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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 are watching TBPN.
Speaker 2:Today is Wednesday, 09/09/2026. You wanna tell us how many days we got till Christmas? Because we are live from the TBPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortune finance capital capital. How many days until Christmas?
Speaker 1:One hundred and six days until...
Speaker 2:Really makes it feel like it's going faster. I feel like It's... Just the other day we were at 112.
Speaker 1:It's flying.
Speaker 2:It's flying by. Start shopping. Just do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And you actually have time to again, like we talked about yesterday Yeah. Remove your flooring, floorboards, all that stuff. Oh, yeah. And just dig straight install a permanent Christmas tree.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Don't just get ready for Christmas twenty twenty six.
Speaker 2:Be ready for next year. Need to start thinking about gift giving. It's harder than ever to find good gifts. The best gift you can give someone is helping them save time and money. Get them on ramp.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Time is money, save both. Use these corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more. Mom, I got you a corporate card that you're gonna love. Anyway... Pull
Speaker 3:this up.
Speaker 1:Pull this up.
Speaker 2:IPhone Duo is gonna be This is more important. A lot of Christmas trees. But what's more important than the new iPhone
Speaker 1:--... This graphic. Foldable. Pull up this graphic I was hoping that Apple would announce this today. Okay.
Speaker 1:If you zoom in
Speaker 2:What is it?
Speaker 1:You can see
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:The tree is actually the house is actually built around the tree.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Stop building a home and adding a tree to it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Find a Christmas tree build the house around it. Exactly. Yes. That's the Christmas spirit.
Speaker 1:Our mutual friend John sent this sent this to me this morning.
Speaker 3:So Love
Speaker 1:he's on top of it. Cool.
Speaker 2:Let's let's do it. Well, Apple has announced the iPhone Duo, their foldable phone. It's we'll we'll we'll pull up some video and react to a little bit of it. Right away. What?
Speaker 1:How is this gonna impact screen time? Is it... Do do... Does your screen time go twice as fast? Cause you're locked in on two screens.
Speaker 2:Should you do pixel adjusted screen time too? Like, do you... If you're watching a laptop versus an Apple Watch, I spend an hour in Apple Watch, is that like fifteen minutes on the on the laptop? On the triple monitor setup? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Getting triple the screen...
Speaker 1:We have the the AirPods with the cameras.
Speaker 2:They didn't... They
Speaker 1:didn't do that.
Speaker 2:They haven't announced those. I don't think they're going to reporting.
Speaker 1:But when that comes
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That could potentially help you add to your screen time by tracking screens out in the real world
Speaker 2:True.
Speaker 1:That you're
Speaker 2:seeing True.
Speaker 1:That aren't getting picked up.
Speaker 2:True. Yeah. Digital billboards, that should go in your screen time. Eventually, it's gonna be twenty four seven screen time. Everyone's looking at a screen everywhere.
Speaker 2:There's a screen everywhere. You're looking at the the windshield of your car. That's the screen. We pull
Speaker 1:up some real pictures of the Duo? Here it is.
Speaker 2:Here it is. The Duo. So in this video, there is no crease. I'm sure the YouTube tech reviewers will be hunting in all different lighting for creases. But it feels like Apple waited long enough to avoid a crease whatsoever.
Speaker 2:So you will get no crease in your... That is crazy.
Speaker 1:Sitting there, boom.
Speaker 2:It's cool.
Speaker 4:It's cool.
Speaker 2:I think this is gonna sell like hotcakes. I think people are ready to spend... It's gonna be like $2, maybe $3 when you max it out. I think the Apple buyer, the Apple fanboy is ready for something that actually is a flex beyond Yeah. Like a slight upgrade.
Speaker 2:You paid 30% more for the pro. This says you pulled out the big you dropped two...
Speaker 1:The thing that the relative to how much value you get out of a phone Yeah. Phones have always been incredibly cheap. Yeah. Even the highest priced...
Speaker 2:Spend more time on your phone than you do in your car and your car is 10 times the price of your phone always. Like that's... If not more. And so I think this will sell very well. It'll be interesting to see if anyone...
Speaker 2:If any new apps come from this, if people need to redesign stuff. Like, we're having Mikey from Suno on the show later today. And Suno has an app that's really full featured for iPhone. You can make songs. You can scroll a feed of other people's songs.
Speaker 2:But you do have to pop over to desktop if you want to get into their composer and actually deconstruct the song and shift around different pieces of the song. And then you get a sort of GarageBand interface. What's his plan? Is he thinking, okay, this is gonna sell enough that I need to reengineer my app for a different flow? You've seen...
Speaker 2:Even even using a lot of normal iPhone apps on iPads, it usually just doesn't feel quite right scrolling. So I think there'll be a couple UI, UX opportunities, challenges, both. Interesting little bezel there where you can see the screen is curved, but it's on a a blocked out squared off edge there in the center. Two cameras on the back, one on the front.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Leaving room for the iPhone Duo Pro with five cameras or something like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It really it really shows that the phone seems to be... At least the iPhone is is certainly in its final form. Right?
Speaker 1:This feels like the biggest step forward in a long time Mhmm. And yet it does absolutely nothing new for you.
Speaker 2:A rave review. Until the new It's like paper that folds out.
Speaker 1:Moderately it's moderately exciting because we're all... It's it's moderately exciting because everyone's addicted to their phone and it's like cool. New new new screen. But it does nothing new for you. It doesn't move humanity forward anyway at all.
Speaker 1:Jordan, you're gonna be able
Speaker 5:to watch two reels at once and they're both gonna be vertical.
Speaker 2:You think so?
Speaker 5:Yeah. What do you mean...
Speaker 2:Demo that I saw, it looked like it was... You put the video up top and then you iMessage your iMessage... Horizontal video.... Open two copies of Instagram at the same time.
Speaker 5:No. I I think it'll be more like the iPad OS where you can have different windows.
Speaker 2:So you think you'll be able to do YouTube shorts and Instagram reels side by side?
Speaker 6:Ideally. Hopefully.
Speaker 2:Ideally. Brain rot final boss over here wants to do it.
Speaker 5:And then you can have the third one on the back.
Speaker 2:Well, it's definitely gonna be better for looking at charts on public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. What what is what is Apple actually doing today in the market?
Speaker 1:Brian says this could literally two x GDP.
Speaker 2:It... The market like this? I mean, all this has been, you know, priced in, but let's check on Apple. Down 1.27% today, down 5% over the last five days, but sort of flat on the month. So it's it's exciting to see John Turners get a big win, like, early.
Speaker 2:Like, thing as the CEO, first major, you know, Apple event, and it's an entirely new product, the foldable phone, something that's been rumored for years. They didn't tee him up just to do a minor Mac mini refresh. Exactly. Yeah. It's exciting that he got to come out strong with this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it's also less of a risk than the Apple Vision Pro. If they'd thrown him there, then he'd be remembered, oh, his first thing was sort of a flop. Denial...
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think this is gonna be a hit even
Speaker 2:though it doesn't
Speaker 1:matter at all.
Speaker 2:I think it's gonna sell very well. I think a lot of people are gonna buy him for a variety of reasons. But I think I think it's just a good way to to kick off a really strong decade long run. Hopefully, four decades. Cooked couldn't couldn't make it to 95 in the seat, but Turnis, I think he got it, what it takes.
Speaker 2:I wanna see Turnis run-in this place and...
Speaker 1:So you're a 100% getting the Duo?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think I'll get it. I'll need to feel how it feels in my hand. But at one point, I was considering carrying an iPad mini as my daily driver phone. Because I was like Okay.
Speaker 2:They... So they come with WiFi.
Speaker 1:Six eight.
Speaker 2:Six So I have big pockets. And so it would actually fit in my pocket. And I don't like the phone feature of the phone. I don't like getting phone calls. You lose that because it doesn't have a So cellular it doesn't have a...
Speaker 2:So you can never call me.
Speaker 1:And it's not like you need a phone number for anything else besides calls like logging into pretty much any service.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You can do two factor on a on an actual like authentication app. I think you can get by. You might need to have a a Mac Mini hooked up somewhere that has a has a phone number attached to it that can route you two factor codes or something. But it did seem doable.
Speaker 2:Or, you know, you just check your phone, their actual phone with the phone number at home later. But every day, you just have this, you know, iPad mini that you pull out and it has it has a cellular connection. I don't know that it can actually get phone calls, but it has a cellular connection. Yeah. So so you can get data while you're out and about.
Speaker 2:So you can be out in the world and scroll reals. Data. What else do you need? You don't need to make...
Speaker 1:Big data.
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, it really comes down to... Look, the the phone is is lighter, thinner. Not lighter.
Speaker 2:It's not thinner. It is probably faster. It's bigger. This is this is the opposite of your meme. Typically, they come out and they say, it's lighter, thinner, faster, thinner, faster, fit thinner, faster 12 times.
Speaker 2:It's the best iPhone ever. This is actually a different direction. This is a...
Speaker 1:Here's here's...
Speaker 2:This a response to your joke.
Speaker 1:Here's here's something.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Would you rather search work and iMessage or be able to get the Duo?
Speaker 2:Search work in iMessage? What do mean?
Speaker 1:Like search in iMessage.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Oh, you want that to work. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Personally, I would be excited about functional features of the core software that I use with the iPhone. Yeah. Among among, you know, many other things. But Kate over on X says mentally ready for my iPhone to start being slow, laggy and having a bad battery. Have that to look forward to.
Speaker 2:So did they... They they also updated like the normal iPhone. Is that right? Did you watch a little bit of the earlier keynote?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, they already said...
Speaker 2:That one is thinner, lighter, faster, better, stronger, all the different things.
Speaker 5:They they updated Apple Intelligence Sponge. So Oh, yeah. There was like all all the...
Speaker 2:I thought they haven't launched
Speaker 3:it yet.
Speaker 2:I thought this was the launch of the Siri, like it's actually gonna go out now.
Speaker 5:Correct. Yes.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:Yeah. This was in the in the launch video.
Speaker 7:Okay.
Speaker 5:And also the old iPhone... Or not not the old iPhone, but the new normal iPhone 18, they were like, oh, the battery is like much better. So all all those things that Jordy state... They like said about the new iPhone...
Speaker 2:Which which one do I have? Because I got mine last year, I believe, about... I have a 26. No. 17.
Speaker 2:I have a 17. So they launched the 18 which is the same form factor just lighter, thinner, faster, better, stronger?
Speaker 8:Correct.
Speaker 2:Okay. But looks exactly the same?
Speaker 5:From what I... I mean, I'm sure some people can tell difference.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. But yeah, better chip or something. So I don't know. Maybe you'll notice it with Apple intelligence.
Speaker 2:I wonder if there's any gated features because I know that there are some initially some gated features for the Pro models. You need more memory for the on device stuff. I don't know. It'll be interesting. I'm excited to get it in hand, see how it works.
Speaker 2:I don't... I might might be too much to open that thing up. I'm thinking like, it's pretty easy just... Because
Speaker 1:you're such a newspaper guy.
Speaker 2:I do like a newspaper.
Speaker 1:Put your feet up on the desk and fold your phone open.
Speaker 2:I'm scrolling. Yeah. Something like that might make sense. I don't know. I don't know.
Speaker 2:I was reflecting on Steve Jobs. I saw a viral video about Steve Jobs predicting chatty PT in 1985 and the video is incredible because he arrives to this talk. He's giving a talk at a university on the future. It was just Steve Jobs view the future in 1985 and he arrives on a helicopter with an entourage and they all get out of this helicopter and they go into this. It's amazing.
Speaker 2:I'm I'm rolling. But more of a... Where is it? King in the castle. King in the castle.
Speaker 2:Because the video kinda takes kinda takes place in the castle. But we can but we can probably play this this video here. Let me let me pull this up. I'll I'll send it in. Because you gotta watch Steve Jobs in 1985 predict modern AI pretty well.
Speaker 2:What is that sound? Is that plus or is that the sound board? You got a new like just like vibe chatter in the background? Anyway, while we pull that up, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider.
Speaker 2:Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases and more while railway. Automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. So, yeah. Let's play Steve Jobs predicts ChatGPT in 1985 because I had a bunch of thoughts based
Speaker 9:on Aristotle. And I read this. I became immensely jealous. And I think I would have enjoyed that a great deal.
Speaker 2:And So pause. And He's... The the lead into this... What is the second video that's playing? I think you guys have two videos playing.
Speaker 2:He's saying, I'll just read the transcript. He says, do you know did you did you know that Alexander the Great's tutor for fourteen years was Aristotle? When Alexander the Great had a question, he would just go to Aristotle. I think we can play the clip from the beginning now. Let's see.
Speaker 9:Who Alexander the Great's tutor was for about fourteen years? You know, Aristotle. And I read this, I became immensely jealous. And I think I would have enjoyed that a great deal. And and through the miracle of the printed page, I can at least read what Aristotle wrote without an intermediary.
Speaker 9:And maybe if there's a professor, they can they can add to that, but at least I can go directly to the source material. And that is, of course, the foundation upon which our Western civilization is
Speaker 2:By using the printing press.
Speaker 9:But I can't ask Aristotle Aristotle a question. I mean, I can, but I won't get an answer. And so...
Speaker 1:Perfectly timed soundboard....
Speaker 9:Is that in in in our lifetimes, we can make a tool of a new kind, of an interactive kind. And so my hope is someday when the next Aristotle is alive, we can capture the underlying world view of that Aristotle in a computer. And someday, some student will be able to not only read the words Aristotle wrote, but ask Aristotle a question and get an answer. And that's that's what I hope that we can do.
Speaker 2:It's so crazy. He's just like, we gotta we gotta compress all the data down and be able to Yeah. Give it a conversational interface.
Speaker 1:Large language models with a simple interface that anyone can use.
Speaker 2:It's it's a crazy crazy prediction forty forty something years ago. And I mean, there's so many interesting details about that video. Steve Jobs is probably the most famous techno optimist, the most successful techno optimist. The bicycle for the mind quote, that one continues to hit constantly. But then you can see his excitement every time he gives a keynote.
Speaker 2:He'll just be on stage like giddily testing garage band. But his delivery there too is something really, really special. I mean, noticed that. Right? Where he he asks a hypothetical question then, you know, well, I could ask, but I wouldn't get an answer.
Speaker 2:And he kind of like lets the laugh lines kind of land and lets the audience. He is really...
Speaker 1:I basically the Mark Gurman of CEOs.
Speaker 2:I guess. Mark Gurman is a GOAT Yes. Journalist. Yes. Okay.
Speaker 2:She Okay. Okay. Is Yeah.
Speaker 1:The greatest, you know, founder CEO Yeah. Ever.
Speaker 2:It it just it just... It's a really really cool timing.
Speaker 1:Surprised it took you that long to...
Speaker 2:I... Because I thought you were talking about Mark Gurman's comedic timing which is fantastic. But Mark Gurman's delivery of
Speaker 1:Apple truly... He truly has Apple intelligence and his delivery... That's true.
Speaker 2:That's true. Phenomenal. Yeah. Mean, you can see Ben Thompson's called this out a few times. But when Steve Jobs introduces GarageBand, he is just so excited about this product.
Speaker 2:You can see him in this one video introducing GarageBand one point o with John Mayer, which is really cool. He has John Mayer come out and just like play some stuff on the guitar.
Speaker 9:This is where I wanna show you loops. And I'm gonna show you what a non And
Speaker 2:he's just, like, chilling there on this computer on this stool.
Speaker 9:Gonna be
Speaker 2:me Using this tool. Using loops. So he come And just doing a live demo. And if you if you scroll forward about halfway, you'll see John Mayer comes in and plays some songs toward the end. There you go.
Speaker 6:It's a
Speaker 9:British invasion.
Speaker 2:He's just having fun. And so, know, with the with the power of modern LLMs, like you can ask you can ask, you know, an AI version of Steve Jobs what would he think about AI. I did. And I think I think the answer is somewhat interesting. He said, probably yes with very strong opinions about what makes astro...
Speaker 2:What makes AI worth using. That's speculation, but his own words give us a surprisingly good basis for it. In 1985, Jobs imagined computers capturing a thinker's underlying ideas so that a student could interact with them. You could actually ask Aristotle a question. He was already enthusiastic about something resembling a central promise of conversational AI, but his enthusiasm would come with three demands in this hypothetical Steve Jobs analysis.
Speaker 2:One, you got to give people new abilities, learning, designing, composing, building would probably excite him most. Two, you have to make it effortless. I'd expect him to push for AI that understands what you want with minimal instruction. And three, you have to make something excellent. I suspect he'd value AI's ability to help someone realize an original vision much more than its ability to produce enormous quantities of generic content.
Speaker 2:He would be anti SLOP but pro AI. Aristotle also had an interesting AI take in this imagined LLM version of Aristotle. He'd care more about what AI does to our character than how intelligent becomes. The the conclusion of this is Aristotle would favor AI as an instrument of human flourishing while resisting the idea that a life requiring less human effort is automatically a better life. You must continue to create.
Speaker 2:You must continue to work. You will be unsatisfied if the... Consume. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Forever. Exactly. AI that strengthens our ability is what's important. And so what what I was going back and forth with you about was like was like it seems pretty clear that Steve Jobs would be excited about AI or some form of AI, but what would the reaction to that be in the modern era? Because I I tend to think that there would have been the natural cycle of reaction because of there's a whole host of things, political polarization, economic stagnation, wealth inequality, negativity bias in social media.
Speaker 2:There's so many different incentives that the desire, the impetus to tear someone down is unavoidable. And so I think we would be in this weird era where a lot of people would be excited about that particular vision for AI and yet there would still be, you know, viral videos complaining about the latest Steve Jobs keynote. But what do you think? Because you've called for like the the Steve Jobs of AI, someone who's an optimist, someone who talks about empowering humanity, focus on human flourishing, agrees with the Aristotelian philosophy around AI. But what would the actual reaction be?
Speaker 2:Is that actually a panacea or would it fall by the wayside like like all other attempts at positivity seem to have fallen by the wayside?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I've come around to the technology itself being fundamentally scary.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. I know
Speaker 1:it's very cool.
Speaker 10:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And then, you factor that in with with certain actors
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:That are trying to position it as even, you know, more scary Mhmm. Than maybe it is, you know, inherently. Yeah. And I think even if we still had Steve with us, it would still be a mess. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And he might be nicely counter positioned, but it doesn't stop doesn't stop other people from, you know Maybe not. Poisoning.
Speaker 2:Maybe not. Maybe not.
Speaker 1:Poisoning the discourse.
Speaker 2:What do think his p doom would be? Over under 10%. Like
Speaker 1:1%.
Speaker 2:Probably.
Speaker 1:He seems like a 1% guy.
Speaker 2:1%. He's the 1%. What did Joanna Stern have to say about the Apple launch? There's a video here you wanted to...
Speaker 1:Called live rewind.
Speaker 2:What is this feature? Let's play it. Let's see it. Hi. Welcome.
Speaker 2:Today's specials are the heirloom tomato BLT, Caesar salad, cod salad, lentil soup, chicken Alfredo, the smoked salmon, and the avocado tortilla.
Speaker 11:Just double press the digital crown. In Live Rewind, transcribes what was just said. You can ask Siri about the content of that transcript.
Speaker 1:What if you can't read?...
Speaker 10:To revisit later.
Speaker 11:This is great for when you're trying to recall a book recommendation
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 11:A colleague's brilliant idea, or something you didn't hear the first time. The next audio intelligence feature will help you remember key moments from daily conversations so you can be more present.
Speaker 2:So is it just recording everything? Because that seems genuinely useful. Probably not in the... I mean, Joanna Stern, her take here is, I don't know, maybe just ask the waitress to repeat herself. That's a good point.
Speaker 2:But if you're actually talking to someone, you know, like your lawyer is breaking down a contract and you forget which part of the contract that the lawyer flagged as important for you to go dig into and get to the bottom of, Having a transcript there makes sense and you could ask lawyer to repeat themselves, but it costs a thousand bucks an hour. So maybe you'd wanna just transcribe it. I don't know. What do you think about this? If if I...
Speaker 1:There's some people gotta out there that are that are, you know, thrilled and and, you know, incredibly excited about this new feature.
Speaker 4:And
Speaker 1:and I would be surprised if there's more than, you know, a 100 of them globally. Yeah. But, you know, there's some...
Speaker 2:It's just...
Speaker 1:It it it just feels like...
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's just hard. It's it's... This whole event is hard to be excited about anything at all.
Speaker 2:A lot of these a lot of these demos, they get harder and harder to feel natural and human. Like, the GarageBand example is, like, pretty... It's so much easier to make it look cool because you're there with John Mayer and you're imagining, okay. I got a buddy who can play drums, but I can't play bass. So I'm gonna get, you know, GarageBand to fill in the bass digitally, and I needed to compose everything together.
Speaker 2:I don't really have an alternative that's less super logical, like, just asking someone to repeat themselves. Anyway, it it's gotta be a tough job working through the... Like, how do we showcase this in a non black mirror...
Speaker 1:Semi analysis says, how we feeling on the crease? Yeah. Are we feeling... I haven't been able to get my eyes on the crease.
Speaker 2:No. It it feels like whatever they did in the photography or...
Speaker 1:Oh, and that's the that's the one thing you would expect from from them entering the foldable market. You would expect them
Speaker 2:to absolutely... Gonna get... There's not gonna be a crease on this thing. I will be shocked if there's a visible crease whatsoever. Is there...
Speaker 2:Oh. Arthur from Vibe just resigned today.
Speaker 1:That's a joke.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's a joke?
Speaker 1:It's obviously a joke. Okay. Read read it out since you brought
Speaker 2:it up. Sorry. I spent the last three years doing TV ad performance at both Vibe and Walmart. Neither company is acting responsibly. Are racing straight to self improving TV advertising and gambling with our ROI.
Speaker 2:More thoughts below. I'd like it. Very good. I was like, I only read the first line. Stupid.
Speaker 2:Apple foldable crease. Let's see if there's anything here. Okay. This is how Apple dealt with the crease issue on the iPhone Duo. This is definitely going to be the best folding on the market.
Speaker 2:Think passport size of it. There's some there's some photos. This is a canyon. It's not a crease, it's a canyon. The crease in the middle isn't very noticeable.
Speaker 2:It's been handled well. I don't know. We'll see. It definitely seems like they were waiting for the technology to become post crease before they launched this. Because foldable phones have been out for five years, seven years or something like that, and they've always been a little bit rough.
Speaker 2:The hinge gets dirty. This feels like it will hold up for at least for at least one year to get you to the next one. What do you think? I think that's the plan. Yeah....
Speaker 2:Life span of eleven eleven months and twenty seven days. We engineered it.
Speaker 1:I'm trying to find new... The... An image of the the new Apple Watch, which I think they're calling the Apple Watch. What is that for? Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Because it is just crazy to look at.
Speaker 2:It's got the Jubilee bracelet. Right? It's got it's got a really chunky metal bracelet on it. Anyway, let's see what, the Grubinator says about the iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pro. So last year, an unplanned personal hiatus coincided with the time I should have been reviewing the then new iPhone seventeen and seventeen Air.
Speaker 2:He said 354 is arguably more than a few. But given I missed the window for reviewing them when they were new, I thought it might be interesting to consider the iPhone 17 Pro and Air on the cusp of their being obviated by the next generation of iPhones. So the iPhone Air is nicest phone Apple has ever made. Probably the nicest device Apple has ever made, period. Just so nice.
Speaker 2:He loves it. I've seen 17 Pro. I'm eagerly awaiting the daring fireball review of the of the of the the new foldable phone. But he's gotta get his hands on it. I gotta I gotta know what he's thinking about.
Speaker 2:Yes. The Hermes Paris Apple watch. Is this the ultra? That is a chunky chunky device.
Speaker 5:Yeah. This is the ultra four.
Speaker 2:Ultra four. You don't like this? No. What's not to like?
Speaker 1:Terrific.
Speaker 2:It's horrific. Is that the is that the dial or the the bracelet?
Speaker 1:Everything about it.
Speaker 2:It does have a very odd interface to the actual watch with that with that bar that comes out of the clasp. Like the clasp doesn't actually integrate fully into the watch. It sort of has these two points that bolt on there. Yeah. Pretty chunky.
Speaker 2:But honestly, the the Apple Watch Ultra, this device had gotten so chunky that I think the chunkier band might fit better with the chunky watch. Because if you put a really thin strap on that, then you just have this massive bulge on there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I almost think they should have launched it as an ankle bracelet. Imagine checking checking checking your super chunky watch by just pulling up your foot.
Speaker 2:An ankle monitor? Yeah. The Boston Rolex?
Speaker 1:And you could be in a meeting just looking down. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I've seen some guys doing that with their whoops. They put it on their on their ankles.
Speaker 1:Or... Yeah. Yeah. People are saying Bobby Bobby Cosmic says no pendant. Imagine you have this
Speaker 2:The flavored flake. Skunky flavored flake. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:This clock.
Speaker 2:Yeah. John Turnis was vague posting before this at 6AM. He posted just a light and it was maybe a little bit too vague. Was that it? It was just a light?
Speaker 2:It didn't it didn't really hint at anything. Was this a...
Speaker 1:What's wrong, Turnis? This... Afraid you might say something?
Speaker 2:Was this a teaser that... Is there a folding thing here that's... That I'm not picking up on? Is this an homage?
Speaker 1:Samsung mobile US hit accent so far so same hashtag it's time to switch throwing shots.
Speaker 2:Using the hashtag in 2026, they're gonna go so... They're gonna be so dedicated to the hashtags on that brand account that it's going to become ironic and cool again to use hashtags and they're going to be in the perfect spot. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.
Speaker 2:In The Wall Street Journal The Wall Street Journal, they didn't talk about math. It made it to the digital version, didn't make it into the paper. Navier Stokes did not make the paper edition of The Wall Street Journal. But Meta and their new personal AI agent did. It's right here.
Speaker 2:Meta launches
Speaker 1:The absolute state of traditional media.
Speaker 2:Hey. Is Meta. Probably... It's more profitable as a business perspective. Right?
Speaker 2:It's like, what are you gonna do? Sell math theories? Navier Stokes was a $1,000,000 prize. You don't think Alex Wang can pull a million bucks off of this?
Speaker 1:This could be a trillion dollar prize.
Speaker 2:They can get... I... They haven't monetized it yet, but they gotta put ads in this thing. And will they do Agent to Commerce? What will they do?
Speaker 2:We were very excited talking to yesterday about AGI for small businesses, for folks who run ads on Meta. I still love that idea, but they're going a different direction. They're doing personal super intelligence. Zach's been talking about this for a year at least. He's put out a lengthy blog post about how he wants AI to diffuse, how he wants everyone to have AI.
Speaker 2:And now everyone does with the MetaMuse app. That's a separate app that you get that will book restaurants for you. The Wall Street Journal has a little bit of a story here. Meta Platforms is betting that making AI agents easy to use will get mainstream consumers to start adopting them in their daily lives. The company on Tuesday announced a new personal AI agent that can buy goods online.
Speaker 2:I think they partnered with Stripe on Link. So I don't know if that just means that when Link is enabled on a particular checkout, it'll be a little bit smoother or if it's like it's gonna try and steer you towards things that are linked. Right? Because some websites do it. It's really nice when they do.
Speaker 2:But certainly getting closer to this. It can respond to emails and so do you have to link it to your Gmail, I guess, to get that working? And complete other tasks users authorize you to it to do for them. The agent called Muse is accessible via a dedicated app. Users operate the agent by conversing with it like a typical chatbot and can choose their own names for it.
Speaker 2:I saw some really funny ones. Tyler called his Mark. I saw someone else that's... Someone gave it a really funny name like like they said like, you can pick one. And then the name of the agent was just you can pick one or something like that.
Speaker 2:Bunch of funny hallucinations. Always happens with these products. Everyone's going to have fun with them. The new tool is Meta's latest attempt to monetize its massive AI investments, which are expected to top 130,000,000,000 this year. The AI agent is free to access for most of what people need and has two tiers of subscription plans for power users, $100 a month and $20 a month.
Speaker 2:Anthropic and OpenAI have quickly built multibillion dollar businesses around agents capable of performing complex computer tasks, but most of that usage is driven by software coding or other business applications, consumer adoption of technology lags behind, offering Meta, Apple, and other companies potential for catching up. The fact that we've given such a powerful technology in a package that is going to be really digestible for the product is one of the things that will set us apart from lots of other agentic products, Meta's AI chief Alex Wang said in an interview. Ben Thompson was raving about the fact that it gives you a pretty powerful VM, eight gigs of memory and eight gigs of storage that is yours sequestered and they're also implementing a lot of the security features that they have done with WhatsApp where there's end to end encryption.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They got Moxie pulled into it, apparently.
Speaker 2:That's really cool. Moxie is a legend. So great on the recruiting front. Everyone loves Signal and and great team there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The the question is how... Sounds like if there's... They're actually giving every user a
Speaker 2:computer. VM. But yeah. Yeah. It's like virtualized.
Speaker 2:But yes. Yeah. But the cost is
Speaker 1:gonna probably be pretty significant. So
Speaker 2:so the VM most likely, like, spins up when you use it and then gets, you know, like, you know, taken down when you're not using it. So the actual compute hours that are associated to anyone but a power user, and of course, very quickly you can wind up spending $20 or a $100 and that's enough to just pay for a virtual machine. Like, you can go and rent, you know, a true virtual machine to host your website on DigitalOcean for like $20.
Speaker 1:So Kaz, the CEO of Opendoor, went to X and said... Posted a screenshot of him asking Meta AI and WhatsApp. And he said, please make WhatsApp the main interface for these things, Alex Wang, please. And he just says, how do I use Muse? And Meta AI responds, Muse is a free AI assistant from Anthropic.
Speaker 1:You can use it on the web, on mobile, or through their API. Yeah. Go to claud.ai, create an account, log in. So I'm looking at this post. I'm trying to find why is nobody talking about how Meta AI thinks that Muse is a product from Anthropic and is telling people to go log in there?
Speaker 2:That is weird that it would hallucinate that Muse is from Anthropic because there's not even any connection between those. It's not like Anthropic ever had a product called Muse that I know of. Very odd. But Meta AI, of course, is running an older LLM. And then I believe you get you you still get thrown into a LAMA model, I think, when you're on Instagram if you wind up in a in a LLM chat.
Speaker 2:And so there's going to need to be unification around all of these different products, and they're gonna need to eventually talk to all the same models. But, of course, there's like scaling and all sorts of different issues that you need. Because some of these products that they've gotten to scale are pretty significant even even if they're not like the most talked about when you are a hyperscaler with billions of users and you vend an LLM into something like you've deployed that at scale. It's doing a lot. And it's like, you know, the new Gemini 3.7 flash, bunch of great reviews, great benchmarks on things.
Speaker 2:But like, they can't just stuff that in Google search on day one. Like, they have to actually scale it up.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The question I have is do you think they... Does this seem like this was something they were working on prior to instinct gaining traction or is this an instinct clone? I saw one post that was saying, you know, that that Tried
Speaker 2:to buy.
Speaker 1:Rumor that they tried to buy which makes sense.
Speaker 2:R Farock says, there's a rumor going around that Meta and others made a 10 figure offer for Instinct. That's a crazy valuation for a what? A one year old company? Something like that? Instinct Less turned
Speaker 1:than less.
Speaker 2:Turned it down. Now Meta
Speaker 1:has Something launched like that.
Speaker 2:And that's literally what the post is. Meta has launched Muse and now the timeline is reacting. It'll be a big deal. Sounds familiar. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I saw some people saying like now the people with distribution are coming in. It'll be interesting to see how much... What distribution looks like in the Meta ecosystem because, yes, like, Meta was able to win stories. How did they do that? They didn't win by launching a Snapchat clone as a separate app.
Speaker 2:They they won by putting it in Instagram, which already had the install base. And so if Muse works its way into Instagram, which a lot of people do use, it'll probably get a lot of adoption. If it's a separate app, it's a little bit trickier. Now, the threads playbook worked. They routed a lot of people to their thread shows up on Instagram.
Speaker 2:It has an advertising surface area. It's pulled over. What are they at? A couple 100,000,000 MAUs?
Speaker 1:100 hundreds of millions
Speaker 2:Hundreds of
Speaker 1:millions. MAUs. And again, it's hard to fully understand the value of that because they're they're counting somebody who clicked through clickbait on on on Instagram.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's that. And then also...
Speaker 1:But there's a there's a robust, like, real community of pure threads users. For sure. The other the other thing that I think about is, like, Meta has the advantage of being able to... When you open all their apps, just put a huge billboard. They make ad inventory just for themselves.
Speaker 2:Yeah. With the Ray Vans.
Speaker 1:The specs where you open around Sorry. Yeah. It's a little little slip there. But when you opened Instagram in q four
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's like buy some of our, you know, And so I would expect... I don't think they're gonna do that until Muse has like Yeah.
Speaker 2:Significantly more than adopters on and and figure out all the kinks and stuff. Growing Daniel... Says Meta has been working on Muse for almost a year now. You have to believe that that's true. The Manus acquisition ties into that.
Speaker 2:The Zuck messaging around personal super intelligence. I mean, we interviewed him a year ago, we were asking about, oh, am I gonna be able to use your AI to actually buy... If I see a pair of shoes, will I be able to just buy it? And he was kind of like, I'm not ready to announce that yet. But it was very clear that that's where this was going.
Speaker 2:So I don't think it's an Instinct clone. I think it will compete with Instinct. And I think it's tricky because Instinct is pretty early and they are going up against big company that's been investing and has a lot of resources to go after this very, very hard. At the same time, consumers come to Meta to be entertained. Muse feels like a product for productivity.
Speaker 2:And I'm not sure that people will put them in the same buckets like that it's it's it's very unclear. At the same time, people do a lot of shopping on Instagram basically just scrolling.
Speaker 1:Really?
Speaker 2:Oh, for sure. Not not actually are you joking? Go ahead.
Speaker 1:I just messed it.
Speaker 2:No. No. No. So so like...
Speaker 1:It's like it is like the most dominant shopping app of Yeah.
Speaker 2:Time that Yeah.
Speaker 1:Positioned as...
Speaker 2:But particularly people will like go there and not just search things but just like casually scroll and like linger over things so that they get retargeted. Visit websites and then have the have the ads come to them. And so you you could imagine that that on the shopping side that there's a lot of traction there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Lot of excitement around this. Climbing the chart is currently Muse is number three on the charts
Speaker 2:Good, dad.
Speaker 1:App Store after ESPN Fantasy Sport Fantasy Sports and more and Chad GPT.
Speaker 2:ESPN Fantasy Sports?
Speaker 1:Growing Daniel came in with an absolutely brutal ratio.
Speaker 2:What did he say?
Speaker 1:He quoted Zach's announcement with a screenshot of the exchange that Zuck had with with somebody during the early days of Facebook where he said, yeah, so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard, just ask. I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, and student numbers. What? How do you manage that one? People just submitted it.
Speaker 1:I don't know why. They quote unquote trust me dumb f's. Anyway. Wow.
Speaker 2:Growing Daniel never forgets.
Speaker 1:Obviously, Zuck has grown up a lot since then.
Speaker 2:Who punched him in the nose? That's the question.
Speaker 1:That is the big question....
Speaker 2:Let me find the... You sent me the image. Is this true? So
Speaker 1:Yeah. Here's the thing. His nose is starting to look like this guy, Merab, who's a UFC champion. And Merab has one of the most busted up noses in the UFC and Meraab was the UFC fighter that Zuck was training with
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:On that on that deck. That's a... So pull up this picture of Meraab and you can see their noses are starting to look quite similar.
Speaker 2:That's a really that's a really good sign that... Zoom
Speaker 1:in there. Zoom
Speaker 2:in there. He's pushing.
Speaker 1:Look. He's... Zuck was like, give me one of them right now.
Speaker 3:Give me
Speaker 1:a nose like that right now.
Speaker 2:I like it. Do you think...
Speaker 1:And I would expect... I... You know, who who knows? Rob could go and get probably surgery to correct this. One, it's a very cool battle scar
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Aura. Yeah. And two, you know, it... This this tells me that Zuck is going way harder in training Yes.
Speaker 2:Than he lets on in the Totally. Totally.
Speaker 1:Which I which I love to see. He's like, he's ready for that Elon fight. Yeah. He's like, there's a chance. I might catch Elon on a good day.
Speaker 1:He opts in. Yeah. I gotta be ready.
Speaker 2:He's also going extremely hard on the Irish countryside buying castles. We call them Lord Zuck. We got a video now breaking down his latest real estate purchase. Stranqually Castle in Ireland. Let's play a little bit of this because there's some good voiceovers, some good context.
Speaker 8:Stranqually Castle. And it can be found on the banks of the River Blackwater in County Waterford. This gothic revival mansion was designed by the famous Young Brothers for John Kylie, a local landlord, former Tory MP for Clonmel and high sheriff of County Waterford. The house was complete in 1830 and its scale...
Speaker 1:Keith's got a under
Speaker 2:there. According to records,
Speaker 8:it took a brisk four and a half That
Speaker 2:is a bunker.
Speaker 8:Just to get from the kitchen to the dining room. Within the grounds He is. There was a folly.
Speaker 2:Five minutes.
Speaker 8:A pagoda and an aviary. The folly, which is known as Stran Kelly Tower, was built in 1826.
Speaker 2:We're having David Perell on the show later to talk about architectural revival.
Speaker 8:Medieval show. Look at this. And it served This is awesome.
Speaker 2:He's gonna have the resources to actually restore this and and do this. Some of these castles are, like, cheap relative to, like, how epic they are, but the carrying cost of actually renovating or living in... Even visiting any of these places, Just like cleaning out the cobwebs is probably 6 figures a year. And the landscaping's gotta be extremely expensive. But I think this is the answer to like, where's the tech wealth going?
Speaker 2:Like, at some point, he's either gonna get bored of this or donate it or pass it on or it's gonna fall out of the family because seven generations later, the family's like, yeah, we don't really want this castle anymore. And boom, you got a beautiful museum that was properly renovated and brought up to modern standards in 2026. Yeah. And is prepared to actually house bunch of prints of AIR. We're
Speaker 1:to watch this quick video and then we're going to talk about absolute doom and despair.
Speaker 2:Okay. Let's doom it up.
Speaker 1:But first, this little palate cleanser.
Speaker 2:What are we doing?
Speaker 4:I'm emperor, dude. Does that feel like that ever?
Speaker 1:No. Wish that people did what I wanted them to do. It's like that would be that would be fun. But it but in the meantime, you can have some fun.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Oh, yeah. I would have a chopper. I'd have a... I don't even know what I would have.
Speaker 7:I would have an underground tunnel.
Speaker 4:I do have an underground tunnel. Do you really?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So it's like more
Speaker 4:of underground storage situation. But
Speaker 1:but yeah. No. It's a it's a...
Speaker 4:Oh, wow. Wow.... Emperor, dude. Does that feel like...
Speaker 2:I love that the Theo Von arc happened where like for some reason all the tech CEOs were like, it's right of passage now. We gotta go. I'm disappointed we didn't get Sacha on Theo. And I'm really disappointed we didn't get CC Web.
Speaker 1:Keith got a bunkie.
Speaker 2:Zucky got a bunkie.
Speaker 1:Zucky got a bunkie. Alright. Okay. Let's talk about Doom.
Speaker 2:Doom. An anthropic researcher is quitting the artificial intelligence industry. Woah. He didn't just quit the company, quit the industry over fears that the lab and its competitors are racing to build systems that could spiral out of control and destroy humanity. This was not received well.
Speaker 2:A bunch of back and forth with another researcher chiming in saying that they have a PDOM of 10%, which is something that's come up years ago and we kind of went back and forth on. This all started with Jacob Coxen who said, I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pre training research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.
Speaker 2:He is not happy with where things go. And it got a 100,000,000 views and 600,000 likes. It's going straight on a Bernie Sanders billboard for sure. I worked on an actual thermonuclear weapons project, Martin Casado from a 16 says, and the dissonance was less bizarre. And so he's comparing it to what it was like working on very scary technology, very different than what's going on today.
Speaker 2:And Evan Hubinger who works on alignment science at Anthropic previously, Miri, OpenAI, Google, Ripple, Yelp. I guess he works with the... Ripple was the cryptocurrency. Is that right? Isn't Ripple XRP?
Speaker 2:Yeah. He says Jacob is correct here. We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans. I personally think it's above ten percent within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are clearly not on track to.
Speaker 2:So everyone's sort of pushing for a slowdown now, but then you go into the regulatory capture thing. I've been seeing... What?
Speaker 1:Just Buckingham says, bro, got that pip.
Speaker 2:Yeah. A lot of people are like, you giving back your equity? Blah blah blah blah blah. Yeah. Odd.
Speaker 2:Nick Carter says, if you actually believe this, you'd be committing acts of violent sabotage and terrorism against your employer. You clearly do not. So stop self stop it with this self aggrandizing twaddle. On the other side says, thank you for saying plainly what you believe. I do appreciate it, and the world could be even grimmer than it is otherwise.
Speaker 2:We have we have Eliasor Yudkowsky's coauthor coming on the show tomorrow, Nate Soros, to talk about if anyone builds it, everyone dies. We'll continue the doom debate. It seems like it's in the news. Lots of people were just going back and forth on everything. Ryan Peterson sees it as a bull case.
Speaker 2:He says, I need to buy more stock in this company. I've never seen such a commitment to making money regardless of the consequences. Yeah. It is it is...
Speaker 1:Says if you publicly assign a greater than 10% probability to human extinction within a decade, you owe people a clear explanation of how you reached that number plus what would change your mind.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. So a... Yeah. A lot of people were upset that this felt like a vibe prediction, very, like, you know, unresearched.
Speaker 2:And and he did link... Evan did link to the anthropic risk report, which you can read in full. They have a reasonable scaling policy, and they're talking about pacing the frontier, collaborating with other labs. And I'm I'm oddly optimistic that this will happen. Obviously, you know, there's the Sam and Dario can't even hold hands on stage in the...
Speaker 2:That India conference. But AI has made strange bedfellows out of people. Like, if you had if you had said, oh, yeah. In in six months, Elon Musk, the guy who's calling anthropic, misanthropic, will be doing a deal and bring in Shulto to watch rockets take off at Starbase, I would have been like, no way. No way can Elon Musk and Dario become friends.
Speaker 2:Like that just seems like impossible. But the funniest outcome is the most likely to quote you on again. And yeah, maybe there's this weird, you know, oh, people wind up working together. There are other consequences of that. There are some very...
Speaker 1:Thinking thinking that, you know, believing in your whole heart that things are that serious and then just rage quitting Yep. And not and not leaning in
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And trying... Like, do you do you really think that the the rage quit method
Speaker 2:is... I don't know. I I mean, some of these organizations are really big and if you're at a certain level, it can be very hard to actually get things done in a large organization. So you can be there and say like, yeah, I've been sending a Slack message and emailing the whole executive team every day that I that this is the thing that I want to have happen and it's not happening. And like, I don't have the authority within this particular role to actually have the change.
Speaker 2:People sort of tend to think, oh, if you work for the company, you can exact your will, but that's not true. Like, you can work in the marketing organization and think you want to run billboards in, you know, Tallahassee, Florida and not be able to get that done because someone higher up than you said, no. We're not doing billboards in Florida. Right? Like things get vetoed for a variety of reasons.
Speaker 2:So it's not like, you know, you just take a job at a 5,000 person company and then you can just do whatever you want. That's not the way companies work. It's, yeah, it's a weird weird time. We'll see. But there are serious there are serious like regulatory frameworks for not allowing collusion between big companies.
Speaker 2:And so, we might wind up in this other weird scenario where if if all the big labs are like, yes, okay, the government's not stepping in and regulating, we're going to self regulate, we're going to work together, then that could actually be a legal problem because you're not allowed to price fix, you're not allowed to collude with your that is like textbook antitrust. Right? And then and then the other thing is that there's this weird dynamic I've seen playing out where people, the AI leaders make a prediction and then the like the the outsiders criticize that prediction is like they're only saying that to raise the next round. Or they're not they're only saying that and this is the same thing with like all the labs were saying like we want regulation. And then and then they're like, there's they're only saying that for, you know, regulatory capture.
Speaker 2:And it's like regulatory capture might be a side effect of regulation but the labs can still want it. And now, I'm seeing people online look at the look at what's happening and say, we do need regulation and I'm willing to put up with that regulatory capture that may happen under that scenario. And so, there's all these weird predictions that happen way too early for everyone to digest because the people inside the lab see things Yeah. Much earlier and understand, oh, yeah, okay, the next leg up is going to work. The agentic era is going to arrive.
Speaker 2:Swarms are going be a thing. Like, we're we're we're on we're on track to to solve this. Anyway, Jordy, one last thing and then we'll bring in
Speaker 1:One last Trump. So what a friend of the show, Bucco Capital, quoted Evan with his, you know, 10% prediction and said, hey, quote, hey, Dario. Congrats again on the great quarter. Nice to see enterprise reacceleration. Hoping you could provide a little color on that 10% extinction number and some of the puts and takes that might have on further enterprise adoption.
Speaker 1:And then just quick follow-up after.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What are Anthropic earnings calls gonna be like? It's just gonna be CFO and Dario or are there... Daniela gonna be on? I don't know.
Speaker 2:It's like that that... That's not that crazy to imagine that that happens. That's like a thing that happens on the call. Very, very odd. I mean, I guess, you do have like defense tech companies that have earnings calls and or defense primes.
Speaker 2:They may get asked about geopolitical things that are pretty heady. I don't know. Anyway, we'll figure it out. In the meantime, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market?
Speaker 2:Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. Up next, we have David Khan from Sequoia Capital to talk about the state of AI. Good news.
Speaker 2:There's lots happening. So plenty to talk about, David. Going on. Welcome back to stuff. Thanks so much for hopping.
Speaker 2:Guys. How you doing?
Speaker 10:Good to see you guys again. You guys got
Speaker 2:a lot of
Speaker 10:range from Zuck's Castle to Piduum.
Speaker 2:There's a lot range. There's a lot of range. You think he's got a bunkie in the castle? Or do you think he has enough bunkies? It seems like...
Speaker 1:Think he's got a doomsday dungeon.
Speaker 2:Dungeon. Okay. The doom dungeon to go with Zuck's bunkie. Cookies bunkie. Anyway, what is on the top of your mind?
Speaker 2:Because there's so many different things happening in the application layer. We had cognition on. Harvey just raised a bunch of money like things are going really well with diffusion and the actual application of the technology. There's value. Jobs apocalypse is delayed.
Speaker 1:And should he do and be factored into financial models for series a investments?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:I think broadly in AI right now, I mean, the thing that seems really interesting to me is just the concentration of capital going into these big companies. Mhmm. It does seem like the thing top of mind for me is just like the way the venture landscape has changed.
Speaker 2:Yeah. When you
Speaker 10:think about doing this job five, six years ago, you had a 100 interesting companies that everybody was looking at and you're trying to find the next one and that's still happening and yet so much of the conversation today is about the top 10 companies.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then Yeah. On that point, is the biggest... Is the concentration of capital into OpenAI and Thropic, maybe XAI, SpaceX two, is that the biggest driver? Or is...
Speaker 2:When you're talking about reshaping venture, I've been much more keyed in on the fact that you get hugging face and open router and there are now many decacorn liquidity events that I would think changes the underwriting if you're a VC and you're like, yeah, it's an early round. It's a billion dollar valuation but there are plenty of examples of 10 x returns at this scale.
Speaker 10:Well, I think, I mean, to me, that's always been the case. We were early investors in in Hugging Face. I think there's always been this thesis on you have a big community and you have a lot of bottom up adoption and that there's a lot of option value in those type of companies. I think you'll see that get reflected back into the market where there's always these companies where investors ask a 100 questions about what has this become, and yet you just have so much sucking sound from the market that those are gonna become interesting companies. It's so hard to be relevant and build something important, I think Hugging Face did that and OpenRatter did that.
Speaker 10:I think they'll continue to be examples of that. The thing that's interesting to me just in this moment, and it's like the fall of twenty twenty six, we're about to see these IPOs
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:Is this precipice of moving from so much capital. And, honestly, this is not even like a tech market, VC market thing. Like, the entire universe of capital has concentrated on this one sliver of the market, is kind of pre IPO, late stage AI companies, and we're about to see that transition into the public market. And so I don't think anybody knows what exact... How exactly that's gonna play out, but it does feel like we're on the precipice of something pretty interesting.
Speaker 2:It is wrong to think that it will play out as a binary one day liquidity wave, correct? Because there will be lockups and then many LPs will receive their stakes and want to hold some venture capital firms, registered investment advisers will hold as well. So we're looking at, like, how exactly does that change the market? Because there will be the optionality of liquidity, but not necessarily actual cash on balance sheets ready to go into the next generation of startups.
Speaker 10:Yeah. I mean, one thing I've been thinking about it, you guys remember, like, '21, you had, like, CrowdStrike and Datadog Republic, and then you're investing in, like, private CrowdStrike and Datadog. Right? Yeah. There was Databricks.
Speaker 10:Right? And you could go invest in Databricks, and it was the same business model. Should have understood how this thing was gonna trade when it was liquid. And I think that's what's that's what's interesting about AI right now is, like, there's no real holiday comps for any of these private companies. But as soon as one of these companies...
Speaker 10:Let's say Anthropic is the first to get out. As soon as one of these companies gets out, I think you actually have a better valuation framework for the rest of the market. And so I think it it is a healthy thing for the market when you kind of can look at the liquid. You can look at the illiquid. You see how these things trade, and it will it will provide a lot of clarity, think, to the private market.
Speaker 2:Why is why is SpaceX not a good comp for Anthropic, OpenAI, and then even the smaller firms?
Speaker 10:I think it is. I think SpaceX was the beginning of this. Obviously, it's held up really well. And for all the volatility and every Yeah. You know, every day you...
Speaker 10:My my brother and I always joke of, you know, every day you see a news headline that's like stock was up 2%, and it's like stocks go up and down 2% every day. Yeah. Yeah. Nothing happened. And there's always, like, some reason why it happened, by the way.
Speaker 10:You know? It's like, oh, went up and down. I mean, SpaceX has done... Has held up well. You know, there have been liquidity unlocks.
Speaker 10:Everyone was super worried going into the liquidity unlocks in the media and nothing... It was like a nonevent. You know? We're we're we're still...
Speaker 1:Remember the day of the big unlock somehow traded up, like, 7%, if I
Speaker 2:remember correctly.
Speaker 10:Like, a short squeeze where all these guys were shorter than they even squeezed out. Yeah. So I do think SpaceX is is the bellwether, and it's not... To your point, it's not gonna be a one day event, but I think it's an exciting time that these companies are growing so so fast. I think there's a lot of demand for these companies, and it's gonna be interesting to see that play out.
Speaker 10:I think the second thing that I... That we're paying attention to, and I think a lot of investors are focused on, is just, the full stack of the data center build out that's happening. Yes. There's... I wrote this blog post maybe a year and a half ago.
Speaker 10:Server, steel, and power are kind of the three pillars. Obviously, everyone's paying attention to the server side, which is chips.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 10:Steel side is the industrial side. You know, you... Elon now making his own gas turbines.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:So there's a lot of emphasis on the industrial revolution component of this where you, you know, we're out of... We can't make more more of the components that go into data centers. And then, of course, the power piece where everyone's looking at, hey. We know how to get power for the next... There's no there's no more power for the next, you know, twenty four months.
Speaker 10:And what are the what are the timelines? And with these CapEx... You know, these big CapEx projects, have to plan two, three, four years out. Who even knows what the world's gonna look like two, three, four years from now? So I think that, you know, deeper below the, you know, cusp of OpenIanthropic, the frontier models is all the things that make them possible.
Speaker 10:And I think the market is pretty well educated on the compute market now, investors are familiar with all parts of the stack. But I think there's gonna be a lot of innovation, all across that.
Speaker 2:Do you think that the opportunity in the grid opportunity in power plays out more like the neo cloud market than the rocket launch market. Like, I've always said, like, ah, it'd be amazing if we had an Elon of solar or even an Elon of nuclear. And there's some nuclear companies that are doing really well. Some of those founders could go on to build like the trillion dollar energy company. But it feels like everyone's focused on it.
Speaker 2:There's so much capital flowing in energy. Default would be very oligopolistic. Bunch of great outcomes, but not this winner take all behemoth. But what's your model for where energy and grid build out goes?
Speaker 10:Yeah. My mental model is probably closer to the Elon case than Neo Cloud case, and I can explain why.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Please.
Speaker 10:I think on the Neo Cloud side, the primary innovation was financing. That's that's sort of how I look at it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like real estate private equity
Speaker 10:deal. Yeah. Exactly. Like, we're buying a bunch of chips from Jensen, and Jensen, to his credit, was an amazing player in the ecosystem and has helped really build the ecosystem. He made Cory what Cory is today.
Speaker 10:There was sort of this moment where Cory realized, we can buy these chips. We can finance them with Blackstone. Somebody's gonna finance the GPUs. So there's still a lot a lot of financing innovation. Now there's a lot of companies that have followed suit.
Speaker 10:Obviously, you need to be a good good deal maker. But in some ways, you know, you could start a Neo Cloud tomorrow. You know how to do it. Getting access to power is hard. It's not easy, but there's 15 Neo Clouds.
Speaker 10:There's gonna be more. I think by contrast... And and my partner Sean McGuire always has a great framework around this on the hardware side. He wrote this hardware manifesto long before hardware was cool, and he had this concept of, you know, in hardware, there's potential energy, and these hardware companies spend five, six, seven, eight years building this potential energy. It's because they're doing real, very difficult r and d work.
Speaker 10:And at some point, that potential energy converts into kinetic energy, and that's when, you know, stock prices move. And you see that with SpaceX, which took twenty four years to bake in each step of some of these harbor companies. And so when we... You know, at Sequoia, as we're looking at the energy ecosystem, we've sort of chosen a few places to to make investments. Sean was on the show talking about Valor, which is our nuclear investment.
Speaker 10:Last week, we announced our investment in company called Form Energy, which is doing grid scale batteries. That's a company. It was founded by the guy who ran the energy business. He actually started the energy business at Tesla. Oh.
Speaker 10:A a guy named Yatmin Chang, who is the... Probably the... One of the top three battery experts alive today. So just very, very strong team. And they're nine years in.
Speaker 10:They spent nine years building these billion dollar batteries. They just signed up a a big project with Google earlier this year. And so... And then you you you ask yourself, okay. Well, if we're gonna have a lot of solar and wind, are we gonna have a lot of batteries on the grid?
Speaker 10:I think the answer is yes. Yeah. And then it's... You have a company that spent nine years building IP to go put those batteries on the grid and then this unique moment to go scale that up for AI. So, anyways, I think there's gonna be...
Speaker 10:To your question, like, think there's gonna be three, four, five interesting kind of companies with deep, deep IP that you can go invest in, but I think it's different from the Neo Cloud space where what you really need is capital and access to GPUs. Whereas on the grid side, you actually need... You you ideally want some real fundamental IP that is that is difficult to replicate. And then, of course, you need access capital. Right?
Speaker 10:So I
Speaker 7:think Yeah.
Speaker 10:On the nuclear stuff, what's interesting... And and a lot of these companies, it's interesting. You need to raise billions of dollars before you get to the promised land. And so that alone... One thing I say to founders, I meet a lot of seed stage founders in hardware.
Speaker 10:And I'm like, even if I think your IP is amazing, I can't invest if I don't think you can raise a billion dollars Sure. Because you just won't get there. Right? And you'll end up getting consolidated. So access to capital and and consolidating capital, obviously, is an important part of building these companies as well.
Speaker 2:What How are you looking for? Like, what what what are the tells of a founder who can raise a billion dollars? Is it great storyteller? Is it just actual...
Speaker 1:I mean, Isaiah is like a a great example because even early on at the seed stage, like, honestly, if I look at the the the Gundot crew and I look at Augustus and Isaiah and their ability to sell you their vision was just on another level even before they had raised, like, $10,000,000. Like, when they were raising their first round, they they were just different. Like, they had a natural talent, and then they've refined that. And you have to be in a category that allows you to sell this vision of a trillion dollar opportunity, a $100,000,000,000 opportunity, what that is. But I think you have that like natural talent and selling ability that is somehow inherent to some people.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Like, are people that are just way less compelling naturally, and they get more compelling over time because they get more confident Yeah. In their business and round after round and hundreds of pitch meetings and meetings with candidates, and they just get better and better and better. But then some people just start on, you know, at the at the 10 yard line, and it... They just refine it a little bit, and then they can go from raising the $5,000,000 round to raising a billion dollars.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:Yeah. In our in our partner meeting, we actually talk about this a lot. I mean, actually, is probably the most important question that you have to get right in early stage investing. The framework we often use is, would you go work for this person? Because I think everything is sort of subsumed in that.
Speaker 10:Like, if other people have to be willing to go work for this person Yeah. The decision of whether you go work for a person is effectively putting a 100% of your equity in this one company. Right? So would you put a 100% of your equity in this company? And and often, you know, we had Matteo, the former energy CEO, come in.
Speaker 10:You have people kinda come and say, wow. Like, I... This person seems really serious. This person seems like they're... You know, they have an incredible track record.
Speaker 10:In his case, he had built the energy business at Tesla. Mhmm. They've they've sort of done something that's really impressive early on in life. And I believe... And then there's a clarity of thought component, which is...
Speaker 10:So sometimes pitches are coherent, and sometimes they're not coherent. Right? Like, there's sort a coherent story, which is like, okay. You know, we're... Form Energy is building an iron air battery.
Speaker 10:Iron's really cheap. Air's really cheap. That is why they're building an iron air battery. Right? It's so simple and yet kind of makes sense.
Speaker 10:Mhmm. And then it's like, well, why do we need batteries? Well, you know, there's there's no sun out at night. You know? It's really simple things, and I think something we look for in a lot of these conversations with founders is a priority of thought.
Speaker 2:If you
Speaker 10:can articulate to an investor who's not the most sophisticated... The investors are never the most sophisticated people around the table. You articulate to an investor a very clear articulation of why this vision makes sense, why your plan makes sense, then you're gonna be able to articulate that to an employee. And then we have people like Sean who have PhDs in physics and
Speaker 2:can go
Speaker 10:incredibly deep on the science and technology behind it, and you sort of marry those two things. And I think that's kind of how we make these decisions. And we spend a lot
Speaker 6:of time with people.
Speaker 10:We spend a lot of time getting to know the founders as well. So Mateo, I had known for six years before he invested. Sean knew Isaiah for a long time before he invested.
Speaker 2:Yep. That's
Speaker 10:You're not making the decision in a single in a single pitch.
Speaker 1:How are you thinking about trying to time the acceleration of the real world? Right now, it feels like it's much faster to do things on your computer. Mhmm. And it's creating efficiencies and a bunch of it for a bunch of people and and companies and all these things, but we're not seeing the kind of GDP growth that has at least been predicted. And it feels like in order to have that, we're gonna need to see, one, a general advancements of of models and and and AI models that can, you know, actually be a drop in sort of addition to your team or or or replacement or or whatever that ends up being.
Speaker 1:But but it feels like we're gonna need to make a lot of... And do a lot of things in the real world to feel that acceleration. And even with, you know, the the launch of Astra, we haven't actually played this video on the show yet today, but somebody had basically hooked up Astra, like... And it can just drive your car now. Right?
Speaker 1:And it's not designed to... You know, it wasn't something that the model was designed to do, but the models are getting sufficiently advanced at understanding the world. And it feels like we're on the cusp of this, like, acceleration of the real world, which I think is gonna be way... It's very a magical experience to, like, say, generate me an image of this scene in my head and be able to see it on your screen. It's gonna be a 100 times more magical to be like, make this thing in the world.
Speaker 1:And then it just makes it. Right? And that can be applied to real estate, to building widgets, you know, the the list goes on and on. But robots building other robots and building things, I feel like will be the greatest investment cycle ever and much more exciting for normal people than just, hey, we made this software feature, you know, in two weeks versus, you know, twenty weeks.
Speaker 10:I have two thoughts on that. I mean, one is I think it's so important to synchronize the timeline of your investment with the timeline. To your point on, like, you need you need to understand when the market opportunity is gonna convert, and, ideally, you're synchronizing the timeline of the company with the timeline of the market. So, for example, if you're trying to solve AI power and you're starting today, it's kind of late.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 10:You need you need more power, like, literally in a year. Yeah. So it's like you... Hopefully, you've been working on that problem already for a few years. If you're trying to solve nuclear and that's a twenty forties problem, great.
Speaker 10:You can synchronize the timeline of being an early stage company, chasing opportunity that is really going to hit its inflection in the twenty forties. I think that synchronization matters. I think the second thing, it is interesting that VCs have really shifted toward hardware investing. There's this broader trend. Think Andrew came on the show and talked about SendCutSend.
Speaker 10:Like, we've been doing a lot of stuff in the hardware industrialization space. Part of that is because of this feeling that the timelines are so fast in the digital world that it's hard to create moats and it's hard to create value. So I think there's a reason why in hardware, there's a feeling that you can create moats over many, many years. And eventually, obviously, the ultimate moat, to your point, is going to be the machine that makes the machine. Right?
Speaker 10:It's the it's the it's the reindustrialization of this country, and I hope we're going to get there. I think we're going get there. I do think sci fi kind of preempts reality, and so Isaac Asimov obviously imagined the most... In iRobot, the most valuable company in the world is the company that makes all the robots, and there's a reason I think a lot of investors own Tesla for that reason
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:Because I think that he's gonna he's gonna win on Optimus. So, anyways, I think there's a lot of companies that should benefit from acceleration in the physical world, and there's a lot of investment going in there.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, breaking it down
Speaker 10:for Thank Yeah.
Speaker 2:Excited to have you back soon. Always a good time.
Speaker 1:Glad to see you.
Speaker 2:Have a great
Speaker 1:rest of day. Appreciate the
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon. Let Let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. We have Mikey Shulman, cofounder, CEO of Suno here with us in the waiting room. Let's bring him in.
Speaker 2:Go. Go. Go. Since... I think since you came on the show last, we have all been completely one shot by Suno.
Speaker 1:It's time to talk
Speaker 2:about Suno. We come in to the studio. We're blasting Suno songs. We have a lot of fun with them. Make a Suno song for our friends, whatever the news is of the day.
Speaker 2:We're having a great time. But how are things going with you?
Speaker 6:Much better now that I know that you guys are enjoying the product.
Speaker 2:I love it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I will say... Okay. I'm gonna give you I'm gonna give you like I'm gonna give you...
Speaker 2:Trick and glaze.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna tell you one thing. Okay. I'm tell thing and then I'm gonna tell you another thing. Okay. I'm gonna tell you one thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay. Compliment sandwich. Let's...
Speaker 6:You don't need to compliment sandwich me. That's fine.
Speaker 1:No. No. No. So one, the product is like the the AI, you know, is probably the AI product that has brought me the most belly laughs Yeah. Period.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, it's just a joy to use Yep. Daily user. Like, we have so much fun with it on the team. Yep.
Speaker 1:I've pulled it up in situations in my own home that I think are hilarious to me, you know, less less funny to members of my family. But Sure. Anyways, the product is just like amazing. It's wonderful. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Get so much joy out of it. I think the software quality is bad Okay. In the app. Like, I think that it...
Speaker 2:Not on the model side.
Speaker 1:Not on the model side. Like, the model is amazing.
Speaker 10:Like, the
Speaker 1:things that matter are like so good. Like, it's so unbelievably fast.
Speaker 2:And I Yes.
Speaker 1:Haven't even tried the new model yet. Yes. But but the actual software, I think you've been... Hard navigate? Or...
Speaker 1:No. No. It just feels like
Speaker 2:it's Okay.
Speaker 1:Kinda buggy and it feels like you guys feels like you've been vibe coding too hard. Okay. I want you guys to like, you know you know, basically do some cycles on just cleaning it up a
Speaker 2:little bit. Okay. But more optimist. What do you think?
Speaker 6:That that's a good compliment sandwich. Let me let me say... The
Speaker 2:final bread. And it's amazing. No. No. No.
Speaker 2:No. The actual quality of the of the output is is The real product is the most the like video generators, you're you're looking at it and like no matter how much ever you put in, it's still like not quite there. This is like it passes the touring test of like listenable so you can have fun with it. Anyway, continue.
Speaker 6:I appreciate that. We should probably stop releasing models while you guys are on air so
Speaker 2:you can actually Yeah. Try them.
Speaker 6:Have some time to test them out. But, yeah. Well, I'll just take the opportunity to talk about Please. What we're doing today, which is releasing a new model.
Speaker 4:Okay.
Speaker 6:And so, way better than the last one.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 6:It's actually way faster, and so you'll see the... The way that you can use it when the songs come back so faster is just very different, much more fun, way more Way faster.
Speaker 2:Don't know why it needs to be faster. Like, it was already fast enough because I would type the prompt and I would click the button and then it'd be available immediately. Yes. And I think it's because you stream it in. Right?
Speaker 2:Like, it's still rendering in the background. Is that right?
Speaker 6:No. The... We're still streaming it. Okay. But
Speaker 1:No. When I when I feel like it's slow as when I'm when I'm in one of these, know, when I'm one shot by a song but I wanna change like a certain word Oh. Lyrics and I'm like change this
Speaker 2:to Okay. Well then...
Speaker 1:Get on speed. Get on the
Speaker 2:speed.... As you cover.
Speaker 1:But yeah, that that was the thing when I first when we first started using... When we first got one shot by Suno, we would fire off a prompt and put your phone down and be like, I'll come back to it in like, you know, five minutes, see where it's at. But then it'd be back in like twenty seconds. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 6:I think the thing that people don't realize is that when you're building things in entertainment
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Actually, the the loop speed, how quickly you give something to your users, ends up mattering a lot. We can actually measure that Yeah. Pretty directly, and we know how much it matters. Just Sure. Going back to the model.
Speaker 6:So v six is better. It's faster. The songs are way better. It's more expressive. We have v six wild, which is a model that makes just some of the most interesting stuff, even though the songs themselves may not be quite as good.
Speaker 6:I'm having a ton of fun with that one. And it's actually like a big day for Suno and actually for the whole music industry where this is done in concert in partnership with some of the best music companies in the world. It's really kind of laying out a blueprint for how we think AI can really grow the entire music ecosystem. So we're we're super super excited.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We were talking to Sean... More on... Yeah. We can go there.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 6:On the on the partnership.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The partners the partnership.
Speaker 2:Everyone's waiting for a partnership. Everyone's been been interested in how the economics will flow, what happens to songs that are used in training. Obviously, there's a fair use argument. There's obviously the the Spotify I want a royalty on everything forever. And it feels like this is the start of moving the conversation forward at least one click.
Speaker 6:This is definitely an amazing start. Yeah. The way I think about this is, yes, these are now not only new business lines and new revenue streams for rights holders, for artists, for all kinds of creatives. Most importantly, these are really long term partnerships that let us build products together with the greatest music companies, with the best creatives. And the thing that's so exciting is that for the first time in a long time, there's actually product differentiation.
Speaker 6:There's the ability to build things that are just different. And I think we've been so ingrained in the last twenty years just to think about digital music as one thing. And so we'll be releasing more products in the near future
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:That let you play with the content from your favorite artists when those artists opt in. When users play with their content, the revenues that are attributable to those users, a portion of that will flow to those artists. And then, again, just building more from that in the future of what should the future of music look like? What are the most engaging fan experiences? How do we pull people deeper into music and change the place that music has in their lives to change the place that music has in culture?
Speaker 6:And the thing that's so amazing is that there's kind of acknowledgment from all sides here. Like, we have a very good start. We don't know what the... All of the products should look like, and we're excited to build them together.
Speaker 2:How does AI video play into this? I noticed that when I open Suno, I often get served a vertical video feed of other Suno creations that are often AI video animated in a pretty convincing way. Like, get a full music video, basically. Is that something that you're planning to... Is it already available for everyone?
Speaker 2:Is there just a button that can make these, or are there sort of like more pro creators that are using outside models bringing a music video to the platform?
Speaker 6:It's a great question. Right now, that is mostly creators bringing outside technologies to bear. Interesting. I would just back up though and think Sure. The purpose of Suno is actually to inspire you to do things that you haven't done, and not just to Yeah.
Speaker 6:Do the old thing of scrolling again. And so Yeah. What you may have noticed is those videos are actually really tailored to get you to lean in, to take a piece of content. You can actually remix it right off of that video. I think we're not used to thinking of ourselves as creators, us mere mortals.
Speaker 6:Maybe you guys are. You guys are are, you know, on TV every day. Sure. But it feels amazing to be creative. And just getting people over the hurdle of, actually, I am a creator, and I will find it really enjoyable to be creative.
Speaker 6:That's kind of the magical spark that we're trying to bring to people.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I I have that all the time. John will send me a Suno song and I'll be thinking to myself, John... Even though John... Even though all I know...
Speaker 1:I know that John just wrote like a handful of sentences and he put the words and the letters in the right orders and it got that output. I'm still thinking there's a spark of like John is a genius for putting the this set of ideas together and I know that he was like thinking about the lyrics and how to arrange it and and and things like that and and so that joy of creation and and compacting it into something that... And again, I just... I've always seen this as like net new. Right?
Speaker 2:Like Yeah.
Speaker 1:John... Like the the the idea of like a gag song, you know, like a joke has Yeah. Has been around forever. But but the the friction to do that.
Speaker 2:I thought we were enjoying it specifically because it allowed us to go after music that was basically low tam. So we could make a song about most feared lawyer, about John Quinn, a corporate lawyer that would never exist in any timeline other than when you drop the cost of creation to effectively zero, then you can actually get this. And I thought that was just us, but when I was scrolling, you know, I saw similar similar experiences happening in other pockets. Like, someone made a song about the Revolutionary War and they took a bunch of history. And it's like George Washington.
Speaker 2:Have you seen this video? I I don't know. But it's all it's all animated with AI. And I was like, oh, like, this sounds like a fourth of July banger, but it's historical. But no one is really going to sit there and arrange that.
Speaker 2:And all of a sudden, you have this, like, very niche overlap of, like, you want a July 4 hard hitting song, but you also want to learn history and like it puts it together in this really weird niche way, which I I think is like happening all over the place.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Look, let me let me say two things to that. One is a plug. You can go all the way down to a TAM of one or two people. Yep.
Speaker 6:You guys, I'm sure, have iMessages with one another.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 6:You can actually access Suno right from iMessage Oh. If you have the latest version of the app, and so it'll just be easier to interact there.
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 6:But the other thing I would say is I think maybe the best examples, I don't know if you guys saw this so called Oreo gate No. Of... Oh, this is a lady who took the text messages from her mom's chat about her kids eating Oreos or sending Oreos to school Mhmm. And just using music as a platform to express, I don't know, what is special and absurd and banal about everyday life. And if, when I think about what was the alternative for her to be expressive like that, to use her vantage point, she basically would have had to become a stand up comic to bring this to life, and now you can use something like music to do this in an entirely new way.
Speaker 6:And, it's something that I think like tons and tons of people really can relate to on a fundamental level.
Speaker 1:How do you think about all the ways other than speed and overall feeling of music or or musical quality going from, you know, model generation to model generation? One one thing I noticed with the last generation was that it would just constantly be referencing like glass in different ways. Mhmm. Like, in a bunch of different songs, it would come back to this like, you know, the glass shattering, you know... Yeah.
Speaker 1:Was talking to Sean... To it was like a tell that... Like
Speaker 2:Suno developed its own It's... Turns of phrases. Yeah. It's not this, it's that, or you're absolutely right. Like, the Suno version of that was different, but it seemed to exist.
Speaker 2:How much are you hunting for those tells?
Speaker 6:You know, it's a it's a really tricky thing in music on, like, let's say, the the big labs, LLMs, intelligence, there are no benchmarks. And so Mhmm. These questions of taste end up mattering a lot lot more. And even just measuring these things is really hard. So we are always on the hunt for kind of that telltale sign.
Speaker 6:And then, yeah, there's a good amount of judgment that goes into how do we fine tune, how do we post train these models. Actually, what we're releasing today, having both a v six and a v six wild, v six wild being very differently post trained to be way more interesting and basically a little less good at making full songs, is kind of a start at bridging that of how do we make sure that people actually have the most creative experience that they can.
Speaker 2:Back on the deal with Warner Music Group, BMG, Believe, I'm interested to understand how you're talking to investors, how you see the market evolving over the long term. Because the the most extreme economic share might be something like what we see with Spotify. I think they give maybe 30% of top line to artists across everything. There's a huge stake of revenue that goes to creators. Still a $100,000,000,000 company, fantastic business.
Speaker 2:We love Spotify. And I'm interested to to to think about as the industry outside of sooner, but just just AI generated tools, what type of economic structure would you see landing in equilibrium?
Speaker 6:I think about this in a couple of ways. There are things where we can think about how do we take the existing technology and really lower the cost and give it to way more people. And that's what you said before, and you would never be savoring these moments if it weren't so easy to make music. Yeah. And then there's the whole other side of things of how do we actually now apply this to markets that people couldn't even fathom before?
Speaker 6:And this is actually something that I, you know, kind of live and breathe every day. Yeah. If you rewind a couple years ago and people think music is really small, I don't want to invest in it, and then you realize that it's not just that old tam. Actually, what we're doing is fundamentally changing how people interact with media, how people entertain themselves, and realizing that that actually is much bigger. And so to answer the question more directly, this is actually evolving.
Speaker 6:This is like, we have some economic models now. We have a lot of alignment to build products together and figure out the economic models that go with those products instead of having to figure everything out all at once. The crazy time that we live in about AI progressing so quickly, we kind of don't have the luxury of trying to get it right in this very moment because things change so so fast.
Speaker 2:What's the... What is the demand side from consumers on editability, the pro workflow? Obviously, the model is outputting basically a complete waveform, but you can also use AI to deconstruct that into stems, into notes, into sheet music, and then a more experienced musician can go in and make fine grained tweaks and and just like you can generate an image and bring it into Photoshop if you want. What is demand like? What are you building there?
Speaker 2:Where do you see that side of the business going?
Speaker 6:We have a pretty broad product suite here from... You can type in a few words or access it from iMessage all the way down to Suno Studio, which is our digital audio workstation
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 6:Which is really professional workflows. What we've seen is actually by making those workflows not only different and powerful, but actually much more fun
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:More of the professional tooling ends up just appealing to average people who fall in love with making music. I think this is a lot like, I might buy the signature guitar of my favorite guitarist. Yep. I don't think I'm gonna be a famous guitarist, but it actually makes me feel really good knowing that I use the same tools Yeah. That the greats use, and it makes me feel better about my creativity.
Speaker 6:And I think that it's only for lack or it's a failure of imagination to think I can't actually fall in love with digital tools in the same way. Like, I know I'm using the same tool set, at least in part, that makes some of the best music. I feel more creative as a result. I fall in love with making music, and there are virtuous cycles there.
Speaker 2:What are you learning from the early sparks of progress in AI video? I was trying to think about the biggest AI video, the most viral AI video from last year. And I was... I I couldn't put my finger on it easily. I can think about the previous year because that was Harry Potter Balenciaga.
Speaker 2:That was the moment we were like, wow, this really like worked. And I think for this year, music like Rubbers by Phoenix Flexing, it's now out that it was AI generated. I don't know if he used Suno or not, but it it sparked the conversation. And then, I'm wondering what next year looks like if we are trying to pattern match against the ebbs and flows of progress in AI video.
Speaker 6:It's a great question. I almost think video is having a super interesting moment right now
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:As there's a lot of new models, and they're getting more convincing. They're getting easier to use. Mhmm. And so we look at that very closely. I think the one maybe easy thing for me to say here is that actually speed ends up mattering a lot.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. And as it becomes more affordable to really iterate a lot on video, because if you rewind, let's say, six months, it's actually kind of prohibitive to make a a full length video. Yeah. I would imagine that we're going to see some very interesting cultural moment. And I think of these less as technology per se.
Speaker 6:It's actually... You gave the technology to somebody who has an interesting point of view, who's able to express that point of view to the world with these tools. And so I think it's very hard to predict exactly which point of view that will be. It's like a very cultural zeitgeist y moment.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I remember I talked to Ahmad...
Speaker 1:There are gonna be... There's gonna be at least one very big cultural moment. I will tell you that. That's all I can say right now, but there's gonna be a big cultural moment involving music and technology.
Speaker 2:I... Yeah. I was talking about Ahmad Mustak after Stable Diffusion launched years ago. This was maybe 2023, 2022. And and he was predicting that by 2024, 2025, there would be full movies that were AI generated.
Speaker 2:And we we kind of got there, but they didn't really break through. But AI video is actually really successful. It's just taken a very different approach and it's diffused in an interesting way where it's making its way into VFX workflows all over the place and it's become very useful. But it... But there hasn't been like the fully the fully AI generated, you know, movie that is so good it gets over the hill of like, oh, I don't I don't want to like it but I have to like it because it's good.
Speaker 2:And I'm wondering if that will be what next year in AI music looks like. It's it's a tool that's in every every studio, every production and and it's something that certain artists take off the shelf occasionally, but it's not fully AI created albums that are out, but it's also not fallen by the wayside. Is that a reasonable prediction or do you think that's too conservative?
Speaker 6:No. I think that's actually not too conservative. For the reason that an album is a... Or even a song is a is a point of view. It's very hard to just one shot the point of view that is going to really resonate with the whole world.
Speaker 6:Yeah. It does happen. But I think of this as... It is a process of refining your own point of view over and over again. And you may use an AI toolset, you may not use an AI toolset.
Speaker 6:And so, like, I think that, you know, a year from now, it's actually quite mundane that there's a lot of AI in music. It's, like, used in every single part of the production chain. Some of it will be Suno, some of it will not be Suno. But the idea that, like, there's just going be charts full of one shot at AI bangers, to me, actually kind of misses the point of... It doesn't express the point of view of the artist.
Speaker 6:And I think that this is kind of a this is kind of a faulty comparison to, let's say, you know, we just saw OpenAI maybe prove a huge math theorem. Yeah. And, like, this is something that is long running, that is verifiable. Music is just not that way, and so I'm not sure we expect to see the same types of things.
Speaker 1:Wait until I'm spinning up 1,000,000 agents command 1,000,010 instances of Suno to create the Giga Banger chart topper that sits at Billboard Hot 100 number one for a hundred years straight.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. The final song. I'm sure you can do it. I'm plugging through...
Speaker 2:What was your takeaway from like the Astra launch over the weekend? Because the lots of like blender models, lots of video games created And I feel like the answer isn't going... Like like a million one shotted web games were spawned this weekend and I could not be more optimistic about GTA six blowing out the predictions. At the same time, I feel like as soon as I stop playing GTA six, I'm gonna get a text from a friend with a really hilarious microgame that they vibe coded that's GTA six, but for TBPN or for tech or something. I'm going be, oh, this is cool.
Speaker 2:This is a special thing that only makes sense to me and you. And so is that is that how you process that or is there anything new on the on the overall AI capability side that's exciting to you these days?
Speaker 6:Maybe I'm too dumb to predict the future, and so I would just look at, let's say, the last revolution there, which would be Roblox letting people really start to make their own games.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 6:And at the beginning, it starts really small, and people are really just playing their own games, and eventually, the technology progresses where you get more of that power law, you get people playing other people's games Yeah. Etcetera, and then you make an ecosystem there. It's not crazy that we'll see something similar there. Yeah. But again, I think a game is a very...
Speaker 6:It's... A game's purpose is to be played by people. And it is very different from the general intelligence model of things. And so I think it's hard to really apply logic from one into the other.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Do you think that... How much should we read into the the iPhone Duo launch? Do you think Apple's so soon appealed that they want, you know, every person to have more real estate to be able to make music? What's your read?
Speaker 6:I really I really hope Apple's so soon appealed. You know, humbly, I don't think we're the reason that
Speaker 9:they're making that
Speaker 6:that they're making that phone. But if if you wanna suggest that, I'm I'm very
Speaker 2:happy to
Speaker 1:take it. I'm suggesting that. Yeah. What... As as somebody who makes mobile apps, do you...
Speaker 1:Have you guys... Are you guys already looking into like the implications of this and and how it'll like... How you're gonna need to change your application to to be able to adapt to this kind of new...
Speaker 2:Might just be one prompt. Make it work For on the a lot of developers, that might be the answer.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Absolutely. I think about this as opportunity of... If there is different interaction with your phone, we actually are able to now inspire you at different times. And, like Mhmm.
Speaker 6:You can take out your phone and do something without unlocking it. You can use one camera versus the other camera. You know, I don't know what the plans are for the Vision Pro, but when I think about a final form of Suno, it's actually, how do I get a Vision Pro app that I can put on and conduct an orchestra? Know, and so I think when we think about interfaces, this is where in the creativity game, we will just work on forever. You know, there's there's there's no end to working on how we delight people by letting them interact with technology in new ways.
Speaker 1:Last question. Have you ever... Have you guys ever run any billboards or wheat pasting campaigns?
Speaker 6:Not that I know of.
Speaker 1:Why you... If you... Billboards we should... Well, I just feel like you should be running a billboard that says make a song with a sentence. And you should just go go hard on that.
Speaker 1:Because it's just like people people need to experience the magic of this product. It's just like...
Speaker 6:Get people to pick up their phones while they're driving. That would be that would be bad, but we gotta place those billboards in the right place.
Speaker 1:Everybody's in Waymo's now. Tesla, Cybercabs, maybe....
Speaker 2:For billboards. Waymo's. You can...
Speaker 1:No. No. No. It's actually a bear case because...
Speaker 2:Oh, you're looking down.... Their phone. Yeah. Maybe.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be rough.
Speaker 2:Anyway, thank you so...
Speaker 6:Bright. You know, you're gonna have... You're gonna be sitting in your Waymo. You're gonna have a lot more time to be creative. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Way better than driving. Way safer than driving.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. You say nothing from my end. Thanks. And then you go back to making Sunos songs.
Speaker 2:That's... Great to see
Speaker 1:you, Mikey. Congrats on the launch.... Excited try the new model.
Speaker 2:A little a little high this time. Have a good one. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents.
Speaker 2:Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Thieves raided the Renoir Museum in the latest French art heist. We'll get to that story after we chat with Keith Rabois, managing director at Coastal Ventures, returning to the show for the fourth, fifth, sixth time. It's always a great chat.
Speaker 2:Keith, how are Great. You
Speaker 4:It's great to be back.
Speaker 2:Have you been following this this French art heist? Is this is this bearish for France?
Speaker 4:I I have not been following it. Okay. I don't know how I I don't know how I missed that. I was just in France last week and somehow
Speaker 2:Oh, you were in France last week. Are you guilty? Let's figure it out.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Maybe, you know, you never know. Maybe I was stealing some, you know, artworks.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. Well, you're back in America.
Speaker 1:Markets are too frothy. I'd rather swipe some some fine art.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Are they are are they too frothy? Feels like there's a lot of value. A lot of the a lot of the companies, they're growing revenue. The products work.
Speaker 2:They're magical sometimes. Is it too frothy right now?
Speaker 4:Well, I think the revenue traction's real, as you pointed out. And then there's a variety of different categories of companies. Some are producing meaningful margin on that revenue, and others are not. And so I I don't think you can paint with one broad brush and say, hey. All these companies are worth x or y or not worth x or y.
Speaker 4:You have to kind of understand the fundamental drivers, but many of these companies have significant traction. I'm not worried about that, and I don't think multiples are the right way to evaluate private companies typically anyway. But if you work backwards from 2030 and say, which of these companies are gonna be sustained? Which ones have durable advantages? As I like to talk about it or communicate it through accumulating advantages, that's less clear.
Speaker 4:Like, the traction is off the charts by any historical norms. The ability to go to a 100,000,000 in revenue from, you know, two years or so or hundreds of millions in four years, basically unprecedented. But you still do have to ask questions about what's the sustainability of that revenue, not just because customers may or may not change their mind or there may be new competitors, but, like, different... The way the ecosystem evolves around AI is not at all easy to forecast. So we struggle with this and debate this in our partner meetings constantly.
Speaker 4:The the the founders are impressive. The teams are impressive. The revenue and the adoption is impressive, and even the usage often is impressive. But if you still say, is this going to be an iconic company that's around for twenty, thirty years? In many cases, the question is not so...
Speaker 4:The answer is not so obvious. Now, you play your cards correctly, you may be able to get acquired Yeah. And that's... That can be fine.
Speaker 1:No. And it feels like it feels like the the the powers that be in AI, I'm thinking of one guy, I won't name him, is almost not willing to let any AI companies fail at the... At this moment
Speaker 4:in time. At the moment. He is playing an interesting... So that company means money. Yeah.
Speaker 4:They're growing really fast, and they have lots of profits. If you're in those shoes, you know, and your revenue depends upon people buying what you sell, that are mostly AI companies, the strategy is incredibly coherent. Now they are starting to move from being a platform company to a product company. You can see it with the recent acquisition. Yeah.
Speaker 4:As they start shipping products, may... Maybe they ship products in other areas, they will compete with more people than they ever have before. Right now, any I... AI growth is great for NVIDIA. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:But as they start having their own products, that may change how people perceive them and how they perceive others. And I think to continue and sustain their growth for whatever sort of reasons, believe they need to have their own products.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And there's... One thing that's interesting is there's so many companies that are marked up into the into the tens of billions of dollars that that are actually insignificant to the overall AI trade. But their valuations are such that if one were to fail, you would have all over the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, all the newspapers, $30,000,000,000 company Yeah. You know...
Speaker 2:It would be like a WeWork and Theranos level failure. Which like it would be a bit for a very different reason but like And I think that --... Think I
Speaker 1:think that the market would be able to process it generally. Yeah. But like you said, there's just... When when the cash is flowing, there's an incentive to make sure that, hey, let's buy this company an extra two years. Right?
Speaker 1:Even when there's no other investors lining up to back the company. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, it's it's in self interest. The the longer the AI wave continues, the better it is for NVIDIA, without a doubt. And the bigger the amplitude, almost surely, is better for NVIDIA unless, and until there's a better version of NVIDIA or, you know, somebody obviates their competitive advantages, which could happen. It always happens in technology at some point.
Speaker 4:You know, we're seeing this play out now that what's the future of Google? Who knows? But that was, you know, even five years ago, even formulating that question kind of felt silly. Mhmm. But now it feels very realistic that, you know, a chat or similar interface may displace all of searches.
Speaker 4:I mean, the advertising revenue will will, like, lag Mhmm. And so the business the business itself will show signs of life for a while, but people I know, and not all of my friends and colleagues, you know, in different fields are tech forward, have substituted huge fractions of what used to be searches with things they do with Chateap Tea.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. No. The last three... Don't think that's for most.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The last... You know, obviously, I'm I'm, you know, quite quite biased here, at least, like, but I went from last year not making any real, like, commercial decisions with with AI to suddenly everything I buy, all that research is happening within ChatGPT. And I feel like I'm buying better better products and I'm having a better experience. Right?
Speaker 1:Mhmm. I don't need to... I have like very specific, you know, I have very specific things. Like my frustration with Amazon was always I just wanna buy products that... Where the company has been around for fifty years.
Speaker 1:Right? I don't wanna buy the the drop ship thing with a with a name that doesn't make any sense that that's gonna fail within the first year or whatever. I wanna buy the thing that I'm willing to pay 30% more to buy the thing where the company has been around for fifty years. So now I can...
Speaker 4:Now you can afford it. It's great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But I'm talking...
Speaker 2:Yeah. The example he uses is like paper towels or like the paper towel holder. That's very funny. Jordan, what are you
Speaker 1:talking Anyways, I I wanted to get right into how you are... Like, what what is your in... Like, what are you... How much are you pricing in a, like, a data center freeze or or or real friction to bringing in? And, like, what is your mental model for what happens then?
Speaker 1:Because on one hand, existing compute that's in a powered shell becomes potentially a lot more valuable and starts to trade hands as certain companies are able to monetize it, you know, much better than others. But then there's potentially, you know, millions of of GPUs that aren't plugged in that the world is figuring out how do we shuffle these around the world to get them to places that that they can be plugged in and Mhmm. And the the capital flows that happen there and the impacts to the to the labor market. Like, there's so many downstream implications of that. And when you have both sides of the political aisle that are realizing, hey.
Speaker 1:I can get points for pushing back here, then it's hard to imagine that there isn't, like, very real friction ahead.
Speaker 4:So I think... Let me simplify sort of the AI exposure first and then come back to that. The most devastating thing to the frothy hype and the traction that we're seeing with AI and the funding of it from VCs would be if Anthropic and or OpenAI have a blip in their public exits, their IPOs. Do they have to show metrics over the next month to first few quarters that cause people to value either company less than the current belief that they will trade in the trillions? They could have a miss on revenue tracks, could miss on margins, something something like That would be catastrophic and it would immediately reset virtually all valuations in the AI world.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. And probably deprive half the companies that are raising money from access to capital.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. And then I've been asking I've been asking
Speaker 4:that happen. I'm not saying that's gonna happen or is likely, and I think if they miss, it would be more on the margin side than on the revenue side
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Right now. But if they do, everybody is predicating the idea... Their their valuations and new investments in dollars on the idea that you can build a trillion dollar company within the life cycle of a venture fund. There's two examples currently, and there's several companies that people believe have the potential to get there. If that changes and you cannot, sort of predict that more trillion dollars or...
Speaker 4:Companies are... Can be created, then the valuations that people are investing in and the dollars that are being invested do not make that much sense. Let me backtrack one second. Like, basically in the history of venture, a very successful company was 10 to $50,000,000,000, maybe 100,000,000,000 at the max. That's like a home run.
Speaker 4:That's like we all, like, dreamed about sort of thing. It is possible now that at least one order of magnitude, possibly two orders of magnitude have been added to the upside potential of a startup, which does adjust the prudence and irrationality of a VC investing $50,000,000 at $500,000,000 or whatever whatever the case is compared to, you know, when I invested in Airbnb, it was at 1,700,000 pre or post. 1.7. Yeah. So, like, that world may or may not be coming back, but certainly by adding a zero or two zeros to the upside potential, you can rationally look yourself in the mirror and, you know, say, okay.
Speaker 4:Sure. I'll take a shot on goal here.
Speaker 1:But how do some of these investors... And and I'm seeing these rounds, let's call them like series b and c stage rounds where a company has a much richer rev... Revenue multiple than let's say the labs, leading labs, and they're growing like often like not not even necessarily as well, and you know they're not as talent dense, And these all these rounds are getting funded. And I'd... And and that is that's like the that's like the place of of frothiness that I don't understand.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I don't understand...
Speaker 4:No sense. I mean...
Speaker 1:But I don't understand how you look at the business and say like, oh yeah, this has a path to a trillion when it's like, okay, every single person working at this company tried to get a job at like four other companies, couldn't, and then is now here. And that doesn't mean they're not great and they could very well build a billion dollar company.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But I just... I don't know how you you underwrite these things to that to that trillion dollar mark. That's crazy.
Speaker 4:No. You're... No. It's a very astute observation, nor do I, which is hopefully on your list of companies that are getting funded that have those three criteria. None of them none of them none of them are by investors.
Speaker 4:But, like, if if you told me, like, hey. Company is growing less less rapid clip than the Frontier Labs with less density of talent.
Speaker 1:At lower scale. At, like, like, at
Speaker 2:100 x lower scale. Multiple.
Speaker 4:And what's a higher multiple? My answer would be no. Yeah. You know? I I have some competitors I'll introduce you to if you want, but, like, you know, and that it's not I'll
Speaker 2:be in France.
Speaker 4:I'll go find I'll go find a start up in France. Like, there's one or two apparently that are quite good. Yeah. But the fundamental driver though you identified, which is key in a lot of people lose lose sight of, so it's worth double clicking on. The critical density of talent does matter.
Speaker 4:Yep. And so if a company is in the short term at low scale growing at, you know, x clip, that's not that critical. If they have the right team assembled against the right challenges, that is investable, you know, up to some dollars amount. And whether you're, like, multiplying, you know, using Meta's multiple or OpenAI's implied multiple or NVIDIA's multiple, doesn't matter in the earlier stages if the team is stellar. But your point is the team is often not stellar.
Speaker 4:Now it doesn't have to mean the same people that would work at Anthropic or OpenAI Mhmm. But they have to be world class at what they do at their craft, and you have to be able to, you know, assemble a density of them. In some ways, you want to find people who are mispriced, and that the labs don't necessarily value you as much as they should, and there's an archetype you could scale a company on, but you still have to believe you're scaling with incredible talent, like top one basis point, 10 basis point on some dimensions to really believe that you're going to create a trillion dollar business from scratch in less than a decade.
Speaker 2:Do you think that differences in philosophy, whether it's P. Doom or AGI pilledness, can create sub pockets of talent density. We just had Scott Wu on the show, brilliant mathematician, cognition's on a tear. I don't know if this is just because he's at the application layer, but not a lot of doom, lot of optimism because he's interfacing with the real world. And I love that energy.
Speaker 2:And you see with Ramp two where incredible talent density, but not of the crazy doom scenario, weird, like, you know, that pocket is a different group. Those folks are really talented, but they have different beliefs. And so I'm wondering if there's if there's, like, the hyper talent actually scatters across different pockets of philosophical alignment.
Speaker 4:Absolutely. You know, it drives back from Peter's old expression of, you know, you're building a cult. Yeah. Well, think about it. Cults have tenets.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And so some of that is a philosophy of life. Yeah. And I think that's right. Like, at Ramp, we're optimistic about the future.
Speaker 4:Yeah. We use technology to improve society, and we're optimistic about, a, our ability historically to do that, and our ability in the future to do it. Yeah. That's why people come to work at Ramp, and that's what they do every day. And all of them are thinking like the world's gonna be better than it was a decade ago, and it's gonna be better than it was twenty years ago, And we're gonna we're gonna wave our magic wand to make it better if we have to.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yep. I'm a firm devotee of the cult of saving time and money. That is for sure. But what do you make of the conversation around doom?
Speaker 2:There's been this back and forth around regulatory capture and the evolution of this. And I've watched some people from the outside, friends who are not in tech but critique tech from a political angle, and they were upset about the rhetoric leading to potential regulatory capture. But now, they are worried about some of the developments in AI and they're calling for regulation. And so they're sort of begrudgingly giving the labs their due on the calls for regulation. But how have you been processing just this year?
Speaker 2:Has it updated you at all on how we should think about the probability of the bad outcome and doom and all of that?
Speaker 4:Well, I think people start off in their life with, you know, orientation optimism or doom. Yeah. And, you know, maybe from the time they're like seven years old. I'm an optimist. I'm a tech optimist.
Speaker 4:That's what I do. If I wasn't a tech optimist, I wouldn't be investing in tech companies. And there's a question of whether these people should be building or working there or forfeiting their equity if they really believe they're doing something that's bad or evil. Mhmm. In my opinion, like, the world is getting a little tired of some of this because, you know, we had the gloom and doom about jobs.
Speaker 4:All jobs are going away. There's no human jobs. It could still happen, but all of the evidence as of today is to the contrary. Every single piece of evidence. You could look through...
Speaker 4:You can be with Shulman, you know, with with your magnifying glass. You can't find any evidence that AI is causing... Creating job loss. If anything, it's creating jobs. Yeah.
Speaker 4:So... Okay. So they're o for one, let's say, as of now. Then they're like, oh my god. The world's gonna end.
Speaker 4:Okay. Well, hard to falsify that. AI AI jobs, at least you can falsify. You're like, no. That's not happening.
Speaker 4:False. This one's a little hard to falsify, but then I think as a couple of people push back today online is, well, articulate how the world ends.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 4:Because then at least the pre... The precepts or the predicates, we can start trying to falsify. Sure. You know, and then prove or try to disprove that, you know, there's some risk there. And then...
Speaker 4:And I I do think that the reality is the world is always going be subject to some risk. You know, people like to compare to the advent of the nuclear bomb. Yeah. And, you know, there's a very strong argument. It's not, you know, QED proven, but the nuclear bomb in many ways probably made the world more peaceful.
Speaker 4:If you went through the arc of history and like how many citizens died, you know, as a fraction of the population of the globe in conflict before and after the advent of the nuclear bomb, you have a pretty strong case. It certainly wasn't negative. Yeah. And is it... But was that known that it would play out that way, you know, on day one when we dropped, you know, a nuclear bomb or two in Japan?
Speaker 4:No. Even, you know, there's a scene in Oppenheimer where they don't even really know what it would do to the atmosphere, and they go to consult with Einstein to make sure it's not going blow up the world. And he's like... Doesn't give him a very compelling, like, definite answer? So, you know, like, the world is free of...
Speaker 4:Is not risk free.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And I think, you know, all of us make decisions every single day. We drive a car, we fly in a helicopter, blah blah blah blah, you know, take that into account. So I don't think a zero defect approach to life really works either for humans. Mhmm. But I think the burden is on the people arguing for regulation or slowing progress down of articulating, well, what goes wrong, why, and how, and so that people can probe and push back and try to evaluate and quantify that risk and I have yet to see a compelling answer to that.
Speaker 4:That's not just like, oh, I know it because I was working on this and it's really dangerous. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Many of these ideas Wait. Do you
Speaker 4:Wait. Hold on. Me layer on one other political point. Even if that was a 100% true, the idea that politicians are gonna make it better is also subject to historical debate. Yes.
Speaker 4:Like, if you said we have a world class problem on our hands, would you entrust it to the federal government or to a bunch of private citizens? Not obvious.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Do you think that that basically these ideas around PDOM end up in the s one? Because I would expect them
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:I would expect Anthropic to actually put this as a as a real risk factor. People are saying like, oh, you know, the the... You know, what? They they gotta stop the employees from posting this stuff. But if but if it's coming top down
Speaker 2:Yeah. It might be just
Speaker 4:Then
Speaker 2:then Upper SEC disclosure.
Speaker 1:It could very well end up in there, and it would be a... It it it...
Speaker 4:I used to be a securities litigator, so I can argue a couple kind of fun points on this. You could say, hey. Like, if the real risk is the world's gonna blow up, buying anthropic shares is no more dangerous or risky
Speaker 2:than buying anything else. That's a good point.
Speaker 4:So it's not a particularly... It's not a risk factor associated with anthropic.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 4:A a more nuanced view might be, hey. If the political environment were to appreciate that
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 4:No. No. We can...
Speaker 1:You couldn't you make the argument that there's like... That that the company could, with a runaway AI, incur such massive liability that it it is a risk to your actual investment?
Speaker 4:That's probably fair, and there probably will be language like that, but it'll be so toned down that most people won't even understand it. You know, there's an old Peter Thielian lesson here too, which is if you have risk factors, you want the most possible risk factors so no one can really tell which one's really important. So you might see an anthropic, you know, prospectus that has hundreds of pages of risks, so you can't like isolate, oh, this is the one I should actually care about.
Speaker 2:Got it.
Speaker 4:But the most acute risk probably would be something like, hey, we scare enough politicians that Yeah. You know, they implement policy that's particularly in... You know, not necessarily imprinted, but it could... It would, it could, you know, constrain our growth, and that is, you know, a real risk if they can't control their employee blog posts or x posts
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Sooner rather later. Is there... You know, think people are seeing through some of this. Sure.
Speaker 7:You know,
Speaker 4:there there has been significant exposure of the fact that many of these anti data center, you know, crusades are being funded by China Mhmm. Intentionally by our adversary. There is, you know, real proof that these data centers certainly do not waste energy, you know, waste water and things like that. It's kinda a silly... It's almost like a walking IQ test.
Speaker 4:That doesn't mean that the political cost doesn't have to rebut it Sure. But it is kind of a walking IQ test for someone if they really believe that data centers are gonna, like, make the world run out of water somehow.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's it's very ridiculous that the origin of that is, like, just a simple calculation error that was off by a couple orders of magnitude, and it just ran away before the
Speaker 4:whole Unfortunately, you can use chat GPT now solve math problems.
Speaker 2:I know. But but it did it it reveals like a different problem, which is that like people don't do the calculations. They don't they don't even need to. They they just go off...
Speaker 1:Tell me about your read on the dynamic between effective altruism and venture capital. Because I think there's a lot of like VCs out there that are just sort of have like generally pretty like down the middle beliefs about the future and maybe they're generally optimistic and then you get, you know, the pitch from a budding young effective altruist. And part of it is like you know this person is just gonna be extremely, generally at least we've seen points like extremely risk on. It does qualify as a pretty good venture investment. But there's...
Speaker 1:I feel like now there's been enough of a pattern of of blow ups that you need to be like kind of wary. Right? Where there's like extreme upside, you know, potentially catas... You know, your downside's capped as a VC, so you're kind of like, if you blow up, like, it's more your problem than my problem. Sure.
Speaker 1:But but but there's so much upside and so I I I just think that like that specific dynamic, there will be, a book written about it. Sure. You know, fast forward ten years, but I'm curious your view on it.
Speaker 4:Well, think venture, it's practiced as a craft at its best, is a matchmaking exercise between founders and a team and a vision and your sort of views about the world. So I think that some types of founders with some beliefs about the world, whether you label them, you know, effective altruism or something else, could be a good match for a VC who sits around all day and worries about that stuff. It would be a bad match for someone at Founders Farm, let's say. Mhmm. So I think that, you know, the best relationships between a founder and their investors and a consigliere or a board member are when you have alignment, kind of double entendre Yeah.
Speaker 4:Between how you think about the world and what's good for society and how the founder does. I do not... For example, I do watch and I'm friendly with many people who work at prediction markets, but I personally don't believe prediction markets are good for society. I believe in the Trump quote, and actually, I had actually used the line before he did, but there... It's just another casino for Americans at the moment, and I don't think we need more forms of speculation in The United States for normal people, and the evidence is that, you know, 99% of the people who engage in prediction markets are gonna lose money, and I don't think that's necessarily a positive, you know, thing either.
Speaker 4:I don't really love sports betting even though I love sports. So... But that's why I would probably be a bad match for someone who wants to build poly market even though I like Shane or or Kelsey, even though I, you know, I hang out with her too. But it's just not what I believe that the future of the world makes the world a better place.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. No. That makes And I I and I would just say that I think there's a lot of investors that have their beliefs about the way the world should be and then are willing to completely discard their values and beliefs to back companies because they're just like, well, the return is just gonna probably be so good. Got I got it.
Speaker 1:No. You know, the percentage of investors that will discard their beliefs in order to get returns is like... It feels like it's like eighty, ninety, 95%.
Speaker 4:I agree I agree with that assessment. It's just why do you do what you do as... You know, in a... In your professional career. And at least at KB, and this is true at Founders Fund too, we wake up and say, is this going to have a positive impact in society?
Speaker 4:We have, you know, more money than we need. We have more money to deploy and invest than we need. We could be doing lots of things with our time, and we want to apply our energies to solving problems that we think would move the world forward. You know, Peter and Trey have pretty strong filters on this stuff, and Vinod and I do, and my call... I think all my colleagues at KB do.
Speaker 4:But not... That's not for everybody. I mean, some people, you know, work at hedge funds. I don't wanna work at a hedge fund either. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. This is always great.
Speaker 1:Great to catch up. It'd been too long. Too long. Yeah. Enjoy that.
Speaker 1:Enjoy that art.
Speaker 2:Let's make it. I I missed
Speaker 4:I missed the fur... I missed the first month of you guys when I was like on every day.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Hey. You're always you're always This came up because I was like, we haven't talked to Keith It's been
Speaker 2:way long. It's always been hang. So... We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:Have a
Speaker 2:great rest of your week.
Speaker 1:Cheers.
Speaker 2:Bye. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. We have David Perell here with us live in the TBPN UltraDigm.
Speaker 2:David, good to see you, man.
Speaker 1:How you doing?
Speaker 2:Much. Hanging out, doing the news, talking about new iPhone, talking about AI...
Speaker 1:Excited for another screen? Two screens in one? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Was doing
Speaker 7:the news. An Uber
Speaker 2:over. Yeah. Yeah. You getting one? Of course.
Speaker 2:Really? Of course. Okay. The fold thing. Yeah.
Speaker 1:He's gonna be writing by hand on screen more...
Speaker 2:What we're just saying... Bookish look to it.
Speaker 7:Yeah. You don't need an iPad mini anymore,
Speaker 2:you Yeah. Yeah. Alright. Do you do the the the iPad for the notes when you do an interview? Have you toyed with that?
Speaker 2:You know how Chris Williamson, a lot of people have iPad there? Not the full... I do the full computer.
Speaker 7:You know, I've actually gone...
Speaker 4:It's the
Speaker 2:key to a good interview.
Speaker 7:I've actually gone full smartphone. Okay. I've gone full smartphone. Interesting. So what I do is Yeah.
Speaker 7:If you watch the interviews
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:On the right side, just kinda keep the And then what I can do is I can just do quick pulls of like, hey, check this thing, check that thing.
Speaker 2:Feel like if I pull out... I feel like if I go on my computer right now, it's like, oh, he's doing something serious. But if I pull out my phone right now, you're like, this guy's really distracted, scrolling reels. It feels a little disrespectful, but you've gotten over that hump.
Speaker 7:Well, the other thing is I don't do it live. Yeah. So I do a bunch of editing. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 7:So I think...
Speaker 2:So you might say, hey, I'm gonna look this up and then I'll I'll hit you
Speaker 7:with a I say, hey, if I'm looking something up, just keep talking Yeah. Prep them on this.
Speaker 2:Cool. Cool.
Speaker 7:Cool. And and then what I do is I watch every interview back.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Which I've now done a 130. So I just... That's that's my game film, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What's been the biggest one... Dark room. Dark Yeah.
Speaker 7:Exactly.
Speaker 1:Screen on, locked in.
Speaker 6:Just locked in, sitting there.
Speaker 2:What's been the most recent interview that you... That that that you came away from being like, this is what I want the show to be?
Speaker 7:There's an interview I did with Dana Joya. Yeah. He's Ted Joya's brother. You might know the Substacker. And Dana is just so so well read.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. He lost a son when... He lost his first son, I want to say, to sudden infant death syndrome when he was four to six months old. And you can just feel... Yeah.
Speaker 7:You know, our friend Jeremy Giffon has the line where there 's pre fall and post fall.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Seriously.
Speaker 7:And you can feel when somebody is post fall, they sort of wrestled with grief. Yeah. And then you combine that with these really well read. And so I flew out to Sonoma, we recorded for seven hours, chopped into a three hour interview. Wow.
Speaker 7:And it was it was phenomenal. You know, it's funny because you're asking about recent interview. And this is what I love about YouTube is that interview did okay
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And then the algorithm found how to distribute it like fifteen months in and now it's written. So like
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 7:Last month
Speaker 2:That's cool.
Speaker 7:That interview was our most watched interview in terms of watch time and it's two years
Speaker 2:old. Wow. That's fascinating. How much are you thinking about booking guests that can go viral in the YouTube algorithm? You sitting down with Clav anytime soon?
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know, there's always like these people who come up on the cusp.
Speaker 6:I don't care about that.
Speaker 2:And it's like, if you get this person this time, you got one of the first interviews, you know, playing that game.
Speaker 7:No. The game I'm trying to play is I think Patrick O'Shaughnessy has crushed It's like, you know, you have these people who are coming on. You don't hear a lot of... Who's the guy who he did the hedge fund guy with the... Like, John Paul, speak slowly.
Speaker 2:Paul Tudor Jones?
Speaker 7:Paul Tudor Jones. Exactly. Like, I wanna do interviews like that.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 7:Right? Like, Paul Tudor Jones hasn't done a bunch of podcasts Yeah. Get them on. I don't really care about having something that crushes right away. Yeah.
Speaker 7:I want I want it to be like the Paris Review interview series where you look back and I want in fifty, sixty years
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:People to
Speaker 1:be like, this was... Snapshot.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. That makes sense. But to give to give Patrick even more of his due, I feel like he has a couple of products in one in the sense that, yes, he does those interviews where it's like, wow, haven't heard from this person in a long time. I'm so glad I did.
Speaker 2:This is amazing. But then he'll also do like the... A super timely interview with like Sam Altman about the news Yeah. The expectations for that company right then at the turning point. Yep.
Speaker 2:And then he'll also do, you know, a catch up with Gavin Baker regularly just getting up to speed. And so it feels like he has a couple series, a couple like, okay, this person's coming out of stealth and it's Gavin Newberty at etched and it's the first time you're hearing from this person. He's almost breaking the news. And I'm wondering how calcified you think about different products if you want to add. We've...
Speaker 2:We we have a few. We have like a lightning round interview. Founder Young not... Hasn't done hours and hours of interviews. Comes on for ten minutes.
Speaker 2:Tell us about... We hit the gong. Another person we might yap with for thirty minutes. We might have somebody in studio for an hour. We have different products.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm wondering if you're thinking about where How I Write goes
Speaker 7:Yes.
Speaker 2:And whether you want to have different SKUs within the main feed.
Speaker 7:Dude, a 100%. Okay. So here's how I think about it. I wanna get the best riders in the world. That was my first goal.
Speaker 7:Yep. And so like this month is Andy Weir did Project Hail Mary, Jillian Flynn, Gone Girl, Michael Lewis,
Speaker 2:Malcolm so Gladwell. Good.
Speaker 7:We're like, let's get the best riders.
Speaker 11:Yeah. Yeah. You nailed it.
Speaker 2:You nailed Wait. Are you the reason that you're in LA? JK Rowling's yacht is in LA? Is it happening? Oh, I mean.
Speaker 2:You saw this. Right? The the mystery yacht? The mystery yacht has been unveiled to be But but I I mean, you're gonna get like, I'm just so excited for that level of interview to happen soon.
Speaker 7:And so then the game is it's like a t. So then you go up, you kind of reach the top here Yep. And then break... Oh, music. I wanna do music.
Speaker 7:Cool. I wanna have screenwriters. Yep. And then, just trying to break into that. But the thing is, we're kind of in a local maxima with the YouTube algorithm.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 7:So, this is sort of the grand irony of the whole thing. I got into this because I love posting. Yeah. I love posting. That is my thing.
Speaker 7:Wait.
Speaker 2:Wait. Isn't posting on YouTube a form of posting?
Speaker 7:It kind of is. But the people who I like really feel a kindred spirit with, it's like you guys. Like you, you know, you had the YouTube channel, like you're But kind of going then what happened but then what happened was the novelist, the poets, they were the best interviews Yeah. And they were the ones that that that crushed. Yeah.
Speaker 7:And so now I'm in this like weird situation where like that's what I do. Yeah. But I like... I don't know.
Speaker 2:But but but it's just being a Nimsel in a particular community. It's niche, but that's valuable.
Speaker 7:What's a Nimsel?
Speaker 2:Nimsel is niche internet micro celebrity. It's like it's like, you know, if we go to YCdomo Day, we'll get recognized.
Speaker 7:Like We get a sound effect back. We get a sound effect back.
Speaker 2:But but we can walk around anywhere else and you don't get recognized. Like, there are certain areas where, like, there'll be some cooking influencer where, like, every chef knows them or like an auto influencer where like every car guy, Cars and Coffee, everyone will stop Doug Jamuro. But like, you know, he doesn't get stopped if he just goes to like a Costco. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's just the modern the modern incantation of celebrity as we've created these pockets. But interesting. What what are you excited about in terms of actual growth? You're growing on YouTube. You're also growing on Instagram.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. There's some stats for us. I wanna hit the gong. What you got? You got some stats?
Speaker 7:I got some stats. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Give me some stats. How how is the how is the product doing?
Speaker 7:Been a crazy year. So we're gonna do 6,000,000 views on Instagram this
Speaker 2:month. What about YouTube?
Speaker 7:3,000,000 on YouTube. Woah. Okay. No. That's been good.
Speaker 7:That's been good. But the big thing, I think this one deserves the big gong. So we started a a YouTube channel. I found this guy named She and Quirk. Crazy story.
Speaker 7:Yes. And we made this pilot episode with him.
Speaker 5:His last
Speaker 1:name is Quirk?
Speaker 7:Quirk. Quirky Quirk. Yeah. That's what I call him.
Speaker 2:Quirky Quirk. He's the cultural tutor.
Speaker 7:The cultural tutor. Yes. And so I found this Twitter account Yeah. 2022. Yeah.
Speaker 7:And I was like, this account rips. This is so good. And so it was Anon, and I was like, hey, we gotta talk on the phone. Mhmm. So I get on with him and I expect like 65 years old.
Speaker 7:He's writing about like culture and like bollards and like buildings. And he's like, 24 years old. And I'm like, what? He's like, yeah. You know, I live in the North Of England.
Speaker 7:My parents just got divorced. I have no money. I'm like, cool. Like, what do do for work? He goes, I just quit my job at McDonald's.
Speaker 7:And I'm like, okay. That's a little bit weird. He's like, yeah. That's why I started this cultural tutor thing. So I'm gonna tutor people in culture to make some money.
Speaker 7:Terrible way to make money. Mhmm. And then he goes, yeah, I'm gonna go join the British military if it doesn't work. It's been my dream to die for my country. And I'm just like
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 6:I've known him for ten minutes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like about
Speaker 7:as long as I've been on the show right here for, you know, today. And I'm like, dude, that is a bad idea. So I just raised some money for my writing business at the time Yep. And I made him a writer in residence.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 7:He had a 100,000 followers at the time. Yeah. Three years later, 1.6 on Twitter.
Speaker 2:Insane.
Speaker 7:We're in London Yep. Last year, walking around. He's giving me a tour every day. I'm like, dude, you can write well. But you are an amazing speaker.
Speaker 7:Are the next Bourdain.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 7:So I said, hey, let's make a pilot episode, put in a $150 of my own money. I really believe in this guy. And we went to Hollywood. They said, no, we're not interested. Go make a pilot episode.
Speaker 7:So we had a pilot, Tommy Lee, the director in the There back right we go.: And we published it from an account with zero subs. It was our goal to get a 100,000 views and then go pitch Hollywood. And we did a 100,000 views in eighteen hours and then 5,600,000 views now.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Wow.
Speaker 7:And just from that one video, almost a quarter million subs.
Speaker 2:You optimistic about being able to break into Hollywood? This year has been like the crossover year with Markiplier, Obsession, Backrooms. Right? Like Hollywood is seeing that they can print on adaptations of Internet... Do you need Hollywood?
Speaker 2:You need Hollywood?
Speaker 7:This is...
Speaker 1:Now you walk in with your pilot, it's like I shot your your freaking pilot. Yeah. Here you go. Yeah. But then it's like, do you actually need them?
Speaker 1:Can you figure out a way to...
Speaker 7:This is the driving question of my life right now. Yeah. This is... We're trying to figure
Speaker 6:it out.
Speaker 5:I mean,
Speaker 1:we went to... Spike Ship.
Speaker 7:We went to one of the major studios here yesterday. We had a meeting with them.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:This is what Hollywood tells us. They want exclusivity of person or exclusivity of place.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 7:So if you can go film in the Sistine Chapel and other people can't, they love that. Yeah. And then if you're you're like, hey, Brad Pitt's really interested in architecture. Let's have Brad Pitt be the host. They love that.
Speaker 7:Yeah. They're like, we'll give you money
Speaker 2:for that. Brad Pitt and the Sistine Chapel and they're like, one more change. It needs to be a low budget horror film.
Speaker 11:Low budget horror.
Speaker 2:We're just gonna have a one note. No.
Speaker 7:But I don't think I I don't think we're gonna go that route.
Speaker 2:No. No. I mean, I I would... I
Speaker 7:don't think we're gonna go... Their pitch isn't compelling.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, thing is is that...
Speaker 1:What is the actual pitch? It's it's capital and then we'll get you
Speaker 7:I would say even more like, in what way is a streaming service exciting? I think that streaming service is exciting in two ways. One, you have Amazon, HBO, Apple, whatever. They can give you budget to make something awesome. That's the first thing, budget.
Speaker 7:The second thing is prestige. And, you know, I think the root of prestige translates to illusion. And I just always try to remind myself of that. Because YouTube is, you know, you can really get views now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They are not going... They're not in the business right now of talent development. They will attach Brad Pitt but they are not gonna allow you to spend their money building the cultural tutor into the next Anthony Bourdain. You're gonna have to do that on your own platform.
Speaker 2:And then when you're ready and you've ready to let rest on your laurels, they'll be like, welcome.
Speaker 7:This is...
Speaker 2:Door's finally open.
Speaker 7:So this is what's funny about that. So Sunday, I was at Sundance in Utah Mhmm. Not at the festival, but just at the just at the hotel. And that's where Robert Redford started the film festival. Yeah.
Speaker 7:And so as you walk through the main room, they just got all these photos of old Hollywood. And it was so cool. It was like a bunch of risk taking and all that. And what happened, the reason why Hollywood is boring and the reason why a lot of the modern world is boring, and I credit Derek Thompson with making Yes. This observation, is the money ballification of our world.
Speaker 4:Okay.
Speaker 7:What happened is things are boring now because we've gotten smart.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 7:And it's... They've gotten good at pricing risk and all that sort of stuff, but the problem is then you end up getting Spider Man 74
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 7:Lord of the Rings seven rather than some new show and that's just the state of our world.
Speaker 2:The funny thing is that the late... I feel that. No.
Speaker 1:It's over.
Speaker 2:I feel the... Where
Speaker 1:also the Internet will strike back.
Speaker 2:And also and also the latest Spider Man made a billion dollars. So so like the the irony is like I feel the same, you know, of Marvel fatigue that everyone does. Mhmm. And yet the latest Spider Man was a fantastic...
Speaker 1:A counter example.
Speaker 2:So like the monster works with them.
Speaker 1:Nathan Nathan Fielder Yeah. Like In
Speaker 2:2020.
Speaker 1:Is on an incredible run. And... Starting very long ago.... That is a set of new ideas and and forms of content. Right?
Speaker 1:Where... That that are like... That are meaningfully novel, that are rooted in this like talent. So I would almost argue there's not a shortage, like, anybody can make media now. It's cheaper than it's ever been, production and distribution.
Speaker 1:And, like, as much as you can argue, like, all the capital is flowing into these, like, big bets Spider Man 12.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:At the same time, for talented people, it's, like, the best time in the world to do anything.
Speaker 7:I agree.
Speaker 1:And and in and in some ways, like Nathan Fielder is like the best modern instantiation of like being yourself in Hollywood.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And like finding that mix of commercial appeal and and new ideas. Where like for me, I'm more excited to see the new Elizabeth Holmes movie than anything. I'm I'm... If you... If I could only watch like the Odyssey or the new Nathan...
Speaker 7:Did you see the Odyssey?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah, did.
Speaker 7:What'd you think?
Speaker 1:I thought it was a good movie.
Speaker 4:It was
Speaker 7:a good movie? Have you seen it?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I liked it. It was good. It was a lot. I don't think it's like a rewatch it every year like the Dark Knight.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That was my take.
Speaker 7:So I got to see the Chinese theater which if you...
Speaker 2:Yeah. Went there....
Speaker 7:Place to watch a movie. Holy cow.
Speaker 2:Nah. You
Speaker 7:don't like it?
Speaker 1:Absolutely not. I I came out of that and I was like, you gotta be kidding me guys. How do we end up how do we end up...
Speaker 2:Universal is... You're much closer to the screen.
Speaker 1:And I
Speaker 2:Same same size IMAX screen but you're closer.
Speaker 1:No. But it's more... Have to walk out of the theater. The theater's fine. I I thought it would...
Speaker 1:I I I didn't I didn't personally like that it was grungy and and dirty feeling but... The store...
Speaker 7:On my way.
Speaker 3:But the
Speaker 1:second that you get out of it, you're... It's like, you know, you're you're watching this beautiful film work of art and then you come out and it's like the worst place on earth, you know. Sunset Boulevard.
Speaker 2:Oh, rough.
Speaker 1:Like completely completely brutal. Hollywood
Speaker 7:is so seedy. That's been my biggest takeaway being here. What is going on?
Speaker 2:It always has been. I didn't realize Yeah.
Speaker 7:It's crazy. Right? Because you're just like, wow. It's my dream to go to Hollywood. And then you get here, you're like, this is what it's like?
Speaker 2:I'd like to go to West Hollywood instead. I'd like to go to Beverly Hills. What's on your wrist?
Speaker 7:Oh, good question. I just went to the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. Yeah. So this museum opens September 22. Okay.
Speaker 7:So it's just kind of like these Previews? Preview tours. Dude, so good. Yeah. Oh, my goodness.
Speaker 2:What's good about it?
Speaker 7:Okay. So the reason
Speaker 1:Is I have that not... Is the whole project not like a massive white pill that we can still make?
Speaker 7:Honestly, it is such such a massive white pill. The only thing that bums me out is San Francisco and Chicago said no, but then LA got it. So...
Speaker 2:Let's go.
Speaker 7:Well, is that
Speaker 3:not the...
Speaker 2:Victory for Los Angeles.
Speaker 1:Were they saying no? Like, this needs to be in LA. This this... I don't... It's got...
Speaker 1:It would just be wrong for us to...
Speaker 2:To take this.
Speaker 1:Or they were just like, yeah, the idea is kinda mid. Like, it would suck to have a billion dollar museum.
Speaker 7:It's like 44,000 pieces of art in George Lucas' collection. Wow. 13,000 at the museum. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Only six of them on loan. Yeah. And... Woah. So I thought that what I was gonna walk into was like Star Wars Yeah.
Speaker 7:Land. That's actually not what it is Get ready
Speaker 2:to dress up as Chewbacca.
Speaker 7:So this is what the narrative art museum gets, which is modern art, most of what you see kinda stinks because it's super abstract and you're like, what is going on? Yeah. This is the best non canonical collection of modern art museum I've seen. What is And what I mean by that is I think the MOMA has a better collection.
Speaker 4:Okay.
Speaker 7:But at the MoMA, you see the canon pieces of modern art. Mhmm. You see everything from Van Gogh's Starry Night to, you know, Cubism to then stuff that comes out of World War two. This is very different. This is a lot of paintings that I did not know.
Speaker 7:And almost every painting feels like a freeze frame in a movie. And you almost feel like somebody stopped it, so the lighting is super dramatic. There's like these dramatic scenes.
Speaker 2:That's cool.
Speaker 7:Then there's a whole range of styles. And then the other thing for people like Norman Rockwell, it's... Must be one of the largest collections of Norman Rockwell paintings of...
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Love it.
Speaker 7:And then also the way that they organize the museum is super different. So usually it's all around jargon
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Or time period. This is different. This is around family, school, like friendship, stuff like that or specific artists. So because of that, it doesn't feel like heady Mhmm. As a museum.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:It feels like the kind of art that'll be both good and super mass market.
Speaker 2:That's cool.
Speaker 7:Almost like Star Wars itself.
Speaker 2:Is there at least one Chewbacca? Do you see any Star Wars?
Speaker 7:Only saw... So this is why I
Speaker 4:have this.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 7:Here. I just went and I went
Speaker 6:up to the front desk.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And I was like, this is Can so I leave, go on TV Yeah. And then come back? Yeah. And she was like, fine.
Speaker 7:We'll make an exception.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 7:So we're booking it back to down... Okay. Chewbacca for you.
Speaker 2:And I will send you I
Speaker 7:will send you a selfie.
Speaker 2:I will send you one Chewbacca selfie. I want that. I I I see this modern art. I love Star Wars. What do you think of Mark Zuckerberg's new castle?
Speaker 2:You know, the critique is that tech wealth is not going into beautiful things
Speaker 7:Which is true.
Speaker 2:And he just bought a beautiful castle in Ireland and it feels like the beginning, you know, I think the Stripe founders bought a castle in Ireland. Yeah. There's there's the seeds and I think that there... I I understand the critique of tech wealth is not going into beautiful things. We're not getting the museum, the libraries.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But I think that there is a world where wait until they're 45, they'll buy the castles, they'll get sick of them at 65, the kids won't want to live there, and then there'll be museums and libraries because that's what happens when you renovate an eighteenth century castle.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Museum
Speaker 2:of... Wanting to pay the $5,000,000 a year to maintain it.
Speaker 1:The museum of Zaki's bunkie is gonna
Speaker 2:go gonna go so hard.
Speaker 1:Okay. All these what will then be antique firearms that are like Halo style.
Speaker 2:And you're really like... He's got a needler?
Speaker 1:He really had that on?
Speaker 2:He had a needler? He really
Speaker 1:had that in 2026?
Speaker 2:He's got a needler.
Speaker 3:He had the
Speaker 1:the the the good supply of of...
Speaker 2:If he has a needler and we don't know about it, that's a that's a major issue.
Speaker 7:It's interesting those two examples. Both of them bought existing places.
Speaker 2:They did not... So building's important.
Speaker 6:They did
Speaker 7:not build them. Okay. Like you look at Hearst Castle, You know? William Randolph Hearst. I'm
Speaker 2:actually staying. Love the story of Hearst Castle. Yeah. And I and I both aspire to personally embark on such a crusade that I die with it unfinished like he did. And also I encourage other people to take on projects that are so unwieldy that they will ultimately never be...
Speaker 2:Never see the fruits of their labor and only the next generation will.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, beyond that, you know, it's really easy to talk about castles and palaces and stuff like that. What about just like the tech initiative to make the Panhandle, like one of the most beautiful parks in America? Sure. Sure.
Speaker 7:You know what I mean? Or like, let's restore Fillmore Street. I heard of a project that's exactly that. It's like four or five blocks of Fillmore. Like, we...
Speaker 7:I think that the beauty conversation is way too much about these giant big buildings.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Gotta start small. Corgi cafe. Corgi cafe? They're they're starting with the cafe.
Speaker 2:You scale that up. Corgi library, Corgi museum, Corgi Central Park.
Speaker 7:We'll save the world.
Speaker 2:Could happen. You never know. They're reinsurers now.
Speaker 7:Well, this is what's so great about New York. Like, think it was... Is John Paul the investor?
Speaker 2:I think so.
Speaker 7:Who made
Speaker 2:a lot
Speaker 7:of money in the financial crisis?
Speaker 2:He's the one. The one. Yeah. Exactly. One guy.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:But he donated a $100,000,000 to Central Park.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's cool. It's good. Okay.
Speaker 7:The simple stuff for the people. Yeah.
Speaker 2:What what about on the overall architectural malaise and just this, you know, is there a linkage from housing prices, we can't build anything, stagnation and the critiques from you and the cultural tutor on...
Speaker 7:Oh, that's interesting. So, I think that the way that people see it is something like this. Mhmm. We can't build and because of that, we need to make it cheaper and uglier. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And it's like a cost problem. Actually, there's a new article in Works in Progress that basically makes this point. That one of the reasons why it's hard to build is that things aren't beautiful enough. Yeah. So like if I look at...
Speaker 1:Yeah. Why go through the hassle?
Speaker 7:Yeah. And and and also for the neighbors, they're like, don't I want something new being built. It's gonna be butt ugly. It's gonna make my neighborhood less less nice.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's gonna be a square box.
Speaker 7:And so, it's this weird kind of compounding loop where things are ugly, so then there's more regulation. Then there's more regulation, so it's more expensive. Then we need to save money, so things get ugly. And maybe there's a way to reverse that where you have nice buildings and people are excited about building a little bit more and you begin to change that.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Yeah. I I've been... There's some... There's there's things coming down the pipeline.
Speaker 1:I I I was hanging out with a friend of a friend who's an architect based in Europe and he was just showing me like all the stuff that he has in the works. And to me, I got incredibly excited because I was like, every single one of these things, you know, he's a rising star. Every single one of these things will end up being in every mood board. Like, they are like net new creations that are inspired by the past but also just new ways for buildings to exist. And I have another friend who does does real estate development in the American Southwest and he is showing me things that he's actively building right now.
Speaker 1:And I'm like, that entryway to the home is gonna be iconic. Mhmm. And so a lot of these are like... I still... In some ways, I think you're gonna see...
Speaker 1:Like, the world is so Instagram driven now that there are beautiful things being built purely for the feed to basically, like, stop people and to get attention. And I think that I'm I'm excited to see what you're pulling up.
Speaker 2:Oh. You got it. I'm trying to get them to pull it up. I gotta show you this.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 7:So I think that the side by side format will change the world. It already is. And all the side by side format is super common on Twitter Yep. Super common on Instagram. All it is is you show one old thing versus one new thing and you just say, what happened?
Speaker 7:Yep. And this is one of those formats that we've all seen that no one has taken seriously.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:So this is... Oh, hold on. Okay. We got to cut that for the clip.
Speaker 2:So we're we're going pull it up a big board too.
Speaker 7:Old Home Alone house.
Speaker 2:Here you go.
Speaker 1:Here we got both
Speaker 3:of them.
Speaker 7:Old Home Alone house.
Speaker 2:Scroll scroll up. Scroll up. This is 1990.
Speaker 7:1990. This is the old Home Alonex Iconic. That we all
Speaker 2:Yes. Okay. Wallpaper, carpets on the stairs, lots texture, lots of warmth.
Speaker 5:Yep. What happened?
Speaker 7:Now scroll down. This is what they did to it.
Speaker 1:Stunning. Very... Stunning and brave. So... The white white the the the different shades of white.
Speaker 1:So much white.
Speaker 2:It's so much white. So this
Speaker 1:sells better...... Rug. I mean, who who would be bold enough?
Speaker 2:Is that why they did this?
Speaker 7:Well, here is what happened. So Yeah. There's a few things that changed. One is that housing went from something that people would build for themselves to something that was done by real estate agents
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 7:Or and real estate companies. Mhmm. And so housing became a market that you thought of as something liquid
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And then you basically need to increase the... How generic something is, so that it basically is a more liquid asset.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Right?
Speaker 2:Makes sense.
Speaker 7:And then the other thing is a lot of these projects are built by people who won't live in them. Yeah. And so they sort of see the world through a spreadsheet.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Spread shit. That's exactly what I...
Speaker 2:It's called a spreadsheet.
Speaker 7:It's called a spreadsheet. They see the world through a spreadsheet and...
Speaker 2:Yes. But when I look at this, I think buying opportunity, buy this and and remodel it to look like the home can't be that hard to put carpet down on the staircase. Right? I like the style. I think it's called pre modern.
Speaker 2:This is generally the the like what what this is referred to now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. You're you're saying something that's very real. I I have a friend of mine bought a place years ago, invested a bunch of money into it and and I think like legitimately for 99% of people made it way worse like... Oh, I know
Speaker 2:what you're talking about. Like for
Speaker 1:for him he's like he's like, yeah.
Speaker 2:It's like so much character. Like, much
Speaker 1:character there buddy. Like some some of the rooms I'm just like this is horrific and and you need and it actually even though he invested a lot of money into the property you actually have to deduct Yeah. That basically an equal amount from the new purchase price which is gonna be lower Right. Than what they paid because you have to You rip all this
Speaker 2:you looked you liked blue. You made your house blue.
Speaker 1:But but I do think that I I think that like maximalism is a 100% coming back.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and you're you're seeing this in...
Speaker 2:Think it loud opulence, Mikey?
Speaker 1:Like even look look at car look at cars. Like cars are a wonderful way to express yourself and just enjoy the road and it's this like symbol of freedom and all these things. And cars got very boring to the point where if somebody was like spicing it up, they're like, I got a green car
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And a tan seats. And then it's like, well, now there's a whole... For years, there's been Instagram accounts dedicated to this combination, which I think is beautiful. I have a green car with brown seats. But it's almost to the point where it's no longer even a way to express yourself.
Speaker 1:It's just like, it's as basic to me as like a black car. Right? And so I've been I've been intentionally going the other direction. I'm I'm...
Speaker 2:What's the next color you're going with?
Speaker 1:I'm I'm I'm in the process of specking a car that is is like a rose metallic and and it's like completely insane. I've shown it to some people and they're like, oh, yeah. Need that. We It's gonna be... We
Speaker 2:to be...
Speaker 7:Car that looks like a NASCAR that you guys can drive around with all the sponsor logos....
Speaker 2:We've we've thought of it....
Speaker 1:Play TBPN over there. Right there. And and I and I I think that you're not just naturally seeing a shift. People are rejecting minimalism and I I actually already... As much as as much as this is happening, again, I don't think you're gonna ever get back to spec...
Speaker 1:Like the spec house is naturally designed to appeal to... It's like I view a spec house like the one you're showing here basically Mhmm. As like a canvas on which someone else can come on and paint. It allows you to have that liquid
Speaker 7:The thing
Speaker 2:is asset.
Speaker 7:I'm not pro maximalism or anti minimalism. I'm just pro quality and anti crap.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And I think that what has happened is we're like, okay, here's minimalism. And we're like, okay, minimalism is cool. Like, Johnny Ive really understands minimalism well. The Japanese really understand minimalism well.
Speaker 7:Yeah. But then what happens...
Speaker 1:I got a house I got a house to I got a house to sell you.
Speaker 7:If you don't really understand the form, you end up with that meme of the guy who just has his mattress in the room and nothing else with like the little video game. You're like, that's minimalism.
Speaker 2:The ultimate male living situation. I love it.
Speaker 7:Hey, you know, you gotta invest in that guy.
Speaker 2:Would you like the glass or the cup for whatever you're drinking?
Speaker 10:I'll wash these sheets in
Speaker 7:six months.
Speaker 1:Do you know the...
Speaker 2:What you got, Jordy?
Speaker 1:Do you know the the architect John Lautner?
Speaker 2:No. Oh, you're talking about a place in Alaska?
Speaker 1:You you blew the punchline. Oh, I'm sorry. You blew the punchline. But but yeah, the...
Speaker 2:The open lock in the Lautner
Speaker 1:is the protege of of Frank Lloyd Wright
Speaker 7:Okay.
Speaker 1:Has created some of the most... To me, the most beautiful homes in in The US. There's there's even like this weird sort of like roadside motel out in in Palm Desert area that you can go stay in that's a lot there. I I recommend you check it out. I think you would enjoy it.
Speaker 1:But I track John Lautner homes that are for sale and there's two right now that stand out. One is in Pasadena which is like seemingly like an extremely... At the time, it would have just been like, I'll take one home, please. Mhmm. You know, it's like a two bedroom, two bath.
Speaker 1:But then there's this other one that's Wow. That's only 1,370,000, potentially a great starter home candidate. And...
Speaker 7:This is one in Alaska.
Speaker 1:One issue. It's in Alaska.
Speaker 2:That's not an
Speaker 1:issue. That's a And so this is two acres. You got a John Lautner, an architecturally significant home in nature and I think you gotta go for it. I think you gotta like, you know, take some of your own medicine here.
Speaker 2:And I think you need to... No,
Speaker 1:no, no. Is Redfish.
Speaker 2:This is for sale.
Speaker 1:This is for sale. 1.3. I've been extremely tempted just because I'm like...
Speaker 7:Yeah. Let's start a group chat, see if we can pull 1.37...
Speaker 2:Bunky too. Yeah. Yeah. It's Bunkieville.
Speaker 7:This would be good for like a TBPN...
Speaker 1:Satellite. Satellite. Look this. At this. The wood paneled interior.
Speaker 1:It's like every material in this home was actually designed to last There's room for the Christmas tree there. Indoor waterfall ish
Speaker 2:Oh, thing.
Speaker 1:It's awesome. So anyways, what what I'm hoping to see is the the young John John Lautner that just build a couple... Just dedicate your life to building a couple 100 homes like this. But I but I think that the truth is that that we look back and we look throughout history and we see home... We we see things that were built like this and we're...
Speaker 1:And people are like, we, you know, we gotta return to like that era of design. But the truth is that for every one of these homes, there was a 100, a thousand that were just cookie cutter.
Speaker 7:The thing is, I don't wanna return to any era of design. I want us in 2026 to have a sweet era that reflects who we are, what we value, that like projects a bold vision for the future that's like, let's go. Yeah. And we should have all these awesome visions of what tomorrow can look like. Yeah.
Speaker 7:And what I love about talking about homes and like making nice streets is like that is a way for every single human being to like put their footprint, their, you know, their stamp of optimism and like promise for a better future Mhmm. Into the world. Yeah. And that's why I think this is important. Yeah.
Speaker 1:What's... Minutes.
Speaker 2:No. I wanna go through the rest of the show and tell what else do you have for us in the stack. The team has the PDF you shared. So... Are there any other images that you'd like to share with us?
Speaker 1:By the way, we definitely don't
Speaker 2:We do. We're we're we're rearranging the schedule and
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Fletcher Richman from Type will be joining us at 01:50 after Jim O'Reilly from Charleston AI.
Speaker 7:Have you seen the new Obama library?
Speaker 2:I have. Yes. New Obama presidential people are going back and forth about it.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Let's get it up on the screen here.
Speaker 1:I'm a fan.
Speaker 2:You're a fan.
Speaker 7:You're a fan.
Speaker 2:Because because it's because it's clearly a data source.
Speaker 1:Data center. It's a
Speaker 10:data center.
Speaker 7:It seem like aliens.
Speaker 2:It has No. Just source inside.
Speaker 1:I'm I'm generally in... I I love brutalism. Just period. I think it's beautiful Yeah. When contrasted right with with Sure.
Speaker 1:Nature.
Speaker 4:Yeah. The...
Speaker 1:Here's the
Speaker 7:thing with brutalism. Okay. Good brutalism rocks. Yeah. But a good style is...
Speaker 7:Works when average people do it. And so the problem with brutalism is the variance is so big.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Like most brutalism absolutely is awful and tyrannical. But like you're saying, you get some Brazilian brutalism, some DC brutalism, and when it works, it is absolutely awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Every time I think brutalism, I go to a badabad in Osama bin Laden's camp compound. You know what I'm talking about? The Osama bin Laden house looked... Is very brutalist.
Speaker 2:I lived in a house that looked exactly like this for a while. It's crazy. You were... Would
Speaker 1:you practice in there in case you got the call?
Speaker 2:No. Keep it in counter...
Speaker 7:So the new Obama library, this is where was built in 1893. Okay. And so the Obama Library, this is for the Chicago World's Fair. There's three photos And these were in 1893.
Speaker 2:Which... Yeah.
Speaker 7:Basically, these were temporary houses.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:So they were made out of plaster. They were not made to...
Speaker 2:The center one was a temporary house?
Speaker 7:The Chicago winners. It was for the World's Fair. So like it was a big deal. Don't get
Speaker 2:me wrong. For sure.
Speaker 7:But I think it says so much about who we are. Like, first of all, I'm not sure that we could build this now Yeah. And there's no way that we would do something temporary like this now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay. Yeah. What what else is going on? How how many other photos do you have here?
Speaker 7:We don't need to go through all of them.
Speaker 2:Oh, I wanna I wanna know the story of the...
Speaker 6:What we did
Speaker 7:in yeah. So I think this another Humble photo. Actually here's one that has a personal story. So this is San Francisco. Yeah.
Speaker 7:When I was a kid, I don't know if you guys have walked here. When I was a kid, this is
Speaker 2:Beautiful photo.
Speaker 1:Where I
Speaker 2:would walk.
Speaker 4:Wow.
Speaker 7:And I used to like marvel at these chains. Yeah. I think these chains are sick. Yeah. And also like, this is the kind of world I want to be in where like, you know, it's by the bay, there's always the big cargo ships coming by.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And I'd always used to, you know, check out these chains. My mom would say, if you touch those, you're gonna get tetanus.
Speaker 2:You know what I mean?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 7:And you know, it's time to replace the chains, which is fine. And they replaced them with this. And like, this is the thing. You know, each one of these is not a big deal. But if you have 10 or a 100,000 decisions like this in a country and a culture, you really stamp out the soul and vitality, the spirit of who we are.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And that's what I want to fight against, you know? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Rough. What's going on in the world of high fashion?
Speaker 1:What's wrong with stainless steel?
Speaker 2:Is that stainless steel?
Speaker 7:It just lacks character.
Speaker 1:Well, think it's because it's new.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What happens when that gets patina and starts giving you tetanus? Will you be satisfied then? Will you be satisfied then? I
Speaker 10:think we could
Speaker 7:have done better.
Speaker 2:Tetanus risk?
Speaker 7:We could have done something with like little Golden Gate bridges in it. Something that would...
Speaker 2:To tie to the aesthetic of the space.
Speaker 1:Or like a Louis Vuitton monogram. Yeah.
Speaker 7:We talk about cost. There's an artist somewhere that would happily
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 7:Do this at cost.
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 7:To make something else. Yeah. Right. Yeah. You know?
Speaker 2:Might be a safety thing. You trip over the chain but you don't do this. But again, yeah, you're getting into...
Speaker 6:The r word. Regulation.
Speaker 1:I think they want to keep people from surfing. They don't want you to discover the thrill.
Speaker 2:No. They want you to walk in and continue building your startup because as we know, if you go surfing, you'll be less productive. So you gotta stop people from surfing in San Francisco. They got to get the share price up.
Speaker 7:That's the key. Patagonia founder, his book is called Let My People Go Surfing.
Speaker 2:Oh, really?
Speaker 7:It's like the whole premise. They're like, yeah, we're company....
Speaker 2:1,000,000,000,000. Well...
Speaker 1:Yeah. Patagonia would have been the the first trillion dollar company.
Speaker 2:It could have been. It could have been. A little less surfing guy. Lock in, by
Speaker 7:the Yeah. And then we got the same thing happening in logos.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Let's see. Just see.
Speaker 7:It's the same pattern everywhere. And this is what's...
Speaker 2:This has to change soon though.
Speaker 7:This is insane.
Speaker 2:This is an opportunity. You you have to imagine that there are plenty of brands that see this. I don't want to be a part of the meme, I'm going go a different direction.
Speaker 7:The reason why I'm just utterly astonished by this and think about it every day is I think that aesthetics people think of like little icing on the cake, you know, like you put on a tie, now you'll look good or something like that. But the thing is like society's aesthetics represent the the spirit of a time. Like it's the outer reflection of the inner spirit of an age. And all this is how we see who we are, what we value. And the thing is, when I look at these designer logos, you know, it's easy to say, oh, there's no style there.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Really, what you see is a culture that values efficiency
Speaker 1:and Conformity.
Speaker 7:Conformity above all else. And I just... I don't want that to be who we are. And also kind of global sameness. Like, I want a world where there's like radical diversity.
Speaker 7:You go to different places, they feel completely different, and that the things that are made have the unique character of the people making them. That's the world I want to live in. That's the world that inspires me.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. How do you get into a museum if it's closed?
Speaker 6:There's actually a hack for this.
Speaker 2:Tell me.
Speaker 7:Okay. So you go to Paris
Speaker 1:or something... Spend a decade developing a personal
Speaker 2:brand reputation.
Speaker 1:Spend spend a decade building a reputation of someone who cherishes
Speaker 2:millions and millions of views on human...
Speaker 7:So there is a hack for this. So if you go to Paris, I was in Paris like a month and a half ago. Buy a flight to Paris. Any any city, any city, New York, LA Yep. Chicago Any city.
Speaker 7:And you show up, often they'll say, hey, you can't get into the museum, you needed tickets in advance. Mhmm. A ticket at most museums cost like $30. So if you're going with a friend, it's like $60.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And you'll say, can I get in? There's... They'll be like, there's no way. You'll say, can members get in today? They'll be like, no problem.
Speaker 7:You say, how much is a membership? $120. So if you just pay $60 more, $30 per person, you can basically get into any museum in the world, no lines.
Speaker 2:Your answer is just pay? Just pay for it.
Speaker 1:It's one simple trick.
Speaker 7:But here's the thing. It's just about the membership, which is not advertised.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. No. No.
Speaker 1:No. That's a good point. But but the new Luke the new Lucas......
Speaker 2:Gonna be some, like, go in the back door, walk... You know, like, dress up...
Speaker 1:The new Lucas museum is also I don't think if you're a... They're not... I'll take... If I walk up there and say I'll take one membership, please. They'll be like, come back when we're open.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You gotta get a job.
Speaker 2:That's the real hack.
Speaker 4:You gotta get
Speaker 7:the job.
Speaker 2:You gotta get the job there. That's... Or build a great brand, build a great...
Speaker 7:I feel like my first you can do anything moment was sneaking down at Warrior Games. Had season tickets to convince my dad to get season tickets as a kid. We're all the way up in the third day.
Speaker 2:Again, you paid to get in. Trick to sneak Buy some tickets.
Speaker 7:We got the cheapest tickets. I sat I sat outside of the first deck for six games. Went to every game for the season. I just snuck through.
Speaker 2:So good. Okay. That... Yeah. This a good one.
Speaker 2:Turnaround. This is a good one.
Speaker 7:Got really good at getting the free pizzas and the t shirts. I knew, like, where the t shirts were like most likely to go.
Speaker 2:Okay. I got thunder... Gun or no?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Okay. Actually, my my my ultimate hack Yeah. For sports was when I was a kid, I was obsessed with catching baseballs at games. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:So, you know, you can get the baseballs off the bat. Yep. But what I would do is I'd go to the stadium, I'd get the away team hat, the away team shirt
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Then sit by the opposing team dugout
Speaker 2:Less
Speaker 7:competitive. To Wrigley Field, Darren Oliver, starting pitcher. I knew the name of Darren Oliver, the bullpen catcher, walked away with six baseballs.
Speaker 2:Six baseballs.
Speaker 10:I was like a
Speaker 2:fifth grade kid. Was like... Oh, that's fantastic. I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:Alright, boys. You.
Speaker 1:At the museum.
Speaker 2:Great to see you. Get a Chewbacca picture. Yes. Please. I will tell everyone about Cisco critical infrastructure for the AI era.
Speaker 2:Unlock seamless real time experiences new value with Cisco. And I'll also tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Up next, we have Jim Reilly from Charleston AI. You've seen him on the Internet.
Speaker 2:We've discussed him multiple times with his partnership with San Blancs Monaco. And now, we are pleased to be joined by Jim Reilly from Charleston AI. Jim, how are doing?
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:I'm doing real really well. Thank you. Thank you Appreciate very you much
Speaker 2:for taking the time to come chat with us. I would love to know a little bit of the backstory. I'm sure a lot of people have seen the viral video. But what is your career story? How did you get into this particular business?
Speaker 2:And then, of course, we can talk about where it's going from here.
Speaker 3:Okay. Well, I've been doing different things for many, many years. You know? Mhmm. The only boss I ever had was my father Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Other than when I was a busboy and worked in a movie theater. Wow. So it was a family business I grew up in, and I did many things. Yeah. And where do I go from there?
Speaker 3:Recently yeah.
Speaker 1:What what got you what got you in... At least interested in AI?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Okay. Well, my partner, we started this produce delivery business during the pandemic Uh-huh. Because the farmers couldn't sell produce, there were no farmers markets, and people were kinda locked down. So we saw a need, we saw something that we could do together, and he's the geek, I'm not.
Speaker 3:And, so we put together, you know, delivering produce directly to people's houses. We put it right on on their, you know, front porch by their door. Our model is that we deliver it. We... They don't come pick it up, we deliver.
Speaker 3:Seven days a week, three hundred sixty five days a year.
Speaker 2:And so...
Speaker 3:Then he's...
Speaker 2:Yeah. Did this business grow out of that?
Speaker 3:Yes. Well, we're partners in Rainbow Packaging and he's always been into AI, you know. He was an engineer from IBM, so he's, like I said, he's a geek. Mhmm. And this is one of his, like, pet projects.
Speaker 3:He's really into AI, so he got... He infected me a little bit with it.
Speaker 6:Okay.
Speaker 3:And we saw the opportunity, we thought it was time. Let's open up a storefront. Mhmm. That's what we have here, it's basically a storefront even though it's a nice office Yeah. To just introduce people to AI, help them where they need it, and that's what we've been doing.
Speaker 3:We started January 1.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Jordy?
Speaker 1:So January 1, what what... Who were the... Who were your first like customers, clients that were When coming when when we originally saw the viral video, you know, it it made so much sense to me to actually put something like a storefront Yeah. Because everyone in Charleston is I'm sure reading about AI, watching videos online. Some of them are excited, some of them are scared.
Speaker 1:To give people the opportunity to come in and just talk to somebody who's actually in their local community and learn about it actually makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Right. In the beginning, it was slow. I have to admit, it's taken a while, but what I've come to realize, this is the FUD period, is fear, uncertainty, and doubt when it comes to AI. And, people are gradually getting over it. So my partner, he he can do the elaborate stuff, he can do the, you know, systems integration.
Speaker 3:I'm the one that can talk to people and tell them how it's benefiting me. And that's what I do.
Speaker 2:Do you see more people coming in with sort of a consumer lens on? They wanna know how to use AI products in their personal lives? Or is it mostly other businesses in the Charles...
Speaker 3:Of both.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:Okay. So like, I'm pretty good at talking to people I'm asking So, you using you know, I I don't wanna plug it, but my favorite is open AI work right now. It's fantastic. So I'll tell people about my little experiences, how I spend... Save time by using it, And they said, really?
Speaker 3:So I'll say, here, load ChatGPT Mhmm. You know, play with it for a week or two and I'll come back and I'll show you how it can benefit you. Okay. And mostly, you know, they're small business owners, so it's easy for them to, you know, adapt to it. I mean, lot of people would like to do it in my opinion, but they don't have time.
Speaker 3:And they're so used to doing what they do, that this is just not natural to them. Yeah. Totally. And then the other side of the coin are the people that have larger sized businesses who are really into AI, so they spend two or three days... Two or three hours a day doing it, and then they realize they're falling behind on their work.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And
Speaker 3:so that's why they need us to come in and help them, you know, put it together and make it work for them.
Speaker 2:What is your business model? Do you charge people hourly for training sessions, or do you work on affiliate commission if you refer someone to a particular product?
Speaker 3:No. We're just... We're like vendor neutral. We'll work with any anybody's AI. You know, my partner will learn it Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And he'll install it. And it... Our customers choose the AI they want.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 3:And we just help them make it work.
Speaker 2:So training implementation.
Speaker 3:Correct. And, you know, we charge. The first visit's free.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 3:We're not, you know, you come in, sit down, let's talk about it, see what you want, what you need, and, you know, we'll come up with a plan for them.
Speaker 2:Do you think the model will be scalable? Do you think you'll be able to hire technicians and educators in other markets and set up similar franchises?
Speaker 3:Absolutely. Yes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's exciting.
Speaker 3:I think it has appeal. Yeah. The time is, you know, the time is now. We have a few years. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And AI is changing so drastically, so quickly, in my opinion, you know. And people can use it. And the other thing I noticed, like, with individuals Mhmm. We take this open AI work, which I refer to it as. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:I I went away on vacation for a few days, and I'd get up at five, I normally get up at four, so I slept in late. And then for two hours, I would do my work.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Found...
Speaker 3:Days, I did more than I would do in six months previous, so that sold me.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You
Speaker 3:know, so I have an agent that works for me every day. Yeah. And if I don't have her working on something, then that's my fault. That's my, you know, my bad. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And it's just... I I find it fabulous. I think it's tremendous. And with that too, that I I noticed personally, is that I'd be uptight with I gotta do this, I gotta do that. I'm short on time, I'm thinking about it.
Speaker 3:But now, this AI companion might... She does it, and I'm free to think about other things during the course of the day. Yeah. I'm freed up. And I think a lot of people, once they adapt it and start using it, they're gonna be the same way.
Speaker 3:They won't be so uptight and so, you know, bothered with what they think they have to do. Because it's already done.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Or it's being worked
Speaker 4:on. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:What's what's business been like since the the video that broke the Internet? Which was...
Speaker 3:A lot of attention. People stopping by, you know, Sunday, you know, I work seven days a week, so Sunday... We're still continuing our produce business, so, you know, we have customers there we gotta satisfy. So I come in early, pack pick pack, go deliver, then I start working, you know, contacting people, responding to emails, and, you know, people stop by randomly. We're in Charleston and we're going back to Florida.
Speaker 3:We're in Charleston, we're going back to Charlotte.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well,
Speaker 3:come on in. Let me give you a little tour. Let me talk to you. Tell me about your story. What is it?
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 3:Because I I like to talk to people myself.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Beautiful. Are the most common concerns that people cite when they're talking to you? What what are what are they worried about? What are they nervous about in terms of AI?
Speaker 3:Mostly unknown fears.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 3:You know? And they, you know, they they read something, they hear something that somebody said, and they're not they're not real. So until they get to know it, hold it, see it, and use it, they'll have that. But I'm trying to break that barrier down, you know, and kind of infect them with the, you know, the benefits of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's good. How much
Speaker 1:do you wish you had Today's AI when you were starting your career and your family business?
Speaker 3:I can't do that. It's not realistic.
Speaker 2:I like this. It's super grounded. Grounded. So grounded. Mean, because...
Speaker 2:Did
Speaker 3:I have it, I wouldn't be here now talking to you.
Speaker 2:That's true. You'd be retired.
Speaker 3:You know, I had had to experience everything I experienced to get to this moment. Yeah. All my mistakes, all my, you know, my failures, my victories, things I did right, things I did wrong, but, you know, I needed all to do all that. And I know I could save a lot of time and be more efficient by using my agent in the morning. Yeah.
Speaker 3:That's... My AI agent.
Speaker 1:Yeah. When's when's the second location opening up? How how aggressive do you guys wanna get around expansion or are you still kind of dialing in the the curriculum?
Speaker 3:Well, everything has to be done in its proper time and place. This has to be up and running and functioning, and then we can devote a little time to the next one. Mhmm. I I believe there's gonna be demand for it. Believe there is demand for it.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Awesome.
Speaker 3:And now that it's arriving at the point where AI is being more accepted by people and being used, they're still confused and AI is changing so much with all these different applications they have, they're gonna need some help. So I wanna get a firm foundation and then we'll talk about expanding.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Do you do you pay much attention to the to the conversation around AI fear and doom and safety that's happening primarily in San Francisco or do you kind of ignore all that mumbo jumbo?
Speaker 3:No, it's noise in my opinion.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I'm looking at the benefit. If I spend an hour or two hours and it takes care of six or seven hours worth of work, I I don't have to worry about that. I'm not... I can enjoy life. I can spend more time in the moment and weren't...
Speaker 3:Having my head filled with things that are not gonna happen, that may happen, but now it's done. So next.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. It's a good good mindset.
Speaker 1:Great mindset. Well,
Speaker 2:congratulations on the progress.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This has been amazing. You're welcome on the show anytime.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Let us know.
Speaker 2:How we do.
Speaker 1:However we can help. If there's any AI founders that you wanna meet, there's a good chance that that we've spoken to them at some sort. We'd love to we'd love to support and hopefully we can we can stop by the store at some point.
Speaker 3:Please do. You're always welcome.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much.
Speaker 3:And Charleston's a nice city to visit.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I've heard.
Speaker 3:The restaurants are really good.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Amazing.
Speaker 3:And the people are friendly.
Speaker 2:I love it.
Speaker 1:I can see that. It's great to meet you, Jim. Thanks so much for coming on and congrats on all the success.
Speaker 2:Have a great rest of your week.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Have a wonderful day.
Speaker 1:We'll talk you soon.
Speaker 2:Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it.
Speaker 2:CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.
Speaker 1:Amazing story. Amazing mindset.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And
Speaker 1:I've seen enough. Give him 200 on a billion.
Speaker 2:There are some wild posts in the in the chat which I really enjoy. So thanks everyone who's tuning in and chiming in with some fantastic takes about what's going on. We have Fletcher Richman from Type, the co founder and CEO here building a shared AI workspace. Welcome to the show. What's going on?
Speaker 2:Sorry for the mix We got caught up with David Perell. He brought whole show and tell for us. We had to go through with it, but we...
Speaker 1:And then we had to, of course, talk with with Jim Reilly who I would already suggest you should pursue some type of partnership with. Anyways, introduce yourself and the company.
Speaker 11:Yeah. Nice to meet you guys. Thanks for having me. Funny enough, I actually go to the same gym as David, so
Speaker 4:that's a small
Speaker 11:world moment of the day.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Nice. That's great.
Speaker 1:Who who lives heavier?
Speaker 11:I can't disclose that.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's... Yeah. That's why I got a pause for sure. Anyway, tell us about the business.
Speaker 4:What are
Speaker 2:you building?
Speaker 11:Yeah. So Type is a... You mentioned it, shared workspace for teams to build
Speaker 1:with AI. A lot of
Speaker 11:work right now in AI is still happening, very single player mode.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:People are working with Cloud or ChatGPT on their individual computer and that's not really how businesses work.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:And so we make it really easy to take that work starting in Clot or in ChatGPT and push it up into a shared workspace where you're all actually building together. Crazy as it seems, multiplayer AI still isn't really solved.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Are you Yeah. Trying to narrow in on a particular type of work, whether it's code that's generated, the blender three d models that we saw, spreadsheets? Like, there are collaborative environments that are point solutions for each of these to some degree. GitHub sort of collaborates with code.
Speaker 2:But how how do you see finding a a beachhead? Or or is it important to be sort of omnipresent across the organization?
Speaker 11:Yeah. So we're focusing more on nontechnical teams.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 11:We think that the engineering teams have a lot of this pretty figured out, like you mentioned. They've been doing these workflows for a very long time.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 11:But the nontechnical teams that are suddenly all now writing code that weren't used to be writing code, They don't know what GitHub is. They don't know how to deploy to Vercel. They don't know how
Speaker 1:to do a lot of
Speaker 11:this stuff. And so we've just given them these magical agents that can do it all, but they need tooling to actually make that work.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. What are you targeting in terms of early adopter? Do you want to go into new companies that don't have anything to rip out faster moving startups for early adoption? Or are you gonna go duke it out in the Fortune 500 and try and get someone to, you know, either add this on to all the other tools they're paying for or maybe rip something out?
Speaker 11:Yeah. So what we found at the very beginning, you got a couple people. You can just use cloud. It's not a big deal. So Yeah.
Speaker 11:That's not really a pain point. Yeah. We've been targeting, I'd say more in the 25 to a couple 100 employee range has been our sweet spot so far. I know you know a lot about this space. Interestingly, the direct to consumer e com space.
Speaker 11:Oh, Those teams have just been loving it.
Speaker 2:Interesting.
Speaker 11:It is I think one of the best use cases for agents if you kind of think about the business and what it is. Yeah. It's a series of pretty structured inputs.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 11:Hey, I have this landing page. I run these ads.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 11:I have this Amazon listing. It runs this stuff.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 11:And then that comes out. I need to order more inventory because this ad is doing really well.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 11:And the whole loop just kinda runs. And so agents are... It's crazy what you do in some of these ecom businesses. Totally. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, we talked to Sean Frank at the Ridge and... Yeah. Every Yep. Every ecom business is like, okay, there's the churn spreadsheet and there's the there's the script for conversion and there's something that synthesizes all of our performance marketing and then we have all of our influencer ads over here and how much we're spending.
Speaker 2:And and the opportunity to bring it all together is huge. Jordan
Speaker 1:When did you when did you actually start the company?
Speaker 11:We started a year ago. So we were just obsessed with this multiplayer AI concept. I've been, crazily enough, it's weird to say now, but spending about a decade building in that space of
Speaker 1:kind of collaboration and chat.
Speaker 11:Yeah. Exactly. And I, built a company before this that was acquired by Slack. Oh, sorry. That Slack, was an investor and it was acquired by Atlassian.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 11:OpenAI was a was a user of it. It was called help. So I've been thinking about how do people collaborate in this in this chat environment for a really long time and this just felt like the next generation of tools was necessary because we've got these agents now and it's just a totally different way to work.
Speaker 2:Very cool. Give us the funding news.
Speaker 1:Tell us about the news.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How much did you raise?
Speaker 11:Yeah. We raised $4,000,000. Next goes on their info near New York City. And, Haystack as well out of the West Coast. And, my buddy's matchstick.
Speaker 11:I'm from Colorado. So Colorado's firm in there as well.
Speaker 1:Love those guys. Well... Very cool. Well, we're gonna... We'll we'll get the team on it.
Speaker 1:Give it a Yeah.
Speaker 11:You guys should play around. I think you'd like it.
Speaker 2:That'd awesome. Awesome. Have a great rest.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Great to meet you.... We'll see you in the next round.
Speaker 3:Nice to meet you.
Speaker 2:Cheers. Let me tell you about Shopify. Speaking of d to c e commerce, Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business, lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Jordy, do we have time to tell the story of the heist, the thieves? They raided Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Our museum. We'll see you tomorrow.
Speaker 2:See you tomorrow.
Speaker 1:It's been an honor.
Speaker 2:A teaser.
Speaker 1:A privilege.
Speaker 2:Little teaser.
Speaker 1:I mean, today today this is this is TBPN. This is TBPN. In my opinion, we got Jim O'Reilly.
Speaker 2:Jim O'Reilly, Mikey. We got the hot AI sound. Everything.
Speaker 1:Living the dream. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yap about the the current thing, the doom, the new iPhone, all of this. Let us know what you think. Are you picking one up? Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com.
Speaker 2:We will see you tomorrow PM. Yeah. At 11AM Pacific sharp. That will be Thursday.
Speaker 1:Hundred. It will be a hundred and five days until...
Speaker 2:King in the castle. King in the castle.