actually look really cool, especially if it's like a car or it's something that, like, AI is particularly good at generating and sort of, like, using it as a transition from a drone to inside of a car self like like, first person view. Like, there are really cool and innovative ways to use AI imagery in a way that maybe it stands out as like, that's obviously AI, but it's cool.
Speaker 2:Like, if you're gonna do the AI thing, be Harry Potter Balenciaga. Like, do something that is iconic and interesting and inspired. Don't just be like one ad that we would have just used CGI for last year and now we just use the AI for it. It was it did not hit. What do you think?
Speaker 4:Well, I was saying, we should, we should watch Ryan Peterson's Flexport ad. Some are saying it some are saying it might be AI.
Speaker 2:It might be AI. Okay. Let's pull up Flexport's ad. Let me tell you about Applovin. Profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai.
Speaker 2:Get access to over 1,000,000,000 daily active users and grow your business today. Let's pull up Ryan Peterson's Flexport ad.
Speaker 1:Dad, how did everyone What's real so far? Shirts.
Speaker 6:Seriously, dad. Did all these jerseys get here?
Speaker 12:Well, kids, let me tell you about something called a global supply chain. First, jerseys are manufactured, boxes are packed, and logistics company Flexport takes it from here. Then containers are loaded onto cargo ships.
Speaker 6:Or pulled through the ocean by a 100 pirates?
Speaker 12:Not exactly, honey. But if you want speed, Flexport does coordinate airframe.
Speaker 6:And fighter jets.
Speaker 12:Actually, buddy, Flexport then gets the jerseys through customs back on the trucks.
Speaker 6:And then the superheroes fly the trucks to the stadium. And lightning zaps the jerseys onto the players. And
Speaker 1:Yeah. We're being sarcastic, guys. This is entirely AI. Entirely AI,
Speaker 2:but this is so good.
Speaker 1:But it it has the nailed the feeling of a classic Super Bowl ad.
Speaker 2:Totally. It's all things that yeah. Like, the budget to actually film trucks crashing it's millions millions of dollars.
Speaker 1:Ryan didn't actually run this.
Speaker 2:No. He didn't. But it still got a it still got a bunch of views. It was very fun. And it's it's interesting because he's actually explaining the FlexBoard business, but in this funny way that you keep asking, like, and then they the the lightning comes down or then the superheroes fly.
Speaker 2:Like, they so you're explaining it to a kid, but you're, like because if you just sit there and you just do the vanilla, like, flex sport explanation, that's gonna be a little dry.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But what's interesting is now, I I feel like I mean, I'm sure smart advertising agencies are already doing this where it used to be that you would a company would say, hey, I wanna run a Super Bowl ad. They'd go and talk to a bunch of different agencies. They would get a they'd do an RFP. Yep.
Speaker 1:And, and then and then the agencies would, like, come up with some concepts Mhmm. That they would basically script out. Maybe they add some images or whatever. Now it feels like the agencies have to actually make a v one an AI v one ad Totally. And say, like, here's our five concepts.
Speaker 1:If you hire us, we'll, like, narrow in
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And actually Yeah. Make it hire hire actors, maybe not use entirely AI. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But I I thought that I thought that was really good. And I I can't believe I think he made that, like, himself. I think that he wrote the script and and concepted everything and, like, actually, like, prompted everything, which is, pretty remarkable. And and I think it all flows from the idea of, like, having a viewpoint, having an insight, having, like, an idea that makes sense for the Super Bowl. I maybe Flexport should just get this, like, add a add a layer of polish and then and then run this.
Speaker 1:Oren Oren went so hard
Speaker 2:What do say?
Speaker 1:On the on this Fed cap. Okay. Yeah. Let's read it. First AI generated Super Bowl ad ever.
Speaker 1:A milestone for truly no one. The worst of agencies pitching, be the first that no one but the agency cares about. Much rather would have watched a cast of characters workshop how they're actually gonna become the top vodka of 2033. Yeah. That's a cool concept.
Speaker 1:And there's a lot that they could have done.
Speaker 2:And and I mean, the the actual like character design of the Svein Kabat is very off putting and very it's just very plasticky, and, it it it doesn't even feel like a modern humanoid design. Like, if you put this next to, like, a one x or, or a Tesla, you know, Optimus, like, you're just it it feels like this is what, like, the nineties called they want their robot design back. Like, that's what it feels like to me. Anyway, let's move on to some other tech ads. First, let me tell you about Console.
Speaker 2:Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of ITHR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.
Speaker 1:Rippling ran an ad. Let's pull it up.
Speaker 2:Parker Conrad, an absolute dog.
Speaker 1:With Tim Robinson. I love Tim Robinson. He's fantastic. So funny.
Speaker 2:But nasty to me. After years of planning, I'm finally gonna get my revenge. I'm gonna trash the town with baby Breck. Unfortunately, baby Breck hasn't been onboarded yet. We're still waiting for his laptop and health benefits.
Speaker 2:Baby Breck? You don't even know what a laptop is. He's not onboarded? No. And his harness wasn't approved by finance.
Speaker 2:They're stuck chasing down their seats. The harness was gonna dangle him from the chopper when we bring him into the town and drop him in. It's like perfectly like he's tripping over his words like See, this is funny.
Speaker 1:This is really really really funny Yeah. If you know Tim Robinson. Yeah. But my concern is I mean, I don't know how I honestly don't know how many
Speaker 2:He's pretty popular now. Yeah. Mean, show on Netflix is pretty big. Yeah. You should believe.
Speaker 2:It's like, he's he's definitely funny. And and I mean, that that style of comedy can just be I don't know. It it is it is a little
Speaker 1:there's so many Tim Robinson sections where he is in a workplace setting Totally. Talking exactly like that.
Speaker 2:I just love I I love when tech companies and founders become like patrons of the arts in the sense that like like, this is probably like a pretty big payday for Tim Robin. Is Robins or Robinson? Robins. Robins. Tim Robinson.
Speaker 2:Love him. Wanna support him. And it's just like it makes me like the brand because I'm just like I like that he likes that they like the same person as I and they like, you know, got him to do something.
Speaker 1:It's so funny because I've I've like actually laughed at Tim Robinson content Totally. So many times. Yeah. Seeing this, I don't even know what what is baby Breck?
Speaker 2:I think it's just like The
Speaker 1:character they made up.
Speaker 2:A character that they made up that's like a Godzilla type that's gonna wreck the city and these are, like, evil villains and they're planning but they're they need to onboard we we saw this ad in
Speaker 1:the dangle him from the chopper.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It it just assumes you know all the lore of this campaign that like who knows where it came from. But he done even know about laptop is? What is what a laptop is? He don't even know what a laptop is.
Speaker 2:The the hashtag. Yes. Rippling. Exactly one post with this hashtag, killing it. This is so funny.
Speaker 2:But I I Yeah.
Speaker 1:I was waiting for I I I know a number of companies have been circling Tim Robinson being Yeah. Like be the first tech company to work with I Tim really
Speaker 2:do think that there's there's some alpha in like if you're if you're just, on the fence.
Speaker 1:55 GPUs, 55
Speaker 2:d centers, 55 neo cloud. That's a great reference. That would have been incredible. We need to get, we need to get some hyperscaler on that one.
Speaker 1:Cadillac. Okay. Ran a full One minute One minute ad. Super Bowl ad. Let's Pachenzo.
Speaker 1:Watch it. Former guest.
Speaker 2:Business to everyone about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously, stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Okay. Let's watch the Cadillac f one video.
Speaker 9:We choose to go to the moon in this decay and do the
Speaker 2:other Probably just CGI. I'm so excited for Cadillac f one. They are easy. I think I'm the only one. But And
Speaker 9:because they are hard.
Speaker 2:I am very excited for it. See, that yeah. That could easily be CGI. It could easily be AI. But That's all.
Speaker 1:It It sort sort
Speaker 2:of of depends on who you put on the team.
Speaker 9:We serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and films.
Speaker 2:I like building the car, like a car breakdown.
Speaker 1:It's a team sport.
Speaker 9:Challenge is one that we're willing to accept.
Speaker 1:It's an engineering challenge.
Speaker 9:One It's
Speaker 2:like the moon landing. Is that what they're saying? Ignition. TWG is the is, like, sort of the presenting sponsor of Cadillac f one.
Speaker 3:To win through
Speaker 2:two. I like delivery. It's hard when you don't have a a really bold color. Like McLaren orange, Ferrari red.
Speaker 1:Black and silver is
Speaker 2:The black silver is cool, but it's a little understated for for the grid. So it doesn't quite jump out at you the way, an Aston Martin Green does. But over time, you know, hopefully, they can kinda dominate that. But Mercedes has sort of has carved out like the silver line a little bit. So
Speaker 1:TWG has Range. They're unique holding companies strategically investing in and operating businesses across investment management, securities, AI and technology, finance and corporate lending, merchant banking and private investments, and sports, media and entertainment. Thank goodness. There we go.
Speaker 2:Oh, I think somebody from TWG once,
Speaker 1:randomly. But, Apple, Parker says, amazed Apple's finally going for the Spotify jugular promoting the ability to switch easily to Apple Music during the Super Bowl.
Speaker 2:So the Apple Music brand reached during the Super Bowl, think, was number one or number two right up there with Budweiser. It did very well. I saw it winning awards. I haven't seen the ad. Let's pull that up while I tell you about 11 Labs.
Speaker 2:Build intelligent real time conversational agents. Re imagine human technology interaction with 11 labs.
Speaker 1:While we're pulling that up Yes. Apple Music was also they also presented the halftime show.
Speaker 2:Yes. They presented
Speaker 1:They had a crazy box.
Speaker 2:They hand
Speaker 1:over Yes. And and break it down.
Speaker 2:What happened? So so so we're in the stadium and they and they do one of those let's cut to the box. They got the long lens looking inside the box and who's there? Tim Cook. Everyone knows Tim Cook, they didn't need to give him a little tagline.
Speaker 2:But there was this other guy whose name was Dave Grohl.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I guess they were worried that people wouldn't know who he was. Yeah. So they put the little Dave Grohl tagline there. But they didn't need to give one for Tim Cook, so
Speaker 1:Tim Cook was was Orafarming.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 1:His box was
Speaker 2:crazy. His box was crazy, actually. And it was funny because I'm I'm of course joking, but Tim Cook was like sort of in the shot, but on the edge of the shot and kind of like the the cat the photographer or the videographer or the cameraman was like sort of moving Tim Cook in and out of the shot, really focused on Dave Grohl who was like putting on a fun performance like chugging a beer and being funny. And Tim Cook was just off to side and I was like, pan over. Show us the big guy.
Speaker 2:Show us the CEO of Apple. That's who I care about at Super Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, we we can talk about the halftime show Yeah. From our point of view since we were there. Yeah. I would say the the energy the production value was insane. Yep.
Speaker 1:Like, very, very Yep. Like, cool, unique looking Yep. Set up. It was really funny because I was I was, like, looking away while they were setting up and I looked down. Was like, they basically created Puerto Rico.
Speaker 1:They recreated the entire island. It seems like
Speaker 2:Plants and people in plants.
Speaker 1:And the plants were so funny because It it seemed like the people in the plants couldn't see out very well. No. And so they had like air traffic control people that were like moving the plants around like yelling. Yeah. You could tell they would be Forward.
Speaker 1:They would be getting like right in the face of the plants and yelling like, go this It was crazy. But the production value was insane. The energy in the stadium was completely dead.
Speaker 2:Dead. No one was dancing. It was very Dylan Patel
Speaker 1:was dancing.
Speaker 2:Yes. He was
Speaker 1:going He was was like Yeah. It was so funny because he was gonna walk down and sit next to you. And then he was like, actually, no. I'm gonna stand up here. I gotta dance.
Speaker 2:And he just started dancing.
Speaker 1:Dylan Dylan held it down for everybody.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think I think the audience of people that go to the Super Bowl, it's a lot of like older folks and they were just not into the the new kid on the block, Bad Bunny. But, it really was, like, a a remarkable production when I think about, like, what we do here in terms of live production, cameras, Chirons, all sorts of stuff. So much goes into it. And to to to do that and say, you have twenty minutes to to build a city on the field, and then you're going to walk around with wireless cameras that look like Arri Alexa's.
Speaker 2:It looks like a movie. It's, like, perfectly shot. You don't even see in if you're watching from home, you don't see that you're at the Super Bowl until, a couple minutes in. And then if you're at the stadium, you don't see what's happening on the performance because it's not on a stage. It's, It's like in this interior zone.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, you can't even tell if that's at the Super Bowl until, like, they start panning out and showing you the full thing. But so much layered detail in the performance. So many Easter eggs. Going back
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was interesting. Era was designed. It was very much felt designed for television.
Speaker 2:Totally. Totally. And that and that's what the Super Bowl has become, and the Super Bowl halftime show has become like, it is an opportunity to bring in a new audience who would not necessarily be watching the Super Bowl, but they come for this and then they maybe some of them drop off, but some of them stick around and it's just like a new introduction. But, it really, really crazy. At one point, he climbs up on a on a, on a telephone pole, which again was constructed twenty minutes before.
Speaker 2:There's a camera that's, I think, battery powered and wirelessly streaming. And so you have talent who's like a multimillionaire. He can't fall down and get injured. He's at the top of this telephone pole. There's a camera there that shows him, and then fireworks start going off.
Speaker 2:And so the combination of fireworks, camera equipment, and elite talent that cannot be injured was a really remarkable magic trick from the production team. And of course, there's a whole bunch of fireworks and whatnot.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Was a lot of people obviously, you know, somewhat somewhat divisive online because there are people that are frustrated because they couldn't understand what he was singing about. But from a purely commercial standpoint, think it makes a lot of sense
Speaker 2:Huge win.
Speaker 1:For the Super Bowl, specifically because a bunch of people that wouldn't have watched the Super Bowl that are international are going to tune in. So I I was in the moment thinking that it'd be great if Apple had their new translating AirPods, and you could actually Oh, yeah. Hear in real time.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But
Speaker 2:Yeah. You could probably throw those on.
Speaker 1:Anyway. Yeah. And and it you know, surrounded by a bunch of, like, AI ads, and then you have this, like, insane IRL
Speaker 2:experience. Yeah. Yeah. It it was very much like practical effects, and there's all these cameos and and details and yeah. Just just just really remarkable to watch the video.
Speaker 2:Not so remarkable seeing it from the stands. But, anyway, do we have the Apple ad available?
Speaker 1:No. No. No. They they No.
Speaker 2:Oh, they didn't even run an ad.
Speaker 1:I Wait. It was like integrated into
Speaker 2:Oh, that was the thing.
Speaker 1:Oh, Let's go to the ai
Speaker 2:ai.com.
Speaker 1:Ai.com.
Speaker 2:Ai.com. You wanted AI, you know where to go. Ai.com. They spent $8,000,000 for a Super Bowl ad.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Bobby says, and the NFL is in the midst of a big international expansion. So they're playing a bunch of international games.
Speaker 2:Totally. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Play a game in London, Canada, and stuff.
Speaker 2:Trying to bring the sport of football to the world. What do we have here? Ai.com.
Speaker 6:It's only thirty seconds long, but it seems to have
Speaker 2:a couple of questions. Did they have a voice over in the actual ad? I don't know. You can just kinda see it, but it was Big Duca says AGI is coming, and it's a five zero three service temporarily unavailable screenshot because I think they got so much traffic. But it was a very odd question.
Speaker 2:So you go to ai.com and asks you first to log in with Google. So you have to give this new website access to your Google
Speaker 1:Which is like insane because they're wrapping they're wrapping Open Claw.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Which
Speaker 1:It's an Open Claw wrapper and and so I go
Speaker 2:in there. That's a new company. And I was like, I don't
Speaker 1:have a sing you know, I have multiple Google accounts. Yeah. I was like, I don't have a single account that I'm willing to just connect to some some app Yeah. That has existed for.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So we can't even find the ad online. I can't find it anywhere. Oh. Did you Chris, the the founder didn't I don't think
Speaker 2:We're gonna we're try and understand like the bigger project. But because it seems like the domain buy was maybe longer than the build out of the product because it's it seems like it's an open claw fork of some sort. And and the domain name was maybe $70,000,000. They say it's $500 for a vibe coded site, probably fake, but funny. And Okay.
Speaker 1:We got the ad now.
Speaker 2:Oh, we do. Okay. Let's pull it up. Let's pull up the ad. What else we got?
Speaker 2:Okay. Do you think this is AI generated? Because if this ran first before SVEDKA, SVEDKA got scooped. No. This looks like maybe traditional motion graphics.
Speaker 2:I don't know. It's hard to tell these days. AGI is coming. Get your handle now.
Speaker 1:You're gonna want You're gonna want
Speaker 2:You know, am a sucker. I'm a sucker for locking down Sam. I know. Was interested in What are they doing there?
Speaker 1:They're trying to get people to Who's Mark?
Speaker 2:Oh, Zuckerberg? I I was thinking Mark Chen. Yeah. So
Speaker 1:What? Yeah. I mean, the the whole thing is I I invited found Yeah. Chris, the founder on. We'll try to get him on to understand more The longer strategy.
Speaker 1:One of the things so he had a lot of success clearly buying crypto.com. Yeah.
Speaker 2:.Com arena here
Speaker 1:in LA. Yeah. He basically owns LA. Yeah. But the difference with crypto is like building an exchange is like somewhat like a commoditized platform at least in its simple state.
Speaker 1:You're like, I want people to buy crypto
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:In my app, in my exchange. They come here, they make their.com. Okay. The difference with ai.com Mhmm. Is like I think to actually compete in this domain
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Your product's gonna have to be insane. Yeah. Right? Because you're competing with OpenAI Yeah. Gemini, Anthropic.
Speaker 1:You're competing with Perplexity. Like, there's so many you know, thousand different startups. And so I think this ad is not gonna give people a lot of the whole experience here is not gonna give people a lot of confidence. One, getting people to like sign up, connect there. Not even giving them an opportunity to just create a normal account.
Speaker 2:That yeah. That is wild.
Speaker 1:One, that that's crazy. But would have just created
Speaker 2:It's gonna be way better if you do give it access to your email because then immediately it knows who you are, what you talk about, what you shop for.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But also running a Super Bowl ad and only having Google
Speaker 2:That is crazy. There's so many people that are on Yahoo and Outlook and you know, any any other service like there are people that are like, I'm an iCloud guy, you know. It's it's it's it's like rare, but it's still like millions and millions of people like
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They're just not in your in your target market. Very odd.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So anyways
Speaker 2:.co. We're d to c brands, b to b startups, AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pet channels target audiences, measure sales just like on Meta. Jordy, do you have anything else on ai.com?
Speaker 1:Adam Strong said Did you already cover this? No. He said 8,000,000 for Super Bowl ads, 70,000,000 for domain name, $500 vibe coded site, Cloudflare basic hosting, priceless. Yeah. App did not or the the website did not feel polished.
Speaker 2:This is Paul Paul e Williams post with 18,000 likes. Love the idea of running a Super Bowl ad that just says go to my website and not and then not being ready for the traffic. Yeah. I mean, you can like cache the site like locally everywhere and have it be super static and and and bury the call to action. Like, can capture someone's email in the browser and then just hold it there for an extra minute while you give them some other experience.
Speaker 2:So you're like pushing the funnel so your server isn't on fire. Like, to actually usually, like, what what the the thing that brings down the sites that are like deeper in the back end, like the database is not performing or whatever. It's very rarely like I couldn't get them HTML on time. Like, that's pretty solved. And so it's it's it's very, very odd.
Speaker 2:But, I don't know. At the same time, like, yeah. Reflecting on the the crypto versus AI thing, like, there was never really a crypto talent war like there was in AI because there was never a moment where it was like, oh, like, this platform needs this particular feature and only that person, that scientist needs knows how to do it. It's like, there were important features that got built, but a lot of them were done open source. And then the value of the platform was, like, liquidity, the scale, the features, the compliance, the regulatory, like, all of that.
Speaker 2:And you can't just, like, poach one person and then all of a sudden be like, I have Coinbase's stuff. And so very interesting question of, like like, it's maybe not crypto.com. How do you build something that's that's as performant as Perplexity or Claude or Gemini without that team? Or maybe you're ready to invest in that team.
Speaker 1:And Yep. Or I mean, if the most successful brand I've never heard of. Yep. If you can get through to the site Yep. Requires you to authorize login
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And like I read through the I read through the the privacy policy and the terms and I was like, like, definitely not. Yeah. And and so, yeah, again, what's what's the point?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's interesting that AI is somehow more intimate in many ways. If you're talking about personal assistant, personal AI, then I like, I would trust crypto.com with my money in many ways because I'm like, okay. If I buy a Bitcoin, like, there's a chance that it's an offshore exchange. It goes bankrupt, but, like, it's contained to, like, whatever you're doing there.
Speaker 2:Whereas if you're letting an AI into your Yeah.
Speaker 1:One reason to trust crypto
Speaker 2:and all your bank accounts.
Speaker 1:Yeah. One reason to trust crypto.com is it made it through the last cycle.
Speaker 2:That's true. That's And I
Speaker 1:think a of people felt like, hey, I haven't heard I mean, company I think was mostly pretty much bootstrapped. Think it's mostly mostly founder, you know, entirely owned by the founders. So they've they've been stable in that sense. But anyways, very You
Speaker 2:see most bootstrapped companies. You know what I'm gonna say. Turbo buffer. Serverless factor and full text search built from first principles on optic storage. Fast, 10 x cheaper, and extremely scalable.
Speaker 1:Before we talk about Jason Carman's
Speaker 2:Yeah. Let's run through some Ranking.
Speaker 1:No. We gotta jump in with some breaking news.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. What do we got?
Speaker 1:Apparently, OpenAI actually rolled out ads in ChatGPT today.
Speaker 2:Let's go. Finally. Dreaming the Gong for them? We beat them to it. We beat
Speaker 1:them to it. We front We
Speaker 2:beat them to it.
Speaker 1:We front
Speaker 2:Breaking news. Ads have officially launched in ChatGPT. You can go to the free tier or I believe the go tier as well and enjoy ads. In ChatGPT, you'll see probably enhanced rate limits and extended functionality more
Speaker 1:recent Can you work to try to find to get served an ad? Yeah. I wanna see what they actually I'm worried or create a
Speaker 2:new account maybe.
Speaker 4:Yeah. New email.
Speaker 2:New email. I I I would love to know, you know, how much how how how much do they exaggerate when you see an ad? Like, they could do a blaring red background. It's very obvious. This is the ad and then this is the content.
Speaker 2:Will the ads be even at all related to the content? Right? All related to stuff you've seen in the past, or is it just gonna be completely random? We'll see. And I'm sure we'll see a lot of screenshots in the timeline.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think from from what I understand, it won't be related to the content Yeah. Because people are gonna be annoyed at that. Mhmm. I would expect that in the future, it is.
Speaker 1:Right? That's just sort of the natural evolution. Right? And so that's like one one one way to justify
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Drapix critics, know, kind of like original ad Yeah. Which is like, hey, you asked about this thing, asked about how to get healthier and we offered you this drug. Maybe that's not that not super aligned. Yeah. But in the meantime, I think it'll effectively be display ads based on your interest graph.
Speaker 1:Right? What they know about you based on what you've searched in the past. So interested to see this. I'm not gonna say anything more anything more positive because Your audience captured. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Everyone everyone It's so funny. I went from like last year being like Oh, Jordy's a hater. Hypercritical hater. Hypercritical of opening AI was like I was stealing everything. Yeah.
Speaker 1:John was the steel man. I was like, Sora's gonna fail. Yeah. Atlas is gonna fail. They're launching adult mode.
Speaker 1:I'm like the the the the like the the most
Speaker 2:trillion's too much. Like, where's
Speaker 1:the most like vocal critic. I'm talking about like, you know, throwing shade at Sam's answer on BG two saying like that was the worst possible answer you could have given. I have zero confidence. So suddenly I say like, I just pop my head up Yeah. At one point and say Hey.
Speaker 1:Hey. I think the ads are kind deceptive. Parker says the amount of athletic greens in Squarespace ads is
Speaker 2:gonna be tough. I'm excited for it. I'm excited for
Speaker 1:So anyways, we'll We'll we'll see what Tyler can dig up.
Speaker 2:What people get. Let's also tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Brian says, to be fair, Sohr and Atlas have kind of failed. And that and and, yeah, I said that basically the day they launched. I was like, I don't I think Soar is a good cool way to generate a video. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't think it's gonna work so
Speaker 2:about that too. People are using it more as, generate something to send to a group chat, generate something that goes on to Instagram or something like that. Or even even just like use it as a tool in the tool chain for
Speaker 1:certain things. Yeah. Anybody that anybody that anybody that said anybody that said, oh, oh, you're just you're just like pumping OpenAI. I'm sorry, we literally had Nick on the show last week. Trying to provide a balanced point of view.
Speaker 1:Let's head over to Jason Carmen. He built a tier ranker
Speaker 2:with Call 52. If you want to share where you think each brand landed, can go to story.incsuperbowl and you can tap an ad and then you can tap to rank it and you can decide where you want to put you want to put Budweiser. Where does Pepsi go? What do you like? What you hate?
Speaker 2:And you can take a screenshot of this and share it. And Jason, of course, he makes cinematic ads for science and technology companies and he will be sharing his rankings tonight. I guess he probably already put them out. Let me see. I gotta find these.
Speaker 2:But anyway, go check it out at story.inc. He loves loves a good guy.
Speaker 1:Serena Williams partnered with Row.
Speaker 2:She's been partnered with Row for a long time. Yeah. But partnered for a Super Bowl ad, is a new level up. Let's see what she had to say about Row.
Speaker 11:I'm on Row. Thirty four pounds down on GLP ones. Healthier on Row. Supported on Row. FDA approved GLP one options.
Speaker 11:Now even in a pill. Weight loss expertise I trust. I'm moving better on Row.
Speaker 2:Extremely clear.
Speaker 1:I'm feeling better. Lot of repetition.
Speaker 2:It's just like, this is what it does. I'm famous, and here's exactly the value prop. On row.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Good pitch.
Speaker 1:On row at least at least five times.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You don't know the brand by the end of that. That's good.
Speaker 1:Sticking with Row's history and direct response and just They're growing up as a seed like, if we run an ad, it can't just be They Nora
Speaker 2:were doing TV direct response super early. I remember seeing those ads in bars and random TV spots. They were doing NBA, MLB, all sorts of stuff.
Speaker 1:They mentioned the pill. Do you think that's an actual do they have an
Speaker 2:actual Yes. It's the same thing, front end to Novo, front end to To Govy. Yeah, yeah, to the big pharma companies. They are I I think that they have fully stayed out of the compounding space or at least a little bit. And and really and really them just be this, you know, like seamless front end to deal with doctors.
Speaker 2:But anyway, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.
Speaker 1:Let's pull up the CoreWeave ad.
Speaker 2:I love CoreWeave. I'm a big fan. This ad
Speaker 3:You can't control. Anything
Speaker 2:without AI. We were memeing this too. Were like, you can't you can't spell quad without a d. A as in aerospace. I like this transition.
Speaker 2:This is cool. N is for Nanotech, navigation, neuroscience. Why is simply yes. Yes to predicting storms to keep people safe. Yes to empowering a lot of good stuff.
Speaker 2:A n. T is for translation. Trading. Yeah. Tools teachers need to educate each kid.
Speaker 6:In their own way.
Speaker 2:That's a weird transition. H is for healthcare, to help keep humans healthier. Home automation and robotics. I is for ideas and the power to grow them exponentially. N, this is for now.
Speaker 2:The time to never say never. G is for the good we could do with AI. Genomics.
Speaker 1:Sir, it's a bubble.
Speaker 2:Moon boots? Gravity?
Speaker 1:For anything.
Speaker 2:Oh, anti gravity boots. That's what it is.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:The Chance We were Core Weave. The essential clown for
Speaker 1:So the Chance a Rapper
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Part felt super random. I haven't seen or heard from Chance a Rapper in
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Long time.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think what they were trying to do Mhmm. Is they're probably looking around and saying data centers are the most hated thing in America right now. Yeah. We gotta make the case for data centers.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is this
Speaker 1:is But what my my point I would have liked something like potentially even more Tactile. Direct and, like, tactile
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Than just kind of, like, rambling on. It was it wasn't again
Speaker 13:I don't
Speaker 1:know. It wasn't it wasn't like it wasn't it didn't really, like, pull pull you in. Yeah. It was just kinda, like, background noise.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There was one there was one part where
Speaker 1:Dan says Chance the Rapper, w r a p p e r.
Speaker 2:That would have been good. Yeah. Yeah. There's a line in there where he says something predicting the
Speaker 1:ad reprice their CDS spreads and bring down the refinancing cost.
Speaker 2:We will find out for sure. No. The business is doing fine.
Speaker 1:Up 8% today. Total victory. But
Speaker 2:no. No. So so he's doing this alliteration thing where where there's different like, it's tea and then he mentions predicting the weather, which I think is cool. And I think that's actually like a great story of AI, like, you know, oh, there there's a flood like No.
Speaker 1:It's not.
Speaker 2:Okay. But but then
Speaker 1:Just because we've had weather forecasts forever. So so if you're trying to justify data center development and say, like, hey, AI is cool, actually. You can predict the weather. People are gonna be like, cool. The thing that I've been able to turn on my television and Yeah.
Speaker 1:Then
Speaker 3:you understand.
Speaker 2:Tells me. Okay. Well, I don't know. My my point was that each letter had five or six things instead of one concrete thing. Maybe you want to narrow it down and unpack it and actually make the case because clearly, just mentioning that you can predict the weather with AI didn't hit with you, but maybe if they unpack it with three or four sentences, they could convince you a little bit more.
Speaker 2:And then this is trading I think a lot of people don't care about trading.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Part of it is like, doesn't CoreWeave have, like, a handful of customers that actually matter?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And they're also, like, deeper in this stack than most of companies. It's like, there there will be there will be a weather prediction company that uses a a a foundation model that is run on CoreWeave, but you you won't even you won't see CoreWeave powering that. So even if you are like, wow. I actually got a flash flood warning early.
Speaker 2:I moved out of town and it was amazing predicting the weather's IBM Watson
Speaker 1:Cam. Cam. There probably was an IBM Watson Super Bowl ad at some point that was like, in the future, we will be able to predict the weather.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Oh, well. Oh, well. Yeah. This one was this this one was not that well received.
Speaker 1:That's not over to
Speaker 2:Dunkin' Donuts. First, let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. Let's head over to Dunkin'
Speaker 14:version of Goodwill Hunting was made as sitcom with a real genius in the lead and some
Speaker 2:other So this is AI as well. Right? De aging? Arrange the munchkins in the Fibonacci sequence. I got a genius whacking for me.
Speaker 13:Who's such a genius? And why'd he put ice in his coffee? Come on, Chucky.
Speaker 3:I'm just Will Hunting.
Speaker 2:I'm not a genius.
Speaker 6:I will marry the first man that can help me with the Fibonacci sequence.
Speaker 14:How you do it? Chloe. Don't you have a girlfriend?
Speaker 9:We're on a break.
Speaker 3:I don't need her.
Speaker 9:I just got everything I need
Speaker 14:right here at Dunkin'.
Speaker 2:Hey, kid. If you're still single doing this Boston shtick and working for Dunkin' when you're 50, I'm a be very disappointed.
Speaker 3:Isn't that your girlfriend?
Speaker 6:It's like cameo central. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Very chaotic.
Speaker 6:Well, this is my new boyfriend. How you like
Speaker 7:Tom Brady?
Speaker 2:I'm sorry. They really were
Speaker 1:spamming the cameo.
Speaker 2:How many cameos do you want? Yes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The the the the the AI CGI was a little rough. Yeah. Like, it wasn't
Speaker 2:It was it was reasonable. The the haircut is what's hilarious to me. The putting Ben Affleck in the Matt Damon haircut, that's very funny. But not not a great pitch for Dunkin' Donuts. I don't know.
Speaker 2:It was fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What's the takeaway? Think about Dunkin'. Sometimes all that matters is you get people to think about
Speaker 2:had fun with it? I don't know. It's interesting. The Squarespace ad was particularly odd. I I I think the Squarespace one was weirder to me.
Speaker 4:That was I like that one.
Speaker 2:You like that one?
Speaker 1:Alright. That's cool.
Speaker 2:We'll debate this while I tell you about Labelbox. RL environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams continuing to watch the Squarespace ad with Emma Stone.
Speaker 1:Oh, is a Genspark ad.
Speaker 2:Oh, what's Genspark? Should choose to. Monday, February 9. Genspark, finish his slide deck. Okay.
Speaker 14:Now you're not working from home. Hey, you put on pants. This is practical.
Speaker 3:Genspark, dial in this space.
Speaker 2:Space tune went so hard. Parker's got it.
Speaker 14:We done? Circle back on out of here. Let Genspark automate your work and take a day off.
Speaker 2:Okay. AI for enterprise.
Speaker 1:Gents Mark. Unicorn raised around half 1,000,000,000 to But They have a Yeah. Competing I mean, effectively competing with Copilot. Right? Copilot also ran an ad for Excel.
Speaker 1:Let's pull up the Squarespace ad now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is one where they just let the director go crazy. So find your domain name. She wants emmastone.com and it's unavailable. So she breaks the laptop and there's a whole bunch of laptops that have already been broken.
Speaker 2:So she's furious. She gets another laptop. It's still unavailable. She smashes it again. Now, I was thinking that this get your oh, this is a shorter version.
Speaker 2:So there's another version where, like, there's this rollerblader who comes in and, like, continually, like, delivers her new laptops. She tries multiple times. And I was like, oh, I know where they're going with this. Domain brokerage. They're gonna help her buy emmastone.com from whoever owns it.
Speaker 1:That goes out with the killer. Works where, you know, you pay $70 and then they just take your money and they're like, yep. Couldn't get it.
Speaker 2:Sure. But, you know, maybe their pitch is like, it works now. We're good at reaching out to the people that have the domains and we will, we we And so we got Emma Stone, emmastone.com. You can go there right now and like, we brokered it for her. Those products.
Speaker 2:They just end and they're just like, get your domain before it's too late.
Speaker 1:I don't think those products will ever work for Yes. Everyday consumers because they'll tell you They'll they'll literally reach out to like google.com and say like, hey, if you give us $70, we'll try to get google.com for you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Obviously, they need to have have some sort of layer of interaction. But you you could imagine that between AI agents, a a small Salesforce, really top tier people, like, you could Squarespace could have a serious domain brokerage that could do 80% of requests. Like Yeah. Especially if you're Emma Stone and you have a budget.
Speaker 1:It's kind of a rough the the the challenge with the ad is that a lot of people that do go on Squarespace Yeah. And try to get a domain and make a website will have that exact experience.
Speaker 2:Yes. So you're
Speaker 1:kind of like advertising the experience you don't want Yes. Your
Speaker 2:Also, if you go to msstone.com, it is her website. So it doesn't quite match.
Speaker 1:Fake news.
Speaker 2:They do a good job of saying get your domain before you lose it. They tie it back to the super ad. And it's the same video, like, black and white texture. Yeah. You can see it.
Speaker 2:So it it it does complete the journey, but it's a little bit odd from the storytelling perspective because in the video, she was unable to get emmastone.com. But then somewhere after the ad ends in the castle in the island, she gets the domain and spins up a website from square Squarespace. Anyway, beautifully shot ad and fun that they went they went black bars. I believe they didn't do a full widescreen ad. They did a little bit squarer, which I think is like a nod to Squarespace maybe.
Speaker 2:I don't know. We will see.
Speaker 1:We watched the Hims and Hers Super Bowl
Speaker 2:Oh, they launched one too? Interesting. I thought I thought thought Roe would be the only one. Okay. Let's let's pull
Speaker 1:it up. Dropping it in here.
Speaker 2:I will tell everyone about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputer for training and inference that scales from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. And then we will pull up I like the thunder. The
Speaker 13:cloud.
Speaker 1:We're we're adding We just two different effects today. It's amazing.
Speaker 2:Let's pull up the Hims and Hers ad. What does this one say?
Speaker 14:Live longer.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Spend millions of g death and taking shots at
Speaker 15:b Johnson.
Speaker 1:Buys more time. The wealth gap is a health gap.
Speaker 2:It Okay. The
Speaker 14:rich have health care that comes to them. Custom formulated peptides, specialists on call, and preventative care
Speaker 2:before democratizing health? Of everything.
Speaker 1:It's pretty wild to a bunch of biomegaard testing.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay. Testing and getting the EDM guy. This is a lot of content here. Fit your goals. Microdosing?
Speaker 2:In positive In a super testosterone hormones
Speaker 14:to keep you feeling great. And early cancer detection through a simple blood test. Okay. Same science
Speaker 1:Raghav says last ad before bankruptcy. Stock's down 17% today because of this ad.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We
Speaker 1:I'm kidding. It's down because they got a very angry
Speaker 2:The admin. Right?
Speaker 1:FDA came out hard against them Friday.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:We had TJ Parker came on the show, broke it down Yeah. On Friday, if you wanna understand the him situation.
Speaker 2:There's an article
Speaker 1:go back.
Speaker 2:Washington Post, Eric Topol shared it. He says Super Bowl spot will promote a cancer test that can produce false results. I mean, every test can have false results. The question is like, out of the bounds of what the FDA approves? You know, even even, you know, an off the shelf pregnancy test can have false positives.
Speaker 2:That's why they say take multiple. But it does seem like the FDA is not a fan of the move fast and break things approach in this particular category. So rough
Speaker 1:Move fast and disregard IP. That's another one. Disregard studies.
Speaker 2:It's a it's a rough time.
Speaker 1:Make your own drugs. Our first
Speaker 2:guest joining in just a minute, but Michael Dudeau continued his reviews, which I'm enjoying at this point. Homes.com. No. Rowe, not entertaining, but it will be massively effective for Rowe's business. I agree.
Speaker 2:It was like, okay. I get it. I get it. I get it. But that's the point.
Speaker 2:Wix Harmony, think they meant to have that on Grammys last week. OpenAI expected better from the company synonymous with AI. So Michael Duda is going all over the place. Mister Beast also collabed with Salesforce on a massive Super Bowl ad that had a lot of hype, giving away a million dollars. There's lot of cool CGI in here.
Speaker 2:We had the chance to meet mister Beast at the game. Yeah. What we're hoping
Speaker 1:Well, he's a he's a Ramp customer.
Speaker 2:So he
Speaker 1:came by the Ramp box yesterday.
Speaker 2:That's right. Yeah. We're very excited for him. Well, without further ado, let's bring Jason in from the restream waiting room. Well, a little ado because I'm gonna tell you about fin dot ai, the number one AI agent for customer service.
Speaker 2:If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. Sorry, Jason. Welcome that thought. Hold that. That's a
Speaker 5:great product. I love it.
Speaker 2:It's great. Thank you. Well, how are you doing?
Speaker 5:I'm doing well. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Did you watch the Super Bowl? Are you a Super Bowl guy?
Speaker 5:Not really Okay. Actually.
Speaker 2:Did you see any of Once I saw the TV once I
Speaker 5:saw the end the ad, I I Yeah. Kinda tuned up.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. You're you're like, okay. Three we're three hours before the game, job's finished. I'm good.
Speaker 2:That's right. That's right. And and and you flew to San Francisco to see it because it was a regional buy. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Of course. Yeah. Couldn't miss
Speaker 2:it. Yeah. Okay. I couldn't
Speaker 1:miss it. Well, the the
Speaker 2:news that we wanted to talk about
Speaker 1:Yeah. Wanted we we were texting a little bit about the the new Ferrari EV. Yes. And I think there's nobody that I was excited to talk to more Yeah. Than you about it, just given your I've always appreciated your your personal taste in cars and just also in design choices broadly.
Speaker 1:And I think this is such a for anyone that missed it, Ferrari is making a their first electric vehicle, the loose Luce. Yeah. Am I saying that correctly?
Speaker 5:Italian. Luce. Sounding Italian.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sounds Italian. I thought they we don't know exactly what the car looks like, but it's like meant to be kind of a daily driver. Mhmm. It look it looks to be like some sort of hatchback, something like that.
Speaker 1:So not as aggressive looking as as the g t GTC four Lucio Lucio or the FF. But looks fine and highly anticipated. And then just on the interior, they partnered with Johnny Ive and the Yes. Lovefront team. So I before I share my thoughts, I'd I'd love to kind of, like, hear how you've been processing it.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So I saw it this morning like everyone else did. I think they came out with it this morning or announced it this morning. And, obviously, it's a demo. It's a three d demo of kind of what this thing appears to be, at least the the video was.
Speaker 5:And I think the first thing you go is that, well, that's at least very fresh. Like, it's about time. It feels like car interfaces have really gone mostly in the wrong direction, just like black glass screens and everything's touchscreen, and they're starting to bring some switches back and dials back. But, clearly, this feels a bit more considered. There's more tactile stuff.
Speaker 5:There's more real stuff integrating with with virtual stuff. And, of course, all all of the design choices were, you know, very beautiful. Transitions were lovely, and there's no lag in all these things. Again, this is a demo. It's hard to say what this will really be driven on, but it looked great.
Speaker 5:I think it looked great. There was a really nice I would say the thing that really stuck with me was the integration between the virtual and the physical Switches that when you when you move them up, like, then a digital display comes up, little buttons on the top right corner adjusting some display stuff. Really, really nice. A lot of inspiration from other brands I saw too. I saw I kinda felt like there was a little Aston Martin thing going on here.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:So the the DB nine era of Aston Martin's, you take this key, this glass crystal thing and you push it into a slot Yeah. To start the car. Yeah. And I think that's what they were showing here is they put this
Speaker 1:like, you can imagine the experience of, like, pushing the key in, having it lock in place and then tapping it because it it's just a nice experience. Still, there's I mean, I I feel like so often I'm like putting my key in random different places at different times and it's nice to just have a place in the car. Push it, lock it in, you know where it is.
Speaker 5:And to leave it there. That's the thing. Yeah. Exactly. It probably is magnetic, so it probably snaps in, snicks in, and down.
Speaker 5:But that's kind of an Aston derivative. And also, the way the the dials, when they light up, they they go counterclockwise is also something that Aston was doing. So, Johnny, I'm being British. I wonder if there's little bit of a call out to Aston there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Good point.
Speaker 2:But it's cool. I would say, though, one thing that,
Speaker 5:you know, no no one knows is what the outside of the car looks like yet. And I think great interiors need to be matched up with great exteriors. The best interiors in history, I think, were complete ideas. You think about, like, the and I'll go off on this, you tell me to stop. But, like, the the the VW first VW GTI Mark one, special interior.
Speaker 5:It felt like it fit with the exterior, the, like, Lancia Delta Integrale is another car like that. It's just like the interior and the exterior just were perfectly built together. The Porsche nine twenty eight feels like the interior had to be in that car. It couldn't have been in a different car. Totally.
Speaker 5:And so it's hard to evaluate with interior design like this. It's like, what does it look like? Fit in? Does it fit with
Speaker 1:yeah. That's that's the the big unknown for me right now. Because I look at the the mock up that everyone's been sharing and it's this, like, hyper modern sporty hatchback. And then on the inside, have all this analog buttons and you have what looks almost like a restomod, like, heavily inspired by some of legacy Ferraris from, you know, you know, traditional classic Ferraris. And so right now, when you look at Johnny's work and you look at the mock up, it doesn't feel cohesive at all.
Speaker 1:And the experience when you get into the sporty hatchback and then you have, like, an old classic Ferrari kind of like racing inspired steering wheel just it looks strange. So I think we need to withhold judgment there. The kind of going into some of the more negative, like, I never have something I've really disliked about some of the more modern AMGs is this like iPad. This like iPad interface, and you've seen this in in some of the Astons too where it's like, hey, we didn't know where to put this screen, so we're just gonna like bolt it on to the front dash and like put it out in your face. And the experience of being a car in a car, it's just so incredibly nice when everything just kind of, like, blends in in the front and you're able to just focus.
Speaker 1:And I don't want I don't want a screen kinda pushed into my face. So some of the, like, it it feels like like, my big concern with this project is that Ferrari is not Apple. So Johnny Yes. Doing Johnny doing work, doing doing product design work and building products at Apple, one of the greatest hardware manufacturers in history, probably the greatest hardware manufacturer and and consumer electronic manufacturer in history. And then you put him in in a team at, like, Ferrari, and then, like, it almost like, he's gonna be handicapped to some degree by Ferrari's own internal capabilities, which, like, anybody that's owned a Ferrari is, I never, in my Ferrari ownership experience, was I like, oh, Ferrari is just exceptional at at, you know, making electronic interfaces.
Speaker 1:Right? Like the they can't even there was like a very long period where the buttons would be sticky after a year. Right? And that was just like an ongoing problem that they couldn't seem to And so my concern is that Johnny's probably deeply handicapped not just by the Ferrari team, even though they're so great at making vehicles overall, but also from regulation. Right?
Speaker 1:And that, like, just because you wanna do something doesn't mean you can do it, even if it, is would be a nice consumer experience. And so the excitement comes from, like, fresh look at the interior, a bunch of new ideas, bringing back these kind of, like, analog, tactile experiences, taking inspiration from history. But then the concern is that it's Ferrari, and they don't they can't fully deliver on it. And and some of these features, like, aren't as reliable as you'd want them to be and and on and on and on.
Speaker 5:You know, I yeah. I agree with all that. I also think your your point about the Mercedes AMG GT floating iPad. Like, I love the way that car looks.
Speaker 8:Yeah. It's
Speaker 5:amazing. I love that car. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I
Speaker 5:hate the entire I will not buy one.
Speaker 1:I know.
Speaker 5:Because it looks it's so bad. The other thing that's interesting is he also seemed to kinda you know, Mercedes has these iconic round vents. And I've kinda got that vibe from this interior too. Yeah. The back,
Speaker 1:Yeah. In the back, the passenger vents look really cool, and they can point around in a unique way. It's a bit of
Speaker 5:an AMG thing. But anyway yeah.
Speaker 2:Not to go, like, too gigabrain, but is there any translation that you think you can do? Any, like, red string drawing from, like, skeuomorphism to flat design, like UI to what's going on with the Ferrari interior design language? Or any even just, like, reflections on your career and how you processed skeuomorphic design and the transition to flat design, which sort of I I believe it was led from Apple, and then everyone else just fell in line. But what what was your experience there? And then is there anything to pull from it?
Speaker 15:Yeah. That's a
Speaker 5:great point. I mean, I think that we lost a lot. Actually, we lost skeuomorphic design, we went to flat design. And I think what we're seeing now is a pullback, and you're seeing it everywhere. I think you're seeing it more in software too where there's more sort of textures and transitions and different things happening and shading again.
Speaker 5:You're seeing it in car design now with knobs coming back and neural surfaces. And, like, I saw in the new Audi I think they called it the concept c or something like that. This new TT inspired design they're working on. Their interior is, like, very tactile. It's not just that there's buttons.
Speaker 5:Like, there's buttons. But there's also the buttons have texture and there's clicks and snicks and all these things that are going on. Yeah. And I think that that just it's so deeply satisfying Yeah. To know that when you put an interface into a certain position that you did it right and then it works and that Yeah.
Speaker 5:Status
Speaker 1:That physical feedback. All
Speaker 5:that stuff. And I think we lost some of that. I I love seeing that it's coming back. And, you know, I think look. I I saw some criticism online that, like, what Johnny Ives was, you know, designing stuff for billions of people and now he's designing something for, like, a thousand rich people or whatever.
Speaker 5:But I think this idea is going to make its way down the chain Yeah. Across. I think people are gonna be inspired by this design in general and hopefully pay more attention to these things. I do think, though, it's very important that with what we've seen, every pretty much every car interior today can just be, like, pulled out and put into a different car. It just feels like they're all the same.
Speaker 5:And I think that these brands need to figure out the whole idea and not just kind of just throw a bunch of screens and go, we we've done it. We've we've made Yeah.
Speaker 1:Mean, the Aston Martin has been ripped apart on some of their halo cars, the Val Valhalla, the Valkyrie, where they they just built this beautiful, like racing machine and then they're like, here's an iPad. Right. And it's like, we gotta we gotta get beyond that. Is the other
Speaker 2:Is the INEOS Grenadier underrated, overrated? Is it a gimmick or is it the future?
Speaker 5:I like the outside of it. I've never driven one.
Speaker 2:So inside, it's all physical switches for everything. I mean Okay. There are so many switches. I mean, still have a screen a little bit, but, like, you know, you have switches up on the top of the ceiling and all the way down to the cup holders. Airplane cockpitty?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a little airplane cockpitty. But people love it, but it is it feels like it's intentionally contrarian, which I think is a good exploration. But yeah.
Speaker 5:I think they've leaned into what that is, which is like trying to go to become an old school Land Rover again. I have a Land Rover Defender, the current version, and I think they've done a really nice job with the interior in that car.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:There's some screens. They're relatively small, but a lot of things are still tactile. It's a and also the interior really mimics the exterior. I think that's one of the best designed cars at the moment, actually. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Inside and out, like, combination full ideas.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:There's some good stuff, though.
Speaker 2:But and I think, like,
Speaker 1:Kia is doing some great stuff.
Speaker 5:There's a lot of cool stuff.
Speaker 1:I was telling a friend like, yeah, it seems like the the INEOS is like a huge hit. I just like, it's like every fifth car and it's like It's the only car. Dude, you live in Malibu. It's like the prime. It's like I was like Yeah.
Speaker 1:The the one the other criticism, again, I wanna hold actual criticism until we see what the actual outside looks like. But but the current renders that we're seeing just look like Kias. Like, if this looks like it
Speaker 5:could Yeah. Be I mean, I mean was the
Speaker 1:same criticism of the Purosangue. Which is like, hey. Like, this could be you could put a Kia badge on it, and I would think
Speaker 2:But you you can contrast it with, like, the Lamborghini where, like, everything's an octagon or hexagon, and, like, it looks like everything is the most extreme. Like, just to turn it on, you have to, like, click up and push down, and there's, like, 25 different things. It's, like, overengineered, but it's unmistakable. And that's sort
Speaker 1:of Yeah.
Speaker 2:The shtick, and it works.
Speaker 1:I don't know. So my my prediction
Speaker 5:I agree. But I think this is credit to Kia, though, and not discredit to Fowler.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. It's good. He is
Speaker 5:He is doing some amazing design Totally.
Speaker 7:Totally.
Speaker 1:And it yeah.
Speaker 2:It shows Who knows? Maybe they're a love from client and they just said, keep our name off the web page.
Speaker 1:Quietly. Conspiracy theory here. My prediction with the with the Luche is that it prices in the mid 3 hundreds, somewhere in that range. You'll be able to buy it for 200 within Yeah. A actually think they'll sell I actually think they'll
Speaker 2:Oh, because
Speaker 5:they're EVs.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The EV
Speaker 2:thing is so rough.
Speaker 1:Think they'll sell well because there's certainly demand for a daily able Ferrari, but the Purosangue being priced at over half $1,000,000, it just like really cuts out so much so much of the market who can who can actually there's very few people that will daily a Ferrari that want that kind of brand surrounding them at all times.
Speaker 2:And it's twice an Urus. And then
Speaker 1:you're gonna probably a quarter mil Yeah. Within a couple years. Like, these cars are gonna be available for a quarter million dollars and not that long. Yeah. And and I expect the EV, the depreciation to be even more vicious, but I expect these to do numbers in Cupertino from the old Apple guard that wants to just By the
Speaker 2:I like that.
Speaker 5:I did comment on this on on x about how the worst part of this interface is Apple CarPlay integration.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Why?
Speaker 5:And I feel like I feel like there's a sweet revenge in that for for
Speaker 2:For Johnny.
Speaker 5:For Johnny and I think Mike who's kind of a iOS designer Sure. I forget his name. Fantastic designer.
Speaker 2:Is that the fact that
Speaker 5:they made this look the worst? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, Because yeah. The design language doesn't match or it's customizable. Okay.
Speaker 7:Well, and
Speaker 5:It doesn't match, but what's interesting in most cars, it's the best part because the rest of their interface sucks.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 5:Totally. In this case, it's the Apple looks the worst. The Apple bit looks the worst. And I think that I just think it's sweet revenge for them, frankly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We're still in this messy middle where cars have basically two operating systems. Yeah. And Yeah. It's unfortunate.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It is really bad in some cars where if you turn the volume knob, you can't access the the the the CarPlay UI because it's a layer on top, and it's like, oh, come on, guys. I think Apple's working on solving that, but it takes years and years to roll all this stuff out. It is it is it is an odd revenge to, like, spend your entire career building a walled garden and then be on the outside of that walled garden and be like, but I'd really like to get into the garden.
Speaker 2:And you can't because you built it.
Speaker 5:That's right.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Well, cool. Thank you so much. Great to
Speaker 1:catch up. Thanks for
Speaker 13:popping up. Anytime.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Talk to cars
Speaker 1:on floor. We'll come back on soon. Great to see you.
Speaker 9:See you guys
Speaker 2:in person. Have a good one.
Speaker 1:See you.
Speaker 2:Let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium sized businesses. And without further ado, we have Bill Bishop. He runs cynicism. Welcome to the show, Bill. Good to see you again.
Speaker 2:Welcome back.
Speaker 7:Hey. Thanks for having me back.
Speaker 13:It's Happy New Year.
Speaker 2:How's your New Year going?
Speaker 7:It's going pretty well. Although, it feels like we're in the near the North Pole here in DC. We've been iced in for two weeks. It's pretty nuts.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, describe iced in. Are you actually you can't go outside?
Speaker 7:No. I
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 7:Got everything dug out. But, literally, one point, the the guys digging out my driveway were taking selfies with the blocks of ice they
Speaker 1:could It pick
Speaker 2:was so big.
Speaker 7:It was it was so big.
Speaker 1:It was frozen solid. Wow.
Speaker 7:And it still is.
Speaker 1:That's insane.
Speaker 2:Did you watch the Super Bowl?
Speaker 7:Of course. And congrats on your ad. That was awesome.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Yes.
Speaker 7:The earned media was I don't know what your ROI like, the the multiples on your 50 k or whatever you said, but that was Yeah. What a brilliant hack. Congratulations to you guys.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Anything else?
Speaker 7:The game kinda sucked, but, you know, other than that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was it was not not the most exciting. Just a lot of field goals in the first half.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We we unfortunately left, like, three minutes into the fourth quarter because it just we knew it was gonna be same chaos getting out, and then it just got really it got it got
Speaker 7:A little
Speaker 1:a little more interesting. Yeah.
Speaker 7:So I have a question. But was that an interception or a fumble?
Speaker 2:Oh, I don't know. You're asking the wrong people.
Speaker 1:You're asking the wrong people. When when did that happen in the game?
Speaker 7:Oh, that was their last touchdown. Right? Were they Okay.
Speaker 1:So we had we had Yeah. We had we had we had left. Okay. We had we we had to get to the airport. We're we're stuck It was it was tough to follow because we went with with a bunch of with with the ramp team and a bunch of our friends, and so was just
Speaker 2:There were a lot of interesting conversations to have with folks, and so there's a lot of opportunity just to, like, get lost in conversation and then turn around and, no, they scored.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anyway Any any of the ads stand out to you?
Speaker 7:The robot doc ad that you guys talked about a little while ago, which was pretty awful. But, you you know, China's got the the the Lunar New Year's coming up next week and and Lunar New Year's Eve, the CCTV does this big spring festival gala with, you know, hundreds of millions of people watch.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:It's gonna be full of robots. So I'm very curious to see how they spin the robot performances.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Mean, I think they're
Speaker 7:gonna Drinking vodka through the neck.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That was very, very weird.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Associating your your your
Speaker 2:alcohol,
Speaker 1:which kind of, like, tastes like engine lubricant with with, like, heavy machinery, is an interesting decision. I expect the the the robots to perform incredibly well just based on some of the demos we've seen where these things are flipping around. They're moving like Yeah. You know, actual, like, fighters or dancers. It's it's incredibly impressive and Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, still worried that we're gonna let them sell, you know, 10,000,000 of those in before we kinda wake up.
Speaker 2:But Have you been following the DJI story?
Speaker 7:Which part of it?
Speaker 2:Just the band and, like, how fast it's rolled out, if there's any loopholes. Because you always hear the headlines, like, you know, NVIDIA, the the chips ban, like, there's zero NVIDIA chips are going to China. And then it's like, oh, well, there's diversion. There's the there's the cutouts. There's Nerf chips that that that wound up.
Speaker 2:You could train deep sea. You could do a lot, and then the the the trade deal gets renegotiated. And so I'm just wondering, like, there were a couple founders who were sort of taking victory laps in the drone americandronecom community, and I'm rooting for them. I'd I'd love an American DJI. GoPro famously failed at this mostly because of the supply chain pricing, all of that.
Speaker 2:But it's always like I I see people take victory laps, and I'm wondering, it feels maybe a little bit like, will the new regulation stick? How how how how how all encompassing is the regulation?
Speaker 7:I think it's a bit premature, and I think you've seen already bits of it whittled away where now you can buy previous models and parts for it. And so part of the problem, I think, really is that DGI makes the best drones Yeah. Both in terms of performance as well as cost. And so unless the American firms can actually make drones that, like, law enforcement wants or, you know, various
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Companies want, You know, I mean, it it it is it's in an unfortunate situation. I certainly hope the American drone makers can catch up, but it but it and maybe this regulation will will help. But Yeah. You know, we have we have to be competitive. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it also just seemed like DJI I mean, yeah, there were a ton of, like, commercial applications, but it was just such a go to Christmas present for, you know, a lot of people, like, you know, the casual outdoor person that goes on hikes. They wanna take cinematic video. Like, realistically, it's gonna be collecting dust in three months, but it's gonna be an epic present on Christmas.
Speaker 2:And so, I mean, that probably propelled a lot of sales and just helps get to scale, and that's important in these manufactured products. Right?
Speaker 7:Uh-huh. And and again, as we all you know, you've talked about ad nauseam with lots of people. I mean, China has a supply chain for this stuff, and we still don't. And so whether or not these regulations will pull that supply chain creation here, it it remains to be seen. The the challenge, of course, is you have to balance cutting off access to products that that customers actually not just want but need, like police departments, etcetera.
Speaker 7:And so but but then at the same time, just making it so that some companies can can to take advantage of loopholes, have some sales, but still kinda wash their components through third countries that actually still are probably Chinese components.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. No. The the I mean, the supply chain I I I remember digging into the the small drone motor market. So the motors that go on those drones, the small motors, and Mhmm.
Speaker 2:There's there are truly no American companies. There's one Right. Company in, I think, Seattle that sold to private equity and they immediately offshored all of the all of the manufacturing, and it's just like this holdco now. And I think that they're now they're starting to bring some stuff back, there's, like, green shoots. But these things take years and years and years.
Speaker 2:Just look at, like, TSMC in Arizona. Mhmm. So, actually, years or maybe a decade to get actual to scale from, like, the initial plans. Anyway, let's let's dive into the PLA purges. We we we read through The Wall Street Journal's coverage, and I have a bunch of questions.
Speaker 2:But how are you framing it? How are you thinking about what's happening in China today?
Speaker 7:So the PLA purges have been ongoing for quite some time. They've accelerated over really the last eighteen months or so. I mean, they are part of a multiyear process of Xi Jinping both starting out, you know, taking control of the PLA, but then also forcing through a whole series of reforms around structure force structure operations to try and get the PLA to to what they called world class fighting force with a specific goal for 2027, the centenary goals, which are the it's the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the People's Liberation Army Mhmm. Where they wanna be you know, some people say they wanna be able to invade Taiwan. Haven't explicitly said that, but it's to get to to get get a force to the point where it could actually undertake missions like that.
Speaker 13:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And the latest round where the PLA has a top structure, it's called the central military commission, and it's got a chairman who's Xi Jinping, and then two vice chairman and four members. So seven members. They're now two members, Xi and a vice chairman. Wow. Because he's purged the rest over the last year or so.
Speaker 7:And the just for a couple weeks ago, they purged the remaining or the the the one central military commission vice chairman and one member. And it was quite shocking both because there have been rumors popped up, and then three or four days later, they were gone. Mhmm. But also, the vice chairman who was purged was someone who's considered to be close to Xi, who Xi had kept on past assumed retirement age because he was supposed to be sort of she's guy. And so it's pretty shocking on the one hand.
Speaker 7:On the other hand, it's kind of a continuation of what's been happening. We don't know why. There's lots of speculation. The Wall Street Journal article you you referred to, I think, talked about possibly a briefing internally that said that this vice chairman, John Yuan Shah, was leaking nuclear secrets to The US. Wish it were true.
Speaker 7:Haven't found anyone in DC who actually thinks it is. We got it. It would be it would be impressive. Right? If we had that level of of a a spy.
Speaker 7:Yeah. But what it what I think it points to is and then the question is how you interpret what's going on. There are lots of people who are trying to sort of put out versions of what happened. You know, there was rumors that there was a gunfight. Total BS as far as I understand, but Mhmm.
Speaker 7:It's a black box, so you you can't say zero.
Speaker 2:So Before we go into the implications and the interpretations, can you break down anatomy of a purge, history of purging? It feels like a uniquely Chinese just event. Like, we, you know, like, we when we elect a new president, a bunch of positions turn over. A new head of the FDA comes in or whatever, and we don't think of that transition as purging. Although, of course, some people get fired midterm even if they've been appointed by the president.
Speaker 2:And so what's actually going on? Are these, like, forced resignations? Are these purges? Or are these firings?
Speaker 7:They are detained for investigation.
Speaker 2:Okay. So it's there
Speaker 7:is secret process or alleged criminality or alleged violation of of party or or military rules in this case. And then they are and all we got, you know, all we all we got was a very terse statement from a very nervous looking ministry defense spokesperson announcing that these two individuals, Zhang Yoshia and Liu Zhengli had been put on an investigation. That was it. And then
Speaker 1:And so she has not come on the record she has not come on the record about any of this?
Speaker 7:Not publicly. There there have been authoritative statements in, like, the PLA Daily, which is the military's newspaper, but she has not yet said anything publicly. And then there may be at some point, there'll be he probably has talked about it internally. At point, maybe we'll get a publication of some of his speeches. But we have very, very little information that's public about what's actually going on other than that these two have been taken away for investigation, and so far, they have not been replaced on this body.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And then one way you could potentially read into this is that you're consolidating power, which makes it easier to perform military operations. The other is that you lost all your top guys who were gonna help you with military operations. What's your interpretation?
Speaker 7:So it's a good question, and I think it kind of is both. There's clearly the number of generals and senior officers who have been taken out over the last two plus years is quite shocking. It's in the dozens. And so it it's hard to imagine in the short term. It doesn't have some impact on the military's ability to fight.
Speaker 7:In but at the same time, there are a lot of officers and a lot of, you know, younger up and coming officers in the PLA. You know, the PLA has historically been an incredibly corrupt organization, and Xi Jinping has been you know, he started he really kicked off this anti corruption campaign in the PLA in 2014
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:In in sort of full force. And so what may be happening is that he has realized that he just has to effectively decapitate one or two generations of the PLA to get down to a group of younger officers who were promoted not by buying their positions, as was very common through up until even I think into the Sheeran How
Speaker 1:get how did did those get priced? Obviously, under the table very
Speaker 7:So you guys your your audience may find this interesting. It's kinda like an angel investment, at least in some cases, where actually people would collectively buy a stake in a rising officer. Because I'm not joking. Right? Literally.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 7:And then So they'd
Speaker 1:go basically, they'd go out and say like, the officer would be like, hey, I've got some potential within the organization. I think I can get this job. Let me pool together some capital, and then they pool together that capital.
Speaker 9:Then they
Speaker 1:also They'd pay off the person or someone to get the role, and then there would be a revenue stream back to the original pool
Speaker 7:The of idea is you're buying an option on a future revenue of corrupt goodies. Right? I mean, I'm not
Speaker 1:it's actually a real thing. If said person gets the job, they'll be able to generate a bunch of revenue, not just for their salary, but through corrupt activities.
Speaker 7:Yeah. They have they can create a whole bunch of opportunities for people who are close to them.
Speaker 1:Wow. Okay. He basically gets a certain job. He's got access and control over some amount of budget and creates basically a little economy around within the stack. That is insane.
Speaker 7:And and and this was and there are there's been certainly I don't think it's been in the media, but I certainly heard that among the funders of some of these officers in years past was our America's CIA because it was a great way to
Speaker 1:Woah.
Speaker 7:Push people in and and and, you know, eventually they owe you. Right? And so, I mean, it's actually
Speaker 1:Friends and family around from the CIA.
Speaker 7:Yep. And this is something without going into detail, the party has talked about about, you know, getting rid of this process of buying and selling promotions. You saw from some of the previous cases of generals who were who were detained early on in the sea era. I mean, the stories of, like, you know, the the cars full of gold and the, you know, these suitcases of of millions of dollars and euros worth of cash hidden in one of their villas. I mean, it's it's the level of corruption was insane because there's so much money Yeah.
Speaker 7:Being thrown into military, you know, the military buildup.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Interesting. Crazy. What's the state
Speaker 1:of And so and so part of that, if you have decades of corruption that have been, like, that has been intimately intertwined with the military buildup, maybe doesn't give you that much confidence in a lot of the actual fighting force and the equipment. Right? Because it maybe it wasn't going necessarily to the to the best vendor. It was going to the vendor that was pushing enough money out the back door?
Speaker 7:I mean, that is certainly the the risk and potentially the concern. I mean, you look at in addition to all these generals, they've they've basically taken out a significant chunk of the leadership of the military industrial complex. All sorts of defense contractor, defense, you know, weapons makers, heads of research institutes that were involved in weapons development. At the same time, the weapons look like they work. I mean, think about China and corruption is, you know, China has this great high speed rail system.
Speaker 7:Right? Well, the guy who really oversaw it is in jail because he was corrupt. So but but the thing is is the corruption is just sort of like it's another tax. It still works.
Speaker 2:It still works.
Speaker 7:Right? Unlike maybe other countries, you still get it done. It still works pretty well. But some folks, you know, but then you make a little money on the side.
Speaker 2:Wow. That's funny. He's like,
Speaker 1:I actually gotta make the trains run so I can keep
Speaker 2:the gravy train going. Yeah. Exactly. The gravy train is important. A lot of lots of lessons there.
Speaker 2:What's the state of communications or relationships between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping? Are they talking regularly? Are they meeting in person? What are are are we at, a local top or local bottom? Are things the worst they've ever been, somewhere in between?
Speaker 7:No. No. We we seem like we're in a steady state. They had a a a call last week Mhmm. Which, you know, again, I think is an indication that so far, least, things are on track for for president Trump's visit to China in early April.
Speaker 7:There was one sort of wrinkle though in the readout from the Chinese side of the of the call he had with with Donald Trump last week. He was had some pretty stark language around Taiwan and specifically around US arms sales to Taiwan because The US sold 11 you know, announced an $11,000,000,000 arms sales package to Taiwan back in December, which was at the time, it's a very large number. The US has sort of been doing billion or so kind of packages and rolling them out. The Chinese get pissed off, but, you know, they move on. Yeah.
Speaker 7:11,000,000,000 was pretty significant. I had heard that the reason the Xi Jinping had mentioned sort of being prudent around arms sales to Taiwan last week was specifically because The US was working on a big arms package. The Chinese had found out about it, and the Chinese ambassador here in DC had basically gone to the White House and thrown a fit. Mhmm. Over the weekend, you know, we we we saw I think on Friday, the Financial Times reported, yes, there's a $20,000,000,000 package in the works.
Speaker 7:And it's something the Chinese don't want to have happen, and they have threatened to postpone or cancel Trump's visit. And I think I think they might actually need it. And so I would imagine that the the Trump administration won't push forward that sale until after the the meeting. What's interesting, though, again, is it's not clear Trump knew about it. This is people in the administration who maybe are more interest who are sort of more pro Taiwan, not happy with this kind of whether you I don't wanna call it detaints.
Speaker 7:It's little too early for that, but this sort of steady state in the relationship over the last couple months. Mhmm. And they wanna make sure that Taiwan is still getting attention.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's fascinating. How does China frame the Taiwan question internally? In the West, we sort of all accept the premise that if we're doing an aid package, it's for defense and that the only possible scenario is that China would invade at some future date.
Speaker 2:But does China use rhetoric that's like, well, we don't want Taiwan to have weapons because we're worried about them invading us. Is that even something that they toy with? Or are they saying like, we don't want them to have weapons because we're planning to do this at some point?
Speaker 7:Well, no. I I don't think they're worried about Taiwan invading. I think it's more, you know, they Taiwan is the first of their of their red lines, especially in The US China relationship. And so they but ultimately, you know, they they don't want I mean, The US Yeah. Saying we're gonna sell you a bunch of weapons.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. Even if right now, for example, Taiwan, because of the political what's going on in Taiwan politics, you know, the the Taiwan legislature won't approve the the budget to buy the last package of weapons because it's the opposition party controls with the with the coalition party controls the legislature. So this $20,000,000 package
Speaker 1:Should we assume that CCP operatives have effectively infiltrated the opposition party? Or is that too much of a tinfoil hat? Because I imagine that if if you were Mhmm. It would it would be worth the time to try to get your team
Speaker 2:Get out
Speaker 1:or elected.
Speaker 2:Good good seed investment.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Good seed.
Speaker 7:So Yes.
Speaker 1:Put an adventure together.
Speaker 7:There are no questions. A lot of influence efforts. The the Taiwan government under the current president, Lai Chingde, has definitely stepped up and talked more about this kind of these kinds of infiltrations and influence. Mhmm. I don't think there should be any surprise that that that is going on.
Speaker 7:But all but what I but but ultimately for these arms packages, it's also a signal of I think The US is trying to make it a signal of we still support Taiwan. So that because what what Beijing wants ultimately is for the Taiwanese people to think that there's nothing, you know, no one there's no help coming. They have no other choice, but, you know, effectively resistance is futile. Roll over. Right?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Roll over. And the faster you roll over, the better you'll be treated. Is I think the the the kind of the constant messaging they're trying to put out there. And so support from The US in terms of either rhetorical or big arms packages messes up that messaging.
Speaker 7:The comments from the Japanese prime minister and back in November mess up that messaging. And then they also complicate the PRC's planning in the in the event that there is some sort of scenario where they have to use some sort of force, it's going to be a lot harder if the Taiwanese have better weapons, better training, and have support from The US, and potentially Japan has to get involved.
Speaker 1:What economic indicators are you tracking in China broadly? Things like unemployment rate, foreclosures, general, you know, development, infrastructure development, housing development, all that stuff.
Speaker 7:So, I mean, all those are worth tracking. You know, all you have to sort of filter through the the the data. I think the the cons the consensus of a lot of the folks who really tracked us closely is that generally, like, the economy is not doing great, but it's also not falling off a cliff. Right? It's it's, you know, it's not the binary like boom boom or bust.
Speaker 7:Yeah. The things to really watch over the next I mean, we'll we'll learn a lot more by the March because the March starts what's called the two sessions and the one that matters is this national national people's congress, their legislature. Mhmm. And so we'll get a work report from the premier that will then lay out targets for this coming year in terms of things like GDP growth and etcetera. But then also, this is the year where they roll out the fifteenth five year plan.
Speaker 7:And that also includes not only high level goals, but also some targets in certain sectors. And so those ultimately, I think, are more useful to look for over the next next few months than some of the sort of high frequency data just because the high frequency data is noisy and, ultimately, the Chinese you know, again, the the stock market's up 50% or so from the lows. It's it's at a new high, I think, today. The the tech sector is booming. There's an a there's I don't wanna say bubble, but there's a big AI boom in terms of the AI related shares on
Speaker 1:the Yeah. AI companies are going public much sooner than ours. Right? Yes.
Speaker 7:With much lower revenue, raising much less money, much lower valuations. And a lot of it is because they, you know, they they actually need the capital. I mean, it's I think they but the amount of capital they need in raising is a it's like it's like, you know, a rounding error for what, like, OpenAI is raising. Not quite, but sort of. Right?
Speaker 7:No.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, you see some raising
Speaker 1:What is the general pop how does the general populace feel about AI? I think most of America is, especially after the Super Bowl, nobody was seeing the Super Bowl AI ads being like, you know, this is amazing. That's lot of because
Speaker 7:they kinda sucked. Well, yeah. Okay. So the ads the ads
Speaker 1:Yeah. The ads weren't that great.
Speaker 2:Yeah. A lot
Speaker 1:of them weren't that great. But there's just also a general fear around job displacement, lack of you know, people are not excited to even to put a data center in their state. Right? We have all this legislation going down the pipeline. But how do people in China actually feel?
Speaker 1:Unemployment rate for youth is already so high, it's hard to imagine it going much higher. So maybe there maybe people already feel like it's over. So so
Speaker 7:I mean, data centers, energy, obviously, you have other guests who talked about it. It's not an issue for China, right? It's somewhere they could build as many data centers as they want as long as they can get the That's Yeah. That's the bigger issue. I think when you look at what the what the government is doing, you know, they have a they have like this AI plus plan they rolled out a couple months ago where it's really to embed AI throughout the economy and throughout society.
Speaker 7:And so they're not really focused on as much as sort of getting to AGI and and these these massive models. They're really more focused on diffusing, you know, how do you use AI and all sorts of tasks in your apps, in WeChat, in for for for medical, for, like, seeing doctors for medical advice. I mean, there's a big boom right now in in companies chasing sort of medical AI, including Alibaba. Mhmm. And so, it it seems like even though it may not be, you know, the models may not be like the chat GPT or Gemini levels, at the same time, they're being taking a much more pragmatic and practical approach to just diffusing it through society.
Speaker 7:And then in terms of what it does to employment, there's been lots of discussions about the impact. I think, you know, it's it's a country where they can incentivize positively or more negatively companies to not necessarily lay off as many people as they would if they were operating just purely on an economic basis Mhmm. When it comes to sort of AI disruption. Doesn't mean unemployment is not a significant problem for the youth, and I don't know I don't know that they have a good solution for that, but it isn't holding back what they're trying to do around AI at this point.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. Last week, Jensen was on CNBC, I think it was Thursday or Friday, talking about, you know, how the overwhelming demand, obviously, we had earnings last week, everyone's raising their CapEx guides. You have legacy AI chips that are sitting at very high utilization, surprisingly high utilization in pricing compared to what a lot of the AI bears have been thinking about over the last six months saying, like, hey, all these chips are gonna be worthless and turns out Like
Speaker 7:Michael Burry
Speaker 1:and others? Yeah. Yeah. Those those types. And so I think there was some conversation around, okay, and and if if Jensen wants to go, like, hey, all these people are super chip constrained.
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:I think the question comes up why okay. So then why are we why are we selling why are we selling chips To China. To China then. Right? If if if our if our leading labs are are not able to get the
Speaker 2:Call Amazon. They'll buy them.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. Call my It's a great it's a great question, and it's something that is, you know, certainly you've seen some movement on Capitol Hill Mhmm. Asking that question, asking the impact on, like like, HPM prices. Right?
Speaker 7:Memory And ultimately, the answer is, well, Jensen Huang can go direct to Donald Trump and convince him to approve these sales. What's interesting, right, I think it was the financial times reported last week that even though, like the Department of Commerce has signed off on the licenses to sell the China, the h two hundreds, that the Department of State or the State Department, which has this bureau of, I think it's arms control and non proliferation, they have yet to sign off on it. So the sales actually haven't happened.
Speaker 1:Interesting. And what is the general sentiment now from the CCP and various groups? Because when the first time we maybe agreed generally to a chip sale, and then Howard Lutnick came out and said, like, we're gonna get them addicted to the American AI stack. Then they were like, actually, we don't want Actually, they were like, no. We don't want them.
Speaker 1:But clearly, all the companies want them. Their compute they're more way more compute constrained than we are.
Speaker 2:They really rock.
Speaker 1:And so where is that actually? Do you think that if it actually gets fully approved that they will all flow without any type of red tape on the China side?
Speaker 7:Or No. There's been reporting, I mean, various reports that the Chinese are being careful about who they allow to actually order. And they're talking about the h two hundreds. They didn't want the h twenties. They need the h two hundreds because China has enough like, can actually make looks like decent inference chips.
Speaker 7:They just can't make the chips they need for training. Right? And so that's the h h 200 fills that gap. And so I think that Any's perspective is, look, we're not there yet. We can fill this gap we have to sort of keep competitive in the AI AI game.
Speaker 7:NVIDIA, the US government has approved these sales. NVIDIA will sell this to us. We're just gonna make sure that if you buy these, you also have to also make sure you're buying Chinese chips to keep supporting our own indigenous ecosystem. Right? And so and then, of course, there are some, I think, potentially some security concerns because of the whatever the security review The US is requiring, which is basically, I think, just to make sure that the chips get shipped to The US, charge the 25% licensing fee as a tariff, which makes it legal, and then ship them back to China.
Speaker 7:But, from the Chinese perspective, what's the security view? Why do have to do these who knows what they might do with these chips? So there's certain places I think that, like, state owned enterprises, certain labs where they probably won't want these chips. But the issue also is, right, there's also still a lot of NVIDIA chips in China. Right?
Speaker 7:So we should see in the next week or so. If you remember, you guys, it's been a year since the quote unquote deep sea moment. Right? Yeah. And so now everyone's waiting for deep sea's next model, which is supposed to launch on or around lunar New Year, which is next Wednesday the seventeenth.
Speaker 7:So we should have some sort of a DeepSeek model in the next eight or nine days. Mhmm. I think it was the information reported it's being trained on black wells Mhmm. Which they're not supposed to have. Right?
Speaker 7:But somehow they have the black wells. And they It fell off the
Speaker 2:back of a truck.
Speaker 7:And they can they can get as many video top end chips as they want hosted overseas in these cloud facilities.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right.
Speaker 7:So so it is it is not a clean set of controls by any means.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. What what do you think China's reaction is to the the the latest election in Japan?
Speaker 13:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Obviously, Japanese equities responded positively to to the result. But how are you tracking that whole situation?
Speaker 7:I mean, I think that the the Chinese helped Takeichi because their their reaction to her comments in in early November, which, again, she said she reiterated the Japanese position on sort of a Taiwan contingency Mhmm. So to speak. She said it in a in a in a setting where it hadn't been said before by sitting prime minister.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And, you know, but their reaction really, I think, helped make her case and other sort of more defense hawks in the Japanese government make their case that we need to do more because China's a threat. And so now she really has a mandate. The question will be, will the Chinese continue to really push on her or do they sort of find ways to over the next it won't be immediate, but over some period of time, find ways to at least calm things down and then start reengaging with dialogues. I think, you know, the fact that they clearly started playing the rare earths cards card again with Japan, you know, also again, in some ways, there's no going back for Japan. Even if the Chinese were to find they were to find an off ramp and find a way to sort of get back to kind of The US China sort of detente ish like relationship around I think the the damages have done in terms of Japan needs to a stronger military, and Japan needs to move faster to protect itself from the weaponizing of certain parts of the supply chain that China can do, which we all know from mirrors.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That makes a ton of sense. Else, Rudy?
Speaker 1:This was super fun. This is always amazing. Thank you so much for your We love having you on. The audience loves you too. I'm gonna follow-up and ask what headset you use because we're making fantastic.
Speaker 1:Because not every guest of ours comes in with a sound video setup like this.
Speaker 7:It's a Shure headset and Ben Thompson got it for me, you know, because he because I do the Sharp China podcast with with his team with Andrew Sharp, so Ben sent me all the gear.
Speaker 2:Very thoughtful.
Speaker 8:So I
Speaker 7:have this solid state logic little box and then I plug in this this headset. Actually, is it? Yeah. Sorry. It's a sen Sensenhauer thing.
Speaker 7:Sorry.
Speaker 2:Sennheiser? Sennheiser. Sennheiser. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Sennheiser. Alpha.
Speaker 8:Thank you
Speaker 2:so much for taking the time.
Speaker 3:Have a good
Speaker 1:rest of
Speaker 2:your we good luck with the weather. We will talk to
Speaker 7:you soon.
Speaker 2:You. Have a good one. Let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk.
Speaker 1:Before our next scout agent, let's go over to Tyler.
Speaker 2:Let's go over to Tyler. What's new in Tyler's world? Why are we x ing out Tyler?
Speaker 1:Back to the show.
Speaker 2:That's it?
Speaker 1:That's it? Just trying to
Speaker 2:drop the the the special effect, the latest and greatest special effect.
Speaker 1:This one?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Tyler, tell us the rest of your story. That's all folks. Fantastic. Let me tell you about Sentry.
Speaker 2:Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why a 150,000 organizations use to keep their apps working. And without further ado, we have Jason Kelly in the Restream waiting room. He's the cofounder and CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks. Jason, good
Speaker 1:to see
Speaker 2:you. Wow.
Speaker 3:Good to see you guys. You look fantastic.
Speaker 1:Incredible setup.
Speaker 2:You sound fantastic. I don't know if you remember me. You gave me a tour of Ginkgo Bioworks over a decade ago, maybe 2012 or something, 2013.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That was a real long time ago.
Speaker 2:It was a long time ago.
Speaker 3:Different era. You were doing yeah. Different era.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Soiling. Soiling stuff. Yeah. I remember.
Speaker 2:It It was remarkable. I mean, the the the facility was incredibly advanced. You had the pipetting machines. Everything was already automated. I'm I'm seeing behind you, it's clearly grown.
Speaker 2:Break it down for us. Like, what is the shape of the operation today? What is the Yep. What what what is this the the scale of the footprint? What what's the business like today?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So when you would have come by, we're sort of early on this journey of trying to automate lab work.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So I I brought you in the lab. I'll I'll give you, a little bit of an introduction to
Speaker 2:Yeah. Please.
Speaker 3:How to do science. You know, you hear a lot about AI for science. There's some massive thing with OpenAI. Yep. So like, does it actually look like to be a scientist?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So first off, glasses, lab coat.
Speaker 2:Lab coat for sure.
Speaker 1:Good stuff.
Speaker 3:Pipette.
Speaker 1:Pipette. There you go.
Speaker 3:Okay. Yeah. The robot handles the pipette. If you remember like high school biology, right? This is a little like a very fancy straw.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And you suck up liquid and you squirt it out somewhere else. Yep. And you do that for five years and you get a PhD at MIT like I did. Right?
Speaker 3:Like it is just a grind. Like you're you're actually doing the work of science primarily by hand.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And that's that's still broadly true. Like, all you know, United States where our labor is extremely expensive, everything else doesn't matter. Yeah. Like, scientists are working by hand at the lab.
Speaker 2:No. I remember I I went toured my, the the Langer lab at Caltech. My my cofounder was doing a PhD there. And I was like, oh, like, you're in the most elite lab. It's Caltech.
Speaker 2:Like, it must be all robots and stuff. And he was like, yeah. This is my day. This? Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then it just jiggles it and kinda just like gives a little emotion, little and then centrifuge over here. Just like moving moving little buckets from one tool to another all day and just by hand. Yep. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So okay. So then the tech people hear this and they're like
Speaker 2:That's crazy.
Speaker 3:Automate it, bro.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, what are you guys doing?
Speaker 3:Like, it's crazy. Right? And and and so so the analogy
Speaker 1:Trust trust me. I built a crud app. I can I can do that? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I got this. I got this. And and but, like, let's let's take transportation. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. We've actually we have that we had automated transportation a hundred years ago. True. Trains With subways.
Speaker 2:Car, subways.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Exactly. Trains. Right. Okay.
Speaker 3:And, yeah, We had the car Yep. Which is this manual thing. So why why didn't we just apply our automation to the car? The answer was variability. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Right? Like, the car needed to you needed to transport yourself to your front door. And once you had that extra element of, like, the variety of requests from the user Yeah. Rails were screwed.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Automation was screwed. Yeah. And so up until four or five years ago, suddenly we start seeing Waymo's around, and you and we don't even call it automation anymore. We start calling it autonomy. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Because it's so surprising
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:That you can automate that variability. Mhmm. And what they did with transportation, you know, at Google and at Tesla, the the that that's coming for every other, in my opinion, physical Mhmm. Industry.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Right? And the and what's gonna bring AI in is managing the variability.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And and so this behind me is an autonomous lab. Yeah. The reason we were able to let GPT five drive this thing, which we can talk about Yeah. Is is first off because it operates like a Waymo.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:A scientist can just tell this thing what experiment it wants Yep. And it'll do the experiment.
Speaker 2:Okay. So break down the line between
Speaker 3:ten years to, you know, to
Speaker 2:get there. When you visited True overnight success right here. True overnight success. I'm sorry.
Speaker 3:That's not a trivial thing.
Speaker 2:Break down the line between experimentation and manufacturing. Because once a discovery is made and we're hearing about, you know, GLP one scaling up, I feel like those pills are made in automated factory. That is Yeah. Already automated. So break down that.
Speaker 3:That's subways.
Speaker 2:Okay. That's
Speaker 3:subways. So manufacturing is the subway lines. Right? You're doing the same experiment every day. No big deal.
Speaker 3:There's a ton of automation already in biotech and pharma and any frankly, many manufacturing across the board. Right? It's the research side of the house. Yeah. Those sad grad students at the bench, and I say that with love.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You know, that are doing all the variable work. And by the way, that's what's moving the frontier Sure. Of science.
Speaker 1:Right. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so if we wanna you know, and by the way, this is both true at, like, the nation's level. Like, you know, if we want The US to lead in science. But I think what you're now seeing, thanks to, you Sam and OpenAI and and making hard core bets on original research Yeah. You're seeing industry suddenly wake up again and say, oh, maybe we should be doing original maybe it's time for Bell Labs again.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Like, we should be doing original research because it takes. Right? You know, like, if you really have fundamental discoveries Yeah. Then you can you can be the first to the line to commercialize them. So I think unlocking this flywheel with science where the models can control autonomous labs, I think you'll see that in a lot more sectors than you'd expect because people are getting religion about research again even in the industrial sector.
Speaker 1:And talk about how you process the AI over the last maybe five years because, like, the whole concept for the company originally wasn't predicated on people getting excited about LLMs. It was just like, hey. Let's automate a lot of this work. So when did you start thinking about
Speaker 2:In in many ways, wasn't a crud app on top of a on top of a lab. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I'm sure you always I'm sure you like, there's some people that have a company that's capitalizing on AI Yeah. That you can tell they just were like, oh, this is a better idea than what I was working on. I'm sure you and the team and and your investors and partners always thought about a world where you could generate a concept for an experiment or do research with AI and then automatically sort of prove it out or study it in the real world. But walk us through kind of like how you've processed the developments of the labs and how all of that work can be integrated and applied within Ginkgo.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So so we're laser focused on make that hardware layer and then the software that that basically orchestrates and schedules this thing and makes it possible to put lots of experiments on it, make that robust, and also make that have hooks into whatever. It could hook into a scientist placing an an order just like a person can sit in the back of the Waymo and tell it where to go, or it could hook into an AI model placing the order just like when a person's not in the Waymo, Waymo's AI is telling me the the Waymo where to go.
Speaker 8:Right?
Speaker 3:Same exact idea. So we so we thought our we're not actually trying to solve the AI scientist problem. Mhmm. Right? Like, OpenAI came to us.
Speaker 3:Like, we had that interaction. They were excited on the research department to see, hey. Can these models be smart enough to design experiments? And we just announced on Thursday that we had a a breakthrough where we let OpenAI do six rounds of experiments on the platform. And on the fourth round, it beats scientific state of the art.
Speaker 3:And then by the sixth round, it had beat it by 40%
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 3:On cell free protein expression, which is just like a a a a tricky biochemical reaction to set up and and design. And so it was it's not a
Speaker 1:bad science. Is beating it just a, like, consistency thing? What what is
Speaker 3:Yeah. What does that actually mean? So yeah. So what in this particular thing. Right?
Speaker 3:Like, so all the cells in your body Mhmm. Right, are producing protein every day. Mhmm. So you as a human are basically a bunch of, like, nanotechnology.
Speaker 2:Mine produce a lot of protein. Yeah. Yeah. You guys are yeah. I can tell.
Speaker 2:I can see the difference. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So so so they're making all these and all the proteins are different. They're like little pieces of nanotechnology. It's it's almost freakish to look at, like, what they look like under a microscope. And so they're all interacting. They build your cells when you cut your skin and it regrows.
Speaker 3:That's all the proteins in your body, like, able to rebuild that stuff. And so your cells can take DNA code and turn it into whatever protein you want. Mhmm. Alright. So the question is, could you, as a scientist, print a piece of DNA, which you can do synthetically?
Speaker 3:You design it. Mhmm. Add it into a mixture that has all the parts, the guts of a cell, and have it make your protein at a high level. It's like the world's smallest three d printer. And so that reaction is cell free.
Speaker 3:So there's no cell there. It's all in a test tube. It's in like these little guys. Cell free protein synthesis.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 3:And it lets scientists design new drugs if they're making a protein therapeutic. It could be a new material. Who knows?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Right? And so we are able to let JATGBT bring the cost of that down.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so that was the that was the big goal. Like, how much cheaper could it get? And there was a paper out of Stanford just in August that set a benchmark, and we beat it by 40%. So I I think it's a it's a good demo. It had a clear benchmark so you could mark against what other people were doing.
Speaker 3:That's why we liked it. The experiments are fast. Yeah. But the model designed about 500 of these plates for each well, and that is a little experiment, and it designed the experiment for each one.
Speaker 2:Got it. Yeah. Talk more about the different applications across I mean, we we were talking about, like, synthesizing unique perfume scents at one point. Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 2:There's obviously everyone jumps straight to cure cancer, but there's also a boom in GLP ones. Like, where where are the bounds of, like, where we need more experimentation or even just, like, where experimentation is valuable?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I I I'm pretty excited about what's happening with the GLP ones. I I think it's opening the door to applying the tools of biotechnology to wellness. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 3:Like like, right now, if you think about the pharmaceutical industry today
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's basically the disease industry. Yeah. Yeah. And, like, how much of your life are you sick?
Speaker 1:Not much. Not that much.
Speaker 3:Depends on the person, but not that the average person, not that much. Yep. How much of your life would you like to feel better? Would you like to sleep better? Would you like to have more muscles?
Speaker 2:You know? Right? Like like like like that oh, like, if
Speaker 3:you have something that adds muscle mass annually in your sixties, it's another GLP one. It's it's a it's a multi trillion dollar drug. If you have something that adds a year to lifespan
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:What's it worth? Like like, do you even how do you even put a market cap on a thing that adds
Speaker 1:a year about when you think about how much consumers spend on various wellness things today that have zero impact, Like truly, like
Speaker 3:Well, you know do you know why? Do you know why they have no impact? The reason is we the industry today, we the pathway to apply all this Mhmm. To the problems of wellness is much more it's, like, muddy. It's unclear.
Speaker 3:How do get the FDA approval? There's lots of there's lots of barriers. So we haven't actually thrown the full horsepower of biotechnology against that problem. Mhmm. We've only thrown the full horsepower of biotechnology against disease.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. And I think I think that needs to change. And and so that's my if you ask, like, where do I see biotech? Because all that stuff, right, was
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Ideas on, like, different areas we could bring biotech to that wasn't disease. Mhmm. And, like, people tried the the food, people tried perfumes, people tried new materials, all kinds of things. And the one I like the best right now is, well, health and wellness. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think
Speaker 1:it's Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 8:A monster.
Speaker 1:What if you had a sixty second slot in the Super Bowl and you wanted to get people excited about the intersection of AI and and all the things that we're talking about, what would you wanna communicate?
Speaker 3:So I I think what would be cool to communicate is that science, like what it really is, is like the formalization of human curiosity. Okay? And everybody's curious. And the reason everyone doesn't do science today is this shit. Okay?
Speaker 3:Right. It is you're blocked by the cost and expense of all the physical infrastructure.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 3:if you took that away, if this was available Cloud style, for example, how many people would want to be doing science? Maybe they have a health condition. They want to study themselves. Maybe they have a new idea for a material. Maybe they want to make
Speaker 2:a new pet. You know, they want to
Speaker 3:do a new they're a gardener and they want to make a new plant variety. I have no idea what ideas they would have. Right? But I think that is gonna be accessible to people coming up. And I know that sounds crazy, but I'll tell you something else that sounded crazy.
Speaker 3:In 1960, if you said random average people will program computers
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:AWS. That sounded insane.
Speaker 2:Totally. 100%.
Speaker 3:Absolutely insane. And so I think you fast forward on the back of this, you know, the the the model's ability to access Yeah. Literature and be smart and tell you how to turn your question into an experiment, then the autonomous labs that could do that experiment for you in the cloud.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I think we'll have millions of scientists just like we have millions of programmers now. Yeah. As we made it easier.
Speaker 2:Then what yeah. What then what's the next step? Because it feels like
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That was that was perfect. That was perfect. We'll we'll run this next year.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Models Your your guy's ad was the best,
Speaker 2:I would say. Thank you.
Speaker 3:I think it
Speaker 2:Yeah. Models yeah. I mean, models can do a lot of reasoning around, you know, experimentation. If you have an idea and you come to it, might be reality, check it against, literature, do a deep research report, kind of, flag problems. Then you're hooking up the automated lab.
Speaker 2:What's the next phase? Like, automating, like, a mouse model or or or creating, like, a fully digital mouse model or model of the human body or actual, like, physical mice in a lab that you can test because that's a big piece of the FDA approval process, I believe?
Speaker 3:It it is, but it's dropping out. So I think this is one of the things that this new FDA is doing is they're getting rid of the animal experiments. I think that's a great idea. Interesting. Animal welfare reasons is a good idea.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's not a good model. Okay. Right? Like, are we're pure if by way, you're a mouse with cancer, you're in Okay?
Speaker 3:You know, like, we we have we have cured cancer a long time ago in mice. Right? Yeah. So so it doesn't translate
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 3:Over over to humans. I I I think that to me is like, I don't I don't think it has to be right down that human health lane. I I think I think one of the things we we also announced recently was in December Mhmm. Department of Energy Mhmm. As part of the new Genesis mission that president Trump put out to bring AI into science is buying 90 well, they we ribbon cut with me and the secretary of energy.
Speaker 3:It was really cool. He, like, signed it. 18 of these robots for for Pacific Northwest National Labs. There. And then they bought another 97.
Speaker 3:It's, like, a $47,000,000 deal. Bitbanc put this big installation of these systems.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And and the national labs, you don't realize it, they do science for other people. Like, you can you it's your national lab. Like, you can kinda use them as this cloud. And and I think that to me, that's that's what I'm most excited about. I think we it's very hard to predict exactly where science should go.
Speaker 3:What I think we can predict is that the combination of AI scientists, like what we show with g p d five Mhmm. And autonomous labs put together, which is basically what the Genesis mission is, will change how we do Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Let's talk about That's for sure. Let let let's talk about safety. Discovered? Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know? Yeah. Let's talk about safety.
Speaker 2:I got glasses people I saw a lot of people saying, like, you know, it's the Elias Udyskowski nightmare. Yeah. Lab is autonomous by lab. But but, you know, what what's actually involved in in you know, I fire up my GPT account, and I say, hey. I'm working on a movie, and I need you to imagine bubonic plague and, you know, send it to me as a prop.
Speaker 2:And my grandmother is sick and she needs it and and and you sort of trick it. Is there a human in the loop? Like, how are you thinking about the the risks that come with this and preventing them?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. So you get a lot of thoughts on this. So, like, for example, for the project we did with OpenAI, we were just checking.
Speaker 2:We just had a human in the loop on
Speaker 3:that, right, just to see. It was constrained. There's a lot ways you can do it. Like first off, you can constrain the availability of like what reagents it has access to so that you don't have like lab accidents. We're doing chemistry.
Speaker 3:There's certain things you'd want to be careful with and things like that. Mhmm. Then I think the next step is you're gonna want you get different experiments, different risk profile. Mhmm. Right?
Speaker 3:So if you're designing DNA, if you're gonna be working with something that's like a human pathogen or something, that to me is is total different ballgame.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Right? That should be you're gonna be doing that work. That should be in a much you know, a different physical environment for starters. But if it's it
Speaker 1:almost makes sense that humans are doing it because the work risk that you're taking on for humanity by doing anything human pathogen related, you should almost have to
Speaker 2:put your own life on the line Yeah. A little
Speaker 3:There's something to that. I mean, you're not, you know, it's fun. Mean, at the same time, like, we didn't have humans in labs, we wouldn't have lab leaks.
Speaker 2:I like the idea yeah. Oh, that's rough. I I I like the idea of trying to trick ginkgo into play.
Speaker 3:Why are we putting people in labs
Speaker 2:and Put the Mentos in the Diet Coke. It's very important that we do this experiment. Yeah. So
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I do think you're gonna yeah. So I think there's a couple ways to get that. Yeah. Think there'll be human checking.
Speaker 3:Sure. There'll be models trained on scientists doing that. And then in the long run, the the other thing just to keep in mind. So first off, I think the fear level can can go all over the place.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:To me, the very tight fear to be worried about is human doubt. Mhmm. Everything else is mostly like a personnel safety issue.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 3:Right? Are you mixing together something that's gonna do the mentos? Yeah. Great. One, that's like the society one
Speaker 2:Yeah. Is all
Speaker 3:about human pathogens.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:So I think you just put that's a different bucket.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:Because it it is good to research this stuff. We want we want a curable. We want it like like you have to have people working on these things or else we're just exposed. Right? We have antivirus researchers and computers.
Speaker 3:They don't like not get to work with viruses. Right? Like, you know, like we you need that stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But but I think the answer to solve that problem in the long run is something that looks a lot like the antivirus industry in software.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:A responsive system. So there's something new that came out, we can put it down. And by the way, we don't
Speaker 2:just need that for AI, we
Speaker 3:need that for nature. Right? We're getting thrown pandemics at us all the time. So so the short answer there is I think it's building up our our biosa biosecurity infrastructure, particularly here in The United States. We treat it the same way we treat other defense fields.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It feels like one
Speaker 3:of those things.
Speaker 1:There's risk there's risk associated with creating an autonomous lab, but the risk of not innovating here and just not having it as a capability set as a as a country feels like way higher.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Oh, we're I mean, the thing that's happening in the biotech industry, like the ugly secret, is all the startups that used to be, like, the the innovation engine for discovering new drugs over the last two years have been moving to China. So when you see these acquisitions of new drug candidates by the large pharmas, it went from less than 5% from China to more than 40% over the last two years.
Speaker 8:Wow.
Speaker 3:So that and that's not manufacturing. That's innovation and discovery. And you know the reason why? You know what China has cheaper than The United States?
Speaker 1:Pipetting. Labor.
Speaker 3:Hands pipetting. Yeah. So if we're gonna keep up, we gotta move to a topic. And this is by the this also how we're gonna reindustrialize manufacturing. What do you think we're gonna do?
Speaker 3:We're gonna compete with on hands? No way.
Speaker 2:So advice for No.
Speaker 3:I look at hatering and everybody else. It's it's all it's all automation.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So so advice for young people, should you if you want to have an impact in science, should you learn to code? Should you learn to prompt? Should you learn to pipette? What should you learn?
Speaker 3:You should learn about the domain. Mhmm. So so you should learn if you wanted to have a breakthrough in biology, you should learn about biology. Sure. Right?
Speaker 3:So that you're the one who understands
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:The limits of that. And then second, I think
Speaker 2:you do need to like, don't
Speaker 3:think PhDs are not gonna work at the lab bench at the start. Yeah. Because you got to understand the limits of experimentation. Yep. So that it's just like today, who are the best users of the coding aid?
Speaker 13:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Coders.
Speaker 13:Yep.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You know? Right? So who are going be the best users of autonomous labs? Scientists at the lab
Speaker 2:bench. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Right? That that already know. And and I think the thing is I people get scared. Oh, is it gonna take scientist jobs? That's like, there's a great IBM ad from, the night 1951 IBM ad.
Speaker 3:It's like, the the automated calculator will do the work of a 150 engineers, and it shows engineers with slide rules. Yeah. I swear to God. Wow. Like a sea of engineers with slide rules.
Speaker 3:And and you might have said, oh, will take a 150
Speaker 2:engineer jobs. And, of course, total opposite. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Right? By increasing the return on investment of computation, what was in the minds of engineers became worth a 100 times more. Jobs increased by a 100 fold, all post IBM. Right? All post the automation of computation.
Speaker 3:So if we automate all these industries, whether it's science, manufacture blah, blah, blah, it only favors the people that have the know how in those industries. But we gotta automate it because otherwise, we're not competitive.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And and in the modern era, we already automated the easy stuff. We automated the subways. It's all the autonomy. It's the things that can handle the variability. That's what the hardware guys like us have to work on, and then let the AI models go go nuts.
Speaker 2:That's awesome.
Speaker 1:Jordan, this is fascinating.
Speaker 7:Is great.
Speaker 1:Really enjoyed it. You're our new you're our two new in house science yeah. Our our science corner, our our biotechs are.
Speaker 3:Yes. So CVPN science corner.
Speaker 2:It's happening. I'm here for it. I'm talking to Yeah.
Speaker 1:Incredible incredible setup again. So looking looking forward to the next one.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Talk to soon. Much for coming by.
Speaker 3:Alright. Take care,
Speaker 1:We'll talk
Speaker 2:to you soon. Let me tell you about Graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. There was some breaking news over the weekend.
Speaker 2:SpaceX has delayed Mars plans to focus on the moon. This is something we've been debating a lot. Are you moonpelled or are you Marspelled? Well, SpaceX is going all in. They had previously aimed to reach the red planet in 2026, but Elon is focused on lunar voyages for NASA now.
Speaker 2:So the rocket company told investors it will prioritize going to the moon first and attempt a trip to Mars at a later time according to people familiar with the matter. Company will target March 2027 for a lunar landing without humans on board. The strategic shift comes as SpaceX doubles down on plans to launch AI data centers in space. That deal, they acquired x AI, which we've talked about. In a memo announcing the merger, Musk outlined the plans to help build a permanent presence on the moon.
Speaker 2:He referenced aspirations to use it as a base for exploration deeper into space. He wants to build a mass driver on
Speaker 1:the moon. Have you Launched bunch of you've always wondered if this would happen at some point.
Speaker 2:Well, I've always thought that even though the getting to the moon doesn't really solve the initial Elon pitch for, like, making life multiplanetary, creating, like, if something really bad just asteroid hits the Earth, then it's destroyed, like, does humanity continue? If you're on the moon and the Earth's just destroyed, like, you're probably in a bad spot as well. But if you're on Mars, like, you genuinely are okay. And so it's not the long term solution. But You probably need some resupplies.
Speaker 2:But if you're if you're there and you're really set up and you got your systems humming, like, probably gonna be okay.
Speaker 1:10,000,000 Optimus robots.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's at least a chance. I've always thought the moon was a great staging ground for going to Mars because you can go any day of the week. You can only go to Mars, I think, every eighteen months because the the the the planets are only in alignment. Do you know the number?
Speaker 2:Is it is it eighteen months? You're you're looking
Speaker 4:at me No. I don't know exactly.
Speaker 1:But it it Okay. It makes sense to transfer orbit.
Speaker 4:On on Dorakesh, he talked about the moon driver.
Speaker 2:Or Yeah. The mass driver. Mass driver. Yeah. And so once you get to the moon, it's very easy to get elsewhere.
Speaker 2:You can build things. There's materials there. And then also, underrated is that if you get people doing, like, moon tourism, you you you effectively the moon always faces the earth. And so as long as you're on the as long as you're on the front side of the moon, you could essentially have an escape pod where, like, you know, in that sci fi scenario, oh, no. There's a crack in my helmet.
Speaker 2:You could just dive into an escape pod, smash a button, and splash down in the Indian Ocean in, like, I don't know, a couple hours probably, because you're always facing the right direction. Whereas if you're on Mars
Speaker 1:says it's a shift, but Elon has been consistent in 2019. He said, for sure, moon first, as it's only three days away, and you don't need interplanetary That's
Speaker 2:three days. Not a couple hours. Yeah. But yeah. You can so so you can, like, you can get your reps in on the moon, but it's less of, like, okay, the final boss.
Speaker 2:Like, really, what is the vision of SpaceX? So this doesn't seem like a complete flipping of the narrative or flipping of the strategy.
Speaker 1:The first podcast on the moon is gonna go so hard.
Speaker 2:It is. It is. You could do a very short podcast in space via Blue Origin for, I think, a couple $100. It would need to be like a sixty second. It'd be one of those man on the street videos.
Speaker 2:What do do for a living? Okay. We're back.
Speaker 1:Well, I started a company, a retail small retail business called Amazon.
Speaker 2:Amazon. Yeah. I deliver packages. Anyways, this is cool.
Speaker 1:I'm excited. It's it's yeah. I I want to I think I want to go to the moon. Applying, like, SpaceX pace to something that is not so far out in the future is is gonna be super exciting. I wanna we gotta pull up this leaked.
Speaker 1:It's leaked. The leaked OpenAI ad. It's very unclear. Oh, yeah. Seems completely fake.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Openaicom said it was fake.
Speaker 2:It was just completely fake. What
Speaker 1:Shows the power of AI that you can make an ad as just like a fake speaker? Who's this Can we get sound?
Speaker 2:On Skarsgard? Skarsgard? There yeah. There's no sound. This was leaked.
Speaker 2:Right? But so is this is this AI generated, or is this actually this looks photo real. If this is AI generated, it's very, very impressive.
Speaker 1:I wonder if it's an ad for a video model company. They're like, oh, that was actually us. That'd be cool. That'd be a great Because, again, it looks like the actual act.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It really does. Like, this
Speaker 1:looks better than the Dunkin' Donuts AI kind of like CGI.
Speaker 2:But also it might just be the actor. But
Speaker 1:Well, but if it is the actor You gotta get the bottom of This is
Speaker 2:the real actor. He he he should comment. Has he commented? We gotta we we gotta dig in and see. What's his name?
Speaker 2:Michael Skarsgard? I'm gonna I'm gonna pause it. Alexander Skarsgard. Alexander. Alexander Skarsgard.
Speaker 1:Nice to hear your voice, Ben.
Speaker 2:Yes. Swedish actor. I'm here. Does he have Alexander Skarsgard's Pop Crave has something. Does he have any like social accounts?
Speaker 2:He's on Instagram. Have he posted about this? No. His last photo was I don't know. Just picture of him looking at the camera.
Speaker 2:Really quickly, Gemini three Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. Yeah. I don't know. We'll have to we'll have to dig in and and and fact check this, put it in the truth zone.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, open air is disavowed. So, I mean, it seems pretty clear that it's not it's not a real thing. So Ars Technica has a Eric Berger has a has a piece in Ars Technica. Why would Elon Musk pivot from the from Mars to the moon all of a sudden? SpaceX has already shifted focus from building a self growing city on the moon.
Speaker 2:That sounds amazing. As more than a 120,000,000 people tuned in the Super Bowl for kickoff Sunday evening, SpaceX founder, Elon Musk, turned instead to his social network there. He tapped out an extended message in which he revealed that SpaceX is pivoting from the settlement of Mars to building a self growing city on the moon. I like this. For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus from building a self growing city on the moon to to building a self growing city on the moon as we can potentially achieve that in less than ten years, whereas Mars would take twenty plus years.
Speaker 2:This is simultaneously a jolting and practical decision coming from Musk. So we'll have to dig in more and talk to I I still wanna get Eric Berger on the show because I'm a big fan of his writing it or his technical on space. Yes. Elon is following and unfollowing all sorts of people on the timeline as part of his never ending Recruiting. Recruiting push.
Speaker 2:Also, Jeff Bezos posted just a picture of a turtle from Blue Origin. Do we know what's going on here?
Speaker 4:To descend the turtle space. Tortoise and the hare. Right? So so they're taking a slow approach. They're gonna get to the moon first.
Speaker 2:Elon said this. He said, they might get to
Speaker 4:the moon before us. Hare.
Speaker 2:Okay. So so Elon was sprinting. He was the hare sprinting towards Mars. And instead, you know, the tortoise is is plotting along. Either way, good for America, good for the space Good to
Speaker 1:have two mean airs going head to head.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. So SpaceX. Can raptor broke it down. People are confused, so let me shed some light.
Speaker 2:You ever hear the tale of the tortoise and the hare? SpaceX is the hare, quick, active, but easily distracted by Mars and AI. Blue Origin is the tortoise, slow but methodical, dead set on the main goal, the moon. Bezos clearly implies here that they will beat SpaceX to the moon. While I like that it's a new race, It's gonna be a lot of fun to watch.
Speaker 2:Before we bring in our next guest, should we talk about France? You got in trouble. Let's save this one. Okay. We'll
Speaker 1:save I don't wanna keep down.
Speaker 2:We did talk about it
Speaker 1:a little bit on Friday. It's too much fun.
Speaker 2:It's too much fun. So we'll we'll dig into that later. Quickly, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco.
Speaker 2:And without further ado,
Speaker 7:let's bring
Speaker 2:in Dan Romero.
Speaker 1:Wait. Wait. Wait. Woah. We're now entering.
Speaker 2:Oh, we're the lightning round. The Lambda lightning round. That's right. Thank you. This is our Lambda lightning round.
Speaker 2:And we will invite Dan Romero from the recent radio room into the TV panel. Danny, good to see you. How are you doing?
Speaker 8:Good to see you guys.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:Great to see I like this what is this? A little sweater with
Speaker 2:a Good. Good.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Have new jobs. I'm dressing for success.
Speaker 7:What's the title?
Speaker 2:What's the role? What's the company? Break it down for us. Yeah.
Speaker 8:So we sold Farcaster Mhmm. Last month. Yeah. And, you know, it's a five year chapter. Yeah.
Speaker 8:And now I am working at Tempo, which is a purpose built l one blockchain designed for stablecoin payments.
Speaker 7:Okay.
Speaker 8:Stripe and Paradigm incubated it. And, yeah, I am working on the go to market side of things.
Speaker 1:Okay. Makes so much sense when I saw the news. The first conversation we ever had
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Was about stablecoins. This was back in in Venice in probably 2021, 2022. We were both so excited about stablecoins at that time and kind of frustrated with how little they were integrated into the actual tools that businesses and consumers could use every day, and specifically yeah. Just specifically making them valuable by integrating them with the rest of our global payment network. So Yeah.
Speaker 1:The role makes a lot of sense. Yeah. What what I mean, kind of a silly question, but, like, why why this opportunity? It's an existing business. You, you know, you proved to be a extremely formidable founder Mhmm.
Speaker 1:With with Farcaster. But I I already know the answer, but I don't Tell the audience. For you to tell the audience.
Speaker 8:Yeah. I mean, look. I've been working in crypto for twelve years, first at Coinbase and then Forecaster. And I feel like, honestly, the time spent hasn't really resulted in that much real world impact. Right?
Speaker 8:Like, crypto has been its own thing, and, obviously, the price of Bitcoin has gotten pretty high.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:But I I genuinely think with the Genius Act, which was a law passed last year, the opportunity for stablecoins over the next eighteen to twenty four months is is pretty massive. And, obviously, I think Stripe figured that out. They bought Bridge last year, and then they bought another company, Privy, which I think is a sponsor of TPPN.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 8:But, yeah, I I think banks banks are taking it pretty seriously. I don't know if you guys saw that Wall Street Journal article where
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Jamie Dimon had some choice words with Brian Armstrong.
Speaker 1:We hanging with Brian yesterday, and I told him, I was like, you better have printed that out and framed it immediately because
Speaker 7:It's a
Speaker 1:great one. That is I've like, it felt like he had been the whole Coinbase team had been working forever to get that kind of quote because that was the whole ethos of the entire movement from the beginning. It's like, hey, we can actually come in and be a real player in in Yeah. Finance.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, like, I
Speaker 8:started at Coinbase in 2014, and it's it's the classic first day they laugh at you. Mhmm. You know? Or first they ignore you,
Speaker 2:then they laugh at you, then then
Speaker 8:they fight you. This is clearly the
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Fight you. But I but I think generally, though, there are a lot of banks that are very excited about working with stablecoins. We're really excited about working with banks with stablecoins. I I think stablecoins are startling for money is what I've heard from someone say that I think is pretty good. And I think generally, you you have a payment rail now that is global, fast, and and cheap Yeah.
Speaker 8:That moves at the speed of of developers and and, frankly, now AI. Right? So AgenTic payments, probably have seen a bunch of the stuff with I know you guys have been talking about Cloudbot and things like that, but that that I think is gonna be on stablecoin rails. Yeah. And so the the opportunity is pretty massive.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Talk talk GTM I was gonna incredibly broad role means you're gonna be getting people to use Tempo. Yeah. What is the role gonna look like? I imagine, are you interfacing with with finding legacy financial institutions, new, you know, neo banks Fortune hundreds.
Speaker 2:Wallace. To consumers.
Speaker 1:All the way to governments, I imagine Yeah. You'd be interacting with those kind of groups as well.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Everybody and and anybody. I was meeting with a bank. I'm in New York right now, and I was meeting with a bank this morning about the one right after this. But also, neobanks, developers, any anyone who wants to do payments globally, I I think is gonna be on stablecoins.
Speaker 8:And I think Tempo is very focused on the features on payments. Right? Like, I think there are lot of blockchains out there that do a lot of different things, but Tempo's functionality is really dialed into payments. I mean, obviously, working closely with Stripe on that. And so I think, yeah, that that that's the focus for the go to market stuff.
Speaker 1:How lay out the the AI agent thesis a little bit more.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Why wouldn't I just wanna give OpenClaw or Clogbot or, you know, whatever agent I'm using just like my credit card?
Speaker 8:Well, I think one thing is the credit card itself is kind of like a private key. Yeah. And so having that get prompt injected out is maybe not the best thing in the world.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 8:And then going and giving a bunch of other agents your credit card, one of those could be malicious and then that gets popped where
Speaker 1:I promise I won't charge
Speaker 8:it again. Securely.
Speaker 2:Right? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 8:Yeah. So I think naturally that, but to to also if if you have these agent swarms, the idea of, like, spinning up a new credit card for each individual sub agent doesn't make sense, where you could imagine wallets. You can spin up as many as you want and then be able to kind of manage programmatically the different balances for each agent.
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:But you you if you think about it, like an API call to any of these frontier labs right now is a, you know, pay per call. Right? Mhmm. So if if you actually kind of break it down, you're eventually gonna get to a point where every single API call, you can just pay some amount of stable coins in the background and and keep moving. Right?
Speaker 8:So I I think that's where the world is headed, and I think it's it's on us to to kind of pull that forward a bit.
Speaker 2:Does that have a meaningful impact on the, like, the API business? Because most API companies are like, yes. I'm I'm giving you the service piece by piece, but I'll invoice you at the end of the month, and it's fine. Is there, an impact to cash flow if you pull that through or security or risk or underwriting? Like, what is the benefit if you're if you're OpenAI or Anthropic?
Speaker 2:And you're like, yeah. Technically, we offer services on a per microsecond basis, but our like, our the Fortune five hundreds who are buying our API, like, they pay their invoices on time.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Look. There's there's obviously some amount of cost to using different payment rails if Sure. With stablecoins, it's as cheap as it gets.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:I think that there's also some amount of fraud. So when you Sure. Don't have that because it's a bearer instrument with stablecoins, that's a settled payment. That also benefits. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:But I just also think that you just kinda have new use cases. Right? So how does an agent decide what, you know, service to use to register domain or to host a database? Mhmm. Right now, you you kind of are using Cloud Code and then it kicks you out to a web browser.
Speaker 8:And it says, hey, go set up an account over here. Fill it out. When when you're done, bring it back, and then I can continue what I'm doing. Whereas you could imagine you you have, you know, Cloud Code running and it finds a stablecoin native way of doing something.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 8:It's just gonna sign up and do it for you. Right? Yeah. And so I think I think that's the kind of future where it it just allows the agent to be unblocked, assuming the agent has some money to spend.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What are the what are your main lessons from, you know, the probably hundreds of l ones that have launched in the the last kind of decade. There's been so many that had a lot of potential, differentiated maybe approach from a technology standpoint. I think the opportunity with Tempo as you're combining, you know, these trusted brands, you know, a deeply experienced team. You guys, I imagine, are gonna be incredibly focused on, you know, actually, you know, you have the ability to, sign up one partner that could drive billions of dollars of volume, I imagine.
Speaker 1:And so you guys have feel like have all the right ingredients to be successful here. But having studied, I'm sure the last generation the multiple generation of l ones, what is it gonna take to to win?
Speaker 8:Yeah. So I I think the differentiated thing for us two things. One, the blockchain is specifically focused on payments. So there haven't been too many l ones. I think a lot of l ones tend to try to do everything, and we're really, really focused on payments.
Speaker 8:And the second thing is we have a bunch of initial partners that we've been fortunate enough to work with. And part of that is also having kind of closely been working with Stripe since the beginning. We we kind of are able to approach the payments use case specifically. And so you you have, you know, publicly, like, we're we're working with partners like DoorDash or Klarna and bringing that perspective in. Whereas I think traditionally, in my decade in crypto, most of the time you launch an l one and then you you go spend a lot of time trying to figure out if anyone wants to work with you.
Speaker 8:Whereas I think since the beginning, Tempo, because of kind of like that focus on payments, have had these concrete use cases that we're gonna be bringing to market over the next, you know, six to eight weeks. We we should be live by, you know, kind of q '2 this year, which
Speaker 1:is very cool.
Speaker 8:Start to finish in in less than a year.
Speaker 1:Has crypto sentiment ever been worse in in your time than right now?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Way, way, way, way. Yeah. This is an easy day.
Speaker 1:What what what was your first darkest hour. What was your darkest hour?
Speaker 8:I I I think the Bitcoin scaling '20 Sure. '15, '20 '16 Yeah. You know, pre pre kind of Ethereum Mhmm.
Speaker 1:It it it was it
Speaker 8:was pretty grim because everyone was assuming all the the payments was gonna you know, peer to peer electronic cash. That was Bitcoin.
Speaker 2:Right? Yeah. That was the thesis.
Speaker 8:And so the fact that things weren't going anywhere. Yeah. And then I think Ethereum in 2017 really kind of broadened the aperture from kind of just being Bitcoin. Yeah. There were a lot more choice words to describe any other blockchain at the time.
Speaker 8:And and it became crypto. Right? Yeah. And all the kind of stuff that's since come
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:From that. So I I I think things were way more grim in 2015
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 8:Relative to now. I mean, you have Genius Act, Clarity is still kind of in play in Congress. I mean, we had we had a Super Bowl ad yesterday Yeah. Room was singing. Right?
Speaker 8:So, like, I I I think things are I mean, 2022 is also pretty bad.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 8:So I I I think that the real world impact for crypto has never been closer.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:And so, you know, I I'm I'm really really excited. That's why I wanted to come on the show today.
Speaker 1:Either already retired Mhmm. Or or could be. But what I appreciate is the ones that could retire and are staying are staying in it again just because the the opportunity is is is is brighter than ever. So I'm yeah. I'm very excited to see this roll out.
Speaker 1:And Yeah. When when do you think the average when do you what what's your timeline for the average Internet user just consumer?
Speaker 13:I may
Speaker 1:not even know. To No. No. No. I was just gonna say, like, to to be, like, basically doing something with with Tempo.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay.
Speaker 8:I'd say a
Speaker 4:year from now.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Not maybe average Internet user might be a little extreme, but, how about how about the terminally online or Yeah. Or savvy online
Speaker 2:Okay. A year from now. I like that. Yeah. That's good.
Speaker 2:Well, congratulations on the new role. Thanks so much for stopping by the show.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's great. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 8:I'm excited for you guys to talk about France. I I was I was Oh, yeah. I know. Knocking at
Speaker 1:the bit for this story. That was amazing that How did you how did you how you process that whole exchange? Because I mean Have
Speaker 2:you ever had an entire country mad at you?
Speaker 1:I was I was actually So the real bearish case for France is that I didn't get any death threats.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:I did not get a single
Speaker 13:You're very polite
Speaker 2:over there.
Speaker 1:I didn't get a single mean message basically saying, hey, I'm here in Saint Tropez. We actually have I have got my own cluster. Yeah. We're gonna we're gonna we're gonna win. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We're win the AI race.
Speaker 5:Alive and well.
Speaker 2:Alive and well.
Speaker 8:I'm usually a big France proponent because they're 70% nuclear, but I I I do I do think you won that exchange.
Speaker 2:Okay. Well, thank
Speaker 1:you Doug. We had Doug from Semi Analysis on. He was saying like, hey, all the energy's there. A bunch of the labs have gone over, tried to get something done Let's
Speaker 2:do it.
Speaker 1:And just walked away.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Ready
Speaker 1:to And so as I said, until LVMH is spending 100,000,000,000 a year on data center CapEx, they're not really in the game. They got a They haven't They clearly haven't read They haven't studied situational awareness yet. Yeah. So
Speaker 2:And and Louis Vuitton, hopefully on temp Dan. Well, to you soon.
Speaker 1:Congrats to the whole team.
Speaker 2:Goodbye. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. And guess what?
Speaker 2:Sydney Sweeney just rang the opening bell for the stock market today at the New York Stock Exchange. Adam Aronson said it was bound to happen because what do Sydney and Sweeney have in common? NYSE. Right in the middle of the Venn diagram. She has the letters NYSE in both her first name and her last name.
Speaker 2:That is a fantastic coincidence. What an interesting what an interesting Let's
Speaker 1:go back to Friday, February 6.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Macron I We'll back to France.
Speaker 2:We we will we We'll will close France. We have Boris Soffman waiting from He's the CEO and co founder and he's here in the TV at Ultradome. Welcome to the show. Sorry to keep you waiting.
Speaker 13:Yeah, Joe. Pleasure to be here. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Thanks. Glad to have you. Do we have a phone call like a decade ago about Anki because we were both in the Andreessen portfolio? Is that possible?
Speaker 13:It's, very possible. That was quite a journey.
Speaker 2:I remember because we were the only two portfolio companies that were, like, selling something online. And so I was like, okay. Connect me with the one person that's not just doing software. I need to know how this works. And you kind of broke it down, it was very fascinating.
Speaker 13:This is be before the physical stuff became in style again. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It is in style.
Speaker 13:Had a hard time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But first time on the show, please introduce yourself and explain what the company does.
Speaker 13:Thank you. First of pleasure to be here. Thank you for the invitation. Of course. Name is Boris Hoffman.
Speaker 13:I'm the cofounder and CEO of Bedrock Robotics. Yeah. And we're developing autonomy technologies for heavy machinery. And so these are the sort of machines you see in construction like excavators, wheel loaders
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 13:Motor graders, compactors, but also in all types of other industries like mining, agriculture, lumber. And so they're the workforce for a pretty sizable percentage of the world's GDP. And these are sectors that are going through pretty massive labor challenges. And so we're bringing autonomy solutions that can enable them to be fully operatorless to be able to execute work with a lot of flexibility and bypass a lot of the constraints that right now are really challenging for not just The US, the whole world.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Why is there a labor shortage? Why don't people wanna drive cool trucks and tractors and Yeah. Finding equipment dream. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It feels like it feels like a dream.
Speaker 13:They always want to drive it for for a little bit, but it's a really, really tough tough work. So, you know, the amount of people going into this line of work is just way smaller than it used to be in the past. You also have a fragmentation where you can be an expert bulldozer operator, but you're not an expert excavator operator. And so you end up having these, you know, these challenges. And what what's happening is that the average age is getting higher and higher.
Speaker 13:Retirement are skyrocketing. People are not coming into this line of work. Temperatures are high. Vibrations of these machines are really painful. And it oftentimes takes many, many years to become even decently competent at these machines because they're very complicated.
Speaker 13:And so you end up having giant spikes in demand, for example, from the data center boom and onshoring and manufacturing, housing shortages, infrastructure work. But a lot of our partners are expecting half the workforce to retire the next seven years, and so it's going the opposite direction
Speaker 7:Wow.
Speaker 13:In an industry that already had 800,000 workers shortage over the next few years.
Speaker 1:Talk about so so it sounds like you guys are building hardware, software that can kind of bolt on to existing machinery. Talk about that decision making process. It feels smart for a number of reasons. And I also want to understand how the actual equipment manufacturers are thinking about autonomy. We were talking about Caterpillar last week.
Speaker 1:It's been if you were a hardware VC ten years ago, you probably should have just put all your money in Caterpillar based on on how stocks traded. Right. It's right. Double digits every single year for for almost a decade. But but, yeah, talk about kind of the the approach that you're taking.
Speaker 13:Mhmm. So my roots and a lot of our roots from Bedrock, we actually came out of Waymo. So I was an executive there for about five years. I was leading trucking. Various technology teams supported the cars as well.
Speaker 13:And in that world, we had to redesign the fundamental platform every time you would make a new vehicle. So you wanna put a Jaguar on the road or a Daimler Freightliner or a Hyundai, you're doing a multi $100,000,000, like, multi many year program because, you know, these are very complicated, you know, systems that needed to be redesigned for safety reasons. Mhmm. The advantage that we have in in the space and the approach we're taking is that we can actually retrofit existing heavy machinery. So take a Caterpillar excavator, for example.
Speaker 13:We can turn it into autonomously capable with a sensor compute outfit, and now you take this half $1,000,000 machine that a general contractor already owns, and it could become autonomous for the scope of work that's cleared for.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And with with autonomous vehicles, when you when you look at the cost of Waymo, that's been obviously one one of the criticisms of it. If you have a half $1,000,000 machine and then you're put bolting on five you know, 50 ks or 100 ks worth of sensors in order to run it autonomously, the economics can make a lot of sense quickly because the operator was getting paid. Maybe you can't find the operator, and they also were probably getting paid quite well. So I imagine like the economic trade is pretty good.
Speaker 13:Economic economic trade is fantastic because the cost of hardware is also, a lot lower because now there's an ecosystem of components being driven by automotive space and others. And so we can, enable these machines to be autonomous, you know, for a lot less cost. But then you're able to operate eight hours a day, fifteen hours a day, twenty four hours a day. You can compress schedules. You improve safety.
Speaker 13:You get visibility of your work, higher predictability. And so when you change the physics of how you actually manage the operations of a construction project like this, suddenly, you can get a lot more productive and fundamentally expand the sector, and you can utilize your machinery a lot more with a lot less constraints, which immediately helps general contractors and subcontractors who are our customers in the end do work.
Speaker 2:Makes sense. One interesting decision from Waymo is the electrification of the fleet. That feels like it unlocks a specific acceleration curves, very precise, and people really rave about the driving experience sitting in the passenger seat because it's computer controlled. Is there a major barrier to electrification of construction equipment because of the energy density and the work that needs to be done and maybe charging infrastructure? Like, you expect an electric, you know, tractor to be rolled out in a decade or is are we further away?
Speaker 1:Just plug it in like one of those vacuums that has a cord.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I just want to say about, like, electrification of, construction equipment broadly.
Speaker 13:Yeah. It's funny. Electric things are actually easier to control because they're much more predictable in the output
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 13:Of of what they have. So there's actually advantages from a, you know, from a vehicle standpoint. The you know, in construction, what's challenging is you get pulled into really strange locations in the middle of nowhere. And so infrastructure is just very complex. And so for example, data centers are getting pulled into strange locations because availability and power.
Speaker 13:So, you know, you end up having a practicality that's, you know, kinda tougher on that in that domain. And so for us, we're embracing the ecosystem that exists today, which is incredibly designed machines. They just happen to be, you know, still, you know, not not electric yet.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 13:But I believe, you know, when you do a robotaxi, you can have hubs that have, like, massive large scale charging facilities. It'll take more time, I think, for that to propagate into into construction where, by definition, you're going to areas that are pretty greenfield that don't have that infrastructure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Based on everything you've seen over your career, do you think it's a good time to start a new AI toy company now?
Speaker 13:It's like, yeah, we were maybe a little bit ahead of our time. You know, what what's interesting is the technology that has skyrocketed over the last five, six years that has enabled autonomy on public roads and industrial equipment, it kind of applies everywhere. And I think more generally, the physical world is gonna get reinvented because now suddenly you have these incredible interface capabilities through, like, large language models and super sophisticated AI. You have lower cost of hardware. You have cloud compute you know, cloud AI that can now be on a wireless network connected.
Speaker 13:So those are building blocks for all every industry effectively. And so I think that, you know, we've seen this, like, transformation on the digital side with, you know, LLMs and OpenAI, Gemini, and others. The physical world is still 80% of the world's GDP. This is the future where Yeah. You comply this to every single sector, then every one of them can have a reinvented experience.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I I just thought about, like, a lot of I mean, the the Waymo's are incredibly reliable, but there's plenty of AI models that have little hallucinations. But if you design the kids toy to sort of embrace that, we talked to what was that company that was you take a pic or you describe whatever you want and then prints a sticker? I think it was called Stickerbox
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:For kids. It was just like this it was sort of leaning into all the rough edges of AI in a very positive way that's like low stakes.
Speaker 13:Content becomes, like, so much easier because of the Totally. So I think I mean, generally, think it's gonna reinvent gaming and entertainment like this just because of the like, you don't have to script the entire experience like you you used to. The other nice thing is what you mentioned is that, you know, when you are dealing with autonomy in a lot of applications, you're so sensitive to the worst case of what happens, not the average case, which is what most of AI has to focus on. Mhmm. And so that adds an incredibly high bar to releasing a car and, you know, to go drive a list in San Francisco or a 110,000 pound machine to go and do an excavation project in a you know, for a factory.
Speaker 13:There's a lot of other sectors that can benefit from the fact that there's a softer, you know, kind of boundary and resilience to, you know, certain mistakes. And in general, I think that you see this shape in every industry. That's why legal LMs or or medical LMs have, a large larger bar than a chatbot that maybe keeps you company and, you know, gives you some does some research that's not absolutely, like, accuracy critical.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:How many how many OEMs are you do you think you guys wanna be working with in in, let's say, five years? Like, can you reach a critic can you reach kind of critical scale working with Caterpillar and John Deere and kinda going down whatever the the kind of power law players? Or is there more of a long tail that I'm not aware of?
Speaker 13:So there's absolutely millions of these machines. And almost always, the bottleneck is that the labor to operate them is, you know, is limited. In The United States, you know, every every geographical region will have its biases. Today, we're working with on Caterpillar machines. Most OEMs are actually moving towards this drive by wire architecture where you can control these machines in a very efficient fashion electrically.
Speaker 13:That's a proves to be a, you know, big enabler, which didn't exist for the, you know, car, truck space among other challenges. And so but what's nice is that we're the OEM ecosystem is probably not gonna be the constraint for many, many years mainly because there's such a prevalence of machines. And eventually, these technologies will probably influence the buying cycles into the subset of OEMs that actually have the capabilities like this.
Speaker 2:Is there an OBD two port on these Caterpillar vehicles? Yeah. There's a they have a
Speaker 13:campus interface, and so you, yeah, you tend to have, you know, signals passing through, and so you can, you know, plug in. And and in fact, I think the industry's benefited from the fact that there's a lot of foresight from companies like Caterpillar and Deere Yeah. To interoperate with high end GPS systems, the driver assist systems that help you auto level a blade, for example. And so you have the prerequisites of autonomy even if the capabilities on the AI side weren't ready yet.
Speaker 2:That makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 1:Jordy? Got some news?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Tell us about the round. What happened? Let's bring down the mallet from the Lambda Cloud. Oh
Speaker 13:my god. That's a big mallet.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We got some heavy machinery here. We got some gong machinery.
Speaker 2:How much did you raise?
Speaker 13:We raised $270,000,000. Oh my god. We got a gong.
Speaker 1:There we go. Congratulations. There
Speaker 2:I It's dramatic. It's very dramatic here. We like theatrics on this show. We enjoyed talking to you. Thank you so much for taking the time to come
Speaker 1:yeah. I'm super excited about what you guys are building and yeah. Glad you're glad you're doing it. Just like the even just yeah. The all the the speed ups, every the more that we can speed up every single, you know, project in the real world from, you know, a a train to an airport to someone's home, the better.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So
Speaker 13:The whole economy will feel it. It's you know, it could be a radiation on the whole sector, and hopefully, this opens up a pretty broad generation of building at a scale we haven't seen yet.
Speaker 2:I love it. Well, thank you so much
Speaker 1:for Yeah. Didn't even get into software. I'm hoping I'm hoping it feels like a video game when I'm, you know Yeah. When I'm just kind of observing my fleet.
Speaker 2:Agent Swarms. Yeah. Agent swarms.
Speaker 13:Orchestration of these, that's the that's the future. And Yeah. Yeah. For sure. But Amazing.
Speaker 13:Gentlemen, thank you.
Speaker 1:Have a great rest great having on.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 13:Yeah. Congratulations. Goodbye.
Speaker 2:In other news, mister Beast bought a bank. That's fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Mister Beast
Speaker 8:Beast Industries.
Speaker 1:This was a
Speaker 2:Gen z focused banking app.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Launched in the twenty tens, very hot in the twenty twenty, twenty twenty one fintech era. Remember when every when every, you know, one of these companies was trading at a 100 times revenue? They raised something like a couple $100,000,000 of equity, I believe, and then a bunch of debt
Speaker 2:Oh, wow.
Speaker 1:As well. Yeah. So anyways, unclear. This felt I don't think this was probably a great outcome for the venture investors Okay. Involved.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But I It unlocks Who knows who knows, like, if if it's a a a they bought a 100% of it or Yeah. Or whatever. But, yeah, now you have, you know, one of the biggest, you know, distribution platforms like built in the world. I do wonder if they'll be able to go international from day one, just given that so much of misuse this audience is so international. Very global.
Speaker 1:Well We'll have to figure it. Very cool. This was something I remember people have been saying since at least kind of that 2021 era, MrBeast should have a bank. Yeah. Like, you should have a effectively a commodity business that's differentiated by brand and your ability to get users to sign up in an expensive way, and something that he can offer to everyone.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Something that you know, so anyways, this this Yeah. And and extremely scalable, obviously. So I'll be interested to track this as they I'm assuming every single MrBeast video will have have a
Speaker 2:Call to action?
Speaker 1:Call to action
Speaker 2:Probably.
Speaker 1:Very, very shortly.
Speaker 2:It's gonna be good. Well, we have Sarah Hooker in the restream waiting room from Adaption Labs. Welcome to the show, Sarah. How are you doing? Good evening.
Speaker 10:Hello. It's lovely to be here. How are you?
Speaker 1:Great to have you. Love the I love the background. It looks like a beautiful day.
Speaker 2:Are you
Speaker 1:in San Francisco?
Speaker 2:Are you outside in San Francisco?
Speaker 10:I'm not. But I'm surrounded by glass, so it gives a good illusion. This is the outside.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 10:See how beautiful it is, this is this is inward looking, but just high high reflection density.
Speaker 2:Amazing. First time on the show, so please introduce yourself and the company.
Speaker 10:Fun. So I did wanna say I was trying to this might, as a site aside before we get started, but I was trying to describe to an AI researcher what this show was over the weekend.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 10:And what was funny was, I was saying it's kind of like CNN New Year's Eve show
Speaker 13:Oh, sure.
Speaker 2:Like every day. Every day.
Speaker 1:Every day. Yeah. Incredible. Dramatic. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We should
Speaker 1:go we should go watch all of
Speaker 2:should have a ball that drops from the ceiling.
Speaker 1:And Yeah.
Speaker 2:When it falls, the the show Don't.
Speaker 1:You gotta protect that researcher with your life because they're locked in enough to not Yeah. Have ever heard about us.
Speaker 2:That's a high value person. Signal. That's great.
Speaker 10:And I do think it's it's fun because you have the cerebral from Anderson Cooper and you kinda have the dash of drama from from the Bravo.
Speaker 2:Anyways,
Speaker 10:just love to hear. Three months ago, I started Adaption with Sadeep, who's my cofounder. So I'm
Speaker 2:Overnight success.
Speaker 10:Oh, thank you. That's lovely. Yeah. We just closed our $50,000,000.
Speaker 2:There we go. Ready
Speaker 1:Anyways, continue. Continue.
Speaker 10:That was a lovely deduction. I thought that was very bombastic. But probably more important was and probably the most important question I'll work on. So most of my career has been in Frontier Labs and building the biggest model that we can, that's very performant. But this is fundamentally bucking that trend.
Speaker 10:Trend. It's about how do we continue to evolve these models real time? How do we not just build a static model, but, how does a model adapt to incoming data in a really efficient way?
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Learning. Continual learning? Is that the buzzword? Is that a good buzzword?
Speaker 2:Do you like that phrase?
Speaker 10:Continual learning, I do because it's actually not a new buzzword. So for the first time, we're not introducing a new word, which is foundation models was introduced by Stanford. We often see these models kind of introduced as pretty bump but but continued learning is an old problem. It's just increasingly urgent because it's now within reach in many ways. Like, most of the last decade has been like you throw compute at the training pre training.
Speaker 10:Yep. But now, we have expressive enough models that it can interact. And that's fundamental to the question here is how do you interact efficiently with the world? And so I don't mind continual learning. I think it serves its purpose.
Speaker 10:That's good.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How much are you thinking of, like, an entirely new architecture versus what we're seeing with folks building skills and markdown files, compacting chats, larger context windows? There's so many different ways to sort of get continual learning lights these days, and everyone's solving it in different ways. What what do you think the most interesting path is?
Speaker 10:Yeah. That's such a fun question. And I'll tell you why, because there's almost like two crucial questions that continual learning has to solve. The most heavy handed version of continual learning is you basically have to train again. And that is something that's not all interesting, think, to to adaption mainly because it's a very high barrier to entry.
Speaker 10:And if we want to foresee it adapt and interact, you want it to be real time. I would say, like, the light version you're talking about is probably another least interesting alternative. It's powerful. It's a lever. But it's really that you want to do two things.
Speaker 10:Like, we want to have control of the stack and be changing, the weights without gradients, which I think you can do in powerful ways, especially if you do it jointly with GPU optimization. But the second thing, and this is interesting, is that you really need to care about the way you place compute. So the way with monolithic models now, I think people intuitively understand we saw the same model at every problem, which is a big waste of compute. Mhmm. And 90% of problems every day that you solve using AI are extremely easy.
Speaker 10:Mhmm. It's a 10% that matter. That's the long tail. But even there, we spend too much compute because we do these massive rollouts. And we all really have good verification for code and design right now.
Speaker 10:Why? Because those are people who care enough to give a ton of feedback. And that's where we see it working really well. And what's interesting is that the the component that's most fascinating for us is let's care about interface, and let's create really interesting interaction points that are adaptive to each task. And so when we talk about add adaptivity, it actually includes the interface because the type of feedback you should get to change based upon your problems.
Speaker 10:And that's how you make it efficient. So kind of on that spectrum of, like, heavy handed you train, but really for us, our constraint is on the other end. We want it to be real time and we wanna use, a a strong set of levers to get there.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. What's oh, sorry.
Speaker 1:Go for it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Just what's the biggest, sort of consensus take in AI right now that you disagree with?
Speaker 10:Oh, in AI? I mean, I think data centers in space is pretty bonkers.
Speaker 2:Okay. That's a good one.
Speaker 10:I don't know if that's specific to AI, but it just feels topical. So maybe I'll throw that one out. I I do a lot of work on systems as well, so serving really fast is really important for Frontier and Dynamics are just really tough if you do. I think there's two things that are changing that make it hard to do something like data science in space. One is most co located hardware is pretty much for training.
Speaker 10:Mhmm. I think that's why you care. Otherwise, you can distribute. And so inference compute, which is where everything's moving, you know, when we talk about real time adaptation, a lot of it's inference. Mhmm.
Speaker 10:You can spread that compute more easily. You can have multiple data centers. Mhmm. So if you care about space, you probably only care about training compute. And I think people underestimate the amount of failures that happen.
Speaker 10:And you don't wanna get your training job interrupted.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We unpack that more because it seems like if things are moving towards inference and inference does not need to be co located, having inference happen on a single, maybe maybe wafer scale system on a chip in space, that seems like more possible in that case if we do move to inference. France, and maybe the training still does happen in the co located data center, but then the inference happens on the on the space data center. Is that possible or or or is there some logical inconsistency there that I'm missing?
Speaker 10:So you can distribute inference, but Yeah. To be honest, that's pretty easy to do on Earth. Right? Because you have less constraints to be co located. The real shortage of data centers and, you know, where, providers like Google
Speaker 2:Is around training.
Speaker 10:Around training.
Speaker 2:You Okay. Wanna And
Speaker 10:so the truth is it it's you can do inference distribution much more easily, which is less but the real issue, frankly, is that, GPUs still have failure rates. So Yeah. The 2% GPUs that enough just started. It's considered done every year. You don't try and revive them
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:From the death. And that's really your cost.
Speaker 2:Like Yeah.
Speaker 10:It's how how quickly you can replace those and what it looks like.
Speaker 1:Very interesting. What do you think your first customers will look like?
Speaker 10:Oh, for us, we wanna make, workloads, like, adaptable all the way from data to interface. And so, there's two use cases for adaption that are both pretty powerful. The first one we're focusing on is customization. Mhmm. So right now, like, if you're a developer, you typically have tried friend tuning.
Speaker 10:You haven't succeeded, because it's too much. You have to bring your data. You have to wait, and then you become a prompt engineer again. And so most rapidly growing companies just have a ton of prompt scaffolding. And for us, like, frankly, if I think about our measure of progress, it's that we eliminate prompt engineering.
Speaker 10:Because that's really I think intuitively, it's a desire for control, but it's also an acknowledgment models don't work for people.
Speaker 2:Well, congratulations on the massive round and all
Speaker 1:the progress. I'm sure you'll be back on this soon.
Speaker 2:Have a great rest of your day and enjoy sunny San Francisco. What a beautiful
Speaker 1:And we're gonna go watch CNN ball drops from the last like hundred years and just
Speaker 2:Game tape.
Speaker 1:Game tape. For sure. Study up. So thank you for the inspiration.
Speaker 10:You're useful. You'll get the sense
Speaker 9:when you wanna
Speaker 10:play. It's very fun banter. Yep. And I think that's the cross section that you both capture which is kind of fun.
Speaker 2:Style and substance. Hopefully. Amazing. Hopefully. Anyway, thank you so much for coming out.
Speaker 1:Great. Sarah.
Speaker 2:We'll talk Thank to the Sarah. Bye. And without further ado, we have Ed from Muckin' Labs in the studio. Good see Good to see you. Fantastic.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:What's happening? Come Why
Speaker 15:don't you go?
Speaker 2:Let's let's kick off
Speaker 1:Woah. Some Got some heavy metal.
Speaker 2:Can we oh, can we knock this? Let's knock the gun. What do you got? Wait. Sit down.
Speaker 2:Tell us the number. One twenty four minutes. So you guys put our
Speaker 15:ad in our logo in your ad yesterday. We thought we should put you in metal. Amazing. Amazing. Amazing.
Speaker 15:Nathan, our new engineer, took some time off from customizing cars and It's so cool. Put this put this in. Yeah. So Wow.
Speaker 1:Very, very, very cool.
Speaker 2:It's amazing. Okay. So this is metal deforming. Explain what's going on here. Right.
Speaker 2:Explain what machine made this.
Speaker 15:Yeah. So we build a machine called Robocraftsman. It basically does different types of metal operations like a craftsman would. Yeah. Core operation is sheet forming.
Speaker 15:Mhmm. Is a slight kind of indentation to kinda get your logo out. Yeah. But we can form, you know, aircraft panels. Sure.
Speaker 15:Airframes, you know, car bodies. We do a lot of customization work with Toyota right now. So but the system is designed to do all kinds of manufacturing operation. You know, you kind of think about it as kind of versatile Sure. Manufacturing robot that can do different types of operations Yeah.
Speaker 15:Just through software.
Speaker 2:And what unlocked the new round? Is it a partnership with a big automotive OEM or just sort of broad adoption unlocking certain technical milestones? Like, what what jumped off the first slide of the pitch deck?
Speaker 15:Yeah. So we're now going actually from kinda like, you know, technology development at this stage to actually scaling.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 15:Right? So we are deploying at facility number three Here we go. Facility number four
Speaker 8:Here we go.
Speaker 15:Right? So this third facility is gonna be 250,000 square foot facility, which is twice the size, more than twice the size of our, you know, second facility
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 15:Which is 75,000 square foot right here in the in the valley. Yeah. So for the and also, we're gonna expand the scope of operation. Mhmm. So we initially built a platform to do sheet forming.
Speaker 15:Now, we're adding welding.
Speaker 9:Mhmm.
Speaker 15:We're adding adding assembly, machining. So we can do full end to end, you know, complex metal structure assemblies
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 15:For our customers. For example, we're doing a lot of work right now with aerospace primes
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 15:To do missile airframes. Mhmm. So this actually, this first facility is gonna do that at larger volumes. We're gonna do thousands of missile airframes Mhmm. A year out of that facility.
Speaker 15:But the beauty is that tomorrow you can just switch it and do aircraft panels or do car and automotive panels.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Do you want to ever allow someone the flexibility of something that feels almost like three d printing? You you know, you're you're able to do r and d low volume, but then when someone says, Okay, I'm going to make the cyber truck. You need to gig a press. Is that something you want to get into or is that something you see as like antiquated, we won't need stamping anymore in the future?
Speaker 15:Yeah. I think in the short term, I think we could cover up to a few thousand a year. Right? And the big question is long term, you know, what does the manufacturing look like? Mhmm.
Speaker 15:My view is that long term we're going to have less high volume of making the same thing over and over again
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 15:And more just keep changing. And then you look at the software, you know, how many apps you have on your phone? Yeah. Like, you know, hundreds. Like, you can download thousands
Speaker 1:software used to make it, it would get you put it on a disc, sell it Right. Just pray, basically.
Speaker 2:Right. Right. Future your car, you don't have a daily and a weekend. You have different panels that you could chunk off, change it.
Speaker 1:I mean Jeep does that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they do. They do.
Speaker 1:Already. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 15:So that that world is I think, you know, you look at any sci fi book, you know, it just tells you about this world where, you know, like every building looks different, every car looks different, you know
Speaker 1:Basically a lot more version of
Speaker 15:it. A lot more variety. Yeah. So I think in long term, we're probably not gonna have as much of like make the same thing over and over again.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When you talked to Lukasz Ziggur about three d printing for the hyper car he built, it feels like there's certain trade offs that he's optimizing for where certain weight to strength ratios are only unlockable with certain structures. They look more organic.
Speaker 2:What what are the other optimization parameters that you're
Speaker 1:looking at? Yeah. Go for it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm just thinking like cost, speed, flexibility, any anything else that's like jumping off the page so Yeah.
Speaker 15:Right off the bat is just the speed. Right. You know, that's why also we start out of defense because Yeah. Like, you know, that's where you want you wanna have a new idea and new weapon system, you wanna scale it really fast. Sure.
Speaker 15:But not only just to scale it
Speaker 2:fast Quickly, it's like quantize that speed because I've seen, you know, heat the the image that I'm conjuring, you can correct me, is like two massive like sort of robotic arms pushing against this metal sheet. Right. And it's working for like a few hours. Right. Is that right?
Speaker 2:Is that hours, days, or how how long
Speaker 15:are we taking? Yeah. Depending on the geometry Yeah. You know, the tack time could be a few hours Sure. Up to maybe a day.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 15:Right? Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, you have to compare it to the traditional paradigm where you have to go make a dies and tooling. Sure.
Speaker 15:So now you're looking at three months up to a year Yeah. Depending on how many tools you need Yeah. Can potentially be longer before you even get your first one.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. And that wait time is terrible. I've seen that for like even just like plastic forming. Takes forever. Injection molding.
Speaker 2:Like, make a mold that makes the mold that makes the mold. Know, it's seven steps and every and then someone goes on new year and
Speaker 15:you're And the fundamentally comes down to like, okay, what is the dollars went into building a part because you can horizontally scale. Yeah. Right? So if let's say, hey, you know, have to spend $200,000,000 to set up a facility and pay for all the dyes to get to production. Okay.
Speaker 15:With $200,000,000, how many of Robocraftsmen can run-in parallel?
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 15:And that's where it becomes a little bit more relevant because we get speed through parallelization, whereas as you know, traditional manufacturing gets to speed through decreasing tach time. Right? Like, I do it fast, but I have one assembly line that things go through, it needs to be fast. Whereas we're saying, okay, have a matrix operation, have 200 of these cells. Yeah.
Speaker 15:Same cost
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 15:But then to get you same throughput, but tomorrow you wanna change from, you know, you know, model a to model b, you can just do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Who who are you actually competing with? Is it is it operations in China? Like, that is that like when you're when you're really when when somebody's kind of comping you out? Right.
Speaker 1:I I imagine there's not there just can't be that many super tech enabled kind of manufacturing companies of the future in Southern California to where I often imagine your competition is overseas? Right.
Speaker 15:Yeah. No. So I think, well, it could be for some of the sectors. In commercial world, yes. But then in defense, you know, these are already within The United States.
Speaker 1:I meant more like in auto manufacturing.
Speaker 15:Yeah. So I think, you know, going back to your question around like what do we enable? Speed is one thing, but a lot of times we also enable something that traditionally was just not possible. Mhmm. Yeah.
Speaker 15:That's what we're doing with auto. Right? Traditionally, you could not go, no matter if you did it in China or here, you still have to make dies and unit economics doesn't make sense if you have to customize and make a new die and new mold for every panel or every custom car you're going So in those cases, we're actually creating a completely new paradigm. Like this is a new business model that Toyota's going after. Like, okay, you know, John or Jordy can go on a website and say, hey, I want this Toyota Tacoma and I want t v p n.
Speaker 15:You guys have to have to get fleet vehicles at some point. Yeah. I can do that
Speaker 2:for you.
Speaker 15:So t v p n on the side door and I want 200 of them. Right? Yeah. Twitter would be like, this is not impo it's just not possible. Yeah.
Speaker 15:Right? So we're in
Speaker 1:actually a big market. Mean, imagine thinking electricians, like all these different trades where you would want the custom truck because you're like, we're gonna run this into the ground. It's not like a consumer buying something that that maybe they're like, oh, I'll be in it for a few years.
Speaker 2:I just want a sticker on the side. We want something that's, like, permanent. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right. Makes a
Speaker 2:lot of sense. I have an idea of what your CapEx looks like. I mean, you're buying big robotic arms. What does the OpEx look like in a robotic factory? Are buying a lot of, like, oil cans, like, squeaking Yeah.
Speaker 2:Things? Like, what like, what what are the what what are the parts that break when you're running a lot of robotic arms?
Speaker 15:Yeah. So I think like robot maintenance is one part
Speaker 2:of part.
Speaker 15:Yeah. Right? Like, you know, changing oil. Yeah. You know, every once in a while you have gear boxes that wear out you have to change those things.
Speaker 15:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But Motors too? Mhmm. Do motors Burnout?
Speaker 15:Burnout? Motors actually are pretty I think, you know, I've had I've been working with robots, this company in the previous one, Relativity Space. Yeah. Never had a more motor give on me.
Speaker 1:Wow. Really?
Speaker 15:I've had gear boxes give on me. Have supplies give it, you know, but not motors.
Speaker 1:Is that when people talk about humanoids, they're often the criticism is like, hey, you have all these different motors that need to function and they're gonna be under a lot of strain and maybe that's kind of a risk from a depreciation standpoint or just operating
Speaker 2:expense? Yeah.
Speaker 15:I mean, at the end of the I think the way I think about it is, if you go like very fundamental, right, the bill of material that goes into making a robot is not that significantly different than the bill of material to go into building a die. The difference is a die and a mold is a dumb material versus a robot is an intelligent material Sure. That can change its configuration. Yeah. So so I mean, it's the same argument even with molds.
Speaker 15:Like, you know, if you have your gearboxes kind of like, you know, getting worn out, dyes get worn out. You have to repair dyes. Right? So the argument applies either way. It's a question of like which one is a more longer term ROI, which is usually intelligence has more longer term ROI than Yeah.
Speaker 1:You scaling outside of California yet or Yeah.
Speaker 15:Third So facility is not gonna be in California.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 15:So volume production, I think obviously California, have lot of engineers, so we want our R and D development be here. But productions, we're looking at Texas now for the third facility, New Mexico
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 15:Nevada recently and New Mexico and Alabama.
Speaker 1:So How what's the process with those states? Are they getting or is it fairly competitive? Is is there states that are leaning? Does does tech as because I imagine Texas has a lot of momentum. If you're one of these other states, you maybe offer more incentives to get your get your business.
Speaker 15:Yeah. I think Texas has the benefit like, you know, we're looking at Austin and nearby area like Los Angeles. SpaceX used to
Speaker 1:Yeah. People want to live there. Exactly. The benefit.
Speaker 15:But then you go to New Mexico. New Mexico has, you know, actually they have a sovereign fund that can invest into Yeah. Into facilities that that you're gonna deploy. Obviously, taxes are, you know, estate taxes are minimal in all all three, you know. Texas is more property related taxes.
Speaker 15:So, It's different different for each state, but you're right. I think Texas is becoming that premium state, so they value themselves a little bit higher than
Speaker 1:What what was the ten year pitch for investors? Obviously, they're investing based on the, you know, everything you've done to date and the and the current traction. But if when everything goes right, what does the business look like?
Speaker 2:Custom hoods for Ford Raptors.
Speaker 1:Else do you need
Speaker 2:to know? Don't even open the docks app. Right. Just wire the money. Exactly.
Speaker 2:I think you you
Speaker 15:see I think, you know, what excites us and also like everybody in the company, right, is the world where, you know, when when I got out of school, you know, in order to build hardware, you have to work in big companies. Mhmm. Like like, you know, if you're a software engineer though, you know, you can have a small team, put stuff on AWS, suddenly your app is accessed by, you know, millions of people. Yep. If you're a hardware engineer, you have to go work for like, you know, big companies, Toydas, you know Boeing.
Speaker 15:Boeing. Yeah. Because your idea requires a lot of CapEx to be built. So Yep. Long term vision is can we make that happen for hardware?
Speaker 15:Can we make what happen with software for hardware? Where you have an idea, you go on a portal.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 15:You know, the AI on it guides you to turn your intention into a design that's manufacturable. And you say, hey, I want 200 of these, you know, in Hollywood, California and the right facility that might be in South Bay or in the Bay Area gets programmed makes it for you and you know, a week later you you get it you get it
Speaker 2:shipped to your door.
Speaker 1:Amazing. What
Speaker 2:about the abstraction layers on top of the robots? You you obviously buy robots that are, you know, off the shelf. I mean, they're they're made by large corporations. But once those arrive, I'm sure they have some computer control system. Have you had to build an abstraction layer on top of that?
Speaker 2:Or do you have a translation layer from a design you put in an image and that turns it into a three d point cloud or something Yeah. And then translates into robotic motions? Like, what was the process to actually, you know, fire it up? Because you're you're not controlling this with an Xbox.
Speaker 15:No. In early days we did. Yeah. But but yeah, no. So there's two pieces of software that that we developed.
Speaker 15:So one we call like, you know, cut off line programming software where it takes a design Mhmm. And then modifies the design, then prepares instructions that can be sent to the robot. Mhmm. Then And once the robot is done, it gets the results from all the sensors and allows you to do some analysis or even train models afterwards that gives you better process parameters for the next time. Yeah.
Speaker 15:Right? So that's our offline software we call it architect. And then there's a software that controls robots every four milliseconds. Look at the sensor data and say, okay, how did you do and do I want to adjust? Mhmm.
Speaker 15:Right? And so it's so I can improve it. So both of the software is internal. You know, we did decide to try to be as much as we can off the shelf. So 70% of our hardware BOM is off the shelf.
Speaker 15:There's 30% like things that the robot pick up or the way Yeah. We, you know, hold the material or the whole platform itself because it's a portable platform. Those are built and designed by us. But we wanted to be able to go to market with, you know, limited amount of CapEx requirements where something that can be easily financed with debt as opposed to try to spend a lot of equity dollars on Smart. On building, you know, custom machines.
Speaker 15:But yeah. So software is all us. Yeah. Hardware side, 30% is is designed and, you know, 70% off.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Talk more about the capital sources. What's the role of debt in this business? What's the role of strategic partnerships? It feels like at this level of the stack, we often see companies teaming up with bigger players.
Speaker 2:What are the pitfalls of that best practices?
Speaker 15:Yeah. You know, I think, yeah, that's one of the things that I learned. It's like a company like this, you need to basically have very diversified capitals. Mhmm. Right?
Speaker 15:So obviously, get equity dollars for development. Mhmm. But I think the best use of the equity dollars is just put into engineering Yeah. Build something that gives you long term money.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 15:Most of our, you know, CapEx is fine as finance with debt Sure. Even up to this date.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You get a mortgage, basically.
Speaker 15:Yeah. So you basically get mortgage against the asset. You know, it's still pretty cheap. Used to be much cheaper. Yeah.
Speaker 15:Now it's like, you know, maybe 2% to 3% above the prime rate. Sure. Right? So so and then and then I think customers play a big role. Because we're such a fundamental change.
Speaker 2:Are those loans typically interest only or are you paying down the principal over like ten year depreciation schedule?
Speaker 15:Yeah. So like You can do either. All flavors. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 15:Right? So so we have like some of them that like, you know, couple of years interest rate only Okay. Then you have five, six years of repayment.
Speaker 2:Got it. Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know
Speaker 2:Just like a house, but a little bit shorter because it matches the depreciation schedule. Yeah. Makes sense.
Speaker 15:And then, obviously, you brought customers. I think for us, was actually pretty crucial. Like most of the time people think of, okay, know, if you're a venture funded business, don't go to customers, they change your direction, maybe they give you a little bit Yeah. You know, they they kind of force you to do things you might not want to do. I think in our case, it's such a fundamental change.
Speaker 15:I mean, Toyota's of the world, aerospace problems of the world, manufacturing is their thing. Right? So I found actually it's better to partner with them and actually get them involved because some of these manufacturing changes takes five, six years to do. Right? So if the executives, even the CEO of the prime is not in it, you know, doesn't have a stake in the long term, there might not be, you know, the success might be a little bit iffy, right?
Speaker 15:Yeah. Because they're not committed to for the long ride, right? Yeah. And then, I think the last source of capital, I think, you know, this is, you know, we talk about manufacturing as a national security Yeah. Kind of advantage.
Speaker 15:So a lot of governments.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 15:You know, we work with a lot of governments to provide, you know, kind of certain level of support so that we can deploy these factories in their in their countries. We recently announced a partnership with UAE.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 15:Cool. So that's gonna be
Speaker 1:where our fourth facility Yeah. They haven't seen incentives around. They have so much power and so much land and they just want things to be made there.
Speaker 15:Yeah. And they have a huge I mean, that area I mean, speaking of I'll call it like, you know, Abrams is a core two point o. That area is like so much going on there in terms of instability. Yeah. All the kind of sane countries in the region are trying to Sure.
Speaker 15:You know, have some level of defenses. And I think UAE is doing a smart thing. They want to become the defense manufacturer in the region next to Turkey and Israel. So Cool. Spending a lot of money and time on it.
Speaker 2:That's great. How big is the company? What's the hiring plan? Big new round?
Speaker 15:So right now, are roughly 70 people planning to get to two forty
Speaker 2:Two forty.
Speaker 15:In the next year and a half Wow.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's a lot of people. Is that manufacturing jobs sort of is there blue collar element to any of the work?
Speaker 15:Yeah. Yeah. So we still need a lot of technicians Technicians.
Speaker 2:That's
Speaker 15:I think, you know, there's a lot of scare when people talk about, you know, kind of AI and like automation. It's like, okay, where are the jobs going? I think we're actually gonna see a revival of blue color a little bit. I think the blue color is not just gonna be, I call it not as blue as it used to be. Like Sure.
Speaker 15:They're gonna be, you know, they're gonna be working with robots and iPads and they're gonna be enhanced. But, we still significantly need technicians, manufacturing engineers on the shop floor operating these systems. That
Speaker 2:makes a lot sense. Jordy, anything else?
Speaker 1:No. Thank you for this wonderful gift. This is
Speaker 2:a wonderful gift. Thank you so much.
Speaker 15:Awesome. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Great to
Speaker 1:meet in person.
Speaker 15:Good to meet you as well. Have a
Speaker 2:great rest of your day. Impressive. We'll talk to you soon. We gotta talk about France, right? Do we get to We gotta out with France.
Speaker 2:Tell us what happened, Jordy. They they invested a lot of money.
Speaker 1:They did. You know? They did.
Speaker 2:How much have you invested in AI? Know, certain
Speaker 1:of million euros. Macron posted on Thursday
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:At 11:53AM Pacific Mhmm. That science has found its home. Through France 2030, we have invested more than 30,000,000 to advance AI and a number of other initiatives.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Anyways, I didn't actually see it until Steven from Lambda sent it to me.
Speaker 2:Throwing him in front of the bus.
Speaker 1:No. He just you know, it's it was important news. I think he just wanted to share he wanted to make sure that I saw it. Accurate. The next morning, shared breaking.
Speaker 1:France is going all in
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:On AI with their last 30,000,000 and used this wonderful image. And it wasn't, I guess, like it took a few hours, but the French responded via the account, the official government account, French response. And they said, breaking. Jordi Hayes can't tell the difference between an investment in AI and academic grants for semesters in the South Of France. Can we can we pull this up, guys?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Here we go.
Speaker 1:You kinda have to see it to believe it.
Speaker 2:It's crazy.
Speaker 1:My original post did Fully quote tweeted. Yeah. They quote tweeted
Speaker 2:And tagged you by name. They're quote
Speaker 1:tweeting podcasters.
Speaker 2:They
Speaker 1:are. But my post, of course, outperformed. I got a million views, 13,000 likes. They managed to rack up almost half the likes, 300,000 views, not bad.
Speaker 2:For what it's
Speaker 1:worth, But they the problem is, what does this even mean? So they're saying they're not investing in AI. They're just giving academic grants for semesters in the South Of France. And I was like, you're you're supposed to be Investing in AI. That you are investing in AI.
Speaker 1:And you're telling me that your whole initiative, France 2030, is just French vacations for researchers? Like, you're not you're not giving me a lot of confidence here. This is Yeah. Kind of insane. Macron later I came at you.
Speaker 1:He he made a more general response which again
Speaker 2:You went He came with the long post.
Speaker 1:He came in with the long post. And and so if you're responding to people that are calling you a clown, I wouldn't start your own post and response with just quote, this clown wants
Speaker 2:to make France Oh, so you didn't call him a clown, to be clear.
Speaker 1:I did not use that term. I would never do that. I respect You
Speaker 2:compared him to Matt Damon in rounders.
Speaker 1:I love France. I love France. I've been multiple times in the last few years. You will need to track your passport is still valid there though. He said it.
Speaker 1:This clown wants to make France an AI leader with 30 mil.
Speaker 9:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And and then he goes on and on and on with a with a lot of basically coping and seething. He he then shows a says hashtag for sure. And then he has he he showed a chart of just foreign investment in data centers and and it's apparently 69,000,000,000. Okay. It's going into France, maging The United States.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We only have 27 of foreign money.
Speaker 1:Completely disregarding the trillions Bank?
Speaker 2:Didn't they put in way more? I mean, I guess this is OpenAI and then OpenAI funnels
Speaker 1:it too. Who knows? But obviously, it doesn't matter because you need to look at foreign and domestic. Yes. Wanna get an actually Yes.
Speaker 1:Actually accurate view. I responded. I'm sorry, but until LVMH is spending a 100,000,000,000 a year on data center you guys are taking AI seriously. Okay. And I I honestly think I I I know this sounds like really insane.
Speaker 1:Yes. But in a fast takeoff scenario Mhmm. You would imagine that France actually getting serious about AI is getting their national champions all types. Yeah. LVMH, even the brands.
Speaker 1:It's wasn't Christian Dior actually owned by a big like infrastructure company back in the day? There you go. And so I could imagine I could imagine the Arnaud's getting getting getting back in the game at some point. Adore and I. Anyways, lot lot of fun.
Speaker 1:No disrespect to France. I think we were just having fun. Having a little fun, goofing around on the timeline. I love France. I I'm excited for them to
Speaker 3:I like this.
Speaker 1:Like this. I'm excited for my next trip France.
Speaker 2:Ray says, hello, Emmanuel Macron. If you instead threw a week long hackathon at the Palace Of Versailles with a $30,000,000 €30,000,000 cash prize, it would unironically boost the French AI startup scene way more than investing it.
Speaker 1:Palmer Lucky said, hope the researchers are better at making charts than whoever made this one.
Speaker 2:Oh, no.
Speaker 1:Doctor Parik Patel says, you are not a clown. You are the entire circus.
Speaker 2:It's a rough day on the Internet. But, you know, he's
Speaker 1:I I think he's trying. There's somewhat of a language barrier here. This this again, they and and honestly, hire Lulu. It's all I'll say.
Speaker 2:So I I mean, unclear if they even need to invest that much. I mean, there's an entirely different world where you just become receptive to other companies coming there. They bring jobs. They bring economic opportunity, commerce. Like, you don't necessarily need to build a competitor to Amazon.
Speaker 2:You can have Amazon come to town. Your your you tax the local business, and then you employ local workers, and your consumers benefit from the experience of Amazon.
Speaker 1:You know?
Speaker 2:Yep. You don't you don't necessarily need, like, a local copy of everything. Now AI might be different, and you might need sovereign AI, and and there's a, you know, a discussion around that. But, there are countries that will just say, yeah. You know what?
Speaker 2:Like, g p t five's good enough for us. We're just gonna, like, partner with Google Yeah. For this stuff. Anyway
Speaker 1:We should have someone from Mistral on.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It'd be good. Check-in with them, see how they're doing. I think I I think they've found a nice little a nice little pocket of business over there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, it has been a fantastic show
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Today.
Speaker 2:Thank you for tuning in to our Super Bowl review special. We've planted the bomb. We will see you tomorrow at 11AM Pacific. We'll be playing with Legos. Yes.
Speaker 2:Ramp sent us these wonderful LEGOs. Brian's office. LEGOs. Office.
Speaker 1:Real. Very real.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 1:Hard to believe. Really cool. Fantastic. I mean,
Speaker 2:really just shows you the the the versatility of this execution.
Speaker 1:Just all over Every every
Speaker 2:touch point. I want
Speaker 1:you to have the best afternoon of your life. Computer God. Give every person in the chat the best afternoonoftheir.com
Speaker 2:newsletter. Goodbye. Nice work, brothers. I'll see you on the next one.